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 1149 August 20 2002

Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074  

www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk
[P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.] 25p

Continuing shock over World Trade Centre reflects underlying imperialist fears about the revolutionary epoch which it signaled. Third World hostility and anti-imperialist struggle can only intensify as the capitalist crisis deepens to slump,  and warmongering is stepped up - both to bolster "policing" of an increasingly rebellious planet and as trade war conflict between the imperialists themselves. Force helps underpin the world wide dictatorship of capital - but force on its own cannot hold onto the exploited masses in long term because capitalism's usefulness historically is over - now in crisis it once more offers only war,  destruction and chaos, on a scale greater than WW1 and WW2.  Third World determination in Palestine and Zimbabwe eg shows imperialism's problems but the battle for revolutionary understanding is crucial to lift the struggle to a conscious fight for socialism, the only full solution to capitalist chaos.     

The extraordinary tide of "memorials", "analysis" and "cost-counting" over the September 11th World Trade Centre attack on America, already swamping the bourgeois press a month in advance of its anniversary, reflects far more than crocodile-tear "compassion" for the "innocent victims" or even the pain, humiliation and damage to imperialist pride done by "maverick suicide bombers". 

It is recognition of the pivotal significance of this guerrilla war/"terrorist" action, which demonstrated in dramatic fashion that the Third World hatred of the endless brutal world capitalist exploitation has reached explosion point, taking the fight right into the heart of "impregnable" US imperialism, and indicating that a watershed point has been reached in world revolutionary development. 

The destruction of the Manhattan heart of world finance capitalism was not simply knowing and sophisticated symbolism by Muslim anti-imperialists, but a signal that the relentlessly growing crisis within the entire imperialist order is  accelerating and has reached a new revolutionary threshold - boiling over with hatred and resistance of billions of exploited people world wide, who have cheered on this and other attacks ever since.

There is a long way to go before this inchoate upheaval and festering rebelliousness becomes conscious revolutionary struggle to end capitalism - not least the building of much deepened revolutionary understanding to win a clear conscious leadership, including defeat of the fake-'left' hordes who deliberately head the masses away from seeing the revolutionary nature of all development, with philistine pseudo-Marxist shallowness and lying posturing about "reforming capitalism" and "building democracy".

But the real fightback,  from Colombia's FARC army to Indonesian upheavals, Argentinian riots to Pakistani demonstrations, is rising. The genie is out of the bottle. 

And the universal dialectical laws of development, also grasped fully for the first time by Marx and Engels, dictate that it cannot be got back in.  Everything that imperialism does now to try and stamp on this growing rebelliousness simply makes the situation ten times, or a thousand times, or a million times worse. Revolution is the only resolution to this sharply peaking contradiction at this period in history, when imperialism has reached the end of any useful historic development.

The fraudulent but ruthless Bush "war on terrorism" has already directly inflamed the entire south Asian continent and most of the Middle East with its fascist arrogance, pointless and indiscriminate bombing of all and sundry in Afghanistan, and its futility, achieving nothing but renewed chaos, warlordism, drug running and hostility there and renewed hatred elsewhere; as imperiialism's violent and brutal l nature is underscored yet again for the masses. 

And the ever more cynical  atrocities and massacres against the second intifada in Palestine, not only cannot make it  lie down but push it from strength to strength. This concentrated expression of the entire Arab world's exploitation and revolt against it, gains ever greater fighting sophistication and to-the-death-resolve against hugely unequal odds.  Only the total genocidal elimination of the entire Palestinian people (and parts of the wider Arab world) could stop it.

So powerful is the impact of this determined struggle that like the Vietnamese Tet offensive victory, which gave rise to the US anti-war peace movement, it is forcing the argument to new levels worldwide. The exposure of the increasingly grotesque fascist attitudes of the Zionist Jewish colonisers are rapidly clarifying and polarising opinion everywhere,  as the EPSR has demonstrated (No1148)  - forcing disparate middle class and other elements everywhere to start taking sides, (with the academic boycott and renunciation of the Jewish "right of settlement" in Israel for example.)

The iron grip of the same dialectical logic is simultaneously forcing US imperialism into ever greater political financial and fascist military support for Zionism, not that it cares as such for the "Israelis" but because it is now taking its cue from these ideological mad-dogs for "smiting" the wider Arab world (and everywhere else which shows rebelliousness).

The EPSR has previously speculated that US imperialism could be forced into a split with the Zionist excesses as crisis deepened, because its strategic interests in exploiting and dominating the Middle East have used a variety of alliances with stooge Arab regimes, predominantly the Saudis, and it might not want those upset.

But the surfacing of the Third World antagonism expressed in the WTC attack and the Al-Qaeda network has revealed a depth and breadth of hostility which has caught Washington by surprise, just as the underlying economic crisis has burst open too.  The right-wing Cheney/ Rumsfeld/ Condeleeza Rice axis has been pushed into the ascendancy, going for the escalation of direct fascist/military domineering as the "solution" to problems, including, in some recent bourgeois press speculation,  a complete split with the Saudi order and even plans in hand to directly take over the Saudi oilfields.
But this kind of action and the increasingly noisy threat of war on Iraq are creating new contradictions and fears throughout the ruling class, with endless rumours and leaks about differences in the US administration, from dubious Pentagon generals to even Henry Kissinger advising caution. 
Their fears and doubts have nothing to do with morality of course; Kissinger notoriously sanctioned the illegal bombing of Cambodia during the fateful US imperialist onslaught on Vietnam's communist struggle and was at the helm during some of the many of the worst world domineering atrocities of the USA, not least being at the heart of the secret CIA overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile by the death and torture squads of General Pinochet's army.

