Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.) [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]                                     
No 0850 April 23rd 1996                                                                                                                                        10p 

EPSR Friends conference. June 1, Southwest region.

Zionist state-terror tyranny brings colossal own-goal damage to Western imperialism's rotten exploitation business throughout the Middle East, and brings communist revolution closer.

In examining the uncontrollably aggressive colonialist essence of the imperialist-Zionist domination of the Middle East, last week's Review in an aside warned Arab refugees not to place too much confidence in United Nations 'safe' areas.

Hours later, the most ferocious deliberate butchery was inflicted by Zionist-imperialist onslaught on Arab women and children sheltering at the UN Qana camp in Lebanon.

This genocidal murder, which flows automatically out of the essential colonial-conquest nature of the Zionist presence in the occupied territory of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria (and of Jordan and Egypt as well at an earlier stage of the domination), cannot help but further exacerbate imperialism's whole relations with the Middle East.

Such hegemony is inseparable from monopoly capitalist exploitation, and the armed revolt of factions in Lebanon against continued bullying Zionist occupation, and by Palestinian factions against the continuing (and permanent) usurpation of their homeland by the Zionist colonists (so-called 'Israel') is bound to spread relentlessly.

The conquerors cannot stop smiting to confirm their hold and domination. The conquered cannot cease relentlessly returning to armed revolt.

Either the Zionists will have to complete total genocide against the native populations. Or else the national-liberation struggle must be bound to triumph eventually. There can be no halfway house in such circumstances of irreconcilable contradiction.

And such has been the wretched experience of the entire Arab nation at the hands of imperialist domination that the anti-imperialist struggle will effortlessly spread from the immediately-occupied territories (Palestine, Lebanon, etc) to every other Arab nation, and to even more Muslim nations further afield, like Iran, where the humiliation of Western exploitation and control is rebelled against just as determinedly.

Zionism's sick belligerence first places the greatest strains on the shaky rule by the cowardly Arab bourgeois-nationalist and feudal regimes within the pro-imperialist camp (recipients of US imperialist hand-outs or stooges for Western arms domination to help keep their own masses in order).

There could be successful assassinations, coups and revolutions in these countries, such as Egypt, even before rebellions come to a head within such rotten regimes as Lebanon and the Palestinians' joke 'self-rule' areas.

The bellicose bankruptcy of Zionism's colonising destiny also obviously simultaneously causes enormous difficulties for US imperialism's overall control of developments in the entire region.

US imperialism is well versed in the general colonial strategy of dominating and intimidating subject peoples, and is the world's leading exponent of military terror to put down revolts.

But Middle Eastern policy has always required the use of much more subtle methods of control as well, - mainly bribery, and the propping up of degenerate reactionary regimes by allowing them sufficient nationalist posturing to just about keep revolution at bay from the continually frustrated masses.

And Washington's humiliation at being unable to control or justify the mad-dog actions of its Zionist mailed-fist henchmen sends shudders throughout the whole creaking edifice of imperialist market control of the Middle East.

The other serious damage caused by Zionism's punitive terror onslaught on poor defenceless Arab communities is to Western public opinion in general. The counter-revolutionary complacency of the average middle-class anti-communist mentality in the 'free world' suffers a severe shaking up when such blatant fascist imperialist terror as the Zionists have just inflicted goes unpunished or even uncriticised by the West.

The moulding of anti-imperialist public opinion is a very slow long process, but it is continuing. And every time it moves on a pace, there are uncomfortable repercussions to the existing bourgeois ruling-class security and confidence throughout the free-market system. When Western leadership itself is made to look criminally tarnished, then every regime in the 'free world' comes under worrying added pressure.

The capitalist press itself has reflected a lot of these problems in trying to cope with the mind-boggling horror of the Zionist atrocities, and the terrifying revolutionary implications of these insoluble contradictions.

A full record of the bourgeoisie's own admissions on these grave questions tells the best story.

Explaining the fanatical response by Egyptian fundamentalists to Western imperialism's Zionist state-terror was one immediate hard task which raised some nerve-wracking perspectives for the Mubarak regime:

There are of course specifically Egyptian reasons, quite unrelated to the Arab-Israeli conflict, why these fanatics do what they do. The reasons are rooted in poverty, unemployment, overpopulation, corruption, remoteness and authority. Theirs is at bottom a socio-economic protest, for which "political Islam" of the most extreme and bigoted kind furnishes the ideological justification.

The Egyptian government had of late been claiming that it had smashed its indigenous Islamist terror. And a booming tourist trade was proof of that.

But such successes were always liable to be shortlived so long as the basic causes of discontent remained. These have if anything grown worse, especially since December's corrupt general election and the incontrovertible evidence it furnished to the Islamist opposition, its non-violent moderate wing no less than its extreme one, that it could never find a voice through parliamentary process.

The Cairo massacre, on the road to the pyramids, is a mighty blow to the government's claims. Doubtless the four gunmen had specifically Egyptian reasons enough to justify it. But the timing cannot but give it a wider meaning. The "Zionists" - or just "the Jews" as they often call them - loom as large in the demonology of Egyptian Islamists as any others. Israel is the embodiment of Western or Judeo-Christian "oppression" implanted in the very heart of the Arab-Muslim world.

Whether or not Israeli, rather than Greek, tourists were the target, there is no question that in the minds of these fanatics the murder of a Western tourist is a fit response to what the Israelis are doing to fellow Muslims in Lebanon.

The atrocities are linked in the minds of Arabs everywhere. For them, what the Israelis have been doing in Lebanon is another example of the "state terrorism" by which Israel was built, and by which it has been sustained, at Palestinian and Arab expense, ever since.

Throughout the Arab world this morning there will be countless newspaper editorials lamenting the bad name these Muslims give to Islam but seeking to explain the logic behind their actions. They will say, basically, that Israeli fanaticism has given rise to another, the Islamists. That, though not representative of society as a whole, it reflects the deep anger and frustrations fermenting in it. That by its inaction and impotence, every Arab government is exacerbating the popular outrage, despair and humiliation. But that the greatest shame falls upon pro-Western governments, and above all those such as Egypt and Jordan, which have made peace with Israel.

In one way or another, they will echo a front-page editorial on Wednesday by Ibrahim Nafi', the editor of Cairo's al-Ahram. It has a prophetic ring. But what lends it special importance is the fact that al-Ahram is the voice of the Egyptian establishment, and Mr Nafi' could be called the voice of President Hosni Mubarak.

"It is impossible'', he said, "to under-estimate the scope of the anger sweeping the Arab masses, including our people here in Egypt, in reaction to Israel's continued killings and scorched-earth policy". These were the excesses of an Israel which did not expect to be held to account by the great powers, especially the United States. They were making it impossible for Arab governments to go on controlling the reaction of the Arab people, who are "bound to revolt against such humiliation".

WHEREAS "crises between governments can be manageable, social conflicts are more difficult to control, especially when they involve all layers of society... What Israel is doing now is returning the Arab-lsraeli conflict to a question of life or death where the Arab peoples are concerned... These operations may be vote-winners in national elections but they unveil the depth of Israeli hatred for everything Arab, which in turn breeds a desire for revenge among the Arabs, "if a car is burned in Israel, she finds it enough reason to burn a whole country and displace its population. That — a thousand teeth for one tooth — makes Israeli state terrorism into racism," writes Mr Nafi'.

How long, asks Mr Mubarak's most authoritative mouthpiece, "can Arab governments remain committed to peace when Israel itself chooses to blow up all its foundations?

