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 0867 Tuesday August 20th 1996                                                                                                                     10p 

Programmes for socialism which leave out the crucial long historic role for the dictatorship of the proletariat, are a complete waste of time. 'Free'-Russia's murderous mess in Chechnya is the best proof possible of the validity of Soviet achievements.

The bloody massacres and chaotic degeneracy in all the political, economic, and social relations between Russia and Chechnya provide important lessons for all anti-imperialist struggles.

In the real world of capitalist crisis, all human affairs end up sooner or later in a brutal mess and total uncomprehending confusion.

The West's break-up of the Yugoslav socialist federation finished the same way, - the struggle for survival reduced to its barest animal necessities of kill or be killed.

Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Mozambique and scores of other countries were driven in the same direction earlier by the incurable historic inadequacies of the world dominant imperialist system. Cyprus next? Jordan?

Chile's 1970 break to free itself from the savage injustice and uncertain lottery of monopoly controlled international market forces resulted in US-imposed murderous mayhem. Grenada and Nicaragua and Panama all later suffered the same abysmal fate in the interests of the American imperialist bourgeoisie. Haïti was 'rescued' in order to be placed into the same permanent turmoil from whence it tried to struggle out, and Cuba would be put back there if only Washington had the guts or the ability.

The list can go on endlessly, but the point can now be adequately made: In the modern world, one of the major lessons of Marxist-Leninist science burns brighter than ever; namely, that in every country, either the dictatorship of the proletariat must prevail, or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will.

For the whole of the 'free' world, no political programme from the anti-imperialist camp is worth reading if it fails to make the dictatorship of the proletariat the central issue in this epoch, - the epoch of imperialist crisis.

To describe this period as "the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism" no longer adds anything to general Marxist understanding. To correctly term it the epoch of imperialist crisis and proletarian dictatorship immediately brings the transition to communism alive and takes the ground from under reformism, revisionism, and all fake-'leftism' in one go. They have all capitulated, reneged, or buckled by some means or other over this central question of Marxist philosophy.

It was already before the October 1917 Revolution that Lenin made his powerful assertion, - based on his monumental reworking of the basic ideas of Marx and Engels on the actual transition to socialism in his work The State and Revolution, - that:

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested.

Lenin's deep philosophical analysis of modern society's class realities and motivations, as well as possibilities, - building on from where Marx and Engels had left off their studies, - makes the attempted re-examination below obligatory. But the present-day context is the real starting-out point, and it is in their astonishing ignorance and naïvety about this that the problems created by reformism, revisionism, and 'left' opportunism (of all varieties) begin.

Of what possible use is a 'programme', running to no less than 15,000 words (longer than the original Communist Manifesto) on the struggle to get to socialism and communism, - and which admits that only a 'world proletarian strategy' will do, - which says virtually no more about the crucial real history of mankind's anti-imperialist struggles from 1917 to the 1990s than that "the 1917 workers state in backward Russia was left fatally isolated" and that there is "no sustainable alternative between capitalism and genuine socialism".

And that is it. Nothing about the unprecedented international imperialist onslaught on the planet from 1917 onwards to make sure that not a trace of socialist construction should succeed or survive anywhere at all. And not a word about the actual heroic achievements of the masses in breaking through against imperialist dictatorship and war-intervention here and there, from time to time, to start reconstructing society along socialist lines without a capitalist ruling class or imperialism's international domination over them. And not a word about the crucial lessons for mankind of what further attempts were bravely fought for and sacrificed for which did not result in any success at all because of terrible mistakes made or because of specific skulduggery by imperialist reaction.

In other words, not a single scrap of worthwhile analysis of where the present world has come from in its struggles against imperialist reaction, or therefore of what real conditions it is likely to face next, as the spontaneous revolutionary battles for a more just (socialist) society rage on. Specifically, the actual colonial warmongering circumstances of imperialist crisis (which were the background to all of the socialist revolutions which have been attempted so far in history, in the most heavily-exploited and deprived regions of the world) - do not get discussed at all.

A proper draft 'programme' for a Communist Party of Great Britain needs to correct these omissions urgently.

Does not the phenomenal US imperialist pressure to bring down the Cuban Revolution - and the astonishing brilliant planned economic achievements of Cuba in transforming the lives of the masses and winning such enormous support that it can withstand this unprecedented imperialist embargo, invasion, sabotage, and political onslaught, - seem like an obvious case to study if one is serious about the actual real-life conditions in which a 'world proletarian' revolutionary struggle is likely to have to develop against demented US imperialist reaction?

And what is absolutely essential to understand about Cuba which causes the greatest power in world history to hate it and vilify it so? The fact that it replaced the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the dictatorship of the proletariat, something which Allende in Chile, the Sandinistas, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, and the former CIA stooge turned 'nationalist patriot', Noriega (obviously), all failed to do. All perished.

And when did the world's first workers state perish, - the USSR? Not until its complacent bureaucratic leaders, in their philosophical revisionist degeneracy, decided to abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of the glasnost/perestroika of free market forces and parliamentary (bourgeois) democracy. Then they were quickly sunk without trace (Gorbachev) whatever their 'socialist' pretensions or ambitions.

The argument about a 'programme' for communism begins with the most basic scientific concept of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, - one often repeated but one which is in fact never really accepted by opportunists of all generations and of all kinds, - the notion that modern society can only be either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, nothing else. Only one class really holds the power.

