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
I.L.W.P. BULLETIN
Weekly newspaper of the International Leninist Workers Party (P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL)((GPO Regd.)   
No 479 Wednesday January 25,1989                                                                                                              10p 

Opportunist Mendis a cruel hoax on real communists and real refugee problems

This bogus 'communist' from the RCG middle-class swamp was never a fugitive from reactionary forces in Sri Lanka. He never spent a day of his life fighting either in Sri Lanka or even in Britain, for a truly revolutionary communist solution to the wretched crisis of the capitalist system on that island.

Along with many of the other idiot divisive policies of the RCG splitters, Mendis postured ineffectively on behalf of the Tamil Tiger separatists, whose bourgeois nationalist illusions have helped pile up the disasters for all of the people on Sri Lanka.

Only a Leninist revolutionary movement uniting all the proletariat of Sri Lanka against all of its rotten bourgeois-nationalist factions including the Government parties, the JVP, and the Tigers, etc, offers any worthwhile future for the island. 

Such genuine communists would indeed be a target of bourgeois reaction, - Sinhalese, Tamil, Indian, and Muslim alike, - and would be on any government 'wanted' list. Mendis doesn't remotely qualify.

If his argument is that he was a 'refugee' from the violence on the island in general, then he cannot have it both ways and also claim that he would have been in danger as a 'marked communist'. Read Lenin to see how the Bolsheviks rose animatedly to the occasion when capitalist crisis moved towards its point of civil war breakdown, which 'at last' would give the Bolsheviks opportunity for 'real revolutionary struggle', - leading the masses shaken out of themselves, and their past lethargy and backwardness and conservatism, by the enormous pressure of events.

Civil war rages in Sri Lanka now, creating potentially colossal chances for a Bolshevik revolutionary mass movement to sweep away the rotten capitalist system once and for all under the dictatorship of the proletariat; - and where does the bogus 'Sri Lankan communist' Mendis want to be? In sodding Manchester, either peddling a dreary little reformist guilt-sheet for the middle class once a month, - 'Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism', - or else hanging around in church.

And Mendis is not even a genuine refugee from violence in general. There are tens of thousands of poor villagers from the disputed areas who are genuine refugees, losing everything, - some possibly hoping for some asylum abroad. But any places that might be available (from the rotten British bourgeois racist immigration limits) have had a prior claim on them by the posturing fraud Mendis who left Sri Lanka 16 years ago to seek his opportunities in the West, not a refugee from anything.

Claims of 'particular dangers from the JVP' won't wash either. Virtually all 10 million Sri Lankans might make the same claim too. The JVP had never heard of Mendis, and he was on no hit list. The problem of JVP sectarianism is a problem affecting all Sri Lankans, and it requires for its solution real communist leaders on the spot in Sri Lanka, to lead the mass revolutionary alternative to this petty-bourgeois nationalist narrowness.

But the precise problem with RCG politics (apart from its appalling opportunism) is its petty-bourgeois narrowness. They have a criminal record of backing every sectarian splitting that's going. They cheer for the Tamil Tiger bourgeois separatists in Sri Lanka. Even worse, they have supported the bourgeois-nationalist Eritrean stooges of the CIA (and reactionary Saudi-Muslim finance) trying to dismember revolutionary socialist Ethiopia to set a new imperialist pattern for the enforced balkanisation of every major African socialist state.

Before the epic year-long miners strike began in 1984, the RCG said it would never happen because the mining communities were too venal to fight. Then once the huge class battle was joined, they united with the rest of the petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' swamp to tail-end Scargillism instead of demanding a sharp break by the strike leadership from NUM-Labour 'restore the investment boom' barmy perspectives.

The RCG's most notorious opportunist sectarianism has been in support of the renegades from the Leninist proletarian-dictatorship perspectives of the ANC/ SACP revolutionary struggle in South Africa, - the Kitsons and Mayekiso. These RCGer middle-class centrists could never be happy backing a powerful communist authority like the ANC/SACP leadership (to be supported unconditionally, if critically, regardless of the mistakes and weaknesses in its work).

But the best test case for these RCG parasites was their abysmal cowardice in refusing for many months in 1980-81 to take up any position at all on the monstrous counter-revolutionary fraud of Solidarnosc launched by the CIA, the Vatican, and every rotten bourgeois-fascist Polish gang past and present, inside and outside Poland. Eventually when the RCG did acknowledge that the ILWP had been correct to expose this bogus 'trade-union' counter-revolution from the start, these incorrigible fence-sitting academics totally failed to address the most crucially important matter of all, - to declare unconditional solidarity with the government of the Polish workers state (however critically, regardless of its mistakes) - in the face of the potential Western counter-revolutionary blitzkrieg (which the CIA and the Pentagon had planned if Walesa & Co had got their intended putsch off the ground (see the Radomgate tapes, ILWP Books vol 3).)

Not one word could the petty-bourgeois RCG bear to utter in support of proletarian dictatorship in the Polish workers state.

But what speaks even more eloquently about the relentlessly middle-class anti-communist limitations of the RCG, and the entire rest of the 'left' swamp to which they belong, is their living identification with endless protest politics, - pure reformism.

What a huge investment in sheer futility has been their demented campaigning on behalf of their stooge member Viraj Mendis. What a total demonstration of completely bankrupt and pointless frustration. What a calculated exercise in the miseries of inevitable defeatism, - the hallmark of the middle class.

To the last gasp, the hysterical RCG groupies were screaming, - as if on behalf of the entire working class and labour movement, - "Viraj will stay; we dare not lose this, or it will be the end for the anti-imperialist struggle; the miners were beaten, the Murdoch printers were beaten, the anti-rate-cap rebels were beaten (etc, etc, listing every lost-cause reformist hopelessness in recent years); - if Thatcher wins this too, it will be curtains", etc.

This is defeatist garbage from born losers who have not the faintest inkling of what revolutionary class struggle even means, let alone how to fight it.

These academically-led posturers actually believe in protests as a consciously-organised end (as opposed to Lenin's understanding of protests as the spontaneous means to an end, - the raising of revolutionary consciousness among the revolutionary vanguard and the mass movement).

