Recent issue
No 1351 12th June 2009
New Labour panic, sleaze exposés, election meltdown and collapse should be welcomed by the working class as a sign the old “parliamentary democracy” racket is historically bankrupt just like monopoly capitalist bourgeois dictatorship it fronts for. Yugoslavian, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, the catastrophic failure of the finance system, rising international tension and the political implosion are all part of the same disaster for the profit system heading back once more to the horrifying World War destruction. “No to war” fake-“left” politics will not stop it, only complete overturn led by Leninist revolutionary understanding
Huge new questions about how the society’s and the world’s future now unfold are being raised by the implosion, degenerate backstabbing and sleaze paralysis of New Labour and, behind it, the entire corrupt, cynical, and degenerate “parliament”.
And not just in the moribund former “British Empire”.
Election meltdown in Europe, – and the increasing realisation that the “new broom” of Oabama-ism has changed nothing essential about the warmongering, torturing and exploitation reality of US imperialism – further confirms that the “democracy” game is losing its grip and falling apart across the board.
Voting figures underline completely that this meltdown is not simply a “turn away” from Labour within the old framework.
The giant raspberry delivered by the working class meant that turnout figures were so low as to be meaningless, a mere 34% of those “entitled to vote”, as the bourgeois press always slyly adds, but even lower as a proportion of the total adult population when adding in the significant percentage which for various reasons, from illiteracy to disgust or conscious rejectionism, simply never registers.
On top of that, even more than in the unprecedented declines of the last general elections, such voting as there was from those who retain some illusions in the process, almost entirely expressed hostility to the New Labour charlatans (as a general expression of “the government”) and was far from some great positive surge of support for any of the other parliamentary opportunists.
The entire press, TV and politicians’ circus went through the normal pantomime of “claiming victory” and carrying out interviews as if it all means something, in a desperate effort to keep the whole thing rolling. But it was clear from the voting patterns that none of them was a “winner”, as is clear from the percentage change of the huge Labour collapse being spread evenly across the spectrum of “alternatives”, with 1% here and 2% there for the UKIPs and the Greens and the Scottish or Welsh nationalists.
Even the trumpeted “turn to fascist nationalism” sinisterly hyped-up by the endless publicity given the BNP in the run-up to the election by Labour politicians and the bourgeois owned and controlled “free press” (underlining even further the twisted role it plays in the great lie of democracy too) – was absent, with a significant drop in the numbers of backward or sometimes simply disillusioned elements supporting it and only a relative gain because of the overall disillusionment.
The European elections also show similar, if slightly less pronounced, universal dismay at the reformist promises of “change through parliament” not a “swing to the right”.
It looks like a historical watershed in the shattering of illusions.
That can only be a good thing not the “terrible problem” the petty bourgeois agonise over.
It means there has never been a better time to fight for revolutionary theory and expose the lies of parliamentary “free market” progress, and all those who in one way or another help sustain it.
A massive political vacuum now exists, triggered superficially by universal disgust and anger at the foetid squabbling and self-seeking jostling for position of the Labour “comrades”, prepared to go to any treacherous backstabbing length – to each other and to the working class – to save their own skins, sacrificing first the Speaker and potentially their own leader and colleagues in a bloodletting scapegoating frenzy.
Their squealing rush down the sinking ship’s hawsers would make even rats look dignified.
But the greasy opportunism of the MPs is not the real issue.
As Leninism has constantly warned the working class for the last 30 years, beneath “scandals” is the much deeper reality that the monopoly capitalist world is being driven into catastrophic economic failure, now glaringly clear and unstoppable whatever pretend “green shoots” of recovery the ruling class and its slimy New Labour stooges might have temporarily conjured up by insane levels of even further additional credit creation (following behind the US’s even larger overheated printing presses).
At the same time its entire worldwide exploitation dominance is under unprecedented and irreversibly increasing challenged by Third World rebellion and upheaval. Though, at present, the revolt comes in a hundred different and sometimes bizarre forms, from shades of “religious” militancy and insurgency through the Middle East, to Somalian “piracy”, indigenous population resistance to oil exploitation in Peruvian jungle or the Nigerian delta, island insurgency in the Philippines, assorted leftward populist movements in Latin America, anti-imperialist land seizure doggedness in Zimbabwe or full-out Maoist revolution in Nepal, and not to miss the heroic communist resistance of the Cuban workers state now in its 50th stunning year, it is all an expression of the intolerableness of imperialist diktat and endless plundering exploitation of resources and near-slavery levels of labour.
Setbacks, confusion, and internal conflict are guaranteed but these are historic growth pains as gradually these struggles are becoming more and more coherent and organised and inflict defeat and stalemate on imperialist rule.
Iraq is a disaster of hostility and chaos with imperialism forced to retreat and depart without effectively solving anything (though it will leave huge bases behind). Afghanistan is an endless quagmire, comparable to Vietnam for the US in some senses (though the historical period and situation of imperialism is different) and has created such hatred and hostility that resistance is spreading uncontrollably into the hugely populated next-door Pakistan, inflamed even further by the American imperialist money and arrogant pressure on the military there to brutally crackdown, and by the increasingly hated “drone” blitz interventions by direct and unasked US action causing indiscriminate murderous civilian massacres.
And there is the supremely dogged and heroic Palestinian people who have shown growing courage and determination over 60 years of suffering and genocidal abuse by Zionism.
The billions worldwide will eventually develop and built the necessary leadership to become a full communist Leninist challenge to capitalism.
There is no stabilisation possible of the crisis anywhere, which is destined to unroll into the greatest Depression disaster and turmoil in history, and intensifying trade and economic conflict as the great imperialist powers fight out the battle for imploding markets, in cars, electronics, food resources, energy, oil and everything else. All the big powers are already using state support and “bank backing” in their own economies to protect their own industries however bankrupted, at the expense of allcomer rivals (as in the giant battles to subsidise sections of the hugely overproducing car industry by the US, Germany, France, Italy or Japan currently etc etc).
And the working class is already being forced into wage cuts, job speed-up and slashing of pensions, whether or not there is any transient weak “recovery” for the bosses’ companies, with slashing cuts in public social provision coming and perhaps inflation on top.
The pattern of international tensions, and whipped-up chauvinism (not just from the BNP but the anti-communist fake-“left”, including New Labour itself and the “left” Trade Union leadership too, like No2EU feeding the nationalist “British jobs” narrowness) is already well down the road which led twice in the 20th century to the horrors of total war.
