Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
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No 0855 May 28th 1996                                                                                                                                 10p 

Southwest sales rally on Saturday (June 1) at 2 pm. Receipts please. Subs

British colonialism's Irish debacle is most instructive about imperialist system weaknesses as monopoly capitalist 'know-how' and power explode chaotically around the sick profiteering rivalry of the bogus 'European Union'. Fake-'Marxist left' exposed in all its sectarian stupidity over Ireland.

The fake 'democracy' of elections this week in the British-Occupied Zone of Ireland, still suffering under its gerrymandered artificial Orange-colonist majority, will be one of the last farcical acts of the hated imperialist domination.

The polling for the cosmetic 'Forum' is a final gesture by the humiliated London establishment to its own stupid fears of losing face, and to the sick 'Ulster Unionist' posturing of its outdated colonial regime in the OZ.

The 'Forum' was a skinny useless rabbit pulled lout of the hat at the 189th minute by the Tory ruling class after the Mitchell Commission Report had effectively told London to drop all preconditions about 'decommissioning arms', etc, and fix a firm date for all-party negotiations, at last, on a completely new deal for Ireland.

The South quay bomb in London's Docklands in February was the national-liberation struggle's effective answer to this further unconfident dithering by London, frightened of further setbacks at the hands of the IRA's guerrilla war, but too befuddled and timid to finally push its 'Unionist' stooges into a corner either, and tell them to at last face up to the loss of their former colonial racket in so-called 'Northern Ireland'.

The 'Forum' elections gimmick was persisted in, but the firm date (June 10) was at once fixed for the opening of the all-sided negotiations, London, Dublin, the 'Unionists', and the Irish nationalist population of the Occupied Zone, - with heavyweight imperialism from the USA and Europe hovering in the background to push the reluctant British ruling class into agreeing some new deal for Ireland to replace the despised colony position and Partition provocation of 'Northern Ireland' as it was, - a permanent legitimate target for revolutionary guerrilla-war action.

Having accepted that the peace process must finally begin, the Tory hierarchy has since February been going through contortions trying to admit that there will no longer be any preconditions imposed on the national liberation movement at all, - while continuing to cloak their public statements in such confusion that the leading 'Unionist' posturers would not feel too exposed as empty bags of wind and feel obliged to resign.

London's further retreat, clearly visible for a while and always inevitable according to the historical-materialist analysis of imperialist decline (and especially the collapse of British imperialism's positions) which the EPSR long ago established (see ILWP Books vol 8 published just after the turning-point climb-down for Britain in the 1985 Anglo-Irish Treaty)), - was semi-official in this weekend's capitalist press admissions:

THE BRITISH Government is prepared to allow detailed discussions to begin on constitutional and political issues at the all-party Northern Ireland talks before the IRA starts handing over its weapons, the Observer has learned.

The IRA has repeatedly made it clear it will not accept decommissioning as a precondition for negotiations.

In sum, Dublin now accepts there would not have been a ceasefire in the first place had there been such a stipulation. It takes the view it would be much harder a second time round to make another ceasefire conditional on decommissioning as a route into the 10 June talks.

The British Government holds to the view that it has compromised on the issue. Sir Patrick Mayhew said last week the Government wanted decommissioning ahead of all party negotiations. The IRA said it could only happen at the end.

The Mitchell Commission supposed 'middle course', - no prior decommissioning before talks start immediately; disarming to be dealt with in the course of the negotiations, - is in fact a complete capitulation by London.

The leaders of the national-liberation struggle will enter the peace process in total triumph, having forced the imperialist colonisers to negotiate a new deal for Ireland, and having surrendered none of their weapons, ready and willing to resume the guerrilla war the moment that London sabotages the talks again, or allows its 'Unionist' stooges to do so.

It is not even absolutely certain that the IRA will honour the settlement conference with another ceasefire, although they will probably do so out of good tactical sense. But the national liberation struggle has properly refused all demands for any 'guarantee', -  short-term or longterm, - about ending its military activities. The South Quay bomb was and remains an effective ultimatum: Either talk seriously about a new deal for Ireland, or you know what to expect. And that will continue to be the sole reality, whatever idiot pretences that the Tory imperialist press propagandists try to come up with.

The desperately posturing 'Unionists' attempted one last 'menacing' hoax last week (to try to hide their retreat from their notorious 'No Surrender' past colonial bluster) when the UUP spokesman Trimble pretended to threaten to bring down Major's precarious government (only a one-vote majority in the Commons with the aid of the 'Unionist' MPs).

This should have been a sensational story, - a real threat to bring down the Tories after 17 years in power, and a real threat to rip apart the obvious unquestioning past unity between the colonists and their imperialist protectors.

But the story barely caused a ripple in the capitalist press. Everyone (bar the fake-'left' in Britain) now recognises that the British presence in Ireland is going to have to make a historic compromise with Irish nationalist self-determination in the coming period (months or years), and that the old 'Unionist' defiance of 'No Surrender' - (meaning continued exclusively British control over the Occupied Zone) is now hopelessly out-of-date and is what is going to have to disappear in order to make way for a new set-up in Ireland.

The long-running scuttle from colonial empire is going to continue. The only thing left to the British imperialists of all shades is to try to rescue a little prestige and avoid total humiliation at the hands of the despised 'bog-trotters' (six of whom it takes, remember, to change one light bulb).

