Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however it to change it - Karl Marx Economic & Philosophic Science Review
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No 1075 Feb 6 2001                                                                                                                                               25p

The head-in-the-sand ignoring of the crucial daily developments in the worldwide crisis of the imperialist system, - and the idiotic pretence that capitalism’s monopolisation process can be made to stand still - unite the Trots, Revisionists, and Stalinists in a nightmarish swamp of rival sectarian fantasies, each envisaging a steady expansion via electoral promises into eventually replacing the Labour Party. Past uncured theoretical bankruptcy has restricted these fake-'lefts' to plodding the barren treadmill of 'really socialist' reformist promises, and pretending that they are 'democratically' preserving an anti-monopoly status quo (which does not exist anyway) to excuse their social-chauvinist degeneracy defending the fascist line of a capitalist Britain out of the European Union. Blaming 'cranks' for Marxist science only compounds the stooging pact with philistinism that Lalkar's museum-Stalinism has recreated, guru-worshipping Scargill instead of JVS, historic tragedy the first time, obscene farce the second.

The back-stabbing bust-up inside the New Labour leadership which at a stroke has destroyed what little remained of Blairism's credibility as 'Third Way government of supreme-competence and supreme confidence', thus dramatically bringing closer the downfall of this latest ludicrous bourgeois ideological gimmick for delaying the ultimate inevitable crisis-catastrophe for the capitalist system, - has typically been dealt with by total silence around much of the fake-'left'.

The whole panicking bloodbath has either been ignored completely by the 'socialist' press or else just noted for its various political-organisational facts in order to pursue whatever sectarian opportunist advantage can be gained by the rival guru-led petty-bourgeois sects.

A psychological and philosophical analysis of the Machiavellian scandal in order to bring out for the working class its reflections of the ideological chaos (see last EPSR) of capitalism's political-control system as a whole, (reflections which the critical realism of the official media can never take too far for reasons of self-confusion and self-preservation), - is alien to them because of the 57 varieties middle-class hostility to the whole content and spirit of Marx's revolutionism.

These Trots, Revisionists, Stalinists, and other anti-communists, remain paralysed in their various retreats from Marxist-Leninist science into which they all uselessly fled as the 20th century's colossal workers-state developments were led to self-destruction because of Moscow's ludicrously-incorrect world analysis and subsequent bureaucratic complacency, - none of which was ever successfully exposed (see EPSR 2001 Perspectives).

The museum-like preservation of these defeatist ideological cul-de-sacs still dictates their pattern of dogmatic sterility and inflexibility; and ignoring actual developments in order to keep peddling some unrealistic doctrine or other is a feature common to them all.

All 57 varieties, for example, continue to ignore New Labour's relentless destruction not only of its own credibility but also that of the whole last century of supposed 'reformist' political advance for workers interests; and as a result still pointlessly urge the working class to buy 'new' promises of 'parliamentary socialism' from them (SSP, Socialist Alliance, SLP, or whatever), all vainly trying to re-create "what the Labour Party should have done in the first place", namely use the overwhelming voting support it had won from the working class to carry out "the complete socialist revolution".

The first 8 Labour Governments in history got 'left' cover and won the enthusiastic support or else the cooperative tolerance of all these Trot, Revisionist, Stalinist, and other anti-communist groupings which make up the fake-'left'; and even the 9th and latest, - Blair's government, still drew not a scrap of totally communist ideological denunciation from any of them.

They all plod on in the anti-Marxist philosophical fairyland of imagining that some kind of mass labour-movement party, some kind of trade union-backed Mark II version of the original model - "which sadly betrayed", - will finally do what the Labour Party "ought to have done", and legislate 'socialism'.

No matter how many times this utopian dream has cruelly been inflicted on the working class, usually because given a 'left' cover by all of these fake 'socialist' groupings, - this Trot/Revisionist swamp is still determined to inflict it yet again, conning workers with quite futile empty promises of what the Alliance will do, or what the SSP will do, or what the SLP will do, etc, etc, etc, if only workers will vote that way.

It is all a monstrous, disgusting fraud of course. The modern capitalist system (bourgeois parliamentary democracy) invented and perfected the contemporary electoral system, - Labour Party & all, and not always in 'opposition', - precisely for one reason only, to absolutely guarantee that the capitalist system would never lose power.

Ever since this modern 'democracy' racket became fully flourishing, all the fake-'lefts' have forever been giving a nudge and a wink in order to hint that "of course we're not fooled by the electoral racket, but we play it in order to get attention, and as soon as the 'left' is strong enough, we will insist on the socialist revolution", etc, etc.

All 57 varieties are still at it today, still turning up on workers doorsteps with sterile "socialist promises", plus a nudge and wink to hint that there will be more to it than just voting, etc, etc.

