Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 797 Tuesday April 11 1995                                                                                                                         10p 
Southwest sales meetings Sat. April 22. 2pm. Rcpts.

Another big joke

Tory attempts to gag the media with privacy laws or threats of punishing libel actions only reveal establishment despair at the way in which the old international status-quo, - the monopoly-capitalist system in which British imperialism for so long had such a prominent role, - is falling apart.

Certain aspects of the ruling-class mentality still want to go and give a good shaking to whoever or whatever might be blamed for "letting the side down" and "opening the door to Bolshevik anarchy again", etc, "by talking in front of the servants", etc.

The whole of bourgeois society is corrupt, and the whole of the bourgeoisie and their middle-class hangers on, know it.

Every single activity in the whole of business, government, and public life under the capitalist system has a contact in some form or other with the hierarchical gravy train which dominates everything, even if that contact is no worse than the minor hypocrisy of accommodating some dignitary or other who is opening a school fete or presenting a local football cup, or whatever, and who is more than likely a completely corrupt monster in both their public and private life.

Public revelations of what a crooked, corrosive system capitalism all is, full of the most outrageous humbug, alarm blinkered small minds and deluded would-be 'heroes' of the free market like Aitken, because they still kid themselves that the rotten old game of keeping 'good public order' can be kept going indefinitely via the mass hoodwinking through the 'parliamentary democracy' fraud, the sanctity of the 'rule of law', and a discreet press.

They are fooling themselves. The whole of capitalist history can only be one long steady relentless process of enlightenment for the masses of what an ultimately corrupt racket is the private monopoly ownership of social wealth, and what an eventually laughably inefficient racket too, one that will just have to be overthrown, before it falls apart in total decadence and paralysis,(as measured on a whole list of political, economic, social, cultural, environmental standards, etc, which gradually become historical requirements to the satisfaction of the whole of civilisation but which cannot possibly be reached under capitalism.)

The capitalist form of society can only take human and social standards so far. And by a million and one channels quite impossible to enumerate or for the brain to comprehend, - those standards are steadily being registered in most right-minded people's thinking as becoming laughably corrupt, hypocritical, and sleazy.

Our "ruling class" is becoming a sick sad joke, from the tasteless and inept monarchy down, and not excluding the church hierarchy, the whole 'law and order' racket, and especially big business and their 'parliamentary democracy' stooges waiting for the next handouts and free trips.

And the capitalist system is naturally bound to stumble over its own biggest racket, the fraud of 'democracy', - at the moment in the form of the bogusly 'free' press in particular.

The 'sleaze' revelations are telling nothing like the full truth, and never will, - namely that the whole capitalist 'democracy' system is nothing but one giant racket of back-scratching and humbug. But they have to play their 'free press' part doing something in these times of colossal public cynicism and international political and economic turmoil.

So the newspapers' commercial ambitions have persuaded them that the more grotesque or the more arrogantly pompous misdemeanours are fair game, such as the antics of Mr Bed-spring and the ritzy Jonathan of Arabia, the Cabinet's leading gun-runner, (massages extra).

Of course it is educational learning what these stuffed-shirt hypocrites really say to each other at their dinner parties.

It could be very useful political information indeed at some future stage of ruling-class splits and paralysis, and even now gives an added dimension to our knowledge of the real small-mindedness and grubbiness of our "ruling class". Roll on the capitalist press revelations. Let dog eat dog ad infinitum. Let more rats desert more sinking ships, and let more thieves fall out.

Leaderless imperialism is stumbling blindly back towards total conflict. The 'new right' farce is doomed before it starts.

The 'free-market' bourgeois-imperialist system is on its way back to largescale widespread warfare.

The capitalist states face leadership crises in every direction (see P7) and the 'new broom' of 'hard-right' imbeciles who have captured office in the USA have only one real policy, - to build up American war spending and to refuse any limits to US action.
 
The only one of the Republican 'Ten Commandments' of the 'Contract with America', passed in the '100 Days' legislative blitz, to have much relevance to the international economic chaos hammering the US dollar and inflicting trade-war everywhere, is the 'Security Restoration' Act to increase 'defence spending' and to forbid US forces ever having to obey United Nations authority.

The balanced budget amendment, if bloated US bourgeois society can ever manage to live within its means from its arrogant position of world domination, can only ferociously sharpen the international trade war. The anarchy of free-market inflationary pollution and 'surplus' capital mountains is caused by capitalism itself, not by American imperialist expansionism and greed as such which are merely the most visibly incurable symptoms of the monopoly exploitation system. A more combative and competitive USA can only reshuffle and re-deal the system's economic difficulties, not solve them. There is no solution to the monopoly-capitalist conflict for world leadership.

The new phenomenon of talk-radio conservatism which helped Republican reaction to capture the entire Congress (House and Senate) in November is a dismally impoverished philosophy, typified by such ludicrous figures as the failed Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy who turned to God after prison and now seems to have adopted a living impersonation of George Raft, the epitome of gangster wisdom exposing the crookedness in others, - and Rush Limbaugh, a grotesque fat-arse who specialises in sneering at Clinton for being a coward who would not fight for 'his country' in Vietnam.

Much of the 'performance' of these new idols of the right wing who helped raise millions of dollars for Republican candidates at whooping 'personal appearance' dinners, etc, amounts to nothing more than the most embarrassing self-regarding smugness and complacency, conveying absolutely nothing but individual conceit.

Liddy, for example, spits into the microphone: 

"Twenty five years ago, they say I was responsible for bringing down a Republican administration single-handed. A couple of months ago, they say I brought down a Democratic administration single-handed. They were exaggerating slightly in both cases," 

which inane drivel brought the roof off.

Bob Grant, another favourite poisonous personality with a talk-radio show, snarls out to the New York region such enlightenment as:

"If they didn't observe Martin Luther King day, there would be trouble from the savages. They're not satisfied with every third street being named Martin Luther King Boulevard, you know, named after that scumbag Marty".

Another piece of broadcast wisdom declared:

"We have in our nation millions of sub-humanoids, - savages who really would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari".

