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 1106 October 2 2001                                                                                                                                        25p

Foul attempts by petty-bourgeois fake-'left' moralisers to use Lenin’s name as a cover for their Trot and Revisionist cowardly treachery to idealistic suicidal eruptions against imperialism by Third World nationalists. Lenin polemicised against anarcho-terror tactics ONLY in order to explain superior communist-revolutionary tactics, NOT in order to join the bourgeoisie in 'moral' denunciations. The "solidarity with WTC office-workers" sophistry has to be the class-collaborating Trots' most loathsome humbug ever, effectively completely selling-out all revolutionary struggle for all time. And the Scargillites' wretched social-pacifism, and stab-in-the-back for anarchist demonstrators, is no better. Suicidal guerrilla-war ambushes against overwhelmingly superior imperialist strength are always likely to cause unintended casualties, but it is the worldwide, political damage to Western domination that is the big issue, and ALL the fake-'lefts' have analysed that incorrectly.

Fake-'lefts' are trying to cover up their cowardly capitulation to imperialist warmongering hysteria against "terrorism" (meaning any resistance to Western domination sympathetic to a guerrilla-war stance) by pretending that "Marxism has always condemned terrorism".

This is a grotesque lying distortion of historical reality.

In herewith putting the record straight, the sole aim is to show that in jumping on the anti-terror 'moral' bandwagon to denounce the New York guerrilla-war strikes as "an outrage", "appalling", "horror", "despair", "fascism", "reactionary", "strengthening imperialism", "being the CAUSE of more repression for the Third World", etc, etc, etc, these fake-'left' petty-bourgeois opportunists of the Socialist Alliance, SWP, CPGB, etc, are revealing an anti-communist mentality a million miles from Marxism-Leninism, and are showing that these Trot and Revisionist sects are in the cultural and ideological camp of COUNTER-revolution.

The aim is not to deny that Leninism rejected terrorism as incapable of being much help to the mass political education and organisation which could make the revolution; nor that Lenin frequently polemicised against supporters of the terror-weapon for distracting the revolutionary cadres, and for weakening or confusing the proletariat's grasp of why all-round political exposure of the corrupt social order,  and MASS struggle against it, were the only real way forward to final revolutionary victory.

Also, it is NOT being argued that the same Marxist critique of terror's limitations, or even disadvantages, as an anti-tyranny weapon, couldn't still apply to this spectacular New York guerrilla-war strike in principle.

The argument is that no serious revolutionary anti-imperialist understanding could ever line up with the stinking hypocrisy of the modern bourgeois world which not only condones but actually lives by the proceeds of an international militarised exploitation system which daily inflicts unspeakable TERROR in the form of starvation, disease, slavery, mass murder, torture, and fascist repression of every other kind from scores of vicious or demented regimes, not just backed by the West but often installed by the West "to prevent communism", inflicting this on literally hundreds of millions of "innocent victims" every day of the year.

To "deplore" or "condemn" this fight-back against New York which these hundreds of millions of proletarians in the Third World have all rejoiced in, is to identify with this First World of imperialist exploitation.

It is the most contemptible deceit or sophistry to pretend to be arguing that the New York strike is bad news "because there were working-class casualties", or "because revolutionary organisation is the better way forward for the Third World" or "because Bin Laden is a nutty religious fanatic", all of which are obvious from a 'humanitarian' or an academic 'revolutionary' point of view, but all of which are quite deliberately ignoring the big issues raised by September 11.

Firstly, regardless of doubts about the alleged specific human agency, and doubts about the longer-term usefulness of the methods, guerrilla-war has struck back from the tormented Third World against the US imperialist heartland itself, and has struck a devastating blow against American 'New world order' cockiness and confidence, plus giving a massive boost to the BILLIONS in the Third World who could never have thought such a strike-back possible.

Lenin made the following observations in 1916 after hot-shot 'lefts' leading the Second International had written-off any significance or worth of the Easter Rising in Dublin (inspired by very religious middle-class nationalists with no organised working-class support and relying on the explosive nature of the coup for effect):

On May 9, 1916, there appeared in Berner Tagwacht, the organ of the Zimmerwald group, including some of the Leftists, an article on the Irish rebellion entitled "Their Song Is Over" and signed with the initials K. R.'1' It described the Irish rebellion as being nothing more nor less than a "putsch", for, as the author argued, "the Irish question was an agrarian one", the peasants had been pacified by reforms, and the nationalist movement remained only a "purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the sensation it caused, had not much social backing''.

The term "putsch", in its scientific sense, may be employed only when the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators or stupid maniacs, and has aroused no sympathy among the masses.   Whoever calls such a rebellion a "putsch" is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon.

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc. - to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, "We are for socialism", and another, somewhere else and says, "We are for imperialism", and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a "putsch".

Whoever expects a "pure" social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois-democratic revolution. It consisted of a series of battles in which all the discontented classes, groups and elements of the population participated. Among these there were masses imbued with the crudest prejudices, with the vaguest and most fantastic aims of struggle; there were small groups  which accepted Japanese money, there were speculators and adventurers, etc..

The socialist revolution cannot be anything other than an outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of the petty bourgeoisie and of the backward workers will participate in it and just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors. But objectively they will attack capital, and the class-conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented mass struggle, will be able to unite and direct it.

Is it not clear that it is least of all permissible to contrast Europe to the colonies in this respect? The struggle of the oppressed nations in Europe, a struggle capable of going all the way to insurrection and street fighting, capable of breaking down the iron discipline of the army and martial law, will sharpen the revolutionary crisis in Europe to an infinitely greater degree than a much more developed rebellion in a remote colony. A blow delivered against the power of the English imperialist bourgeoisie by rebellion in Ireland is a hundred times more significant politically than a blow of equal force delivered in Asia or in Africa.

