Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions  £20p.a.    [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.] 
No 1036 Mar 21 2000                                                                                                                                             10p

EPSR seminar Sat 2 p m. Receipts pse.

Anti-German venom will only breed worsening trade war but not solve Rover workers problems arising from the monopoly capitalist market system's over-production crisis. International socialist revolution is the sole sensible perspective to work for to end the profiteering anarchy wrecking human lives and communities. Anti-theory philistinism throughout the fake 'left' holds workers back.

The Budget will spread more 'good news' drivel but the real story of the economy is the Rover fiasco and rumoured closure of Ford Dagenham.

The further rubbishing of car-making in Britain, even though long since needing to be foreign-owned to continue at all, repeats the same old reality of decadent bourgeois management and cynical shopfloor relations, a legacy of dying British imperialism.

Now coinciding with deepening worldwide monopoly-capitalist crisis, the worsening 'British disease' ('poor products' and 'poor productivity') throws the most glaring light on the inadequacies of the fake-'left' trying to give a 'socialist' lead to the working class.

From the TUC 'Meeting the millennial challenge' statement to the '93-party Belgrade Declaration', the sole perspective is that although the world has many problems, fully rational solutions are available for all of them, with no one getting really hurt in the process.

What sick, dishonest gibberish!

The back-stabbing destruction of Rover and the threats to Dagenham are the true picture of inter-imperialist cut-throat competition, the reality behind the 'free market' system which has been inevitably increasingly dominated by monopoly interests since Marxism first analysed its crisis problems. 

The main point about monopoly imperialism is that by its very 'free market' nature, it has no other mechanism for development other than anarchic, speculative, cut-throat boom and bust. It is a system of incurably, regularly-recurring crises, as will shortly be painfully obvious to far more than just the carworkers of Longbridge and Dagenham.

What is worse, the whole pattern of human history for the last 100 years is totally governed by the ultimate expression of these inter-imperialist trade-war crises, - the armageddons of big-power rivalry known as World War I and World War II.

Thus the TUC millennial challenge document pretending that the only difficulties that the future holds for the working class can all be solved by improved liaison with corporate management, by better training for workplace reps, and by slicker organisational recruitment to the trade unions, is in practice more a 'partnership for doomsday' than a 'partnership for prosperity'.

The statement by the so-called 'communist' parties attending the Belgrade congress of Milosevic's ruling Serb Socialists in February was even worse.

As though the imperialist blitzkriegs and armed subversions of the last dozen years against Nicaragua, Iraq, Panama, Afghanistan, Grenada, Libya, Serbia, Chile (a bit earlier), and Palestine & Lebanon repeatedly (by the Zionist imperialist stooges of the West) had all never happened, plus scores more acts of repressive violence indirectly traceable to reactionary US influences as in Somalia, Timor, Congo, Colombia, etc, etc, - the 93 'communist' parties declared:

IN a comprehensive and meaningful exchange of opinion, the participants at the meeting confirmed their joint commitment and conviction that a peaceful and stable future of the world at the outset of the 21st century may be built solely on respect for the principles of peaceful co-existence, equality, non-interference in the one another's internal affairs, sovereignty, territorial integrity and solidarity. They condemned the threat or use of force in violation of international law, interference in the internal affairs of other countries and policy of interventionism, hegemonism and the tendencies of neo-colonialism as a dangerous threat to international peace, security and conditions for development. They emphasised the importance of a resolute commitment of all progressive and peace-loving forces to respect the UN charter, the principles of the non-aligned movement and particularly the principles of the sovereign equality of states.

The participants in the meeting underlined their full support to the people and leadership of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and the Socialist Party of Serbia in their struggle for freedom, for preservation of sovereignty and territorial integrity, independence and cooperation on an equal footing, without blackmail and sanctions.

At the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, humanity has at its disposal impressive achievements in science, technology and production of goods for a dignified and rich life. To make the achievements of the human mind serve the goals of wellbeing and equality of all states, nations and people of the world, it is necessary to ensure a lasting peace and stability, free the world from all deceptions, artificial limitations, double standards and all types of monopoly, hegemonism and neo-colonialism.

The prerequisite for this is democratisation of international relations and a reaffirmation of the original principles of international law, preventing the international organisations from being used to fulfil narrow goals and interests of certain countries or groups of countries. Participants in the discussion resolutely rejected all attempts at abusing human rights, democracy, freedom of the media and the principle of self-determination with a view to interfering in the internal affairs of other countries as well as encouraging separatism and terrorism in order to fulfil the geo-strategic goals of economically and militarily powerful countries, to the detriment of legitimate interests of a majority of mankind.

No, the "prerequisite for this" is the revolutionary overthrow of the imperialist bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of the proletariat in as many countries as possible as soon as possible, and to pretend any different is simply criminally irresponsible deception on the workers of the world.

And yet this was the jamboree which the SLP museum-Stalinists were desperate for Scargill to attend and which only got turned down because such a gathering might be a bit too "advanced" or "progressive" for current SLP tastes. In other words, it was not reactionary enough for Scargill & Co!!! After correctly identifying the actual exploiting and domineering viciousness of 'globalisation' in reality, the 93 parties then pretend to have a peaceful solution to this undoubtedly explosively-lethal truth about the 'free market':

MULTIPOLARITY, to which an overwhelming majority of humankind is committed, the world of democracy, equality and independence, free choice of internal political and economic development, represent a fundamental antithesis to hegemonism and hierarchy in world relations. For the stability in the world which had for a relatively long time been based on the balance of military power of the two confronting blocs, can be, at the beginning of the 21st century, built and based only on respect for equality and sovereignty of all countries of the world, regardless of their size, the level of economic development or military power. This was emphasised in the addresses of a large number of participants in the debate.

