Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V. I. Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
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No 1094 June 19 2001                                                                                                                                             25p

It is the lack of all perspective on where the monopoly-imperialist market system is heading which exposes the conscious counter-revolutionary opportunist reformism of all the fake-'lefts'. The pretence of a new 'revolutionary' programme to cover up the Socialist Alliance deserved electoral disaster is the most treacherous nonsense yet, mis-representing Marxism, lying about the Bolshevik Revolution, and ludicrously posturing that crawling back in behind the Labour Party is going to bring socialism. The philistine failure of all the fake 'lefts' (SA, SLP, etc) to develop a proper Marxist scientific account of the historic wrong turnings of both Trotskyism, and Stalinism is what still allows imbecile anti-communism to rule the roost. Until the theoretical propaganda fight is won for a return to serious Marxist science, opportunist nonsense will continue to rule unchallenged. The failure to nail Trotsky's Transitional Programme treachery to the international working class fully exposes the Alliance petty-bourgeois wish to class-collaborate with imperialist anti-Soviet conspiracies.

The humiliation to fake-'lefts' that the election result delivered, all seen through for their pathetic attempts to dress up more mere 'left reformism' as 'real revolutionary socialism' has led to some usefully educative further exposures of the treacherous anti-Marxism which fuels the opportunism of the Socialist Alliance and the SLP.

The most extreme 'revolutionary' posturing around the Alliance, the Weekly Worker, has immediately launched a frank condemnation of the abysmal electoral performance of this ragbag of anti-communist sects, but pretends to offer a solution with a revised 'revolutionary' programme of truly astonishing reactionary stupidity and counter-revolutionary treacherousness.

The opening bleat confirms everything that the EPSR said would be the long-term downfall of this deliberately-shallow and meaningless 'socialist alliance' posturing, which runs away from all the serious revolutionary questions facing the international working class historically, like the plague:

The Socialist Alliance majority simply wrapped themselves in old Labour clothes and expected disillusioned old Labourites to flock to us. But that constituency is a shrinking pool - that is why New Labour was able to maintain its stranglehold over working class voters. In any case our task is surely to break the mass of Labour-voting workers from Labourism. Unless we formulate a consistent, coherent strategy to do that, we will remain on the fringes.

The notion of a 'Labour Party stranglehold over working class voters' is itself a hopeless mis-analysis, opening the door to even more insane opportunism than ever, dealt with below; but first must come the CPGB rump's new farce of a 'revolutionary programme' with which to try to further cover up and conceal the essential reformist careerism of all this Alliance anti-communist parliamentary cretinism.

For obvious back-biting and point-scoring reasons, the tiny slice of reality abused 
by the CPGB for padding out this completely vacant, abstract, and academic new 'revolutionary' posturing, is Trotsky's failed Fourth International nonsense The Transitional Programme, intendedly a stab at the only two sizable sects within the Alliance, the SWP and the Socialist Party (ex-Militants), (although neither are that loyal to any serious theoretical disciplines, even to bankrupt Trotskyism):

Behind the programmatic timidity of our Socialist Alliance partners is their commitment to what they grandly call the "transitional method" derived from Leon Trotsky's 1938 programme The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International, otherwise simply known as the Transitional programme.  Trotsky was a great revolutionary, but he was badly mistaken in 1938. He believed that capitalism was in absolute terminal decline. Capitalism was in its "death agony" (L. Trotsky The transitional programme New York 1997, p 111). It could no longer develop the productive forces or grant meaningful reforms. The introduction of new machines and technology provided no answer to chronic stagnation. Nor in general can there be in the epoch of "decaying capitalism" systematic social reforms or raising the masses’ living standards. Therefore, Trotsky concluded, defence of existing economic gains through demanding a "sliding scale of wages" and hours would almost by itself trigger a final and apocalyptic collision with capitalism. The question of democracy was likewise reduced to merely defence of the existing "rights and social conquests of workers" (ibid p115).

Nonetheless simply because capitalism was viewed as being in absolute and terminal decline, every serious economic demand of the workers "inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and the bourgeois state" (ibid p 114). In effect Trotsky was reduced by extreme organisational weakness into advocacy of a particular version of economism: i.e., the workers would through strikes and other such elementary struggles find their "bridge" to revolutionary demands and revolutionary consciousness. With him eschatology was combined with revolutionary economism.

What our Socialist Alliance allies have taken from his programme is many of its weaknesses and precious few strengths. In their hands the "transitional method" becomes a commandment to prioritise trade union-type demands still excused as in 1938 by holding fast to the theory that somehow such struggles, if conducted militantly enough, will spontaneously lead, stage by stage, directly to the conquest of power.

But having so painstakingly set up this scenario in order to declare the revolutionary opposite to this anti-revolutionary 'left reformist pressure' nonsense, thereby demolishing both Trotsky and his joke 'followers' at one fell swoop, the Weekly Worker then spectacularly fluffs its lines. No revolutionary opposite to 'left reformist pressure' is identified at all. Instead, the CPGB pretend that the Trots’ Labour tailing parliamentary opportunism will be swept to oblivion by arguing for an £8.57per-hour minimum wage under capitalism instead of the £7.39-per hour minimum wage that the Trot SA majority insisted on for the election manifesto.