They are all lying. Every anti-communist brand of Trotskyism, Revisionism, and Stalinism, is outlining nothing different from politics-as-usual as the fake-'lefts' have always played it, lots of 'real' promises of 'left reformism', all utterly meaningless, and just more junk that will sink into the swamp of electoralism.

Permanently omitted is the one crucial aspect of socialist leadership, agitation and education, - explaining to the working class how the crisis conditions are maturing for the collapse of capitalism in revolutionary crisis, without which all perspectives about workers taking power and building socialism are just so much hot air.

And such a factual detailed analysis of how capitalism is crashing is deliberately omitted, although it was the essence of Marxist science, because these guru-led fake-'left' sects are the precise opposite of 'communist' and 'revolutionary', part of the complacent anti-theory academic petty-bourgeois past, clinging paralysed to its museum-like ideological perches.

Just as they all ignored reality in order to adopt some sectarian posture throughout the USSR’s existence, - those who postured 'against'-Stalinism and Revisionism being just as unrealistic as those who postured 'in favour', - so they all ignore reality now.

Marx would have written copiously and entertainingly on the underlying capitalist crisis ideological nightmare which has sparked off the homosexual-freemasonry internal explosion at the head of the New Labour Party. For Marx, it would have been rich confirmation that every kind of self-promoting and self-protecting freemasonry (ethnic, religious, sexual, etc) pulling opportunist strings within an anarchic capitalist boom, would sooner or later find, itself uselessly pushing on those same strings, once the boom conditions began giving way to crisis panic.

Because the slow long-term waning of British imperialist viability also meant the steady decline in the credibility of its 'democratic shadow', namely the 'useful reformism' of the Labour party, - the ideologically-disastrous mess that Blairism rescued in order to try to rebreathe life into the rapidly-dying 'electoral choice' fraud, which safely immunises politics under capitalism, could only be revived with a series of empty propaganda gimmicks.

Thus Labour had to become New Labour, kept in the air by nothing but one insane public-relations spin after another. The traditional class-based organisational 'opposition' to capitalism’s excesses, always a 'reformist' fraud, could no longer put on any kind of believable challenge to 'New World Order' imperialism.

But as the EPSR was explaining from the start of the collapse/capitulation of Stalinist-Revisionist theoretical idiocy, this apparent 'New World Order' was in reality just another phase of terminal imperialist-system crisis; which had achieved Gorbachevism's final detailed downfall-steps precisely by being forced to offer some genuine arms-race cutbacks truce to Moscow, because imperialist crisis could no longer afford to ignore its internal divisions any more.

As confidently predicted, the supposed 'death of the communist menace' and 'death of the Evil Empire threat' has only coincided with a catastrophic worsening of the 'New World order' internal crisis.

'Labourism' of any kind, - 'New' Labour; 'old' Labour; 'Socialist' Labour; 'Alliance' ex-Labour 'lefts'; - is philosophically still mired in the electoral utopianism of the past. Challenging workers’ bourgeois illusions at election times has not become invalid, but the use of the hustings as a 'revolutionary tribune' needs to become just that in reality, and no longer merely just in gesture because some candidate has 'socialist' or 'communist' in the party description.

The reality is describing the specifically revolutionary crisis of the world imperialist system. This is not an issue of 'barricades now' but of drawing out exactly the inescapable revolutionary implications of all that is now going wrong within capitalism's difficulties, and also drawing out the dangerously deluded nonsense that preserving the reformist status quo is some kind of 'good' option for the working class. It is an impossibility, and peddling such illusions could fatally disarm the working class.

Typical of the appalling blunders that fake-'left' posturing can drag routine 'labourism' into is Lalkar’s latest philosophical contortions, trying to protect the philistine Scargill's back for him in their usual stooge-like insincerity.

Their problem remains the SLP's Little Englander chauvinism, campaigning to take Britain out of the European Union as a good, progressive, positive step for the working class to take, - 'preventing greater monopolisation, exploitation, and repression by the European imperialist bourgeoisie'.

"The European proletariat ought to oppose with all its might the project of a united Europe", Brar's latest mealy-mouthed apologia runs. With some shamefaced self-consciousness, the Lalkar piece adds:

In recommending this course of action, we are fully aware, we find ourselves on the same side as a whole spectrum of political parties and trends, ranging from sections of the Trot-revisionist fraternity to sections of the Conservative Party; the Empire Loyalists of various kinds - even the BNP fascists. But it will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to read, and grasp the meaning of this article, that our reasons for urging the European (including the British) proletariat to oppose this project are entirely different from the reasons being advanced by the other opponents, who are against the European project for chauvinist reasons, such as 'the sovereignty of the British parliament', the traditions of 'British parliamentary democracy', 'keeping the pound with the queen's head' on it, etc.
 