The only significant talk-radio 'opposition' to these fascist diatribes comes from Jim Hightower in Texas who is just as addicted to juvenile cowboy machismo as the 'cure' for everything as his rivals. His only difference is that he wants a Democrat gunslinger in the White House rather than a Republican one.

Hightower declares:

"I see Clinton as thixotropic, something that's solid until you apply a little heat. Then it becomes a liquid.

"The only thing you're liable to find in the middle of the road is yellow stripes and dead armadillos.

"Some people say we need a third party in this country. I think we could use a second one,"

he sneers at draft-dodger Clinton, whom he brands as a closet Republican.

All these broadcasters are closet John Waynes, inflicting the ultimate in instant vigilante 'justice' with gun or fist, but they are all better physically equipped to be a mixture of Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. American bourgeois society has been getting steadily fatter, dumber, and more incompetent with the passing decades, - and all these USA heroes know it. Which presumably is why the bumbling Forrest Gump who becomes a staggeringly successful idol of the nation despite his apparent handicaps, has been such a smash box-office hit in the cinema.

When not fantasising about becoming Superman, righting all wrongs, the American right are squabbling among themselves about whether or how hard to push such hopeless causes as enforced Christian religious instruction back into schools again; total abolition of abortion; a $10 billion programme for new prisons (presumably to house all the 'savages'); further promoting Charles Murray's televised eugenics theories that blacks, by heredity, have less IQ than whites; giving life sentences after just one violent crime, not three, (which was last month's new hard-right doctrine); ending compulsory school desegregation; and rolling back all past 'affirmative action' legislation which enforced discrimination on the jobs market in favour of women and minorities; etc, etc. The right has even come up with a middle-class black shock-jock called Ken Hamblin who aggressively denounces all welfare of all kinds which he claims has robbed American blacks of their dignity, and diminished the achievements of those blacks who have made and seized their own opportunities in life.

Not all of this reaction, of course, is quite as crazy as it looks. Welfare-state reformism as a 'cure' for the evils of capitalist society is obviously as bankrupt as the cause of the problems in the first place, - the very existence of class-divided 'free-market' exploitation society. And the pompous self-righteousness of some 'reformism' can be as damaging and worthy of attack as the system of exploitation itself, which 'reformism' is supposed to be remedying.

But trying to turn the clock back on modern understanding of what ideals are right and wrong, - as rightwing reactionaries dream of doing, placing the whole of mankind onto individual merit and the devil take the hindmost, - is surely a despairingly hopeless perspective doomed to bitter frustration. The very evolution of history itself has taught civilisation that if it does not bring to an end the class-divided destruction and tyranny of civil and international war of successive epochs of exploitation and privately-owned economic might, - then civilisation itself will perish.

And condemning individuals for 'failing' under a system of private monopoly-capitalist ownership, self-protective freemasonries, and exaggerated 'star' systems in every profession, in an economic free-market world infamous for its irrational booms and its catastrophic unpredictable slumps, - is just brutal selfishness, and scarcely-concealed vindictiveness and deliberate cruelty.

Not surprisingly, the 'new' Republican right is even thinking about reintroducing Dickensian workhouse orphanages for the children of single-parent families and other broken homes:

When, for example, Newt Gingrich suggested bringing back the orphanage for children of the indigent, the conventional wisdom said he had bungled. It was a gaffe, chorused the experts; Gingrich had evoked Dickensian images of the workhouse and cast himself as Scrooge. He would have to recant.

But no. The orphanage proposal may have been dismissed as "unbelievable and absurd" by Hillary Clinton, but everywhere else it was taken quite seriously. Liberal columnists emerged to say Newt might actually have a point, that something did have to be done about the offspring of the (mainly black) underclass, who, raised by teen-moms, grow into gun-wielding, benefit-draining, drug-dealing hoodlums. It was as if Newt had tried to see how far he could go, and discovered the answer: further than you think.

Indeed, as the orphanage case proved, America's national conversation has shifted so far to the right that actions or statements which would inflame the liberal conscience anywhere else in the world now go without mention in the US.

Conundrums about personal incentives are a fascinating complex question for civilisation's future to resolve; but the pretence that law-enforced, capitalist-state-enforced, inter-imperialist-war-enforced private monopoly ownership and control of the world's resources gives a 'fair' chance for all 5,000 million people on earth, with rewards for those who make it, and punishments for those who don't, - is just out-of-date barbaric gibberish, well worthy of the primitive eugenics garbage and other elitist crap which these peabrained petty-bourgeois opportunists feed upon.

It is equally contemptuous of mankind, and equally middle-class self-serving, to pretend that the world 'needs' such a society of anarchic unequal 'right' for its economy to flourish properly. The overwhelming evidence already is that the planet is being poisoned and devastated by this large-scale free-market commercial anarchy, even before the future costs of a World War III catastrophe are taken into account, (plus the endless civil war mayhem which will follow because of the difficulty of eradicating stubborn 'capitalist democracy' reaction to a new challenge to the monopoly-imperialist era by revolutionary workers states.)

The previous workers states, past and present, may have made some grotesque mistakes in evolving a new political-philosophical order to cope with a world of dying imperialist boom-and-slump crisis; but many, many things in these new societies were organised brilliantly, - as is occasionally being begrudgingly admitted now by the capitalist press itself:

On Thursday in New York the WHO will present a report on its two-year campaign against the tubercle bacillus. 'There are some limited success stories — New York is one — but it is worse in many ways,' says Kraig Klaudt of WHO. One of those ways is its spread in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, where the collapse of Communism has also brought about a collapsing health system that has allowed TB to infect two million people in five years.

WHO estimates that 29,000 of those have died. All deaths are unnecessary: the cure is cheap (drugs tor the six-month treatment cost $13) and straight-forward. But if patients do not finish the course the disease becomes incurable — and the disease that they spread is also incurable.

In the West, TB, caught at (an) early stage, can be cured by a six-month course of drugs. But in Russia patients such as Plotnikova must hand over control of their lives to the disintegrating health service, which has neither the facilities nor the money to treat them properly.

