Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions — £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications PO BOX 50, London SW17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd]
No 964 Tuesday August 25 1998                                                                                                       10p
No EPSR next week. Resumes Sept 7. EPSR Bookfair Sept 12.

COLLAPSE & WAR

The rampaging crisis of the imperialist system is daily providing new proof of the need for Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science.

Total economic catastrophe already threatens half the planet, but all that the overwhelmingly dominant 'New World Order' forces can do about it is futilely shoot up an Afghan hillside and a harmless Khartoum pharmaceuticals factory, thus emphasising the crazed warmongering aspect of capitalist degeneracy at breakdown.

Western bourgeois ideology, — so desperate to control the world, — is turning itself into a despised laughing stock before our eyes.

Half-boldly, parts of the monopoly-imperialist media have aired doubts that the Shifa plant was for chemical warfare, or have even suggested that the US knew it was not so, but went ahead with the bombing anyway.

But the absence of total media denunciation of this American outrage is just laughable. Why would hordes of Western TV and press correspondents walk all over the smoking debris of a "deadly VX nerve gas factory" unless they KNEW it was complete nonsense. If the Porton Down chemical and biological warfare research institute was bombed tomorrow, would ANY sane reporter cheerfully walk all over its smoking debris?

The world is in the grip of a sick disgusting joke from the 'New World Order' crap, and Western imperialist interests will pay a high price, — as British poodledom under the Blairite clones is already discovering, — the object of universal ridicule and contempt for going on hind legs whenever Washington tells it to.

Third World diplomatic retaliation may cost little for now, but the real price is the total humiliation and loss of self-respect that Western bourgeois ideology will begin to suffer.

Paralysed self-doubt in a ruling class is a crucial Marxist scientific understanding. Revolutions happen not just when the exploited masses cannot put up with any more tyranny and suffering, but also when the ruling system can no longer keep its act together.

The American ruling class has in the last week exhibited very advanced stages of being close to self-destructive stupidity and incompetence already.

From the ludicrous farce of Monicagate, — rival imperialist factions undermining each other over some sordid office self-destructive stupidity in the White House itself, and over the unbelievable lies, cover-ups, and arm-twisting that went with it, — the American ruling class then plunged straight into 'Buster Keaton plays Colonial Fascist Tyrant' randomly firing scores of Cruise Missiles at helpless Third World targets out of imperialist pique.

This madness can only be assumed to be the one noted in history whenever a system begins heading for destruction.

The international economic dislocation virtually proves it. Neither Washington nor anyone has a clue what to do, and it is beginning to look as if they obviously know it.

So much total despair is now pouring out of capitalist economic scribblers and numbed business/political circles that the EPSR's attempt to record the flavour of these turning points is currently being swamped. 

A brief sample ran, in the week:

FEARS about the worsening Russian crisis and the fall-out from America's bombing raid sent stock markets around the world tumbling yesterday in one of the worst day's trading since 1987.

The turbulence which fuelled the London retreat spread from the Far East and Russia to other emerging markets, particularly those of Latin America, which until yesterday had ridden out the Asian crisis.

In Brazil, the stock market slumped by up to 10 per cent in the one day and in Venezuela, shares also crumbled as fears mounted of a currency devaluation.

Latin American worries sent Spanish share prices plunging, led by the banks, which have huge interests in South America.

"Virtually every emerging market around the world is in a state of disarray," said Bill Meehan, chief market analyst "It's all combining to take its toll on what is a very expensive [US] market."

And that was before the ga-ga Yeltsin had dismissed his entire government (for the second time in five months, going full circle back to where this particular period of turmoil started), and before widespread international anti-American jeering had got fully going.

Imminent 'meltdown' is now the favourite phrase of anxious scribblers.

Yet still all the hysteria keeps missing the main point. Speculation on US gunboat diplomacy's next outrage, or on Yeltsin's next brainstorm, — is fair enough, but it is still slightly irrelevant.

What “if" Yeltsin COULD find capitalist success? It would still only leave Russia waiting to become the next Japan, or the next South Korea, or the next Indonesia, — where capitalism HAS found the trick of 'working successfully'. But to what purpose ultimately? To potentially greater economic collapse than even Russia faces.

The point is: There IS no cure for this imperialist-system crisis, not only in practice as is already self-evident, but also in theory. The international free market is already utterly polluted with 'surplus' capital, and not just with that denominated in hopelessly inflated currencies like the Rouble, etc, but polluted with an unmanageable 'surplus' of the mighty dollar itself.

The US currency has been poured out in thousands of billions, — all "as good as gold", ever since 1945 to "make the world safe from communism". Every foul reactionary regime in modern history has been backed to the hilt by dollar aid/loans/investments etc, — all just printed in the USA, and all in reality backed by nothing more than anti-communist rhetoric and imperialist moonshine. 

The 53-year production boom has been the 8th wonder of the world. But now that worldwide 'overproduction' has been reached in industry after industry, this funny money must now collapse. 

And ALL of it, because any one billion dollars is exactly identical to the next billion. None can be wiped out, or ALL must be wiped out. 

The dollar's collapse itself will be the final catastrophe. The greatest war of destruction in all history will immediately follow. Wiping out half Sudan's medicines industry in a flash is just chicken-feed, all in one plant. Inter-imperialist war for economic survival must eliminate entire 'surplus' world industries, — in cars, for example, — hundreds of plants in a hundred countries. 

