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
 No 1102
September 4 2001

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Ignoring the imperialist international REVOLUTIONARY economic crisis while pretending to 'solve' the incurable racist and nationalist problems which that crisis is relentlessly producing in ever-greater volumes,  ‑ ‑  is just falling for every trick in the book of bourgeois ideological diversions, and playing right into the hands of capitalist-class ruling circles everywhere, black and white. Migration is a capitalist-system racket, traditionally designed to be a pressure-valve for easing revolutionary tensions on the front lines of the global imperialist-exploitation viciousness, and further helping sow deliberate racist splits in the metropolitan proletariat at the same time. Persecution of migrants needs exposing, but the failure to denounce 'migration as a solution' as a rotten imperialist stunt just gives chauvinist backwardness an open goal. A league table of slavery crimes in world history is an equally stupid 'racist' diversion from identifying class war (against bourgeois. ruling classes of all colours) as the only real source of human progress. And silly black-nationalist 'political correctness' is letting Zionist class-war colonialism off the hook by just limiting the denunciation of it to merely a form of racist prejudice. Proletarian revolution is the inevitable and only answer to Zionism's colonisation of Palestine, not moral persuasion by 'race awareness' political correctness. The anti-communist fake 'left' is the main agency for keeping the real Marxist-Leninist philosophy from the working class which it will need.

The all-out racist and nationalist conflicts that the world is clearly heading towards (anti-Zionist uproar at Durban conference; slavery compensation; Australia shuts door to migrant ship; asylum-seekers under siege at Channel Tunnel and at reception centres; Jewish colonisation of Palestine ever-closer to international war; etc, etc) make it more essential than ever for political perspectives to get the global economic crisis right.

Can the slump-forces be 'reformed' away or can't they????

If the essential nature of history is steady reform, then the politics of conventional 'progressive morality' will continue to hold sway. If the essential nature of history is revolutionary, then all 'enlightened' conduct on current world problems can quickly be demonstrated as nothing but a thinly veiled cover for counter-revolutionary reformism to continue to hold back the international proletariat from the anti-imperialist revolution that is crying out to be made.

Some of the disabling 'politically correct' nonsense is analysed below briefly, such as the ridiculous Durban attempt to re-label the slavery epoch of world economic history as an issue of 'racism', thereby striking at the whole class-war understanding of the Marxist science of human progress. (Even more stupidly, smug middle-class black-nationalist reactionaries are seeking to take this diversionary gift to current continuing international imperialist CLASS domination into skin-pigment point-scoring about which 'race' had most worst slavery to its credit and how much they should now pay for it. But in the whole of history, of course, with the vast majority of the people who have ever lived on earth being brownskinned, 99% of the slavery in civilisation's records will be traceable to brownskinned perpetrators).

Obviously, the attempt to make European imperialism pay up for its most recent capitalist slave-trade has the makings of a useful money-spinner, but for what purpose? To help current reactionary black bourgeois cliques stay in power in Africa, etc???? This wretched 'race' diversion just gets worse and worse, completely playing into the hands of the contemporary CLASS-RULE international imperialist economic system with which the monopoly bourgeoisie are wrecking civilisation NOW.

But before examining these PC-confusion diversions, the anti-revolutionary essence of fake 'leftism' needs looking at, still trying to destroy Marxism on the most crucial question of all by pretending that its greatest revolutionary inspiration, that imperialist crisis will produce from within the capitalist system its own gravediggers, ‑ was just a hoax which Marx himself no longer believed in.

The worst death-trap facing the working class, luring it towards potential destruction in the chaos that unrestrained inter-imperialist economic trade-war will produce, comes from all the supposed 'socialist' groups, 'revolutionaries', and 'communists', posturing ever-more noisily on the fake 'left' with alleged 'Marxist' sympathies, which simply destroy the revolutionary essence of this sole scientific understanding of society.