Tomsk has the highest number of TB cases in western Siberia and is demonstrably losing the battle to control the disease.

The incidence of TB has been rising across the former Soviet Union but World Health Organisation (WHO) officials point to a 20-25 per cent increase in the number of cases in the past two years.

Between 1990 and 1993, new cases in the region almost doubled. The number of children with TB has more than doubled since 1988 and the deaths of three children last year were the first attributed to the disease for at least a decade.

Once proudly touted as the flagship of the old socialist regime, the health system is so broken-down and cash-starved that Tomsk doctors have not been paid for three months and beds are being closed down. Recently 70 patients were sent home because of lack of food.

Funded by the compulsory deduction of 3.6 per cent from every worker's wage, the health insurance system introduced last year is nowhere near up and running.

And although the USSR, for example, suffered miserably from chronic bureaucratic sclerosis on the way to the tragic self-liquidation under the Gorbachevite small-minded philistines, - there had never been anything but endless change and alteration in the Soviet system, adjusting and tinkering with the economic planning system ceaselessly (and see, for example, extracts from a Fidel Castro speech over the coming weeks, how even the most radical amendments remain far from alien to workers statehood and socialism, which are plainly predicated on rational planned development of each and every kind).

Thus it is obvious that there is nothing inherent in planned socialist statehood itself which would prevent whatever difficulties might emerge under workers governments from being completely resolved in due course.

The notion, therefore, that free-market anarchy is absolutely indispensable to the flourishing of civilisation or a healthy-enough more modest mere survival, - is just suicidal self-delusion, by interested parties.

Exactly how the mindless rightwing reaction in the USA (and elsewhere) is going to make a mess of things is still not clear, but all the signs are of an increasing loss of control by Washington over the whole planet's activities, (compared to the more settled epoch of the Cold War status-quo before uneven developments in imperialist market-profiteering forced the USA, under Reagan of all people, to offer Gorbachev the kiss-of-death deal of some genuine détente at last, - so that American mono-poly-capitalism could concentrate far more resources on winning the trade war with Japan and Germany which by then had started to become a real threat to the USA's world supremacy. Gorbachev & Co accepted the deal, and decided to liquidate the Soviet workers state, so that they could become bourgeois arseholes themselves, and under the delusion that the free-market had solved all mankind's problems.)

Far from winning the trade war once freed from the burdens of 'fighting' the Cold War full blast against a serious alternative world system to imperialist decadence, the United States only sank deeper into economic difficulty, and deeper into domestic and international political turmoil.

All US imperialism's ideological self-justification became instantly publicly suspect from the moment that the 'communist threat' peacefully self-liquidated, proving that it had never been anything of the sort.

And the steadily more antagonistic trade war began to show up all of the West's 'partnership' and 'democracy' and 'justice' values for what they really were, - complete and utter hogwash.

What has emerged more plainly instead has been the blunt self-interest of the American imperialist bourgeoisie, - and the same for every other imperialist bourgeoisie in the world as far as their true motives are concerned.

And more and more, these conflicting imperialist interests are beginning to collide, - on economic issue after issue, in geographical area after area.

The West still appears to act together on many questions. But increasingly, the rifts and real differences of opinion and perspective are beginning to show through.

A lot of the still-remaining superficial 'cohesion' in Western imperialist actions is of a staying-together nature so that all can keep an eye on each other, and so that no one can steal a march on anyone else.

Some of the motivation around the Gulf War participation against Iraq was of this kind, having some forces involved so that a voice could be had in all the subsequent 'peace' manoeuvring when what everyone really wanted to get out of this Middle East adventure, - some say in the oil industry exploitation and marketing and investment of capital surpluses, - was being decided.

Over the imperialist dismemberment of the former Yugoslav socialist federation, all the old Balkans rivalry among the great imperialist powers quickly resurfaced, leaving the West blatantly split and at loggerheads over what should be the outcome of the nationalist struggles there, and what intervention might be permissible.

And now over Turkey's invasion of Iraq to slaughter Kurdish separatist rebellions, the NATO powers seem destined to fragment even more publicly, and contradict each others activities with even more potentially disastrous consequences, - as the capitalist press itself is beginning to admit.

West Europe, and the Germans in particular, have made it clear they do not trust the thrust of American manipulation around their former stooge Turkey's aggressive blitzkrieg.

Now, it is being argued, the US imperialists themselves might scarcely be in control of what is going on:

TURKEY, the eastern bastion of Nato, has agreed a joint military strategy with Iraq to contain and eliminate the threat posed by the Kurds, according to senior western intelligence officials.

Washington fears that the deal with Saddam Hussein is a dangerous sign that the Turks are loosening their ties with the West and retreating into paranoid isolationism.

Officials say that, aside from the contacts with Iraq, Turkey has been using American-supplied cluster bombs against the Kurds, has begun a new Aegean arms race against Greece and is increasingly paranoid about its security.

"We are incredibly nervous about losing Turkey," said one Pentagon official. "They feel besieged and we have less and less influence." The arms race is causing particular concern. Figures published last week by the Monterey Institute, a California think-tank, show that Greece and Turkey — nominally allies in Nato — were the world's largest importers of arms last year. Both countries bought huge quantities of missiles, aircraft and ships worth hundreds of millions of dollars which neither country can afford.

The number of confrontations between Greek and Turkish forces has risen in recent months. In February, an F-16 Turkish fighter crashed in a congested part of the Aegean Sea during a high-speed chase by Greek jet interceptors. No shots were fired and the pilot safely ejected, but the volume of incidents is such that it is only a matter of time before there is a killing, Nato diplomats fear.

"There are incidents between the two every few days and we are obviously seriously concerned about the potential for conflict," said a Foreign Office source. "With the fourth-largest army in the world, the Turks could eat the Greeks for breakfast and not even belch.”

Rather than a full-scale conflict, however, the real concern is that both sides are becoming increasingly engaged in the Balkans — with the Greeks refusing to back down in their confrontation with Macedonia and the Turks increasing their covert support for the Bosnian Muslims.