The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene. 

                                 A serious war would not be treated seriously if advantage were not taken of the enemy's slightest weakness and if every opportunity that presented itself were not seized upon, the more so since it is impossible to know beforehand at what moment, where, and with what force some powder magazine will "explode". We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat's great war of liberation for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement against every single disaster imperialism brings in order to intensify and extend the crisis. If we were, on the one hand, to repeat in a thousand keys the declaration that we are "opposed" to all national oppression and, on the other, to describe the heroic revolt of the most mobile and enlightened section of certain classes in an oppressed nation against its oppressors as a "putsch", we should be sinking to the same level of stupidity as the Kautskyites.

It is the misfortune of the Irish that they rose prematurely, before the European revolt of the proletariat had had time to mature. Capitalism is not so harmoniously built that the various sources of rebellion can immediately merge of their own accord, without reverses and defeats. On the other hand, the very fact that revolts do break out at different times, in different places, and are of different kinds, guarantees wide scope and depth to the general movement; but it is only in premature, individual, sporadic and therefore unsuccessful, revolutionary movements that the masses gain experience, acquire knowledge, gather strength, and get to know their real leaders, the socialist proletarians, and in this way prepare for the general onslaught, just as certain strikes, demonstrations, local and national, mutinies in the army, outbreaks among the peasantry, etc., prepared the way for the general onslaught in 1905.

	July 1916 THE DISCUSSION ON SELF-DETERMINATION SUMMED UP

The social revolution can come only in the form of an epoch in which are combined civil war by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries and a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movement, in the undeveloped, backward and oppressed nations.

Why? Because capitalism develops unevenly, and objective reality gives us highly developed capitalist nations side by side with a number of economically slightly developed, or totally undeveloped, nations. P. Kievsky has absolutely failed to analyse the objective conditions of social revolution from the standpoint of the economic maturity of various countries; His reproach that we "invent" instances in which to apply self-determination is therefore an attempt to lay the blame at the wrong door.

A CARICATURE OF MARXISM (Oct 1916 )

The point is not to compare the Catholic fatalist Pearse with the Muslim fatalist Bin Laden, or to argue that Fundamentalist conservatism is no worse than the anti-abortion, anti-divorce, priest-ridden backwater that the Irish Republic remained throughout the 20th century.

The point is to show how Lenin evaluated blows against the dominant imperialist system from any source, and how virtually all revolt must add to, and eventually culminate in, the proletariat leading a complete socialist revolution worldwide, whether any individual 'bacillus' against Western domination was tuned into such an ultimate outcome or not.

Bin Laden's merchant-wealth background, religious philosophy, and dubious Taleban friends, in no way invalidate his wish to harm US world domination in the interests of greater local autonomy; and they say nothing at all about the motivation and political ideals of the heroic young men from many backgrounds and regions who conducted this colossal guerrilla-war strike.

Even if Bin Laden could be accused of harbouring mad dreams of establishing his own conservative kingdom somewhere, (as reactionary as Saddam Hussein's sectarian tyranny) for which there is not the slightest evidence, the humiliation for US imperialism should still be lauded everywhere. Iraq's perspectives deserve no support. But any defeats which its defiance inflicts on American prestige should be welcomed universally.

There need be no confusion that Bin Ladenism superstitious backwardness is not even worth humouring.

But it lends no support to Fundamentalist reaction to imperialism whatsoever if the bloody-nose consequences to US imperialism from Bin Laden's intransigence are happily acknowledged by the real revolution as having cheered up billions of downtrodden everyday victims of imperialism with some hope and inspiration, even though not yet pointing them in the necessary direction of organised mass communist-revolutionary struggle.

To pretend not to see the shattering turmoil into which this devastating coup has plunged Western domineering, forcing its American leaders into ludicrous and embarrassing mistake after mistake in their panic-stricken attempted response, as the Socialist Alliance, the SWP, and the CPGB continue to pretend, is just acting out wilful obtuse blindness in order to cover up their real hatred and fear of raw revolutionary turmoil while yet preserving their posturing veneer of being 'revolutionaries' themselves.

Secondly, the New York strike is pure gain for the socialist revolution as well because it has precisely exposed all the fake-'lefts' (Trot and Revisionist enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat) who have been dragging back the international workers movement for decades.

Repeated detailed written polemical exposures of fake-'leftism', listing its endless opportunist treacheries to serious anti-imperialist progress (such as to the workers states because they failed to pass the "pure" social revolution test, etc, etc, etc,) are necessary activities for the EPSR which must continue non-stop; but this huge bizarre jolt to world stability which the New York strike has delivered has caused to be revealed massive underlying revolutionary change in imperialism's basic position (thereby exposing how backward and out-of-date this fake-"'leftism" is becoming) much more graphically than ten times the volume of detailed written polemics could do.

The anti-communists' stock defeatist middle-class mentality, always cringingly believing that the imperialist 'New World Order' will always prove superior to any opponents other than their own "pure" revolutionary cadres, at once automatically insisted that the New York blitz would STRENGTHEN imperialism and make it more ruthlessly domineering than ever, to everyone's detriment.

Equally immediately, that class-defeatist petty-bourgeois outlook was made to look hopelessly behind developments, holding back the working class, by the instantly obvious confused panic of the US imperialist leaders, gibbering disastrously about a "crusade" against "the folk" who did this, to be got "dead or alive" (criminal incitement to murder of someone not yet convicted of anything) in order to achieve "infinite justice" (total blasphemy to the Islamic world where only Allah is believed capable of such omniscience), on which issue the world is warned it only has one choice, either join the US imperialist cause, or join the 'terrorist' cause, thus instantly convincing 4 billion people on earth, who had not realised it or thought about it before, that they must be anti-imperialists.

