Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.

-V. I. Lenin 

Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
No 1140 June 18 2002

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                                             25p

This week's "dead-cat bounce" admissions that any share-market 'recovery' is not to be trusted, confirms growing loss of bourgeois confidence in their own crisis-ridden capitalist system. The failure of the "freemarket", after three generations of Cold War anti-communist brainwashing is putting the whole of bourgeois ideology into paralysed confusion. Imperialism's US and Zionist warmongering response to insoluble exploitation economy disaster and ferocious anti-imperialist fightback is facing defeat and fast losing support. Neither stouter walls nor stepped-up blitzkrieg savagery will save the doomed neo-colonial system. Only the wretched fake-'left' of Trotskyism and Revisionism keeps warmongering capitalist 'democracy' in power by "condemning" guerrilla-war terrorism and by refusing to acknowledge that the world is now unalterably locked into a revolutionary process.
Northwest seminar June 29 Sat. Pse collect receipts
The link between economic crisis and capitalist-state warmongering, crucial for understanding the modern world, daily becomes clearer as panic spreads that another Great Crash is imminent.

The real legacy of Western domination of 700 years of bourgeois-capitalist civilisation, - the permanent struggle for arms-race superiority and for leadership of the colonising-bullying essence of capitalism's 'globalised' exploitation, - has reached its terminal stage in the brutal bloody mess that America is getting itself and the world into.

Spontaneous practical protest struggles and armed resistance to US domination and the insoluble economic crisis are breaking out all over the planet, and will continue to draw popular support.

But what the international working class really needs above all is the scientific UNDERSTANDING of the total chaos capitalist civilisation is heading towards, and, obviously, what is the only way to REALLY do something about it.

It is the full MARXIST philosophical grasp of world history which is the NECESSARY next development in civilisation, immediately accessible to the masses of the planet as communist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Any 'workers party' or 'socialist' group which fails to make this understanding a crucial constant core of every struggle against bourgeois decadence and imperialist tyranny is NOTHING BUT a hindrance or an ENEMY to the real interests of the
working class.

Spontaneously-developing struggles to "stop this" or "ban that" or "change the other" are the inevitable and vital lifeblood of working-class development.

But so-called 'socialist' parties who then join in to offer organisational help and "broader, politically-linked leadership" so as to stress "only a socialist solution will do"; but which fail to explain the WORLD REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS as the inevitable basis of all serious anti-imperialist struggle and understanding, - are nothing but the most practised political opportunists who will inflict nothing but disaster on the working class in the part-Trotskyite part-Revisionist traditions of Allendeism in Chile, and the Revisionist destruction of the workers state in the USSR, and countless "revolutionary entryist" Trot frauds by anti-communists in Britain and the West.

By its essential predatory and anarchic nature, capitalism has always been a world rule system of regularly recurring crises.

The key to its long reign, in spite of a succession of utterly horrific war-crisis catastrophes and degeneracy inflicted on mankind (World Wars I & II, Algeria, Korea, Vietnam, the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, etc, etc, etc), has been the crucial role of the fake-'left'; for generation after generation and in 57 ever-changing varieties of Labourism, Revisionism, and Trotskyism.

Perpetually, the opportunist philistinism of this fake'left' has endlessly found 'reasons' for playing down or dropping the revolutionary process ESSENCE of Marxism while yet pretending to be 'Marxists' or advocates of "a complete socialist solution", etc. 

Time after time in modern world history, this refusal to constantly stress the inescapable REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS, ultimately at the heart of all serious anti-imperialist struggle and real socialist development, has meant that the need and opportunity for workers to try to take the power,- often the ONLY thing worth attempting in spite of not all the circumstances being favourable, - has been lost or deliberately neglected, again and again, frequently with catastrophic consequences as in Indonesia in the 1960s and Chile in the 1970s.

These were not just tragic cases of mistiming of a revolutionary push by the working class.

These tragedies were the result of the historical triumph for an entire period of the fake-'left', pretending "socialist revolution" in words, but in practice never doing anything but play the bourgeoisie's joke "reformist" game of parliamentary democracy and endless protests about this, that, and the other.

In reality, basically, - the whole Marxist science of the revolutionary process was deliberately dismissed further-and further into the background.

To help it on its way, the entire nonsense of "the peaceful road to socialism" was substituted in its place.

A total fraud on whole generations of the international working class was covered up with this one tiny and utterly meaningless phrase.

And this is exactly the situation today, - with EVERY 'left' group without exception among the 57 varieties of prominent reformist, Trot, and Revisionist groupings, - ALL still mouthing their "complete socialism" credentials, but ALL still refusing to make the scientific inevitability of the revolutionary process not merely the major plank of all socialist propaganda, but still refusing to make revolution (as the final necessary step towards socialism) ANY PART OF THEIR PROPAGANDA AT ALL.

This fake-'left' essentially petty-bourgeois (i.e. trade unionist) opportunism hides behind cynical philistinism of the 'We'll be there when the revolution begins" kind, which deliberately leaves the working class totally disarmed and uninformed, as they were in Chile; or else reveals its true anti-communist class essence by falling back on the West's 	old anti-Soviet myths of "no thanks to any more of the gulag, mass-murder, and bankrupt economic development", etc, etc.
	
What ALL of the fake-'left' refuse to do is actively and repeatedly take on the ludicrous Western mythology about the 70 years of the triumphant Soviet workers-state development and its honourable international contributions to anti-imperialist struggle, or strive to elaborate any consistent complete theory of Soviet achievements and their Revisionist handicap (and finally liquidation), - fitting it all into a consistent perspective of imperialist REVOLUTIONARY crisis as being the ultimately decisive situation on earth, resolving by the further completion of the world socialist revolution all of the still unsatisfactory difficulties and problems of the first 70 years history of workers-state building on earth (marred by bureaucratic Revisionism). 

But until this perspective is grasped, all 'socialist' striving is either meaningless or a deliberate 'reformist' reactionary diversion; and all anti-imperialist struggle will be so incomplete, and defective of understanding, that the present outcome (with the fake-'left' making solidarity with Western imperialism to "condemn" Islamic guerrilla-war assaults on the USA and its Zionist stooges) will inevitably continue to utterly mislead the working class.

All the time, the fake-'left' diversionaries pretend to report sympathetically Palestinian suffering, or Iraqi fears of renewed imperialist blitzkrieg, or the torments of the Argentine people e.g. (devastated first by the growing 'free-market' economic catastrophe) but do NOT explain the overall REVOLUTIONARY crisis of the imperialist system (without which conscious understanding in a workers party of leadership, there will NEVER be a successful outcome for 'socialism'),-- the bourgeois-imperialist system is actually being HELPED because the reformist and protest approaches, inherent in such treatment, get a prolonged lease of life, (the ONLY consequence ever of all "democratic opposition" throughout capitalism's history).

The suffering of the Palestinians, and the cruelty and injustice of the Zionist tyranny which is colonising their land, only start fully making sense as meaningful political factors in the Middle East maelstrom when the REVOLUTIONARY perspective on the only possible solution is brought into focus.