We reject these bourgeois and chauvinistic arguments in their entirety. Had these been the only reasons that we could discern for the British working class being opposed to the present efforts at European integration, we would certainly not have undertaken the trouble of writing this rather lengthy piece. Doubtless there would not be wanting grouplets of cranks who, with hair-splitting methods of argument, reminiscent of medieval scholasticism, would manage to find our reasoning nationalist or opportunist or both. But that is life, since there is no law outlawing cranks, of whom, sadly, capitalism produces a lot and furnishes the conditions which allow them to grow with tropical luxuriance.

But the gist of these 'different reasons', is totally defeatist in philosophical terms, and is conveying a historical characterisation of current imperialist developments which is 100% wrong.

The drive to ever greater monopolisation is an unstoppable universal phenomenon of the capitalist system. Highlighting just some of this process's latest characteristics in the 'superpower' domination and hegemony ascribable to US imperialism and to a German-led European Union, does not halt this phenomenon's continuing universal effects.

Although not yet in the Euro or NAFTA, lots more jobs in steel, cars, shipbuilding, and other engineering, are once more under renewed massive threat in UK this week because of worldwide 'overcapacity', so-called, which capitalism itself creates, relentlessly working away deep within its system, and to which superpower monopolies are to some extent a historic defence mechanism.

'British' bosses have provided few car jobs for decades, and workers here were glad to take the US, German, Japanese, and French alternatives. It is slump, - a neutral, non-national, universal, systemic, built-in failure (read Marx), - which starts the unstoppable process of those jobs’ removal, - not any national flag-waving as such, superpower or otherwise.

And it is the world slump process which will take the worsening economic condition everywhere, all the way to their ultimate degradation, - not any individual flag-waving.

What "the European proletariat ought to oppose with all its might" is not the ever greater self-defence monopolisation symptoms of coming universal slump-disaster, expressed as a certain amount of increased integration by some West European interests (not all non-British, and including some trade unions) - but the disease itself, the international capitalist process, which one way or another is going to inflict rapidly worsening conditions (be they described as superpower domination, or hegemonism, or greater exploitation, or greater repression, - or as horrors even far, far, far worse than any of them) on everyone sooner or later, whether EU or non-EU, whether NAFTA or non-NAFTA, whether Cuba-trading or non-Cuba-trading, whether non-aligned isolationist, or not non-aligned isolationist.

The status quo is not an option. The system will not stand still, no matter who wants it to. As Marxist science long ago explained, the 'reform' of the capitalist system into something else is not possible. It is impossible. The process of monopolisation cannot be stopped. The 'anti-monopoly' AES (alternative economic strategy) of past notorious Stalinist-Revisionist paralysed shame, - fiddling with impossible idiotic 'reforms' of capitalism while theoretical chaos was completely unchallenged, slowly destroying the ideological sanity of the entire world-communist movement, - should have been pointless disaster enough without Lalkar/SLP and all the rest of the Revisionist detritus all returning to this same sterile vomit now.

In any case, pretending that it would be 'better' for the capitalist monopolisation processes to be frozen still at this moment, rather than go on any further, is suicidal 'advice' anyway. A killer hurricane is on its way represented by, progressively, international cut-throat trade war, then universal slump, and then attempted shooting war to help the destruction of all the 'surplus' capital and 'surplus' labour, a hurricane which will destroy lives at every stage of social evolution all over the planet, whether countries are superpowers more than ever, hegemonised more than ever, regional trade-pacted more than ever, or isolationist more than ever. Wasting time telling the British working class to 'stand still so that the monopolisation process (unstoppable in reality) has not gone further' while this hurricane is still relentlessly bearing down which will not show favours to any particular monopolisation index, or anti-monopolisation index, - is a particularly sinister-or sick diversion depending on the extent to which Lalkar are just talking bollocks in order to protect the total philistine Scargill or to just creep further up his arse.

The same opportunist Revisionist confusion has been built up by similar careerism around the nationalised industries for decades. Spontaneously erupting fights to save the status quo are an obvious initial rallying point, but conscious political leadership should not leave matters there, surrounded with theoretical chaos.

The long fight to 'save' the status quo in all the nationalised industries inevitably went the way of all other 'reformist' attempts to 'preserve the status quo' and 'limit the amount of monopoly-imperialist economic domination' in the world. That long Revisionist/Reformist confusion brought the movement to where? To eventually losing out to Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson!!! What all 'save our nationalised industry' fights really needed for political leadership, including the NUM's heroic strike to save pits in 1984-85 was not Revisionist philistinism but the revolutionary grasp that the TUC-Labour 'left' illusions were already corrupted beyond repair by decades of anti-communist imperialism and were heading towards total reactionary class-collaboration (climaxing in Blairism), and that only a revolutionary challenge to onrushing monopolisation-slump destruction of the 'free world' would leave the struggling working class and miners with any worthwhile education from the fight at all. Not just Thatcher's politically vindictive destruction of the coal industry should have been challenged, but the whole onrushing anarchic-monopolisation 'free-market' chaos should have been challenged, - now currently emerging clearly, finally, in all its catastrophic devastation; - and its Labour-TUC class-collaborating stooges should have been challenged outright politically there-and-then too, the earlier the better.

