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   [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]        www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk                                               
No 1135 May 07 2002                                                                                                                                      25p 

The Le Pen and BNP phenomena will not go away but will only grow until capitalism's deliberately divisive, ruthlessly exploitational, and consciously counter-revolutionary people-migration stunts are exposed, and the sick system overthrown. Race-prejudice, however backward and despicable, is only the SYMPTOM of social tension, not its cause & and preaching at it, but doing nothing to end the capitalist system which breeds it, will only end in even more confused cynicism and resentment for fascism's bogus 'anti-establishment' posturing to exploit. The 'left' since Lenin has made a disaster of fighting imperialist reaction because of the lie that "stop fascism" is a separate issue from the overthrow of capitalism, and legitimises class-collaboration. If this Trot and Revisionist nonsense prevails, it will fail to stop the imperialist-system degeneration into WWIII just as it failed to prevent WWII.

The fake-'left' attacks on New Labour for playing the race card (in agreeing that immigration and asylum-seeking are 'creating problems' of social divisiveness), - are completely missing the point themselves, and even more dangerously and divisively so.

Of course Blairism is being 'racist' when it talks about schools being swamped by asylum-seeker children, and other over-crowding problems or rationing-shortages being added to by more immigration.

The nearly half-a-million white newcomers to Britain in the last 7 years from the USA, Canada, Australasia, South Africa, EU, etc. (almost 70% of total immigration), - fit into the housing market, the professions, the schools, and other public services, etc., with hardly a mention.

Only more dark faces 'cause the problems' is what Blunkett & Co really mean, obviously.

But dismissing "immigration is a problem" as a racist statement (a) will never alter the real difficulties with racism on the ground; and (b) is itself concealing a hidden reality even nastier than New Labour's camouflaged race-card playing.

Firstly, moral exhortations and cultural level-raising will never on their own stop clannishness, racial awareness, and racial prejudice in current society where gross income inequalities, consumerist envy, and serious economic competitiveness, between individuals for a particular job, between regional factories for a particular contract, and between countries for trade-war survival, - are the very way of life.

Secondly, the exposure of the statement "immigration is a problem" as racist, itself deliberately leaves out even more important truths which become clear if the notion is analysed a bit deeper.

Specifically, is "immigration a problem"? After eliminating all kinds of philosophical prejudices to do with "unchanging human nature", plus genetic voodoo, plus racial/religious obscurantist traditions, etc, etc, - the only certainty is that "immigration is a problem" under the capitalist-competitive system in a period of deepening economic crisis and insecurity when jobs and livelihoods, and whole aspirations in life, start coming under threat from slump and even worse, - civil-war, war, etc, which historically have always been inseparable, in modern times, from major economic crisis.

Combining these two aspects of race-awareness together, what emerges as the real problem is not the cultural-difference POTENTIAL for prejudice (which might theoretically linger on, dwindling-away slowly, for centuries since it cannot be simply eliminated by moral exhortations or deliberately improved conditions BY THEMSELVES); nor the nastiness of political opportunism for either exploiting brazenly people's race-prejudice, (Le Pen, BNP), - surreptitiously playing up to it (New Labour), - or self-righteously 'condemning' its very existence (fake-'left').

And just as well that none of these are the real problem, because nothing can be done about the existence of any of them.

Civilisation must simply outgrow all such backwardness, very slowly.

The REAL problem of race-prejudice-flaring "due to" economic and social pressures which are complicated by immigrants and asylum-seekers, is the underlying issue of capitalism's economic crisis.

And most interesting of all, the one great thing which society can actually DO to eliminate circumstances and conditions which breed racism and to help eradicate this primitive backwardness from civilisation completely, is, oddly enough, just to get rid of capitalism.

What would seem to be so vast an undertaking as to be absolutely impossible, is, in fact, the only thing that IS possible in this whole, menacing, racist-crisis mess that society is now facing (Le Pen & BNP votes; racist and ultra-right parties mushrooming all over Europe; etc).

