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 800 Tuesday May 2 1995                                                                   10p 

Despair and confusion grow as 'New World Order' plunges deeper into predictable warmongering chaos. Labour & 'lefts' sicker than ever.

Everyone is now beginning to notice, and mutter about with quiet anxiety, - what the Bulletin declared out loud, at length, and with full scientific coherence when the West started crowing triumphantly four years ago about the 'end of history'.

The self-liquidation of the Soviet Union, the ILWP explained, could only be understood as an aspect of the worsening imperialist-system crisis. No other explanation made sense.

As a result of the further collaborative deals with the revisionist bureaucracy in Moscow, the monopoly-capitalist bourgeoisie could only be freeing its hands for all-out inter-imperialist conflict between the so-called 'free-world allies'.

The domineering American ruling class could no longer keep up its privileged positions as Cold War leader of the 'free world' and at the same time fight off the prodigious, relentless and devastating trade-war offensive by German and Japanese imperialism.

The advantageous but costly leadership strains of the bogus 'crusade against the Evil Empire' either had to be toned down or abandoned if the withering competition from Germany and Japan in finance-capital, industry, science, technology, and eventually international political influence as well, was to be withstood.

The misleading 'world equilibrium' created by the phony 'Cold War balance between the superpowers' was swept aside by the very-real-life uneven development in imperialist world economic power, - the basic driving force of all historic development for more than a century, - just as all other post-1945 international fixtures are now to be swept aside.

This meant that universal warmongering would from then on be the only basic international agenda, as the Bulletin explained in detail, and as events have subsequently proved.

There need be no real puzzlement. The basic laws of cut-throat competitive capitalist boom and slump have never changed, and they alone explain the entire pattern of all modem history for the last 100 years and more, proceeding from the obvious premise that 'free-market' monopoly production can never contemplate trade war other than by dreaming one day of supplying the whole planet with its products, at the expense of defeated rivals.

Nor is it just a question of greed or chauvinist domination decried by 'Thought For Today' preachers surprised by new wars everywhere. The need for market supremacy is often essential, - otherwise up-to-date production itself cannot continue. The investment needs of modern aircraft production, for example, are now so vast that only two or three really giant monopolies are going to survive. Countries which do not make it into the top three, or do not get a share in such action, will no longer be involved in major aircraft production, - just as happened to indigenous British car production some years ago, and is now threatened in shipbuilding, as well as aircraft and many other complex technologies.

And as the world-dominating 'free-market' competition has hotted up towards the real bloodletting level, and the phony 'equilibrium' of the Cold War period has been dispensed with, so has the bitter viciousness of nationalist rivalry begun to soar all over the 'free world' in step with the culture—setting mood of the inter-imperialist trade war.

Why would there not be more than 40 civil wars raging throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, much bemoaned by 'Thought for Today', when the Great Powers have been steadily degenerating towards their current savage bout of preliminary skirmishing, as recorded by the gloom laden bourgeois press itself:

WASHINGTON — The extent of economic policy differences between the United States and Germany has been exposed this week at the annual spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund here

Resentment against Bonn is growing in Washington because the U.S. government has been on the receiving end of unusually strong and public criticism of its economic policies from both Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Hans Tietmeyer, president of the Bundesbank.

Washington's frustration with Germany was highlighted midway through the IMF meetings this week when Lawrence Summers, the U.S. Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, was quoted in the German press accusing Bonn officials of being obstructionist.

The German press report appeared Wednesday, just as top finance officials from the Group of Seven industrialized countries were making a determined effort to put widely reported recent conflicts behind them and to focus instead on trying to talk up the flagging dollar.

Contributing to the U.S.-German tension, Jeffrey E Garten, the U.S. undersecretary of commerce for international trade, has been taking an aggressive stance toward Germany in a trip to Europe this week.

Mr. Garten's trip is aimed in part at lobbying German officials on behalf of General Electric Co., which is trying to break into the German electricity generating equipment market. "We're going to be turning up the heat," Mr. Garten said in Brussels earlier this week, before heading for Bonn.

Although basic ties between Bonn and Washington, at least on politico-military issues, remain good, the main consequence of differences over economic policies is that they could further unnerve already jittery currency markets. It does neither government any good when two of the world's three most powerful economies are even perceived by financial markets to be at odds.

Mr.Kohl last week described U.S. policies as "not acceptable" in a remark that was probably aimed at a domestic German audience of industrialists whose exports are suffering from the strength of the Deutsche mark against the dollar.

Then, on Tuesday, Mr. Tietmeyer made his displeasure clear in a speech: here in which he called on Washington to forge "a credible policy" that addressed the U.S. budget and current account deficits, which have helped keep the dollar down.

On Thursday, Mr. Summers sought to play down a report in Handelsblatt, the German daily newspaper, which quoted him as complaining that German officials were naysayers whose criticism was frequently obstructionist rather than constructive.

Some elements of the U.S.-German clash are more stylistic than substantive. Other aspects hark back to a dispute that continued in 1993 and 1994, when the Bundesbank repeatedly rejected demands by Mr. Summers and other American officials that it cut interest rates in order to spur an economic recovery in Europe.

In recent days, other differences have become apparent. German officials have not disguised their anger at having been dragged into the recent $50 billion worldwide rescue package for Mexico, a problem they perceive as being mainly Washington's responsibility.

Among the more nettlesome economic issues that Mr. Tietmeyer spoke of this week was the controversial tax cut proposal coming from Republicans led by Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House of Representatives.

The Bundesbank chief made a special point of singling out this issue, saying that "important though plans to lower taxes may be, it is more essential to devise and apply at an early stage a convincing strategy to reduce budget deficits."

He added that a U.S. fiscal consolidation policy "would also be the most important starting point for durably overcoming the dollar's recent weakness in the foreign exchange markets."

American officials were somewhat irritated that Mr. Tietmeyer had plunged into the U.S. tax debate.

THE finance ministers from the Group of Seven richest industrial countries expressed their concern last night over the mounting dollar crisis but were reduced to apparent impotence by a split which sees the United States and Britain blocking calls for joint action to address a problem which threatens the world economic recovery.