The 'Unionist' bourgeoisie do not wish to appear too naked of real political power and know-how in front of their own working class, for fear of losing even more than just their ill-gotten privileged position in the bogus statelet of 'Northern Ireland'. The British imperialist state did not want to be seen to have been defeated by a relatively tiny movement of armed urban guerrillas.

Hence the problem for the imperialists in their long slow retreat from colonial empire in Ireland has been one of endless cover-ups of what is really going on, endless delays and procrastinations, and endless irritability and nervousness on all sides for fear of ending up with the historical 'blame' for the retreat.

This atmosphere of subterfuge and double-dealing has been added to by the concerns of the wider imperialist world to get justice for Irish national-liberation and self-determination (especially to score a point against rival British imperialists) but without remotely wishing to be seen internationally as having condoned or encouraged armed revolutionary struggle, which would be a disastrous precedent to set to the exploited and dominated Third World.

The one faint possible problem for clumsy British imperialism in trying to manage this retreat from empire without losing too much face was the chance that if things were handled insensitively or indelicately in trying to smuggle in a new arrangement for Ireland without the demise of the old 'Northern Ireland' being noticed, then it might just spark off an armed backlash from the more demented 'Ulster Unionist' bigots and British colonial die-hards, which would then have to be quickly put down by further British armed intervention.

If this had happened (and it still might yet happen), it would not be a long or major operation, nothing comparable to the latest 25-year-long losing battle against the IRA, - because the aggressive empire spirit is now a historical relic as far as British interests are concerned. There is much blowing-hard remaining, but very little determined and competent colonising know-how with any perspective to it. The pioneering spirit of the British occupation of Ireland is on its last legs.

It now looks as if the stage is finally set for a great moment in history, - the preparations towards the ultimate conclusion to 827 years of domineering occupation of Ireland from Britain via direct armed rule, subversion, and colonisation.

This eventual scuttle has long been made way for, - as has been made obvious in recent weeks with the publication of Mallie and McKittrick's book on The Secret Story Behind The Irish Peace Process, much quoted from in the capitalist press itself, detailing the quite astonishing degree, from 1990 onwards, of concealed British government cooperation with the Irish national-liberation struggle to end the war with a self-determination peace settlement, followed by a bad attack of cold feet in Downing Street once the Ulster Unionist votes had become so vital for securing the Major Cabinet's survival in the House of Commons:

This was the first of a sustained series of overtures which included sending the republicans advance copies of Brooke’s speeches, details of ministerial discussions and even confidential reports on the progress of the Brooke and Mayhew talks with the other parties and the Irish Government.

The Back Channel opened with an approach from the British Government representative who had been in touch with the republicans in earlier periods.

In January 1992 messages were passed back and forth on what Sinn Féin called 'the Irish peace initiative’ — that is, the Hume-Adams talks. The British also, according to McGuinness, kept Sinn Féin informed of the progress of the Mayhew political talks - passing on, in October 1992, a detailed internal government report and assessment on the discussions.

Part of this document suggested the Government was intent on [influencing] a report by Sir Ninian Stephen, the retired Australian diplomat who was acting as independent chairman of the talks...and [was] drawing up model heads of agreement which [would] be submitted for his use on a non-attributable basis, in an attempt to guide his consultations. 'The idea is to ghost-write Sir Ninian’s report’.

This was followed, in December 1992 and January 1993, by meetings between the contact and the British representative, together with a series of phone calls, sometimes on a daily basis. Sinn Féin was unenthusiastic until the Government representative indicated a face-to-face meeting was possible, and began to discuss the logistics of such a meeting The republican account of a meeting between the contact and the representative in February 1993 records:

‘He was very upbeat about the possibility of delegation meetings, he said that he and his colleagues had been working on this for two years. Major and Mayhew had discussed the republican struggle and the Christmas cessation.

Dramatis personae

Gerry Adams president of Sinn Féin.

Sir Roddy Baithwaite chairman, Joint Intelligence Committee.
Authors say he attended Cabinet committee; its purported records were leaked to Sinn Féin.  British Government do not confirm this but acknowledge he was one of the small circle concerned with management of the Back Channel.

Peter Brooke Northern Ireland secretary from July 1989 to April 1992.

Sir Robin Butler UK Cabinet secretary since 1988.

John Chilcot permanent secretary, Northern Ireland office since 1990.

The Contact an intermediary between the Government and Sinn Féin. He has never been named.
The IRA needs to provide the space to turn the possibility of meetings into a reality. A suspension is all that is being required of them.’

The British believed that two or three weeks was a sufficient period to convince republicans [that the IRA campaign was unnecessary]. There would be an intensive round of talks. Once started, people [would] remain until decisions were arrived at. Reciprocation would be immediate; troops withdrawn to barracks, checkpoints removed, security levels determined by loyalist threat.

On 19 March 1993, the Government despatched an important document to the republicans, setting out the broad British approach.

It said it had no blueprint for the outcome of all-party talks, and accepted the outcome could eventually be a united Ireland, though based only on consent.

But only four days after this, according to the republican record, a face-to-face meeting took place between the British representative, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly. The message conveyed by the representative at this meeting, according to the republican note, was much more encouraging to the republicans:

'Mayhew is now determined. He wants Sinn Féin to play a part, not because he likes Sinn Féin but because it cannot work without them. Any settlement not involving all of the people North and South won’t work... The final solution is union [i.e. a united Ireland]. The historical train - Europe - determines that. We are committed to Europe. Unionists will have to change. This island will be as one.’

