Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 0994 April 14th 1993                                                                                                                                10p 

Ireland analysis update will now appear in next EPSR due to space difficulties.

Trots and 'left' counter-revolutionaries continue to do warmongering imperialist blitzkrieg's propaganda work for it, demonising just one nationalism among scores of conflicting nationalisms in the Balkans in order to 'justify' deliberately murderous Western slaughter.

The fake-'left' is still failing to explain why the imperialist-system butcher of mankind (Palestine, East Timor, Kurdistan, Iraq, Cyprus, Sierra Leone, etc) is pretending to help the poor and the downtrodden in Kosovo when this century has seen more people killed under capitalism's domination than in all previous human history; has seen more than 300 new wars of murderous destruction since World War II ended; and has seen 50 million new refugees created in the last 10 years alone, — all to the background of total Western indifference.

To get round its problem of again making a complete idiot of itself, the Weekly Worker is misrepresenting the EPS Review as having called for "unconditional support" for the Milosevic regime, which distorts the facts entirely. It is unconditional anti-imperialism that the EPSR is stressing, — explaining that anyone now playing the West's game of "supporting human rights" for the Albanian separatists, etc, was hopelessly compromising any clear working class grasp of the utterly degenerate warmongering-fascist turn in the world imperialist crisis which this demented 19 nation blitzkrieg on tiny Serbia (population the size of Greater London) represents.

The fiendishly complex and volatile issues of ethnic minority rights, autonomy, separatism, independence, self-determination, etc, in the Balkans are precisely what make the national question such a powder keg nightmare in this period of approaching imperialist-crisis instability and aggression. 

The overwhelming Marxist-Leninist characterisation of imperialist warmongering (see Lenin's volumes of writings throughout World War I, for example) has always been on the rapacious grabbing for territory, markets, and other political/economic influence and domination at the expense of rivals and imperialist-war victims. These academic idiots at the Weekly Worker sneer at a small American group for noting that imperialism has been systematically trying to break-up former Yugoslavia: "Where have they been," chortle Chamberlain & Co. "Yugoslavia has ALREADY been broken up along ethnic and national lines." Oh, so that's all right then, one is tempted to reply.

The CPGB argument is against seeing that there is anything of the old Yugoslav workers state to defend any longer from this new imperialist blitzkrieg. Therefore "the working class must not take sides with either camp" in this NATO versus Serbia massacre, these 'Leninists' conclude.

With 'anti-imperialists' like this, the authors of NATO-NAZI aggression will be rubbing their hands.

Support of any kind for the Milosevic regime and its policies is not the issue, nor is that the question in Iraq. To be for imperialist defeat is NOT the same as being for 'victory for Saddam Hussein', — no more than the epoch-making Bolshevik call for the defeat of their 'own' ruling class in World War I meant 'victory for German imperialism' which was in a rapacious war for spoils with Russian imperialism.

This is the ABC of Marxist science and it is a key part of the appalling crisis that the working class and international society is in that such loudly posturing 'communists' as the Weekly Worker/CPGB frauds possess only such philistine ignorance of real anti-imperialist history.

Basically, these CPGB Trots are just another brand of anti-communist stooges for imperialism, covering their tracks with their bleeding-heart liberal 'concern' for the wretched people of Kosovo whose existence has already been, and is being now, torn apart by the realities of the IMPERIALIST SYSTEM which dominates the world, nothing else.

There are at least a dozen more such explosive issues of mixed-up populations around that Balkans area. Should every minority be pumped up to fighting spirit, as the CIA has deliberately inflamed the KLA for three years or more, — so that NATO could unleash a dozen more blitzkrieg onslaughts? 

There are scores of national minorities within the Chinese workers state. The counter-revolutionary agencies of Western imperialism are already sinking their provocative claws deep into Tibetan nationalists and separatists, into the Central Asian Muslim minorities of China, etc, etc. This moralising self-righteousness by Western petty-bourgeois for the "human rights of all minorities", etc, etc, is just an oil-rag for the incurable system of periodic imperialist warmongering crisis, now seriously breaking out on a world scale.

Let capitalism sort out its scores of self-determination problems in its own sphere (wars throughout Africa, for example; Cyprus; the Basque region; Ireland; in a dozen areas of Latin America; all over Indonesia; elsewhere in Southeast Asia; etc, etc.). These bleeding-heart 'lefts' are just imperialism's anti-communist stooges, turning the wretched suffering in the former Yugoslav workers state, caused by entirely the aggressive character of the imperialist economic system, — into just an exhibition ground for sanctimonious parading of a commitment to "absolute rights to self-determination" and other such purely academic strutting.

Marxism always considered such rights in their real-world context of the priority class war struggle for the proletariat's revolutionary overthrow of imperialism. With more space and time, the EPSR will be returning shortly to Lenin's far more rational approach to the complications of the national question.

A civil war has been raging in the Kosovo province of Serbia between Serbs and Albanians. Slaughter and atrocities have been perpetrated by BOTH sides, it is certain, for longer than three years. The Serbs have grudges against Albanian ethnic cleansing going back to the 1980s.

All that is achieved by jumping in to support the claims of the KLA separatists is to help 'justify' the imperialist blitzkrieg which has nothing whatever to do with anyone's minority rights but is entirely on behalf of the imperialist system's longer-term generalised warmongering and destructive aims (as its insoluble crisis of chronic overproduction of capital reaches the point of devastating worldwide economic collapse). 

