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 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074  www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                    
No 1118 Jan 8 2002                                                                                                                                                 25p

PERSPECTIVES 2002.(Draft) 

Driven by insoluble 'over-production' crisis, the monopoly-imperialist system is gearing up for perpetual inter-imperialist war. Only the relentless destruction of 'surplus' capital is seen as avoiding Japan's fate (of 10 years economic paralysis) afflicting the West. At the same time, all potential anti-imperialist revolt in the Third World can be destroyed. To stifle revolt at home, racial divisions will be continuously provoked. By being brainwashed into 'condemning' the anarcho-terror attempts to fight back against western domination, the entire fake-'left' has repeated the Second International's 1914 disaster of voting for war credits. US imperialist tyranny is as 'fascist' as anything seen when German and Japanese imperialism were setting the pace for warmongering to end capitalism's last world slump. The grotesque theoretical mistakes by Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Revisionism in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, continue to cripple the revival of serious anti-imperialist struggle.

More clearly than ever, the long post-1945 imperialist boom (which saw off Revisionist-Stalinist muddle-headedness and Trotskyite 'left' opportunism equally effectively) is now heading unstoppably towards international slump and inter-imperialist world war, as Marxist-Leninist science has always made obvious must happen.

As economic and political domination by multi-national monopoly finance capital, and its NATO armies, runs into ever-greater contradictions of all kinds, so will explosive anti-imperialist phenomena of various qualities proliferate, such as the international anarchist street protests against globalisation, the al-Qaeda terrorism, the Palestinian suicide bomber Intifada, the FARC and Nepalese guerilla war movements, the Argentine mass political revolt, the race-riots in north of England towns, etc, etc, etc.

And even before any world-crisis effects have started having a major impact on any of the big metropolitan imperialist powers (Japan excepted), the traditional anti-slump diversion of warmongering chauvinist aggression has already become the necessary tone for holding office in the main Western powers.

A quite spectacular note of cold-blooded colonial-fascist domineering has been struck to justify the brutal blitzkrieg on Afghanistan which has casually wiped out thousands of innocent villagers, etc, under the demented high-altitude bombing of targets "where we had good reason to think al-Qaeda or Taleban leaders might be" in the words of the Pentagon and NATO war-criminals.

The same murderous ruthlessness has arrogantly accompanied the total slaughter of hundreds of prisoners-of-war at Mazar-i-Sharif and elsewhere, the bodies photographed with their hands still tied behind their backs.

Only the destruction from major inter-imperialist war can 'cure' the international economic paralysis (slump) caused by the unavoidable 'surplus' of monopoly capital and its 'over-production' crisis. In their 'condemnation' of anarcho-terror spontaneous responses to imperialism's stifling world domination, the fake-'lefts' repeat the social-chauvinist treacherousness of Second International leaders voting for war credits in 1914.

Simultaneously with this xenophobic contempt for cheap Third World life, the Western powers are also all preparing to play the racist card at home.

The 'asylum-seeker' mixture of human despair, economic opportunism, and capitalist racketeering, plus the inevitable ghettoisation of all imperialism's former 'immigration' stunts (to defuse revolutionary crises abroad or to import cheap labour), makes playing upon racial consciousness (as yet unavoidable given some extremely low educational and cultural levels prevailing under capitalism) a simple task for a frightened bourgeois world.

FAKE-'LEFT' HELPS PRESS 'ANTI-RACIST' STUNT CONCEAL CAPITALISM'S RESPONSIBILITY.  NEED FOR SOCIALIST REVOLUTION.

To keep the working class divided so that it does not get together to raise a revolt against the degeneracy of the capitalist free-market system, it is the capitalist press, television and radio which will have the crucial role in initially playing on people's existing prejudices.

The riots have already kicked off in 2001 because of the worsening economic perspectives and feelings of frustration and insecurity which the slump damage so far has caused or threatened.

With ethnically segregated residential areas already (due to the persistent cultural shallowness of the capitalist system and its encouragement of clannishness for reasons of social and economic survival or getting-by), —  it is inevitable that worsening conditions for jobs, housing, schooling, health service, etc, etc, will spread capitalism's rotten basic rivalry in all things (jobs, housing, well-being, living standards, education, etc) into blame and envy about the slump too.

As with scarce council resources already, - with endless complaints that services for one community are better than for another or are being improved at the expense of another,  — so will resentment escalate astronomically when jobs have to be lost, or closures made, and different ethnic groups all think that they are getting the unfair treatment.

Once living standards start falling, and people can no longer provide for their families as they used to be able to, then the latent prejudices which saw riots around the North in 2001 will begin to be whipped up into hardline fascist politics.
 
It is capitalist society AS A WHOLE which will be leading the way, no one part of it.

It is pointless just blaming the fascist parties, for example. They are the SYMPTOMS of growing divisions and conflicts in society, not the cause.

It is pointless blaming the capitalist media as such: They don't run capitalism.  But the media, of course, keep everyone brainwashed so that the capitalist system remains protected.

And that is just what the press are doing now, pretending that they could never be seen as a key part of the causes of racism by putting on this huge show of vilifying Bowyer and Woodgate, thereby also conveniently adding simultaneously to the general brainwashed confusion about where race-riots come from by implying that overpaid thoughtless thugs are the cause, and that giving Bowyer and Woodgate a good public kicking will help wipe out the phenomenon.

A thousand punch-ups outside pubs and clubs every week all round Britain. Hundreds get injured, dozens get killed. But the fracas that gets people agitated is the one involving the 'celebrities', — as created and defined by the capitalist press.

And what about the thousands of other young men involved each week in the wretchedness of street fights and injuries??

They are not 'news' so the reasons for their negative behaviour seldom get investigated. The pressure that should be put on capitalist society as a whole to answer up for the paltry perspectives and ambitions it gives to most working-class youth, for example, gets frittered away by the fake-'left' getting pathetic self-righteous kicks out of fulminating against a couple of equally pathetic hooligan Aunt Sallies, pointlessly put in the stocks by the same capitalist system which gave them shallow and bogus 'notoriety' in the first place.

Beyond the trivia of the sick hoax witchhunt against Bowyer and Woodgate which licensed an avalanche of confusion and sad behaviour in all directions, — capitalist press, judiciary, Leeds FC, whipped-up hysteria, and black nationalist response, —  really serious political issues about imperialist crisis go on piling up for resolution. 

Racist-fascist diversions will continue to grow inexorably, increasingly clouding the perspective for the one burning question which so far just isn't being addressed at all, — how much reaction, death, and destruction is capitalist crisis going to be allowed to inflict before the immediate practical need for world socialist revolution starts being seriously discussed.

UNDER CAPITALISM, ALL 'REFORM' DEMANDS ('LEFT' OR BLACK NATIONALIST) ONLY ADD TO CYNICISM AND HYPOCRISY.

The conflicting and unresolvable arguments about how to improve race relations in Britain are themselves exactly a reflection of what caused the flight into ghettoisation, separate-faith schools isolation, and northern city riots in the first place.

The 'problems' about which no one can find a cure or agree, lie in the dissatisfaction with life itself under the inevitable class-hierarchy tensions of the winners v losers capitalist system.

On top of the jeering resentment of the very rich by the relatively poor majority because of the injustice, unfairness, and exploitation by which the extremes of wealth are accumulated and then preserved, there must be added the unavoidable sense in the non-white population that a lot of their difficulties come from discrimination.

And the racial prejudice is very real, too, and colossally hurtful, — clearly the overwhelmingly dominant issue as far as most non-whites are concerned.

But the black nationalist response to the outrage of race-discrimination, — trying to fight it as a single issue with a 'reform' solution based on putting 'moral' pressure on racists to get them to behave differently, or legal curbs to stop them acting prejudiced, is not only doomed to frustration for as long as capitalism lasts (which automatically endlessly breeds bitterness, envy, and tribalism in all races), but will be used by racists to further justify their resentment of 'difference'.

All 'reformist' 'solutions' to ALL Britain's social (and 'racial') problems will only have this aggravating effect in the end precisely because there can be NO 'solutions' under capitalism, the preservation of which is the sole real purpose for the very existence of 'reformism' in the first place, — the never-ending pretence that the unstoppable monopoly-imperialist accumulation pattern of the 'free market' can be legislated towards ever-increasing 'fairness' and 'justice' via 'democratic government'.

The silliest deception of all rests in the universal make-believe that the plain sad reality that capitalist society has presented the world with in 2001, — race-riots in cities, ghetto-isolation of ethnic minorities, withdrawal into single-faith schools in despair of social justice any other way, retreat into black-nationalist cultural postures out of self-protection instincts, etc, etc, are all the result of 'mistakes in policy' which can now be put right by 'capitalist democracy'.

But quite obviously, envy, prejudice and fear, plus serious communal conflicts when things go seriously wrong in the economy, are exactly what capitalist society is capable of, and all that capitalism is capable of.

An even bleaker picture is presented by the historical record of 'capitalist democracy', and by its current 'world leadership' preoccupations.

The Western-backed genocide of the Palestinian nation in order to complete the handing over of the Palestinian homeland to the Western Zionist-imperialist leadership of world Jewry to build a 'national home' for the faith-linked freemasonry of some of the Western world's most powerful monopoly-capitalist banking and commercial dynasties is one of the most monstrous, sustained acts of official racism in all world history.

The West's 'liberals', 'democrats', and 'reformists' can swear hostility to 'racism' in society for all they are worth, but the very existence of the Western way of life is based on its world economic domination, which in turn is totally dependent on the USA's international military-control system for propping up armed stooges like the Zionists, and putting down any local Third World regimes which might challenge the Washington 'New World Order'.

This planet-wide network of ruthless blitzkrieg repression is unashamedly 100% racist, by the very definitions of the First World dominating the Third World, and by the utterly merciless brutality with which the master-races put down the Earth’s unter-mensch.

Growing up for 7 generations or more with such a regular routine race-superiority/race-inferiority background to all history, how can the people of the Western imperialist countries not be steeped in prejudices, and assumptions, and hypocrisy of all kinds, concerning what real 'justice' there is on earth for the overwhelming majority (non-white) of mankind???? 

These fascist tyrannies against the Palestinian and Iraqi nations are happening in the West's name right now, as criminally murderous as any racist-atrocity injustices in all history.

How can there be anything other than complete disbelief, suspicion, and mistrust in all dealings between the majority ethnic populations of the world and the minority White master-race?????

But just as bad as the petty-bourgeois white 'reformist' delusions that the capitalist world can be changed to one which has perfect equality and justice, are the 'reformist' delusions of the black-nationalist middle-class who basically just want to climb on the bandwagon of Labour or other 'parliamentary' opportunism, and ape their 'party democracy' careerist colleagues in pretending that just one more inquiry, or just one more complete new legislative change, etc, etc, will "transform race-relations in Britain", etc.

Under capitalism, and especially facing a long period of deepening world economic crisis which will see xenophobic warmongering-chauvinism become the main policy platform for every Western power to divert the unemployed masses at home from revolution (blaming 'abroad' for the slump economic difficulties and trade-war disasters), the lives of most of the population will never be far from turmoil, dire insecurity, or real suffering and a vengeful sense of grievance of one kind or another.

Brought up and educated in total brainwashed political and historical ignorance, how can all Western populations possibly avoid being whipped up by racist diversions thrown into the domestic bargain.???

The whole 'immigration' racket is a capitalist exploitation fraud to start with, and has been for hundreds of years, shipping vast numbers of people back and forth around the globe all for the sake of economic domination and exploitation. Slave trade & anti-Third World genocide (America, Australia, etc) were the tragic human suffering at the start of this bourgeois-imperialist racket; race-riots in slump-terrified Western lands will mark its conclusion. 

The USA points the way. It has experienced more dramatic 'civil-rights' and anti-slavery struggles and victories, and has had more outstanding integration triumphs at the top of public life, backed by as much 'political correctness' as can be imagined, as any country on earth. But the racial tensions in parts of America, and the expectations of future racial strife, are more violent and bleak than at any time in US history, —  driven into that volatile condition by the insanely unrealistic propaganda for the American capitalist way of life which pretends that a fabulous life for all US citizens is guaranteed now for all time by the American 'New World Order'.  

That lying hypocritical dream will not fall apart in the most appalling civil-war bloodshed (at some time in the future) just because US global domination is based on racist-fascist tyranny, as seen above, but much more because in the international economic collapse, the imperialist bourgeoisie can only try to pass off the burdens of slump and collapse onto the working class everywhere.

Tragically, class prejudices are likely to be indistinguishable from racist prejudices for a while for many of the victims of the world slump, and it will require a massive rebuilding of an international Marxist-communist revolutionary movement to rally all spontaneous outbursts and struggles into a class war to take power to build a workers state, universally.

'Reformists' of all kinds, — New Labour, Black Nationalist, Lib/dems, BNP, and dozens more to come, — will be the main obstacle, — still all trying to sell to the working class the idiotic dream that the totally unstable, divisive, unfair, and unjust capitalist exploitation system can somehow be 'reformed' into a much happier society by this or that series of changes, major or minor.

It is garbage. If a capitalist country's entire population was totally cloned like peas in a pod, they would still be bamboozled into taking it out on each other when things went wrong if they had been brought up in the brainwashed ignorance such as rules Western 'democracy' today, living a totally false economic existence based on worldwide racist exploitation and tyranny.

All American and other Western history once again proves it. Since the 19th century, every new wave of exploited immigrant labour has been systematically vilified with officially condoned racism, always ready to divide and rule the working class in case of slump and revolutionary necessity, —  anti-Irish, anti-Jewish, anti-Polak, anti-Spic, anti-Spade, anti-Paki, anti-anything-that-goes.

Get rid of capitalism, and all need for such backward, lunatic, racist filth disappear.

