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 1000 May 26th 1999                                                                                                                             10p

Trots, Revisionists, and middle-class 'revolutionaries' are aiding NATO's war effort with their determined ignorance of Marxist-Leninist science on imperialist warmongering. Their phoney 'moral' posturing about Kosovo Albanians is merely born of fear of standing up to the ferocious anti-Serb propaganda lies and hysteria in the West. All the 'democratic rights' sloganising is politically pure hypocrisy, and philosophically pure gibberish. Lenin for caution on many bourgeois 'national liberation' claims. Defeat for NATO is the only issue. Synchronised Western media lies and synchronised KLA lying should fool no-one.

The fake-'left' continue to hide behind their bogus 'socialist' and even 'communist' credentials to fatally undermine the anti-war protests against NATO's blitzkrieg on Serbia.

All are cowed by the ferocious bourgeois propaganda onslaught demonising Milosevic and vilifying & exaggerating the obviously mutual brutal consequences of the two-sided civil war raging in Kosovo but heaped up solely against the Serbs by the capitalist media's brainwashing monopoly.

So instead of contemptuously totally dismissing imperialism's hypocritical tears over the "humanitarian suffering" in the Serb-Albanian conflict as an excuse for militarily intervening (to suit the West's warmongering invasion preparations for dealing with the imperialist system's insoluble international economic crisis) the fake-'lefts' all partly go along with the NATO propaganda.

Some of the barmier Trot anti-communists, of course, even act as cheerleaders for the blitzkrieg bombing, repeating the support that fascist imperialist regimes got in the 1930s (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc) which were financed by monopoly-capitalism to 'solve' the imperialist-system economic crisis then. Vanessa Redgrave leads this degenerate anti-theory philistinism.

More Trots like to hide behind convoluted assertions of 'Albanian democratic rights' to justify their contributions to the confusion surrounding neo-Nazi blitzkrieg, letting NATO get away with it.

It is utter nonsense for these anti-communists (such as the Weekly Worker) to argue the supposed Marxist philosophy of total working-class democracy but then polemically 'justify' its relevance to Kosovo only by quietly slipping in — unexamined and unproven, — a mere biased assertion that the whole trouble there is 'Serbs oppressing Albanians'. Total NATO lies. It ended badly for the Albanians, but it was they who took to arms first to challenge Serb state legitimacy in Kosovo (which goes back a thousand years). They have now paid the penalty, and it is utterly imbecile to NOW press for the Albanian minority's "democratic rights", — especially behind a gang of KLA cut-throats, drug-runners, prostitution racketeers, and general stooges for imperialist domination of the Balkans for centuries (Ottoman, Italian Fascist, German Nazi, and now the CIA).

The SWP get round their fence-sitting (refusing to denounce the anti-Milosevic propaganda nonsense) by playing up parochial nationalism, stressing the villainous US imperialist content to the NATO-imperialist hypocrisy, letting the rest of Western monopoly-capitalist aggressive exploitation appear almost as innocent victims of American warmongering bullying. This is gibberish. It is the whole free-market private enterprise system which is now peddling cynical humbug to inflict total devastating war destruction on mankind as the only way out of anarchic over-production crisis for its rotten system. And every time that the SWP declare their own 'purity' in having 'reported on' the Serb 'oppression' of the Albanians even 'before' the break-up of Yugoslavia, they merely emphasise their own subjective self-righteousness, the hallmark of their lifelong anti-communism.

As a workers state, albeit Revisionist marred, Yugoslavia achieved over 45 years a remarkably civilised (considering the region's brutal history) political and economic development which convincingly established, for the first time ever, the ability of ALL the conflicting nationalities in this notoriously hate-filled and volatile area to live cooperatively in peace with one another once the devil of cut-throat competitive free enterprise, locally wound up taught by rival imperialist inducements from outside seeking to divide and rule, — had been overthrown.

And what was the SWP doing throughout that heroic workers-state development of 45 years? Standing permanently on the sidelines jeering at what 'crap' it all was by their own armchair-socialist middle class standards of the 'perfect revolution', and doing everything possible to help imperialism's anti-communist Cold War propaganda to undermine all confidence in the workers states in general.

To cover up its own past stupidity and criminal responsibility for willing the workers states downfall which has now only resulted in appallingly worse capitalist chaos and tyranny, the SWP make cheap anti-US imperialist jibes. More bourgeois rot.

The Weekly Worker is currently justifying KLA reactionariness by comparing it with 19th century Irish-nationalist conservatism fighting British imperialism. This is farcical. The Serb-Albanian fight over Kosovo has nothing whatever to do with any great colonial imperialist power against whom ANY national-liberation success was a real triumph for all anti-imperialist mankind. Even by 1920, it was far from automatic that ANY bourgeois-nationalist 'liberation'-posing could be guaranteed 'progressive'; and the KLA are REACTIONARY.

Lenin reported to the Second Congress of the Third International:

"We as Communists should and will support bourgeois-liberation movements in the colonies only when they are genuinely revolutionary, and when their exponents do not hinder our work of educating and organising in a revolutionary spirit the peasantry and the masses of the exploited. If these conditions do not exist, the Communists in these countries must combat the reformist bourgeoisie. 
(From the Commission on National and Colonial Questions, July 26, 1920).

