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 0999 May 19th 1999                                                                                                                                           10p

Trots back insane NATO warmongering, becoming open stooges for counter-revolutionary imperialism

As the international bourgeois conspiracy to reestablish blitzkrieg destruction as legitimate diplomacy begins to fall apart, the fake-'left' petty bourgeoisie clings ever more cowardly to the imperialist warmongering propaganda distortions out of fear of where the world is heading.

As NATO's Korisa massacre and cover-up sends even some capitalist newspapers into a fury of contempt and disbelief, one Trot scribbler in the Weekly Worker has decided to end the 'left' middle class dilemma of being FOR the Albanian KLA 'self-determination struggle' but AGAINST their NATO imperialist allies by declaring the West's barbaric onslaught on tiny Serbia to be a 'progressive' historical development by 'democratic' imperialism.

Other Trot voices there say 'pity about the KLA's imperialist allies' but that is all the fault of the anti-imperialist movements for not giving the KLA support themselves!

This could turn into the most notorious case in history of failing to spot the forest because of all the trees around.

It was insane enough when the 'left' swamp first described the blitzkrieg on 10 million Serbs by the armed might of 19 of the richest capitalist states on earth, population 600 million, as an 'inter-imperialist war' which all should help the Albanian minority in Serbia to escape from via independent armed separatism, hacking off the Serbs' most ancient land of Kosovo for their own possession.

It is even more demented to now propose positive support for the NATO imperialist warmongering as a 'progressive historical development' against 'Serb feudalism'.

The West's Goebbels-level brain-washing is inflicting some appalling damage on the anti-communist 'left' swamp of Trot and Revisionist philistinism, and a speaker was aggressively howled down at a London meeting last week for daring to suggest that NATO imperialism might be the biggest enemy around for 'socialists' to be hostile to, not the Serbs.

And with Albanian leader Berisa, ex-president, now calling for Albania to join NATO in the land-grab against Serbia, the generalised warmongering dimensions of this imperialist-crisis blitzkrieg spasm become clearer daily.

Tiny Serbia has fought to defend its homeland for 600 years against a succession of imperialist invasions all using various minority local stooges to try to undermine the Serbs, — the Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italian Fascist Empire, German Nazi Empire, and now Germany and US imperialism stoking up the KLA for yet another tyranny of Balkanisation domination, exploiting local ethnic strife.

Serb-settled lands have already been grabbed by Croatia and Bosnia under the NATO-masterminded break-up of the Yugoslav socialist and multi-ethnic Federation which lived in peace for 45 years, the only ethnic harmony the region has ever known. Both Croats and Bosnians were anti-Serb stooges of the NAZI German occupation in the last great imperialist warmongering spasm (as a 'solution' to incurable capitalist 'overproduction' crisis). Now the Albanians, who almost outnumber the Serbs in the region as a whole, and who played anti-Serb stooges for both the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis, and for every imperialist occupier before that (turning Muslim to please the Turks), are trying to grab their slice of Serb-settled lands.

Into this local ethnic civil war, which has bubbled for a century or more for hegemony in Kosovo, but with Serbia always playing a truly more progressive historical role, — the anti-communist ignorance and prejudice of the Western imperialist bourgeoisie has lumbered once again, backed as usual by its petty-bourgeois chorus of 'left' swamp treachery and class collaboration, led by Trots and Revisionists.

They could just be on a loser. The Serbs have never capitulated to imperialist blitzkrieg yet. And the trade-war-riven Western alliance is becoming more and more fractious, hinting at the true warmongering holocaust to come which the slump-threatened capitalist system needs, — namely inter-imperialist war.

And even the capitalist press's petty bourgeois scribes are beginning to smell something rotten in this Goebbels-type stitch-up of the Serbs:

A MASSACRE on the road to Prizren, more than 100 civilians —  most of them ethnic Albanians —  torn apart in the village of Korisa, stories of women and children ripped apart by Nato cluster bombs. And how did Nato kick off its three o'clock follies yesterday afternoon? Without a single word about these frightful reports, not a single bloody word of astonishment or compassion.

Instead, Jamie Shea and his Luftwaffe general droned on about Nato's successful operations over Kosovo. "They went very well," Major General Walter Jertz informed us. "It was another very effective day of operations."

In Saigon, during the Vietnam War, they had the five o'clock follies. In the 1991 Gulf War, the Americans boasted of their military successes at the four o'clock follies. In Brussels, Nato's follies start at three o'clock. But yesterday the Shea and Jertz show was theatre of the obscene.

Indeed, as we all waited to hear Nato's reaction to what might be its most terrible bloodbath to date (or Serbia's most successful propaganda), a Nato technician projected a massive test slide on to the screen next to the 19 flags of the alliance. "They say we're young and we don't know — won't find out until we grow," the words said on the screen. Were these lines from the Sonny and Cher song supposed to be gallows humour or just monumental ill-taste? The moment Shea and Jertz walked to the podium, we knew.

"We still see no indications of a Serb ground force redeployal (sic)," General Jertz announced. Forty tons of supplies had reached the Red Cross at Pristina. "I can assure you we will do everything possible to ensure the safe passage of these convoys."

