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 he tested. V. I. Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
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No 1108 October 16 2001                                                                                                                                       25p

Defeat for imperialism is the only way to stop war. Only war on war can offer civilisation a sane way forward. Social-pacifist parroting that "violence solves nothing" is what is really doing imperialism's repressive work for it, not guerrilla-war 'terrorism'. It is no part of Marxist-Leninist understanding to condemn other anti-imperialists for humiliating US domination in their own way. Distorting Leninism was exactly how Stalinist Revisionism managed to eventually castrate the world communist movement and the Soviet workers state too. 'No to war' protest impotence is exactly a legacy of that castration, inflicting even more losses on the working class since 1990 than the liquidation of Soviet anti-imperialism itself represented. US imperialist crazed reaction shows how Sept 11 struck a telling blow. The Bush-Blair philistine posturing reveals a whole social-system bankruptcy. Economic crash will put the imperialists at each others’ throats for the real warmongering to begin. The Sept 11 damage to America's interests grows with every new farcical knee-jerk out of Washington. But material defeat, and not just moral humiliation, is the only possible way to end imperialism, via the revolutionary overthrow of failed imperialist warmongering. Lenin falsified as saying 'no' to collaboration with other anti-imperialist struggles. Revisionist anti-revolutionist disaster is the only reason why Islamic anti-imperialism can play such a prominent role. Clarifying theory, not censorship or refusal to discuss, is the only way to successful party-building.

All 'protest' forms of 'opposition' to the fascist-blitzkrieg warmongering by US imperialism can only pretend to some 'coherence' by simply ignoring the two major features of this utterly degenerate world scene.

The first is that however much scorn is poured on long decades of hopeless or hypocritical Western policy ("bombing Afghanistan won't solve the world poverty or world-exploitation causes of terrorism”; "the Taleban and Bin Laden were created by Western interference to hold back Afghanistan's development as a Soviet protectorate"; "NATO blockades and bombing kill more Iraqi children EVERY MONTH than died in New York"; "in 400 acts of war or coup-subversion since 1945, Western imperialism has inflicted more terrorism on Third World nations (napalm bombing, Agent Orange defoliation, scorched-earth village destruction, etc, etc) than was inflicted in all the rest of history combined"; etc, etc) - the reality remains that the warmongering imperialist horror still carries on, getting worse all the time.

The second is that all the routine formal protesting of 'No to war', etc, and all the Socialist Alliance-type preparations and promises to 'replace' the existing imperialist bourgeois order, just keep on getting absolutely nowhere.

As well as routinely ignoring this evidence of its own total uselessness, fake 'leftism' has also proved incapable of properly addressing the undoubted fact that the so-called 'terror' attack on New York did make a staggering impression on imperialism and the whole world, - stopping it in its tracks.

Far from offering any sensible analysis of what this remarkable phenomenon is all about, the fundamentally middle-class fake-'lefts' have just helplessly parroted general bourgeois humbug and posturing about "appalling outrage", "reactionary horror", "massacring innocents", and "doing repressive imperialism's job for it", etc, etc.

The last four EPSRs have exposed at length the petty-bourgeois defeatist class-collaborationism of both the Trot and Revisionist components of fake-'leftism', but here and elsewhere this issue, more is explained about how Marxism-Leninism has been deliberately distorted by these 57 varieties of bogus 'revolutionaries' to provide themselves with a 'left' cover.

The exact historical significance of al-Qaeda 'terror' is obviously still hard to put completely into perspective, and is still emerging; but the wrong assessments are already evident, and understanding the depths of fake-'left' confusion at such a moment is of priceless advantage for helping working-class struggle to finally emerge from the long 80-year nightmare of fake-'leftism' (Stalinism, Trotskyism and the 57 varieties they left behind).

One immediate achievement of the astonishing Sept 11 guerrilla-war coup by the anti-Western fundamentalist fanatics was to shatter the ludicrous social-pacifism inherited from Soviet bureaucratism, pretending that "saying NO to war' - would eventually morally persuade human civilisation to embrace universal 'peaceful coexistence'. (All that it in fact inevitably succeeded in doing was to confuse Moscow into deliberately holding back revolutionary struggles, frequently, for fear of 'provoking' the West (Greece, Spain, China, etc) or making reactionary concessions to the West such as its 1947 UN support for the Zionist colonisation of Palestine to create 'Israel'; and finally persuaded the whole world communist movement to abandon world-socialist-revolutionary perspectives and to shut up shop completely, including the Soviet workers state itself, - in 1990 abandoning its magnificent socialist developments to return to being a Third Rate 'free-market' imperialist system power, losing a long war to Chechen separatism despite Moscow's vicious warmongering brutality, - a separatist problem no one ever wanted to make against the USSR when it was building equal socialist conditions for all 180 nationalities of the Soviet Union).