They fear defeat. This is no longer the epoch of imperialist success and ascendancy, or even the period of some kind of "world balance",  maintained courtesy of Moscow Revisionism and its fatally flawed notions of "peaceful" superceding of imperialism  after "calming" of world struggle. Capitalism is worked-out,  as far as taking humanity forwards any further; all it can face now on balance is failure and collapse. 

Historically capitalism has stimulated science, technology, culture and organisation,  and has overseen the astonishing transformation of the primitive levels of productivity in earlier societies to levels now capable, if rationally applied,  of satisfying the real needs of the entire world, without ecological or environmental detriment.  

But the sophisticated,  savvy,  educated, ambitious workers it has had to create across the planet in order to spread its technology and expand its profit making can no longer tolerate the ever-more degenerate and parastical class rule of the bourgeois and their own endless wage-slavery, want and exploitation.

And beyond that,  the profit making system is anyway laden with the contradictions which must bring it repeatedly into every more devastating crisis and collapse, and which in turn is driving its rulingclass to increasingly desperate measures to try and hold onto its unparalleled wealth and power, which it will never willingly let go of.   

As the endless Stock Exchange turmoil, financial chaos, scandals and revelations of lying, corruption and cheating are now proving , the very heart of the world spanning profit system is rotten ripe for collapse - exactly as analysed and predicted for more than 150 years by Marxist science.  Only the fake-'left' refuse to accept evidence of the now daily stream of pessimistic statistical data, production downturns and so forth which appear in the world's financial and general press, and which signal general downturn whatever short-term blips might occur.  

The world's masses are being driven to revolt and imperialism cannot but respond with ever greater violence. But policing the world with a re-imposed direct colonialism,  however intimidatingly barbaric,  is ultimately impossible. Firstly the scale of the intervention demanded is beyond even the fabulous resources accumulated by US imperialism, the most powerful ruling order in all history. And anyway the entire pattern of twentieth century anti-imperialism has already demonstrated that the movement of history is completely in the other direction. 

Right now the whole of South America is in ferment for example with proletarian movements gathering pace or anti-government, anti-finance and anti-bank turmoil in the completely bankrupted Argentina, in Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Mexico, a failed CIA (Chile-style) coup in Venezuela, steadily increasing peasant and worker upheaval in Ecuador and Peru and the revolutionary anti-imperialist civil war in Colombia.

Asia lingers in continuing stagnation after currency collapse, particularly in its powerhouse imperialist economy of Japan. Frequent eruptions occur from the Philippines to Jakarta.

Africa is proving equally difficult. The continuing outrageous western intelligence orchestrated campaign against the revolutionary anti-colonialist President Mugabe in Zimbabwe is being steadfastly resisted for example. Despite using every tried and trusted subversion technique in the book, from building a supposed "democratic" movement with a stooge "opposition" (conjured out of the blue from disaffected and tribally hostile elements, individualistically ambitious petty-bourgeois, defeated counter-revolutionaries, and converted Christians); manipulating a class-collaborating trade union movement; blockading the economy with tarriffs, trade sanctions and aid fund holdups; and making endless (disproved) allegations of monstrous atrocities, the western intelligence subversion campaign is so far achieving nothing.

And the resistance to it is helping stir up more thoughtful elements such as this in the western press, which despite its capitulation to fraudulent notions of bourgeois "legality" and democracy  [Zimbabwe's "constitution" was imposed by still powerful British imperialism as the UK retreated, after the actually,  internationally,  illegal Smith regime and its barbaric rule was fought to a standstill by the ZANU], does spell out how the west has distorted and manipulated the economies there for its continuing exploitation:   

The most evil man on earth, after Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, is Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. That, at least, is the view of most of the western world's press.

Yesterday Mugabe insisted that 2,900 white farmers will have to leave their land... Twelve white farmers have been killed and many others beaten.  

His assault on white-owned farms has been cited by the Daily Telegraph as the principal reason for the current famine. Now, the paper maintains, he is using "food aid as a political weapon". 

There is no doubt, that Mugabe is a ruthless man... But to suggest that his land seizures are largely responsible for the nation's hunger is fanciful.

Though the 4,500 white farmers there own two-thirds of the best land, many of them grow not food but tobacco. Seventy per cent of the nation's maize -its primary staple crop - is grown by black peasant farmers hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites.

The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is merely one small scene in the tragedy now playing all over the world. Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave their land, with devastating consequences for food security.

For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of a last visit to the graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are dismissed by most of the press as the necessary casualties of development. 

Ten years ago, I investigated the expropriations being funded and organised in Africa by another member of the Commonwealth. Canada had paid for the ploughing and planting with wheat of the Basotu Plains in Tanzania.

Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that crop, rather than maize or beans or cassava, Canada could secure contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world leaders in wheat technology.

The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the Barabaig tribe. Those who tried to return to their lands were beaten by the project's workers, imprisoned and tortured with electric shocks. The women were gang-raped.

For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When I raised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told me: "I won't shed a tear for anybody if it means development:" The rich world's press took much the same attitude: only the Guardian carried the story. 