All of us in the darkened Joseph Bins auditorium at Nato headquarters were holding our breath. Several journalists (the television coverage never shows this, of course) shook their heads in disbelief. There had, it seemed, been no safe passage in Kosovo. We were thinking of the first reports coming in — of Nato cluster bombs bursting amid 500 Albanian refugees, many of them children, of a massacre that would make even the Prizren-Djakovica slaughter in April small scale. We wanted to know about those who were young but would never grow.

But no, General Jertz of the Luftwaffe - or the "German Air Force" as we are for some reason encouraged to call it here - wanted to tell us that there had been 67 Nato missions over Yugoslavia in 24 hours, that there had been attacks on oil refineries, electricity stations, and the Bata-jnica airfield. Projected on to the slide screen - incredibly - were the words "A GOOD DAY". Then Mr Shea - the Horatio Bottomley of Nato - launched into his usual denunciations of Serb atrocities, exhuming some old pictures of alleged mass graves and some (slightly) newer ones of burnt villages.

He quoted from old human rights and newspaper articles and managed to mispronounce the names of seven Kosovo villages. "God knows, frankly, what we are going to find when Kosovo is open," he said, solemnly shaking his head.

God knows, I'm sure, what Mr Shea was thinking; he was far more frightened of what Western journalists - bussed to the scene by the Serb authorities - would find in the village of Korisa. Fifty tractors had been destroyed in the attack, the Serbs were reporting, close to an area that had been the scene of sustained Nato attack.

It was, you see, significant that Mr Shea had not mentioned - had not alluded for a second - to these extraordinary reports. Had he thought for a moment that the Serbs had slaughtered these people, he would have told us all he knew. But he was silent. A colleague muttered in my ear that when Mr Shea was asked about the reported massacre, he would express no compassion for the dead but "promise another of his full and thorough investigations".

And when at last he was asked, Mr Shea expressed no compassion for the dead but promised "a full and thorough investigation". He hoped, he added sarcastically, that the journalists bussed to the village by the Serbs would "insist on their right to go around freely and do their own research" - Mr Shea is now apparently a professor of journalism as well as Nato flak - and that they would investigate "ethnic cleansing" in the nearby town of Prizren. "You know Nato - we give the truth on these issues, every single time, the full facts."

But it doesn't. Nato does not give "the full facts" (or "the full fax" as Mr Shea keeps saying). It lies. When I asked for Nato's reaction to the KLA appointment of one of the most notorious ethnic cleansers as its new military commander - Agim Ceku, one of the planners of Croatia's ethnic cleansing of 300,000 Serbs in Krajina - Mr Shea said he had no comment because "Nato has no direct contact with the KLA". This is totally untrue. Nato liaises with the KLA, holds security and intelligence meetings with its commanders, maintains radio contact with KLA men in Kosovo. Nato officials (including J Shea Esq) regularly announce KLA operations with approval.

When I asked General Jertz if Nato was using depleted uranium munitions in Serbia, he said it had not done so for two weeks but that depleted uranium is harmless. This, too, is a lie. There is growing evidence that the dust from spent depleted uranium shells has caused an epidemic of cancers in southern Iraq and may well be a cause of Gulf War syndrome.

British weapons testing sites are meticulously washed down after depleted uranium test-firings, their contents sealed in concrete. Nothing to worry about, said the general: "You find uranium in all sorts of things - in rocks, soil..." No harm could be caused by the use of such shells, Mr Shea added. So much for the deformed babies now being born in Basra. And so much, I suppose, for the contaminated homes of Kosovo to which Nato claims it will return all of the Albanian refugees.

I kept wondering what this whole farce reminded me of. Here were the two Nato men recording, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, the destruction of the Kosovo population - the fault of the Serbs, to be sure, but the symbol none the less of Nato's total, abject failure in the Balkans. Every day, they tell us about mass graves and death and torture. And I recalled after a while what it all reminded me of - the discreet voices, the dipped lights, the flags hanging like dead flowers behind the podium, even the sinister iron Death Star, which stands grimly outside Nato headquarters. It reminded me of an undertaker's office.

The mock soul-searching, the old pictures, the expressions of regret. The cockney and the general were the morticians, as unable to contemplate an end to Nato's bombardment of Serbia as they were to arrest old age or find a cure for death.

Kosovo is dead. Its people are dead or dispossessed..For investigation, read autopsy. And after a while it dawned on me, as it has dawned on others attending these preposterous gatherings, that we are being prepared for the death of Nato.

It was a smallscale civil war with no refugees (so therefore no 'ethnic cleansing') until NATO decided to get World War III under way. Now there is total devastation and mayhem throughout Serbia. Hitherto, the KLA had murdered Serbs, and the Serbs had flushed out KLA terrorists. This pattern is still visible even in this totally biased Western media report on the massacred of Korisa, - Albanian minority families who were not being remotely 'ethnically cleansed' or butchered by Serbs as can obviously be pieced together from this report:

THE PEOPLE of Korisa had stacked their tractors with their most important possessions: tasselled carpets in red, green and yellow, bags of flour, documents, clothes. All now lie scattered and burnt among the carcasses of blackened and wrecked tractors — the debris of Nato's latest mistake.

By the time the Yugoslav military had taken a small group of journalists to Korisa yesterday, the corpses had been removed and the tractors were no longer smouldering.

Nato said it was a military command post but on the face of it that seems unlikely. On one side of the road was a small factory where they seemed to have been making ornaments - stone lions lying face down in the mud and on the other side was a yard where dozens of tractors had been parked.