The 'race-reform' lobby is not especially bad or stupid, but it is as misleading a fraud and diversion to the working class as any other reformist delusions. It disarms the working class from the crucial understanding that its historical destiny is to make the greatest revolutionary advance in the entire record of civilisation, to rid the world of class domination, by building the true democracy of workers states under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

TO HALT 'FASCISM' AS SUCH IS A DIVERSION. ALL WARMONGERING REPRESSIVE IMPERIALISM IN CRISIS IS 'FASCISM'. THE BOOT OF REACTION GOES IN WITH OR WITHOUT SWASTIKA ARMBANDS. REVOLUTION IS THE ONLY PROGRESS, NOT ANTI-FASCISM. GERMANY & SPAIN WERE STALINIST DISASTERS EN ROUTE TO THE 'PEACEFUL PARLIAMENTARY ROAD' TO OBLIVION.

A looming blind-alley disaster for the working class will be the political extension of the misdirected posturing against thug celebrities which will try to make "stopping the fascists" the main strategy for the socialist movement.

Every catastrophic historical mistake that Revisionism and Trotskyism made between them will be reimposed by such fatal shallowness.

Never in history has the problem been fascism as such, and neither is it now.

The problem is always the social and economic conditions of crisis being sown by the capitalist system as a whole which the fascists take political advantage of, just one of a variety of negative political and social symptoms which the crisis creates.

Just "stopping" one symptom by "halting fascism's march" is a) utterly pointless; and  b) almost certainly futile anyway. 

The essence of all 'fascist' repressive reaction in a crisis is to cow the working class to make it bear (in unemployment and poverty, etc) the burdens of the economic crisis; to divide the working class tribally to make them more easily pacified and less capable of organising a revolution; and to divert the working class and petty bourgeoisie into 'patriotic' war-chauvinist channels by playing on the 'national interest' in xenophobic conflict with 'foreign' enemies of one kind or another. 

In every international economic crisis in history, every single capitalist state has always gone down this repressive reactionary route.

Only in very rare special circumstances has a named specific fascist party had to be put into office in order to achieve the basic task in every crisis-situation, namely, the survival of the capitalist-bourgeois system despite the cataclysmic horrors of slump, reaction, war, and destruction it has led a country into.

In other words, 'fascist' parties as such are a purely incidental phenomenon of capitalist warmongering crisis, — a symptom, not the cause.

For a workers movement ever to declare "Halt the slide into fascist reaction" to be either a sensible or an achievable aim is to make a declaration of total reformist confusion, bankruptcy, and futility.

Currently, this anti-revolutionary anti-Marxist muddle-headedness finds its spontaneous expressions in "Stop the BNP" and "Punish Bowyer and Woodgate", etc, etc.

It is the wrong political education for the working class entirely, hopelessly misleading it that all that is going wrong with capitalism is a temporary reactionary hiccup which can quickly be sorted out with some energetic anti-fascist protest marches and some stiffer punishments all round for racist hooliganism. Not so.

The international imperialist-system crisis the world is approaching is total and deadly.

The quality, cynicism and injustice of the almost casual fascist blitzkrieg death and destruction US imperialism is currently inflicting on Afghanistan, for example, is already in an infinitely more cold-blooded, vicious, and alarming league than anything that German or Japanese imperialism hoped to get away with when deliberately stirring up a warmongering atmosphere during the 1930s crisis. 

And the scale and suddenness of economic breakdown already utterly dwarfs the sort of dislocation experienced during the Great Depression; and the crisis has hardly started yet. 

Argentina’s current civil-war uproar results from just a tiny proportion of the potential devastation. 

Argentina gives a flavour of HOW the turmoil will evolve. Japan is still the much more revealing guide to the terrifying dimensions of the mayhem to come. 

The world's second-most-powerful-economy ever developed is comparable in efficiency, output, inventiveness and productivity to the whole world economy of the 1930s; and its floundering like a gigantic beached whale over the last 11 years, constantly threatening total bankruptcy and ruin in all directions, is symbolic of the paralysed disaster menacing the whole world economy.

Unemployment, poverty, and despair on an unimaginable scale awaits the whole planet, a simple application of Marx's law on monopoly-accumulated unviable capital 'surpluses' makes clear (the 'overproduction crisis'), of which the rioting in Argentina is just a tiny foretaste.

World revolutionary socialist understanding will shortly stage a rapid revival; but failed and incurable Revisionist and Trotskyist muddle-headedness still stands in the way, and fascist diversions will also make their move, all exploiting the same arena of "left"-reformist anti-revolutionary confusion.

The working class must be warned not to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s.

"Stopping the BNP" will be the WRONG issue, —  reformist nonsense. Crisis is driving the whole of capitalism towards reactionary repression and war. It will get there with or without the help of a 'viable' fascist party. Thus, if the BNP were "stopped", the capitalist state would simply find some other way or some other fascist party to get the job done.

There is one issue only from now on: The revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system as soon as possible.

The monstrous mistake of Revisionism in the 1930s was the inability or unwillingness to make it clear (through all the complicated nuances of tactics and strategy) that only the socialist revolution could possibly save the world from warmongering imperialist catastrophe as the climax to the insoluble economic crisis.

Strategic confusion of left opportunism or right opportunism dominated Moscow's leadership of the Third International.

Because of the lack of clarity over the inescapable revolutionary perspective which alone was facing the world, in Germany the mightiest communist party outside of the Soviet Union was virtually wiped out without trace and without a fight in a matter of weeks in a period of domestic and international capitalist debacle where a serious revolutionary attempt, entirely creditable and entirely worthwhile, could have been launched but for the universal theoretical cowardice and feebleness which bogged the communist movement down in opportunist tactical and strategic rigmaroles. 

And the wrong criticism is still being made which pillories the "after Hitler our turn" nonsense.

The crucial failure lay not in mistimed tactical manoeuvres around Nazi Party activities, but in making ludicrous assumptions about the 'worth' and 'stability' of parliamentary 'democracy', & not calling for revolt.

A similar catastrophe was inflicted in Spain three years later where the same delusions insisted that the same worthless 'parliamentary democracy' was what was worth fighting for against the fascist rebellion.

It was nonsense. Capitalist crisis was bent on a course of repressive reaction come what may, either through 'parliamentary democracy' as in Germany (where Hitler was legally voted into taking over governmental power by the MPs), or around the parliament as in Spain.

Either way, the only issue facing the working class was to overthrow the capitalist state. It was the only way to stop the course to repressive reaction. It would have been the only way to raise a sufficiently determined, clear-headed, and far-sighted proletarian movement that might actually have stopped Franco.

Let the Republican Government by all means fight Franco as well.

But as with the Bolsheviks against the Kornilov rebellion in August 1917, let the insistence on proletarian revolution remain in force, whether the weak existing government managed enough of a fight to survive the fascist coup or not.

As with all such potential 'parliamentary' allies against fascism; strike together against the plotters, but march separately, insisting that only socialist revolution can really put a stop to the capitalist course towards repressive reaction.

Even an almost-certainly-doomed bid for power would clearly have been preferable in Germany in the early 1930s. It would have further clarified the reactionariness of the existing 'parliamentary democracy' system, as did the July Days doomed demonstration in Russia, in 1917. And it might also have forced the Nazi Party to reveal its pro-capitalist essence more, in solidarising with the capitalist state, — thus shedding more of its own bogus 'revolutionary' posturing which was still beguiling some sections of backward workers.

But learning no lessons, Revisionism's anti-revolutionary anti-Marxist degeneration subsequently dragged the whole world communist movement towards the 'peaceful road to socialism' delusion and towards ultimate oblivion in the post World War II period.

Even more shamefully, delusions in the stability of 'parliamentary (i.e. bourgeois) democracy' in Indonesia in 1965 saw the world's mightiest communist party outside of the workers states virtually annihilated without a fight and without trace once again, as in Germany in 1933, —  to the background by now of not just Moscow Revisionism's idiotic belief in fairy stories about 'good' imperialism versus 'bad' (i.e. 'fascist' imperialism) but the insanity of permanent 'peaceful coexistence' as well, making anti-revolutionism almost obligatory.

To this day, the entire fake-'left' in Britain, Trot and Revisionist alike, has not really moved on from that shameful Communist Party position of just being useless 'left' reformist adherents to the utterly reactionary Labour Party, the architects of the Cold War nuclear encirclement of the workers states, and the chief stooge still of US imperialism's fascist aggression masterplan to some day rid the world totally of any socialist or anti-imperialist revolt at all, via total repressive reaction.

Tragically, the opposition to Stalinism's Revisionist weakness was dominated from early on by the even worse opportunist theoretical nonsense of the Trotskyites, which rapidly degenerated everywhere into Labour-entryist anti-communism which found its classic Cold War expression supporting the Solidarnosc fake-'left' stunt, financed and masterminded by the CIA and the Vatican which put the neo-fascist nationalist Walesa on the map, eventually guaranteeing capitalist restoration in Poland and undermining all of the workers states in the process.

The only way that total catastrophe for the world from warmongering crisis can now be avoided, and rational progress for civilisation resumed, is by going back to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and working within the workers states for steady improvement. The pro-Soviet world anti-imperialist movement offered the only serious alternative there has ever been to international domination by regularly recurring crises of warmongering monopoly-imperialist aggression.

Only a new wave of Bolshevik Revolutions and powerful workers states, organised on anti-capitalist consciousness as before, will halt this new era of out-of-control warmongering fascist aggression by the monopoly-imperialist system in crisis.

SUCH IS THE 'LEFT' RETREAT FROM LENINIST REVOLUTIONARY ANTI-IMPERIALIST SCIENCE THAT GENUINE RESISTANCE TO WESTERN DOMINATION IS BEING SLANDERED AS 'FASCISM', A HISTORIC TERM ONLY DESCRIBING IMPERIALISM ITSELF. TOO MUCH IS MADE OF THE 'DIFFERENCE' BETWEEN BOURGEOIS DICTATORSHIP BY 'DEMOCRACY' TRICKS OR BY POLICE-STATE TRICKS.

The complexities in the historical journey of class war and revolutionary nationalism towards the overthrow of the imperialist system, since the Revisionist self-destruction of the Soviet workers state and the Socialist Camp, have plunged fake-'lefts' into theoretical chaos.

Sept 11, Palestinian suicide-bombers, or anarchist street fighting in Genoa have all been declared "the wrong struggle" variously by every Trot and Stalinist sectarianism from the Socialist Alliance to the SLP, Lalkar, and beyond, — the 'swamp'.

But they are what is happening, — caused by imperialist world repression and its insoluble 'surplus capital' economic crisis which is increasingly pushing monopoly-bourgeois ideology towards big-power warmongering fascist aggression against any resistance to western (i.e. American) domination.

The fake-'lefts' in Britain who universally condemned the Sept 11 attempt by the imperialist-dominated middle East to fight back against the region's endless humiliation and persecution as a result of Western world-rule, have increasingly more to answer for as the fascist slaughter, which US imperialism has unleashed on the strength of gaining world opinion's approval that "something must be done" gathers pace.

Universal warmongering barbarism is the imperialist system's long-term intention if the deepening economic crisis threatens the West's international domination.

Support for Islamic voodoo is out of the question, but to condemn Sept 11 means, willy-nilly, to side with US blitzkrieg.

As Lenin explained in Guerilla War (1906), it is ludicrous for the socialist revolution to "condemn" episodic terrorist turmoil. Instead, it needs to spread its own influence so as to give a believable direction and leadership to anti-Ruling-Class hatred. 

In their futility and frustration, confusion and self-conceit has dragged 'left' sects beyond the disgraceful attempt to set up Black Bloc anarchists for a beating as 'police provocateurs' to even nastier bourgeois class-collaboration, cheering on the slaughter of al-Qaeda as "no great loss", and even fingering Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorism for "condemnation" too, effectively providing a 'left' cover for further imperialist blitzkrieg massacres.

This theoretical chaos needs to read Lenin, study history, and look objectively at exactly what is happening in the world to produce Sept 11 after a decade of increasing imperialist warmongering-fascist aggression.

It would be marvellous if there was a Palestinian Viet Cong to give Marxist-Communist leadership to the struggle against Zionist colonisation and tyranny, but it was precisely the Revisionism and Trotskyism which produced these armchair-revolutionary defeatists in Britain which also buried Leninism without trace in Palestine too, — [the] 'swamp'.

Hamas has a reactionary, religious ideology and equally backward international sponsors and will undoubtedly fail to inspire the whole Palestinian nation, Vietnam-style, to a successful national-liberation socialist revolution.

But that the Hamas guerilla war is leading the fight against Zionist-imperialist tyranny is also indisputable, inspiring the whole Intifada.

The socialist revolution needs its own independent propaganda in Palestine and its own fighting units, but while marching separately, they need to strike together with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and anyone else willing to topple the Zionist colonisation.

Hamas suicide bombing, for all its flaws and weaknesses both long-term and short-term from a Marxist perspective, is nevertheless WHAT IS HAPPENING on the front line against Zionist-imperialist tyranny. As Lenin explains, the socialist revolution is abandoning the fight completely by simply rejecting what Hamas is doing. The only serious critique that will deserve a hearing is one which gives alternative anti-Zionist fighting leadership from the front. All other purely academic carping should be treated with the contempt it deserves as little better than pro-imperialist,  class-collaborative defeatism.

As obvious as all this is from a Leninist point of view, unbelievably some theoretical confusion on the fake-'left' has actually accepted the 'logic' of the generally confused and cowardly "condemnation" of Sept 11 and condemned Palestinian guerilla-war terrorism as well. This takes Revisionist degeneration into qualitatively new territory, and is already a widely-observed anti-communist phenomenon. This is 'New World Order' defeatism gone totally pro-imperialist. It is the historical equivalent of the Revisionist leaders of the Second International initially voting for war credits in their 'own' parliaments in 1914 "purely for the self-defence purposes of our 'own' country", but rapidly being transformed into open social chauvinists as World War I murderously and humiliatingly progressed, or into shamefaced ones (i.e. social pacifists, idiotically bleating 'No to war' as the Juggernauts of the imperialist economic-survival crisis clashed on).