Instead they agreed to sit the crisis out and expressed their hopes that there would be "an orderly reversal of the movements" which has sent the Japanese yen and the German mark soaring against the dollar and the pound. The inaction of the G7 is certain to be interpreted by the markets as a sign of weakness which could be punished by more erratic movements.

The communiqué, which was issued after a long and lively meeting of the G7 finance ministers and central bankers at Blair House, contained almost nothing to reassure the markets. 

Some G7 members had urged a greater degree of monetary and market co-operation, but had been overruled by the majority.

The G7 has been split by the Anglo-Saxon countries, led by the US and Britain, who want to let the market decide and others, such as the French and the Japanese, who want to see more co-ordination along the lines of the Plaza and Louvre accords of almost a decade ago.

The US treasury secretary, Robert Rubin — at the centre of the storm because of charges of benign neglect of the dollar — endorsed the Chancellor's hands-off attitude.

He gave no hints that the US was prepared to raise its interest rates to protect the dollar, following German and Japanese short-term rate cuts. "It would be counter-productive to talk tactics and strategy," Mr Rubin said. 

The failure of the Clinton administration to apply itself to the underlying budgetary issues has been seen by the International Monetary Fund and others as among the more telling reasons for the 20 per cent dollar decline against the Japanese yen this year. In what was interpreted as a warning to the US and other countries like Italy, running big budget deficits, the G7 committed itself to "strengthen their efforts in reducing internal and external balances and to continue to cooperate closely in the exchange markets."

Mr Clarke for his part criticised the markets for "overreacting" adding that the speed and volume of the capital flows out of the US dollar had surprised him. But he said there was "no sense of any powerlessness" and no consensus that countries should co-operate more closely in making interest rate moves.

According to British officials, Mr Clarke has no time for Japanese ideas of setting formal target rates for currencies, and is less than enthusiastic about coordinated interest rate moves.

The plunge in the dollar against the yen is seen by officials as a heavy blow to the Japanese recovery. It could also damage European recovery and impose increased borrowing costs on developing countries.

In part, the failure to agree was the culmination of a recent round of rancorous exchanges. The German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, in what The Times described as "a particularly aggressive outburst", accused President Clinton of not doing enough to reduce America's budget deficit. The Japanese joined in the attack, renewing an old alliance and hoping that nobody would notice the paralysis that prevents their government from taking any steps to reduce Japan's swollen trade surplus or get its economy moving again.

The Americans responded that the country's budget deficit, as a portion of gross domestic product (GDP), is lower than that of most other countries, and that the president will veto any major tax cuts that might reverse the trend of a declining deficit.

The French, meanwhile, wished a plague on the houses of all who support fluctuating exchange rates, and pressed to substitute fixed exchange rates for what French representatives call "the law of the jungle". And, as if the level of rancour were not already high enough, Michel Camdessus, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, stirred the pot with an extraordinary attempt to influence American domestic economic policy: he demanded that Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, raise interest rates to shore up the dollar.

And so the blame game goes on. Germany wants America to lower its budget deficit; America wants Japan to lower its trade barriers; the IMF wants Greenspan to raise interest rates; the Japanese want a stronger dollar; and the French want fixed exchange rates.

Out of this contentious chaos, one certainty emerges: no country is going to permit its G7 colleagues to pressure it to ignore domestic political considerations in determining its monetary and fiscal policies. Greenspan will continue to look at domestic employment, domestic prices, and the health of the domestic economy in setting monetary policy, and the president will continue to look to domestic political considerations in setting fiscal policy.

In the two global shocks to the world economy this year, Mexico and the dollar collapse (Barings was far more contained) the G7 has been bitterly divided. Over Mexico there was a diplomatic spat after the Americans overrode normal channels to put in place their rescue package. Now, even more seriously, when there has been a crying need for decisive action to deal with the dollar's demise, raw contempt has been shown for the process of co-operation and co-ordination.

Few G7 meetings have taken place amid such recriminations as yesterday's. Even the principal victims of the US currency collapse — Germany and Japan — found themselves incapable of moving in lockstep to deal with the problem. Moreover, matters are not helped when the secondary players in this game, like the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, throw their arms up in horror at the thought that any sand be put in the wheels of global capital flows, let alone there be any attempt to recreate the spirit of Plaza or the Louvre.

It is estimated that since the star of this year Japan has spent $24.7 billion in seeking to stem the yen rise; the US a paltry $3.6 billion (compare that to Mexico) and Germany $1.4 billion. If all or part of that, had come in behind interest rate changes and a Plaza-like statement, the markets may not have been so confident they could take on the authorities.

There was much talk at the G7 of confronting the budget deficits in the main industrial countries while the economies are strong enough to take it. No one wants deflationary fiscal policies which snuff out the global upturn. But there has been insufficient attention to the idea that structural deficits could be tackled now, leaving room eventually for the supply side tax changes, perhaps to encourage investment, which many governments — including our own — would like to deliver. That is useful ballast for what the G7 does. But nothing is more effective than an end to the policy divides and weak leadership that have cast gloom over an era in which everyone should be experiencing the benefits of an expanding trading system.

The question is given an international thrust by the increasingly outspoken sneers of America's former friends in Asia. Kishore Mahbubani, the top official in Singapore's foreign ministry, excited by the projection that East Asia's combined economies will within 10 years produce more than the US and Europe combined, is simply the most blunt.

"American society is breaking down and falling apart", he claims, citing over the past 30 years "a 560 per cent increase in violent crime, a 419 per cent increase in illegitimate births, a 300 per cent increase in children living in single-parent homes, and a drop of almost 80 points in Scholastic Aptitude Test scores".

The simple answer is that the alternative is not inviting. The anti-American jeremiads from Asia trumpet a revitalised Confucian culture which has just stunned us all with nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, and whose Chinese gulag has gone beyond Stalin to treat prisoners as a convenient organ bank for lucrative transplants.

