Recent paper
No 1315 7th June 2007
Revolutionary science is the best and only defence against the tide of brainwashing lies and mendacity daily poured out by imperialism to step up is crisis war drive. Monstrous demonisation of Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and other “rogue” states goes beyond routine imperialist bullying, to whip up the atmosphere for World War Three, the destructive end point of the ripening economic and social crisis of the outmoded profit system. Dire revisionist capitulation to imperialism’s sweeping condemnation of growing world anti-imperialist insurgency struggle, as nothing but “terrorism”, misleads the working class. Leninist clarity needed for leadership
New revelations of Zionist elements at the heart of the anti-Sudan campaign, renewed anti-western nuclear missile aggression against Russia by the west accompanied by increasingly overt Nazism of capitalist restoration in East Europe despite (and because of) continuing soft-brained delusions in “democracy” and the “war on terror” in Bonapartist Moscow, war threats against Iran and the continuing Nazi genocidal violence inflicted on the heroic and ever-suffering Palestinians in the Middle East, all underline what a disaster the world retreat from revolutionary theory has been.
Without the constant fight to grasp the deepest wide-ranging perspective of the entire imperialist capitalist order and its almost certainly terminal and definitely catastrophic oncoming crisis, there can be no sure and permanent movement forwards for humanity from the increasing warmongering destruction and chaos which is all that capitalism can now bring to the world.
It is not enough ultimately that the violence, blitzing, oppression and sheer desperate poverty and despair that imperialist worldwide tyranny imposes on the masses will drive, and is driving, a tidal wave of hostility and hatred to the surface, and with it an increasingly coherent resistance and insurgency as witnessed throughout the Middle East and increasingly into Africa, parts of Asia and South America.
These are excellent indications of nascent revolutionary spirit by the downtrodden billions which will increasingly challenge the ossified imperialist order which has reached its limits historically, no longer pushing the balance of human progress and capable only of implosive destructiveness.
But great masses of the planet can still be run circles around by the constantly pumped out and sophisticated lies and illusions of bourgeois propaganda, set into sectarian conflict with each other, bought off with halfway house deals, and in the richer countries be left complacent and illusion filled about the supposed prosperity and “freedom” they have or are promised.
And all of them, whether set at each others throats for “divide and rule” control, or bemused by philistine consumerism, or held back to limited reformist struggle illusions, are left vulnerable to the vicious, underhand and brutally shocking horror of counter-revolutionary violence by imperialism which it will always stop at nothing to impose in its own interests – when it must and when it can (as witnessed repeatedly over decades of Latin American death squad slaughter for example - [see Venezuela piece page 6], in European fascism, in gangster regimes in Asia, Haiti etc and in propped up feudal backwardness in the Middle East).
Only revolutionary science can lead the working class completely through the confusion, fog and tangles of lies.
A conscious theoretical fight is vital to constantly expose and clarify the overt anti-communism of capitalism, the hidden anti-communism of the fake-”left” Trots, Labourites and trade unionist masquerading as “for the working class”, and the dire revisionism of the huge Stalinist retreats from revolutionary grasp which above all have damaged the masses’s faith in communist science and leadership over decades.
Battle scars, organisational experience, and local knowledge are invaluable, and the bitter determination and dogged heroism of tens of thousands already in major struggles are ignored at peril by any serious movement against imperialism and capitalist degeneracy.
But there is no substitute in class “instinct”, “practical struggle” and “the surer knowledge of those on the ground” for the science of Marxism and Leninism won through sometimes disparaged “bookbound” revolutionary discussion and theory.
Right now the growing tide of anti-Sudan war fever demonstrates the point.
Bush and all the wealthy western countries are pumping out allegations of ‘genocide’ to prepare a “righteous” atmosphere, to try and stampede an unthinking majority into support for yet another blitzkrieg attack, to follow Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Common sense” (and most of the fake-”left”) is ready to join in the chorus of ‘outrage’ stimulated by the relentless press and TV demonisation of Sudan and supposed “ethnic cleansing” and bloodthirsty atrocities in Darfur.
But the whole clamour is a giant Nazi circus of lies.
By looking with the widest revolutionary perspective of the current world class struggle and imperialist decline, is it clear the whole stunt is a giant hypocritical fraud, on a par with the WMD lies about Iraq, or the Reçak “massacre” fabrication in Serbia and equally hysterical and ludicrous lies about “genocide” in Srebrenica (with nearly a decade of investigation turning up no proof of ‘thousands slaughtered’ - because there never was a “massacre”.)
So disastrously have things gone wrong in Iraq, with the defeats and humiliations there forcing to the surface just what a Goebbels fraudulent lie the entire war was from the beginning – and Afghanistan too – that it gets ever more difficult for imperialism to maintain and step up the war mood.
But the world crisis of overproduction and the saturation of the entire trading system with “surplus” capital, grotesquely inflated by the non-stop printing of dollars since the end of the Second World War is unrelenting and accumulating ever deeper and unsolvable contradictions.
Imperialism must sustain the momentum towards destructive warmongering chaos, the only “solution” it has to sort out the enormous antagonistic tensions of uneven capitalist development and the inter-imperialist rivalries for trade, and to deal with the swamping economic disaster which has built up within its profit hungry system.
The US Empire ruling class, focused around the US neocon wing, long ago understood what was coming and has pushed to “get in first” using the overwhelming monopoly dominance of the USA and its currently untouchable military firepower to make clear to the entire planet that it will stop at nothing to stay on top.
And if the economic might by which it could previously stay ahead, installing, dominating and bribing a worldwide network of neo-colonialist stooges, gangsters and mafia client regimes, is now drowning in unrepayable dollar debt, then pure might is to be the answer.
Anyone who wants to recover the real value of the mountains of paper dollars and electronic credits, paid over in exchange for their hard labour, resources and raw materials, can go whistle – or face the same treatment as Iraq, is the message.
Ruthless suppression of all challenges to its position by “shock and awe” is the aim, using conveniently demonisable scapegoats like revisionist nationalist Milosevic in hated one-time communist Yugoslavia, and troublesome former anti-communist tools like the Taliban and gangster stooge Noriega and Saddam Hussein, driven by the crisis to turn against the Empire.
But the huge and growing resistance of the millions in the Middle East and elsewhere has badly stalled plans to escalate the “long war” as the Pentagon has planned it.