None of the parliamentary “solutions”, from the “leftest” protesters to the racist reaction of the BNP will change anything because the plunge into chaos and war is driven by the contradictions and tangles of the capitalist mechanisms of running and ordering world production and exploitation.
Apart from its monstrous unfairness, brutality and tyrannical exploitation and oppression, capitalism eventually just does not work, clogged solid with the profit-demanding “surplus” capital it relentlessly and greedily accumulates (see page six).
Only trade war, slump and destruction of the “surplus” can solve the contradictions if capitalism is to continue.
Only revolutionary politics can finish off the entire stinking cesspit mess altogether, by overturning the tyranny of outmoded and capitalist monopoly world rule to take power and establish planned socialism and human cooperation worldwide to develop the rational planned use of production and resources, under the discipline of a dictatorship of the proletariat building longterm a society based on rationality and self discipline where the state can eventually wither away.
It is the only rational, sane and coherent way out.
Electoral rejection does not mean that this is yet accepted by the great majority, still misled and deliberately confused by the fake-”left” pretend revolutionaries and reformists who mostly help sustain the great anti-communist myths about “tyrannies and totalitarian oppression” which capitalism constantly pours out, (helping feed the working class back into demands for reforms and “left” support for the government, by constantly “demanding” that it “do something” rather than exposing its complete participation in running the foul and degenerate capitalist order).
Equally confusing are supposed “hard man” museum Stalinists, doggedly and dishonestly refuse to look at the philosophical failings which led to the pointless liquidation of the first titanic brilliant 70 year long experiment in working class rule in the Soviet Union and which almost wiped out mass confidence worldwide in communism because of a long drawn out retreat from revolutionary perspectives.
Their posturing and posing is either as bound up with fatuous “no to war” ineffectual protest as any of the remaining swamp “left” or dementedly swinging around to support for assorted shades of leadership weirdness across the planet without any scientific perspective e.g. calling for “victory to” Islamic insurgency in Iraq (rather than explaining the Leninist position of welcoming any defeat for imperialism from whatever source (even from barbarous Saddamism had it happened) but fostering no illusions in barmy religion or backward anti-communism, remaining clear that only Leninist communist leadership will solve the world’s problems).
But all this murky rigidity and muddle is about to be exposed to a glaring light of discussion and debate as the crisis forces the working class into the greatest battles in history not just to hang on in the Depression but for the survival and progress of human society, demanding the clearest scientific leadership understanding.
A great breakdown point has clearly been reached in the old illusions in Parliament which have bound the working class hand and foot to ruling class dominance for the last century or more in the rich metropolitan countries, and as crisis worsens that can only unravel into a break with all the class rule illusions, not just of capitalism’s centuries of dominance but of all class rule throughout history.
It is far deeper than just the final collapse of cynical New Labourism.
Despite the apparent gloating of the Tories at the terminal discomfort of the Brown government the ruling class cannot be at all happy about the chaotic floundering and dismay of the reformist racket – all shades “old” and “new” Labour.
Firstly and superficially the Tories, the Liberals and all the rest are as much up to their necks in the personal gain and self-interest as any of the rest of the parliamentary gang – even more so because their bourgeois privileged backgrounds makes their money-grubbing self-serving even more venal and their pretence about “public standards” even more sickening.
But secondly, and much more critically, the ruling class needs the great pretence of an “alternative” to keep the entire facade of parliament in place.
If Labourism, and “left” parliamentarianism collapses in a festering heap of smelly “ordure, ordure” as the cartoonists have put it, how will it keep in place the great confidence trick of “parliamentary representation” at all?
How long will the ordinary working class remain wedded to a system that offers them only the wealth-owning Tories – or the ineffectual and backward rural Liberals – even if the most obvious moat-owning chinless wonders have been cleared out?
It was only the New Labour “project” which rescued the moribund British ruling class anyway from the sordid cash for questions scandal in the 1990s, itself the result of the intensifying crisis conditions for imperialism which have been unfolding for decades, with the entire imperialist order permanently teetering on the edge of disaster.
Its shallow spin trickery of glitz and advertising to convince everyone black-is-white and “things are really improving” even as health, education, transport etc etc etc were mortgaged and sold out to the profiteers, all paid for on the “never-never” of PFI and unheard of levels of world credit inflation, was a desperate last throw of the dice to sustain the already discredited “democracy” fraud.
Without it the wheels would already have come off Parliament, leaving only the imposition of direct dictatorship to maintain bourgeois class rule (as effectively prevails in most Third World imperialist stooge regimes) and teaching powerful lessons to the domestic masses in the fascist class-domination tyrannical reality of capitalist rule and exploitation.
On an even longer timescale the ruling class has long understood that the Tweedledee/Tweedledum parliamentary game was by far the best way of heading off more fundamental challenges to its rule and dominance, causing maximum philosophical confusion and keeping direct state force and coercion in the background.
Universal suffrage and parliament has been the greatest trick of the ruling class to hold back revolutionary struggle, with its pretences of “involvement in decisions” while capital gets on with making all the significant and important moves, from local development profiteering to giant investments and war conflicts.
But if illusion was to be realistic there had to be some concessions – only possible in the rich heartland of imperialism as partly emerges in a recent bourgeois press piece:
I believe that the current political crisis has little to do with the expenses scandal, still less with Gordon Brown’s leadership. It arises because our economic system can no longer extract wealth from other nations. For the past 300 years, the revolutions and reforms experienced by almost all other developed countries have been averted in Britain by foreign remittances.
The social unrest that might have transformed our politics was instead outsourced to our colonies and unwilling trading partners. The rebellions in Ireland, India, China, the Caribbean, Egypt, South Africa, Malaya, Kenya, Iran and other places we subjugated were the price of political peace in Britain. After decolonisation, our plunder of other nations was sustained by the banks. Now, for the first time in three centuries, they can no longer deliver, and we must at last confront our problems.
There will probably never be a full account of the robbery this country organised, but there are a few snapshots. In his book Capitalism and Colonial Production, Hamza Alavi estimates that the resource flow from India to Britain between 1793 and 1803 was in the order of £2m a year, the equivalent of many billions today. The economic drain from India, he notes, “has not only been a major factor in India’s impoverishment … it has also been a very significant factor in the industrial revolution in Britain”. As Ralph Davis observes in The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade, from the 1760s onwards India’s wealth “bought the national debt back from the Dutch and others … leaving Britain nearly free from overseas indebtedness when it came to face the great French wars from 1793”.
