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 978 Tuesday Dec 8th 1998                                                         10p

Now that imperialist crisis has exposed the treachery of Trotskyite anti-Soviet lies and distortions, it is the EPSR's crisis-analysis that the Trot book-burners really want to silence. FISC censorship's 'homophobe' diversion now in trouble from Marx & Engels, modern science, and even the most 'politically correct' bourgeois newspapers (including the Pink Paper) who condemn BBC blue-pencil protection of Mandelson as an un-gay rightwing intrigue. The flourishing of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory requires this Trot-fascist gagging attempt to be itself witch-hunted out of the SLP and out of existence, just as the FISC have tried to do to real communists. Coming communist revolutions will sweep aside all anti-communist propaganda and all single-issue slanderous diversions.

The Trot attempts to wreck the SLP (via a London Region strike and abuse of the Women's Section's purpose) has nothing to do with bogus defence of Gays, - a pure diversion.

The Trots hate "cranky ideas of Marxist philosophy",(as Heron blurted out in his bilious harangue of the London Region), which came from "one current" and which had "marred the Manchester Congress".

The Heron-Sikorski entryists from the anti-communist Fourth International do not want to hear about the crisis of the world imperialist system.

"But the crisis may not come to Britain" Heron told the SLP's December Congress 12 months ago in a conscious attempted response to "cranky Marxist" speeches made by Leninists there about the political future as dictated by imperialist collapse.

"A windbag trend of gobbledegook" Heron told the London Region 14 days ago to get them to go on strike against prominent agitators for EPSR "cranky Marxism" being fairly constitutionally elected into SLP national office. 

"This trend was swept away by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and all those countries", Heron ranted on in demented anti-communist style.

"They want a super-Bolshevik communist organisation. We want something rooted in reality and life," he added.

These Trots posture mightily as 'Marxist-Leninists' but they hate everything that Marxism-Leninism stands for, — the analysis of imperialist crisis as the current dominant force driving history forward; the building of workers states as the only solution to capitalist domination; and the construction of a serious, dedicated Bolshevik party to get there.

And notice that the 'homophobe' McCarthy-ite smears they are now dealing in since they lost the elections at Congress (dealt with below) are not even mentioned in Heron's fundamental Trotskyite opportunist objections to "cranky Marxist philosophy".

It is difficult to get more "rooted in reality and life" as far as capitalist reality is concerned than to listen to what the bourgeois press itself is admitting is going wrong with its system:

BRITISH Steel warned last night that it planned to cut more jobs in the next six months and might shut down plants for an extended break over Christmas in an effort to avoid financial losses.

City experts predicted that the redundancy figure could reach 1,800 in the next half year but said that would not be enough to prevent British Steel crashing to an £80 million deficit by March.

Shares in the former state-owned group fell 8.5p to l00p as chairman and chief executive, Sir Brian Moffat, blamed a massive surge in cut-price imports from the Far East for the fastest deterioration in prices he could remember.

And, in an ominous prediction from the heart of Britain's manufacturing sector, Sir Brian said he expected national output to move into negative figures in 1999

MORE redundancies in the City are expected after three investment banks announced massive losses and job cuts.

Turbulent trading worldwide was yesterday blamed by Nomura International. UBS and HSBC Midland for the latest upheavals in the Square Mile.

Nomura International, the London unit of Nomura Securities, Japan's largest securities firm, said it would announce job cuts today after interim losses of £289 million.

The bank disclosed in October that it wanted to cut operating costs by 20 per cent after announcing losses incurred by the London unit, with 1,110 staff.        

HSBC Holdings has cut 60 jobs in the dealing area of its HSBC Midland treasury,  foreign exchange and capital markets operation in London because "changing market conditions".  Twenty dealers will leave immediately. 

HSBC Midland employs 1,345 staff globally, with 1,200 in London.

Earlier this month, Barclays Capital shed 120 further jobs, 75 in London and 45 in New York, bringing the latest round of redundancies to 250 staff worldwide and Liffe, the London futures trading exchange, announced more than 600 job losses.

BOEING'S 350 British suppliers are expected to be crippled by the company's plans to scale back production levels and slash 48,000 jobs. The US planemaker yesterday warned that next year's financial results would be sharply down from previous forecasts. The job cuts amount to a 20 per cent reduction in Boeing's workforce from 238,000 in June. Seventy per cent of Boeing's European suppliers are based in Britain.

GEC drove forward its "strategic reshaping" under chief executive Lord Simpson yesterday by announcing 1,500, job losses in low-tech areas of its telecoms and defence electronics business.

Dagenham and Chelmsford, both in Essex, are to take the brunt of the job cuts at Marconi Communications,  with 260 to go at Dagenham from the closure of a cable unit, TCL. Chelmsford is to lose 220 posts, with further cuts in Birmingham and Wavertree, Liverpool and other plants.

They come in the wake of the fusion of GPT, the UK telecoms arm fully taken over by GEC after it bought out Siemens' 40 per cent stake for £700 million earlier this year, with its Italian arm, Marconi. Lord Simpson said that, overall, GEC would lose a net 2,000 posts this year.

THOUSANDS of oil industry jobs in Europe and the US are to go as a result of a new wave of mergers in the sector yesterday.

As many as 9,000 jobs, mostly in refining operations, could be lost with the $77.2 billion (£46.8 billion) alliance confirmed by Exxon and Mobil, creating the world's largest industrial company. The two groups aim to save $2.8 billion from their combined operating costs of $34 billion. Exxon employs 80,000 people while Mobil has 42,700 workers.

In Europe, the surprise £8 billion takeover of Belgium's PetroFina by Total of France is expected to cost many North Sea exploration jobs.

Total said the merger would allow substantial cost savings in exploration and production a well as refining and marketing.

COURTAULDS Textiles, a leading supplier to Marks & Spencer, is to axe more than 1,200 jobs at its Claremont Garments subsidiary just two months after it bought the firm and promised workers the takeover would strengthen the business. Eight Claremont factories, from Portsmouth to Tyneside, are to be closed down with the loss of 1,125 jobs, and a further 95 head office redundancies are planned. The cuts mean that one in four of Claremont's workforce are to lose their jobs.