As examined inside, Marxist-Leninist revolution is the inevitable answer. Russia's turmoil proves it. The alleged reinstatement of more conservative bureaucracy around Chernomyrdin will solve nothing, as the miners camped outside the Duma have already pointed out. Either there is a dictatorship of the proletariat, or there is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. 

The Marxist scientific law is unchallengeable. Having abandoned the workers state to allow 'market forces' to reign supreme, they will remain uncontrolled by anybody until proletarian dictatorship is reinstated. 

And only GENUINE, NEW revolutionary forces are likely to want or be able to achieve that, not resuscitated revisionist-bureaucracy corpses. Their decay had gone too far, clearly, when the anti-Marxist (anti-proletarian-dictatorship) philistine content of Gorbachev's perestroika took over, (examined inside).

The great difference between the obvious weaknesses and inadequacies of the workers-state economies(as they stood prior to the opening of the doors to capitalist counter-revolution) and the free-market chaos now, is that the 70 years of planned Soviet economic development, for example, had NEVER STOPPED evolving, and had NEVER STOPPED always having purposeful plans for further development. Soviet economic might by 1987 was infinitely greater than the almost Third World illiteracy and backwardness of collapsed semi-feudal Tsarist Russia. 

And it is a complete lie, of course, — an insane piece of imperialist propaganda which the fake-'left' is responsible for helping to promote (see inside), — to pretend that Soviet economic development had reached some kind of terminal decay in 1987 (Trotsky's regular annual prediction from 1923 onwards). Utter nonsense. CRIMINAL lies. Gorbachev wanted faster growth rates, more dynamism, etc, — that is all. His bureaucratic philistine stupidity only achieved the total sabotage and wreckage of the Soviet workers state.

The capitalist free-market system, on the other hand, DOES, as now, periodically run into total devastating crisis, — complete worldwide collapse and destruction, first through market crashes and trade war, and then through shooting war. The crisis is uncontrollable.

Planned economies, however, can undergo experiments and changes endlessly in different management structures, incentives, personal responsibility schemes, factory profit motivation, etc, etc, — and all backed by an unending variety of different democratic involvement in overall political control and direction. Ceaseless improvement, in other words, — however long it takes to overcome mistakes and wrong turnings. 

But ALL necessarily ONLY under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nothing else can possibly work.  Build Leninism. RB

Crashing markets shake the whole bourgeoisie, from far right to fake-'left', as working-class power comes back onto the agenda, challenging the sick deceit of 'parliamentary democracy'. The struggle for socialism will founder until the science of proletarian dictatorship is embraced. The triumphs of Soviet history will eventually outweigh all the anti-communism ever piled together.

Part III: The Trots and anti-communist revisionists either just ignore all polemics exposing their wrong perspectives and mistaken understandings, or else just walk away from any past wrong analysis and simply never refer to it again. The Weekly Worker leads the field in this degeneracy.

But it is also warming to a rival method of entirely academic 'communist' posturing particularly favoured by the Open Polemic group.

This favours the rampantly anti-Leninist nonsense of the 'multanimous party' where all the communists have, for example, completely different views from each other about what analysis to make of Soviet history and its revisionist self-liquidation,  — but never try to resolve them, and all agree to happily differ while getting on with "unanimity in action" and elaborating a "common theoretical programme"!!!

And this is called "reforging the Communist Party"!!! If you tried to make this sort of thing up, not the zaniest imagination in the world would take you even close to this nutty reality.

Even stranger, these OPers then reproduced the following from EPSR 942 of Mar. 17 1998:

'Failed Trotskyite entryists are stepping up their middle-class sniping at the SLP by trying to isolate theoretical discussion of Socialist Labour issues published by the EPSR.

The attempt is to "prove that factionalism exists" to try to provoke some anti-EPSR response from the SLP leadership, and to promote the idea of a swamp of ALL the factions as the only kind of party worth having.

Trots in the Midlands have launched documents pretending that the Russian Revolution was only achieved by a swamp of many factions, but simultaneously trying to set the EPS Review up for ridicule and hatred, — and isolation, — because of its communist solidarity with the Chinese workers state.

Meanwhile, the Weekly Worker end of the Trotskyite Swamp of nearly a dozen sects (already!) of "ex-SLP members" has sensibly reproduced huge chunks of an EPSR analysis of the class philosophy of "black sections" but foolishly trying to pretend that theoretical discussion amounts to 'published factional attacks'.

In the Midlands, the failed petty-bourgeois entryists have launched an anti-SLP manifesto which ludicrously claims that Socialist Labour's unitary constitution, which rules out factional recruitment and 'opposition rights', is contrary to Marxism-Leninism.

"This was not actually the way of Lenin and the Bolshevik party" they say about the SLP's insistence on one leadership, and disciplined support from all members for the party's policies.

According to these frustrated individualists and careerists, the SLP without them has immediately turned into "a bureaucratic formulation. It means party worship and leadership worship, with hacks, fanatics, and clones as members."

Modesty and logic are not their strong points. Many individuals among this shower of Trotskyite opportunists who have now left the SLP were supported by Socialist Labour as General Election candidates. One minute, that party support is good enough. The next minute, it consists of nothing but "hacks, fanatics, and clones".

Rewriting history, these Trot sectarians lyingly imply that oppositional factionalising was only reluctantly and mistakenly frowned on by Leninism "in 1921 under the severest of economic circumstances".

