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 0852 Tuesday May 7th 1996                                                                                                                    10p

SLP still reluctant to spell out its awareness of imperialist crisis and counter-revolution into a coherent theory, and practicable programme for how capitalism really can be replaced by socialism and a workers state. Anti-communist propaganda cannot be evaded, it must be exposed. It will be destroyed by workers' own experience as the crisis grows.

The Socialist Labour Party has not been persuaded so far to expand upon its pledge to abolish capitalism (and introduce a just, planned, socialist society) by elaborating on the circumstances in which this will come about.

Arthur Scargill and his closest associates tried various explanations at the inaugural conference in London to say why a deeper analysis of capitalist crisis would be either speculative, or premature, or unnecessarily providing the hostile bourgeois media with ammunition to deride the SLP with.

But the glaring gap remains in the SLP's political armoury with which to appeal to the working class; and the excuses given for not telling workers more about what lies ahead just do not add up.

In one reply to debate, Scargill himself turned to the capitalist press present and announced that the SLP was well alert to the kind of threat represented by the undemocratic capitalist state such as wiped out Allende's SLP-type government in Chile in 1973 by military coup & economic sabotage.

The Italian delegate from Communist Refoundation won huge applause for his very loud condemnation of the threat to democratic socialist progress from reactionary capitalist state forces and his aggressive stance saying how CR is prepared to resist such reaction. 

Scargill referred to Western imperialism's Gladio counter-revolutionary programme for Europe after 1945 under which the CIA and US military forces were prepared to topple any socialist regimes they could get away with toppling, implying that the SLP would be ready to deal with any such threat.

So this explanation of SLP fear of making a deeper analysis of capitalist crisis does not make sense. If it is all right to make speeches denouncing capitalist state counter-revolutionary mentality and plans, it is even better to spell it out to the working class in print that the SLP pledge to abolish capitalism really does mean what it says, and that no capitalist state obstacles will be tolerated trying to prevent that abolition.

And of all political figures with credibility in the working class, Scargill above all is in a position to describe the reality of the bourgeois-dictatorship state in Britain which is basically determined never to allow any socialist threat to take power and abolish capitalism ever even to start its work, let alone finish it, and that was through the NUM's bitter experiences in the great 1984-85 miners strike against pit closures and the devastation of the coal industry, which was defeated in the end by the vicious onslaught of the courts, the police, the MI5 secret service, and the army to break the miners pickets, confiscate the NUM funds, and to beat up or jail as many strikers and supporters as was necessary to demoralise the movement, hand-in-hand with the Labour Party and TUC demoralisers.

But this SLP excuse about not talking in alarmist tones in order not to inflame bourgeois press criticism, still does not even deal with the real issues involved. The crucial part of not disarming the working class (by feeding them daft democratic illusions about how easy it is going to be to abolish capitalism) is to prepare workers politically for what lies ahead, not organisationally in terms of self-defence mechanisms and legislative measures by which reactionary capitalist-state coups could be nipped in the bud, as important as it is to work these things out in advance and to get workers familiar with them.

The all-important political preparation centres on the scientific understanding of imperialist crisis. Far more needs to be said by the SLP about exactly how capitalism's ability to rule on, or to bludgeon or trick its way into survival, is going to start collapsing, - and why; - and how the working class is the only force in society which can possibly replace such degenerating decadence and failure, and become the new ruling class instead of the bourgeoisie.

The SLP needs to start taking its bold assertion of Marxist philosophy a bit more seriously. A major plank of Marx's science of history is the understanding that the era of the bourgeoisie will rise, prevail, and then fall, - to be replaced by the brief era of the working-class in power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that whereas capitalism spontaneously grew into power within feudalism before eventually seizing state control guided by all kinds of subjective-idealist delusions and half-truths about religion and democracy, etc, - the working class must take power consciously guided by the only philosophy of effective socialism and rational workers states, - dialectical materialism.

Without correct revolutionary theory, there can be no successful revolutionary practice, and the Leninist heart of that revolutionary theory is the analysis of how 20th century inter-imperialist conflict has brought ruling classes to the point of such defeat, division, and demoralisation that they can no longer rule on in the old way, and how the devastation of those market crashes, slumps, trade wars, and inter-imperialist conflicts has brought the proletariat to the point where it cannot go on any longer in the old way either, in company with large sections of the petty bourgeoisie as well.

The SLP leadership tried to dismiss the need for the party to get involved in any such analysis on other bogus grounds too, such as that perspectives like that about forthcoming imperialist crisis amount to pure speculation.

But such reservations can only be the basis for rejecting any particular specific form of words to describe the nature of imperialist crisis and the likely forms it will take. They cannot be an argument for making no analysis at all about where capitalism is going.

Yet the SLP rejected specific amendments trying to find a form of words suitable for describing what struggles lie ahead for the working class, but made no effort at all to replace them with a more accurate or far-seeing analysis.