In France by contrast, as Eric Hobsbawm notes in The Age of Revolution, “the financial troubles of the monarchy brought matters to a head”. In 1788 half of France’s national expenditure was used to service its debt: the “American War and its debt broke the back of the monarchy”.
Even as the French were overthrowing the ancien regime, Britain’s landed classes were able to strengthen their economic power, seizing common property from the country’s poor by means of enclosure. Partly as a result of remittances from India and the Caribbean, the economy was booming and the state had the funds to ride out political crises. Later, after smashing India’s own industrial capacity, Britain forced that country to become a major export market for our manufactured goods, sustaining industrial employment here (and avoiding social unrest) long after our products and processes became uncompetitive.
Colonial plunder permitted the British state to balance its resource deficits as well. For some 200 years a river of food flowed into this country from such places as Ireland, India and the Caribbean. In The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger reveals that in 1748 Jamaica alone sent 17,400 tons of sugar to Britain; by 1815 this had risen to 73,800. It was all produced by stolen labour.
Just as grain was sucked out of Ireland at the height of its great famine, so Britain continued to drain India of food during its catastrophic hungers. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis shows that between 1876 and 1877 wheat exports to the UK from India doubled as subsistence there collapsed, and several million died of starvation. In the North-Western provinces famine was wholly engineered by British policy, as good harvests were exported to offset poor English production in 1876 and 1877.
Britain, in other words, outsourced famine as well as social unrest. There was terrible poverty in this country in the second half of the 19th century, but not mass starvation. The bad harvest of 1788 helped precipitate the French revolution, but the British state avoided such hazards. Others died on our behalf.
In the late 19th century, Davis shows, Britain’s vast deficits with the United States, Germany and its white dominions were balanced by huge annual surpluses with India and (as a result of the opium trade) China. For a generation “the starving Indian and Chinese peasantries … braced the entire system of international settlements, allowing England’s continued financial supremacy to temporarily co-exist with its relative industrial decline”. Britain’s trade surpluses with India allowed the City to become the world’s financial capital.
Its role in British colonisation was not a passive one. The bankruptcy, and subsequent British takeover, of Egypt in 1882 was hastened by a loan from Rothschild’s bank whose execution, Newsinger records, amounted to “fraud on a massive scale”. Jardine Matheson, once the biggest narco-trafficking outfit in history (it dominated the Chinese opium trade), later formed a major investment bank, Jardine Fleming. It was taken over by JP Morgan Chase in 2000.
We lost our colonies, but the plunder has continued by other means. As Joseph Stiglitz shows in Globalisation and its Discontents, the capital liberalisation forced on Asian economies by the IMF permitted northern traders to loot hundreds of billions of dollars, precipitating the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Poorer nations have also been strong-armed into a series of amazingly one-sided treaties and commitments, such as trade-related investment measures, bilateral investment agreements and the EU’s economic partnership agreements. If you have ever wondered how a small, densely populated country which produces very little supports itself, I would urge you to study these asymmetric arrangements.
But now, as John Lanchester demonstrates in a fascinating essay in the London Review of Books, the City could be fatally wounded. The nation that relied on financial services may take generations to recover from their collapse. The great British adventure – three centuries spent pillaging the labour, wealth and resources of other countries – is over.
This Guardian hijacking of the long ago developed theory of imperialist super-profits and its corrupting effect on the upper layers of labour, which first Engels and then Lenin explained more than 100 years ago, is an interesting sign of how dire conditions have become and will become for imperialism, and how desperately near the surface is the collapse of the entire racket.
The version presented here in an eclectic hodge-podge of academic quotes by “left” reformist George Monbiot, dressed up as “the theory that is mine (cough-cough)”, is useful enough for the historical detail it references and the revelations of pessimism in the most bourgeois finance circles (despite conflating the bourgeois revolution against feudalism in France with the quite different rising proletarian struggle in Britain where the bourgeoisie had already cut of the king’s head in 1649 to establish capitalist rule).
But there is no mention of the long Marxist grasp of this question which predates all these studies – and for good reason since articles like these are part and parcel of deliberate avoidance and hostility to revolutionary clarity.
Nor does it mention the constant revolutionary upheavals from the Gordon riots and the Luddites, to the very coherent armed Chartist movement, just before the close-by European upsurge of 1848-51.
Nor does the “modern plunder continued by other means”, suggesting bankers’ trickery, quite get over the reality of post-2nd World War imperialism which, while it uses plenty of bullying by organised international finance (IMF, World Bank), has also involved more than 400 bloody suppressions since 1945 including the economic strangulation and starvation of Cuba and Zimbabwe among others; brutal concentration camp military destruction of socialist or anti-imperialist movements in Greece, Malaysia, Kenya and more; sponsored war and terror to bring down the Nicaraguan revolution or Ethiopia’s Mengistu socialist regime, (and the use of its CIA stooge successor to prevent any anti-imperialist progress in next-door Somalia) and scorched earth sabotage of many more anti-imperialist struggles such as the Congo, Angola and Mozambique; assassinations, coups and bloody torture in Chile and much of Latin America with endless death-squad terrorising and murderous mayhem, the cold-blooded coup-massacre of over one million Indonesians merely suspected of being communist sympathisers in 1965 (on CIA and MI6 information), indiscriminate civilian blitzing of Libya, Lebanon, and now Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the total war destruction of Vietnam, Kampuchea and North Korea.
Numerous monstrous and tyrannous regimes have been deliberately installed and maintained like the notorious ton-ton macoute fascism of Papa and Baby doc in grindingly poor Haiti, Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Java, repeated military or corrupt civilian governments in Pakistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Mubarak in Egypt, Idi Amin to depose anti-imperialist Milton Obote in Uganda, military regimes in Nigeria, CIA sponsored General Pinochet in Chile and similar figures in most other Latin American countries, the Turkish generals, and the assorted varieties of neo-fascists installed as “democracy” in the counter-revolutionary parodies in Eastern Europe following the liquidationism of Gorbachev.
Palestine and its people have suffered constant repeated genocidal destruction via the proxy fascist Zionists, paid and supported by US imperialism.