It is an infinitely EASIER perspective to use the slump crisis disaster (capitalism is collapsing into) to overthrow this monstrous class-divided system (and therefore race-divided and nation-divided) than to merely bemoan all the unpleasant social problems that capitalist competitive culture throws up and self-righteously inflict 'moral' blame on the many areas of rat-race living which lend themselves to race-prejudice, - sermonising them to stop it (which is obviously something which cannot possibly happen because of mere preaching).

And it is precisely in this 'religious' approach by the fake-'left' that the stinkingest hypocrisy (and the nastiest damage of all, around this whole rotten 'racism' question) centres.

Raising the 'Stop the BNP; Stop Le Pen' slogans amounts to nothing less than the most sinister counter-revolutionary diversion that the class ideology of the petty-bourgeoisie, - REFORMISM, - has ever come up with.

Capitalist society is in crisis, with racism, fascist-revanchism, and warmongering-bullying spewing out all over the place.

Capitalism could never be more ripe for REVOLUTIONARY overthrow.

And what do the fake-'left' do??? Try to take everyone's mind off such a prize via the lunatic agitation that "capitalism's crisis will be so much less unpleasant provided that the BNP and Le Pen do not get elected."

In reality, the capitalist crisis must inevitably proceed through to economic collapse, slump, trade-war, and eventually shooting war, in some sort of repeat of inter-imperialist World Wars I and II.

Extreme chauvinist warmongering and racist hysteria is going to get stronger and stronger anyway. The votes for parties like the BNP and Le Pen will grow inexorably.

So what is being achieved by the fake-'left'?

It makes sure that no one thinks about revolution to overthrow the rotten racism creating system but that everyone should concentrate on these mere symptomatic pimples (BNP and Le Pen) to "deny them support" (impossible anyway); and to what end? Only to guarantee that capitalism's insoluble crisis rages on, ensuring that in time, major fascist warmongering regimes really DO start taking over the capitalist states again, just as happened all over Europe, - in the crisis leading to WWII.

And why? To make sure that the bourgeoisie's ludicrous illusion of "democracy" is preserved.

The Trot-tinged 'politically correct' Guardian-stance against the BNP and Le Pen sums up exactly why the capitalist system's "democracy" and "anti-racist" liberalism create the problem of far-right voting cynicism and despair rather than provide any 'solution'.

"When British politicians talk about immigration, they are really talking about race," thunders this fake-'left' self-righteousness.

"Immigration is a heavily racially connoted term, just as immigration legislation is racially biased and motivated.

"When they refer to immigrants, they do not mean Australians or Americans; they mean Caribbeans and Asians" etc, etc, etc.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Guardian, another fundamental strand of 'liberty' is spelled out: 'Free markets mean more openness and more social change.'

"If people are encouraged to seek higher pay and living standards, then people will seek them wherever they can.

"What right has any nation state to deny people the opportunity to seek a better life?

"The more liberalised economies become, the greater the desire to move to find better working and living conditions.

"Immigrants are welcome in Britain."

Every other 'respectable' area of politics and press in Britain worthily repeats these indisputably 'liberal' sentiments (although usually with some calculating conditions added, such as welcoming 'qualified immigrants with a real commitment to Britain' particularly when they have 'specially needed skills', etc., etc.)

What a monstrous confidence trick this all adds up to.

"Capitalism is capitalism; and racism is racism. And never the twain shall meet", seems to be the infantile content of this sick fraud, pretending that the 'rational world' (of bourgeois ideology, Guardian, etc.) cannot see what anyone with half a brain can now grasp clearly, - that it is precisely the alleged "freedom to thrive” and the alleged "freedom for all to avoid being caught up in race prejudice" which sum up the lies at the heart of the capitalist system.