"What Israel and the great powers who gave her the green light to engulf the people of Lebanon in this inferno need to know is this: the Israeli operations are stabbing peace to death and could destroy everything that has been accomplished on the path of peace."

And the painful repercussions from this rampant Zionist arrogance far from end there. It quickly emerged that the Western colonisers of Palestine were desperate to get off the hook of their own making as they became aware that their cocky aggressiveness had not cowed the Lebanese poor one bit, and they were facing the humiliation of having to call off the bloodbath with nothing achieved but another exhibition of mindless brutality and racist domineering.

Even worse, the US intervention to smooth ruffled feathers failed to calm Arab alarm either, and left Washington looking foolish as well:

THE crisis in the Middle East began to emerge yesterday as a diplomatic disaster for the United States, as well as a threat to the people of the region.

As Warren Christopher, the United States secretary of state, was forced to extend his peace shuttle, US officials conceded that the battle between Israel and Hizbullah guerrillas had badly embarrassed the government.

Mr Christopher's two meetings with President Hafez al-Assad of Syria yesterday were in bleak contrast to earlier US promises of a breakthrough by the weekend.

The exercise has dealt several blows to America's standing in the region, symbolised by Mr Assad's pointed decision to keep Mr Christopher waiting in Damascus on Saturday while he saw Yevgeny Primakov, the Russian foreign minister.

Unprepared for the international fury at the slaughter in Qana last week, the administration has suddenly had to adopt a more even-handed stance.

This will be manifest later this week, officials said, in a cooler welcome than usual to Shimon Peres, the Israeli prime minister, when he visits Washington.

Qana has also created an opening for France and Russia to pursue their own Middle East initiatives, each sending its foreign minister to the region.

The Lebanon crisis has derailed the administration's strategy for the region. Washington had been using the issue of terrorism to unite Israel and moderate Arab states against Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria.

But the civilian casualties in Lebanon have forced even moderate Arab leaders to condemn Israel and stand behind Hizbullah.

The anti-terrorism campaign has been suspended.

At the root of Washington's problem is its closeness to Israel. The administration's options in the Middle East are sharply constrained by its constant support for Tel Aviv — a political necessity because of the importance of American Jewry's 6 million votes.

US officials are particularly alarmed by Israeli polls which show Mr Peres's lead narrowing in next month's election. The administration is afraid that a victory by Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud party, would stall the peace process and rob Mr Clinton of an electoral boost in his own battle against Senator Bob Dole In November.

The signs are that President Assad intends to make Israel and the United States pay as dearly as possible for what he sees as jointly-planned aggression in Lebanon that has gone seriously wrong.

The Syrian press stepped up its anti-American propaganda yesterday, even as the US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, met Mr Assad for a second time on his shuttle mission between Damascus and Jerusalem.

"Washington is to blame for the bloodbath committed by its strategic ally in Lebanon," the Syrian Times said. "Those who fail to condemn the Israeli crime at Qana are not honest or serious in their peace efforts," added Tishreen, referring to the shelling of a refugee camp.

Israel must be punished, the press agreed.

One Beirut newspaper accused Mr Christopher of trying to achieve for Mr Peres politically what Israel had failed to achieve militarily. 

According to American officials, the US wants a written version of the understandings that ended the last big flare-up in July 1993.

But as the Syrians and the Lebanese see it this version actually amounts to a fundamental revision of the understandings.

Hizbullah would be barred from retaliating with Katyusha salvoes on northern Israel against Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians.

Even less acceptable to Hizbullah, it would be denied the right to "resist" enemy occupation with attacks against military targets in the Israeli-declared south Lebanese security zone.

Israel's offer in return for this virtual demobilisation of Hizbullah would be, as a Beirut newspaper put it, "some non-guaranteed promise to withdraw from Lebanon after nine months".

Furthermore, the fragility of a mere truce would create such a climate of uncertainty that the 400,000 refugees who have fled their towns and villages would be afraid to return.

Seen from here, Grapes of Wrath is a military, political, and moral failure.	

Israel greatly under-estimated the number of Katyusha missiles in Hizbullah's possession and its own ability to strike at Katyusha depots and disrupt supplies.

Israel's political failure lies in its mistaken assumption that the more pain it inflicted on Lebanon's civilians, economy, and post-war reconstruction, the more Lebanon and the Lebanese would turn, against Hizbullah and endorse its demand for an end to their resistance.

But on the whole, Lebanon has never been so at one with itself in adversity as it has since Grapes of Wrath began.

With its continuing salvos, Hizbullah is quenching a thirst for revenge among the campaign's main victims, the Shiites.

Among communities for which Islamic fundamentalism is normally anathema there is sympathy for the resistance. Last week Christian Beirut which in 1982 hosted the Israeli army, staged a rally in support. One Christian speaker urged Hizbullah to rename the movement the Lebanese Resistance.

To these Israeli failures was added last week the international public relations disaster of the shelling of the UN refugee camp at Qana.

It created a new and adverse moral balance of power to which the US could not but pay heed. Having given Israel the green light to break Hizbullah, the US reverted to urging "restraint".

The only way Israel can now hope to achieve Grapes of Wrath's aims is to escalate the campaign far beyond the point ever intended. Since its prime minister, Shimon Peres, has ruled out a ground offensive, there are only two ways it could do that.

One would be to inflict even greater pain on the Lebanese state and people. The other would be to turn on Syrian troops in Lebanon.

The effectiveness of the first course is doubtful and would stretch international relations even further. And despite its military superiority, Israel is clearly not yet ready to follow the second. That would risk an all-out showdown with Syria and wreak havoc on Pax Americana in the Middle East.

So, once again, US diplomacy is rushing to rescue Israel from the consequences of military action which US diplomacy at first encouraged. And, once again, Mr Assad looks like benefiting from something of which he was supposed to be a victim.

THERE was no way, said the Damascus press yesterday, that Syria would be a "gendarme" for Israel in its occupation of South Lebanon.

President Hafez al-Assad was undoubtedly a target of Israel's Grapes of Wrath campaign against his Hizbullah proteges. Judging by his state-controlled media, he believes he has turned the tables.

At the start of the campaign, Israel made it clear that it expected President Assad to ratify, and help enforce, its expected outcome — the neutralisation of Hizbullah.

Mr Assad is more than willing to ratify the outcome, provided it is he, more than they, who dictates what it will be.

Essentially, he wants a return to the US-brokered understandings that ended the last big flare-up in July 1993. That is what Hizbullah wants too, for it enshrines its right to resistance in the form of attacking Israeli soldiers in occupied Lebanon.

Even more dramatically, there must come a point when US imperialist interests must start to diverge radically from the knee-jerk fascist tyranny mindlessly imposed by Zionist colonialist mentality on every occasion when military violence might be the answer.

Sometimes, this will not be Washington's best solution to increasingly complex and difficult questions of control of the Middle East. What will happen then when the hired-gun mad-dog Zionist stooges of US imperialist policy refuse to be reined in? Unthinkable as it might seem, the first great blows against Zionist brutal supremacy in the Near East might be struck by US imperialism itself.

The shaking of Western public opinion is an extremely worrying trend:

DO the Israelis ever pause to wonder why places like Ain el-Hilweh camp, which they bombed this week, contain many Hizbullah supporters? I visited Ain el-Hilweh — and Bourj al-Berajneh and Shatila camps — in November. I met families squatting in tiny one-room homes in a dilapidated hospital building: more than 100 families, with five toilets, five cookers, and five sinks between them, fetching their water from a tap outside. I saw people living in bombed buildings with no external walls.