Once again,  they shamelessly wheel out the great bogeyman of Western anti-communist propaganda, Stalin, to imply that party discipline ideas were murderous, monstrous, and inhuman, — a complete denial of 'freedom'.

This gibberish is loosely supported by propaganda from the so-called 'Socialist Alliances' to which the Trot swamp is now turning as a spoiler against the SLP.

Their attempt to overcome their incurable sectarian factionalism with some 'unity', so as to collectively overshadow the SLP, insists that if 'socialists' would settle for 80% agreement on issues, then it would be possible for all 57 varieties to work together permanently. Admitting that the Trotskyite swamp has never achieved such  'unity' before (or any unity), the Alliance make-believe declares that something "new" has taken place, — namely, "a growing acceptance that no single group has all the answers".

And just to confirm this triumph of the bourgeois philosophy of agnosticism, the Alliance Trots say it again: "This has meant accepting that no one has a monopoly of the truth". In other words, nothing has been agreed at all, — except opposition to the SLP. There is no 80% agreement on anything, which is why there are already nearly a dozen "ex-SLP" competing Trotskyite sects in existence.

In other words, it will be the 57 varieties of subjective individualism exactly as before, and each one separately thinking theirs is the ONLY truth, which has always been the only possible meaning of the idiot agnostic phrase "no one has a monopoly of the truth" which has been used for centuries by reaction to try to hold back revolutionary new thinking.

The sole aim of Marxism-Leninism has always been to establish the scientific socialist truth about human civilisation and its future. What has 'monopoly' got to do with it? The only successful struggles for socialism have been led by communists who have correctly analysed the historical situation and the balance of class forces, and have CORRECTLY built the sort of disciplined democratic-centralist movement (party or guerrilla army) which alone can defeat ALL the wiles of bourgeois counter-revolution in EVERY situation.

And the only basis for arriving at the necessary scientific socialist understanding in every case has been by the constant interchange between theory and practice,  learning by mistakes or successes how right or wrong has been a party's perspectives,  programme,  strategy, and tactics.

For the proletariat, socialism is not the same thing as it is for middle-class academic dilettantes who can possibly afford to spend their whole lives gibbering pointlessly into their glass: "No one has a monopoly of the truth". For the proletariat, socialism is eventually a necessity requiring REVOLUTIONARY ACTION.

The types who stand around at such crucial historical junctures muttering "no one has a monopoly of the truth" will be plainly identified at that moment as counter-revolutionaries.

The Trot pretence that the 1917 socialist revolution was carried out by a party permanently riddled with oppositional factions is just total lying nonsense. At any one time, the Leninist party had as many differences of opinion as there were members of the leadership. But what even the flimsiest knowledge of 1917 history demonstrates is that once a firm party line was established, the Leninist party was utterly ruthless in its hostility to indisciplined behaviour by any section of the party.

So far was Lenin from any notion that "no one has the monopoly of the truth" that at one stage, when the party leadership delayed a decision about whether the time was ripe to seize power, Lenin threatened to quit and form a new party rather than remain in a minority position.

And immediately power had been seized, ALL the history books in the world confirm that an international propaganda blitzkrieg was launched at once denouncing 'Lenin the bloody dictator', and 'Bolshevik Red Terror' as the greatest threat to civilisation ever. 

Stalin had never been heard of at this stage in history. And this Red Terror was most notorious of all for 'turning on its own kind' when the Kronstadt Soviet was drowned in blood by invading Red Army troops in 1921 to put down an armed 'opposition' mutiny engineered by anti-communists infiltrating the Soviet structure and adopting counter-revolutionary petty-bourgeois demands, masquerading as a 'socialist opposition'.

EPSR 935 recently quoted at length from the 10th Bolshevik Congress which in 1921 imposed a massive purge of factional groups and platforms which had wormed their way into the revolutionary party from the vast ranks of the petty bourgeoisie in Russia.

Such factional oppositionism, proposing rival platforms to the agreed party policy, would unfailingly lead to the triumph of the counter-revolution if not purged immediately, the Congress agreed, at Lenin's insistence. This reinforced discipline alone saved the planned Soviet system from being overthrown there and then. 

The Soviet workers state went on to transform 20th century history, although sadly stopping short of going all the way, — ultimately being undermined by revisionist retreats from strict Leninist party and state discipline.

To take up this lying Trot pretence from the Alliance that freely-flourishing factions made the Bolshevik Party a success until the 'disastrous and mistaken' 1921 10th Congress, Leninist science from earlier periods, (declaring permanent factional opposition impossible to tolerate for a revolutionary party which meant business), has to be studied.

The first Lenin quotes from May 1904 (from One Step Forward, Two Steps Back) show that undisciplined petty-bourgeois individualists immediately shouted 'bureaucrat dictator' at Lenin as soon as they failed to get their own way inside the party. The Midlands Trot manifesto does exactly the same today because of being defeated in the SLP.

In 1904, the party majority which backed Lenin were dismissed as 'mere pawns'. In 1998, they have become 'hacks and clones'. Even the sneer at the 'mechanical' majority at the Party Congress is identical, with the same bruised egos at not being invited to become leaders, and furious that their sectarian circles were being ruled out of order.

Contrast this with Lenin speaking gladly that the party had now grown far enough for constitutional organisation to be needed to replace the informally-disciplined struggles of voluntary amateurish circles.

