Hitherto, philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx.
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
(Weekly.  Subscriptions £10/3months. £30p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]               
 No 0875 October 15 1996                                                                                                                              10p

Incorrect manoeuvres around the SLP reflect fake-'left' inability to make the right analysis of the world situation and the international class struggle, or to see themselves clearly without subjective delusions. Ultra-left anti-communism outside the SLP is a worse problem than manifestations of bureaucratic conservatism inside it. Shame on CPGB attempts to finger SLP members.

The concrete situation in Britain in 1996 will finally be decisive for what is 'correct' in the tactics, strategy, and programme for solving the crisis of imperialism through socialism under a workers state.

All the Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding from analysing all previous experiences in the class-war conflicts of the capitalist system is indispensable as a training for how to struggle now.

But very specific and unusual conditions apply in 1996, almost unique in the world generally and in Britain in particular.

Never has there been such a time of overwhelming insistent demand, from every social factor and indicator going, for a socialist solution to capitalism's problems, coupled with such utter bankruptcy and confusion in socialist understanding and preparation for what needs to be done.

General acceptance of any international voice of authority in the question of building socialism and resolving the crisis of imperialism is at an all-time low at the same moment that even simple reformist gestures in the direction of socialism, or spontaneous single-issue protests of that nature, are also filled with doubt and compromise.

The background to this unprecedented ferment of aroused expectations but hesitant uncertainty is the astonishing superficial upheaval of the demise of the Soviet workers state, still only just beginning to be digested in all its profound implications, - plus the apparent 'triumph of history' for the imperialist system, which it is becoming increasingly obvious is not only not all that it seems but is in fact the exact opposite of what it seems, - the ultimate explosive crisis of the imperialist system in reality.

The self-liquidation by the Soviet revisionist bureaucracy has totally altered the world's perception of things, but the commonest assumption that it is a "blow to socialism" is the one thing which it will not turn out to be(see EPSR 870).

At the present stage of society's evolution, the productivity, profitability, and innovativeness of capitalist 'free market' anarchy will always exceed that of an economy and state of civilised planned benefits and development for all.

But at the end of the 20th century, the balance is tipping in the aspirations of people worldwide towards that civilised planned society of honest endeavour and sustainable worthwhile development for all, and away from the shallow and violent uncertainties of the glitzy get-rich-quick life of the capitalist rat-race.

Even as the largish minorities "get what they want" who can push and shove successfully in capitalist society, they soon discover that their triumphant reality is not quite what they wanted anyway, and seek out ever more escapism via drugs, drink, and exhibitionism.

The majorities in all capitalist countries who are never going to quite get the success that the free-market lifestyles tell them that they should want and that should be theirs, - are discovering that the triumph of the imperialist 'new world order' means continuing, or even worsening, exactly the same old exploitation racket that capitalism has always stood for.

Worse still, the anarchic chaos of inter-imperialist conflict now shows every sign of getting out of hand again yet once more this century, which has already twice before totally devastated everyone's aspirations by world wars for monopoly-capitalist supremacy of catastrophic death and destruction.

The 'new world order' meanwhile is demonstrating that far from having any control over these faint but menacing developments & inter-imperialist rivalries ahead, it is falling down continually on even the easiest tasks it sets itself, leaving vast areas of the world like Africa, the Middle East, and large parts of Asia and Latin America in perpetual strife and misery, and hopelessly failing to complete even the simplest operations.

American ruling-class power is at the heart of this paradox, - seemingly omnipotent by being by far the greatest concentration of economic, political, and military might world history has ever seen, and overwhelmingly dominant over its rivals at the same time, by an unprecedented distance, - but yet simultaneously economically challenged by ruthless trade-war competition in commerce, science and technology led by Germany and Japan which could bring the whole US imperialist edifice crashing down; and undermined in parallel by America's own unresolved internal class-war crises, and by the philosophical self-doubt which has been eating away at the American bourgeoisie ever since its defeat in Vietnam and its dim realisation that the future of the worlds masses will only flourish at the expense of the USA's present dominant position, and associated privileged existence.

Specifically in Britain, all this confusion has resulted in the astonishing superficial upheaval of Labour abandoning publicly any further thought of socialism of any kind, in favour of unfettered market capitalism, - just at the moment when the Tory ruling class party is becoming paralysed with doubt and fear over what it ought to do next for British imperialism's survival in the trade-war rat-race to come, now that its own power is so much diminished compared to its rivals and 'allies' in the Common Market and in Japan and the USA.

Within such chaos, the unending long-term requirement of building ever stronger cadre strengths, armed with the most advanced and exhaustive Marxist-Leninist theoretical understanding, always remains the constant starting point and major task.

But thereafter, all is unclear.

The revolutionary cadres will eventually be the party of leadership of the working class, obviously. But by what route will that position be reached?

Even the most posturing of all the middle-class fake 'revolutionary' groups and sects tend to hedge their bets these days about claiming to be the revolutionary party by adopting a "towards the refoundation of" phrase to describe their party ambitions, or by more or less openly continuing their entryist tradition (into the Socialist Labour Party nowadays, as well as still into the Labour Party in some cases), or by trying to build up alliances in rivalry to Scargill's party.

And revolutionary understanding itself has partially possibly moved on a bit to grasping that constitutions, rule-books, and party cards are not remotely the essential attributes of building a consistent Marxist-Leninist influence on the working class. It is winning the battle of ideas itself which is 99.99% of the successful struggle. All organisational questions will then tend to resolve themselves quite easily, - as should tactics and strategy if the historical and dialectical-materialist science has been learned thoroughly enough.

