Recent paper
No 1334 16th June 2008
Fake- “lefts” still bolstering the “democracy” lie even as the slide into fascism intensifies. But the working class will not be trapped forever by the illusions of parliament and the more so as the “credit crunch” spirals rapidly into total catastrophic Depression, confirming once more Marxist understanding of imperialism as a system of crisis, slump and war. But cynicism needs to become revolutionary consciousness to end outmoded capitalist anarchy and destruction
The astonishing resignation of arch Tory David Davis over New Labour’s draconian 42 day detention-without-trial, and the Irish referendum vote against Europe, show how the overall fraudulent “democracy” racket will still entangle and trip up the ruling class even as it slides unstoppably down a path into open dictatorship and slump warmongering.
They are both symptoms of all sorts of potential eruptions to come, and expressions of the huge uncertainties gnawing at the entire moribund ruling class and its historically outmoded system, losing its nerve and confidence more than ever in the teeth of the greatest ever imperialist crisis disaster.
But neither event is anything to do with the restoration, or confirmation, of the “democratic process” as the fake-“left” has rushed in desperately to say, with old-lag Labour “radicals” like Tony Benn and “Old”-Labour MP Bob Marshall-Harris pledging their support for Davis and making “principled challenges” to New Labour within microseconds.
Just the opposite. Both events are highlighting the trampling across all such “rights” by the relentless fascistisation of society driven by the now accelerating capitalist crisis plunge towards slump and war catastrophe.
The Irish vote was an attempt to halt the relentless steamrollering of European monopolisation across workers rights and conditions and the undercutting of hard fought for wages and conditions by “labour mobility” and the Europe wide coordination of the bosses.
Davis’ unexpected individual show of principle (as far as it goes) is a virtually unprecedented phenomenon at the cosy backscratching parliamentary club of shysters, poseurs and mountebanks on the Thames which, by its complete rarity. further underlines the total venality and opportunism of the “honourable members”.
To go so far, pushing for a major public debate at some personal risk, reflects how deep is the disquiet of even some bourgeois elements at the deepening economic and political crisis and stripping away of all so-called “human” and legal rights.
Neither European bloc consolidation nor the stepping up of police state discipline can be changed or halted by “democratic decisions” any more than water can be made to run uphill; they are driven by the relentless unstoppable pressures of capitalist development and especially the now breaking world imperialist crisis which is forcing bourgeoisies everywhere into preparations for devastating conflict and struggle for survival as markets crash.
Only a revolutionary overturn of the entire stinking mess will extricate the world from a plunge into the greatest catastrophic disaster in all history, ten times the turmoil and horrific people-shattering destruction of the Second World War.
But the last thing that the ruling class needs is any kind of serious debate and philosophical examination of the degenerate slide of its system into open dictatorship.
For just that reason the door is wide open to use the election exactly as Marxism has always said the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy should be used, and can only be used; taking advantage of the “freedom” that ruling class has been forced to concede in the past and using it as a platform to expose the real nature of “democracy” as a cover for bourgeois dictatorship.
But even if the Marxist leadership is yet spread thin on the ground for making such conscious argument, the material conditions of the slump are beginning to bring all sorts of discontents to the surface and will revive a growing interest in the Marxism which has become a universal background knowledge over the last 150 years, however confused and muddled it might be.
The EPSR has long made the point that the “democratic” process will be one of the entanglements tripping up the ruling class as it tries to gird itself up for the bitter struggles for competitive survival that its systemic collapse is forcing on it.
Hence the attempt to head the debate back on safe “democratic ground”.
Listen to this pompous nonsense immediately penned by Benn:
In a democracy members of parliament are accountable to the people from whom their authority comes and to whom they are ultimately accountable.
Apart from the broad political choices that have to be made in a general election, issues sometimes arise where it is right and proper that MPs should take the opportunity of consulting their own constituents formally on major questions.
Legislation that would allow people to he imprisoned on suspicion without charge for 42 days repeals Magna Carta, and could easily be extended to cover anyone whom it was claimed might threaten national security.
The parliamentary vote in support of this was only won after the whips had imposed the most rigid three-line whip upon Labour MPs who, in a free vote, would almost certainly have defeated it.
David Davis’s decision to take this issue back to his own constituents and ask for their support for his stand against this law is absolutely right.
Cynicism about politics is now widespread, and the Haltemprice byelection, fought on the question of civil liberties, will restore public confidence in parliament, which increasingly seems separated from the people it was elected to serve.
Tony Benn
What disgusting rank opportunism!
What stinking monstrous lies!
What deranged, wishful and anti-historical thinking!
It is exactly this forelock tugging shyte which has kept the working class in thrall to the capitalist system for the last two hundred years, tied to “proper process” and notions about the “representation” that will finally get their them just rewards and benefits from society, which ultimately has their welfare at heart, supposedly.
And what is the result?
Massive increases in wealth disparities and child poverty once again, on top of the mountains of debt now carried individually and collectively by each and every one of the population, and a society riven by knife and gun crime, drug despair and pointlessness.
Education is a disaster and public transport and other services chaotic, with the much vaunted National Health service little more than a funding machine for the giant drug company profiteers, construction companies and finance houses, and with what little remains of doctors’ surgeries about to be flogged off to Tesco.
And that without beginning to reckon with the real desperations and turmoil that the onrushing slump collapse of the entire capitalist economic system is bringing, starting with the “credit crunch” and spiralling downwards into an ever tighter vortex of company bankruptcies, bank failure, housing price implosion and massively rising unemployment, larded with potentially explosive inflation and desperate shortages, and the rising chaos that perfectly justifiable resistance to such burdens will bring as well.
On top of that the entire moribund imperialist order is heading for open and punishing bitter trade war which will magnify the problems even further.
The ultimate end point is violent and bloody shooting war to impose the slump burdens and destruction elsewhere and particularly on the working class of the “enemy” bourgeois bloc (while keeping the lid of workers’ resistance at home).
The 1930s Great Depression was a tea party compared to the worldwide slump disaster now teetering on the edge of total meltdown into worldwide warmongering (already warmed up in Iraq and Afghanistan by lead imperialist the USA, determined to make sure it gets in first with the Nazi blitzkrieging and intimidation).