'No to war' and 'Break down the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall to allow in the peaceful flourishing of free-market democracy', etc, etc, have between them since 1990 seen the great nation of Iraq blockaded and bombed into perpetual destruction; seen the ancient Palestinian people now losing control over virtually all their homeland through further relentless Western colonisation (the imperialist powers arming and financing Zionist Jewish fortune-hunters arriving from the USA and Europe); seen a holocaust of new Balkan wars as the Big Business interests from the NATO allies carved up the former Yugoslav socialist federation between them; seen half a dozen different serious civil wars erupt all over the former Soviet lands; seen giant Indonesia collapse into a rash of civil wars from one end to the other; seen several other Asian wars either newly break out or increase in intensity, seen what seems like the entire African continent explode into wars of various kinds; and seen the revolutionary war situation in Latin America intensifying relentlessly.

'No to war' is the biggest hoax in human history, making complete social-pacifist suckers of all mankind.

Yet tragically, the latest Castro speech (and the current Granma headline) is entitled "None of the present world problems can be solved by the use of force".

Hopefully, the Cuban Revolution will continue to have the sense to defend its brilliant socialist achievements arms-in-hand to thwart US imperialism's non-stop vicious attempts at counter-revolution, subversion, and sabotage, -  thereby giving the lie to the above 'No to war' nonsense. Heroically, Castroism refused to follow Moscow Revisionism into its final anti-revolutionary self-liquidatory oblivion. 

Sadly, Castro has never grasped that the entire Third International 'peaceful coexistence' gibberish from Stalin onwards was just an anti-revolutionary sell-out to worldwide imperialist warmongering aggression which NEVER ceased persecuting the colonial Third World, but merely smartly avoided too-direct confrontation with the USSR itself.

But that 'peaceful coexistence' delusion saved the world???

It did nothing but corrupt the international communist movement and the Moscow bureaucracy itself into utterly confused self-liquidation.

But it tamed imperialism???

Look around.

Did it not avoid a nuclear holocaust danger???

What crazy nonsense. There are more nuclear powers around now and more nuclear potential, than ever before. And more and worsening conflicts driving nations to war.

And the biggest warmongering threat of all - US imperialism, - is no longer 'balanced' (to the limited extent it ever really was held back from its international warmongering domination (400 wars or coups or counter-revolutions imposed since 1945)) by the Soviet workers state.

And China, which has the power and has avoided falling completely for Gorbachev's catastrophic ultimate Revisionism, is still addled enough with Stalinist theoretical nonsense (see EPSR document) to not yet have woken up to the total international revolutionary-war-chaos and inter-imperialist war destruction that the greatest-ever insoluble economic crisis(of cut-throat competitive 'surplus' capital mountains) is steadily leading the world to.

It has taken the bizarre developments of Sept 11 (oddly trivially superficial events (in themselves) of a handful of fanatics making martyrs of themselves to signal their deeply-held hatred of Western imperialist domination) to possibly help wake the world up from its 'peaceful coexistence' 'end of history' daydreaming.

The idiot fake-'left' petty-bourgeoisie only see "reactionary pan-Islamism" at work, and condemn it with contempt.

The big bourgeoisie have a far more realistic grasp of something much more serious which this Fundamentalist martyrdom might be reflecting, such a degree of total frustration and disillusionment with how the 'New world order' has worked out that it might be close to becoming a symbol of wholesale Third World anti-imperialist revolt.

This ludicrous and furious US imperialist warmongering reaction to a handful of fanatical suicides is the real story here.

People can dismiss Bush as much as they like as just a former Texas bar-room alcoholic whose 'culture' never rose higher than empty drunken postures of 'Do you want a fight?'; and Blair as just the unbelievably shallow inevitable end-product of the political triumph in bankrupt imperialist Britain of endless propaganda spin over any remaining material world-domination substance whatsoever.

But the idiotic flimsiness of these chance lightweight mountebanks is as significant of the West's real development course as anything else.

Why are such farcical figures in nominal leadership of supposedly civilisation’s most advanced political thinking and most mature philosophical wisdom???

Because a whole epoch of human society is about to keel over in globalised cut-throat economic turmoil, unprecedented in capitalist history, which can only end in full inter-imperialist war again (dwarfing WWI and WWII), and to which the only possible solution will be international Bolshevik Revolution.

The degenerate deserved end of this dementedly doomed and decaying social system is well reflected in the unbelievably thug like philistinism of the Bush regime, and the hilarious posturing of his moralising side-kick Blair.

The great capitalist system collapse into warmongering won't happen???

Just look at the USA's hysterical belligerent response to just this little thing going wrong of a handful of suicidal hijackers expressing their total justified frustration with the obvious longstanding and deliberately ruthless unfairness of global domination by Americans 'New world order' exploitation.

Are these suicidal cries of pain, hatred and despair from the Middle East, (indicating that something needs to change) a new phenomenon???

Absolutely not. So will anything change?? Absolutely not. Self-righteous brutal vengeance is all that is in store, and not just for the perpetrators but for any group or regime which hesitates to cheer on America's vengeance. "You are either with us or against us. We are going after them all, dead or alive, trial or no trial, proof or no proof."

And how will this fascist bellicosity respond when the real economic catastrophes start to slaughter the 'American dream'??

There will be self-righteous blaming in all directions, plus warmongering threats, to ensure that everyone bears the burdens of the greatest Crash and Slump in history bar the USA.