Bluntly, Lenin insists that centralist bureaucracy must always prevail over autonomist 'democracy' in any serious workers party which intends to build socialism. He specifically champions the centre's right to appoint cadres to local committees and to have the decisive say in who should be the local candidates for parliament.

Lenin notes how, exactly as today, the capitalist press rushes to give publicity to anti-party opportunists who want to denounce 'dictatorship' and 'lack of democracy' in the party, strangely ignoring, of course, the careerists' own pretence of being 'more revolutionary' than the party they are grassing up for the benefit of the class enemy. 

But who are the real 'revolutionaries', — those who build a disciplined party of the working class to abolish capitalism, or those intellectual individualists who reject all party discipline and are merely in love with the sound of their own voice?

In December 1910 in his Open letter to all Pro-Party Social-Democrats (which was the word for communist at the time), Lenin specifically ridicules the Alliance notion that anything worthwhile can be built out of the undisciplined 'left' swamp all getting together, all with a proportional say on the leadership committees. 

Such a 57 varieties swamp will NOT get rid of factionalism which in time will always wreck the work a party tries to do. Lenin wanted factionalism expelled from the party, and even insisted on a clear break-up with those 'conciliators', like Trotsky, who still insisted that working with the swamp was the best plan of action. 

Lenin rubbished such thinking, saying the swamp could only harm the work; and it was precisely the disciplined Bolshevik Party which went on by itself to complete the abolition of capitalism, starting with the Bolshevik Revolution seven years later.

Abolish factions, Lenin insisted, and seek agreement only with those who fully accept the pro-Party principle, the need for a disciplined authoritative leadership.

Lenin deals with the fake-'left' hypocrites who shout loudest about 'Leninist' or 'communist' principles but in practice do exactly the opposite, just like today's Trots who have tried to wreck the SLP with their opportunist phrase-mongering, their indiscipline, and now their abusive denunciations.

Identify the middle-class splitters, those with their own individualist culture and conceit who will never make good communists, and throw them out as soon as possible, Lenin recommends. He spells it out: Trotskyites, and Trotsky, are a disaster.

In October 1911 in The New Faction of Conciliators, Lenin explains the incurable class contradiction at the heart of the treacherous Trotskyite notion of 'conciliation' with the swamp of fake-'left' petty-bourgeois ideology. Trotskyism lies when it pretends that organisational questions are the problem (the block vote, the appointment of candidates, the black sections, Congress arrangements, the adopted constitution, etc around the SLP). 

It is irreconcilable class differences about the whole political situation which are really behind the factionalising, Lenin explains; 'Out with these conciliators' Lenin adds. No false 'unity' with the petty-bourgeois swamp, he insists, neither ultra-'left' Otzovist (comparable to a position today of denouncing 'electoralism' (a sound Bolshevik tactic whenever mass revolutionary action was not immediately on the cards)) nor rightwing collaborating Liquidationism (comparable to a position today of making Vote Labour the priority). Both deviations were incurably middle-class, Leninist science concluded.

In Material On Conflict of October 1913, Lenin concludes that whether it is an unbridgeable conflict of ideas or organisational indiscipline, anti-communists should not be part of a communist party.'

[Lenin quotes followed.]

The OP's comment (with apologies for the personality concentration, which tries further to obscure the arguments, deliberately,) runs as follows:

I recommend a serious examination of the ILWP document in Economic & Philosophic Science Review of the 17th March. It deals with the Truth. That is to say, it deals with the truth as understood by Royston Bull.

The article is an intoxicating mix of self evident truths, distortions, — inadvertent and deliberate — and some juicy slanders, all done in that ever endearing manner befitting the ILWP. So nothing new then. But the fact is that the article does demand a reply, unlike so much of what passes for ILWP polemic. It demands a reply because it gets to the very heart of the malaise affecting every communist and every communist party, past and present. It deals with communist notions of truth and agnosticism, subjectivity and objectivity, and above all it deals with 'The party', the one thing the ILWP usually prefer not to polemicise about.

Central to the article is Royston Bull's insistence on lambasting those comrades who dare to proclaim that they do not have a monopoly on truth. Now there is an about turn. The normal state of play has every man and his dog hailing their own particular brand of truth whilst denouncing the unbelievers, bourgeois heretics and the plain ignorant. But, at last, in the light of the tortuous experience of the 20th C, communists are now, one by one, coming to the bloody obvious realisation that what they know or think they know should not be mechanically equated with objective truth. Some comrades are humble enough, nay, logical enough to grasp that what they or their party know can, at best, only be an approximation of objective reality.

This as all too much for Royston Bull. For this 'hard Leninist', the very same Leninist who not so long ago was proclaiming the infallibility of comrade Trotsky and comrade Healy, now has a new guru — himself! He and his little band are the fountain of eternal truth, and why, because they study, study, study. And as for we non-believers who limply proclaim not to have a monopoly on truth — we are nothing but helpless agnostics, turning our backs on the hard science of Marxism — the all conquering truth finder.

For the raging comrade Bull, Marxism's a wonderful thing. Just sign up to their Economic and Philosophic Science Review and then get down to some serious study of the objective world and all will be revealed. After all, the history of humanity is a science like any other science, just waiting to be revealed by the consistently materialist Marxists.