Platforms organised around the Mendis case never were used by the RCG to stir revolutionary agitation against the capitalist system in general, (-currently, for example, highlighting such issues as the inevitable drift to inter-imperialist war by the Western monopoly-capitalist powers following the incipient trade-war; the growing inter-imperialist armaments rivalry (chemical war plants for Iraq and Libya from Germany; rockets and plane spares for the Ayatollah from the Contragate conspiracy; nuclear know-how for the Zionists, Apartheid, Pakistan, etc; illegal gun-running to every dirty fascist enterprise on earth, from the Renamo butchers in Mozambique to the nazis in Chile, from the death-squads in El Salvador to the fascist vigilantes ruling the Philippines, from the Zionist state-terrorist tyranny over Palestine and the Lebanon to the British military butchers over the Occupied Zone in Ireland, from the mojahedin killers wrecking Afghanistan to the Unita thugs disrupting Angola; etc, etc); the criminal subversion of the entire socialist camp by the 'free world' promotion of dissidents and the endless Goebbels Cold War propaganda stunts; the appalling usury of the 'democratic' free-enterprise market system exploiting the starving Third World; the most criminally-evil role of all played in all this by the crap 'free world' notions of 'pluralism', 'parliamentarism', 'democracy', 'press freedom', and all the rest of the capitalist-dictatorship nonsense, most typically upheld by the Labour Party; etc; etc; etc; etc; etc).

Not one word about these and other matters of basic revolutionary education has been heard on the RCG's Mendis protest platforms. 

But without such exposures of 'parliamentary democracy', all such protest movements are pointless.

Only these issues can eventually organise an international revolutionary socialist consciousness (in unity with every real Bolshevik struggle against imperialism (the 'free world') everywhere) which will build an organised Leninist leadership to guide the masses to power in Britain (once the deepening slump turns into all-out crash and then unrelievable poverty-depression leading to fascist civil war). And only then will the racist immigration discrimination of the British bourgeois-capitalist state finally become a thing of the past.

But not one word of all this has the Mendis campaign ever uttered. This frenzied protesting has gone on not as the basis for revolutionary agitation, but in order to make a frenzied protest! This monstrous diversion and confidence trick on the British workers has actually had the aim of winning a passport for this one RCG 'communist refugee' posturer. And worst of all, these reformist idiots clearly believe that by protesting hard enough, the British capitalist state can be pushed back.

What an outrageously misleading nonsense for so-called 'communists' to so elaborately and persistently set up for the 'enlightenment' of the British proletariat.

For the logic is obvious. Push imperialism back over a passport for Viraj Mendis the 'illegal overstayer', - and immediately it would be opportune to push the state back over the next issue, - and then the next, and the next, - and so on. And what does this all add up to? Undoubtedly that reformism works, and that there is no need whatever for all this 'disturbing talk' about the dictatorship of the proletariat being the only way forward for mankind.

But in reality, of course the 'logic' of the capitalist 'democratic' system is exactly the opposite of the idealist delusions of the RCG ("if we protest hard enough, we can make it happen").

The essence of history is entirely different. The conflict of class interests must always eventually come into total contradiction. The essential point about the fraud of bourgeois 'democracy' and 'protest politics' is that ultimately the deepest interests of the monopoly-imperialist state cannot give way to the rights or demands of anyone or anything which seriously threatens capitalist class domination. And it is when the brick wall of diametrically opposite interests is run into that revolutionary crisis will begin to grow.

The RCG and the rest of the 'left protest' swamp never make this revolutionary perspective the essence of their protest campaigns because all of their deepest philosophical assumptions about life are that in time, it is they who will be recognised as the 'true champions of the people' in a solely representative (heirs to the whole illusory traditions of generations of Labour 'lefts', of 'Militant', of the various would-be Labour-affiliating Communist parties, etc) fashion. These shallow activists really believe that they will "show Kinnock and Co how really to fight on behalf of the working people", and also "what real issues to fight on which will really undermine racist imperialism", etc.

Hence they are quite happy to organise 'super-protest-politics' at which bishops, Labour MPs, and every other kind of bourgeois-opportunist reptile can happily attend. Such pillars of middle-class compromise are never going to be embarrassed by RCG platform speech denouncing their role in crucially propping up the entire 'parliamentary democracy' fraud. Such bruising confrontations (which would mean an end to such easygoing 'democratic' bourgeois-establishment sponsorship of RCG (and similar) protest causes) would never occur to the RCG because their thoughts are all on 'winning the protest campaign', and never on stirring deep revolutionary hatred for everything to do with bourgeois society, - the Marxist-Leninist attitude to spontaneous reformist protest leadership.

Nor is this sycophantic tail-ending of 'leading left figures' and 'personalities', etc, at all limited to such 'emergency protests' as the Mendis affair etc, as the RCG would like to pretend.

They wag their tails like the dogs they are when anyone 'famous' gets onto one of their platforms at any time, - trying strongarm tactics on the ILWP on one notorious occasion to try shutting up Leninist criticism of the RCG's 'star' guest - the monstrous fake-'left' opportunist Ken Livingstone. 

Parasitically, this 'left' protest sect just exploits notions of 'the proletariat' and 'communist revolution' just in order to keep their own little stunts going.

They don't give a damn what utter confusion they create for any workers fooled into following their campaigns by such despair (an unmistakable sign of deep-down petty-bourgeois political philosophy) as "we must win this Mendis campaign or Thatcher will walk all over everybody" etc.

This incorrigible defeatism is the hallmark of the middle-class, fearful of disaster before the battle has even begun. It is the essence of reformism to be beaten before you start. All ideological reformists are born opportunists, and born losers. Social democracy is the essential outlook of the petty bourgeoisie, - full of fear only, - in one direction fearful of the more naked dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie, and in the other direction of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The middle-class swamp like the RCG never pay more than an occasional half-hearted formal acknowledgment towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, - and certainly would never devote the slightest part of any of their campaigns to serious agitation on behalf of the Leninist science of proletarian dictatorship, - because the middle-class are basically horrified at the idea of a proletarian-dictatorship workers state.