Good luck to existing 'save nationalisation' or 'restore nationalisation' struggles which might yet give the imperialist economic process a local bloody nose or two. But in terms of the political leadership that the whole working class is desperately in need of, such fights will not tell the full story, and could even tell the wrong story, even if 'successful'.

For they will only be 'successful', if at all, on a very limited basis, and within a continuing totally hostile international imperialist economic environment, which no one will still be able to control. World trade-war anarchy, and catastrophic slump is on the way for everyone. And the fake-'left' universal policy of just tail-ending local industrial demands and refusing to give a revolutionary political lead (by telling workers now in struggle that only getting rid of the capitalist system in its entirety is really going to be any good to them) - is just further wretched continuation of failed Stalinist stoogery and opportunist Trot defeatism.

Fighting for just half-a-loaf shows that, deep down, people still think that the 'New World Order' imperialist reaction is still in the ascendancy. This is utterly false. It is plunging headlong into world crisis. Total revolution theory is desperately needed now.

This is a matter of fundamental Marxism. Dismissing it as 'hair-splitting cranks' only shows to what degenerate depths a lifelong habit of lip-biting stoogery, first in the service of Stalinist theoretical idiocy, and now in the service of Scargill's even more demented and egocentric philistinism, can reduce minds which in all other respects would like to be regarded as healthy.

Telling the working class at this stage of imperialist crisis, fast going rotten-ripe in all directions, that workers will be far better off, (facing less monopoly domination, exploitation, and repression), by staying out of the Euro or any deeper involvement in European integration, – is just as big a fraud, and just as much an anti-revolutionary diversion, as telling them that keeping the British economy's own currency would be better. There is no difference between them.

It is not the chauvinistic language which makes the national-jingoist delusion for Britain to 'go it alone' a nonsense, - it is the completely unrealistic substance which makes it a totally barmy case, and nothing but a potentially counter-revolutionary diversion, waiting to go off.

And why would every brand of fascism (remembering that both Mussolini and Hitler insisted that they were national-socialists, and carried out some anti-monopoly reforms to prove it) necessarily object to opposing greater EU integration on the grounds of preventing greater European monopolisation and hegemonisation, greater European exploitation, and greater European repression????? Most of them would possibly quite sincerely pretend that this was exactly the BNP propaganda that had attracted them in the first place.

The unrestrained guru-worship around Lalkar and the SLP has now put these wretched insincere opportunists deep in their worst philosophical shit yet.

Fascism is backward for exactly the same reasons that Lalkar and SLP arguments to "resist greater domination by European bosses" are backward.

This is still well short of a logical equation proving that fascism equals Scargillism, but the unpleasant proximity of one anti-revolutionary opportunist idiocy to the other anti-revolutionary opportunist idiocy is something for the members of the SLP to worry about and resolve, if they are still politically awake.

Some anti-Euro material from some similar Revisionist-era political influences has produced comparable philosophical hair splitting elsewhere. A Coventry TU Council paper rejects the 'sovereign Britain' charge of being chauvinist and insists that it is just the "undemocratic nature of the Euro project" and the "corporate anti-worker influences" that make opposing greater EU integration so important, at length favourably comparing the "democratic mandate" supposedly putting the Bank of England under some electoral control, to the European Central Bank which supposedly is subject to no "democracy" whatever.

What sort of barmy kidology is this, and what could be its possible purpose???

Its only crazy effect is to reconcile the working class to Blairism!!! "You thought no treachery to democratic and trade union rights could be worse than that of Blairism?? Think again. Getting anywhere near that European Central Bank could be a million times worse. So, rattle your chains by all means, but do it joyfully. You could be far worse off elsewhere" the Coventry brothers are told.

Chauvinism-inspired or not, one thing this bilge does suffer from is the most servile imperialism-corrupted defeatism and theoretical philistinism that could be imagined. Complacency is not the word for it. It can be imagined how the working class of Coventry have just loved the way that the "Bank of England works to government-determined inflation targets, which can be varied to suit economic conditions", and how "the Bank of England can also have its independence removed by the government", when suffering the Rover debacle and the Rolls-Royce Ansty jobs threat, etc, etc, in recent times. What practical difference has such 'democratic' drivel made??

It makes no difference whatever. If international monopoly market conditions dictate deeper slump all round, deeper slump all round it will be. The only 'democratic' banking sense the working class could want to hear about is the total public ownership of all the banks and of every scrap of finance and industrial capital, - and worldwide as soon as possible, - in order to place the whole world economy, and certainly the entire economy of Britain to start with, on a completely rationally-planned basis, publicly-debated and approved, organised to serve the interests of the whole world's population equally.