As sick, alarming, and imbecile as is this merciless blitzkrieg on dirt-poor Afghanistan by the mightiest empire in world history, - and as degenerate as is the refusal to ever seriously deal with the desperate problems of Third World poverty and criminal injustice (to the Palestinians, etc, etc), - not even these outrages get close to the real crisis facing the planet of its entire economic system about to implode.

And the Bush regime sabre-rattling will be being cynically calculated to be the best national mood to strike anyway, if the economic worst comes to the worst, as outlined in this routine example of what the capitalist press itself now regularly admits are the system's insoluble contradictions:

The United States financial system risks implosion under the weight of an accumulated mountain of credit claims.

At the end of the second quarter, outstanding net claims in the US financial system stood at an astounding $28 trillion, approximately 300% of GDR.

Cheap and plentiful credit has been the motive force behind the great economic expansion. It has also been the weapon of choice to address the increasingly frequent financial accidents.

But we may be entering some form of endgame. Despite repeated interest rate cuts and extreme levels of credit supply, economic growth continues to slow.

The pattern of this credit boom has been unusual, with a dominant source of supply being the asset markets. Extreme earnings valuations made for a very low cost of capital; money appeared to be "free" for investment and speculation.

The non-bank financial markets have their own deposit base, money market funds, that can be lent repeatedly (multiplied), without limit. Unlike bank deposit lending that is subject to reserve requirements. Lending to the financial sector - up 40% since 1998 - is recycled by this turbo-charged credit machine into financial assets and corporate balance sheets. When accidents happen, the Federal Reserve is there to help out with more of the same reassuring support.

With each successive central bank intervention, the credit required to re-establish orderly markets and protect economic growth has increased geometrically.

In essence, the US has enjoyed a credit spiral that created self-sustaining asset market inflation. This in turn spawned a consumption and investment boom that fed back into balance sheets and so translated capital gains into perceived return on capital.

US corporate sector profits have been in decline since 1997, yet perversely, investment and equity buybacks accelerated, thus exacerbating an already dangerous situation, with business debt climbing to 160% of GDP.

Under such circumstances of excess, any fall of nominal demand would brutally expose the paucity of cashflow growth to support the spiralling debt burden.

So, at every inflection point of risk, the Federal Reserve has sought to maintain bull market confidence. Hence restarting the credit game appears to have been an implicit policy objective. By underwriting market risk in this way, the Fed has had the effect of artificially lowering its price and compounding systemic risk.

Now market psychology is changing. In the aftermath of the hi-tech collapse, the final suppliers of credit, banks and investors, are becoming more risk averse as losses and defaults mount - although international investors remain sanguine, funding the current account deficit via direct investments and the continued purchase of financial assets, particularly high-grade bonds.

Ever larger doses of liquidity are flushed into an increasingly inefficient policy transmission mechanism, as the much-dreaded credit crunch keeps reappearing.

Enter the government-sponsored enterprises. They have, by accident or design, emerged as the principal players in this asset market credit creation.

These government mandated mortgage market "wholesalers"; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - or savings and loan institutions similar to building societies -  have been expanding their trillion dollar balance sheets at annualised rates of greater than 20%.

Funded primarily by money market funds and bonds, their aggressive facilitation of mortgage lending and refinancing effectively monetises house price inflation, placing cash into consumers' pockets.

In addition, their massive purchase of mortgage-backed securities from the market injects cash into investment portfolios, thus helping to re-liquefy asset markets.

It is an elegant conduit of perceived government credit supplies, recycled through Wall Street, to the final demand of the consumer. These subsidised GSEs have only an implied government guarantee.

The end result is a precarious financial system now critically dependent upon reckless credit creation for the continuation of a housing boom and the faith of international investors.

Such a pyramid of claims, supported by so little capital, is a disaster looking for an accident, and they occur regularly.

If current policy fails to reignite the broad credit boom, a breakdown of the intermediation mechanism is probable.

At such a point, priorities would suggest the direct use of the Federal Reserve's own balance sheet in order to purchase assets. That means both debt monetisation and inflation. The US is indeed between a rock and a very hard place.

The much wider scope of the Marxist scientific understanding of the incurable longterm crisis problems of imperialist political economy (the progress of which the EPSR has been systematically following in revealing detail every week for 22 years) plots the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary fall-outs in addition to the bare economic crisis statistics of the above admissions.

It is this political agenda context of the berserk flattening of Afghanistan which alone tells the real story of Sept 11 which the pseudo-'Marxist' fake-'lefts' have completely missed because of their long Trot and Revisionist absence from any serious communist understanding of the actual revolutionary order the world remains cast in.

The suicide bombers are of course not communists, and their reactionary religious fatalism is a million miles from Marxist-Leninist science.

But has their dramatic explosive entry into the world's headlines nevertheless not jolted the whole planet's sickly 'New world order' philistinism back towards the only current reality of life on earth, - society's INSOLUBLE class and national contradictions until the rule of the monopoly-imperialist bourgeoisie is overthrown????