You couldn't make it up.

This mind-boggling reformist trivia is pompously described as ensuring that "the minimum wage therefore emerges as a struggle for the political economy of the working class as against the political economy of the bourgeoisie."

This puzzling claim for adding the necessary 'revolutionary' perspective to the Alliance’s work so as to 'make it more successful next time', etc, is followed up by the CPGB's programmatic standby (for creating a fake 'communist' effect) of demanding (through Parliament, presumably) a "people's militia to replace the standing army", explaining, for some weird reason, that this was a basic 'democratic principle' which the founding fathers of US imperialism adopted when taking over the American colonies and slave trade from the British Empire.

Standing for Parliament on the platform of demanding arms for workers is undoubtedly eye-catching, but what is the real purpose of this 'revolutionary' posturing which, in form, takes the aspect of one small part of a serious class-war challenge to the bourgeoisie for power in Britain, but is totally lacking in the slightest scrap of political or historical content for this forthcoming class war,(which is 100% what any serious revolutionary perspective can only be about)???

It is there solely to divert attention from the glaring reality that these CPGB 'Alliance revolutionaries', despite all these thousands of new words of 'communist' posturing, still have not committed themselves to explaining how and why a socialist revolution is the only worthwhile future for the working class in Britain (and the world), and show not the slightest notion of even understanding what a Marxist scientific perspective is all about.

Their ridicule of Trotsky's ludicrous Transitional Programme, for example, while trivially correct and good fun to aim at the Weekly Worker's SWP and Militant (SP) 'allies', farcically still itself misses the whole point of why the Fourth International posturing was such a treacherous and catastrophic disaster for mankind, and such an all-round abysmal failure.

Mis-diagnosing in 1938 the 'death agony' of the imperialist system, and expecting to bring it down by agitating for a sliding scale of wages, was only a fraction of the mind-numbing counter-revolutionary damage and confusion inflicted on the working class by Trotskyism.

By far the most harmful thrust of Trotsky's 'perspectives' intervention was to completely brainwash all workers attracted to the Fourth International against seeing any useful or worthwhile further international role against imperialism for the Soviet workers state to play.

Surely THE turning point in all history, on a par with the Bolshevik Revolution itself, was the demonstration by 1945 that the most reactionary, degenerate and savage conspiracy in the whole record of civilisation (the deliberate plan by the West to build up German imperialism again from the 1930s onwards to achieve the total destruction of the Soviet workers state so as to eliminate any possibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat coming to power ever again on the planet) was still not strong enough to wipe out the planned socialist state, regardless of all the appalling bureaucratic weaknesses and mistakes afflicting the USSR caused by its tragic Stalinist Revisionist leadership.

As a result of that monumental epoch-making triumph for the dictatorship of the proletariat by 1945 in spite of facing the mightiest and most ruthlessly competent war terror machine in all imperialist history virtually single-handed (Western imperialism did not start seriously taking on Nazi Germany's vast armed forces until June 1944), world development then took another massive turn with the enforced dismantling of the physical colonial control over the planet by the European empires; with the opportunity to build more workers states in East Europe, etc; & above all with the guarantee of eventual success for the Chinese Revolution, which in turn helped allow the titanic victory of the Vietnamese Revolution directly over the new imperialist world power (the USA) and the Korean Revolution to survive, and more indirectly helped the Cuban Revolution to survive, etc, etc, etc.

But here was Trotsky in 1938 urging the international working class to hate and attack the Soviet workers state as much or even more than the Nazi German imperialist state, repeatedly virtually identifying the two. Western war conspiracy leads the USSR too!!!

"The revolutionary elements within the bureaucracy, only a small minority, reflect, passively it is true, the socialist interests of the proletariat.

"The fascist, counter-revolutionary elements, growing uninterruptedly, express with even greater consistency the interests of world imperialism."

Calling for the overthrow of the "bureaucratisation of a backward and isolated workers state", Trotsky warns that this "new ruling layer", this "all-powerful privileged caste", would become "ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie" if it was not overthrown.

Just seven years before the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR achieved the greatest-ever working-class feat of arms over imperialism in 1945, and thereby ensuring the equally colossal military triumph of the Chinese Revolution replacing Western imperialist domination with the dictatorship of the proletariat too, here was Trotskyism urging active hatred and disruption of the USSR and the Comintern, exactly the supreme aim of world imperialism at that precise moment!

"As in fascist countries, from which Stalin's political apparatus does not differ save in more unbridled savagery .... the impetus to the Soviet workers revolutionary upsurge will probably be given by events outside the country. The struggle against the Comintern on the world arena is the most important part today of the struggle against the Stalinist dictatorship",

etc, etc, etc.

But the Weekly Worker finds no fault at all with any of this. Why? Because WW comes from the same vicious petty-bourgeois stable of anti-communism as does the Trotskyite movement.

Here, in a piece allegedly baiting the Alliance Trots for their failure to understand[] anything about the SA's need for a 'revolutionary' perspective if further electoral humiliation is to be avoided from appearing to the working class as no better than warmed-up (left Labour) reformists, the CPGB rump takes aim at the most notorious historical failure in cowardly class-collaborative Trotskyite 'perspectives', and shoots itself in the foot.