The armed and angry white males of America are the psychopathic price to be paid for the furious energies of what remains the most consistently exciting and creative society on the planet. While the rest of us suffer collateral damage, it is a price paid mainly by Americans themselves. Perhaps after Oklahoma City, they might reconsider what it really costs them.

The foul racism of that last bourgeois press comment, - in the most 'liberal' of Fleet Street papers, - will undoubtedly keep 'Thought Tor Today's' pathetic moralising going all the way up to World War III as it itself merges into the general ruling-class warmongering ideology, and takes on its share of Jap-bashing, or whatever.

And where do the cretinous Labourites stand on such questions. Never mind wasting money on fatuous referendum questions to choose between one heap of dishonest manifesto/programme lies and a 'more modernised' version, equally hopeless and deceitful. What can such a ridiculous referendum mean other than that some ordinary people can still be gullible about some crapulous opportunist political leaders.

Why not chide the trade unions for not holding one man one vote ballots, mandatory on Labour Party policy, on such much more realistic questions as "Should MPs, already on £40,000 a year, be allowed to spend any of their time earning further huge directorship fees from big business, and be allowed to use the House of Commons facilities to further these private interests, or to further sell their services to ask questions in parliament on behalf of lobbying agencies and companies?" Or "At a time of hospital and school cuts, etc, should nearly £1 billion a year be given away to the Royal Family and its scores of dependants and hangers-on?". Or "Should the families of crooks like Maxwell who have looted hundreds of millions of pounds off the public, be allowed to live on in idle luxury?". Or "Should £12 million of public money have been given to the racist Winston Churchill and his disgusting relatives to get back state papers removed by their reactionary grandfather?"

But presumably Blair & Co will not be joining in the fascist anti-union witch-hunt for their failure to take ballots on these far more interesting questions than his 'new Clause 4' crap.

Certainly there will be no question of asking the working class, - one man one vote, - if the monopoly-imperialist system is remotely to blame for the endless capitalist arms race and the inter-imperialist wars this century which have followed bouts of savage anarchic trade-war and struggles for greater colonial influence over world markets like Middle East oil, etc, and whether such a cutthroat competitive system which always leaves the ruling class rich but condemns working-class people to the slump, the dole, and being cannon-fodder in wars, is really the only way for civilisation to think of organising itself? Cannot the TGWU and UNISON be hauled over the coals for not giving their whole membership a voice on these far more crucial matters than the hollow deceitful idiocy of Labour's new Clause 4, or its old one come to that.

Even less will there be any point in trying to get any sense out of the Labour Party, or the wretched fake-'left' swamp which surrounds the parliamentary anti-communist cretins, over specific issues of current international warmongering unleashed by the machinations of 'free market forces', such as the new turmoil vomiting up from the corpse of socialist Yugoslavia, torn into factionalising ethnic shreds by deliberate Western 'democratic' subversion and sabotage.

From that disgusting old fraud Michael Foot to the even more disgusting frauds around Vanessa Redgrave and the ghouls of the WRP, demented petty-bourgeois ignorance and dilettantism will currently be throbbing in delusions of 'deserved military triumphs' for the farcical notion of 'Bosnian democracy', meaning the appalling moslem-fundamentalist middle-class stooges of current Western imperialism (and past Turkish imperialism) trying to earn Western hand-outs around Sarajevo by playing up to the Serb-baiting which the 'free world' has resumed...(picking up where German imperialism left off under Hitler and the Nazis).

Nowhere will it get mentioned that once again, it is the Bosnian muslim middle class which has renewed the military aggression. Least of all will any comment be made by the 'left' swamp about the real fascist nature of their beloved 'Bosnian Federation' of supposedly democratically-minded Muslims and Croats ('all
being wrecked by those nasty Serbs'), - as quietly admitted by the bourgeois press itself:

None of his customers had much to add. In the Croatian half of this divided city, criminal gangs — bloated on war profits and extortion — make the rules, and most ordinary people have learnt to keep their mouths shut.

The story which eventually emerged was of a bar-room brawl which spiralled out of control. It is a tale full of clues about the future of Bosnia.

The cafe was said to have belonged to a Muslim, expelled or killed during the Croat ethnic cleansing of west Mostar in 1993.

The man who had an altercation with the staff was said to have claimed the bar as his own spoils of war, but he got the worst of the dispute and ended up in hospital. Two of his relatives appeared soon afterwards and raked the Vukowar with gunfire. The owner's men went after them and shot them dead. A few hours later, after closing time on Good Friday, someone drove by and fired a grenade through the window.

No one has been arrested, and, by all accounts, no one will be. The police are small beer beside the gangs who have grown from their ranks and from the Bosnian Croat forces (HVO). Most foreign observers believe the gangs have a decisive say in local rightwing politics. "This is Dodge City," said one aid worker. "All that's missing is the tumbleweed." None of this would matter very much if Mostar had not been intended as a model for the year-old Muslim-Croat federation.

The federation helped end the bloody 1993 Croat-Muslim conflict but it has achieved little else. During its conception in March 1994, there were hopes of cultivating a joint administration based on cantons. Those goals have been postponed in the face of the constant squabbles between Muslim and Croat politicians, but the greatest barrier has been the resistance of the Bosnian Croats of the Herzegovina region, who have so far shown no signs of relinquishing their dream of an ethnically pure state.

Early plans for organising mixed police patrols and a bus service running between east and west have been shelved. The patrols and buses will stick to separate sides of the city. There is only limited freedom of movement for women, children and pensioners across the confrontation line.

The gangs and local politicians have every reason to maintain the division. The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party uses its control over land routes into the federation to exact duty from all commercial traffic, which nets it an estimated £400,000 a day.

The gangs live off their control of black market supply routes into the east, and from hijacking the EU's fleet of cars.

"People who have power or money don't like to give them up,'' said Hans Koschnick, the former German mayor entrusted with running the city, with the help of 40 European civil servants and 150 policemen.

What worthy recruits to the international 'free market' of 'justice' and 'democracy'.