Otherwise, all attention is merely pity-mongering to sorrows which have no conceivable end.

Every fresh lurch in the 'free-market' economic crisis, already nearly bankrupting the Zionist colonial economy and the USA's ability to continue making it the No 1 recipient of American subsidies on earth (as well as the leading US arms-aid recipient), - means more difficulties and demoralisation for the Sharon tyranny to contend with (already this week officially admitting for the first time that more Zionist settlers are now getting out of Occupied Palestine (i.e. 'Israel') than are newly arriving to reinforce the colonisation of it; and admitting that the 'Israeli' Arab population (nearly one million) are to be subjected to even more barbarous movement and marriage restrictions than ever before, - again because of the Zionists demographic fears that their whole patchwork of illegal territorial seizures (so-called 'Israel' or 'Greater Israel') will become an even more laughably unsustainable colony if the Zionists get outnumbered no matter which bits they try to hang onto for 'legitimacy').

As the imperialist world which bred Zionism goes down towards the longest and greatest slump-catastrophe in history, so will Zionism's fortunes increasingly sink with it.

Conversely, as the fortunes of armed revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle look increasingly bright the whole world over, so will the already colossal achievements of the Palestinian Intifada, including its indescribably brave Islamic-inspired suicide bombers, soar ahead to ever greater military-revolutionary triumphs over their Zionist-colonialist tormentors.

The whole of Palestine will at last get unitary statehood, an Arab anti-imperialist state, with room for handfulls of messianic Jews to continue kibbutzing there if they wish to, but nothing more.

And any 'socialist' sympathy for the Palestinians which fails to make this obvious revolutionary perspective clear at all times, is HARMING the Palestinian cause by undermining or slowing down the world's REVOLUTIONARY understanding which alone can finally make ANY SOLUTION AT ALL possible for the betrayed Palestinian nation.

And 'lurching' is fast becoming the universally accepted accurate description of the 'free-market' economy as it staggers from panic to panic about "no recovery after all", and ever-fresh plunges on the world's stock exchanges, plus mounting cynicism about the ever-lengthening list of infamous corporate crimes perpetrated by some of the biggest names in Big Business.

Once again, what use are sympathetic fake-'1eft' descriptions of e.g. Argentine suffering if the REVOLUTIONARY inevitability in the actual mechanics of it proving frustratingly difficult to find any solution, is not brought out and made the central focus.

What CAN imperialism do should be the invariable perspective of thoroughly Marxist REVOLUTIONARY analysis which would indicate that NOTHING is left but potentially explosive (and warmongering) inter-imperialist disagreements in all directions, plus serious revolutionary/counter-revolutionary implications for Argentina itself, - as the EPSR has insisted from the start, and as the despairing capitalist press itself	keeps nervously touching upon, like this latest overview from the desperately-worried anti-communist Guardian: 	

It is now six months since Argentina devalued its currency and defaulted on its debts,  yet the meeting of G7 finance ministers in Canada over the weekend showed that a workable rescue plan is still a long way off. The view appears to be that the International Monetary Fund is getting to grips with the situation, that the crisis is being contained to Argentina and that the way forward is to impose more economic pain on the country. Wrong, wrong and wrong again.

After four years of economic depression, Argentina is on the point of imploding, and there are now worrying signs that Brazil is becoming contaminated by its neighbour. The febrile mood in the financial markets last week was not just froth, but the reflection of a deep anxiety about the health of the global economy. In the circumstances, it beggars belief that cutting public spending in Argentina when the economy is contracting by 15% a year will have international investors flocking back to Buenos Aires. But that seems to be what the IMF and the G7 are banking on.

Some lessons have been learned from the financial crises of the past decade, but they are not being learned quickly enough. Argentina's plight calls out for the sort of overhaul of global governance that is talked about at international meetings but which never seems to get off the drawing board.

The starting point for a resolution of the crisis in Argentina is a recognition that the country is insolvent. It owes its creditors more than $140bn (£95bn) and has not the slightest hope of paying them back. But a company that is insolvent can seek protection from its creditors and has the chance to wipe the slate clean; a country that is insolvent gets a visit from the IMF and is forced to accept draconian conditions that make the crisis worse.

And the dollar's plunge in value, consistent with a Marxist understanding of 'surplus' capital ultimately creating the 'over-production' crisis which finally tips the world into revenge-seeking slump-disasters and into inter-imperialist warmongering trade-war chauvinism, is also beginning to perplex the minds of even the most conservative bourgeois commentators, likes this in the Times:

A retired British ambassador once amazed me with the following argument for his implacable opposition to joining the euro: "I want to be sure that my grandchildren will be fighting on the right side when it comes to the inevitable war between America and Europe."

Yet even America's instinctive supporters and admirers are getting worried - and not just about Mr Bush's quixotic policies on Israel, Iraq and global climate change. In fact, economics, rather than terrorism and foreign policy, may pose the main danger to America's global stature, just as it did from the late 1960s and 1970s.

While America is still doing far better economically than Europe or Japan, the long slump on Wall Street and the recent plunge of the dollar - which yesterday had to be supported by the Japanese Government to avert an even steeper fall suggest that trouble may lie ahead.

People who saw America as a bastion of free-market economics have been horrified by Mr Bush's tariffs on steel, textiles and timber. Worst of all has been the blatantly protectionist farm Bill, which seems to have reversed at a stroke all the progress towards liberalising both European and American agricultural markets - an initiative that would have offered the world's poorest countries an opportunity to benefit from globalisation and free trade.

As one of the few genuinely freemarket French economists I have ever met noted this week in a circular to his clients: "The great bull market of the 1980s and 1990s found its. source in principled ideas. These principled ideas have been undermined in the very countries where they had originated and surprisingly enough without a proper debate. To see a Republican Administration elected under a free-trade agenda pass not one, but three, blatantly stupid protectionist measures makes me sick to my stomach."

Something is surely amiss in the world when the French have to lecture American conservative politicians on market economics. Yet that is exactly what has been happening in recent meetings between the US trade officials and the EU trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy.

The danger for America in this strange juxtaposition lies not so much in the damage that Mr Bush's protectionism will do directly to the US economy, as in the impact it could have on America's financial and economic standing relative to Europe and Japan. To put it in a nutshell, the financial markets are losing their respect for the US policy and a loss of financial confidence is a problem that America simply cannot afford.

The US trade deficit is running at an annual rate of more than $400 billion and is expected to expand in the next few years to between $500 billion and $600 billion. To finance these deficits, America will have to borrow money from foreign governments and investors on an unprecedented scale, even in wartime. It is true that America has managed to finance vast deficits for more than a decade without much trouble, but the benign conditions that made this possible seem to be changing.

Most of America's borrowing in the 1990s was undertaken by the private sector, but in the years ahead the US Government will become a massive borrower, as it was in the 1980s. While America's borrowing in the Clinton era was used to support private investment, much of its future borrowing will be used to pay for Mr Bush's tax cuts and military build-up.