The 20th century has known only destruction as the capitalist system 'cure' for its incurable crises. 

But by helping imperialist propaganda to impose its warmongering plans, these 'principled lefts' have merely helped bring down infinitely worse troubles on all the people in the whole region, solving nothing for the Albanian minority rights question.

They now claim that Western propaganda justification for the blitzkrieg is backed by the "incontestable facts" of Serbian nastiness. Whatever foul acts of civil war have been committed, only dupes and fools would believe a single word of this imperialist blitzkrieg propaganda. 

To take the CPGB most hysterical point, for example, about the mass exodus 'not possibly' being a 'KLA stunt'. It is actually KLA policy for every Albanian to temporarily go to Albania precisely so as to strengthen the impression of ethnic cleansing by the Serbs and to help whip up NATO war fever for an aerial blitzkrieg as the 'KLA's airforce' followed by a NATO ground troops invasion. 

And to leave a three year-long murderous civil-war theatre to go over the border to relatives for a short period might make sense to many Albanians, especially if they are all now fired up for the 'independence from the intolerable Serbs' programme. 

How many have actually crossed the border, the CPGB does not know. 
How many left because of the KLA call, the CPGB does not know. 
How many because of NATO bombing, the CPGB does not know. 
How many because of Serb reprisals. The CPGB does not know. 

And no one is likely to find out anything for sure in such a monstrous imperialist warmongering propaganda mess.

The CPGB Trots are misrepresenting the EPSR about a non-existent call for 'unconditional support for the Milosevic regime' as part of their own dishonest propaganda lifestyle, to cover up their own published ignorance of a Marxist Leninist understanding of the world of imperialist crisis which the EPSR reproduced recently, — Weekly Worker words of profound ignorance about imperialist skulduggery:

"If it decides to intervene, Nato will police an anti-democratic settlement designed to stifle the will of the Kosovar masses.

Imperialism wants to see the KLA disarmed, not driving out the occupying army. A spokesperson for Downing Street was explicit: "We are not going to act as the KLA's air force."

In other words, one of the main policy aims of imperialism is how to prevent the KLA from winning independence. Nato air strikes could just as easily be directed against the KLA as against the Serbian forces.

For the imperialists the guiding 'principle' is the sovereignty of existing states — i.e. lines on a map.

At the weekend, Robin Cook warned the KLA that its "uncompromising" position would lead to its "marginalisation" and that it "is not going to throw the Yugoslav army out of Kosova".

Officials have become increasingly irritated by the KLA's intransigence — its leadership has so far refused to negotiate directly with Belgrade. 

The Guardian summed it up in this way: "But no one in or outside Nato is prepared to support the KLA's secessionist goal for fear of destabilising the entire Balkan region and sending the dangerous message to any other disgruntled ethnic minority that war will bring them independence and foreign recognition ... In Kosovo, Serbs are fighting KLA guerrillas who any Nato intervention would have to tame" (January 22). A British diplomat put it even more bluntly: "Political or military pressure on Milosevic to back off simply encourages the KLA to proclaim their ambitions for independence."

The Trot fake 'lefts' (from many Guardian journalists to the Weekly Worker) live in a fantasy world of their own making, entirely subjective, where the only principle is the petty bourgeois survival mantra - "parliamentary democracy good (and stuff what Marx and Lenin said), — workers state bad (ditto); dictatorship of the bourgeoisie tolerable (because concealed and therefore does not have to be acknowledged), dictatorship of the proletariat intolerable, in fact the worst thing that could ever happen to talented and free-thinking individuals like us", etc.. 

And the pompous self-righteousness of the anti-Marxist philistinism of these 'middle class revolutionaries' would indeed be laughable if its perpetual consequences were not so tragic.

The epoch-making danger of Balkanising imperialist manipulation of this explosive nationalist region (which in its entire history has only ever known reasonably peaceful and civilised relations in the 45 years rule of the Yugoslav workers state), has been obvious to even the blindest observer since German imperialist influence instantly started carving out its sphere of hegemony after 1989 (building, like all the other imperialists, on pre-prepared soft manoeuvre positions prior to the Moscow Revisionist bureaucracy's astonishing liquidation of the Soviet workers state and its sphere of anti-imperialist protection from direct Western exploitation).

For so-called anti-imperialists (Trots, etc) to start falling for Western-inspired 'human rights' stunts in this new atmosphere of direct monopoly capitalist intervention was the equivalent of throwing a lighted match into the powder-keg room.

Only by the monstrous demonisation of Serb nationalism above all others (as opposed to the far more reactionary record of Croat nationalism, for example, or Bosnian Muslim nationalism likewise), which was deliberately singled out by world imperialist circles for vilification because of its historically outstandingly defiant anti-imperialist credentials, —  —  could any 'sense' at all be made of this regressive nationalist clamour now breaking up the Yugoslav workers state under the direct impetus of German divide-and-rule meddling, which the other imperialists would quickly want to get in on.

It is not part of the Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding of the fraught nationalist problems of this area to exalt Serbian nationalist claims (strong though they are) against rival nationalist claims (which have always been tainted in modern times with a strong flavour of imperialist stoogery). The point is to expose imperialist meddling above all else as the burning issue (literally, now), — engulfing all other considerations.