Opportunists of all descriptions say they agree with this, - but then demonstrate in practice that this Marxist understanding means nothing to them in reality. Hence all the varieties of 'socialist' who have failed to fight tooth and nail in support of Cuba's revolution against Batista's bourgeois dictatorship and its US imperialist patrons, - but who also hesitate to describe Cuba as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or call for the overthrow of its 'ruling class', which would be the logic of their stand.

The Cuban Revolution clearly does rest on the dictatorship of the proletariat, and could obviously rest on nothing else. The real position of these 'socialists' is that the regime on Cuba is "not to their liking", and so they simply renege on the question of international class solidarity completely, - and refuse, really, to say which class rules in Cuba, or that any class does at all, - thus totally abandoning the most basic scientific concept of Marxism, - while still proclaiming loudly, of course, what great 'Marxists' they themselves are.

Such was the whole history of all anti-communist stooges in the West, all the groups and sects of "socialists' who in practice always refused to fight in real solidarity with the Soviet Union against all the sick propaganda distortions of the West, regardless of any formally correct positions they professed of 'unconditional if critical support', etc.

What undermined all these fairweather 'socialists'?

A profound basic ignorance of all that Marxist science had taught about the dictatorship of the proletariat, plus the most appallingly naïve dilettantism about what the real conditions of the fight for socialism were like, and will be like next time, - puffed out with the silliest daydreams about 'perfect revolutions' and such stuff, where all workers march forward together singing, hand-in-hand, bursting to make 'pure' and 'full' democracy work splendidly first time, on every social question, etc.

Petty bourgeois armchair socialism in the West quickly tired of the actual world developments on the revolutionary socialist front from 1917 to 1990 because they were "not quite right" according to some ivory-tower dreams of never-never land. They quickly grew tired of the vast titanic struggles of thousands of millions of people in that time, on four continents, to defeat imperialist domination and sabotage and intervention and political and ideological subversion to try to build a completely new kind of society, - the major part of the population of those countries still fully involved in the effort to develop without a capitalist ruling class lording it over them.

Petty-bourgeois 'socialists' in the West just dismiss it all quickly with a sneer and declare:

"No sustainable alternative between capitalism and genuine socialism; all fatally isolated. Socialism is international and democratic or it is nothing." 

(an example taken from the CPGB draft programme, but any number of alternative programmes would reveal the same blindness).

Clearly, a totally 'nice' socialist world will only be international. Meanwhile there is only bitter relentless class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat against the whole history of bourgeois ideological influences, and against the surrounding mighty power of imperialist hostility, subversion, and sabotage. Meanwhile, in other words, there is the real living history of mankind to contend with. And such 'programmes' say absolutely nothing relevant at all.

Marx, Engels, and Lenin did much better. They explain that the workers states did not fight hard enough against their detractors, or long enough. Given surrounding imperialist hostility, the 70 years of Soviet development (twice completely destroyed by imperialist invasion) were not the amount of time to reorganise the whole of society and its thinking that seemed likely to be necessary, even in the earliest days of boundless revolutionary optimism. The state of proletarian dictatorship would need to rule very firmly against every vestige of selfishness, small-mindedness, indiscipline, subjectivism, - all of the old crap, as Lenin called it, which would constantly renew itself for many generations to come, making the organisation of a socialist society easily the most vast, difficult, and complex undertaking in the whole history of civilisation, - dwarfing all previous achievements by an incomparable distance.

And conflict and struggle would be at the heart of that unending fight, the early communists made clear, based upon a proletarian dictatorship which would need to be hard on everyone:

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon—all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.

‘As the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries.'

In the usual arguments about the state, the mistake is constantly made against which Engels warned and which we have in passing indicated above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy: that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy.

At first sight this assertion seems exceedingly strange and incomprehensible.

No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognises the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organisation for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organised and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general.

In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.

In order to emphasise this element of habit, Engels speaks of a new generation, "reared in new, free social conditions",

Marx not only most scrupulously takes account of the inevitable inequality of men, but he also takes into account the fact that the mere conversion of the means of production into the common property of the whole of society (commonly called "socialism") does not remove the defects of distribution and the inequality of "bourgeois law", which continues to prevail so long as products are divided "according to the amount of labour performed". Continuing, Marx says:

"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society. Law can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby."

And so, in the first phase of communist society (usually called socialism) "bourgeois law" is not abolished in its entirety, but only in part, only in proportion to the economic revolution so far attained, i.e., only in respect of the means of production.

To that extent— and to that extent alone—"bourgeois law" disappears.

However, it persists as far as its other part is concerned: it persists in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of products and the allotment of labour among the members of society.

This is a "defect", says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law. Besides, the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic prerequisites for such a change.

Now, there are no other rules than those of "bourgeois law".

Marx continues:

"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished, after labour has become not only a livelihood but life’s prime want, after the productive forces have increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois law be left behind in its entirety."

Only now can we fully appreciate the correctness of Engels’s remarks mercilessly ridiculing the absurdity of combining the words "freedom" and "state". So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.

But how rapidly this development will proceed, how soon it will reach the point of breaking away from the division of labour, of doing away with the antithesis between mental and physical labour, of transforming labour into "life's prime want’’—we do not and cannot know.

That is why we are entitled to speak only of the inevitable withering away of the state, emphasising the protracted nature of this process and its dependence upon the rapidity of development of the higher phase of communism, and leaving the question of the time required for, or the concrete forms of, the withering away quite open, because there is no material for answering these questions.