Now yet another member of the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom, is funding a much bigger scheme in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Some 20 million people will be dispossessed. Again this atrocity has been ignored by most of the media.

These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects. Mugabe is a monster because he has usurped the natural order.

Throughout the coverage of Zimbabwe there is an undercurrent of racism and of regret that Britain ever let Rhodesia go. Some of the articles in the Telegraph may as well have been headlined "The plucky men and women holding darkest Africa at bay". Readers are led to conclude that Ian Smith was right all along: the only people who know how to run Africa are the whites.

But, through the IMF, the World Bank and the bilateral aid programmes, with their extraordinary conditions, the whites do run Africa, and a right hash they are making of it. 
Over the past 10 years, according to the UN's latest human development report, the number of people in subSaharan Africa living on less than a dollar a day has risen from 242 million to 300 million. The more rigorously Africa's governments apply the policies demanded by the whites, the poorer their people become.

...the rich world has also been using "food aid as a political weapon" : The United States has just succeeded in forcing Zimbabwe and Zambia, both suffering from the southern African famine, to accept GM maize as food relief.

These nations had fiercely resisted GM crops, partly because they feared that the technology would grant multinational companies control over the food chain, leaving their people still more vulnerable to hunger. But the US, seizing the opportunity for, its biotech firms, told them that they must either accept this consignment or starve.

Malawi has also been obliged to take GM maize from the US, partly because of the loss of its own strategic grain reserve. In 1999, the IMF and the European Union instructed Malawi to privatise the reserve. 

The private body was not capitalised, so it had to borrow from commercial banks to buy grain. Predictably enough, by 2001 it found that it couldn't service its debt. The IMF told it to sell most of the reserve.

The private body sold it all, and Malawi ran out of stored grain just as its crops failed. The IMF, having learnt nothing from this catastrophe, continues to prevent that country from helping its farmers, subsidising food or stabilising prices.

'The same agency also forces weak nations to open their borders to subsidised food from abroad, destroying their own farming industries. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents state spending on land reform.

Land distribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms are up to 10 times as productive as large ones, as they tend to be cultivated more intensively. Small farmers are ore likely to supply local people with staple crops than western supermarkets with mange tout.

The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies that supply them. Indeed, it was Britain's refusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform programme in Zimbabwe that created the political opportunities Mugabe has so ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to the black population but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.

The sainted Nelson Mandela has arguably done just as much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to the IMF as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid.

Right on cue another piece spells out how the new class collaboration and capitalism established following the heroic anti-apartheid ANC struggle, is demonstrating how the REAL cause of inequality is capitalism itself, which when it cannot split the workers by racism simply continues to exploit them directly.  Socialist revolution must be brewing here too.  

LUSH green lawns and shimmering swimming pools will greet the 60,000 delegates when they start arriving in Johannesburg for the crucial Earth Summit this week.

But the illusion of abundance shouldn't fool anyone. Not far from the conference circus there is serious concern at how privatisation of South Africa's utilities is seriously failing its population. In the country that has just overtaken Brazil in having the most polarised income levels on earth, the scale of the problems is awesome.

University of Witwatersrand academics say 22,000 people in Johannesburg are disconnected from water supplies each month because they, can't afford to pay steeply rising water bills.
The problem affects the whole country. In a population of 42 million, 10 million South Africans have had their supplies cut.

The result is 43,000 deaths from diarrhoea last year, and a vicious outbreak of cholera affecting 135,000 that has claimed hundreds of lives.

Similar problems blight the country's electricity industry. Although South Africa has the cheapest electricity for industrial users - who have enjoyed a 15 per cent cut since 1994 - bills for domestic use have risen in readiness for a 30 per cent sell-off of Eskom, the country's supplier.

New armies of electricity bootleggers have sprouted to maintain supplies, but many people believe the direct causes of disease, increased crime and a new, anti-privatisation militancy in the country - culminating in a two-day national strike planned this October - is the 'commoditisation' of basic services.

This...has created unprecedented economic hardship through price increases across the board for water supplies by as much as 400 per cent, say unions.

A handful of South African regions have already been privatised. The British company Biwater, a private company famous for its close links to Margaret Thatcher's administration, runs one municipality.

Under Biwater, the town of Nelspruit, with a population of 340,000, has seen consumer boycotts sparked by price hikes and a perceived failure to roll out services to poor areas. Biwater says that its price increases have been the third lowest in the country.

What's more, customers have to pay for up to 90 minutes of 'air time'- the time it takes for water to come out of a tap once its switched on...

...Like most southern hemisphere countries, South Africa has been under great pressure to liberalise its utilities. While it has not had to endure IMF poverty reduction initiatives, the World Bank insisted the country abandon cross-subsidies on its basic utilities which even under apartheid saw the rich contribute to the poor's bills.

The World Bank argued that overseas companies Would fail to invest in South Africa if rich consumers cut down on their water usage. The World Bank didn't approve of an ANC ruling in 2000 - at the peak of the cholera epidemic and on the eve of an election - that every household receive six kilolitres of water...

John Prescott said the Earth Summit's ultimate goal is to reduce the 1.2 billion people without clean war to drink. But as he flies into Johannesburg he will do well to reflect on the catastrophic record of privatisation in South Africa.