Courtaulds Textiles chief executive Colin Dyer said the redundancies would generate "increased flexibility and cost effectiveness" and were "essential to ensure that we remain competitive in the international, fast-moving clothing business".

THE pace of job losses in the City surged yesterday with the news that up to 5,000 workers face the sack as a result of Deutsche Bank's purchase of Bankers Trust of America for $10 billion. The deal will create the world's largest financial services company.

The job cuts will weigh heavily on the City, where many financial firms have already cut up to 5 per cent of traders and financial staff as a result of losses during the recent global stock market upheavals.

Banking sources also fear the worst is to come as other financial groups chase merger partners to increase their presence in the world financial markets.

Deutsche Bank, announcing the record-breaking deal in Frankfurt, said that in a move to cut costs as a result of the acquisition, it would slash 5,500 jobs in London and New York. City sources said last night that at least 3,000 would be felt in London, where Deutsche and Bankers Trust have considerable overlap in some business areas.

"Next year it's going to happen more because other organisations are going to go through the same merger process," said Nick Marsh, marketing director of MSL, an executive search company.

The fact that two non-British owned financial firms can inflict such damage on the City is a sign of the changing structure of ownership of the City's main employers.

Deutsche Bank helped set the pace in 1989 when it swallowed Morgan Grenfell, one of the oldest City firms. German rival Dresdner bought Kleinwort Benson, another City firm, while a Swiss bank gobbled up Phillips & Drew.

American banks have also jumped in, including Merrill Lynch, which bought British stock broker Smith New Court, while earlier this, year Bankers Trust bought part of NatWest's investment banking business. Earlier this month Merrill Lynch announced that 450 jobs would be cut in London.

Few of the main players in the financial markets are now British-owned.

Some were angry, some placid but all agreed on one thing — jobs were at stake and management had cocked things up. All  37,000 workers will vote on the deal.

The Solihull workers, who make the Land-Rover Discovery, Defender, Range Rover and Freelander, were furious.

Why should they, as specialist, four-wheel drive manufacturers, give up their above-average overtime earnings and favourable conditions to save the Longbridge car factory down the road?

Both union and management leaders tried to persuade the Solihull workers that the ballot is about one deal, one company — not one thing for them and another for Longbridge.

Paul Kirk, Rover's manufacturing boss, was booed as he came on stage. Whistles and cries of 'shame' and 'sack him' floated from the floor in the huge NEC pavilion.

'If you reject this package, it will bring the whole company down,' said Kirk as a mass roar of disapproval swept through the hall.

Next up was Tony Woodley, chief Transport and General Workers' Union negotiator for the UK motor industry.

He had sat on the platform next to Rover and BMW executives earlier in the week announcing the 'groundbreaking' deal that he had spent day and night thrashing out at the Munich headquarters. Now he had to sell it to his own members.

To more whistles and boos, he said: 'Rover is technically bankrupt. It will lose £600 million this year. Renault is outselling Rover in Britain.

'BMW is not in the business of making Land-Rovers or cars — it is in the business of making  money.'

He told them that if Longbridge closed the only Rover car in future would be the large Oxford-built 75. With barely any car division there was no guarantee that BMW would continue to invest in Land-Rover in the UK.

'There are people on the BMW board who would be happy to move four-wheel drive production abroad.'

Finally, the union leader paid an astonishing tribute to BMW boss Bernd Pischetsrieder: 'On Friday 13th in Munich they (BMW) said "do a deal or we're going to sack the lot of you". The BMW board voted by six to one to close Longbridge and Pischetsrieder was the one who put his reputation and his job on the line to endorse maintaining a full range of models for the Rover group. He is putting his money where his mouth is.'

He sat down to the odd patch of booing and generally muted applause. The workers poured out of the meeting unhappy and cursing.

Dismissively, Heron told last December's SLP Congress that "the crisis may not come to Britain".

Leninist members of the SLP have been battling for a very long time on this question, against the entire weight of capitalist propaganda, via articles in the EPS Review, publishing weekly for nearly 20 years to keep the flag of Marxism flying.

And this fight has particularly had to be fought hard against the entire Trot and Revisionist swamp of fake-'lefts', — the whole lot.

These anti-communist parties and groups, — from the CP to the 57 varieties of Trotskyite backstabbing sectarians, — either abandoned the idea of socialism completely (like Western communist parties) or else gleefully helped the West's endless subversion and rubbishing of the workers states which have tried making a start to building socialism in the 20th century (like the Trots did and still do).

The Leninists in the SLP, again via articles in the EPS Review, have fought especially determinedly against the whole lying distortion put out by capitalist/Revisionist/Trot propaganda that the workers states "collapsed".

Totally untrue. The Soviet workers state (dictatorship of the proletariat) was deliberately sabotaged by opportunist bureaucrats whose real grasp of Marxist-Leninist science was zero.

Like Heron, they said "Let's deal with the real world, real life. No more cranky Marxist philosophy" about the world imperialist system heading for the greatest crisis of collapse, slump, turmoil, upheaval, war, and revolution in all human history.

So Gorbachev, Yeltsin, & Co fixed up a monstrous class-collaboration with the Western world (i.e. rapacious imperialism) to dismantle the Soviet workers state (dictatorship of the proletariat) and join the "real world" as grasped by all bourgeois ideology (the Trots included).

This was the 'New World Order' where the capitalist system had supposedly finally proved that it was the best for solving ANY problem, including the 'old fashioned' problems of its own periodic crises.

The EPS Review articles have battled relentlessly against this defeatist nonsense which is so crucial a part of Trotskyism's "everything is rotten" pessimism,(a class position governed by the 57 varieties' POLITICAL origins in petty-bourgeois attitudes, to the dictatorship of the proletariat.)

Only superficially has it seemed that Western imperialism is 'all conquering'.

For the "cranky ideas of Marxist philosophy", the EXACT OPPOSITE has been the real story, as chronicled in 20 years of the EPS Review.

The real story is that the imperialist 'free world' system embarked post-l945 on easily the biggest deliberate inflationary boom in the whole historical record, — with inevitable, unprecedented, and as yet unknowable consequences which are now unfolding.