The brilliant Southwest Bulletin article this week further demonstrates how pathetically remote from the real world are these fake-'left' anti-communist circles. The way in which their philistine ignorance of basic Marxist-Leninist philosophy pollutes their opportunist mentality is well brought out, for example, by such epics as the 1995 perspectives of the CPGB (the 'Leninist' rump which captured the corpse of their old much-vaunted 'official' affiliate to the 'only world communist movement', etc (i.e. the one stifling under Stalinist revisionist ideology).)

Their crass misunderstanding of what is happening in the world springs from an inability to even remotely understand that it is imperialist crisis which is the chief motor of world history still.

Instead, the 'victory of capitalism' is taken at face value, springing from the 'defeat of bureaucratic socialism'.

And sticking on all this a headline label of "the world period of profound political reaction" fails even more thoroughly to even faintly grasp that it is a towering world imperialist crisis which is dominating all developments and directing them slowly but surely in the direction of an unavoidable explosion of new revolutionary understanding everywhere.

Every sign of this the CPGB read wrongly. They declare:

"Nevertheless, the counter-revolutions (in East Europe) were a world historic defeat for the international proletariat.

The period remains one where progressive politics in general are at a low ebb.

"The recent events in Ireland confirm this overall picture. While Sinn Féin has not been defeated militarily, the fact is that it has been forced to sue for peace on imperialism's terms."

That is what bourgeois propaganda would have the gullible believe, and it seems that a tiny proportion of the more reactionary gullibles do believe it. More healthy-minded workers worldwide, however, have grasped that it is British imperialism which has been humiliated by having to accept that its outrageous colonial outpost of non-existent 'Northern Ireland' cannot be propped up any longer, in spite of 25 years of the most savage counter-revolutionary dictatorship over the Occupied Zone and over Irishmen in Britain, including Army and RUC death squads; concentration camps (detention without trial); torture barracks; judicial frame-ups; endless midnight terror raids on Irish communities in the Zone; ceaseless vicious racist propaganda; several near-massacres like Bloody Sunday; the starvation to death of the Ten Hunger Strikers; the brutalising of the elderly, women, and children with rubber bullets; the Prevention of Terrorism Act tyranny; etc, etc.

For Sinn Féin and the IRA to have struggled and won against all that, forcing the ending for ever of the 'Northern Ireland' hated Partition nonsense, - is some 'defeat'!

In the same vein of hopeless defeatism, the petty-bourgeois CPGB liken Sinn Féin's 'capitulation' to another "negative resolution" in South Africa, i.e. another 'defeat'. Which planet are these people living on?

Just as British imperialism was inevitably on the slide for 25 years, losing its last colony because of losing its place in the world imperialist pecking order under steady economic and political decline, - so the South African white colonial dictatorship was always facing defeat from the armed revolutionary national liberation struggle, just like fading British, imperialism in Ireland, -  in spite of much comparable defeatism by petty-bourgeois fake-'lefts' and pseudo 'revolutionary' middle-class sects everywhere.

Of course these are not yet socialist revolutions in the OZ or South Africa, - they were never declared to be such; but such revolutionary defeats, arms in hand, for imperialism can nevertheless, properly understood, be just as powerful a stimulus to the general anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

But all that this middle-class CPGB posturing can see is 'negative resolution' everywhere, - because their subjective-idealist philosophy cannot even comprehend the notion of what epoch the world is now living in, - let alone get it right, – the epoch of terminal imperialist crisis.

These petty-bourgeois even ladle their doomed class misery all over the heroic Cuban Revolution, phenomenally holding out for the planned socialist civilisation of the future against demented US imperialist subversion and sabotage.

"Similarly the intense problems faced by bureaucratic socialism in Cuba indicate that the general tenor of the period remains one of defeat, disintegration, and decline of working-class politics," 

they moan on.

The essence of the fake-'left' is simply to get sucked into the prevalent bourgeois-ideological bog. Throughout the Cold War (and beyond), for example, the 'left' swamp (at first the Trots, anarchists and centrists, and then the Stalinist revisionists themselves as 'Eurocommunists') echoed the relentless anti-communist crusade of monstrous imperialist reaction but with some phony 'progressive' pretence added on of the 'neither Moscow nor Washington' variety, or "for the Soviet workers state but with a 'political revolution'", etc, - the agenda only set by international counter-revolution which meanwhile got on with butchering real anti-imperialist movements wholesale, from Indonesia to Guatemala, with impunity because of the paralysis spread by the 'left' swamp's own anti-communist poison.

These CPGBers, for example, then posturing as the 'Leninists' no less, did not fully join the rest of the 'left' swamp in falling for the CIA/Vatican depraved reactionary stunt called 'Solidarnosc', posing as 'rank-and-file socialism' but eventually revealing its true capitalist-restorationist/fascist colours under the reactionary little dictator Walesa, - but equally refused to back the Polish workers state and the Red Army as the only ultimate rebuff to Washington-financed-and-run counter-revolution. These bogus 'Leninists' have always squirmed over the fundamental Leninist understanding that proletarian dictatorship is the only true test of a serious Marxist approach to anti-imperialist struggle.

The latest trailing behind bourgeois ideology by these poseurs concerns Blair's 'New Labour' charlatanism, which one might have thought could hardly bamboozle a newborn infant.

They describe Blairism as "the revival of the Labour Party" and as producing "a viable alternative bourgeois party of government". Blair will probably send them a donation for such favourable publicity. More thoughtful workers will be more sceptical. Labourism was part of the successful imperialist epoch, its permanent shadow. With British imperialism at death's door, certain to have the international position of its class standing utterly destroyed in the coming maelstrom of warmongering trade-war crisis, - the position of its bogus 'parliamentary-democracy Opposition' is bound to be undermined too.

Far from "the revival of the Labour Party", Blairism surely represents a desperate petty-bourgeois dash towards the trivial froth of 'new politics' as the old imperialist two-party racket becomes thoroughly discredited. It is a contemporary twitch echoing Labour leader Mosley's turn to the 'New Movement' in the equally-troubled 1930s crisis for imperialism, but abandoning Old Labour far more comprehensively than did Mosleyism or Ramsay MacDonald's desertion to the National Government, - because now the game really is up totally for British imperialism, and not a trace of petty-bourgeois 'socialist' posturing (like Clause 4) is safe to be left in place any more.