It is a disgusting rationalisation by the RCG and the entire 'left' swamp when they claim they don't like the East European or socialist camp states in general "because of the way they've turned out". They hate the rough justice of proletarian dictatorship far more in principle than their anti-communist whingeing could ever do in practice.

Some of the swamp have occasionally pretended solidarity with newly revolutionary states when communist victories have occasionally won worldwide acclaim for so obviously serving the cause of popular justice (Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Namibia, Nicaragua, etc).

But such solidarity is never unconditional, - which is the only Leninist proletarian solidarity, and the only kind of solidarity which can make any real contribution to revolutionary internationalism.

The very first counter-revolutionary stunt that the vast wealth of the Western intelligence agencies and military subversion budgets, (plus the entire might and propaganda wealth of the Catholic Church, etc,) unleashes against a newly revolutionary country, - and these parts of the left swamp who have shown a bit of opportunistic solidarity are quickly put to rout.

The fashionable 'victory to the Viet Cong' posturing quickly disappeared when the heroic role of the Vietnamese proletarian dictatorship's workers state was under way against the 'boat people' renegades, or against the Kampuchean anarchist fanatics around Pol Pot etc. Of all the swamp, the RCG has always been particularly lukewarm towards the workers states.

Socialist Cuba long ago generously (and very foolishly) offered Mendis a home. Naturally the anti-communist posturer didn't want to know about building real socialism under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It is the rank opportunism of the RCG Mendis campaign which so alienates honest and intelligent workers, and so damages the genuine cause of real refugee victims of international imperialist oppression and dislocation. If Mendis is supposed to be a real international fighter for communism, most serious workers would ask: 'Then why choose Britain? Why not go and fight murdering-fascist reaction in Soweto, or El Salvador, or the Philippines, or in Nicaragua against the Contras where a big international contingent is helping', - if being a passport-less 'illegal' is the problem, because of facing 'certain death' in Sri Lanka?

And when British imperialism's racist immigration authorities finally caught up with Mendis, where did he want to be sent? To Denmark!!!! What a fraud. No wonder the Sri Lankan press are jeering at this posturer offering 'photo-calls' at his Colombo seafront hotel, - depicting him in cartoons as a self-deluding charlatan whose only real interest is in enjoying the relative affluence of life in Britain.

Even the bourgeois press in Britain is able to comfortably outflank Mendis and the RCG from the left by parading their 'concern' for real refugees:

"Indeed, many of those who work closely with refugees and immigrants fear that the campaign on behalf of Viraj Mendis may rebound on people who probably have a far better case than he did to be admitted to Britain.

Take the case of Markandu, a 30-year old Tamil from Jaffna, recently arrived in Britain. His three-year-old daughter was shot dead while she was playing on the porch of the family home.

Days later, his house was destroyed by heavy shelling. Markandu was arrested and tortured. Finally he managed to escape to Britain, via Bangladesh, with the help of false papers. When he arrived at Heathrow, he still bore the scars of cigarette burns on his hands and feet, sustained while under interrogation. He was questioned by an immigration officer who apparently wanted to know only how he had obtained his forged entry visa. Markandu had no opportunity to explain why he had fled.

Three days later, the Home Office decided, on the basis of that interview alone, that his application for asylum was 'manifestly unfounded' and ruled that he must be sent back to Bangladesh.

Or there's the case, first revealed by The Observer last year, of a Kurdish family with two young children, who arrived at Heathrow from Iraq, via Damascus and Belgrade.

On requesting political asylum, the father, Mr Sherwan Rashid, was immediately separated from his family and led to understand by an immigration officer that he was to be put back on the plane. He became distressed and the official is alleged to have head-butted him on the bridge of his nose.

Later that night, Mr Rashid was again interviewed by an immigration officer. He was not told that this was to be the only interview he would be granted about his family's asylum application.

His wife was interviewed separately and the couple were strip-searched. The family were taken to Harmondsworth detention centre where they stayed for 10 days, after which they were returned to Heathrow.

Mr Rashid was body-searched and handcuffed. His wife was handcuffed with her hands behind her back and straps were tied around her ankles. The bruises from the straps were still visible more than a month later.

Because the family had stopped off in Yugoslavia on their way to Britain, the intention was to return them there. But when they arrived in Belgrade, the Yugoslav authorities refused to accept them and the family returned to Britain.

Following representations by lawyers acting for British human rights groups, the family were finally granted temporary leave to remain here. Their future is still uncertain.

When Amnesty International took up their case with the Home Office, the allegations of mistreatment were denied. Amnesty was told that the body searches were a regrettable necessity because experience has shown that passengers have injured themselves and others by the use of concealed items.

THE greatest fear of people who have escaped persecution and torture to seek asylum in Britain is that the Home Office will not believe their story and they will be returned to their country of origin. This fear, understandably, has increased dramatically as a result of the storming of Viraj Mendis's church sanctuary.

Mrs Helen Bamber, director of the London-based Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which is helping hundreds of would-be refugees, said: 'We have had several cases where people have attempted suicide, some very recently.

'I believe they are genuine attempts by people who are unable to face the prospect of further torture and possible execution if returned by this country.' 

The mountebank Mendis has also damaged the cause of workers in Britain. There is nothing worse for the fight for revolutionary consciousness than this pointless RCG passport campaign, doomed from the start to failure. The minority of workers who might have followed the campaign (those who had not immediately seen it as a futile diversion, or who had not been actually antagonised by the RCG's opportunism on this 'members passport issue' compared to their silence or incorrectness on many far more important political matters facing the working class), - can only have had their most pessimistic mood confirmed ("what can you do? what can anyone do?", etc) by this spectacular wipe-out.

And the slanderous charges of "racism" which this sect of hysterical activists bandy about against any who oppose their anti-theory splitting opportunism over Sri Lanka, South Africa, Ethiopia, etc, can of course only damage the fight against fascism.

Racist-chauvinist divisiveness can only be deliberately spread by the 'free world' capitalist states as the imperialist system's crisis inexorably deepens. The dictatorship of the proletariat alone will end the capitalist crisis, and therefore alone can create the conditions for international planned socialist reconstruction in the course of which, over generations, racism (an offspring of bitter class and national antagonism) will be educated away.