It was in open country, with green fields around, where any artillery pieces or weaponry would have been exposed and vulnerable.

The Serb authorities say 87 people were killed and 100 injured when Nato attacked the site with at least five bombs early on Friday morning. There was no evidence of cluster bombs. Nor were there large craters.

Nato said the pilot who first attacked at 11.30pm on Thursday night saw the silhouette of vehicles, confirmed the military target, then dropped two laser-guided missiles, while two planes following behind dropped two more missiles and then six gravity bombs.

Who were the people sleeping in the tractors? From Said Rejaji, a survivor, I pieced together the story. Like most people in Korisa, he is a farmer. He used to have three heifers, three bullocks and three horses.

When the war started Korisa headed for Albania — a village of 4,000 people on the move. About half of them made it, but Rejaji's group was turned back by the police and returned to Korisa. In the house where he is now staying, overheard by Serb police and military, he was a little vague about what happened next.

'When the next round began, we fled again,' he said. He talked of houses burning, but did not say who burned them. 'When we went to the hills that time, we filled our tractors with flour. We just ate bread.' It seems the people stayed in the hills for about a month. No one died, but many fell ill.

Three days ago, as they were once more trying to reach Albania, the Serb police sent them back to Korisa.

They herded them into the yard and stone ornament factory, and put police around to guard them. Rejaji said the police told them they must stay there because the military were still 'cleaning the village of terrorists'.

The Albanians were told that later they would be able to go back home and if their houses had been destroyed, they would have to stay with their neighbours.

But now they are dead because of imperialist warmongering, and Serb-Albanian hatreds have been further driven to total murderous explosion point, - just as the West intended, aided by the Trotskyite loonies who find all this so 'progressive'. And when the KLA gangsters get the upper hand in Kosovo, will the Trots then support a minority Serb national-liberation war for their own self-determination? Future NATO warmongering plans will make a useful note.

Leninism alone exposes all this degenerate nonsense, placing its understanding of the absolute self-determination rights of all peoples firmly only in a context of socialist revolutionary perspectives. None exist here. Kosovo is a Western imperialist warmongering stunt. Royston Bull

The SLP is providing no leadership or understanding, without which anti-imperialist revolution cannot transform society. Its nationalist backwardness is far removed from the necessary Leninist scientific grasp of imperialist warmongering. It cannot rout the fake-'left'. Its leading clique culture of bureaucratic crookedness is an insult to serious working-class socialist aspirations. The stab-in-the-back to the EPSR is a clear warning of syndicalism's counter-revolutionary opportunism. Test the SLP to destruction on current issues facing the working class which require revolutionary leadership. The EPSR's consistent published agitation against SLP leadership backwardness is on the record. It is Scargillism which has fouled the nest, not Leninism. Its determined 'left'-Labourism is political bankruptcy longterm. Great Debate arenas are opening up everywhere. Leninism is the key thing to take in, not SLP banners.

The massive warmongering aggression unleashed in the Balkans by Western imperialism is the dominant reality forming the backdrop to all current conflict over ideological and organisational questions for would-be socialist revolutionaries.

This naked fascist blitzkrieg, and the brainwashing propaganda manipulation of public opinion to make it possible, are a new NAZI era in the making, with all the
necessary imperialist crisis ingredients in the background.

This relentless demonisation of Serbia over 'massacres', 'rape camps', 'ethnic cleansing', 'brutal dictatorship', etc, etc, is running to a deliberate hate-making plan that has long been in preparation to justify eventual NATO armies of occupation to start controlling the planet once the economic collapse (which has devastated the Far East and is steadily pushing Indonesia, for example, towards a renewed era of communist revolutions), - begins hitting the West.

In the years following the last Great Crash, capitalism employed Hitlerism to make it possible for imperialism to embark on total warmongering destruction as the only 'solution' finally to incurable slump resulting from uncontrollable 'over-production' crises. None of the major NATO powers currently has a Hitler regime to set the pace for generalised warmongering destruction over vast areas of the world, but by collectively making scapegoats of a succession of demonisable tiny regimes (Gadaffi, Saddam Hussein, Somalia warlords, Milosevic, etc), the West has managed to increase total brainwashing to warmongering-hysteria levels, and to at least make a start to the holocaust of worldwide destruction that is going to be needed for the capitalist system to survive its coming Great Slump nightmare which will dwarf the 1930s Depression catastrophe.

This attempted Marxist-Leninist analysis of world development can be rejected, but if it is accepted, then many things should follow from it.

The notion of being "against the bombing destruction of Serbia" raises the biggest problem, reviving many of the issues which made the Bolshevik Revolution the Bolshevik Revolution, and everything else counter-revolutionary fake-'leftism', both before and after October 1917 and the taking of power for the first time in history by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Leninist science argued that the only EFFECTIVE way to be "against" the bombing (of the imperialist crisis warmongering of that period) was to understand the full historical implications of the inter-imperialist warmongering disaster irresistibly imposed by incurable capitalist economic crisis, and to explain this to a "party of a new type" to prepare for the revolutionary seizure of power for the dictatorship of the proletariat upon the wreckage of defeat and humiliation "of one's 'own' side in the war".

Against this understanding was ranged every conceivable variation of anti-war protests, pacifism, and social-patriotism that could be imagined, followed by an even bigger variety with 'revolutionary defencism' included in the posture once the February Revolution in 1917 had toppled Tsarist autocracy.