Of course “cynicism about politics is widespread” – and when politics is taken in the sense of “parliamentary politics”, so it should be.
For very good reasons elections no longer draw any positive interest at all – and only draw any halfway interest for ordinary people when they feel there is a chance to express their hostility and detestation of whoever is in power – an entirely sound negative rejection of all supposed “representatives”.
The parliamentary game has almost been worked empty as a trick to fool the masses.
The working class has been educated by 150 years of “Labour” promises and a dozen reformist governments (backed by a spectrum of fake-“lefts” as being supposedly a “step forwards” or “better than the alternative”) into understanding that capitalism rules whatever notional government is “in power” – and that Labour is a lying fraud simply providing a cover for the system precisely when the mainstream bourgeois party of the Tories cannot impose its will any further because of the underlying hostility in the masses it will stir up.
If anything “cynicism” and hatred of the centuries long confidence trick of “democracy” is still not widespread enough.
It needs to become much more consciously hostile – combined with a huge escalation in the only politics that can change anything, namely revolutionary scientific politics; a philosophy of human understanding and change to lead a complete transformation of society.
But exactly at the moment of further difficulties for the lies and fraud of the old parliamentary game, in rush the fake-“lefts” to support it one way or another, if not over Davis then minutes earlier via Ken Livingstone, bewailing the defeat of another ultra-opportunist Labourite to the tricky buffoon Boris Johnson and thereby suggesting that his election would have somehow been an enormous achievement for the working class.
More stinking lies and revisionist confusion!
Livingstone is as much a part of the entire complex edifice of lying parliamentary politics as any of the other opportunists – more so in fact since his role in “resigning on principle” and then re-joining Labour in time for the Blairite warmongering against Iraq was pivotal in further sustaining the parliamentary racket with a “left” prop.
The only honest thing to be telling the working class now is that the entire bourgeois democratic racket is a total fraud and a lie.
Instead the “lefts” of all shades – but particularly the ones claiming “revolutionary credentials”, from the Trotskyists through to the hidebound old Stalinists, help keep it there with their total failure to understand or explain (and deep down lack of any wish to understand and explain) the reality of capitalist dictatorship and its onrushing crisis disaster.
Only the EPSR, for the last three decades has insisted on the need to redevelop Lenin’s profound revolutionary understanding of capitalist imperialist crisis, built on the titanic work of Marx and Engels (see p6) and of the maelstrom of change it is heading for, resolvable only by the taking of power by the working class.
Capitalist exploitation rules, has always ruled in modern history and will continue to do so as long as there is no revolutionary challenge to the entire class-dominated economic and political order, to eventually overturn the entire outmoded, arrogant, exploitative structure and establish the rule of the great majority, the working class and poor of the planet, to build rational planned socialism, everywhere.
Now the decks are being cleared for war and even the pretence of votes and freedom has to be stripped away.
All the bourgeoisies in the major imperialist competitors must “cut the fat” and batten down the hatches for the hurricane of trade war and vicious to-the-wall competition which the overproduction crisis of capitalism is bringing the world back to once more, just as it has repeatedly throughout its centuries of dominance.
As two world wars in the last century have graphically demonstrated, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been once more setting the scene for, the ultimate outcome is the total barbaric destruction – both to remove the “surpluses” of capital and products choking the system and preventing profits being made, and to make sure that it is the rival capitalist blocs which pay the price of chaos and terrifying blitzkrieg, leaving the “victor” to dominate the world again as the USA was able to after the Second World War.
There is no room in crisis for the niceties of “democracy” and “human rights” which were suspended to various extents throughout the past conflicts, replaced by direct class dictate under either theatrical Nazi brutality or by the slightly more subtle “coalition government” “wartime regulations” and “emergency powers” of Britain and others (including detention without trial for “state enemies” and rounding up foreign nationals etc), aided by the class-collaborating “national government” stoogery of Labour and other reformist “leftism” backing a foul turn to monstrous chauvinism, in both the great Second International betrayal of 1914 (the making of Bolshevism) and in 1939.
They are all varieties of the fascist face of capitalism on show in its crisis and slump desperation.
But “parliamentary democracy” (and “human rights”) is one of the greatest tools of class rule ever devised, a great confidence trick refined and sophisticated over centuries from initial concessions to “rights and freedoms” struggle, to allow the “fooling of most of the people most of the time”.
Led into self-delusion on a mass scale, reinforced by the opportunism and lies of 57 varieties of reformist and “left” leaderships, the working class has been kept away from revolutionary politics (the only solution to capitalist problems) for most of the twentieth century.
Via soft-brained revisionist support for “peaceful roads” and “democratic paths” and its Gorbachevite liquidationist end point, it has even helped overturn the historic working class achievements like the staggering 70 year long history of the Soviet Union, the greatest step forwards in human history for science, culture, philosophy, human organisation, economy and cooperation.
But despite its huge value in keeping the masses away from revolution, doped with comsumerism and moralising nostrums about freedom of choice and “the proper way to do things” (according to who?) it is becoming too expensive for the ruling class to maintain.
Giving the illusion enough substance to make it believable has always meant certain concessions, even more so once the epoch of the great advances in socialism began to show the working class in practice exactly what enormous possibilities for universal human development are achievable once the profit system is ended.
“Real” reforms had to be granted to hold back the revolutionary instincts of the working class throughout the West – the pretence that capitalism was even more capable than socialism of providing a decent life and conditions for all, or at least would do so “tomorrow” as steady changes were “legally” enacted.
But this was all a horribly expensive game to play and sustainable only while the imposition of “democracy” worldwide, meaning the total dominance of the Western imperialist order, could ruthlessly exploit the Third World and produce sufficient super-profits to pay for it, in the richest “privileged” countries.
There is no room any more for such luxury.
Just the opposite. The urgent demands of the capitalist crisis demand that they be swept aside and deliberate intimidation be used instead to maintain ruling class discipline over the masses.
But it is easier said than done.
Showing the world once more exactly what brutal class rule dictatorship lies behind the parliamentary smoke and mirrors is also giving the world huge lessons in the real nature of capitalism, as the brutally suppressed and besieged Palestinians have learned for example, or the masses in South America.
The fascist face of capitalism, the most barbaric, is always its weakest.