In addition, American intelligence believes that the Greeks are running a training camp for the Kurdish PKK guerrilla army at a secret base north of Thessaloniki. Americans now say they have photographic evidence of the training. "It is highly provocative," said one intelligence source. "But the Greeks won't listen to reason.”

Last week, Richard Holbrooke, an assistant secretary of state, visited both Athens and Ankara to discuss the growing tension and to try to start what the administration describes as an "Aegean dialogue". Neither country was willing to discuss any American ideas for defusing tension and both appear set on a course of confrontation.

High-level contacts between Ankara and Baghdad resulted in Iraq secretly agreeing to the Turkish invasion of northern Iraq three weeks ago.

The deal is a recognition by both countries that the 12m Kurds who want to establish their own state from land in Turkey and Iraq are a common problem. The contacts have raised concerns in Washington and other Nato capitals that Turkey is drifting away from the Atlantic alliance.

"There is a joint military strategy with a clear division of labour." said one American intelligence official. "The Turks go in and clear out part of the problem and the Iraqis will continue to squeeze the Kurds from their side."

Turkey yesterday pulled a brigade from northern Iraq, but thousands of its troops swept eastwards on foot across mountains in search of Kurdish rebels who were believed to have tied into Iran.

The Turkish invasion was condemned by the European Community last week, and Germany has suspended military aid to Ankara. The Clinton administration has urged the Turks to withdraw, but it has not joined in the harsh condemnation because it fears that criticism will push Turkey farther away from its traditional allies in the West.

Clinton will press Tansu Ciller, Turkey's prime minister, to begin negotiations with moderate Kurds when she visits Washington this month. However, it is unlikely that Ciller will be persuaded to change her mind. The Turks have rejected efforts by the Americans to begin a dialogue with the Kurds, whom they see as terrorists. Once one of Nato's staunchest allies, Turkey is causing anxiety in Washington, which fears that it is "moving off the reservation".

The Turkish slaughter of the Kurds, sweeping aside the supposed NATO air-patrol guarding of the Kurds from coming to any harm (from Saddam Hussein), was humiliation enough for Washington. How, according to the above speculative report from the American capital, the supposedly 'anti-Saddam-Hussein' air security over Kurdish territory was also shamefully scuttled to let the Iraqi regime have another go at the Kurds itself.

The Greek-Turk conflict could prove even more explosively embarrassing for US imperialist influence in Europe and the Middle East, and for the NAT0 'peace and democracy' fraud as a whole.

This appalling arms-race and naked imperialist ambition (small-scale) not only exposes the 'free world' fraud but will dramatically speed up the splitting of the imperialist powers into two, three, or more warring rival camps.

And the disputes between Greece and Turkey can be multiplied a hundred times all round the world as rival powers become increasingly antagonistic towards each other under the worsening impact of the deepening imperialist-system economic crisis.

The visible background to all this, once again, is the deteriorating collapse of the American order, symbolised by the unstoppable slide in the value of the US dollar.

It implies desperate economic difficulties for all of the world which was effectively (economically, politically and militarily speaking) all part of America's vast 'back yard'. And it means growing, endless headaches for Washington itself as the inflationary chickens finally come home to roost from a half-century of utterly dishonest, dissolute 'free-spending' (through the uncontrolled anarchic printing of dollars) by American imperialism on behalf of the 'free world' (i.e. the interests of US domination).

The USA can no longer keep up the pretence of being the world's benevolent uncle, and no longer even tries. The cynical details of the White House's latest bruising disagreements with its 'oldest ally', London, are now reported quite openly by the capitalist press:

There were considerable sighs of relief in the Foreign Office when John Major successfully negotiated the political minefield of his trip to Washington last week. It was fraught with potential problems, given President Clinton's decision to allow Gerry Adams, the IRA leader, to come to a black-tie dinner at the White House and sing a ballad to his apparently adoring audience.

Major was furious and did the diplomatic equivalent of stamping his foot by refusing to take Clinton's let's-kiss-and-make-up telephone call. The British embassy had been trying to find some symbolic way whereby the two men could show publicly that they really liked each other — a political necessity, even if a lie.

But until Major arrived in Washington, every suggestion for informal 'dinners or public social engagements put forward by the British was turned down by the White House, whose officials regretted Clinton would be too busy to oblige. Then, last Tuesday, the embassy let it drop that Sir Robin Renwick, the British ambassador, would be taking Major and his party to Georgia Brown's, a restaurant just three blocks from the White House.

It was an artful choice, not just on account of the speciality de maison — "hoppin' John" a southern delicacy of blackeyed peas and rice that might have perfectly described the prime minister's mood. It also provided a chance for Clinton to satisfy his well known craving for fattening puddings.

Sure enough, after attending a dinner for Ted Kennedy, Clinton came along for coffee and peach cobbler. It was all wonderfully symbolic except that nobody in America paid any attention.

The truth is that Clinton and Major have nothing in common and the president's clear bias towards Gerry Adams has highlighted something that should have been recognised long ago: to the Democrats in the White House, the special relationship is a thing of the past and Britain is just an ally like any other.

And how much of an 'ally', and for how much longer?

The fallout from American imperialism's economic crisis is endless.

In particular, the 'New World Order' is still giving rise to alarms, especially as it affects the former Soviet Union, - as some bourgeois media coverage has itself been describing:

COLD WAR rhetoric and propaganda are back in vogue, the KGB thugs are back on the beat and Stalin is back on a postage stamp. For the proponents of the free market and democratic reform, the past few days in Moscow have been a cruel awakening: whatever the Kremlin is up to, it gives credence to people who argued that Russia always was and always will be an authoritarian state separate from the West.

In a month's time, President Bill Clinton, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and John Major will attend the celebrations in Moscow commemorating the end of the second world war. But behind the smiles will be a sombre awakening.

The American administration believes that Clinton's trip will be critical for American-Russian relations and perhaps even for President Boris Yeltsin himself.