To make matters worse, America's attractiveness to private investors is looking more questionable than it has for many years. Shares on Wall Street are still expensive by historic standards, because the decline in prices after the bull market peaked in April 2000 has been more than matched by a collapse in profits, especially among the former stock market darlings of the electronic and telecommunications sectors.

Even more worrying for America's global stature, there are growing doubts about two of the main pillars of US economic superiority in the 1990s - advanced technology and management methods.

But it is much less clear now that America enjoys a natural advantage in these areas than it was before the bursting of the technology bubble on Wall Street, and the subsequent management troubles of Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorIdCom, Merrill Lynch and other firms that seemed to epitomise America's "new economy".

Moreover, there are signs that the world economy may be moving into a new phase of technological development that could cast the US economic model in a less favourable light. American business, with its emphasis on flexibility, entrepreneurship, risk-taking and rapid decisions, may have had a natural advantage over the more ponderous and consensual ways of doing business in Europe and Japan. But the world economy may now be moving from a revolutionary period into one of incremental change, as new technologies are adapted, perfected and applied to everyday services and products.

In such an evolutionary economy, there may again be a premium on the patient perfectionism and long-term commitment that allowed Japanese and European industries, ranging from cars and aerospace to banking and insurance, to catch up with and overtake their American rivals between the 1970s and 1980s. If this conjecture contains even a grain of truth, then America may find it increasingly difficult to attract foreign capital in the years ahead, just as the tax and defence priorities of the Bush Administration are putting the nation's finances under unprecedented stress. Mr Bush likes to compare his combination of economic, defence and diplomatic strategies with President Reagan's blend of tax cuts, military assertiveness and massive borrowing in the 1980s. His economic advisers certainly seem to believe that America's huge trade and fiscal deficits will be no more disruptive in the next decade than they were in the Reagan years. There is, however, a less attractive precedent that they could hark back to: the decision, first by, President Johnson and then by President Nixon, to finance the unpopular Vietnam War through borrowing and inflation, rather than higher tax. The ultimate result of that was not just America's military humiliation but also the series of economic crises that began in the late 1960s and continued until 1982.

Other bourgeois in the USA are even closer to recognising that the ludicrous "war on terrorism" is just a stunt to cover up the preparation by Washington of a general warmongering stance against all-comers which shames US civilisation, even though the link from warmongering to economic imperialist crisis is not properly brought out. But missing that connection makes the bluntness of the language (in this prominent-people protest-declaration against the Bush administration all the more remarkable.

Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression. The signers of this statement call on the people of the US to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11 and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world.

We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers. We believe that all persons detained or prosecuted by the US government should have the same rights of due process. We believe that questioning, criticism, and dissent must be valued and protected. We understand that such rights and values are always contested and must be fought for.

We believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own governments do - we must first of all oppose the injustice that is done in our own name. Thus we call on all Americans to resist the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral and illegitimate. We choose to make common cause with the people of the world.

We too watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. We too mourned the thousands of innocent dead and shook our heads at the terrible scenes of carnage, even as we recalled similar scenes in Baghdad, Panama City and, a generation ago, Vietnam. We too joined the anguished questioning of millions of Americans who asked why such a thing could happen.

But the mourning had barely begun, when the highest leaders of the land unleashed a spirit of revenge. They put out a simplistic script of "good v evil" that was taken up by a pliant and intimidated media. They told us that asking why these terrible events had happened verged on treason. There was to be no debate. There were by definition no valid political or moral questions. The only possible answer was to be war abroad and repression at home.

In our name, the Bush administration, with near unanimity from Congress, not only attacked Afghanistan but arrogated to itself and its allies the right to rain down military force anywhere and anytime. The brutal repercussions have been felt from the Philippines to Palestine. The government now openly prepares to wage all-out war on Iraq - a country which has no connection to the horror of September 11. What kind of world will this become if the US government has a blank cheque to drop commandos, assassins, and bombs wherever it wants?

In our name the government has created two classes of people within the US: those to whom the basic rights of the US legal system are at least promised, and those who now seem to have no rights at all. The government rounded up more than 1,000 immigrants and detained them in secret and indefinitely. Hundreds have been deported and hundreds of others still languish today in prison. For the first time in decades, immigration procedures single out certain nationalities for unequal treatment.

In our name, the government has brought down a pall of repression over society.

The president's spokesperson warns people to "watch what they say" : Dissident artists, intellectuals, and professors find their views distorted, attacked, and suppressed. The so-called Patriot Act - along with a host of similar measures on the state level - gives police sweeping new powers of search and seizure, supervised, if at all, by secret proceedings before secret courts.

In our name, the executive has steadily usurped the roles and functions of the other branches of government. Military tribunals with lax rules of evidence and no right to appeal to the regular courts are put in place by executive order. Groups are declared "terrorist" at the stroke of a presidential pen.

We must take the highest officers of the land seriously when they talk of a war that will last a generation and when they speak of a new domestic order. We are confronting a new openly imperial policy towards the world and a domestic policy that manufactures and manipulates fear to curtail rights.

There is a deadly trajectory to the events of the past months that must be seen for what it is and resisted. Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist.

President Bush has declared: "You're either with us or against us "Here is our answer: We refuse to allow you to speak for all the American people. We will not give up our right to question. We will not hand over our consciences in return for a hollow promise of safety. We say not in our name. We refuse to be party to these wars and we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name or for our welfare. We extend a hand to those around the world suffering from these policies; we will show our solidarity in word and deed.

We who sign this statement call on all Americans to join together to rise to this challenge. We applaud and support the questioning and protest now going on, even as we recognise the need for much, much more to actually stop this juggernaut. We draw inspiration from the Israeli reservists who, at great
personal risk, declare "there is a limit" and refuse to serve
in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. 

We draw on the many examples of resistance and conscience from the past of the US: from those who fought slavery with rebellions and the underground railroad, to those who defied the Vietnam war by refusing orders, resisting the draft, and standing in solidarity with resisters. Let us not allow the watching world to despair of our silence and our failure to act. Instead, let the world hear our pledge: we will resist the machinery of war and repression and rally others to do everything possible to stop it. 

Laurie Anderson, Edward Asner, Russell Banks, . Noam Chomsky, Oasis Davis, Mos Def, Eve Ensler, Martin Luther King 111, Barbara Kingsolver, Tony Kushner, Edward Said, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, Howard Zinn, and 53 others.

Inconsistent petty-bourgeois protest it remains, but the remarkable degree of identification with the anti-imperialist ''terrorist" world (notably avoiding the "condemnation" which the treacherous fake-'left' all fell for in Britain) hints at a quite astonishing cultural shift in the earth's axis.

The EPSR has frequently argued that the unprecedented postwar epoch of universal relentless anti-communist brainwashing has paradoxically dug the biggest pit for capitalism itself.

It simply dare not fail again on the scale of the last great 19305 Crash and warmongering slump crisis, which eventually inevitably led to the greatest expansion ever of workers states in the post 1945 period, and to the great era of anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist national-liberation struggle, which began the change forever from the Western-dominated world by defeating the great Western colonial empires, often against the bitterest last-ditch military resistance by imperialist and local colonialist forces (Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Egypt, Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa, etc, etc, etc).