On top of all this (which is just a sample) the world has furthermore been subject to the constant background terror of the vast nuclear and conventional arsenals of US imperialism, overwhelmingly greater than any other power and the only country ever to have used fission-based Armageddon weapons in anger (not to beat the already defeated Japanese but as an arbitrary and casually inhuman “demonstration”, to terrify and intimidate the communist Soviet Union).
It was held back from doing so again only by the strength, skill and resistance of the workers states, managing in record time to develop their own counter-weapons (a giant achievement in both supremely clever espionage and technological skill and infrastructure to carry the reality through).
The current North Korean workers state, facing the renewed imperialist crisis warmongering which has already seen two victim countries bombed to pieces (and Pakistan on the way), has quite reasonably just done the same, despite the appalling economic sacrifice and cost involved, and the arrogant hypocrisy of the West’s bogus UN non-proliferation programme, “condemning” it for supposedly “threatening the world”.
Does not the 25 year long possession of secret nuclear weapons by the demented Zionists threaten the world and is that not much more like to be used aggressively?
All this blitzkrieging and torture has been done in the name of “democracy”, while (and so that) the profit was ripped out from the billions of dirt-poor workers of the Third World plantations and sweat shop factories by fascist and gangster stooge regimes, installed, bribed and sustained the dominance of big capital and the major powers.
The entire pretence was maintained by keeping the heartlands of imperialism sweetened with the colonial plunder, as described, though not just Britain but all the rich imperialist nations have taken such advantage of the “super-profits” sweated out from near-slave labour in the Third World colonies and post-war neo-colonial finance colonialism, to maintain the fraud of “freedom and democracy”.
It has been the greatest weapon of all against revolutionary communist understanding.
At home, where it could be afforded, it was an easier, more comfortable and a more effective way to rule than any direct (fascist) expression of capitalist dictatorship, while its giant fraud of “better living standards”, built on the plunder, could constantly be presented as the desirable way to live to the colonial masses so that they could equally be fooled by prospect of “achieving democracy”, like their “betters”.
Equally, those places that saw through it and understood that imperialism offered nothing but sweatshop labour and rebelled (inspired firstly by the USSR’s great achievements), to build socialism or at least to get out from under imperialist colonial diktat in the wave of anti-imperialist struggle post-1945, could be constantly subverted and undermined with a ludicrous comparison between the pirated-wealth-driven glitz and progress of the West and the much stodgier and less immediately consumerist, but steady and fairer, non-alienated growth of supposedly “grey” socialism, or with the inevitable grinding poverty and filth of the colonies, constantly stripped of their products and resources so that even the richest endowed (like the Congo e.g.) were kept in thrall (and from where the Soviet Union’s achievements were understood as a giant stride forwards).
Tragically this shallow philistinism eventually succeeded in undermining even the Moscow USSR revisionist leadership which was deluded, initially with Stalin’s straight-line non-dialectical revisions of revolutionary Leninism, into a perspective of simply overtaking a “contained” capitalism after World War Two – (see previous multiple EPSR critiques of Stalin’s 1952 “Economic Problems of Socialism”).
When economically the much fairer labour conditions of developing socialism could not keep up with imperialist sweatshop forced production levels, the inheritors of Stalin abandoned the still developing and growing (even the 1980s) workers state economy for the supposed “organisation and stimulus” benefits of the “free market”, forgetting all the lessons of imperialist exploitation which alone makes it possible and, equally, of the glitz and glamour’s eventual inevitable catastrophic failure, as the world is now experiencing.
But more importantly the Marxist view shows how all this was only sold to the working class through the influence of layers upon layers of fake-”lefts” of assorted degrees preaching the parliamentary road and “working within the rules” even when they professed to be seeking “revolutionary” change.
Labourism and official class collaborating Trade Unionism was a crucial component of the democracy racket from the turn of the twentieth century when the old Whig-Tory rivalries of the ruling class (industrial versus land-owning) would no longer do to hold back the working class and the rise of revolutionary understanding was gaining massively in the advanced industrialised working class of Europe, particularly Germany and France, and of course the new USSR.
It was headed off by the petty bourgeois influenced layers of the “labour aristocracy” which built up in the imperialist countries, benefiting from the trickle of imperialist plunder allowed them, and corrupting sounder, potentially revolutionary, instincts in the mass of the working class.
Layers of pseudo-”lefts” helped sustain the mainstream reformists with promises of “influence and pressure for the working class” and in post-1945 war times, even professed “communists”, slavishly following the Stalinist “peaceful road” revisions of Marxism which so far retreated from revolution that they led finally to the deluded abandonment of the USSR workers state. Understanding of these questions – how Marxism was bent, altered, twisted and confused by the “democracy” fraud by numerous opportunist threads and trends in the workers movement, is at the centre of the majority of the arguments and polemics that Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and Vladimir Lenin wrote in over 100 volumes of unsurpassed philosophy and reason to untangle the confusions and prevarications of capitalist professors and “economists”, multiple fake-”left” layers of reformists, and self-declared “revolutionary” revisionists and Trotsky who changed and altered the fundamentals of the revolutionary philosophy developed by Marx and Engels.
It has been a powerful tool for the ruling working class to swamp society with consumerist shallowness and, lately, celebrity fatuousness, heading off the understanding that it is only the constant threat of revolutionary upheaval which ever produced any reforms as Lenin explained:
“We must choose” - this is the argument the opportunists have always used to justify themselves, and they are using it now. Big things cannot be achieved at one stroke. We must fight for small but achievable things. How do we know whether they are achievable? They are achievable if the majority of the political parties, or of the most “influential” politicians, agree with them. The larger the number of politicians who agree with some tiny improvement, the easier it is to achieve it. We must not be utopians and strive after big things. We must be practical politicians; we must join in the demand for small things, and these small things will facilitate the fight for the big ones. We regard the small things as the surest stage in the struggle for big things.
That is how all the opportunists, all the reformists, argue; unlike the revolutionaries. That is how the Rightwing Social-Democrats argue about a Duma Cabinet. The demand for a constituent assembly is a big demand. It cannot be achieved immediately. By no means everyone is consciously in favour of this demand.* But the whole State Duma, that is to say, the vast majority of politicians - that is to say “the whole people” - is in favour of a Duma Cabinet. We must choose - between the existing evil and a very small rectification of it, because the largest number of those who are in general dissatisfied with the existing evil are in favour of this “very small” rectification. And by achieving the small thing, we shall facilitate our struggle for the big one.