Full support was given to the efforts to strengthen and democratise the United Nations as the irreplaceable mechanism for preservation of peace, security and equal cooperation. An emphasis was placed on the importance of resolutely confronting the attempts at degrading the role of the Security Council as a guarantor of peace, but also on the attempts at eroding the reputation of the world organisation and its abuse for narrow interests of the most powerful countries in terms of their military and economy. Attempts to place the NATO above the authority of the Security Council, were condemned. All attempts of the proponents of a unipolar world to establish the rule of military power and diktat, instead of the rule of law, were condemned.

The session which drew up those conclusions was presumably chaired by Mary Poppins. They get round the problem that imperialist economic brigandage cannot help itself because there is no other mechanism of 'free market competition' than cutthroat back-stabbing and exploitation, such as Rover workers are now experiencing, - by simply ignoring it! And the UN's total dependence on the major imperialist powers' subsidies is likewise totally ignored.

Capitalism, in other words, is to be made to reform!!! How? By some good moral pressure and some strong finger-wagging!:

THERE was great concurrence of views regarding the perspectives of a modern world. The forces of the Left, of freedom and equal cooperation, project the world in the new millennium as a community whose fundamental value will be peace, based on equality, respect for legitimate interests of all countries and peoples. Solutions to international disputes must not be imposed by force; they need to be sought in dialogue and by political means. Democratic international relations must be based on unconditional respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty of states, for their independence and sovereign equality, for the right to equal conditions of development that would eliminate poverty, misery and terminal diseases. They must be based on disarmament and disbanding of all military blocs, redirecting military expenditures to development and meeting the needs of people; on peaceful coexistence, with full freedom to choose ways and methods of internal development without imposition of dogmatic concepts from the centres of power; on a just international economic order; protection and affirmation of human rights and freedoms, particularly social and economic ones; exclusion of the policy of fait accompli and double standards dictated by the proponents of a unipolar concept of international relations; establishment of just conditions for economic and other potentials of any country; decisive struggle against all forms of separatism, terrorism and organised crime, in particular against arms and drugs smuggling, white slavery, moneylaundering.

Just like that!!! It would be funny if it was not so treacherously serious, coming from the same unreconstructed revisionist mentality which has already harboured the degenerate historical throw-backs who abandoned the Soviet workers state and liquidated socialist construction and communist programmes everywhere else in honour of 'market methods' and 'global cooperation', etc. Not only were the essentials of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary anti-imperialist science obviously beyond these revisionists in spite of all their learned institutes and journals dedicated to the founders of scientific socialism, but even the gist of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf was above their level too, it seems.

The obvious conclusion from this sad spectacle is that the world is plainly not hurting enough yet from imperialist-crisis devastation to wish to revive the only scientific principles for winning a class-war struggle to build an entirely alternative socialist society, - at least as far as these 93 party leaderships of 'socialism and communism' are concerned (which sadly included the CPs of China, Vietnam, Korea, and Cuba).

It is a desperate failure of imagination, - in other words, the continued desperate failure of theory (which has been relentlessly corrupting the workers movements of the world since the revisionist nonsense started creeping into the Third International in the 1920s and 1930s and was more than matched by equal Trotskyite stupidity in the Fourth International outside).

The current war of words between Britain and Germany over the Rover debacle is symbolic of far more than just a row over sneaky reneging on alleged commitments in the interests of cutting losses in order to improve overall corporate profitability regardless of the damage done to individual regions and to workers’ aspirations there (although that would be bad enough on its own). The real frustration is the ruthless logic of how the capitalist 'free market' really does have to work if it is to create the economic progress it is famed for. And what is so uncomfortable for British manufacturing concerns is that the gap between the world's 'most successful' (richest) nations and the poorest continues growing all the time. Britain is still relatively well off, but it continuously falls further and further behind the USA and Germany, for example.

Losing another great slice of car manufacturing industry because of being 'not competitive' is yet a further bitter and worrying blow to already long-suffering and long-declining British imperialist prestige. The Budget chirpily boasts about Britain's 'great economic opportunities in other fields, and elsewhere in other countries', but with a world markets collapse imminent, starting with the stock exchanges but then moving rapidly on to the money markets and every trading sector imaginable, - only the most Blair-blind fools will be really taken in.

Daily, the worldwide need for Marxist revolutionary theory to provide the only worthwhile response possible to an international crash, followed by all-out trade-war, slump, and a new Armageddon, - grows more acute.

It is not just utterly pointless trying to respond to the harsh market logic (forced on BMW in the interests of its own survival) with Blair-government hand-wringing about 'betrayal', and demands for additional compensation, etc, and with TUC calls to the working class to stop buying BMWs (!!!!). It is the worst treachery of all in the whole affair.

The same is true of the universal Trot and Revisionist calls for the privatisation rip-offs affecting Britain's railways (and now threatening London's Tube) to be answered by the 're-nationalisation' demand (and even more true of the SLP's pedantic game of insisting that 'Public ownership' did not necessarily just mean re-nationalisation). A clearer example of the uselessness of putting one finger in a hole in a dyke whose wall was about to shatter into thousands of pieces along a whole length of hundreds of miles, thereby resulting in millions and millions of tonnes of floodwater devastating everything in their path, - would be hard to think of.