The state will be able to wither away completely when society adopts the rule: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", i.e., when people have become so accustomed to observing the fundamental rules of social intercourse and when their labour has become so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their ability. "The narrow horizon of bourgeois law", which compels one to calculate with the heartlessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than somebody else, whether one is not getting less pay than somebody else—this narrow horizon will then be left behind.

From the bourgeois point of view, it is easy to declare that such a social order is "sheer utopia" and to sneer at the socialists for promising everyone the right to receive from society, without any control over the labour of the individual citizen, any quantity of truffles, cars, pianos, etc.

Ignorance —for it has never entered the head of any socialist to "promise" that the higher phase of the development of communism will arrive; as for the great socialists’ forecast that it will arrive, it presupposes not the present productivity of labour and not the present ordinary run of people, who.........are capable of damaging the stocks of public wealth "just for fun", and of demanding the impossible.

Until the "higher" phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labour and the measure of consumption;

(All from 'State & Revolution' by Lenin).

If the exploiters are defeated in one country only—and this, of course, is typical, since a simultaneous revolution in a number of countries is a rare exception—they still remain stronger than the exploited, for the international connections of the exploiters are enormous. That a section of the exploited from the least advanced middle-peasant, artisan and similar groups of the population may, and indeed does, follow the exploiters has been proved by all revolutions, including the Commune (for there were also proletarians among the Versailles troops, which the most learned Kautsky has "forgotten").

In these circumstances, to assume that in a revolution which is at all profound and serious the issue is decided simply by the relation between the majority and the minority is the acme of stupidity, the silliest prejudice of a common liberal, an attempt to deceive the people by concealing from them a well-established historical truth. This historical truth is that in every profound revolution, the prolonged, stubborn and desperate resistance of the exploiters, who for a number of years retain important practical advantages over the exploited, is the rule. Never—except in the sentimental fantasies of the sentimental fool Kautsky—will the exploiters submit to the decision of the exploited majority without trying to make use of their advantages in a last desperate battle, or series of battles.

The transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch is over, the exploiters inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope turns into attempts at restoration.

In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semi-defeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other—just like our Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries.

In these circumstances, in an epoch of desperately acute war, when history presents the question of whether age-old and thousand-year-old privileges are to be or not to be—at such a time to talk about majority and minority, about pure democracy, about dictatorship being unnecessary and about equality between the exploiter and the exploited! What infinite stupidity and abysmal philistinism are needed for this!

Kautsky talks about anything you like, about everything that is acceptable to liberals and bourgeois democrats and does not go beyond their circle of ideas, but he does not talk about the main thing, namely, the fact that the proletariat cannot achieve victory without breaking the resistance of the bourgeoisie, without forcibly suppressing its adversaries, and that, where there is "forcible suppression", where there is no "freedom", there is, of course, no democracy.

But socialism is opposed to violence against men in general. Apart from Christian anarchists and Tolstoyans,44 however, no one has yet drawn the conclusion from this that socialism is opposed to revolutionary violence. So, to talk about "violence" in general, without examining the conditions which distinguish reactionary from revolutionary violence, means being a philistine who renounces revolution.

(All from Proletarian Revolution & Renegade Kautsky by Lenin).

In his 1920s work Left wing communism - an infantile disorder, Lenin warned about the well-known dangers of ideological regression all the time that imperialism remained a powerful force on the planet:

"We in Russia are going through the first steps in the transition from capitalism to socialism, or the lower stage of communism. Classes have remained and will remain everywhere for years after the conquest of power by the proletariat..Small commodity producers...must be re-educated and remoulded only by very prolonged, slow, cautious organisational work. They encircle the proletariat on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere which permeates and corrupts the proletariat and causes constant relapses among the proletariat into petty-bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternate moods of exaltation and dejection. The strictest centralisation and discipline are required within the political party of the proletariat in order to counteract this, in order that the organisational role of the proletariat (and that is its principle role) may be exercised correctly, successfully, victoriously. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a persistent struggle,  bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative, - against the forces and traditions of the old society. The force of habit of millions and tens of millions is a most terrible force...Whoever weakens ever so little the iron discipline of the party of the proletariat (especially during the time of its dictatorship) actually aids the bourgeoisie against the proletariat*

'Under Soviet rule, your proletarian party and ours will be invaded by a still larger number of bourgeois intellectuals. They will worm their way into the Soviets, the courts, and the administration, for communism cannot be built otherwise than with the aid of the human material created by capitalism: and the bourgeois intellectuals cannot be expelled and destroyed, but must be vanquished, remoulded, assimilated and re-educated: - just as we must, in a protracted struggle waged on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, re-educate the proletarians themselves, who do not abandon their petty-bourgeois prejudices at one stroke by a miracle at the behest of the Virgin Mary, at the behest of a slogan, resolution or decree. - but only in the course of a long and difficult mass struggle against mass petty-bourgeois influences. Under Soviet rule these same problems...are arising anew within the Soviets, within the Soviet administration...Among the Soviet engineers, the Soviet school teachers and the privileged (the most highly skilled and best situated) workers in the Soviet factories. we observe a constant revival of absolutely all the negative traits peculiar to bourgeois parliamentarianism, - and we are conquering this evil, gradually, only by tireless constant, prolonged and persistent struggle, proletarian organisation and discipline.
 
'Compared with these truly gigantic problems of re-education, under the proletarian dictatorship, millions of peasants and small masters, hundreds of thousands of office employees, officials and bourgeois intellectuals, of subordinating them all to the proletarian state and to proletarian leadership, of vanquishing their bourgeois habits and traditions, - compared with these gigantic problems it is childishly easy to establish under the rule of the bourgeoisie, in a bourgeois parliament, a really communist group of a real proletarian party."