But capitalism's "universal, freeworld prosperity and security" IS failing again, - diabolically so.

So it's back to the anti-imperialist drawing board for the world's exploited and impoverished masses, to look again at the one scientifically-proven way of getting out from under monopoly-capitalist domination and all its miserable warmongering failings,  - by building a communist revolution and a totally planned economic and political development under the dictatorship of the proletariat. 

And regardless of any apparent distance from all this of current struggles and pre-occupations of workers in Britain e.g., the undying proletarian dream of a planned socialist society of justice, adequacy, and opportunity for creative work, study, and culture for all will remain just a dead cynical fantasy unless a workers movement is built which directly identifies the fate of socialism in Britain e.g. with the eventually triumphal outcome of the worldwide anti-imperialist revolution (which is starting so spectacularly in some of the unlikeliest places such as the Islamic-inspired anti-Western revolt throughout the Middle East and beyond).

The US petty-bourgeois protest gets remarkably close to a crucial understanding in all this, - namely that DEFEAT for the 'western world' (as represented by Bush, Blair, and the NATO powers, all backed by their "democratic oppositions" in parliament) will be a crucial development in the historic overthrow of world-domination by Western imperialist warmongering parties, aided of course by the petty-bourgeois fake-'lefts' in their "condemnation" of the Islamic suicide bombers in Palestine and the Sept 11 attempt to take guerrilla-war resistance to American bullying right into the USA itself).

The essential anti-communism of the fake-'left' (the openly counter-revolutionary viciousness of the Trots plus the weak 'solidarity' sympathy for the workers states by the Revisionists which always retreats from a principled defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat whenever the West cooks up a major anti-communist provocation or scandal) will still be sitting around smugly avoiding any serious embrace of truly revolutionary communist agitation against the imperialist crisis on the 'safe' grounds that, "after all, it DID fail in the Soviet Union and East Europe".

Wrong. It was deliberately sabotaged in the Socialist Camp by Revisionist treacherous stupidity, taking their 'peaceful coexistence' half-truth (muddled from Lenin's very limited temporary 1920s tactic out of then Soviet weakness) all the way to a mesmerised full embrace of Western "freemarket" gibberish (i.e. barely disguised monopoly-imperialist anarchy and ruthless warmongering exploitation) under the sick influence of Stalinist theoretical imbecilities (see EPSR 2002 Perspectives document).

But how is the triumph of anti-Marxist shallowness in East Europe getting on with its new capitalist 'freedom'????

Endless propaganda insists that a "free-market" triumph is on the way.

But many admissions by the capitalist press itself keep on reporting a totally different story, reading between the lines and ditching the bogus anti-communist 'explanations' for everything still going wrong there, - like pretending that Siberia, for example, had always been a disaster area.

What is everything now collapsing FROM if the Soviet 70-years planned economic development and justice had failed to bring anything to the Siberian people, (as all earlier Russian Tsarist regimes are acknowledged as having failed).?

The truth was that all-over USSR development was an astonishing UNIVERSAL triumph for planned economic development and equity FOR ALL, now wrecked by the vicious stupidity and small-minded exploitational greed made unassailable by the DELIBERATE Gorbachev dismantling of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its replacement by the 'delights' and the 'creativity' of the "freemarket democracy" way of life:

Life looked as dazzling as the sunlit snow of Siberia when Yura Romanenko moved into his new flat in the early 1980s. The new town of Prigorsk offered jobs, hope and community - a new life carved out of the taiga in a latterday example of Russia's endless quest to tame the immense wilderness that is Siberia.

"People had real spirit here," said Mr Romanenko, 40, who worked at the top-secret uranium processing plant down the road.

Mr Romanenko's dream of Siberia has turned into a nightmare. Twenty years after Prigorsk was built to house the workers of the uranium refinery, the defence ministry factory is being turned into a women's prison. The kindergarten is an empty concrete shell. Towerblocks stand abandoned with no water, windows, or heating in a region where the temperature reaches -30C (-22F) in winter.

Out of work for 11 years, Mr Romanenko poaches fish from a local reservoir to try to make ends meet. His neighbours are long gone. Four out of five of the original population of 8,000 have abandoned Prigorsk, 300 miles south of the regional capital of Krasnoyarsk

Siberia - Sibir, in Russian - exerts a powerful hold on the Russian imagination, the very word conjuring romantic stirrings of conquest and forebodings of cruelty. The superlatives trip off the tongue: a land mass bigger than Europe and the US combined, 12% of the world's forests, the biggest gas reserves on the globe, gold and diamonds, oil and furs.

"Siberia will make Russia rich;" declared Mikhail Lomonosov, the great Russian scientist and founder of Moscow University, in the 18th-century heyday of Catherine the Great. But the reality today is that Russia, is making Siberia poor.

"Moscow sees Siberia as a kind of warehouse from which you can take what you want without putting anything back," said Professor Vladimir Lanin, a leading historian of Siberia.

Vladimir Levkin, 43, a burly south Siberian from the town of Abakan, is preparing to head west after years of work as a local government driver, which nets him £60 a month: "Everything's falling apart here, the villages, the factories, the jobs. No one's working."

"The whole history of our state has been a search for ways to settle and provide stimuli to settle Siberia," said Leonid Drachevsky, President Vladimir Putin's plenipotentiary for Siberia.

But that history has come full circle. Russia is shrinking. 

.In the past decade, for example, the population of the Chukotka region in the north-east opposite Alaska has fallen by more than 60%. Neighbouring Magadan has lost more than half its inhabitants. Some 15% have fled the Arctic naval port of Murmansk. At least a million people, or 12%, have headed west from the Russian far east: Under government programmes to save on the high costs of sustaining life in the extreme north, at least 20% of the population has been evacuated.

A study of demographic trends by the Russian Academy of Sciences last year found that the north and the east have turned into "a consolidated zone of lost population".

"The main direction of migration in Russia in the past 10 years has been movement from the north and the east to the west and the south, a trend opposed not only to that of the previous decade but to that of the country's entire history:'

Large tracts of central and western Siberia have been losing populations, too, as a result of idling factories, collapsed collective farms, the closure of coal, diamond, and gold mines, the decline of the once massive military industries, and the decay of the frontier garrisons

Nestling in the hills by the Yenisei river' sits the village of Sovetskaya Khakassiya, a disaster zone of abandoned and cannibalised cottages, piles of rusting farm junk, drunk men, and old women.

In a backyard, Nadezhda Beregovikh, 60, is struggling to butcher a pig, watched helplessly by her 91-year-old mother, Zimana, and vainly pleading for an able-bodied male to help her.

Outside in the muddy street, a man, worse the wear for drink, is being battered by his wife. Five young men, also drunk, are kicking and punching a mate lying on the ground.

This village was once the centre of a communist collective farm, closed three years ago as a result of gross mismanagement. Of the farm's 35,000 head of sheep, not one survives. Of the 800 head of cattle, only 200 are alive. "The director, she couldn't tell her oats from her barley," said Nikolai Vozhdayev, who used to teach the farmhands how to use the machinery.