Confidentiality was of the utmost importance. Only Major, Mayhew, Hurd and secretary to the Cabinet [Butler) knew of all this.

On 10 May, Sinn Féin sent to the British an important document setting out their position, together with a message confirming that the IRA had agreed to a two-week suspension. It declared:

‘Dialogue and negotiations are necessary and inevitable if this conflict is to be resolved on a democratic basis. Pre-conditions represent obstacles to peace.’

The road to peace, they insisted, lay through national self-determination by the Irish people.

British sovereignty over the North was the cause of instability and conflict: republicans sought the end of British jurisdiction. Unionist concerns had to be addressed, but Britain should persuade the Unionist community to reach an accommodation with the rest of the Irish people.

The republicans were intensely interested in the idea of delegate meetings, agreeing to a two-week IRA suspension and pressing the British eagerly on logistical details. In the event, however, the go-ahead never came from London. Instead, later in May, the British Government representative was in touch to say he had returned from a walking holiday to find that Ministers had changed their minds. He was ‘absolutely disgusted’ [with this], he said.

According to the republican documents the representative gave the contact the following account of what had happened:

‘The initiative of 10/11 May had been very well received by Chilcot, and plans were immediately put in place to get approval from John Major. Mayhew had reservations, pointing out that he couldn’t risk any announcements in the run-up to the local government elections. He stated that he was worried about an upsurge in support for the DUP [Paisley's party] at the expense of the Ulster Unionist party [Molyneaux’s party].

‘The timetable agenda was agreed by Chilcot and Mayhew. That is, cessation followed within seven days by logistics, followed by delegates' meeting. It was the intention to put this to Major on Monday 17 May. Present at the meeting were Major, Hurd, Mayhew, Chilcot, Braithwaite [see dramatis personae and two other names which appeared to be secretaries or similar.

‘The meeting was rushed and indecisive, with Major asking questions on which he should have been more fully briefed, e.g.: 
1. What guarantees do we have that this cessation can he held or will hold?

2 We need more evidence that what they say, they mean.

‘Douglas Hurd had to leave for a meeting of Foreign Secretaries on the Bosnian peace plan. On the whole, the meeting was most unsatisfactory from an Irish point of view.	

‘John Major adjourned the meeting to the following day and called in Kenneth Clarke [then Home Secretary] who was in buoyant, bombastic mood, and advised John Major that the proposition was much too risky at the present time with the Government under siege.

‘Mayhew was wobbling between pushing for acceptance and wanting a safer, longer period of cessation. John Major compromised by instructing his secretaries to draw up a programme which he would be able to announce in Parliament having previously, ie, 24 hours before, informed Church leaders and the heads of the main political parties that he was instructing the Northern Ireland Office to enter into dialogue with the republican movement. Major’s plan involved a longer cessation, followed by private logistics [involving the British Government representatives], followed by his agreed statement at Westminster, followed by dialogue.’

The British representative passed on a personal message, in which he said:

"There is depression and anger here at our failure to respond to your brave and straightforward offer. None feel it more than I do for obvious reasons... You have my word that all that was conveyed was done so honestly and accurately at the time...I can only ask for patience, for all our sakes.'

The favoured explanation on the republican side was that the key British change of heart had come around May, just as John Major was hopeful of securing Unionist support in the Commons votes on Europe.

But the national-liberation movement continued pushing the peace process from positions of strength arising from the further devastating bombing of the City of London, with potential colossal economic consequences for British imperialism if a peace settlement was not achieved.

And the erosion of the Tory Commons majority anyway, with or without the Unionist MPs, coincided with the humiliating pressure on London from the IRA's ceasefire spectacular, - and even worse pressure from the even more spectacular ending of that ceasefire 18 months later because of London's foolish and dithering intransigence.

But a halt seems about to be called to British imperialism's deliberate disruptiveness, - signalled in Major's still mystifyingly confusing Irish Times article from which the capitalist press itself could only draw the following defeated conclusion:

the overriding consideration will be to avoid blocking the negotiations.

Mr Major’s presentation is a considerable departure from the original British government position, which demanded the destruction of some IRA weapons before political talks could begin. It spurns the early unionist demand for the surrender of all IRA weapons.

Last Sunday Mr McGuinness sought a commitment from Mr Major that the talks would be “meaningful and comprehensive" and he is told that they will be “meaningful and inclusive" with an “open agenda”.

He sought an assurance that the decommissioning issue would not form an “obstacle to talks" and receives a qualified, and mainly positive, reply. As for a negotiating time-frame of six to nine months, Mr Major does the best he can in a situation where he does not control the talks. No one, he writes, wants “to drag out the process". But, he warns, the road to an agreed settlement will continue to be “long and painstaking".

There still exist powerful potential setbacks to these hopes for a successful eventual conclusion to Ireland's unprecedentedly long national-liberation struggle, such as the toppling of Major from the Tory leadership, a resurgence of Tory determination to stay in office at all costs, or an early general election followed by a hung Parliament, etc, etc, etc.

But the deeper currents of history are generally what are going to prevail, and these dictate an ending (in a few months, a few years) at last to the monstrous outrage of the British colonial Partition of Ireland.

This will represent a colossal triumph for anti-imperialist struggle the whole world over, brilliantly directed militarily and politically by a tiny group of determined revolutionary spirits, arms in hand.