Last time it was exposed in the 1930s and 1940s it led to a huge upsurge of anti-capitalist nationalist and socialist movement in the post-war years, a titanic revolutionary wave only just headed off again by reformism and revisionism into the modern post-war philistinism and dumbed down celebrity chasing.
So capitalism has been playing a double game, continuing to use what it can of the bourgeois democracy racket while surreptitiously making ready for total warmongering dictatorship, slipping through ever more draconian measures under the insane fantasy of a desperate “war on terror” ludicrously presented as threatening the very substance of human society.
David Davis, despite his arch-reactionary ruling class politics is in one small sense more “honest” and sincere than the leftest of any of these fake-“lefts”, since he has finally cracked at the steady and relentless fascistisation of society as it plunges towards war, echoing the various ruling class elements who flaked away from their own system, under the Nazis in Germany for example.
Like theirs his “stand” has got nothing to do with stirring up revolutionary change of course.
It is much more likely to be a reflection of patrician nervousness and disquiet at the pace of change being forced on the world by the crisis and the monstrous foulness it is inexorably sliding into (as all sides did in the Second World War, Nazis and the “good” West alike); there may even be some credence to criticism that it reflects an even more conservative view of the world than the majority Tories.
But whatever goes on subjectively in Davis’ head, the objective effect is to unleash a storm of discussion that ill suits the mainstream bourgeoisie.
Hence too the stream of astonishingly vicious ridicule and sneering put-downs heaped on Davis’ head by the entire establishment from his own Tory Party colleagues, assorted New Labourites, the press and others, and the contemptuous refusal to stand any serious candidates against him, for fear of the arguments that could be stirred up.
Re-branded Cameronite “soft and friendly” Toryism, being warmed up in case the New Labour game collapses completely, has instantly revealed its true nature by cutting him loose. Despite weeks of parliamentary posturing against Brown’s specific 42 detention plans it has no intention of seriously changing course – and nor could it.
Tellingly, it is the Murdoch wing of imperialism, with its long-festering impatience at the old ossified incompetence of the British monarchical ruling class, and strong connections to the aggressive neocon section of the American ruling class, which is making the strongest running, setting up former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie for a disruptive “joke” campaign in an attempt to smother the by-election in mockery, and sabotage any serious politics which might emerge.
This section of the bourgeoisie has been urging an aggressive stance for a long time, putting its money on the foul shallowness of Blairite glitzy spin doctoring stoogery to slide through escalating attacks on the working class (whilst swearing that black is white and “things are getting better”) and push the international warmongering needed by capitalism, when the “first team” Tory government of the ruling class had run into the buffers of continuing relative decline of British imperialist competitiveness and stirrings of mass domestic discontent that would not long remain incoherent.
It was already on a slide to fascism before the 1997 election as the EPSR alone was already warning while the bulk of the “lefts” shallowly celebrated the “end of Thatcherism”. As in EPSR 893 in March 1997:
So along comes Blairism, a truly astonishing historical concoction of the most deliberately trivial and crude advertising gimmickry and public-relations posturing which in style is probably closer to 1930s fascism than anything else, but without (so far) the aggressive threats of imperialist warmongering which distinguished another Labour Party leader’s ‘new’ politics , Sir Oswald Mosley, who broke from ‘Old Labour’ after the 1929 period of crisis office, and launched the ‘New Party’, quickly mimicking similar ‘revolutionary’ breakaways from social-democracy in Germany and Italy,- Hitler and Mussolini.
“So far” at that point, rapidly became “plenty” of warmongering since, which has richly confirmed this prognosis, tellingly made long before the supposed “terrorist threat” and “Clash of Civilisations” had emerged to justify the slither into international blitzing.
Just benighted diamond-rich Sierra Leone and tiny once-communist Serbia were in the gunsights for the initial pounding and scapegoating, which has since become non-stop.
Blairism has been toppled, brought down by the unexpectedly determined world resistance to and hatred for the imperialist order (labelled more “terrorism and insurgency”), and its escalating warmongering “solution”.
But Brownite New Labourism, dishonestly levered into position without an election at all after the entire Blair Government was forced out of office – brought down effectively by the insoluble and ever-running Iraqi and Afghanistan chaos and defeat – remains the desperate hope for the time being to sustain the path, and even more so now as the splits in the Tories emerge again.
But it is a nervous game. Both Tories mark One and the New Labour “Tory Mark Two”
party which has been forged as a stopgap, are both relentlessly exposed by the realities of the driving capitalist slump which is going from bad to worse.
Far from capitalism “ending history” and creating the innovation to bring prosperity it is crashing into economic destruction as the EPSR has constantly warned, against the indifference and ridicule of the entire "left" which has utterly failed to keep this most basic part of Marxism as the context for all understanding of developing world class struggle.
The capitalist press articles are non-stop now:
This time last year the UK economy was humming along, with house prices rising rapidly and banks like Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley packaging up their mortgages for the securitisation market. As far as the Treasury and the Bank of England were concerned there was no reason to think that much was amiss. The economy was growing at above trend and the Bank was raising rates in an attempt to slow things down.
There was always a large element of fantasy in all this. The strength of the economy was more illusory than real, with excess lending and borrowing leading to a housing bubble similar to that in America. But last Autumn, consumers were still living in a dream-like state, confident that house prices would keep rising no matter how expensive they became.
The economy helped Brown in his early months, and he was pleasantly surprised at his poll ratings. He was also acutely aware that the Tory party was in some disarray; David Cameron was in a mess with his own party over grammar schools and was criticised for being in Rwanda when Britain was knee-deep in flood water. Feelgood factor plus Labour popularity plus Tories in crisis started to make the Brown camp think about a snap election and the momentum grew and grew to the point where even those close to the prime minister thought he was going for it. Then, within 24 hours, he changed his mind, for reasons still not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that the state of the economy has deteriorated markedly over the past 12 months and it is this - far more than any supposed flaws in Brown’s character - that has changed the nature of the political debate.
When he was chancellor, Brown’s pitch to the electorate had been the man of prudence and probity, the equivalent of the solid shopkeeper who would never sell his customers shoddy goods.
Today the situation is somewhat different, with the voters - in the immortal words of Monty Python - registering a complaint and ministers seeking to reassure, loudly but unconvincingly, that the parrot is not quite dead but is just resting.