The setbacks and partial defeats for imperialism, while still by no means definitive or total, have badly winded it, pushing less robust elements of the ruling class into hesitancy and shattering the petty bourgeois support and consensus built up previously, in some parts into total and growing war opposition.
New ‘popular’ victims are badly needed by the Empire.
Iran and its perfectly justifiable plans for domestic nuclear power (and even for equally justifiable nuclear defence) has been ridiculously elevated into a “threat to the world” as part of the hysterical “war on terror” and “clash of civilisations” nonsense used to justify earlier blitzings. It is top of the list and the sinister war “manoeuvres” of the powerful US navy in the Gulf, the not-so-secret bomb-run training of the Zionists and non-stop panic mongering of supposed mass destruction weapons threats (where has that been heard before?) being developed, suggest that it is still the number one target.
But imperialism is keeping several pots on the go in case of complications, from Sudan to Myanmar (Burma) and Zimbabwe (as well as favourite communist demons Cuba, North Korea, China too and the historic legacy of the Soviet Union).
Sudan’s Islamic leadership, failing to kowtow properly to western domination, has already been an early victim with the 1990s Clintonite blasting of what turned out to be an aspirin factory, after weeks of shouting lies and accusations of “support for terrorism” and “chemical warfare plans”.
But since then lurid stories of “babies stuck on bayonets”, mass gang rape and so forth have poured out to equal any of the propaganda stunts about the Germans in the First World War for example, or the demented lies against Jews, Gypsies and communists in 1930s Germany, or the horror stories from Kuwait in the first Gulf war of “hospital incubators having babies tipped out to die on the floor by Iraqi soldiers”, later exposed to be pure made up lies by the Kuwait ruling families (when the propaganda impact was made and the blitzing and flame-throwing was done).
The CIA has fed already inflamed and tragic long running regional conflicts (in the south of Sudan as well as with next door Chad) to create organised and partly US armed “anti-Khartoum” movements in the hope of pushing out the Chinese and the international-trade oil exploration agreements they have cleverly made with Sudan, part of growing Beijing influence worldwide (and especially the Third world) through commerce and trade, which imperialism hates and fears.
But this routine intervention, among 400 or more coups, assassinations, plots, overthrows, invasions, bribed “elections”, choreographed “people power” middle-class “mass” demonstrations, anti-communist pseudo-union revolts, death squad terrorisation and outright wars used by US dominated western imperialism to suppress and exploit the Third World since 1945 (and long before that too), has now proved useful material for the much more urgent needs of total warmongering which the ripening of its crisis into oncoming catastrophic collapse has made the top priority since the turn of the century (crystallised by the 9/11 attacks etc.)
The usual mix of exaggerated “estimates” of numbers of displaced people, mysterious “agencies“ and “diplomatic sources” and colourful atrocity stories reported without any checking, verification or on-the-spot evidence (one newspaper even declared as “proof” the fact that it had not been in to see for itself because it was “too dangerous” and “only estimates were possible”), have been used to inflame the public view, bouncing back in “demands for action” from a similar reactionary coalition of fundamentalist Christian nuts, stooges and Hollywood lie machine to that which clamoured for the Iraqi invasion (plus Labour establishment stooges like Glenys Kinnock e.g. keeping the heat on with planted press letters at intervals).
As the bourgeois press reports:
George Bush yesterday bowed before America’s most successful experiment in grassroots organisation - the coalition of Hollywood, religious groups and student activists on Darfur - and ordered economic sanctions against Sudan.
The sanctions announcement and a pledge by Mr Bush to press for further action from the UN was timed to pre-empt next week’s G8 summit meeting which is expected to discuss Darfur, according to US officials.
The sanctions came three years after the White House first used the word “genocide” to describe the situation in Darfur, galvanising university campus groups, religious organisations and Hollywood A-listers such as George Clooney.
“For too long, the people of Darfur have suffered at the hands of a government that is complicit in the bombing, murder, and rape of innocent civilians,” Mr Bush said yesterday. “The people of Sudan are crying out for help and they deserve it.”
The measures bar 30 companies that are owned or have close ties to the Khartoum government as well as another company suspected of shipping arms to Darfur, from conducting transactions in US currency. In addition, Washington will strengthen enforcement action against 100 Sudanese companies already under sanctions.
The sanctions also criminalise economic dealings with three officials: Awad ibn Auf, Sudan’s intelligence chief; Admad Mohammed Harum, a Sudanese official accused of war crimes at the Hague; and Khalil Ibrahim, a rebel leader who refused to sign the Darfur peace agreement.
Mr Bush has been under increasing pressure to act on Darfur from not just Hollywood stars but also from leaders of his Christian support base.
...Other activists were more scathing. “It’s pure political showmanship. How is this more than an inconvenience for Khartoum,” asked Eric Reeves, a Sudan scholar and leading campaigner at Smith College in Massachusetts. “This is merely a contrivance.”
The twisted hypocrisy and mendacity of the accusations was already clear three years ago as the EPSR pointed out (issue 1251):
Two weeks ago, we had the evidence from a WHO report for the UN that 10,000 had indeed died in Darfur, Sudan’s oil-rich region, but not from “Arab genocide” as the US warmongers were claiming, — itching to “justify” by any means, fair or foul, blitzkrieg intervention on the bandwagon of a Black African rebellion against “Sudanese Arab tyranny”, a revolt inspired, armed, and financed by the CIA to separate Darfur from Sudan so as to dominate its rich oil deposits, currently being exploited by China under a fair commercial contract with Sudan, — — but from a lack of drinking water which one billionth of the cost of the American Empire’s planned invasion could have remedied in days, had there been any real interest in the plight of the Black-African Sudanese Darfur region, suffering from a routine sub-Saharan climate crisis.
And despite the chorus of drum-banging the same is true today:
Oxfam today criticised international donors, particularly Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain and Australia, for their inadequate or non-existent response to the UN humanitarian appeal for Chad and called on them to give generously to the aid effort.
Penny Lawrence, International Director of Oxfam said: “In stark contrast with the generosity of the public the international response to the humanitarian crisis in Chad has been very disappointing. Thankfully the public has thrown us a much-needed lifeline for our work. Rich governments now have the responsibility to respond as generously to the wider humanitarian effort in Chad.”