Lebanon's Palestinian refugees must be some of the world's most marginalised people. Most are effectively stateless; they have minimal access to employment; their housing conditions are appalling, and the dread of eviction ever-present. They also have an achingly powerful dream of the home where they, or their parents or grandparents, once lived. And they have been watching a peace process unfold south of the border which seem to ignore their plight.

Of course supporting Hizbullah seems attractive—50 years on, no one else seems to be offering them any hope of things ever changing. Bombing Ain el-Hilweh does not change anything either—it just increases hatred all round. 

ONCE again the shameful double standards of the West in its treatment of the two sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict have become all too transparent. If international law and standards of behaviour are perceived to have been broken by Arab or Muslim countries such as Libya, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, the full might of the western alliance and the UN is brought to bear on these countries. When, however, the Israelis behave in a barbaric and disproportionate manner, the United States blocks even a statement of censure in the UN Security Council. Is it any surprise, then, that the Americans and western governments are held in utter contempt throughout the Arab and Muslim world?

MICHAEL Portillo said on Monday, in support of Israel, that "every nation is entitled to security". Can he explain why Lebanon does not have that right? During the last 20 years, the number of people killed in Israel by attacks launched from Lebanon is less than 100. The number in Lebanon killed by Israeli military action over the same period is more than 20,000. Israeli troops continue to occupy hundreds of square kilometres of Lebanese territory, in violation of international law and specific UN resolutions. Lebanon occupies zero square kilometers of Israeli territory.

On any objective assessment, it is not Israel but Lebanon whose security is threatened. By its current massive and illegal bombardment, Israel is again holding the entire population and economy of Lebanon hostage for the actions of Hizbullah. This is not a legitimate response to terrorism — it is the practice of terrorism on a huge scale by the Israeli state.

And no wonder routine middle-class opinion is getting so rattled. The details of the Zionist outrage that even the imperialist press felt obliged to report are bone-chilling:

OLD men and women wept with grief and the young screamed with agony and rage as the children were brought in, two or three little bodies packed into each bag.

Red Cross workers carried in the big orange bags, put them on the hospital floor and unzipped them. They felt the pulse of each child to be sure they were dead, then zipped them up again.

"Oh, what a crime," one Red Cross worker said.

In the hallways and wards the wounded and bereaved shouted, waved their arms or writhed on the floor in grief amid a din of shrieking and weeping. The floors were slippery with blood.

On the floor of an operating theatre a young man lay dying, apparently forgotten, his shirt torn off.

Outside, in the streets of this ancient Lebanese city, crowds of women wailed as the dead, wounded and dying were brought in. Bloodied and shocked, they flooded into the Najem and two others Tyre hospitals.

"May God send a plague on you, Israel," a woman shouted in the crowded hallway, her face smeared with blood. "I want my brothers and my sister."

Mariam Haidar, aged 10, her face ripped by shrapnel, said she saw her sister die as Israeli shells exploded. "I looked at my sister and I saw blood coming out of her mouth, then the building started collapsing on us," she said.

Fadi Jaber, aged 21, wept as he told how the first Israeli shell slammed into the refugees crowded into the United Nations base, and the peacekeepers told them to go into shelters.

"Then a second shell hit us, followed by three more at one-minute intervals," he said. "I heard people scream Allahu Akbar [God is Great]. A woman fainted, so I reached over to check her head and her brains fell out into my hands.

"I saw a dead Unifil captain whose shoulder was blown off. His stomach was gutted open and blood was spilling from it," Mr Jaber sobbed.

Latifeh Roumiyyeh, aged 60, lay on a bed with her eyes bandaged, crying out the names of her children. "I don't know where my children and grandchildren are," she moaned. — Israeli aircraft added to their steadily lengthening list of civilian victims by killing a mother, seven children and a visiting relative in a "pinpoint" raid on a house in Nabatiyeh, and then by killing nearly 100 civilians who had taken refuge at a United Nations base.

The world will discover that only Bolshevik Revolution will tame imperialism's fascist world domination. Read Lenin. AC

From Rome to Moscow, it is capitalism's failings which are driving people back towards communism. The 'free world triumph' is the biggest joke in history.

Western imperialism is fearing a devastating propaganda blow this summer from the possible defeat of Yeltsin in the presidential election by Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party.

However weakly revisionist Zyuganov is, worse than Gorbachev in many ways, and however the West drums it in that his election in no way means a return to Bolshevism, the humiliation for all bourgeois ideology of this turn-round is going to be immense, with possibly incalculable consequences.

The Cold War anti-communist hysteria was the most uniquely desperate and dangerous gamble in the entire history of ideological conflict. The monopoly bourgeois leadership of the capitalist market forces right round the 'free world' virtually staked their survival on the devious stunt that "communism could never prevail in any country if there were democratic elections", - conveniently evading the open scientific stance of Marxism that the dictatorship of the proletariat must persist and alone can keep going throughout the long transition to communism wherever free-market forces and ideology continue to have a major influence on the planet, undermining and sabotaging socialism, – and equally neglecting to point out that the subversive might of bourgeois-imperialist propaganda, glitz, and corruption would never allow there to be truly 'free' elections anywhere. All would be systematically poisoned in the West's favour.

But now looms the greatest polemical humiliation of all time, - the exposure of the most basic equation of all about communism and 'free elections', despite its grotesque bias and unfairness, - as nothing but a giant hoax anyway, - a piece of vicious ideological tyranny which no one had any chance of refuting or resisting but which will now be reduced to the smelliest tatters everywhere.

After more than six years of 'freedom' including an explosion of market consumerism; freedom to travel the world; astonishing opportunities for enrichment and self-improvement; instant cultural abandon and licence for anything that's going; total 'freedom' of thought and information leading to an immediate religious revival and as much mystical self-indulgence as anyone could want; etc, etc, etc, plus lavish Western aid to artificially boost the new free-enterprise economy, - Russia is looking to vote the Communist Party back into power in the bourgeois world's own dominated and deliberately confused 'free' elections.

However Western propaganda tries to dress up this potential phenomenon to soften the blow, such an outcome will be a crushing indictment of the whole cause of the 'free world'. This is one of the world's great nations, renowned in every branch of world culture and science, and every field of human endeavour.

This is one of the most literate and educated populations on earth. And the 70 years of total murderous tyranny, poverty, humiliation, and restriction they allegedly suffered under communism have been seared into people's minds the world over for the same length of time by the non-stop anti-communist Western propaganda machinery.

So which is now going to emerge as the real 'regime of lies and fear', - communism or anti-communism?

So which is going to emerge as the real 'tyranny stifling all thought', - the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union, or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the 'free world'?

Even if the sustained tricks and stunts of Western imperialist interference do manage to prevent a communist presidential victory in the summer, much damage has already been done to bourgeois propaganda by the amazing come-back successes the Communist Party has already achieved, dominating large swathes of local government again with huge electoral majorities; reasserting a massive influence over the peasantry's desire to continue with many effects of socialist agriculture; having a similar attraction for many largescale industries and for such mass institutions as the army, the education system, and the cultural field generally; etc, and culminating in becoming the largest party in parliament at the last elections, challenging Yeltsin for power already.

And this by a party of confused revisionists who on some important world perspectives seem no smarter than the idiot Gorbachev turned out to be.

Western propaganda now has a huge problem of trying to account for all this dramatic turnaround while still putting people off communism but without falling back into the same crude old anti-communist propaganda which has now delivered the West such a debilitating blow.

The perfected anti-communism of the Guardian has had some goes at leading the way through this minefield.