Everything that has happened since has turned the 'free world' coalition for "war on terrorism" towards becoming one of the greatest farces in the whole rotten history of imperialism.

Operation 'Enduring Freedom' to rid mankind of people who could be so dastardly as to hi-jack an airliner gunpoint, is crucially reliant for success on the Pakistan military dictatorship which hi-jacked a whole country at gunpoint, robbing 140m people of 'freedom'.

Even more comically, the Pakistan dictatorship, which grabbed power illegally on the grounds that Islam's Fundamentalist pure-living was being corrupted by the ousted political system, is in danger of being toppled itself by lining up with the hated Western imperialist influence in order to stab in the back Pakistan’s purists' erstwhile collaborators and co-thinkers in the Taleban regime in Afghanistan and in the al-Qaeda movement Bin Laden founded.

At the same time, the West's own domestic opinion and political cohesion is falling apart more rapidly than even the EPSR could have envisaged. The whole intelligent world is now screaming: "Never mind the huge costly blitzkrieg manhunt being mounted to find one bloke or bomb Afghanistan even more into rubble than Western anti-communist world order has already reduced it, when is something going to be done about the crushing poverty all round the Third World which leads resentment of Western domination down desperate suicidal guerrilla-war channels?????"

But instead of the necessary humility, all that is guaranteed by imperialism so far is open justification for a reinvigorated campaign by the CIA of international assassinations, blackmail, fascist provocations, and every other dirty counter-revolutionary trick in the long rotten historical record of "the greatest democracy's intelligence agency”, which permanently spies on all the world, and bribes hundreds of thousands of agents worldwide, but which didn't have a clue that the most spectacular guerrilla-war strike in history was coming its way.

And to help win the international battle of minds, the West has allowed Berlusconi to mouth his fascist master-race filth from the last great imperialist crisis period:

On three occasions during a lightning visit to Berlin, Mr Berlusconi enthusiastically proclaimed views that will appal western leaders and be seen by many Muslims as confirming their worst suspicions. He boasted of the "supremacy" and "superiority" of western civilisation and called on Europe to recognise its "common Christian roots".

The Italian prime minister, who has been under pressure over the handling of demonstrations at this year's G8 summit in Genoa, also used his trip to claim a link between Islamist terrorism and the anti-globalisation movement. He said there was a "strange unanimity" between them.

Both, said Mr Berlusconi, were the enemies of western civilisation.

Standing beside the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, at a joint press conference, he declared that he and his host "consider that the attacks on New York and Washington are attacks not only on the United States but on our civilisation, of which we are proud bearers, conscious of the supremacy of our civilisation, of its discoveries and inventions, which have brought us democratic institutions, respect for the human, civil, religious and political rights of our citizens, openness to diversity and tolerance of everything".

A broadly smiling Mr Berlusconi said his discussions with the chancellor had been carried out "strong in this pride,  this awareness".

 He had earlier told Italian journalists covering his visit: "We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilisation, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion."

As if to rub salt in the wound, Mr Berlusconi added: "This respect certainly does not exist in the Islamic countries."

Heedless to warnings that the anti-terrorist coalition must make a clear distinction between the Taliban regime and the Afghan people, Mr Berlusconi congratulated the US and its allies on isolating "the country  -  I'm not sure if you can call it a nation - of Afghanistan".

The singer-turned-TV magnate-turned-politician's views were launched on the world just as policy makers in the US and allied states had begun to hope they had limited the damage done by President George Bush's description of the campaign as a "crusade".

Wrong about the imperialist cause being 'strengthened' (see previous EPSRs for other examples of disastrous splits appearing in the imperialist world order, such as the frantic Washington ultimatums to the Zionists to suspend their colonising genocidal brutalisation of the Palestinian nation temporarily while this farcical 'coalition'
for a totally bogus 'war on terrorism' is still so struggling for credibility), the fake-'lefts' are also hopelessly wrong about the Marxist view on terror, and even more slanderously distorting the truth when accusing anarcho-terror direct-action of being "the cause" of police-state repression in the world. 

The tone and thrust of all the fake-'left' quotes below is exclusively one of self-righteous petty-bourgeois moralising, scolding the New York bombers or the Genoa street anarchists for so badly letting 'our' side down that they must be condemned as outcasts or as agents of the police and imperialism, virtually doing repression's dirty work for it. 

It is total lies that Marxism-Leninism ever took any such attitude. It is an utter slander on communist revolutionary philosophy to suggest such a calumny. Lenin simply argued that the mass revolutionary political involvement of the working class was the ONLY way to final revolutionary success, and that the terror-advocates, anarchists, and others were merely wrong to argue that their favoured tactics were equally important or even better.

NOWHERE did Lenin attempt to grass-up these alternative arguments as "playing the autocracy's game for it”, or as "the enemy within", or as being "the CAUSE of repression on our heads", etc.

Even less would it have entered Lenin's mind to adopt this petty-bourgeois proprietorial mentality of these fake-'lefts' who think they OWN the fight for socialism and the anti-imperialist struggle, and moralise against anarchists and others as though they had no RIGHT to fight back against reaction in any way they think fit.

This is essentially a mentality of the reformist establishment 'left'. It is a class attitude betraying an utterly incurable ANTI-revolutionary instinct (in which reformism and Revisionism are both steeped), that continuous 'left' exposures of imperialist rottenness will eventually force the world to accept that socialist answers are much better. Garbage!

This is the essence of the 'left' reformist delusions in the power of electoral politics, or 'democracy' as they call it, and of Stalin's Revisionist delusion that a successful USSR would eventually peacefully convince the rest of the world of the superiority of the socialist way of organising society.

Spontaneous anti-imperialist revolt has now passed-by the collapsing sandcastles of the reformists and Revisionists, and is lashing out under all kinds of crazy banners, reflecting disorganised and leaderless human frustration with the rottenness of the status quo under US imperialist degenerate domination.