The public donated more than £1m in the first 10 days of Oxfam’s appeal. The total now stands at over £1.5m.
This year the UN has appealed for £82.5m ($174m) for Chad but has only received £36m ($72m). Approximately only 20 percent of the total needed has been given in cash that can be used to save lives immediately, the remainder is promises of food aid that can take months to arrive. Some vital life saving sectors, such as water and sanitation and shelter have yet to be funded.
Oxfam is calling on rich countries to fund urgently the appeal if the increasingly desperate humanitarian needs are to be addressed.
Based on each countries’ ‘fair share’ of contributions to the UN appeal Oxfam calculates that Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden have very generously gone over and above their fair share, but Germany and France are giving well below theirs.
Oxfam is particularly critical of those countries that so far have failed to make any contribution what-so-ever to this year’s UN Chad appeal which include Japan, Italy, Spain and Australia. The UK has told Oxfam that it will be giving £5m ($10m) to humanitarian work in Chad. Oxfam calculates that the UK’s fair share for the UN appeal should be £6m ($12m).
In parts of the country aid agencies are only managing to get four litres of water to people a day for all their needs when the basic minimum ration should be 15 litres.
Since January, Oxfam has responded to the crisis around Goz Beida by digging boreholes to provide clean water, building latrines to improve the sanitary conditions and conducting public health outreach work to prevent disease outbreaks for those forced to flee the fighting.
Much more monstrously, huge amounts of money have been poured into the exaggerations and wardrum hysteria, with some sinister connections to Zionism causing ructions as they emerge:
At the heart of the shake-up are questions of whether the former executive director of the organization, the Save Darfur Coalition, wisely used a sudden influx of money from a few anonymous donors in an advertising blitz to push for action.
Many of the groups opposed some of the tone and content of Save Darfur’s high-decibel advocacy campaign.
Coalition board members sought to minimize the dispute, saying that tensions had existed between advocates and aid workers in previous crises, like Kosovo, and that the organization’s rapid growth and changing membership had motivated the board’s decision to remove the director, David Rubenstein.
“We are grateful for the extraordinary job he has done and wish him the best in his search for new opportunities for public service,” said Ruth W. Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service and a Save Darfur board member, who declined to discuss the reasons for Mr. Rubenstein’s dismissal. Allyn Brooks-LaSure, a spokesman for the organization, said Mr. Rubenstein was not available for comment.
...Perhaps no cause in Africa since the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa has drawn such wide and deep grass-roots support across the political spectrum. Many activists, politicians and policy makers praise Save Darfur in particular for its role in raising awareness about the crisis.
The group says it has delivered more than a million postcards to Mr. Bush, organized mass rallies that have drawn tens of thousands of participants and urged its members to wear green wristbands emblazoned with the anti-genocide motto “Not on our watch.”
In February it began a high-profile advertising campaign that included full-page newspaper ads, television spots and billboards calling for more aggressive action in Darfur, including the imposition of a no-flight zone over the region.
Aid groups and even some activists say banning flights could do more harm than good, because it could stop aid flights. Many aid groups fly white airplanes and helicopters that may look similar to those used by the Sudanese government, putting their workers at risk in a no-flight zone.
Sam Worthington, the president and chief executive of InterAction, a coalition of aid groups, complained to Mr. Rubenstein by e-mail that Save Darfur’s advertising was confusing the public and damaging the relief effort.
He noted that contrary to assertions in its initial ads, Save Darfur did not represent any of the organizations working in Darfur, and he accused it of “misstating facts.” He said its endorsement of plans that included a no-flight zone and the use of multilateral forces “could easily result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals.”
Another aid group, Action Against Hunger, said in a statement last week that a forced intervention by United Nations troops without the approval of the Sudanese government “could have disastrous consequences that risk triggering a further escalation of violence while jeopardizing the provision of vital humanitarian assistance to millions of people.”
Aid groups also complain that Save Darfur, whose budget last year was $15 million, does not spend that money on aid for the long-suffering citizens of the region.
...So some relief agencies said they were horrified when Save Darfur’s ads in February reported that “international relief organizations,” among others, had agreed that the time for negotiating with the Sudanese government had ended....Mr. Bacon said similar tension had flared publicly during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo, when relief groups had staff members in the Balkans at the same time advocacy groups were calling for bombing and more aggressive military action.
“It is extraordinary,” said Samantha Power, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “The fact that Darfur is even on the policy map along with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, global warming, the fact that Darfur merits an 8 a.m. statement by the president, is testament to one thing and one thing alone, and that is this movement.”
Not only this movement of course; imperialism’s world anti-communist brainwashing arsenal has far more weapons for its constant confusion-mongering.
There is no way any working class or proletarian movement can rebut and counter-propagandise every issue, or has anything like the mass media and cultural resources of capitalism, which is yet another reason why there is a crucial need to always fight for the highest grasp of Leninist science, creating a trained cadre movement in every struggle capable of continuously, independently understanding the widest perspectives and assessing all the factors of the world class balance, to guide its own struggle and constantly feed that back into the overall understanding of the working class internationally.
Open vigorous polemical struggle is crucially important in this, the very opposite to the stultifying traditions of post-Lenin Moscow leadership which ever more stifled the critical fight to understand the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary nature of all physical, economic and social development. Again as the EPSR has previously said:
Aided by universal Stalinist stupidity and cowardice and by congenital Trotskyite petty-bourgeois anti-communism, - the great key to all Marxist-Leninist science of history namely that all capitalism can be only the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and nothing else, even in the most “democratic” of parliamentary republics; and all effective replacement workers states, building a publicly-owned and planned socialist economy, can only be the dictatorship of the proletariat for as long as substantial surrounding imperialist power remains active in the world, - remains under a cloud.
Until new globalised imperialist tyranny experiences and vastly clearer working-class consciousness disperses this cloud, the building of long-term effective anti-imperialist struggle will remain anchored in mud and confusion.
And it is the joke “communists” and “Marxists” who refuse to fight on these issues, all of them on the entire fake-’left’ with their wretched “condemnation” of modern “terrorist outrages” which Marx, Engels and Lenin would all have [understood as] as humiliating blows to imperialist tyranny (while chiding the laggardly communist movement for failing to be ahead of these spontaneous responses so as to give a better alternative scientific revolutionary leadership to these anti-imperialist manifestations), - - who are the worst obstacle to working-class understanding on these crucial historical questions.