It is of course a nationalist revolution, as the EPSR has astonishingly had to continually point out to sectarian philistine groups on the fake-'left' of the British petty-bourgeoisie's bogus 'Marxist' swamp, - but it is nonetheless an outstandingly important anti-imperialist victory for all that. A 'free-world' monopoly-imperialist giant will have been seen to have been defeated by an armed revolutionary struggle. And even more importantly, the British working class itself will at last have been freed of one of its oldest and most corrupting imperialist influences, - the mindless racist arrogance that inevitably flows from feeling to be part of 'major power superiority', particularly contemptuous over the centuries against the Irish, and irrevocably tying workers in Britain to class-collaboration with their own ruling class, making an effective struggle for their own emancipation impossible.

As Marx explained: 'No nation which oppresses another can itself be free' and this applies even more to the British colonial working class in the Occupied Zone of Ireland, the pointless targets of ultra-'left' posturing by middle-class 'Marxist revolutionary' frauds. Many Trot sects with no real political courage, convictions, or maturity, have tried inventing a 'plausible denial' of the need for unconditional revolutionary solidarity with the Irish national-liberation struggle on the grounds that Sinn Féin & Co should really be appealing to the 'protestant' workers in the Occupied Zone for a joint revolution, north and south, against all capitalist governments.

This is particularly nasty and destructive posturing and confusion-sowing by these shallow opportunists. On one hand, it is a gutless retreat from fear of 'contamination' with IRA terrorist violence in a completely unprincipled way. No serious-minded revolutionary worker or anti-imperialist could ever dream of saying anything other than that the Irish national-liberation struggle has the absolute right to fight against colonial occupation with any and every means it chooses.

On the other hand, this fake-'left' stance is such humbug. To tell Sinn Féin it should only be fighting a revolutionary struggle against capitalist government north and south, - while not one single Trot is conducting one sliver of armed revolutionary struggle against any other part of the United Kingdom (as 'Northern Ireland' constitutionally remains) is the most despicable and provocative hypocrisy.

And the other damage these loud-mouthed provocateurs do, of course, is in general to the whole cause of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science by showing such shallow philistine ignorance of the very ABCs of Marxism, while posturing as 'Marxists'.

Take the following poisonous sectarian rubbish from the Sparts, which goes even further than the disgraceful-enough CPGB Workers Weekly venom (see last week's Review) which took up British Imperialism's sneering bourgeois-moralist stance against the 'death of innocent workers' due to, allegedly, IRA guerrilla-war actions.

As the Review has explained in the past to such utter nonsense, it is the imperialist ruling class which drives people to desperate terrorist struggle in the first place, and the same cowardly ruling class which, in the second place, deliberately protects itself from any danger of frontline guerrilla-war assaults, and quite consciously only leaves the more indiscriminate targets available such as ruling-class property such as the City of London buildings. On top of that, imperialist-state policy has been quite notoriously lax on many occasions about protecting the general public when public-area bomb alerts have been notified, - frequently, as in the case of February's South Quay incident, failing to clear property areas for which more than ample warning had been given. The tragic victims at South Quay had already once been cleared from their newsagents kiosk, only to be told to go back in there before the bomb alert had even remotely been satisfactorily resolved one way or the other, - all totally due to either the authorities' incompetence or their intended negligence. The same suspicions have followed scores of other tragic incidents in the past.

It is utterly reactionary to stick the knife into a popular struggle which is fighting with its lives to try to turn the tables on brutal imperialist repression. No international working-class sympathy with anti-imperialist struggle is obliged to endorse any particular tactics whether it be hunger strikes, dirty protests, assassinations, or urban guerrilla bombs. But what has always been required, without exception throughout the entire history of Marxist-Leninist science, has been unconditional solidarity with the right of any popular struggle to take on imperialism by any means it chooses.

The Sparts go one worse than the CPGB in their moralising condemnation of national-liberation struggle and guerrilla-war terrorist methods. In an astonishing series of comments taken from recent Workers Hammers Nos 147 and 149, these most bureaucratically-minded of Trotskyite sectarians advance from denouncing IRA/Sinn Féin as gullible stooges of British imperialism, to accusing Gerry Adams of being about to treacherously disarm the IRA to please British imperialism, to accusing the national-liberation struggle itself of murderous criminal responsibility for deepening the hatred between Catholics and Protestants, and between English and Irish workers!

The “armalite” and the “ballot box” wings of the IRA/Sinn Féin are symbiotic, reflecting two sides of a desperate nationalist strategy which has no perspective outside the framework of capitalism and looks to imperialism for a “solution”. Having built up illusions in an imperialist-brokered settlement, the IRA ended their ceasefire complaining that “instead of embracing the peace process, the British government acted in bad faith”, while still calling for an “inclusive, negotiated settlement”.

Talk by Sinn Féin about “taking all guns, including those of the army, RUC and Loyalists, permanently out of Irish politics” (Independent, 14 August) is ludicrous, bespeaking deadly illusions in imperialism.

The present dispute over whether disarming the IRA should begin before, during or after “negotiations”, only reflects uncertainty over how quickly and effectively Gerry Adams can deliver the weapons without provoking a split in the IRA ranks.

As we warned: “Any imperialist ‘deal' will be bloody and brutal and will necessarily be at the expense of the oppressed Catholic minority. And it would not do any good for working-class Protestants either” (Workers Hammer No 138 November/December 1993).