What astonishing Trotskyite hypocrisy (Gary Younge) to 'reveal' that it is capitalist politicians who conceal the real connections they want people to make when "the immigration problems" are mentioned, but to then keep silent about the capitalist Guardian's own foul hypocrisy in pretending that racism's existence is a question of 'moral choice' rather than an inevitable product of the cut-throat competitive rat-race which the 'free market' really is in essence.

And what hypocrisy to extol the "individual-opportunity to thrive" alleged aspect of capitalism but to keep deliberately quiet about the inevitable certainty of racism, fascism, and wars-everlasting because of the unchangeable cut-throat competitive domineering essence of the exploitation system.

And what conscious brainwashing to print 'exposures' of the rotten 'Third Way' Giddens-Blair subterfuge of using the "immigration is a problem" code for covert race-card playing but to then remain silent about the far worse smokescreen in all this which hides the capitalist system's responsibility for the very existence and every delinquent deed of fascism.

Only worse confusion than ever for the working class will have been achieved by the fake-'left' helping to create an utterly ludicrous 'anti-fascist front' around voting for Chirac, a PROVEN monster of Western imperialist warmongering, to continue the monopoly-capitalist domination of the planet (Gulf War, anti-Yugoslavia wars, Afghan War, Zionist blitzkrieg, new Iraq War, countless African interventions on behalf of colonialism's stooges, etc, etc) and a potential nuclear-chauvinist warmonger of the nastiest kind once the 'free market' has moved on from routine graft and corruption (Chirac is an expert practitioner) to international armed crookedness.

This silly stunt of totally sterile humbug has only managed to steer Le Pen's opportunist philistine bandwagon to nearly 6 million votes by adding credibility to his sick fascist fraud that he was the "anti-establishment candidate" against whom all of the "failed old politics" had been forced to unite to "stop the people hearing the truth and voting it into power", etc, etc, etc.

What a shameful farce all round for the dying Revisionist and Trot fake-'left' to dribble out its last days perpetrating. (See next item on 'anti-Nazi' stupidity). 

Meanwhile back in the real world of non-stop imperialist revolutionary crisis, the American struggle to contain the Palestinian anti-colonial war of liberation, staggers on from humiliation to humiliation. Even the bourgeois press, despite its outrageous bias in favour of Zionist imperialism in the USA, Britain, and most of the West, is finding the stupid crudities of Washington's manipulation of the situation hard to take seriously:

David Turnley at smirkingchimp.com, analysed the wording of the president's recent instructions to the antagonists in the Middle East: "Enough is enough!" "Withdraw without delay!" "I meant what I said!" "To his credit," wrote Turnley, "he uses language and tone that most of us can relate to. Unfortunately, it's the language and tone people use when talking to their dogs."

The animals having proved unbiddable, the president seems this week to have become the dog's cushion, bearing the imprint of whichever backside sat on him last. The one that sat on him most firmly seems to have belonged to Karl Rove, his political adviser, which is why the administration's crazed zigzag is now zagging firmly back towards Israel. Once again, we have a situation where the internal pressures on the administration are unrelated to those coming from the outside world. And this is a president, as has been noted before, who is more attuned to the politics of the middle west than the Middle East.

There are virtually no pro-Palestinian voices in the US media and there are no votes worth counting in being pro-Palestinian. In a sense, there are no votes in being pro-Israel either, because that is the default position of American politics. It is more a question of losing votes and financial support in being characterised as anti-Israel, which was the position to which Bush momentarily exposed himself. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary and the left's favoured hate figure, was shouted down when sent to address the huge pro-Israel rally in Washington last Tuesday. That may have been a turning point.

What scares Bush most is being outflanked on the right. He was blooded in national politics as his father's ambassador to the rightwing Christians in the 1992 election. Politically orientated evangelical groups have become increasingly powerful in the Republican party in the decade since then, and they have become increasingly drawn to Israel too.