In his Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for the same Congress, Lenin wrote:

"Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations (for example, Ireland, the American Negroes, etc) and in the colonies. Without the latter condition which is particularly important, the struggle against the oppression of dependent nations and colonies, as well as recognition of their right to secede, are but a false signboard as is evidenced by the parties of the Second International.....

"The Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e. those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations."

The whole Congress was saturated in exposures of the falseness of the Western imperialist democracies in promising national-democratic rights to small nations, covering up the reality of insatiable exploitation and plunder.

"The Treaty of Versailles is an even more brutal and foul act of violence against weak nations than was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk....They are hastening the collapse of the petty-bourgeois nationalist illusions that nations can live together in peace and equality under capitalism"

Lenin added.

There are foul and disgusting ethnic wars currently raging ALL OVER the world, thanks to the capitalist system. The Hutu-Tutsi slaughter around Rwanda and the inter-tribal perpetual butchery in Angola are only the latest flare-ups to catch the eye; but the Arab-African ethnic cleansing rivalry for southern Sudan and the nearby Tigrayan-Eritrean-Amhara-Oromo four-way conflict around Ethiopia have been raging for a generation, wiping out casualties by the million. An utterly savage caste war in Bihar, India's most populous state, sees entire villages and their inhabitants routinely obliterated on either side. 

All are terrifyingly murderous, the Serb-Albanian confrontation in Kosovo as bad as any. But what shred of evidence is there for so much of the fake-'left' in Britain and elsewhere to have decided that the armed challenge by Albanians (to Serb self-determination in territory settled by Serbs for a thousand years or more, and currently part of the tiny Serbian state-independence) is so worthy of 'international communist' support???

Is the KLA really a proletarian revolutionary movement??? Or is it a bourgeois-democratic nationalist movement which is out to create conditions within which a proletarian-revolutionary development can flourish??? Even when fighting against a genuine imperialist-colonial power, the Communist International was advising caution in backing purely bourgeois 'liberation' demands. But how does tiny Serbia even qualify as an imperialist-colonial power anyway? There are almost as many Albanians as there are Serbs in the region to start with. And Greater Albania has been a bourgeois dream for more than a century with just as much (if not more) opportunist manoeuvring behind its 'self-determination' posturing as the record shows for Greater Serbia aspirations.

And notoriously, Albanian nationalism has treacherously acted as stooge (for brutal imperialist invasions of the region) in its ruthless ethnic rivalry against other local nationalities, - joining forces with the Italian Fascist occupation and then the German Nazi occupation (and originally turning Muslim to please the Ottoman Empire).

Surprise,  surprise, it is now in league with the NATO blitzkrieg under the US imperialist 'New World Order'.

While it can be argued that other local nationalisms have similar chequered records, it still does not explain why the fake-'left' has gone barmy for Albanian separatist opportunism this time round. There is nothing remotely progressive about any Albanian faction; they are riddled with mafia drugs & vice underworlds (several rival clans, according to Sali Berisa, ex Albanian president); and they ARE undoubtedly collaborating closely with Western imperialism's barbaric blitzkrieg plans for the area.

Only 'left' weak (petty bourgeois) susceptibility to Big Power imperialist bluster, plus their middle-class knee-jerk Stalinophobia against anything to do with the historic achievements of the East European workers states, - causes the 57 fake-'left' varieties of Trots and Revisionists to ignore all this and agitate for the "self-determination democratic rights" of the "little Kosova Albanian nation anyway", - stressing hopelessly muddled and irrelevant "political principles" in an orgy of self-righteous moralising which is as divorced from the Marxist-Leninist science of unrestrained class war against the international bourgeois system as it is possible to be.

The founders of the philosophy of communist revolution in practice advocated a consistent approach of total democracy towards the multi-ethnic masses (including the full right to self-determination all the way to secession) ONLY in the perspective of the actual OVERTHROW of the imperialist system, the perspective of imminent world revolution. It is also clear that the discussion was invariably about clear,  distinct, undisputed national HOMELANDS, - such as Finland (which the Bolshevik government let secede on Lenin's anticipation that precisely such unconditional freedom would be the best way to win voluntary Finnish adherence to the Soviet workers state). 

At the same time, Leninist policy was always directed at what a VIABLE communist party might importantly be proposing (as an accepted political force in society, - in the light of the international triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution).

But even so, Lenin's resolution on the national question at the May 1917 Bolshevik seventh all-Russia conference added the following:

"The right of nations freely to secede must not be confused with the advisability of secession by a given nation at a given moment. The party of the proletariat must decide the latter question quite independently in each particular case,  having regard to the interests of social development as a whole and the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat for socialism.

"The party of the proletariat emphatically rejects what is known as 'national cultural autonomy', under which education, etc, is removed from the control of the state and put in the control of some kind of national diets. National cultural autonomy artificially divides the workers living in one locality, and even working in the same industrial enterprise, according to their various 'national cultures'; in other words, it strengthens the ties between the workers and the bourgeois culture of their nations, whereas the aim of the Social-Democrats (Communists) is to develop the international culture of the world proletariat.