And all the finer details of fake-'left' arguments that "We knew all that already" or "Terrorism is no use, is immoral, and only plays into imperialist repression's hands", or "Killing New York office workers is no step towards socialism", etc etc, demonstrate just one thing only, - that the obvious general revolutionary-historical implications of the Sept 11 explosion (regardless of the laughably crude limitations of the 'happening' itself) are simply not being seen by fake-'leftism' because it has long since abandoned any expectation seriously of communist revolutionary turmoil alone marking society's significant future.

The 'No to war' nonsense; the total lies of "total opposition to terrorism" invented by the fake-'left' for 'Marxism' (see EPSR 1106 for pages of Lenin quotes on the subject); the equally grotesque distortion that in the eyes of 'Marxism' only purposeful communist revolution counted as serious blows against imperialism (likewise see EPSR 1106 for Lenin quotes on this matter too); etc, etc, etc, all demonstrate conclusively the hopelessly complacent petty-bourgeois minds of anti-revolutionaries, who don't want to see the world battling it out between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

As the EPSR has explained over the last four issues, the fundamentalist suicides are not part of the socialist revolution, and may well have been quite hostile to such a notion in their heads, who knows; but that their explosive guerrilla-war coup has brought the world face to face with its underlying reality of unending class-war and national-war until the incurably exploitative capitalist system and its-outrageously unequal monopoly imperialist domination is overthrown, is clear.

The silliest fake-'left' response of all is to say that although Sept 11 may have dramatically drawn the world’s attention to the grotesque injustices on earth, the irresponsibly murderous means has only played into repressive imperialism's hands.

This is the exact OPPOSITE of reality, and reveals nothing but the utterly anti-revolutionary defeatism at the petty-bourgeois core of all these bogus 'revolutionary' sects.

The irrational extremes of self-righteous hysteria put forward as America's response to the effects of global injustice finally hitting the USA's shores, had to be seen to be believed. The whole rational world is still reeling from such ludicrous humbug and hypocrisy, thirsting to blitzkrieg anything remotely connected to this crushing humiliation to American arrogance and pride.

The Sept 11 blows from amateur guerrillas were a colossal DEFEAT for US hubris, and every panic-stricken and warmongering response since has only led the USA to adding to its own humiliation.

Just bombing Afghanistan's wretched poverty to further smithereens just plays into the hands of America's further humiliation, not strengthens its repressive hold over the planet at all.

At the moment, all that this hugely costly blitzkrieg is doing is adding to the overgrowing lethal financial imbalances at the heart of US world domination which can topple into total economic collapse at any time.

On the ground, every Third World 'nationalist' regime which in reality only ever acts as a doormat for US imperialist interests, is being pushed further towards crisis (approaching anyway because of impending economic collapse) by association with America's vicious blitzkrieg.

And non-stop Zionist colonialist aggression has been edged towards total intransigence by Washington's pressure to curb its worst excesses. Open conflict between Zionist imperialist interests and US imperialist interests, a serious possibility which the EPSR has regularly referred to over the years, has come more into potential focus.

Best of all, the ridiculous American warmongering outburst to 'defeat terrorism' could itself come to disaster in the field. At the moment, the mad bombers from NATO haven't the slightest idea of what they're really supposed to be doing, or how to end it. A hopelessly catastrophic invasion to try to capture Bin Laden could be the icing on the cake of the USA's total defeat and humiliation.

It is on the question of imperialism's defeat that fake-'leftism' shows its complete ideological bankruptcy.

The insane notion of moral embarrassments or 'defeat by superior example' has hung on (since the worldwide supremacy of Revisionist theory) to corrupt working class understanding more damagingly than ever before.

According to Stalin (see 'Perspectives'), imperialism would eventually capitulate, possibly peacefully, to socialism's demonstrable 'economic superiority', - an idiotic daydream while imperialism could still stage another vast international trade boom fuelled by boundless credit (see earlier capitalist press admissions), - a possibility which Stalin ludicrously ruled out in his crucially-influential theoretical catastrophe Economic Problems of Socialism 1952.

Castro's nonsense: "None of the present world problems can be solved by the use of force", is the direct offspring of that monstrous Revisionist nonsense, as is 'No to war', and the daft idea that imperialism will be hauled back from its worst excesses by 'moral embarrassment'.

Humiliation of the USA is excellent, but MATERIAL DEFEAT has got to be at the heart of that, and at the heart of all serious anti-imperialist struggle.

Tsarist imperialism was defeated in WWI, and that alone gave the Bolshevik Revolution its chance. The humiliation of Chinese nationalism in WWII gave Maoism its credibility. US imperialism was only persuaded to grudgingly tolerate communist states in Asia after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam. British imperialism's inability to defeat the IRA alone gave Irish nationalism its halfway-house opportunity for self-determination after the Good Friday Agreement. Talk of relaxing Zionist tyranny in its colonial occupation of the former land of Palestine has only come about with the ever-increasing Intifada ability to inflict serious guerrilla-war casualties on the Zionists. Etc, etc, etc.

Sept 11 wasn't yet that kind of defeat for imperialism, but it was in the right direction, and it absolutely shattered America.