Lenin - Left Wing Communism - an infantile disorder.

Contemporary 'left'-opportunist 'programmes' also tend to lack confidence in talking about capitalist crisis, - the historical conditions which have created most of the revolutionary situations so far on record. This reflects their petty-bourgeois class nervousness, always fearing that the big bourgeois ruling class will continue to remain triumphant, always pulling something new out of the hat to keep in power with.

Once again, this leaves the working masses with no real guidance or 'programme' at all to explain to them exactly how and why the socialist revolution will yet come about, and exactly what conditions workers need mentally to prepare themselves for.

Marx, Engels, and Lenin had no such hesitation in foretelling the appalling warmongering bloody mess that the imperialist system would repeatedly periodically collapse back into, with weaker ruling classes reaching such a degree of degenerate paralysis and loss of confidence that they can no longer rule on in the old way any more, - a crucial ingredient for revolutionary crisis.

Unbelievably savage inter-imperialist trade war and political conflict lie ahead, followed by all-out preparations for the most murderous atavistic conflagration in all history, outdoing even the unprecedented barbarism of imperialism's World War I and World War II. The brutalising conditions for part III of that World War are undoubtedly being set up right now in the uncontrollable anarchic economic turmoil which laughably passes for the 'new world order', - and only revolution will be able to stop them being translated into a real war reality again.

Far from undermining the daily class-war fight to better the working class's position and push back the ruling class, such an understanding of the hopelessly crisis-ridden and fundamentally flawed nature of the hated capitalist system cannot fail to give workers enormous additional confidence in their struggles. How can workers fail to be better armed politically, as well as boundlessly optimistic if they not only merely know from daily experience what a swindling, exploitative, corrupt, and inefficient system capitalism really is, but also grasp that shortly, on the stage of history, capitalism will also once again be being seen as a fatally flawed and intolerably destructive system which must eventually sink and be swept away under incurable crisis.

And this is no pie-in-the-sky baseless comforting at all, but the actual science of Marxism-Leninism, which the petty-bourgeois 'left' opportunist sects of all descriptions have abandoned just as they abandoned (or never grasped in the first place) the Marxist-Leninist science of proletarian dictatorship:

"The final cause of all real crises," 

Marx wrote, 

"always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit" 

- meaning the entire world in today's far more extreme monopoly-imperialist international market conditions. To survive in the jungle of market forces, monopolists only feel safe if they install enough new cost-efficient plant to secure the entire market, (or a dominant share of it). They cannot all succeed therefore. 'Recession', or 'slump', or 'downsizing' is the only way wasteful capitalism knows for disposing of "failed enterprises" when supposedly "unwanted" products fail to sell at a profit in a supposedly "glutted" market, making millions more people "redundant" all round the world every year, and thus adding still further, of course, to the "poverty and restricted consumption of the masses". The system is ludicrously destructive of real people's lives and real productive values in a world where the United Nations regime itself (a stooge organisation for world imperialism) has just officially reported that the absolute poverty of the poorest billions on Earth continues growing relentlessly.

Clearly, the completion of the building of a socialist world cannot be completed via the most exploited and underdeveloped countries which feel the worst of the capitalist crisis; - but equally the international socialist revolution cannot be contemplated without embracing all these crucial Third World upheavals where imperialist domination is bound to come to grief again first, just as has happened in the two previous great warmongering capitalist crises this century.

But the CPGB 'programme', for example, says nothing about what should happen in this vital piece in the historic jigsaw which will lead in reality from world capitalism to world communism. What, for example, - to raise one specific gigantic point, - is going to happen to the huge potential influence of Communist China?

The opportunists sneer cynically, or stay silent. And clearly, the revisionist decadence in Beijing could easily go the same liquidationist way as the Soviet bureaucracy. But necessarily so, or desirably so? Will not ailing and isolated proletarian dictatorships at some stage in world history meet up with renewed imperialist warmongering slump and new revolutions, and be pulled back down the path of socialist development again, partially as was reflected in some aspects of Soviet revisionist bureaucracy behaviour after 1945, for example? And if such a development is not ruled out, then is not more supportive revolutionary agitation in Beijing's direction now called for by 'international revolutionists'? The opportunist cynics refuse to do so, once again, because they are far more in fear of bourgeois ridicule about Communist China's supposedly "cruel and chaotic tyranny", etc, than they are seriously convinced that the world only has one future, - ultimately total capitalist warmongering slump degeneracy, compared to which the current conditions in Communist China will seem like paradise to the billions in the Third World, and already do to most of them.

Once again, it is the naïve ignorance in the minds of petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary socialist' dilettantes which makes them incapable of grasping a single thing about what the long epoch of transition from world capitalism to world communism, - an epoch of relentless class war under the dictatorship of the proletariat, - could possibly be about or could possibly be like.

All deliberately push the same daft illusion that there was some early period of the Bolshevik Revolution, - the first few years or so, - when there was nothing but brotherly love, democracy, and harmonious cooperation performing wonders of creativity against just tiny handfuls of quickly isolated imperialist interventionists and reactionary ruling-class Whites, - but then a great cloud of purely destructive tyranny fell over the place, called Stalinism.