Worse still are the small sects of cocky academic individuals who claim to have always been "upholding the banner of Marxism" in their years of anti-communist retreats and electoral opportunism, but who now deign to admit loftily that 'maybe' there is something in this capitalist crisis that the 'catastrophists' (i.e. the EPSR) go on about so much, but that a 'properly' Marxist communist approach is therefore needed 'if' this crisis turn out to be "comparable to the global depression of the 1930s", etc.

What follows, of course, is the most disastrous de-gutting of all the revolutionary philosophical content of Marxism that could be slimily inflicted on the working class by these mountebanks of petty-bourgeois opportunism.

Every variety of Trot and Revisionist fake 'leftism' is in on this treacherous fence sitting opportunism, hedging their bets about whether to turn to real revolutionary understanding or to continue with their wretched 'left reformist' kibbutzing around trade-union protests, anarchist actions, and debates on Labour legislation which endlessly and futilely tinkers with capitalism's domination of life in Britain, both at local and national government level.

But the pseudo-intellectualism of just one source of this middle-class obstructiveness to the development of real communist understanding will do as an example. Fresh from being properly roasted by the anarchists for the disgraceful fingering of Bakuninist street-fighters by the Weekly Worker as "the enemy within" and as nothing but "agents provocateurs for the police", the CPGB rump now turns from trying to defuse the revolutionary aspects of the Genoa massacre (see EPSR 1100), to pouring water on any notion that the capitalist world, slipping evermore clearly towards universal revolutionary crisis, could possibly start sparking off outbreaks of spontaneous revolutionary consciousness in the international proletariat. No such possibility, insist these organised anti-communist defeatists. ‑  the real 'enemy within'. Only through such 'established' and 'competent' heroes of existing 'socialist' theory, practice, and party organisation as the CPGB can the working class hope to make progress, these arrogant relics of Stalinist Revisionist chaos and bourgeois careerism imply.

What utter self-serving nonsense.

Of course the proletariat is going to need a disciplined Leninist party of revolutionary theory and practice to lead any worthwhile advance to working-class power on the collapsing wreckage of the capitalist social order; who, apart from openly anarchist anti-communists and openly bourgeois-reformist Revisionists has ever doubted it? 

But the whole history of Marxist-Leninist struggle suggests that the ever-present 57 varieties of 'socialist leadership', always trying to boss the proletariat (in best control-freak fashion during every major anti-capitalist upheaval there has ever been, ‑ have also always been wrong about everything, and have had to be FOUGHT AGAINST in order to develop and spread genuine revolutionary consciousness.

And what makes such a transformation possible, ousting the existing swamp of fake‑ 'left' opportunist compromise-with-capitalism and its lethally-treacherous 'democracy'????

The correct Marxist scientific understanding of the international balance of class and national forces (and therefore of the possible revolutionary paths ahead),  allied to the spontaneously erupting glimmers of revolutionary consciousness which the deepening capitalist crisis's own intolerable pressures have forced the proletariat and workers generally to begin to develop for themselves, leading them to start wanting to hear on a mass scale some correct answers to all of the questions they will begin to pose.

The idea that some pea-shooter small-circulation paper on the fake-'left', even the overwhelmingly 'dominant' Socialist Worker, ‑ can on its own undo the brainwashing power of literally hundreds of millions of press, radio and television productions swamping the working class every day, is pure fantasy.

The whole dialectical essence and beauty of Marx's philosophical science lies precisely in the fact that it is the capitalist system ITSELF which finally 'educates' the working class into no longer being prepared to live on under the old way, to exist just as exploitation-fodder for capitalist and landowner profiteering, or as cannon-fodder to help their ruling class fight inter-imperialist wars for strengthening the bosses monopoly-exploitation positions.

The entire 'Socialist Alliance' defeatist anti-communist swamp has done nothing but tell workers in practice that only slicker electoral promises of a more determined and radical 'left-reformist' nature than the 'left' of Labour can come up with, will give the working class the 'representation' it needs to at last introduce 'real socialism' to replace the capitalist system. Rot!