The Western imperialist bourgeoisie do not make the same mistake, and still churn out the most misleading, foul, and distorted propaganda slanders against all workers-state manifestations, - both those surviving and those now matters of historical record, - in order to keep the whole world still well and truly brainwashed in anti-communism.
Shallow anti-theory impressionism helps play into imperialism’s hands over Sudan and other interventions like the renewed slaughter in Mogadishu for example, prey to twisted and racist-tinged Trot theories of the “ultra-reactionary” nature of Islamic regimes like Iran’s – (CPGB for example), – helping justifying attacks upon them (as always under the bogus cover that “opposition” must be “done by workers’ movements” – the same lying confusion that helped bolster the west’s anti-communist artificial “popular movement” stunts like Solidarnosc in Poland for example, or currently against anti-imperialists like Mugabe).
Equally superficial views that the Chinese are “just as bad as imperialism” in their dealings with Africa for example, or in the many other trading arrangements they are creating world wide simply feed the campaign against Sudan and others, as imperialism consciously declares via New Labour stooges like Hilary Benn for example, feeding the hostility to both China and Sudan.
But there is nothing inherently different in principle in the commercial dealings and trade arrangements made by the Chinese workers state to those urged on the early Soviet Union by Lenin’s dialectal grasp that “learn to trade” and swallow your pride by not overtly declaring revolutionary principles every day in the wrong place, was as important for the survival of the workers state as any other revolutionary practice, (while it was confronted with a much more advanced economic might of continuing imperialism).
Declaring and explaining revolutionary principles in the right place and time is another matter however.
The criticism of Beijing that is valid is that it shows as many revisionist philosophical shortcomings as Moscow displayed (leading to its deranged capitulation and liquidation of the proletarian dictatorship in 1989), with not only an appalling silence on issues of great import to the working class like Iran e.g. (where it is able to comment) or Sudan itself, but capitulation to the Nazi warmongering notions of imperialism like the “war on terror”.
Dire apologetics are made for regimes like Khartoum instead of exposing the west’s crisis-driven hypocrisy over Darfur and its scapegoating of “rogue” regimes as part an overall war drive.
The absence of revolutionary perspective is glaring – Beijing simply urging a ”softer line to solve the crisis”:
But, in a sign that it may be yielding to growing international pressure, the Chinese foreign ministry announced the appointment of a new special representative to Africa and confirmed plans to send 275 military engineers for UN peacekeeping operations.
In an open letter to President Hu Jintao earlier this week 108 US congressmen warned that the 2008 Olympics could be disastrously marred by protests if there was no change in the host nation’s position.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu rebutted these claims, saying China’s non-confrontational approach was yielding results: “We hope to solve the issue by political means, so we are ready to make joint efforts with the international community, including the US.”
She said the new special representative on African affairs, Liu Guijin, would focus on solving the Darfur crisis.
China, which buys two-thirds of Sudan’s oil, has blocked punitive moves in the security council. But in April it sent a special envoy to persuade Mr al-Bashir to accept 3,000 UN peacekeepers to bolster poorly equipped African Union troops in the region who are struggling to keep order.
By all means let there be aid in sorting out the civil war disaster in the south and rebuttal of the west but clarity for the world working class is ten thousand times more important - helping expose the “war on terror” lies as the Goebbels excuse they are for example.
But the Beijing’s denial of any responsibility for leadership other than solving its own problems of development is a tragic reflection of the disastrous retreat from Leninism since the Second World War worldwide with revisionist leadership in Beijing as much as Moscow letting go of the crucial core of understanding that capitalism is a system of oncoming catastrophic failure.
Turning around one quarter of the planet’s population from poverty to culture and educated progress is admittedly a titanic task, and the use of capitalist economic method a valid tactic, as long as overall state control is maintained by the working class.
With the never before seen economic growth, China’s world impact grows increasingly significant – not least in directly aiding by trade such heroic revolutionary regimes as Cuba for example, where the importance of Lenin’s understanding on trade has been demonstrated by the near economic strangulation of the country by the foul American siege blockade for over 40 years.
But as influence grows so does the reason to speak out.
Havana’s unequalled revolutionary vigour, internationalism and sacrifice to aid anti-imperialist and liberation struggle, and simply the needy as in Pakistan recently, has made it hugely influential throughout the Third World and especially in Latin America where its example and achievements are part of the inspiration for the wave of popular anti-imperialist national movements loosely linked around the “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela.
But its sometimes dire revisionist pronouncements simultaneously damage the crucial understandings as formerly noted in the EPSR:
Castro’s weakness in Marxist-Leninist science is always being excused in similar ways as ‘wise tactics under the threat of instant US imperialist obliteration if he says too much’, etc. This meant going along with the catastrophic defence of Gorbachevism by Castro, the ANC/SACP, and others, as it unfolded from 1984 to 1991. It meant going along with Havana’s zero-useful advice to the Sandinista Revolution, helping its downfall to a CIA electoral sucker-punch because of an absence of any understanding historically about imperialist boom and crisis, Soviet revisionist retreat, and the neglect of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It meant the criminal destruction of the Grenada Revolution without a fight because of Castro’s friendship with the anti-Leninist populist Maurice Bishop. It meant watching Cuba lending tragic support to the anti-Leninist delusions of Allende in Chile, culminating in predictable counter-revolutionary disaster.
Castro’s heroic Cuba remains the greatest practical revolutionary example to mankind that could be imagined, worth a thousand communist programmes. But the rest of the international working class desperately needs programmed communist perspectives as well. [EPSR 1044]
The dangers of a repeat of the Chilean torture coup horrors (and much else from Guatemalan death squad terror to Nicaraguan contra nazism and currently the fascist terror killings endlessly imposed on the Colombian masses) are still not only not warned of to the vulnerable masses of South America but the exact opposite – Allendeism continues to be upheld as a heroic example to Latin American workers, a deadly weakening of their preparedness (see follow on article).
Worse confusion is piled on top such as the recent uncritical reproduction in Cuban paper Granma of the non-Aligned movement’s motion “against terrorism”.