Lenin would have said more power to their elbow, as he did about the 1916 middle-class Catholic 'putsch' in Dublin. Let all who want to, kick imperialism as hard as they can, in any way that they want to. Let the communists organise a party of theory for world revolution.

But that organisation cannot even begin while these fake-'lefts' are stuck so deep in their own subjective idealism that they cannot even bear to polemicise with critics of their mistakes.

Instead of debating differences, all that these Trot and Revisionist fake-'lefts' can do is expel, ignore, or vilify the EPSR's arguments in various dismissive ways while meanwhile carrying on with their sectarian anti-Marxist posturing, still deep in the class-collaborative rut of the Stalin era. Compare the following cringing social-pacifism with Lenin's revolutionary spirit below.

The Scargillites have amazingly at last actually published something about the astonishing upheaval in the world which began three weeks ago. 

It was not worth waiting for. 

It has listened to the popular international good sense about this humiliation to US imperialism which the EPSR has been analysing in massive detail, and has avoided some of the more treacherous denunciations that its fellow fake-'left' anti-revolutionaries have gone in for; but it has chosen to subside into its usual useless social pacifism instead, a mentality which Lenin really did put the boot into because of its real class-collaborative cringing, and its rotten confusion it lays on the working class with this fraudulent 'leadership'.

Never in his life has Scargill led a campaigning action, either in politics or trade-unionism, to declare: "This is to bring down capitalism", nor does he now (and nor will he ever).

Such 'left' reformism will never go beyond "Stop the war", which just uselessly plays into imperialism's hands because it never will 'stop the war' in terms of its endless warmongering.

The only way to stop war is by the revolutionary overthrow of imperialism.

In the miserable few words Scargill has managed to get out, the social-pacifist hand-wringing is the dominant note: "American people suffering" in huge headlines. "An appalling loss of life .....the SLP deplores the loss of life in the United States... However, we fear that the world could see more of this type of attack."

To "fear" guerrilla war getting back at US imperialist world domination is hardly a class stance that can be adopted in unashamed and unambiguous solidarity with the world's proletarian billions who are still rejoicing at this humiliation for the planet's monopoly-capitalist exploiters, tormentors, and police-military repressors, and dream of the day that there will be much more of it, and much much worse.

It is a museum-Stalinist stance which still dreams that if enough solid citizens stand up all round the globe demanding peaceful coexistence and 'No to war', then the world's imperialist leaders will eventually be forced to call a halt to their predatory ways.

It is a pacifist delusion guaranteed only to completely disorient any workers naïve enough or sheep-like enough to want to play along with it.

Scargill's Stalinist stooges in Lalkar do even worse than merely refuse to cheer on the fact that imperialism is being humiliated or challenged, no matter how. Their published sneers against the anarchist rioters at the Genoa globalisation summit amount to virtually inviting workers to label all anarchists as hired tools of the imperialist state-establishment, to get them driven out of anti-capitalist protests or even worse; a provocateur role which Lalkar originally adopted after the Gothenburg anti-globalisation demonstrations, first commenting-on favourably and then quoting Swedish Stalinists, and then taking up the back stabbing treachery themselves, hiding behind a phoney 'academic' posture:

Secretary of the KPML(r) Comrade Frank rightly points out that rioting for the sake of rioting is not an appropriate tactic for the revolutionary working class. Much of the anti-capitalist rioting that has been seen lately is of this nature: it is not aimed at wresting any concession from capitalism, much less at overthrowing it. Hence, although it gives frustrated people a chance to vent their anger, it can actually prove harmful to the building of a movement to overthrow capitalism. In Sweden the sight of armed police on the streets would normally have outraged the majority of Swedish people and they would have been prepared to act accordingly. The pointless violence of the supposedly anti-capitalist demonstrators, however, allowed the police to set a precedent for arming themselves and shooting unarmed demonstrators almost with impunity. Quite rightly the KPML(r) draws attention to the fact that we will not be able to oppose our class enemies effectively if we do not learn to distinguish violence which has the potential of advancing the interests of the working class from violence that is either totally pointless or which can only harm its interests.

The fact that more than 35,000 people have participated in the three demonstrations that took place from Thursday to Saturday was virtually ignored in the newspapers, which focused instead on the hooligan behaviour of a small minority of some 500 people, led and organised by provocateurs, disguised as "leftists" or "anti-fascists" etc.

In effect these anarcho-syndicalist and trotskyist groups have behaved as the tools paid or otherwise of the bourgeois establishment and ruling class, the EU imperialist elite, and in the interests of monopoly capital. The fact that they unfortunately succeed in misleading a number of young, politically inexperienced people, is deplorable but doesn't alter the fact that they are the instrument of the reactionary forces.

However a revolutionary knows that it makes very little sense to initiate violence against the system when you haven't got the slightest chance of success.

Imperialism is not going to be defeated by a putsch of a few hundred anarchists. At the moment, all that the initiation of violence does is give the state more 'justification' and more resolve in its violence against us. The initiation of violence at demonstrations by such organisations as the Black Bloc really represents weakness and frustration. Any movement against capitalism which does not place its confidence in the working class is bound to suffer from frustration, and this frustration will manifest itself in outbursts which only serve to alienate it further from the working class.

Now how does that pseudo-intellectual belly-crawling differ in the slightest in class-ideological bankruptcy from the anti-communist defeatism of other theoretically-rotten Revisionist detritus in the CPGB, warning the Palestinians to cower lower and not to provoke the Zionists with any more "atrocities'"?

No matter how you judge it military, economically or ideologically its power has not been dented and its world hegemony remains intact. Despite their immensely destructive results, the suicide actions can only have been symbolic. Indeed, if anything, the beast has been strengthened, certainly in terms of rallying all sections, all classes of US society to the Bush administration. That fact will ensure he has even more of a free hand in the manner in which he carries out the acts of retribution that will inevitably  follow.