But this catastrophic comeuppance to the free-market system has ALWAYS been the truly important and decisive underlying reality, even when the boom seemed to be at its height and convincing EVERYBODY (bar a tiny handful of Leninists) that "the West could now solve ANY problem, ANY time, — such was the immense power now of US imperialism, unheard of previously."

Currently, all strands of opinion mention the crisis, at least tentatively or occasionally. But less than two years ago, the EPSR's Leninist view, — repeatedly expressed every week, that imperialist CRISIS was the decisive reality, not the imaginary 'New World Order' — was universally jeered at as 'cranky', including by all the Trots, and including at the SLP's first Congress (May 1996), shamefully from the platform.

And the smartarse new point that "this tiny handful of cranky Leninists have ALWAYS gone on about 'the crisis of capitalism' and so they were bound to be right one day" is sheer philistinism unworthy of a workers party.

Certainly, the working class has always had to deal with 'the real world' of booming aggressive capitalism which obviously could not be stopped in its tracks just by being told that underneath, it was really a system that was all the time unavoidably building up only for the greatest crisis in all history.

But such a perspective, now at last beginning to be more widely accepted, WOULD have always made an enormous difference to how the workers movement coped with its own mental condition and organisational structure when facing booming imperialism.

Past patterns of trade-union industrial struggles and party-building struggles could have gone differently given a deeper understanding of capitalism as basically an incurably flawed and disastrously decadent system.

Real life provides the best examples and illustrations of how vital is this "cranky Marxist philosophy".

Arthur Scargill's colossal reputation as a working-class leader was greatly enhanced by his having the "cranky Marxist" guts to tell the whole world that Thatcherite degeneracy was prepared to actually destroy the British coal industry in order to defeat the miners, standing at the forefront of the defence of working-class interests in Britain.

He showed even more courage and farsightedness to insist that the class-war instincts of workers to build the miners strike by mass meetings and by class-solidarity picketing actions were infinitely superior and preferable to allowing the struggle to be hauled down by bourgeois propaganda provocations for an "individual ballot", — part of fake, anti-working-class "democracy" provisions, — reducing the working miners' collective strength to the weakness of the most worried domestic kitchen decisions, taken in atomised isolation and surrounded by wall-to-wall capitalist press & television propaganda.

But the very opposite to "cranky Marxist philosophy" perspectives was shown in the NUM's finally tragic delusion that the Labour Party could eventually return to office with a new 'Plan for Coal' based on 'unchanging' boom conditions and an 'unchanging ' stake in Britain's prosperity for the organised labour movement.

The Great Strike was a crucial vehicle for educating the working class in the ultimate worthlessness of Labour-Partyism and capitalism for securing workers interests. And in the end,the Socialist Labour Party had to be born.

But the greater the spread of deliberate Marxist consciousness, — the better, firmer, and sooner do all such developments occur.

Far from being "cranky", it is the essential role of Marxist science to be able already to see in 1984-85, if possible, not only the deliberate class-war purposes of the capitalist regime's pretended "cost-effective reasons" for closing down pits, but also how Labour-Partyism would class-collaborate with the world-imperialist ruling-class needs of the British bourgeoisie all the way to TOTAL blitz on the WHOLE working class at some stage (coming soon) of capitalism's economic difficulties.

For the essential message of the coming Great Slump will be that the way of the Soviet workers state (in pursuing economic self-sufficiency and refusing to drop its guard against Western capitalist subversion and political infiltration) was the only policy with a future (and a very bright one), — a policy destroyed by Revisionist ignorance of Marxist-Leninist science, (which led to the Revisionists themselves eventually being destroyed (or completely turned), and the Soviet workers state along with them).

And it is THIS vital understanding of Marxism that the Trots so hate and fear, — that the science of underlying imperialist crisis would eventually prove that the Soviet workers state (dictatorship of the proletariat) way of doing things was the right way after all (as far as general economic planning, and worthwhile social order, and anti-imperialist world political stance, etc, were concerned).

And the treacherous Trots who gleefully helped bourgeois propaganda kick the memory of Soviet workers state achievements to bits once Revisionist (anti-Marxist) stupidity had abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat, — are even more hysterical now than ever about "cranky Marxist" analysis of long-term imperialist crisis patterns being visible for more than 20 years, — now that the catastrophic consequences of abandoning the planned workers states (dictatorship of the proletariat) are plain for all to see, as these latest capitalist press admissions show:

When communism began to crumble 10 years ago, the East seemed like the proverbial land of promise: free-market capitalism would transform the hopelessly inefficient state industries, while the well educated, well trained but poorly paid workforce would prove irresistible to investors. Few doubted that, after a difficult but brief transition, the moribund economies would be transformed into dynamic economies.

But look at them now, nearly a decade on.

Between 1989 and 1997, far from growing overall, the Czech economy has shrunk by 2 per cent, according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's recent Transition Report. Hungary has shrunk by 10 per cent in the past decade, and Bulgaria by 37 per cent. 

The further East you go, the worse it is. The Russian economy grew last year — by only 0.8 per cent. But that was the only year the economy hasn't shrunk since Russia embraced the free market.

Bad as it is in Russia, the Bear is positively booming compared to the Ukraine, which has not had a single year of growth since the fall of communism. Overall, the economy of Ukraine — and the incomes of its 50 million citizens — are now barely a third of the size that it was under communism. Slovenia and the Slovak Republic are almost back where they started. While the total economy of eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union has shrunk by a quarter over the past decade, all countries in Western Europe have enjoyed economic growth.

The scale of the problem led to far deeper economic contraction than originally expected, and made it almost impossible for many countries to stabilise their turbulent economies. Taxes were often difficult to collect as hard-pressed citizens struggled for economic survival. Governments faced shortfalls in revenue, and many ran up budget deficits of as much as 20 per cent of GDP.

Many of the liberalising reforms had knock-on effects. Removing the enormous subsidies paid to state-owned farms often hit factory output: in many countries, one quarter of all investment was in agricultural machinery, but once the subsidies were removed, farmers could no longer afford new tractors.

The medicine of radical privatisations also produced largely disappointing results. Gomulka said: 'It was a failure of imagination to think that privatisation would produce instant results. The companies were mainly sold to the managers and employees, who still had the wrong machines producing the wrong goods, and didn't have any access to capital to make other investments.'