The latest colour supplement effort attempts to gain credibility with a lot of useful detailed on-the-spot information about Zyuganov and the Communist Party which has hitherto been very hard to come by, but tries balancing this with stress on negative nationalist aspects of its political appeal, plus implications that whatever is attractive about the Communist Party now has little, of course, to do with communist pure ideals or any actual worth in socialism itself, naturally. Russia is turning the clock back out of cultural sentiment, the silly and unnecessary mishandling of the return of capitalism, plus the cynical continued opportunism of the Communist Party, supposedly, which is allegedly how it managed to survive before as well, etc, etc. And in case a CP-led Russia should start to do well again, hints are dropped in the piece that the old 'Stalinist-fascist' smears are being kept in reserve in case they should be needed again in one final attempt to revive the Cold War hysteria era.

This interesting bourgeois propaganda is worth putting on record and commenting on:

Russians seem likely to put a Communist back into the Kremlin this summer — and this time in a free vote. Since every specialist on Soviet affairs failed to predict the collapse of the Communist Party, it may not be surprising that they failed to predict its revival by popular demand five years later. It does not diminish the shock of the event itself.

Back in 1989 and 1990, when the Soviet empire began to unravel, Russians seemed to accept it with remarkable coolness. This was not the sour and bloody farewell acted out in Rhodesia, Algeria or Vietnam, more a soft shrug of the collective shoulders. Now it appears the pain went just as deep but took longer to gather. Anger and humiliation stalk many a Russian soul, while suspicion of the West is on the up. Couple that with a market reform process that has almost halved average wages since 1990, and you have a major reason for the Communist revival.

It would be easy to sneer at it as the nostalgia of the ignorant. Easy, but wrong. Analysis of the December parliamentary result shows that more people with the highest level of education voted for the Communists than for the pro-government party, Our Home Is Russia, or the Yabloko party of the reformist Grigory Yavlinsky. The Thatcherite advisers from the West, who took charge of the transition from Communism in the early Nineties forgot there already was a substantial middle class in Soviet times: the scientists, the teachers, the engineers, the actors, the nurses, most of whom have been marginalised by Russia's wild new capitalism, with their incomes slashed by the collapse of the state sector and their savings destroyed by inflation.

Nor did the Communists rely for their electoral success on benighted bastions of peasants. Their vote was evenly split between large towns, small towns and the countryside. As for income, the Communist total contained a slightly smaller section of the very poor and a slightly larger share of the very rich than the other two blocks.

Credit for this broad outreach must go in large part to Gennady Zyuganov.

Amazingly for a man who calls himself a Communist, he criticises the Bolsheviks for what he describes as their Western-inspired over-emphasis on materialism. In its place, he upholds a set of values that draw their inspiration from the spiritual legacy of a thousand years of Russian Orthodoxy, traditional Russian collectivism and pride in the perseverance of the Russian state. Stripped of "the Russophobia of the radical cosmopolitans and the temptation of world revolution" (Zyuganov's words), Communists can get back to their authentic Russian roots. In short, post-Communism is turning into pre-Communism.

Equally amazingly, Zyuganov has managed to project the new Communist Party as the political equivalent of a catacomb church. Purged of "traitors" like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, it claims to represent 90 per cent of the rank and file who were always the party's heart of oak and have now emerged in post-totalitarian conditions able to express their views at last. With half-a-million members, the Party is 10 times the size of any other. It is a formidable army of activists who are pounding the housing estates and knocking on neighbours' doors to get out and vote. By contrast, the wild nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who shot to prominence two years ago, has no grassroots organisation.

Even the Communists' severest critics concede that the Party's dumping of Marxism in favour of patriotism is touching a national chord.

Immediately, the old charge of 'privileged bureaucracy' is raised again to put off Western workers and potential communists, with misleading explanations that it was the existing middle-class ignored by the West which led the turn back towards communism, with more of the new 'very rich' rather than the 'very poor' voting for Zyuganov & Co.

Even more subtly, the impressive Communist Party mass membership are dismissed in the nicest possible way as all hypocrites who are only now accepting freedom of expression, having kept their mouths shut under the USSR when it might have been braver and more valuable to have spoken up for themselves then.

But immediately, it is obvious that the piece is intent on completely avoiding the really big conclusions to be drawn and analysed, in favour of these lesser snipes.

For while it is clever to sneer at the CP for allegedly adopting patriotism in place of Marxism, it neatly avoids the question of "but why turn to the Communist Party?", when there are far more authentic patriotic Russian parties in the field, with a much more up-to-date public image and publicity and celebrity support, and with no dark record of "70 years of Gulag Stalinist tyranny" to give people at least doubts about voting Communist again.

With a very nasty smear, one implied explanation for renewed CP popularity is slyly slipped in here, - the hint that Zyuganov flirts with fascist anti-semitism which always goes down well with the ignorant masses, it is disgracefully implied. Zyuganov may well be a bit backward on these questions, but the whole of the rest of the piece confirms again and again that it is the Communist Party's historical record that is being reinstated to popular acclaim. And it is the most disgusting lie that a single thing about the proud history of the Soviet workers state represented any flavour of racism or anti-semitism in any shape or form. Exactly the opposite. The USSR was a genuine multinational multi-cultural commonwealth with subsidised national theatres and film schools, etc, run in many of the minority ethnic and linguistic groups, some of which did not even possess a written language until Soviet times, etc; - and the USSR's international record of fabulously generous economic aid to every anti-imperialist country on earth, with literally millions of scholarships and training schemes inside the Soviet Union for foreign Third World guests, etc, - was every bit as exemplary. It will be centuries before racist backwardness disappears entirely from more advanced human rationality, but for a British modern bourgeois commentary to be sneering at the Soviet Communist record for racism of all things, is the most contemptible hypocrisy, typical of the Trotskyite mentality of the Guardian's 'left' cover.

Just how thin is this attempted put-down of the significance of the revived Communist Party on the grounds that it represents more backward nationalism than anything, is clear from the next section which tries every anti-communist avenue possible to get more dirt on Zyuganov, but only hears echoes of the good reputation of life in the USSR, even from the most reactionary quarters:

Of special concern were the campaigns by the Moonies and other Western sects to exploit the country's new freedom by mounting well-funded crusades on Russian television and in Russian sports stadia - a practice that Zyuganov has promised to curb. "These missionaries are obviously aiming to split Russia," Father Gogolev says. "We know how they work. We think there is an organising centre in the West which wants them to operate here."

Alexei Tikhonov, a 23-year-old from St Petersburg, is blunt: "No one outside Russia wants a strong Russia. The West is offering us money in exchange for our freedom." Sergei Matveyev was worried about Western values: "It is not good to educate people to be ambitious. Russians don't have programmes for their lives. They live. They connect with other people, though in some ways they are more idealistic. They like a big idea, and will follow someone who has it." In the last decades of Communist rule, after the earlier persecution, the Church hierarchy had an intimate relationship with Soviet power. Archives opened a few years ago revealed that several archbishops collaborated with the KGB. In the new post-totalitarian conditions, relations between a Communist government and the Orthodox church will be different. The old ambiguities, inherent in a powerful state and a subservient church, will give way to respectful cooperation -- and it is Communist attitudes that have shifted more than those of the Church. Zyuganov has made a major change in the Party rules. Atheism is out and believers are entitled to join the party.

Thirty miles from Kostroma, Karabanovo is as sad as any Russian village, a dwindling colony of pensioners.