All sorts of 'justification' is put forward, now as then, as to why such class-collaboration is 'necessary', — invariably along the racist-chauvinist lines that the enemy fighting one's 'own' imperialist state is "even MORE reactionary" than the home team, and so the "lesser of two evils" has to be sided with.

Unbelievably, fake-'lefts' like the CPGB and others in the Socialist Alliance, are spouting this degenerate opportunism right now, denouncing the pathetic Islamic naïvety of such insubstantial lightweight sects as al-Qaeda as "dangerous reactionary anti-imperialism whose religious feudalism would drag civilisation back historically", etc, even as the only truly dominant, direction setting force on earth, Western imperialism, was in the process of inflicting such atrocities as the two massacres of prisoners at Mazar-i-Sherif (see EPSRs 1114 & 1115), and continuing the merciless blitzkrieg brutality, bombing more than 3,000 innocent civilian casualties to death so far in Afghanistan.

It is derisible fantasy to pretend that Osama Bin Laden, or sheikh Yassin, or even Saddam Hussein, can even remotely be considered a "serious fascist threat to the world" as these weird bedfellows Bush, Blair, and the CPGB like to make out.

None want to restore feudalism against capitalist-imperialist world progress; none of them are in the slightest position even to try.

And however 'barbaric', primitive', or 'reactionary' any of their actions or programmes can be labelled, it throws all reading of history into impossible confusion to see any of them as the "possible next fascist threat to civilisation".

Firstly, the description of the danger is itself phrased hopelessly misleadingly, causing people to look for fascism in entirely the wrong phenomena.

Secondly, even when correctly stated, there is no way that any regime headed by Saddam, Osama, or Yassin could play the slightest 'fascist' role in inter-imperialist warmongering, which is the arena which alone has given 'fascism' its dramatic historical resonance.

It was a specific world-imperialist crisis situation which created the fascist phenomenon (aggressive warmongering tyranny fuelled by manic ideological extremism of a racist/religious/mystical flavour). It was the crisis era which created the fascists, not the fascists who created the crisis era.

There have been plenty of would-be lunatic messiahs marching around the political scene for generations.

But there was only one fascist era — the 1930s when difficult economic world-crisis conditions particularly put the squeeze on some major, or would-be major, imperialist powers who felt they were being denied the chance of colonial expansionist lifelines out of the international slump conditions prevailing universally.

Germany, Japan, and Italy felt especially aggrieved against the colonial-exploitation stranglehold that Britain, France, and the USA in particular had already historically established.

Their 'fascist' ranting about a 'new world order' to keep their own slump-threatened populations bemused by aggressive preparations for expansionist warmongering, set the tone for a row of smaller-power imitators, but was crucially pandered to, up to a certain extent, by the established Big Three imperialist powers who all had a mature grasp of warmongering chauvinism's great potential for keeping state-unity intact during a severe economic crisis, but who also had a huge stake in trying to crease a particular imperialist-warmongering conspiracy which might strike at the Soviet workers state.

For a serious repeat of a 'fascist' threat as history knew it, Saddam, Bin Laden, and Yassin would not only need to be the partial inventions of imperialist foreign policy in the first place which then went wrong (as they all in fact are, encouraged as foils for perceived 'greater evils' at the time); but they would also need to be potential state-regimes which could in time become a worldwide military threat.

For the British fake-'left' to shout 'fascist danger' in unison with imperialism at Saddam, Bin Laden, and Yassin is a) just lunatic fantasy; and b) class-collaborating treachery anyway because any military defeats which ANYONE can inflict on world-dominant imperialism should be ecstatically welcomed by all who have a serious interest in the overthrow of the imperialist system, — defeat in war being the only route well-trodden in history so far for the revolutionary socialist overthrow of a ruling class, (after its defeat and humiliation in a failed inter-imperialist war).

When imperialist powers fought each other, the science of Leninism saw only the opportunity for each working class to topple its OWN ruling-class after defeat, setback, or humiliation. NEVER did Leninist science see the social-chauvinist route (of regarding the domineering warmongering aggression of the 'enemy' as "more fascist" than the home government's destructive murderous opportunism and jingoistic hysteria), — as anything but a ludicrous mistake and a catastrophic betrayal of the working class.

For the fake-'lefts' to abandon 100% concentration on looking for the next imperialist defeat, setback, or humiliation while they make utterly useless academic appraisals of how much 'fascist potential' they can see in the regimes targeted by their 'own' imperialist governments for fascist blitzkrieg, — is such reactionary treachery to everything that serious anti-capitalism has ever been about that all pretence to some kind of 'socialist' ideology by these sects is destroyed completely.

Not a scrap of imperialist foreign policy has ever been anything less than 100% 'fascist' in being willing to blitzkrieg and repress local resistance to whatever extent necessary whenever it could be got away with.

The colonising/domineering tyranny abroad by imperialist powers (Britain, France, USA, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, etc, all the same, exactly like Germany and Italy) for more than 100 years consisted of massacres, torture, concentration camps, starvation, cultural destruction, and total murderous genocide, etc, etc, etc, long before German imperialism gained its international brutality notoriety in the 1930s.

And the butchering, poisoning, torturing, defoliating slaughter in Vietnam by the USA in the 1960s took imperialist tyranny abroad to unprecedented new depths.

The merciless savagery against innocents in Afghanistan right now shows that nothing has changed, ever will change, or ever could change. It is 'fascist' (for whatever use the word is).

For accuracy's sake and for strategy's sake, a distinction only has to be drawn about the organisational nature of imperialist domination at home.

The dictatorship of the capitalist bourgeoisie is permanent until overthrown by socialist revolution, whether the proletarian masses are hoodwinked, swindled, and repressed by 'democratic legal' means or by open dictatorship.

Anti-imperialist tactics, ideology, and means of struggle must adapt to whether the working class is being screwed by a parliament, fronting a police-state; or by the police-state directly.

The great danger is in making too much of this difference whereby the catastrophic historic phenomenon of 'reformism' (plus the fake-'left') is able to prevail for ages, limiting the anti-imperialist struggle effectively to just "defending this democratic gain" or "winning that human-rights extension", etc, etc, but all the time solely determined to limit the fight just to that single issue.   

Such delusions of "socialist struggle" are not just utterly useless because capitalist states have for more than a century realised that it is far better to rule the working class by conning them with 'parliamentary democracy' than by direct police-state methods, if economic prosperity allows such a 'democratic' luxury. 

Such delusions are also totally treacherous, gagging and binding the working class hand and foot to be dominated by bourgeois propaganda and 'representative' betrayals ad infinitum.

The socialist revolution never comes by such means, nor could it ever come by such 'democracy' means.

Such understanding, however, does not rule out the need for mass mobilisation to defend any 'democratic right' whenever appropriate. Such struggles can educate and revolutionise wider sections of workers and middle class who might not yet have seen through the fraud of capitalism and its 'democracy' yet, but might learn this in some 'rights' battle or other, (provided that the revolutionary purpose of all such reformist protest mobilisations has been well argued).

Proof of the pricelessness of Marxist science over the imbecile blathering of SLP demagogy is already at hand anyway, over Ireland. The analogy is not to imply anything positive at all about Bin Ladenism but to show how lessons for the working class about the imperialist world crisis must start from the conflict of class and national forces as it unfolds in reality, and not as how it 'ought to' unfold.

Any disgrace for the Northern Ireland office of dying British colonial-imperialism in Ireland and its police chief Flanagan flowing from the Ombudsman's report on the Omagh bomb fiasco, springs out of the massive significance of the Good Friday Agreement defeat for imperialism which the EPSR has alone ever fully explained.

This Ombudsman office has a huge budget and a large powerful staff reflecting the dramatic historical nature of the GFA which effectively dismantles one of the oldest, best-entrenched, most viciously-minded, and most difficult-to-dislodge colonies of all, — the 'separate state' effectively, of 'Northern Ireland'.

It was brought down by Sinn Féin and the IRA via, eventually, the snails-pace nationalist compromise of the GFA, which less-than-clear-cut 'socialist' victory had the likes of the SLP and Socialist Alliance constantly sneering at the 'failed peace process' and 'Sinn Féin capitulation to a US-imposed settlement', etc, etc.

From the start, what every variety of fake-'left' ideology misled itself with was in automatically sneering at the more obviously backward Catholic nationalism of the Provisionals after they split from the more apparently 'communist' Officials in the Sinn Féin/IRA movement. The raw terror of the IRA frightened off these British labour movement traditionalists too (all hopelessly corrupted by Trot and Revisionist brainrot).

These opportunists who now form the 'swamp' failed to observe the basic Marxist scientific requirement to actually look at what is happening (see Lenin Guerrilla Warfare. [below]).

What was clearly being built from the start was an effective national-liberation struggle which was obviously going to LEAD the anti-imperialist fight in circumstances where a 'pure socialist revolution' as such (as advocated by all the conceited swamp as "the easiest way forward" despite not only being incapable of doing the same in Britain, but of not even daring to try), — was historically not yet on the cards for a whole variety of obvious reasons.

More Marxist-Leninist understanding was required to then see what a crucial anti-imperialist victory it would be to eventually achieve the dismantling of the 'Northern Ireland' independent statelet colony as it used to be, with its own sectarian army and police.

Not a single sect in the 'left'-swamp could even see it, — let alone recognise it — when it arrived, deliberately concealed for additional obvious reasons within the Good Friday Agreement, which the entire fake-'left' voted "useless compromise, which will solve nothing".

The cowardly SLP will, cautiously, continue to opportunistically boast of its 'big party' relationship with Sinn Féin, which, the non-Marxist Sinn Féin will naturally humour, as it does all bourgeois-liberal British politics.

But the sick philistine hollowness at the heart of such SLP-opportunist posturing remains doomed to contempt and hatred from revolutionary working-class understanding as it relentlessly grows.

AFTER HELPING BOURGEOIS HYSTERIA SET UP THE FASCIST BLITZKRIEG ON AFGHANISTAN, THE FAKE-'LEFT' PLUMBS THE DEPTHS OF HYPOCRISY STUPIDITY BY THEN CHANTING 'NO TO WAR' TO 'CONDEMN' SEPT 11 TO ACCEPT THE WHOLE BOURGEOIS-STATE 'MORALITY' JOKE OF 'PUNISHMENT LAW', MAKING ANY WISH TO SEE THE WARMONGERS DEFEATED POINTLESS. LENIN SHOWS WHY MIDDLE-EAST 'TERROR' IS THE ESSENCE OF ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE, AND ALL WHO 'CONDEMN' IT ARE PRO-IMPERIALIST STOOGES. SHAMEFUL REVISIONIST CONTEMPT FOR PALESTINIAN DEGRADATION IT HELPED TO CAUSE.  

As events move on, this servile and treacherous "condemnation" 'morality', siding with stinking bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy, will unavoidably become more and more obviously the measure of class-collaborating rottenness, petty-bourgeois stupidity, and total untrustworthiness as far as the working class is concerned.

Depending on how events develop, this filthy betrayal of the impoverished and tortured Third World's obvious incapacity or perspective-limitation to start fighting back against colonial-imperialist humiliation and totally repressive domination in any other way, could rank alongside the 1914 voting of war credits by the Second International as the greatest fake-'left' treachery in history.

Endless 'revolutionary'-sounding arguments were aggressively put forward in 1914 by the Second International leaders of the Revisionist retreat from Marxist-Leninist science then, just as now, — but in practice all were just a cover for class-collaborating chauvinism.

No different today. To condemn Sept 11 as only a "barbaric atrocity" by "fascist anti-imperialists" is to concede the field of argument completely to the bourgeois-reformist imbecility which thinks that the poverty causes of terrorism should be eradicated soon, but that the 'indiscriminate slaughter of innocents' cannot be tolerated, and has to be stopped immediately.

To agree with bourgeois hypocrisy that "something must be done about barbaric terrorist atrocities", which helped put Bush and Blair in total charge of world opinion (superficially and temporarily), but to then protest the blitzkrieg outcome with pacifist 'No to war' objections, is the cynical absolute in self-delusion by the fake-'left'.

The Second International similarly pretended that each party voting for war credits within their 'own' parliament would only provide for each country's "own" defence, but not for any colonial-imperialist war aggrandisement, conquests, reparations, or other booty.

But warmongering chauvinism quickly won the propaganda battle in every country, as was bound to happen as soon as the fake-'left' conceded any justification whatever in voting war credits.

The same now. As soon as the phoney 'morality' of reformist imbecility is conceded that "something must be done about barbaric terrorist atrocities", then blitzkrieg repression ad infinitum has been conceded.

As in the 1914–18 War and as in all warmongering, the only way for halting the butchering chauvinism henceforth (Iraq, Somalia, and the Palestinians are already being lined up for the next blitzkrieg slaughters) is by taking advantage of ANY defeat or setback whatsoever for the imperialists to wage war on the warmongers themselves. (See EPSR 1109 for the quotations from Leninist science which explained its epoch-making practical development of strategically setting up the October Revolution).

But having effectively abandoned the field to bourgeois propaganda's claimed right to "wage a war on terrorist atrocities", then there is no way possible for the fake-'left' to now encourage the world to look forward to imperialist defeats in these blood thirsty brutalities and triumphalism. It would make no sense for these Trots and Revisionists to do so.

And in practice in this case, "condemnation" is indeed the language of reformist punishment, the entire fraudulent basis of all bourgeois-imperialist "law" everywhere.

You may not wish to emulate a poor old lady stealing a pack of bacon from a supermarket, but as soon as you publicly condemn her, it is tantamount to accepting all the hypocrisy of bourgeois 'justice' including the crap that her 'punishment' will henceforth make society a better place, less crime, etc.

Publicly "condemn" Sept 11 and its 'punishment' will arrive inexorably. Pointless to say 'No to war' at that stage. Equally unbelievable to then hope for an imperialist defeat at the hands of what you have already publicly "condemned".