But what all these 'left' varieties of 'anti-war' posturing chauvinistically balked at was seeing and willing the defeat of one's 'own' side in the inter-imperialist war as the only way that the jingoistic involvement of the masses in the fighting and its outcome could be broken. They all feared the difficulty and ridicule of pursuing such an 'anti-patriotic' line, and used such difficulties to obscure the Leninist materialist grasp that difficult or not, it would only be defeat and humiliation that would enable the masses to turn against their ruling class (their 'own country').

To rout the entire swamp of 'left' confusion and get this Marxist-Leninist materialist understanding across to as many people as fast as possible should now be the obligation on every serious communist.

Firstly it involves a deep understanding of the economic crisis and its inter-imperialist warmongering implications. Secondly, it involves constantly completely reviewing the whole of 20th century history, mastering every detail, to re-establish the achievements of the workers states as the only sane and worthwhile basis for the future development of the whole world, but crucially including a scientific explanation of what went wrong (and why) under Revisionism, and comprehensively routing the bunker mentalities which say either nothing ever went wrong under Stalin, or nothing ever went right.

A huge amount of educational work and polemical struggle is going to be required, but a leadership grasp and ability in all this, such as the EPSR's understanding has alone ever been able to offer, is the first vital necessity.

Such a leadership influence can and should try to spread its effect through every avenue open to it (such as playing a full and sincere part in mass-support trade union struggles, single-issue campaigns, and centrist political amalgamations), - as the EPSR has always done.

But no broad popular agitation can be pursued at the expense of maintaining the fight to build a leadership party of revolutionary theory ultimately, the key to which is the fight for theory, not the fight for party.

Any attempt by a centrist political amalgamation to close down that fight for theory, and to cut off that effort to give leadership as soon as it showed too many signs of having an effect, - is a clear signal for the revolutionary struggle to move on to new challenges and opportunities, and also a major political event in itself which needs fully exposing.

The EPSR is a leadership collective of revolutionary theory, and it cannot expect to remain credible if it starts to deliberately cover-up or mis-describe the political backwardness, grotesque incompetence, or mafia antics of a leadership clique of opportunist Philistinism, some of which would even be a disgrace to the label centrism and much of which is downright reactionary, which is putting itself forward as the leadership party of the working class for the achievement of socialism, - namely the SLP.

The SLP had a potential mass base and it was given support only on the basis of taking it as far as it would go towards becoming an arena for developing the revolutionary understanding of the working class, and always in the knowledge that any insurmountable weakness of its centrist philistine origins would have to be pressed all the way to a split at some point, - if Scargillism did not get in with its own split first.

The November Congress election, and Scargill's trouble with his own Trot and syndicalist co-founders, combined to put the boot into the EPSR first, just marginally before the SLP's backwardness on the imperialist warmongering would have made an identical critical tone in EPSR coverage inevitable anyway.

The back-stabbing manoeuvres, used to control the SLP, are in themselves a political philosophy, - the class-collaborative aspects of trade-union elitism and thuggery which reached its peak when closed-shop bureaucracy used to control workers voices, - tolerated and sometimes even encouraged by a quiescent ruling class. Reformism and syndicalism are PETTY-BOURGEOIS philosophies, - corrupting and betraying the working class from within, essentially. Communists need to thrust themselves into every such activity, - trade-union, anti-war, all single-issue campaigns, - but in order to fight against sectarian, self-serving isolationism and bureaucratic complacency, and to raise the need for revolutionary understanding (the only basis for eventual revolutionary unity) among the whole population suffering the disasters of imperialist crisis.

It is the understanding which must be preserved and developed, not necessarily the arena into which it is projected.

Warning workers (that not everything that the SLP leadership says and does can justify promotional agitation) is one thing. But critical testing of dodgy SLP positions, in practical struggle and polemical conflict, is much more important in the long run for convincing workers of the vital necessity for correct revolutionary theory as the only ultimately reliable leadership, i.e. Marxist-Leninist science.

The only real test of the worthwhileness of the SLP in any case (and of anything else) is how it does on the current major questions facing the working class.

So how does the SLP fare on the war? Its line is utterly disastrous from a long-term Leninist perspective of preparing for the revolutionary overthrow of failed imperialist warmongering. Far from remotely educating its membership and the working class in the prospects of eventually turning catastrophic inter-imperialist war into civil wars by workers everywhere, Socialist News has been publishing vague calls for sympathy with KLA separatists, the very stooges for this warmongering imperialist interventionist outrage in the first place, and inflicting hopeless 'democratic pacifism' illusions on everyone by pretending that 'UN peacekeeping forces' are a way out. In terms of national mobilisation on the war question, the SLP has been completely passive, and it has failed to publish or preach a single word exposing the deep and incurable economic-crisis background to this unavoidable warmongering degeneracy by imperialism, or expose a single aspect of the self-destructive nonsense that the fake-'left' is coming out with who could all be routed for ever over their various stances of social-pacifism or outright backing for imperialist blitzkrieg under the idiot fraud that the West is remotely really interested in the 'self-determination rights' of the drug-running Albanian mafia in Kosovo, or even more insanely that NATO has any serious 'democratic humanitarian concern' over the 2-sided local civil-war there.