Not the slightest understanding do these Alliance 'communist' posturers have of the plainly obvious real historical crime of Trotsky's Fourth International middle-class 'revolutionary' opportunism, - namely in trying to undermine international working class support for the real anti-imperialist perspective of 1938 that despite its handicaps from Stalinist Revisionist stupidity, the Soviet workers state could nevertheless still rout the world's greatest imperialist warmongering conspiracy ever, and, on the strength of exposing this further degenerate rottenness of the imperialist system and the virtues of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, could in turn encourage and help further anti-imperialist revolutionary advances in the world (which is exactly what happened after the war in the overthrow of Europe's physical colonial empires, the Chinese Revolution, etc, etc, etc).

That would have been the realistic perspective to encourage international working class revolutionism with, and to it could and should have been added some constructive criticism of Stalinist revisionism's already glaring failings in THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING which was the Comintern's real crime in the Spanish Civil War, deluding the working class that a coalition of 'anti-fascist' forces around Republican petty-bourgeois parliamentarianism could save Spain from bestial reactionary dictatorship.

The 'Popular Front' was crap theory and a wrong perspective then, and it remains so today where it still rules anti-Marxist and anti-communist circles such as the Socialist Alliance with its class-collaborative attitude towards the Labour Party (see below).

But the petty-bourgeois emotional anti-proletarian dictatorship hysteria of the Trotskyites at that time obliterated with anti-communism any hope of a constructive exposure of Stalinism's weaknesses and mistakes, as it still does today.

All the propaganda had to be about the Soviet workers state deliberately "strangling the Spanish Revolution", which was a completely idiotic description of Revisionist stupidity in Spain. But it is this irrational middle-class recoil from possible mistakes which a proletarian dictatorship might make which still rules to this day in all sections of the Socialist Alliance (and even wider throughout the 57 varieties of Trotskyism, anarchism, and Revisionism), thus leaving the Stalinist disaster still not properly analysed and overcome in the international workers movement, a rational Marxist explanation still unable to make progress against all manner of anti-communist hysterics. Trot paranoia was worse than Stalinism's. The CPGB itself cannot begin to grasp the real fault in the Transitional Programme perspectives because of its own anti-communist bile befogging the brain. Thus what actually happened to Trotsky's perspective, completely missing what was going to be the main framework of anti-imperialist struggle for the next 50 years and the main arena for trying to constructively improve upon the truly flawed Stalinist Revisionist view of the world’s long-term future (the anti-revolutionary idiocy of 'peaceful roads to socialism' and 'imperialism no longer able to economically re-expand' etc, etc, (see EPSR 2001 Perspectives document)), simply does not register with the Weekly Worker middle class mentality which wishes to know nothing about any workers-state successes in the 20th century but knows only about some "slave states" which existed then but "now fortunately no more", etc, etc.

The crippling problem of having a wrong perspective on the next possibilities for anti-imperialist struggle in the world is not remotely addressed by the CPGB pompously issuing sterile academic lectures about the formal 'need' for both a maximum and a minimum programme.

Merely abstract descriptions that a communist programme needs to provide a dynamic road map, endlessly debated and re-debated through actually changing conditions, to achieve the revolutionary goal by the quickest, least-costly but most reliable route possible (which the WW almost said, but for its stylistic constipation) are completely useless. And just saying that it is vital to correctly examine the period we are in, and the balance of class forces, for a successful revolutionary perspective to be outlined, is equally sterile if a completely wrong analysis is made, or, even worse in the CPGB's case, no firm or clear analysis is made at all in spite of all the build-up bluster. Apart from the WW's usual defeatist whining about this still being "an inhospitable climate for revolutionaries" and moaning about the "official workers movement still exhibiting a tectonic drift to the right", etc.,  there is no committed analysis at all about how the international imperialist economic crisis will end up, how Labour Party reformist 'stranglehold' will be brought to a close, or in what form the socialist revolution will actually take place. Noticing the degeneracy of Labour's internal democracy, and the popularity of anarchist views now, is mere description, and provides not a scrap of perspective at all.

Saying that a parliamentary reformist route to the socialist revolution is impossible does explain something, at least, but, once again, it is mere 'revolutionary' posturing if not accompanied by any attempt at all to describe in what conditions the socialist revolution can actually come about in Britain.

Boldly (?) asking for no less than a 'Bolshevik' programme for the Alliance gets absolutely nowhere either, if no specific 'Bolshevik' programme for Britain is then spelled out.

And longwinded attempts at academic exhibitionism, showing off the CPGB's feeble grasp that Lenin 'merely modified' the Bolsheviks' minimum perspective on state power ("the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" effectively realised (as far as it was ever going to be) by the dual-power Soviet authority standing behind the provisional bourgeois government during the first months after February 1917), rather than abandoned it as the Trots allege, also tell us nothing about what the CPGB envisage as the conditions for the forthcoming socialist revolution in Britain.