We repeat: this is the fundamental, the typical argument of all opportunists all over the world. To what conclusion does this argument inevitably lead? To the conclusion that we need no revolutionary programme, no revolutionary party, and no revolutionary tactics. What we need are reforms, nothing more. We do not need a revolutionary Social-Democratic Party. What we need is a party of democratic and socialist reforms. Indeed, is it not clear that there will always be people who admit that the existing state of affairs is unsatisfactory? Of course, always. Is it not also clear that the largest number of discontented people will always be in favour of the smallest rectification of this unsatisfactory situation? Of course, always. Consequently, it is our duty, the duty of advanced and “class conscious” people, always to support the smallest demands for the rectification of an evil. This is the surest and most practical policy to pursue; and all talk about “fundamental” demands, and so forth, is merely the talk of “utopians”, merely “revolutionary phrasemongering”. We must choose - and we must always choose between the existing evil and the most moderate of the schemes in vogue for its rectification.
That is exactly how the German opportunist Social-Democrats argued. They said, in effect: There is a social-liberal trend which demands the repeal of the anti-socialist laws, a reduction of the working day, insurance against illness, and so on. A fairly large section of the bourgeoisie supports these demands. Do not repel it by tactless conduct, offer it a friendly hand, support it, and then you will be practical politicians, you will achieve small, but real benefits for the working class, and the only thing that will suffer from your tactics will be the empty words about “revolution”. You cannot make a revolution now, in any case. One must choose between reaction and reform.
The French ministerial socialists argued exactly like the Bernsteinians.’” They said in effect: We must choose between reaction and the bourgeois radicals, who promise a number of practical reforms. We must support these radicals, support their Cabinets; phrases about social revolution are merely the chatter of “Blanquists”, “anarchists”, “utopians”, and so forth.
What is the main flaw in’ all these opportunist ‘arguments? It is that in fact they substitute the bourgeois theory of “united”, “social” progress for the socialist theory of the class struggle as the only real driving force of history. According to the theory of socialism, i.e., of Marxism (non-Marxist socialism is not worth serious discussion nowadays), the real driving force of history is the revolutionary class struggle; reforms are a subsidiary product of this struggle, subsidiary because they express unsuccessful attempts to weaken, to blunt this struggle, etc. According to the theory of bourgeois philosophers, the driving force of progress is the unity of all elements in society who realise the “imperfections” of certain of its institutions. The first theory is materialist; the second is idealist. The first is revolutionary; the second is reformist. The first serves as the basis for the tactics of the proletariat in modern. capitalist countries. The second serves as the basis of the tactics of the bourgeoisie.
A logical deduction from the second theory is the tactics of ordinary bourgeois progressives: always and everywhere support “what is better”; choose between reaction and the extreme Right of the forces that are opposed to reaction. A logical deduction from the first theory is that the advanced class must pursue independent revolutionary tactics. We shall never reduce our tasks to that of supporting the slogans of the reformist bourgeoisie that are most in vogue. We pursue an independent policy and put forward only such reforms as are undoubtedly favourable to the interests of the revolutionary struggle, that undoubtedly enhance the independence, class-consciousness and fighting efficiency of the proletariat. Only by such tactics can reforms from above, which are always halfhearted, always hypocritical, and always conceal some bourgeois or police snare, be made innocuous.
More than that. Only by such tactics can real progress be achieved in the matter of important reforms. This may sound paradoxical, but its truth is confirmed by the whole history of the international Social-Democratic movement. Reformist tactics are the least likely to secure real reforms. The most effective way to secure real reforms is to pursue the tactics of the revolutionary class struggle. Actually, reforms are won as a result of the revolutionary class struggle, as a result of its independence, mass force and steadfastness. Reforms are always false, ambiguous and permeated with the spirit of Zubatovism31; they are real only in proportion to the intensity of the class struggle. By merging our slogans with those of the reformist bourgeoisie we weaken the cause of revolution and, consequently, the cause of reform as well, because we thereby diminish the independence, fortitude and strength of the revolutionary classes.
To forget the real significance of such a reform, as an attempt on the part of the Cadets to strike a bargain with the autocracy, means substituting the liberal-bourgeois philosophy of progress for Marxism. By supporting such a reform, by including it among our slogans, we dim the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat and weaken its independence and fighting capacity. By upholding our old revolutionary slogans in their entirety, we
Strengthen the actual struggle, and thereby increase the probability of reforms and the possibility of turning them to the advantage of the revolution, and not of reaction.
June 1906: ONCE AGAIN ABOUT THE DUMA CABINET
The ruling class has become ever more addicted to this super-profit fraud such that the entire post-Second World War period has been built on endless printing of dollars and the constant retreat by the ruling class from fully taking on the working class in its own countries, and the bribery and buying of regimes abroad to maintain imperialist dominance on its behalf.
It cannot last because the unchallenged expansion of monopoly capital cannot last, but over and over it has put off the moment of confrontation when crisis will force the necessity of suppression of the working class even in the richest countries – and such few forays as it did make with Reagan/Thatcherism proved difficult enough.
That it got anywhere against the titanic and heroic miners strike for example was largely due to the failure of the leadership then – despite Scargillism’s personal bravery in leading the fight - to break with all the old traditions of reformist philistinism and demands such as the “Plan for Coal” which called on a Labour Government for more by now unworkable reform (to sustain the industry). It was an impossibility from an increasingly out-competed British imperialist monopoly capitalism that could neither afford it any more or dared to confront the pressures of international capital to do it and a political impossibility of trying to revive already discredited reformism.
But even after 1984 the fears of the ruling class at the hornets nest it was stirring up (Brixton riots, the Poll Tax etc) led first the Tories to revert to pumping up the economy with the ever-increasing credit dollar tide from the US (Lawson inflationary Budget) and when that drowned in sleaze and currency turmoil, to the last throw of New Labour .
Even after years of preparations for police state control, torture, and surveillance which the dog-end of reformist Labourite collusion with imperialism has been “modernising” the laws for, while it sold the lie of making “further social progress” using the latest advertising hype, the ruling class will go to almost any lengths to avoid the actual confrontations which the slump will eventually drive out.
Desperate fear of the potential oncoming struggle is part of the panic now tearing open parliament and it is notable how the tiniest hint that the great splurge of additional credit has “slowed up the crisis” has been enough to bring the New Labour comrades back round the table “supporting” Gordon Brown and desperately hoping they can spin out the old reformist nonsense a bit further.