As in Prigorsk, most of the people have left a village that has reverted to an earlier era Where once there was central heating, there are now woodburning stoves. Where there was running water, the villagers fetch water in milk churns from a well in the street. "The wells freeze in winter and we need to get water from the Yenisei arid boil it," Mr Vozhdayev said.

His wife Natasha said: "There are no young people left here. Those that remain are not having kids. They're afraid to, they can't feed them. Soon there will be only old people left here."

Lifeblood

The government in faraway Moscow and the regional elites like to talk of Siberia as Russia's lifeblood. "When Siberia is healthy, Russia is healthy," Mr Drachevsky said.

Russia's rapacious "oligarchs", the gas monopoly Gazprom, the oil majors, the aluminium tsars, will continue to exploit Siberia's mineral wealth and fill Moscow's coffers. But the human factor is waning.

Following orders from the Kremlin, a government strategy for the development of Siberia has just been adopted. It envisages a 3.5-fold growth in Siberia's gross domestic product by 2020 and a diversification of the Siberian economy away from reliance on raw materials into hi-tech industries and manufacturing.

Mr Drachevsky, Mr Putin's regional tsar and a key architect of the strategy, is sceptical. "There are real fears that this plan will be successfully forgotten. The opponents may sabotage it."

The main opponents are among Mr Putin's economic team and some of the "oligarchs" or billionaire businessmen who control Siberia's hydrocarbon riches.

German Gref, the economic development minister and a proponent of laissez-faire economics, does not see Siberia as a priority but as a huge drain on limited resources, a region that should be left to sink or swim by the laws of the market. If Mr Gref has his way, Mr Drachevsky has complained, Siberia will become a human desert with a few oases located along the 5,000-mile trans-Siberian railway.

Boris Reznik, an MP from Siberia in the parliament in Moscow, said under Mr Putin's drive to recentralise power in Moscow, the neglect of Siberia is greater than ever. "The government is retreating from solving Siberia's problems and from the problems of the peripheries generally" 

Given Russia's bleak demographic predicament, there is no quick fix. The country's crisis combines the worst of two worlds, that of the wealthy west with its low birth rates and that of the developing world with its high mortality, low life expectancy, and poor health.

According to Russian demographers, the current population of 145 million will slump to around 90 million within two generations, although UN projections are more optimistic. The age structure will also change, with the working age population diminishing by almost a million a year from 2005, according to Mrs Zaionchkovskaya. This predicament is writ large in Siberia since the population decline is worsened by migration. 

Inside and outside the Russian government, many welcome Siberia's shrinkage and view the government policy of neglect as benign. A paper from the Brookings Institution, western experts on contemporary Russia, argues that the fate of Siberia is the nation's biggest test. "Moving people across the territory back to European Russia would be Russia's real opportunity to join the west."

However much bluffing is going on, what cannot be altered is that the "Soviet system has failed" arguments will remain effectively unchallenged until there is a return to communist revolution in Russia, which of course shows no signs of happening or even beginning yet.

But the fake-'left' anti-communist philistinism will remain uneasy. Clearly, something has gone desperately wrong with the return of "freedom" to East Europe.

At one time, a patchy response was the get-out, with the more backwards countries being compared unfavourably with the less backwards or 'more Western' former workers states, - like Poland, where capitalism was briefly universally acclaimed as a 'triumph'. Not any more, apparently, - according to this sourly anti-communist capitalist press survey by a leading Clinton era American fake-'liberal', Joe Klein:

Solidarity is a good part of the reason why I'm here - its legacy of moral clarity in the socialist era and of political freedom and bold market reform after liberation. For years, Poland - the most populous of the former Soviet satellites, with 38m people - has been considered a capitalist showcase, the country said to be making the easiest transition from communism to freedom, the country best prepared to join the EU. Its economy grew at a rapid pace in the 90s; there was talk of a Polish Miracle. But the story has soured in the past few years.

The economy stopped growing.  Unemployment stands at more than 18%. In the parliamentary election of 2000, the centre did not hold.

Solidarity remnants collapsed. Two rather unique populist parties suddenly materialised as significant forces. 

By contrast, Freedom Union - the party of the former Solidarity intellectuals - received only 3% and has disappeared from the Polish parliament, the Seim.

And so, the Polish jitters. Pessimists abound in Warsaw, and around the country. There is a war between the government and the still strict central bank over monetary policy. Lepper is making news every day, usually involving scuffles with the police (last Thursday, he tried to stop imported grain from entering Poland by rail) or with his fellow parliamentarians (he was removed from the hall after a scuffle last Friday).

"Poland is becoming more and more like Latin America," says Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the Law and Justice party, a reformist centre right political remnant of Solidarity. "People succeed here not because they're talented, but because they know the right people. There is a Polish saying: thousands gain, millions lose. This is an over-simplification, but we do pay an enormous corruption tax, and no one seems interested in reform. So we have an economic crisis that threatens to become a political crisis - my fear is that unless the economy improves, the populist parties will become very strong."

Versions of this scenario were being offered all over Warsaw, from the left and from the right. Part of it is chronic Slavic pessimism: that the sky hasn't yet fallen is considered a quirk of physics, possibly caused by the intercession of the Virgin Mary, a powerful figure in this extremely religious country, where 48% are regular churchgoers. The universality of the dread is striking. Indeed, the only optimist I could find in Warsaw was a man who has always been a dissident of one sort or another: Adam Michnik, the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, the legendary newspaper of the Solidarity movement, once published by mimeograph and now the most popular newspaper in Poland.

"It's still like a wonderful dream," Michnik tells me in the spanking new Gazeta offices, complete with swimming pool, workout room, dining room, towering bamboo plants and terraces. "I'm sometimes afraid to open my eyes in the morning."

"But people don't seem to be very happy," I point out.

He shrugs. "Poland has its problems, but these are problems that all European countries have. There is a story from prison that I sometimes tell. It's about the way we divided the good wardens from the bad ones. The good wardens would accept bribes in return for longer visits, more coffee, larger packages from home. The bad wardens were the honest ones, who wouldn't take bribes. What we have in Poland now is that the country is being run by the good wardens."

Nova Huta

In 1952, the Soviet authorities decided to build their fantasy just outside Krakow: a model town of the future next to an immense steelworks of the future. The steelworks would be named after Lenin and the town would be called Nova Huta. At its peak, 27,000 people worked at the Lenin Steelworks. Today, it is an economic and ecological disaster area, still owned by the state, which seems unable to figure out how to dispose of it. Nine thousand people still work here, but there are plans to reduce the workforce to 4,000 later this year. The local unions oppose the plan and are threatening to strike. The most important of these unions is Solidarity.

Nova Huta always was a troublesome place for the communists. Their town of the future didn't have a church and - in 1960 - the workers began a series of protests that forced the government to allow one to be built. Then, in 1988, the steelworkers - now represented by Solidarity - began a strike for higher pay and for recognition of their union. The strike spread to the local coal mines, and then it spread throughout the country: There were battles with the police; many of the workers were thrown in jail. But they won the strike and the right to be represented by Solidarity - a victory that led directly to the collapse of communism in Poland two years later.