The imperialist-sponsored “peace process” in fact necessarily reinforces communal divisions between impoverished Protestant and Catholic workers through a form of the “divide and rule” strategy beloved of the British ruling class.

In such situations of interpenetrated peoples there can be no just solution to national oppression outside of the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers rule.

We Marxists oppose forcible unification of Ireland, which would reverse the terms of oppression against the Protestant community, who are separate and distinct from the Irish Catholic nation.

We call for integrated, programmatically based workers militias to combat both Army/RUC rampages and sectarian terror from both sides.

Travellers have been subjected to systematic, deadly pogromist attacks throughout the south, both in cities like Dublin and in rural backwaters like Wicklow and Westmeath. For workers defence guards to defend Travellers against fascistic mobs!

Integrated workers militias - incorporating both Catholics and Protestants, under a communist leadership—are vital in Northern Ireland to combat imperialist and Loyalist rampage as well as sectarian terror from any quarter - Orange or Green.

We fight for an Irish workers republic as part of a federation of workers republics in the British Isles, forged through the revolutionary unity of the working class across national and religious boundaries.

The only way to disarm the repressive forces of the capitalist state is for the working class to seize power, and to create its own, new revolutionary armed force. We say: British troops out of Northern Ireland now! Not Orange against Green but class against class!

From the standpoint of proletarian revolutionaries the Canary Wharf bombing was indefensible - in no way a blow against the forces of British imperialism.

It indiscriminately targeted civilians who simply happen to live or work in London’s Docklands.

We Marxists oppose the tactic of terrorism because it is antithetical to the necessary task of mobilising the proletariat against the imperialist oppressors. Rather it reflects the petty-bourgeois aims of its practitioners to assert themselves as the leaders of “their” people.

But we take a fundamentally different attitude to indiscriminate terror. From a proletarian perspective, these are criminal acts which serve only to deepen hatred between Catholic and Protestant, English and Irish workers.

This grotesque confusion starts with the same old 'left' schoolboy howler of denouncing the national-liberation struggle for not being a revolutionary socialist struggle. Sinn Féin and the IRA might as well be being denounced for not being a pork sausage or a bag of crisps. It is a nationalist struggle.

That is what it is.

But it does not remotely follow from SF/IRA not being a Marxist-Leninist proletarian revolutionary struggle that it is necessarily "looking to imperialism for a solution" or wrong to anticipate being able to force imperialism into retreat from the colonial occupation of Ireland.

It is waging guerrilla war against imperialism for a 'solution', - and very effectively too.

And modern history is littered with negotiated retreats by imperialism as the 'solution' to scores of national-liberation struggles short of outright total destruction for the imperialist power or forces. Most of the British Empire achieved self-determination by such enforced negotiated settlements.

Nor in the circumstances of British imperialism's colonial retreat from Ireland is it at all 'ludicrous' or 'bespeaking deadly illusions in imperialism' to imagine that all British imperialist guns (army, RUC, and Loyalist) might eventually be taken out of Irish politics. It is precisely what will happen under eventual reunification of Ireland under a Dublin government.

It is contemptible nonsense beyond all reason to then suggest that Gerry Adams is doing his best to disarm the IRA in the interests of imperialism. What demented bilious subjectivism these petty-bourgeois 'lefts' of Trotskyite bogus 'Marxist' persuasion are capable of! How wrong is it possible to get a historic analysis posing as 'Marxist'?

The Sparts quickly demonstrate how wrong by their insane conclusion that the national-liberation struggle has achieved nothing so far (entirely incorrect) and will in fact make things worse for the nationalist population (ignorantly called 'Catholic') all round.

So blinkered are the Sparts in this determination not to see the reality in colonial Ireland but to see only their own, entirely subjective interpretation confirmed, that this daft idea, - that the national-liberation struggle can only worsen the Irish population's plight in the Occupied Zone, - is proudly re-stated in March 1996, after the ending of the IRA ceasefire, - in order to boast how correct the Sparts had been when they first uttered this lunacy in December 1993.

The obvious regret by the entire population of the OZ that the IRA ceasefire had to be called off this February because of British imperialist intransigence, jeopardising thereby the improvements in life in the Occupied Zone which had flowed from the far more civilised conduct of the Zone's affairs by British imperialism in the wake of the IRA's major peace gesture, - has just not been noticed by these sectarian navel-contemplators.

What is even barmier, these Trots then add that not only will an imperialist 'deal' be bloody and brutal and at the expense of the Irish nationalist population in the Occupied Zone but that this will be inevitable precisely because the national-liberation struggle has posed matters in an allegedly artificial 'Orange v Green' manner, merely thereby resurrecting British imperialism's divide and rule strategy which for some unexplained reason is presumed to have fallen into disuse!

This is fantasy country. British imperialism plays the Orange card for centuries, deliberately implanting British-Protestant colonists on occupied Irish-Catholic lands and then terrorising the displaced ethnic Irish poor, and endlessly rousing colonial spirits with non-stop scaremongering about 'foul Fenian revenge' and 'Papist tyranny on the march', etc, etc, --- and the long tradition of Irish national-liberation struggle is then blamed by these armchair 'socialists' for these sectarian divisions in the Occupied Zone population. British colonist workers have apparently never existed in their own right but have only been created by Sinn Féin's misguided propaganda, it is alleged. And the working class in Britain with its British imperialist mentality as described famously by Marx as never being ready for their own emancipation all the time they continued supporting their 'own' British imperialist ruling class (and especially true of the British working class in the Occupied Zone part of the United Kingdom), -- have never existed either, - just more mere creations of misguided IRA sectarianism, according to these Trot geniuses. These academic 'Marxists' truly live in ivory towers of their own making.