In other words, to have joined the hypocrisy of bourgeois-imperialist propaganda to "condemn" Sept 11 is effectively a social-chauvinist declaration of pro-imperialism (i.e. pro-'reformism' which in practice can never get rid of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and therefore amounts to a permanent acceptance of imperialism, and is thereby 'pro-imperialism'.)

Another bogus 'argument' by fake-'lefts' is that "ineffective terrorist desperation" has "strengthened imperialism".

Lenin wrote interestingly on whether inadequate terror-assaults disorganised or demoralised the working-class or not, —  and what to do about it, in his Sept 1906 article Guerilla Warfare:

Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.

The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any revolutionary organisation.

The usual appraisal of the struggle we are describing is that it is anarchism, Banquets, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution. Examples in support of this appraisal can easily be found in the events reported every day in the newspapers.

But are such examples convincing?

The fact that "guerrilla" warfare became widespread precisely after December, —  and its connection with the accentuation not only of the economic crisis but also of the political crisis, is beyond dispute. The old Russian terrorism was an affair of the intellectual conspirator; today as a general rule guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply by the unemployed worker. Blanquism and anarchism easily occur to the minds of people who have a weakness for stereotype; but under, the circumstances of an uprising, which are so apparent in the Lettish Territory, the inappropriateness of such trite labels is only too obvious. The example of the Letts clearly demonstrates how incorrect, unscientific and unhistorical is the practice so very common among us of analysing guerrilla warfare without reference to the circumstances of an uprising. These circumstances must be borne in mind, we must reflect on the peculiar features of an intermediate period between big acts of insurrection, we must realise what forms of struggle inevitably arise under such circumstances, and not try to shirk the issue by a collection of words learned by rote, such as are used equally by the Cadets and the Novoye Vremya-ites: anarchism, robbery, hooliganism!

It is said that guerrilla acts disorganise our work.

It is not guerrilla actions which disorganise the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control. Being incapable of understanding what historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of neutralising its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is engendered by powerful economic and political causes. It is not in our power to eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against guerrilla warfare are complaints against our Party weakness in the matter of an uprising.

What we have said about disorganisation also applies to demoralisation.
                                                    condemnation and curses are absolutely incapable of putting a stop to a phenomenon which has been engendered by profound economic and political causes: It may be objected that if we are incapable of putting a stop to an abnormal and demoralising phenomenon, this is no reason why the Party should adopt abnormal and demoralising methods of struggle. But such an objection would be a purely bourgeois-liberal and not a Marxist objection, because a Marxist cannot regard civil war, or guerrilla warfare, which is one of its forms, as abnormal and demoralising in general. A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e., into an armed struggle between two sections of the people. In such periods a Marxist is obliged to take the stand of civil war. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism.

We fully admit criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say. But we absolutely demand in the name of the principles of Marxism that an analysis of the conditions of civil war should not be evaded by hackneyed and stereotyped talk about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and that senseless methods of guerrilla activity adopted by some organisation or other of the Polish Socialist Party at some moment or other should not be used as a bogey when discussing the question of the participation of the Social-Democratic Party as such in guerrilla warfare in general.

The argument that guerrilla warfare disorganises the movement must be regarded critically. Every new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices, inevitably "disorganises" organisations which are unprepared for this new form of struggle. Our old propagandist circles were disorganised by recourse to methods of agitation. Our committees were subsequently disorganised by recourse to demonstrations. Every military action in any war to a certain extent disorganises the ranks of the fighters. But this does not mean that one must not fight. It means that one must learn to fight. That is all.

When I see Social-Democrats proudly and smugly declaring "we are not anarchists, thieves, robbers, we are superior to all this, we reject guerrilla warfare", - I ask myself: Do these people realise what they are saying? Armed clashes and conflicts between the Black-Hundred government and the population are taking place all over the country. This is an absolutely inevitable phenomenon at the present stage of development of the revolution. The population is spontaneously and in an unorganised way - and for that very reason often in unfortunate and undesirable forms - reacting to this phenomenon also by armed conflicts and attacks. I can understand us refraining from Party leadership of this spontaneous struggle in a particular place or at a particular time because of the weakness and unpreparedness of our organisation. I realise that this question must be settled by the local practical workers, and that the remoulding of weak and unprepared organisations is no easy matter. But when I see a Social-Democratic theoretician or publicist not displaying regret over this unpreparedness, but rather a proud smugness and a self-exalted tendency to repeat phrases learned by rote in early youth about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, I am hurt by this degradation of the most revolutionary doctrine in the world.

It is said that guerrilla warfare brings the class-conscious proletarians into close association with degraded, drunken riff-raff. That is true. But it only means that the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism. And without this latter condition, all, positively all, methods of struggle in bourgeois society bring the proletariat into close association with the various non-proletarian strata above and below it and, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become frayed, corrupted and prostituted. Strikes, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become corrupted into "alliances" - agreements between the workers and the masters against the consumers. Parliament becomes corrupted into a brothel, where a gang of bourgeois politicians barter wholesale and retail "national freedom", "liberalism", "democracy", republicanism, anti-clericalism, socialism and all other wares in demand. A newspaper becomes corrupted into a public pimp, into a means of corrupting the masses, of pandering to the low instincts of the mob, and so on and so forth. Social-Democracy knows of no universal methods of struggle, such as would shut off the proletariat by a Chinese wall from the strata standing slightly above or slightly below it.

That being so — and it is undoubtedly so — the Social-Democrats must absolutely make it their duty to create organisations best adapted to lead the ,masses in these big engagements and, as far as possible, in these small encounters as well. In a period when the class struggle has become accentuated to the point of civil war, Social-Democrats must make it their duty not only to participate but also to play the leading role in this civil war. The Social-Democrats must train and prepare their organisations to be really able to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of inflicting damage on the enemy's forces.

This is a difficult task, there is no denying. It cannot be accomplished at once. Just as the whole people are being retrained and are learning to fight in the course of the civil war, so our organisations must be trained, must be reconstructed in conformity with the lessons of experience to be equal to this task.

We have not the slightest intention of foisting on practical workers any artificial form of struggle, or even of deciding from our armchair what part any particular form of guerrilla warfare should play in the general course of the civil war in Russia. We are far from the thought of regarding a concrete assessment of particular guerrilla actions as indicative of a trend in Social-Democracy. But we do regard it as our duty to help as far as possible to arrive at a correct theoretical assessment of the new forms of struggle engendered by practical life. We do regard it as our duty relentlessly to combat stereotypes and prejudices which hamper the class-conscious workers in correctly presenting a new and difficult problem and in correctly approaching its' solution.

*The Bolshevik Social-Democrats are often accused of a frivolous passion for guerrilla actions. It would therefore not be amiss to recall that in the draft resolution on guerrilla actions (Partiiniye Izvestia, No. 2, and Lenin's report on the Congress) the section of the Bolsheviks who defend guerrilla actions suggested the following conditions for their recognition: "expropriations" of private property were not to be permitted under any circumstances; "expropriations" of government property were not to be recommended but only allowed, provided that they were controlled by the Party and their proceeds used for the needs of an uprising. Guerrilla acts in the form of terrorism were to be recommended against brutal government officials and active members of the Black Hundreds, but on condition that 1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into account; 2) the conditions of the working-class movement in the given locality be reckoned with, and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat should not be frittered away.	

Proletary, No. 5,   GUERRILLA WARFARE                         September 30, 1908

As the EPSR has explained from Sept 11 onwards, people will struggle like this anyway, whether bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy, fascist-blitzkrieg retaliation, or petty-bourgeois 'left' denunciation has 'condemned' the suicide guerrillas or not. Lenin clearly explains here that the organised socialist revolution cannot stand back from such anti-imperialist war but should try to provide proper leadership and perspective to all such struggles.

The fake-'lefts' have shamefully tried to wriggle out of this Marxist-Leninist scientific exposure of their reactionary 'moralising' by pretending that these unbelievably heroic guerrilla-war sacrifices by the Palestinian suicide-bombers and their Sept 11 counterparts are "reactionaries trying to bring back feudalism" or new "fascism".

The Goebbels-like propaganda scabbiness of this disinformation by the CPGB and others, plus the essential pro-imperialism of their opportunist position on Third World terrorist fightbacks, is beginning to mark out these Socialist Alliance careerists as one of the most despicable sects in the whole rotten history of fake-'left' "Marxism".

And the other part of Lenin’s message is equally relevant. If Sept 11 is indeed a "bad tactical move", then even greater is the guilt of the whole history of Revisionism (which spawned these new CPGB clones) for causing the international proletariat on merit to abandon any support for the old Third International traditions, which have now degenerated into complete counter-revolution in many countries.

If the clearly inadequate terrorist conspiracies are doing it wrong, or doing it at all when they should not be, then do more to clarify the appeal of Marxist-Leninist science, and win back the world proletarian leadership, Lenin is saying.

Nowhere is this stinging rebuke more appropriate than in Occupied Palestine where the fight against the Zionist colonisation of the Arab nation's homeland was sold out from the start by Stalinist Revisionism's United Nations agreement to let Zionist imperialism begin "legally" imposing genocide on the Palestinian people by stealing their land from 1947 onwards. Now the CPGB successors of that Revisionist treachery have the insane gall to charge as "racists" all who refuse to accept the colonisation of Palestine by the Zionists as a fait accompli. And once having got the 'politically correct' slander going, the related provocation is to sneer "racist" at the argument (see Lenin above) that depending on historical, cultural, or regional backwardness or unfavourable conditions, the blind rage of a terrorist outburst might well be accepted as unsurprising considering the wretched conditions of total degradation and humiliation that the hopelessly repressed refugee camps might breed in the persecuted Palestinian people.

'That is racist patronising' to paraphrase CPGB. 'Of course they could fight back with a Federal-Republican Constitution dedicated to socialist democracy: Saying that terrorism is all that the repressive conditions allow, or the best answer they can think of, is a racist slur on the Palestinians'.

Self-righteous moralising humbug of this extreme nastiness and barminess is undoubtedly stuck emotionally 100% in the camp of imperialism prevailing.

A large part of this cringing wail that "the terrorists are making imperialism stronger" is just the snivelling petty-bourgeois servility in the face of what 'lefts' think or fear is "super-imperialism" (Kautsky) invincibility.

Lenin's Guerrilla Warfare could almost have been wholly written to expose Lalkar's silly snivelling retreat from Marxism into pompous posturing in impotently 'denouncing' the Genoa Black Bloc anarchists for fighting back against police brutality at the globalisation summit.

Such Revisionist capitulationism is completely missing the historical context, as Lenin explains above. In fact it shows no awareness of dialectical historical development at all.

So, "now they will really give these terrorist sources what for" will they???

But Zionist colonisation has been promising and threatening exactly this same brutality, non-stop, every year for nearly 50 years.

And Zionist imperialism has virtually unchallenged power to precisely continue inflicting genocide 'punishment' with virtual impunity.

The result? The Intifada is wrecking the 'peace' of all the Zionist 'conquests' more devastatingly today than ever before.

And the guerrilla-war skills and ruthless determination are more awe-inspiring and more universally lionised by more young Palestinians than ever before.

And all of this came about predictably too (see EPSRs for 22 past years) because this most genocidal and brutal of all colonisations has taken place in basically the historical epoch when such direct colonisation was crumbling in every corner of the earth, the irresistible forces of national-liberation and Third World awakening driving out the no-longer-tenable humiliation of imperialist domination and exploitation.

And no nation has suffered more greatly or more brutally than Palestine, yet no major cultural tradition in human history has more catching-up to do, or a greater sense of grievance at having been wronged and scorned by the West, than the Arab Muslim civilisation which was at one stage so advanced that for centuries it made Europe look backward.

The stealing from them of their Palestinian homeland has made this 7-million strong most cultured and capable section of the mighty Arab nation an obvious historical explosion just waiting to happen.

It is inevitable that single nationhood must be restored to the entire land of Palestine, and all stolen properties returned to their rightful owners.

Consistent with the outcome of war crime/colonisation trials against the most rapacious Zionist-imperialist criminals, any Jewish-immigrant workers who want to live on (and have no property stealing crimes against them) will have to put up with living as a minority in a majority-Arab country.

The undoubted and criminal RACISM in this whole equation resides within the ignorant, arrogant, sentimental Western 'political correctness' (shared by Revisionism's rotten class-collaborationist tradition) which unthinkingly and unhistorically insists that "of course Israel is here to stay".

And out of this routine failure to apply an absolutely objective historical examination to the Palestinian question as Lenin recommended, routine non-Marxist fake-'left' posturing invents the ultimate prejudice against terrorist methods and declares the Palestinian guerrilla-war "condemnable" because they are deluded it is "doomed".

This standard petty-bourgeois undialectical prejudice that the 'sole super-power' imperialist 'New World Order' is bound to win any international political-military conflict whenever it wants to, only continues Revisionism's anti-communist thinking that a shattering crisis for the 'free-world system' such as produced the inter-imperialist catastrophes of World Wars I and II, is no longer possible.

The ignorant prejudice also continues, shared by bourgeois and Revisionist anti-Marxism alike, that 'fascism' is just violent aggressiveness attached to any backward beliefs. Hence the sneer from the pro-imperialist 'lefts', —  who are opportunistically desperate to dissociate themselves from Sept 11 but who are embarrassed at the worldwide proletarian satisfaction at America's humiliation, — are so keen to dismiss the al-Qaeda guerrilla-war operation as 'fascism'.

But the only fascism around, of course, is the historically established aggressive imperialist warmongering as the chauvinist 'solution' to international capitalist economic crisis.

It is what US imperialist warmongering aggression is actually DOING now which could earn the additional description of 'fascism' (for what it is worth), whipping up chauvinist belligerence as hysterically as possible as the notion of a 'solution' to worldwide problems, 'pacifying' everything in sight as the only way forward.