On the war question, the SLP nationally is a hospital case itself, and communists in the SLP who fail to point this out "because they have been able to come out with a good line locally", or some other SLP area has, or whatever, - will lay themselves open to justified accusations of a degrading cover-up on a crucially important issue for the working class.

The same is true over the appalling import-controls nationalism which the SLP's chauvinistic EU-elections blurb is dumbing-down the party towards. This Little Englander mentality will be a catastrophe for the working class, and any SLP communists who have failed to point out such an approaching danger because of local opportunist reasons will deserve to forfeit their revolutionary leadership credibility within the working class.

And to keep repeating that such potential national SLP weaknesses have always been known about, or that it is irrelevant to argue that the situation has moved on because situations are always moving on, - is to declare Marxist methods null and void.

The issue is the war NOW, and the European elections NOW, - trying to build leadership and understanding in the working class based on the very latest developments at the very highest point of potential enlightenment about the whole of class-war history.

The point of a Marxist fight against centrist backwardness is to agitate against it in practice on the very current frontline of the class-war struggle, hopefully demonstrating to workers, as things happen, the correctness or incorrectness of any particular understanding. It is precisely the notion of turning one's nose up at a mere outline manifesto, years before the actual skirmishing begins, that smacks of subjective sectarianism.

Apart from being insulting nonsense, to suggest that contributions to EPSR understanding have only grown critical recently on the SLP under the influence of subjective sour grapes is factually sheer LIES.

Prior to any vice-presidential election result, the Review was systematically publishing non-stop criticism of the SLP leadership's failure to grasp the need to RESOLVE political differences splitting the party; of its disastrous mis-education of workers for allowing reactionary articles into Socialist News; of its failure to encourage education and polemics to train party cadres; of its confusion over the bad influence of single-issue philosophies like feminism; of its weakness in cosseting certain 'left' Labour reptiles; over its treacherous articles on Ireland; and endlessly over the rotten Trot politics close to Scargill in the leadership. Review articles, and verbal and written contributions to the SLP leadership and to Socialist News, were notorious for their outspokenness and for their refusal to keep quiet about anything. Well before getting elected (just prior to being stabbed in the back), Socialist News sales were being openly abandoned because of the crap that was in successive editions. Any EPSR of that period will do as an example of a consistently critical attitude to SLP backwardness, but the Oct 20, 1998 issue (No 971) will save spending too much time on file-research. It typifies a perpetual forthright campaign to tell the SLP that only Marxist-Leninist science will really help the fight for socialism in the long run. It was clearly stated then, and it won a vice-presidential election; and it should be clearly stated now, with all its Leninist implications about current SLP policy.

It also lost the SLP vice-presidency too, but that only makes it even more reason to be absolutely clear about SLP leadership backwardness, and to make sure every worker understands it too.

Far from the Review's March 9 attack on the SLP's EU-election social-patriotism reflecting just personal griping, its timely warning and perception became instantly verified when Scargillism failed to get out of the chauvinist swamp of confusion over NATO warmongering, refusing to make Western aggression itself THE only issue, or raise revolutionary understanding as the only possible solution long-term to such systemic barbarism.

Without its loud confident EPSR part-voice, the SLP is now a poor sickly thing, and its evident decline demonstrates this. Scargill's abiding 'strike-leader' reputation, guaranteed by being a mineworkers union figurehead, plus mass spontaneous frustration with Blairite government chaos, - might yet see a new surge in SLP support.

But its back-stabbing turn against Marxism-Leninism and its embrace of anti-theory philistinism, tinged with museum-Stalinism and Trot single-issue posturing, is likely to witness a continued ideological deterioration and more rampant opportunism. Without an open Leninist fight throughout its ranks, the SLP will become a political health-hazard for the working class. The EPSR's success in promoting the SLP is a triumph for the Review, not Socialist Labour.

Colossal tasks face the socialist movement to re-educate the working class about imperialist warmongering crisis and the fundamental soundness of the historic turn to workers states in the 20th century. Bigger arenas to work in are always needed, but currently, for example, it is the war question itself which is providing them, - big meetings everywhere open to all-comers. The SLP itself has provided few forums, and can provide little or no support for communists tackling those mass meetings of 'left' swamp confusion.
 
Spontaneous current-issue arenas will continue to proliferate. To make best use of them, communists need bigger, better, and more frequent EPS Reviews, not more Scargillite philistinism and anti-communist backwardness.

To argue that the 1984-85 miners strike would have been transformed if the SLP had existed then, and to see this as a plus-point for uncritical support for the SLP today, is to grab hold of the wrong thread of history. It was precisely the EPSR which alone in 1984-85 loudly agitated in a principled critical manner for the NUM to see that its hopes in a returned Labour Government, and for a renewal of the Plan-for-Coal era, were out-of-date capitalist-reformist boomtime illusions, and that a break from Labour for the working class's socialist aspirations was what this strike, - and the onslaught on it by the capitalist state, supported by the whole of its capitalist parliament, - was announcing as necessary. Precisely because of its political philistinism, Scargillism itself hadn't a clue.