What is so noticeable about such an omission and such reluctance to even discuss the detail of such perspectives, merely dismissing them as not needed or as harmful, - is that Scargill himself made a large part of his deserved reputation as an outstanding working-class leader by his bold predictions around the 1984 miners' strike against pit closures that the ruling class was planning to virtually destroy the whole of the nationally-owned coal industry. Was that speculative? or sound leadership to prepare the miners and the working class for what the imperialist system in cut-throat competitive crisis had in store for the masses? The correct major point that the SLP now makes in its economic statement about the wholesale de-industrialisation that has hit British industry since 1984 provides the answer.

But how much better would it have been then if Scargill had been able to see even further into the future, and how much better it would be now if the SLP would take its analysis a little deeper.

The NUM strike partly failed because of the continuing belief then that a future Labour Government could restore the position for the nationalised coal industry and the miners, and that a reformist, class-collaborating boomtime Plan For Coal could be resumed, just like that, if everyone was willing.

These were deadly illusions, as Scargill himself now admits partially. And these illusions never wholly convinced all of the working class which came out in support of the miners that they were reliable or the right perspectives. By 1984, large sections of the working class were already beginning to lose faith totally in the Labour Party and the TUC, - a position which Scargill himself now endorses and says was correct then, - as opposed to his continuing delusions then.

Huge credit to Scargill for being big enough to admit all this, but it would be even more important to learn all of the rich lessons which this experience contains for the working class and the fight for socialism.

The struggle took a massive leap forward with the defeat of the 84-85 strike which turned into a vast learning process.

But the struggle would have been even further forward had the lessons about Labour's class-collaborating reformist uselessness and the TUC's treacherousness been forced out earlier and used to strengthen the revolutionary combativeness and the self-reliance of the miners and the working class even more. The working class is stronger for being no longer in so complete a position to be fooled and betrayed by Labour. More farsightedness at the time of the 84-85 strike, accepting now as the SLP does, the validity of lessons which were already available then, - would have been enormously to workers' advantage.

Therefore, far from it being a question of speculation, the issue of knowing all of the class enemy's tricks or potential in advance is one of great importance to the working class. The further it examines what lies ahead, the less is the proletariat likely to be taken by surprise, hoodwinked, or betrayed.

By not discussing openly, in advance, the capitalist system's counter-revolutionary essence, it creates illusions in workers' minds that the problem of counter-revolution must therefore not be a very important one, or unlikely to be very relevant. Such illusions will leave SLP supporters dangerously disarmed.

By not discussing the likely outline of the imperialist world market's further crisis degeneration towards trade-war, slump, and shooting war, the working class is denied the most crucial part of its vital re-education in political philosophy, seeing the overthrow of capitalism as the necessary next step for civilisation to take in the interests of everyone.

If the appeal to the working class is left at the level of calling on them to fight for just a bit more justice for themselves, they are hardly being broken from the whole opportunist psychology of reformism, leaving them still prey to the next set of chancers to come along such as the populist chauvinists, or the anarchists, or the fascist-nationalists, or whatever.

Every shade of reformism, from rightwing Labour to the very 'leftest' of the most 'honest and sincere' leftwingers, is still not committing itself to much more than pie-in-the-sky jam-tomorrow promises. The essence of the eternal appeal of communism to workers is that it promises nothing less than the massive task, virtually unending, of reconstructing the whole of society in the interests of everyone, making creative work man's prime necessity, allowing people everywhere for the first time to live to work rather than having to work to live.

The SLP's minimum programme demands of better pay, fairer pensions, improved working conditions and social services, shorter hours, etc, are appropriate for challenging the ruling class's selfish exploitational greed with the humane and civilised rights of the working class, but they lack the vision with which to inspire workers to transform the SLP into the great revolutionary crusade that it needs to become.

It is good to quote James Connolly's gentle irony "Our demands most moderate are, we only want the Earth" because it emphasises the continuity in the British labour movement, from the start, of seeing the total contradiction between the interests of the capitalist owners and the interests of the workers. But irony can also betray a rather dilettante approach to the task of overthrowing capitalism, and there have been revolutionaries who have argued that a slightly blunter, more professional approach to the business of organising the revolution would be more reassuring. The necessary process of destroying capitalist state power and replacing it with workers state power is not so much saying that it 'wants' anything but rather
asserting what crucial historical work remains to be done, and must now be done.

(Incidentally, there was a gross philistine contradiction in part of Scargill's reply to discussion, rejecting amendments calling for more revolutionary theory, when he patronisingly sneered that modern British workers in struggle would just dismiss with ridicule learning about what one foreign revolutionary might have said to another in 1917. So why is what another foreign revolutionary said even before 1917 the sole prominent statement on the front of the SLP membership card? And what about all the evocation of Keir Hardie's achievements?).