This ridiculous fairytale fiction still prevails instead of any real knowledge of actual Soviet history, or any real understanding of what sort of country and society the USSR actually became, regardless of the remarkable indications just from recent voting intentions that life in the USSR was better than life in post-communist 'free' Russia, - ballots registered in spite of the unprecedented anti-communist brain-washing which has been inflicted on the country since 1990, in spite of the grotesquely rigged election results, and in spite of the communist cause still not having found a decent scrap of worthwhile new leadership.

The Chechnya debacle is an interesting illustration. The history-making Soviet nationalities policy, - the first state in the whole record of civilisation to deliberately set out to provide written languages, education, culture and political regional autonomy in the native tongue of more than 180 small nations inside the former Tsarist empire, - was monstrously distorted, vilified, and simply lied about or suppressed by the West more than any other achievement of the Soviet Union (and for good reason because it was imperialist colonialism's greatest weakness).

In particular, anti-communist propaganda about continuing Soviet problems with the fierily independent Caucasus region nationalities was a permanent useful smokescreen for imperialist ideology to conceal the real historic balance of the matter. Just find one anecdotal incident or two of alleged rough Soviet justice against local nationalist gripes, - and the whole tyranny of worldwide imperialist exploitation (and of real colonial empires up until the 1960s) could be covered up again, - and the actual achievements of the USSR in effectively banishing racism and discrimination throughout a vastly difficult country to govern, could be forgotten.

And forgetting all Marx, Engels, and Leninist science about how long an epoch would have to pass before all this 'old crap' of chauvinistic squabbling could be finally seen an end to permanently, all the dilettante 'revolutionary socialists' of the West joined in with their bourgeois-imperialist ruling class's propaganda to screech as well, - at every World Service or Radio Free Europe 'incident', - that Soviet Russia was a prisonhouse of nations just as under the Tsar, etc.

An entire balanced record of Soviet government versus local national-chauvinist and tribal reaction is not possible yet, and whatever arbitrary criminal mistakes in Soviet nationalities policy in Stalin's time will have to remain an open question.

But how do even the worst allegations, - that Chechen reactionaries were unnecessarily and vindictively deported from their homeland to avoid the advancing German Nazi-imperialist armies being able to recruit them or bribe them for anti-communist struggle, - look now in the light of 'free' Moscow's apparent willingness to try to literally wipe out the entire Chechen nation with non-stop mass bombing and scorched-earth fullscale invasions which have already reduced the entire Chechen homeland to total destruction, killing hundreds of thousands.?

In the entire history of the USSR, when were Soviet government relations with dissident national-chauvinism so bad that anything like this all-out genocidal war was even remotely on the cards? Never once, of course.

Anti-communist cynics will still persist, naturally, in sneering that such genocidal destruction of local nationalities was probably happening all the time, but that censorship covered it up. In which case, how is it that the BBC World Service, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and all the other anti-communist propaganda tyrannies directed against the Soviet workers state have recorded literally tens of thousands of 'incidents' allegedly taking place since the 1920s in this Caucasus village, or that Tartar commune, or the other Armenian,/Georgian/Azerbaijani/Estonian/Ukrainian/Moldovan/Lithuanian/etc/etc/ town, - always involving a dozen or so, or even up to a hundred 'casualties'?

How come all these tens of thousands of 'incidents' were all so well 'documented' - but total, long-lasting, genocidal wars on the scale of the present Russo-Chechen conflict were miraculously hidden from world knowledge? It makes no sense at all.

The other argument from 'revolutionary socialist' cynics is that the KGB were so ruthless in their repression of national-chauvinist dissidence that no revolt ever got off the ground.

Well how ruthless does the total mass-destruction genocidal war by sky and land currently being inflicted, by 'free' Russian state forces have to be before it earns the cynics' admission that Moscow's present policy is 'pretty ruthless' itself?

But with what result? Under the Soviet workers state, the Chechens got on with their lives, and developed a flourishing autonomous region. Under the 'free' Russian state, they seem to be prepared to fight to the death to get out of it.

The point of all this is that it is only the colossal peace-making achievements of the Soviet proletarian dictatorship which pointed a way forward, - in comparable areas and conditions, - from the bloody murderous turmoil and tyranny which is the modern world of unending capitalist crisis (see also following story). But where is the 'programme' for the world proletariat that will deal with this reality? Certainly not being produced yet by any of the 'left' opportunist groups, who are all still back-pedalling in panic from Leninism under the lash of anti-communist propaganda.

And particularly unrealistic are their feeble-minded expectations of what it is going to be like trying to build proletarian dictatorship in the West, once the degenerate destructive mayhem of capitalist crisis, corruption, and slump reaches the point of non-governability.

What will be the conditions of racial friction by then in the most run-down inner city areas? What will be the aggressive levels of self-help criminality?

What will be the philistine damage of drug-era cultural anarchy? What will be the levels of total cynicism about the whole of society and government?

What will be the enforced levels of survival-of-the-fittest selfishness? Without the Marxist-Leninist science of the firm proletarian-dictatorship state's re-educative and reorganising powers, there is not a 'revolutionary socialist' programme that can be written that will have the slightest worthwhile thing to say to the working class and all serious revolutionary workers.

And on the question of having more confidence in the working class, it is precisely the opponents of proletarian dictatorship science who lack it. It is exactly because of boundless confidence in the working class that its crucial historic role in its period of ruling-class dictatorship holds no qualms. It is the incorrigible anti-communist opportunists and faint-hearts who feared life in the Soviet Union who showed the real lack of confidence in the working class.