"The interests of the working class demand that the workers of all nationalities in Russia should have common proletarian organisations: political, trade union, co-operative educational institutions, and so forth. Only the merging of the workers of the various nationalities into such common organisations will make it possible for the proletariat to wage a successful struggle against international capital and bourgeois nationalism".

The conflict between Serbs and Albanians over the administration of the Kosovo area of Serbia is being argued about by 'liberal democracy' and the fake-'left' with hardly even a mention of the imperialist-system economic crisis conditions (of which this opportunist chauvinist rivalry is a small part), let alone involving any perspective of OVERTHROWING the imperialist system and of establishing REAL emancipation of the working class through the dictatorship of the proletariat.

What is involved is the foul squabbling for territory and for local political domination, a typical drop in an ocean of worldwide tribal hatreds, backstabbing, and opportunism which IS the planet under the international domination by imperialist free-market forces. Increasingly degenerate and mutual petty-chauvinist confrontation has been descending on the WHOLE of ex-Yugoslavia ever since the writing was on the wall for the Revisionist-bound workers state, undermined by relentless imperialist subversion determined to play up the ethnic rivalries for its own market-exploitation and geo-political strategic purposes.

In this particular territorial conflict going back hundreds of years, or even going back just to 1986 when it started to get bad again, - how could it be remotely rational for 'international communists' to try to say who has inflicted the greater injustice on the other between Serbs and Albanians, and what would be the point of any such assessment anyway?

There are scores of such struggles going on currently around the planet. Not only is that how the imperialist-dominated free-market system keeps control of everything; it is the only way things CAN BE under a capitalism-run world. Surely the task for international communists is to explain the bankruptcy facing all nation-state autonomy in world capitalist-crisis conditions of the near future. Surely the most pointless activity is to be cheering on this ethnic skulduggery from either side.

There is no distinct undisputed national homeland involved in this Albanian attempt to annexe a centuries-old part of Serbia and a part of the Serbian state to this day, and inhabited by Serbs as well as by Albanians.

And there are certainly no viable communist parties involved on either side, making proposals for a solution with the slightest relevance for the international future of communist revolution.

Crucial is one new factor, - the ONLY factor worth the while of international communist engagement in what would otherwise be just local petty-bourgeois nationalist squabbling, - namely the decision by world imperialism to launch total military blitzkrieg in favour of one side.

That startling development makes explaining the causes of this imperialist warmongering the prime requirement for Marxist-Leninist science, and also makes available (and vital) an excellent campaigning agenda for the international working class, - namely the perspective of DEFEAT for this degenerate NATO-imperialist warmongering through failing to coerce Serbia possibly; or actually losing a ground war; or splitting internally so badly within NATO as to not be able to finish the job, and be humiliated in failing to re-establish Albanian dominance in Kosovo; or through some other catastrophic foul-up.

The causes for this Western onslaught have not the slightest connection to the Kosovo question, of course. It is merely a convenient conflict into which NATO can get involved so as to pursue other global aims entirely. Imperialist economic crisis of over-production is the problem, and warmongering destruction eventually on a worldwide scale is the only 'solution' that a bourgeois-capitalist-dominated system could ever come up with, or has ever come up with. The West could not have LESS real interest in the so-called 'self-determination rights' of the Albanian minority in the south Serbian province of Kosovo. This ethnic quarrel is purely a convenient issue on which NATO warmongering and its moralising propaganda and hypocrisy, can go to work.

Blitzing Serbia fits a pattern of demonising some monstrous hate-figure, and establishing the 'right' of the imperialist West to inflict whatever amount of destructive bloody war and occupation thought necessary to quell the difficulty. The precedent is then set for all coming civil-war/revolutionary upheavals associated with widespread capitalist collapse and slump to be also blamed on 'ethnic cleansing ambitions' and 'massacres', etc, and dealt with in the same imperialist-invasion way. The 'morality' of total blitzkrieg destruction is what Western imperialism aims to reestablish in Serbia.

To frustrate this warmongering monopoly-capitalist conspiracy is the only interest for the international communist struggle in this capitalist-era Balkans tragedy with all of its equally worthless 'solutions'. What progressive purpose can be served by international agitation on behalf of the various KLA gangs of drug-runners, prostitution racketeers, and gun-happy stooges for any imperialist stunt the CIA wants to get up to??? For what perspectives are the ethnic-minority Albanians in southern Serbia being exploited by various unsavoury political opportunists using the crudest nationalist prejudice which in the past has done deals with invading Ottoman tyranny, invading Italian Fascist tyranny, and invading German Nazi tyranny, and is now fronting for CIA and NATO imperialist tyranny????

The question is especially relevant when the fake-'left' support for the Kosovo Albanian cause plays directly into the hands of imperialist-crisis intrigues in the region, where joint warmongering now is considered to possibly suit RIVAL imperialist warmongering there (and everywhere else) in the future (principally led on either side by US imperialism versus German imperialism whose competing drives fuelled the ethnic-conflict pattern of workers-state breakdown in Yugoslavia in the first place). In addition, of course, such pro-Albanian pointlessness also heaps up the confusion around a correct Marxist-Leninist world-revolutionary analysis in 1999, instead of aiding clarity with a clear-cut anti-NATO stance.