The SLP has openly welcomed communists to join and build the party, - the SLP party, obviously. Plainly, the SLP is a hotch-potch coalition at this stage, dominated naturally by Scargill's clearly centrist ideology, - the odd revolutionary phrase or two about abolishing capitalism, and being for Marxism, and believing in the extra-parliamentary struggle as much as the parliamentary struggle, - and being for international ties with socialist Cuba, etc, etc, plus specific short-programme demands which would clearly be incompatible with the continuation of the capitalist system. Determinedly lacking is the slightest scrap of imperialist-crisis theory, which is the heart and soul of Marx's scientific understanding, but which Scargill refuses to contemplate to avoid being labelled 'hysterical revolutionary' and to avoid all contamination with such, as he sees it; similarly absent is any Marxist theory about the state and the absolute need to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only serious proposal to put to serious-minded workers about how the secret capitalist police-state, guarding ruling-class interests at all costs, is to be dealt with, - likewise played down for fear of frightening workers or of being ridiculed.

Joining the SLP therefore, clearly means helping to build up a centrist party and centrist influence among workers in Britain and beyond.

In the present circumstances, it seems obvious that this is going to happen anyway, because of the almost starting-from-scratch-again situation the mass movement is in, with no authoritative voice of revolutionary leadership heard anywhere. None of the remnants of the previous world communist and trotskyist movements have even begun to resolve the complex theoretical questions which brought them down, and none of the petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' new tendencies has a clue either.

From the SLP's development, communists could gain a growing militant arena in which to struggle for deepening Marxist-Leninist theory while building the SLP, bringing workers from anti-socialism to socialism, and from disorganisation to organisation.

Much Marxist experience of centrism is of a reactionary diversion, brought into the workers movement precisely to hold back the advance of revolutionary understanding.

Lenin's August 1915 description from "Socialism and War" is plain enough:

Kautsky, who in 1912 signed the Basle Manifesto on taking revolutionary advantage of the impending war, is outdoing himself in justifying and embellishing social-chauvinism and, like Plekhanov, joins the bourgeoisie in ridiculing any thought of revolution and all steps towards the immediate revolutionary struggle.

The working class cannot play its world-revolutionary role unless it wages a ruthless struggle against this backsliding, spinelessness, subservience to opportunism, and unparalleled vulgarisation of the theories of Marxism. Kautskyism is not fortuitous; it is the social product of the contradictions within the Second International, a blend of loyalty to Marxism in word, and subordination to opportunism in deed.

This fundamental falseness of "Kautskyism" manifests itself in different ways in different countries. In Holland, Roland-Holst, while rejecting the idea of defending the fatherland, defends unity with the opportunists' party. In Russia, Trotsky, while rejecting this idea, also defends unity with the opportunist and chauvinist Nasha Zarya group. In Rumania, Rakovsky, while declaring war on opportunism as being responsible for the collapse of the International, is at the same time ready to recognise the legitimacy of the idea of defending the fatherland. All this is a manifestation of the evil which the Dutch Marxists (Gorter and Pannekoek) have called "passive radicalism", and which amounts to replacing revolutionary Marxism with eclecticism in theory, and servility to or impotence towards opportunism, in practice.

And Bolshevik attitudes to opportunism and philistine eclecticism replacing scientific Marxist theory were no less rugged in the earlier phases of the growth of the mass socialist movement in Russia alongside the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, etc.

But in that first flourishing of the age of socialist revolutions, the universal acceptability of Marxist theory was hardly even challenged in general, nor the idea of building the revolutionary party. The fight was mostly about exposing the revisionist distortions of Marxism from various incorrect leaderships which directly affected the mass movement, convincing workers that Lenin's correct interpretation and development of Marxism was proving itself in practice against all rival theories.

Temporarily, the current scene bears no such character of embryonic revolutionary consciousness bursting forth everywhere, thirsting for Marxist-Leninist leadership.

What is required at the moment is to redevelop the mass socialist movement while still maintaining the fight for revolutionary theory.

The launch of the SLP, representing the more militant aspirations of the labour movement which had been confused and pushed back by the weight and influence of the massive postwar anti-communist offensive and bourgeois class-collaborative propaganda, provides exactly this opportunity to assist the overall longterm cause of the working class, and to demonstrate in practice the greater usefulness of a Marxist-Leninist understanding of building the socialist revolution compared to the activities of opportunist dilettantes.

There is no confusion about the limitations of centrism either, or of the militant left reformism which has been Scargill's undoubtedly heroic record in the labour movement hitherto, fighting outstanding class-war battles in the real interests of all workers against the very essence of capitalist-class exploitation and social domination. It is these very limitations which have led Scargill to make his unique explanations to the working class of his own painful learning process, a principled and not uncourageous development which no other failed 'left' Labour or TUC leader has ever remotely contemplated emulating. It would be infinitely more valuable if far more was analysed publicly about exactly what great historic lessons should be drawn from the magnificent failure of the 1984-85 strike epic to prevent the state-powered destruction of the mining industry; but Scargill's acceptance of his earlier misguided Labourism is an acknowledged constant living reminder of the superiority of scientific socialist theory.