And as for avoiding giving the capitalist press any ammunition to fire at the SLP with, the Guardian cynic certainly had a scoff at the notion of teaching the working class its revolutionary destiny, an obviously high-flown word which a printed, considered expression of the need for theory could easily avoid. But apart from jeering at the plainly sectarian-hysterical contributions to debate, where Guardian sarcasm really struck home was against platform unwillingness to go beyond superficial expositions of what is involved in the basically sound proposition to abolish capitalism, such as laughing at why white South Africans would want to come to a Scargillite Britain (a half-cocked shallow excuse for a very correct SLP stance on the obvious controls a workers-state Britain would have to keep on movements in and out of the country), or laughing at how long capitalist profits might hang around in the face of announced SLP intentions to double pensions, introduce full-pay retirement at 55, award massive pay increases all round, and reverse every single social-services and welfare cut or economy that has ever been heard of. And without explaining the obvious background of Guardian sarcasm which alone can possibly accompany a transition from capitalism to socialism in Britain, such minimum demands merely stated baldly can indeed only invite overwhelming ridicule from the current popular press. Far better, and inviting far less ridicule, to begin now a much deeper explanation of exactly what the economic, social, and political conditions are going to be like when the need to build a workers state to replace the capitalist state finally comes irresistibly onto the agenda in a revolutionary crisis.

There is nothing speculative or fanciful about analysing the relentless drive towards all-out trade-war by the rival imperialist blocs. The capitalist press itself is frequently writing about very little else these days.

What needs to be added is what is to be the fate and opportunity of the working class in these situations. That is what the SLP should begin analysing and describing, - teaching the working class that it will be its task to stop this degenerate warmongering rot, and to build planned socialist workers states to replace the destructive decadent anarchy of the capitalist free market.

The current SLP perspective is merely for eternal 'left' reformist pressure, - to replace what went before, -  which was just more eternal 'left' reformist pressure, - for there was always a 'left' wing promising to replace the right wing the day after tomorrow at the head of the Labour Party, - just as there is now, in fact, (led by Corbyn, Benn, Livingstone, Skinner, Abbott, Grant, etc) all still promising to force renewed 'left' policies back on the next Labour Government (like Clause IV, etc). The biggest danger of the SLP early sparks becoming a damp squib lie in trying to fob the working class off with just another diet of 'left' promises, plus the obligatory vow that this time, the new perpetual 'left' pressure is being vouchsafed by fresh leaders who will "never betray", etc. That they may well mean it is utterly irrelevant. A programme of perpetual 'left' pressure to bring socialism is a complete nonsense, a historical impossibility, even if promised by the saintliest of people. Capitalism will only be ended when state power is taken off the capitalist ruling class.

The capitalist bourgeoisie's utter cynicism about 'democracy' cannot be stressed energetically enough. Everything is always in place in every 'free world' country to impose the most brutal of counter-revolutions such as the West engineered in Greece 1946, Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1965, Grenada 1982, Nicaragua 1986, Panama 1989, etc, etc, including Guyana, Congo-Kinshasa, Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and countless attempts against Cuba and against East Europe when workers states were being built there, and so on. 

The Gladio plans to make sure there were never any socialist revolutions in West Europe were even more extensively plotted for and funded. And the place where the CIA has laid down the greatest number of long-term counter-revolutionary 'sleeping' agents?

In Britain itself, and probably by now in Germany too, plus Japan, - on the grounds that a communist revolution in, say, faraway Ghana or Egypt would be one thing to get alarmed about because of the bad propaganda effect it would have on the rest of the 'free world', especially the Third World in those cases. But imagine the probably irreparable damage to the reputation of capitalist democracy's virtues if the working masses of Britain, for example, should organise a successful socialist takeover. It would shatter free-market credibility worldwide for all time. There is no way that imperialist counter-revolution is going to allow any socialist programme to be introduced easily into a major country of the capitalist 'free world'. That is what NATO is all about, and has always been for the collective counter-revolutionary guarantee for imperialism. You have to be a complete imbecile to believe a) that the Soviet Union wanted militarily to conquer western Europe; or b) that NATO was set up to resist those non-existent conquest plans. The Gladio preparations were the very essence of the institution of NATO, and inseparable from it.

And what are the great Western democrats up to currently? Interfering ruthlessly in Russia's internal affairs by pouring billions of dollars in to help their stooge Yeltsin win June's presidential election, plus numberless skilled advisers and intriguers, and artificially arranging an endless procession of prominent 'free-world' leaders to visit Yeltsin to boost his credibility and prestige.

And if that does not look like working? There is virtual open admission in the capitalist press itself of close Western involvement in utterly cynical plans to either rig the election results, or else get the elections called off completely. Just listen to how casually these sick machinations are being discussed. For 70 years, Soviet socialist achievements were systematically dismissed as worthless and undeserving of any consideration at all because of the supposed 'lack of democracy'. Now compare how priceless capitalist reaction's dis-achievements in Russia are considered to be, to such an extent that 'democracy' being ludicrously distorted or even completely suppressed is condoned in advance as being just a minor embarrassment for the West to get over:

A secret Kremlin poll conducted in mid-April showed that Yeltsin, at 10 per cent, is trailing Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov at 30 per cent, and the nationalist buffoon Vladimir Zhirinovsky at 15 per cent. This has come as a shock to the President s entourage and there has been loose talk about falsifying the election results by up to 10 per cent. The panic is on.