It obviously can equally be argued that a pro-Milosevic position offers just as little future appealing perspective or useful understanding for the present world situation for anyone living in Serbia, But for the umpteenth time, being for a NATO defeat does not remotely necessarily convey any illusions in Milosevic's dubious regime.

But what is hoped, of course, is that Yugoslavia will be the rock on which conflict-ridden imperialist aggression stubs its toe and further disintegrates. Which means that all such 'democratic' stumbling blocks to Western fascist bullying as Yugoslavian state sovereignty and territorial integrity, etc, can be grist to the mill in such circumstances.

For real lives on the ground, the working masses THROUGHOUT Yugoslavia (and everywhere else on earth too) need a serious international communist revolutionary programme of anti-imperial ism. Meanwhile, Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo have been fighting a 12-year civil war for small-minded bullying supremacy locally, - with regular savage brutality, - and even worse murderous intent, - ON BOTH SIDES. Both sides have every intention to dominate. Both sides took their chances and resorted to arms. Tragically for them, the Kosovo Albanians lost the war, inviting all the possible ensuing horrors of victors and vanquished.

But instead of that being the end of the story, equally futilely repeated scores of times all round the planet currently (and invariably with even far greater suffering and brutality) under the going-nowhere international capitalist system of total frustration, - Western imperialist domination of the world decided to "intervene for humanitarian reasons", and not only did the entire fake-'left' get suckered into participating in this lethal hypocritical nonsense, but some Trots even pronounced it the work of "progressive imperialism". Can anti-communist insanity go much further?

The West is out to impose a universal pattern of warmongering aggression to prepare for an imminent total free-market collapse with all of the revolutionary upheaval that will unleash. All interventions in the Kosovo question which fail to say that NATO blitzkrieg is the ONLY problem involved, are playing into the hands of counter-revolutionary holocaust intrigues and World War III preparations (for when inter-imperialist over-production conflict not only does not get solved by an international markets collapse and Western warmongering to put out the fires of revolutionary upheaval, but is made even more acute initially by such slump destruction and chaos, - with ever more bitter recriminations over "who has mishandled the international crisis", much as is already happening over the stalled blitzkrieg that was supposed to wipe out Yugoslav anti-imperialist resistance).

NATO failure and effective defeat is the only historically verified basis for successful mass revolt against the imperialist system. It should be agitated for by all serious-minded socialists everywhere.

Exposure of the monstrous NATO brainwashing propaganda is an early part of the same requirement, totally ignored by the whole of the 'left' from the SLP to the CPGB because of an abject failure to analyse the imperialist-crisis-warmongering motives of the blitzkrieg, and out of a cowardly wish not to be tarred with the 'defending ethnic cleansing' brush although 'opposed to the bombing'.

Only seeing NATO aggression as THE ONLY ISSUE WORTH TAKING UP in this Balkans tragedy can concentrate the mind on the colossal damage being inflicted by the West's Goebbels-level brainwashing, and on the terrifyingly irrational detail of this non-stop diet of LIES posing as 'free-press news and democratic commentary', etc.

The latest propaganda atrocity is the arrival of thousands of male Albanian refugees of fighting age.

Shock! Horror! "They have been imprisoned". Shock! Horror!  "They have been starved" (of which there is not the slightest evidence). Shock! Horror! "They have been beaten and tortured" (of which there is not the slightest sign). Etc, etc, etc.

All this hysteria, of course, in order to totally bury the REAL story, consciously done by Western media conspiracy.

These thousands of men are, after all, ALIVE. And the West has been told for weeks that they had all been massacred. 'Secret' video-camera shots of graves were shown to 'prove' it. Aerial photographs of lines of apparent graves were shown to 'prove' it. All deliberately contrived, utterly fictitious nonsense, of course. There are freshly-dug graves everywhere. The civil war has killed thousands on both sides. The NATO blitzkrieg destruction over the whole of Serbia has killed thousands more. 'Proving massacres'? No, proving there is a brutal war on.

And alongside the obvious conspiracy of the Western media in failing to mention to these fighting-age male refugees: "You were all supposed to have been massacred", - there was another obvious conspiracy. In regimented unison, these refugees, now inescapably at the mercy of the KLA fascist mafia, all intoned together: "We were starved; we were tortured; we were beaten", etc, and not one word of relief that at least the Serbs had granted them prisoner-of-war status, - which is a lot more than Serb captives have been receiving at the hands of the KLA on the other side of the civil war for the past few years,  - mostly being butchered in cold blood.