For Marxism-Leninism, there is nothing new in having to, temporarily, go along with potentially centrist developments for the wider and longer-term benefit of the working-class cause. The Bolsheviks, for example, adopted exactly this policy towards the initial leadership of the Soviets after the February Revolution in 1917, realising that there was no way better to get across to workers the likely limitations of Menshevik and SR conduct of Soviet government than to support their 'Marxist' capture of office and see their 'revolutionary' pretensions lead to disaster. This obviously meant genuinely working to ensure that the Soviets did seize and consolidate the taking of power initially in the name of the development of the whole working class and its cause, giving the maximum possible leadership to workers that lay within the grasp of Bolsheviks within that development. This obviously means helping to 'invent' the Soviets as organs of state power, and to 'prop up' the Soviets, even though initially they clearly were vehicles only for Menshevik and SR centrist policies. The working class had to continue to be led through this Menshevik-SR Soviet power experience, and the best way for the Bolsheviks to lead this development was from in front.

Another historical comparison, similarly not remotely proof of anything in itself but usefully illustrative of some of the depths and complexities of the problem, was the widely-accepted attitude on the left in the hayday of Labour Party power that any left-Labour pretensions (such as from Benn's challenge to the existing leadership) would best be dealt with by trying to get such 'socialist' promises elected to office in government in order to conclusively demonstrate to the working class the emptiness of such 'reformist' militancy. Working for a Benn government might well have been a legitimate and even necessary part of the working-class cause in such a period.

If it is the correct thing to do now, helping to build the SLP requires communists to give whatever leadership they can to this working class cause, inevitably preparing to have to put up with a degree of bureaucratic rightwing intriguing and routinism on the way, but in compensation getting invaluable hands-on practice in diplomacy, tactics, and strategy. In theory the SLP looked like an initiative to tentatively support. In practice, it has thrown up a number of new problems and considerations.

In now being forced to deal with them, the theoretical understanding of where the struggle is going and needs to go has been infinitely deepened and strengthened.

The SLP is part of a new mood among workers wishing to break out of the sectarian isolation into which all had been driven by imperialism's final phase of pre-crisis, boomtime triumphalism. Not only does it re-create opportunities to deal steadily with an ongoing workers movement. It also requires a leap up in the pragmatic grasp of how the cause of socialism might further develop.

Even with the Labour Party's first great opportunist assault on governmental power in the 1920s when already plainly branded as a bourgeois labour party as the epitome of imperialist-dominated social chauvinism, - Lenin nevertheless called on British communists, about to form a serious smallscale mass party themselves with already enough support to warrant the imprisonment of some of its leading agitators just five years later prior to the General Strike, to "help Henderson or Snowden to beat Lloyd George and Churchill" in order to "help the majority of the working class to convince themselves by their own experience" of Labour's treachery and the correctness of communism, — meaning helping Labour's election victory. (The idea of the electoral pact with Labour was the second option for the moment when a united Communist Party had actually been formed from the four weak groups which were coalescing to build the CP, - one with strict conditions for such a deal. The first idea was just for helping Labour get elected as necessary for the working class's own development, in spite of the imminent successful launching (and relatively largescale by our own 1996 measurements) of the Communist Party.)

Even with such a reactionary anti-communist fraud as Labour's major-party development, Marxist revolutionary science dictated a big tactical compromise.

The SLP's development is not remotely to be compared to Labour's reformist evolution as the 'reformist' saviour of the imperialist system from the threat of communist revolution in the periods following the two inter-imperialist world wars. It is not remotely describable as another bourgeois labour party, or as the Labour Party mark II. Nor is it remotely useful to describe the SLP as the product of the defeat of the working class by imperialism, and therefore as a purely negative phenomenon.

The SLP is the opening up of a new centrist arena of struggle so that the best ideas and practice can prove themselves to the working class. It is a coalition of disparate forces which it would be pointless to regard as having been brought together in order to fail to build the SLP. Success is the aim. The most successful party-building methods and ideas will prevail.

If those turn out to be Labour reformism mark II or demagogic centrism, or revolutionary socialist clarity, - those are the ideas which will gain ground inside the SLP, reflecting the level of maturity of the working class.

Political consciousness develops socially and organisationally, as well as by the direct conflict of rival theories and programme. To miss out on crucial developments in working-class politics could mean disaster or isolation for any sectarian aloofness.

The struggle to build a larger-scale workers party for socialism than has been open to communists hitherto will be its own reward, even if the SLP does end up being swamped by TUC Labourism mark II due to the historical situation being less advanced than has been anticipated.

The mentality of trade-unionism (petty-bourgeois class-collaborationism) will, of course, continue anyway, always needing to be combated by revolutionary consciousness. Eventually it is transformed into pro-revolutionary trade-unionism.

None of this potential broad-front SLP activity should involve revolutionary socialists in the slightest retreat from Marxist-Leninist understanding of imperialist crisis and the further developments of the international class struggle. Having views on the eventual revolutionary nature of the conflict, and the organisation expressions that will make necessary, is no barrier to the most genuine fight to take the working class forward at this stage of SLP-type development. The phenomenon is an aspect of the working-class movement itself, and although it would be pointless to deny the enormous influence and role that Scargill himself will play in SLP development, there is no requirement to praise any particular way of putting things or style of leadership.

Equally there is no point in trying to win the battle for a Marxist-Leninist understanding of socialism within a broad-front organisation by manoeuvring for the exclusion of rightwing tendencies. The more elements that abandon TUC-Labour 'reformism' to take up the SLP's challenge to abolish capitalism, the better, - no matter how class-collaboratively conservative or anti-communist their thinking initially. In the end, communists have got to win a majority of the working class to something close to revolutionary-socialist consciousness, no matter from how much backwardness they have to be brought forward. What better place to start than in the SLP.