The slow pace of recovery has prompted strong criticism of the free-market reforms the West pressed on former communist bloc countries.

While the poor got poorer, a small elite has been able to exploit the partial reforms to generate huge wealth.

But even these countries haven't escaped the impact of the recent global financial turmoil. Those economies that were growing strongly will slow, while the weaker ones will slide into recession. The EBRD estimates that Russia and Romania will both have contracted by 5 per cent by the end of this year, the Czech republic by 1 per cent.

The EBRD's Transition Report says: 'Progress in transition has been slower and more erratic than in any year since the fall of the Berlin Wall.' It may be some time still before the East lives up to its promise.

These own-goal admissions by bourgeois propaganda fail to explain, of course, that their excuse for capitalism's failure in East Europe (through "need for better management") collapses completely once the beginning of the Western free market's own failure is taken into account.

And the crisis is worsening unstoppably all round the world now, as the bourgeoisie's own gloomy predictions freely admit:

SHARES on the Brazilian stock exchange crashed by almost 10 per cent yesterday after the Cardoso government failed to push the first phase of an IMF-inspired austerity package through parliament, reigniting fears of a crisis in the world's ninth biggest economy.

News that Brazil's lower house had blocked $2.2 billion of social security cuts to trim the country's $64 billion budget deficit set nerves jangling on Wall Street as dealers weighed up the chances of a flight of capital leading to an enforced devaluation.

Analysts said markets had been unsettled by the heightened risks of a domino-style collapse in the whole of Latin America next year.

Brazil's economy is already contracting at an annual rate of 6 per cent even without these problems.

The stock market rally of the past two months has been based on hopes that Brazil would avoid financial collapse and that the Japanese economy would gradually haul itself out of its worst recession since the second world war.

However, figures released yesterday showed few signs of the world's second biggest economy turning the corner. Japan's economy shrank by 0.7 per cent in the three months to September, the fourth successive quarterly decline.

With consumers refusing to spend and corporations scaling back investment, Japan's gross domestic product was 3.6 per cent lower in the third quarter than in the same period a year earlier.

Taiichi Sakaiya, head of the Economic Planning Agency, said it would now be difficult for the government to meet its forecast of a 1.8 per cent contraction during the current fiscal year."It's hard to say [the economy] has hit bottom and is rebounding, but I have the sense it's crawling along the bottom," he said.

Analysts said the latest GDP data gave no cause for optimism. "This fits in with the pattern of a deepening recession," said Colin Calderwood, of Jardine Fleming Securities Asia. "If there is light at the end of the tunnel, you have to squint very hard to see it." Price-cutting and falling sales have caused profits to plunge at most Japanese companies, and driven many of the largest into the red.

The news comes at the end of week in which Boeing announced it was cutting 48,000 jobs worldwide in response to orders from Asia drying up, while the World Bank estimated that 1.2 billion people in the developing world would suffer a drop in living standards as result of this year's economic turmoil.

All in all, recent events must rather dent the optimism of policy makers in the industrialised world who thought that a steady as she goes course could steer the world economy off the rocks.

Since the crisis began in Thailand last September, the West's response has been that more of the usual medicine is all the world needs to avert a crisis. Japan has continued to throw money at its nervous consumers, Brazil signed up to the usual IMF fiscal austerity package when it accepted its financial bailout and central banks around the world have behaved as if half percentage point cuts to interest rates will slow down the financial contagion.

But the reality is that policy makers throughout the Group of Seven industrialised countries have been shortsighted, complacent and too slow to react to events while their prescriptions have been too little too late and too wrong.

So far, what the West has tried and advised others to try isn't working. After an initial flurry on the world's stock exchanges since September, it seems that even the markets no longer believe that policymakers are doing more than papering over the cracks.

The one threat overshadowing all else is that there will be a second collapse on Wall Street and that this time there will be no recovery. For if the rest of the world has been suffering from too little too late, Wall Street is a classic case of too much.

The move to hold a special session of the IMF's policy-making Interim Committee — the first since it was set up at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 — comes amid signs that the recent recovery in world markets is stalling, with fresh falls on world stock markets, profits warnings and job losses from multi-national companies, as well as fading hopes of restoring order to the Russian economy.

The meeting will break the normal pattern of a twice-yearly IMF gathering and emphasises the concern at the fragility of the global economy in both the Western countries and the developing world.

This was underlined last night when Wall Street was again gripped by panic selling in the wake of the announcement by Boeing of 48,000 redundancies worldwide. In a separate development, the World Bank revealed that Brazil, Russia, Indonesia and 33 other developing countries — accounting for 1.2 billion people — were likely to suffer falling standards of living this year.

THE rosy scenario that has propped up western financial markets since the turmoil sparked by the Russian devaluation and debt default is fading quickly The falls seen on the European markets in yesterday's trading — 4.8 per cent drop in the Dax in Germany and a 3.59 per cent drop in the FTSE — are substantial and reflect deep-seated concerns about global economic events. 

Why, then, is there a sudden return to gloom on the financial markets? It is the realisation that the global economy is slowing quite speedily. One of the symptoms of this slowdown is the sudden rash of mergers as some of the fatter multinationals shed costs and jobs.

The survey data is also less than encouraging. In the UK, while the Chancellor is away battling against tax harmonisation, the surveys have taken a nasty turn. It is the surveys these days that count — they are more forward-looking, than official data and often more reliable. The UK Purchasing Managers Index has registered its lowest reading in its seven-year history, with orders still tumbling.

But it is not just manufacturing that is in the doldrums. The new, quarterly services sector survey, produced by the CBI and Deloittes, predicts falls in consumer, business and professional services as the cost pressures on the corporate sector start to bite. 

What was really scaring the markets in late trading was the US National Association of Purchasing Managers report, which came in sharply lower, sending the Dow down and bonds up, in expectation of interest rate cuts to come. Similarly, the German purchasing managers index was gloomy: so much for European Union, which was to keep global recession at bay The latest equity market falls are almost certainly the start of a second, more permanent, correction.

But even this amount of misery gets nowhere near to the heart of capitalism's problem.