Could a conspiracy to lie be organised among so many, it is asked? Why not, - someone organised the Western media to avoid the obvious questions. Someone organises the Western media to never point out that pictures of alleged 'massacre graves' during a bloody war with thousands of fresh casualties weekly prove absolutely nothing without further investigation, and are in fact a ludicrous insult to viewers intelligence; etc, etc. Of course it is all a conspiracy of brainwashing. The biggest part of the entire NATO warmongering operation is devoted to winning the propaganda war with a dubious public back home and internationally. And Western imperialist-bullying psychology firmly decided as long ago as the First World War that little untruths were useless, and that great big HUGE lies were the only appropriate policy in a world approaching total chaos. German imperialism made a science of the BIG LIE in the warmongering preparations for the free-market system's second great inter-imperialist holocaust. US imperialism actually started its Vietnamese war with the grotesque intricately-manufactured LIE about the non-existent 'Gulf of Tonkin' incident, which criminal conspiracy Western imperialism is still protecting to this day.

Synchronised lying over Kosovo??? That is ALL that there is.

And to prove it, listen to the small-print admissions in capitalism's own press, proving what lies the headline spin is conspiring to put across about 'Serb barbaric brutality' and 'intolerable genocidal policy which the modern world cannot tolerate', etc, etc, etc:

From Nora Lamoja, who used to work in Pristina for the United Nations committee for human rights, the important message is that Albanians can and do still have a life in the Kosovan capital.

"About 40,000 Albanians are in their homes in Pristina, and they have adequate supplies of food," she says. "The water and electricity work, as well as some phones at home. One post office is functioning from where people can also phone. People venture out to the shops between about ten in the morning and two in the afternoon.''

Ms Lamoja, who now works with deportees in this mainly Albanian town on the Montenegrin coast, left Pristina three weeks after Nato started its air strikes. She spends her day interviewing new arrivals from Kosovo. Many are traumatised and exhausted from their enforced exodus, but Ms Lamoja's own account of life in Pristina - based on her experience and constant updates on the phone - suggests that life for Albanians there may not be as grim as some suggest.

'In my building there were 12 flats. Only one was occupied by a Serb. But the Albanian flats have not been looted. The police did not loot as much as they could have,' she said.

Ms Lamoja decided to leave Kosovo, not because she was ordered out by Serb police, but because of a general move by several of her neighbours which she found it hard to resist.. But she does not believe the reports that Albanians were rounded up and held in the stadium. 'Maybe there was a confusion of stadium and station' she says.

She drove towards the Macedonian border with friends and a 90-year-old woman When they saw the immense queue of cars at the border crossing, they decided to return to Pristina. Police stopped them on the outskirts and ordered them to take a route to Albania, but after six days of sleeping in the car the group resolved to go home to Pristina.

This time they got through. "It was wonderful to be back in our flat. It was just the same. There had been no looting,' she recalled.

By then several buildings in the city centre had been hit by Nato bombs.

After a week back home Ms Lamoja, with her sister-in-law and five-year-old nephew Roni, went to the bus station and took a bus to Podgorica. "No-one else seems to have done it. and we got through. Everyone else on the bus was Serb. Nobody was aggressive towards us.'

Vjosa Osmani, a 17-year-old who speaks English, Spanish, Serbian and Turkish as well as her native Albanian, also arrived in Montenegro by bus. She was a passenger on one of the buses which Serb companies started to organise to take Kosovo refugees to Podgorica. Vjosa, along with her parents and four siblings, had to pay 100 Deutschmarks each.

"We stayed for more than a week in Tavnik, in different houses. It was the only area which still had houses you could live in. Last Thursday police and soldiers came and said we must leave. Extra buses had started going to Podgorica and many Albanians had already gone before us. There were Serb passengers on the buses too. They paid only 10 Deutschmarks each," she said.

The war suffering remains real and tragic on all sides. The West's propaganda conspiracy, like the Western blitzkrieg conspiracy conducted for a completely different international warmongering strategy agenda entirely, - can only continue making this mayhem a million times worse than it might have been. 

Defeat NATO. Bring down capitalism. Build Leninism.   

Royston Bull

The SLP election manifesto is just encouraging backwardness.

Socialist Labour has now published its full manifesto for the Euro elections -and it confirms the dangerous perspective of seeing the 'EU bosses club' as such as the enemy to working-class socialist aspirations rather than identifying the WHOLE monopoly-capitalist system, in or out of the EU, as the lethal threat itself.

Scargill's introduction blames the Maastricht Treaty convergence terms for a single currency as being responsible for public sector cuts, bureaucratic taxation waste, unemployment, and poverty, - advocating trading with anywhere but Europe as the solution for goods and services and "the jobs of British workers".

This is just nationalist crankiness little different from what the UK Independence Party and the BNP come out with.

Capitalism is a world marketing system, and the dictates of monopoly competition and over-production crisis dominate everyone's lives, - as the Far East crash has demonstrated, devastating jobs and living standards identically, whether in the ASEAN trading bloc or 'independent' like Japan.

Cut-throat trade-war competition cracks the whip over every country, - whether one particular trading bloc, the EU, collapses tomorrow or not; and under capitalism, the threat to countries which are "not competitive" remains bankruptcies, unemployment, and falling living standards whoever they trade with and under whatever rules.

The capitalist system is the problem, and the pressures created by monopoly-imperialist bloc rules (such as the EU) are dictated by the requirements of worldwide cut-throat competition arising directly out of capitalist evolution itself.