Incidentally, Lenin far from wanted to prolong the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry as "the lynchpin which joined the minimum and maximum sections of the programme", as the CPGB totally falsely allege, pretending that "the Bolsheviks were committed to using the salient of state power to help spark the socialist revolution in the countries of advanced capitalism", thereby further promoting the fake-'left' lunacy that no sane Marxism would ever have dreams of trying to build socialism in backward Russia, but would wait for "the advanced workers of the West" to do it first, "as Marx always intended" they ludicrously and misleadingly add.

But as early as April, 1917, within five days of Lenin arriving back in Russia, from his long years of exile, his Letter on Tactics was already agitating to split the 'democratic dictatorship' (embodied in Soviet dual power behind the bourgeois provisional government) in order to rescue the working class from the 'revolutionary defencist' trap of chauvinism into which the peasant petty-bourgeoisie was already falling. Already, after only a few weeks of dual power, Lenin was becoming convinced that the 'democratic dictatorship' formula of the minimum programme had already been completely by-passed by reality, and that if it was to take power on its own, detached from the provisional bourgeois government, it could only become a reactionary influence on the revolution.

Quoting Goethe, Lenin polemicises against Kamenev: "Theory my friend is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life", and then goes on:

First. The question of "completion" of the bourgeois-democratic revolution is stated wrongly. The question is put in an abstract, simple, so to speak one-colour, way, which does not correspond to the objective reality. To put the question this way, to ask now "whether the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed" and say no more, is to prevent oneself from seeing the exceedingly complex reality, which is at least two-coloured. This is in theory. In practice, it means surrendering helplessly to petty-bourgeois revolutionism.

Indeed, reality shows us both the passing of power into the hands of the bourgeoisie (a "completed" bourgeois-democratic revolution of the usual type) and, side by side with the real government, the existence of a parallel government which represents the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry". This "second government" has itself ceded the power to the bourgeoisie, has chained itself to the bourgeois government.

Is this reality covered by Comrade Kamenev's old Bolshevik formula, which says that "the bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed"?

It is not. The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all. It is dead. And it is no use trying to revive it.

I am deeply convinced that the Soviets will make the independent activity of the masses a reality more quickly and effectively than will a parliamentary republic (I shall compare the two types of state in greater. detail in another letter). They will more effectively, more practically and more correctly decide what steps can be taken towards socialism and how these steps should be taken. Control over a bank, the merging of all banks into one, is not yet socialism, but it is a step towards socialism. Today such steps are being taken in Germany by the Junkers and the bourgeoisie against the people. Tomorrow the Soviet will be able to take these steps more effectively for the benefit of the people if the whole state power is in its hands.

What compels such steps?

Famine. Economic disorganisation. Imminent collapse. The horrors of war. The horrors of the wounds inflicted on mankind by the war.

Comrade Kamenev concludes his article with the remark that "in a broad discussion he hopes to carry his point of view, which is the only possible one for revolutionary Social-Democracy if it wishes to and should remain to the very end the party of the revolutionary masses of the proletariat and not turn into a group of Communist propagandists".

It seems to me that these words betray a completely erroneous estimate of the situation. Comrade Kamenev contraposes to a "party of the masses" a "group of propagandists". But the "masses" have now succumbed to the craze of "revolutionary" defencism. Is it not more becoming for internationalists at this moment to show that they can resist "mass" intoxication rather than to "wish to remain" with the masses, i.e., to succumb to the general epidemic? Have we not seen how in all the belligerent countries of Europe the chauvinists tried to justify themselves on the grounds that they wished to "remain with the masses"? Must we not be able to retrain for a time in the minority against the "mass" intoxication? Is it not the work of the propagandists at the present moment that forms the key point for disentangling the proletarian line from the defencist and petty bourgeois "mass" intoxication? It was this fusion of the masses, proletarian and non-proletarian, regardless of class differences within the masses, that formed one of the conditions for the defencist epidemic. To speak contemptuously of a "group of propagandists" advocating a proletarian line does not seem to be very becoming.

Far from wanting to preserve the notional theory of the 'democratic dictatorship' as any kind of 'lynchpin', and to hold back from steps towards the socialist revolution, Lenin is already by early April charting the path towards a revolutionary challenge to the 'revolutionary defencist' chauvinism gripping the Soviets via winning significant enough Bolshevik support in the Soviets to set up a socialist state under the dictatorship of the proletariat, a course when then dominates the rest of the year 1917 which even any half-brained reading of Lenin’s works will richly confirm a billionfold.

And in these remarks (and in the next three volumes of his collected works), Lenin describes the real-world situation and thereby provides the whole of the perspective necessary, repeated and elaborated upon hundreds of times subsequently: namely, only the socialist revolution, only the dictatorship of the proletariat, can rescue mankind from this insoluble inter-imperialist war conflict. "Famine; economic disorganisation; imminent collapse; the horrors of war; the horrors of the wounds inflicted on mankind by the war", these will "compel" the steps to the socialist revolution by gaining Bolshevik leadership in the Soviets, defeating the 'revolutionary defencism' chauvinist illusions that the majority peasants and fake 'lefts' were already falling for inside the Soviets.