The fantasies just mount. Having written legitimate national-liberation struggle out of the history books, and having corrected Marx's 'delusion' that workers loyal to the British imperialist state were totally corrupted for all socialist purposes, the Sparts then pronounce that only proletarian revolution supported by British and Irish workers together is a way forward out of the Irish troubles, - just like that.

Now well into its make-believe stride, Trotskyite purity then declares what a good thing it is that national-liberation struggle is not able to defeat British imperialist occupation of part of Ireland, - because it would only lead to even worse domination in reverse, by the Irish against the worker-leftovers from the British colonisation!

First what a disgusting baseless slander. But second, what if there was just a remote grain of truth about some Irish attitudes towards some British colonial remnants in a re-united Ireland? In Ireland (or anywhere else) Marxism has always held that national Irish self-determination interests have the absolute right to flourish, not British colonial rights. The Trot philosophical trick here is to pretend that reality is what they would like to pretend is true, - namely that the British colonial working class are already pure internationalist proletarian revolutionaries, obviously in no way deserving of any national-discrimination disadvantages at all in Ireland, - which presumably has no right at all to feel Irish until the Spart Revolutionaries say that it is all right.

This dream world then builds up. Any hint of Irish nationalism is by now being called not just deluded and unfortunate, - strengthening the Irish's own chains, - but has become "sectarian terror" and nothing else!!

And to prove the point, attention is drawn to the supposedly routine sectarian terror, - no, fascist terror, even, - now rampant in town and country alike in the Irish Republic: - Gipsies have been less than well treated down there.

Now the prejudiced hostility that Gipsies arouse everywhere, in every country, is undoubtedly a sad reality, - a complex problem rooted on all sides in the hate-making contradictions of the capitalist system itself. But to blame the Irish national-liberation struggle for this racist and social prejudice - inherent in all capitalism - is just demented, - so unhinged that these anarchic 'travellers' are described as being subjected to 'fascist pogroms' in the Republic of Ireland. To put it mildly, this seems a slightly unbalanced way to view history.

Next comes the instant mind-boggling solution: 'Mobilise the communist workers militias immediately, north and south, the only way to progress! Forget Marx; forget national-liberation; forget history. Just get moving quickly to transform world development at a stroke, and get down to Westmeath to protect those Gipsies who are having a poor reception locally.'

If this stuff were not so comical, it would be tragically certifiable.

But it gets worse again. Having made the case for instant proletarian socialist revolution now, not just in Ireland north and south but all over Britain as well at the same time, the Trots can then devote their full invective against what they really hate and wish to target, - the actual revolutionary struggle by the Irish national-liberation movement.

South Quay was "just an indefensible blow against innocent civilians. It was the epitome of deluded petty-bourgeois individualist terror, arrogantly pretending to leadership through a vain exhibition of indiscriminate violence. These are just criminal acts, themselves partly responsible for racist hatred in imperialist Britain. All terror is utterly abhorred by 'We Marxists' ".

What indescribable conceited nonsense!

Marxism only ever 'opposed' terror tactics in the sense of preferring to mobilise working class revolutionary forces by mass political action and the philosophical leadership of correct theory in the revolutionary programme.

But the Bolsheviks themselves, under Lenin, were not opposed to the odd terrorist tactic or two, such as bank robbing; and killing Tsarist government spies; and explosions to break out of jail, killing guards if they had to; etc, etc.

This Trot posturing against heroic Irish national-liberation struggle is simply a million miles distant from the ecstatic spirit in which the founders of Marxism-Leninism enthused over militant struggle against imperialism from every quarter, - nationalism included.

These Trots are not communists but the most despicable bureaucratically minded pedants, - petty-bourgeois individualists living vicariously off the mass anti-imperialist movements.

It is this sectarian nonsense which damages the anti-imperialist cause by sowing confusion into workers minds. Expose Trotskyism. Build Leninism.

Douglas Bell.

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

INTERNATIONAL YOUTH FESTIVAL SPEECH BY PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO

THE MONSTROUS CONSEQUENCES OF NEOLIBERALISM ARE ALREADY APPEARING IN MANY PARTS OF THE WORLD

During the Cuban revolutionary process which began in 1959, people spoke of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. On the international scene there was much talk about these ideas, these concepts, they were studied, analyzed; now the reference is neoliberalism and some claim that the coming century will be the century of neoliberalism.

In fact, when the socialist camp and the Soviet Union collapsed, all these imperialist theories made great advances; in reality, the time had come to settle accounts, to take control of the world economy, and ail the international credit institutions; and the developed world imposed neoliberal policies. We are already beginning to see the consequences.

I do not find it very pleasant to mention countries by name, nor do I want to offend anyone of those present here, or the representatives of certain countries. You referred to them this morning. The monstrous consequences of neoliberalism are already appearing in many parts of the world.