There is much talk from Alistair Darling about how the economy is better placed than those of other countries to withstand the global downturn (“the Norwegian Blue prefers kipping on its back”), and that there are parts of Britain - away from the financial sector and the housing market - that are still doing well (Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, beautiful plumage).
As far as the voters are concerned, the plumage don’t enter into it. They seem utterly unmoved by the idea that Britain is, by all accounts, envied as a bastion of creativity when their homes are dropping in value and their real incomes are being squeezed. Rather like the angry customer in the pet shop, they have taken a closer look at the parrot and decided that the only reason it stood on the perch for so long was that the government nailed it there with both public and private debt.
To be fair, the Treasury is not alone in being in full Monty Python mode.
The Bank of England seems to think that unless the parrot is nailed down with excessively high interest rates it will nuzzle up to the bars, bend ‘em apart with its little beak, and Voom.
Last week, the news on the economy was as follows. On Monday, the Bank of England reported that mortgage applications have halved over the past year to the lowest level since records began in the early 1990s. The Chartered Institute for Purchasing and Supply said manufacturing - despite the beneficial impact of a weaker pound - was on the cusp of recession. Bradford & Bingley, after a weekend of arm-twisting involving the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority, changed the terms of its rights issue to prevent the offer failing, an eventuality that would have raised fears that the government potentially had another Northern Rock on its hands.
On Tuesday, the CIPS said the construction sector was in freefall and on Wednesday the same body said that services - which account for three- quarters of the economy’s output - had also slipped into recession territory. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development cut its growth forecasts for the UK and warned that two tough years lie ahead.
On Thursday, the Halifax reported that house prices were down by 2.4% in May and by 6.1% over the past three months. The bank has been publishing house-price data for 25 years: in all that time, there has never been a three-month period - even in 1992 when George Soros orchestrated the removal of the pound from the Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday - when the cost of a home has been falling so fast. Four hours after Halifax released its data, Threadneedle Street left the bank rate unchanged at 5%.
On Friday came crude oil’s biggest one-day price rise in history, taking oil prices up to more than $139 a barrel, a new record, while Bradford & Bingley raised interest rates it charges on its buy-to-let mortgages by more than half a percentage point. How much worse could it get? Quite a lot, as it happens. The housing market has come off the boil far more quickly than the industry experts predicted, with the fall in prices in the first half of the year bigger than that predicted for 2008 as a whole.
The weakness of activity and the dearth of credit means that further falls are inevitable, particularly given the Bank’s approach to interest rates. City analysts are busily revising their forecasts of how far house prices will fall; six months ago only the hard core gloomsters were pencilling in a 20% fall in 2008 and 2009, but that is now the consensus.
Even this, and many gloomy others, dare not tread too far into a real prognosis of the full unravelling of the overblown inflationary dollar-corrupted world economy which Marxist science shows will be unstoppable eventually.
But these credit disasters are already confirming the Leninist perspective of total catastrophic collapse.
Ten years of non-stop warmongering, initiated by lies and demented Goebbels propaganda against various victims from Serbia through Afghanistan and Iraq, also confirm that the Marxist understanding that crisis leads into world war disaster, deliberately ratcheted up by capitalism as the only “solution” it knows to slump failure.
Despite the defeats and setbacks for imperialism in the endless festering quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the damage it has done to Blairism and the neocon agenda, the warmongering continues, with Bush in London this week to keep the stooge Brown in line for continued blitzings and the threats and lies constantly being wound up against suitable demonised victims, most notably Iran.
The Zionist rottweillers have been used to release the latest Nazi threats:
Israel “will attack” Iran if it continues to develop nuclear weapons, one of prime minister Ehud Olmert’s deputies warned yesterday. Shaul Mofaz, a former defence minister and a contender to replace the scandal-battered Olmert, said military action would be “unavoidable” if Tehran proved able to acquire the technology to manufacture atomic bombs.
Mofaz is Israel’s transport minister, but he is also a former chief of staff, privy to secret defence planning as a member of the security cabinet, and leads regular strategic talks with the US. He implied that any attack on Iran would be coordinated with Washington. “If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it,” he told the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot. “The UN sanctions are ineffective.”
Mofaz was born in Iran, giving his remarks extra edge after repeated threats against Israel from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has also denied the Nazi Holocaust. Ahmadinejad “would disappear before Israel does”, Mofaz said.
Mofaz’s remarks came at the end of a week of intense US-Israeli talks on Iran. They were also the most explicit threat yet against the Islamic Republic from a member of the Israeli government, which, like the Bush administration, has preferred to hint at force as a last resort should UN sanctions be deemed to have failed.
Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, told pro-Israeli lobbyists this week that the military option against Iran remained on the table, though he also offered “meaningful concessions” if it bowed to international demands.
Experts doubt whether Israel could destroy Iran’s extensive and heavily defended nuclear facilities without American help. In 1981 Israel bombed and destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Last September its planes bombed a site in Syria that the US said was a nuclear reactor built with North Korean help. Syria denied having any such facility. Israel is believed to have an arsenal of 150-400 nuclear warheads. Unlike Iran, it has never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Iran denied seeking to develop nuclear weapons and insisted it would not abandon enrichment.
But the entire “war on terror” is a sick joke. “Terrorism” is a pinprick against the might of the imperialist power and their vast billion (even trillion) dollar military resources.
It is becoming something else perhaps as the early inchoate anarchic rebellious attempts of the Third World to get out from under the numbing poverty desperation that has been imposed on it for the entire imperialist epoch, develop ultimately into revolutionary struggle. But that is caused and triggered by imperialism itself and its oncoming disasters.
There is only one overwhelming threat to human existence – the demented refusal of the ruling class to give up the sweet life that its centuries of profiteering world plunder has given it, even though the in-built intractable contradictions of its system are bringing the planet into total mayhem and collapse.
Rather than give way to the now rational and scientific potential of human cooperation – communism – creating peaceful world coordination of economic and societal development, made possible by the astonishing levels of technology and human scientific understanding already achieved and further achievable by the development of human consciousness and capacities – they would take humanity into a pit of destruction using the same technology and science, but distorted to create a hellfire of war one hundred times as destructive and horrific as that which has killed tens of millions already twice before.