The theological basis for this appears to be that Israel needs to exist in order to pave the way for the Second Coming, at which point the Jews would all convert. This is not an argument that would go down a storm in the Knesset, but at this stage they are grateful for all the friends they can get. Since the only high-profile opponent of Israel in the US, Pat Buchanan, has left the Republicans and become a talkshow contrarian, they have pretty much all the friends they need.

The Democratic opposition, in so far as that matters, has been responding the same way: even Al Gore, sensing the president's sudden uncertainty and vulnerability, got up off his knees to venture a little mild criticism. For there is something at work here that goes beyond interest groups and ethnic groups.

The instincts of the American public (in favour of the Israelis over the Palestinians 60% to 15% in last week's poll) are unequivocal. Arabs, quite frankly, are not America's favourite people.

But the ridiculous injustice of letting the Zionist colonists get away with murder, massacre, blitzkrieg, and genocidal ethnic-cleansing, - wrecking what is left of America's reputation for 'international justice and peace' in the process, and all respect for 'United Nations decisions', and all credibility in the sincerity of 'anti-fascist' stunts of any kind throughout the West is steadily only running into ever-increasing contradictions and difficulties.

Being greedily torn between completing the massacre of the Arafat regime as a 'terrorist-Godfather' and continuing to prop this opportunist Palestinian bourgeois up as a "worthy peace-agreement partner" (to sell-out the self-determination national-liberation cause to permanent Zionist domination), the monopoly-imperialist hawks (i.e. the whole monopoly-imperialist system) have only succeeded in broadening the Palestinian basis for an all-out revolutionary struggle, and made Arafat's chances of getting away with yet another Oslo-type compromise-betrayal increasingly slender.

In even the most refined and respectable Arab circles now, the talk is of toppling Arafat and pursuing the war of national-liberation to a total anti-Zionist-colony conclusion:

Despite the havoc wrought by Palestinian suicide bombers, it is Israel that has proven to be the incontestable historical master of controlled and directed fury; from the callous, calculating terrorism of its pre-state underground to the most recent thorough and systematic lynching of the Palestinian Authority - security agencies and civilian infrastructure alike. Against this background, recent events take on a certain cyclical consistency: Israeli oppression met by Palestinian acts of resistance - sometimes bold, often bloody met in turn by Israeli force, always excessive, invariably disproportionate and purposely designed to inflict maximum pain.

Indeed, there is even an ironic symmetry in the fact that Ariel Sharon's old "special" forces Unit 101 was as active in Jenin this month as it was half a century ago in the attack on the Palestinian village of Qibya in October 1953 when 69 civilians were killed, their houses blown up over their heads as the future Israeli prime minister oversaw the operation in person. Jenin can thus be seen as the latest episode in a long-running Israeli attempt to break the back of the Palestinian national movement by attacking its soft civilian underbelly. Sharon's ongoing assault on the authority in many ways represents a return to the raw existential confrontations of 1948 in the land of Palestine, albeit with an even greater imbalance in tools of confrontation available to each side.

Sunday's apparent resolution of the impasse over Arafat's imprisonment in Ramallah should not be misconstrued: Israeli rightwing triumphalism is in full swing and its appetite for colonial expansion and a "greater Israel" whetted again. Even before the latest violence, 34 new settlement outposts had been established by Sharon on the West Bank and plans are apace to expand into densely populated areas of Hebron and Arab Jerusalem. The apparent defeat of the authority can only serve to fire the right wing's enthusiasm for yet more radical solutions -including a return to the basics of "transfer", or ethnic cleansing, supported by about 50% of the Israeli electorate, according to opinion polls. Sharon is now likely to extend his war to Gaza and is still bent on the political, perhaps physical, elimination of Yasser Arafat. His ultimate goal is no less than the total subjugation and dissolution of the Palestinian national movement. 