And to hear that, will require some communist political leadership, not some wretched careerist opportunism, recycling the same dreadful old Revisionist stoogery which assisted in losing for the world, the planet's first genuinely democratic economic achievements, - the colossal planned triumphs of the Soviet workers state.

Even worse philistinism surrounds the Trot joke 'Socialist Alliance' which is now playing at 'programme writing' in order to further avoid having to analyse real world developments or basing the perspectives for socialism solely on what is happening now in the world and on what serious revolutionary anti-imperialist breakthroughs are in the offing.

One early and completely sterile blueprint, in 25,000 words of utterly arbitrary 'social-engineering futurism' off the top of someone's head, emerges from academic CPGB's ivory tower. Some planned details for a future Britain may even be similar to what eventually might happen, but hundreds of rival blueprints could all prove as valid; and secondly what is the point?

The socialist revolution will very specifically arise out of the collapse of the existing capitalist system. This 25,000 word blueprint does not even describe the imperialist economy being in any kind of crisis at all, in Britain or in the world. A completely abstract capitalism is described as being capable of harsh exploitation at various times, of damaging the environment, and even of inter-imperialist war, - but no specific real world crisis is described as such.

In which case the real-world revolutionary upsurge which is going to take over from the revolutionary crisis of the real-world capitalist system is not described either, or even referred to at all. A completely abstract socialist development is described.

Some clue to this extremely bizarre 'socialist' leadership being offered to the working class in Britain may lie in the startling opportunism of this little sect. It once boasted so proudly, as the 'Leninist' faction, of being part of the 'official' communist movement, then in full flood of mindlessly bureaucratically destroying theoretically everything that had made the USSR the colossal historical anti-imperialist influence that it was, defending workers-state proletarian dictatorship at all costs, wherever possible. At the liquidation of the official CP in Britain, this sect made sure it grabbed the CPGB title, still so historically bound up with the titanic triumphs of the Soviet workers state in 20th century history.

Now, in 25,000 words explaining to the working class why running a planned socialist society is what workers need to think about in view of the continuing nastiness of capitalism, and its ever-present war threat, - just 100 words is devoted to the entire subject of the world's first workers state, which dominated the whole world’s political thinking for most of the last century, and still is the single most talked-about political subject in the world. In just 100 completely superficial words, the epoch-making world-shattering Bolshevik Revolution's sensational birth; mind-boggling fight for survival; tremendous planned socialist construction achievements and social-political transformations; and finally its treacherous relentless betrayal by a universal CP inability (the CPGB included) to overturn Stalin's theoretical shallowness, protected by the universal infantile guru-worship of him (including in the CPGB); - is all ludicrously shallowly 'dealt with'.
 
Even if there was a scrap of historical validity in this paragraph's conclusion instead of just anti-historical meaningless rhetoric, these ludicrous 100 words would still indicate a sect living nowhere near the working class, in terms of worldly experience, and not really anywhere in contemporary life at all. The conclusion reads:

"The eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 confirms that there are no national roads to communism nor any sustainable alternative between capitalism and genuine socialism."

Leaving aside the historical abstract stupidity of that statement for the moment, the first amazing contradiction is that not one single word out of the 25,000 on how to get socialism, is devoted to the obvious major problem which the above conclusion raises, - namely how do all 192 countries in the world all simultaneously all fight their class wars to end all class wars, against their local entrenched bourgeoisie and powerfully-armed and powerfully allied capitalist state machines, - and all coordinate their victories together so that no one is left trying to build socialism on their own.

Even more remarkably, there is no really clear picture how even one country should take the power in order to start building socialism.

More remarkably still, once such masses of fine print are unravelled, there is not even any detailed discussion of obstacles to be overcome in order to take power and build socialism in Britain. Even the actual taking of power itself, the supreme act of revolution, is not even discussed as such.

More than 20,000 words go by before it can be read under 'Socialist constitution' that "supreme power in the state will be in the hands of workers councils", but how it got there, and what happened to Parliament, etc, is just ignored.

Meanwhile, "The armed forces and the police will be dispersed", - just like that. How? The CPGB aren't saying. "In their place will be a workers militia". Good, and when did that start to form? Was it a long guerrilla war? Were there major battles with the army and police? Or was it all done through urban terrorism, and when did that start? Such titanic questions about the real 'futurism' of the country are deemed irrelevant, it seems.

Part of this coyness is to avoid upsetting the 'Socialist Alliance' middle class with the 'problem' of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It does finally get mentioned right at the end under 'socialist states' in the following half-embarrassed patronising way, like some twee antiquarian having to discuss that, yes, the Dodo bird did have rather large bollocks. It runs:

"The socialist state - i.e. working class rule, or what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat - is needed in the first place against the resistance of the forces of capitalism." 