As the Review's "cranky Marxist philosophy" has consistently explained since weekly publication began 20 years ago, the private enterprise system's self-poisoning anarchy can only end in the collapse of the dollar itself, never mind about the catastrophic domino-collapse of Southeast Asia's currencies one after the other.

The collapse of the dollar would put the whole world into such a pandemonium of economic crash and turmoil and revolutionary upheaval as to defy description.

Dimly, even the capitalist press is at last beginning to grasp just a Little of what the system is heading for:

The presumption is that Brazil will be next on the list.

Important though it is, Brazil may prove to be something of a sideshow, because there is an even bigger danger lurking out there — the risk of a collapse in the US dollar.

The lay-offs at Boeing brought home an uncomfortable truth, namely that the earnings growth which the stock market bulls use to justify rocketing share prices simply are not coming through.

So what is happening to profits in America's "miracle economy"? Far from rising exponentially, they have been dropping for the past year and are now declining at an annual rate of 6 per cent. Margins are being squeezed by overcapacity; rising employment costs and a deceleration in productivity growth.

"We believe the US economic and market conjuncture closely resembles the Asia- economic catastrophe (formally known as miracle) back in 1996," said Mr Edwards. 

"Excesses in the US have built up which inevitably will be corrected. The cycle has yet to be abolished. When adjustment does occur, the dollar should be watched closely."

Far from being a "new paradigm," the US bears all the hallmarks of a Mexico or a Thailand, only on a frighteningly colossal scale. For a start, it is running a vast and expanding current account deficit, which is being funded by flows of foreign capital. This hot money is attracted by the rise in US asset prices, which in turn are helping to fund excessive consumption by both businesses and individuals.

At some point, this tail-chasing will stop.

What would be the policy ramifications of this? Obviously in the short run, a dollar. currency crisis would be utterly disastrous, since it would choke off European exports and do immeasurable damage to the prospects of a Japanese recovery But in the longer term, the global crisis may have to arrive in America's backyard.

Although phrased emotively and tendentiously, Heron's hate-list can easily be turned back against himself.

The Bolsheviks were a workers party, from a largely illiterate working-class at that, who fought to understand and spread the scientific understanding of imperialist revolutionary crisis as understood by Marxist-Leninist science. The only problem for workers in Britain is that they have never yet done the same thing themselves.

The Trots pretend to prefer "something rooted in reality and life" whatever that means. If it means no more crisis, then it is pure anti-Marxism, and the above capitalist admissions shoot that one down. If it means no more Bolshevik parties, it is ludicrously dishonest since no Trot sect in history has ever tried to do anything else but organise along Bolshevik lines, and the Heron-Sikorski Fourth International FISC Trots are no exception.

All that this opportunist hypocrisy means is that they do not want any rival proposals for using revolutionary theory to guide the practice and understanding of the SLP as it develops. They just want their Trotskyite imbecile drivel to reign supreme.

If their "reality and life" means their pathetic blinkered Philistinism about "the crisis possibly not coming to Britain", the SLP would be well divested of that nonsense.

Their Manchester Congress views that workers do not need political leadership from a communist party, just help in clearing blocked drains; and that a socialist labour party should step aside in favour of supposedly 'left electoral assets' such as Ken Livingstone, are much closer to Mary Poppins 'reality' than to real political life as most serious-minded workers want it interpreted.

The Trot grasp of 'reality' is so weird that Heron and C.Sikorski advise the SLP to denounce its own vice-presidential election result because "the Daily Telegraph would just take up what the Weekly Worker puts out" (London Region address) and because 

"he appears not to do anything in the labour movement, he produces his thoughts every week and seems to send them out to people, and he is well-known to leading gay activists such as Peter Tatchell and to ultra-left groups such as the CPGB. 

The CPGB also produce a weekly paper which they also send out far and wide, and have spoken in the past about Royston Bull's homophobia at SLP public meetings. We cannot over-emphasise how concerned we are" 

(current circular headed 'National Women's Section' but going only to selected women comrades and to selected all-male CSLP branches).

And this circular has the cheek to accuse the EPS Review of being "very rambling"!!!

Trying to disentangle these primeval screams of anti-communist fear and hatred is unpleasant work but might be useful for clarity's sake.

First the 'homophobic' nonsense which has been borrowed from the Trot-influential CPGB losers and which Heron pretends will lead the SLP to be "branded gaybashers" in the national press.

This would seem an odd way for the capitalist press to try to influence workers against the SLP, especially for the mass readers of the Sun and the Telegraph; but leaving that aside, this Trot notion makes it clear that they think Socialist Labour doesn't stand a chance anyway, — for the Weekly Worker (and the Trots themselves)have muttered far nastier slanders than 'homophobe' in the SLP's direction. 

"Fascist; Scargill dictatorship; anti-Semites; Stalin-worshippers; gas-chamber lovers; racists; misogynistic; etc" 

are just a few of the vilifications in the London Regional meeting, the women's circular, and the Weekly Worker.

As explained before, the 'homophobe' jibe was a diversion the Weekly Worker losers came up with after being comprehensively politically defeated by EPSR arguments on what the SLP phenomenon represented; on how communists should lend their weight to such a movement; on the hopelessness of entryism and 'Socialist Alliances'; on Trot defeatist stupidity about US imperialism's non-existent 'New World Order'; on Trot defeatist stupidity for insisting that Sinn Féin/IRA have been beaten and have sold out: etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Now another sect of Trot losers around Heron are trying the same diversion after defeat in the elections and on political arguments about the crisis; Ireland; the role of Marxism; the question of 'alliances' with the swamp; deferring to 'left' MPs; the type of party; the question of Black Sections; etc, etc, etc, etc.

"Join the 'real world' and make any mention of possibly reactionary homosexual political influences a completely taboo subject, or any scientific, psycho-sexual or sociological analysis of the statement 'being homosexual is exactly the same as being heterosexual'," — these Heron Trots now pretend to say.

They do not believe a word of it themselves, of course, and do not really expect anyone else to believe a word of it either, other than the very silliest of people. 

As the EPSR has already demonstrated, all of science on the subject would be banned; Marx and Engels would be banned for ribald jokes against a rightwing homosexual political conspiracy; and a lot of modern history would be unable to be examined where homosexual connections have merged with political connections. 