It all sounds so neat. However, there's one tiny flaw in Bull's Marxist methodology. He and his merry band conscientiously study to find the truth, but so do Harry Powell, Ted Hankin, Jack Conrad, Cliff Slaughter, Tony Clark, Eddie Abraham, Tony Cliff, Peter Taaffe, et al. And that's just the 'English list'. And the big blow for comrade Bull is that every single 'study group', 'research bureau', 'political committee' or whatever name the comrades like to go under, keep coming up with different conclusions, from the very same empirical data!

What Bull and all the other purveyors of truth refuse to recognise is that bourgeois agnosticism and materialist scepticism are not the same thing. Marxists never surrender the understanding of the dialectical relationship between absolute and relative truth, and it is that understanding that reminds us continually that what we know may be partial, one-sided and prone to error while also containing seeds of absolute truth. 

"Each step", says Lenin, "in the development of science adds new grains to the sum of absolute truth but the limits of the truth of each scientific proposition are relative, now expanding, now shrinking with the growth of knowledge." (Vol 14. P135.) Not for comrade Bull the dialectics of absolute and relative truth. No, just the absolute belief that what he and his group know is more correct than every body else because they study harder than everybody else. Not for him Engel's warning against those 'marxists' who insisted on drawing too close a parallel between the natural sciences and the social sciences — a warning that Open Polemic has repeatedly made.

Agnosticism, a feature of bourgeois scholasticism must be continually combated but not in the bullheaded manner of the ILWP. Consciousness, as a reflection of matter, like any reflection, will be open to distortion and there can be no greater distorting effect than human life itself.

For those comrades who are brave enough to proclaim their scepticism with respect to their own dearly held truth, I would say, you are the future nucleus of a multanimous communist party. Your task, our task, is to find appropriate ways and means to unite ourselves in a democratic centralist party that does not suppress the natural multanimity of thought whilst at the very same time preserving the unanimity of party action. As for Royston Bull and his ilk, they should be left to construct their gods in their own image.

To which the following reply was sent, but only partly published, leaving out all the evidence of correct factual world analysis which was precisely the point of the reply, and is precisely the difference between Marxist-Leninist science and the petty-bourgeois anti-communist swamp. The admitted "omission because it is a summary of the EPSR's particular line on Ireland" is marked in the large square brackets [in italic - ed AG]:

'In OP6, the endless Open Polemic articles seeking abstract formulae for successful communist-party-building poke a stick at the Economic & Philosophic Science Review for believing that there is a correct Marxist-scientific analysis of world developments which is the only basis for revolutionary leadership.

The flaw with this, you say sarcastically, is that there are always at least 57 sectarian varieties of this 'truth' on offer at any one time.

Well, so there were in Marx's day too, and during Lenin's dominance, — many of them major international 'socialist' figures.

Marxism-Leninism triumphed NOT by 'multanimous rapprochement' behind the bogus diffidence of "no one has a monopoly of the truth" (which has ALWAYS been the cover for the most hidebound doctrinaire posturing since time began, afraid of a real argument) — but by exposing the idealist opportunism of the 'rival' leadership, — their WRONG ideas.

And the method is not mere repeated loud assertions that "this is the truth", but by endless reference to the actual historical developments taking place.

And the only basis for arriving at the necessary scientific socialist understanding in every case has been by the constant interchange between theory and practice, learning by mistakes or successes how right or wrong has been a party's perspectives, programme, strategy, and tactics.

And that underlined paragraph was stated in exactly those words in the EPSR March 17 article which you attack, pretending that it claimed that "objective truth should be mechanically equated with what EPSR articles think they know".

That article photocopied 5,000 words of Lenin quotes from many different articles and periods denouncing the anti-Bolshevik opportunism of Martovites, Trotskyites, etc, (for advocating "bottom-up democracy" against "top-down bureaucracy"), and denouncing support for organised factions, and even the idea of conciliation with organised factions and their advocates.

Lenin told this entire anti-Bolshevik swamp: "Those who do not subscribe to our party's ideas do not belong to our party." He condemned the "unprincipled 'unity' schemes of the conciliators which wish to base the unity of the party on an alliance of ALL factions. They lead to nothing".

You explained the position yourselves, albeit sarcastically: "After all, the history of humanity is a science like any other science, just waiting to be revealed by the consistently materialist Marxists".

Dead right, comrades, and the dialectical relationship between relative and absolute truth, was not remotely intended by Lenin to imply that there was never a definite analysis of reality to act upon.

Just the opposite. Lenin's whole life consisted of very firm decisions and absolute discipline when necessary, but an ability to identify, admit, and correct any wrong elements as soon as possible.

That LEADERSHIP responsibility was acquired by a lifetime spent taking decisions and living by the consequences.

Where is your programme and perspectives? You do not have one. Can workers get a lead from OP on what to make of the Ireland crisis over the past number of years? No, you do not have a line.

[Others do, in and around the SLP, and they are WRONG. They do not understand the anti-colonial balance of forces there and internationally, and see the Irish Agreement as an imposed 'victory for the imperialist New World Order'.

The EPSR's work goes back 19 years tracing the snail's-pace WITHDRAWAL by British imperialism because its degenerated condition can no longer defend the old colonial status-quo. It is a colossal revolutionary victory for the national-liberation struggle, arms in hand.