The rules can be done differently, or the pressures can be avoided by staying outside the EU, but the underlying imperative to become "more competitive" on a global scale stays the same because that is what capitalism itself is doing, and cannot stop doing.

This naïve philistine refusal by the SLP to bother with even the ABC of Marxist science, - and to produce the full EU election manifesto without any discussion at all on its contents, either around the party or even in the NEC, - - makes a complete mockery of a 'socialist' party for 'workers'. It is a trade-union bureaucrat's nonsense.

To blame Britain's current economic and social woes on its membership of the 'European bosses club' creates a reactionary illusion in 'national capitalism', and encourages the worst xenophobic traits in a working class which under a long imperialist history suffers enough from chauvinism anyway. The SLP is just encouraging backwardness with this election manifesto, - summed up in the ludicrous national-capitalist remark: "The SLP is opposed to giving away Britain's sovereignty". Build Leninism and real internationalism. RB

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

The blockade torture of Cuba goes on full blast from the leaders of "Free-World concern for the poor and the downtrodden".

The third anniversary of the signing of the Helms-Burton Act has prompted analysts and the international press to offer retrospective commentaries and forecasts on the impossibility of any success in its real objective, the total defeat of the Cuban Revolution.

To look back over the three years that have gone by since the anti-Cuba legislation went into effect with such fanfare, Granma interviewed Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly. Since March 12, 1996, on behalf of the revolutionary government, Alarcón has consistently denounced the illegal and extraterritorial nature of that legislation, the brainchild of the U.S. ultra-right wing and its Miami annexationist mafia sponsors, and its similarity to the Platt Amendment.

Three years ago saw the approval of the Helms-Burton Act, a text reflecting a fascist and annexationist mentality and accepted by an administration which is incapable of demonstrating moral consistency. We should recall that this legislation has the Revolution’s destruction as its objective, through a combination of economic warfare and internal subversion. The act also stipulates that the ironclad blockade would not end even if that should be achieved, (which of course will never be the case) but would remain in place until properties belonging to Batista's followers and the former exploiters now living in Miami - i.e. land, housing, schools, hospitals, beaches and factories, everything that belongs and will continue to belong to the people - are “returned."

Repudiated by the entire world, as reflected in the annual vote against the blockade in the UN General Assembly, and in numerous statements by governments, parliaments, organizations and individuals, the monstrosity is still in place, and is daily applied as the clearest evidence of U.S. Arrogance.

Nevertheless, the U.S. government is trying to demonstrate that it has relaxed:, its blockade policy. Could you comment on this?

That universal rejection has been further supported by a whole range of institutions and public figures within the United States itself, including religious figures, the business sector, academics and trade unions.

For 36 months, Washington has ignored that vigorous and growing movement and, instead of dispensing with an illegal, inadmissible policy which has aroused such widespread opposition, has done everything imaginable to extend and reinforce it. At the same time, it has made lies and deceit the behavioral norm of its officials and propagandists.

It promised Europe it would make cosmetic changes to the act when in reality it brought in amendments which among other aspects, precisely toughened up the title that it had promised to soften. As it is now, the text could, be considered even more offensive by those who thought they had reached some kind of "understanding" with the U.S. Authorities.

On more than one occasion since last year, announcements have been made on the “relaxation" of the blockade while, in reality, the administration is stepping up the fines, trials, investigations and threats against U.S. citizens and other nationals accused of failing to observe the legislation. Today, it's not just the text signed by President Clinton on March 12,1996, in the midst of a collection of mafiosi and terrorists and to the applause of corrupt and ignorant political intriguers. Now it is much more. That legislation has been reinforced by various amendments, to which have been added other legislative decisions aimed at expanding the economic war against Cuba and extending sanctions and threats to other nations. The current U.S. Budget Act, shamelessly includes “at least” two million dollars for the financing of treasonous activities within Cuba, as established in Title 1, Section 109 of the Helms-Burton Act.

But on top of that, we have the handing over of financial resources specifically for subversive and espionage activities within Cuba - in at least one case, personally handed over by President Clinton - and this information announced publicly by U.S. officials.

And most recently, there was the January 5 announcement that, starting from this point, they are also seeking contributions from the U.S. private sector to swell the funds destined to buy traitors and to pay for their services, in an attempt to undermine Cuban society.

In the three years that have gone by, every legislative move by the U.S. Congress has been to introduce measures that are aggressive toward Cuba, and hostile and disrespectful toward countries that, oddly enough, are classified as friends and even allies of the United States. Every step taken by the Clinton administration is directed toward reinforcing the act's application directing  additional resources for its operation, undertaking actions to repress and punish those who defy it within and outside of the United States and in an increasingly more insolent and provocative manner to effect its interventionist and subversive plans within Cuba.

With an Olympian cynicism and the diligent collaboration of some fawning journalists, Washington is attempting to make people believe that what it has been doing and is doing - 	intensifying its economic warfare against Cuba is known as “relaxing" the blockade.

How has Cuba confronted the increased degree of hostility and lies?

When our National Assembly approved the Act for the Protection of National Independence and the Economy, thus fulfilling its most elemental and essential duty of defending the nation, and facing with integrity the aggression to which it is being subjected, Washington lifted its baton and got its chorus of trained parrots singing.