Consequently, the outlines of the solution that has served as the underpinning of the peace camp on both sides since the mid-70s are beginning to fade. As "Sharon's way" has moved to occupy the Israeli centre, the very notion of a viable two-state solution is being called into question. Sharon is setting up fences and buffer zones outside the main Palestinian urban centres that will effectively designate the de facto boundaries between the two sides. Far from eliciting an Israeli return to anything like the 1967 borders, the coming political-diplomatic tussle is likely to centre on forcing Israel's retreat from the April 2002 lines. Sharon may well offer a political solution, even a 'Palestinian state'; but it will be nothing near the minimum required for a fair and sustainable peace, and he has already declared his refusal to dismantle a single settlement now or in the future. The Israeli Labour party, tainted by its association with Sharon's enterprise and unwilling or unable to suggest a viable alternative, has lost all credibility with the Palestinians and its own electorate. For the foreseeable future, it looks as the notion of a "return to Taba" and a comprehensive two-state solution is sheer illusion. The two sides will simply not get there on their own, and the international community (read the United States) will simply not take upon itself the task of making both sides - and Israel in particular - an offer they cannot refuse. On the Palestinian side, other ominous trends have begun to emerge: in the West Bank and Gaza, Fatah and the other Palestinian political factions will be digging deep underground and preparing for the next lengthy phase of bloody armed resistance. Gone will be the hopes for an imminent end of occupation and with them the belief in a meaningful political process. Arafat's successors will not be some enlightened democrats rescued from the wreckage of the authority, but the hardened and embittered veterans of Sharon's war seeking revenge and retribution. 

With the destruction of the authority, the centre of Palestinian political gravity is likely to shift back to the PLO on the outside. As long as it is at the mercy of Israel's superior firepower, it is evident that the authority, with its current or any subsequent leadership, will not have the freedom of action or credibility to sign and deliver a political solution that can carry the majority of Palestinians with it. The alternative is for the Palestinians inside and outside to prepare for the long haul. 

Inside Israel itself, the 20% of its citizens who are Arabs can be expected to feel more alienated than ever from the Jewish state. Their fears will create new bonds with their Palestinian compatriots outside. Likewise, in the refugee camps and elsewhere in the diaspora, different Palestinian factions will be seeking to draw upon the vast groundswell of popular sympathy felt by a new generation of Arabs touched once more by the drama of Palestine. Innovative and more destructive modes of armed struggle will be sought and developed. April 2002 seems to have brought us back to where we all started in 1948, an all-out existential war for the land of Palestine. Only this time the way forward will be harder and more hazardous than ever before not least for Israel itself.
 
AS Khalidi is a senior associate member of St Anthony's College, Oxford, and a former Palestinian negotiator. aswk@yahoo.com

But with the world continuing on its path of revolutionary class-struggle and national-liberation reality, it only makes more ludicrous the astonishing attempt by the prized trade-union 'militants' of the fake-'left', - Bob Crow and Mick Rix that both the SLP and the Socialist Alliance love to make such a hero-worshipping fuss of), - to resurrect the Labour Party as the vehicle for socialist progress by renewing the delusion of 'left-reformist' pressure, via trade-unionism and Parliament to get 'justice' for the working class:

We believe that it is time the Labour party was reclaimed for labour, that it learned once more to listen to the voice of the class it enfranchised.

Trade unions are still potentially decisive in shaping Labour policy. The party is still our representation committee - if we choose to make it so. OK, we don't write cheques for £125,000 and expect the PM to write a letter on our behalf by return. That deluxe service is reserved for business leaders. But our representatives are there when policy is debated, have votes when votes are counted and are embedded in the life of the party at every level.

All that is required is the will to use that influence democratically. For example, Tribune editor Mark Seddon presented a motion to the last meeting of Labour's national executive calling for a halt to moves to privatise public services. The motion expressed the opinions of millions of trade unionists and ordinary voters. It also expressed the policy of almost every union affiliate to the Labour party. Yet the great majority of trade union representatives attending the meeting sheepishly voted the way ministers wanted and prevented the motion's adoption. Had they done otherwise, it would have helped send a clear message to government that our opposition to the privatisation of the NHS is more than just rhetorical.