EPSR 1106 has already explained the lying foolishness of fake-'leftism' in pretending that Marxism was only interested in 'proper communist revolutionary defeats of imperialism, and not in anything else'.

It is an imperialist-dominated world, and any resistance provoked by imperialism which is able to trip up imperialism is a gain for ALL interests who are fighting imperialism.

When Tsarist imperialism was defeated by equally tyrannical German imperialism, far from holding their noses, the Bolsheviks welcomed the autocracy's humiliation with both hands, to take advantage of it to fulfil the only realistic policy against WWI which was 'Civil war on our OWN warmongers', not 'No to war'.

Fake-'lefts' ludicrously refuse to welcome (for propaganda exploitation) US imperialism's significant defeat on Sept 11 on the insane 'moral' grounds that "innocent office workers were killed".

This was exactly the treacherous class-collaborating stance of the social-pacifist opponents of Bolshevism in 1917 who pretended that 'morality' ruled out taking advantage of Tsarism's WWI defeat "because German imperialism had killed over a million innocent Russian workers".

The Bolshevik Revolution itself killed even more people from every walk of life, - including workers.

But without waging war on war, there was never going to be an end to that inter-imperialist war.

The inhuman slaughter only stopped when the Bolshevik example of waging civil war ag[ainst] one’s OWN warmongers started spreading to all the other combatant armies.

Another lying 'objection' raised by fake-'lefts' to telling Third World enthusiasts for Sept 11 to enjoy America’s defeat but to start seeing the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat as the only final solution to imperialist warmongering domination, - is to pretend that Leninism was totally hostile to any anti-imperialist collaboration with Pan-Islamic movements, quoting one scrap from the June 1920 draft theses on national and colonial questions for the Third International.

This calls for "the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the position of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc".

The EPSR is in no doubt that a Bin Laden appeal to Islamic purity is a reactionary resistance to Western imperialist cultural domination, and has never failed to point this out.

But while definitely NOT the socialist revolution, it IS nevertheless genuine resistance to imperialism and it usefully humiliated the USA on September 11. The EPSR sticks by its Leninist lesson from WWI, - that ANY defeat for one's OWN imperialists is to be taken advantage of, but obviously without any suggestion of taking German imperialism's side in the WWI conflict. Similarly, there is no suggestion in the slightest that communist revolutionary anti-imperialism should even remotely contemplate forming any kind of pact or bloc with Bin Ladenism. Nothing of the sort.

So how did this somewhat bureaucratic formalism come to be suggested for the Third International??

The problem of prescriptive instructions for the future of the world socialist revolution, which ultimately helped lead the Third International and the whole communist movement to final total theoretical and practical disaster, is discussed below.

But first what was Lenin actually trying to convey?? 

Well, clearly not that communist revolutionaries should only ever exhibit total hostility towards any Islamic expressions of anti-imperialist feeling, as the fake-'lefts' (who all hate Leninism) are mischievously trying to pretend:

April 2, 1920  Orjonikidze,   Revolutionary Military Council, Caucasian Front

Again urge you to display caution and maximum good will towards the Moslems, especially on advancing into Daghestan. Do everything to demonstrate, and in the most emphatic manner, our sympathy for the Moslems, their autonomy, independence, etc. Give me more precise and more frequent information on how things stand.
Lenin

To the Indian Revolutionary Association49

I am glad to hear that the principles of self-determination and the liberation of oppressed nations from exploitation by foreign and native capitalists, proclaimed by the Workers' and Peasants' Republic, have met with such a ready response among progressive Indians, who are waging a heroic fight for freedom. The working masses of Russia are following with unflagging attention the awakening of the Indian workers and peasants. The organisation and discipline of the working people and their perseverance and solidarity with the working people of the world are an earnest of ultimate success. We welcome the close alliance of Moslem and non-Moslem elements. We sincerely want to see this alliance extended to all the toilers of the East. Only when the Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish workers and peasants join hands and march together in the common cause of liberation - only then will decisive victory, over the exploiters be ensured. Long live a free Asia!
Pravda No 108.  May 20  1920      Published according to the newspaper text

August 7 1921

Comrade Safarov,

Thank you very much for the pamphlet414 and other material.

We are sending Joffe to make an attempt to combine your line and Tomsky's.

That must be done.

Unquestionably grain and meat to Moscow, first and foremost.

For this purpose, both the "New Economic Policy" in general and a number of concessions and bonuses to the merchants.

At the same time, systematic and maximum concern for the Moslem poor, for their organisation and education.

Such a policy can and must be worked out and fixed (in a number of the most precise directives).

It must be a model for the whole East.

Best greetings.   Yours, Lenin

	The awakening of Asia
  
Was it so long ago that China was considered typical of the lands that had been standing still for centuries? Today China is a land of seething political activity, the scene of a virile social movement and of a democratic upsurge. Following the 1905 movement in Russia, the democratic revolution spread to the whole of Asia -  to Turkey, Persia, China. Ferment is growing in British India.