A tough state regime to build socialism against continuing bourgeois imperialist sabotage and backwardness (of every description from every quarter) can hold no fears for any real democrats who believe in Marxist-Leninist science as the true philosophy of the working class, with its ultimate aim of creating a society where mankind will live to work as its prime need, and no longer just work to live. And mankind has a very long proletarian-dictatorship road to travel to get anywhere near such a society of communism.

Let those who want just tinkering reforms with present capitalist 'free' society get on with it by all means. Only let them stop calling themselves 'revolutionary socialists' or worst of all 'Marxists'. They are nothing of the sort. 

Build Leninism. RB

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

Europe’s new poor

THROUGHOUT Eastern Europe, a "nouveau poor" class has appeared, less striking, but far more present than the nouveau riche. The conditions of this poverty are markedly different in Hungary, Romania or Russia. However, there is one common factor: all these peoples have experienced various years of drastic economic purges and a dramatic reduction of their living standards. Moving from one end to another, in 1995 Georgia s production levels only reached 17 percent of those attained in 1989, Russia's stood at 49 percent, while Slovenia and Poland barely reached the levels existing prior to the disintegration of the Soviet republics.

Even in the countries that have made more advances, a new poverty has appeared, since social transition, an essential accompaniment to economic transition, was frequently disregarded. In the Czech Republic, the ultra-liberal Vaclav Klaus, a champion of privatization, up until this moment has maintained a relatively generous scheme of social security, and attempts to destabilize the country's health care system have not as yet been successful. But, concerned by a lack of financial resources, and by the decrepit state of the hospital system, doctors took to the streets in November.

One symptom of Romania's increasing poverty is that the number of abandoned children is on the increase, and has already exceeded the 100,000 mark. Since many parents no longer had the means to raise a family, they "entrusted" them to hospitals or specialized institutions. After the change of regime in 1989, the international organizations, which were numerous in Bucharest, left the country. The current government is dedicating itself, as a matter of priority, to constructing new orphanages, and the hospitals are reduced to hoping for a donation of a scanner for one or a supply of medicines for another.

In the majority of the states, it is the minorities, in particular the gypsies, that have been most affected. As an example, in Hungary, close to 6000 gypsies, who formerly provided a basic work force in agriculture and heavy industry, are now begging in the streets.

In the Czech Republic, the Romanies (gypsies) were protected by the communist regime, but nowadays have to confront the racism of the population. Their ghettoes are expanding, especially in northern Bohemia. "In our country, the Bulgarians are becoming poor, and the gypsies are dying' is a saying in Sofia.

Do older people comprise the "ruby" generation in this economic transition?' Definitely not.  At times, they are the victims of desocialization phenomena (the fragmentation of families, breakdowns in the mutual aid associations) and, above all, they don't remain alive for long. In Russia, to give the most extreme example, life expectancy dropped in a spectacular way, moving from 64 years in 1990 to 58 years in 1994, a rate inferior to that of half the low-income countries in the world. If a ruby generation exists, it barely survives retirement age, while in France, where male the expectancy reaches 73.8 years, a retired person looks forward to an average of dose to 15 pensionable years.

It's difficult not to link this contemporary unexpected evolution in terms of life expectancy with the diminution of social security, sanitary conditions and nutrition. Alcoholism is on the increase, as are numerous reports on the disastrous situation in Russian hospitals. The per capita consumption of meat dropped from 70 to 50 kilograms per year between 1990 and 1994 in France the rate is 102 kilograms). A further comparison that speaks for itself is that the Russian population earmarks 48 percent of its budget for purchasing food, and the French population only 18 percent.

Economic transition and economic development respectively - or changes in the system of production and the enrichment of the population — are two distinct phenomena. However, they are interdependent and, at the present time, advances in the transition process have very frequently resulted in the impoverishment of the former European communist populations.

Just a few years back, inequalities in Russian incomes were minimal, due to an extensive range of non-wage advantages, from products sold by an enterprise to vacational centers.

From here on, wage inequalities will be higher than those in France, even leaving to one side the country's wealthiest citizen. The former Soviet Union's poorest regions are becoming steadily more demonetarized, and wages are no more than a source of additional income. In Georgia, wages’ portion within family, incomes fell from 70 percent in 1985 to 20 percent in 1993. •

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. 184. Sunday 10th August 1996

Making sense of Cyprus.

It is the unavoidable aggressive competitive race for world market domination brewing up between the key imperialist powers which everywhere threatens to raise murky local national squabbles (in Rwanda/Burundi, in Chechenya, in the Balkans/Aegean/Middle East etc. etc.), into potential third world war material, and not (as bourgeois propaganda would have it) a few 'outdated' local flare-ups which are 'sadly marring an otherwise assured progress towards a harmonious new world order'.

One horse's mouth letter to the left-liberal press (from "Former UK and UN mediating officer in Cyprus") rudely interrupts the crocodile tears over Cyprus to register a few home truths about imperialism's real role postwar:

CYPRUS is not divided because Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots could not live peaceably together (Deadly Games on the Green Line, August 13). It is divided because "shadowy" British and US planners decided that the establishment of a sovereign unitary state would run counter to long-term Western strategic interests in the region and because Athens and Ankara were allowed to pursue their own nationalistic objectives in the island.

Decolonisation came through the foreign imposition of a flawed constitution which promoted the idea of communal separation and which was highly vulnerable to both internal and external subversion. The UN presence has preserved (through the Green Line) an inequitable division of the island and thereby safeguarded foreign strategic interests to the detriment of those of the Cypriots.