There are two stolid, soot-coloured buildings with crenellated roofs that stand at the gates of Nova Huta. One houses the plant's administrative offices. The Solidarity office is located in the other, and I'm overcome I by a sudden wave of nostalgia when I see the familiar red-and-white flag and logo. The local leader, Wvadimir Kilian, greets me and my interpreter,  Eve, in front of the building. He leads us up to the office, which has a large poster of the Pope on the door. He introduces us to some workers, who have stayed around on this late Friday afternoon to talk to us.

I expect anger and frustration from them, but the overwhelming emotion seems a dignified sadness. "I expected that the west would help us more after the Berlin Wall came down," says Adam, who is 55 and has worked at Nova Huta for 37 years. 

"But that illusion faded very quickly.  You know that, after the second world war, the European Coal and Steel Community was formed to provide support for the mines and mills in the west. Now, we're in the same situation and the EU is telling our government that if it wants to join, it cannot support factories like this one. Why are the rules different for us?"

Kilian says that the early Solidarity governments were a disappointment to the workers, many of whom turned to the former communists.

"Lepper plays on nostalgia and anger," says Adam, "and the old days were more safe and secure. People had more things to be happy about. Sometimes you were able to buy 100 grams of coffee"- a mischievous twinkle here - "and the whole family would be happy. But who would ever want to go back to that?"

"My children found some of the old food coupons in a drawer," says Ryszard, 41, an electrician. "They didn't know what they were. I had to tell them about the old days. You know, I came to work here because my father worked here. My son is crazy about computers. I want him to go to school and become an expert, but you need money for that. Many people don't even have the money to buy schoolbooks for their children. I am just an ordinary worker, not a union leader like these guys. But I am disappointed in the ruling elites, especially those who came from here, from this union, and turned their backs onus."

One would think, given the broad expanse of its social democratic heart, that the EU - if not the Polish government itself - might find some way to provide schoolbooks for the children of the obsolete steelworkers, miners and farmers whose courage brought freedom to Poland.

Olkusz

I am beginning to regret that I've chosen not to see Lepper. It was probably a case of misguided responsibility: journalists always seek out the Leppers of the world and blow them out of proportion. The mini-Hitters begin to believe their own bloviations - look at the press, they take me so seriously! -and people begin to think that they represent more than just a minority, the lunatic 20%. But this is a part of the world where the lunatics have been known to take over the asylum and so I've made a concession to paranoia. I've set up a meeting with members of the League of Polish Families, the moderate lunatic populists, in this small town 4Okm north-west of Krakow.  These are, after all, devout Catholics. Their complaints should be heard.

I ask the group: how are things in Poland these days? And kaboom. Everyone is talking at once, everyone wants to rant. Very quickly we get to the heart of the matter. "People of Jewish origin got control and manipulated the Solidarity leadership," says Janek, a retired miner who is wearing aviator glasses and has the precise, angry scowl of a prison guard. He names the culprits - Michnik, Bronislaw Geremek, Jacek Kuron - and then the list goes on to include people such as President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who is not generally thought to be Jewish, and every other recent political leader. "All of them, all Jewish. The truth is coming out about their backgrounds now! They have stolen the assets of our country. The Jews and the Germans have manipulated our government and stolen everything. The Jews control it all. The Nobel Prize, the Oscars. Who wins the Oscar? Andrzej Wajda, a Jew who makes anti-Polish films'

I am waiting for someone to interrupt and say, "But Janek, aren't you going a bit too far?" This doesn't happen. My throat has tightened: I've listened to Arabs rant about Jews for years, but this is my first experience with the pure strain of central European anti-semitism. We are just the other side of Krakow from Auschwitz.

The Jews are just the beginning, however.

There are the Masons and the insidious international cartels - run by Jews, perhaps? - that have brought Ikea and Office Depot and supermarkets to Poland. "They undersell our good Polish stores in order to drive our shopkeepers out of business," says the doctor, a woman named Maria. "The Masons tried to rule the world through communism, but that didn't work. So now they're trying to rule the world through globalism. Thank God for our protector, the Black Madonna, who is a source of light even in the darkest times."	

I had met Bronislaw Geremek, the most gentle of men, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, an intellectual leader of the Solidarity uprising and foreign minister in the last Solidarity government, a professor of European civilisation now.

`It's sad how quickly people get used to freedom," he said, beginning a quietly remarkable internal dialogue, in which Geremek's optimism and pessimism debated each other. "Freedom brought dignity, but it also brought crime, corruption, corporations with no sense of social responsibility. I don't want to grow melancholy and nostalgic about Solidarity. But it was such a clear, honest movement. And too much melancholy in the political discourse is part of our current problem. That may well be a consequence of the fact that we have so few 
statesmen and so many politicians."

"Like Lepper?' I  asked.

'Politicians who exploit the mistakes we have made. The people trusted us, but we were amateurs.' 

Despite these clear if reluctant admissions that Polish society has taken a turn for the worse with this open return to fascist-chauvinist traditions of Polish religious bunker-mentality, the anti-communist 'left' will still sneer that "workers-state weakness had failed to eradicate this backward potential when they had the chance", etc, etc.

The EPSR has no rival in its much more serious criticism of ALL of Revisionism's far more crucial failings, in Poland and elsewhere, but this point is a complete anti-communist nonsense.

All the while that bourgeois-imperialist ideology remains so dominant an influence on earth (largely thanks to the fake-'left' backing 'democracy' rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat for a whole epoch), -  then the slightest relaxation of workers-state anti-imperialist internationalism (such as it was under Revisionist limitations, but considerable - enough to be a huge influence on this sort of question) will forever see "all the old crap reviving" in Lenin's memorable analysis.

It was precisely because these rampant Pilsudski-ite Catholic traditions of Polish anti-communist rottenness were forced to bottle themselves up under the Polish workers, state that the dictatorship of the proletariat regime there came in for its most sustained propaganda onslaught from the Vatican and the CIA's massive counter-revolutionary subversion campaigning (nonstop) and that these endless anti-communist provocations always apparently won such 'wide popular support', precisely thanks to these by-no-means-dead-yet fascist traditions.

Fake-'left' solidarity sympathy, utterly useless even if emotionally not totally inappropriate when expressed for the Palestinian plight (because pea--shooter 'left' rags spread only a tiny fraction of humane understanding compared to the huge audiences for the regular if occasional capitalist press and TV exposures of Zionist tyranny, and only end up HELPING  'democratic' bourgeois press freedoms to conceal or divert-from the far more crucial issue that remains hidden, which analyses why REVOLUTION is the ONLY way forward - see above), - -was never just useless in its sympathy-solidarity-with-the-Polish-people days but permanently get ting-it COMPLETELY WRONG.

The 'people' the fake-'left' always sympathised with in East Europe were ALWAYS these very same traditional fascist-chauvinist circles of widespread religious backwardness.