But there is no recovery possible other than the shallowest of temporary super-inflationary splurges.
Capitalism cannot “recover” not even after Monbiot’s “generations”. It can only “recover” via world war.
The only solution to overproduction disaster is the kind of recovery kind that got the imperialists out from the last great Depression and disintegration – total devastation and destruction of vast quantities of the “surplus” capital clogging the system (and “surplus” populations too) and a “sorting out” among the increasing unbalanced imperialist powers (such as the ludicrously over-represented influence of ossified hollow British “Empire” power) of who was to be top dog in the rebuilding.
For ordinary people who have no class interest in the wealth and profit of the system, the only way out of that is to end capitalism and the class dominance and exploitation which it is built on and which creates the endlessly recurring and ever worse crises and war destruction, already seen in three inter-imperialist conflicts, including the two World Wars of history shattering horror and turmoil.
As conditions rapidly worsen, – inevitable whatever short-term “green shoots” the endless financial trickery of the ruling class temporarily conjures up by printing billions more worthless paper dollars and completely unrepayable “electronic debt” than have already poisoned the international trading system for decades, – the urgency of an answer will become pressing for masses everywhere facing homelessness, breakdown in health care, unemployment and wiped-out pensions already.
When finally the desperate “quantitative easing” also collapses, that will turn to fullscale starvation and penury on a scale not seen for a century in “rich” Western countries, as well as the already desperate conditions of the Third World.
International war, devastating central Europe, then the whole continent in 1914-18 and then much of the world in 1939-45, has three times been the endpoint of the bitter industrial and trade wars between the major powers, now erupting over car production, banking and every other aspect of profit production.
The world has already been warmed up for war by the ludicrous hysteria of the “war on terror” for a decade by a US ruling class that knows just what it needs to get out from its disastrous catastrophe.
The New Labourite facade has been a crucial part of getting that entire monstrous repeat of war underway again, aiding with its degenerate lying “WMD dossiers” and spin about the “war on terror” both the warmongering on Iraq and the escalation of police state and surveillance.
But defeat of this initial warmongering bullying, which was intended to intimidate the whole world to re-establish imperialist dominance by suppressing Third World rebellion and making clear to all US rivals, who is the most ruthless and powerful, only added to the problems facing the entire ruling class.
The whole capitalist system is rotten ripe.
But fake “leftism” continues now deliberately tapping the backwardness and elitism of the “labour aristocratic” corruption by pandering to petty nationalism and Little Englander drawbridge politics.
Small wonder the working class are led round in circles even into supporting the backward racism of the BNP.
The petty bourgeois hysteria of “Stop the BNP” campaigns, will do nothing to stop the development of chauvinism and backward job protectionism which is part of capitalism itself. As remarked by EPSR supporters, the establishment and its foul and treacherous New Labour frontmen have done far more fascist blitzkrieging and killing across the planet, fed by xenophobia and imperialist British nationalism and the “war of civilisations” backward scapegoating of Muslims and Asians, than the BNP could dream of.
By all means challenge backwardness like the BNP but the pretence that it is “the problem”, is treachery of the first order. It suggests that if only the BNP is “stopped”, the collapse into war mongering chauvinist degeneracy will not happen; it suggests that the BNP reaction can be stopped separately to stopping capitalism, whereas it is bound up in the collapse into crisis, is part of it, and will happen anyway as long as capitalism continues.
Treating it as something different diverts attention from the fascist nature of imperialism itself in its crisis phase and effectively suggests that the rest of the ruling class racket is “better”, thereby giving it tacit support (overtly so in the case of the monstrous crypto-Trotkyist anti-communist opportunism of the Weekly Worker CPGB which specifically calls on the working class to vote Labour!!! “to stop the BNP” - a foul opportunist treachery).
Only revolution and the argument for it to stop capitalism can stop the BNP.
How to do that when the forces arguing for such a perspective are so limited is among the questions now thrown up within the small numbers of those struggling to continue Leninist understanding – in other words how to build a genuinely Marxist Leninist party?
The sharpness of the discussion internally itself reflects the growing intensity of the crisis and the need it is creating in the working class for answers, as the old reformist game collapses.
In one sense at least it confirms the understanding of the long efforts to grasp Leninism by EPSR, that the critical questions of the class struggle first of all find a reflection within the party. To quote an earlier effort to understand this [EPSR1171]:
The pursuit of internal EPSR disagreements as a polemic priority has been tactically disputed, but more weight of evidence will be needed for a challenge to the previous EPSR assumption - (attempting to understand things the way that Leninist science did) - that disputes within the party itself were always the highest point of the class struggle.
Hitherto, the issue has always been that the understanding of all the vast complexities of revolutionary theory would always remain the key to successful eventual party building, and that however few in number (and there were less than 3 dozen Leninists at one stage), the highest development of theoretical understanding would still always emerge from polemicising about new developments, or new insights, WITHIN that advanced circle; and that understanding’s most logical, best, immediate use would be for maintaining that polemicising cadre, such as it was, as a necessary step before any possibility of moving on further.
The EPSR’s understanding has only ever developed collectively, and while no crude nonsense has ever prevailed about “the bigger the collective, the better”, and splits have always been properly argued out right to the parting of the ways, - it has been a consistent principle that most could be learned, all round, precisely by arguing all matters out exhaustively, wherever possible and practical.
And at the present time and in the coming period, disagreements about possibly serious political movement in various ‘left’ tendencies on the question of forming a revolutionary party could not be more topical or more central to the leading imperialist crisis conundrums of the day.
In these internal party matters, it is likely that intolerance of “too painstaking” methods will prove more of a problem than the “painstaking” methods themselves.
Disagreement needs to be properly worked through for a scientific understanding.
Part of the debate at present is that somehow such sharpness over critical issues be relaxed for those drawn around the party on the grounds that all sorts of illusions and disagreements will inevitably persist in those new to politics and to insist on battling everything to conclusion on the spot will leave the building of a party in a sectarian enclave.
Unquestionably. But a willingness to debate and listen, and to let issues ride when talking to those who are interested in the party, “patiently explaining” over and over (as Lenin famously told the Bolsheviks 1917) is one thing; a compromise on its politics to the extent of arguing the opposite case for the outsider is another.