A significant development is the spread of the revolutionary democratic movement to the Dutch East Indies, to Java and the other Dutch colonies, with a population of some forty million.

First, the democratic movement is developing among the masses of Java, where a nationalist movement has arisen under the banner of Islam.

The usual events of a pre-revolutionary period have begun. Parties and unions are being founded at amazing speed. The government is banning them, thereby only fanning the resentment and accelerating the growth of the movement.

A National Union of the native population has been formed in Java. It already has a membership of 80,000 and is holding mass meetings. There is no stopping the growth of the democratic movement.

World capitalism and the 1905 movement in Russia have finally aroused Asia. Hundreds of millions of the downtrodden and benighted have awakened from medieval stagnation to a new life and are rising to fight for elementary human rights and democracy.

The workers of the advanced countries follow with interest and inspiration this powerful growth of the liberation movement, in all its various forms, in every part of the world. The bourgeoisie of Europe, scared by the might of the working-class movement, is embracing reaction, militarism, clericalism and obscurantism. But the proletariat of the European countries and the young democracy of Asia, fully confident of its strength and with abiding faith in the masses, are advancing to take the place of this decadent and moribund bourgeoisie.

The awakening of Asia and the beginning of the struggle for power by the advanced proletariat of Europe are a symbol of the new phase in world history that began early this century. 

May 7 1913

7/VIII   (1921)

Comrade Tomsky:

Thank you very much for the letter which is very clear. Of course, you are right that we in Moscow must have "9 million sheep ".271 They must be obtained at all costs! Send us at the C.L.D. a calendar programme of their receipt at once.

The same about grain.

We are sending Comrade Joffe in an attempt to settle your differences with Comrade Safarov.

I believe the two tendencies can and must be combined

1) the first priority is grain and meat for Moscow;

2) (for this) a number of concessions and bonuses to the "merchants";

3) no question about the new economic policy (10th Congress, Conference of May 1921, etc.);

4) Moslem poor peasants' committees indispensable, and 

5) the Moslem poor should be treated with care and prudence, with a number of concessions.

It is possible and necessary to combine and consolidate the line of wisdom and prudence, maintaining the interests of our "world policy" throughout the East.

With communist greetings,  Lenin

On behalf of the Moslem group in the Second Duma Khan Khoisky (Elisavetpol Gubernia) said: "We Moslems, who number over 20,000,000 in the total population of the Russian state, are following the debate on the agrarian question with the same keen interest and are looking forward to its satisfactory settlement with the same impatience"  (20th session, April 2, 1907, p. 1499). In the name of the Moslem group the speaker agreed with Kutler and supported compulsory alienation based on a fair valuation (1502). "But to whom are these alienated lands to go? On this matter the Moslem group is of the opinion that the alienated lands should form not a state stock, but regional stocks of distributable land, each within the borders of the given region" (1503). Deputy Mediev (Taurida Gubernia), the "representative of the Crimean Tatars", in an ardent revolutionary speech, demanded  "land and liberty". "The longer the debate goes on the clearer we hear the demand of the people that the land must go to those who till it" (24th session, April 9, 1907, p. 1789). The speaker showed "how sacred landed property was established in our border regions" (1792), how the land of the Bashkirs was plundered, how ministers, councillors of state, and chiefs of the gendarmerie received tracts ranging` from two to six thousand dessiatins. He cited the mandate of his "Tatar brethren", complaining of the way the wakf lands'°' were plundered. He also quoted the answer, dated December 15, 1906, which the Governor-General of Turkestan gave a certain Tatar to the effect that only persons of the Christian faith could settle on state land. "Do not those documents smell of decay, of the Arakcheyev regime'°' of the last century?"  (1794)  
Dec. 1907 Agrarian programme of Social-Democracy

Russian Bolsheviks have succeeded in forcing a breach in the old imperialism, in undertaking the exceedingly difficult, but also exceedingly noble task of blazing new paths of revolution, whereas you, the representatives of the working people of the East, have before you a task that is still greater and newer. It is becoming quite clear that the socialist revolution which is impending for the whole world will not be merely the victory of the proletariat of each country over its own bourgeoisie.

That is why in every country a civil war is brewing in which the old socialist compromisers are enlisted on the side of the bourgeoisie. Hence, the socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie - no, it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism. Characterising the approach of the world social revolution in the Party Programme we adopted last March, we said that the civil war of the working people against the imperialists and exploiters in all the advanced countries is beginning to be combined with national wars against international imperialism.

We know that in the East the masses will rise as independent participants, as builders of a new life, because hundreds of millions of the people belong to dependent, underprivileged nations, which until now have been objects of international imperialist policy, and have only existed as material to fertilise capitalist culture and civilisation.

That majority, which up till then had been completely outside the orbit of historical progress, because it could not constitute an independent revolutionary force, ceased, as we know, to play such a passive role at the beginning of the twentieth century. We know that 1905 was followed by revolutions in Turkey, Persia and China, and that a revolutionary movement developed in India.