Ireland is another topical reminder of how the ENTIRE fake-'left' always got EVERY THING wrong about which anti-imperialist strategy would succeed (Sinn Fein and IRA Provisionals) and how tactically to express solidarity with that triumphant struggle for English workers and British nationalists.

It is also a useful handle on the DEFEAT aspect of the essentially revolutionary crisis the imperialist system is facing worldwide.

It was the British imperialist reluctance to continue struggling to maintain an effective colonisation-dictatorship 'separate state' pretence for the Occupied Zone, clearly identified from the start by the EPSR, proceeding from its Marxist understanding of history, which was the making of the triumph for the Provos guerrilla-war terrorist strategy,

The entire fake-'left' from the SLP to the Trots has always denied this was an anti-imperialist liberation triumph, and still tries to deny it,  going so far in Socialist Alliance ideological circles as to insist on a mini-repartition to give "self-determination" to British colonialism's dying Orange-fascist community causing the dog-in-the-manger destructiveness in North Belfast now.

Why now? Because the 'British' colony is lost forever, and the imperialist-minded local stooges for colonialist reactionariness are only just realising it, provoked anew by such things as leading Provo Alex Maskey no longer being deprivable of becoming Mayor of all Belfast due to a mixture of winning SF tactics in Ireland, plus the demographic direction towards an Irish majority in the North which will see Ireland fully reunited within a generation.

Like the doomed Zionists in Occupied Palestine (now trying to
build a wall to ward off the inevitability of the eventual reunification of ALL of the territory of the Old Palestine as a unitary Arab state), the doomed stooges of British imperialism would be granted a three-county walled laager by the SA fake-'lefts'.

Rut it will not be granted by dying British imperialism. It is reactionary redundant nonsense. And an understanding of the REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS of world imperialism overall is crucial to grasping a rational understanding of what is happening in Ireland, and why.

British imperialism is getting out, humiliated and defeated. Listen to its own admissions:

Widespread collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland continued unchecked for years because a culture of "gross unprofessionalism and irresponsibility" allowed officers to create a climate in which Catholics could be murdered with near impunity, a comprehensive investigation has found.

An explosive report by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Stevens, to be completed in the next few weeks, found that in many cases the relationship between Special Branch detectives, army intelligence officers and loyalist paramilitaries was so unprincipled and lacking in accountablility that it bordered on "institutionalised collusion", the Guardian has learned.

The three-year investigation into the murder of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane will also condemn a culture of incompetence that left junior ranks effectively making up the rules as they went along.

The commissioner hopes to recommend charges against several police and army officers and he will outline proposals for wholesale reform of procedures to ensure future transparency in what the police force is doing.

	"If I was in charge of those inquiries," said one Stevens detective, "we'd be going in there arresting people and finding 	out what's going on. The RUC's attitude is incredible. There's 	no attempt to keep law and order. That is the story of what is going on in Northern Ireland at the moment, not what happened more than 10 years ago'.

The criticisms of the Police Service of Northern Ireland made by the province's police ombudsman over its handling of the Omagh bomb investigation was also telling, Stevens investigators believe.

The ombudsman highlighted how warnings about an attack were not passed on by special branch to CID officers before or after the explosion that killed 29 people.

This alone indicates that little has changed in the policing of Northern Ireland since Mr Finucane's murder, and that the recommendations of two previous investigations into policing in Northern Ireland by Sir John Stevens - in 1991 and 1994 - appear to have been ignored.

One of the leading officers in the inquiry has been the Met's deputy assistant commissioner Hugh Orde. Two weeks ago, he was appointed the incoming chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and will be responsible for implementing the recommendations of his former boss.

Speaking to former soldiers, paramilitaries and double agents, Sir John's team uncovered astonishing levels of collusion between terrorists and the security forces.

	His report will not estimate the number of shootings that resulted from 	the collaboration, but he believes that loyalists were incapable of carrying out targeted assassinations without significant help. 

"There are many anecdotes of special branch officers, when interviewing loyalists, saying 'you are targeting the wrong people' and then walking out of the room, leaving photographs and other details on the table," said one source close to the inquiry.

Either by accident or design, the Stevens team found that RUC special branch - which gathers intelligence about terrorists and handles agents failed to keep records about meetings between officers and paramilitaries, and there appeared to be no guidelines about conduct.

Sir John has been told that attempts by his detectives to find out who was in charge of operations was "like trying to juggle soot".

Supporters of the Finucane family will not be satisfied by the Stevens report. They believe that only a public inquiry will resolve whether the collusion really went right to the heart of the British establishment.

One source said: "Next to nothing was written down, so it is extremely difficult to find out exactly what was done and on whose authorisation. Northern Ireland special branch kept no records; had no recognised policy code and yet their agents and informers were deployed at the cutting edge of life-threatening situations at more risk than in any other region of the UK."

Sir John's inquiry was drawn into a broad review of the murky world of undercover operations in Northern Ireland when it was asked by the RUC, now the Police Service of Northern Ireland, to review its investigation into the 1989 murder of Mr Finucane.

Nobody has been tried for the murder of the father of three, who was shot 14 times in front of members of his family as they ate Sunday dinner.

Sir John, who has conducted two previous inquiries in Northern Ireland, already knew that Mr Finucane's details had been passed to loyalist paramilitaries by an army double agent, Brian Nelson, who was helping loyalists to identify leading Catholics.

He went on to discover that two of the Ulster Defence Association gang members thought to be responsible for the murder were informers for the police. One of the two guns used was stolen from an army barracks. Sometime later, the weapon was recovered by police officers who, inexplicably, returned it to the army where it was modified - destroying potentially crucial forensic evidence.

The Guardian has learned that a special branch officer spoke of wanting Mr Finucane, a leading human rights lawyer, killed. 
"When three out of four people in the frame for the Finucane murder turn out to be security force agents, you have got to ask yourself, is this counter-terrorism, or totally counter productive?" said a source.
 
While Sir John will name the loyalists arrested and questioned on suspicion of the Finucane murder, he will not identify the two suspected gunmen.

During the inquiry, the Stevens team reviewed documents from the Ministry of Defence, which detailed the activities of soldiers working for the army's top secret force research unit (FRU). The FRU recruited and handled agents in Northern Ireland and it is still operating, albeit under a different name. Unlike the police, the FRU kept meticulous records in so-called "secret books"; the existence of the files was only revealed when a former FRU member, known by the pseudonym Martin Ingram, came forward. The paper trail led the Stevens team to arrest and question under caution a number of former FRU soldiers and agents, including Brian Nelson. Stevens has said that a fire which destroyed an office he was using to investigate British intelligence dirty tricks in Northern Ireland was caused by arson.

His views are being taken as confirmation of claims in The Sunday Times that the fire, in 1990, was started by the Force Research Unit (FRU).

A British Establishment majority has accepted the inevitability of ending its colonial toe-hold on Ireland since the 1970s after seeing national-liberation sweep the world of direct empires, and seeing dying British imperialism no longer need the extra 'rear door' safeguard of a 'British' Ulster, or need the extra war industry capacity of Belfast's shipyards and aircraft factories.