Blairism might win an election or two, but the last thing it could become is a "viable alternative bourgeois party of government". British imperialism has no such future stable life remaining to it, - under any government. The next government, whatever it is, is going to be a government of even greater chaos and crisis than Major's present bedraggled crew, overwhelmed by the enormity of the catastrophe overtaking British imperialism at long last.

Perhaps the key to these 'communist' posturers amazingly taking Blairism at face value is their second 'dominating factor' of the domestic scene, described merely as "the palpable exhaustion of the Tory agenda", which does not resonate quite as much as describing the terminal inter-imperialist warmongering trade-war crisis (in which British imperialism will be slaughtered) as the nature of the epoch and its true dominating factor.

Another clue is the CPGB's revived Hobsbawmism that "the working class has disappeared as an independent political factor.....

"The fact that Labour will now dump even this sop to the proletariat (Clause 4) illustrates the extent to which our class has lost its independent presence".

It should be made clear that these middle-class pessimists are speaking for themselves.

What can be said of the working class is that it has been temporarily betrayed by the entire spectrum of crap petty-bourgeois leadership, - from the Labour Party to the Trots and the revisionists (like the WRP and the CPGB), all of whom are now in total confusion about the nature of the epoch, and the true revolutionary direction in which the whole crisis of the inter-imperialist trade-war system can now only be heading following the end-of-an-era self-liquidation by the Soviet revisionist bureaucracy after Reagan's all-the-way class-collaborating offer(to allow the American ruling class to get to grips in earnest with the truly lethal trade-war threat from revived German and Japanese imperialism, (taking over from the phony 'lethal' threat of the Moscow geriocracy.))

But under what philosophical chaos can it be said that "the working class has disappeared, as an independent political factor"? What, just because the trade unions are dead and there is no more Clause 4? Surely to any just faintly class-conscious 'communist' worker, such a reformist collapse would mean the precise opposite, - that with the ignominious collapse of Labourism's fake 'socialism', the working class could at last get the chance to flourish for the first time ever as a "truly independent" political factor, meaning no longer befuddled and held back by bogus 'left' reformist daydreams, always propped up by a variety of 'left' swamp confusion pretending to be anti-Labour but basically coat-tailing reformism's deception-link to the proletariat via fake-'leftism' (anti-communism) of all descriptions.

As almost a classic confirmation of how the fake-'left' merely tail-ends bourgeois ideas, the CPGB offers to help

"the left..make a break from Labour..by our organisation placing an emphasis on the electoral tactic in the current situation".

But one of the greatest gains from workers breaking from Labour, over Clause 4 or anything else, is surely the chance to break them from electoral cretinism once and for all. If there is one thing that the electoral tactic should not be used for, it is to make workers breaking from Labour feel comfortable again with the delusions of parliamentary democracy. There can only ever be one general purpose to any revolutionary party tactic and that is to turn as much of the working-class as possible as far as possible towards Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science on every occasion, and to which the notion of 'feeling at home with the electoral tactic' for ex-reformists who have 'seen the light', can hardly add a great deal.

Build real Leninism. JH

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 B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]    
No.118. Wednesday 26th April 1995

Let capitalism stand trial for its war crimes.

The murderous implosion of impotent reactionary wrath which the psyched up degeneracy of US imperialism inflicted on its own citizens in Oklahoma is only the most attention-grabbing expression of a much more general underlying phenomenon: the growing paralysis of imperialism in face of its deepening world crisis, and the self-destructive shallowness of all attempts so far to cover over that paralysis with a lot of rightwing posturing.

Days after imperialism's self-inflicted stupidity took the lives of 200 American citizens, several thousand Africans were being butchered in Rwanda with a fraction of the publicity, reflecting on a far huger scale the exact same crisis of world bourgeois leadership, full of impotent rage but unable to give a clear lead in any direction.

What loaded and pointed the guns which butchered men, women and children at Kibeho was the whole of imperialism's rapacious divide-and-rule colonial past, revisited on Rwanda's population with redoubled fury right now by the present acceleration of world imperialist crisis.

The traditional divide-and-rule cynicism (with which both German and French colonialism formerly exploited Rwanda directly) persists more virulently than ever now that all attempts at extending neocolonial control are themselves torn in different directions by the trade-war pattern of relations imposed by imperialist crisis.

Where once the French used Tutsi tribalism to dominate the Hutu majority (setting the scene for the anti-Tutsi pogroms which soured decolonization), France and Belgium subsequently protected their neocolonial exploitation by backing the Hutu tribalist faction around Habyarimana, keeping the tribalist pot boiling the better to safeguard their superprofits.

But as imperialist crisis turned up the heat and the pot boiled over again, with last spring's anti-Tutsi pogroms, world bourgeois leadership started to reveal just how paralysed and divided it has become.

Having let the pogroms take their course, France intervened to create unilaterally a supposed safe haven in the southwest for Hutus fleeing the vengeance of the triumphant minority Tutsi regime of the RPF. Whilst some sections of imperialism built up the RPF side of the civil war as the 'good guys' (with whom the 90% of the population who happened to be Hutu had better get 'reconciled', or else), the French 'safe haven' policy effectively contradicted this version.

In short, divisions within imperialism itself made the vigorous assertion of a single divide-and-rule strategy impossible. As in the Lebanon, Somalia and Liberia, imperialism lacks the unity of purpose and confidence to make its own writ run, only succeeding in preventing any of the forces on the ground locally from establishing any kind of stable order of their own.

The resulting mess has festered on for a year now, with no section of world imperialist leadership feeling rich, powerful or cocky enough to insist on its own control strategy as the one behind which the super-exploitation of this region of Africa must continue.