At the same time, there need be no necessary insurmountable conflict between mistaken SLP policies (as far as things stand at present) and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism. All policies will sooner or later be argued at conference, or even in the SLP press. Once again such struggles, should be regarded as opportunities, not impositions, - all of course depending on how things progress further inside the SLP from their reasonably promising position at present, and in which direction.

Marxist-Leninist ideas only need embodying in a revolutionary party programme as their ultimate expression, but not necessarily for their earlier development. Marxist circles are well able to cope with that if the ideas being developed give correct leadership, if the polemics are genuine, and if their organisational expression is adequate for the task of clarification and further expansion. Philosophical understanding, the very heart of Marxism-Leninism, is impossible to conceal and hard to censor.

Some self-proclaimed revolutionary socialists insist that the SLP's constitutional ban on the affiliation of other parties within the SLP makes a struggle for Marxist ideas to prevail in the broad-front party impossible.

What they really mean, of course, is that they think the revolutionary takeover of the SLP is now impossible.

They were wrong to start with, - on two counts. First it was a completely silly idea that Scargillism would be launched and would immediately allow itself to be taken over by sectarian entrists.

What the Scargill tradition stands for in the workers movement pulls far more weight than any 'revolutionary' sect, and will continue to do so for some time yet. 

Secondly, any such frustrated affiliates would have been kidding themselves about their 'Leninist' revolutionary credentials anyway in the light of such a poor piece of analysis.

There could be any number of phony 'communists' or 'Marxists' inside the SLP. There need be no reason for there to be any good communists outside the SLP who want to be in it, and active in it.

There is no organisation in Britain at the moment that is able to act as a visible revolutionary party. There are some sizeable left sects like the SWP or like Militant were, but they are all hopelessly anti-communist through and through.

On the other hand, there exist publications of very considerable Marxist-Leninist achievement, but there is no visible revolutionary party yet to speak of attached to them.

All would-be Marxist-Leninist cadres could easily work within the SLP by simply abandoning any attempt to build a party within a party. Secret sectarian entryism owes more to Walter Mitty than Karl Marx, and it is hard to discern what is lost to Marxist-Leninist circles that is gained by a tiny sect posturing as a revolutionary party, especially posturing as the revolutionary party.

Party actions certainly should bring forward party development if there is any correct leadership; but Marxist circles can develop just successfully in just the same way, - and even more so if the leadership is better.

Analysing the world correctly and preparing working-class political intervention on the issues is the advantage of party building for cadre development as opposed to circle building for cadre development. If a 'revolutionary' group can achieve this outside the SLP, they should stay there and get on with it. If they cannot break out of circle work without joining the SLP, then they should abandon the 'revolutionary party' pretence and genuinely join in building the SLP.

In the absence of established factional rights within the SLP, it is senseless to conduct public propaganda and agitation for an anti-leadership platform at such an early stage of the party's development. It would make nonsense of all the above considerations, and it would be especially clumsy sectarianism in the light of the fraught initial history of the SLP, driven frantic by witch-hunting hysteria and entryist fears. By all means let like-minded SLP communists have a drink and chat together as often as is valuable for developing the strength and achievements of the SLP, but all public posturing as an alternative platform is just more self-delusion from the same Walter-Mitty stable which envisaged taking over the SLP as the revolutionary party to start with. It is all the wrong game, and all at the wrong time.

Given the SLP's origins and likely broad-front centrist development, it is probably inevitable that the day will come when a mass SLP might split between a less revolutionary tendency and a more revolutionary wing, - for example over the question of a future workers state and how the essential question of socialist construction, - the dictatorship of the proletariat, - is to be tackled. But such necessary factional struggles are a long way ahead at the moment. It makes no sense for now to insist on building the SLP in only one direction and down only one narrow path. All such approaches are just sectarian revolutionary fantasy, and have missed the point of the SLP's development entirely.

Contemptuous dismissals of 'liquidationism' provide no answer to the foregoing arguments. The CPGB has just attacked the IBT Spartists breakaway for "their deep entryist opportunist burrowing" into the SLP, and for "being drawn to the right in pursuit of power in the SLP", and for "the crass hypocrisy of this sterile little sect" for publicly liquidating in order to join the SLP "under instruction from North America", and for it remaining 

"crystal clear...from the behaviour of their comrades in the SLP and from their own self-described clumsy designation of these people as IBT 'supporters', that the IBT continues to exist as an organised group in Britain".

This is a monstrous deliberate fingering of the IBT, every bit as bad as the McCarthyite informing and witch-hunting which the CPGB accuse the SLP of. None of the IBT's polemical criticism of the CPGB which the Weekly Worker has drawn attention to can remotely warrant the CPGB turning fink on the IBT. It looks as if the CPGB's hurt pride at being challenged over its SLP policy has caused the Weekly Worker to turn stool-pigeon.

This is a truly alarming development for all who have attempted a comradely polemical relationship with the Weekly Worker. What is really "WRETCHED" (the WW headline) is not the IBT's arguments for liquidation into the SLP but the CPGB's treacherous reply.

Fingering comrades for wanting to discuss a different approach to SLP work than the half-and-half measures the CPGB tried, would also indicate that the CPGB has now given up on its own attempted relationship with the SLP via the "comrades who have joined the SLP as a direct result of our call". This savage back-stabbing of the IBT seems to signal abandonment of Weekly Worker concern that "the witch hunt in the SLP has been exclusively directed at purported CPGB 'members and supporters'". Turning fink on the IBT is just asking for trouble.