But with just six weeks to go before voting might not postponement lead to trouble? Korzhakov smiled and gazed towards the fountains as if deep in spontaneous thought. 'Why should it? It all depends where the initiative comes from,' he said.

Yeltsin's spokesman was rattled to hear Korzhakov had been sounding off in this vein. 'He told you officially that he wanted the elections postponed?' said Sergei Medvedev, with an almost audible groan.

Thanks to Korzhakov's disclosure, a conspiracy is exactly what it is beginning to look like. The 'initiative' for postponing the elections is apparently coming from a reassuring variety of groups.

But an open letter from 13 of Russia's biggest industrialists and bankers, printed on the front page of Commersant Daily a week ago, has had by far the biggest impact. They warned that Russian society is dangerously split. 'The crack which divides us into red and white, ours and theirs, goes through Russia's heart,' they said, warning that whoever wins the elections will be ruling in the name of a 'minority' and only able to 'confirm their power by means which lead to civil war'.

They signed off with a threat that 'Russian entrepreneurs do have the necessary resources and will to influence the too unprincipled and uncompromising politicians'.

Only the letter's initiator, Boris Berezovsky, head of the LogoVAZ automotive and industrial conglomerate, has demanded the elections be called off. 'The question of our system is not decided by voting.'

Mr Yeltsin assured the Western leaders last month that he would win the election comfortably. Many Russian analysts in the West believe him, if only because the ballot boxes will be controlled by the provincial governors, whose autonomy would be at risk if the Communists won.

Two pretexts for postponing the election have already been floated informally by Russian diplomats, senior United States officials have said privately. One would be the formal return of the former Soviet republic of Belarus to the Russian fold, which might widen the electorate. The other is the proposal last month by 13 senior Russian businessmen and bankers, that "an election will solve nothing".	

'Yeltsin is not understanding much any more, but then you have to remember how Hindenburg only had everything explained to him at the last minute,' says Piorttkowjki, referring to the German President who appointed Hitler Chancellor and ended his days as a figurehead.

According to a report in the Boston Globe in February, US defence analysts have been forecasting an attempt to postpone the elections. A growing number of intelligence officials are saying that, if Yeltsin's health or political popularity give them no other choice, the Russian President's entourage might postpone or manipulate the 16 June elections in the interests of personal survival,' the report said.

Calling off the election would put the international community in a quandary. It would rather have Yeltsin in the Kremlin, but such a flagrant departure from democratic procedures could hardly be condoned.

Yes, 'hardly', - but it might be condoned nevertheless, if thought necessary, and if Yeltsin's dictatorship over all television coverage and use of legal and illegal state funds for re-election fails to prevent the declared Communist Party candidate Zhyuganov from winning and delivering the greatest humiliation ever to the West's all-consuming propaganda ideology and principal religion, - anti-communism.

The biggest laugh capitalism has ever had at the expense of the working class is how gullible people have remained about 'democracy' in spite of the endless mountains of evidence available that everywhere it is nothing but a prop behind the non-stop propaganda rackets with which big business and the bourgeois state establishment perpetually fool the proletariat.

The disinformation stunts with which the ruling class bamboozle public opinion at crucial junctures quickly get forgotten, but they vitally control the mass and the 'democratic' response at key moments such as the non-existent 'Gulf of Tonkin' incident, an entirely fictional Vietnamese patrol-boat attack on US Navy vessels which enabled US imperialism to launch its land war against the Vietnamese revolution; the deliberate falsehoods about Iraqi troops smashing babies to the floor to steal incubators out of Kuwait hospital; the lie that Iraq forces were then massing to invade Saudi Arabia when the exact opposite was the case; the continuing mysteries of the Berlin disco bomb, the Lockerbie air bomb, and the shooting of WPG Yvonne Fletcher to whip up justification for the NATO air blitz on Libya; the complete fabrications to justify the gunning down in cold blood of the three Irish nationalists in Gibraltar, and the endless cover-ups and dirty tricks to prevent the shoot-to-kill secret policy from being revealed by the Stalker investigation; the imaginary Indonesian communist 'coup' used by imperialism to engineer the butchery of tens of thousands of poor Communist Party supporters; the hypocritical campaign against Noriega, the CIA's own former drug-running stooge, to justify the invasion of Panama to halt its turn towards nationalist policies; etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

And what is the involvement of the West's black propaganda departments in today's pro-Yeltsin stunt of letting him (in debt to the West for $20billion) kick out 'British agents' as an election gimmick to show him as a 'strong independent Russian', - a racket immediately described by the capitalist press itself:

Before an election it is important to show the FSB is active. As the Russian proverb goes when talking about someone who is not doing his job well: "He is not catching mice." By catching a British spy, the FSB is showing that the Russian cat is not entirely asleep.