The state farm putters on in name only, producing little. The one sign of vibrant life is the church, with its middle-aged priest, Georgi Edelstein, known to his flock simply as "Batyushka" (Little Father). With financial help from Canada and Norway, Batyushka is restoring the village church from its Soviet role as a fertiliser store. Next, he plans to re-open the village shop. "If the church can run the shop, and organise some sort of medical help, the village can survive," he says. "A church, a shop and a nurse, that's it. Otherwise, the village will go under.

"If the Communists win, it will be because of people's poverty. Which is more important, freedom or an empty stomach?" he adds. A young physicist from Moscow, who helps Batyushka on occasional Sundays, agrees. "Compared to the Seventies, people have less opportunities, fewer rights and a government which is unreliable," he says as we wait for the bus into town. "Besides, many ordinary Communists were good people with a certain moral code. People see that and respect it."

Next stop on my quest for the reasons behind the Communist revival was Iambov. Two years after the Bolshevik revolution, this region of fertile farmland, a third of the way from Moscow to the Caspian Sea, produced the biggest revolt of the Soviet period. Thousands of peasants took to the forests in protest at the forced requisitioning of grain. Short memories and changed circumstances have produced a new reality and, in the December elections, the Communists won over 40 per cent of the vote, one of their highest totals in Russia. Mayor Valery Koval, a Yeltsin appointee, who worked hard to open the local archives and subsidise a book on the Tambov revolt, now finds himself beleaguered. Nineteen of the area's 23 councils have renamed themselves Soviets. Thirteen of the 16-member city Soviets are Communists. They took down the red-white-and-blue banner of Yeltsin's Russia and, in violation of the constitution, ran the red flag up the mast.

Mayor Koval was once a Party member himself, like almost every other official in Russia. Suddenly, those who did not resign are the heroes. A left-over election poster on a lamppost near the town hall promotes Alexander Ryabov, the pro-Communist governor, who won last December. "Ryabov didn't throw away his Party card. The turncoats' time is over. Now is the time for patriots," it says.

Tambov's main factories, once heavily involved in military production, have sacked half their staff and pay the rest late. They keep their engineering and design teams in the vague hope that something will turn up. Anatoly Tkachenko, personnel manager at Polimermash, says production is only a fifth of what it was.

With the backing of the International Monetary Fund, Yeltsin has been trying to control inflation by tightening the money supply to the point of absurdity—and possible political suicide. Millions are not getting their wages on time and Russia is reverting to a barter economy, an unprecedented phenomenon in the industrial world. "It began in 1993," says Tkachenko. "We get paid by our clients with tyres, butter, sugar or sunflower oil, and we pay our workers in the same way instead of money." Even as a senior member of the management, he had to wait until February to get the three months' pay he was owed for October, November and December. "That's why there's mass dissatisfaction with Yeltsin," he explains.

Four years ago, Tambov had never heard of unemployment offices. Now the corridors where glum-looking people wait for appointments are full. Valentin Pavlov, the director of the labour exchange, complains that Yeltsin's tight-money policy means that the jobless also get their benefits late. "From this January, they cut the share of the wagebill which factories have to pay to fund the unemployed from 2 per cent to one-and-a-half. But the jobless rate is still going up, so this quarter I'll be in deficit for the first time," he says.

This is all much more than nostalgia. This is a totally transformed society over its period of 70 communist years, which is now coming out of its Western-induced propaganda hysteria and realising what the actual 20th century history really says about the perceived and lived-through rival merits of capitalism and communism for the vast mass of the underprivileged people on earth, of which the Soviet population were so obviously a part in 1917, - gaining a new and exceptionally brilliant existence under the USSR.

The broad conclusion is that Soviet life was much better than capitalist Russia is now offering, and even all of these reactionaries contacted by the Guardian have to admit it and dare do nothing else for fear of public ridicule, even though their own narrow class interests would tend to make them less than enthusiastic natural communists.

And even when Yeltsin's mismanagement is blamed for all the problems rather than the incurable anarchy of the capitalist market versus the far more civilised society of workers-state socialism, the obvious big puzzle still is why did steady Soviet progress need this messy and damaging replacement, a question most Russians are now clearly asking themselves.

And just the fact that real life only throws up this simple-to-answer conundrum and no other is the most devastating blow to the 'free world' of all. For Russians with this incomparable experience, the whole 70 years of anti-communist hysteria and apocalyptic nonsense is reducible to asking 'is all this freedom fuss actually taking real life further forward, or is it all creating just a pointless nonsensical mess which we just don't need?' - to which the answer is glaringly obvious.

To avoid dealing with this shattering demolition as worthless of the most extraordinary ideological crusade in the whole of Western history, - the 70 years sustained anti-communist hysteria and its fabulously costly material and ideological back-up world-wide, - the Guardian hatchet-job finally gets into its real stride of trying to begin the demonisation of Zyuganov.

The colossal implications for the world in the late 20th century of Russia choosing to go back towards being a Soviet workers state again six years after being delivered to 'freedom' following 70 years of 'communist gulag tyranny', etc, is deliberately buried by presenting a warts-and-all concentration on Zyuganov personally, as though the individual character of leaders is all that history is really made up of.

And what a portrait! - a cross between the clumsiest Stalinist and the dumbest fascist you could ever be bored with:

The man who may soon inherit the task of reviving this limping giant of an economy had the conventional background of a Party apparatchik until his early forties. Gennady Zyuganov's father and grandfather were village teachers and when he finished school, he stayed on and taught before going to the local training college to study maths. He did his three years of army service in a special unit of military intelligence that trained troops for tackling contamination from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. On demobilisation, he moved into full-time work for the Young Communist League and the Communist Party, first locally and in the Seventies in Moscow.

Nail Bikkenin spent 10 years working alongside Zyuganov in the Central Committee building. "He was above average, well-organised, rather serious, even a trifle gloomy, though he had good relations with everyone. He was loyal and dependable," Bikkenin recalls.

Zyuganov was sent to his home region of Oryol, south of Moscow, to work as a Party secretary for several years before returning to the Central Committee in 1983. Unlike most other officials, Zyuganov was not desk-bound. His new job took him to the Baltics, the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as throughout Russia. "For 10 years there wasn't a single social flash-point which I didn't have to deal with," he now boasts. "I saw with my own eyes how the problems came to a head."

Zyuganov gradually turned into a critic of Gorbachev. He felt perestroika had become a synonym for the destruction of the Communist Party and the Soviet system. It was not a rare view. What was unusual was Zyuganov's courage in speaking his mind in office, no easy thing in a Party where conformism was the paramount instinct. "He didn't just mutter behind people's backs. He was open in his criticism," says Andrei Grachev who worked in the Central Committee's international department and was no friend of Zyuganov's point of view.

Zyuganov started seeing Alexander Prokhanov, the non-Communist editor of Dyen (Day), a fiercely anti-Gorbachev and anti-Western paper. He urged Prokhanov to draw up a patriotic manifesto that could rally the anti-Gorbachev forces. Entitled A Word To The People, the emotionally-charged document came out in July. Its opening lines were: "Dear Russians. Citizens of the USSR. Fellow Countrymen! An enormous and unprecedented misfortune has occurred. Our Motherland, our country, our great state, given to us for safekeeping by history, nature and our glorious forefathers, is perishing, breaking up and sinking into darkness and annihilation..." The document caused a furore. At a Central Committee meeting a few days later, Grachev attacked it as destabilising and dangerous. "Afterwards, Zyuganov ran up to me in anger. ‘Couldn't I see how the forces of disintegration were working in the Soviet Union,' he shouted. ‘The West was already taking advantage,' " Grachev recalls.