Apart from the irony that the Guardian in which the first piece appears, is one of the most relentlessly hostile bourgeois papers against the Mugabe government (or regime as its subtly twisted journalism always likes to call it - implying some lack of legitimacy) the article is also typical of the fake-'left' and liberal opinion which provides an ongoing ideological cover  for imperialism with its notions of "fairness" and "democratic change" and "reform". It finishes up with the following paragraph:

Let us condemn Mugabe's attacks upon Zimbabwe's whites by all means, but only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war that the rich world wages against the poor."

This is a complete petty bourgeois copout, on a par with those who "condemn equally" the "violence" of the Palestinians and the Israelis, or "condemn the methods of the terrorists".  

The ruthless oppression of imperialism whether it is through the slow irresistible power of capital and bank loans confronting the worker who has only his own labour power to sell, or the violence of death squads, military occupations and police torture is the only thing totally to be resisted and condemned. 
To quote a recent EPSR (No1144); "...the only real issue of course is that, as throughout history, the sole effective class-war and national-war means against absolute tyranny (the existence of 'Israel' means the stealing of the best part of the Palestinian homeland for keeps) is to fight total conflict. The 'violence' of the Palestinians, all of it, is 100% justified both historically and 'morally'. There is no other way.

The 'violence' of the Zionists, all of it, is 100% contemptible fascist brutality and criminal aggression."

And the same applies to the anti-imperialist struggle against the tiny minority of colonialists who seized the best land in "Rhodesia" almost within living memory and whose Selous Scouts and army were a byword for atrocity and viciousness throughout the civil war in the 1970s. 

And most of all it applies to the whole existence of imperialism and its increasingly stifling grip on human potential and development, and the ever worsening threat of warmongering mayhem and destruction that it must bring.

Marx of course understood profoundly the need to overthrow the system, the only way the destruction and damage its decadence (in the full sense) is wreaking on the planet (slump, chaos and ultimate Third World War) can be halted.  And his work is being underlined by the realworld development of the crisis, now glaringly visible to all but the fake-'left' "anti-catastrophists".  

Bang on cue bourgeois ideology has produced a fresh new edition of the Communist Manifesto.  It is far too well known and available to suppress, which is what the bourgeoisie would dearly like to do, so instead it comes with a brand new commentary by a prestigious bourgeois stooge professor "proving" that Marx got it all wrong, most crucially of course on the question of "revolution" (the bit all the fake-"lefts" avoid talking about (except occasionally for credibility's sake mentioning it in the most distant "theoretical" and "pure" terms completed unrelated to any messy reality of struggle that might be going on today.)

Note the patronising academic smugness of the "for Marx" as if it is somehow just another "opinion" instead of a the devastating truth which wiping out people's savings investments and pensions across the planet and threatening imminently to drive many of the  middle class "into the ranks of the impoverished" as Marx predicted.

 The myriad scandals currently rocking corporate America would have come as little surprise to Karl Marx. The unchecked expansion and corrupt practices of Enron, Xerox and WorldCom were, for Marx, part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, the modern world economy looks more like the capitalism he described in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 than at any time since.
Marx was the first to capture capitalism's incessantly restless, compulsively innovatory character; its iconoclastic subversion of all cultures, practices and beliefs. In more respectful terms, the financial press of 2002 perfectly echoes his account. The picture of contemporary capitalism that emerges from the Economist is of a deregulated world economy dominated by multinational companies and continually reshaped by the pressures of international finance.

Nor would Marx have been surprised by the political reaction to this current "crisis of capitalism': [inverted commas!!!!!].

The free-market right blithely regards the corruption as the work of a few rotten corporate apples - declaring that, besides, there is no alternative. The anti-globalisation left is equally sceptical about the serious reform of capitalism and so advocates its abolition. But whether Marx theorist of a post-capitalist order of communism, rather than sustainable development - would have joined the protesters of Genoa and Seattle is more questionable

Coherent anti-capitalism certainly begins with Marx. Before him, opposition was largely limited to machine breaking and incendiarism. It was only with the manifesto, which so clearly outlined the self-destructive progress of capitalism, that organised antagonism emerged. Capitalist development, Marx maintained, would end in a world revolution driven by the exploited masses of the new economic order and spearheaded by the factory proletariat of the industrial cities. Although this world revolution never occurred, the growth of a labour movement and spread of socialist ideas did pose real obstacles to capitalist advance. Until the seismic events of 1989, socialism and communism hampered capitalist development both politically and geographically.

Now many of Marx's erstwhile followers, who have switched their attention to the anti-globalisation movement, appear to share the same world view as the Economist. Both assume that the optimal functioning of a capitalist economy requires an amicable partnership between a minimal state and deregulated economy. As the Communist Manifesto put it, the "executive of the modern state" is "but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie".  And while, for the moment, socialism may have been defeated, Marx correctly predicted a global polarisation between wealth and poverty. Hence the position Terry Eagleton, who recently argued in these pages that the only thing that has changed is that while once the uprising of the dispossessed was expected in Bradford or the Bronx, now it is coming from "the souks of Tripoli and Damascus".

In the present climate, it is not difficult to understand why there should be such widespread despair of meaningful reform. Marxian assumptions do not seem unreasonable in a world in which the Italian state is in the pocket of its largest entrepreneur, and in which the election of the American president was bankrolled by Enron. But there is no need to accept either the right's vision of a capitalism triumphant or the anti-globalisation left's assumption that Marx has been proved correct. Their contrary yet righteous certainty is the product of an ideological hostility to a mixed economy that the previous social democratic movement did not share.  [precisely - which is why New Labour is the sellout it is.]