It is a point well made that excessive insistence on immediate full agreement could drive away the hesitant or uncertain; noone learns or necessarily understands and agrees with everything immediately.
But surely those who were only on the edge of the arguments and differed on basic touchstone issues, would not be appropriately brought into the central argument, forcing it back over old ground?
What issues? Those that have been understood as pivotal in past debate, particularly the unconditional defence of the workers states, including China and North Korea eg.
Rightly criticising and polemicising with sometimes appalling retreat from Leninism of revisionism in Beijing or North Korea, or even of the staggering revolutionary example of Cuba, is one thing. Declaring them to be ”no different to imperialism” is another, and is not only factually untrue even on superficial appearance but completely hostile.
Going further and declaring the concept of “imperialist exploitation” and “anti-imperialist” opposition to be “just rhetoric” is a position that anyone is entitled to hold, and many including “pan-African” opportunists do so, but it is not an indication that the party should be spending extra special effort talking to such a person.
It would also be supposed that where a newcomer has a long political history which the party could “benefit from” as currently alleged, that they would also be more robust in argument as well.
The EPSR makes no pretence that it has cracked building a mass revolutionary party in the unprecedented philistinism and anti-theory climate of late consumerist imperialism but the clear understanding it has gained over 30 years is that there is a scientific revolutionary view which is uncompromising, however gently argued. Build Leninism.
Don Hoskins
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How the West revives its LIES about the workers states :
The only picture of any bodies at all from the Western Goebbels lie of a “massacre” in Tian An Men in Beijing, China 20 years ago, shows not the square as implied but an army collecting point for bodies and debris after street fighting which had been instigated first by attacks from demonstrators intent on provoking martyrdom by attacking soldiers and police (brutally killing dozens of the Chinese state forces as fighting developed). Fatalities totalled between 300 and 400. Even some bourgeois press eye-witness accounts (Spectator notably) declared the square cleared peaceably, and leading BBC journalists on the spot like John Timpson admitted again on the radio on the stirred up anniversary of the events (still presented as a “massacre”) on June 2nd that “strictly speaking no one was actually killed in the square but in the streets around”. Both he and Kate Adie conceded numbers were “a few hundred or perhaps a thousand according to some estimates” (the “according to”, unspecified, is an old journalistic trick to cover thin unverified evidence.) This is not “just a matter of unimportant historical detail”, as both lyingly and sneakily pretended, but admission that hysterical stories of “cold blooded massacre” of “peaceful demonstrators for democracy” mercilessly run down by tanks and gunfire in the square is a TOTAL fabrication. The stories at the time (left uncorrected as “fact” in the public mind) reported thousands killed and then allegedly (and impossibly) burnt before dawn (leaving no traces!!) or lifted out of the square (by dozens of totally unseen helicopters). Even now, lurid fantasies of petty bourgeois anti-communists like the Chinese novelist ex-patriate used by the Guardian to repeat the lies, declare “thousands killed and injured”. But despite hyped-up accounts of “new photographs discovered recently” (which show nothing of interest) there are still no pictures of even dozens, let alone thousands, of bodies from the world’s most well-equipped and experienced press, TV and photographers who monitored events for two months. Only this one picture was used, given cover treatment to leave an impression of many more pictures inside. There were none because there was NO massacre, and no “tanks rolling over innocent people”. There was a counter-revolutionary challenge to the Chinese workers state in the name of US imperialist Statue of Liberty “democracy” which tragically led to some fighting and fatalities. In the Chinese workers state’s 50 year existence no other incident has given the West even the chance to embroider and exaggerate as it did Tian An Men but constant anti-Beijing abuse as a “totalitarian” horror story continues and a constant stream of equally lurid LIES about Tibet or Burma etc and against “rogue” state victims (North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Sudan etc etc). [Detail EPSR (ILWP) Book 16 on China].
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Cynical academic pretend “anti-Zionism” needs exposing as a reactionary fraud
The explosion of sympathy and support at home and internationally for the Palestinian struggle against the Jewish-Zionist colonial occupation following the Gaza onslaught in January and Zionism’s failure (despite its vastly overwhelming military firepower, proven eagerness to commit the most Nazi of atrocities, and backing to the hilt from crisis-ridden monopoly imperialism) to defeat the heroic Palestinian resistance is forcing the fake-lefts to go through ever more excruciating contortions in order to justify their reactionary support for the Zionist entity.
Leeds Stop the War Coalition’s promotion of “informative and scholarly” Moshe Machover as an “anti-Zionist” Jewish intellectual at a meeting in May is a deliberate attempt to undermine growing understanding that only a Palestinian revolution and the complete destruction of the Jewish-Zionist entity will ensure lasting peace in the region (see EPSR 1345 for letter on Leeds STWC).
Machover disgracefully misled the participants by his assertion that Palestinians have no other choice than to accept, “under protest”, life in “Indian reservations” because the only other alternative is life under direct military rule.
The “balance of power” between the Palestinians and Zionism is so large (Zionism is “armed to the teeth”) that the creation of a single Palestinian state is impossible, he claims.
The only hope is for the Palestinians to fight a “defensive struggle” until there is a “change in the regional balance of forces”.
These assertions of Machover are LIES designed to spread confusion amongst those sympathisers of the Palestinian struggle present at the meeting.
By these words, he covers up the reality that it is Zionland that is experiencing defeat after defeat at the hands of the heroic Palestinian masses and will eventually and inevitably be destroyed.
The failure to shatter the Hamas led resistance in Gaza at the start of this year was a major DEFEAT for Zionism, as was the historically very significant defeat of the Zionist invaders in Lebanon by Hezbollah in 2007.
The shattering of the revisionist illusion of a “two-state” permanent solution was also a crucial defeat for monopoly imperialism’s monstrous pretence of seeking a “just and lasting peace” in the region (despite desperate attempts, in the face of these defeats, by the beatific Obama to miraculously resurrect the fraud, with the arch-reactionary feudal Papacy relic flown in to give its “blessing”) – a solution that Machover also accepts is impossible.
However, he accepts it in a way that manages to avoid pointing out the necessity of defeating and eventually destroying the Zionist colony.
Instead, he sets out a vision of a negotiated solution in the distant future as a part of moves towards a “progressive” regional federation of some sort, in which Palestinians and “Israeli Hebrews” would be a part.
He envisages such a condition coming about only with the “decline of American global dominance” and the growth of unification moves within the Arab nations – with the crisis of capitalism “hopefully” leading to such a “transformation”.