The metamorphosis of Yeltsin from cuddly democrat to grizzled despot was made clearer than ever last week when his government dropped all pretences of partnership with America and its allies. Instead Russia has reverted to its dark and age-old suspicion of the outside world.

First Yeltsin signed a bill which would require all foreigners resident in Russia for more than three months to prove they are free of the HIV-virus or face deportation. Then William Perry, the American defence secretary who was in Moscow for pre-summit negotiations, tried desperately to persuade the Kremlin not to sell a light-water nuclear reactor to Iran. Nyet, said the new hardline Russians, announcing that they were going ahead with the sale.

Moscow also repeated its persistent demand that Nato bans all old Warsaw Pact countries from membership. Get any closer to our borders, threatened Pavel Grachev, the defence minister, and Russia will scrap both the treaty on conventional forces in Europe and the ratification of Start II, the strategic arms reduction treaty.

Then, late last week, the Federal Counterintelligence Service, one of the descendants of the KGB, was renamed the Federal Security Service (FSB) and given extended investigative powers. Its declared mandate is to crack down on organised crime and increase Russian surveillance operations abroad. Its agents will be given the authority to obtain information from any source as they see fit, and it will even operate the infamous prison cells in the bowels of the dreaded Lubyanka building.

Finally, yesterday came the news that Russia has issued a postage stamp featuring the head of Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet dictator, for the first time in more than 40 years. The world war commemorative stamp shows him with Roosevelt and Churchill.

Perry's team returned from the trip to Moscow deeply pessimistic. They believe Yeltsin is beleaguered between reformists and old guard communists.

Russians say, however, that there are no reformers left and that Yeltsin, like other politicians, is using the surest way to try to win votes as the starting line forms for parliamentary and presidential election races: proclaiming the strength and greatness of Russia at home and abroad and championing the restoration of order and security after the chaos of the post-perestroika era.

Riding the wave of military pride, Alexander Rutskoi, Yeltsin's former vice-president, launched his presidential quest with an angry roar against the West last weekend. Russia's main enemy was "the creation of a global dictatorship by the West under the crafty label 'New World Order'”, he said.

Rutskoi's brand of nationalism is mild when compared to the racist chants of the rightwingers Ilya Konstantinov and Viktor Anpilov, or the attention-grabbing Zhirinovsky. Their belief in Slav superiority has chilling overtones. Many Russians nodded sagely in agreement when Bela Denisenko, one of the parliamentary deputies responsible for drafting the Aids bill, stated that "sex with a foreigner is 100 times more dangerous than sex with a Russian" — condom or no condom. Whether any of these politicians will actually get to contest an election — for parliamentary deputies in December this year and for the presidency in June 1996 — remains to be seen, however. Rutskoi accused Yeltsin last week of planning a referendum to postpone the presidential elections.

Democracy has become such a dirty word in Russia, tainted by its association with the rising crime rate, economic chaos and general turmoil that has engulfed the former Soviet Union since 1991, that it would not be a rallying cry should Yeltsin decide to cancel elections. Old Yeltsin allies such as Yegor Gaidar, the architect of Russia's economic reforms, are finding their "democrat" labels are millstones around their political necks.

And what if the deterioration in the attempted capitalist stabilisation of Russia should not even stop there, - at producing an embittered wounded former superpower with a dangerous vacuum instead of firm class leadership, and loose cannon in all directions?

What if, regardless of Western press claims of some sort of 'economic turnaround' in the FSU' s hitherto declining economic fortunes, the fall-out from the USA's inability to bail out the whole planet any longer, led towards truly cataclysmic developments such as have potentially appeared in Mexico? What if a new 1917 appeared on the horizon? New right Republican gloom would know no bounds. The dollar's value could implode completely.

The most startling thing about the Mexican crisis is that there, truly right on the USA's own doorstep for the very first time in history, potential communist revolution sits brooding menacingly, - and there appears to be nothing at all that the whole might of US imperialism plus all the financial help it could muster from equally-alarmed bourgeois-imperialist ' allies' worldwide, can do about it, - so the bourgeoisie's own press keeps implying:

The men crammed into the dirt-floored schoolroom. We asked whether the village belonged to any political party and the spokesman hesitated. A voice came from the crowd. 'We are Zapatistas,' it said. We were in rebel territory.

It took a day to walk from the end of the paved road, across fields cleared out of the jungle, uphill and downhill and up again, past the last army checkpoint and into the village. We crossed rivers, wading knee-deep or teetering along half-rotten tree trunks. Occasionally military helicopters buzzed overhead, drowning out the salsa music from the Walkman strapped to the back of the horse. As we panted in the humid heat, tiny Tzeltal women scurried past, barefoot and laden with bundles, moving at twice our speed.

Los Altos, the highlands of Chiapas, challenge the government's claim that Mexico, with its stock exchange and television-shopping channel, belongs in the First World. Here on the Guatemalan border, babies die of preventable diseases at the same rate as in poor pans of Africa, and the poverty of the peasants contrasts with the wealth of the landowners and the urban middle-class. That, said the Zapatista in the schoolroom, is why they became guerrillas.

'We don't have decent houses, land, clinics, doctors, or clean water. Nor do we get a good price for our crops — coffee, maize and beans — and we need a proper road.'

He and a few other village men were members of the Zapatista militia, armed and trained by the rebels after their uprising on 1 January last year. When the Mexican army began its counter-offensive eight weeks ago, he buried his balaclava and uniform in case the troops came to the village. But, without a road for the armoured cars, the soldiers had approached only on foot and then had not entered.

The militiaman agreed to a television interview if he could be anonymous. He donned a pair of dark glasses, another villager supplied a cap and the cameraman lent him a scarf to cover his nose and mouth. Light was provided by torches and five candles in empty Fanta cans. The question was whether the armed struggle would bring the people what they wanted. 'Almost nothing has changed up until now, we're suffering more than ever,' he said. 'It's just that we're organised and we're the Zapatista army.'

Being organised is a change and that is why the government has sent its troops to deal with a group of guerrillas so poorly armed they often parade with wooden rifles.