Capitalism more usually refers to a question of degree than of kind. [!!!]  The unrestricted exchange of commodities together with a free labour market is compatible with a broad range of political regimes. Yet what Marx initially promised was a post-capitalist society. It would be as dynamic as capitalism itself, but no longer subject to an arbitrary market, freed from scarcity and its classbound polarities of wealth and poverty.

Marx's manifesto vision was driven by a conviction that the capitalist "cash nexus" distorted the expression of human need. Drawing upon German legal historians, he concluded that the modern form of private property and the exchange economy based upon it was only one in a historical succession of different property forms. Capitalist private property had produced the unparalleled productivity gains of the 19the century industrial revolution. But this prospect of the end of scarcity also suggested that capitalism had completed its historical task.

After the failed 1848 revolution Marx searched in vain for a non-market model capable of rivalling the dynamism of capitalism.          

He had originally distinguished human beings from animals by their capacity to create new needs. This innovatory potential was to be a feature of the rational mode of production that would replace regulation by the market. But without the market, he found no way to replicate the innovatory energy of capitalism. Only the freedom and dynamism, of market-based capitalism had a built-in interest in the expansion of new needs. In effect, he had only constructed a regulated non-capitalist society, not the post-capitalist society of which he dreamed.

Eagleton and other anti-capitalists searching for an answer from Marx might therefore ask whether he ever succeeded in constructing a coherent theory in the first place. The practical failure of 20th-century communism was preceded by Marx's theoretical failure to create a viable conception of modern communism. The 20th century showed that in periods of war and political upheaval, it was certainly possible to create non-capitalist societies, though usually with authoritarian consequences. But the notion of a post-capitalist society was a hollow promise. 

What has stultified the thinking of the left has been its continued belief that capitalism is to be wholly accepted or rejected as a single system. It retains a lingering conviction that capitalism is all of one piece and can be rejected in the name of a non-existent communist system destined some time to form the basis of an alternative world order.

But if there is no post-capitalist society in the name of which we can despise all attempts to reform the existing political and economic system, we should embrace the only alternative. That is the progressive relationship between pressure from without and reforming activity within the political system. For it was this interaction between protesters and reformers that transformed the lives of those working in advanced capitalist societies. Inside and outside parliament, the forces of progressive social reform improved working conditions, secured education and achieved decent pay levels. Cynicism or silence about the possibility of reform merely reinforces the rightwing fantasy of a global capitalism without politics: a world made ever safer for Enron and Berlusconi.

Gareth Stedman Jones is professor of political science at Cambridge University. He has written the introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition of the Communist Manifesto gsj @ kings. cam.ac. uk

It just looks like Marx may have got it right, says our esteemed professor only to follow through with a stream of deliberately sustained ignorance, shallow philistinism and pure lies, to somehow suggest that after 1848 he realised that he had "actually got it wrong".  But since when did Marx ever "search for a non-market model"? This very notion is a piece of shallow reformist bollocks imposed on Marx by this twister of a professor who clearly has either not read or certainly not understood a word of the Communist Manifesto let alone anything else that Marx and Engels wrote.  

Marx would never for a moment have accepted that capitalism "refers to a question of degree rather than kind". The whole of Capital, a detailed labour of 25 years was to demonstrate the fundamental dictatorship of capital,  whatever political form its bourgeois superstructure took, and to demonstrate the inevitable relentless law governed processes by which the system would reach crisis and collapse, to be solved ONLY by the revolutionary overturn of the private ownership of the means of production.
The pathetic mingling of Marx's titanic understanding with the appalling fake-'left' shallowness of anti-revolutionary reformism and left-Labourism is to grotesque even to contemplate. Marx may have watched with interest "anti-globalisation" movement, but would have made its anarchist weaknesses and posturing fake-'left' theoretical shortcomings profoundly clear (as he did with the anarchist Bakunin).

Marx's understanding was to profoundly uncover the reality of capitalism and demonstrate that mankind HAD to overturn it if society is to develop forwards, not some ivory tower search to "replicate the innovatory energy of capitalism" (which currently mainly innovates new and more barbaric ways of killing torturing and oppressing people.  

The society which did start searching for a "non-market model" the living REVOLUTIONARY society of Soviet Russia under Lenin (and afterwards) proved that far from it being short of "the freedom and dynamism of capitalism" it was to far outstrip it, despite endless subversion, invasion and repeated destruction of its achievements. 

From a standing start as a totally backward feudal society in 1920 which had had the best of its forces wiped out by seven years of devastating war and siege, the Soviet Union built a hugely educated,  cultured, inventive society and a massive industrial base which by 1945 (just 25 years,  including five at war, compared to 400 years or more of Western European development) could completely destroy the forces of the most advanced and aggressive imperialist economy in Europe (Nazi Germany - six times more powerful). 

And IN SPITE OF the stultifying retreat of Stalinist and later Revisionism from a continuing grasp of Marx and Lenin's revolutionary perspectives, the post-war Soviet Union filed more patents annually than any other country, caught up with and outstripped the West's space, aircraft and other technologies from a base where one third of the country had been completely flattened. The economy steadily developed right up until 1989.