It is the pure anti-Leninist philistinism of the RCG's contempt for theory which leads them to chirp 'racist' at any opposition to their reformist stunts, - oblivious to what arguments might be being put up for more far-sighted revolutionary perspectives.

It is on this shallow basis that the RCG can work so harmoniously with religious reactionaries and 'democrats' of all kinds, - turning their Mendis demonstrations into scenes of despair reminiscent of Solidarnosc 'witnessing' around the Black Madonna shrine at Czestokjova.

And this same anti-theory philistinism of the RCG, - deliberately mis-educating their campaign movements away from revolutionary political consciousness, - also plays into the hands of the Tory Government, which can simultaneously announce letting 2,000 new Vietnamese boatpeople in as Mendis is kicked out, and claim 'Not racist, you see'. 

Only Leninists could convincingly explain that the boatpeople are in because they are anti-communist bastards; - but the anti-communist RCG could hardly so argue and be thought consistent with the many stunts against the dictatorship of the proletariat (real, or in embryo as in South Africa) they have promoted or failed to denounce. They may not have backed the boatpeople derelicts themselves, but they have certainly never consistently backed the workers states of proletarian dictatorship, and certainly do not regard counter-revolutionary imperialism's regular campaigns and stunts against the workers states (the central phenomenon of the international class struggle in the postwar era) as any of the RCG's business. 

Naturally, the RCG will still want to have it both ways with their 'left' posturing, kidding themselves privately that they put up a 'great' fight, and really won a 'great moral political victory', while at the same time blaming everyone else in the labour movement, - particularly any Leninist insistence on fighting for real revolutionary understanding and perspectives, - for the fact that Mendis didn't get his British passport after all.

The worst anti-Marxist subjectivism of all is that of the rest of the swamp who felt obliged grudgingly to give support to the RCG 'campaign' on the idiot reasoning that once a publicity issue had been made about a "poor black communist who was being victimised by the fascist immigration controllers", then there was 'no choice' but to express 'solidarity' with Mendis.

On this and on a hundred more swamp solidarity campaigns like it, there is no such obligation. The entire 'left' reformist swamp must be told by revolutionaries "No" to 'urgent' pleas for this or that 'emergency situation' which is 'the real front line' and which if lost will 'give Thatcher complete dictatorial power', etc, etc.

The 'left' swamp propping up reformism never does anything else but fight such single-issue campaigns, completely complementary to the reformist trade-union movement itself; which is why the swamp is truly reformism's 'left' prop, - from Foot to Healy, from Grant to Gill, and from Benn to Bellos.

All the swamp always end up fighting their 'politics' from a position of defending some vested interest or other, - either Labour careerism; - or a trade union, or council, or parliamentary constituency vote-winning cause; or kow-towing to some aggressive reformist sect or other such as black nationalism, nuclear disarmers, gay rights, feminism, animal lib, ecologism, etc; or representing some international sectarian interest or other; or just blowing their own trumpet.

What all the 'left' swamp collapse from doing consistently, - and eventually from doing at all, - is to fight solely for revolutionary theory, - for the objective scientific dictates of the international balance of class forces on its struggle towards the international dictatorship of the proletariat. (See ILWP Books vols 3 to 15 for the detailed practical policy implications of this fight).

But that is the only position from which conscious revolutionary struggle must start. Spontaneous protests come and go endlessly. At some point of spontaneous revolutionary crisis, (which no one can make happen), the time will be ripe for the conscious revolutionary seizure of power. Every second of every day up to that moment must be filled with preparing the revolutionary understanding and leadership for that overthrow, - building the revolutionary movement. Struggling to lead spontaneous protests can and will play an important part in that building. But the revolutionary education and experience is what matters, - not the protest as such.

Protests which make impossible the introduction of revolutionary politics are a complete waste of time. Say 'no' to the swamp and its wretched sectarian campaigns. They are just a diversion to con insecure and uncertain workers and would-be revolutionaries. Build Leninism.

Manchester ILWP group

Moscow's dangerous hit-or-miss tactics

Gorbachev's long periods of silence about daily dramatic developments in crucial current areas of international class struggle such as Palestine, Namibia, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Poland, etc, prove what a total disastrous vacuum is now in charge of the world's most powerful workers state.

The cowardly revisionists in the CPSU make no impact with any criticism they have of non-stop Zionist terror against Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Lebanon, - but they are heard offering to cooperate with Mossad and the CIA against 'Arab terrorists'!!! Their feeble protests against the criminal violations by Pakistan and the Pentagon of the Geneva deal, banning interference in Afghanistan's affairs, - are ignored, - but their blame of Kabul authorities (!) for the counter-revolutionary siege difficulties rings out loud and clear. They join their voices to Western imperialist humbug demanding the restriction of chemical weapons, etc, - but say nothing serious about the continuing imperialist cause of the warmongering arms-race in the first place, (still demonstrating the point every hour in about 20 current theatres of reactionary war, and in such aggression as the brutal attack on Libyan airspace by US nazis even as the 'disarmament' conference was meeting.)

The degenerate defeatism in Moscow may yet avoid total humiliation over its retreat from Leninist internationalism (helping the Afghan socialist revolution fight off world-imperialist counter-revolution), - if the tribal and feudal reaction completely collapses in squabbling once the 'jihad' against 'infidel foreign invaders' no longer works as lies after Feb 15th, and the vast mass of Afghans has to decide if they want the civil war to continue, and what regime they could live under.

But Gorbachev's "like it or lump it" attitude is absurdly backward, and gives the international proletariat an utterly misleading and demoralising pointer to the future that "the Soviet Union is going to keep out of things in the 'new times' ahead, and all problems are going to melt away or be solved amicably".

Every single indicator in this outlook is pure garbage. Not one aspect of the huge undecided problems of the international class war is going to disappear or be settled peacefully. Exactly the opposite. The capitalist system is plunging relentlessly towards inter-imperialist World War III; and its careering arms-race degeneration	is bound to inflict (or try to) ever-widening tentacles of warmongering aggression in all directions.