Three of the manifesto's 12 co-signatories joined the senior ministers who imprisoned Gorbachev a month later in his Crimean holiday-villa. There is no evidence that Zyuganov was part of the plot. He was on holiday in the North Caucasus when the three-day putsch was launched and wisely sat it out in silence, offering neither support nor condemnation. He now describes the putsch as "an operetta" provoked by the general disorientation of the pro-Soviet conservatives. The real "coup" was the way the putsch was exploited by Yeltsin to ban the Communist Party and force "shock therapy" market reforms on to an unsuspecting public. Zyuganov says the break-up of the Soviet Union was promoted by the West: "They could not have done better if they had made the head of the CIA the general secretary of the Communist Party." The US is using the IMF to finish off Russian industry and remove a competitor.

After the coup, tens of thousands of Communist officials resigned or switched to the Yeltsin side. Zyuganov was one of a few hundred who chose to fight on. Some joined the Socialist Party Of Working People, a newly-formed social-democratic group aimed at following Gorbachev's legacy in the style of the reform-Communists of Eastern Europe. Zyuganov picked a different route. He stayed with the melange of Communism and patriotism with which he had begun to experiment before the putsch.

Throughout 1992, as Yeltsin's market reforms moved into high gear, a variety of organisations with patriotic names sprang into life: the All-Russian People's Union, Otechestvo (Fatherland), the Russian National Assembly, the Council For Popular-Patriotic Forces. Zyuganov was always there. Some members of these groups were openly anti-Semitic, others sounded like fascists. The common thread was the revival of an ancient Russian dispute — the conflict between Slavophiles and Westerners, those who believed in a Russian exceptionalism. and those who preferred the Western way.

The least extreme of the new groups was the National Salvation Front, though it was also the most dangerous since it threatened to appeal to a wide audience (Yeltsin banned it a week after it was founded in October 1992). To those of us who sat through its chaotic founding conference, the Front's ideological breakthrough was the theme that the civil war was finally over. Seventy years after the guns went silent, Mikhail Astafyev, leader of the Constitutional Democrats (successor to one of the best-known anti-Bolshevik parties of 1917), told the meeting: "What people think of the October revolution of 1917 has become academic. Just as the French can differ over Napoleon's but still not forget their national interests, so here people from the Left and Right need not be enemies."

Zyuganov's political philosophy has evolved from there. In three recent booklets - Over The Horizon, Russia And The Contemporary World, and Great Power — he praises Lenin and the October Revolution because they preserved the Russian state after the defeats of the first world war. Stalin is lauded for uniting the country in a patriotic crusade against the Nazi invaders. The enemies within are the Westernisers.

As head of the largest faction in the Duma, the lower house of parliament, Zyuganov now enjoys the biggest private office — an immense corner room with a splendid view of the bust of Karl Marx in the garden opposite the Bolshoi Theatre. The first thing he did when he moved here in March was to hang a vast map of the Soviet Union on the wall. "I'm a Russian by blood, culture, psychology and thought," he told me with pride. "We have a number of characteristics which distinguish us from other peoples. I respect English traditions, your character and morals, your ability to control large spaces and withstand heavy blows, your conservatism, if you like. I hope you would understand the Russian people." He then mentioned Russians' "spirituality" and two other virtues, which are almost untranslatable and so perhaps indeed specific. These are derzbavnost (loyalty to the state? The ambition to be a great power?) and narodnost (people-centredness? Folksiness? Grassroots directness?).

Zyuganov has the clumsiness of the self-taught. He has changed the Communist Party 's symbol by adding a third element — an open book — alongside the hammer and sickle. "I'm one of the few politicians who have read the Bible and the Koran, as well as having studied the development of political thinking in various countries," he boasts. Russians have always had a non-materialist approach to life, he argues, as he praises the three religions that are strong on Russian soil — Orthodoxy, Islam and Buddhism — because their values are opposed to the individualistic and competitive value system of the West. The main threat to the world is the US-inspired "New World Order", which is aimed at keeping the planet divided into a "Golden Billion" (the inhabitants of Europe and North America) and an increasingly impoverished and powerless majority.

Zyuganov's eclectic ideas have driven some supporters out of the Party. Boris Slavin, who heads Pravda's political department, resigned from the Central Executive: Committee last year. In an open letter, called The Repudiation Of Marxism Will Destroy The Communist Party, Slavin denounced Zyuganov's statism. "He thinks the state is neutral between classes, and therefore plays no significant role. I disagree. That is why Zyuganov can publicly pay respect to the reactionary 19th-century Tsarist Education Minister, Count Sergei Uvarov. He praises him for promulgating the three virtues — Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Narodnost — which are very similar to Zyuganov's Spirituality, Derzhavnost and Narodnost."

Slavin is also worried by Zyuganov's ambivalent attitude to Stalin, and the whiff of anti-Semitism. Two of Zyuganov's latest booklets contain the identical paragraph: "The Western world's culture, ideology and world-view are increasingly influenced by the Jewish diaspora. Its influence grows literally by the hour, not just the day. The Jewish diaspora traditionally controls the financial life of the continent and is gradually taking over the controlling packet of shares in Western civilisation's socio-economic system." Zyuganov's attacks on the Bolsheviks' "cosmopolitanism" also sound very similar to the classic anti-Semitic charge that Lenin was surrounded by Jews.

Alexander Tsipko, another ex-colleague from their Central Committee days in the Eighties, says charges of anti-Semitism are often wild. "Prokhanov is an anti-Semite, but I would be very cautious about making the same accusation about Zyuganov. I never heard anti-Semitic remarks from him. It is a weak point in his argument that he does not mention Judaism as one of the traditional religions on Russian soil. Judaism is his ally. He should value it, since it is based on the same values which he now exalts." Tsipko says the key to understanding Zyuganov is that "he's a very badly educated man. He doesn't know the difference between two things, the anti-Zionist cosmopolitanism of the Bolsheviks and Zionism itself. Most of the Jewish intelligentsia in Russia did not support the revolution in 1917".

Zyuganov's down-playing of Stalin's crimes appears to stem from similar ignorance. He cannot accept that the Soviet people defeated the Nazis in spite of Stalin, not because of him. As a result, he feels bound to magnify the dictator's wartime contribution and minimise his terror. He is on record as saying that less than a million people were shot summarily or died later in the Gulag.

Zyuganov's inability to penetrate the psychology of Stalinism seems to stem from his family's experience. The war meant far more to the Zyuganovs than Stalin's misdeeds. "In the village where I was born, almost no one suffered under Stalin," he told me. " They all worked honestly. They fought for the Motherland. My father lost his leg at Sebastopol, and was in Odessa in one of the worst periods of the fighting. Many of my family members were killed. My parents did not belong to the Party, but in their souls they shared its ideals — friendship among different peoples, bringing children up properly, looking after the elderly, holding a united country together." His implication that no one suffered under Stalin because they all worked "honestly" suggests he still does not realise that most of Stalin's victims were innocent.

Russian analysts agree that Zyuganov is a conservative. The argument is whether he is a right-wing conservative, as Alexander Tsipko believes, or a left-wing one, as Boris Kapustin says. Tsipko points out that in Eastern Europe, the anti-Communists were able to come forward as nationalists. In Russia, the anti-Communists came forward as Westernisers. They failed to link the struggle for democratic rights and freedoms with the restoration of the Russia the Bolsheviks destroyed. The only man who tried was the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but he has been marginalised as too anti-Communist for the Zyuganovites and too much of a Russian nationalist for the liberals.