And all of this would seem to confirm that the CPGB was confused from the start about the SLP and got its tactics in a muddle. It would seem to confirm that there really was an illusion that the SLP could be taken over to become the revolutionary party, a daft analysis.

Analysing the world correctly remains the CPGB's weak point, and as the EPSR has consistently, and in detail, tried to tell the CPGB, it is this failing which undermines its only really worthwhile attempted argument against the IBT in a whole page of abusive diatribe, namely that SLP activities leave unresolved "the central political question in Britain, the need to reforge a democratic centralist Communist Party", i.e. a Leninist party.

As true as this is, it is completely irrelevant coming from the CPGB because the Weekly Worker gets so much wrong all the time. Trotskyite anti-communism predominates, and that makes the CPGB's description of democratic centralism, -

"allowing the existence of different political trends and the right to form factions able to openly publicise their views",

- a dubious place to launch the revolutionary party from. It sounds democratic. But in reality it is just an eclectic muddle. Sure, all opinions have to be considered. But then decisions have to be made and correct leadership has to be given.

All too often, the CPGB is just wrong about everything.

As the EPSR has regularly quoted from Lenin at the CPGB (albeit pointlessly because the CPGB centrally refuses to consider the EPSR worth reading, - so much for rapprochement), the only basis towards greater unity for communists (e.g. to allow the party to be rebuilt) is to clarify all disputed matters between communists, - i.e. who is right and who is wrong. Now, total agreement will always be impossible, of course. And any agreement at all, short-term, is going to be very hard to achieve.

But the problem is that there are such vast differences with the Weekly Worker (and especially with its majority Trot/anti-communist correspondents) and on such fundamental questions facing the world socialist revolution and the anti-imperialist struggle, - and there appears to be so little grasp at the CPGB of how crucially debilitating these divergent world views are, - that the zero progress on clarifying any of these issues makes the dream of a united major CP around the Weekly Worker look like wild fantasy.

In which case all of the earlier arguments above about correct tactics towards the SLP in the light of the continuing weakness of the 'revolutionary' 'left' become precisely relevant. But even if still incorrect from the CPGB viewpoint, informing on the IBT in this way only gives added doubt that a sufficient degree of communist political maturity even remotely exists yet in Britain for combining into a successful united Communist Party, especially one based on the CPGB's self-publicising and self-aggrandising claims.

The spiteful sectarianism of this petty-bourgeois subjective reply from the CPGB is by no means the first suggestion that FISC-baiting may foolishly have caused more trouble than it was worth in the manoeuvres around the SLP's launch. If right from the start, CPGB conceit was already adamant that formal abandonment of independent CPGB recruitment for a while was completely out of the question, then this consideration will be wasted on the Weekly Worker. But for others, the SLP's constitution was more daft than anything, - an unnecessary self-inflicted limitation on the SLP's ability to grow in numbers and to grow in political maturity able easily to deal with the increased numbers of anti-communist Trotskyite sectarians which might have come its way with a different constitution in place. But the anti-affiliation rules were not seen as insuperable barriers for communists to be able to work within the SLP, invited as they were to do so.

At least part of the problem with alleged FISC witch-hunting was caused by ill-thought-out CPGB tactics and strategy, as argued above. Given the circumstances, the CPGB were asking for trouble with the way they went about their interest in working with the SLP. It was clearly the intention to joyfully meet this trouble head-on, - presumably with a view to defeating it, or damning the SLP in the attempt. Again, this is looking like a not-well-thought-out move. Now the CPGB is breeding a "down with the SLP" attitude. Is this so smart?

The IBT may well be the worst Spart/Trot creeps that ever breathed (in a hot contest which has all 57 varieties simultaneously in first position) but the CPGB attack on them gets the worst of both worlds. They are attacked for what might in fact be a clever tactical understanding, given the condition of the 'revolutionary left' in Britain. They are not attacked for ultra-left Trotskyite posturing and anti-communist defeatism, the grotesque subjective psychosis of their former parent body. 

Similarly, the Weekly Worker blocks in dubious solidarity with the SWP and Militant in denouncing the SLP's rather fancifully-alleged "McCarthyism". But the independent existence of the SWP and Militant has been nothing but the most outrageous anti-communist opportunism. These truly 'wretched' sects are led by the most appalling subjective petty-bourgeois mentality imaginable. With encouragement, enough good communists within the SLP's ranks could easily sort out these treacherous counter-revolutionary 'lefts'. It is no great surprise or concern, that Scargill's founding group decided not to bother, and to leave them outside instead.

Bans and proscriptions remain the weakest option for dealing with demented anti-communist and anti-party trouble makers. But there is no way that they should be the end of the world. It is the weakness of SLP politics that is likely to cause the real worry. And on that score, once again it is the even greater weakness of the CPGB's own politics on some issues (Ireland, the workers states, the Soviet Union, South Africa, the 'new world order', etc) which is as big a problem. The CPGB has been bold with its rapprochement initiative. All credit to it. But it needs to try harder to actually listen to what people say rather than to just give them a hearing. Analyse yet again the latest news from Ireland, for example. Further imperialist retreats ahead. Reunification of Ireland in the faint distance. Build Leninism. Spread the EPSR, the only possible source of Marxist-Leninist leadership for the moment. Joe Harper

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

ANTIDOTE TO U.S. VENOM

After thousands of acts of sabotage, assassination attempts and armed subversion, the weapons that the United States now uses to achieve its interventionist objectives are the maintenance and extension throughout the world of the criminal blockade, which is economic, commercial, political and diplomatic; 1712 broadcasting hours directed against Cuba on 33 radio and television frequencies, from U.S. territory, filled with calumnious propaganda aimed at undermining the solidity of the Revolution from within; and the travesty of Track 2, which is part of the Torricelli Act.