The current issue of the Observer from the oh-so-politically-correct Guardian stable where homosexual viewpoints receive very liberal coverage, would have to be suppressed for the following interesting political speculation (about reactionary homosexual influences) which is not remotely 'homophobic gay-bashing' but would presumably be burned by the Heronites nonetheless:

The use of power to blur the distinction between privacy and privilege is the engine that drives the half absurd, half sinister efforts of Peter Mandelson to silence those who say he's gay. As with Bill Clinton, it's not the sex that matters but the levers pulled by men used to getting their own way.

Mandelson's orientation, as we say these days, is not what you'd call a secret. Not only did everyone in the small but perfectly self-satisfied world of the Westminster-Fleet Street nexus know, but so did mere voters. Mandelson had been outed in the News of the World, Britain's biggest selling paper, in the Eighties. Matthew Parris was thus reading from the public record on Newsnight when he inadvertently set the story running and there was no need for Jeremy Paxman, supposedly the last BBC interviewer with vertebrae that connected to form a backbone, to rush to Mandelson's West London house as soon as the show was over and deliver a hand-written apology in the small hours. Parris had repeated an uncontested truth with no obvious malicious intent.

But Paxman still grovelled to a politician who is a friend of John Birt, his director general, and Parris still lost a column on the Sun, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch whose bid for Manchester United Mandelson will eventually have to approve or reject.

The resulting interdict against discussions of Mandelson's private life by the BBC Editorial Policy Unit has, of course, been a hoot. The sight of Ed Stourton shouting down poor Nigel Hawthorne on the One O'Clock News as if he were a spy about to blurt out troop movements in wartime rather than an actor talking about Oscar Wilde, was splendid, and scoffers are having great fun at the BBC's expense.

But the corporation's role as laughing stock does not stop its staff becoming edgy and a little frightened when Mandelson's name comes up. I had a call the other day from the editor of the gay Pink Paper. Researchers from Have I Got News For You had asked for all his stories about the Mandelson affair for use in the headline 'missing word' competition. He tuned in to enjoy cracks about Mandy and BBC authoritarianism, only to find that their headlines were not broadcast and the Minister had been airbrushed from the programme. 

My friend was astonished that one of the few homes for wit and dissent left in the BBC could be sat on. The directives of the Editorial Policy Unit —  which broadcasters know by the appropriately Orwellian title of Editpol — are not to be mocked.

Nor is it safe to talk too frankly about Mandelson in the press. The Sunday Express is recovering from a ferocious round of buck-passing and back-stabbing which followed a feature on 'Peter's friend', a 26-year-old Brazilian called Reinaldo Avila da Silva. The paper is owned by Lord Hollick, a new Labour peer, and Philip Gould, Tony Blair's adviser has an office in its building.

In other words, there were many levers waiting to be pulled. Amanda Platell, the editor of the Sunday Express, found herself in trouble so deep that her career was on the line. Her job was offered to a journalist on a rival paper and she and four of her colleagues faced the sack. Platell survived, but I suspect the next time she is presented with a piece about Mandelson she will move smartly to the next business.

The Express was not the only distressed institution. When Mandelson heard that da Silva was to be introduced to the readers, he tried to get the Press Complaints Commission, the newspaper industry's watchdog, to stop publication. It couldn't and didn't, but its staff and Express newspapers had long and serious talks before the article appeared, even though the Commission is meant to respond only to complaints made after publication. 

A furious Mandelson turned on the commission that had failed him and threatened to abolish it. Officers made light of the outburst, and told me that film stars' lawyers are always trying to bully them. Yet film stars are in no position to change the law, while a Secretary of State with the ear of the Prime Minister clearly is.

You're probably all saying by now that you find tabloid dirt-digging distasteful and feel twinges of unaccustomed sympathy for Mandelson. If you had your past turned over by my colleagues, however, there would be no BBC ban on chat about your private life, no meetings at the Press Complaints Commission, no apologies from Jeremy Paxman and no editors' jobs on the line.

If Mandelson hates what has happened to him, he should support a privacy law which protected all citizens equally. Many journalists, your correspondent included, would oppose him and protest that the legislation would allow the wealthy to escape what little legitimate scrutiny of their affairs the media currently practises. But at least the playing field would be level.

New Labour won't pass a privacy law. It wants the support of the five men — Murdoch, Conrad Black, David Montgomery and Lords Hollick and Rothermere — who control 90 per cent of national newspaper circulations and is not going to spoil everything with a law which would make the papers a dreary read. Rights are for the many, privileges for the powerful.

So is this article 'fascist'; or are the fascists those who scream 'homophobe' at any sensible discussion of such matters and would burn or ban such publications????

This question is also now particularly directed at those fainthearts around the SLP who have been advising "Drop this subject; don't mention sexual politics ever again; the Trot name-callers will make mincemeat of you" etc, etc."

And this is the same snivelling line that the Trots themselves are now trying to panic the SLP with — "nullify the vice-president election result or the Daily Telegraph and the Weekly Worker will make mincemeat of you" etc, etc.

To such snivelling capitulators to fascist methods, the Leninist answer is 'Get lost'.

In 978 issues spanning nearly 20 years, the EPS Review has spoken its mind on every subject under the sun, and will continue to do so, however difficult the fight or however difficult the subject.

The only way to answer the EPS Review is to write better articles proving that the EPSR understanding is wrong, at which point the Review will be the first to say 'thank you' and re-orient its perspectives accordingly.

The real test of any scientific endeavour is how well it copes with its own mistakes until the practice of life itself proves revolutionary theory to be right or wrong.

The Review will match its ENTIRE record to any scrutiny, line by line every week going back 20 years, if the Telegraph and Weekly Worker really want to dig dirt that badly (which seems doubtful). No other publication can hold a candle to it for accurately interpreting world developments from an utterly uncompromising standpoint of wanting the total world defeat and destruction of the imperialist bourgeois system as soon as possible, and explaining how and why it will happen.

(For anyone seriously concerned about the SLP's reputation due to Leninists active within it, it would be far more realistic to be worried about the occasional reactionary nonsense published in Socialist News which will hurt and haunt the SLP for years to come. Workers might accept that "everything used to be published". But to put their trust in a party, they will want to know "but when were decisions published about what was right and wrong in everything that was printed?", — particularly the rubbish on Ireland; the 'New World Order' and the crisis; Black Nationalist issues; and anti-Marxist defeatism from the Trots.)