The 'make profits or perish' logic of the universal free-market-domination of the whole world's economy now means that no gentle hand of humane public expenditure can possibly be allowed to thwart the demands of the monopolies, or the power of 'public opinion' totally manipulated by the privately-owned media.

Even if governments can get elected promising 'socialist' reforms and 'public ownership' interventions and 'welfare state' support-schemes, etc, - those state spending plans can always be attacked by international big-business monopolies via assaults to devalue a nation's currency, or to block its world credit rating, or to discriminate against its trade through tariff barriers, sanctions and the like.

The role of revolutionary theory is called for. Never was the basic Marxist understanding more true that without revolutionary theory, there will never be any successful, sustained, revolutionary practice on earth (i.e. building an alternative socialist society to this chaotic, cut-throat capitalist mayhem).

Scargill's finest hour was not his leadership of the direct-action picketing fight and mobilisation of huge working class support for the miners' strike to attempt to prevent the dismantling of the deep-mined British coal industry in the 1984-85 dispute, as outstanding as that was. His political achievement in exposing the Tory government's willingness to deliberately destroy the country's own major fuel industry in order to score a class-war triumph - against the feared miners, - was an infinitely greater triumph. It could have been the basis not only for the huge proletarian support which it did in fact win, but for taking the revolutionary fight to thwart the 'elected government of the day', even further. 

And it was precisely Scargill's biggest failing which then let him down, - again not an organisational or motivational problem but one of political understanding once more, - an inability to grasp that this ruling-class determination to break the power of the NUM (which weakening British imperialism could no longer afford to make concessions to), would not be countermanded by a new Labour Government coming in. A traditional 'left'-Labour philistine indifference to theory had Scargill foolishly peddling the idea that if Labour got back in, a new Plan For Coal of state-assisted expansion of the mining industry would be bound to go ahead.

But even then in the 1980s, new conditions of sharpening international trade war were already threatening to bankrupt by a variety of means any state which tried to thwart market trends and private monopoly interests by turning on the public spending taps. Already then, what was needed to mobilise a successful working-class fight against impending privatisation speed-up and imposed self-reliance to replace welfare-state spending in health and education, etc, was sufficient revolutionary theory to foresee how the world monopoly-imperialist crisis must further evolve. Right now, in the face of the Rover humiliation coming after a whole torrent of embarrassing setbacks for Blairism, and exposure of laughable incompetence and shallowness, it is simply a cover-up for any 'left' group to just press on with single-issue protesting as usual, demanding state-aid for Longbridge workers, or pressures to change BMW's mind, or threatening strikes to stop Dagenham's closure, etc, etc. All such 'reform' agitation just plays into reaction's hands, shorn of a call to revolt.

The need for revolutionary theory now has practical immediate applications as well as the lone longterm perspective that makes any sense at all. Only on the basis of challenging outright the entire political establishment, the entire media, and the entire philosophical orthodoxy "that the capitalist free-market system will bounce back to provide even better career prospects for the West Midlands in the months and years ahead even if a mass-production car industry is finally wiped out there" (and elsewhere in Britain), - will a permanently worthwhile struggle be unleashed.

Temporary piecemeal measures may save a few jobs here and there, and some new-industry new-starts may well flourish initially because of the still-bounding stock-exchange boom and gigantic international investment-capital conglomeration and rapid movements in and out of various parts of the world. Longbridge workers may be lucky.

But that period of capital over-production crisis is rapidly arriving which will soon start plunging not just weak individual competitor firms like Rover into bankruptcy, but also threaten whole swathes of industry with closure, - or even whole industries, - or even wipe out entire economies and currencies, (and even moderately-successful ones too, as happened quite recently in South East Asia once the speculative-boom bubble had initially burst there).

The mechanics of collapse and slump caused by 'surplus' capital (created by untameable private-enterprise anarchy and greed for profits without which the bourgeoisie can no longer be the bourgeoisie) are the cast-iron laws of the free-market system fully exposed and expounded by Marx and never refuted. It is the most ludicrously irresponsible and criminal lightmindedness for all so-called 'socialist' and labour leaders to pontificate on the car-industry debacle, or the railway privatisation fiasco, or the racketeering manipulation of the fuel and power industries, etc, etc, but to not place the calls for protests, agitation, and 'alternative' electoral platforms firmly into the realm of conscious revolutionary theory.

Science already knows where the world is heading next, - to a crash, trade-conflict, slump, and then war, - to inter-imperialist World War III. The only historical laws of capitalist-imperialist crises ever discovered have already provided abundant evidence of past regular patterns now repeating themselves once again, - patterns moreover, which have already been acted upon with astonishing revolutionary success before (socialist construction and anti-imperialist defiance in the Soviet Union and its supporting states for 70 years after 1917, and still to a certain extent continuing now in China, Cuba, Korea, etc) precisely because of conscious confidence in the vital role of revolutionary theory.

Why does such an obvious truth keep on having to be stressed? Because all around, the fake-'left' effectively does nothing but deliberately conceal and distort this understanding with all its might.

The Belgrade Declaration of 93 'communist' parties tries to hide Marxist-Leninist proven science with a complete revisionist-reformist parody of a real analysis.

Assorted Trotskyites around the London Socialist Alliance try to bury a Marxist-Leninist approach under a whirlwind of electoral opportunism, ignoring real-world developments and mass-revolutionary educational requirements in favour of the silliest 'left'-reformist self-promotion as the 'socialist' heroes who can allegedly transform the capital into a rank-and-file-democracy, planned-economy paradise just via leafleting on the knocker, some double-decker bus publicity, and the ballot box support for some media-star, beautiful-people, illustrious candidates, - all the most small-minded anti-communists in real life. Perhaps this obscene stunt is even a slur on the name 'opportunist'.