Only the relentless imperialist pressure on the country (nuclear encirclement, brutal anti-liberation wars planet wide, etc) and the mistakes and retreats it led to in a leadership which proved less strong than the needs of history demanded, led to the downfall of the Soviet Union. Its philosophical incapacities culminated in the religious individualist inanities of Gorbachev and the letting slip of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the essence of the struggle to build socialism in a world still dominated by imperialism and its insidious all-permeating anti-communism. (See EPSR Perspectives 2001 and 2002).

China, Cuba and others like Korea and Vietnam also continue to demonstrate the capacities of the dictatorship of the working class despite equally hamstringing Revisionist philosophical leadership. One BBC radio reporter this week speculated grudgingly that China's announced ambition to be the world's most advanced scientific nation within 25 years "just might be realisable".  Some "lack of innovatory capacity".
And without the burden of poverty, lack of sanitation, hunger and malnutrition, illiteracy, limited or non-existent education and the general destruction of the spirit imposed by capitalist exploitation, the greater part of mankind, another 3 or 4 billion people, could be brought into the great struggle for human understanding,  science and rationality.
What a stunning qualitative leap forwards in human innovation would be achieved, especially when it is guaranteed that many of those disadvantaged billions could outstrip our Cambridge professor in grasp, common sense and revolutionary class spirit right now without even trying.

Build Leninism. Don Hoskins. EPSR London

Letter 
From a reader in Indonesia

I was really pleased to come across your web-site last month...  it was like a breathe of fresh air.
I have been keeping up with developments in Britain via the internet. It has been depressing to read the responses of the so-called "socialist" organizations to the momentous world event that have been taking place. The condemnation of the attacks on the USA, the Palestinian intifada, Zimbabwe land reform, etc.  by these "revolutionaries" have been appalling. Following the 11/9 attacks, Indonesian TV showed pictures of demonstrators carrying large models of the WTC, with plastic model aeroplanes sticking out of its side, over their shoulders. Osama bin Laden t-shirts (with or without pictures of the burning buildings in the background) can be seen sold in market places and worn by young men almost daily. Islamic leaflets distributed after Friday prayers continually expose the imperialists world designs. Are we supposed to condemn these expressions of anti-imperialism? You are right in saying that it's the socialist movement's weaknesses that stand condemned and not the brave anti-imperialist fighters whose example can only raise the spirits of the entire Third World.

For the benefit of the CPGB who asserted during a discussion on ancient societies and revolution,  at their "summer university",  that nothing positive had ever been done by the Roman Empire which was "totally reactionary" and purely the negative enslavement of men and women by force,  during the entire perhaps 700 lifespan of its history. 

One philistine, Duhring, meets his modern day equivalents. 

From Frederick Engels 
Anti-Duhring 
[1894]

Chapter Two - Part Two 
The Theory of Force     (Beginning section)

"In my system, the relation between general politics and the forms of economic law is determined in so definite a way and at the same time a way so original that it would not be superfluous, in order to facilitate study, to make special reference to this point. The formation of political relationships is historically the fundamental thing, and instances of economic dependence are only effects or special cases, and are consequently always facts of a second order. Some of the newer socialist systems take as their guiding principle the conspicuous semblance of a completely reverse relationship, in that they assume that political phenomena are subordinate to and, as it were, grow out of the economic conditions. It is true that these effects of the second order do exist as such, and are most clearly perceptible at the present time; but the primary must be sought in direct political force and not in any indirect economic power" {D. Ph. 538}. 
This conception is also expressed in another passage, in which Herr Dühring 
"starts from the principle that the political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation and that the reverse relationship represents only a reaction of a second order ... so long as the political grouping is not taken for its own sake, as the starting-point, but is treated merely as a stomach-filling agency, one must have a portion of reaction stowed away in one's mind, however radical a socialist and revolutionary one may seem to be" {D. K. G. 230-31}. 

That is Herr Dühring's theory. In this and in many other passages it is simply set up, decreed, so to speak. Nowhere in the three fat tomes is there even the slightest attempt to prove it or to disprove the opposite point of view. And even if the arguments for it were as plentiful as blackberries, Herr Dühring would give us none of them. For the whole affair has been already proved through the famous original sin, when Robinson Crusoe made Friday his slave. That was an act of force, hence a political act. 

And inasmuch as this enslavement was the starting-point and the basic fact underlying all past history and inoculated it with the original sin of injustice, so much so that in the later periods it was only softened down and "transformed into the more indirect forms of economic dependence" {D. C. 19}; and inasmuch as "property founded on force" {D. Ph. 242}, which has asserted itself right up to the present day, is likewise based on this original act of enslavement, it is clear that all economic phenomena must be explained by political causes, that is, by force. And anyone who is not satisfied with that is a reactionary in disguise. 

We must first point out that only one with as much self-esteem as Herr Dühring could regard this view as so very "original", which it is not in the least. The idea that political acts, grand performances of state, are decisive in history is as old as written history itself, and is the main reason why so little material has been preserved for us in regard to the really progressive evolution of the peoples which has taken place quietly, in the background, behind these noisy scenes on the stage. This idea dominated all the conceptions of historians in the past, and the first blow against it was delivered only by the French bourgeois historians of the Restoration period; the only "original" thing about it is that Herr Dühring once again knows nothing of all this. 