Profit as a guide for human society and motivation is unconscious, misleading and ultimately destructive as well as relentlessly unfair, degrading, brutal, suppressing, oppressing and pointlessly divisive, preventing the rational and steady solving of all mankind’s critical problems – need for development, education, environment, possible global warming, water shortage etc etc – because of its insistence of subjugating all coherent and coordinated production to the insane willful logic of the “market” and demands for ever greater sales, no matter whatever the actual needs of humanity.
This anarchic frenzy may have dragged still superstitious and backward mankind forwards from feudal stagnation but it can never achieve the enormous potential of modern science and technology.
Just the opposite. It has reached the end of its usefulness historically precisely by bringing productive capacity and technology to the advanced state of the modern world, which allows for socialism.
But rational development of the vast potential of the billions on the planet is stifled and once again threatened with deadly war destruction.
As it dawns more and more on the great majority how they have had the wool pulled over their eyes, more and more will they turn once again to the only path out of crisis that there is – the complete overturn of the profit system and its growing viciousness.
The revival of Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding and leadership, and the deepening development of revolutionary struggle to end the stinking mess into which the profit system is heading, is already overdue, as it slides into World War Three.
Sudden eruptions, chaos and conflict are already the order of the day as the lorry driver disputes across Europe already indicate once again and as numerous other suddenly intensifying economic problems will produce worldwide, adding to the turmoil, and more and more merging with the wave of anti-imperialist sentiment and hatred which has swept the world for the last decade and which continues to grow as slump, food shortages and blitzkrieg barbarity are imposed by imperialism.
Eventually this will solidify into all out class war conflict, which will be forced to look for a grasp and understanding of the enormous historical crisis it is being driven by, and to build the Marxist leadership which alone can struggle consciously for the answers and lead the struggle to a successful conclusion.
It is against all this future revolutionary upheaval that a panicking ruling class is trying to build up its armoury of dictatorial weapons and intimidatory “laws” to suppress all political activity and leadership in the working class, not some fantasy terrorist threat (whatever small incidents there may be).
Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie will continue to make as much use as it can of the “democratic” fraud even as it collapses, just as it did in the 1930s when Hitler was elected (!!) into power, with top hat and tails formalities all nicely observed, before unleashing Nazi crackdown and brutality, and the path into World War Two.
The US presidential electoral racket will remain as cynically manipulated as ever, as the American election circus is proving once again, with all multi-million dollar campaigns already banging the warmongering drums as loud as Bush himself against Sudan, Iran and other imperialist scapegoat victims, however much they profess themselves to be “opposed” for campaign reasons.
Capitalism is attempting to spin the fraud out a little longer by playing its minority cards of Feminism and black nationalism, both varieties of “at last” reformist special pleading, at the same time, such is its desperation.
But the cynical reality of the disgusting, manipulated money and string-pulling “democracy” façade is already showing through, as the two Democrat candidates have hastened to make clear to the ruling class which really pulls the strings.
First was the “joint declaration on Darfur” by Obama, Clinton and Republican John McCain, winding up the Goebbels provocations against Sudan, which the West has been keeping well heated up for possible future blitzkrieging.
And front-runner Obama has made it very clear which side he is on, as in the Iran threat above and more:
After viral emails and vicious attacks against him as an anti-Israeli or even Islamic sleeper, the worm turned – in the direction they pointed. Obama promised to support an “undivided Jerusalem,” as Israel’s capital in his speech to the lobby.
Not a single country recognises the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem. Indeed, the last few banana-ish republics that maintained embassies in West Jerusalem have removed them, since no country, including the US, is prepared to over-ride the UN partition resolution which designated the city as international territory.
There are proposals that would have the city as the joint capital of both Palestine and Israel, and it is possible that Obama was thinking of those. However that possibility was somewhat diminished by the complete absence of any mention of Israeli settlement building, the road blocks, the separation wall, all in defiance of international law, and indeed of Israel’s own commitments to the Quartet and the peace roadmap. Indeed, far from pressuring Israel to live up to its obligations, he promised yet another $30bn in stringless aid!
Those of us who were, on Tuesday night, cheering the seeming end of the long years of neocon domination of foreign policy should pause and recall that Paul Wolfowitz addressed an AIPAC crowd and reminded them: “Israelis are not the only victims of the violence in the Middle East. Innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying in great numbers as well. It is critical that we recognize and acknowledge that fact.” The crowd booed. However, he knew they would and was prepared to take the risk.
At any AIPAC rally since the defeat of Saddam, it is always good for a quick buzz to attack Iran, and of course, all the candidates obliged. So, the choice we are left with is choice between Obama, who is prepared to talk to the Iranians, but still waving a big stick, (“I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power. Everything.”) and McCain, who wants to dispense with the talking.
Several people in the crowd said they were moved by the sense of history about the occasion - and by Obama’s promise of change.
In the shadow of the television camera risers, campaign volunteers danced to Stevie Wonder music, and hugged. Others talked about how unlikely it had seemed, all those months ago, that Obama could ever be the nominee.
Then he unveiled a much steelier persona than before. In a sign of the coming general election fight, Obama talked about “tough” diplomacy, and about putting pressure on Iraq’s leaders.
Tragically the fraud gets further credence from the inanities of revisionist communism - this time in the form of the heroic figure of Fidel Castro himself leader of the brilliant and determined Cuban revolution which has stood firm, despite its small resources, for 50 years against the non-stop intimidation, bullying and sabotage of the giant US.
Obama adds to his already reactionary agenda by also attacking Cuba too, pledging to uphold the embargo which has which has damaged its development heavily.
Castro correctly takes up this reactionariness and its criminal nature.
But he also drops in the phrase that Obama is “by far the most progressive of the candidates”.
What nonsense, born of the soft brained retreats of revisionism into notions of “good and bad” imperialisms and the possibilities of “peaceful pressure”.
Obama is just another face of imperialism; another trick in the book of fooling the world.
But the imperialist game is reaching the end and the crisis will turn more and more to revolutionary struggle.
Mugabe has the right idea, now making it clear that the struggle of the masses in Zimbabwe will not capitulate to the trickery of the CIA funded and lying “Movement for Democratic Change”, and a western manipulated election defeat but will fight a further liberation war, if needed, against imperialism.