The treacherous 'left' collapse into its "condemn terrorism" stupor is the other side of its anti-communist inability to accept that the whole imperialist international 'free-market system' is soon to crash in a worldwide revolutionary crisis which will even dwarf the turmoil of 1917 and its aftermath.

The Enron 'greatest bankruptcy in history' is signal enough, but the far more conclusive evidence still revolves around Japan's fate where the world's second most powerful imperialist economy ever has remained paralysed for 11 years in a classic 'surplus capital' crisis, and simply cannot get out of it despite the repeated massive use of every reflationary trick in the Keynesian book.

And until World War III destroys enough 'surplus capital' (and 'surplus labour', etc, etc) worldwide, no economies will avoid the relentlessly oncoming slump any more successfully than Japan.

Hardly surprising, therefore, how noticeably quick Japan was to offer active-service military units for the anti-Afghanistan warmongering bonanza, again re-writing its 'peace' constitution in the process. Germany, where economic stagnation has now lasted two years, was equally quick to do likewise, and get in on the international warmongering 'solution' to problems as rapidly as possible. The self-deluding myth of 'super-imperialist invincibility' is just the rationalisation of the petty-bourgeois class-collaborative instinct, but it shallowly looks to these undoubted 'facts' of imperialist warmongering build-up to "prove" how this 'desperate terrorist atrocity' has only 'made imperialism stronger'.

In workers movement history, the periodic annihilation of all ability to think dialectically never ceases to astonish.

Firstly, when has a breaking-out of generalised imperialist warmongering ever led to anything but revolutionary disaster ultimately for the degenerate 'free-world' system??

Secondly, if cut-throat inter-imperialist trade-war is already virtually strangling to death such major economies as Japan, then how can the spread of inter-imperialist rivalry in warlike posturing and threatening (as around the Gulf War earlier, then around the Balkans emergencies, and now around the anti-Afghanistan blitzkrieg) not RAISE expectations that the degenerate warmongering system is heading yet again in the same catastrophic direction as marked the 'free-world's' two previous great economic crises by World Wars I and II.???

Thirdly, what does an initial run of easy US imperialist 'victories' (Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, etc) most resemble in modern history?? The 'triumphs' for imperialist aggression as a promised world-slump 'solution' which preceded the most disastrous inter-imperialist degeneracy so far in history, — namely, World War II. Prior to it, the world turned a satisfied 'peace in our time' blind eye to the 'justified' triumphs for self-righteous 'civilising' warmongering imperialist aggression against Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, etc, etc. And then when World War II's declaration was forced onto the bogus 'democratic' world by the shame of its own degenerate connivance in all the warmongering imperialist aggression, there was yet another run of seemingly unstoppable imperialist-war 'triumphs' across Europe, the Near East, and the Far East. But all the time these 'victories' were only dialectically building the imperialist system up for its most devastating fall yet in the aftermath of World War II when a whole string of new states ousted capitalism and imposed the dictatorship of the proletariat; and then the whole colonial world rose up in arms to wipe out one great 'invincible' Western empire after another.

History is clear. The imperialist system goes to war, and sooner or later, the imperialist system itself must also suffer some defeats.

Most of the revolutionary overthrows of the murderous and destructive capitalist system so far in history have come out of imperialist defeats in the warmongering aggression it inflicts so "unstoppably" onto society.

And while heavyweight inter-imperialist war some way down the line will undoubtedly produce comparable defeats at some stage or other, revolutionary upheavals are not ruled out before that because a combination of circumstances can at any time create a humiliating defeat or setback for almost any imperialist power.

The greatest obstacle to understanding and preparing for this essentially revolutionary direction of history is the philistine influence of fake-'left' sects on the British workers movement, all pretending to be 'revolutionary' this, and 'Marxist' that, and 'real socialist' something else, but all in reality being nothing but the sterile clones of failed old Labour 'leftism', utterly deluded by the fraud of 'reformist pressure' eventually producing a 'socialist majority' in Parliament.

The snivelling impotent fake-'left' sentiment will be that like on Genoa's streets or in Gaza or on the West Bank, 'violent provocations' like Sept 11 will 'play into strengthening imperialism's hands', etc.

Social pacifism comes out of the same roots of "you can't fight against impossible odds, so just stop the juggernaut with moral shaming".

But far from impossible, Leninism explains that the victims of the imperialist world order will never stop fighting in any way they can. It is the task of Marxist science to give the anti-imperialist struggle a convincing unifying world-revolutionary perspective.

The entire fake-'left' is held back from even starting the task by its sectarian backwardness of being crippled by unresolved theoretical skeletons in the cupboard.

A self-regarding petty-bourgeois small-minded inability to face up to past mistakes of a Trotskyite anti-communist anti-Soviet nature, or a museum-Stalinist Revisionist nature of "no mistakes here" in best cultist-monolith tradition (although grotesque errors clearly started creeping in from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, ending in total catastrophe by 1990), — has paralysed all competence for genuine, open, all-round objective polemics.

As is already happening, the development of events themselves wi11 increasingly expose this reactionary theoretical backwardness of the fake-'left'.

This isn't just a question of a difference of opinion or feeling about violence, or just a tactical political mistake which will soon be forgotten.

The whole philosophy of whether the world is heading for a revolutionary future as the inevitable outcome of the insoluble contradictions of imperialist crisis, or whether rational reforms are going to find solutions to most of the world's problems largely peacefully, — is bound up in this issue.

And that is not a harmless choice to be made either. Choosing the essentially class-collaborative view of the future in which everyone is going to act fairly reasonably, it is assumed, and nothing too terrible is going to happen to the world, — is essentially threatening to totally disarm important sections of the population and make the direction of the inter-imperialist trade-war economic crisis towards World War III all the more certainly unstoppable before it starts, and in consequence all the more genocidally destructive and devastating once it is allowed to get going.

Paradoxically, it is the "condemnation" of the Sept 11 terrorist violence which most ensures that the greatest brutalities and bloodshed will be inflicted on the world by the imperialist crisis.

If the whole planet had risen up to sympathise with the tragic victims of Sept 11 but to tell the world imperialist system (of economic exploitation, political domination, and military humiliation) that its foot on the neck of the Third World (to keep going the injustice and unfairness of the rewards on earth) was the real CAUSE of why young men from the Middle East were driven to such terrible fanaticism, — then the sick authors of the barbaric blitzkrieg slaughter now raining down on the world's poorest people, —  and with much more threatened to come, — might have been restrained.

This is unrealisable fantasy, of course. But posing such a hypothesis brings home what has been achieved by confused petty-bourgeois idiocy in feeling obliged to go along with the bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy of "condemning" the Sept 11 violence.

It has massively reinforced the operational confidence of the monopoly-imperialist humbug (not an inevitable development), smugly congratulating itself that its propaganda blitzkrieg has fooled enough of world opinion into "condemning" Sept 11, implying "something must be done", to now be able to get away with murder (literally) in Afghanistan, and probably much further afield too, warming up early for US imperialism's planned World War III violence.

It is pointless the fake-'lefts' now saying that they condemned Sept 11 but that they instantly said also 'No to war'. Sept 11 was the time to tell US imperialism "serves you right. It is your system which makes the world a violent unjust tyranny. The tragic victims of Sept 11 are just a drop in the ocean of the vast numbers massacred, murdered, starved to death, diseased to death, or otherwise brutalised and blighted EVERY DAY all round the world by your system of domination and exploitation. And the violence and the bloodshed will only get worse for as long as your system rules on, —  worse in all directions".

And what use is the 'left's "condemnation" anyway, since far more and far worse terrorist attempts by the Third World to fight back are bound to follow.

If it is argued that no, the NATO special forces will wipe out al-Qaeda and that this will be an end to all such terrorist 'outrages' for all time then this amounts to "condemning" Sept 11 in the spirit of effectively helping imperialism's retaliatory blitzkrieg.

And if it is argued as the Socialist Alliance CPGB sect does for example, that the defeat of the "Taleban counter-revolutionary fascists" is a good thing, and that Lenin supported the need to "combat pan-Islamism", — then such "condemnation" of Sept 11 effectively amounts to enthusiastic support for the imperialist blitzkrieg and massacres.

It is pointless just blaming Blair for such a de facto British imperialist role. In such matters, governments can be swayed by public opinion. The petty-bourgeois academic "communist" idiocy, — which turned the tormented Third World's attempt to fight back on Sept 11 into a moralising posture about ends and means, and irresponsibly falsified the historical record to pretend Leninist backing for this imperialist aggression (the real fascism) against Third World revolt, has provided just the self-absorbed confusion, blind to real world hatred of imperialism, which Blairism has needed to go down this sick warmongering holocaust road.

Imperialist warmongers now feel justified by all the anti-Marxist "condemners" of terrorist guerrilla-war; and the fascist massacre trick of "shot while escaping" is already rampant, reading between the lines of the uneasy capitalist press cover-up of the deliberate slaughter of prisoners-of-war at the Qala-i-Jhangi fort.

And Iraq is next, Bush warns. The fake-'left' imbeciles joining the bourgeois "condemn terrorism" hoax, will presumably cheer again.

PUTTING THE U.S' ANTI-TALEBAN BLITZKRIEG INTO ITS CRISIS CONTEXT OF DECADES OF COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY WARMONGERING PREPARATION BY IMPERIALISM, THE ONLY SERIOUS 'TERRORIST' THREAT TO MANKIND IS THE AMERICAN IMPERIALIST BOURGEOISIE, PREPARING FOR WWIII. BUT 'LEFT' AVOIDS HAVING THIS PROVED TO IT VIA STALIN'S TRICK OF REFUSING GENUINE OPEN POLEMICS, THE VERY LIFEBLOOD OF THE 50 VOLUMES OF LENINIST SCIENCE. UNTIL THE MARXIST-LENINIST POLEMICAL TRADITION IS RESTORED, THE ENTIRE 'LEFT' CAN ONLY KEEP ON SPLITTING, AND FAILING. USSR DOOMED BY THE SAME THEORETICAL BANKRUPTCY.

Sept 11 and its aftermath have raised many questions but principally the issue of anti-revolutionary degeneration of the socialist movement, once again.

When not idiotically supporting bourgeois hypocrisy's "condemnation" of this desperate Middle-East attempt to strike back against PERMANENT imperialist domination and warmongering humiliation (in occupied Palestine, and elsewhere), — the fake 'left' just naïvely catalogues "another round of US bullying aggression", & calls 'No to war' uselessly.

But the science of Marxism-Leninism only examines such phenomena in the context of imperialist-system CRISIS and not at all as just arbitrary American acts, or convoluted oil-pipeline conspiracies.

It is also necessary to constantly relate the world turmoil Sept 11 has produced to the ever-improving understanding of what was achieved by the workers states and the socialist Camp, plus the now-towering historical significance of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

The hindsight which new developments help create also makes plainer the long theoretical build-up over decades to Moscow's ultimate Revisionist catastrophe of self-liquidating the Soviet workers state.

The arbitrary murderous blitzkrieg on Afghanistan reveals more fully the crisis-driven neo-fascist phase of the imperialist trade-war cycle which may yet have a huge distance to run (aspects of it having appeared as long as 10 years ago in the anti-Iraq blitzkrieg) but which already has the stamp on it of massive World-War-III escalations to come.

The American monopoly-imperialist bourgeoisie is giving notice, ahead of the next Great Crash dwarfing the events of 1929, that history's next long depression period of collapsing markets, mass unemployment, and poverty-driven revolt internationally, will be resolved in the USA's favour by military-backed cut-throat competition from the start.

The message, intended for Japan, Germany, Italy, and any powers taking notice, is that there will be no waiting for Pearl Harbour next time.

The US propaganda about a 'war on terrorism' could not be more misleading, especially coming as it does from the imperialist superpower which for 55 years has been running the 'School of the Americas' out of Fort Benning, Georgia, where every cut-throat tyranny which has ruled Central and South American countries throughout that time in counter-revolution's interests, has had its leading butchers trained in torture techniques; illicit assassinations; 'deniable' mass-murder; 'legal' frame-ups; 'paramilitary-vigilante' death-squads; straightforward military dictatorships; and fascist coups; (as capitalist press reports themselves have frequently acknowledged, see EPSR 1113),  —  every truly 'terrorist' activity known to history.

While the Sept 11 guerrilla-war actions against New York and Washington were the catalyst for this renewed surge of American fascist-imperialist aggression (and Sep 11 can indeed be described as terrorism in its proper historical sense of pre-rising individual revolutionary violence against institutions or symbols of the repressive authority, — in this case the US-led international imperialist economic system and its political/military establishment), — the wider, real, longer-term purpose of this ruthless blitzkrieg on the world's poorest and most backward country is to launch the war on capitalist crisis and its effects before the capitalist crisis launches any more war on US monopoly-imperialist domination.

It is the lessons of history forgotten by the international workers movement (thanks to a steady increase in theoretical mistakes by the CPSU Third International leadership from the 1920s onwards, mainly challenged only by Trotskyism's even worse Revisionist errors and treacherous opportunism) which matter most in this crucial understanding of what happens next, —  not the notorious ruling-class inability to avoid past pitfall patterns.

The bourgeoisie have not forgotten the lessons of how to fight slump and war.

The US ruling class are not fooled now. They know what nonsense it is to "wage war on terrorism", but they also know that ruthlessly putting the boot into all world developments henceforth will be the best way to prepare for the inter-imperialist trade-war and political conflicts to come, basically intimidating everything in sight and preparing for military adventures of the greatest destructiveness possible, the only 'cure' for worldwide 'surpluses' of investment capital in every industry which are steadily choking world trade profits by recession.

Little of this Marxist understanding appears in fake-'left' anti-war propaganda, from the Stalinists to the Trots, from the SWP to the SLP. All either still want to protect their own incorrect historical stance on the questions of war and revolution such as the "peaceful road to socialism" or the "neither Washington nor Moscow" Third-Camp academicism (turning into pro-Solidarnosc 'rank-and-file' counter-revolution at every opportunity); or else just wash their hands of all attempts to understand correctly the triumphs and failures of world revolutionary socialist history, and stick to routine 'left'-reformist electoral futility and 'No to war' endless social-pacifist protesting like the useless Socialist Alliance, (basically just yet another attempt to dig-up again the long-dead corpse of 'left Labourism', the worst fraud ever perpetrated on the working class).