The Zapatistas inspired a social movement, and not only have indigenous people invaded landholdings all over the state of Chiapas, they have also gained the support of many other Mexicans. They present themselves as the heirs to the Mexican Revolution — a symbolic legitimacy that appeals to Mexicans' discontent with corrupt government and economic collapse.

The Zapatista leader, the mysterious Subcomandante Marcos, is hiding in the jungle. He writes to the Mexican people through communiques to the newspapers sent, some say, by the Internet. Last month, he quoted a Shakespeare sonnet in its entirety and wrote a satirical dialogue with a jungle beetle called Durito, who provided sharp and witty criticism of the government's shaky economic policy and membership of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Unable to catch the 'Sub', as he is known, the government is calling once again for negotiations while the army has concentrated its force on indigenous villages, destroying tools and household goods. The aim, it seems, is not to kill people but to prevent them from surviving as subsistence farmers. The army is handing out food, creating dependency.

One Zapatista sympathiser told us the army had started to do what the people wanted most — extend the road. The soldiers brought their bulldozers and grading equipment. Then they took it away again. 'They saw in the newspapers that we had complained about them to reporters, so they said: tell the journalists and human rights workers to build your road,' he recounted.

The government's month-long amnesty for the Zapatistas ends tomorrow but the battle for hearts and minds will no doubt be pursued with new vigour.

Not all of the unprecedented $50 billion lifeboat put out by international finance-capital to try to rescue something from their collapsed Mexican economic and political investments, seems to be able to put the Humpty Dumpty of Mexico's class hierarchy back together again. People no longer seem to trust the imperialist racket.

And if and when US imperialist manipulation manages to hold the line for the 'New World Order' in Mexico and Russia, - then there will be only another 150 countries or so to go, many of them far far bigger than Russia or Mexico, and with far far bigger problems.

In Brazil, for example, the class struggle has already taken on forms of a weird fullscale civil war even before hostilities have even started, unspeakable horrors committed daily in the great Latin American hope of the 'free world' which the bourgeois media report on quite casually:

Suzano, an industrial town outside São Paolo, the sound of gunshots is not unusual. Violence is rife in the area and even the recent murder of three teenage boys by a "death squad" was seen as part of daily life.

Five "street children" had been talking on a street corner outside a disused warehouse shortly after midnight when six men, claiming to be policemen, approached them, pointing their revolvers. When the boys started running the gunmen fired, killing one instantly before catching two others and shooting them. Only two of the six men named by the survivors in Suzano have been arrested. 

They belong to one of many "death squads" or justiceiros, made up mainly of off-duty policemen or former officers working as hired killers for businessmen who believe the sight of poor children and petty thieves is not good for trade.

Official figures show that at least 7,500 people were shot dead in the streets of São Paolo. Recife and Rio in the past year. At least 600 were street children.

Such an existence, with more than half the world waiting for 'something to turn up', cannot continue for much longer, especially now that international economic conditions are deteriorating again. It is a farcical life with a now well tried and tested remedy, - communist revolution. Build Leninism. JH

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

Stagnation

THE INFLUENCE wielded by Washington in the United Nations Human Rights Commission (HRC) has markedly diminished again this year, with regard to the traditional points of conflict between the United States and Cuba and their interpretation by the rest of the 53 countries that make up this UN body.

In view of the results of voting on a number of resolutions presented by Havana and Washington during the fifth session of the HRC this March, and according to the opinions of numerous Cuban and foreign officials and specialists, the United States is increasingly losing its clout in this agency, despite the fact that it continues to exert tremendous pressure on other countries in order to influence their votes.

Cuba succeeded in achieving a majority vote in favor on two significant resolutions. One of them condemns the use of "unilateral coercive measures adopted by economic powers in order to exert political pressure on developing nations" (known in Cuba as the blockade). The other resolution addresses freedom of travel, given that the United States currently prohibits its citizens from traveling to Cuba.

In this regard, a high official from the Cuban Foreign Ministry (MINREX) told Granma International that the latest session of the HRC provided ample evidence of the "regressive stagnation" of the U.S. government-sponsored anti-Cuban offensive.

The MINREX official commented on Washington's powerlessness at the recent meeting, "not being able to prevent, for instance, the March 8 vote on a Cuban-sponsored draft resolution reaffirming the universally recognized principles of freedom to travel and family reunification, both of which are denied to the Cuban émigré community in the United States; the results of the voting were 27 in favor,  nine against and 17 abstentions.

"All of the Latin American countries voted in favor of the resolution," Caballero emphasized, "with the exception of the Dominican Republic, which abstained. With regard to Africa, of the 15 countries in the Commission, 11 voted in favor, while two abstained."

With regard to two other resolutions presented during the same session, however, the United States managed to get a majority of member nations to vote on its side. One of these was a U.S.-sponsored resolution criticizing Cuba for alleged human rights violations, which was passed. The other was a Cuban draft resolution addressing the violation of the rights of ethnic minorities in the United States, which was voted down.

Taken as a whole, nevertheless, the votes on the four resolutions reflected a clear tendency toward a decrease in voting favorable to the United States, in comparison with recent years.

He explained that the United States resorted to its traditional "policy of pressure and blackmail" to prevent the approval of the Cuban draft resolution condemning the mistreatment of racial minorities in the United States, "a situation that was amply criticized in the report prepared by the special rapporteur appointed to look into this matter."

International news agencies reported that Glele Ahanhanzo, the special rapporteur appointed to study the current situation regarding racial discrimination, intolerance and xenophobia, denounced the fact that the majority of blacks in the United States are condemned to lives of poverty, disease, illiteracy, drugs and crime.

Emilio Caballero, the ministry's director of Multilateral Affairs, pointed out that this year, as in 1994, the majority of the commission's member nations decided not to support the anti-Cuban rights proposition, "a trend that continues to gather strength," he emphasized.

In speaking of "the majority”, the Cuban official explained that he was referring to the official representatives "of the 31 countries that simply chose not to vote against Cuba: of the 53 member nations, 22 delegations voted in favor of the proposition condemning Cuba, while 23 abstained and eight voted against it.”