The USSR and China (and behind them much of the socialist camp) may be strong enough to avoid being directly attacked in WWIII (unlike WWIl); - but active armed communist intervention (of one kind or another) in fact summarises in one sense the whole healthy prospects for mankind's entire future. The incurably hate-making and divisive imperialist system is going to be overthrown by communist revolution, one way or another. There is no other perspective.

The fault with Moscow's clumsy and half-hearted intervention against CIA counter-revolution against Afghan developments was in
not going through with it thoroughly and warning Pakistan, Tehran, and Washington that their border subversion operations would be wiped out by Soviet invasion if they did not cease.

But because Brezhnev had already followed Stalin and Kruschev's revisionist retreat partway down the defeatist road to the illusion of 'permanent' peaceful coexistence (a mere temporary tactic in Lenin's understanding), the intervention halted in no man's land, the job only half-done.

If the fledgling communist regime in Kabul disintegrates under the severe forthcoming tests, Gorbachev may not even be able to wash his hands of Afghanistan for any length of time, - let alone revolutionary-warmongering crises sweeping the rest of the world. 

If a CIA financed and organised counter-revolution is allowed to be successful in Afghanistan, then the only certainty is that the socialist camp will have its hands full resisting yet another new centre of fascist subversion of increased savagery somewhere else soon.

The 'new times' gimmickry applied to the international class struggle is just a criminal delusion by the defeatist Gorbachevites. The historic war to overthrow the imperialist bourgeoisie worldwide can only intensify as capitalism's revolutionary crisis unstoppably deepens. 'Perpetual' harmony is an impossible contradiction among the Western monopolists themselves, let alone between them and the workers states.

Applied domestically, Gorbachev's 'new politics' can be just as misleading. Admitting past stupidities is one thing, but avoiding present and future anti-Leninist ignorance is vastly more important, and this Gorbachev signally fails in every day he survives. Only communist leadership, towards completing the international dictatorship of the proletariat, could possibly reunite all the nationalities of the USSR now. And only communist leadership, - a planned world economic perspective which was actually going somewhere, - could revive labour enthusiasm in the Soviet Union. Gorbachevism' s shallow 'pull your socks up' exhortations are just a joke.

Applied to Poland, the 'new times' class-collaborating illusions are also a huge joke, but it is unlikely that the Warsaw regime has fallen for them in reality. Publicly ordering the Catholic-bourgeois Solidarnosc reactionaries to agree to communist party leadership, to the building of socialism in Poland, and to no longer accept CIA funds from 'free world' so-called 'trade-union' sources, is hardly a defeat for the workers state, - however insincerely Walesa & Co will carry out their part of the 'legalisation' bargain.

Solidarnosc was thrashed by the proletarian dictatorship's martial law, but just as millions of defeated White Guardists in Russia were eventually offered intelligent work in Soviet society by Lenin, so it is better in Poland to offer millions of reactionary Catholics something worthwhile to do. If they cooperate, the Polish workers state benefits. If they don't, the Church exposes its reactionary atavism once again, which will eventually be left behind by mankind's scientific progress. Labour's blasphemy moves against Rushdie will too. Build Leninism. JH

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited from Prensa Latina, Tass, Granma, Soviet News, Soviet Weekly, Barracuda, APN, Czechoslovak Life, etc).

Substance of Revolution

The war in El Salvador has now lasted for more than four years. The US administration has included our country in its geopolitical schemes as a part of a zone “vital" for the United States. Indeed, to impede the victory of the Salvadoran revolution and to crush it has been a "matter of honour" for Ronald Reagan ever since his inauguration as President on January 20, 1981. He repeatedly had to stake his prestige in order to get the Congress to authorise growing military and economic appropriations for the genocidal Salvadoran dictatorship.

When analysing developments in El Salvador, one should not lose sight of the fact that US imperialism has been meddling in the country's affairs not for the purpose of getting hold of its extremely scanty natural resources. Washington has much more serious objectives: it hopes to crush the Salvadoran revolutionary movement and so to demoralise and spread frustration within the liberation forces on the scale of Latin America as a whole (and to some extent throughout the whole Third World), thereby obtaining arguments for fanning imperial chauvinism among the US people themselves. Let us bear in mind that such chauvinism is the underpinning for the political domination of the military-industrial complex and its anti-Soviet and general anti-socialist line of whipping up the arms race.

Material supplies to El Salvador were followed by US military advisers, now already numbering more than 300. They are implementing the Pentagon's strategic and tactical plans in the light of their Vietnam experience. These plans are backed up with recommendations from politicians like Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, George Schultz, deputy secretaries of state for Latin America, and analysts from the State Department, the National Security Council, some universities and, of course, the CIA.

In order to get on idea of the scale of US interference one should bear in mind that our country is territorially the smallest state in the continental part of Latin America (just over 21,000 sq.km), while its pre-1980 budget was just over $ 1.5 billion.

The generous US aid to a corrupt, blood-stained and moribund military dictatorship, which has been tormenting El Salvador for 50 years, and the ultra-reactionary bourgeois-and-landowner oligarchy was designed to help them humiliate and subject a people which repeatedly repudiated the hated regime at the polls. Having failed to bring about any change and despairing of realising their historical aspirations through due process of law, the Salvadorans took up arms to fight for democracy and social progress. Stripped of all legitimacy, the dictatorship has resorted since 1974 (as it did in 1932 and 1944) to massacres with the use of state terrorism, the only method at its disposal for surviving. This has meant mass torture, raids, arrests and the “disappearance" of men and women. The “death squads" unleashed an orgy of bloodshed and the daily spectacle of mutilated bodies lying along the public highways. Even the Archbishop of San Salvador Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero became one of their victims.

President Reagan turned the United States into an accomplice of the criminal tyranny, which that great power has not only supplied with dollars and weapons but has also provided the military and political direction of the Salvadoran regime's war against its own people in an effort to add the dimension of genocide to state terrorism under the pretext of fighting “Soviet expansionism" and "Cuban-Nicaraguan intervention". "Made in USA" weapons have already been used to assassinate almost 50,000 innocent civilians.