Pity that ZANU ever went along with the “democracy” racket at all and did not build a Marxist clarity of proletarian dictatorship. It remains to be seen if it will take a communist path.
But that is what it required for the whole world.
Don Hoskins
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Discussion: Banning or deliberate avoidance of discussion on delicate issues around sexuality can only ever result in an increase in prejudice and bullying against homosexuals. Open polemic and debate leading to a common understanding and position, and then moving on, in the Leninist tradition is the only way to give clarity and leadership on all aspects of the human condition.
Attempts by members of the House of Lords to block all discussion on the possibility of any links between homosexuality and paedophilia only makes the struggle for understanding of this sensitive issue harder and, because of this, does nothing to protect homosexuals from bullying and violence. The motivations for this attempt at censorship by an establishment that has a long history of covering up, and acquiescence in, child sex abuse in children’s homes, boarding schools, churches, etc. as well as warmongering and slaughter worldwide also needs to be exposed.
Amendments to the Criminal and Justice bill going through the House of Lords follows on from previous legislation that purported to be aimed at stopping “Islamophobia” but was, in fact, an attempt to co-opt a tier of petty bourgeois Moslems and “liberals” into joining in with imperialism’s war of terror campaign against the anti-imperialist understanding and sentiment that is growing rapidly within Moslem communities. It also comes on the back of a completely reactionary campaign conducted by “gay rights” lobbyists and fake “left” anti-communists against any state that stands up to imperialism (Palestine, Iran, Zimbabwe, China, etc). That anti-religious or anti-homosexual hatred legislation can never stop such prejudice under capitalism is demonstrated by the discriminatory treatment of Moslem parents at Bristol primary schools who participated in protests against homosexual schoolbooks that included other, non-Moslem parents.
Further studies on homosexuality and paedophilia are necessary. Periodically, the working class has spontaneously protested against the presence of known paedophiles in council estates, etc. Such protests could, with provocation, easily spill over into irrational attacks on homosexuals out of a lack of understanding of the paedophile condition. A party that seeks to give revolutionary leadership to the working class needs to have as clear an understanding as possible of both homosexuality and paedophilia.
Studies are also necessary in order to understand and explain the responses of workers states to homosexuality and paedophilia, not least because accusatory fingers will always be pointed at countries such as Cuba for alleged “homophobia”.
Research conducted by Arguelles and Rich in 1984 (and published in a pro-gay book that collected articles aimed at “reclaiming the gay and lesbian past“) into the Cuban revolution’s response to homosexuality gives some illuminating insight into the revolutionary government’s policy immediately after the revolution. One of the few places in which homosexuals in pre-revolutionary Cuba, with its deep-seated machismo culture, were able to give expression to their desires was in the underground gangster-ridden Havana’s tourism sector, where homosexuals came into contact with Western tourists and the fathers and sons of Cuba’s decadent bourgeoisie.
The defeat of gangster capitalism and victory of the revolutionary forces in Cuba broke up this capitalist-orientated homosexual culture. It became necessary for the Cuban government to keep a close eye on areas of homosexual liaison. According to the authors “some veterans of the old underworld enclave joined counter-revolutionary activities or were pushed into them by the CIA. Other homosexuals, especially those from working class backgrounds or students from petty-bourgeois families, worked to integrate themselves into the revolution … Young homosexuals seeking contact with ‘the community’ in the bars and famous cruising areas of La Rampa were thus introduced to counter-revolutionary ideology and practice.” The need for strict controls on these centres of CIA-sponsored counter-revolutionary activities, intensifying following the US Bay of Pigs aggression, was demonstrated after a homosexual student leader and revolutionary war veteran, Rolando Cubela was recruited by the CIA to assassinate Castro.
Deep suspicion of homosexuality thus arose in part out of the already present machismo culture of Cuba, which Castro later acknowledged to be a problem (see below), but was also an understandable response to counter-revolutionary provocation. As late as 1979, the CIA was targeting homosexuals for counter-revolutionary propaganda; using blackmail and offering academic grants and publishing contracts to gay intelligentsia figures, for example, to attract them to defect to America. Despite this, as the revolution stabilised during the 1970s, homosexuality was no longer seen as a fundamental problem nor referred to in criminal terms. However, declarations for homosexuals to be removed from the field of education were made at the First National Congress on Education and Culture in 1971 and the Penal Code maintained many restrictions against homosexual practice.
The clandestine, conspiratorial and commodified culture of homosexuals in Cuba, made them highly amenable targets for CIA subversion and the Cuban state was right to be suspicious. This was not “homophobia”, but a sensible and correct use of its proletarian dictatorship to protect the revolution during a highly dangerous period, without ruling out the possibility that the machismo nature of Cuban culture at that time may have led to some arbitrariness in its implementation. There needs to be some research into the arguments made at the 1971 Congress in order to ascertain whether or not the declarations in favour of curbs on homosexuals in education arose out of a perceived or observed link between homosexuality and paedophilia, fears that family life might be subverted, fears of counter-revolutionary subversion in schools, or, as gay rights campaigners would allege, a result of irrational “homophobia”. These issues need to be raised and understood in order to counter the pro-imperialist propaganda of CIA-front organisations like Reporteur San Frontiere who use the “homophobia” allegation as a whip with which to beat the Cuban people.
Unfortunately, more recent interviews with Castro have failed to give much clarity. When interviewed by Borges in 1992, Castro ascribed the machismo culture of Cuba to be at root of the problem but he failed to address any of the justifiable concerns of CIA subversion that can be extrapolated from the pro-gay article quoted above, let alone touch upon the possibility that an unhealthy obsession with gay lifestyles above all else might leave homosexuals open to counter-revolutionary pressures and intrigue. In fact, there is little indication of scientific thought in Castro’s statements:
“I don’t consider homosexuality to be a phenomenon of degradation. I’ve always had a more rational approach, considering it to be one of the natural aspects and tendencies of human beings which should be respected. That’s how I view it. I think there should be consideration for a family in this situation. It would be good if families themselves had another mentality, another approach, when a circumstance of this nature occurs. I am absolutely opposed to any form of repression, contempt, scorn or discrimination with regard to homosexuals. That’s what I think.”