Meanwhile imperialism's leadership bankruptcy has transformed the whole region into an unproductive wasteland, punctuated by deserted villages, feeding stations, concentration camps and armed enclaves, with millions of rootless inhabitants pushed from pillar to post. In this cesspit of degenerating imperialist authority, charity empire-building and religious idealism swarm to fill the vacuum like maggots on a dead dog:

For UN workers, a posting in Rwanda, though arduous, has real compensations. Truck drivers employed on contract by the UN can make $12,000 a month tax free; 20 year-old UN human rights monitors sent into the field for the first time with little or no experience are on more than $7,000 a month. More senior UN personnel earn $20,000plus a month and everyone gets generous daily allowances and food and board thrown in.

"You work here a year and you're away", says a Swiss UN worker. "Hell, man, we've never had it so good. It's money in the bank", says Michael, an American mechanic employed on a fat contract to pull UN vehicles from the mud. 

"Aid is big, big money, now, worth billions of pounds a year. Every NGO worth its salt, any group wanting to get into emergency aid recognised that it had to be in Rwanda", says a UN spokesman. "More than 180 international organisations 'parachuted in' [as well as six UN agencies] at the height of the crisis. It was chaos in the beginning, madness."

Much of the aid is inappropriate and sometimes useless. German groups came with very sophisticated water and sanitary systems, but have now left and no one knows how they will be maintained.

As crisis turns to transition, development consultants flash in for three days to write plans for Rwanda's next 10 years. Expensive drugs, never seen before in equatorial Africa, are still liberally dispensed without any thought for the consequences.

Food is provided with no consideration about how long it takes to cook, leaving refugees with no option but to rape the land near the camps for fuelwood. "At the height of the crisis planeloads of doctors were being flown in on mercy missions for two-week rotas without a clue what was happening", says a worker for the MSF.

When one group of westerners confiscates machetes because they're seen as weapons, and another then hands them out as agricultural implements it's probably just incompetence. But when Rwandan children who know only a few words of English know how to say: "Biscuit, biscuit for silly little nigger" the level of cynicism is more apparent.

"My rent has gone up 400 per cent", says Appollinaire, a Zairean in Goma. "I can hardly pay for anything now. I am stopped in the street by the army who demand money.

The number of crimes has increased dramatically. Life is much worse now."

Françoise collects her humanitarian beans and grain courtesy of the International Red Cross and the UN World Food Programme and heads down "Oxfam Road". She scrambles a quarter of a mile through a sea of 30,000 tents to reach home in exile - a plastic-covered construction pitched on volcanic ground in Kibeho camp, 20 kilometres over the Rwandan border into Zaire. There she divides up what the world has given her today - not very much because UN rations have halved since the West ran out of money and a convoy of food trucks has just been hijacked near the border. The grain she will cook later, but she'll sell the beans in the camp's street market because she needs to buy wood to cook the rest of her food.

She'll call in on a western-run clinic on her way there, complaining of sleeplessness. Usually she's given some Swiss pills which she can sell to the "Pharmacie de l'Avenir", set up by a refugee businessman. If she passes one of the many church organisations in the camp she might get some 20-year-old American army biscuits or Japanese sardines; but she could buy them in the market, along with goodwill T-shirts and sweaters donated by the British, Chinese bicycles, American cuddly toys and Japanese shoes.

Françoise is destitute so she can't shop for the world's "kindness" today. She could go to another camp and pray for a miracle with US evangelist Pat Robertson's team of Operation Blessing missionaries. God — and Pat — may give her a bible, a blanket and some more pills if she prays hard enough. But Françoise's moral well-being could equally be looked after by the Moonies in Goma, the Adventists or orange-robed Buddhists.

If her children feel traumatised, she could pick and choose psychiatric help between western gurus who say they should relive their genocide experiences, and others who say they should be integrated back into society as fast as possible.

There are western educationalists, psychologists, Samaritans, counsellors and social workers in the camp, too. UN human rights monitors will defend her interests if she chooses to return home. No, she hasn't heard of the clowns who have come to give the refugees western laughter therapy. 

Now into this supposedly protected area (as 'safe', it turns out, as the other joke 'safe haven' of Kurdish northern Iraq, where the occupying Turkish military now butcher Kurds daily with impunity), the Western-backed RPF 'government' (tribally based on 10% of the population) has revealed its own civil war agenda, not detectably any different from that pursued by the Habyarimana clique.

The smart bourgeois cynicism about the charity antics reflects a widespread petit-bourgeois unease at the dithering inadequacy of bourgeois leadership, slipping easily into a resentful aggressive insistence that 'somebody better do something to sort out this mess'. Hence the same Guardian article which usefully documented all that philanthropic bullshit did so in the course of building a case for giving up on the whole 'humanitarian' defence of capitalism, opting instead for the brutalism of asking basically 'why bother feeding these savages anyway, they'll only go on killing each other?':

Question: should the West be feeding and providing for Françoise, employing her killer husband and feeding her children? And now that the refugees who fled to Burundi are fleeing again, what should the West's response be?

the clean, compassionate image is tarnished when aid targeted at the most destitute is also knowingly handed out to the killers. The figures are eloquent: the UN believes that more than $700 million of world money has been spent on the Hutu refugees — including the killers — and less than $300 million has gone to their victims, to securing justice or rehabilitating Rwanda.

Genocide has turned humanitarian aid on its head and the Rwanda relief effort threatens to become an identity crisis for western aid, and to change the way we "give". What was called the "mother of relief efforts" last June, is increasingly seen — but is seldom expressed — by charities, the UN itself and individuals as a three-ring circus of financial self-interest, political abuse and incompetence.

The first accusation, levelled mainly by human rights workers and the Rwandan Government of Reconciliation, is that having failed to stop the Hutu extremists' pre-planned genocide of the minority Tutsi people and then having ignored it when it was happening under their noses, the world community and its agents — the charities and relief organisations — is now cynically providing for the guilty who fled to neighbouring countries.

"Because they build schools and hospitals etc, they say we should forget", said Rwandan vice-President and Minister for Defence, Major General Paul Kagame recently. "They [the international community] are hypocrites... they say if you do not do that, you will not have money — they brought planes and soldiers to evacuate their own people and left us people they saw being massacred".