Everything is geared to reinforcing the bourgeois message that capitalism is stable and that 'democratic reforms' are the obvious way to try to change those aspects of the economy and social justice which working people find unfair or deficient, etc. Total garbage!

Internationally, the entire anti-Lenin swamp has long been writing off all anti-imperialist struggles as either 'ready for peaceful-settlement compromise' with imperialism, or cynically enjoying declaring that the 'one-superpower’ unchallengeable 'New World Order' has everywhere been "imposing peace settlements on failed revolts", etc. What idiocy!

These Trots and Revisionists are not into these 'compromises' or 'acceptance of failure' because of a realistic understanding that nothing else is possible at this stage of the international balance of class and national forces, but because their individualist petty-bourgeois mentalities actually flourish best in this endless hovering between fear of the dictatorship of the proletariat on one side, and fear but grudging respect for the ruthless might of the imperialist big bourgeoisie on the other side.

Thus the CPGB's belated acknowledgment that this all-powerful 'New World Order' might be facing unplanned economic difficulties simply crawls with ill-concealed doubt that mighty US imperialism really cannot 'impose' yet another 'solution', plus unconcealed contempt and fear of the idea of spontaneous proletarian revolutionary struggles breaking out everywhere for the obvious good of civilisation's future, ‑ and all couched in an arrogant, know-it-all academic posture which is actually quite hostile to any notion of a chaotic catastrophic and REVOLUTIONARY collapse of the 'New World Order', and even more hostile to the idea that new conscious revolutionary movements and parties might sweep forward on the basis of such spontaneous uprisings which would totally bypass and politically bury the fetid 'Alliances swamp of parliamentary class-compromise.

Here is a flavour of this typical Trot and Revisionist counter-revolutionary bet-hedging:

Begin quote

It may be that this phenomenon will turn out to be no more than a steep and generalised cyclical downturn. Astute management of monetary policy by central banks, appropriate fiscal stimulus from governments and other traditional panaceas will ensure that the problem is contained. That, at least, is what many orthodox economists and commentators in the bourgeois press are telling us and themselves, though it will be small comfort to the multitude of workers ‑ tens of thousands of them in Britain ‑ who are already experiencing the reality of sudden redundancy and unemployment.

Against this background, the paradigm of the 'new economy', in which the business cycle had effectively been banished and recession was something to read about in history books, became orthodox ideology. This hubris was, no doubt, in part a reflection of the implosion of the USSR and the apparent victory of 'liberal democracy', portrayed, absurdly, by the likes of Fukuyama as signifying the "end of history".

Now the situation is radically different, for it is the rapidly faltering US economy itself that is at the centre of the problem. On August 21 the Federal Reserve made its seventh cut in interest rates this year. At 3.5%, a full three points down from January's levels, the federal funds rate is now lower than it has been since April 1994, and chairman Greenspan is indicating that rates may have to fall even further to stave off recessionary, pressures.

The rationale is not difficult to work out. Company profits in nearly every sector are in steep decline and business investment in new means of production shows its biggest fall for more than 20 years. Corporate and individual indebtedness are at historically high levels. Judging by recently released revised figures, it turns out that both the productivity gains and the rising profits that characterised the boom years of the 'new economy' ‑ gains that led many enterprises to over-invest by acquiring cheap capital on the basis of ramped up stock valuations, and led to such phenomena as the mania for dotcom shares and tech stocks in general ‑  were somewhat overstated. By historical standards, the revised growth rate of around 2.5% in the second half of the decade was healthy enough, but not sufficient to justify the 'new economy' euphoria, which saw in the information technology revolution an epochal source of almost inexhaustible profit.

And then there is the dollar. Some are getting excited by recent falls. Given that the US current account deficit of around $450 billion last year is held by even the International Monetary Fund to be "unsustainable in the long term", and given the fact that funding this deficit soaks up nearly 65% of the world's net capital flows, this is perhaps understandable, with a shrinking US economy making dollar-denominated assets rather less attractive to international capital. But that capital must find a home somewhere. There is no doubt that steady inflows of foreign capital have played a significant role in underpinning the whole US economy over the last decade. One should not forget that as recently as July the currency reached a 16-year high and that some depreciation must be expected in current circumstances. Nor would a fall in the dollar necessarily spell entirely bad news for most of the metropolitan economies.