Likewise, at the party's annual conference, we can make policy if we want to, the more so since our opposition to privatisation and our support for a better deal for trade unions and employees in the workplace are shared by many and probably most party members, who prefer Labour's traditions to the embrace of suspect business leaders. If we have a government that is more Berlusconi than Bevin, it is only because we tolerate it.

Now that New Labour has found out the hard way the corrupting consequences of inviting the right into their political parlour, there could be no better time for the unions to play a more open, and proud, part in Labour's policy debates. Were that to happen, millions more people might decide to make a choice in the polling booths - because they would feel they had one.

"If pigs could fly...'? is the only appropriate comment to such treacherous mindless drivel.

The anti-theory philistinism of the Scargill-clone likes of Crow and Rix is scarcely credible, especially after the worldwide exposure of New Labour as the most disgusting toe-rag of US imperialist viciousness in the whole foul history of reformist trade unionism’s class collaboration with monopoly capitalism.

But the very most that the fake-'left' wretches in the SLP and the Alliance will do about it - is stop boasting so much that "Mick and Bob are secretly still with us", etc. Forthright denunciations of this 'left pressure' cretinism by these lionised 'militants' will not be very prominent. Build Leninism. EPSR

Letter

Being fooled by the capitalist press into diversionary 'anti-racist' stunts around individual 'celebrity' thugs is dumb 'leftism' but a worse missed chance.

The sinister hypocrisy of the capitalist press in being so keen to put the boot into Bowyer and Woodgate should have alerted communists to the reactionary rottenness in this scapegoating.

Pointless support or sympathy for overpaid racist thugs is not the issue. The problem is the total confusion about capitalism's responsibility for sustaining racist backwardness which this sort of personal and individual vilification lets off the hook. Regarding football louts (on or off the pitch) as a 'source' or 'cause' of fascist prejudice (a) identifies the wrong culprit; and (b) even more disastrously implies a completely false 'solution' via reformist moralising pressure on individuals to seriously re-think and revise their behaviour.

While bourgeois 'legality' and widespread moral condemnation can indeed force individuals to behave better, and by example make everyone think much more carefully about how they see things and how they give vent to their prejudices, neither the law, nor the pulpit, nor the occasional press witchhunt of someone (usually a celebrity) for criminal or outrageous behaviour can even stem the growth of racist and fascist mentalities, let alone eradicate them from society.

Going along with the blackguarding of Bowyer and Woodgate is helping to spread exactly the WRONG signals to society.

It implies that reformist pressures and moral example really work in this society.

It also implies that racism and fascism will become less and less of a problem.

Neither of these is remotely true. In fact they are both so false; and about such crucial questions in society, that going along with this attempted campaign of public vilification of Bowyer and Woodgate amounts to support for criminal brainwashing of the working class.

Aggressive expressions of race-prejudice and fascist-party support are certain to keep growing in Britain.

Pointlessly scapegoating Bowyer and Woodgate as though they were a 'source' of this, which could be 'cured' by their vilification, is more likely to make them martyrs to the cause of increasing British nationalist chauvinism than anything else.

The world capitalist crisis is inevitably going to turn the existing massive race-prejudice (albeit still latent for the moment) into active political fascist jingoism.

And leading the way in whipping it up will be this selfsame capitalist press, -  as it has done in the past with "Hop off you Frogs", etc, - which currently finds it convenient to put on a big show of anti-racist self-righteousness and bravado by heaping published abuse on Bowyer and Woodgate and daring them to sue.

And this is the big issue, - what this selfsame capitalist press is going to be doing in the near future as the international trade-war and slump deepen, sending bankruptcies, unemployment, homelessness and poverty soaring.