The UN is embarrassed, with secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali having apologised: "We know we are feeding the killers, as well as the innocent", says UNHCR (UN High Commission for Refugees) administrator Nicky Dahrendorf based in Goma, Zaire, where more than a million people fled:

"Yes, the international effort has largely gone into providing for those who fled. It has kept alive a lot of people who would normally fall out of the 1951 Convention of the Rights of Refugees. Suddenly we wake up and ask 'who are we feeding'? There are people in these camps who should be of no concern to us".

A UN World Food Programme executive agrees, off the record: "The refugees have been much better provided for than their victims.

"They are often better off in the camps than the communities into which they come.

"We know that food goes astray, reaching even the former army, and that the camp leaders often the killers, hike up the camp numbers to get more. They abuse us daily. It's a fact of life". 

"What can we do?",' asks Jaap Vermeulen of Oxfam in Goma. "It used to be clear who we dealt with. Now it isn't. We have to deal with the killers and the innocents and the vulnerables".

"The international community and the NGOs have been employing killers wholesale", says Rakiya Omaar of Africa Rights. "In the panic to be seen to be providing, most looked the other way, asking no questions of those who queued up to be interpreters, cooks, drivers, laundrymen or guards. Even when lists of people implicated in the genocide were available, they turned away."

"It's so difficult. I wanted to work with boy scouts in the camps", says Marie de la Soudière, Unicef's senior technical adviser who employs western aid groups and charities to work with Rwandan children in the camps. "I thought they might make good role models for younger children, but I cannot employ them because people say they are implicated in the genocide. We might be handing children to the wolves." She tries to be careful, but admits she hasn't a clue who the good guys are.

"Some of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) align themselves, subtly, [with the killers]", she says. No one in the UN denies that world bodies have "probably" employed people implicated in the genocide.

Emergency aid has gone way beyond its nice little principles, says Rachel Kiddell-Monroe, former MSF (Holland) Rwandan country co-ordinator. "The political vacuum is now being filled by the NGOs. We see clearly the abuse of humanitarian aid by the international community. We look at the UN delaying things, using their vetoes and doing nothing about justice and human rights, and we have to start putting ourselves in a political context."

The agencies are having to grow up politically. If it was once considered positive to be politically naive in a crisis, now it isn't: where principles of humanitarian aid used to be impartiality, neutrality and to treat everyone equally, now the dangers of naivety are clear: "Should we be on both sides of the fence any more?" asks Kiddell-Monroe.

MSF is the only organisation to have partially withdrawn from the refugee camps on principle and argues with others that NGOs should be involved in broader political discussions without taking the decisions. 

Whether this vengeful search for someone to blame for imperialism's failure to lead modern society forwards now has a different taste in its mouth after witnessing how literally the "Rwandan Government of Reconciliation" took the advice about the Hutus not really deserving to be kept alive anymore remains to be seen:

TENS of thousands of Hutu refugees who survived the massacre and stampede that claimed at least 5,000 lives at Kibeho camp in southwestern Rwanda at the weekend were yesterday herded on a forced march by Tutsi soldiers responsible for the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children at the camp.

The United Nations deployed peacekeepers to protect the column as it tramped toward the city of Butare, after Tutsi residents stoned some refugees and beat them with sticks.

The killing came after the government moved to eradicate refugee camps on Rwandan soil, which shelter nearly 300,000 people including some of those responsible for last year's genocide of much of the Tutsi population.

In the most savage attack by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) since its victory over the extremist Hutu regime in July, troops rampaged through Kibeho, shooting, bayoneting and throwing grenades in an attempt to force about 100,000 people to abandon the area.

"There are people macheted on the inside of the camp, people stampeded, people who were shot and killed by other weapons — hand grenades and, we believe, mortars," said Major Peter Seaman of the Australian UN medical team.

A British soldier told aid workers he saw a woman throw her hands into the air to surrender. She was shot at point blank range.

Most people died in the stampede that followed the start of the shooting. Afterwards, crushed women and children, men with their faces blown off, and children ripped apart by grenades, lay among the trampled remains of their miserable belongings. By yesterday, only the dead, badly wounded and soldiers were left in the camp.

Bulldozers were digging mass graves for the 5,000 corpses of men, women and children the UN said it had already found. The UN special envoy to Rwanda, Shaharyar Khan, said he expected the official count to rise, and that "many more were buried without UN knowledge" by the RPA.

"The RPA's first move this morning was to get rid of the dead," said one UN officer. "Those corpses have been dumped in pit latrines, shallow graves, anywhere the RPA could find." One foreign soldier said some of those dumped in latrines were still alive at the time.

The killing in Kibeho began after soldiers surrounded the camp. Panicked refugees fled to a neighbouring hillside and then tried to break out of an RPA cordon. Soldiers opened fire indiscriminately into the crowd, setting off the stampede. The shooting went bn for more than an hour.

When some of the refugees fired back at the troops, the RPA intensified its attack by lobbing mortars into the crowd.

"We couldn't get to many of the wounded because of the gunfire." said Captain Carol Vaughan-Evans, a doctor with the Australian Medical Corps. "It's like a chicken shoot... About four soldiers run after one guy and then shoot him. It's horrible." 

After the killing and stampede subsided, corpses were piled three deep. Dead babies lay by the roadside. Living babies crawled along, after being deserted by their mothers. Soldiers plundered abandoned belongings.

But whether the latest twist in the civil war prompts a facile shift of blame to some other quarter, or whether it is decided to stick to the script provided by the sinister Médecins Sans Frontières (late of Afghan counter-revolution fame), the reactionary essence of such varieties of impotent petit-bourgeois rage will remain the same: always looking for something safe to kick, never daring challenge the imperialist cause.