But search the thousands of words of the CPGB advocacy of a 'revolutionary perspective' for the Socialist Alliance in vain. There simply is no perspective. No one is any the wiser at the end of their academic posturing about exactly how or why a socialist revolution will be the only answer to imperialist crisis. And the WW section explaining that "Labour can’t be wished away" piles up only total reformist confusion rather than any 'revolutionary perspective' clarity. As in:

We favour systematic work in the ranks of the Labour Party. We believe that under certain conditions electoral support can be offered to it. Equally the leadership of the party could be approached for joint work and political cooperation. Were times and constitutions to change, it could be a principled tactic to attempt to affiliate.

This will require time, patience, the right strategy and tactical skill. We must stand against any suggestions that we should dismiss Labour as one undifferentiated reactionary bloc. We must learn how to use internal tensions in this party to promote the project of working class independence and genuine socialism.

Similarly, we should have 'done a Hackney' nationwide. Labour candidates should have been approached to state openly where they stood on the SABA priority pledges. Electoral support backed up with independent campaigning should have been conducted for those who were prepared to endorse. No support should have been offered to those who refused. This approach makes far more sense than wasting our time with meaningless debates over whether the leftwinger Dennis Skinner is sufficiently rightwing to allow us to stand against him (an SA executive committee in the lead-up to the election filled up its time with this rather esoteric discussion). Skinner, along with all the rest of the Labour candidates asking for the support of our class, should have been approached with the SA's priority pledges. By his response, he defines himself as leftwing or not leftwing, as being worthy or not worthy of our support.

Yet at the start of this section, the CPGB was complaining (see earlier quote) that the Alliance got the bird from the electorate because it was seen as merely "wrapping itself in old Labour clothes".

But how is this correct observation in the slightest changed by all this abstract CPGB posturing, supposedly offering a "full revolutionary programme", to the Alliance which is totally devoid of any real content or intelligible perspectives for the transformation.????

The Alliance 'priority pledges' are just the same old 'left Labour' demands which have been trying vainly to put 'extreme reformist pressure' on the Labour leadership for 100 years.

How will this new proposed Socialist Alliance approach to Labour differ in effect or outcome from every previous historical attempt by fake-'lefts' to achieve a 'revolutionary breakthrough' by supposedly 'subtle' influences and covert entryism???

It won't be different. It will be absolutely identical. And it will be routed just as surely as all previous 'revolutionary' attempts to 'take over' the Labour Party in its history.

And that failure is certain for exactly the same reason that these fake-'lefts' have virtually reached imbecile rock bottom with their ridiculous 'revolutionary' posturing. In a nutshell: without revolutionary theory, there will never be any revolutionary practice.

Marxist science uniquely provides the working class with its own complete revolutionary philosophy for totally taking over the whole world and leading civilisation to a completely transformed and incomparably superior existence, a planned socialist planet run by workers states for the equal benefit of the earth and all its inhabitants, steadily developing in harmony and cooperation towards a communist existence where intelligent work will be every person's prime need, not duty, and endless further development of human understanding of everything under the sun will provide limitless scope for everyone to shine and succeed as far as their personality, talent, and ambition want to take them, in any field of science and creative endeavour they choose.

But that sole scientific socialism is indivisibly grounded on the equally tested Marxist understanding that winning the historic class war against the capitalist bourgeoisie and the remnants of feudal landowning via revolution is the only possible way that the existing set-up of monopoly-imperialist domination of the world can be overthrown.

The sole reason that the Labour Party exists in history is precisely to be set up as 'the workers party' in Britain (and similar 'reformist' parties in other countries) purely to ensure that this Marxist science of how the world really works and can be truly transformed, should NEVER get a grip in the working class.

These fake-'lefts' have exactly the same petty bourgeois aims in life. Their 'Marxist' posturing is entirely calculated, and endlessly recalculated, to ensuring that any 'communist' leanings in workers should be recruited into these bogus 'Marxist' sects routinely, and there left to fester aimlessly and mis-educatedly towards gradual total demoralisation and Revisionist/Trotskyist confusion. This renewed gibberish from the fake 'revolutionary' wing of the fake 'Socialist Alliance' provides just another classic example of how this treacherous and disarming stunt is pulled off. The CPGB witter on about 'recreating the National Left Wing Movement' which practised a CP-inspired entryism into the Labour Party in the 1920s. But a) it totally failed; b) it only succeeded in corrupting the Communist Party further and further towards 'left reformist illusions' in Parliamentary roads to socialism, and further and further away from Marxist science which understands that revolution is the ultimate medium of all meaningful social change from class epoch to class epoch, and indeed the ultimate medium of all change in every phenomenon of nature; and c) now is a completely different epoch from the 1920s anyway, especially for collapsing British imperialist positions in the world, then still surviving (just about); now almost completely vanished, with colossally disastrous economic consequences to come when the coming imperialist markets collapse from the regular periodic 'surplus' or 'over-production' of monopoly-accumulated investment capital finally breaks, taking the world into another catastrophic 1930s slump, inevitably followed by something like inter-imperialist World War III.

A new NLWM period will not be the issue. Overthrowing the weakest link in the warmongering imperialist chain, as happened to the Russian ruling class in 1917, will be.