It was passed as part of an exposure of the lying hypocrisy of the US which uses terror with impunity worldwide (whether by covert CIA action, casual and cynical civilian shooting and blitzing, or B52 indiscriminate bombing) and which has just released Posada Carriles, one of the leading bomb planters against Cuba, responsible for downing a Cuban airliner and killing over 70 people.
What point is there to such petty moralising except tail-ending the very hypocrisy it supposedly is aimed at?
“The Movement reaffirms its vigorous and unequivocal condemnation of terrorism in all of its forms and manifestations, as well as all actions, methods and practices of terrorism, no matter where they are committed, whoever the perpetrators may be, against whomsoever they are committed, including those in which states are directly or indirectly involved, all of which are unjustifiable whatever considerations or factors may be cited to justify them.”
This is tantamount to writing off all early armed struggle by desperate and downtrodden people everywhere, including ironically much of the hit and run fighting carried out by Castro’s own Sierra Madre guerrilla actions which finally overturned the corrupt and mafia backed Batista regime nearly fifty years ago, and certainly the entire Middle East struggle, the front line of current international class conflict which has paralysed the Empire’s confidence in Iraq, and Afghanistan etc, and most of all the long running and bitter struggle of the genocidally oppressed Palestinian people.
So, only when a fully fledged “official” army has sprung into being, with an “official” capacity to declare war for national or socialist rights, doubtless on official notepaper and to the Queensberry rules, will the poor and dispossessed be allowed to struggle.
What insane garbage.
What a craven extension of the “peaceful road” revisionist idiocies that have so damaged the influence on the masses of communist science and understanding for the last 60 years.
All incipient and armed struggle against imperialism’s domination has always been labelled “terrorism” by capitalism, a blanket condemnation now extended into the main justification and excuse for the endless warmongering that its own system’s crisis alone is responsible for imposing on the world.
Small wonder there is a giant vacuum in world leadership filled de facto by an assortment of sometimes weird and wonderful ideologies throughout the Third World – derived mainly from local cultural religious forms like Islamism and adapted Heath Robinson style to reflect the needs of militancy and struggle.
As frequently explained Marxism does not advocate individual terrorism nor “glorify” it, or suggest it is the solution to mankind’s problems. But as Lenin noted in the crucial 1906 article “Guerrilla Warfare”, neither does it condemn it, or as petty bourgeois fake-”lefts” do in order to keep in with imperialism, declare it to be “reactionary”.
The revolutionary scientific view can only be to recognise that what is erupting in the world is the growing revolt of the billions against the centuries of oppression, poverty, punishment, degradation, ignorance, desperation, torment, torture and death that has been their lot, to allow their exploitation by the rulng class to feed its indolent luxury and power.
The insurgency and resistance from Somalia to Iraq, erupting in Pakistan and widespread in Afghanistan, and brewing in a dozen more countries, is anyway already far beyond “terrorism” whatever label imperialism chooses for it; its broad sweep a historic symptom of struggle which is maturing rapidly into world revolution and already having a titanic impact on imperialist confidence, including making the space for the entire Latin American struggle to move forwards, only because the brutal counter-revolutionary control imposed for a century by the US in its arrogantly declared “own backyard” has been distracted by the Middle East disasters.
Lenin’s answer to the outbreaks of his time was to emphasise the need for revolutionary clarity to win the leadership of the spontaneous upsurges and move forwards from limited and sometimes counter-productive methods.
The continuing blitzkrieg lessons imposed on the masses worldwide will force grow increasingly clear revolutionary consciousness, even within the unscientific forms much Middle East struggle uses as leadership, as the contradictions of the struggle demand more answers.
The recent call for anti-invasion unity between Sunni and Shia by Moqtadr al Sadr in Iraq is a powerful signal of how the bitterness and agony of the foul and fascist US occupation is slowly teaching deeper lessons that will ride up and over the sectarian differences which imperialism exploits for its “divide and rule” purposes.
And the Palestinians, being taught yet another horrifying civilian blitzing lesson in northern Lebanon by the US armed and funded Beirut stooge fascists, that imperialism offers them no solution at all to their historic dispossession by Nazi Zionism other than to “go away and die” – are constantly moving forwards too:
Khaled Mashal, the influential political leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, insists attacks on Israel will continue despite overwhelming Israeli retaliation that has cost scores of lives in the Gaza Strip in the past two weeks.
Speaking in Damascus yesterday he asserted it was the right of the Palestinians to resist “Zionist aggression” regardless of whether their actions were effective.
The continuing siege of the Palestinians would lead to an explosion that would affect the entire Middle East, he predicted.
“Under occupation people don’t ask whether their means are effective in hurting the enemy,” he told the Guardian in a rare interview at his heavily guarded offices, plastered with images of Jerusalem and “martyrs” killed by the Israelis.
“The occupiers always have the means to hurt the people they control. The Palestinians have only modest means, so they defend themselves however they can.”
Hamas has been the main force behind more than 250 qassam rockets fired at southern Israel from Gaza in the past two weeks, killing two civilians. Israeli aircraft have struck dozens of times to curb the attacks, killing some 50 Palestinians.
“The Palestinians are steadfast and there are many ways of resisting according to opportunities and conditions,” Mr Mashal said. In the past Hamas carried out many suicide bombings inside Israel; its main weapons now are the primitive but occasionally deadly missiles fired by its military wing, the Qassam Brigades.
The Hamas leader, who helped Saudi Arabia broker February’s Mecca agreement creating a Palestinian unity government, ending clashes with the rival Fatah movement, blamed outsiders for recent renewed fighting between the two sides.
“Palestinians have made some mistakes and wrong bets,” he admitted. “But negative foreign intervention, especially by the US and Israel, is responsible for these internal conflicts.” US financial support and training for Fatah is intended to boost its ability to control security and confront Hamas.
Problems have been compounded by the siege imposed on the Palestinian Authority by the US and EU after Hamas won democratic elections in 2005, Mr Mashal said.
“The siege is collective punishment, and a crime. And the crime is even worse after the Mecca agreement because Palestinians had expected the siege would be lifted.
“Now the international community is trying to undermine Hamas. That will lead to an explosion that will be in the face of the Israeli occupation. The damage will affect the stability of the entire region.”