Tsipko argues that Zyuganov is the man who has found the synthesis. With his emphasis on Russia's "uniqueness", he is going back to the Narodniks of the 19th century, who wanted to replace Tsarism with a system based on the egalitarian ideology of the village commune (obsbema). Although this peasant socialism has a left-wing flavour, it is embedded in the right-wing cocoon of a strong and xenophobic Russian state.

Kapustin, by contrast, describes Zyuganov's programme as leftist in the modern sense of the word. The national-patriotic spectrum in Russia is very wide. It includes dangerous clowns like Zhirinovsky as well as monarchists and lesser-known proto-fascists. Zyuganov's outstanding contribution, according to Kapustin, has been to ensure that the left-wing modernisers predominate in the patriotic debate. Zyuganov is not a fundamentalist. His conservatism consists of appealing to symbols that still have meaning, like keeping the name Communist for the Party, and paying lip-service to the voluntary restoration of the Soviet Union. In practice, he will maintain the institutions of post-Communism, such as a mixed economy and a multi-party system.

Kapustin points out that since the parliamentary victory in December, the Party's rhetoric has become more oriented to the future. "We will not survive with the old baggage," Zyuganov told the Party after the December victory. If it was to move beyond 23 per cent of the vote achieved by "the popular patriotic coalition", it needed support from young people and other "historically-promising social groups", such as skilled workers in high-technology industries, computer software and the growing service and leisure sector. Zyuganov says his priority is to restore civic peace by cutting the massive widening of income differentials through use of the tax system, and by enhancing welfare benefits. The state is expected to use protectionist methods to reduce imports and support Russian industry. It will target credits to the defence, energy, transport and food-processing sectors. Zyuganov's election programme says nothing about re-nationalisation and in his interview with the Guardian, he said: "The main stimulus is a new tax policy. If something has been privatised and is working effectively, we will support it. If a factory has cut production, the working collective must work out what to do. "

The economic clash between Yeltsin and Zyuganov is far less apocalyptic than Yeltsin and his Western backers pretend. It is mainly a struggle between Russia's new elites — the open-economy exporters of oil and gas — against the heavy-industry people who need protection, state aid for modernisation and a secure internal market. "There will be no revenge or settling of accounts," Zyuganov constantly says in an effort to reassure the new capitalist managers.

The Communist leader is a pragmatist with an alert ear for consensus, as he made clear during the crisis of October 1993, when Yeltsin violated the constitution by dissolving parliament, and eventually sent in tanks to shoot the MPs out. Though not an MP at the time, Zyuganov used a television interview to reject force and call for a compromise. He promises to change the constitution to restore primacy to parliament and end the present system of a "presidential monarch". In foreign affairs, Russia will pursue an independent Russia-first policy, no longer worrying whether its actions satisfy the West. A strong admirer of China's state-run reforms, and a defender of the Tiananmen clampdown, Zyuganov wants to restore close relations with Beijing.

Victory for Zyuganov is by no means ensured. Yeltsin controls the levers of power, including the main television stations and the Central Election Commission, which, although nominally independent could switch enough votes in a close race to affect the outcome. The IMF and Western governments are pouring in loans to allow him to pay the billions of roubles of unpaid wages before the June vote.

Sniffing the threat of defeat, Yeltsin has also been stealing the Communists' political clothes, with a new emphasis on an independent foreign policy, a higher priority for welfare spending and hints of a confederation between Russia and some of the former Soviet republics. So, even if the Communists lose this summer's poll, they have already won the argument. The Westernising policies of the last 10 years, moderate under Gorbachev but taken to politically humiliating and economically destructive extremes by Yeltsin, have run their course and, from now on, the outside world will have to deal with a prouder and more awkward Russia. 

But far more than just the Communist Party revisionists having won the Slavophile argument against the Westernisers even if the presidency is not captured this time, the real story buried by this devious Guardian 'neutral news-objectivity coverage' is that communist revolution has already won the 20th and 21st century argument against 'capitalist freedom'.

The former Soviet Union was the test case, never mind the wretched petty nationalism of East Europe which revolted against Russian influence (although even there, communist parties are back in office in an astonishing number of places). And history's great verdict, now that capitalist parliamentary-democracy freedom has replaced workers-state socialism, - is that socialism was much better, and this is in spite of the obviously enormous bureaucratic inefficiency and unimaginative arbitrariness of the Communist Party as it progressively degenerated towards its revisionist anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist self-liquidation as the proletarian-dictatorship ruling party, and in spite of the relative ease with which up-to-date imperialist market technology can easily still put to shame the still less fit and agile development of Soviet socialist technology as it was then in the USSR and as it continues in its own cultural form in China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.

It is also the obvious reality in spite of the euphoric Western claims of 6 years ago of the free-market forces having won the battle of history for all time against communism. That brief euphoria will turn out to be the biggest hoax and the most ludicrous miscalculation of all time on such crucial questions for the future of civilisation.

The electoral victory in Italy of the former Communist Party forces after having been hysterically kept from power since 1945 under the constant threat of military coups and US imperialist intervention, - tells the same story.

Of course this is not the old hammer-and-sickle CPI winning power while the dictatorship of the proletariat still rules in Moscow, which is what the entire 'free world' was so desperate to prevent. And the replacement PDS and the smaller Refoundation Communists are both just as revisionist or even more so than the former Eurocommunists.

But again, that completely misses the really enormous historical point being made by these developments.

The 'triumph' six years ago of the 'free world' over communism was meant to have resolved for all time the great class conflict internationally of the past 150 years of market imperialism's survival-of-the-fittest anarchy versus the planned socialist revolution by the masses, which has raged via colossal revolutions, massive civil wars, and titanic national-liberation struggles throughout this period.

What does George Bush's 'the end of history' look like now? Like the start of even more obscene bollocks than even all the crap that bourgeois idealism had polluted human reason with up to that point. The Chinese communist revolution is getting more bolshie than ever; Vietnam is more independently-minded than ever; Castro is more defiant than ever; even North Korea is parading its workers-state muscles more determinedly than ever. And elsewhere? The Communist Party nearly back in power in Russia; governments of former communists all over East Europe; the communists surging towards electoral power in India; and now the triumph at last for the Italian communists.

Clearly, temporarily, all of these regimes can be said to have abandoned classical Marxist-Leninism to one extent or another; and clearly all have acknowledged the useful power of market forces economically in one way or another, especially for the moment in Europe, for example. So temporarily, pure reformism everywhere. But the real significance is why, especially at this supposed triumphal epoch for the 'ultimate victory' of anti-communism, should the masses turn towards the communist parties for this reformism? Why not just turn to the reformist parties? Why turn to the parties bearing the stain of 'failed communism'? There are any number of reformist parties in Italy, and in India, and in Poland, for example. So why turn to the communist parties?

And in Russia, it becomes obvious why. Precisely because it is still communism which still represents the great hope of mankind, and also the mass of ordinary people's proudest achievements back in the deepest recesses of the collective international folk memory, - the triumph of the original Bolshevik Revolution; the history-making achievements of the Soviet plans for economic and social transformation; the titanic victory of the Red Army in liberating the advanced world from fascist conquest; the tremendous Soviet sacrifices in helping the rest of the world to complete its socialist or national-liberation revolutions free from a large part (sadly not all) of the potential armed imperialist counter-revolution; the admirable Soviet example in attempting to build an international socialist and anti-imperialist camp based on equality and mutual support; etc, etc, etc.