"The FSB is looking for a spy at any price," Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB defector now living in Britain, said last night. "A political gesture in the middle of an election campaign shows that Yeltsin is patriotic and wary about the West."

Not a day goes by now without it being possible to find some revelation in the capitalist press, somewhere or other, detailing past, present, or future anti-communist propaganda rackets to justify totally corrupt counter-revolutionary deeds by 'democracy', like this for example:

Vice-President Richard Nixon, soon to face off against John Kennedy in the November election, was a prime mover in securing the approval on March 17 that year of a covert action programme against Dr Castro.

Four months later, President Eisenhower suspended purchases of Cuban sugar. Like the full-scale embargo decreed the following year, this move was presented publicly as retaliation for expropriations without adequate compensation.

Not so, according to Ambassador Bonsai. ''The suspension of the sugar quota was a major element in the programme for the overthrow of Castro," he said. A programme which, according to Castro biographer Tad Szulc, "already constituted top-secret policy in March of 1959", just weeks after the revolution triumphed.

The removal from power of the Cuban leader remains the goal of the US embargo, which has been unilateral since the Organisation of American States (OAS) lifted sanctions in 1975.

This puts it in breach of a number of international treaties, not least article 19 of the OAS charter, which states: ''No state may use or encourage the use of coercive measures of an economic or political character in order to force the sovereign will of another state and obtain from it advantages of any kind."

The United Nations General Assembly has repeatedly condemned the embargo as illegal, with the US supported only by client states such as Israel.

Pious statements about freeing Cuba from communist dictatorship beg a million questions about double standards.

During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton's unsuccessful bid to win the key state of Florida included a surprise announcement of support for the "Cuban Democracy Bill", which had been cold-shouldered by President Bush as likely to alienate US allies.

This year, provoked by the shooting down by Cuban MiGs of two unarmed private planes piloted by exiles, Mr Clinton reversed his opposition to the even more draconian Helms-Burton Bill — now the Cuban Liberty and Solidarity Act — which aims to strangle foreign investment in the island.

Under the new law, US citizens will for the first time be able to sue foreign companies that buy, lease or benefit from properties expropriated by the communist government.

Leading trading partners of the United States with investments in Cuba, including the European Union, Canada and Mexico, have not surprisingly taken a dim view of this blatant attempt to legislate beyond US borders, and are trying — so far without success — to have it declared illegal under international law.

Washington seems largely unconcerned by the sharp reaction of some of its key allies.

The lavishly-funded all-powerful counter-revolutionary propaganda departments of the 'free world' powers have been waging non-stop total war against socialism and communism since the 1920s, and they will not stop now.

Scargill himself knows all about the vicious disinformation and subversive sabotage which tried to destroy the miners strike of 84-35 with tales of Libyan Gold, house-buying rackets for NUM officials, unaccounted suitcases full of money, etc, etc.

When the final story is told of the history of the greatest brainwashing experiment ever conducted on society, people are going to be staggered at the astonishing lengths and unbelievably devious measures to which bourgeois ideology has resorted in its anti-communist dementia, - cascading its lies, confusion, and stunts throughout the film industry, television documentaries and plays, book publishing, the pop music industry, newspapers and magazines, civil rights stunts, prisoners-of-conscience gimmicks, Nobel Prize awards, refugee and other border provocations, dissident and émigré rackets, and above all the non-stop manipulation of the international news agencies to simply control people's thinking.

Even the very shoddiness and shallowness of some of these ruses nevertheless helps to rot brains and sow more confusion, such as a paltry new anti-China stunt launched over the weekend with a "sensational new literary masterpiece", the escape diary of a former prisoner in China with lots of crawling-through-mud and eating-maggots details just like Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovitch trick, - this one with starving Chinese peasants boiling their own baby for food.

The timing, placing, and presentation of this piece bore all the hallmarks of a major new CIA propaganda drive against China.

The style is astonishing, - headlines all about Mao, mass starvation, full horror, 30 million dying of hunger, etc. When it comes to the actual book extract, there is nothing about all this at all, just some completely fanciful anecdotes, presented as autobiographical fact, of a prisoner on the run trying to steal scraps of food and water from peasant carts and cottages, -	and finding only corpses under the tarpaulin, or boiled babies inside the iron water pot, etc, etc, - all most graphically described in the most carefully-chosen punchy literary language.

To progress from this fiction to the slander of the Chinese workers state as some living-hell of a madhouse, the following pathetic emotional 'logic' is employed:

It was not my one mouth, it was not my one stomach, and it was not my one life that was traumatised, but those of the entire race. The damage to a few people is perhaps not important; individuals are easily replaced. But harming the humanity of the great majority of the Chinese people, denying their self-expression, destroying their reasons for living, has lowered the human quality of all Chinese...