In accordance with the Pentagon's "counter-insurgency" models, US aid in the military sphere has resulted in the build-up, modernisation and re-training of the dictatorship's armed forces, which numbered not more than 14,000 men in late 1980 and 43,000, in December 1984. The firepower of the regime's army has been increased several times over. It now has an air force (including helicopters) and fight warships adapted to counter-insurgency operations. The troops have been or are being trained under the direction of US instructors in modern warfare, including airborne helicopter landings. Under pressure from the US Embassy the command personnel has been gradually replaced in order to make the Pentagon's “counter-insurgency" doctrine entirely pre-eminent, and the manning and organisational structure of the troops has been altered accordingly. As a result, the old pro-oligarchic army has been converted into a modern puppet armed force, largely dominated by US politicians and military.

That has proceeded in the midst of the most acute contradictions within the ruling elite. On the one hand, the terrified oligarchy anxiously looks to salvation from the United States, but on the other, finds it hard to accept its new subordinate role, which is why it has been desperately trying to regain the main instruments of power.

Our national sovereignty and independence have been trampled. Meanwhile, aping the cheap style of US politicians, Duarte keeps issuing statements about his government allegedly being "independent". At the same time, Washington has been putting constant pressure on governments, especially those of Latin American and West European countries, in order to secure support for Duarte, to prevent his condemnation at international forums and to isolate the FMNLF-RDF.2 US State Department experts have worked hard to groom their puppet for strutting with his "own" line of behaviour in the world arena.

Despite the ever deeper US involvement in the fight against the FMNLF-RDF our forces have kept growing qualitatively and quantitatively. We have maintained the offensive initiative in the course of the war, and we control roughly 40 per cent of the national territory, while actively contesting with the enemy for the rest of it in virtually every part of the country, including the vicinity of the capital. Over four years of war, the FMNLF has put out of action nearly 19,000 military personnel of the puppet army, capturing more than 6,000 rifles, hundreds of guns, mortars and other fire-support weapons, a great many radio transmitters, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition. Summing up the results of these years, it is now quite safe to say that the tyranny's armed forces would have been routed long ago, but for the US support.

In 1984, FMNLF-RDF action invalidated the US imperialists' new strategy and tactics in El Salvador, according to which the revolutionary army was to have been pushed back into a small (and most backward) region in the north of the country, leaving control of the vital territories of the centre and the south (the most populated and economically most developed) entirely to the puppet army. In accordance with a plan worked out by the Kissinger Commission, these zones were to receive vast investments for rehabilitation and development, while we, besieged in the North, were to have been deprived of influence in the masses and isolated internationally with the aid of the "centrist" Duarte government, thereby plunging El Salvador even more deeply into neocolonialist bondage and gradually turning it into a citadel of counter-revolution and US domination in the Caribbean.

For that purpose, the puppet troops were being built up numerically, and their mobility, coordination, firepower and combat capability were being improved. They were preparing to wipe us out by pushing us up against the border with Honduras and using that country's army as an anvil for the "Salvadoran hammer".

At the end the situation, plainly speaking, was characterised by the following elements:

a) the FMNLF inflicted heavy casualties on the puppet army, so frustrating its plans for deployment and demoralising its ranks. We have consolidated and extended the zones controlled by the revolutionary forces and the hinterland, and have intensified our military presence in the north, in the centre and in the south of the country, and guerrilla action in the major cities and their environs;

b) our military operations were also extended to El Salvador's western provinces, a key agro-industrial zone which has been the enemy's deep rear in recent years;

c) as a result, and especially following FMNLF strikes at war-related economic installations, the Salvadoran economy has entered a new and more acute crisis, so that even greater dollar injections will be required if it is to be kept afloat. A sizable part of the increasing aid which Washington plans to give the puppet government will, therefore, merely go to cover its losses, without giving it an offensive potential;

d) a strike movement grew throughout 1984, and there was more and more action in defence of human rights. The National University restored its campus, which had been invaded and sacked by the troops of the dictatorship in 1980 (it now has more than 20,000 students). The working people in the countryside, demanding land and higher wages, stepped up their struggle and improved their organisation.

The Duarte government has never been and will never be able to satisfy the aspirations of the masses, for all its demagogic declarations, and that for a very good reason: on the one hand, it has shown itself to be totally incapable of increasing the inflation-eroded salaries of government employees, who have made up the main contingent of the strikers. On the other, it has clearly demonstrated its impotence. having failed to check the oligarchy, to make it raise the wages of workers and employees and accept an agrarian reform. Indeed, the oligarchy's deputies In the Legislative Assembly voted down the agrarian transformation laws, while the state bank has kept credits to peasants on a miserable level. Meanwhile, the prices of farm facilities, their maintenance and fertilisers have been going up;

e) the FMNLF-RDF have consolidated and extended their diplomatic ties through their consistent new initiatives aimed to seek a dialogue and negotiations for a political settlement of the armed conflict. Back in early 1981, i.e. at the very start of the war, they put forward various proposals on this issue both to the US administration and to the government of El Salvador and its armed forces. Up until September 1984, our peace proposals were invariably rejected;

f) as a result of the favourable changes in the balance of forces on the military, political, and diplomatic levels, the Duarte government, pretending that it itself was taking the initiative, was forced in October, 1984 to start a dialogue with us, naturally after having obtained Washington's blessing. Thus, Reagan and Duarte decided on what was an evident and highly painful recognition of the FMNLF-RDF which raised our international authority and gave a powerful impetus to the people's struggle for its economic and political rights, promoting its legalisation, especially in San Salvador and other cities, where the masses went out into the streets despite the "death squad" terrorism and in defiance of the state of siege, which has been in effect since 1980.

Although the decision to start a dialogue at first raised Duarte's prestige at home and abroad, the results of the meetings have shown our partners' lack of sincerity. It has simultaneously become clear that the army command will not take orders from the government. It refused to abide by the terms of the Christmas and New Year's ceasefire agreement reached between the authorities and the FMNLF and in fact violated it. The acerbity of the contradictions between the government and the oligarchy, which had appeared to be on the point of resolution, became even more evident.

The hopes which at least a part of the people could have pinned on Duarte's advent to power have been dashed: it has proved incapable of winning over the masses. The Duarte government, a key element of the US counter-insurgency scheme in El Salvador, has far from bolstered its positions and has, in fact, markedly weakened them. Its prestige is obviously plummeting both at home and abroad, and as this is being written, the ruling circles are in the grip of a grave crisis.