Now that is a revolutionary perspective, quite specific about how Labour and the 'lefts' will repeat the 'defencist' chauvinism exactly as the treacherous turncoats of the 'Marxist' Second International did in World War I, creating Leninism as the new world socialist science. Spread the EPSR and build Leninism, not this anti-Marxist 'Alliance' fraud.

Tragically, the SLP's response to its electoral humiliation for also doing no better than wearing Labour's 'left reformist' old clothes, was even sicker than the Alliance's. Scargill simply biliously declared that black was white and that not only had the SLP got more votes than in 1997 (a farcical deception since 114 candidates get 57,288 votes between them this time while only 64 candidates pulled in 52,110 votes in 1997, a much higher if still completely derisory percentage of the poll),  but that it had also outpolled the Socialist Alliance (a direct lie, both in terms of an equally derisory total vote and an equally derisory percentage of the poll).

The SA’s 1.69% and the SLP's 1.42% are testimony to their equal anti-Marxist failure to mount any serious ideological challenge to the international imperialist crisis which is relentlessly casting ever-longer shadows over everyone’s lives.

These non-revolutionary opportunists have absolutely nothing to say to the working class. If 'left' reformist pressures amounted to a socialist transformation of Britain, then 100 years of 'left Labour' and 'left TUC' posturing, not to mention generation after generation of 'revolutionary entryism' into Labour would surely have got the job done decades ago.

But the whole 'reformist pressure' perspective is just a sick joke, a conscious treacherous disarming of the working class to precisely make sure that genuine revolutionary understanding of the world should never gain a hold in Britain.

These SA and SLP wretches are tomorrow's Second (Marxist) International 'defencist' chauvinists and counter-revolutionary betrayers (the Kautskyites, Martovites, Plekhanovites, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, etc, etc, of the new period),  the same old Revisionist and Trotskyite tricks of countless past betrayals. They haven't a worthwhile, meaningful perspective to rub together between them. 

It is all just one long class-collaborative opportunist crawl behind yesterday's 'left reformist pressure' fakery of the reactionary old Labour Party. It is all doomed brain-rot which is just too philistine or too terrified to even recognise the approaching imperialist international revolutionary crisis, let alone make any sensible perspectives analysis of what is going to happen, and what will need to be done to bring about a socialist revolution. 

Build Leninism.

EPSR supporters.

World Socialist Review
(edited extracts from s variety or anti-proletarian struggles).

BRIGHTON BOMB WAS A TURNING POINT --  MAGEE

FORMER republican prisoner Pat Magee, in an interview with the Sunday Business Post, has spoken publicly about the bombing of the Tory Party's 1984 annual conference in Brighton and of his support for the peace process.

"In lieu of the capacity to wipe out the IRA, the longterm strategy was to depict us as criminals while containing the war within the North," he told the Post's Tom McGurk. "As long as the war was kept in that context, they could sustain the years of attrition. But in the early 1980s we succeeded in destroying both strategies. The Hunger Strike destroyed the notion of criminalisation and the Brighton bombing destroyed the notion of containment.

"I regret the deaths at Brighton," said Magee. "I deeply regret that anybody had to lose their lives, but at the time did the Tory ruling class expect to remain immune from what their frontline troops were doing to us? From the mid-1970s on, the two principal considerations for the British in dealing with the IRA were criminalisation and containment. 

"Until Brighton we were not being taken seriously by the British political establishment, we were trapped in the acceptable level of violence strategy and it's important to remember that the only way we could have lost this war was to be trapped in indefinitely fighting it.

"After Brighton, anything was possible and the British for the first time began to look very differently at us; even the IRA itself, I believe, began to fully accept the priority of the campaign in England." 

When asked about the reported anger of Norman Tebbit's wife, permanently paralysed in the explosion, Magee said: "Mrs Tebbit is entitled to her anger. But on a wider scale I must ask were the Tory classes in Britain completely oblivious to what they were inflicting on our communities? Did they never think that one day their turn might come?"

Reflecting on the republican struggle and the developing peace process, Pat Magee said: "The last 30 years has been a process where we gained or garnered political strength. In fact, the military campaign facilitated that development. The Hunger Strike accelerated our political nexus; it began all this. It showed people how much could be achieved politically. Of course at the time we had the ballot box and armalite strategy, the halfway house so to speak, but that too was a transitional phase. If you look at Irish history, particularly the republican story, what defeated us in the past was lack of unity, especially between the soldiers and the politicians.

"This time around there is absolute determination to maintain that unity. The decommissioning scenario, for example, was intended to fragment this and it was a deeply frustrating brake on progress. But at the end of the day you had to carry your own support base. And if anything we are here today where we are because that task was carried out successfully. What we have done is to use time against an attritional backdrop to develop politically."

Letters

Weekly Worker, BBC, Socialist Labour Party and The Guardian, ITV, Socialist Alliance, Liverpool Echo, The Sun, and British National Party, all in their own specialised way, dump their cart loads of anti-Communist, counter-revolutionary, pro-capitalist philosophical garbage into the working class.

A Letter from a Liverpool SLP candidate to the Weekly Worker, 19th April 2001, makes the point.