With interest rates already around zero, the Bank of Japan has no room for manoeuvre. Even were they not confronted by export-led failure and a mountain of unsold commodities, companies will not or cannot invest because of their straitened financial circumstances. Consumers will not buy when they see prices falling every day, and savers have to withhold ever larger sums from their disposable incomes to cover the lack of any meaningful return on their nest eggs. Japan's particular and seemingly  intractable local difficulties have obviously been exacerbated by the contraction in US and European demand for IT-related products.

At home, the consequences of a global downturn for the British economy are already becoming apparent in the closure or downsizing of enterprises, particularly those foreign companies involved in information technology and related industries. Manufacturing, along with a raft of other sectors, has already entered technical recession and the prospects of attaining the government's stated growth targets must be seen as poor. Politically,  this must surely impact on the claims by chancellor Gordon 'prudence' Brown that the era of boom and bust has been relegated to the past.   As usual, consumer confidence, traditionally a lagging indicator, gives the government some ground for unreasonable hope that the storm can be weathered.  

Given Brown's neo-Thatcherite determination not to run a deficit in order to finance Labour's much vaunted plans for public expenditure on health, education and other public services, any significant downturn in the UK economy will leave the government with big problems as it faces the task of winning a third term.

The necessarily brief and cursory panorama set out above indicates clearly enough that at this juncture international capital faces some serious problems; whether these problems are soluble by applying the nostrums of orthodox capitalist economics remains an open question.

To be sure, among some sections of the left, the catastrophists will gleefully be dusting off their doomsday scenarios and eagerly anticipating the 'Final' and 'inevitable' apocalyptic cataclysm that will, like a deus ex machina, bring about not just the collapse of the whole edifice of capitalism but somehow spontaneously lead to the development of socialist consciousness on the part of the working class. The theoretical poverty of this mechanical approach, not to mention its historical myopia and its rotten political passivity, are self-evident. In essence, it rests on the illusion that it will not be the historical self-activity and self-emancipation of the working class  ‑  as a class not just in, but for itself  ‑ but rather 'history' and the capitalist system itself (viewed abstractly) that will bring about the revolutionary transformation of society.

Leaving aside the period before 1857, when Marx and Engels themselves were enthused by the apparent possibility that commercial crises could by themselves create the preconditions for a revolutionary uprising of the proletariat, the catastrophists have not a theoretical peg on which to hang their faith in crisis in and of itself moving the working class in the direction of revolutionary socialism.

Others will see in current developments the proof of some particular theoretical postulate about overproduction, under-consumption, disproportionality or the declining rate of profit. All of these are not the causes but rather the effects, the symptoms, of a fundamentally contradictory and irrational system.

Clearly, where the failing rate of profit is concerned, it is true that adherence to the labour theory of value does oblige Marxists to accept the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as something inherent in the capitalist mode of production. But what Marx himself saw as merely a tendency ‑ against which a multitude of countervailing tendencies, particularly improvements in productivity arising out of new technologies and new means of production, could prevail  ‑  they are content mechanically to erect into an iron law, with, once again, its own comfortingly 'inevitabalist' implications for the class struggle. 

Capitalism's distinguishing facet, the ultimate source of crisis, is its subordination of production to the extraction and accumulation of surplus value: i.e., in the whole system of abstract labour, the very essence of the system. In this sense, therefore, crisis is not an event but an intrinsic, perennial condition. As Schumpeter memorably remarked, "This process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has to live in." This is surely what Marx and Engels meant when they referred to the fact that, "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones" (K Marx and F Engels, 'The Communist manifesto' Collected Works Vol 6, p487).