The SLP postures in similar fashion, saying absolutely nothing about the world situation but brazenly touting this trappist anti-theory philistinism as the "correct revolutionary stand against imperialism". The working class will rarely find a more condescending contemptuous attitude towards its real needs for revolutionary theoretical explanations of what imperialist crisis will do next, and how to prepare for it in the light of a serious scientific analysis of how and why earlier socialist-state resistance to imperialism fell apart. 

The continued denial of Stalin's monstrous theoretical nonsense (which fatally undermined the USSR and the Third International) by the SLP's core support around Lalkar is possibly an even more obscene farce than the continued middle-class 'revolutionary' posturing of the LSA Trots. 

The rest of 'left' Labourism and revisionism (still sticking with the TUC-based party) remains deliberately equally remote from unveiling any serious new leadership for coping with renewed imperialist world crisis in a post-Soviet epoch. If the present Downing Street government of British imperialism is not listened to, but treated with contempt by BMW's far-more-pressing monopoly-corporate interests in a desperately difficult world-market struggle for survival, what effect will the 'more fairness' and 'think again' reformist demands of Woodley & Co have on behalf of the Rover workforce, even when lent heavyweight personal support by Morris and Jackson to make the union stand look more impressive?

Longbridge workers, and millions more elsewhere, really do need to be deciding if this is just one more turn of the changing-jobs-and-industry merry-go-round of ongoing capitalist success, or is something far more fundamental going wrong at last with the 'free market' postwar world of virtually endlessly rising prosperity? Is the trouble that the remaining sectors of mass-car-production face in Britain just another simple market shake-out and reorganisation, or is it the total cul-de-sac of capital over-production on a global scale beginning a serious, brutal, worldwide cull of all supposedly 'surplus' capacity, now threatening profitability everywhere? Or to put it more concretely, did BMW steal Rover from a much more willing partner in Honda (exploiting the fawning gullibility of the British parliamentary political class) in order to limit Japanese competition with a foothold base in Europe (giving BMW fallback positions of closing the rival West Midlands capacity down anyway if the world boom continued on course towards world glut followed by catastrophic slump conditions when the cut-throat competitive nastiness will really begin in earnest???)

Either way, 'left' trade-unionism responded in the worst possible way with a social-chauvinist attack on the German connections of the back-stabbing.

This will be a disastrous route for the working class to be misled down. It is the monopoly-imperialist rules of the 'free-market' system which are to blame and which must be made the scapegoat for the bad times ahead through building a revolutionary movement for the overthrow of capitalism everywhere, British and German and every other nationality of workers all on the same programme. Blaming BMW's German-ness misses the point entirely, and plays right into the hands of reaction and the slump. 

Trade war will bring catastrophe for everybody. The appalling consequences of Scargillism's failure to avoid social-chauvinism in the SLP's initial break-up of pro-imperialist Labourism are already becoming apparent. Without a prominent pole of anti-chauvinist attraction, the likelihood is that almost the whole workers-movement reaction to an international markets slump (and Third Way debacle) will first-off take a xenophobic shape, not unlike Scargill's 'No to European bosses' Little-Englander line for last year's European elections. Such social-chauvinism can only be a disastrous failure as a response to slump, and can only lead on to even more diabolical warmongering consequences subsequently.

The variety of obstacles blocking the path to universal re-adoption of Marxist-Leninist theory for the workers movement, - diverting it and completely disarming it with one opportunist or demagogic or petty-bourgeois individualist or anti-communist stunt after another, - is never-ending.

The middle-class paranoia against strong leadership of any kind, which revisionist bolt-hole the Open Polemic has made a huge fetish of, has again tried to answer EPSR criticism of this retreat into political agnosticism. A page prepared by the OP is printed subsequently, (followed by the extracts from EPSR 1028 to which they are replying), - sadly turning it into a largely personal attack (for the obvious purpose of sneering at all 'leadership pretensions') and at the same time rather missing the whole point (and well-laboured point) of the EPSR's existence which has been to champion the crucial role of revolutionary theory for the future of mankind, and to struggle in practice each week to demonstrate how the task might be tackled.

It has never remotely been the EPSR's claim that it gets everything right, or that the EPSR comrades are the obvious people for building a new Leninist party leadership around. The EPSR's expectation still remains to hope one day to be able to help build a new mass communist movement, contributing in any way possible. That was the completely open and honest role of EPSR supporters inside Scargill's SLP. The communist cadre development from the Review's long struggle for Marxist-Leninist understanding proved astonishingly effective.

But the problem remained there, and will always remain, that the EPSR's understanding of what revolutionary theory is, and how it plays its role, cannot possibly be limited by crude party discipline or 'loyalty', since all it boils down to is attempting to provide a constant Marxist-Leninist description of the daily developing international class-war situation. The excerpts (from Review 1028) objected to, simply contrast this understanding with the fake-'left' refusal to polemicise on the interpretation of current world issues (without which ongoing permanent polemics nothing can ever be clarified) and with Scargill's refusal to ever say much about anything to do with the present-day international balance of class forces.

It makes the point that pretending to lead and build a mass socialist party requires a struggle to provide a correct interpretation of world developments daily, and just such a retreat from giving real leadership to the international working class lay at the root of all Stalinism's misdirection of the CPSU and the Third International. In particular, Moscow's failure to deliberately seek out contrary opinions about what was happening in the international class struggle and to polemicise against them until one or the other was proved correct by subsequent world developments, - the Stalinist control-freakery and censorship, - was its specific downfall in that by the time of Gorbachev, the CPSU leadership ended up not knowing what its own purpose was in history, and self-liquidated.