... "I am fed up with the way the left are constantly arguing among themselves. Unless they learn to get along with each other they will never be a serious threat to the right. Unless they start to understand that the only way they are going to get elected is to play the same games as the right does. In other words they must become like chameleons, constantly changing their colours and ditching the word 'socialist', 'socialism', 'communism', 'Marxism' and all the 'isms'."

Having complained - "I am fed up with the way the left are constantly arguing among themselves"  --  this wannabe "chameleon" of the SLP immediately launches a pitiful anti-Communist argument of his own. "I know the old left will be mortified by this, but when are they going to realise than there is a new type of leftwing activist who is willing to play the right at their own game? What's with the names anyway? You can still be a Marxist, communist, or Trot without using the names."

It gets worse. "... The next resurgence will come from within the community. It is the community that we should be working in...If we don't learn to do this, using the same tactics as the, devious middle class, right wing council officers we shall always remain a spent force. "

Of course, one SLP parliamentary candidate sounding off in Liverpool, doesn't signal the end of Marxist Leninist internationalism by any stretch of ignorant wishful thinking, but it says a lot about the 'right' wing pessimism that is being hatched in that particular part of the 'left' swamp under the 'educational' direction of Lalkar revisionism around Scargill.

What's more, the "old" and not so "old" 'lefts' will not be "mortified " by the suggestion they should 'play the right at their own game' at all. The spectrally challenged SLP National Executive Committee, dancing round Scargill's electoral 'pole of attraction' have recently approved a manifesto that hides its 'right' wing politics behind a red cover and a cynical pretence to be some sort of useful 'socialism '.

It starts, not with an internationalist call to the working class, but with a nationalist call to '... the millions throughout Britain...'  it attempts to bury the class struggle and the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat, with at least 97! references to 'Britain' and all things supposedly 'British'. E.g. 'British workers', 'British people', 'British pensioners', 'British householders' and so on. Just when you begin to think you've picked up a BNP pamphlet or that the author might be a Blaireite telling us "the class war is over", you eventually get a mention of 'working class children' and surprise, surprise, 'the British working class'. With only these two grudging mentions of the existence of a working class, the message couldn't be clearer, its 'Britain' first!

Scargill's often repeated, tongue-in-cheek claims that he's not a 'little Englander', is only true because what he is, is a 'little Brit.' Its no exaggeration, the 'British' nation imagery in this manifesto is massive and not accidental or merely a convenient geographical reference, it is intentional reformist, British national chauvinist propaganda. The SLP are saying that 'the people', of 'our nation ', 'as a whole ' only need to elect them, in order that 'our railways, 'our indigenous energy resources', 'our power stations', 'our engineering industry ', our economy, etc, can be run for 'the nation as a whole ' including, of course, the capitalist class.

The SLP though, are slyly pretending that everything of importance and value isn't really owned and controlled by a capitalist class and protected by its brutal state. They are pretending that the working class will not need to smash the murderous, corrupt, and warruined state in order to command 'industry', and the 'economy'. They do this in full knowledge that the best tried and tested tool for frustrating proletarian dictatorship, is bourgeois national chauvinist sentiment.

At the top of page 21 we read: 'Rebuilding and restoring our economy (!) can only be dome by regenerating our deep mine coal industry, (!) redeveloping our battered steel industry (!) and ending all coal and steel imports into Britain.' That should set the nationalist pulses racing and being a party of 'direct action', don't be surprised to see the SLP agitating for a picket of the docks to encourage some trade war stunts.  I

It gets worse. 'restoring our economy', (whatever that means) can only be done if we re-establish a British motor car industry with a socialist perspective.'('British', 'national', 'socialist perspective', not internationalist proletarian dictatorship perspective). 'Economically, if the French and Germans can each support three major motor car manufacturers, then Britain which gave birth to the industrial revolution (mother country???) can surely sustain its own motor industry, (national envy) but one which meets social and environmental needs.'

How would 'supporting' manufacturers', without a workers dictatorship, possibly meet social and environmental needs generally unless we are talking about the needs of capitalism? It's particularly ridiculous in 'Britain', (the mother country), 'which gave birth to the industrial revolution', that is, capitalist imperialist plunder and slavery, two world wars, and enough deranged racist national chauvinist ideology to brainwash most of the planet, especially 'British' labour movement and fake 'socialist leaderships'. Worse yet, 'We have to rebuild again, from the perspective of social need our engineering industries, and restore the mighty shipbuilding industry which was once the envy of the world.' So, Johnny foreigner has to be envious of our 'mighty' fleet.

All this is about as far as it's possible to get from the Marxist understanding articulated in the Inaugural address of the first International Workingmen's Association of 1864. 

"If the emancipation of the working class requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure?" 

And about as far as it's possible to get from Scargill nationalism, is the place to be now. JD

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

Unending reactionary subversion by US imperialism against Cuba tries to repeat the CIA-Vatican Solidarnosc stunt which turned the clock back in Poland to religious primitivism business corruption, and mass prostitution.

ON May 16, Republican Senator Jesse Helms presented a new bill, anticipated for three months by Jorge Mas Cantos, president of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), to distribute $100 million USD among groups considered as potential instruments against the Cuban government.

According to Helms, by means of this bill, the U.S. president would be authorized to send money, particularly to self-employed workers on the island.