Having at last made a formal announcement of a break from Labourism in 1996, Scargillism then had to be told in a loud and principled voice that without Marxist-Leninist science, this SLP centrist project would bear little fruit and ultimately only poison. Once again, the EPSR's small but vital support was forthcoming. But once again, Scargillism wasn't listening. It remains 'left'-Labourism outside the Labour Party. Its tendency will be to merge back with more 'left' Labourism, but history has no real place for any Labour Party Mark II. It is just not needed, and can only repeat the ultimate reformist sterility of the Labour Party Mark I.

EPSR influence continues to be slow-growing, but it develops steadily and honestly, submitting itself to all the debate and polemic that anyone can muster, and always matching the work it does (concentrating on the frontline changes in the international class struggle) with the actual outcomes so as to endlessly correct and verify its basic Marxist-Leninist scientific grasp of human history. Its achievements in correctly analysing developments, - thereby making appropriate programme, strategy, and tactics possible, - provide its unique difference from the fake-'left' swamp. Build Leninism. RB

Scargill still hiding behind constitutional oafishness, and plain lies.

Dear Arthur Scargill,

Your attempts to justify your manipulativeness are as dishonest as your original manoeuvres to expel me.

You were asked why you failed to inform me first that the March 20 NEC had not confirmed my expulsion (on some technicality or other which you have still not explained) before proceeding to expel me on April 2 for "non-payment of dues" (to a party I assumed I was no longer a member of).

Your 'explanation' for that failure to communicate that March 20 NEC decision is that "as you were no longer a member, there was no reason for me to write to you."

I would expect a sharper grasp of the situation from a tree stump, but just so that your methods of 'leadership' to a tiny party of committed 'socialist comrades' is clear to everyone, I will spell it out again.

In the 2-week gap between the March 20 NEC meeting and your letter dated April 2 seizing the opportunity to expel me for non-payment of dues on that date, why did you not inform me that the NEC had been unable to expel me on March 20, and also inform me what my party standing therefore was as a result of that NEC meeting.??

It will be obvious to even a tree stump that to say you did not communicate the NEC decision to me on March 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26,  27, 28, 29, 30, 31, or April 1 "as you were no longer a member" (which was not true until April 2), - is just senseless gibberish.

Or it is just plain dishonest contempt because you could not care less what I think or anyone else thinks? But in that case why did you bother replying to my letter at all? (Answer is below).

In response to my challenge, you boast at the end of your letter: "I certainly will 'explain' my conduct to the next Party Congress, and also inform that Congress that the Vice-President elected in November 1998 did not have a sufficient sense of discipline to pay his Party subscriptions thereafter," and you add no less than three further paragraphs to hammer home your pretence that "strict adherence to rules" is the real issue here.

You forget how easily it is to reply in kind to this 'constitutional' posturing,- which is sheer bureaucratic flannel. For example:-

Your 'Rules and Constitution' proudly boast "a Complaints Procedure, drafted by John Hendy, QC, for the SLP" and adopted by the NEC in 1997. Rule 19 clearly instructs the General Secretary to "inform the respondent within seven days" what the NEC had decided to do about the Complaints Committee recommendation (for immediate expulsion with effect from March 20).

Only now,  in your letter of May 11, have I at last been "informed" that "As the result of another case, unconnected with yours, the NEC meeting held on 20 March could not consider the report on your case by the Complaints Committee, and consequently could take no decision".

Clearly I should have been informed of this "WITHIN SEVEN DAYS" of March 20. But your letter of May 11 is the first communication I have received from the SLP on this not unimportant matter.

So who is it who really lacks "a sufficient sense of discipline"??

Even on the dues-paying question itself you are a complete fraud. "You know perfectly well that you automatically ceased to be a member of SLP on April 2" (under Clause V(4) 13-week rule) you pompously declare.

But you know, and everyone in the party knows, that long after April 2, SLP meetings were being held where not only many of those selecting the candidates for elections were way past the 13-week rule for 1999 contributions, but a large number of the candidates themselves which were put together were out-of-benefit too.

Maybe no-one will have the nerve to stand up and tell you at your forthcoming Congress what a bare-faced hypocrite you are with you small-minded 'constitutional' rackets, but you are and will remain a trade-union bureaucracy political crook of the nastiest kind.

"And what about Rule 18 of the Complaints Procedure? This orders that "a written report of the Complaints Committee decision, summarising briefly the reasons for it" must be supplied to the Respondent (via the General Secretary) "within 14 days of the hearing". This was on Feb 12. To this day, as you well know, I have never received IN WRITING so much as the verdict of the Complaints Committee, let alone their reasons for reaching it, which were never supplied verbally either. In even the most wretched legal procedures on earth, it would be out-of-order to not supply the accused after the trial with the verdict and the sentence IN WRITING, - as your own rules instruct you to do. Did you "lack a sufficient sense of discipline" to carry out these important instructions as General Secretary?

And since you pretend to be so 'rule conscious', can you explain what happened to your 'constitutional discipline' in never having yet replied, - neither at the Complaints Committee, or in letters to me, or anywhere else, - to the SINGLE constitutional point I put back to you in reply to the avalanche of 'constitutional transgressions' you raised against me, - namely, the quite vital legal point spelt out in rule k of the Complaints Procedure, and wisely thought important enough by your legal adviser to be stressed again in the short preamble to the full 5-page 37-paragraph document to avoid the SLP falling foul of the law and being sued for discrimination or persecution.

This obvious sensible safeguard declares that the Complaints Procedure "is only applicable to conduct by a member of the SLP IN THAT CAPACITY" or relating to the conduct by "an SLP member IN THAT CAPACITY".