That might have meant an abstentionist policy of letting the rival nationalist forces get on with sorting each other out but minus any outside interference. But from the Marxist point of view of imperialist warmongering (now unleashed) as the overwhelmingly worst-case future threat to ALL nationalisms everywhere, — this would still have been justified.

As it happens, tens of thousands were killed anyway in the rival nationalist strife following Yugoslavia's breakup, even with imperialist intervention and fake-'left' cheerleading for competing 'self-determination rights'. Without such misguided interference, who knows."	

(EPSR 992).

To equate tiny Serbia with the 600 million population of the 19 richest countries on earth currently beating up little Serbia, calling this an "inter-imperialist conflict" which "all 'lefts' should condemn both sides of;  — is such deranged nonsense from the CPGB/Weekly Workers as to defy description.

Build Leninism. RB

The EPSR and the SLP

The struggle for Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding as the key to developing successful socialist leadership for the overthrow of capitalism in Britain by the working class, has experienced a two-way impact from involvement in the SLP project.

New loyalties have been engaged in the course of broad-based party-building — both through local membership collectives, and through sharing a party-wide wish to see the SLP flourishing as a whole and in terms of its national image and recognition.

The leadership of Scargill and Scargillism, such as it is, has had to be responded to and joined forces with to a certain extent, — as much as the SLP's anti-Marxist limitations would allow (which every individual communist has obviously inevitably assessed differently in such a new, untried, and complicated development in the anti-imperialist class war).

From the far-flung extremes of EPSR influence, some of these differences have naturally been stretched to breaking point as a result of rapid changes in the overall international class war situation and reflected in sharp turns within the British labour movement, including the SLP.

Such differences are, of course, a priceless source of taking understanding of the whole process of centrism, and its implications, to new levels (meaning Scargillism specifically, whatever definition is given to it).

It would be good for these widely differing attitudes (which replicate doubts and divisions accompanying the growth of initial EPSR sympathy for successful SLP development) to be reflected in contrasting Review articles on these complex matters, — challenging this article which will continue the trend towards drastic new conclusions about this SLP phase of workers-movement evolution.

Regardless of sentiments and wishful thinking, Scargillism may already have passed its sell-by date. Mass electoral support and other campaigning support may yet be drawn from a working class which has been starved of any good feeling of class mobilisation for so long, but seriously harmful theoretical/ideological damage to workers which might be about to accompany any such spurt in mass support, due to world political developments transforming the scene so rapidly, — need urgently to be considered, and would surely dictate a marked propaganda turn AGAINST Scargillism. 	

That in turn would raise the question whether Scargillism could be partially opposed while still worthwhilely trying to build Socialist Labour, or whether the fight for Marxist-Leninist science might be done more harm than good by continuing to push a now visibly handicapped SLP.

The issue is no longer merely Scargillism's declaration of hostility to any further growth within the SLP of the influence of the EPSR's campaigning (for Marxist-Leninist science, and for criticism of the negative legacy of single-issue anti-communist reformist ideologies and philosophies such as feminism), - as damaging and challenging as has been the disgustingly crude manoeuvres to get the EPSR closed down or its editor expelled from SLP membership and elected party vice-president.

The speed of political developments in the world imperialist crisis has already overtaken those sordid side-events and has raised the questions of how social-chauvinist is Scargillism proving itself to be, and what response does it demand.

Unbelievably, some communist supporters of the EPS Review still claim not to understand exactly what the EPSR articles are alleging against Scargillism.

So first it is necessary to review the offending SLP Euro-election statement (l); and the subsequent EPSR article excerpts (2,3,& 4) which have attacked it in EPSRs 989, 990, & 993:

***1***

SOCIALIST LABOUR is committed to complete withdrawal from the European Union. 'Europe' is a bosses' club which exists for one purpose: so that multi-national corporations can exploit workers throughout its member states. Europe's millionaires may be worth £3.7 trillion, but unemployment and poverty continue to advance throughout the EU, including Britain.

The European Union's vast, faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy also now stands officially accused of breathtaking corruption, covering up multi-million pounds' worth of fraud for which we pay. (Just one example: last November, the European Court of Auditors had to acknowledge £3 billion of mis-spending through fraud and mismanagement of the EU's 1997 budget.)

The British people suffer an annual NET loss of £4 billion, thanks to membership of the European Union.

The global crisis into which capitalism has now moved is making a very bad situation worse. Even capitalist economists are warning that if ever nations in 'Europe' needed to be able to manage their own economies, that time is now; they warn that the economics of monetary union seem increasingly dubious. Yet, thanks to the decisions of capitalist governments, the sovereignty of nations including Britain has become virtually meaningless.

The targets set by the Maastricht Treaty affect German unemployment which is going UP; they affect Italy's industrial output, which is going DOWN. Britain is already in recession, and economic growth predictions throughout the EU are sliding downhill....while anxiety about the single-currency 'Euro' (to which New Labour is so eager to sign up) grows daily.

There is a Socialist alternative to this mess. Socialist Labour wants Britain to come out of the European Union and into the world. We believe in real internationalism, not a capitalist bosses' club, which sees workers only as fodder to be used at the lowest cost so bosses can make the highest profits.

We want Britain to develop and expand trading, social and cultural links with all the nations of Asia, Africa, the South. Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, including Cuba. By 'trading' we mean goods that are needed to build societies, not destroy them — we want an end to the evils of the arms trade.