Mr Mashal rejected demands by the Quartet (the US, the EU, the UN and Russia) that Hamas accept three conditions - recognition of Israel, an end to violence and acceptance of previous peace agreements with Israel. These terms had been accepted by Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader and president of the Palestinian Authority, but that had not forced Israel to withdraw.
It was the Palestinians who needed recognition, not Israel, he said. It was a “pretext” to demand the amendment of the Hamas Charter, which says: “Israel will ... remain until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.” The charter calls the whole of Palestine an Islamic trust which cannot be given away to non-Muslims.
Some recent Hamas statements have implied acceptance of Israel as a “reality” but without saying so explicitly. “We have agreed to a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders,” Mr Mashal said without elaboration. “This is our national goal.”
To his own people, Mr Mashal is an admired leader, but the Israelis see him as a dangerous terrorist. Ten years ago he was the target of an assassination attempt in Jordan by Mossad agents who injected him with poison. But the operation was exposed and Israel was forced to provide the antidote.
Last week Israel’s public security minister, Avi Dichter, warned that he and other Hamas leaders could be targeted wherever they were. Machine-gun-toting guards and surveillance cameras outside his offices give a hint of the precautions in place to protect him.
Mr Mashal, described by western sources as the channel for Iranian financial support for Hamas, said the movement’s relationship with the Islamic Republic was natural and being exploited by their common enemies. The US has pressed Syria to close down the Damascus offices but Syria insists it will not.
Contemplating the forthcoming 40th anniversary of the June 1967 Middle East war, when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sinai desert, he underlined his view that armed resistance will eventually succeed.
“What caused Sharon to leave Gaza, Barak to leave Lebanon in 2000? And look what’s going on in Iraq where the greatest power in the world is facing confusion because of Iraqi resistance. Time is on the side of the Palestinian people. We are right, and our cause is just, despite the appeasement of Israel by most powerful members of the international community.”
There is more to learn, not least that the compromising class collaboration of Arafatism was always on a path to the disgusting and outright corrupt stoogery now exhibited by the Abbas Fatah movement, taking US and Zionist arms and money, to aid imperialism’s blatant tearing up and strangulation of electoral democratic victory won by Hamas, because of its refusal to accept “Israel” as anything but an artificial colonialist occupation by fascist Zionism.
Decades of revisionist retreat from Stalin’s initial 1948 disastrous “recognition” of Israel and extended though “two state solution” illusions has tragically extended the confusion.
Leninism is the way to cut through it – challenging and polemicising all the way the false or unproven understandings which saturate the bourgeois world from its own media to the trickery of the fake-”lefts”.
Only when this scientific struggle is understood to be the highest form of “practice” will the world finally throw off imperialism for good . Don Hoskins
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Chávez may be physically battling the counter-revolution in Venezuela, but a whole history of revisionist confusion – over popular frontism (including Castro’s blind spots) needs to be battled with too, for revolution to triumph in Latin America and worldwide
Further moves by Hugo Chávez to suppress counter-revolutionary TV and radio stations in Venezuela show the growing firmness of the Bolivarian revolutionary-democratic government - but just how Leninist the ruling group is remains open to question.
No one in the world has any doubts that rampaging Washington fascism would like to have Chavez overthrown, and this means that all genuine Marxist revolutionaries should be urging on the greatest clarity about the planet’s class-war realities and combating the tendency for left-wing nationalist movements to fall prey to revisionist confusion, long before they fall prey to CIA-financed bullets.
It should also be borne in mind that Chávez did not seize power arms in hand at the head of a trained revolutionary movement and disband the old bourgeois state forces – he gained popularity through a left-wing nationalist coup attempt, and then won an election to gain office; he also presides over fabulous oil wealth, which gives him huge leeway to make popular reforms without immediately being in all-out confrontation with the Venezuelan ruling class. Similarly, although he is a self-declared “Marxist” (Chile’s 1970s lethally misleading social-democrat President Allende made the same declaration), and gets the Cuban revolution’s support, this does not mean that Leninists can just walk around being supremely confident that Chavez will not fall victim to revisionist ignorance and confusion.
Chavez’s firm actions to date could certainly reflect the same strategy of cunningly squeezing the life out of the local bourgeoisie and consolidating the revolution as Fidel Castro pursued when he took power in Cuba, but, equally, some lethal wishful thinking and “strong man” blind spots could still be reflected in Chavez’s more demagogic moments (waving Noam Chomsky books at the UN, letting himself become associated with the small-minded cynicism about the Soviet Union’s history of Trotskyism) that jeopardise the revolution by veering towards class-collaborationist weaknesses in thinking.
To his credit, Chavez has set up committees for the defence of the revolution in his country, which reflects a far greater healthiness and intensity of the Bolivarian revolution than the miserable cowardice of the Allende period in Chile in 1970-73.
Then, Salvador Allende invited the generals into his cabinet to “stabilise” the situation in the teeth of the CIA-fomented lorry drivers strike and the rampant hostility of the Chilean ruling class, a class that had not been overthrown. The US-backed bloodshed and torture they imposed in the Pinochet coup, with 10,000 massacred in the end, put them back in the government driving seat.
However well the “cunning” strategy of deposing Venezuela’s ruling class is being effected, with huge amounts of encouragement from the whole world revolutionary movement and Cuba in particular, there must remain uncomfortable fears, in the absence of any critical re-assessment of Castro’s lionisation of Allende (and later Maurice Bishop in Grenada), that the Latin American and world revolutionary movement could still suffer some extraordinarily painful defeats because of this. Leninism is needed.
Illusions in popular frontism have seriously undermined and damaged the whole course of the socialist revolution, from even before Moscow’s retreats from Leninism over the correct strategy in the Spanish Civil War. Philosophically, the belief that the imposition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, firm communist party leadership, and the spreading of communist revolutionary understanding through the population is not necessary is the “popular frontism” that condemned the Chilean struggle to defeat in the Pinochet coup, the populist idealism that stupefied the Sandinistas into giving up power electorally, the blind spot that saw Castro slander the Grenadan revolution’s leaders (the New Jewel Movement majority leaders Bernard Coard and Hudson Austin), and in the end was the death of the Soviet Union workers state under Gorbachev.