The Trot anti-communist provocateurs love to label any pro-workers-state opponents with the 'Berlin Wall lovers' and 'Tiananmen Square massacre lovers' tags, thinking they are being oh-so-devastatingly cute.

Such challenges will always be thrown right back in their anti-communist faces. It is only their patronising contempt for the working class that makes them think that workers will be impressed by such philistine stooges climbing aboard such worn-out CIA bandwagons.

The only problem with the Berlin Wall was that it was not built much much higher and much more stoutly and not added to year by year right up to the present day (plus the slightly irrelevant problem (to this argument) that Soviet revisionist weakness should never have conceded West Berlin to the imperialist provocateurs in the first place since it was well within the Soviet zone of liberation where socialism had properly begun to be built. West Berlin was nothing but sabotage to East Germany's very creditable socialist construction efforts from Day One. The imperialists having been foolishly admitted, their subversion should next have been strangled at the Berlin Airlift time).

As wretchedly confused as the former Revisionist party was in successfully running the East German planned economy, and as confused as the workers of East Germany know the Revisionists to be, — that party nonetheless emerged as the biggest in the East of Germany at this year's elections, — entirely on the memory and realisation now by East Germany's workers that in fact they were far better off in the GDR than they have become after nine years of the 'West German miracle' coming to "improve their lives".

It is the same story all over East Europe, and only the most disgusting philistines like the Trots would ignore what has happened since Revisionist stupidity abandoned the workers states (dictatorship of the proletariat) nine years ago, and triumphantly chortle along with the CIA about how "the Berlin Wall and all those countries" were swept away.

According to the capitalist press admissions above, the former Soviet republic of Georgia is how reduced to one third of its former economic production and living standards. Really funny, Brian. Great triumph!

But to feel 'free', — that must be worth something, isn't it???

Let the capitalist press itself answer this point:

Vura Plotnikov, aged 39 and a seller of second-hand bicycle parts, avoids despair by refusing to think about the future in any detail. But unlike many of his neighbouring traders on the fringes of Volgograd's open-air flea market, his equanimity is not supported by bootleg vodka.

"I'm fine. I don't need to drink. I earn about 100 roubles (£4) a day," he says. "It's a lot better than working in a dead factory and not being paid at all."

Mr Plotnikov is not fine. Few Russians are. His wife, two teenage sons and retired parents live in dilapidated concrete housing blocks on porridge, potatoes,  cabbage and tea. They are all gaunt and grey. The children are doing well enough at school to qualify for university, but unless he can find £625 a year for fees their education will soon finish. Mr Plotnikov says he is saving "bit by bit".

Demand for bicycle parts has fallen with the onset of winter, so he has had to diversify. Laid out on a sheet in the snow next to a bicycle pump are three heaters, several doorknobs and transformers, bought from friends who steal them in lieu of wages from the factories where they work. He wants 45 roubles for a round metal clock which began life in a military helicopter dashboard.

Unless trade picks up miraculously, his sons will not be going to university. "I will try to earn more money," he says, knowing this is nearly impossible.

So why does he say and mean it? He is not a shoulder-shrugging optimist and is certainly not indifferent to his children's future. But without refusing to acknowledge that they face a hand-to-mouth existence like his own, he could not maintain his dignity.

His wife, a nurse, finds the best way to control her anger is to keep busy at work and at home, and to talk rarely.

"I have not been paid in three months. We live wonderfully," she says abruptly.

The Plotnikovs have so far resisted the lure of crime and alcoholism  —  two   common Russian responses to the disappearance of jobs, a varied diet, holidays, free education and health care. Instead they appeal to the mutual support of family and friends. As the post-Soviet state undergoes involuntary privatisation, pre-Soviet traditions of collective self-help are revived.

Next to Mr Plotnikov's parents' television are three sacks of potatoes harvested from his sister's dacha garden. Fruit for the jam that adds flavour and sweetness to their monotonous diet also comes from the intensively cultivated country allotment about three hours' bike ride from the city.

At the end of the summer neighbours brought the potatoes back in their car. They were given some potatoes in thanks. Mr Plotnikov's 20-year-old Soviet racing bike is a crucial lifeline. To save money on bus fares he cycles to and from work through the ice and snow.

It takes 20 minutes to pile his market goods on panniers at the front and back.

"More reliable than a Russian car", the bike is washed and oiled in the hall every evening.

Dinners are small, quiet and brief. His two sons then do their homework or go to visit their grandparents' nearby flat with their mother. Here only the fridge's death rattle drowns out game shows and Soviet era cartoons on the black and white television which is rarely turned off.

Since his retirement from a local metal factory 10 years ago, Grandfather Plotnikov, aged 71, has seen his pension dwindle in value to the point where it is almost worthless. Interrupted by his wife's recital of housekeeping statistics — "Macaroni was two roubles a kilo. Now it is nine. Bones for soup are 15 roubles" — he speaks slightly incoherently, betraying neither anger, hope nor fear.

"I voted for Yeltsin in 1991. He's now too ill. We can't go back. The factories don't work. I would like my grandchildren to live well."   

His son has stayed home for some solitude. He listens to 1980s Soviet pop in the kitchen on an old ghetto-blaster which needs regular repair. It reminds him of more hopeful times.

"Back then, when Gorbachev came to power, it looked like things might change. But nothing came of it." He answers questions curtly but not rudely.

"If I was unable to work because of illness I would borrow money from friends.

"My cigarettes cost 2 roubles a packet [8p]. I smoke a packet a day. We call them contraceptives because they're probably bad enough to stop you having children."

"I last had a holiday in 1993. I stayed at home. The last time my wife and I went outside Russia was in 1990. We went to Georgia."

"We don't go out. We may go to friends' to celebrate birthdays. Then we might buy some vodka. Parents have to pay for repairs at the school. Fortunately our school is in quite a safe area with low crime so we do not have to pay for security."

His flat was given to him by the factory where he worked five years ago. He pays no rent. Unlimited gas and electricity cost 200 roubles [about £8] a month.