Well! That's a bit of a relief, but the repeated emphases everywhere on "the peoples semi-state" and "the fullest flowering of democracy" and "the withering away of the state", etc, etc, etc, only raises bigger and bigger problems. What if in response to the statement "Socialism is a worldwide revolution", the CIA says "Oh no it isn't" and sends in the B52s; how is this 'semi-state' going to cope at that moment?

Which reveals the major coyness of this programme, - or its utterly paralytic uselessness, to put it another way, - which is its refusal or inability to start with this real world, and its now total instability due to its uncontrollable imperialist-system crisis, and to start the world socialist-revolution building from there, real countries, real conflicts, real ways forward. The crucial difficult problem of the American socialist revolution, presumably particularly vital to a project for 'world socialism' which insists that unless the whole world starts building socialism together, then it cannot be built at all, - does not get mentioned at all.

This is not the real world. This is all just abstract fantasising by petty-bourgeois dilettantes who absolutely hate the whole idea of what the real world of proletarian revolution is going to be like, just as they hate the whole history of the titanic Bolshevik Revolution, - which they themselves killed off in their days of loyalty to 'official communist' Revisionist mindlessness. 

Build Leninism.  EPSR

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

CHALLENGING THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER

THE YEAR 2000 saw a rise in mobilisations against the globalisation policies of the international financial institutions. The World Bank, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were targeted by thousands of concerned citizens around the world, aware of the damage that globalisation policies are causing to already shattered economies of developing countries.

Founded in 1944 and housed in Washington DC, the IMF and World Bank are the architects of the global economy. The policies they impose on indebted countries back a corporate agenda at the expense of people and the environment. The World Trade Organisation enforces and expands the powers that corporations have won over developing countries through IMF/World Bank programmes.

As Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith note in a new book Globalisation From Below, 89 countries are worse off than they were ten years ago. In Africa, where per capita income grew by 34.3% from 1960 to 1980, per capita income subsequently fell by about 20% from 1980 to 1997. At the same time, they point out, the world's 200 richest people have doubled their wealth in the past four years. Decades of promises that just a little more "short-term" pain will bring long-term gain have exposed the IMF and World Bank as false prophets whose mission is to protect those who already control too much wealth and power.

On 12 December, Jubilee 2000 - the worldwide campaign for the cancellation of unpayable debt - argued that rich creditors have failed the world poorest countries. The campaign group's final report, The World Will Never Be The Same Again, analyses figures from from the World Bank and IMF to show that the nine countries currently awaiting debt relief will see debt payments fall by less than a third.

In Cologne in 1999, the G7 leaders declared that by the end of 2000, 25 countries would have begun to receive debt relief under the 'Heavily Indebted Poor Countries' (HIPC) scheme. A year later, in Okinawa, Japan, they scaled this target down to 20. By the end of 2000, only 13 countries had started to benefit.

The first 13 states to receive debt relief have had an average 37% reduction in annual debt payments, leaving all but two still spending more on debt than on health. Mauritania, for example, the first country through in 2000, will be paying $63million on debt repayments, but spends only $51 million on education and $17 million on health. Zambia, the latest country to enter the scheme, also illustrates its failures. Despite the IMF's best efforts to 'front-load' payments to avoid an embarrassing immediate rise, Zambia is set to see debt service payments rise above 2000 levels in just four years. From 2001-2004, Zambia will be spending on average $168 million a year on debt. Zambia is one of the world's poorest countries, where one in five adults has AIDS, and the disability adjusted life expectancy is now 30.3 years.

Yet the next nine countries to complete the HIPC obstacle course will fare even worse. The nine, seven of whom creditors have promised debt relief this year, are projected to see debt payments fall by only 29% on average. Niger, for example, will be left spending $40 million a year on debt, compared with only $27 million on health, though 70% of the population have no access to health services.

"We know that the big creditors like the G7, the IMF and the World Bank are probably hoping that they get rid of the stubborn Jubilee 2000 campaign", said Jean Sommers, from the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland, in December. "Now that we are coming towards the end of the Jubilee year they are probably thinking that we'll be packing our bags, thinking we have done our bit and that we will call it a day... But the Jubilee Campaign will be continuing. So I want to put the G7 on notice that when they first meet in 2001 in Genoa, we'll be there."

During the recent European Union summit in Nice, France, the Prime Ministers of the 15 EU member states were deciding on increasing the powers of the European Commission, so it could negotiate in behalf of all members on trade issues. This increase in power affects the areas of investment and services and intellectual property.