Workers in Britain need and deserve to learn that this defeat for British imperialism in Ireland is enormously to their own advantage in their revolutionary need to take on imperialism. Bolshevism made its name by alone denouncing WWI as an inter-imperialist war which Russian workers should see only as an opportunity for the defeat of their own ruling class. Workers in Britain will need similar leads, and have done so for 30 years (and longer) over Ireland.

But you tell workers nothing. You cannot be wrong, of course, but you can never be right either. The EPSR's 19-year-long analysis may prove wrong. It would have to accept its mistake, work out why it mis-analysed things, and try to grasp Marxist-Leninist science better henceforth.

But the EPSR has been correct so far about Ireland; about Solidarnosc and anti-communism; about the Mojahedeen in Afghanistan; about Gorbachev from the moment he came; the need for proletarian dictatorship science to be grasped in Grenada and Nicaragua; about the historical implications of the final self-liquidation of Moscow revisionism; and above all about modern world history being driven by imperialist economic crisis, etc, etc, — and giving a lead to workers FROM THE VERY START OF EACH ISSUE when the rest of the  'left' was all over the place on each matter.

And this is being written at the very moment that (June), the only 'news'  available on Ireland is depicting the Orangemen on the verge of toppling the New Agreement. They will fail. They want to topple it because the New Agreement IS a defeat for the old colonial status-quo. And they will lose because the forces of national-liberation have proved stronger, and because British imperialism is too decrepit to stand against these national-liberation forces any longer.

Again, against the "No one has a monopoly of the truth" irrelevance around]...

...the SLP,  the EPSR has long been describing the detailed implications for Britain of the unstoppable world trade-war and slump, bringing the Far East collapse-hurricane to all corners of the free market.

"It might not affect Britain," — heard in SLP circles, — is USELESS leadership.

But your fence-sitting at OP on all key world issues which ALONE can make or break a communist party LEADERSHIP for the working class, is even worse than useless.'

This fear of leadership through the clarification of issues around the crisis of imperialism and the actual TRIUMPH of 20th century workers-state building, (obscured only by bourgeois propaganda), is now openly trying to infect the SLP via defeatist pleas in its newspaper for 'left' Blairism, — to completely repackage and redefine 'socialism' so that it is out of sight completely.

"Socialism is no longer credible. It sounds like an old worn-out phrase that has been by-passed by history," 

the party's paper now declares, slightly out of tune with Clause IV of the SLP's constitution.

And on what basis is this grotesque reactionary confusion set before workers? On a Philistine stew of lies and backwardness worse than the SWP anti-communists promote on behalf of imperialist propaganda.

Reform and revolution have both failed and are now yesterday's argument, it is proclaimed in fully Blairite terms:

"The situation has changed, and Socialists must change with it to survive. At the heart of this change are the dramatic events that have occurred at the end of this century. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc sent ideological shock waves around the whole world. Communist governments just surrendered openly and embraced capitalism as the only way out of their crisis...This represented a world historic defeat for Socialism".

Total imperialist lies. It is imperialism which is in crisis, and it is the anti-revolutionary revisionist accommodation to the supposed miracle of free-market forces which has suffered the 'world historic defeat' — sucking up to the West because 'pluralism' had supposedly at last worked out the magic formula for crisis-free never-ending rapid economic growth for all.

The planned Soviet economy was in no kind of crisis at all. Its steadily-strengthening workers-state methods were SABOTAGED by this Philistine revisionist stupidity which had long since ceased believing in the world socialist revolution (precisely in line with the anti-communist defeatism throughout the fake-'left' in the West).

This ignorance of Marxism-Leninist science still refuses to grasp that imperialist crisis is THE GREAT DYNAMIC FORCE of this long period of history of slow, halting transition from crisis-ridden imperialism to the first faltering workers states, building socialism by trial and error, but ONLY able to do so by maintaining the DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT. As Lenin declared in the Dec 1918 addition to State and Revolution:

It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky's pamphlet, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, published in August 1918, i.e., long after the first edition of the present book, is a perfect example of petty-bourgeois distortion of Marxism and base renunciation of it in practice, white hypocritically recognizing it in words.

To proceed. The essence of Marx's teaching on the state has been mastered only by those who understand that the dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from "classless society," from Communism. The forms of bourgeois states are extremely varied, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to Communism certainly cannot but yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The truly 'dramatic event' which occurred ten years ago was the ignoramus decision by the Gorbachev bureaucracy to abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat, deliberately dismantling it under perestroika with its great historical task not yet fractionally completed. Total disaster rapidly followed for the world's first workers state. 

Any 'socialists' remotely worth the calling should learn this basic Marxist science and should stop publishing lies about the non-existent "Soviet economic collapse", — playing into the hands of the imperialist crisis.

Not only was there no "Soviet economic collapse", but the latest admissions from the capitalist press, — made willy-nilly in their farcical non-stop pretence of 'reporting' the world (when their whole intention is to cover up what is really going on), —  have been scoring sensational own goals.

Adequate food production and distribution was 'the Achilles Heel' of the Soviet 'economic planning disaster', the entire anti-communist chorus of bourgeois ideology, from Trotskyism to BBC fascism, never stopped trumpeting. The collective-farm 'failures' were crowed over by the whole West as being the mass peasantry's revenge for "forced collectivisation", and the most unconcealable example of the supposed Big Joke on all Soviet socialist production and planning, epitomised in low productivity. "They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work" was the alleged two-fingered response by the entire proletariat to the "hated Party dictatorship", etc. And the instant disposal of all goods from the food shops, leaving an impression of permanently semi-bare shelves, — was supposed to be the 'proof' of this 'crisis'.