Coming out of the European Union is a crucial first step towards fighting against global capitalism, and for international co-operation to achieve peace, prosperity, and environmental harmony throughout the world.

It's because we want Britain to take that crucial first step that we are standing SLP candidates in six Regions in the Euro-Elections on 10 June.

Vote us in - to get us out!

***2***

'Now that it is right out in front, the SLP's Euro-elections drive: "Vote us in to get us out", is so hollowly misleading that working-class confusion can only increase. 

Imperialist crisis is going to devastate Europe, all parts, no matter who is in or out of the European Union. The SLP slogan incorrectly implies that being out of Europe is some kind of solution to capitalist crisis problems. It is not.

The SLP's slogan and accompanying statement implies that the problem of monopoly-bureaucratic boss-ism is WORSE in Europe than in Britain or elsewhere. As far as the working class is concerned in bearing the burdens of the coming crisis and world slump, implying such a difference is utterly misleading. The monopoly-bureaucracy of the imperialist ruling class will be a tyranny for the working class to bear almost identically everywhere, whether inside or outside such an economic union.

Specifically, the SLP claims that a British capitalist economy still using the pound will fare better in the crash than a British capitalist economy tied up to the Euro. This is factually speculative in the extreme, with every likelihood of being quite WRONG. On the balance of probabilities, an economic union clinging closer to Germany might be expected to fare better in a slump for a while (when ALL will be doing badly in any case, which is the real point) than an uncompetitive economy on the fringes of Europe. This largely pointless and misleading claim is little more than a sop to crude nationalist prejudice.

The SLP notion that a British capitalist economy out of Europe would have 'more sovereignty' and 'more ability to manage its own economy' is not just pure nationalist self-delusion but lays workers open to quite monstrous class-collaborative illusions as well. Socialism has still not been mentioned at this point in the SLP's latest 'Euro-election presentation, so all the assumptions are about what the SLP's understanding will achieve for workers in Britain while still as it is, - a capitalist country.

And when the 'socialist alternative' is finally brought forward, it is presented only as the means for getting Britain out of the European Union, not as a means of getting the capitalist class out of Britain. Such a notion does not even get mentioned. A Britain is envisaged, - class-rule and mode of production unspecified, - which is part of "real internationalism" as opposed to being part of the EU 'capitalist bosses club', and where workers are no longer seen "only as fodder to be used at the lowest cost so that bosses can make the highest profits".

Which leaves the door open to the assumption that a high-wage low-profit capitalist economy is both available in this world, and acceptable, - both of which are infamous nonsense-ideas. This SLP Euro-election propaganda is running into some very treacherous waters indeed.

Still not identified as socialist, a presumably still-capitalist Britain is then pictured in an idyllic trade-expansion area for its economic flourishing which will famously include Cuba and the Third World, - which is a nice if vague idea under continuing capitalism, but which so ludicrously avoids the question of what will the world-dominant imperialist economy be doing meanwhile that it renders this naïve SLP make-believe utterly incredible.

This Mary Poppins blurb concludes with confirmation of earlier assumptions that it is a still-capitalist Britain that is envisaged, with "coming out of the EU" described as "a crucial first step towards fighting against global capitalism", but with still never a mention of any class war against the British capitalist class.

These are just the paltry warmed-up leftovers from the utterly discredited and failed CP/Morning Star anti-monopoly policy of Alternative Economic Strategy which marked Revisionism's final spiral downwards into total class-collaborating pointlessness and deserved death and obscurity.

This historically-bankrupt Revisionist nonsense, imagining some kind of rational planned way out of global imperialist crisis, - a total and dangerous delusion, - is treacherously augmented by its inevitable nonsense-counterpart of import controls, spelled out in the national assembly elections spiel for reviving the coal, steel, and engineering industries in Wales and Scotland.

Again this is simply put forward by the SLP as the best policy of any party to meet the current economic situation. There is not the slightest suggestion that class war will first have to take place against the British ruling class, and then international class war against the domination of the world economy by imperialism, before planned revival out of capitalist slump can take place.

Any idea that "not everything has to be spelled out" or "why upset people by telling them more than they need to know at this stage", etc, etc, is the most foul gross deception on SLP members and on the working class.

And it is utter nonsense as well. There is no mistaking that the SLP's latest Euro-election and national-assembly propaganda is clearly putting forward 'dramatic' reform proposals for the economy and society AS IT IS NOW, - i.e. proposals for current capitalist Britain.

And if further proof were needed, the policy statement for Wales spells it out: 'Halt imports' to make the revival of domestic industries possible NOW, - thus confirming what Scargillism employed as a stunt in the joke disciplinary process against the EPSR editor, expelling him among other things for being opposed to import controls "which are SLP policy", it was announced.

And import controls is the only possible 'explanation' for the insoluble conundrum posed by this SLP demand to restore basic industries NOW before even the slightest hint of class war against the present capitalist ruling class for the ownership of the economy and the industries has been mentioned. There is currently world over-production of all these basic commodities. That is why Britain's industries have been knocked out by cheaper or better trading competition from supposedly cheap-labour international monopoly rivals. So where would revived British production of coal, steel, shipping, and engineering go if there is already a worldwide glut in all these things which is what is causing the slump and the growing mass unemployment in the first place? And the answer is: Import controls. The British economy gets out of its own unemployment crisis by forcing some rival producers somewhere abroad to close down instead.