The USA, the mainstay of global imperialism, can only but react militarily - or using its 'diplomacy', backed up of course by the threat of crushing military action. It is incapable of finding a social response  - the system it defends throws up inequality, oppression and injustice over and over again. It puts profit first and foremost always ahead of the rights of the world's people.

In Palestine hundreds of the oppressed rejoiced in the street at what they saw as a blow against their number one enemy's main ally and backer - scenes that were repeated on a much smaller scale in several European cities. But the Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat quickly condemned the atrocities and was doing its best to dampen down any celebrations. With good reason. It knows only too well that it could be deemed responsible, since it already stands accused of 'shielding' terrorists. Even if the US decides to pin the blame on Osama bin Laden and again hits out at Afghanistan, it is entirely possible that the Israelis could take advantage of what they see as the tide of world opinion to take out leading Palestinian figures.

Lalkar then wheel Stalin out, as if to demonstrate some weird pride that the source of modern Revisionist chaos is not dead yet:

"The method of combating tsardom chosen by the Narodniks, namely, by the assassination of individuals, by individual terrorism, was wrong and detrimental to the revolution.

They hampered the development of the revolutionary initiative and activity of the working class and the peasantry.

So it is clear to us that while it is necessary to verse ourselves in tactics of self-defence, the tactics of deliberate violence are detrimental to our cause at this moment in time. 

The italicised quotes at the end are from Stalinism's Revisionist CPSU History.

This was not Lenin's attitude, which only ever 'condemned' the anarchists or terror as an inferior political philosophy for the working class, and as an inferior choice of tactics.

Never did Lenin, in pre-revolutionary struggles, invite workers to turn on anarchists en masse as 'police provocateurs'. This Stalinist slander is the provocation.

Far from this self-righteous moralising tone of terrorism being "wrong", Lenin said the exact opposite, that terrorism was not wrong in principle but merely an inferior tactic, inspired by inadequate philosophical perspectives, in the new circumstances for mass proletarian revolutionary political organisation which were emerging:

In principle we have never rejected, and cannot reject, terror. Terror is one of the forms of military action that may be perfectly suitable and even essential at a definite juncture in the battle, given a definite state of the troops and the existence of definite conditions. But the important point is that terror, at the present time, is by no means suggested as an operation for the army in the field, an operation closely connected with and integrated into the entire system of struggle, but as an independent form of occasional attack unrelated to any army. Without a central body and with the weakness of local revolutionary organisations, this, in fact, is all that terror can be. We therefore declare emphatically that under the present conditions such a means of struggle is inopportune and unsuitable; that it diverts the most active fighters from their real task, the task which is most important from the standpoint of the interests of the movement as whole,  and that it disorganises the forces, not of the government, but of the revolution. We need but recall the recent events. With our own eyes we saw that the mass of workers and "common people" of the towns pressed forward in struggle, while the revolutionaries lacked a staff of leaders and organisers. Under such conditions, is there not the danger that, as the most energetic revolutionaries go over to terror, the fighting contingents, in whom alone it is possible to place serious reliance, will be weakened? Is there not the danger of rupturing the contact between the revolutionary organisations and the disunited masses of the discontented, the protesting, and the disposed to struggle, who are weak precisely because they are disunited? Yet it is this contact that is the sole guarantee of our success. Far be it from us to deny the significance of heroic individual blows, but it is our duty to sound a vigorous warning against becoming infatuated with terror, against taking it to be the chief and basic means of struggle, as so many people strongly incline to do at present: Terror can never be a regular military operation; at best it can only serve as one of the methods employed in a decisive assault. But can we issue the call for such a decisive assault at the present moment? Rabocheye Dyelo apparently thinks we can. At any rate, it exclaims: "Form assault columns!" But this, again, is more zeal than reason. The main body of our military forces consists of volunteers and insurgents. We possess only a few small units of regular troops, and these are not even mobilised; they are not connected with one another, nor have they been trained to form columns of any sort, let alone assault columns. In view of all this, it must be clear to anyone who is capable of appreciating the general conditions of our struggle and who is mindful of them at every "turn" in the historical course of events that at the present moment our slogan cannot be "To the assault", but has to be, "Lay siege to the enemy fortress". In other words, the immediate task of our Party is not to summon all available forces for the attack right now, but to call for the formation of a revolutionary organisation capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual practice and not in name alone, that is, an organisation ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting-forces suitable for the decisive struggle.

WHERE TO BEGIN 	1901

Svoboda advocates terror as a means of "exciting" the working-class movement and of giving it a "strong impetus". It is difficult to imagine an argument that more thoroughly disproves itself. Are there not enough outrages committed in Russian life without special "excitants" having to be invented? On the other hand, is it not obvious that those who are not, and cannot be, roused to excitement even by Russian tyranny will stand by "twiddling their thumbs" and watch a handful of terrorists engaged in single combat with the government? The fact is that the working masses are roused to a high pitch of excitement by the social evils in Russian life, but we are unable to gather, if one may so put it, and concentrate all these drops and streamlets of popular resentment that are brought forth to a far larger extent than we imagine by the conditions of Russian life, and that must be combined into a single gigantic torrent. That this can be accomplished is irrefutably proved by the enormous growth of the working class movement and the eagerness, noted above, with which the workers clamour for political literature. On the other hand, calls for terror and calls to lend the economic struggle itself a political character are merely two different forms of evading the most pressing duty now resting upon Russian revolutionaries, namely, the organisation of comprehensive political agitation. Svoboda desires to substitute terror for agitation, openly admitting that "as soon as intensified and strenuous agitation is begun among the masses the excitative function of terror will be ended" (The Regeneration of Revolutionism, p68). This proves precisely that both the terrorists and the Economists underestimate the revolutionary activity of the masses, despite the striking evidence of the events that took place in the spring,* and whereas the one group goes out in search of artificial "excitants", the other talks about "concrete demands". But both fail to devote sufficient attention to the development of their own activity in political agitation and in the organisation of political exposures. And no other work can serve as a substitute for this task either at the present time or at any other.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 1902