Without the slightest respect for the work they claim to do, certain journalists flooded the teletypes with crude falsifications and lies. Then came the chorus of certain politicians who don’t seem to have realized as yet that their first duty is to defend their national sovereignty from offenses by Washington and not by Havana.

But that uproar will pass. Paid gibberish cannot bury some very concrete truths: the economic and political war against Cuba is continuing and becoming more brazen; the Cuban people will continue resisting and advancing in the irreversible process of a steady economic recovery, and will carry on defending the nation’s independence and. dignity with unswerving unity and patriotism; and the U.S. blockade will continue reaping failures in a world that is not prepared to allow itself be trampled underfoot by U.S. arrogance. 

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

It’s not just the sectarian loyalist gangs carrying out violent attacks that makes Portadown Ireland’s Alabama, it’s the collusion of everyone else. The RUC patrol which ignored the desperate pleading of Robert Hamill’s companions to intervene. The shoppers who passed by as a frightened little schoolboy was attacked in the town centre by a gang looking for a  “Fenian”

WHEN a gang of youths asked ten-year-old Brian if he was “a Fenian", the boy answered truthfully that he didn't know. Every day, Brian travels the short bus journey from his home on the Garvaghy Road across Portadown town centre to the Catholic Convent school. The bus is frequently attacked by stone-throwing loyalist youths. Yet despite repeated parental warnings, on this particular school day Brian had spent his bus fare on sweets and was walking home.

It was a small deception by a child too innocent to realise the danger in which he had inadvertently placed himself. And now he was surrounded by a gang of hostile teenagers, pushing and pulling, demanding to know his denominational status. When Brian’s coat was dragged open, his school uniform was sufficient to ensure him a beating. "They hated me," Brian later told his mother "and they didn't even know me".

In the local community centre, Brian’s mother Marie sips a cup of coffee. It's a gloriously sunny Saturday afternoon, but life on the Garvaghy Road is no picnic. Since July last year, there have been over 170 Orange rallies and marches in Portadown. A few have been held in the town centre, but the vast majority have taken place on the interface around the Garvaghy Road. Many have been attempted loyalist incursions into the  predominately nationalist estate. A further 50 are planned for the town between now and July of this year.

Today, the Orange Order is holding a “Grand" parade. It is scheduled to pass around the Garvaghy Road area at 2.30pm. Inside the community centre, members of the Residents' Coalition are preparing to monitor the march and the crown forces' presence which accompanies it. Breandán Mac Cionnaith is answering the telephone while chatting to a journalist. Everyone is tired. The evening before, a delegation had travelled to County Cavan to address a meeting of local people. It was after midnight before they arrived back in Portadown.

The first time I was asked to address a meeting,’ says Marie, "I didn't sleep a wink the night before". That was only just over a month ago, “but it's getting easier", says Marie. In the last few weeks, members of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition have travelled to speak at venues across Ireland, recounting their experiences of sectarian intimidation to local community and residents' groups. The one question we always get asked," says Marie, "is how do they know you’re a Catholic”?

In Portadown, being a Catholic is almost as conspicuous as a black skin amongst white supremacists. There are numerous ‘give away’ signs, a name, an address, your school, where you socialise, what direction you are walking from or to, even the entrance you use in the main shopping mall. Robert Hamill was kicked to death because he was walking away from a Catholic social club towards a nationalist estate. The loyalist gang waiting at the junction knew exactly how to identify ‘a taig’.

“And we always tell them,' says Marie. “It's because we all belong to the lighthouse family." Marie moves her head rhythmically side-to-side side to-side, her eyes fearfully scanning the horizon like the rotating flicker of a lighthouse beacon. Our companions roar with laughter.

BUT it’s not just the sectarian loyalist gangs carrying out violent attacks that makes Portadown Ireland's Alabama. It's the collusion of everyone else. The RUC patrol which ignored the desperate pleading of Robert Hamid's companions to intervene. The shoppers who passed by as a frightened little schoolboy was attacked in the town centre by a gang looking for a "Fenian”. ‘It wasn't the beating," says Marie of her son's ordeal. ‘Brian was very upset because other boys’ mothers had walked by and no one had tried to stop it.”

The weekend before last in the shopping mall, when a glass cola bottle from which a 13-year-old Catholic girl was drinking was smashed into her face, no one rushed to call an ambulance. The grey-haired elderly woman who jeered and gloated about the murder of Rosemary Nelson with other loyalists who had gathered on the edge of the Garvaghy Road is unlikely to have planted the car bomb herself.

Since last July Portadown town centre has become a virtual ‘no-go area' for Catholics. Sporadic sectarian attacks on Catholic shoppers escalated into an orchestrated loyalist agenda. On one particular Saturday in August several hundred loyalists converged on the centre and forcibly expelled Catholic families shopping in the mall. The RUC did nothing. 

The mob attack was repeated a week later. Catholic shoppers and workers fled as Orangemen torched Catholic owned businesses in the town. The RUC did not intervene.