A glance at the map reveals the enormous strategic importance of Cyprus postwar. The island's proximity to occupied Palestine and the Middle East gives imperialism an ideal regional vantage point from which to back up and supervise Zionism's direct colonization of Arab soil. Throughout the Cold War, socialist Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were all within easy reach, and the Soviet Union itself lay to the north, beyond Washington’s trusted bulwark against communism, Turkey.

For keeping a stranglehold on the region's oil supplies, clamping down the lid on Arab national aspirations, tightening the Cold War circle round the Soviet socialist camp, and (not least) keeping a 'free world' eye on a Greece which had so nearly broken from the capitalist fold at the close of WWII, NATO's post-colonial exploitation of Cyprus as a permanent aircraft carrier was just too valuable to American interests to allow the emergence of a strong unitary state capable of championing sovereign territorial rights.

But with US hegemony increasingly challenged and undermined by imperialist competition, the phony balance of the Cold War no longer in place to keep erring 'free world’ allies behind Washington's lead, and revisionism everywhere losing its potency as a 'jam tomorrow' substitute for revolution, the crisis of world imperialism is changing the story faster than the US can keep up with it.

Whoever's hand turns out to have been behind the latest staged confrontations on Cyprus, there is IN GENERAL no way that world bourgeois society con do anything other than drive headlong into ever nastier national squabbles, finally all the way through to the attempted bloody redivision of world markets in line with the new pecking order required by the uneven development of monopoly capitalism.

It suited Washington to subvert Turkey's post-Ottoman national democratic development into the degrading role of America’s number one anti-communist stooge in the region, a permanent armed camp threatening the Soviet Union and relying on mass torture and incarceration to contain class and national revolts at home.

It likewise suited imperialism to see Ottoman backwardness artificially revived so as to help with the job of containing Greek capitalist instability. It had taken a British-imposed counter-revolution to shove the anti-fascist Greek working class back from socialism at the end of the war. And the unreliable shallowness of restored bourgeois rule ever since (variously expressed in a brief desperate period of open fascism, and a much longer period of corrupt social democracy which saw Greece habitually at odds with the official American Cold War line) has put a high premium on Turkey’s postwar role as brutally reliable nationalist check and balance.

But now it is Turkey's turn to be the loose cannon (not that Greece has stopped). Transformed over the years into a militarized Frankenstein's monster at the service of Washington's Cold War crusade, forced to distort its own economic, social and political development to serve US imperialism's own market-domination interests, Turkey is now pitchforked into a world in which obedience to Washington is no longer a guarantee of immunity either for its trading prospects abroad or against the social explosion which is now brewing (most visibly in is political prisons).

Aside from angling for EU entry (the customs union agreement is already in the bag), Ankara in its recent deals with Iran and Iraq is much more obviously going against Washington’s declared interests:

Turkey yesterday signed a multibillion dollar deal to import natural gas from Iran in defiance of Washington's threat to take action against companies investing in the Iranian oil and gas industry.

An elaborate ceremony indicated the importance Iran attaches to relations with Mr Erbakan’s new government, which promises to alleviate Tehran's international isolation. Mr Erbakan told his hosts: "We cannot turn our backs on a crucial neighbour like Iran, especially when we desperately need their energy resources." Turkey also signed agreements to buy Iranian electricity and boost bilateral trade.

Mr Erbakan is on a tour of five, mainly Islamic, Asian states to strengthen ties with the Moslem world after decades of neglect by secularist governments.

Iraq and Turkey’s Islamist-led government have signed an oil-for-food agreement only days after Ankara and Tehran struck a multi-billion energy deal in defiance of new US legislation threatening sanctions against companies investing in Iran.

The Iraq-Turkey "mutual understanding" memorandum calls for improved political and economic ties, increased trade and construction of a gas pipeline.

Iraq was one of Turkey’s principal trading partners before the war. But trade has dwindled to $200m a year.

Now Turkey wants to meet all Iraq’s need for food imports and take Iraqi oil in payment.

Mr Necmettin Erbakan, Turkey’s new Islamist prime minister, wants to build stronger ties with Moslem countries, while maintaining Turkey’s traditionally strong ties with the west.

Given this new insistence on following through its own trade competition interests in the teeth of America's boycott plans, coupled with the new Islamist influence at government level, Ankara is likely to prove at least as unreliable for US imperialism as Greece has traditionally been. More fundamentally, such low-level national squabbles as that between Greece and Turkey which were allowed to rumble on throughout the Cold War (recognized then as mostly working to US imperialist divide-and-rule advantage) are now set to rumble much louder and prove much less controllable by anyone, now that world imperialist crisis is setting the pace, and all the old patterns of US control are thrown into doubt.

This is least of all likely to herald the successful "establishment of sovereign unitary states" everywhere, carving out a space for independent national development as US imperialism loses its grip. The situation IN GENERAL is rather as described in last week's EPS Review:

Whatever 'deficits' exist are created mainly by the workings of the monopoly-capitalist free market, and the English capitalists themselves have just as many grievances against how they get carved up by US, Japanese, German, and French capital, etc, as the Scots do about how the market gives London an advantage. What do those recommending a capitulation to Scots bourgeois nationalist claims wish to see happening in England, - that the English nationalists should be tail-ended when they complain about the 'democratic deficit' with the European Union or other international trading arrangements? 'No' to EU withdrawal; just bring down capitalism.

There are real or imaginary 'deficits' all round under imperialism by its very nature as a monopoly-accumulation/exploitation system. Greater 'national self-determination' under continuing capitalism is the reactionary direction in which every craphead petty-bourgeois political tendency will degenerate as the world economic crisis deepens, - just as they all so degenerated towards social-chauvinism in 1914 in the Second International, (founded by Engels and officially Marxist one hundred percent), - with the exception of the Leninist party, of course, and a couple of other continental groups.