Barely two years ago other problems were being discussed: the social problems resulting from neoliberalism. The universal complaint of teachers, doctors and professionals who attended congresses here in Cuba was the suppression of credits and the budgets allocated to education, health care, social security, social development, for all those activities. But the economic crisis of neoliberalism could still not be seen clearly, that crisis which is now being manifested in the form of high unemployment figures, which in some regions have tripled in scarcely two years, or serious financial problems which could ruin any country overnight. There are also countries with vast natural resources and huge incomes, which are on the verge of a social explosion resulting from daily battles between workers, the police and other repressive forces, in Central America, in South America and in other places. We are already seeing the consequences, and there are countries which have clearly stated that they are not going towards neoliberalism, that they are going to avoid it at all cost.

Friends of ours, important figures, have sent messages to us saying: ‘We do not know where you are headed' — a good question, and linked to some of the concerns raised here — 'but we advice you not to go where we are going.' These are the words of friends who are caught up in this wave of neoliberalism, and are now committed to that policy.

The effects are already such that even international organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank are talking of social development and of giving credits for social development. They are beginning to take serious note of the time bomb that is ticking away everywhere and in Latin America in particular. In spite of all this talk of macroeconomic indices, everyday reality is confronting them; it is a terrible and desperate situation.

Everything has to be privatized! Well, they have already privatized almost everything. They solved budget deficits with the revenue from privatizations, but the state's private properties are now gone; properties built up over decades are fast disappearing in the name of that practice and that philosophy. Soon there will be nothing left to privatize.

One of the results of such privatizations was that a transnational came along and its first move was to reduce the number of workers in that industry.

It can't be said that they are going to solve the problem of unemployment in this way.

Now neoliberal theoreticians are trying to work out how to combat unemployment, in the same way that the large banking institutions are discussing what to do in terms of social development. But the fundamental problem is this: capitalism and social development always have been, always are, and always will be irreconcilable. (APPLAUSE) Capitalism and plunder, plunder within and outside the country, are inseparable. Capitalism and unemployment are inseparable; try to tell Europe it's any different.

There are countries in Europe with more than 20 percent unemployment, and the famous industrial restructuring as a means of increasing competitiveness has brought further unemployment. Certain countries in Europe have been forced to uproot thousands of olive trees.

Millions of grapevines, millions of hectares of land left uncultivated; subsidies given to campesinos so that they do not produce food; millions of heads of cattle sacrificed to increase the milk prices; FAO statements on the fall in cereal production, implying an increase in the prices of all the cereals bought by Third World countries.

Slaughtering animals means starving people to death; destroying plantations, limiting and subsidizing the non-production of grains; where is the logic behind all this in a growing world which is enduring increasingly greater food problems? This is not good news for the poor countries of the world.

But it is a real fact that solid foundations do exist to support the conviction that the world that is being designed for us in the next century has no future whatsoever. It will enter into crisis, it will have to enter into crisis, and it will be in that world where you will have to try and take forward the ideas contained in the commission reports on education, health, the environment, women, children, culture, employment, democracy and participation. And I'm not telling you these things to discourage you, far from it, but to give you full credit for the questions you have raised here; because it can safely be said that in this International Youth Festival you have drawn up a program of work and struggle, and an inventory of the problems in the world today.

Added to this, there are clear indications in certain important countries of a political shift to the right, a turning towards reactionary positions, not everywhere, but in a few very important countries, among them the United States, which plays a decisive role in the world of today and will inevitably play it in the world of tomorrow.

It must be said, there have been struggles within the United States itself, over several years, which led to a series of social conquests: the black population's battle for their rights, a historic battle; the national minorities’ struggle, and the struggles of the unemployed, of the poor, and of women to win a series of advances. Today, all this is clearly in danger as a consequence of the shift to the right in U.S. politics, to the extent of reaching really extreme right-wing positions.

The extreme right could come to have almost total control of power in the United States. This is a factor which is very important to keep in mind, because the world situation could worsen and U.S. imperialism could become more aggressive and much more dangerous for the world.

Suffice it to say that, in relation to the United Nations, there are currently two theories: one held by those who want to use the United Nations as an instrument to 'sanctify' their interventions in any part of the globe and their foreign policy, but hiding behind a fig leaf, which is the United Nations; — and those who want to make it disappear so as to exercise direct power In the world, those who want to get rid of the stumbling block of the United Nations.

In relation to Cuba, two political theories are also under discussion: the one of those people who wish to destroy us from outside — that is to say, with more hostility, with more threats of aggression — and that of the 'noble and generous gentlemen' who want to destroy us from within, but both of them using the blockade; both theories are supported by the blockade.

However, some people think: this blockade is enough, but we have to add this and that to destabilize and destroy the Revolution, as if we were fools or sucked our thumbs, because the famous Torricelli Act's ‘track two' could have some potentiality and some effect on stupid people. You don't even have to be a genius to know that we can't be caught by that policy, and in the same way we have to have sufficient serenity to resist the other variant.

If we found out tomorrow that the extreme right had conquered not only the U.S. Congress, but also the U.S. government, this wouldn’t scare us, we have already been through similar periods.

Because of this we have been resisting for 35 years, and I also said that we have to be prepared to resist for another 35 years or longer.

It Is appropriate for our friends throughout the world to know that, and also that our people know it, and our people do know it.  And since we are optimists, I am certain that there are reserves within the people, reserves within the country, it is possible for our country to resist, and to even continue to move forwards. •

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 172. Saturday 25th May 1996

Struggle to unite the working class around the Marxist-Leninist understanding of imperialist crisis. 