As you repeat in your latest (May 11) letter, you brought your complaint against me over what the EPSR does because I was "deeply involved in the publication of the EPSR".

But I don't edit the EPSR "in my capacity as an SLP member". My SLP membership has got nothing whatever to do with my being editor of the EPSR, which job I have done every week for 20 years in accordance with the instructions (of the Editorial Committee) for a Marxist commentary on the activities of the WHOLE labour and trade-union movement in the light of the changing requirements of the international class war against imperialism. Nothing the EPSR has ever done has been referred to the SLP or ever will be, or referred to the wishes of anyone acting "in their capacity as an SLP member". EPSR editing functions and SLP membership functions are completely separate activities.

Things I did "in my capacity as an SLP member" were to act as secretary for the Stockport Area CSLPs; act as agent in two SLP election campaigns; regularly sell huge numbers of Socialist News; write many articles for Socialist News; move motions at SLP Congress; get elected to regional and national SLP committee; etc, etc. For NONE of these activities "in my capacity as an SLP member" have I been charged, which are the only activities your own Constitution and Rules say that I can be taken to the Complaints Committee over.

For someone with such a self-proclaimed sense of 'constitutional discipline', why do you refuse to address this matter which is crucial to my case, crucial to your behaviour as General Secretary (especially with the emphasis you always put on how 'constitutionally' you always supposedly conduct yourself), and crucial to natural justice????

Your one attempt to justify your illegal treacherous victimisation to expel me, which was unleashed at the NEC meeting on Dec 12, was to try to pretend to the Complaints Committee that the contents of the Dec 15 EPSR on which you based your complaint, referred to "internal SLP matters you could only have known about in your capacity as an SLP member".

Just not true. A complete lie, in fact.

As I patiently explained to the Complaints Committee (without getting one word of response from them on this matter, or on any other matter that I disputed in a 2-hour hearing), - the reference in EPSR 979 was to a London Region SLP meeting at which your Trotskyite close collaborators in the founding of the SLP, Heron & Co, had declared a strike on all future cooperation with the SLP in response to my election as vice president.

But I learned about that meeting not because of "my capacity as an SLP member" but as a reader of the published press where a full report of that London regional SLP had been carried weeks earlier by the Weekly Worker.

Since your treacherous back-stabbing was unleashed on Dec 12, it is possible that I have referred to matters which I have only learned about because of my membership of the SLP, but this entire disciplinary racket you have cooked up tied itself to the Dec 15 issue of the EPSR. It is just gross deception on workers to circumvent your own constitution to pretend that my editing of that newspaper could be related to me "in my capacity as an SLP member". You are lying, and your whole complaint is a complete fraud.

So on what basis does your pretended veneration for abiding strictly by the letter and spirit of 'disciplined constitutional behaviour' let you examine my EPSR editing activities (of 20 years standing) as though conducted "in my capacity as an SLP member", when purely PARTY behaviour is the ONLY grounds on which a complaint against me can be made?

And why have you never replied to this point, either in writing or in your lengthy submissions to the Complaints Committee, - a point which I spelt out fully in my own submission, and also put in writing in my final written submission to the Complaints Committee?

And why did the Complaints Committee not reply??

I will tell you why, further on in this letter.

It is for the same reason that you simply totally refused to consider my cooperative offer to resign my office as vice- president in order to allow a serious DISCUSSION leading to a hoped-for UNDERSTANDING of each other's positions within such a small party. I openly acknowledged the potential influence that weekly publication of the EPSR could give to the Leninists in the SLP's ranks, and was prepared to creatively debate all manner of possibilities for turning such writing and publishing capacities to the advantage of party information and education, to be mutually agreed by the party leadership collectively.

You refused any such discussion from the start. You simply issued an increasingly bilious stream of letters containing various peremptory instructions,- (all of which I attempted to adapt to in a spirit of cooperation pending further serious party-leadership discussions (which in the end never once took place with the slightest scrap of sincerity on your part)), - concluding with your Dec 12 motion out of the blue (at the first NEC I ever attended, and the only one)  in effectively have me expelled from the SLP for being the editor of the EPS Review, a job I had done for 20 years.

What all this registers is your utter syndicalist outlook on politics. You really do believe that the trade-union rule book is going to win socialism in Britain, and you have a profound philistine contempt for serious scientific theory about political class struggle (Marxism-Leninism).

The total vacuum on your part for collective leadership via constructive debate shows up in most areas of how the SLP is run. The newspaper is entirely devoid of polemics and does not even have a letters column. It panders to 'famous names' no matter what rubbish they write. You loudly declare a near-pathological dread of "internecine warfare", banning all debate and expelling me for explaining mistaken Trotskyite contributions to the SLP (on Ireland; in going on strike because they did not like an election result; in resigning because they could not get their way on Black Sections; etc. etc, etc, etc, etc;) - - - and yet you then almost tie the party up in internal constitutional legal wrangles going on endlessly which basically need solving by POLITICAL confrontation followed by a quick split from anti-party factionalising.

Your philistinism is such that in my case, you simply refused to show to the NEC the 5,000-word letter I wrote TO the NEC offering my resignation in return for debating a constructive way forward for EPSR supporters to continue actively backing the development of the SLP.