The imperialist war aroused the East also and drew its peoples into international politics. Britain and France armed colonial peoples and helped them to familiarise themselves with military technique and up-to-date machines. That knowledge they will use against the imperialist gentry. The period of the awakening of the East in the contemporary revolution is being succeeded by a period in which all the Eastern peoples will participate in deciding the destiny of the whole world, so as not to be simply objects of the of the enrichment of others.

That is why I think that in the history of the development of the world revolution - which, judging by its beginning, will continue for many years and will demand much effort - that in the revolutionary struggle, in the revolutionary movement you will be called upon to play a big part and. to merge with our struggle against international imperialism.

Here contact with the peoples of the East is particularly important, because the majority of the Eastern peoples are typical representatives of the working people - not workers who have passed through the school of capitalist factories, but typical representatives of the working and exploited peasant masses who are victims of medieval oppression.

Our Soviet Republic must now muster all the awakening peoples of the East and, together with them, wage a struggle against international imperialism.

In this respect you are confronted with a task which has not previously confronted the Communists of the world: relying upon the general theory and practice of communism, you must adapt yourselves to specific conditions such as do not exist in the European countries; you must be able to apply that theory and practice to conditions in which the bulk of the population are peasants.

You must find specific forms for this alliance of the foremost proletarians of the world with the labouring and exploited masses of the East whose conditions are in many cases medieval.

The task is to arouse the working masses to revolutionary activity, to independent action and to organisation, regardless of the level they have reached; to translate the true communist doctrine, which was intended for the Communists of the more advanced countries, into the language of every people; to carry out those practical tasks which must be carried out immediately, and to join the proletarians of other countries in a common struggle.

Such are the problems whose solution you will not find in any communist book, but will find in the common struggle begun by Russia. You will have to tackle that problem and solve it through your own independent experience. In that you will be assisted, on the one hand, by close alliance with the vanguard of the working people of other countries, and, on the other, by ability to find the right approach to the peoples of the East whom you here represent. You will have to base yourselves on the bourgeois nationalism which is awakening, and must awaken, among those peoples, and which has its historical justification. At the same time, you must find your way to the working and exploited masses of every country and tell them in a language they understand that their only hope of emancipation lies in the victory of the international revolution, and that the international proletariat is the only ally of all the hundreds of millions of the working and exploited peoples of the East.
Dec 1919  2nd Congress of Communist organisations of the East

Exactly the opposite sentiments there to the fake-'left' insistence that any Islamic influence automatically turns any resistance to imperialism into "reactionary anti-capitalism" by non-communists which communists should have nothing to do with, as opposed to "progressive anti-capitalism" by non-communists, which is OK to ally with. 

In "condemning" the "appalling outrage" of "barbaric inhumanity" of Sept 11, the CPGB, for example, declared Islamic Jihad its "enemy", as well as the Taleban and Bin Laden's al-Qaeda: 

"Lenin's Comintern specifically refused to align itself with reactionary muslim fundamentalism", 

Weekly Worker 400 went on.

"This kind of ultra-clerical, fundamentalist, anti-culture is the most barbaric by-product of the world capitalist system,"

it added in 402. They also quote a sentence from Lenin from a 1916 pamphlet 'A caricature of Marxism' polemicising against dogmatic 'left' so who refused to accept that national self-determination struggles could also encompass serious anti-imperialist struggle: 

No Marxist will ever forget, however, that capitalism is progressive compared with feudalism, and that imperialism is progressive compared with pre-monopoly capitalism. Hence, it is not every struggle against imperialism that we should support. We will not support a struggle of the reactionary classes against imperialism; we will not support an uprising of the reactionary classes against imperialism and capitalism, 

Lenin wrote.

This generalisation, allied to the Theses generalisation, is clearly identifying the feudal policies associated with Khans, landowners, and mullahs as a reactionary class war against the coming of capitalism and imperialism.
Is this really what Islamic Jihad represents in the Palestinian revolt against Zionist colonisation? (a colonisation, incidentally, which the CPGB Weekly Worker is in full support of as 'Israel' borders).

Is this what Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are really representing?????

In the very next paragraph of the Theses, Lenin proposes: 

"The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries."

But there is not a scrap of 'bourgeois democracy' in the Middle East which is not unquestioningly Islamic, then as now.

And Bin Laden made clear in his worldwide TV broadcast last week (see EPSR 1107) that he was condemning first and foremost "the hereditary rulers" of the Middle East for their failure to seriously fight US Imperialism and Zionism.

And he was hardly stripped of his Saudi citizenship four years ago because of his support for 'khan, landowner, and mullah feudalism'.

The nearest context in the 1916 pamphlet discussing real-life anti-imperialist situations as opposed to prescriptive generalisations, refers favourably to the Easter Rising in Dublin led by the extreme Catholic fundamentalism and almost obscurantist relentless Irish nationalist insistence of Padraig Pearse. Lenin had no trouble in ecstatically welcoming this 'reactionary' bourgeois 'putsch' (as fake-'left' dogmatists at the time termed it - see EPSR 1106) as a brilliantly useful wake-up call to conscious proletarian revolutionary anti-imperialism.