It is for all of this that communism is not remotely dead. And it is because the capitalist system cannot ever solve its political and economic crisis problems of warmongering inter-imperialist trade-war, slump, and collapse contradictions that the notion in people's minds of communism is already surging forward again everywhere just six years after history had supposedly conclusively buried it once and for all.

Naturally, half-hearted 'Marxist-Leninists' and anti-revolutionary communist reformers of all kinds will initially grab the leading seats on this popular bandwagon, but then what will they all do?

It is not inconceivable that Washington might end up giving a Zyuganov presidency massive loans as well, just as are being poured in to help Yeltsin's re-election, fearing that worse will replace Zyuganov if he does not succeed.

But it is precisely imperialism's ability to keep on bailing out the collapsing parts of the 'free world' which is really dying. The licence to print dollars endlessly 'as good as gold' and use them to create an anti-communist world is degenerating rapidly.

For a brief period of confused stagnation and collapse worldwide, there will be some swinging back towards openly capitalist parties in search of a solution.

But much more relentlessly, there will be a steady march back towards serious scientific Marxist-Leninist revolutionary understanding all round the world. The naff appearance of the Western world leaders in Moscow last week to help the ridiculous Yeltsin's re-election is just part of a long ludicrous swansong to the dying era of imperialist world domination. Build Leninism. Alf Lee

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 (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 167. Sunday 21st April 1996

Expand or die is the only possible watchword for all monopoly capital. War is the only possible outcome for a world in which monopoly capital continues to rule.

The imperialist crisis, erupting bloodily in the latest Zionist bout of expand-or-die warmongering frenzy, is with less public spectacle continuing to beaver away beneath the foundations of the world banking system itself, even in the rarefied fastnesses of Switzerland. Squeezed between high street losses and overcapacity internationally, the giants of Swiss monopoly capital now seem set on an uncontrollable expand-or-die course of their own.

The disproportionate world monopoly finance clout of Switzerland has previously allowed its bourgeoisie to get away with combining its privileged relationship with German imperialism with a phony national posture of 'neutrality' when the going gets rough.

But that universal bourgeois reverence for the 'neutral' rights of monopoly capital (to 'peacefully' concentrate itself ad infinitum in flagless numbered bank accounts behind the Alps) could already be wearing a bit thin this time around, judging by the capitalist press commentary tracking the unfolding merger wars breaking out both within the Swiss market and at large In world banking:

The big three already have more than half the Swiss market. Over the next couple of years they will gain more, buying up small banks that have buckled under the weight of their bad loans.

Over-capacity in Swiss high streets and lending to the country's mid-sized companies have hurt their results. The strong franc and the collapsing property market have forced the banking system to set aside reserves of about $10 billion a year. All the banks have been obliged to cut costs.

With total assets in 1994 of $293 billion (£196 billion), CS Holding, the group built around Credit Suisse, is bigger than Barclays or NatWest. It is also larger than its two
Swiss rivals, Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Bank Corp. Between them, the three control about 55 per cent of one of Europe's most difficult banking markets.

Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Credit Suisse is prepared to think the unthinkable: could two of Switzerland's big three banks merge?

"It would make, sense from a global perspective. The result would be very, very strong worldwide," he muses. Pointing to the agreed merger between the drug makers Ciba and Sandoz, he said: "Nothing is unthinkable any more."

The attraction of a merger lies, in part, abroad.  Through CS First Boston, its investment banking subsidiary, CS has been present on the international markets for more than 20 years. UBS, which bought the City broker Phillips & Drew in 1984, is expensively building its own global operation. SBC's recent purchases -give it a good chance of crashing into the global bracket.

All three art trying to create worldwide wholesale banking groups, handling huge transactions for corporate and institutional clients.

The quest has taken them into the whole range of international banking activities, from currency trading and bond issues to derivatives trading and corporate advisory services. But it has also brought them up against other international banks which are chasing the same kind of business..

"Look at Japan and the US. Mega mergers there have created banks with huge capital bases. There may be more...

In what must be an unprecedented public spat in Swiss banking circles, UBS's statement is openly dismissive about the overtures from CS.

UBS made quite clear its anger at the unceremonious way that CS tried to push through a merger deal. According to UBS, the directors were "taken aback" at CS's insistence that they make a firm decision on the takeover before a scheduled annual meeting. UBS follows this up with claims that such a deal would over-stretch the group's management and financial resources.

One can only wonder at the kind of behind-the-scenes row that prompted an organisation such as UBS to make this statement public. It is a quite remarkable statement for such a tight-lipped organisation as a Swiss bank.

It will also continue to whip up takeover speculation throughout an already overheated banking sector. The staid world of the gnomes of Zurich will never be the same again.

The frenzied expand-or-die logic of this battle for market share is what comes to dominate every aspect of bourgeois existence under conditions of sharpening imperialist crisis, from Zurich to Tel Aviv. The undiplomatic violent terms in which capitalism's trials of life are being conducted amongst Swiss bankers, so unaccountable to the 'mildly amused' smug liberal commentary, are in fact an entirely accurate and necessary reflection of just how desperately serious these battles are.

Somehow or other, surplus capacity, whether being sat on by weaker rivals in the high street or clung onto by wounded giants on the world stage, MUST be shoved out of the market, if the greediest and most ruthless are to survive to exploit another day. This is what is starting to be fought through now by mergers, takeovers, forced bankruptcies, asset-stripping etc., with all the destabilizing consequences of mass unemployment and insecurity to follow.

These boardroom spats are in fact far from just storms in teacups, and are not bloodless. In a world whose whole productive existence is enslaved to the movements of monopoly capital, the 15,000 bank clerks likely to lose their jobs in consequence of surplus banking capacity being liquidated through Credit Suisse gobbling up UBS would be only the tiny BEGINNING of the catastrophic indirect effects such seemingly-'paper battles' end up having on the jobs, welfare and security of millions of people all round the world.

And in the end the theatrical-seeming market scuffles are the beginning of a process which points in the end inexorably towards imperialist war.

Already the international battle to suppress rival surplus capital is joined at the level of trade and currency wars, arms races, and competitive war-diplomacy (e.g. Paris jogging Washington's elbow with its own 'peace plan' to stitch up the Arabs). And the 'technical' problem of how to stop world capitalist production choking itself to death on its own unmanageable surplus capital in the end turns out to be resistant to every attempted capitalist solution, bar the 'solution' of imperialist war itself.

The hysterical internal wrangling within UBS after its retreat from CS's advances offers a further insight into the knots monopoly capitalism ties itself into:

SIX thousand shareholders of Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich's Hallen Stadium yesterday delivered a vote of confidence in the board of the bank

The vote was a slap in the face for Martin Ebner the maverick financier who called for "a board and a management which has the capacity to implement a clearly defined strategy geared to optimising returns". This is code for an aggressive restructuring of the Swiss branch network and for the bank's withdrawal from low-margin businesses such as lending to multinational corporations.

A similar result might also be achieved by merging two of Switzerland's three big banks. Last week UBS rejected a proposal from Credit Suisse that the rival institutions begin merger talks.

Despite the management's victory yesterday, Mr Ebner will not fade away.

Mr Ebner has also asked magistrates to investigate allegations of criminal conduct by Mr Studer and unnamed board members, whom he claims wilfully damaged the bank by buying its own shares which then fell in value.

Down one road, retreat from the merger fray, stagnation, self-liquidation of surplus capital through incestuous share buy-back deals, corruption, potential disaster. Down another road, staking everything on risky high-earners, taking on all-comers in the battle for merger-dominance, potential disaster. What a choice.

Build Leninism.

Paddy Chambers