And coming from the tradition of 100 years of TUC-Labour Party class-collaborating 'reformism' and pro-imperialist chauvinism,- the rule-book you hope to lead Britain to 'socialism' by is, of course, completely bent.

You swamp people in constitutional f1annel but you don't believe one word of it yourself and have not the slightest intention of being bound by it in reality. You are a demagogic bureaucrat through and through.

You send this reply without an ounce of sincerity because that is what bureaucrats do. You and your Complaints Committee stonewall on the question of the complete 'disciplinary' illegality (of charging me over conduct "in my capacity as an SLP member" for my regular political-journalism activities which have roughly followed the same pattern for all of 20 years now, and which have not the slightest relationship to my behaviour "in my capacity as an SLP member"), - - for the same bureaucratic reasons.

You even bother going to all the bureaucratic trouble of denying that you initiated the expulsion procedure against me,- purely in order to be the complete bureaucrat. "I did not seek your expulsion from the SLP," you write,"and whatever decision the Complaints Committee reached was a matter for them, not for me."

Who do you think you are kidding with this stuff? And why do you bother? The truth is that bureaucratic posturing is ALL you've got,- your syndicalist demagogy. You don't have any politics other than to be a weathervane for 'left Labourism', the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the working class in this country; and your 'break' from the Labour Party was in name only, - a significant historical development in itself but the understanding of which was something way beyond the interest of its main protagonist, (and which will be analysed elsewhere in the EPSR now that this development has apparently exhausted its immediate potential).

Royston Bull

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a selection of anti-imperialist struggles)

The crisis will have long-term implications for food security in the region

ROME - The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned in a special communiqué published on April 13 that, in addition to the direct consequences for human beings, the Kosovo war has devastated the agricultural and food preparation industries, as a result of the drastic reduction in the volume of supplies and food availability. 

The communiqué states that thousands of arable land areas have been destroyed or abandoned, while food distribution has been reduced due to transportation difficulties. 

Even in the good years, Kosovo was a region with severe deficits, and the volume of food and productivity recorded a sharp drop in recent years due to the conflict in the border areas, further complicated by difficulties presented by the terrain, poor soil with a limited potential and a significant decrease in the utilization of essential agricultural supplies.

In response to the crisis, at the beginning of April the World Food Program (WFP) and the FAO jointly approved an extension of the Emergency Operation to mobilize additional aid tor the affected populations.

However, the document continues, without improvements in the situation, aid operations can only be directed to refugees who have already abandoned the province. 

If the situation improves to the point of permitting the population to return to their homes, the FAO stresses that vast amounts of international aid extended over various months will be needed to assure food supplies in the province until national agricultural production and the regular commercial routes can be re-established.

Added to this, March and April are the traditional months for sowing some 100,000 hectares of corn, mainly used for animal feed; 10,000 hectares of secondary grains for animal feed and beer production; 25,000 hectares of various fresh vegetables; and 20,000 hectares of forage feed. Practically none of these activities have been possible

The FAO states that, as if this weren't enough, massive livestock losses have been recorded due to violence, disease and abandonment, while the intensification of the violence in the last few weeks has meant a halt in aid operations within the province.

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a selection of anti-imperialist struggles)

The banana empire

It's said that it all began in 1870, when Lawrence Baker, a ship's captain, unloaded 160 bunches of bananas in Jamaica, thus initiating what would become a lucrative business.

In 1876, Baker established the Boston Fruit Company and extended the range of his purchases to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama and Colombia.

By 1898, bananas had caught on and over 100 banana companies existed, importing some 16 million bunches into the United States.

The following year, various of these merged into the United Fruit Company, with start-up capital of 20 million dollars. For many people, this was the birth of the banana empire, since that company took over land in Central America, Ecuador, Colombia and the Caribbean.

By 1930, the investment capital had multiplied to 250 million dollars, which is easily understandable if we take into account that out of every dollar earned from bananas, United Fruit received 86 cents and the producing country - obviously -14 cents.

As lord and master, the United Fruit Company considered itself to have - and in fact did have jurisdiction in the broadest sense. That's why it successfully conspired in the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

That conspiracy - recalls Granma daily - was plotted from the highest commands in Washington, where the Dulles brothers were directing the Department of State and the CIA and, not by coincidence, were also associated with the law firm representing...United Fruit.

A different decade - the '60s -awaited United Fruit. The winds of Revolution were blowing in Cuba and 110,000 hectares and two sugar mills were nationalized. Nothing would be the same. The company began to merge with other U.S. monopolies, like American Machinery; transformed itself, or possibly disguised itself as Chiquita Brands; and then divided into subsidiaries like Cobigua, its name in Guatemala, or Tela Railroad in Honduras.

Nonetheless, the company's centennial anniversary will be recalled, as one example, for the sacking in 1996 of half of Guatemala's 6000 laborers, and the layoff, of 7500 out of a total of 10,000 right after Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras.

For their part, the banana producers of the Caribbean, where it's all said to have started, are now being affected by the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling in favor of the United States in its litigation with the European Union (EU).

The United States claimed losses of 520 million dollars - the WTO backed it to 191 million - on account of the preferential treatment given by the EU to the banana-producing members of the African, Caribbean and Pacific States (ACP).

The centenary anniversary of United Fruit - or whichever of the names it's adopted - doesn't appear to be a time for celebrations in any of the banana regions.