Where’s the psychology? What scientific enquiries have lead Castro to this conclusion? Of course prejudice against homosexuals should be opposed, but it would be more useful had Castro outlined the debates made around this issue within the Cuban Communist party and the wider Cuban society and what conclusions, if any, could be drawn from them. Without this, the statements made only give the impression of a capitulation before the PC anti-theory brigade, to the point of skating around a direct question on homosexual membership of the Communist party.
The EPSR’s expose of the ultimately reactionary nature of all single-issue campaigns (feminism, gay rights, black nationalism, etc.) has been consistently proved correct, and is now being proved correct again on the pro-imperialist nature of gay rights and fake “left” campaigning against Palestine, Zimbabwe, Iran, China, etc. The EPSR has also shown itself prepared to face up to the taunts of “homophobia” when it insists on using scientific methods to demonstrate that early child-rearing experiences are crucial in determining whether or not a child develops a homosexual personality, and the necessity of developing an understanding of all other delicate issues of sexuality. Further scientific study, understanding and clarification is required, however, of Roy Bull’s argument, in EPSR No.891, for example, that homosexuals have “well-known proclivities to paedophilia” and, as a result, should be discriminated from jobs in the caring professions.
It doesn’t take much surfing around the internet to see that the whole debate is emotionally charged, with well-funded militant gay rights campaigners on one side seeking to “prove” that homosexuality is perfectly normal and equally well-funded reactionary religious zealots on the other “proving” that homosexuality is an evil abomination; each side selectively choosing research finding to prove their arguments. The whole confusion this generates makes it difficult to come to a scientifically objective understanding of the issue.
Whilst exercising caution, some research into what is largely a male condition, does come through that sheds some light on the issue. Research conducted in 1984 with offenders has found that over a third targeted male children. This is a high percentage of the population, given the much lower percentage of homosexuality in the adult population (between 1 and 3 percent - not the 1 in 10 figure promoted by gay rights campaigners throughout the 1980s and 1990s). A further study of offenders conducted in 1988 found that 86% described themselves as either homosexual or bi-sexual. In 1990, it was found that, although victims of child sexual abuse are more likely to be girls, boys are large minority of the victims. However, a previous 1987 study had found that 59% of offenders against girls only had one victim, compared to 33% against boys, implying that offenders against boys were more likely to repeat the offence, leading some researchers to suggest that offenders against girls are not true paedophiles.
Despite some indication that boys are more likely to be victims of paedophiles than other types of sexual abusers, this data does not, however, demonstrate that there is a causal relationship between paedophilia and adult homosexuality. Nor does it suggest that all homosexuals have predilections towards paedophilia. However, it does not rule out that tendencies in that direction do exist either. Current research is inconclusive. Men in adult heterosexual relationships can be attracted to underage boys. Some paedophile men only prey on young girls, others target boys, and others abuse both boys and girls. Surveys into the extent to which fantasies about young boys permeate gay culture (in magazines, films, calls for the elimination of the age of content, etc.) may be illuminating when set against research into the fantasies of under-aged sex by heterosexual males. More understanding of the psychology of paedophilia is also required, as well as understanding of how the workers’ states dealt with this issue, including any mistakes they made in analysis or implementation of policy.
There are limits to what can be understood at the present time. It will take a world-wide communist revolution against the decadence and fascist confusion-mongering of capitalism and many decades of socialist development and construction before all matters arising out of human nature can start to be fully comprehended. That a more healthy homosexual outlook is possible can be gleamed from the 1984 study:
“But many still take the opportunity to visit lesbian and gay bars and bath houses in New York or San Francisco. Ironically, their own adjustment to a greater social integration in Cuba causes them to feel out of place in these sites, viewing their sexual consumerism as bizarre.”
There are questions that need to be asked in order to confidently be able to give leadership to the working class on issues of sexuality. Homosexuality needs to be discussed with sensitivity, not least because people coming to communism for the first time may be homosexuals themselves or have friends and relatives who are gay. Subjective denial that there might be a problem could be a major barrier to someone who genuinely wants to become part of the revolutionary movement, and it might take a great deal of time to work through this. However, attempts at censorship of scientific discussion needs to be fought vigorously and defeated. Overthrowing capitalism is the priority and the EPSR should not allow itself to be distracted from this. Only Leninist science can begin to provide the answers.
Phil Waincliffe
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Lalkar/cpgb-ml still blocking off their own cadres from Leninist perspectives on the imperialist warmongering crisis by their guru-worship of Stalin. ussr’s revisionist collapse is traceable philosophically to Stalin’s retreats from Marxist politics – and there’s no getting around this
The recent one-day conference of the CPGB-ML on capitalist crisis had an open character – which only served to highlight how blocked off this group’s cadres are from Leninist politics by the wretched opportunism of their leadership clinging to museum-Stalinist futility.
First, a presentation on the economics; followed by reasonable discussion; then a presentation on the politics of the crisis, followed by a reasonable discussion.
But clamping down on the discussion also took place: pathetic insults directed against the determinedly anti-Trotskyist EPSR as “a bunch of Trots”, “with no political achievements worth speaking of in 30 years” etc.
Challenged by the EPSR comrade present that the savage US Empire blitzkrieg warmongering was driving history on, and the need for revolution, and therefore the need to clarify what happened to the post-WWII vast Communist movement, which totally capitulated to reformism, leaving the Third World rebellion to be all-too often led by Islamic movements;, and challenged by the EPSR insisting that the collapse of the Communist movement and the final self-liquidation of the Soviet Union all sprang directly from the revisionist politics ushered in by Stalin’s dead-hand influence over the politics of the USSR and the Third International, the Lalkar leadership was incandescent: “We are not here to go over the issue of Stalin... but to my mind he advanced no policies that were not correct at the time he made them.”
But, the EPSR comrade pointed out, Stalin’s “Economic Problems” (1952) is a smoking gun of anti-Marxist nonsense (even if all the other evidence of Stalin’s huge role in instructing the CPs all over the world from the 1930s to the 1950s to develop popular frontist (ie. reformist) alliances and programmes, is denied.)
In this work, Stalin says that the Western camp will gradually be overwhelmed peacefully by the weight of the economic development that will be achieved by the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Red China.