What crucially 'divides left forces' in British politics is not first of all some bureaucratic oddities on the part of centrism, but rather the dire effects of philistine anti-communist hostility to theory right the way through the labour movement.

Insofar as centrism has started to challenge the class-collaborating reformism of the imperialist Labour tradition, it is in practice opening up the ground for a real fight for class unity to begin - the struggle to unite around agreement on the correct class-struggle analysis of developing capitalist crisis.

'Militant Labour' now beats its breast about the claimed sectarianism of the SLP's constitution, posing as would-be unifiers of the working class held back only by some bureaucratic conservatism originating with Scargill.

Yet it was the Militant trots who for years helped keep alive the lefty credentials of Labour by lending spurious activist credibility to all the half-hearted Alice in Wonderland promises of socialist 'Jam tomorrow'. This game only ended with their expulsion: and even now ML has been obliged to stand alone, these 'revolutionaries' still show no sign of breaking philosophically with the philistine anti-communism the Labour host and its parasitic entrists always had in common.

It is reformist social democracy itself which is dying the death, not 'socialism' in the Labour party.

The witch-hunting of Militant from the ranks of Labour was an episode in the demise of reformism, not a defence of reformism against revolutionary invasion. The 'revolutionary' message itself never deviated from the most crass anti-Soviet and anti-theory muddle. And in its practice, Militant could only reproduce the contradictions of mainstream Labour reformism, all the way down to recreating its very own version of 'our friends in the north' on Merseyside.

Militant's whole approach of putting 'left pressure' on Labour, with the goal of eventually 'forcing' a Labour administration to start 'acting like socialists', could never amount to anything more than a late extension of a game which ran out of time at the same time the postwar boom began to run out of road.

The only way having got kicked out of Labour might teach ML something might be if they now started a serious examination of their own dire contribution to the anti-communist politics which have so disastrously worked to divide the working class, and even temporarily put many off all further talk of socialism.

Those around ML who profess themselves eager to unite 'the forces of the left' could start by matching Scargill's courage in admitting that he deluded himself for years in trying to convince himself and others that socialism could be won through Labourism.

Or they could recognize what an enormous obstacle to working class unity in Britain is in the process of being removed by the successful Irish national struggle against British imperialism, and stop stabbing it in the back. Why not join the SLP in a common defence of the rights of the Irish to resist British imperialism in whatever manner they see fit?

For that matter, ML could learn a lot from what Scargill was saying and doing over ten years ago, even when still trapped (along with Militant) behind illusions about 'the next Labour government pushing through the 'plan for coal'. Whilst Militant was falling over itself to give a 'grass roots anti-Stalinist' cover to the Solidarnosc counter-revolutionaries, Scargill was vigorously defending the Polish workers state.

And now imperialist crisis looks like forcing a re-evaluation of the Soviet Union and its place in history:

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.

There is muddle enough in this Scargill soundbite for ML to put a Trot spin on, probably. But the real value of these words lies in their tacit acknowledgement that the work of analyzing the workers state history of the Soviet Union is going to be unavoidably at the centre of any serious discussion about the working class renewing its political challenge to the right of capitalism to exist. The enthusiastic support for the Cuban revolution to which the SLP has signed up also goes against the grain of Trot sectarianism.

So if those around ML seriously want to 'unite the forces of the left', why don't they turn their backs on the whole history of Trot backstabbing against the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba etc.?

Bucking out of all this by blaming imperfections in the SLP constitution for 'dividing the left forces' is a monstrous cop-out. Anti-Soviet anti-communism managed to 'divide the left forces' perfectly satisfactorily for 50 years (before the SLP ever showed its face) from Orwell to Hatton.

Over its open challenge to the Labour party, over its
support for the Irish struggle and for the Cuban revolution, SLP centrism has already moved light years ahead of Militant's sour and parochial sectarianism.

And where the SLP is weakest - in its reluctance to grasp the need for a theory of imperialist crisis, - Militant's political assistance is least of all missed. The unshaken ML addiction to 'left pressure' activism, trying to unite workers on the lowest common denominator of hostility to proletarian dictatorship theory, represents not a 'left' ADVANCE on Scargillism, but rather a threat to reinforce precisely what is most conservative in the SLP's approach so far. (Ironically, it is exactly such conservatism over theory which forces the SLP into defending its political independence via the bureaucratic shifts about which the Trots protest so much, and which makes some of Its local branches shy away from public meetings for fear of 'getting swamped'.

The SLP's blind spot over 'left pressure' is certainly a hopelessly Canute-like response to what is in fact an uncontrollable crisis of world monopoly capital. Left undisturbed, it would serve as a permanent excuse for ignoring that it is the contradictions of capitalism ITSELF, and the class-struggle forces unleashed by capitalism's OWN CRISIS, which is what drives history on from capitalism to socialism.

Left unchallenged, this 'left pressure' halfway-house between reformism and Marxism would indefinitely obscure from socialist-minded workers the crucial role of revolutionary theory in effecting further historical progress.

But the world crisis of imperialism will leave nothing and nobody unchallenged or undisturbed. It is that crisis which is cracking open the Tories, calling time on the welfare state, shafting Labour reformism, exposing the Trot posers, and opening up the development of centrism. And it is that crisis which all who count themselves socialists now need to get serious about analyzing.

Fight for Leninism.

Paddy Chambers