To theorise and fully understand this process is clearly a vital task, but theory by itself is not enough. As communists we must primarily be concerned with transforming this knowledge from theory into practice, equipping ourselves and the working class with the tools necessary to break the chains of a contradictory and irrational system that alienates us from one another and prevents us fulfilling our potential as human and therefore social beings. Foremost among those tools must be a revolutionary programme and a revolutionary party. Only thus can we transform the capitalists' crisis into a means of our own self-liberation. 

End quote

How wonderfully restrained and stable this imperialist world chaos can be made to sound, with the totally-anarchic and world-destroying ruthless greed and domineering of the monopoly-capitalist system, which has wrecked its own economy with its class-ridden nastiness, characterised as merely "somewhat overstated".

And the implications of this yet proving to be "comparable to the global depression of the 1930s"???. Well, it might make it more difficult for New Labour to win a third term in office, these 'Marxist' wiseacres announce. Is that a11???

And note the smug self-congratulation with which the CPGB's deluded (and unstated) 'position'(it kids itself it importantly occupies with the 'Socialist Alliance' is implicitly hinted at as being all of the 'revolutionary programme'- basis that the working class will need, should this imperialist economic hiccup really come to a ….

……to what, exactly? The CPGB is so degenerately reformist now, that it can no longer even postulate hypothetically that this almighty 'New World Order' might actually collapse into total revolutionary chaos.

Note also how the Communist Manifesto philosophy of 1848 is slyly revised out of existence as 'proper Marxism', not something which Marx, Engels ' or Lenin ever showed the slightest inclination to do. And how the categoric Marxist iron laws of demented surplus-capital accumulations, eventually always bringing the anarchy of the international free-market to total breakdown and revolutionary crisis, ‑ are reduced to mere "tendencies", supposedly, when 'Marxist philosophy is seen in the round'.
What diabolical lying calumnies, deceptions, and distortions. 

The worldwide CIA news-control, spreading constant disinformation and confusion above Marxism and communism, could hardly do a better job of undermining workers confidence in revolutionary socialist' philosophy than these so-called 'Marxist' middle-class posturers. 

Marxism has been subjected to 150 years of international brainwashing on workers by bourgeois ideology,  ‑  easily the most unique historical phenomenon in the whole history of civilisation,  ‑  precisely because it roars forth inspiringly, in every sentence, its belief that the increasingly degenerate development of the capitalist system itself will finally create the conditions for the transformation of the proletariat into the world's new ruling class, inevitably. And becoming conscious of THIS FACT, and therefore consciously building communist parties of proletarian dictatorship to carry out this unavoidable historical task, ‑ is the necessary subjective input which workers will have to supply, and will supply, after conscious political struggles, when circumstances at last put capitalism's head on the revolutionary chopping block.

It is at this very first role of revolutionary theory that this Trot and Revisionist swamp part company with Marxism-Leninism.

Of course there is no revolutionary party yet. Of course there is no revolutionary theory. And that is precisely because this Trot and Revisionist swamp dominates the 'left' of the labour movement with its rotten anti-communist defeatist traditions, the foulest mixture of Stalinism and Trotskyism which were monstrously bought off by modern imperialism to betray Leninism.  (See EPSR 2001 Perspectives, and countless past Reviews and ILWP Books publications ad infinitum).

But the EPSR’s weekly struggles for serious Marxist-Leninist understanding over the past 22 years on all world developments in this period (and on many older issues outside this period) are clearly far too accurate for the CPGB to dare to polemicise openly with the EPSR, ‑  and all other fake-'left' sects the same.

And infinitely more importantly, the spirit of Marxist revolutionary understanding and struggle is showing increasing signs of spontaneous life, awaiting convincing all-embracing new international revolutionary perspectives, in many areas of the planet such as Colombia, Nepal, Palestine, Ireland, Mexico, etc, and still hanging onto life, however faintly in terms of anti-imperialist crisis-understanding, in Vietnam, Cuba, China, etc.