Incidentally, the way in which the CPGB heirs to Revisionism have abused one disjointed sentence from Third International prescriptive instructions on 'how to make a revolution' completely sums up the ultimate wretched failure of Stalin's regular distortions of Leninism and inability to keep Marxist scientific understanding developing to accurately objectively analyse all world developments after Lenin's death.

Third International solidarity would have been a good idea, independent communist parties lending strength to each other and objectively disputing how the world was changing in open polemics.

The notion of prescriptive rules for the world socialist revolution under the tight control of the colossal authority invested in the USSR leadership, willy nilly, was a catastrophically bad idea, - a well-meaning illusion inherited from the earliest (false) assumptions of Marxism that the workers of the world's most advanced industrial nation would LEAD the world socialist revolution on to rational effortless follow-up victories everywhere else.

The real world turned out vastly differently, as Leninism discovered, - only at the very end, for example, seeing peasant guerrilla war as a complex option requiring maximum tactical flexibility, etc, etc.

But sadly the endless complexities of the actual long-drawn-out completion of the world socialist revolution had not become sufficiently obvious by Lenin's death to make the whole idea of a world party of prescriptive international revolution, emerge as the quite daft handicap to the further development of Marxist science that Stalin's Revisionist bureaucracy in reality turned out to be.

The sterile anti-revolutionism of these remnants of fake-'leftism' could not reveal their dogmatic hostility to Marxism-Leninism any more clearly than, for example, in this demented CPGB determination to effectively declare Islamic Jihad, etc, as "the enemy", and therefore to fully subscribe to the Blair-Bush hysterical nonsense against 'terrorism'.

Who would not want a communist guerrilla war to be leading the insurrection against Zionist imperialism and colonial tyranny??? No one. The Vietnam communist guerrilla war triumph over imperialism and its stooges (and Castro's revolutionary triumph likewise, etc, etc) gave the world its greatest possible uplifts towards the end of last century.

But why aren't the communists leading the guerrilla war in Palestine to throw off imperialist colonial tyranny???

Because of the rotten Revisionist tradition which spawned these CPGB anti-revolutionary cretins, which first voted at the UN to allow Zionist imperialist colonisation of partitioned Palestine, and then thereafter castrated communists everywhere, formally, to pushing just 'peaceful coexistence' and 'negotiated solutions' in every conflict on earth, in pursuit of the insane Stalinist theoretical programme that imperialism would eventually just be completely economically overshadowed by socialism's achievements, and more often than not might peacefully accept its defeats steadily mounting.

Hence the 'peaceful road to socialism' was born. What criminally disarming, damaging, and dangerous nonsense!

Because of Revisionist brain rot slowly totally demoralising and confusing the whole international workers movement, it was precisely left to other anti-imperialist forces and movements to rekindle the revolutionary fight against imperialism.

The Cuban CP had to very belatedly climb onto Castro’s revolutionary bandwagon.

The Nicaraguan CP actively opposed and denounced the Sandinista revolution.

The either ignorant or deliberate betrayal of possible revolutionary opportunity after revolutionary opportunity continued throughout the whole 60-year Revisionist stewardship of the Soviet workers state.

This tragic Stalinist theoretical farce finally symbolically ended in total Soviet self-liquidation after Moscow's agreement to help US imperialism to fight 'international terrorism' and to help imperialist economic exploitation re-colonise all former Soviet territory via the joke 'free market'.

Exactly what Islamic Jihad, etc, fully stand for is almost totally irrelevant in these present circumstances of a completely destroyed world Marxist revolutionary movement.

What they understand is that imperialism has to be FOUGHT and DEFEATED. And, moreover, that it can be, - successfully. The electrifying example that this and other such struggles will have on wider anti-imperialist struggles cannot be over-estimated, but without there being the slightest need, or suggestion of a need, to give up on communist revolutionary struggle as the only serious long-term effective anti-imperialism.

To liken such national-religious revolts against imperialist domination to fascism is the most reactionary nonsense of all by the fake-'lefts', - criminally confusing and destabilising of all anti-imperialist struggle everywhere.

If there was any activity that was really playing into the hands of imperialist repression, this idiocy takes the prize.

Fascism and nazism entered history as specifically revanchist chauvinism, attached to existing imperialist powers where it was felt that other imperialist states were denying then a rightful 'place in the sun', their rightful international glory, their rightful 'lebensraum', etc.

How can any analysis which is remotely rational equate the desperate Islamic Jihad suicidal guerrilla war, born out of the disgusting refugee-camp squalor afflicting the Palestinian people, with mighty German, Japanese, or Italian imperialism's wish to aggressively assert their right to as big a say in world affairs as the US, Britain, and France had already commandeered for themselves, and prepared to inflict brutal colonial repression on smaller states to justify their claims to importance?

There is no comparison. This fake-'left' lunacy, lyingly distorting Leninism on every tactical question, and treacherously backing potentially the foulest reaction in history in the Bush/Blair hypocrisy about 'terrorism' by pointlessly 'condemning' it and helping imperialism to hopelessly corrupt its meaning, - is the real danger to the working class, not anarchist violence or fatalist anti-imperialism. Build Leninism.

EPSR supporters.