 Just recently, images on Cuba television of the police brutality in San Diego, California — against members of the Pastors for Peace caravan as they attempted to cross the Mexican border with 325 computers, in order to donate them to the Cuban public health system.

Those computers were a contribution to fulfilling the most elemental of human rights, the right to live, and it was precisely the representatives of the country that claims to most strongly defend human rights who were savagely guaranteeing the contrary, and violating the precepts of their own Constitution, and the democratic principles of coexistence and human solidarity.

DEMOCRACY, political pluralism and respect for human rights are the principal characteristics of the conditions that the White House and the U.S. Congress are attempting to impose on Cuba, in order to normalize bilateral relations.
The triumph of the Revolution signified the definitive breakdown of the old political parties of the pseudo-republic. Orphaned from support and deserted by the people, those parties dissolved one by one and many of their leaders abandoned the country, naturally en route to the United States.

The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act and the daily venom of U.S. propaganda, welcoming those who left the island illegally as heroes and offering them a paradise, led directly to the disturbances in August 1994.

But those antisocial elements served to strengthen the Revolution and to reaffirm the unity and militancy of the vast majority of Cubans who support and defend that Revolution.

Since the end of the '60s, when Cuba's internal counter-revolution was defeated, attempts from abroad to sponsor and finance counter-revolutionary actions have been neutralized by direct intervention on the part of the nation's workers.

The revolutionary organizations that headed the popular battle against Batista's dictatorship were the 26th of July Movement, the 13th of March Revolutionary Directorate, and the Popular Socialist Party.

The Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) developed from these three forces, and when the armed people buried their dead, victims of the aerial attack which preceded the Bay of Pigs mercenary invasion, and ardently proclaimed the socialist nature of the Revolution, the three organizations decided to dissolve and to form the United Socialist Revolutionary Party (PURS).

The Communist Party of Cuba was founded from the PURS on October 3, 1965. This was preceded by the founding of the Young Communist League (UJC), the successor to the Association of Young Rebels.

The country's necessary institutionalization advanced with the experiment of the People's Power government in Matanzas province and one year later, in 1975, the National Assembly of People's Power (the Cuban parliament) was founded.

The election of deputies to the National Assembly begins at the grass-roots level, where the electorate proposes its candidates and selects the delegates by secret ballot. These delegates form the municipal assemblies of People's Power, which select their own internal leaders.

In open assemblies, candidates are proposed for delegates to the provincial assemblies of People's Power and for deputies to the National Assembly.

An electoral commission analyzes the proposals, ensuring that these candidates are suitably qualified - i.e., that they have no criminal records, that they are not subject to any legal proceedings and that their social conduct is acceptable, etc. The Party does not propose candidates at any level.

Photographs of the candidates are displayed in public places up until election day, when the population decides by direct and secret ballot who will make up the provincial and National Assemblies of People's Power. In its first meeting, the National Assembly elects its president, vice president and the members of the Council of State.

The Communist Party of Cuba is the historical continuation of the Cuban Revolutionary Party founded by our national hero Jose Martí, on April 10, 1892, to organize the efforts of all Cubans in a united and concerted front, to lead the liberation struggle against the Spanish colonialists and to carry the "necessary war" to its conclusion.

Today, that is still a necessity, since the U.S. government is openly proclaiming its strategy against Cuba, and the ultra right wing elements in Congress are attempting to intensify the criminal blockade. The unity and cohesion of all the Cuban people under the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba is now more necessary than ever.

Faced with that venomous U.S. campaign, revolutionary truths are our antidote, the truths that are like weapons.

Civil rights in Cuba have been changing, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in line with the Revolution's consolidation, and the strengthening of its national institutions and unity, notwithstanding the very difficult times we are living through in this special period. Cuba's regional isolation - decreed by the Organization of American States (OAS), under orders from the United States - has been broken, and Cuba is now an important link in terms of continental integration.

We are not denying the problems confronting us, or the shortages that beset us. The disappearance of the Soviet Union and socialism in Eastern Europe, plus the reinforcement of the U.S. blockade, represented a rude blow to our economic and social development, a blow from which we are beginning to recover, thanks to our government's correct and daring strategy, together with the support and efforts of the Cuban people.

The shortages of raw materials, fuel and other goods obliged us to close some factories and caused a substantial drop in the production levels of others. Thousands of workers have had to rely on state benefits. Medical supplies decreased; however, traditional medicine developed more intensely to fill the gap.

Agricultural production and the sugar industry were affected, as well as the availability of school supplies and clothing. The Cuban food supply falls short of former protein levels, but is still above the world average. Urban transportation systems were thrown into crisis and housing construction plans and social and urban development projects were reduced.

However, not one Cuban school closed, not one hospital, not one polyclinic, not one family doctor's office, not one day-care center, not one senior citizens' home or disabled center.

The work of the Revolution has not been halted. Rather, with scant resources, it is continuing to build for the future, with even more sacrifice, but with unfailing determination. •

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. V.I. Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colston St Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 191. Friday 11th October 1996

Building proletarian internationalism.

Any serious attempt to promote working class internationalism, in the unions or anywhere else, can only begin by analysing the international character of world bourgeois society's imperialist crisis.