Laughably, these excerpts reprinted and circulated by OP, break off precisely where EPSR 1028 gives examples for current world issues of where the fake-'left' fails completely to make a comment and give a lead, or else talks nonsense but refuses then to polemicise and answer criticisms of that nonsense.

So even in replying, OP is still doing the very thing it stands accused of, - actually avoiding communist-party rebuilding by avoiding the crucial political material, - correctly analysing the current world situation, - on which the working class and revolutionary causes can alone unite. By not reproducing the EPSR argument on Ireland used for demonstrating how the CPGB fails to provide any worthwhile revolutionary leadership or understanding to the working class in Britain, the OP once again puts itself in the same academic non-polemicising boat as the useless CPGB. 

The rest of the OP reply just tries to lampoon the EPSR's challenge to allcomers to by-all-means disprove the Review's positions on any or all subjects and thereby provide better leadership for the working class. This is distorted as arrogant unlistening conceit by the EPSR, and then as sectarian factionalism against Scargill. Their main barb seems to be against the EPSR's abusive language, compared to Lenin's supposedly nicer polemical tone 'between comrades', with a further contrast (unexplained) between 'militant socialists' in EPSR sights, and 'scientific communists' in Lenin's. The OP have obviously never read the collected Lenin volume "Against Trotskyism". The abuse would make a sailor blush.

The dispute over the CPGB's 'multanimous' pretensions is likewise obscure, approaching incomprehensible. Maybe 'multanimous' has been misunderstood, but the Review has always used it to describe the undoubted CPGB claim that communist unity cannot be built on an agreed interpretation of current world developments and the immediate past they have come from "because no one can agree". They insist that their party is being built without any agreed understanding of what the Soviet Union was and how or why it fell apart. In EPSR thinking, such chaos can only build more chaos. This 'multanimous' approach is called 'Trotskyite' because a) it is endlessly and deliberately factional; and b) it is an individualist petty-bourgeois attitude invariably attractive to the most bitter anti-communists.

The rest of the OP's reply is somewhat baffling, ending as it does with a blatant plea for elitist status for party polemicists over ordinary workers, after launching the most obscure onslaught on 'covert leadership factionalism' lurking elsewhere which pretends to be against any factionalism at all but is in reality at the core of all 'leader centralism' (which is picked out as the greatest tragedy to have befallen working-class struggle in history).

To unravel this wholly abstract formalism rather than just dismiss it, OP's solution to this mess is to have....no leadership at all. In the 'multanimous' party, everyone says what they like at any time with nothing to be identified as the party line or leadership. But how would a policy-making party conference differ from a packed Saturday night at J D Wetherspoon's? Presumably OP reject Marxism's long struggle demonstrating the reactionary subjective-idealist folly of Bakunin, Proudhon, and other anarchist self-delusions, - their relentless 'open' factionalism being the greatest hypocritical threat of all to any hope of a united workers movement, and dismissed by Marxism using far cruder abuse than the EPSR would dream of:

One must not allow oneself to be misled by the cry for "unity". Those who have this word most often on their lips are the ones who sow the most dissension, just as at present the Jura Bakuninists in Switzerland, who have provoked all the splits, clamour for nothing so much as for unity. These unity fanatics are either people of limited intelligence who want to stir everything into one nondescript brew, which, the moment it is left to settle, throws up the differences again but in much sharper contrast because they will then be all in one pot (in Germany you have a fine example of this in the people who preach reconciliation of the workers and the petty bourgeoisie)—or else they are people who unconsciously (like Mühlberger, for instance) or consciously want to adulterate the movement. For this reason the biggest sectarians and the biggest brawlers and rogues at times shout loudest for unity. Nobody in our lifetime has given us more trouble and been more treacherous than the shouters for unity.
Naturally every party leadership wants to see successes, and this is quite a good thing. But there are circumstances in which one must have the courage to sacrifice momentary success for more important things. Especially for a party like ours, whose ultimate success is so absolutely certain, and which has developed so enormously in our own lifetime and before our own eyes, momentary success is by no means always and absolutely necessary. Take the International, for instance. After the Commune it had a colossal success. The bourgeois, struck all of a heap, ascribed omnipotence to it. The great mass of the membership believed things would stay like that for all eternity. We knew very well that the bubble must burst. All the riffraff attached themselves to it. The sectarians within it became arrogant and misused the International in the hope that the meanest and most stupid actions would be permitted them. We did not allow that. Knowing well that the bubble must burst some time our concern was not to delay the catastrophe but to take care that the International emerged from it pure and unadulterated. The bubble burst at the Hague and you know that the majority of the Congress members went home sick with disappointment. And yet nearly all..these disappointed people, who imagined they would find the ideal of universal brotherhood and reconciliation in the International, had far more bitter quarrels at home than those which broke out at the Hague. Now the sectarian quarrel-mongers are preaching reconciliation and decrying us as being cantankerous and dictators! And if we had come out in a conciliatory way at the Hague, if we had hushed up the breaking out of the split—what would have been the result? The sectarians, especially the Bakuninists, would have got another year in which to perpetrate, in the name of the International even much greater stupidities and infamies; the workers of the most developed countries would have turned away in disgust; the bubble would not have burst but, pierced by pinpricks, would have slowly collapsed, and the next congress, which would have been bound to bring the crisis anyhow, would have turned into the lowest kind of personal row, because principles would already have been sacrificed at the Hague. Then the International would indeed have gone to pieces—gone to pieces through "unity"! Instead of this we have now got rid of the rotten elements with honour to ourselves—the members of the Commune who were present at the last and decisive session say that no session of the Commune left such a terrible impression upon them as this session of the tribunal which passed judgement on the traitors to the European proletariat. For ten months we let them expend all their energies on lies, slander and intrigue—and where are they? They, the alleged representatives of the great majority of the International, now themselves announce that they do not dare to come to the next congress. (More details in an article which is being sent off to the Volksstaat with this letter.) And if we had to do it again we should not, taking it all together, act any differently—tactical mistakes are always made, of course.
In any case, I think the efficient elements among the Lassalleans will fall to you of themselves in the course of time and it would, therefore, be unwise to break off the fruit before it is ripe, as the unity crowd wants to.