That they could, during the Great Cultural Revolution, prostrate themselves in unprecedented madness of worship at the feet of someone who was not unprecedentedly great and, under his banner, carry out self-flagellation in an extraordinary display of aberrant behaviour, was related to the fact that the fibre of their being had been seriously damaged several years earlier. As one traumatised organism, the country went mad.

What you don't get is a rational argument about what mistakes the Chinese workers state might have made on the way to its colossal achievements of ripping this vast impoverished country out of total imperialist domination for 100 years up to 1949, and then transforming it into a leading world power with colossally high standards (compared to its Third World origins) of mass literacy, mass culture, health and social services, higher education, science and technology advance, industrial infrastructure, and highly creditable environmental awareness (panda protection, etc). What you get is a mentally sick self-abasement by an out-of-place individualist to feed the worst kind of yellow-peril racist phobia of the West in return for money and a bit of attention. The sole aim of such books and news coverage is to pollute Western minds.

Scargill tried to claim that it reflected a lack of faith in the working class to insist that the SLP should need to warn workers of every dirty trick that capitalist-state counter-revolution might get up to.

Just the opposite. It betrays a lack of faith in the working class, and contempt for its intelligence, for the SLP not to proceed to the highest possible level of understanding of the imperialist economic crisis, of its reactionary anti-democracy preparations, and above all of its foul history of anti-communist propaganda stunts, anti-worker provocations, and anti-national-liberation scares with which it has kept revolution at bay since the 1920s.

Build Leninism. RB

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

Cold war aim behind Kennedy assassination to clear the way for an all-out us imperialist onslaught on Cuba

RIO DE JANEIRO. — Cuban and U.S. investigators are claiming that the so-called parallel government in the United States planned John F. Kennedy's assassination in order to avoid a rapprochement with Havana.

In the Justice Tribunal of this Brazilian city, during a seminar titled "JFK: the truth revealed," ten experts — eight from the United States and two from Cuba — discussed the convergent political circumstances which led to the 1963 murder of Kennedy in Dallas.

In the interview with Prensa Latina, members of both delegations agreed that the theory of the lone assassin has been discounted. General Fabian Escalante, director of the Cuban Center for National Security Studies, stated that "according to Lopez Estrada, an expert on the CIA, the Dallas assassination must have been committed by approximately 30 persons."

U S. lawyer and diplomat Wayne Smith commented that he is sure that the intelligence services in his country and Cuban counter-revolutionaries were involved in the plot to kill Kennedy, who had declined to approve new plans to invade Cuba after the Bay of Pigs disaster. He added that after three decades of research, non-governmental specialists in the United States believe that the deceased president was not in favor of a fresh invasion plan, previsaged for 1963, the year of his death, and that U.S. official sources attempted to involve Cuba in the Kennedy assassination when, on the contrary, there was evidence of the president's rapprochement with the government in Havana.

Escalante, division general of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior and former chief of counter-intelligence, reiterated that Cuban counter-revolutionaries played an important role in the presidential assassination, which is amply confirmed in 32 years of research material. U.S. professor and journalist Gaston Fonzi, who investigated the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and exiled Cubans in Florida, pointed out that the former entity controlled Alpha 66, the counter-revolutionary organization based in Miami, and although the CIA denies any links with the Cuban exile right wing, there is sufficient evidence to confirm that it, together with other powerful elements, directed the plot to eliminate the president.

Escalante noted that the Cuban government, on request, handed over important documents on the Kennedy assassination in order to clarify various aspects of the counter-revolutionary participation in the Dallas shooting. Representatives of the U.S. Senate Select Committee traveled to Havana in 1978 in search of information on Lee Harvey Oswald's 1963 visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico, and were given the relevant data.

After referring to the organization of the counter-revolutionary military structure in Miami and the role played by the CIA, Escalante offered proof of the participation by the so-called parallel government (the CIA, the Mafia and Cuban exiles) in the assassination, in the face of the presumed impossibility of convincing the Democratic president to attempt a further invasion of Cuba.

He also revealed an additional plan to place the blame on Havana, while laying the plans for the military invasion which its leaders knew would not be approved by the president.

In his exposition, Escalante stated that "in their assault upon Cuba, the CIA broke with all its traditions and created an internal division, with 400 officers, 4000 agents, 55 companies, airlines, ships, airplanes and many other resources, an apparatus which we call the CIA's Cuban mechanism, and which was responsible for the campaign against my country and which would subsequently erupt in scandals such as Watergate, Irangate and the Contras."

According to AFP, that mechanism, which was secret and difficult to control, arose as a result of the failed Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961, and ended by exploding against U.S. society. Furthermore, the Cuban specialist pointed out, Fidel Castro has survived some 300 assassination attempts dating back to 1959, according to "the most accurate data available," and that, between January and August 1968 alone, the Cuban security agencies recorded 5780 armed operations within the island, "perpetrated with CIA funds and weaponry."