In the meantime, Palestinians should just sit and wait, presumably!!
However, monopoly imperialism’s crisis will ensure the destruction of the Jewish-Zionist colony, which is inevitable anyway because it is an historical anachronism that was imposed on the Palestinian people in 1947 in the era of communist revolution and national liberation victories (with the victory of the Indonesian masses war of independence against its Dutch colonisers in 1945, the British Empire’s final defeat in India in 1947, the Chinese people’s heroic communist revolution in 1949, communist revolutions in Eastern Europe in the immediate post WW2 years, etc, etc.).
The Palestinian people will never accept a Jewish settler state on any part of their territory.
“From the River to the Sea” will always be their rallying cry until the Jewish settlers are driven from their land, with the possibility that those who wish to stay are allowed to do so after negotiation with a future Palestinian leadership.
Disgustingly, Machover attempts even to deny the Palestinians a state because “Palestine was created by imperialism for the purposes of Zionism” in the 1920s and so cannot “serve as the framework of a solution for the Palestinians” now.
”Palestine is part of the problem” Machover arrogantly asserts.
This foul piece of legalistic sophistry ignores the fact that Palestinians have been living on land stolen by Jewish settlers for 1,500 years; and it denies their claim to nationhood any legitimacy because it was not recognised by imperialist bourgeois law!
But it gets worse.
Machover wants us to accept the so-called state of “Israel” as a reality simply because Jews went to Palestine with the sole purpose of creating a nation!!
He falsely and misleadingly creates a distinction between two forms of colonisation – one that it is aimed at creating a new nation (e.g. US and Australia (and now “Israel”)), where the indigenous population is “surplus to requirements” and another that exists in order to exploit local human and natural resources (India, South Africa, etc).
He then says that, in order to create a nation, the Jewish settlers have to “ethnically cleanse” Palestinians from their land though expulsion or enclosure in reservations, in the same way that Native Americans were driven from their land.
However, the enforced enclosure of Native Americans into reservations like herds of buffalo in the 1870s, as part of the creation of the United States, followed two centuries of genocidal slaughter and near extinction of the entire race, who fought valiantly to the very end and are today, over 100 year later, still fighting for reparations.
This is also the murderous logic of Zionism’s colonisation – it cannot stop until every single Palestinian is wiped off the face of the earth because the Palestinian people will never stop their resistance.
But the analogy goes no further than this; and Machover failed even take it this far.
The creation of the United States, took place when capitalism was in its ascendency and it culminated in the American bourgeois revolutionary war of 1775 to 1783 that followed the 17th century British bourgeois revolutionary defeat of feudalism and preceded the 1789 French revolution.
Zionism’s genocidal war against the Palestinians is being waged with the backdrop of the most catastrophic and revolutionary failure of monopoly imperialism in world history; and its survival depends on this very same imperialism providing it with all the military training, education in the world’s best universities, devastating weaponry and billions upon billions of dollars it needs.
Once this rug is pulled from under its feet by the crisis, Zionland will collapse like a house of cards, and is already beginning to do so – with Hamas and Hezbollah giving it the vital push it needs.
The creation of the United States cannot in any way be compared with this Zionist implant.
Machover bases his solution on 19th century bourgeois notions of nationhood but the “state of Israel” is not, and can never be a nation in any shape or form and has no legitimacy whatsoever.
At the meeting, Machover advocated boycotts and divestment campaigns, etc, in order to “mobilise public opinion” in support of “a lasting regional resolution” of the conflict but said nothing about the Palestinian resistance until pushed by an intervention from an EPSR supporter, and then sought to downplay the significance of its armed struggle.
“Palestinians can use whatever means necessary for self-determination” he announced, however, armed struggle will not bring about a Palestinian state.
Armed struggle “strengthened the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa” and played some role in “pressuring the regime from inside” but it did not cause the end to the racist apartheid regime, he claimed, as this was inevitable anyway because it had lost its economic viability.
This is another enormous LIE.
The struggle in South Africa was one of constant guerrilla warfare and street fighting and was crucial in forcing the defeat of white colonial rule.
The South African movement’s so-called “non-violence” defiance campaigns of the early 1950s were accompanied by rioting and clashes with police in the face of the most vicious state suppression, anti-communist witch-hunts and the shooting and murder of hundreds of black people.
An upsurge in violence accompanied the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and forced the ANC to ditch its passive resistance strategy and launch armed guerrilla operations.
1976 saw waves of violent protests following the killing of student protesters in Soweto, leading many to leave the country to train for guerrilla warfare.
By the 1980s many townships had become no-go areas for the state forces with continuous uprisings from 1984 onwards eventually forcing the defeat and dismantlement of the apartheid regime.
No wonder Machover opposes attempts to compare Zionland with apartheid South Africa!
No colonial regime has ever left the scene without the necessity of violent armed struggle to force its destruction, although bourgeois propaganda will always try to portray a peaceful transfer of power, in the way Machover does, in essence.
British imperialism was defeated by the Irish armed struggle in the North of Ireland and it is only the snail-paced nature of Irish unification via the Good Friday agreement that allows it to pretend that Sinn Fein’s 30 year guerrilla war was unnecessary, for example.
The Jewish-Zionist colony will also be defeated by armed resistance.
Hamas’s leadership of the armed struggle is increasingly becoming more disciplined, sophisticated and successful as capitalism’s crisis deepens, and it is winning the struggle.
It remains to be seen how far its Islamic ideology can take it through the rapidly unfolding crisis.
Capitalism’s devastating collapse into Slump and war will eventually push forward the understanding that only communist revolution will ultimately bring peace to the region and the rest of the world.
It is this understanding that drives fear through the heart of monopoly imperialism.
The CIA would love to have fake-lefts and pretend “anti-Zionists” such as Machover pumping out as much confusion as possible at meetings and in articles in order to disorientate the working class and undermine its growing revolutionary understanding.
Tellingly, Machover was not introduced as a member of the anti-communist Hands off the People of Iran’s steering committee, preferring instead to give him a veneer of soporific academic authenticity and respectability; and audience contributions were restricted, as usual, to questions and unchallenging short comments.
Leninism demands that all such attempts to spread petty bourgeois ideology within the working class movement be exposed and defeated as a necessary part of building a revolutionary movement that can finally overthrow imperialism.
Phil Waincliffe
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