Caballero noted that there is a growing trend among the majority of nations to either oppose or disassociate themselves from Washington. "In 1993, there were 27 countries that voted in favor of the U.S. resolution, in 1994 there were 24, and this year there were 22, which demonstrates that the United States has now lost two more votes, and a total of five over the last three years."

Other Cuban high officials have recently voiced criticism of the resolution addressing purported human rights abuses in Cuba. The Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, José Pérez Novoa, denounced the manner in which the United States wields its influence to win votes.

He emphasized that Cuba has been clear, precise and thorough in condemning the United States' immoral exertion of pressure as a means of achieving its aspirations since 1991. •

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. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications, PO BOX 50, London SW17 9NL]]
No.115.Thursday 6th April 1995

It is all of ruling class leadership which is put in question by the non-stop drain in government confidence, not just Major's twilight days

The collapse of bourgeois news-management seen in the shambles over the pulled Major interview registers a new low in class confidence.

It is dangerous enough in the first place for Tory loudmouths to be crapping all over the hallowed notions of BBC 'impartiality' which crucially help stiffen the 'democratic' bourgeois authority of the state.

It is doubly dangerous now for Birt's gutless BBC to be caught out bending its own 'impartial' rules in a presumed attempt to mend bridges with the Tories, and then to fall foul of the 'separation of powers' fiction, getting tripped up by capitalism's own 'independent' judiciary.

This ends up making everybody looking stupid, not least the self-important petit-bourgeois litigants. Because this is not about 'preserving the impartiality of the BBC' as the opposition parties claim (where were the 'interdicts' all the time Irish nationalism was gagged?) or about the 'freedom of BBC professionalism to make its own judgement of impartiality' as the BBC claims. It is about the failure in leadership confidence of the entire ruling class, reflected not only in its failure to keep consistent control of news-management through the BBC/ITV lie-machine and bourgeois press, but in every aspect of its financial, legislative and parliamentary activity. After a week of this farce, the BBC, their ' more-impartial-than-thou' commercial rivals, the judiciary, the executive and every backstabbing Westminster gangster without exception ALL end up looking shiftier than ever.

The same is true of the ritual humiliation of Howard and Bottomley. Far from proving that 'Westminster democracy really works' or that 'the judiciary really is beyond politics', this spectacle of weakness, paralysis and internecine war within the ruling class is incalculably damaging, not just to Major's sinking government, but to ruling class prestige right across the board, from Howard's pathetic 'boot camp' fantasies to Blunkett's 'get tough on teachers' demagogy.

It is bourgeois democratic life in its entirety which is now pervaded by an air of paralysis and unreality, with the theatrical mock-chastisement of the spivs and whipless wonders on the Tory benches now being mimicked on Labour's side by the equally theatrical dismissal of shadow foreign minister Clwyd (for daring to extend her 'left' posturing to the touchy question of the 'free world's long-time ally Turkey butchering the Kurds in the West's own designated Iraqi 'safe area').

In all the mutual recriminations, theatrical fallings-out and reconciliations, joke 'suspensions' for the cash-for-questions spivs, saber-rattling legislative programmes, and renewed fumbled efforts to try bribing back votes by a half-promised tax-cutting spree just as the latest rolling Increases are biting,-what stands out most obviously is the refusal of ALL parties to address the real question of how British monopoly capitalism proposes to try and survive the coming onslaught on its world market positions unleashed by the world crisis of Imperialism.

What nobody at Westminster would dream of raising publicly, -neither 'Europhobes' nor 'Europhiles', Blairites nor 'left' posturers, - but what is keeping them all on tenterhooks all the same, - is how exactly British monopoly fortunes are to be protected as renewed worldwide 'overproduction' forces every major imperialist player to fight for the right of its own capital to dominate the world market at the expense of the 'surplus' capital and productive capacity of all rivals.

Nobody in positions of leadership in bourgeois political life yet dares risk a straight answer to the question: What will happen when British imperialism, - long past its imperial heyday, stripped of its productive capacity, the international credibility of the City of London tottering, Ireland on the way to reunification, the pound on its back, and the windfall good fortune of ending on the winning side of both world wars now visibly wilting along with the Atlantic 'special relationship',- has to expose its now-vulnerable monopoly positions to the coming trade, currency and share-crash firestorms?

So far, the ruling class cannot even make up its mind whether it wants to join France this time in capitulating to German imperialism in advance, or get back on the phone to Clinton to beg an extension on a humiliatingly modified 'special relationship', or actually take its own pathetic 'little England' propaganda seriously enough to stake everything on a doomed 'independent' throw (with Canada's turbot and the Windward Islands' bananas in support, maybe?).

So meanwhile, these undecided questions about British monopoly capitalist survival only get expressed in a lot of frenetic milling-about in secondary and largely unreal battles between 'philes' and 'phobes', pro- and anti-Clause Four, and a lot of empty hot air about 'cleaning up corruption', 'law and order' and 'duties and responsibilities' from all parties, with nothing getting resolved, only the atmosphere getting progressively more poisonous.

Again, behind all the flannel about how much or how little 'private' or 'state' involvement is 'appropriate' for different sectors of the economy, for example, lies this same huge unanswered question about what survival plans British monopoly capitalism proposes to make in the crisis ahead.

The Tory project of pretending to invent a 'property-owning democracy' on the back of a 'feel good' phony boom, in which a major plank was the sale of the profitable bits of the nationalized industries (nursemaided by nationalization in the first place when direct private ownership could not turn a sufficient profit, and cynically presented to workers by Labour as the reward for keeping class struggle hobbled by reformist perspectives) has come hopelessly unstuck, with even the normally tame Tory press backing off from the job of trying to make the pit of greed and cynicism now opening up under the whole privatization game smell like roses.

The smell cannot be hidden now, because the whole exercise is failing - and not crucially because of any particular technical problems associated with this or that mix of 'public' and 'private', but because of a radical failure in confidence of the entire geriatric British imperialist bourgeoisie and all of its hangers-on.