To keep the working class divided so that it does not get together to raise a revolt against the degeneracy of the capitalist freemarket 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, wellbeing, 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.

But is it, even so, not a good thing that two potentially fascist-minded, public figures have at least been publicly humiliated for their thuggish and suspect racist conduct?

Not really, because all of the anger which might have been channelled against capitalist society for routinely creating such wretchedness (as this type of after-drinking-hours brawl) has been vented uselessly on these oiks, who are also victims of capitalism in their own sad way.

And spewed out for the worst of reasons because it is largely envy-driven, full of anti-capitalism bile misdirected against these two because they are coining it under this outrageously unfair system (despite their nastiness). 		

The moment the argument turns to demanding stiffer punishment for Bowyer and Woodgate, or moaning that they have got away with what an ordinary white worker might have been given 7 years prison for, - the anti-capitalist plot has been lost entirely.

There must be 1,000 incidents a week all round Britain where drinkers young and old get into an affray and there are injuries such as Sarfraz Najeib suffered.

All round Britain, there must be at least a dozen deaths a week from routine aggro.

The implication from the "send them down" chorus against Bowyer and Woodgate is that if all 5,000 or more young and old drinkers involved in rucks every week all round Britain were all routinely given stiff prison sentences, then Britain in no time at all would be a much better place to live in.

This is not just extreme Tory mentality, wishing to preserve their own corner of peace and quiet in a badly troubled land. It is also insanely unrealistic. Society cannot be cured of its sickness in this way.

And if it is insisted that the Bowyer-Woodgate affair is just an unusual one-off issue (because of their wads of money and the racism involved) requiring special sanctions, the opportunity still is being lost to turn this matter precisely into an examination of why ALL young men have to run the gauntlet of bravado and violent conflict in this culture. What is it about capitalism that it directs young bucks down this potentially murderous path???

Stating the obvious to scream and shout about how disgusting it is to see these ludicrously overpaid young footballers acting like hooligans MISSES THE POINT ENTIRELY.

Such sanctimonious scolding offers no more than what the multimillion-pound industry itself is prepared to say which set these youth up in the first place to behave with this particular combination of loutishness.

But too little education, too much money in the pocket, and too much to drink, really isn't the rarest profile to be found among those getting involved in drunken group thuggery.

So all that this extraordinary furore over Bowyer and Woodgate comes down to in the end is that people have naïvely been suckered in to following the press's own self-interested racket of highlighting celebrity status just for its own sake. If a celebrity does something, then it is a story first and foremost because they are a celebrity, not because of what they might have done.

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 kick 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.

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 action 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 muddleheadedness 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, as 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 muddleheadedness 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. Build Leninism.  

EPSR supporters.

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

The 'Parliamentary democracy' way officially revealed  - concentration camps and torture.  But British colonialist resistance to leaving Ireland was doomed from the start.                   

THE British Conservative Government under Edward Heath introduced Internment in 1971 because it feared the imminent collapse of British rule in the Six Counties. Documents released at the Public Records Office in London in early January under the 30-year disclosure rule reveal that Heath, who has continued to defend his decision, authorised the use of internment in an attempt to prop up the Stormont regime and fend off the possibility of direct rule.

He did so against the advice of the government's military commander in the North, General Harry Tuzo, who told him that it would have a "harmful" effect on the army's attempts to control the nationalist population and that those held under it could be categorised as political prisoners. The British Army's preferred option, said Tuzo, was to regularly arrest and interrogate republican activists in order to quell resistance.

Nevertheless, Heath insisted on allowing Unionist leader Brian Faulker to introduce internment, thus setting the scene for almost 30 years of disastrous British military policy. In 1971, Heath's war cabinet was told that the army hoped to arrest some 300 of the 500 or so "suspects" on 9 August. Although a warning was issued to the British prime minister just days before the first wave of arrests that internment "would lead to retaliation" the raids went ahead on the basis of hopelessly outdated and useless intelligence. The extreme degree of British Army violence involved and the arrest of hundreds of ordinary nationalists caused a massive backlash and an international outcry.