It is freezing outside but the kitchen window is open because it is too warm. Cheap heating and accommodation are the only vestiges of the once all-providing Soviet state. In remoter regions even these are being withdrawn. "Otherwise the state means nothing to me. I expect nothing from it," he says.

A sort of urban survivalist, Mr Plotnikov lives outside the state, not in rural isolation but in the heart of the city. The government has not paid his parents' pensions, wife's wages or children's benefits for months. In return he pays no taxes.

Utterly uninterested in politics, he has not voted in the last two elections and did not know that Yevgeny Primakov, the former foreign minister, had been appointed prime minister.

In developed countries not knowing who is prime minister is regarded by psychologists as prima facie evidence of insanity. Mr Plotnikov smiles at the thought. 

Even with the rotten confusion that nine years of relentless CIA-directed anti-communist propaganda have inflicted on the former Soviet population, (which the Trots would love, of course, who are well into censorship and want the pro-Soviet EPSR closed down, presumably just as they would want any pro-Soviet Russian papers now closed down), — — the total catastrophe of Heron's delight, "sweeping away the Berlin Wall" (symbolising the liquidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat all over East Europe), is made numbingly clear in the above capitalist press admissions.

Leninists stand even more firmly, if such is possible, on the defence of the Chinese workers State (dictatorship of the proletariat) over the counter-revolutionary provocations around the US Statue of Liberty on Tiananmen Square in the same period.

An EPSR book covers the non-existent 'massacre' — (there were a hundred or so deaths in total, which all occurred away from the Square where not a single person was killed, and were 50% inflicted on soldiers, policemen, and other state representatives)— which is the obvious propaganda ploy for the CIA to hammer away at ever since, abetted of course by all the Trots.

It explains the coordinated disinformation and distortions which, mixed with anti-Chinese racism in the West, easily made it possible to cash in on the anti-communist nonsense and hysteria of the period and convince weak, brainwashed minds (like the Trots) that 'unarmed student protesters' were 'crushed under tanks' on Tiananmen. 

The EPSR book quotes capitalist press sources to disprove this nonsense.

But that the counter-revolutionary provocations were eventually suppressed is not in dispute with Leninists. 

The only quibble is "Why did it take the Revisionists in Beijing so long to recognise a clear CIA provocation, and deal with it.?"

And what does happen to Trot-type Western brains that the well-known and fully-recorded enormous list of Western counter-revolutionary stunts and provocations since 1917 gets immediately forgotten the moment that Western propaganda can whip up some scare or other about "heartless communist brutality", etc.???

But anti-communists everywhere are wholly fooling themselves if they think this reactionary propaganda will count for much once history's communist-revolutionary march forward has resumed progress. Do they really think that people at their wits' end out of impoverishment and brutalisation from the imperialist slump are going to be held back for long from their own communist revolution by idiot stories told by those same imperialist-slump perpetrators about fictional events elsewhere? 

Will the Indonesian masses, whose wretched lives are merely hinted at in the capitalist press admissions below, really make their top priority not communist revolution and how to get it, but the completely bogus issue instead of how to avoid non-existent 'discriminatory language' by 'politically correctly' suppressing any mention of rightwing political conspiracies if they happen to have a homosexual link.??? To merely pose the question shows what a ludicrous joke this whole Trot 'homophobe' stunt really is:

"Our whole lives are focused on filling our children's stomachs and then our own. Everything else has been put on hold," said Alek Budiarno, dulling his appetite with a homemade cigarette that costs a fraction of the price of a factory one.

A glance at his three-room house confirms this. For the past year it has been little more than four walls and a roof: the windows are boarded up because he cannot afford the glass; the daily downpours turn his earth floor to mud, and the walls are decorated with calendar pictures several years old.

"One day we will paint the walls, lay a floor and put in the windows," he said.

In the meantime he struggles to get by doing odd jobs and tending his tiny plot of land. His wife Sri used to run the village's only shop, a roadside kiosk, but it went bankrupt two months ago because no one could afford to buy anything.

Their diet is typical of tens of millions of Indonesians: rice, the odd vegetable and a piece of tofu, soybean cake or salted fish. The nutritional value is so low that Unicef has predicted that the crisis will drive down the IQs of children under three by 7 per cent on average, and up to 15 per cent for the worst-off.

Meat is so expensive that one chicken in the nearest market  costs  twice  as much as the monthly rent for a stall. With about half the country's 203 million people living below the poverty line, few can contemplate such luxuries. 

The flood of newly unemployed town dwellers back to their villages is putting greater pressure on the scant resources. "The population of Pacing Lor should be 470," said Marto Taruno, the village chief. "But because of the crisis it has now swollen by almost 20 per cent, making things even harder."

The migration shows no sign of ending. Unemployment is rising by at least 10,000 a day — a figure that is artificially low because anyone working one hour a week and earning as little as three pence is counted as employed.

The attraction of the countryside, everyone agrees, is that life is less desperate there than in the towns.

"Poor people in rural areas can still scavenge for food," said Lukman Sutrisno, professor of rural and regional studies at Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University. "But when you are poor in the towns you are really poor, because you have to have money to survive."

The situation has become so grave for the poorest in Yogyakarta that last month Prof Sutrisno's department stopped distributing cheap staple food and other essentials and offered ready-cooked meals, subsidising the price by about half.

"We discovered that the poorest people can no longer afford to cook, so there was no use giving them uncooked rice and cooking oil."

After a month of relative stability, food prices are starting to rise again throughout Java because the distributors refuse to travel. They fear for their lives after reprisals for the killing by masked ninjas of more than 150 witch doctors and Muslim clerics. At least 50 suspects have been killed in Java, including police officers.

Exacerbating the problem is the massive overcrowding in Java, where 120 million people live on an island the size of England and Wales.

Oxfam's representative, Fizal Malik, is becoming more pessimistic about when a recovery might start. "In April we thought two to three years. Now we are saying it will be nearer to five."

At every opportunity, it is important to make diseased Trotskyism pay the full price in ridicule for their ludicrous counter-revolutionary diversions to try to prevent the advance of communist revolutionary philosophy. Build Leninism. Rout Trotskyism. Royston Bull