As any fool knows, of course, this only raises further questions of an even more insuperable or terrifying kind.

If Britain stabs other countries' coal, steel, and engineering exports in the back, what is then to stop them stabbing other British exports in the back such as textiles, or cars, or computers?

And once these capitalist trade-war cards have been played in full, which in all capitalist history have never led to anything else other than dramatic economic collapse for ALL parties involved in this beggar-thy-neighbour stupidity, - what then stops the still 'surplus' labour forces (the unemployed) being driven into uniform to take this trade-war conflict onto the political war-conflict stage, - i.e. an inter-imperialist shooting war, such as alone ended imperialism's two previous great trade-war crises this century?

Scargillism is preparing the working class to be led into the most appalling and idiotic tyranny imaginable, - putting it into the ideological pocket of its own rotten ruling class on the eve of the most disgraceful devastating crisis and crash that capitalist private ownership has ever inflicted on mankind.

This is the price of Scargillism's philistine fear of theory and its bureaucratic stifling of discussion and debate. It is a nightmare of demagogic conceit, and its crude populism is shamefully closer to the politics of the National Front than anything else.

Again this is simply put forward by the SLP as the best policy of any party to meet the current economic situation. There is not the slightest suggestion that class war will first have to take place against the British ruling class, and then international class war against the domination of the world economy by imperialism, before planned revival out of capitalist slump can take place.

The Balkanisation of Britain is being proposed solely because Britain is now one of the weakest links in the imperialist chain and could suffer proletarian revolution during the long slump-crash devastation to come. Split apart, the fighting capacities of the working class in Britain might just about be controllable, especially if the most renowned militant sections in Scotland and Wales can first of all be weaned off into some petty-nationalist make-believe. And then once isolated and hived off, the fiery Welsh and Scots working class might also be controllable too.

Facing the entire proletarian forces in Britain up in arms, international imperialist intervention would have great difficulty in carrying out a counter-revolution, despite having the CIA-Pinochet 1973 model against Allende in Chile as the current successful blueprint.

But with all the international multinational firms (the real owners of Scotland) in operation against an isolated Scottish working class, an isolated Welsh working class, and an isolated English working class in turn, the counter-revolution would have a much better chance.

These 'devolutionary' games are a bourgeois racket which the most philistine or backward anti-communist 'left' daydreamers in Scotland have alone fallen for. A majority of the Glasgow working class failed to vote for devolution or refused. That was the real intelligent genius of Scotland speaking.

This petty nationalism has got the epoch completely wrong, - still assuming some never-ending capitalist boom, where all that needs to flourish is the individualist consumer spirit. So why not be proudly and identifiably Scottish with a capital S, etc, etc. Yes, why not indeed, but do it where the real working-class genius of Scotland has already shown such outstanding strengths of collective courage and independent-mindedness in the modern era, - in standing up to INTERNATIONAL capitalist oppression, - British, American, Scottish, what difference does the nationality of the imperialist bourgeoisie make?

What the world needs now is workers with the guts and the good sense to stand up for communist revolution, and finish with all capitalism for all mankind, - not creep away into some Scots petty-bourgeois hellhole with the reins being pulled by the SNP posturers or the Edinburgh aristocracy or any other capitalist mafia, replacing the crooked London Establishment (where many of the same Scots who will rule 'devolution' are already pulling strings anyway, this having been genuine BRITISH ruling-class imperialism for 200 years or more, i.e. not exclusively English imperialism).

'Devolution' will be a nightmare nonsense, and working class parties which fail to spell this out before it happens or who actually help deceive workers in Scotland that 'devolution' will be a good thing for them, will deserve to pay a heavy price in the future in eternal hatred for them by all serious-minded workers everywhere. Imperialism cannot wait to play the nationalist card all over the world so as to divide and rule the working class on a continuous basis in spite of the collapse of their rotten system plunging everyone into poverty and despair.

Thus, even in its daft vacuum where the SLP and Socialist News pretend that theirs is the only 'left' policy before the working class and that no rival confusing ideologies need polemicising against at all, - Scargillism still manages to get everything wrong once scientific political detail has to be gone into.'

***3***

'The worst outcome of the European Union resignation debacle would be a new surge of anti-EU English nationalism, such as clouds the SLP's vision.

It is monopoly imperialism which is corrupt, - ALL of it, and not just the multi-billion pound frauds around the Brussels bureaucracy.

Big business rackets are just as rampant throughout the running of Britain whose 'parliamentary government' is just as uselessly unaccountable as the condemned EU Commission incompetence. Fortunes have been siphoned off via crooked privatisation deals; colonial arms sales subsidised by the ECGD (Export Credit Guarantee Department); commissions on government-to-government official arms deals where private companies have been involved; and nonstop City frauds which treat all pretend government 'regulation' as just another huge tax-avoidance scheme to be worked out.

The SLP line: "Even capitalist economists are warning that if ever nations in Europe needed to be able to manage their own economies, that time is now" is nationalist twaddle. Which 'own' economy do the people of Britain have? None. It belongs just as much to a bosses club as the EU.

"Vote us in to get us out" is a nationalist tease which would be meaningless applied to Westminster elections.

"Vote us in to bring capitalism down" is the issue.

The whole imperialist system is heading for trade-war & slump. Nationalism is fatal.