The spontaneous effect on world revolutionary consciousness of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was incalculable. It was the subsequent party-organised theoretical and programmatic follow-up which proved to be the eventual disastrous zero, ‑  the rotten Stalinist-Revisionist tradition which spawned this present wretched anti-communist CPGB sect.

The spontaneous effect of world revolutionary consciousness of the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution had a similarly galvanising effect on the entire conscious political life of the planet, again reigniting a widespread international interest in Marxist-Leninist programme and party-building a thousand-fold. And once more it was the incumbent theoretical 'leadership' which let the international working-class down.
The present 'left' swamp in Britain, every sect, has an unbroken line of inheritance from 75 years of defeated Trotskyite and Stalinist theoretical bankruptcy and counter-revolutionary uselessness, letting most of the mighty gains of Leninist proletarian-dictatorship-understanding slip away entirely.

But despite all these never-ending attempts to busy it or discredit it, the inspirational genius of Marxist-Leninist understanding remains as potentially strong as ever:

Begin quote

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to lace with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and, his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reaactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world-literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e.  to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground-what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class.
A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called tip by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity  ‑  the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises art prevented.
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons ‑ the modern working class ‑ the proletarians. 
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed   ‑ a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to tile means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class - the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants ‑ all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by Force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised; in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises tip again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among tile bourgeoisie itself. Thus the Ten-hours' bill in England was carried. .
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class-struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling-class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
	The  dangerous class,  " the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society" may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
	In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of tile immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up,  without the whole super-incumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

 Communist Manifesto 1848

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Indeed, no one,. we think, has up to now doubted that the strength of the present-day movement lies in the awakening of the masses (principally, the industrial proletariat), and that its weakness lies in the lack of consciousness and initiative among the revolutionary leaders.

nbs In the previous chapter we pointed out how universally absorbed the educated youth of Russia was in the theories of Marxism in the middle of the 'nineties. The strikes that followed the famous St. Petersburg industrial war of 1896 assumed a similar wholesale character. The fact that these strikes spread over the whole of Russia clearly showed how deep the newly awakening popular movement was, and if we are to speak of the "spontaneous element" then, of course, it is this movement which, first and foremost, must be regarded as spontaneous. But there is spontaneity and spontaneity. Strikes occurred in Russia in the 'seventies and 'sixties (and even in the first half of the nineteenth century), and were accompanied by the "spontaneous" destruction of machinery, etc. Compared with these "riots" the strikes of the 'nineties might even be described as "conscious," to such an extent do they mark the progress which. the working-class movement had made in that period. This shows that the "spontaneous element," in. essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form. Even the primitive riots expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent: the workers were losing their agelong faith in the permanence of the system. which oppressed them. They began ... I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, and definitely abandoned their slavish submission to their superiors. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle. The strikes of the 'nineties revealed far greater flashes of consciousness: definite demands were advanced, the strike was carefully tattled, known cases anti examples in other places were discussed, etc. While the riots were simply revolts of the oppressed, the systematic strikes represented the-class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo.

They testified to the awakening: antagonisms between workers and employers, but the workers were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system, i.e., theirs was not yet Social-Democratic consciousness. In this sense, the strikes of the' nineties, in spite of the enormous progress they represented as compared with the "riots," remained a purely spontaneous movement,

It is often said: the working class spontaneously gravitates towards Socialism. This is perfectly true in the sense that socialist theory defines the causes of the misery of the working class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory, and for that reason the workers are able to assimilate it so easily, provided, however, that this theory does not itself yield to spontaneity, provided it subordinates spontaneity to itself. Usually this is taken for granted, but it is precisely this which the Rabocheye Dyelo forgets or distorts. The working class spontaneously gravitates towards Socialism, but the more widespread (and continuously revived in the most diverse forms) bourgeois ideology nevertheless spontaneously imposes itself  upon the working class still more. 