F. Engels's Letter to A. Bebel, June 20,1873. Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, pp. 283-85

There is no disagreement with OP that censorship-wielding sectarian cliques rule throughout the entire fake-'left', - but not because they give leadership, but because of the exact opposite. A genuine interest in trying to provide scientific Marxist leadership will gladly subject all ideas to all of the polemical conflict to be drawn out. It is the only way to prove an analysis is correct or not over time. It is the bedrock of all hopes for revolutionary theory to eventually alone lead to successful revolutionary socialist practice by being a correct understanding of how the world works. Stalinism, revisionism, Scargillism, & Trotskyism are the exact opposite to this wish for scientific leadership through correct theory, - either saying or publishing very little, or sticking to endless abstract formalist wrangles with no solution while ignoring polemics about real-world developments where proof of Marxist understanding can alone ultimately be found.

The working class needs a party of Marxist understanding and revolutionary leadership. Who can explain everything about the whole world movement of class and economic forces in the year 2000? The EPSR speaks its mind every week, and gives detailed criticism of where others get it wrong, either in historical background, current assessment, future perspectives, and usually all three. Further events will prove which analysis is closer to Marxism. Let the OP at last start trying its hand at developing real scientific theory, - about the real world,- instead of still endlessly timewasting with abstract disputes about the rules of argument and polemical organisational structures, etc.

And finally, while small circles are obviously still the reality, what convoluted barminess could bother to insist that it is an absolute virtue that wider workers gatherings are not yet able to be drawn into the fight for revolutionary theory? It could only make sense to incurable sectarian formalists who have no real interest in trying to build a movement of practical revolutionary leadership. Let the OP prove this wrong by beginning to analyse real world developments. 
EPSR supporters.

Mapping a path forward

Open Polemic replies to the EPSR

Although we have no argument concerning the crucial role of Marxist revolutionary theory, Royston Bull, the editor of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review, does not concur with Open Polemic on the way to go about developing theory through what he describes as:

"... sustained serious polemics about what is happening in the world now and what happened in the immediate past - the only sensible way to begin trying to map an objective path forward." (EPSR 1028 Jan 26)

Firstly, if scientific communists (Marxist-Leninists to the EPSR) are to sustain serious polemics, it is necessary to begin with serious polemics, which is hardly the case with Royston. He constantly refers to anyone who may disagree with him, on anything, as part of the 'left' swamp or fake-'left', or as one of the 157 or 51 varieties, or perhaps Revisionist, Centrist or Trotskyism. 

Despite this, he is not adverse to going directly into 'serious polemics' within this 'political conglomeration'. In doing so he reveals that the EPSR (of the erstwhile International Leninist Workers Party) regards itself as the theoretical centre of scientific communism for the working class; if you don't go along with Royston Bull, you cannot be a scientific communist. The entry of the EPSR (ILWP) as a faction into Scargill's leader centralist Socialist Labour Party, with its inevitable factional wrangling and manoeuvring, was a confirmation of the sectarian, leadership pretensions of the EPSR with even, for one brief moment, Royston himself gaining the vantage point, illusory as it turned out, of its Vice-Presidency. The strategy of the EPSR, for open polemic with militant socialists in Royston's 'political conglomeration' stands in opposition to Open Polemic's strategy for open polemic between scientific communists or as Lenin, who was not dealing with a myriad of disciplined sects but with the future development of one disciplined party could put it in his time, 'between comrades'.

Multanimous practice

With the Open Polemic Editorial Board alone standing for multanimous practice within the democratic centralist party, Royston (in OP's extract from his article on 'Philistinism') singles out Open Polemic as heretically Trotskyist by asserting that: 

"Within more self-conscious Trotskyite posturing it (philistinism) comes out as: 'For the multanimous party'."
He tries to sustain this assertion with 'the lie to prove the heresy'. He writes: 

"As noted, both these groups (Open Polemic and the 'CPGB'/Weekly Worker) champion the 'multanimous' nonsense which actually opposes the idea of getting agreement on a contemporary world analysis of class forces as the only way to restore a united revolutionary mass movement, and both groups avoid polemics with the EPS Review whenever possible."

Firstly, he knows full well that the 'CPGB', like the EPSR itself, champions leader centralist practice, because Open Polemic has made it its business to supply Bull with all the relevant material and that material makes it quite clear that the 'CPGB' most definitely does not champion multanimous practice within democratic centralism. There lies the lie.

Secondly, as both the 'CPGB', which he defines as Trotskyist, and OP "champion the 'multanimous' nonsense", Open Polemic must accordingly be Trotskyist. Here is the heresy according to Bull.