And because the personality cult around Blair is just another expression of that collapse of confidence, not any kind of alternative to it, - the shadow-boxing over the joke 'socialist' Clause Four (neurotically reburying the ghost of collectivism) has only succeeded in demonstrating that the Blair/Prescott leadership is just as rudderless as the one it is supposed to be challenging, cynically relying on 'neutral' accountancy arguments to justify whatever mix of 'public' and 'private' is deemed 'appropriate' this particular week and leaving it to the crippled Tory privatizers to try and set the pace.

Italy is the last place where public opinion was for a time encouraged to look to stainless magistrates and 'new' politics to  'clean up government' and cut a way through the slump-crisis. With the 'new' politics revealed as the old fascism grafted onto the dying boomtime glitzy consumerist dream, the judiciary bogged down in the mire, and the slump-crisis driving proletarian revolt ever more on to its mettle, the notion that here in Britain some alliance of an ever more rightwing 'New Labour' and a muscle-flexing judiciary will offer any answers to imperialist crisis is going to be a hard one to make stick for long with public opinion.

The phony 'debate' meandering on in Britain around the rights and wrongs of privatization should also be held up to the light of current Italian experience, as detailed in this revealing bourgeois commentary:

THE question Italian politicians and their cronies running state firms used to ask about privatisation was whether to do it. Their reply was generally No. Then, between 1992 and 1993 tangentopoli swept those politicians out of power and into jail, along with many of their state-industrialist friends.

Meanwhile, new managers at those same firms were busy adding up just how many billions of lire their predecessors had dished out to bribe the political parties. A ballooning state deficit and EU competition rules ended the easy days of state handouts. These days, when the privatisation question is asked, the answer is Yes.

Over the past two years more than 10 trillion lire (£3.8 billion) has been raised through the privatisation programme, which has trundled jerkily on—politics permitting. In 1993 it accelerated under Carlo Ciampi's government, then drifted under Silvio Berlusconi, whose allies in right wing Alleanza Nazionale seemed more interested in stuffing state firms with their appointees than in selling them off.

Under the present prime minister, Lamberto Dini, it has built up steam again.

Stet is controlled by IRI, Italy's sprawling state industrial holding company and, after the sale of its two big banks last year, it is the last jewel remaining in IRI's lacklustre crown.

IRI, which is in hock to the banks for over 70 trillion lire — not far off lreland's annual GNP — can probably hope to pocket 12.5-15 trillion lire from selling its 61 per cent stake.

Meanwhile, the government's debt swallows much of the nation's savings. That means the banks — recently permitted to invest long-term in industrial shares and still mostly state-owned — will have an important role in all the privatisations.

To prevent hostile takeovers and to control Stet managers, the government plans to create a "hard core" of strategic shareholders willing to pay extra for a voice in the boardroom. It is adopting the same approach for ENI and ENEL.

"The problem is finding Italian banks, companies and institutions willing to pay extra to enter these companies," says a Milan analyst. So why not sell them to the market, as was done with, say, BT and was originally planned for Stet? "I don't think anyone wants to wake up one day and find AT&T sitting in Stet's boardroom," he says.

For the international banks, selling Stet offers rich pickings. Some 26 banks have taken part in the costly beauty contest for the job of global co-ordinator, hoping to work alongside Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank which is advising IRI on the sale. The job has not yet been awarded but for the hopeful bankers it may already be too late, thanks to Mediobanca, the powerful and secretive Milan merchant bank, whose shareholders include Fiat, Pirelli and the commercial banks once owned by IRI.

A Mediobanca-led consortium has offered to take IRI's packet of Stet shares off its hands and look after the placing itself, at its own risk. This includes deciding who will be in the hard core of shareholders, but mentions no price. 

"The banks will look for the hard core shareholders and then get out. It is purely a merchant banking operation," promises Lucio Rondelli, president of Credito Italiano, a consortium member. Market sources say that several large US pension funds are threatening to dump their entire Italian portfolios if the Mediobanca deal goes ahead. 

"It's a totally non-market proposal. You can't change the rules of the game once it's started," one Milan analyst said.

The observation about Italian fascism's continued attachment to corporate statism, (according to this report actually resisting under Berlusconi some of the privatization plans embarked on earlier and now pushed on with by the bankers' man, Dini), usefully nails the lie about capitalist nationalization being a 'gain for the working class won by reformism', exposing the crass stupidity of trying to make the class struggle against capitalism hinge on calls to 'defend OUR pits/NHS/railways' etc. (John Redwood's late and sudden conversion to the defence of the Welsh health service as a useful cover for his rabid rightwing demagogy is instructive in this context.)

And what is to be made of a 'privatization' exercise which forces the state-holding company to disgorge the telecommunications industry, then fixes things so that a consortium of Italian banks (with close links to both the state and to the Flat, Pirelli etc. bourgeoisie) can have a go at rescuing the national monopoly from foreign acquisition? And with the bizarre added twist that two of the banks ganging up to 'privatize' Stet have themselves only just been 'privatized' from the very state-holding company which is selling Stet!

What emerges most clearly from this incestuous tangle is, first, that the process of concentration of capital and production continues relentlessly, regardless of what 'private' or 'public' label gets hung round monopoly's neck. (The latent huge Japanese investment-banking merger made this clearer than ever, where one of the partners was Mitsubishi, bank and corporation rolled into one.) Second, what is putting the pressure on this forced cannibalization of capital and capacity at home is the international crisis of imperialism, obliging the Italian bourgeoisie to get ready for bruising monopoly confrontations ahead on the world market.

And if the Italian bourgeoisie is already having nightmares about 'waking up one day and finding AT&T sitting in Stet's boardroom', what kind of sleep is the decadent British ruling class enjoying?

It is not feeble rearguard campaigns around the 'defence of Clause Four' or 'recommitting Labour to the policy of nationalization' which are required now, but the serious fight for proletarian dictatorship science. That alone can lead the working class to start making conscious revolutionary advance out of imperialism's setbacks.

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DH (Dominic H)