But the only real answer to these 'democratic deficit' postures is to get rid of the imperialist free-market system. 

Neither Turkish nationalism, Greek nationalism nor the phony 'internationalism' of a UN-brokered 'sovereignty' agreement look remotely capable of sorting out the problems of tiny Cyprus — let alone the wider animosity between Greece and Turkey (with potentially disastrous extensions into the Balkans). And there are hundreds of similar unresolved national frictions lingering on (or yet to be created) waiting to go screaming over the top as imperialist crisis turns up the heat, and the decay of the postwar settlement takes all the customary brakes off.

Anti-imperialist revolts of all descriptions, ranging all the way from renegade bourgeois stooges driven to revolt for fear of revolution (e.g. Saddam Hussein) up to communist-led national revolts (like Cuba and Vietnam), can hardly fail to play a major role in shaping the circumstances in which the crucial struggle for proletarian dictatorship starts to make headway in one or more of the national strongholds of monopoly-capitalist power.

But the best use will be made of the revolutionary opportunities such national revolts will open up when the proletariat is least of all constrained by ABSTRACT appeals to self-determination, national-cultural rights and sovereignty.

The last time Greeks took up arms in defence of 'national rights', what developed concretely was a bitter class struggle against fascism, which in turn became a battle for a Greek workers state. That battle only stopped under direct counter-revolutionary assault from British parliamentary democracy.

A realistic assessment of the way forward for workers in Greece, Cyprus and Turkey - and in Britain too, for that matter - would set a lot more store by that one fact of history than by any amount of ABSTRACT appeals to the rights and wrongs of self-determination.

Build Leninism.
Paddy Chambers

[Socialist review] 
[SouthWest Bulletin]

Unjust economic world order
Speech by Fidel at 11th Non-Aligned Summit

Never before, since the Movement was created 35 years ago, have we been more isolated and unrecognized in international politics, so discriminated against and relegated in terms of development aid and credits, and never has the international economic order imposed on us been so unjust and unequal. Never before have the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the countries of the South been more seriously threatened, never before has our independence been more endangered, never before has such flagrant interference in our internal affairs been perpetrated.

Instability, social violence and ethnic conflicts have spread through various regions of the planet. Whole peoples, united by history, economics and even their own blood, broke into pieces, fought among themselves and even went to war.

Today insecurity and poverty are greater. Attempts are being made to put our peoples into the straitjacket of globalization, preventing us from applying national policies which differ from what the North dictates. Total privatization and commercial opening at any price are presented to us as the only possible formulas for economic success.

Although no one seems to want to even mention the Third World's foreign debt anymore, it is growing nonetheless, and along with unequal terms of trade it constitutes the principal obstacle to development today. Its total has now reached the staggering figure of 1.5 trillion dollars. Unemployment is growing and social development is mercilessly sacrificed.

Is it reasonable to accept the concept that certain economic models imposed by the most developed societies, along with their specific patterns of political organization within society, should become universal paradigms and uniform treasures of legitimacy and correctness?

How long must we witness in silence the absurd waste of resources by opulent societies, the criminal mortgaging of our children's future, in an unbridled race toward ecological disaster which many now consider inevitable?

Production of ever more sophisticated arms continues; their sales are increasing. Competition is fierce among powerful producers. Then there are the interventions of the Security Council — whose permanent members are the principal arms vendors — to make peace in the name of the United Nations.

The U.S. Congress approves larger military budgets than those proposed by the country's own president. What do they want those arms for? The emergence of a unipolar world has accentuated hegemonistic tendencies which attempt to act beyond the scope of the United Nations. Attempts are being made to impose the hegemonic power's will on the Security Council and use that body as an instrument for the subjugation of the world. That policy is even more worrisome and dangerous when it is formulated on the basis of positions assumed by the ultra-rightwing sectors which seem to be gaining considerable political terrain within the United States. That is how Nazi Germany’s fanatical dreams of dominating the world emerged; the only thing is, Hitler didn't have such immense power. 

Given this danger and other ills that threaten us, it is our duty to struggle with determination to democratize the United Nations; to achieve the General Assembly's proper role; to assure that the Security Council stops usurping the General Assembly's functions and acting behind its back, so that privileges cease. So that the permanent seats on the Security Council cease to be the almost exclusive attribute of European countries or nuclear powers or super-rich nations. We must not vacillate. We must struggle with determination so that two permanent seats on an expanded Security Council go to Latin America, two to Africa, which currently has no representation on the Council, and two more for Asia, where 60 percent of the world's population lives.

The irritating veto power should at least be reformed, if that anachronistic and undemocratic instrument is retained. Let's put an end to the absurd practice that one country, out of the few granted that power, can annul the will and decisions of all the other countries making up the United Nations put together.

United we are strong. United, our voice can be heard. United, we are a force that must be reckoned with.

We are not simple spectators. This world is also our world. No one can replace our united action, no one will speak for us. Only we united, can do away with the unjust political and economic world order which they are trying to impose on our peoples.

The demands we make today will not be satisfied spontaneously. Victory will not come as a result of concessions made to those who exploit us, or through the weakness of cowards, or through a failure to fight for our most sacred and legitimate rights. Only loyalty to the principles which gave life to this Movement, the strength of our convictions and the determination to make concerted actions will bring us the future which our peoples deserve. •