Without in the least denying violence and terrorism in principle, we demanded work for the preparation of such forms of violence as were calculated to bring about the direct participation of the masses and which guaranteed that participation. We do not close our eyes to the difficulties of this task, but will work at it steadfastly and persistently, undeterred by the objections that this is a matter of the "vague and distant future." Yes, gentlemen, we stand for future and not only past forms of the movement. We give preference to long and arduous work on what promises a future rather than to an "easy" repetition of what has been condemned by the past. We shall always expose people who in word war against hackneyed dogmas and in practice hold exclusively to such moth-eaten and harmful commonplaces as the theory of the transference of strength, the difference between big work and petty work and, of course, the theory of single combat. "Just as in the days of yore the peoples' battles were fought out by their leaders in single combat, so now the terrorists will win Russia's freedom in single combat with the autocracy," the April 3 leaflet concludes. The mere reprinting of such sentences provides their refutation. 

Anyone who really carries on his revolutionary work in conjunction with the class struggle of the proletariat very well knows, sees and feels what vast numbers of immediate and direct demands of the proletariat (and of the sections of the people capable of supporting the latter) remain unsatisfied. He knows that in very many places, throughout vast areas, the working people are literally straining to go into action, and that their ardour runs to waste because of the scarcity of literature and leadership, the lack of forces and means in the revolutionary organisations. And we find ourselves - we see that we find ourselves - in the same old vicious circle that has so long hemmed in the Russian revolution like an omen of evil. On the one hand, the revolutionary ardour of the insufficiently enlightened and unorganised crowd runs to waste. On the other hand, shots fired by the "elusive individuals" who are losing faith in the possibility of marching in formation and working hand in hand with the masses also end in smoke. 

But things can still be put to rights, comrades! Loss of faith in a real cause is the rare exception rather than the rule. The urge to commit terrorist acts is a passing mood. Then let the Social-Democrats close their ranks, and we shall fuse the militant organisation of revolutionaries and the mass heroism of the Russian proletariat into a single whole!

REVOLUTIONARY ADVENTURISM   1902

The all-round political exposure (of the revolutionary crisis imperialism is currently heading for), cannot even begin yet because fake-'left' sects dominate, deliberately shutting down polemical argument and education of the working class (while themselves incapable of following the daily new developments which are all the time capable of turning millions of new workers to revolutionary politics all round the world, if the Marxist-Leninist scientific approach of the EPSR was adopted), or else so wrapped up in organisational opportunism and manoeuvres like the Socialist Alliance, that the revolutionary crisis of imperialism has STILL not been recognised; and when the real world ferment is addressed, primitive anti-revolutionary prejudices still dominate (SWP, CPGB, etc) because of the continuing Trot and Revisionist tradition of barring polemics with such real revolutionary views as the EPSR’s (while happily taking on or holding public meetings for every vague 'left' fathead on earth as long as they have some sort of 'celebrity' status).

The result is that no living thriving party can be built, via which dynamic polemical arguments could not then fail to be spread right round the working class and all of its struggles.

If any serious revolutionary theoretical struggles were even detectable within the SLP, they would at best be identified as museum-Stalinism, at least 60 years out of date.

And the Alliance buried itself consciously into a non-polemicising permanent jolly, in which no basic historical questions for routing anti-communism can even be discussed. It is a unique 'party', organised to make sure that no real 'party' should ever develop from it, such is the fear of reality of the middle-class academic 'revolutionaries' of the SWP running it.

Because of this total fake-'left' sectarian backwardness in place of where the revolutionary party ought to be, there is not a scrap of Marxist-Leninist leadership anywhere on earth for the coming world socialist revolution. Instead, we have the academic idiocy of Lalkar, for example, trying to apply Lenin’s 1918 lessons on Brest Litovsk, (warning the Soviet-state leadership-party not to try an armed adventure against Germany (in order to help Liebknecht and Luxembourg) if the USSR was far too weak, still, to do it successfully), - to this period of spontaneous eruptions in total frustration by street anarchists, Fundamentalist suicides, etc, etc.

As Lenin explained above on the 1916 Dublin 'putsch', spontaneous eruptions can have a mighty destabilising effect on imperialism, no matter who originates them for whatever philosophy, and an electrifying stimulus on the world's anti-imperialist masses, even though there is no future for 'stimulus as a tactic' so to speak.

In the ideologically bankrupt period the world has just been going through, with the international working class still completely paralysed because of, on one side, the self-liquidation by the Revisionist world movement leadership, and on the other by the incurably reactionary anti-communism of all the Trot and Centrist sects, it is precisely spontaneous eruptions like the Indonesian revolution, or dramatic terrorist strikes like the blitz on New York, which might well provide a chance "bacillus" to get the conscious Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement going again.

But so cowed are the fake-'lefts' by anti-communist propaganda over the last 55 years that they cringe at any "violence", so much so that the SWP instantly declared "We abhor violence" after September 11, in panic at fear of having their own collars felt.

Fake-'lefts' like the WRP used to cringe and grovel in exactly the same way whenever IRA violence "went too far"(although nominally supporting Irish national liberation's right to fight a guerrilla war on the imperialist mainland.)

Such treacherous opportunism is obviously intellectually bankrupt, but it is also worse than laughably fatuous tactically. If draconian repression is going to clamp down on any expressions of the slightest squeak of sympathy with the terrorists' cause, then what more worthy candidates for intimidation anyway than those fake-'lefts' who proudly posture their 'bold' support for the 'right' of tyrannised people anywhere to fight back in any way they can, but who then join the bourgeoisie in 'moral condemnation' the moment that there is a higher-than-usual casualty count.