Restricting the explanation to pointing out that exploitation operates across national borders, playing off British workers against German workers or Western workers against Third World workers, WITHOUT at once showing how this process is driven on and intensified precisely by the uncontrollable cutthroat antagonisms unleashed WITHIN WORLD BOURGEOIS SOCIETY ITSELF under pressure from overproduction crisis, misleads and disarms workers.

At best, such partial explanations leave workers stranded at the level of (spontaneously bourgeois) trade unionist politics. With the best will in the world, all this can ever amount to is an attempt to internationalise the same rearguard 'left pressure' resistance against slump which in all countries has failed domestically.

The idea that even the most brilliantly organized strikes and mass pickets, organized behind trade unionist consciousness, are going to be able to prevent the bourgeoisies of all imperialist nations from struggling to survive at the expense of all their rivals, and first and foremost at the expense of 'their own' working class, - was disproved back in 1984-85. If courageous militancy, coupled with dire self-delusion about the solution to capitalism's crisis lying in a 'Labour government with a real socialist programme to make Britain competitive and prosperous once more', was ever going to do the trick, then the great Miners Strike was when it was going to happen. It didn't, and couldn't have; but that failure set a political benchmark then for the minimum POLITICAL advance that would be necessary before this class struggle against capitalist slump could resume in earnest.

The significance of the Socialist Labour Party has been the tentative and uneven political movement of a key section of the labour movement towards meeting that benchmark.

At worst, when the halfhearted calls for 'trade union internationalism' are seen to be largely empty, such half-explanations (stressing capitalism's supposed international unity, and missing out the central role of imperialist overproduction crisis and resulting trade-war divisions) threaten to open the door to the defeatist opposite of proletarian internationalism: chauvinist invitations to campaign against 'unpatriotic British capitalism selling out British jobs to foreigners'.

Persisting blindly with these 'left pressure' illusions means in practice that first of all trade union reformism is expected to do something completely beyond reach of its class-collaboration boomtime habits, and in any case quite impossible on the basis of reformist politics (i.e. halt the juggernaut of crisis by sheer 'left pressure'). Then, having failed miserably, the scene is thereby set for reformism to be pruned all the way back to its class-collaboration roots, all the way down to the most unbridled social chauvinism.

This mirrors the parliamentary/local council decay of reformism where, as the long postwar boom itself decayed into slump, reformism first went patchily into 'super-reformist' overdrive ('anti-racist' reformism, gay rights, political correctness, 'equal opportunities' bandwagons etc.) before flipping over into Blair's post-reformist self-liquidation of the labour movement, with its entirely deliberate Third Reich echoes of 'a thousand days to prepare for the next thousand years'. But this will not be a Blair problem alone: nothing and nobody on the 'left' can expect their 'internationalism' to be left standing once the wind of social chauvinism starts blowing in earnest, until the role of imperialist crisis and its analysis is properly grasped. Getting unstuck from its confusion over the EU is not in the end just a policy option for the SLP but a class question that it cannot with impunity duck.

'Globalisation' is not first of all a capitalist con-trick on workers, or a smart cosmopolitan plot to catch workers napping, but a mark of imperialism's terminal illness. Concentration of capital within and across borders into ever fewer hands (through bankruptcy, take-over, market-annihilation of rivals, trade-war, and finally war-destruction of rival surplus capacity and war-annexation of rival markets and resources) does not free capitalism from its nation state limitations. Rather, it condemns world society to go on slugging it out between trade-war blocs organized around the same old national flags. What is 'globalised' is crisis, and the end result of all capitalism's internationalism is world war, - and the revolutionary internationalism of the working class.

The notion that 'capitalism has got its act together internationally, workers should do the same' has got it all back to front. The working class is the first class in history whose objective class interests are genuinely international, and in the end coincide with the needs of all modern social development.

It was capitalism itself which brought into being those production relations which made possible the complex and large-scale exploitation of living labour on which all its profits depend. But if it was the capitalist mode of organising social productive labour which first taught workers themselves how to combine in the defence of their wages and conditions, it has been the repeated collapse of modern world bourgeois organization into massive crises of overcapacity, leading to cut-throat trade rivalry, market collapses and world war, which has been completing this education with a vengeance, demonstrating that only the revolutionary overthrow of this system of permanent crisis can advance the interests of workers.

Overcapacity in cars is a case in point. It is well known that decaying imperialist Britain no longer has a volume car industry to call its own. Its spokesmen are instead reduced to bragging about the UK's success in attracting inward investment from such rivals as Japan, Korea and Germany, but any consequential temporary amelioration of the unemployment statistics is small consolation to the British bourgeoisie, who have no illusions what this non-reciprocal export of monopoly capital implies about British imperialism's accelerating relative decline.

Aside from some luxury-car niche-marketing, Britain's indigenous auto manufacture is now restricted to the parts industry. But in this sphere too, recent capitalist press reports make clear that all over the world, 'independent' parts manufacturers will sink or swim depending on their ability to shape themselves into willing auxiliaries of the dominant monopoly players in the world car industry, including scouring the world for cheap labour on behalf of their giant 'customers':

"VW will have more to offer than just advice on how to prepare for this new era of global working. VW buyers are keen to spend more money with UK firms but will make it clear they are being hampered because some UK companies are complacent, poor performers on quality and productivity, and suffering from a financial system that prizes short-term profits when increasingly it is longterm planning that counts.