In November 1984 Mexico. France, Spain, Greece, Sweden and Algeria put before the UN General Assembly a draft resolution condemning the Salvadoran government for its growing violations of human rights, and in particular for its bombings of the civilian population. The text of the document characterises the situation in El Salvador as a "general state of conventional war", so refuting the charges of "terrorism" levelled against us by Reagan and Duarte, a fact which undoubtedly testifies to the ever broader recognition of the FMNLF-RDF abroad.

Summing up what has been said, one must emphasise that the US plans have totally failed: the FMNLF-RDF has not been weakened politically, has not been driven into a confined area, and has not been isolated internationally. On the contrary, we have gained in strength. We have launched even more vigorous offensives in the military, political and diplomatic fields.

The banner of sovereignty and independence, the cause of the people betrayed by the puppet regime, is in the hands of the revolutionary movement, round which all the patriotic forces now seek to rally, regardless of the degree of their organisation. This movement is the vanguard in the struggle for democracy and social emancipation, for the sake of which it was started in the first place.

A superficial view of events in El Salvador could suggest the following conclusion: "The revolutionaries have had more than enough time to win, but they will never succeed because they are firmly opposed by the United States."

That would be a shortsighted conclusion. Even the Reagan administration, which in January 1981 declared its ability to crush the revolutionary forces within three to six months, is perfectly aware that the fact of our resistance to the growing US pressure and intervention is in itself a resounding victory for the FMNLF. Washington is also aware of the price of the FMNLF's political and diplomatic successes scored by inflicting crushing and debilitating strikes at the puppet armed forces, which it costs the United States more than $ 1.5 million a day to keep going.

In order duly to evaluate the importance of the four-year revolutionary people's struggle in El Salvador, one need merely imagine the international consequences if the FMNLF were defeated. The people's Sandinist Revolution in Nicaragua would face even greater difficulties, because it would be confronted by a seasoned, expanded and modernised Salvadoran army doing the will of imperialism, and also by our country's rich and ultra-reactionary oligarchy. The US hawks and the whole of Latin American reaction would be given a fresh incentive for wild attacks on democratic and revolutionary movements. The "golden dream" (in the spirit of Hitler) of invading Cuba, something the United States has never quite abandoned, would be even more tantalising, while peace on the globe would be even more fragile than it Is today.

By fighting and winning, the Salvadoran patriots and the whole of our people are making a contribution to the continuity of the revolutionary process in Central America and the cause of Nicaragua's defence, so ultimately advancing the democratic and national liberation movement in Latin America. And the successes are there for all to see. Fascist regimes implanted by the US imperialists in the south of our continent In the 1970s have recently been swept off the political stage. Fresh forces are now arising in that area: broad masses of Chileans are coming out against Pinochet's CIA-fostered bestial tyranny. Our impressive victories daily help to expose and neutralise the Reagan administration's brazen and aggressive policy both in its own country and in the international arena, and this, for its part, reinforces the struggle against imperialism and for world peace.

Such, in our judgement, is the only correct evaluation of the international significance of the Salvadoran people's struggle.

It has taken tremendous efforts to stand our ground and continue the offensive in a small country which has no common borders with any progressive state, which is close to the United States and is very far from the Soviet Union, and in order to resist US imperialism, which seeks to defeat us at any price. These efforts could be concentrated only through the unity of all the forces within the FMNLF, its correct line, its solid alliance with the RDF-led democratic forces, the deep roots of the revolutionary process within the masses of working people and the people as a whole, and also the active international solidarity with our struggle.

How do the US administration and the Salvadoran dictatorship explain the obvious fact that their plans have failed?

They claim that the FMNLF has been getting large consignments of weapons from the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua, but they cannot provide any hard evidence. Journalists of all ideological trends and different nationalities, including those from the United States, have unanimously reported from the war fronts in El Salvador that our fighters have been using US-made weapons identical with those the Reagan administration has been supplying to the dictatorship. For their part, the sophisticated US military intelligence services are perfectly aware that all this talk about a "vast flood of arms" from Nicaragua is a lie. However, even if that had been true, it would not explain the results on the field of battle. After all, everyone, including the Pentagon, has admitted that the volume and firepower of the US weapons being delivered to the dictatorship's army are more than a hundred times greater than the volume of the alleged arms supplies from Nicaragua (to say nothing of the advisers, the training of the troops, the collaboration in military intelligence, and so on).

To this should be added the fact that the FMNLF has no helicopters, planes, howitzers, light warships or armoured troop-carriers. Nor has anyone cast doubt on facts such as these: the FMNLF has a contingent of officers and men which is only a small fraction of the enemy's; It controls no industry or trade; it does not receive tens of millions of dollars in the form of aid from abroad for the purchase of uniforms, foodstuffs, medicaments and means of transport; it is not served by a state machine, and lacks the immense resources available to the bourgeois clan of entrepreneurs. In short, the FMNLF is deprived of everything that the puppet regime's army has at its disposal.

The Reagan administration has yet another explanation of the defeats inflicted on reaction in El Salvador. US government officials reason on roughly these lines: "Salvadoran military commanders are, with few exceptions, incapable and corrupt, and fail to understand and assimilate what their advisers teach them; In contrast to US soldiers, who usually have ten years of schooling, Salvadoran soldiers have no more than four or five years, which Is why the Salvadoran troops are incapable of absorbing modern knowledge; the government's civilian functionaries are also corrupt and this tends to reduce the effectiveness of US aid.

We say nothing about the glaring and ever growing corruption of the officers and civilian functionaries— they were chosen by imperialism itself for its "friends", and are being used as an instrument in “defence of the free world" in our region and so it has no moral ground to complain about them. Let us consider the Salvadoran working people's alleged "incapacity" to become excellent officers and soldiers.