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?	V. I. LENIN

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Capitalism will collapse, and the international proletariat will resume the revolutionary road to socialism en masse. And all the efforts by the entire 'left' swamp, from the 'Alliance' to the SLP, to ignore or silence such Marxist-Leninist struggles for revolutionary theory(as the essential start to revolutionary party-building) as the EPSR has conducted every week for 22 years, will be in vain.

It is the fake 'left' deliberate defeatist denial of this all-out world revolutionary perspective which leaves their attempts to explain and give a lead to workers on these nationalist/racist questions in such confusion and chaos.

Mired in perpetual 'left reformist' nonsense, the 'Alliance' and SLP swamp can only continue the hopeless class-compromise traditions of Trot and Revisionist 'political correctness'. This unreal collaborative idiocy is bound to leave these ludicrous capitalist-crisis issues bouncing endlessly back-and-forth unresolved between 'humanitarian' parliamentary, posturing on the one hand, and 'right-extremist, fascist dangers' on the other.

But placed in their correct context of insoluble and worsening international revolutionary capitalist crisis, the confusing rival pressures on workers from useless and fake 'left reformism' on one side, and BNP reactionary idiocy on the other, would disappear immediately.

In the context of 'stable, reformist civilisation', ‑of course there is an unanswerable humanitarian case for providing sanctuary to all 'asylum seekers', whatever the cause of their misery.

But if it really is a stable reformist civilisation, that response then is unanswerably challenged by the BNP objection that up to 500 million people in the Third World are unhappy with their lot. All have genuine cause for misery just as much as 99.99% of the existing flood of 'asylum seekers'. Are all 500 million going to be welcomed to Britain too as a 'solution' to the problem?????

But if the notion of a 'stable reformist civilisation' is derisively rejected, as it should be, the issues change dramatically. The world is turned into one of unending revolutionary crisis caused by the very circumstances which drive individuals into asylum-seeking misery or peril. In which case there is a far better and more realistically constructive answer to the ludicrous challenge which 'complete freedom for immigration' otherwise presents. All who feel driven to flee their own homelands can be far more productively and satisfactorily urged to take help instead to achieve a revolutionary overthrow in their own countries, rather than eke out a miserable existence in a Glasgow reception centre.

Only the revolution will change and provide real social progress in Britain; but individualist refuge seeking Kurds, Afghanis, Iraqis, Latvians, etc, will be far closer to a revolutionary transformation of their miserable lives by making the revolution in their own countries than in remaining individually isolated in a Glasgow reception centre.

Genuine revolutionaries seeking political asylum as a respite from difficult revolutionary struggles in Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, etc, are one thing, ‑ deserving all the help and encouragement they can be given.

Individuals who just want to opt out of their revolutionary struggle at home are a different problem entirely.  They are individual 'reformist' cases which no more deserve to hi-jack the attention and struggle of the anti-imperialist revolutionary movement than do any number of domestic reformist cases of local people feeling miserable with their lot and demanding special treatment from the capitalist state authorities.  

Opportunist economic migrants are no more an issue for the revolutionary movement than local people with housing grievances who decide to fight their own personal war against capitalism and to squat some better-off properties.

If it becomes a wholesale national revolutionary squatters movement, threatening to bring down the existing social order, so well and good; back it to the hilt. If it remains the personal crusade of isolated individualists, sympathy will be inevitable, but not any necessary need to make such protests a key part of the revolutionary cause.

The same with asylum-seekers/economic migrants. If they risk their lives to get here in order to raise the banner of proletarian revolution around the Glasgow reception centre, more power to their elbows. But if they are just breaking the 'law' in order to get an easier life as individuals, then let them and bourgeois 'morality' get on with it. Only the embarrassment to capitalism (from so much worldwide misery being in evidence from their system) is of much real use to the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism.

Every other intervention on behalf of such migratory economic opportunism is the purest reformism.

Publicly campaigning to encourage more and more of such reformist situations ((by encouraging more and more such opportunist migration) becomes positively reactionary politics by the 'politically correct'.