According to Reuters, approval of the initiative would lead to Washington providing direct funding for the first time in 40 years for dissident groups in Cuba. In fact, for some years now, it has been no secret that Washington has been financing subversive activities against the Cuban government since 1959. It has now been admitted that $10 million USD has been directed to that end. But those who should have received it say that a good part remains in Miami.

On February 7, Mas Santos outlined CANF's plan for President George Bush II,  to be presented by Helms, head of the Foreign Relations Committee, and other congress members, to the Inter-American Foundation. This group enjoys a fat income, officially supplied by the Cuban-American lobby created 15 years ago by Ronald Reagan, president at the time.

In his presentation, the son of Mas Canosa revealed that the plan had been drawn up to counteract those people (in diverse sectors of the United States), who are really more interested in preserving what they call stability on the island.

He added that to those ends, they would cultivate an emerging civil society, with financial and other means of support. The CANF president also revealed that his intention is to act like the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, which. financed and utilized other methods to back "democratic opposition" in Poland.

Presenting the, bill, Helms disclosed (in line with Mas Santos' scenario) that he wants to instigate an act similar to the one passed in the 1980's by the United States to help the anti-Communist 'Solidarity' movement in Poland, the news agencies reported.

Senator Helms drew up the 1996 legislation that, among other regulations described as extraterritorial, prohibits Washington from normalizing relations with Cuba without the U.S. Congress certifying that a 'democratic government' exists in Havana. That bill was drafted by lawyers working for the Cuban-American Bacardi, Fanjui, and Mas Canosa families, as on this occasion.

In his diatribe, Mas Santos stated that programs should be devised that would provide direct funding and material resources to the democratic opposition and independence groups and individuals in Cuba such as computers, printers, telephones, cellular phones, fax machines, Internet devices and the latest communications equipment, as well as cordless technology, satellites and more.

Helms' bill, following that line, and upping the stakes, would authorize the channeling of $100 million USD over a four-year period, in cash, foodstuffs, medicines, computers, telephones, fax and other office supplies and education materials for opposition groups and non-governmental organizations on the island, EFE, AFP and Reuters reported.

Supporting Helms' bill, called Act of Solidarity with Cuba, are Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat AI Gore's vice presidential running mate in the recent elections; and other senators like Robert Torricelli, Bob Graham, George Allen and John Ensign. Congress members Lincoln Diaz Balart and Ifiana Ros Lehtinen will take up the task in the House of Representatives.

In February, Mas Santos also revealed other aspects of the plan, which he now prefers to manage with more discretion, according to generally well-informed sources. He stated that the new policy should promote free enterprise in Cuba, by fortifying and expanding the combative and heavily repressed self-employed sector and private property owners of family restaurants and lodgings, independent campesinos, private day care centers, refugees taken in by the Church and other independently financed enterprises.

He also declared that these sectors should be exempt from the blockade and that a U.S. fund, directed by recognized nongovernmental organizations, with the purpose of granting loans for establishing private businesses, should be established. Another fund would be utilized to offer scholarships for study grants and business administration training. It was acknowledged that those sources are central to their subversive intentions.

According to The New York Times, Cubans eligible to receive such funding would extend from self-employed workers to "political" prisoners, dissidents, independent economists, journalists and members of religious groups, as well as agricultural groups that in this way could buy and sell on the U.S. market.

Critics of the bill in the United States stated that aid would make those sectors assisted look like Washington's paid agents, given that the U.S. treats Cuba as its enemy. Those people would come to be enemy agents and face the consequences as such. The bill contains provisions to invest in counteracting the blocking of Radio Marti and TV Marti, (U.S. government broadcasting stations) by the Cuban government, as well as trade unions on the island.

The program advanced by Mas Santos also anticipates the purchasing of more powerful transmitters for those two stations and to help groups of Cubans to organize trade unions in cooperation with the AFL-CIO, a trade union organization seen as having been neutralized years ago by the U.S. system.

Aspects perhaps forgotten at one point but now incorporated  would oblige President George W. Bush's government to seek UN approval of a resolution calling on Cuba to respect human rights, free political prisoners, and to hold free elections.

The new proposal by Helms and the other Congress members benefiting from customary monetary contributions, is considered as a new effort to distance political debate on the blockade, which has come under intense pressure from companies interested in trading with Cuba, especially in the pharmaceutical, agricultural and food sectors, Reuters recognized.

It is expected that critics of the real economic warfare imposed by Washington for 40 years and of this recent initiative, like Senator Christopher Dodd, the highestranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, will vigorously oppose the bill which has the publicly stated support of George W. Bush. Dodd stated that the important thing is to help the Cuban people by ending the economic blockade and the prohibition on travel to Cuba.

Helms commented that his new proposal does not intensify or relax the so-called embargo imposed on Cuba, although it would allow the Bush administration to grant licenses for donations from U.S. citizens with the objective of securing Cubans.

Forestalling the opposition, he didn't hesitate to observe that this is an investment which would reap benefits for the U.S. economy, in the same way as investments made in Eastern Europe, which have resulted in immeasurable benefits.

Fellow Senator Charles Schumer made a wise comment on that, by stating that Cuba is not Poland.