The EPSR has to always argue 100% for Leninism, not capitulate to the mass petty bourgeois psychological pressures ranging from Big Brother philistinism to CIA propaganda to Trot anti-communism that leave would-be revolutionaries reduced to being feeble-minded cheerleaders, who will one moment promise “unswerving” commitment to the cause of revolution (in, say, Venezuela, or their home, metropolitan country) only to renege if too firm a step is taken in the interests of the proletarian dictatorship (which allegedly “provokes” imperialism).
Arguments have been raised around EPSR circles that too much highlighting of the lack of clarity about Leninism from Chavez smacks of a kind of elitist or scholastic cynicism about the Bolivarian leadership, and, in other words, some truly vainglorious smugness, coming from the meagre forces of the EPSR.
But that is not how the whole history of the EPSR sees it, and could never be Leninism. See our Book 6 on the revisionist disasters inflicted on the socialist revolution and the vast suffering such failures of leadership have caused the world working class.
There can never be full confidence that such Allende-type and Sandinista type capitulations to class-collaborationism won’t happen, until the Latin American movement really knows the score on them, and wants to tell the world socialist movement all about it.
Chris Barratt
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From the EPSR archive
“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly”
VI Lenin – What is to be done? [Collected Works Vol 5 1904]
The greatest problem facing workers everywhere is lack of leadership, and this in turn is the result of a steady degeneration in theoretical understanding of capitalist crisis since earlier this century.
A correct scientific assessment of the imperialist system’s insoluble contradictions has nothing to do with crisis-mongering or wishing catastrophe on the world in order to get a revolutionary political response.
Grasping the general pattern of inter-imperialist conflict due to the uncontrollably destabilising effects of private monopolies accumulating vast inflationary-capital ‘surpluses’ anarchically, - is far from being an ‘academic’ question.
Not a single phenomenon on earth can be analysed sensibly, shorn of the realisation that the great imperialist powers must inevitably sooner or later dictate a new period of devastating international strife and suffering.
The idea of pressing ahead with ‘socialist’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ struggles while in the meantime keeping an ‘open mind’ on whether the imperialist system is going to collapse or not, is just a giant debilitating delusion.
A purely reformist mentality is bound to predominate before long. Life will be lived in the name of ‘small victories’ here and there, or of ‘changes’ forced on capitalism which will make it ‘more tolerable’ or even ‘better’ for surviving under.
And in no time at all, entirely conservative attitudes to ‘keep this going at all costs’ or ‘preserve that at least’ will begin to prevail on matters of previous government welfare concessions or on issues of organisation or campaigning within the labour and trade-union movement.
At that point, the door slides open easily for a drift to the negative syndicalism of the import-controls kind and Little Englander chauvinism; of the jobs-demarcation inter-union disputes; of racial tensions; and of the completely reactionary ‘anti-scrounger’ outlook so disgracefully evident in New Labour’s ‘welfare-to-work’ sanctimonious gimmickry, or in Clare Short’s monstrous insensitivity towards the wretched people of Montserrat.
But don’t just blame New Labour’s leading opportunist reptiles themselves for all this reactionary degeneracy. It all flows ultimately from the benighted stagnancy of only ever thinking about the world in a completely non-revolutionary way.
But the key to the never-ending pattern of evolutionary change mixed with revolutionary leaps is grasping the nature of the revolutionary leap, especially in something as complex and as consciousness-driven as the history of social change.
The short record of the 20th century is one of epoch-shattering revolutionary achievements eventually stifled temporarily by the illusory appearance of ‘more safe’ and ‘more secure’ supposed ‘advances’ made by ‘reformism’ under capitalism.
The welfare concessions made by the imperialist powers, masking the real and unchangeably vicious workings of the capitalist system in the raw, will obviously be completely misleading and misunderstood unless placed in the clear context of the terrifying jolt given to the imperialist bourgeoisie by the 20th century’s history-making revolutions.
But it is only the firm grasp of Marxist scientific theory which makes such an analysis possible, and then keeps in sight the absolute primacy of revolutionary transformation where the decisive longterm international pattern of social change is concerned.
Anti-theory philistinism mingles inseparably with material changes to make its appeal through humanity’s lowest common denominator, - a complacent wish for comfort, or at least not too much discomfort or ‘unnecessary agitation’, etc.
An ‘improving’ status-quo is reformist thinking’s greatest foundation.
An economic crash would help disturb the ground. But thereafter, only 150 volumes of Marxist-Leninist philosophical and historical materialism will be of any use.
In in doubt, ask MI5 who still keep voluminous files on any left in Britain remotely suspectable of having ever had a grasp of revolutionary theory of any kind, as has just been revealed.
But the British labour movement traditionally has a dismal record in its attitude to theory. Its early indifference to world-revolutionary perspectives based on the pragmatic advances of the trade-unionist and reformist epochs was later cemented by decades of glib Stalinist revisionist plodding or by even more glib anti-communism, frequently disguised with the thin veneer of Trotskyism or other ultra-leftist posturing.
This philistinism has always decided to keep an ‘open mind’ about a serious Marxist-Leninist interpretation of the broadest patterns of 20th century history,- meanwhile getting on with entryist careerism up the Labour Party or the trade unions, or winning bourgeois media publicity through endless bogus ‘exposures’ of the ‘counter-revolutionary Soviet camp’ (but mostly laughably missing the actual Gorbachev counter-revolutionary betrayal when it finally came, or even supporting it as a ‘progressive’ development’.)
Any ‘open mind’ about anything had long since been forgotten in such an all-round Niagara of opportunism, - revisionist, reformist, or anti-communist.
A close companion of this anti-theory philistine tradition, and often effectively masking it,- has been a wide variety of narrow-minded sectarianism.
This again helps fail to give proper leadership to the working class by permitting intense concentration on sectional interests, or on a few limited issues,while giving the appearance of complete dedication to the all-out fight.
Exclusive concentration on ‘the’ party, - to the point of refusing to publicly polemicise with rival versions of ‘the’ party, or even allow members to hold private discussions with other ‘faiths’ or even exchange newspapers with them, - is one infamous form of this sectarianism, notorious among Trotskyism’s 57 varieties.
But other shapes adopted by philistinism, to hide itself in sect-like activities,are even more insidious such as all single-issue protests around a specific trade-union struggle, or individual injustice cases, or particularly offensive new laws, or one special aspect of imperialist tyranny such as nuclear weapons, etc.