But as the EPSR never tired of pointing out, the Soviet Union had a very fit and vigorous population which had doubled in size since the Revolution and had lengthened its life expectancy to the near-average Western 70 years (it has since dropped alarmingly back towards Third World levels) and with one of the lowest infant-mortality figures on earth. The mass strength of the USSR's industrial, scientific, military and sporting achievements were legendary. Skinny Russians were a very rare sight.

And shop distribution had continued in exactly the same way for 70 years, never any different.

The 'secret' was that nearly every workplace fed its own workers canteen — adequately, with factory shops for extra produce, all at non-profit rates, and extra produce of every description was regularly available through the general-public shops and markets but with always an output target which permanently struggled only TOWARDS absolute demand. 

How could it be any different in a TOTALLY PLANNED economy which had yet to reach the condition of ABUNDANCE??? (i.e. enough of everything for everybody so that prices — and money — could eventually be got rid of too, along with all rationing). 

Every single product and infrastructure output of the planned Soviet economy was self-evidently always LIMITED to how much could be allocated in that year's plan. Until ABUNDANCE was reached, how could it be any different? 

When, for example, could the nation's housing supply be "sufficient"? — in a country of 300 million people which had come from Third World backwardness in 1917, and had twice been completely, military destroyed in its main European industrial and agricultural centre by foreign imperialist intervention in the subsequent 70 years.

The unbroken, uninvaded 500-year wealth of British imperialism and colonialism and industrialisation has still not 'solved' the housing problem in Britain, — with 4 million new homes needed fairly urgently according to the present British imperialist government.

So when would a planned socialist economy have built enough good quality housing square metres to 'solve' the USSR's vast 'housing problem'???? Another 30 years, 50 years, 100 years??

So if every year there was always INEVITABLY some 'rationing' for housing expenditure compared to what was equally badly needed for the expansion of every other human and social need (schools, hospitals, transport, consumer goods, research institutes, cultural activities, etc, etc, etc), why would not the allocation for food production have also been "just enough within the state budget to meet real needs", which is exactly what did happen.

But it happened every year without fail, and the Soviet Union was adequately fed every year without fail, — no question about it, and anyone who suggests otherwise is just a complete LIAR.

And all of this was achieved, in spite of the unconcealed many many mistakes and wrong turnings in agricultural policy and very many changes in management techniques and incentives, etc, — part of the unavoidable trial-and-error mistakes referred to in earlier Lenin quotes, — but in a climate which is just about the worst in the world for agriculture in its hot/cold temperature extremes, its drought/rainfall extremes, and its general land fertility which is one of the lowest on record.

Yet the Soviet Union was in general just about self-sufficient in food, and certainly vastly superior in output to the pre-revolutionary achievements of capitalist agriculture.

But what is happening now under capitalism, whose legendary ability to provide the consumer-goods market should have written the final shaming chapter on decades of Soviet 'economic failure', etc?

Let the anti-communist press tell the story in its own words:

Shopping provides damning proof of the failure of "reform" for most Russians. Flirtation with the West, its food and financial habits, is ending in tears.

FOR ordinary Russians, sausages are one of the most revealing measures of post-Soviet decline. Ask a miner how much his standard of living has fallen since Boris Yeltsin moved into the Kremlin seven years ago and he tells you how many sausages his family ate per week before and how few they eat now.

The Soviet sausage, he says, was full of home-grown meat, but its Russian successor contains western gristle and fat.

The sausage was also a salutary lesson in basic economics delivered yesterday by Mikhail Abramian, a Moscow butcher, as he gave customers the bad news. "I've had to raise the price of my sausages because they're all made from imported meat. It's not my fault," he said.

A brief lecture in international trade followed to prove that he was not profiting from the 20 per cent rouble devaluation on Monday. "Russia doesn't produce meat any more. We buy sausage ingredients from abroad and have to pay in dollars. Now I need more dollars to buy these ingredients. That's why the price of my sausages has to go up," he said.

More than half of Russia's food is imported. Traders yesterday ignored government threats to punish them if they raised prices and did what they had to by passing on rising costs to customers.

"People can't and won't pay 30 per cent more for their food," said Henryk Kasparian, a food importer. "There will be upheaval. There has to be."

With lavish Western subsidies, capitalism roared back into Russia in 1991 with a huge extravagant flourish, piling the shops high with all the most up-to-date Western consumer goods and food which the carefully-rationed PLANNED Soviet economic development had never seen. People were suitably amazed, and scoffed at their former 'poverty'.

But the subsidies have run out. The deceitful capitalist show the West put on has run out of steam. The slump and trade-war realities of capitalism are back with a vengeance. "There will be upheaval", even the bourgeois businessman admits.

There are still plenty of goods in the shops, — but no one can pay for them. And the general economic situation is only going to get worse. There will be hunger. And then there will be revolution. It will be back to the Soviet Union, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which it was a lunatic failure by revisionist philistinism to have abandoned in the first place.

The dazzling impression that capitalist consumer-goods supplies make has always been misleading because it is a completely false guide to what is the real picture on overall living standards and consumption.

Shirts on UK High Streets could be found of good quality and at an occasionally reasonable price, compared to cheaper but shoddier goods in East Europe sometimes.