But as the EPSR has insisted since its launch as a weekly paper 22 years ago, until the greatest ever polemical debate and theoretical rethink has challenged the ultimately negative results of Revisionism's and Trotskyism's long hold on the international workers movement, then every attempt at any new serious 'revolutionary' party' building is doomed to never get beyond the squabbling-sect stage.

The wretched farce of Scargill's SLP sums up the problem, deliberately driving out the EPSR's growing influence within the party's ranks with the openly cynical demand that the Review should cease discussing certain subjects (specifically, in that detailed charge, the history of Trotskyite delusions on the Irish Question (because some SLP leaders still adhered to them)) or its editor (the then SLP vice-president) would be expelled from the party.

This laughably trivial nonsense is of no importance in itself, but its symbolism is enormous, exactly capturing the quite ludicrous sectarianism (arrogantly contemptuous of, yet secretly fearful of, all discussion) inherited from the long rotten history of Stalinist cultism. Even more ridiculously and significantly, Scargill only managed to keep any life going in the SLP at all thanks to the typical traditional bureaucratic-opportunist 'loyalty' of the Lalkar museum-Stalinist faction of the Indian Workers Association, which dutifully feigned support for Scargill in every arbitrary outrage of party 'leadership'. Lalkar's museum-Stalinism notoriously 'solves' all the vexed questions of 20th century workers-state and Third International history by simply still continuing to believe that Stalin never got anything wrong, and bluntly just refusing to consider the irrefutable evidence from Stalin's theoretical works of the most crass mistakes in international analysis, and the most grotesque Revisionism of Marxist-Leninist scientific discoveries.

But now, most farcically of all, Lalkar itself (with Scargill's tacit approval, it would seem) has been forced to make the most withering open polemical attack on anti-communist delusions within the SLP leadership which has actually voted Scargill down (apparently) in order to publicly join the SLP to the West's bourgeois propaganda bandwagon (supported by all the fake 'left') of "condemning" the Sept 11 Third World attack on US imperialism.

Such are the sectarian imbecilities resulting from the attempt to build a 'real socialist' party not only without any worked-out revolutionary theory at all, but in undisguised contempt for all genuine polemical open struggle on questions of revolutionary-movement theory.

And everywhere else around all 57 varieties of Stalinist and Trotskyist sclerosis, the same bureaucratic manipulative nonsense prevails, all terrified of taking up the open polemic against all-comers.

Such is the rotten hold of Revisionist traditions that even the sect called Open Polemic just point-blank refused to discuss the broadest vexed questions of revolutionary history "because it was premature until the working class itself can do so once a new party is built".

This chicken-and-egg demented formalism is not so much the "inevitable result of too much aimless talking-shop discussion" as the final ludicrous thrust of precisely those Stalinist bureaucratic traditions of 'loyalty' (which killed off not just all ability to make discussing all new developments afresh and objectively the only possible starting point for every new daily political analysis of the world, confirming or rejecting what had already been 'understood' or predicted, — but killed off even any capacity to understand what was meant by "only ever starting with actual world developments, always analysed in the light of ever-renewed and ever-reviewed existing theory").

And while another fake-'left' group with pretensions to 'open polemical' dedication, the John Chamberlain sect which captured the CPGB title, — is not so daft that it cannot see the need to base its 'revolutionary programme' on a supposed analysis of contemporary world developments, its continuing Revisionist-tradition disease of bureaucratic manipulativeness and lying hypocrisy means that it will only 'openly' polemicise with selected safe, small targets, or provocatively abuse advantageous larger targets, but consciously tries all the time to ignore or deny the existence of the constant and weighty polemical challenge which the EPSR inevitably makes against this CPGB 'objective debate' posturing.

The obvious opportunist temptation is only ever to polemicise, if at all, within a larger amalgamation or with a larger party which might provide some recruitment advantages. But this all hopelessly misses the point of objective Leninist polemics which can only be to build a genuinely competent, all-round cadre party which could carry on the revolutionary communism fight, if necessary independently for a while in the worst conceivable most isolated circumstances.

With one or two honourable exceptions, the whole ex Third International virtually fell apart at the end of the Revisionist epoch which deliberately set out to kill all notion of polemical struggle (on all matters with all comers in order to develop an independent ability everywhere to grapple with the ever-developing truths of Marxist-Leninist science.)

One of recent history's most tragic ironies is that all the split-offs from narrow-minded Stalinist complacency inherited exactly the same authoritarian philistinism as the sectarian bureaucracy they were breaking with.

In every case, it was the complete failure to establish any kind of correct perspective on the world's future developments (different from Stalinism's warped vision) which skewered the endeavour.

The lack of a credible and defendable world view will always embarrass any sectarian 'revolutionary socialist' posture into stifling any real debate or polemic in due course.

The development of 57 varieties of even worse bureaucratic Revisionist authoritarianism than Stalinism itself, marked the essential petty-bourgeois opportunism of the intellectual or trade-union-bureaucrat-cadres (and their working-class followers), splitting for careerist reasons from the Soviet monolith in a decades-long intimidating atmosphere of relentless anti-communist propaganda and vilification. And the specifics of Stalinism's own failure to read world developments correctly contributed to all its critics getting their perspectives hopelessly wrong too.

The Trotskyite Fourth International came spectacularly to grief at the end of the 1930s after the Death Agony manifesto predicted total Stalinist capitulation to fascist warmongering, and an easy 4th I[nternational] revolutionary triumph over imperialism's death throes via programmatic steadiness demanding little more than "a sliding scale of wages" and "opening the books of big business to union inspection", etc, etc.

Seven years later, after the Soviet workers state's 1945 triumph over imperialism's fascist-aggression conspiracy (as great a triumph as 1917 itself), and as total US dollar hegemony started reviving monopoly-capitalism towards its most awe-inspiring world trade boom ever, — no Trot faction realistically had a perspective left to stand on; and so authoritarian stifling of all serious theoretical discussion was all that was left for all wannabee true Trot sects, and the splits inevitably began mushrooming faster than ever.

All subsequent sizable Trot sects imposed the same authoritarian dogmatism, — and all always broke into further smithereens as soon as a major theoretical difficulty was thrown up by further world developments.

The splits from Moscow's theoretical paralysis in a more nationalist or reformist direction but which equally failed to come up with a more convincing world perspective than Stalinism's Revisionist nonsense, fared no better.

Maoism (for understandable reasons) totally failed to get to the bottom of Stalin's theoretical mistakes because of Mao's own involvement in their perpetuation; and the resulting non-polemical bureaucratic authoritarianism then left the party prey to even wilder voluntaristic excesses (and the start of serious splits, inevitably sparking off even more dogmatism), from the lack of any polemical party mechanism to cope with the theoretical questions thrown up by the clash with Moscow.

The inevitable subsequent further entrenchment of unchallengeable theoretical authoritarianism by a less-and-less confident (because less-and-less polemically-trained) leadership, unavoidably plunged towards even worse Revisionism later on, a tragic decline which the confused Chinese workers state has yet to see the end of.

Eurocommunism was an even more shamefaced, tight-lipped retreat from Marxism-Leninism, almost abandoning the whole revolutionary idea itself of a role for theory, swamped by the urgent pragmatic business of 'realistic reforms'.

The eventual self-liquidation by Western 'communist' parties could not have provided a more fitting monument of shame to the long-threatened total collapse of any meaningful revolutionary theory, or of any understanding of its crucial role in party-building and the socialist revolution.

Anti-polemical bureaucratic authoritarianism, the total enemy of serious theoretical understanding, had finally proved the point in the most dramatic war possible, — by killing off the party.

The retreat from serious, objective, polemical theoretical struggle (and the start of ultimately terminal Revisionist sickness, unless checked) begins with Moscow's perplexed confusion at the failure of the world socialist revolution to spread further in the 1920s, a nervous paralysis made ten times worse by Trotsky's endless opportunist boat-rocking (against which Lenin had properly introduced the 10th Congress ban on organised factionalising, which tragically was later distorted into a virtual ban on all polemical theoretical struggle of any kind, the lifeblood of the revolution and of civilisation itself).

After much disputed zigging and zagging about the ending of NEP, collectivisation, China, and Germany, etc, (requiring full re-examination in due course), the kernel of Stalin’s ultimately destructive world-perspective Revisionism appears in the Spanish Civil War policy of deluded 'support' for petty-bourgeois parliamentary Republicanism when the CP correctly joined the anti-Franco war of resistance. Connected to it was the delusion that 'good' imperialism could be shamed into helping the 'legitimate democracy' survive the outrageous subversion by 'bad' fascist imperialism.

Both were utterly false and misleading perspectives; all imperialism was encouraging reactionary fascist aggression; and the petty-bourgeois 'parliamentary democracy' fraud could never rally sufficient anti-Franco resistance.

The CP line was a disaster. Only a workers state could have been inspired to defeat Franco's coup-war, and might well have triumphed. The Soviet workers state did against far vaster fascist forces three years later. The CP should have called for joint anti-Franco resistance; no support for the petty-bourgeois government; and a proletarian revolution as the only serious way forward.

It was this idiot Revisionist theory of a 'good' imperialism which would help defeat a 'bad' imperialism (which was further boosted by the anti-German 'allies' aspects of world War II (which had entirely different chance causes)) which Stalin then embellished into the "Permanent peaceful coexistence" and "peaceful roads to socialism" imbecilities, embracing various anti-revolutionary put-downs, Spain-style, on the way.

It culminated in the monstrous theoretical nonsense of Economic Problems of Socialism, 1952 which declared that the days of the imperialist system's economic expansion were over, and that the Marxist-Leninist science of capitalism always having growth potential, was no longer valid. 'Capitalist markets' could no longer be made even 'relatively stable'.

With this gibberish as the gospel Soviet faith over the next two generations, no wonder the CPSU Revisionist hack Gorbachev found himself by 1990 no longer believing in the Stalinist myths that planned socialist equitable production and distribution would by then have left capitalist living standards behind (impossible against the West’s super-profits from the world-trade-exploitation's greatest boom in history).

Going with popular opinion, which no longer believed it either, Gorbachev insanely decided that the flaw in Stalin's perspectives was the sluggishness of steady planned non-exploitative Soviet economic development instead of the fact that of course imperialist world-domination still had endless TEMPORARY expansion-potential left in it, —  all the way up until the next great slump and World War III.

Instead of tearing up the whole Stalinist Revisionist understanding of 'tamed imperialism' which was still the CPSU delusion, Gorbachev tore up the Soviet workers state and its planned economy, and called for the 'magic' of the market to transform the people's lives (with the fraud of 'parliamentary democracy' inevitably in tow).

Sept 11 and its alarming warmongering aftermath raises the question 'Where is the world heading' as never before; and the tortuous fake-'left' stumbling over the daft notion of joining bourgeois imperialism to "condemn" the tragic terrorist despair of a Middle East wish to fight back against humiliating domination, —  shows what a huge theoretical re-education the socialist movement needs.

Stalin's wishful-thinking legacy about 'good' imperialism still lives on, totally deluding everyone's natural instinctive hope for a peaceful democratic solution to all the world's problems.

It is totally disarming dangerous gibberish, backed up by the combined efforts of Socialist Alliance fake-'lefts' to dismiss the blitzkrieg on Afghanistan as just more bombing, unconnected to any deeper imperialist-crisis warmongering, and solvable by diplomatic and democratic reformist pressure(SWP); or else as no concern at all because imperialism is doing the world a favour by wiping out such reactionaries as the Taleban Islamic fundamentalists, even distorting Lenin as being in favour (CPGB).

The massive reproduction of all the quotes from Lenin in recent EPSRs, proving conclusively that there was no Bolshevik objection in principle to terrorism, and nothing but the most careful approach to pan-Islamic developments which genuinely were prepared to fight aspects of imperialist reaction, — are all, of course, totally routinely ignored by such fake-'lefts' as the Socialist Alliance, in line with the whole rotten Revisionist-epoch development in the socialist movement of simply abandoning all serious polemical theoretical struggle.

But such silly opportunism is doomed to get absolutely nowhere against the impending titanic world imperialist crisis in which the working masses will demand and need the most comprehensive revival and further development of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory ever known.

The EPSR has never seen the point of this challenge — as insisting that all of the answers are here, right now.

The point is that without debate, without consistent serious polemical struggle, a new real revolutionary party will never be built to provide the answers workers have to develop.

EXTREME 'LEFT' REFORMISTS IN FACT ONLY PROP UP THE BOURGEOIS-IMPERIALIST SYSTEM. REVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENTS ARE IN AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE CATEGORY OF HISTORY. ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE DAMAGED MOST BY TROT & STALINIST IGNORANCE OF MARX-LENIN THEORY.

As night follows day, the notion that surely civilisation's economic development can be rationally planned to proceed steadily in the interests of everyone on earth rather than have this periodic terrifying slump-catastrophe, will rapidly again become the chief aspiration of all human longing, — as socialism has been, already, for nearly 200 years.

What precise battles for socialist ideas will have to be fought is not yet known, of course; but that there is no alternative but world socialism to the slump and warmongering catastrophes of capitalism's grotesquely unfair and uneven development is not doubted by anyone.

Exactly how to conquer the world for a totally classless international society of planned cooperation is the stuff of all future argument; but there can be no question that even spontaneous developments (in Argentina and elsewhere) will sooner or later suggest the mass of the people taking over the ownership, running, and planning of their own country's whole economy rather than let the present insane mess continue. Organised revolutionary communist proposals will already be fermenting there for certain.