The correctness, or usefulness, or even necessity of such fights is not the question here. What needs stressing is the easy popularity of such struggles precisely because they avoid participants having to get involved in the major historical problems of revolutionary theory, and often deliberately promote themselves on an anti-theory basis. ‘No politics here’ is the frequent daft shout in many such campaigns, - smart when evading Trotskyite sectarian squabbling, but foolish when preventing scientific socialist lessons from being drawn from the struggle in hand, crucial for that struggle’s further and better success.
Worse than these specific single-issue fights for encouraging anti-theory philistinism have been the generic ‘liberation’ struggles on behalf of women, gays, blacks, etc, which have all consciously sought out a ‘minorities’ culture, deliberately preventing any all-embracing involvement, and even more confusingly have insisted that the fight could be won whether capitalism goes or stays, and that such a victory would be the real ‘revolution’, or the real ‘liberation’.
This is all nonsense, of course. Prejudice, discrimination, and unequal treatment is, of course, intolerable, and it must be bitterly felt. But ‘liberation’ through such single-issue struggles is a nonsensical illusion.
The capitalist system and its culture is the great repressor and exploiter, even though sometimes completely invisible behind seemingly ‘pure’ racism, sexism, or homophobia, etc. But capitalism it is, and capitalism alone, - which controls ultimately the creation of all culture in modern society. And only when the capitalist system ceases to corrupt human behaviour and thinking will it become possible to begin the complete eradication once and for all of such barbaric backwardness from civilisation as racist, sexist, or homophobic prejudices, or any other immature discriminatory attitudes towards any minorities whatever, merely for being themselves.
And everyone, of course, for all kinds of reasons, has a serious historical interest in getting rid of the capitalist system.
Tragically, the frequently sectarian, and often sociologically nonsensical, single-issue campaigning by such ‘liberation’ fronts actually helps philistine ignorance in society reinforce itself sometimes, rather than help break it down.
Now, specific campaign demands in themselves are obviously the norm in any form of human struggle, at any stage of the revolutionary process. The difficulty being identified here is the perspective within which these demands are framed.
And it is not just a problem if single-issue fights are merely projected without any reference at all to the overall longer-term perspectives for getting rid of the capitalist system itself, in its entirety.
The disaster is the deliberate philistine substitution of one-off ‘liberation’ fights for the socialist revolution as a whole, which is viewed with dismissive or cynical contempt.
And it is a real disaster, which will not be resolved until widespread Marxist clarity is able to clear up all this ideological confusion surrounding all the protest movements.
The ‘unity’ of all campaigners against aspects of capitalist society can be called for until the end’ of time but it could never succeed in unifying.
Only on one basis is any worthwhile unity ever possible on any subject, and that is the unity of correct scientific understanding of the matters in hand, including the crucial questions of how society actually works, and even more crucially how it is going to develop in the immediate and longer-term future.
“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice” Marxism-Leninism explains. Meaning that until the historic class struggle is fully understood, successful intervention in that class struggle that will lead to lasting victory is impossible.
Specific campaign demands will continue to arise spontaneously. What should always then be fought for is the correct revolutionary perspective within which to frame these demands so that they should cease to be single-issue delusions, whether ‘won’ or ‘lost’.
The demands remain campaigns for ‘reforms’. And some may even be ‘won’, resulting in real and worthwhile changes. And many will take part usefully neither knowing or caring about what political perspectives have been discussed as the context for the particular struggle.
But the really important achievement of such battles is when they are precisely fought out to the background of the struggle for correct perspectives on the overthrow of capitalism as a whole, illustrating or illuminating that fight in ways vastly more significant than that single battle itself, even when won and as vital as such victories obviously are.
The great miners strike of 1984-85 taught many magnificent lessons about working class struggle but the most crucial understanding it established was of the impossibility of ever returning to the illusions of a programmable boom period of Labour ‘interventionist’ government, implying public democratic control over the economy while it remained essentially capitalist and free-market oriented.
‘Reformism’ was effectively sunk by the 1984-85 strike. And the vital lessons of all of that would have been far more decisively learned had all the concerns of that struggle been taken in alongside a tradition of all-the-time politically testing every major working-class experience for what new light it could throw up on the longer-term perspectives for getting rid of capitalism altogether by, in effect, the social revolution.
And that scientific mentality can only flourish as a result of the deliberate pursuit of the Marxist-Leninist socialist philosophy.
It is only when a comprehensive historical understanding starts to develop that real leadership can begin to be constructed in the working class.
And the most important constant function for this leadership is, straightforwardly enough, to constantly give a new lead to workers whenever new political situations arise, which is basically all the time.
The working class will eventually become the mightiest force in society, giving a lead to all workers by hand or brain, when it has supported the growth of a leadership which can quickly provide a correct new rallying cry at every new turn in the international class struggle, or get close enough to the right understanding that any details not immediately perfectly understood can soon be corrected by the first experiences of taking the fresh assessment of things into practice via political campaigning, and discovering in practice that some nuances or other, or even major planks of a platform, have not been quite in place.
For the working class, its political leadership which is going to take it to socialism must begin to be in a position to answer every question on behalf of workers that comes up in society and in international conflict. A successful working class political leadership must eventually embrace the best wisdom on every subject on earth, or at least have access to it via sympathetic independent intellectuals and scientists or industrialists.
Only when inspired with such comprehensive and understanding leadership will the working class begin not merely to become suspicious of, or scorn, the domination by bourgeois ideology, but also start wanting to actively expel ruling class influence out of every aspect of society by entirely overthrowing the ruling class itself, the complete social revolution.
Single-issue economic demands will never get there by themselves. At some stage, the working class is going to have to feel that the old society and its entire culture simply cannot continue in the old way any more, and should feel that the workers themselves should become the new ‘ruling class’, one which after a temporary dominance will be able to get rid of all ruling classes for ever.
But such thinking can never develop until a working-class leadership develops which will be capable of providing a sound lead for all workers on every matter, involving the whole working class in that struggle for correct theory, and beginning the long process of the final complete emancipation of the working class via universal higher education, obliterating ‘mental’ and ‘manual’ labour categories, and freeing everyone so much from necessary drudgery that all will have the time and inclination to pursue for pleasure new specialisation after specialisation, new career after new career, etc.
Roy Bull
From EPSR issue no.915 26th August 1997
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