More than 80 per cent of the FMNLF fighters come from the working strata of town and country, and a large part of them join our ranks unable to read or write, undernourished and in poor health. All of that is a reflection, however partial, of our country's social realities: the result of the people's brutal exploitation by the insatiable oligarchy of the big landowners, industrialists, bankers, importers and exporters, and the monopolies of the United States and other countries. All of that puts limitations on us and demands on the FMNLF great efforts to overcome difficulties in the face of incredible privation. But these problems are also an indispensable component of the deep-seated motivations impelling the Salvadoran people to revolutionary action. Formed in such conditions, the principal forces of the FMNLF have within their ranks experienced commanders and fighters well versed in the art of popular war in a small and densely populated country. By contrast, the enemy's soldiers, most of whom are doing a bad job at fighting (which gives the USA some ground for the numerous reproaches), become first-class fighters as soon as they go over to our side, bringing with them valuable military information.
In other words, there is obviously no ground for the claim that the Salvadoran working people are in some way ''inferior", that being a specimen of imperial arrogance and insulting disrespect for our people.

In sum, the FMNLF is gaining the upper hand in the war because it is on the side of the people, the true and chief protagonist of the revolutionary war in El Salvador. The high moral spirit and combat efficiency of our officers and men stem from the fact that they are fighting for a just cause, and that is the reason for the striking contrast: the high combat qualities of our fighters and the mediocrity of the puppet army soldiers.

The FMNLF is the guide, organiser, leader, armed hand and indisputable vanguard of the Salvadoran people. It is no exaggeration to say that it is blood of our people's blood and flesh of our people's flesh, its feelings, will and conscience.

Following a series of defeats, and being subjected to tough control by the Pentagon, the dictatorship's armed forces are beset by deep internal contradictions, and this, together with the fierce inter-factional strife in the reactionary camp, and the national economy in a shambles, tends to develop into a general crisis of the whole ruling forces bloc.

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited from Prensa Latina, Tass, Granma, Soviet News, Soviet Weekly, Barracuda, APN, Czechoslovak Life, etc).

CUITO CUANAVALE

• BRAZZAVILLE. — The representatives of the South African racist minority seemed to be ready, at last, to abide by international law 13 years after the apartheid troops clashed for the first time with the Angolan and Cuban Internationalist forces.

This was made evident at the People's Palace here in the Congolese capital when South Africa's Foreign Minister Roeloff Pik Botha signed the Brazzaville Protocol that opens the road to Namibia's independence, the safety of Angola's borders, an end to the hostilities in southwest Africa, and the fallback and subsequent withdrawal of the Cuban forces.

The Brazzaville document that Pretoria's white minority regime finally signed In the very heart of the African continent, was also signed by the delegation heads of Angola (Antonio dos Santos Franca, "Ndalu'') and Cuba (Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada), in the presence of the head of state of the Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso, and U.S. mediator Chester Crocker.

A high Congolese source emphasized to Granma the importance of the events as follows: “What for ten years neither the Western countries of the contact group nor the parallel efforts of the international community were able to accomplish was now made possible by the demolishing blows dealt to South Africa in southern Angola by the joint Angolan, Cuban and SWAPO forces."

Speaking in the same vein was Cuba's Deputy Foreign Minister Ricardo Alarcón who underscored the fact that beyond the diplomatic skill of the negotiators, the real reason behind the signing of the Protocol was the heroic performance for 13 years of the Angolan and Cuban internationalist forces, which culminated in the Cuito Cuanavale victory.

Historically speaking, great symbolism is attached to the Protocol as it was precisely here in Brazzaville, 23 years ago, that Cuban internationalism made its appearance in black Africa In the legendary figure of heroic guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara and his comrades in arms.

A few details worth mentioning characterized the December 13 ceremony In Brazzaville. One, for instance, was the eleventh hour demand lodged by the foreign minister of apartheid Pik Botha to have two chairs placed at the table to be occupied by South Africa during the signing of the Protocol.

The reason for this — again prompted by South African domestic policy needs — was that Botha was accompanied by General Magnus Malan, the minister of defense who harbors presidential hopes in Pretoria. Both of them, therefore, wanted parity conditions during the signing ceremony so that the large number of journalists present from South Africa would give them equal coverage.

Another detail revealed the fine humor exhibited by the host country. Following the signing ceremony a reception was given by President Nguesso in the Palace gardens. At the request of the Congolese executive, the delegation heads gathered to have their picture taken and chat with the president.

Meanwhile, a local orchestra played popular music. After the picture taking was over, the foreign minister of apartheid asked one of his aides to bring to him a bottle of a rare South African liquor especially for the occasion, which he said was made from a small wild berry "capable of getting an elephant drunk."

While the South African representative was promoting his “amarula," which is what the drink is called, the Congolese orchestra began to play and sing in perfect Spanish the song "Cuba, qué linda es Cuba” (Cuba, How Beautiful Is Cuba), with particular emphasis on the part where Fidel and the Cuban flag are mentioned.

Botha, who speaks no Spanish, continued to sway to and fro on the grass while praising the effects of the little fruit on the elephants, but the Cubans present, many Congolese who speak Spanish because they have studied in Cuba and even some Spanish-speaking members of the U.S. delegation were quick to get the subtle message given by the local musicians.

To arrive at the events witnessed in Brazzaville that day, five rounds of intense negotiations were held in this capital, plus all the others held elsewhere. At last South Africa had to admit, through its acceptance of the Protocol, that the times when apartheid acted as it pleased in southern Africa are gone forever.

A week earlier here in Brazzaville, Pik Botha tried his last act of histrionics and quit the negotiating table when his unacceptable request to verify the withdrawal of the Cuban troops was refused. This time he was back to sign virtually the same document that he had earlier rejected, without any of his demands having been met. The Cuban withdrawal, as agreed between the Cuban and Angolan governments and the United Nations, will be monitored by a UN professional team.

A step of far-reaching importance has just been taken here, but one thing is very clear: neither has the racist regime suddenly changed its nature which has earned it worldwide rejection, nor can an improved international climate do miracles by itself.

If events like the one described here are to be repeated, it will be above all because the humiliated and offended people Dostoyevsky spoke of have said enough is enough and have decided to put an end to the iniquity of an unequal world. This was what happened deep in southern Angola — in Cuito Cuanavale — where the obsolete apartheid regime was dealt a demolishing and irreparable blow.