Third World Countries are the most vulnerable in those three specific areas. For example, take Basmati rice. People from India and Pakistan, who developed that breed of rice over the space of centuries, will have to start paying royalties - to an American Company called Rice Tech because this company patented the gene of the Basmati rice grain. It is registered in the US patent offices and anyone who wants to grow the rice in the future will have to pay royalty to that company in America. This is protected under the intellectual property regulations of the World Trade Organisation.

On 16 April 2000, Finance Ministers and central bankers from some 25 countries, as well as officials of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO – a veritable board of directors of the Global Economy – met in Washington, where they were greeted by huge demonstrations that united trade unionists, environmentalists, left wing organisations and NGOs.

The next meeting took place in Prague in September. The Czech Republic dealt with the impending global finance protests by turning back at the border hundreds of demonstrators with arrest records from Seattle and from anti-globalisation protests that have bird-dogged finance meetings in Washington; Davos, Switzerland; Melbourne, Australia; and Okinawa, Japan.

Demonstrators arrived anyway, and about 10,000 of them defied Czech police lines to try to march on the Congress Centre, where delegates to the joint annual meeting of the World Bank and the international Monetary Fund arrived in special sealed subway cars.

Obviously, dark shadows move beneath the dazzling Czech surface. The country hosting the IMF and World Bank is also a distinct symbol for everything that's wrong with corporate globalisation.

The respective fates of the Czech Republic and Slovakia seven years after their separation are symbolic of the growing inequality taking root even on the Social Democratic soil of Europe. In the poorer Slovakia, unemployment runs at 20% - twice the level of its neighbour. Inflation there is 14%, compared with 2.5% in the Czech Republic.

Yet Slovakia is a raging success story compared with many of the other transitional countries of Central and Eastern Europe. According to a little-noted report released by the World Bank just one week before the Prague conference, "there is little doubt that poverty has increased dramatically" in the former Eastern bloc since it entered the global system. "Moreover, the increase in poverty is much larger and more persistent than many would have expected at the start of this process."

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

	Palestinian bloodshed

Palestinian people are demanding an immediate end to the occupation. Seven years after that famous handshake on the White House lawn, the Oslo process has brought no real progress toward a just and lasting peace, they say.

Palestinian opposition groupings, including Hamas and dissenters in the PLO, were already denouncing the agreement, some of them terming it a "betrayal" of the dead. And, most significantly, some of Arafat's supposed loyalists, including the Fatah in Gaza and Marwan Barghouti in the West Bank, were calling for continued protests against occupation.

The 12 October killings and bombings had fanned the flames of the uprising, sparked by Ariel Sharon's entry into the Haram al-Sharif compound in Jerusalem, with the full backing of the minority Labour Government. At first, vocal, non-violent protests at Sharon's visit were led by a coalition of Palestinian leaders. The following day, seven Palestinians were shot dead within the Haramal-Sharif by Israeli troops. By 30 September, the flames of this act had spread to most cities within the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Palestinian communities within Israel experienced their most severe confrontations since the establishment of the Jewish state. Within an additional week, numerous villages became actively involved as well, a development which in both 1936 and 1988 signified the transition from popular uprising to sustained rebellion.

Most clashes have pitted civilian demonstrators armed with stones and petrol bombs against Israeli soldiers firing tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition, including high-velocity bullets which fragment upon impact. Where such confrontations escalate, and in those instances where armed Palestinians have become involved, Israel has deployed heavy machine guns, tanks and attack helicopters. Israeli soldiers most often fire from reinforced concrete bunkers where they are in no physical danger. The widespread, use of snipers, in combination with the large and growing proportion of head and chest wounds sustained by unarmed demonstrators, has reinforced the Palestinian conclusion that Israel is applying a "shoot-to-kill" policy.

Israel claims that Arafat instructed the dominant Palestinian political faction, Fatah, to incite the Palestinian public to demonstrate and throw stones at soldiers. The uprising is unquestionably being led by Fatah and its cadres have played a greater role in the armed clashes than the PA security forces. But Fatah's ability to mobilise the Palestinian street was reliant on a widespread disillusionment with Israeli behaviour. It is likely that there is nothing Yasser Arafat could have said or done to incite Palestinians more than Israel and its actions. Fatah's success in sustaining the uprising reflects, above all, the cumulative popular anger at continuing Israeli impunity in the Occupied Territories.

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

Feeble New Labour changes rotten mini minister but needs to tackle old colonial mentality or accept it has betrayed the Good Friday Agreement.

APRIL will mark the third anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.  The Agreement explicitly recognises the widespread existence of discrimination and through a range of measures agreed by the participants seeks to end inequality by promoting equality and justice for all citizens. These measures include the promotion of Human Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity; the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into law; the establishment of a Human Rights Commission; the imposition of a statutory duty on public authorities to promote equality of opportunity; a new Equality Commission, and a to-be-agreed Bill of Rights.

It is appropriate and necessary almost three years on that we assess what progress has been made since April 1998 on the equality agenda and what gaps remain.