Furthermore: even if we assume for a moment that Herr Dühring is right in saying that all past history can be traced back to the enslavement of man by man, we are still very far from having got to the bottom of the matter. For the question then arises: how did Crusoe come to enslave Friday? Just for the fun of it? By no means. On the contrary, we see that Friday "is compelled to render economic service as a slave or as a mere tool and is maintained also only as a tool" {D. C. 9}. Crusoe enslaved Friday only in order that Friday should work for Crusoe's benefit. And how can he derive any benefit for himself from Friday's labour? Only through Friday producing by his labour more of the necessaries of life than Crusoe has to give him to keep him fit to work. Crusoe, therefore, in violation of Herr Dühring's express orders, "takes the political grouping" arising out of Friday's enslavement "not for its own sake, as the starting-point, but merely as a stomach-filling agency"; and now let him see to it that he gets along with his lord and master, Dühring .

The childish example specially selected by Herr Dühring in order to prove that force is "historically the fundamental thing", therefore, proves that force is only the means, and that the aim, on the contrary, is economic advantage. And "the more fundamental" the aim is than the means used to secure it, the more fundamental in history is the economic side of the relationship than the political side. The example therefore proves precisely the opposite of what it was supposed to prove. And as in the case of Crusoe and Friday, so in all cases of domination and subjection up to the present day. Subjugation has always been - to use Herr Dühring's elegant expression - a "stomach-filling agency" (taking stomach-filling in a very wide sense), but never and nowhere a political grouping established "for its own sake". It takes a Herr Dühring to be able to imagine that state taxes are only "effects of a second order", or that the present-day political grouping of the ruling bourgeoisie and the ruled proletariat has come into existence "for its own sake", and not as a "stomach-filling agency" for the ruling bourgeois, that is to say, for the sake of making profits and accumulating capital. 

However, let us get back again to our two men. Crusoe, "sword in hand" {D. C. 23}, makes Friday his slave. But in order to manage this, Crusoe needs something else besides his sword. Not everyone can make use of a slave. In order to be able to make use of a slave, one must possess two kinds of things: first, the instruments and material for his slave's labour; and secondly, the means of bare subsistence for him. Therefore, before slavery becomes possible, a certain level of production must already have been reached and a certain inequality of distribution must already have appeared. And for slave-labour to become the dominant mode of production in the whole of a society, an even far higher increase in production, trade and accumulation of wealth was essential. In the ancient primitive communities with common ownership of the land, slavery either did not exist at all or played only a very subordinate role. It was the same in the originally peasant city of Rome; but when Rome became a "world city" and Italic landownership came more and more into the hands of a numerically small class of enormously rich proprietors, the peasant population was supplanted by a population of slaves. If at the time of the Persian wars the number of slaves in Corinth rose to 460,000 and in Aegina to 470,000 and there were ten slaves to every freeman,something else besides "force" was required, namely, a highly developed arts and handicraft industry and an extensive commerce. Slavery in the United States of America was based far less on force than on the English cotton industry; in those districts where no cotton was grown or which, unlike the border states, did not breed slaves for the cotton-growing states, it died out of itself without any force being used, simply because it did not pay. 

Hence, by calling property as it exists today property founded on force, and by characterising it as 
"that form of domination at the root of which lies not merely the exclusion of fellow-men from the use of the natural means of subsistence, but also, what is far more important, the subjugation of man to make him do servile work" {5}, 
Herr Dühring is making the whole relationship stand on its head. The subjugation of a man to make him do servile work, in all its forms, presupposes that the subjugator has at his disposal the instruments of labour with the help of which alone he is able to employ the person placed in bondage, and in the case of slavery, in addition, the means of subsistence which enable him to keep his slave alive. In all cases, therefore, it presupposes the possession of a certain amount of property, in excess of the average. How did this property come into existence? In any case it is clear that it may in fact have been robbed, and therefore may be based on force, but that this is by no means necessary. It may have been got by labour, it may have been stolen, or it may have been obtained by trade or by fraud. In fact, it must have been obtained by labour before there was any possibility of its being robbed. 

Private property by no means makes its appearance in history as the result of robbery or force. On the contrary. It already existed, though limited to certain objects, in the ancient primitive communities of all civilised peoples. It developed into the form of commodities within these communities, at first through barter with foreigners. The more the products of the community assumed the commodity form, that is, the less they were produced for their producers' own use and the more for the purpose of exchange, and the more the original spontaneously evolved division of labour was superseded by exchange also within the community, the more did inequality develop in the property owned by the individual members of the community, the more deeply was the ancient common ownership of the land undermined, and the more rapidly did the commune develop towards its dissolution and transformation into a village of smallholding peasants. For thousands of years Oriental despotism and the changing rule of conquering nomad peoples were unable to injure these old communities; the gradual destruction of their primitive home industry by the competition of products of large-scale industry brought these communities nearer and nearer to dissolution. Force was as little involved in this process as in the dividing up, still taking place now, of the land held in common by the village communities [Gegoferschaften] on the Mosel and in the Hochwald; the peasants simply find it to their advantage that the private ownership of land should take the place of common ownership. Even the formation of a primitive aristocracy, as in the case of the Celts, the Germans and the Indian Punjab, took place on the basis of common ownership of the land, and at first was not based in any way on force, but on voluntariness and custom. Wherever private property evolved it was the result of altered relations of production and exchange, in the interest of increased production and in furtherance of intercourse - hence as a result of economic causes. Force plays no part in this at all. Indeed, it is clear that the institution of private property must already be in existence for a robber to be able to appropriate another person's property, and that therefore force may be able to change the possession of, but cannot create, private property as such. 