But the sweated near-slave labour at a Bangkok factory employing child-labourers, making just a tiny fraction of that High Street price for themselves, was for long ignored, and still is. 

The East European goods would have come from somewhere in the socialist camp where universally equal living standards either already prevailed or were the clear aim, so that the person buying the shirt in GUM was in no way exploiting the labour of the workers in the Uzbekistan factory which made the shirt, whose living standards (schooling, housing standards, health service, higher education, general social provisions, cultural opportunities, etc, etc) would be virtually identical to those of a Moscow worker. 

Which is hardly true of a High Street shopper in Britain compared to the 16-hours-a-day child labour which has produced in India the 'very reasonably priced' rug just purchased.

The imperialist consumer illusion has always been a giant fraud which all the fake-'lefts' and Trots have always been happy to fall for so as to be able to jeer at the obviously less-affluent consumer-industry efforts of the socialist camp.

But one was a genuine achievement of the state of civilisation's productivity, — the other was just a deceitful nonsense, still going on.

But now the Western consumer miracle has a new problem: It is all falling apart anyway. The exploitation-driven boom-bubble has burst. Soon there will be a chance to see what REAL living standards Western economies have produced once they are shorn of international Third-World markets — (in labour and raw materials, etc) — to exploit, what will living standards look like under permanent mass unemployment in the West??

And what is the point of continuing with such a wasteful hit-or-miss system (destroyed surplus food mountains one minute, universal bankruptcy and unemployment the next) when planned workers states have already proved their worth?

The anti-communist 'lefts' have a lot to answer for. Roy Bull

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

Republican News comment reflects growing Sinn Fein political authority as leaders of the successful national-liberation struggle.

AFTER such an appalling tragedy it is difficult even to attempt political analysis. Only words of sympathy for the bereaved and maimed seem appropriate at such a time. Yet we must try to assess why this atrocity happened and how further deaths and injuries can be prevented.

Words such as 'psychopaths' and serial killers' have been used. In the heat of anger and grief this is understandable but the people who carried out the Omagh atrocity do not fit that description. The Omagh bombing was carried out by a splinter group which claims to be republican. The group brought about this tragedy because it is mired in militarism.

Any struggle which adopts the tactic of armed force is in danger of succumbing to militarism. Militarism means that military considerations come before all others. The political nature of the struggle is obscured. The continuation of the armed campaign itself becomes the objective.

When this happens the tactic of armed struggle — rather than the political objective for which it is carried out — is elevated to a principle. In a protracted struggle such as that in Ireland the danger of militarism is increased. When the militarism of the state intensifies the war through repression the danger is greatest. Defeat looms for a struggle which allows itself to become caught in a spiral of conflict, losing sight of the political context, the strategic objectives, and ultimate effects of armed force.

Succumbing to militarism increases the danger to non-combatants because of ill-conceived or reckless military operations by the insurgents. It plays into the hands of the oppressive state because it greatly enhances the efforts of the state to isolate the insurgents politically.

There comes a stage where isolation is so complete that the insurgent group becomes insulated from the political effects of its actions. That is, it becomes isolated from its own people. It falls back behind the defences of its dwindling support and unless it extricates itself from militarism by a change of strategy it is bound for certain defeat.

It is obvious that the splinter group responsible for the Omagh bombing is totally militarist. It has passed through the stages above and gone further. This group has no community or political support base upon which to fall back. Its minuscule support is confined to the immediate associates of its activists. Now, as revulsion at the Omagh atrocity grows, it faces a wave of repression North and South.

Republicans will not join in the clamour for more repression, such as 'selective internment'. There is a dangerous argument abroad now that "only a security response" can address this situation. 

The danger here is that the cycle of armed repression and armed resistance, albeit by a very small group, could be intensified. 

Recruits could be won on the basis of sympathy, as they surely must have been following the killing of Ronan Mac Lochlainn in Wicklow earlier this year by Gardai who could have arrested him. The reality is that only continued political progress can see the ending of this futile militaristic campaign.

What are the objectives of this group's campaign? Accusations that they intended to kill a large number of civilians in Omagh seem wide of the mark. Nonetheless they bear full responsibility for the deaths. Their campaign itself is ill-conceived; their modus operandi was deeply flawed both in placing such a bomb in the middle of a busy street on a Saturday afternoon and, apparently, in their botched warning.

They themselves would argue that their aim is to destabilise British rule in the Six Counties. But anyone with a modicum of political sense can see that their actions strengthen the hand of those who most resist political change and who seek not only the maintenance of the status quo but a return to the failures of the past. Repression has moved  to the top of the political agenda; the sterile decommissioning argument has been revived; the name of Irish republicanism has been sullied.

Irish republicans have given five years of commitment to the peace process and have made significant gains. The Good Friday Agreement, while far short of our ultimate goal of unity and independence, is now the political context of struggle, containing as it does the potential to move us closer to our goal. By agreement among the broad range of republican opinion the peace process is at the centre of republican strategy.

Republicans have always acknowledged that where a peaceful route forward — an alternative to armed struggle — is available, then they are morally and politically bound to take it.

It is against this consensus among the republican people that the splinter group is struggling, rather than against British rule. There is no other logic or political purpose to their campaign. Their actions amount to sabotage against Irish republicanism. Is this the purpose of people who claim to be republicans? Now is the time for them — and for those who might have considered supporting them — to step back and consider the futility of the path of militarism which they have chosen.