It will take the beginnings of such revolutionary upheavals (in Argentina or in any one of a score of other countries where capitalism's failure is already proving intolerable), — plus US imperialism's inevitable threatening response, - before the connections between international imperialist slump and international imperialist warmongering begin to be widely-made; but once events themselves start to teach the world such lessons (rather than the tiny propaganda output of the few circles of genuinely revolutionary Marxist understanding, which could never achieve such an educational effect on their own), — then all further mind-conditioning that "bombing is best" as a cure for the planet's ills by the likes of Bush, Blair, Polly Toynbee, Clare Short, and Christopher Hitchens, will be self-branded as more and more demented.

"War without end" was one of the more perceptive slogans already appearing on the huge London demonstration against imperialist blitzkrieg politics

And deepening splits in the ranks of middle-class mind-conditioning — all united in their horror-stricken "condemnation" of Sept 11, — are observable in the capitalist press:

(In the original EPSR issues from which these perspectives were assembled, there are several quotes here. See recent back issues prior to this Perspectives issue —  ed.note)

As usual, this well-meaning liberalism is unable to provide any perspective for any kind of end to imperialist warmongering rampaging, revolutionary or otherwise.

As usual, if there is any message at all, it is that the world would be a better place if it did not go down this route of American fascist domineering. Reformism, in other words, is the only answer put forward.

And the essence of parliamentary cretinism, Wedgwood Benn, was on hand at Trafalgar Square to actually declare: "We have a passive parliament and a cringing Cabinet", but still the 'answer' is reformism.

But of course it solves nothing. It was the total fraud of bourgeois democracy elections to a parliament under capitalism which gave Hitler the power in 1933. It was what put Bush in office last November. And it is obviously the system responsible for what Benn now calls a "passive parliament".

It is not a historical record of 'lesson learning' either. Imperialist warmongering, colonial tyranny, and the never-ending arms race are the entire unbroken story of the capitalist system; and "clearer-headed" or "more decisive" parliamentary voting is not about to change anything, no matter how many warnings are delivered by periodic outbreaks of fascist aggression.
 
The lesson-learning has to be about the 'free market' system itself, and its impossibility of ever achieving economic and technological progress for the potentially-useful benefit of mankind without creating, by those very same 'free market' means, the most grotesque inequality, injustice, and uneven development on earth, (plus periodic slump catastrophes), that must always unalterably end in total frustration, envy, hatred, revolt, and consequential domineering-warmongering-tyranny ultimately, for as long as a capitalist class is allowed to rule, (i.e. even exist, since once a capitalist class exists it is bound to rule).

This is where the petty-bourgeois fake-'left' plays its major role, posturing as 'revolutionary socialists' but utterly confusing the picture of total, all-the-way hostility to the imperialist-state world-domination and nothing else.

The "No to war, and No to terror" line of the SWP and the Socialist Alliance completely disarms the working class, playing them straight into the hands of Western propaganda pretending that the destruction of Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taleban regime will make the world a "safer and better place".

As even the capitalist press admits, the last time that imperialism's current allies in the Northern Alliance took power in Afghanistan, there was a widespread bloodbath of more degenerate savagery than the imagination can master.

And even worse than that, the anti-war sections of bourgeois press opinion are also currently drawing attention to the astonishing fact that far more "terrorist outrages" have been committed by the US imperialist system itself, in crushing its opponents by fair means or foul, than have been perpetrated by anti-imperialist struggles:

(See ed.note above on cuttings)

So the fake-'left' posturing 'morality' of agreeing with the West’s propaganda to "condemn Sept 11" not only effectively justifies the US imperialist pretence that "terrorism must be eradicated", but allows the West to literally get away with murder in its hypocrisy.

There is nothing to "condemn". Arbitrary savagery and brutal injustice are inseparable from the class-war and national-war struggles for the survival or overthrow of the international imperialist-rule system; and 'morality' will play no part at all in bringing down the monopoly-capitalist class; only organised communist-revolutionary strength and mass political understanding will.

Even "terrorism" could be a legitimate weapon, as EPSR 1106 explained in detail, quoting in full from Lenin on the subject.

'Only' two months late, at least the hoax 'Marxist' wing of one degenerate fake-'left' sect, the SLP, has limped into line with the EPSR's Marxist-Leninist understanding of class-war history by briefly repeating the same Lenin quotes, but with no acknowledgement, of course, of how and why Lalkar has now seen the light, and, more disastrously-pathetically still, with no reference to how Lalkar got it completely wrong in its previous issue two months ago.

Last week's EPSR derided Lalkar's opportunist cowardice for at last denouncing fake-'lefts' who "condemn" terrorism — but for not having the political guts to explain that it was Scargill's SLP they were really targeting, which has just belatedly formally joined the petty-bourgeois "condemnation" brigade.

This time, the charge is even more serious. Scargill's Lalkar stooges lack the political courage to admit even their own mistaken analysis, even when the progress of historical events themselves have shown up the stupidity.

It was nearly three weeks after Sept 11 that Scargill's arbitrary decision to "deplore the loss of life in the United States" and to express "fear that the world could see more of this type of attack" was revealed to those in the international working class who might have been waiting for a lead from the SLP.

The EPSR tore this mealy-mouthed petty-bourgeois idiocy to pieces for limping along half-heartedly behind middle-class "condemnation" and fascist-imperialist revenge seeking belligerence.

Lalkar came out at roughly the same time, not just failing to criticise this SLP nonsense, and calling Sept 11 a "disaster", but indirectly supporting Scargill's reactionary confusion in a separate attack denouncing anarchist anti-globalisation street fighting as only damaging the working-class cause, and only playing into the hands of imperialist counter-revolution.

"The tactics of deliberate violence are detrimental" Lalkar scolded, and approvingly quoted an allied Danish Stalinist sect branding the international anti-globalisation anarchist protesters as "tools of the bourgeois establishment, paid or otherwise" and as "the instrument of the reactionary forces".

With Sept 11 still the world's number 1 talking point, Lalkar then pointedly quoted Stalin on the Narodniks, the dominant anti-Tsarist revolutionary movement before the Bolsheviks' rise began, and renowned internationally as practitioners of terrorism against imperialism.

"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."

Lenin never said this about the original Russian revolutionary movement. On the contrary, he paid tribute to the "heroes" and the "grandeur" of their struggle against huge odds and fearful repression.

Lenin's massive output against the Narodniks was to expose their utopian views about using the Russian peasant commune system as a possible non-capitalist development, and their philosophical idealism which failed to grasp the Marxist materialist basis of social, economic, and political attitudes.

Lenin's more dismissive comments were directed against the Liberal Narodniks of the 1890s, a sad reformist retreat from the Revolutionary Narodniks of the 1870s.

Lenin's attacks on terrorist methods were always on the question of terrorism as an inferior tactic once the Marxist movement had won support for the idea of a mass working-class revolutionary movement of open political understanding as opposed to the earlier anti-Tsarist belief in a conspiracy movement of outstanding individuals.

In particular, Lenin attacked a verbal infatuation with terrorist methods which many Leninist supporters still were influenced by, and which the Socialist-Revolutionary claimants to mass working-class revolutionary leadership also continued to put forward "in the Narodnik tradition".

The problem for all today's fake-'left' parties remains the same, SLP included. By "condemning" terrorist methods, in the aftermath of Sept 11, these wretched petty-bourgeois opportunist sects all effectively line up behind the savage imperialist blitzkrieg on the Middle East to "destroy terrorism". All weaselling that "a police action" would have been "an alternative" to the imperialist blitzkrieg, or that "United Nations peacekeeping" should have been used to stop "the deplorable massacre of innocents on Sept 11, which the whole world must condemn", etc, etc, is the most monstrous dissembling. The fascist-aggressive turn in contemporary US imperialist world-domination under the so-called 'New World Order' has long been obvious to everyone on earth. And this murderous, ruthless, genocidal terror-bombing of Afghanistan was freely predicted by the whole of world opinion.

So what was crucially needed was for that whole world opinion to avoid at all costs giving the slightest justification for this demented imperialist blitzkrieg, which is still inflicting airforce massacres all round Afghanistan utterly indiscriminately, despite the effective abdication of the Taleban government, - giving cover simultaneously to equally murderous warlord opportunists in the Northern Alliance. World opinion predictably failed. But for so-called 'lefts' to join in the wittering bourgeois hypocrisy about "appalling horror" and "unacceptable barbarism", etc, about a worm-turning retaliation at last by Third World hatred against the PERMANENT warmongering terror-domination by Western tyranny against the slightest anti-imperialist revolt anywhere, — was more cowardly political treachery than the whole wretched history of anti-communism has produced in a long time.

The fate of the reactionary religious delusions of the Taleban and Bin Laden are not the issue. Serious revolutionary anti-imperialism will not miss them. Providing imperialist "anti-terror" humbug with a 'left' cover is the truly barbaric horror which has been committed over this Sept 11 issue, — a lame-brained ignorant betrayal which will help add tens of thousands more "innocent victims" to the endlessly growing world's total out of deepening imperialist-system economic crisis in the longer run, now that this ludicrous Bush-Blair 'anti-terror' posture has been allowed to get away with such blatant fascist tyranny and murder.

But still the fake-'lefts' continue peddling the same old lying tune as an 'excuse', — namely, that Sept 11 "had to be condemned, — otherwise it would have meant supporting Bin Ladenism", etc, etc. EPSR 1109 has already quoted Leninist science in full refuting that idiotic non sequitur in respect of the Bolshevik hope to take advantage of Tsarist imperialism's defeat by German imperialism in World War I, dismissing Trotsky's incomprehension of Marxism which slandered that Lenin's slogan for Tsarist defeat amounted to "support for German imperialism as the lesser evil".

There were no such stupid implications, Lenin explained.

Equally stupid is the current Trot and Revisionist anti-Marxist drivel that hoping to see US imperialism further humiliated by the disastrous failure of its attempted "war on terrorism" retaliatory barbarism against Afghanistan, — similarly amounts to "support for the Taleban".

No such nonsense.

A further example of Leninist dialectical science on such matters was provided by the challenge to clear-thinking priorities which the Kornilov rebellion against the Kerensky government presented in August 1917 to the Bolshevik propaganda demanding Kerensky's downfall.

Kornilov represented fascist counter-revolution against the great anti-autocracy gains of the February Revolution. It had to be fought against unconditionally.

But Kerensky's suzerainty over February's gains had already plunged them back towards total loss, (temporarily, effectively), by continuing Russia's full participation in inter-imperialist WWI, and would doom them to certain permanent loss in the near future, if the war was continued with for much longer, and if the bourgeois-state Provisional Government was not overthrown by the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Bolshevik conclusion was to make opposing the Kornilov Rebellion to bring down Kerensky the priority, but to explain vigorously to the world why that in no way meant any support at all for the continuation of the Kerensky regime.

It is equally clear today that agitating for the defeat of the imperialist blitzkrieg implies not a shred of support for the reactionary ideology of the Taleban. At the same time, however, any "condemnation" of al-Qaeda terrorism clearly invalidates all 'No to war' posturing social-pacifism, and plays Afghanistan and the international working class totally into the hands of the bourgeois-imperialist propaganda racket.

To shore up the contention that cheering for imperialist military defeat is tantamount to supporting the Taleban, Trotsky is approvingly quoted (Trot and Revisionist anti-communists are losing much of their distinction) from 1935 on why the Ethiopian autocracy feudal emperor Haile Selassie deserved to be supported in the fight to resist Italian colonial conquest, and not merely by-passed in the course of opposing the fascist invasion.

Similarly, the CPGB quotes Trotsky favourably from 1927 implying that the Kuomintang regime in China was progressive enough to be sided-with in trying to establish full independence from imperialist domination.

Both examples miss the point that Lenin makes about precisely NOT supporting or siding-with the Kerensky government despite the priority need for all the forces of the February-Revolution-transformation to all join in the resistance to the Kornilov counter-revolution in August 1917.

And historical perspectives exactly confirm this Marxist understanding.

By the 1920s and 1930s, the epoch-making triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat in being able to start transforming the massive backwardness of the Tsarist empire into a technologically-advanced and totally politically-educated and socially-organised workers state which the entire might of the imperialist world could not subsequently dominate, — demonstrated that communist revolution could be a practical way forward already everywhere on earth, given enlightened Leninist leadership of the proletariat, both locally and internationally.

What the world sadly got instead, of course, was a sick choice between Stalinist or Trotskyist Revisionist ignorance and opportunism, the degeneration of the necessary Marxist scientific understanding of world development either way, and equal treachery to the dictatorship of the proletariat too, in the very long run (see EPSR 2001 Perspectives document).

Illusions in the Kuomintang was precisely one of the revolutionary movement's problems in China, and the National government's uselessness against Japanese domination later on doubly proved the point.

And the CPGB canvassing to spread retrospective illusions in the Ethiopian feudal emperor of the 1930s must set some kind of new barmy record even for the off-the-wall Weekly Worker.

The problem of retreating from the gains of Marxist-Leninist science was seen clearest in Spain. Creating 'support' illusions in the bourgeois 'parliamentary Republic' was fatal. The international bourgeois-imperialist system was turning to fascist aggression wherever it had revolutionary problems, and the middle-class 'democracy' stood no chance of survival.

Certainly all the forces of the new Republic in Spain needed to join the fight against Franco's counter-revolution, but, as with Kerensky in August 1917, without sowing 'support' illusions in a uselessly weak government, but continuing to spread the campaign instead that only the dictatorship of the proletariat building a workers state could save Spain from the bourgeois-imperialist world system’s fascist onslaught.

And given the Bolshevik Leninist understanding and organisation that first transformed backward Tsarist Russia and then set the Soviet workers state off on its path that was eventually to achieve such mightiness, Spain could have become an even more glittering triumph of planned socialist organisation and anti-imperialist defiance.

What the world now desperately needs is a return to Marxist-Leninist science, and the problem it faces is the remnants everywhere of the same Stalinist versus Trotskyist backwardness which destroyed the international revolutionary movement with Revisionist ignorance last time round, forming the 57 varieties of sectarian opportunism around the Alliance, the SSP, the SLP, 'left'-Labourites, and everywhere else.