Attempts to minimalise the significance of Scargillism's import-controls policy are no service to the working class.

Ideas that such a populist measure is closer to ordinary workers spontaneous reaction to trade-war difficulties (bankruptcies, closures, unemployment, etc) and is therefore not a big issue, could not be further from the truth.

Just rowing in with "how everyone thinks about foreign competition" represents a total absence of leadership, and laughable Philistinism on two counts.

Such unserious anti-theory in the first place challenges the very concept of Marxist-Leninist science having ever established a single truth, - programmatic, strategic, or tactical, - about class-struggle history.

Secondly, such couldn't-care-less opportunism declares that it doesn't matter whether or not all the efforts to analyse this modern imperialist crisis as imminently more devastating than even those which caused World Wars I & II, are proving their worth or not.

Scargillism is not just tail-ending widespread popular complacency that "nothing ever changes much" and "nothing too disastrous can happen" which is the normal, routine, everyday thoughtlessness of masses of ordinary people whose non-stop personal survival-worries exclude them from ever usually seeing anything of the big picture. Scargillism is positively taking the lead in this mindlessness.

The longest and most prosperous boom in all world history is still taking its worst toll by utterly disarming people about the grotesque contradiction that is to come as the deepest-ever slump wipes out the unbelievable quantities of credit-created 'surplus' capital now just beginning to choke the system.

Whatever brief lip-service Scargillism pays occasionally to acceptance of 'the crisis', the full implications of this phenomenon, which Marxist science ALONE is responsible for ever having identified, analysed, and prepared for, - - are in reality still being totally ignored.

Apologists for Scargillism maybe need to make up their own mind about how literally they take their own Marxist-Leninist analysis.

If Marxism is merely valued for adding sexy catastrophist propaganda to the fight for socialism, then it might still be possible to regard Scargillism as mildly behaving thoughtlessly or unguardedly but with every capability of rising to the required levels of alert defiant anti-imperialist action as soon as the situation really demands it, if and when.

But if, however, Marxist crisis-analysis is taken at its scientific word, then all the perspectives suddenly look totally and hair-raisingly different.

And all the historical precedents are exactly to do with the most profound questions of all that could face mankind, - to face the inevitable barbaric destruction which the existing capitalist society will impose everywhere in order to secure its own market-cycle revival in due course; or to take the boldest action that has ever had to be considered by humanity, and consciously organise the deliberate mass-revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois order.

The 1914-1918 World War I crisis of civilisation was decades in the build up, and filled, just as now, with trade-war alarms, retaliatory measures, and calculations about the advisability of various imperialist bloc-formations.

But having formally-denounced the inter-imperialist armsrace and having vowed never to get sucked into class-collaboration with one's 'own' imperialist-bourgeois predators in this disgraceful struggle for world political and economic domination, - every one of more than 40 parties in the 'Marxist' Second International, - bar the Bolsheviks, of course, and small groupings in Serbia and Bulgaria, - slipped nonchalantly, in a couldn't care-less manner, into petty nationalism of the "obvious, mass-spontaneous kind" which no-one thought harmful because everyone was doing it, - as soon as the actual war broke out. It took more than 3 years of utter barbarism (of mass gassing and trench warfare bombardment and suicide attacks) before Marxist-Leninist scientific wisdom at last began to assert itself, culminating in the Bolshevik Revolution, the spread of whose influence alone quickly forced all the imperialist warmongers to urgently think about finishing the war one way or another as soon as possible.

Ultimately, the tragically spontaneous tendency for class-collaboration on one's 'own' side had to be posed in its starkest option, - continued bloody war-slaughter 'with' one's  'own' side, or revolutionary war AGAINST it, so as to end the degenerate slaughter.

Until the Soviet workers state was dragged into the war, WWII at the end of the 1930s trade war and slump was shaping to pose exactly the same challenge again to workers in every capitalist state, - to fall for participating alongside one's 'own' ruling class in renewed inter-imperialist slaughter for world political and economic domination, or to wage revolutionary civil war to overthrow the bourgeoisie and take mankind out of this incurable capitalist-market lethalness once and for all. Once more, petty-nationalist leadership of the workers movements mostly went 'patriotic' (with a few honourable exceptions), - following earlier trade-war class-collaboration with enthusiasm for the fake notion of 'good' imperialist states versus 'bad' imperialist states.

But for the Soviet workers state becoming involved (which gave workers everywhere in the 'allied' imperialist camp full justification for fighting the war on their 'own' imperialist side), virtually the entire workers international movement would once again in World War II have been conned into mutual slaughter on behalf of their 'own' rival bourgeois-imperialist ruling classes.

Now the same catastrophe of self-inflicted social-chauvinism threatens the whole workers movement worldwide once again. And if Scargillism turns out to have not yet fallen into this nationalist trap, and is now prepared vigorously to say so and correct any misunderstandings its Euro-election propaganda (Socialist News 16) has given rise to, then the EPSR will have performed a priceless service in forcing such clarification out of the SLP leadership.