Frans Boot, the senior VW manager responsible for buying components from British companies, said he had warned Mr Lopez that some UK companies needed to undergo a huge change of attitude before they would be capable of taking a place in VW's evolving supplier organisation. He told Mr Lopez: "VW must do something about these people in the UK. They don't even feel part of Europe some of the time. How can they be global?''

The trade and industry department is acutely aware of the importance of the parts industry. With turnover of £8 billion a year, it employs many thousands of people. Equally important, its competitiveness determines the standards achievable at. its clients, the car companies themselves. Slipping standards in the components industry will threaten inward investment — a crucial political issue — and drag down car companies already here.

The UK needs to make more of the parts used in the cars which are assembled in UK factories. Car companies with UK factories are still buying large quantities of parts from abroad. The risk is that this trend will increase as car firms buy worldwide.

Volkswagen, Europe's biggest carmaker, is in advanced talks to invest more than DMlbn ($658m) on a new plant in Brazil, extending its lead as the country's biggest car manufacturer.  Since ending the Autolatina venture with Ford in 1995, VW has consolidated its lead. In the first eight months of this year it took about 38 per cent of the new car market.

The new plant will extend VW's "modular consortium" production concept from trucks to cars. VW is gaining experience with the new technique, entailing a closer involvement of component suppliers in vehicle assembly, at a new truck plant at Resende, near Rio de Janeiro. When it is fully operational, component suppliers will pre-assemble key parts at the plant and install them on vehicles, with VW largely restricting its role to quality control, sales, and marketing.

Like Resende, the new car plant is expected to be at a greenfield site, which would allow the company to choose workers not used to traditional car assembly methods. Potential conflicts with trade unions over demarcation issues because of the presence of component makers on the assembly line would also be avoided.

Hans Weiser says: "We are in jeopardy on all sides. From the Americans, the Japanese and the Koreans."

Mr Weiser, in fact, works for an American group, the largest motor components company in the world, a group owned by General Motors and renamed Delphi. But he is speaking as a European rather than president of Delphi's European operations.

He says: "The Japanese and Korean companies will come to Europe. They are on tile way and, as far as we can see, they have very aggressive plans. That is why we must be aggressive too."

As Mr Weiser is the first to agree, the turmoil in the European car industry is due to more than anticipation of competition from low cost regions such as the Far East. The industry is beset by environmental legislation, safety laws and overcapacity. Profit margins are being squeezed as competition drives down prices.

The car companies are responding by beefing up the specification of their cars, or "adding value", as Mr Weiser puts it. This pushes up the costs they are anxious to drive down. By streamlining their own operations, the car companies can cut costs so far. For more lasting economies, they need suppliers to help them make more of the car outside their own assembly lines.

The suppliers are in turn reorganising as fast as possible. On offer are lucrative long term supply contracts. But to win them, they need technical expertise, the ability to apply it worldwide, and the financial muscle to set up plants sometimes close to the car factories, sometimes far away in low cost areas.

This reorganisation is causing mounting concern that the industry may "hollow out", with thousands of jobs relocated to eastern Europe and the Far East.

When the European Commission hands down tougher environmental laws, it is the fuel and emissions systems suppliers that bear much of the burden. When safety laws are drafted, they affect the steering and braking companies, the seat belt makers, the electronics firms. The car company tailors the solution to each design; the supplier finds the solution in the first place.

There is, as a result, a relentless pressure on the parts industry, which is forcing through a wave of mergers, acquisitions and closures.

for many smaller companies the restructuring spells an end to their independence. If not taken over, they will find themselves locked into joint ventures and collaboration. Car companies can at least deploy marketing expertise in the face of the overcapacity.

For the components companies, upon which the car groups ultimately depend, there is no such glamour ahead.

General Motors faces escalating strikes at its Canadian plants today, barring a last-minute breakthrough in contract talks with the Canadian Auto Workers union.

Should the work stoppages go ahead, they are likely to cripple GM operations throughout North America over the next week or two. The carmaker's Canadian assembly and parts operations are closely integrated with their US counterparts; thanks to free-trade agreements in automotive products stretching back to the mid-1960s.

The main sticking point is a demand by GM for greater flexibility in "outsourcing" work to-outside suppliers, many of them non-union-ised. GM Canada has given notice of plans to sell two parts plants and may shrink a third, which together employ almost a fifth of its workforce. "

Any support from British trade unions for Canadian workers fighting General Motors, or for Brazilian workers trying to get a square deal out of VW etc. is to be warily welcomed, self-evidently. But the most crucial contribution that can be made to all of these international struggles against imperialism, and most specially to the overthrow of the British imperialist state, (the best internationalism of all for British socialists), is the fight to develop the fullest possible understanding of the nature of the imperialist crisis which is driving capitalism into such a ruthless frenzy of welfare-slashing, cost-cutting, speed-up, "outsourcing", take-over and brutal monopoly bullying. This frenzy cannot be tamed, it can only be overthrown. But first it must be understood. Study Leninism.  Paddy Chambers 

Real trade union internationalism in Britain might start by welcoming the way that British imperialism's decline, under pressure from sharpening world imperialist crisis, has given the Irish the opportunity to press their legitimate national claims all the way to Britain's present snail's pace retreat from the last corner of empire, and by mounting a vigorous campaign for the state to stop dragging its feet over discussing with Sinn Féin how it intends to meet its historical responsibility for dismantling clapped-out Orange police-state rule in the now-defunct 'Northern Ireland' statelet. The SLP has made a welcome half-step in this direction.