TORTURE OF DETAINEES

	The torture of detainees was also approved by the British cabinet, who were told on 8 October 1971 by the then Defence Secretary, Peter Carrington, that they should not be "unduly squeamish" about the 	methods employed by the British Army and RUC to extract information. 

	In language reminiscent of the worst days of British colonial rule, the papers also show that Carrington defended the B-Specials 	as essentially "decent" and insisted 	that whilst some of the interrogation methods employed during internment might appear 	"unnecessarily harsh", it was important to remember that the government was "dealing with an enemy who has no scruples". According to the papers released, "techniques designed to isolate detainees subject to interrogation, to prevent them from obtaining any exact sense of time and location and to impose fatigue by exposure to insistent and disturbing noise were regarded as proper".

However, "expelling" the six counties from the United Kingdom was also discussed at the time. In a memo dated 3 September 1971, British cabinet secretary, Sir Burke Trend, says that although "to let Ulster go... is, presumably, unthinkable in the current climate" it is "less unrealistic to think in terms of an arrangement which would give Dublin, not complete control over Ulster, but at least more effective say in its administration". 

And, with some foresight. he noted: "Sooner or later, all the parties will be driven to the negotiating table. It will be both more honourable and more economic to go there sooner rather than later."

"MICKS" AND "PRODS"

The colonial attitude of the British ruling elite towards all of the people of Ireland, including unionists, is also revealed in a briefing paper written in 1970 by one Oliver Wright, the British state's representative in the North, who routinely refers to them as "Micks" and "Prods".

In his assessment to the then Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan, Wright - who had spent just six months there - referred to the Six Counties as a "tribal" society, and observed that the "Scots Calvinist colonists" despised the "native Irish" and were terrified of the possibility of being absorbed by these "natives". "They like and trust each other as do Arab and Jew, Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot, dog and cat" he wrote.

Commenting on the outbreak of the conflict, he said: "When the Catholics, whose loyalties are at best ambivalent and at worst treacherous, demanded their civil rights, the Prods saw red and burned their houses down." In his despatch, Wright goes on to blame Britain's neglect of this part of its "realm", for the troubles and says that its mistake had been to try and govern the Irish for the past 700 years.

Whilst Wright concedes that nationalists have been "more sinned against" he also claims that they are not "entirely blameless", saying that "the Micks have enjoyed provoking the Prods as much as the Prods enjoy retaliating. It makes the Prods' blood boil - and all Irish blood boils at very low temperatures - to see the Micks enjoy the superior material benefits of the British connection while continuing to wave the Tricolour at them."

He warned that the Protestant population were thirsting for revenge at having to suffer the perceived indignity of watching the ascendancy apparently being forced to offer civil rights to Catholics, saying: "Altogether, too many of them have only one thing in their heart: hatred; and only one desire: vengeance. Altogether too many of them look to one man with charisma in Ulster, a man of God, the Reverend Ian Paisley, to give it to them... It is small wonder that Ulster men seem, in my short experience, to be men of pessimism: they have a lot to be pessimistic about."

His solution? "I am suggesting a containment or the managing of the Ulster problem," he said.

"POORLY LED" RUC

As Harold Wilson's Labour government sent the British Army into the Six Counties, its most senior officer branded the RUC as hopeless, describing it as "poorly led", "behind the times" and describing Special Branch as "sadly inefficient". Chief of Staff General Sir Geoffrey Baker went on to say that within Special Branch "speculation and guesswork largely replace intelligence", and that senior RUC officers consistently withheld information from British ministers if such information was considered detrimental to the interests of the force.

The papers reveal that the ineptitude of the RUC prompted the British Army and intelligence services to install their own anti-republican networks, but that relations between MI5 and the RUC became so fraught that the former moved its offices out of an RUC building and into British military premises.