This international conference, sponsored by Justice Tribunal and the Rio de Janeiro municipality and coordinated by Claudia Furiati, opened with a round table. During this session, the pathologist who participated in Kennedy's autopsy, Dr. Cyril Wecht, and Wayne Smith agreed that, in the light of their examination of legal evidence, the Warren Commission failed to afford the requisite importance to the physical and circumstantial details of the shooting, perhaps because of its more urgent need to find an explanation that, at the same time, would provide a viable political way out of the issue. 

*************
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 Colston St Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 169. Friday 3rd May, 1996

The fight to analyze and abolish capitalism, the fight to re-analyze the twentieth century and the defining significance within it of the Soviet Union, and the fight far proletarian dictatorship science, are one and the same.

What the arms-racing, warmongering crisis of monopoly capital must sooner or later provoke everywhere is proletarian revolt against the political authority of the capitalist class itself, organized around its capitalist state.

It is out of the heart of capitalism's own contradictions that arise the social forces capable of resolving those contradictions: capitalism produces the gravediggers of its own capitalist system.

And where these revolts come to be led by a degree of conscious Marxist revolutionary science, the century now closing has demonstrated how awesome are the planned socialist transformations of social relations, production, science and culture of which the working class is capable, even under often very flawed workers state leadership.

When Time magazine asked Castro: "Where did communism go wrong?", his answer was straight to the point. "It went wrong by not liquidating capitalism earlier. I believe that capitalism, in spite of its great successes, is a catastrophe for the world. No matter how many cars, no matter how much good living you have, there are billions of people living in poverty who have no cars, no comfort, no public health, no education... Capitalism developed the forces of production; it developed technology. But at the same time, it has been digging its own grave."

At its best, SLP centrism sounds like getting close to saying the same thing:

"The Soviet Union's mistake was to abandon its socialist principles."

So observed Mr Arthur Scargill as he launched the Socialist Labour Party yesterday.

"Had they had our commitment they would have had a socialist system in society and it would not have collapsed and now... it would have been way ahead of the rest of the world. The tragedy is it departed from those commitments," he concluded.

Clearly, basic questions about the Soviet Union, its central role in the history of this century, and the significance of its collapse are already rapidly pushing their way up the centrist agenda, thanks to the sharpening of imperialist crisis and the corresponding rapidity of reformism' s demise.

The announced 'commitment' to build a political movement aimed at the abolition of capitalism will be welcomed by every socialist-minded worker.

And if Scargill were to say, along with Castro, that if communism can be said to have 'gone wrong', it did so by "failing to liquidate capitalism earlier", then some similar thinking around the Kremlin might indeed have done a power of good in stopping the revisionist rot.

But it is not yet clear that that IS what is really being said. With "our commitment", "they would have had a socialist system..." - so what kind of system is it supposed was being built all those seventy years? - "...and it would not have collapsed" -but how could socialism collapse if it was supposedly never really being built in the first place!

The reality is that the Soviet Union WAS building socialism for seven decades and WAS "way ahead of the rest of the world" in showing how an enormous modern industrial society could be managed and organized by the working class alone, without any 'help' from an exploiting bourgeois class.

It is true that the 'commitment' to proletarian dictatorship science was progressively weakened since Lenin's pioneering days, and that in the end the criminal perestroika self-liquidation of workers state leadership was indeed a tragic departure from that commitment.

But it is in the nature of such centrist pronouncements (at least as reported by the capitalist press, on whose self-interested commentary all remain dependent until the SLP's own paper is off the blocks) that they should be open to different reading by different class attitudes.

So the door is left ajar for trade unionist economism to set its 'commitment' to fighting the necessary rearguard defence of wages and conditions in artificial opposition to the need for workers to build a political challenge to the political dictatorship of the capitalist state.

The door is likewise left ajar for the Trots to go on slandering the Soviet Union, giving them another chance to elevate their own 'commitment' to petty bourgeois 'democracy' games above the genuine emancipation of labour, alone made possible by the fight for proletarian dictatorship.

More of THAT kind of thinking around the Kremlin would have hastened the degeneration, not stopped the rot.

But the real value of Scarglll's words lies in their tacit acknowledgement that analysis of the workers-state history of the Soviet Union is unavoidably at the centre of any serious discussion about the working class staking a political challenge to the right of capitalism to exist.

And what is also quite clear is Scargill's readiness to lead the SLP into open political battle on the electoral front, apparently with none of the qualms about 'splitting the anti-Tory vote' or 'being nasty to decent left-Labourites', or the sentiment that 'it might be better to wait for a (ninth) Labour government to expose themselves as reactionary dogs before making a big electoral push' which are still being voiced fearfully in more timid corners of the fledgling movement:

Yesterday Mr Scargill singled out new Labour as "the most undemocratic party" in Britain. He called on all Labour MPs, whom he believes are "filled with guilt", to look to their socialist souls as new Labour "supports capitalism, a stakeholder economy and the free market".