Nor can we use either force or property founded on force in explanation of the "subjugation of man to make him do servile work" in its most modern form - wage-labour. We have already mentioned the role played in the dissolution of the ancient communities, that is, in the direct or indirect general spread of private property, by the transformation of the products of labour into commodities, their production not for consumption by those who produced them, but for exchange. Now in Capital, Marx proved with absolute clarity - and Herr Dühring carefully avoids even the slightest reference to this - that at a certain stage of development, the production of commodities becomes transformed into capitalist production, and that at this stage "the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself but a portion of the product of others' labour appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, but replaced together with an added surplus... At first property seemed to us to be based on a man's own labour... Now, however" (at the end of Marx's analysis) "property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the labourer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity." In other words, even if we exclude all possibility of robbery, force and fraud, even if we assume that all private property was originally based on the owner's own labour, and that throughout the whole subsequent process there was only exchange of equal values for equal values, the progressive development of production and exchange nevertheless brings us of necessity to the present capitalist mode of production, to the monopolisation of the means of production and the means of subsistence in the hands of the one, numerically small, class, to the degradation into propertyless proletarians of the other class, constituting the immense majority, to the periodic alternation of speculative production booms and commercial crises and to the whole of the present anarchy of production. The whole process can be explained by purely economic causes; at no point whatever are robbery, force, the state or political interference of any kind necessary. "Property founded on force" {D. C. 4} proves here also to be nothing but the phrase of a braggart intended to cover up his lack of understanding of the real course of things. 

This course of things, expressed historically, is the history of the development of the bourgeoisie. If "political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation" {D. K. G. 230-31}, then the modern bourgeoisie cannot have developed in struggle with feudalism, but must be the latter's voluntarily begotten pet child. Everyone knows that what took place was the opposite. Originally an oppressed estate liable to pay dues to the ruling feudal nobility, recruited from all manner of serfs and villains, the burghers conquered one position after another in their continuous struggle with the nobility, and finally, in the most highly developed countries, took power in its stead; in France, by directly overthrowing the nobility; in England, by making it more and more bourgeois and incorporating it as their own ornamental head. And how did they accomplish this? Simply through a change in the "economic situation", which sooner or later, voluntarily or as the outcome of combat, was followed by a change in the political conditions. The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility is the struggle of town against country, industry against landed property, money economy against natural economy; and the decisive weapon of the bourgeoisie in this struggle was its means of economic power, constantly increasing through the development of industry, first handicraft, and then, at a later stage, progressing to manufacture, and through the expansion of commerce. During the whole of this struggle political force was on the side of the nobility, except for a period when the Crown played the bourgeoisie against the nobility, in order to keep one estate in check by means of the other; but from the moment when the bourgeoisie, still politically powerless, began to grow dangerous owing to its increasing economic power, the Crown resumed its alliance with the nobility, and by so doing called forth the bourgeois revolution, first in England and then in France. The "political conditions" in France had remained unaltered, while the "economic situation" had outgrown them. Judged by his political status the nobleman was everything, the burgher nothing; but judged by his social position the burgher now formed the most important class in the state, while the nobleman had been shorn of all his social functions and was now only drawing payment, in the revenues that came to him, for these functions which had disappeared. Nor was that all. Bourgeois production in its entirety was still hemmed in by the feudal political forms of the Middle Ages, which this production - not only manufacture, but even handicraft industry - had long outgrown; it had remained hemmed in by all the thousandfold guild privileges and local and provincial customs barriers which had become mere irritants and fetters on production. The bourgeois revolution put an end to this. Not, however, by adjusting the economic situation to suit the political conditions, in accordance with Herr Dühring's precept - this was precisely what the nobles and the Crown had been vainly trying to do for years - but by doing the opposite, by casting aside the old mouldering political rubbish and creating political conditions in which the new "economic situation" could exist and develop. And in this political and legal atmosphere which was suited to its needs it developed brilliantly, so brilliantly that the bourgeoisie has already come close to occupying the position held by the nobility in 1789: it is becoming more and more not only socially superfluous, but a social hindrance; it is more and more becoming separated from productive activity, and, like the nobility in the past, becoming more and more a class merely drawing revenues; and it has accomplished this revolution in its own position and the creation of a new class, the proletariat, without any hocus-pocus of force whatever, in a purely economic way. 

Even more: it did not in any way will this result of its own actions and activities - on the contrary, this result established itself with irresistible force, against the will and contrary to the intentions of the bourgeoisie; its own productive forces have grown beyond its control, and, as if necessitated by a law of nature, are driving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution. And if the bourgeois now make their appeal to force in order to save the collapsing "economic situation" from the final crash, this only shows that they are labouring under the same delusion as Herr Dühring: the delusion that "political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation"; this only shows that they imagine, just as Herr Dühring does, that by making use of "the primary", "the direct political force", they can remodel those "facts of the second order" {D. Ph. 538}, the economic situation and its inevitable development; and that therefore the economic consequences of the steam-engine and the modern machinery driven by it, of world trade and the banking and credit developments of the present day, can be blown out of existence by them with Krupp guns and Mauser rifles.