Trimble will still threaten periodic resignation as First Minister of the steadily disappearing old 'Northern Ireland' colonial-dictatorship statelet in order to continue Britain's "sympathy with Orange fascism" tactic to try to keep the gunmen-mafia on board and not have to wage all-out war against them.

But this die-hard colonist-criminal mentality will not be pandered to forever if Trimble's tactics fail to stop UDI nastiness.

The unstemmable revolutionary-crisis reality of the dying imperialist system will guarantee that Sinn Fein's reunification of Ireland strategy will triumph, providing the necessary national-liberation clearing-of-the-decks without which all the fake-'left' "immediate socialism" or "immediate reunification now" posturing was always meaningless reactionary dilettantism and diversions in imperialism's interests.

Build Leninism. EPSR

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperia1ist struggles).

Repressive United States

• 'Free trade' agreements give leverage to private sector against unions as U.S. companies move south in search of cheap labor and low maintenance. North American working classes find themselves fighting similar shock packages as those of their Latin American counterparts.

Company electoral intervention and blacklisting are part a larger pattern of union busting practices which have gained momentum over the last decade. Even in the event that recognition has been won, the hiring of part-time contract workers to replace strikers has proven very effective in diminishing union membership. Contract laborers work for lower wages, are entitled to no benefits, and tend to render strikes as symbolic gestures given that the positions have been filled. Repressive measures such as these, taken by Massey corporation, have resulted in a drop in union membership from 30,000 in 1979 to 4,000 at present.

IMMIGRANT LABOR: A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

During what has become known as the Third Wave of immigration from Latin America over the last two decades, undocumented immigrants have commonly been brought in as contract labor. Willing to work without benefits and for wages well below the national minimum wage, thanks to Washington's policy of persecution, corporate America found yet another lucrative mechanism with which to break up union activity.

The main difference between yesterday and today's union-busting practices, however, is that companies now have the option of not only moving to non-union states like Texas and Arizona, but also transferring their industries to Latin America.

The "Free Trade" agreements have been used as a watershed opportunity for firms eager to take advantage of cheap labor, low maintenance, few safety and environmental regulations and little if any taxes in Latin America.

Firms in the United States continue to move south of the border at an alarming rate. The U.S. Department of Labor observed that since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), roughly 1.5 million U.S. citizens have found themselves in the unemployment lines since 1994. Real wages in the industrial and textile sectors have fallen by 27 per cent.

In Mexico, unemployment has claimed various millions, according to its Labor Ministry, as a result of privatization related to structural adjustment. Moreover, real wages in Mexico have fallen by one third.

It's of little wonder that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has reported a 30% increase in illegal immigration across the Mexican border since 1997. 

Indeed, faced with the alternative of being out of a job or underemployed, as private industries pack their bags for Mexico and other Latin American countries where conditions are much more profitable, the strains on working families on both sides of the border have never been greater.

According to the Economic Commission on Latin America, IMF-inspired neoliberal shock packages have plunged almost half of the region into abject poverty due to massive privatization, price hikes, slashed wages, and the virtual elimination of the socio-economic net. Meanwhile, its industrial counterpart continues to experience a shock package of its own.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, undocumented Latino workers represent a multibillion-dollar asset to the American economy annually. By the late 1990s, immigrant contract labor composed a majority rank and file in many profitable industries throughout the south-western United States. This was the case in California's Silicon Valley, where Sommers Building Maintenance maintained a practically all immigrant janitor workforce. In one of the most high profile organizing drives in, the state's history, the progressive legal group Justice for Janitors, who had already succeeded in attaining union recognition for maintenance workers in the surrounding districts, confronted Sommers Corporation directly.

Exposed to the gains made by other organizational drives in the area, what was to become known as the Local 1877 gained its official recognition by the Labor Board in 1999, after a bitter and prolonged struggle. But it wasn't for lack of trying. A fierce union-busting campaign was waged against the firm's immigrant labor, including threats and intimidation, the firing of labor leaders, and deportations. During various pickets, police were mobilized by "Capital's beckon call," resulting in violence, injuries, and arrests.

The same tactics were initiated against the current national laundry workers' strike. Disillusioned by repressive manoeuvres against immigrant labor, Maria Espinoza, who was hired by Up-To-Date to recruit Latino workers, finally went on strike herself. "I felt awkward because the company wanted me to tell workers they would be deported if they joined the union ...l couldn't take it anymore and I resigned two weeks ago," she commented to the press. Ironically, what was initially appeared to be a union-busting mechanism is presently seen as a threat.

Indeed repression tends to sow the seeds for the very thing companies try to avoid at all costs: the radicalization of their workforce. And the Justice for Janitors case hasn't been the only victory against corporate America. After a two-and-a-half-month strike against Hollonder Home Fashions in Los Angeles, the garment union finally gained official recognition and a new contract including a moderate pension plan and wage increases. Gregorio Rosales, a four-year employee of the firm, commented to journalists that "the strike was beneficial for all the workers. We got to know each other, the owner realized the power of the union, and even through our gains were not what we expected, perhaps we will negotiate better conditions in the next contract."

For both Flores and Prater, like thousands of working families across the United States, life is only getting tougher. But before Up-To-Date will even consider addressing their demands, the company must first officially recognize the union. Every time a petition is presented before the National Labor Relations Board, however, the company quickly hires new workers to tip the political scale just before the final vote.

In West Virginia, hundreds of miners have been on strike since May against the A.T. Massey conglomerate. Before a vote last November for union recognition, the firm hired 46 new miners which predictably swayed electoral results. The petition was withdrawn.

The issues were similar to those of the laundry chain: low wages, poor benefits, and an abysmal health and safety record. According to the United Mine Workers of America, Massey owes $30 million USD to the Workers Compensation Fund: last year alone five workers died in mining related incidents. The mining corporation has also been cited by local authorities for illegally dumping 250 million gallons of waste in the state of Kentucky.

• SUSANA Flores, a laundry worker from Maryland, picketed the Up-To-Date laundry franchise for its "union busting" activities.

"The union is my people. We want decent lives and opportunities for our families... We make six dollars an hour after one year, and we have to pay $96 USD a week for health insurance. So you have to think twice about whether you pay for baby-sitting or medical coverage," commented Flores.

Prater, another laundry worker, pointed out the company's indifference towards health and safety conditions: "Workers get stuck by syringes that are caught in the laundry. We don't have protective clothing. The company is supposed to provide hepatitis shots, but they don't. Sometimes the temperature rises to over 100 degrees (Fahrenheit) in the plant, and the ventilation is poor."

In Mississippi, a nationwide strike against Titan Tire Corporation has been in process for almost three years. Given this protracted war of attrition, combined with insufficient strike relief funds, workers have had to look for part-time jobs. Company "black lists" however prevent strikers from being hired. One striker mentioned that he went to interview at a Wal-Mart. When they found out he was participating in the picket against Titan, they told him he wouldn't be hired.