It was drivel. No socialist production system could hope to compete in the production of consumer goods for its population -- because Western monopoly-capitalism will sweat the blood out of colonial labour and labour in the metropolitan countries to create vast profits and flood shops with commodities. More importantly, Stalin’s views are anti-Marxist drivel because, after WWII, so much rival capitalist capacity had been smashed (plus 50m dead) (on top of the destruction of capacity capitalism “achieved” in WWI and the Great Depression of the 1930s) that the capitalist-commodity-boom could be unleashed after WWII.
The boom-spiral upwards after horrific slump destruction is as much a part of Marxist economics as its understanding of capitalism’s “over-production” crisis slump-spiral downwards.
On top of that, Lenin’s understanding of how the world is redivided by imperialist world war between the imperialist bandits (“Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism”), which meant that at the end of WWII the imperialist gangsters had accepted the over-arching domination of US imperialism, thereby setting the stage for renewed general boom conditions was thoroughly revised by Stalin --- who admitted he was revising Lenin.
BUT IT WAS BUNKUM!
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union strove mightily post-war, with gigantic achievements in industry, health, welfare, sport and science -- but the notion that the world would peacefully become socialist because the socialist camp would surpass capitalism for wealth creation was exposed as a bitter illusion.
Far from galvanising the Soviet camp, it was a perspective that shattered all confidence in the socialist revolution, and left the bureaucratic leadership more addled by an inferiority complex than ever before.
The policies of reformist popular frontist CP politics that went hand-in-hand with this perspective simply destroyed all revolutionary politics in any CP that adopted them.
To pretend that any group calling itself communist can just get on blindly with “leading the working class” but dismiss this issue of Stalin’s revisionist confusion is totally counter-revolutionary. It is dead, museum, crass lunacy, and accounts for untold human tragedy across the former Soviet Union today (see latest BBC2 series on today’s Russia) where the great Russian working class is paralysed from taking on Putin’s Bonapartism and cartel exploitation of their lands because no one, it seems, has the ability to set up a truly Leninist party, because all attempts founder on the legacy of Stalinism.
Why is it so destructive of the revival of a socialist revolutionary movement to crush the oligarchs’ robber capitalism and restore the Soviet Union?
Because it has no convincing perspective that the global-monopoly imperialist system can only lead to war, exploitation and destitution, meaning the revolution is the only means to achieve a worthwhile life for the hundreds of millions of people in the former Soviet territories. The mass Soviet enthusiasm for building socialism and the international revolution was totally done in by the Stalinist CPSU’s revisionist degeneration (started by Stalin in the 1930s) that “peace had to be maintained at all costs”, and for this to be the line of the Western CPs too. The permanent peace campaigning against Washington’s non-stop NAZI arms-race warmongering became such a psychological burden on the Soviet working class that they were suckers for Gorbachev’s liquidation of “all the things that worry imperialism -- the KGB, the Red Army, socialist ideology, so in the great human interest of peace, they should all be thrown away”. They were, the USSR collapsed, and war and pestilence, prostitution and Mafia capitalism spread like wildfire across the former Soviet territories.
In the three decades previously, all the Western CPs turned from being hopelessly reformist into bastions of anti-communist reaction.
That’s what happens when politics gives up on the revolutionary perspective and does not develop along the Leninist lines of Marxist science and the rigour of proper polemics.
Take Lalkar’s dunder-headed support for Arafat’s corrupt protégé, Abbas in Palestine. It is a spear through the heart of their inanity. But the Lalkar leadership still pretends that EPSR criticism of their long-time post-Arafat support for this Western and Zionist stooge is “nit-picking”.
Most Lalkar supporters now seem thoroughly embarrassed by this blunder, so why can’t the Lalkar leadership even now admit to a mistake, or even go one better and admit that its mistake was pointed out by the EPSR, and that Lalkar’s line changed only when Hamas won the Gaza strip in an election, and Abbas was on the very point of attempting (with Western and Zionist arms) to slaughter the Hamas leadership in Gaza to a man? (Only being stopped by the alertness of the Hamas movement, which nipped the plot in the bud using force of arms – shocking the West to its boots).
Why can’t the Lalkar leadership admit the error???
Because its entire method has absolutely no connection with the Leninist method of seeking polemical discussion to clarify issues and enrich revolutionary theory but, instead, only echoes the ghastly bureaucratic stifling of the ROLE of revolutionary theory (out of petty-bourgeois fear of struggling to understand in the harsh battles with imperialist pressure), inflicted on the Stalinist parties (Stalin’s ability to stay the largely loyal Leninist under Lenin himself, faded under the pressure of imperialist warmongering against the USSR and its own titanic peasant-backwardness difficulties into the class-compromise of permanent “peaceful co-existence” (as opposed to the tactic as pursued by Lenin).
But even now, the CPGB-ML/Lalkar leadership clings to promoting the impossible “two-state solution” for the conflict between the heroic insurgent Palestinian nation and the murderous Western-backed Zionist colonial implant.
Why back this poisonous non-starter, which is constantly presented by Bush, Blair, Brown, the Zionist negotiators, and the Western politicians and media as a “real hope for the region”?????
Because the Lalkarites simply don’t want to say that the only thing for the Palestinians to do is to fight, and get better and better at it, and head more and more strongly towards an implacable Leninist-type leadership (better than Ho Chi Minh, if possible) to defeat their tormentors. The Lalkar line is a philosophical position of always seeking a class-compromise solution, of always believing that “if enough well-meaning people stand up and press for something then imperialism will concede it” ie. total reformism. Whatever lies about “peace” the West and the Zionists tell, the Palestinians will be slaughtered until they defeat the colonialists.
An unequal struggle, requiring great political efforts and strategies, certainly. But promoting the crazy delusion that the Zionists would give the Palestinians a small homeland is truly monstrous. Over the spurious Oslo accords, the Arafat-Abbas traitors to the cause were reduced to a rump; backing these bourgeois cowards with the philosophical filth of museum-Stalinist class collaboration, marked one almighty piece of brutally stupid treachery by the Lalkar group; still refusing to discard this nonsense, when group members are wounded by it; when the Abbas traitors are being armed by the West and the Zionists (!!) to kill Hamas; and when the EPSR has provided chapter and verse on the insane politics that lead to such treachery, just piles up the dishonour.
Chris Barratt
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