It is typical that some of the most ultra-'left' Trot posturers of all, like the Sparts, denounce the New York strikes as "an indefensible act of criminal terror", but then justify their past "principled support" for the Vietcong, with weasel words that the 60,000 Americans blown up there in frequently extremely grisly and cunning-terrorist ways, were 'legitimate' targets "because they were in uniform".

As it happens, lots of the US 'peacekeeping' forces, in South Vietnam to "defend democracy", were butchered while in their own working-class civilian clothes when on rest-and-recuperation leave.

But the serious point is that those 60,000 were infinitely more 'working-class' (if such posturing weasel-word 'explanations' are worth examining) than the tragic casualties at the World Trade Centre, being mostly draftees who hated their enforced service, with a very large proportion of them being young blacks who hated the whole USA/American imperialism entity itself, let alone its colonising army.

Those 60,000 butchered in the most horrible circumstances were mostly truly tragic young working-class people, 'innocent casualties' of the non-stop worldwide class and national war between the Third World and the imperialist system.

The tragically dead 6,000 at the WTC are in exactly the same category.

And, sadly, they are TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to all questions of what to make of this Islamic Fundamentalist guerrilla-war strike on New York. Sadly, the international anti-imperialist revolution is going to cause millions of casualties, 'innocent' and otherwise, before it is over.

To stop now because "we abhor violence" or because there will be "working class casualties" is exactly where these Trot and Revisionist fake-'left' posturers really stand. They are all anti-communists and counter-revolutionaries to a guru,  from the Socialist Alliance to the SLP, and every wretched sect in between.

And any good people who choose to line up with these treacherous anti-Leninist opportunist organisations, and don't speak up against their petty-bourgeois rottenness, will be tarred with the same brush.

Build Leninism. EPSR supporters.

Cuba and Sinn Féin

That Cuba and Sinn Féin would tactically avoid making accusatory remarks about US imperialist world domination's deserved come-uppance might have been expected, but wretchedly joining-in the universal bourgeois-reformist 'moral' condemnation of the guerrilla-war strikes on New York just shows up the pitiful political and philosophical limitations of Revisionism and bourgeois nationalism.

Castro's statement excellently derides the fanatical, warmongering, and educationally sub-normal character of Bush's posturing address to Congress, pointing out the long-established, steadily-increasing, fascist belligerence in the US imperialist tone of bewildered frustration as its 'sole superpower New World Order' just slides into more and more chaos and trouble in all directions. 

The philosophical faultline leading Castro to then describe the New York strikeback at US imperialism's murderous destructiveness as "ethically indefensible, which (along with its perpetrators) should be eradicated regardless of its deep origins and the economic & political factors that brought it to life", shows clear in the daft class-collaborative offer (vintage Stalinist Revisionism) "to cooperate with every country in the total eradication of terrorism".

While imperialist exploitation of the earth lasts, pigs will the sooner take wing rather than this idiotic peaceful-coexistence illusion. Sinn Féin's "condemnation" to get on the 'free-world' bandwagon relies even more bizarrely on a sort of moral quantification, and on outrageously convicting (without trial or evidence) the suicide bombers of "deliberately choosing innocent people as targets". This monstrous slander comes close to Hurd's racist-fascist abuse on R4 of insisting that "some terrorists end up just killing for killing's sake" implying that this was likely to be true of any Middle Eastern terrorists. On this lying Berlusconi premise, Sinn Féin go on:

those who fight to end injustice and are forced to use arms to end that injustice must ensure that the moral context within which they operate is of a higher standard to the ethos of those they oppose. 

There were many occasions during the last 30 years of conflict when the IRA unintentionally killed innocent people. Their willingness to accept responsibility for these killings and to apologise to their relatives helped to create the moral context for republican activists and supporters

onto this muddleheaded twaddle, Sinn Féin back-stabbingly add: 

that never have the 'power elite' authors of Third World oppression been in such a position as they are today, courtesy of people who claim to be freedom fighters.

What? Not when they burned alive 200,000 in one afternoon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Not when they dioxin-poisoned the whole Indo-China peninsula of 100m people? Not when they napalmed to death entire village after village in Vietnam?

Such short-memory, logically-ignorant racism dishonours the heroic Irish national-liberation struggle.

Defeat or humiliation for imperialism is what counts, not the quantity or the tragic quality of the war casualties, of which there will be millions before imperialism is overthrown. EPSR

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

	Bush's terrorists

The selection of ultra-right winger Cuban-American Otto Reich as Undersecretary for Hemispheric Affairs forms one link in a chain of political appointments that have intensified Washington's cold war policy towards Latin America.

The Senate's current Democratic majority decided to oppose Reich's election. Democratic leaders like Christopher Dodd and John Kerry declared to CNN that Reich is but one among many of a long list of extremist candidates for important policy-making positions in relation to both the region and domestic power structures.

Reich's history speaks for itself. During the formative years of the Reagan administration, he was director of the Agency for International Development (AID). In a declassified report, former Attorney General and ex-general advisor to the Agency, John R. Bolton,  admitted that AID "is a subsidiary of the CIA which serves to promote political and economic interests of the federal government through financial assistance programs abroad."

Between 1983 and 1986 Reich upheld the position as Chief of the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD). The OPD was a covert psychological operations department whose primary task was to discredit progressive governments and social movements throughout the hemisphere.

Through this office, a full-scale anti-Sandinista propaganda campaign was waged against the U.S. Congress and public during the span of almost a decade, reflecting revolutionary Nicaragua as a gulag and Soviet beachhead. More importantly still, his work was to ensure that the image of Contra narco-insurgents as "freedom fighters" remained untainted. The objective:   to maintain the flow of money and arms to the mercenaries at all costs.