This sick perverted logic by which the very system of warmongering monopoly capitalist exploitation which stokes up all the civil war anarchy in the first place is then quietly given the 'liberal' green light to go ahead and decide who in the aftermath of the subsequent mayhem is fit to be fed and sheltered, and who is fit only for death by starvation or 'war crime' verdict) perfectly expresses both the limitless pretensions of imperialism and all its hangers-on, and the despairing impotent rage which comes pouring out when those pretensions drive into the historical brick wall of renewed world crisis.

It is likewise sound 'left' and 'liberal' opinion which is cheering on the UN 'war tribunal' fraud, encouraging Goldstone to turn from his recent triumphs in South Africa (whitewashing apartheid's death squad thuggery) and get on with framing leading figures in the troublesome Serb resistance to imperialist diktat in the Balkans.

And it is the same circles who most aggressively demand that this or that section of Africa's civil war nastiness (breaking out on cue as imperialist crisis deepens) should be hauled up before some bourgeois-stooge 'war crimes' tribunal or other.

Since it is now admitted that the atomic bomb was developed with a view to sole possession by the USA, and not at all to thwart fascist nuclear advance, which intelligence revealed was not a real option for Germany at the time; and since it is further admitted that Japan was from the outset the intended target (because less technically equipped for effective revenge), not Germany; - it is now clear on the historical record that the holocausts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were among the worst war crimes ever perpetrated.

200 lives wiped out in Oklahoma as the US imperialist scorpion starts to sting itself to death are a tiny footnote to the thousands which US imperialism in its heyday put to atomic death SOLELY so that the world should know that it intended to stay undisputed top dog postwar by whatever means necessary. The message, both to Moscow and to all present and future imperialist rivals, was that US imperialism was going to stop at nothing to have its way in the domineering exploitation of the world's markets, resources and peoples.

What kept Patton and Bomber Harris from joining their fellow imperialist warmongers before the Nuremberg tribunal was the fact that the USA came out on top, - nothing else.

But Clinton chooses a very different moment in history to blurt that 'America was right to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and that he would have done the same himself'.

Whilst it has served the book of the liberal-left press (and Clinton himself) to point out the evident kinship between the militias' redneck thuggery and the reactionary opportunism of Gingrich in Congress and the 'shock jocks' on the airwaves, so far the reality looks less the hinted-at terrifyingly well-drilled, ideologically motivated fascist movement lurking behind a Gingrich-Dole 'fifth column', and much more like a lot of unfocused reactionary bluster all round, shuffling about in the leadership vacuum centre stage and half-scaring itself to death with the class-war implications of its own violent rhetoric (and worse).

Every fresh attempt to explain the ideology behind the self-proclaimed 'mad bombers' of the survivalist militias and their kindred spirits in civilian life only succeeds in demonstrating what very feeble historical content fascist aspirations have to work with in the USA.

Harking back to the early period of national democratic existence (when the pioneering energy of bourgeois individualism was successfully leading the anti-colonial republican fight against British monarchical oppression) only makes the depth of the subsequent imperialist degeneration the more comically obvious. The democratic right of citizens to bear arms against King George's outdated tyranny and in defence of the republican cause cannot sanely he compared with the right of fat men with beards and skinhead nerds to posture around the backwoods pretending to be Davy Crockett and Rambo all rolled into one.

In the contrast between heroic posture and degenerate reality can be seen the real problems US imperialism faces in getting fascist warmongering aggression firmly enough entrenched in public opinion to be able to weather even the first of the humiliating shocks and setbacks in store sooner or later.

Certainly, the Nazi mythologizing of the German national history via the Wagner cult and Norse gods looked stupid to many even at the time. But what made this crap just about palatable for a leading section of German public opinion was the germ of historical reality still lurking in the image of Germany as heroic underdog. The conclusion of part I of this century's world war was indeed achieved at the expense of Germany's monopoly-capitalist global aspirations, with its economy set on the reparations rack and the hated French bourgeoisie left in charge of putting on the screws.

The conditions which followed Germany's humiliation at the hands of its better-established imperialist rivals in the end made the only real historical options either communist revolution or fascist revolution. With the failure of the former, it became possible (with enough of a sense that the final sorting out with Anglo-Saxon imperialism was yet to come, and enough exploitable confusion about the essential capitalist class origin of all the cynical profiteering at the head of society) for the bourgeoisie to give the phony 'national socialist' Siegfrieds their chance.

By contrast, when it comes to the threat Japan and Germany once more pose to the status quo, it is hard to see how the bloated US colossus is going to be able to present itself as the hard-done-by party, 'with its world civilizing mission thwarted by the machinations of stronger players' etc as the underdog script requires. The USA has been rotting on top of world imperialist society for so long, keeping itself up there latterly by ever crasser blackmail of its economic rivals, that it cannot credibly blame anyone else for its problems.

With its bloated deficit-corrupted economy under permanent threat of annihilation by superior Japanese competition the minute its high-stakes currency-war strategy misfires, and with all Washington's world authority increasingly under challenge, it is harder and harder to explain to the mass of modern world society why exactly it should be that the REAL 'war criminals', the greedy warmongering imperialist parasites who block the road to all further modern social development, should be allowed forever to go on escaping revolutionary judgement.

It is criminal imperialist rule which needs hauling in front of the only 'war crimes tribunal' worth a light, proletarian revolution. And it is precisely that, communist revolution, for which imperialism is unwittingly recruiting support as it drives the modern world once more back in the direction of warmongering misery.

Whilst the media pick through the sick sad fantasies of the fascist 'militias' (in search of some substantial counter-revolutionary leadership with which to go on scaring workers off from communism), the best proof of imperialism's growing mood of impotent fascist despair is not skulking in backwoods Michigan but is on permanent obscene display, - there in Rwanda, Somalia and Algeria; in the Balkans and Kurdistan; in Haiti, Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua; in the sink of mafia depravity imposed by 'free market' forces on the former Soviet Union; and, not least, in the uncontrollable chaos and misery inflicted on America's own proletariat in Los Angeles, Washington, New York and Detroit.

Out of this abyss of misery, imperialist crisis is raising its own gravediggers. Fight for Leninism.

DH (Dominic Hull)