By raising such bogus 'revolutionary' issues around these reformist asylum-seeking rackets, the fake 'left' is just pointlessly playing into the BNP's hands.

Turn the problem back onto the capitalist system. Why are millions unhappy in their homelands??? Because of insoluble imperialist crisis. Solution???? Free-for-all immigration solves nothing. Only world socialist revolution offers any solution.

It is similarly utterly reactionary for Mary Robinson, et al, to help US imperialism break up the anti-racist conference in Durban by their ludicrous defence of Zionist colonisation of Palestine as being "not equal to apartheid or racism". It is a thousand times worse than mere apartheid or racism, of course, but the opportunist backwardness of UN bourgeois circles is being sucked into the circled-wagons defensive laager which surviving colonist traditions everywhere are now being forced into. Zionist colonisation was hopelessly inadequately targeted by the non-revolutionary 'reformist political correctness' of the Durban conference, but it will be toppled anyway. The international anti-imperialist revolution will be made irresistible by capitalism's ever-deepening crisis conditions, given a return to Marxist-Leninist philosophy. The Palestinian part in this unstoppable world anti-imperialist drive is indubitable. Build Leninism. EPSR supporters.   

(edited extract from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Twilight of British Empire in Ireland gets useful endorsement from bourgeois public-opinion ruse.

A SURVEY conducted by ICM for The Guardian newspaper has revealed that only one in four Britons believe that the Six Counties should remain within the `United Kingdom'. In what will be a deeply unsettling finding for unionists, the poll reveals that 41% believe that Ireland should be united, whilst only 26% said that it should remain a part of Britain. The newspaper said: "For unionists, many of whom consider themselves British and refer to Britain as `the mainland', [the] findings amount to a cold shoulder from their fellow citizens."

	British propagandists will also be depressed at another of the poll's findings, which 	revealed that, despite the best efforts of the NIO, unionists 	and the right-‑wing media, the British public does not blame republicans appreciably more than unionists for the current state of the Peace Process. 
	Some 64% blame both sides equally whilst 3% thought unionists to blame and 5% named 	republicans. Significantly, the poll did not appear to offer those questioned the choice of whether they thought the 	British state was in any way 	responsible, a question which may well have altered the perception of a widespread 	attitude of "a plague on both
your houses".

The results also conform to a wider, long-term consensus 3 that Ireland should be united. An overwhelming majority of people in the 26 Counties and in the United States support unity. In spite of the clear desire by Britons to let Ireland go, Jeffrey Donaldson of the UUP yesterday remained undaunted, saying that the only view which counted was not that of millions of people in

Britain ‑  whose taxpayers pay untold billions in order to maintain the British presence, or indeed that of millions more in Ireland and the United States ‑but that of unionism alone. Writing in Wednesday's Guardian, he claimed: "Far from being upset by the poll, unionists will draw comfort from the constitutional and political reality that under the principle of consent, their future in the union will be determined by the people of Northern Ireland themselves, voting in a real poll." He was, of course, using the term "people" in the same sense as the DUP, which employs it to refer only the unionist people.

Whether the British Government, which was voted into power on far less than 41%0 of the population (indeed, was voted in on almost exactly the same percentage as the minority who want to retain the Six Counties), will heed this verdict on its continued presence in Ireland remains to be seen, but The Guardian on Tuesday observed that "British officials have spoken privately of a limited public patience in Britain with Northern Ireland and its problems".

In its editorial, the newspaper conceded that the poll will be "heartbreaking news to unionists.

"Their whole world is built on the perception of themselves as UK citizens even as Brits ‑ who by some irrelevant fluke of geography happen to be located across the Irish Sea. They are, in the cliché, more British than the British. They wave the flag, speak reverentially of the crown and cling to customs that vanished from the place they still think of as "the mainland" in the '50s. To enter the head offices of the Ulster Unionist party is to see the Britain of a bygone era: portraits of the Queen Mum on the staircase. Now they hear, via an opinion poll, that the feelings are not mutual that most of us do not want them."