In fact, every party, whether Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, State-capitalist or even reformo-communist like the CPB or anarcho-communist like the 'CPGB', practises leader centralism; they are all opposed to the concept of multanimous practice. Indeed the list in Bull's article, of the way that the various parties curtail and suppress serious polemics, are all symptoms of the practice of leader centralism, or the practice of "sectarian-clique leadership" to Bull. These symptoms are the manifestation of a covert leadership faction, or 'sectarian-clique', using its control over the processes of democratic centralism to ensure that no other 'sectarian-clique', or faction, can mount a successful challenge to its theoretical and political dominance.

Covert leadership factionalism is the taproot of leader centralism and its protagonists all constantly perpetrate the myth of the 'non-factional' communist party. In fact, all leader centralist parties are firstly, by definition, factional and most contain, to varying degrees, factions other than that ensconced in the leadership.

The call for open factions to be allowed in the party does not seriously challenge covert factionalism in the leadership of the party and it this which must firstly be overcome if we are to begin to prepare the ground for any advance. In fact, Open Polemic's concept of multanimous practice, which would deny the leadership of the party special rights in the elaboration of theory and formulation of policy and which would allow like-minded groups to work as open forums within the party, strikes at the very heart of leader centralist practice.

Getting agreement Royston Bull argues that OP's concept of multanimous practice in the future party: 

"actually opposes the idea of getting agreement on a contemporary world analysis of class forces as the only way to restore a united revolutionary movement".

At the same time he complains that: 

"what is left of the socialist camp now, in China, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, etc, - still refuses to resume the mantle of Lenin's Third International and establish a worldwide Marxist-Leninist forum for the further elaboration of scientific socialist theory, clarifying how things went wrong and were misunderstood in the Soviet period ... etc, etc."

Yet, when Open Polemic nearly ten years ago, in the absence of the leader centralists of China, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam etc, or any other leader centralists for that matter, establishing a 'worldwide Marxist-Leninist forum', except perhaps on the basis of their own sectarian interests, decided to make its own contribution to that possibility, it met with the particular opposition of the EPSR.

Royston Bull rejected Open Polemic's contention that a contemporary analysis of class forces must begin, first and foremost, with the state of the working class and, crucially, the disintegration of its advanced elements, the task then being to bring together as many of those advanced elements as possible on a fundamentally principled basis in order to steadily elaborate such an analysis. 

That is 'the only sensible way' to go about mapping a path forward. It is the Leninist way forward. But Bull does not agree. He considers it to be an 

"academic obsession with formal, structural, tactical or constitutional questions of programme".

Open Polemic does 'not 

"avoid polemics with the EPS Review whenever possible." 

The problem is that Royston Bull is for 'getting agreement' by discussing everything in the here and now among all militant socialists whereas OP is for 'getting agreement' among scientific communists on fundamental principles and a common theoretical programme for the party. For Open Polemic, it is the party which engages in discussing everything: first the party, then the class. Going directly to the class in the present situation is nothing more than a divisive, sectarian claim to the leadership of the class.

In the knowledge that Royston Bull may demand that Open Polemic publish everything that he writes, from Ireland to tube privatisation or whatever, we would suggest that if the EPSR really wants serious theoretical polemic 'between comrades', it makes a start by publishing this short response to Bull on the question of mapping a path forward. Build scientific communism. 
Open Polemic

OP excerpts from EPSR 1028.

..this philistinism is universal around the fake-'left' and takes any number of forms, not just the blinkered single-issue campaigning typical of the Socialist Worker which consciously OPPOSES the introduction of anti-imperialist theory and revolutionary perspectives into labour-movement disputes.

This is EVERY one of all 57 varieties of Revisionism, Centrism, and Trotskyism fronting a public meeting on the Paddington disaster, Hillingdon hospital dispute, tube privatisation, NATO-bombing, or whatever, and trying to prevent, by censorship or violence, any attempt to widen the discussion in the only sensible way by placing the issue within the very relevant context of the overall international crisis of the imperialist world-economic system.

This is sectarian leadership cliques of EVERY 'left' party or group WITHOUT EXCEPTION, - refusing, for one reason or another, to allow polemical debate (the ONLY means ultimately to guarantee correct theoretical understanding) because it would "be divisive", or "because we all have our own opinions", or because "we don't want a talking-shop", or "because workers don't want to hear what one dead Russian revolutionary said to another", etc, etc, etc, through every philistine excuse in the book for avoiding theoretical struggle, the absolute key to the world's socialist future, and the only way it will ever come about.

Fear of theory, fear of being proved hopelessly wrong, fear of making some appalling leadership mistakes, is the worst treachery of all to the working class. It is the most unpleasant and damaging feature of sectarian-clique leaderships of parties and groups. Building a socialist organisation and appealing to workers for support is a claim to a leadership role and to an influence on the working class, whether consciously and purposefully touted or not. To then use such leadership influence and to exploit budding organisational loyalty purely in order to maintain the status quo of the top bureaucratic clique and to AVOID having to provide too much, regular political analysis and leadership to the working class (to counter its DAILY brainwashing at the hands of the seductive capitalist mass media) is the slimiest kind of opportunist treachery imaginable.