***4***

And although not falling for all of the fake-'left' moralising posturing over 'human rights' and 'self-determination', - playing into imperialism's hands which is deliberately exacerbating all these issues exactly so as to provide a cover and a smokescreen for the West's real interest which is to re-establish the expectation of a culture of warmongering destruction to prevail in the world once more, - neither have Benn or Scargill had the wit to expose imperialism's deliberate provocations (of minority issues) as the sole real CAUSE of the civil-war strife and manufactured 'excuse' for bombing Serbia, or to even refer to the whole inter-imperialist 1990s economic crisis as the only scientific explanation why warmongering blitzkrieg is back on the West's agenda so unmistakably and relentless, - an explanation vital to the entire working class worldwide.

Scargill's statement brands Blair and Clinton as criminal murderers responsible for the bloody slaughter of innocent people and without a shred of legality for this arrogant and unjustified aggression into the problems of Yugoslavia which should be left to sort out its own internal affairs. But a reference to British and American imperialism's rotten record on human rights (occupying Ireland, crimes against humanity in Iraq, etc) stops there, demanding that the New Labour government be condemned by all socialists inside the Labour Party. Total silence on US-UK warmongering to meet inter-imperialist crisis.

Is that it? Will that do the trick? It is the shallowest nonsense, of course, sheltering Scargill's 'left' nationalist position for his social-chauvinist stance against the European Union which pretends that "the sovereignty of nations including Britain has become virtually meaningless" because of this 'European bosses club'.

It is the monopoly-capitalist system itself which renders 'national sovereignty' meaningless to any socialist understanding, of course, - inside or outside the European Union. The postwar American imperialist domination of the planet via the Marshall Plan, the IMF and UN, NATO, and the Cold War (in all of which the US monopoly-capitalist ruling class was most loyally supported by TUC-backed British Labour governments, with Scargill's condescension until 1995) effectively consumed the 'sovereignty' of all people on earth (except for the workers states and the revolutionary struggles against Western colonialism). The Common Market in fact represented a West European ruling class CHALLENGE to that total US domination, and to call the EU "the actual concrete form taken by imperialism in postwar Europe" (as does an SLP apologist's letter to this week's Weekly Worker) is the most utterly misleading 'left' nationalism, - pure social chauvinism.

No wonder Scargill's 'stop the bombing' platitudes do not want to refer to the crisis of Anglo-Saxon imperialist domination of the planet leading to this reassertion of blitzkrieg-destruction culture. It would make nonsense of his petty nationalist opportunism for an anti-EU electoral stance. 

For various reasons, a minority of EPSR opinion still feels reluctant to take up the cudgels against Scargillism in the way that the above critical assessments would seem to demand, if they are accepted as a correct analysis. Others just want to give up. Some reject the findings altogether, reluctant to believe that Scargillism has already outlived its usefulness (such as it has been).

How, why, and for how long centrism was considered in EPSR circles to be likely to benefit the long-term mass struggle for socialism was never made exhaustively scientifically precise, nor could it have been. But the emergence of social-chauvinist backwardness at the approach of extreme imperialist crisis was always widely accepted as being the likely eventual stumbling block for revolutionary politics to uneasily coexist any longer within the ranks of Scargillism or any centrism. Suggestions that EPSR publishing tactics should have been more circumspect or less inept, and subsequent SLP rows handled better, have yet to make it into coherent expression in a theoretically-useful form for all to benefit from, but also now face the problem of being superseded by more decisive political questions. If Scargillism has emerged as social-chauvinist, then all the clever tactics in the world are never going to alter that definitive class-war reality. Confirmed as social-chauvinism, Scargillism immediately transfers from out of centrist limbo and firmly into the camp of imperialist counter-revolutionary confusion.

Which should be no great surprise, because that is where English trade-unionism has always resided. (See countless past EPSRs, and countless future EPSRs for Marxist-Leninist scientific analysis of this reality).

The evidence of where Scargillism does currently stand is reproduced above on the direct question of nationalist delusions, but most of the other circumstantial evidence of SLP orientation indicates an immovable anchoring in English 'left' trade-union consciousness too, - with all its incorrigible backwardness.

There is such an insane philistine mistrust of all political theory that debate, discussion, and polemic of any kind, even a letters column, is actively discouraged throughout the SLP. The total absence of opportunity for the SLP to become a homogeneous PARTY with a collective spirit and a distinctive cadre-character - (which can be readily identified by the working class from party-wide-supported SLP political demonstrations and other activities on a large scale, nationally and locally), - which this censorship, control-freakery, and total absence of normal political-party life results in, - is got round by complete reliance on a trade-union-bureaucracy constitution and trade-union block votes to try to provide the stability, continuity, and leadership-support which Scargillism seems afraid to attempt by establishing its authority by ordinary party developments. Even easily defeatable opposition like the Heronite-Trot factionalising disrupters, - the POLITICAL routing of which through polemics in Socialist News and at special aggregate meetings all round the country could have made Scargillist politics come alive for the membership, - was not taken on, — instead being bureaucratically suppressed in an interminable process of utterly pedantic constitutional manoeuvres about which the party membership was kept completely in the dark.

Demands by the membership to become involved in these CRUCIAL developments which, partially, are effectively deciding the very character of the SLP for the foreseeable political future, - have been met by Scargill with the astonishingly remote and bureaucratic disdain: "people must be living on another planet to want to debate the party's internal affairs at such a time", and "stop this internecine warfare", and other such attitudes completely contemptuous of normal politically-active socialists.