Arthur Scargill opened a new phase in the guerrilla war which small parties are threatening to wage against the Labour-Conservative hegemony at the coming general election.

When the miners' leader's Socialist Labour Party (SLP) was finally given its formal May Day launch, he hinted that he would stand against Alan Howarth at the next election if Labour imposes the Tory defector on a constituency such as the Yorkshire seat of Wentworth...members of Mr Scargill's SLP have already decided to challenge Tony Blair in his Sedgefield constituency and the Shadow Employment Secretary, Michael Meacher, in Oldham West.

Mr Scargill announced yesterday that the party planned to field as many parliamentary candidates as it could afford.

The SLP was being founded, the National Union of Mineworkers president said yesterday, because there were now "no fundamental differences between the Conservative Party, New Labour and the Liberal Democrats".

The new party, whose candidate Brenda Nixon won 5.4 per cent of the vote in the Hemsworth by-election in February, has been dismissed by both the Labour leadership and leftwing MPs like Ken Livingstone as irrelevant. 

And, questions of precise electoral tactics aside, it is that fundamental readiness to move politically against the dying postwar reformist tradition of Labourism (which served the bourgeois exploitation and anti-communist interest so well for so long) which makes it quite natural for Scargill to want to keep talking about the Soviet Union and Cuba. The closer imperialist crisis pushes the centrist debate towards political confrontation, with bourgeois dictatorship, the stronger will wax the class eagerness to struggle to get its bearings in this epoch of wars and revolutions by getting straight on the question of the transforming role of proletarian dictatorship in history.

The emphasis in the Castro quote upon Marx's famous line about capitalism producing its own gravediggers also points up a weakness in the SLP's own grasp of the way that imperialist crisis itself drives revolution onto the agenda. Thanks to this weakness in perspective, some quite vigorous attempts to explain the contemporary reality of capitalist society quickly get bogged down into a lot of idealist wishful thinking.

The Economic and Philosophic Science Review wrote about this tendency last week:

On every philosophical issue of life and society, on every question of economics and world perspectives, on every vexed matter of history and science, - the working class needs a party which grasps and gives leadership on these things better than anyone else can. Only then will the workers movement be completely ready and fit to lead the way to the socialist revolution, and temporarily become the new ruling class to carry through the transformation of society.

The SLP policy statements, particularly on the economic perspectives and international questions, have their heart in the right place but speak with very little authority.

On economic problems, for example, there is a correct and impassioned description of some of the capitalist system's more obvious current failings. But there is not even an attempted historical estimation of what point has been reached in civilisation's long process of social evolution and revolution, or why it has come about. On the contrary, the document keeps suggesting that capitalism could do better if it wanted to, and that the free-market economy does not have to work in the anarchic way that it does.

And this instinctive reformist/class—compromising delusion leaves the SLP merely offering the working class more well-meaning pie-in-the-sky, albeit with a healthy and honest revolutionary/centrist commitment to direct-action class struggle, — of which the 1984-85 miners strike was such a heroic and honourable example, a true milestone in British history.

But this still remains the theory that left pressure, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, will eventually topple capitalism. It is a daydream which partly fell apart in 1985, and which it will be difficult to persuade the working class to believe in next time round. It was an illusion of the reformist era, - a 'left' illusion.

The alternative necessary philosophy is not the silly putschism of the anarchists or the Angry Brigade, or the military training fantasies of survivalist groups. The alternative is a deeper scientific analysis of where imperialism's worsening economic and political crisis will drag mankind next, and what volcanic forces capitalism's coming failings will throw up for dealing with these even greater levels of destruction and alienation.

Like all good centrism, the SLP hints at a revolutionary preparedness to go all the way against capitalism via the extended route of direct-action protests, but hesitates to explain that revolutionary situations will be created by capitalism itself, and that revolutions will be necessary to resolve such situations.

All that is hinted at by the SLP is a willingness to give revolutionary leadership. What the working class needs is a full explanation of why, when, and how revolutionary leadership will be absolutely necessary for civilisation's survival and further progress, and also how the preparation of the masses for revolution will not depend just on party agitation, no matter how brilliant, but will largely be carried out spontaneously by capitalism's own uncontrollable upheavals.

If 'left' pressure was the only route to revolution, there would never be many convinced revolutionaries about. If volcanic forces of capitalism's own crisis are seen as the unstoppable creator of revolutionary situations, then the whole workers movement could become convinced revolutionaries. 

Full support for the SLP's electoral challenge against every pro-capitalist party at Westminster. Full support for the founding of a Socialist Labour national paper to assist the working class in its study of imperialist crisis and of what is to be done to secure the abolition of capitalism. Build Leninism in the SLP.
Paddy Chambers