Cagily sitting on top of the organisational pile already amassed, making as few bold pronouncements as possible (because anti-theory philistinism sees the struggle to provide correct political analysis for the working class as impossibly difficult, risking terrible mistakes all the time and giving hostages to fortune) - is achieved in various ways. One method is to publish as little as possible, and write no far-reaching political analysis when publication does finally happen, filling the space with 'safe' reports of routine trade union activities, spontaneous protests, and single-issue subjectivism. Another is to declare the clarification of all the outstanding political conundrums of the epoch ('workers states, - the record of past failure or the only guide to future socialist success?'; 'the dictatorship of the proletariat, - never firm enough, or Marxism-Leninism's most tragic misunderstanding of historical necessity?'; 'the free-market economy, - the same crisis-ridden death-trap for the working class that Marxist science has always exposed, - or the only sure and correctable vehicle for civilisation's further rapid economic advance?' etc, etc.) all as "impossible to reach agreement about, - so therefore don't try".

This is the most grotesque expression of all to capture and illustrate the very essence of philistinism and the very death of all further development in scientific Marxist political-economy understanding. In dull centrist circles, it comes out as: "Avoid sterile internal wrangling". Within more self-conscious Trotskyite posturing, it comes out as: "For the multanimous party" - which translates as "even though we cannot agree on anything, let's stick together to at least make some sort of noise when denouncing the dictatorship of the proletariat in practice"(in China, e.g.).

This general fake-'left' retreat from a Leninist world view (or from expressing honestly any far-reaching world view at all to cover up all 57 varieties tail-ending of bourgeois anti-communist prejudices and single-issue delusions in practice) is alternatively smoke screened behind the routine demagogic performance-speech where the same eternal 'socialist' platitudes ("is it fair for the rich to be rich while the poor starve", etc) and the same old personal anecdotes of past trade-union heroism win ready sympathy but hide the fact that the current daily brainwashing bourgeois-media presentation of the world (which is effectively holding back the 99% of the local working class who have not come to the hall to cheer and who do not turn out to vote for the 'socialist alternative') is just being let off scot-free and totally ignored once again.

After 100 years mass-movement 'socialist' politics in Britain, in and around the Labour Party, creating such a vast pool of 157 varieties, not just 57, of 'left' opportunist political pseudo-sophistication for the 24-hours-a-day bourgeois media (press, radio, and television) to constantly call on to keep the brainwashing of the working class going strong, - the mere repetition of simplistic 'socialist' slogans (e.g. the ENTIRE political content of the current Socialist News front-page-lead consisted of just 18 words: "Scargill made the connection between different forms of struggle, urging people to resist oppression wherever they encounter it") can lead nowhere.

Significantly, the only two vaguely communist movements (the only serious expression of socialism) ever to remotely challenge for leadership of the working class, - the old Daily Worker Communist Party and the later Workers Press WRP, - most importantly challenged bourgeois-media brainwashing control of the working class on a DAILY basis, and frequently on a deeply thought-out, well-researched, and well-argued theoretical basis approaching Leninist communist standards of understanding.

It was precisely only when opportunist stupidity and a retreat from the necessary methods of proper theoretical polemical struggle started to completely muddle and squeeze out any Leninist grasp of the world situation and history's tasks that these challenges petered out again, - the CP refusing to address Stalinism's mistakes and weaknesses seriously and then just running away from them in anti-communist panic; and the WRP corrupting any ability to understand the world objectively by its grotesque internal and external opportunism. The crucial role for revolutionary theory, without which the working class can never be transformed into the ruling class for the successful building of socialism and without which no workers socialist movement can ever expect to be regarded as a country's all-round competent new leadership, capable of replacing bourgeois leadership in every walk of life as the new ruling class,— had once again been forgotten and abandoned.

The Soviet workers state was undermined by the young and backward state's immature emotional paralysis in substituting bureaucratic loyalism for genuine polemical struggle to daily clarify the best theoretical understanding of how the international class war was developing. By the last decades of the USSR, the grasp of 'world socialist revolution' was so corrupted and compromised by the hopelessly incorrect and chaotically contradictory 'understanding' of how imperialist crisis in the West was proceeding, and would proceed further, that the fraternal aid to the Afghan Revolution, for example, was conducted with no proper perspectives at all on what the socialist camp was facing and how best to approach it, and consequently was fought and led with no inspiration or conviction at all.

The same confusion had long afflicted all soviet relations with the rest of the socialist camp, - most notably in the catastrophic split with the Chinese workers state where the long retreat from Leninist science on world revolution by the Third International left both sides hopelessly in the wrong over a whole range of issues.

It was this abandonment of the struggle for theory conducted in a completely scientific manner,(deliberately SEEKING OUT polemical conflict over the daily practical verification or disproof of a given policy, with the ability to acknowledge MISTAKES accepted as the highest of Leninist leadership achievements), - which ensured the colossal historical setback to the whole planned rational future of civilisation which the socialist camp's disintegration represented.

And what is left of the socialist camp now, in China, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, etc, - still refuses to resume the mantle of Lenin's Third International and establish a worldwide Marxist-Leninist forum for the further elaboration of scientific socialist theory, clarifying how things went wrong and were misunderstood in the Soviet period, what stage has been reached in the imperialist-system crisis, and what class-war developments should be expected next in the international socialist revolution, etc, etc.

The fake-'left' does not want to know either, in spite of a gesture or two at 'open polemics' by the OP, Weekly Worker, and others. An academic obsession with formal, structural, tactical or constitutional questions of programme is used for AVOIDING sustained serious polemics about what is actually happening in the world now and what really happened in the immediate past, - the only sensible way to begin trying to map an objective path forward. As noted, both these groups champion the 'multanimous' nonsense which actually OPPOSES the idea of getting agreement on a contemporary world analysis of class forces as the ONLY way to restore a united revolutionary mass movement, - and both groups avoid polemics with the EPS Review whenever possible.