This cretinous CPGB ignorance of history sums the problem up, still approving the Revisionist tail-ending of feudal emperors and bent Nationalists of the 1930s, and even more stupidly pretending that the only choice today is either support for the Taleban, or opportunistically joining in with the Western 'condemnation' of terrorism.

Neither. There are no forces anywhere resisting this US imperialist turn to fascist blitzkrieg which are more reactionary than this crisis-driven imperialist nightmare. But no illusions whatever are needed in Bin Laden's religious backwardness to nevertheless see that joining the bourgeois world’s 'condemnation' (of the desperate al-Qaeda terrorist attempt to strike back at US imperialism's tyrannical domination of the Middle East)is itself the most opportunist reactionary atrocity on view by far.

Wholly shunned is any attempt to re-convince the international working-class that a further development of Marxist scientific understanding alone holds the key to civilisation’s future by demonstrating a correct analysis of the current stage of imperialist crisis, and polemically defending it against allcomers, — rebuilding a party of revolutionary theory as Leninism did, in other words.

Current world events are either ignored completely, or dealt with by some wooden formula which then not only ignores all polemical critique but even keeps its mind closed when history itself proves things differently. For example, the SWP became the fattest of the fake-'lefts' via decades of the most reactionary anti-Soviet opportunism. Crucial for these anti-communist 'revolutionaries' was the fiction that 'socialist' solidarity with the USSR against imperialist provocation, subversion, and sabotage was not an issue because the Soviet Union was only 'state-capitalist' itself anyway. When the Gorbachev 'market forces' counter-revolutionary debacle did finally re-introduce state-capitalism (quickly inevitably joined and shafted by robber-baron capitalism), and when the overthrow of proletarian-dictatorship central planning and discipline  [happened] state-capitalist 'market forces' soon devastated the former mighty USSR, thus proving that what went before for 60 years could not have been state capitalism, — the SWP simply carried on insisting that its 'theory' which 'justified' its anti-Soviet hatred was 'still correct'.

What undermined the Stalinist Revisionist ideology of the USSR was its being proved wrong by events. The entire 57-variety swamp of fake-'leftism' still has not grasped this point and is doomed to destruction along exactly the same sterile path as Third International Revisionism.

Such widespread multi-hued anti-Marxism has captured the international workers movement before, of course. It was rescued from 57 varieties of Bernsteinism, Kautskyism, Luxemburgism, social pacifism, social chauvinism, etc, etc, in 1917 by the combination of spontaneous revolutionary struggle ripping the imperialist world apart whether anyone had written a constitutional programme or a set of perfect standing orders for it or not, plus the correct scientific analysis of the world by Lenin's deliberate party of revolutionary theory (What is to be done, etc) which was consequently trusted by the masses to give guidance and leadership to the revolution.

A recent new feature of the anti-communist fake-'left' has been to replace the old Trot cliché that 'Lenin was a great revolutionary socialist but Stalin's brutal dictatorship imposed a counter-revolution' (which has always caused difficulty since no one could ever agree when, where, and how this counter-revolution took place),  —  with the more internally coherent line that 'Lenin's revolution was a monstrous anti-socialist dictatorship from the start', etc.

The problem for the anti-communists with this, of course, is the same one that routine anti-Stalinism found difficulty with (apart from in a handful of very wealthily bourgeois Western imperialist countries); namely, that although very patchy and seriously theoretically flawed, the actual 70-year record of the Soviet Union in standing up to or challenging imperialist world domination in so many ways, exposed all instinctive class-based anti-Sovietism for the idealist anti-Marxist reaction that it was. 

Despite endless allegations of dubious motives, crass interference, grotesque mistakes, etc, the plain reality is that for 70 years, the backward and war-devastated workers state founded by Leninism made colossal disciplined sacrifices to help two-thirds of the world rise up against colonial slavery and start their own independent economic and cultural development, supplying doctors, engineers, educational establishments, agronomists, dams, economic enterprises, backed by scores of special Third World colleges and institutions set up in the USSR itself, setting a completely new agenda for the world to replace the bombs, bullets, and scorched-earth tyranny that the dying colonial empires (Britain, France, USA, Holland, Portugal, Belgium, Spain, etc) had tried hanging onto power with post-1945 in Algeria, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indo-China, Egypt, Kenya, Aden, Indonesia, Mozambique, etc, etc, etc. In addition, a score or more countries, from China to Cuba, were further generously helped to establish their own planned economies in defiant independence of the non-stop worldwide imperialist attempts at armed subversion and counter-revolution, at economic embargo-strangulation, and at ideological propaganda-destruction.

These most outstanding and astonishing achievements yet (in the history of international political development)only started going irrevocably wrong when the Moscow bureaucracy began to lose the plot theoretically about how the later stages of the international class war to destroy the international imperialist bourgeoisie and its system of 'free market' world economic domination, would unfold.

Widespread confusion started taking root in the international workers movement from the 1930s Popular Front onwards that capitalism might finally be toppled or tamed, universally, partly by the worldwide pressure of anti-imperialist coalitions of cross-class 'democracy'. This anti-revolutionary delusion was further cemented by the tragic World War II confusion that there were 'good' imperialists (USA, Britain, France, etc) who were prepared to become an 'ally' of the Soviet workers state in its fight for survival against German imperialist onslaught, and there were 'bad' imperialists (Germany, Japan, Italy, etc) who were out to destroy the USSR. This imbecile falsification of Marxism, and history then spawned further stupidities that 'good' imperialism might eventually accept the need to peacefully coexist permanently with the socialist camp, and in time even acknowledge socialism's superiority as an economic system.

This in turn gave birth around the Third International to the nonsense of the 'peaceful road to socialism'; and misled the Moscow bureaucracy into [the] foolish and needless boast that Soviet consumer products would soon outperform, in terms of quality and productivity, the slickest and most cost-effective output of Western imperialism (which had the whole world to exploit at often slave-labour rates and under direct colonial tyranny), — a pointless and ridiculous claim when socialism's target was pointing in the entirely opposite direction of trying to equalize living standards and investment levels right across the socialist camp from Cuba to North Korea and Vietnam. There was no way that factory shirts e.g. from Uzbekistan with its universal free health service, secondary and higher education, widespread cultural facilities, etc, could ever be turned out with so much labour-content so cheaply as shirts churned out from Bangkok factories by child-labour literally sold into bondage by an illiterate peasantry and sometimes literally chained to the looms and sewing machines for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.

But this daftest way possible of trying to 'compare' the building of socialism with the cut-throat competitiveness of the monopoly-imperialist free market was pursued relentlessly by the Revisionist Moscow bureaucracy to the point where Gorbachev eventually concluded that free-market capitalism was the better way to run society altogether, and set about deliberately dismantling the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But in reality, the Soviet workers state carried on successfully technologically transforming itself for a further period four times longer than the span of existence it had covered when Trotsky first declared in 1936 that 'all further Soviet economic progress was now out of the question because the demands of modern technological change had now run into the absolute limits of bureaucratic-dictatorship command-economy management's ability to respond flexibly enough to all the detailed delicate new innovative requirements', etc.

If the USSR could multiply its productive growth period of 1923 to 1936 by five times to reach 1988 successfully, having mastered space exploration, nuclear rocket engineering, aircraft design and mass production, computerised television communications, etc, etc, etc, along the way despite having been utterly war-destroyed again by another western imperialist invasion-intervention from 1941 to 1945, and despite having propped up half the Third World with free technological assistance thereafter, — then Trotsky's sour-grapes counter-revolutionary nonsense was clearly proved as such, and the above 1988 Gorbachevite version of the same irrational anti-Marxist mysticism made no sense either. If bureaucratic state planning can do it at one time, it can do it at another time just as easily.

What undermined the final generation of Soviet bureaucratic leadership was not an inability to cope with "the new scale and pace of scientific and technological progress" (Nauka i Zhizn, 1988 Science & Life, the 3.2 million monthly circulation magazine of the All-Union Knowledge Society) but a degenerate Revisionism which made an even more disastrous mess of failing to understand imperialism as an incurable system of boom-and-bust crisis than Stalin had done. The background to this rationalised idealism (about Soviet state planning suddenly becoming incapable, allegedly, of coping with technological innovation any longer), — lay in the confusion sown by Stalin's 1952 work Economic Problems of Socialism. This had mapped out how the conflict with imperialism would be overcome peacefully through the socialist states eventually easily outperforming the capitalist economies.

When this uncorrected anti-Marxist nonsense had failed to prove true by the late 1980s (according to how the then generation of Moscow Revisionist bureaucrats chose to measure things), this ongoing anti-Marxist confusion decided to abort not Stalin's mistaken ideas about this pointless and unrealistic 'competition' and about misunderstanding the boom-bust nature of imperialist crisis, but his sound ideas about how the Soviet economy should continue to organise its development.

When the Western economies failed to decline to a crawl and be overtaken by the socialist camp, as Stalin's 'theory' explained must happen, Gorbachev & Co decided it was because the Soviet economy was failing to make proper use of market mechanisms.

Stalin's 'theory' carried such weight that it was not even questioned, (in spite of much 'anti-Stalin' posturing after his death), because it fitted so well into so many other non-Marxist anti-revolutionary delusions the bureaucracy had lived by. It suited admirably the established wishful-thinking that maybe ultimate all-out conflict between the socialist camp and the 'good' Western imperialists (now dominant — USA, Britain, France) could be avoided.

Moscow's delusion that workers states now had a permanent safe stake in the world, accepted by the 'good' imperialists, helped breed an attitude around much of the Third International (as was) that the last thing that was needed was any 'revolutionary adventurism', meaning 'premature' bids for working-class power, which would tend to 'unnecessarily rock the boat' of what was seen as a 'good enough' phase of 'stable international peaceful coexistence' which it was imagined would somehow lead to imperialism eventually giving up completely on any general dreams of maintaining active, instant, universal counter-revolutionary responses to block the path forever to any further socialist advances in the world.

In this deluded atmosphere, future socialist advances were seen as almost falling into the lap of the international working class in time, practically automatically. Stalin's casual neglecting to mention the utterly crucial importance to mankind for the working class to be ready to take revolutionary power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie upon the failure of yet another capitalist war-disaster, both reflected and cemented this totally anti-Marxist mentality already established.

Stalin gives this deliberately non-revolutionary perspective further authority in commending the objectives of the heavily internationally CP-backed peace movement. Although not denying that to eliminate wars inevitability altogether, imperialism would have to be "abolished" (but avoiding stating specifically how), — Stalin plainly advocates the following:

"The object of the present-day peace movement is to rouse the masses of the people to fight for the preservation of peace and for the prevention of another world war. Consequently, the aim of this movement is not to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, — it confines itself to the democratic aim of preserving peace. In this respect, the present day peace movement differs from the movement of the time of the First World War for the conversion of the imperialist war into civil war, since the latter movement went further and pursued socialist aims."

As Marx or Lenin might have commented, it is impossible to prevent the capitalist system from going to war. It is not impossible to overthrow the capitalist system. So, surely it would be easier to overthrow capitalism rather than trying to prevent it going to war. But once again, behind this Stalinist anti-revolutionary Revisionism lurks the assumption that the imperialist countries are steadily collapsing economically anyway, and that sooner or later, they will just fall into the hands of the working class like ripe plums. All that is needed from the international workers movement is to guard against letting the imperialists get away with starting another war.

And this was the essence of the "less difficult" task facing the international communist movement than the Bolsheviks had to face in 1917, as Stalin explained it to the 19th Congress of the CPSU in 1952, again implying that bourgeois imperialist decline and decay would make winning power off them relatively easier.

The following passage in Economic problems finally spells out the warped 'theory' behind this anti-revolutionary retreat from Marxist science, which doomed the world movement to an impossible perspective, and condemned it to inevitable ultimate total confusion:

"The result [of East European socialist camp cooperation] is a fast pace of industrial development in these countries. It may be confidently said that with this pace of industrial development, it will soon come to pass that these countries will not only be in no need of imports from capitalist countries, but will themselves feel the necessity of finding an outside market for their surplus products.

"But it follows from this that the sphere of exploitation of the world's resources by the major capitalist countries (USA, Britain, France) will not expand but contract; that their opportunities for sale in the world markets will deteriorate, and that their industries will be operating more and more below capacity. That in fact is what is meant by the deepening of the general crisis of the world capitalist system in connection with the disintegration of the world market.

"This is felt by the capitalists themselves for it would be difficult for them not to feel the loss of such markets as the USSR and China. They are trying to offset these difficulties with the 'Marshall Plan', the war in Korea, frantic rearmament, and industrial militarization. But that is very much like a drowning man clutching at a straw.

"This state of affairs has confronted the economists with two questions:

"a) Can it be affirmed that the thesis expounded by Stalin [talking about himself in the third person] before the Second World War regarding the relative stability of markets in the period of the general crisis of capitalism is still valid?

"b) Can it be affirmed that the thesis expounded by Lenin in the spring of 1916, namely that in spite of the decay of capitalism, "on the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before", — is still valid?

"I think that it cannot. In view of the new conditions to which the Second World War has given rise, both these theses must be regarded as having lost their validity".

This was the gospel in 1952. Despite the start of the open debunking of Stalin in 1956, and the beginnings of China's doubts about how well Moscow understood the world, the November 1960 statement of the 81 communist parties, including China, continued promoting the universal perspective 

"to achieve the socialist revolution by peaceful means" 

on the basis that 

"the pillars of the capitalist system have become so decayed that the ruling imperialist bourgeoisie in many countries can no longer resist, on its own, the forces of democracy and progress which are gaining in scope and strength.  The decay of capitalism is particularly marked in the USA, the chief imperialist , country .... Never has the conflict between the productive forces and relations of production in the capitalist countries been so acute ...." 

etc.

Build Leninism. EPSR