Jean, a pensioner and grandmother, stopped shopping in town after she was confronted by “two big women” who recognised her as a Garvaghy Road resident from television footage of a protest. A quiet authority gives Jean the air of a school governor or member of the parish council, but in Portadown a civic sense of duty requires greater courage. 

Like many of her neighbours. Jean is a resident of the Garvaghy Road "not through choice” but as a result of being intimidated out of another area. As a member of the coalition she often finds herself at the cutting edge of confrontation.

As the Orange parade passes St Jonn's Catholic Church, Jean ignores the line of riot-clad RUC men, all twice her height and build, and urges me to come forward. “Come on,” says Jean, “you can hear them playing The Sash." One of the restrictions placed on Orange parades marching around the Garvaghy Road interface is that no sectarian music is played. “It's a restriction which is routinely flouted," says Jean. Several Orange bands playing The Sash pass in full view of three trades Commissioners monitoring the parade.

Breandán Mac Cionnaith is called away for a second time by news of another arrest. Ten minutes earlier, the arrival of Mac Cionnaith at the scene was sufficient to secure the immediate release of a nationalist child who was being held by the RUC in the back of a jeep. "The RUC man dragged me into the jeep," says seven-year-old Martin, "and said they were going to put me in a home". This time Mac Cionnaith arrives too late. A 40-year-old resident, has been arrested and driven away by the RUC. Local people say he was arrested after he questioned the RUC’s failure to stop loyalists throwing stones into the nationalist enclave. •

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

China Daily examines crisis-basis for American imperialist bullying.

THE United States has been acting apparently as world cop in Nato's barbaric air strikes against Yugoslavia. But behind its unbridled action is a carefully planned and plotted strategic ambition.

As the only world superpower after the Cold War, the United States deeply fears the appearance of other powerful international groups. Washington tried to "take lessons” from the two world wars, which were staged by capitalist countries to scramble for access to a wider market and larger economic profits.

This time, the United States is determined to prevent Europe, its ally, from competing with it.

With the collapse of the former Soviet Union and Communist-led eastern European countries. Russia, besides its nuclear capability, has no strength to confront the United States and Nato.

After the Cold War especially with the financial crisis plaguing Russia, the tension between Russia and the United States has been subdued. Friction between the United States and the European Union (EU) has become acute.

As the strength of EU is growing with high speed economic, financial and political integration, the economic and trade disputes between the two sides are escalating.

The United States fears that Russia was seeking to participate in European integration process. Europe seemed to welcome such involvement.

Because Russia, which facing great difficulties in economic recovery, desperately needs help from European countries, the two sides may strengthen their co-operation. To the United States, the fact that Russia and Europe are moving closer is hurting the interests of the United States in Europe.

If this closer tie becomes true, Europe's economic strength plus Russia's nuclear capability will play a significant role in containing Washington.

The United States is quite upset that it will not get the upper hand in future competition when Europe and Russia unite to fight against it.

Although there must be a long and complicated process before such a possibility comes true, in their eyes the tendency is extremely harmful for US interests. Therefore, the most urgent strategic task for the United States in Europe is first to contain Europe and prevent it from becoming powerful enough to threaten US hegemony in the world.

Moreover, the United States keeps Russia from recovering from its current economic plight and becoming involved in European economic integration. Washington has first to crumble the two to impede them from forming a powerful alliance.

Further, the United States planned to throw Russia into further crisis so as to fundamentally remove the country's nuclear capability and ultimately eliminate this most dangerous enemy.

To achieve the above goals, the United States began to practice a policy of disintegration in Europe, especially after Europe has launched euro currency.

If such a strategy can be realized, it may extend the policy eastward, targeting mainly China and eliminating the country’s nuclear power. While defeating Russia and China. Washington, relying on its nuclear threat and hi-tech equipped military force, can definitely dominate the world on its own.

The latest strategy will be controlling Europe, defeating Moscow, crumbling the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and finally disarming Russia.

The United States may postpone practising such a policy in Asia if it feels frustrated in Europe.

However, the United States, a consistent practioner of the "carrot -and-stick" policy, has made preparations and begun to take steps in Asia.

(The author is a member of the China Association on the History of the World War II)

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 (Xinhua) - The reason the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has given for bombing Yugoslavia cannot hold ground in view of the international law and international relations and it will have an extremely negative impact on the regional situation and world peace. This is a view shared by numerous Chinese international law and international relations experts in an interview with Xinhua Zhou Zunnan, director of the Foreign Affairs College's European Studies Institute, said that the ethnic problems in Yugoslavia have existed for a long time and that the Kosovo crisis was created by the United States.

The Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo pushed for independence three times in the past, he noted, but the U.S. did not interfere because of the needs for its contention for hegemony with the Soviet Union. And, the U.S. did not take any action during the Rwanda's genocide, which was a gross violation of human rights, and this is a "typical example of the dual standard".
The U.S. wants to include Yugoslavia in the NATO and is doing so by interfering in Kosovo to demonstrate a military presence in the region. 

This is an odious precedent of wantonly interfering in the internal affairs of a country out of a strategic need to start a new Cold War, Zhou said, and another reproduction of Truman Doctrine. •