The ODP reported directly to the National Security Council during the Iran-Contra maneuvers, in which the Reagan government engaged in illegal arms sales abroad to continue destabilization efforts against Nicaragua's revolutionary government. Furthermore, according to the Tower Commission, the Senate investigative organ designated to the case, there was a combination of tolerance from the U.S. government and active collaboration on the part of the CIA with respect to Contra drug trafficking.

One document, declassified in 1998, by then CIA Director Robert Gates (1986-89), spells out the narcotics connection: "It was a question of preservation not only of the Contras, but also of the Agency's project... During periods of aid suspension, the Contras continued to receive food, medicine, munitions and other forms of assistance; the narcotics paid for it all. Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador were the transit points to the American market."

According to The New York Times, terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, presently in a Panamanian prison for having organized an armed attempt on the life of Cuban President Fidel Castro during the lbero-American Summit last year, was employed by the CIA during that period as second-in-command of arms and narcotics re-supply operations from the U.S. military base in Ilopango, El Salvador. The CIA and Jorge Mas Canosa were the organizers and financiers of Posada Carriles' immoral escape from a Venezuelan prison, where he was completing a sentence for the sabotage of a Cuban commercial airliner in 1976, in which 73 persons of distinct nationalities perished.

Urban zones throughout the United States were targeted for cocaine shipments where the CIA facilitated the clandestine business. In the name of justice, a Congressional legal investigation is currently underway, sponsored by California Representative Maxine Waters, for damages to affected black and Hispanic populations.

Thanks to the repugnant commerce of arms and drugs, the mercenaries were able to continue their war against the Nicaraguan people.

Aid to the insurgents was suspended by the U.S. Congress under the Boland Amendment of 1982, upon the discovery of illegal activities on the part of the CIA and wholesale massacres of civilians by the Contras. Reich did everything in his power to discredit Senator Tower and his legal team, including a slander campaign labeling him, among other things, an alcoholic and Sandinista agent.

Reich's personal vendetta against the Cuban Revolution is also very well known. His intimate relation with the Miami mafia and reactionary paramilitary groups based in Florida date back three decades.

During the '80s, the OPD conducted a constant offensive against Cuba through the mass media, accusing the island of "exporting revolution" throughout Latin America. As if abject poverty and state-sponsored terrorism were insufficient factors in explaining the roots of armed leftist opposition, the propaganda campaign presented Cuba as the main "instigator" of regional conflict.

His stint in Venezuela as the American ambassador proved quite beneficial for the anti-Cuban right in Miami. Reich pressured the Venezuelan authorities to block a petition by Cuba to extradite Orlando Bosch and Posada Carriles, jailed counter-revolutionary terrorists of Cuban origin. Between the intervention by the U.S. embassy and the financial backing of the ultra-right Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), the two were able to continue their paramilitary activities.

Reich currently directs the RMA International lobby group whose main clients are none other than the CANF and its intimate friend the Bacardi Corporation, which, according to public registers, has contributed some $600,000 USD to his organization.

According to the Boston Globe, Reich was the "architect of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, promoted by the CANF-Bacardi partnership." The legislation penalizes U.S. subsidiaries attempting to conduct business with Cuba. The legislation even goes to the extreme of taking legal action against foreign firms utilizing former U.S. properties nationalized by the Revolution in its early years including former properties corresponding to Cubans who emigrated to the United States during the 1960s.

But Reich merely represents one domino. Bush has recently announced the nomination of Mauricio J. Tamargo as president of the Federal Legal Committee of the U.S. Justice Department, Tamargo, yet another extremist Cuban-American and, "coincidentally," legal defense to Congresswoman and vehement counter-revolutionary Cuban-American Ileana Ros Lehtinen, would oversee all legal issues related to Cuba.

According to The Washington Post, the European Union is in an uproar over the nomination, given the number of lawsuits by European companies in U.S. courts due to the extra-territorial nature of the Torricelli and Helms-Burton Acts.

The selection of former Contra political officer, Roger Pardo Maurer, as Secretary of Defense for Inter-American Issues, has produced even more controversy. 

Defense Department analysts have publicly expressed, on more than one occasion, a series of preoccupations concerning the penetration of the radical right in that institution. In an interview with The Washington Post, one Defense Department functionary, who preferred to remain anonymous, emphasized that the "new administration simply has failed to take note as to how fragile U.S.  Latin American relations are these days."

John Negroponte, former U.S. ambassador to Honduras during Reagan's mandate, has been nominated as the new U.S. representative to the United Nations. Negroponte played an important role in the conversion of Honduras into a colossal U.S. military base and training center for the Contras during the dirty war against Nicaragua.

In a series of articles regarding Negroponte's role in Honduras, The Los Angeles Times affirmed that the U.S. embassy collaborated with both the CIA and the Honduran Armed Forces, under the direction of General Alvarez, in the creation and training of Battalion 316. According to the human rights organization Human Rights Watch and the Honduran authorities, this paramilitary group was responsible for numerous acts of sabotage and torture, homicide and no less than 184 disappearances of political opponents.

And the list continues. Former Under-Secretary for Hemispheric Affairs under Reagan and current co-editor of the ultra-right magazine National Review, Elliot Abrams, is the present candidate for a position in the National Security Council.

Left up to Bush, Roger Noriega, current Latin American Issues Advisor to extremist Senator Jesse Helms, could very well be the next U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS); while Daniel Fisk, Noriega's predecessor as advisor to Helms, is in the waiting room far a position as advisor to either the U.S. Defense or State Department.

Editorials published in the most widely read U.S. dailies The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, expressed their opposition to Bush's "chosen ones," labelling them as "cold war relics of Reagan's United States of America."