The equality agenda is and will remain for some time, a battleground between; those seeking real change and those opposed to change.

That is evidenced in the attitude and approach of even those unionists who are pro-Agreement. For many unionist politicians the equality agenda is a nationalist aspiration that must be cut down to the size of  'minority' rights. This Ulster Unionist view of equality was summed up by John Taylor, Deputy Leader of the UUP when he said: "Of course there can be equal opportunity, but not equality. The Irish minority cannot be equal to the majority in Northern Ireland."

For nationalists and all proponents of the Equality Agenda, the problem is that the British Government, is arming unionism with all the weapons required to subvert the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement.

In at least ten key respects, the implementation of the Equality Agenda is being thwarted:  

1. Flags and symbols -  The decree issued by the British Secretary of State that the British Union jack, and only that flag, must be flown from a departmental headquarters flout the provision in the Good Friday Agreement for parity of esteem. As such,  Mandelson has publicly exposed his own insidious contempt for the principle of equality for the identity and allegiance of Irish nationalists enshrined in the Agreement, and approved by more than two million voters.

2. Irish language and bilingualism - The British Government has failed to recognise in policy and law the intrinsic value of the Irish language and Irish culture as promised in the Agreement. Consequently, the promotion of the Irish language has not been given the priority and resources needed. Many obstacles remain to the use of the Irish language in relation to government departments and public bodies and services.

3. Public Body Designations  - Under the Equality Duty of Section 75 of the NI Act 1998, the British Government has a responsibility to designate public authorities and bodies who then must produce Equality Schemes. These schemes will then be subject to Equality Impact Assessments to gauge the equality implications for that public body. So far, score's of public bodies have been designated.

However, the British Secretary of State has refused to designate the BBC equality duty and all indications are that he will continue to resist in the forthcoming listing. This is despite the requirements of the Equality Commission itself, and the views of the Taoiseach's office, the Equality Authority, the Six-County Human Rights Commission and Sinn Féin.

4. Unemployment differential - The 	British Government has refused to place on a statutory basis "the progressive elimination of the differential in unemployment rates between the two communities".  Despite 30 years of fair employment legislation, which the British Government alleges is the strongest  in Europe, the last published official statistics showed that Catholic males are now almost three times more likely than Protestant males to be unemployed and that Catholics now constitute more than 70% of the long-term unemployed.

5. Targeting Social Need - The refusal to put on a statutory basis the skewing of resources and finances to those areas of greatest social need to fulfil the commitment given to the progressive elimination of the community differentials. These differentials are manifest in the underdevelopment in infrastructure and job investment West of the Bann and along the border.

6. Political ex-prisoners - The British Government has failed to "facilitate the re-integration of prisoners into the community by providing support". Instead, the British Government continues to maintain legislation and policy which discriminates against political ex-prisoners participating as equals in all aspects of social and economic life.

7. National security discrimination - The incorporation into new legislation, (the Fair Employment & Treatment Order (1998), NI), the provision to discriminate in the allocation of jobs or contracts, against anyone deemed by the British Secretary of State to be a 'threat to national security'.

8. Institutionalised inequality in the Northern Ireland Civil Service -  The most recent report by the Equal Opportunities Unit of the Six-County civil service itself, shows the inequality experienced by Catholics in most branches of the civil service, particularly in senior civil service grade. No timetables and targets have been established to progressively and rapidly eliminate that institutionalised inequality, to balance the religious/ political profile

9. Nationality requirements of the civil service - These requirements apply to all appointments to the civil service, and recent cases show how they particularly infringe on senior civil service appointments, and result in public advertisements for jobs such as head of the Equality Unit stipulating that only British nationals may be appointed. This transgresses against the right of nationalists and republicans to "identify themselves and be accepted as Irish... as they may choose".

10. The Equality Commission - The minuscule resources afforded the Equality Commission, (approximately £0.5m), are indicative of the priority attached to the pursuit of Equality Agenda by the British Government. Consequently, there is a growing potential that equality schemes being completed in 2001 by public bodies may identify inequalities arising from their policies and functions, but be unable to take the affirmative action necessary to correct those inequalities.

Equality has to be at the heart of every decision taken by the Executive, the Assembly, the All Ireland institutions and the British Government, and especially the British Government. It cannot be an illusion. It must be a fact.

If discrimination is to be really made a thing of the past, then root and branch legislative change is required. As is obvious from the above, rigid mindsets and attitudes will not change simply because of the Good Friday Agreement, the Equality Duty or the existence of the Equality Commission and the Human Rights Commission.

Robust legislative change, coupled with structures and mechanisms of accountability, and the fullest implementation of properly funded Targeting Social Need programmes,  are necessary to effect the kind of scale and level of change required to impact on discrimination and advance the equality agenda.