This utter reliance on trade-union block-vote bureaucratic mentality ultimately represents a CLASS attitude,  - and not a proletarian revolutionary communist one either. It is the syndicalist attitude of the traditional trade-union bureaucracy, - a petty-bourgeois ideology, which takes on capitalist society in class war, of a sorts, but only in order to force the bourgeois order to grant full recognition, democratic rights, and equality to working men and their political and trade-union organisations.  It believes that the imperialist system can be forced to accept 'reform' legislation all the way to socialism, if workers' organisations fight for it determinedly enough; and that effective workers-control of industry can eventually be imposed, providing real public ownership for the first time ever. Essentially,  it is an anti-revolutionary mixture of bureaucratic rank-and-fileism, and middle-class anarchism fearful of correct scientific theoretical leadership (which is somehow philistinely regarded as a conspiratorial trick on ordinary workers).

It is no real surprise, therefore, that the bureaucratic-legalistic methods of party-building have, - in the case of the factional conflict with Trot-Heronism, - ended up effectively with interminable bourgeois-courtroom stalemate, - a truly sad but typical contribution to the 'socialist revolution' by middle-class anarcho-syndicalist delusions. Authoritarian demagogy is available in abundance from Scargillism. Proletarian socialist revolution is not on the cards at all. Build Leninism. Roy Bull

Letter to Scargill

I had been waiting to hear the final outcome of the expulsion procedure you initiated against me.

The Feb 12 disciplinary, appointed by you, duly found me 'guilty' as charged, immediately banned me from all office in the SLP, and said I would be expelled from the party on Mar 20, the day of the next NEC meeting which would obviously approve the disciplinary panel's findings.

I assumed a letter would arrive soon after Mar 20 informing me of my formal expulsion, approved by the NEC. And if for some peculiar reason the expulsion was not confirmed, I naturally expected to be informed of that too. I am sure it would be most people's expectations that this would be how any remotely civilised organisation would be obliged to operate.

Imagine my astonishment, therefore, to have finally received a letter from you on April 6......which made no reference whatever to the expulsion proceedings.

Instead, even more astonishingly, your letter informed me that my first-quarter membership subscriptions for 1999 were overdue on April 2, and that therefore my party membership was being terminated with effect from April 2, and that if I ever re-applied to rejoin the SLP, my application would be considered by the NEC!

Most normal people will see this for what it is, a really childish stunt.

With my expulsion on March 20 by your hand-picked NEC being a foregone conclusion, the question of paying my first quarter dues by April 2 to a political party of which I no longer had membership was simply a non-issue.

I still have not the faintest idea of what is my status within the party following the Mar 20 NEC meeting, or what halted the expulsion procedure, if that is indeed what has happened. Any assumptions you might have made about what I "must have understood via the grapevine" or whatever, would be utterly wrong. I still have not the faintest idea what my status is, and neither does anyone else that I know.

I would have thought that the civilised thing for you to do would be first of all to explain to me exactly what my status is within the party following whatever happened at the March 20 NEC, and then, if it is the case, first of all invite me to resume my membership before expelling me for non-payment of dues.

I also believe, incidentally, that a letter dated and signed by you on April 2 instantly informing me that my membership was forthwith terminated on April 2, the same day, because of falling behind on that day with my membership subscriptions, - - was not quite how late dues payers are normally dealt with. Can you explain this difference in treatment?

Generally speaking, will you be ready to explain your whole wretched conduct in this matter to the next Congress of the party?

Yours 'fraternally', as you put it.

Royston Bull

How the imperialist warmongers are related (part 1): 

Peter Mandelson is part of an elite transatlantic network, the British-American Project for the Successor Generation, sponsored by Washington in the 1960s to breed, as the title suggests, a new group of Labour leaders to keep the party safe for American power.

In addition to Peter Mandelson, current government members of the group include Chris Smith, Mo Mowlam, Liz Symons, George Robertson and the Number Ten chief of staff Jonathan Powell.

There were also journalists: Jeremy Paxman and James Naughtie at the BBC, plus leading figures from the Independent, the Economist and News International. What better for the international status quo than a well-heeled freemasonry of politicians and journalists setting the news agenda?

Peter Mandelson had other powerful friends. His commitment to establishment orthodoxy fitted the wishes of the powers that be. With John Birt at the BBC, the Murdochs and senior figures at the Mirror and the broadsheets on his side, how many journalists would go out on a limb?

And to have him smearing trade union leaders and opponents in the Labour party — not just the left but those like Bryan Gould who were prepared to challenge the power of the City and Brussels — was not just easy copy for incurious hacks but pure gold for those who employed them.

With a few honourable exceptions, members of the Lobby are not distinguished by their willingness to leave the herd. Their world of non-attribution — the opposite of what young reporters are trained to practise — is one in which Peter Mandelson, with his stock-in-trade of whisper, smear and innuendo, flourished.

The former Labour MP Bryan Gould, in his autobiography Goodbye to All That, wrote of a Financial Times reporter inquiring why the party's head of communications was "out to get" him. Bryan Gould concluded that Peter Mandelson's "playing of favourites ... probably did more to undermine Shadow Cabinet unity and to distract major players from the job in hand than any other factor".

But despite all the references over the years to the "Prince of Darkness", few journalists explained the mechanics of what was going on. Peter Mandelson was an important source, close first to Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair, acting always with their approval. (John Smith kept him out of things.) Exclusion from his briefings meant a drying up of political pap, the daily diet of those reporting the affairs of our democracy.

from The Journalist