Back issue
No 1369 21st May 2010
Desperate coalition LibCon Big Society bullshit is a last sub-Blairite Lib “Con” by a panicking bourgeoisie desperate to keep the parliamentary “democracy” racket alive, despite mass contempt, to pretend agreement for Slump crisis savagery to come. But Thai cold-blood slaughter (with not a word of Western protest) shows the reality of “democratic rule” as crisis bites. Relentless capitalist crisis catastrophe will sharply confront all workers with revolutionary questions. Leninist party and debate vital now
The desperate five days of bourgeois floundering and secret wheeler-dealing after the election to try and assemble some kind of “stable government” with the pretence of a “mandate” for the vicious onslaught about to be unleashed on workers living standards, jobs, pensions and social services, are rich in lessons about the reality of the “parliamentary” democracy Big Lie.
The most obvious one was that the “will of the markets” is what counts, not the people, with the media and the politicians constantly looking over their shoulders at “how the City is responding to the negotiations” and whether the pound or the Stock Exchange was rising or falling dramatically once more.
The central refrain from all the mainstream parties, including the New Labourites and its fake-“left” wing was a constant restatement that “of course, everyone is agreed that the deficit must be dealt with” to try and placate volatile international capital.
“Everyone” is agreed that the working class is to pay the price for the disastrous and devastating slump that capitalism’s crisis collapse and incompetence has caused in other words, as demanded by the fatcats and controllers of international finance whose greed and failure personify the crisis.
Capitalism is run not “by the people” or “for the people” as the voting pretence has it, but “by the money people”, the ruling class for the unending profit hunger of big capital.
Bourgeois “democracy” is a class dictatorship, and “representation” is a hollow fraud of spin and empty promises, with a few scraps thrown from the table in good times for the better-off layers of the working class and petty bourgeoisie (in the rich countries only).
Everything is being revoked in the bad times.
And the bad will always return, as it has, in giant Depression, whichever alternate bourgeois party is fronting the system.
But the next lesson of the election was that no-one dared say exactly what has to be imposed.
Ex-Tory Prime Minister John Major’s dire warning two days into the coalition negotiations that “the country does not understand the severity of the economic problems we face” in an attempt to deflect the oncoming anger of ordinary people, only underlined the complete avoidance of any such talk throughout the election because of fear of the consequences.
The panicky fear of the ruling class is reflected in the first decision of this jerry-built lash-up cabinet to outrageously bend the basic “democratic majority” rules for any parliamentary move to end the government, setting it at 55%.
This prevents the government being brought down (by parliamentary means), ensuring that no amount of opposition voting can actually end the government.
It is a partial dictatorship move which hints at the kind of “legal” methods the Nazis used to dismantle and castrate the German Reichstag, once a top-hat-and-tails Hitler was elected democratically in 1933.
As the fascist-monarchical ruling class in Thailand is currently demonstrating with only the most “neutral” and uncritical coverage from a supportive, reactionary Western press, (unlike the endless denunciations of alleged “undemocratic tyranny” which are faked up around demonised countries like Iran, Zimbabwe or Myanmar [Burma]) – when it comes to the property interests and power of the ruling class being fundamentally challenged, all pretence of “submitting to the will of the people” goes out of the window, to be exchanged for tear gas and live ammunition fire, to cold-bloodedly shoot down demands for democracy and, worse, snipers to shoot down their more outspoken leadership.
And not a word of condemnation or moral “outrage”, or protests !!!
When it suits the Western media and politicians they will pile on the “moral outrage” and “human rights” agonised condemnation of this or that regime, on the thinnest of unsubstantiated pretexts or “diplomats-report-that” rumours, or gushed-out reporting in hushed-voice “secret filming” (usually entirely unnecessarily and done just for effect), the unverified accusations of all sorts of alleged atrocities, missing persons, massacres for which hard evidence is conveniently never available at this moment, or which are shown to have other causes (e.g. a firefight in Serbia, e.g. a civil war of a decade’s standing in Darfur), supposed giant “rape camps” etc etc, all of which never quite make it onto film, or in highly suspect or ambiguous circumstances if they do, and which are never backed up by properly verified forensic investigation or cross-examined witness accounts and confirmations.
All this luridly reported as fact, with “tough talking” TV anchor men grilling ambassadors with aggressive interruptions and browbeating “have you stopped beating your wife yet” questioning, and all surrounded by outraged demands by politicians and mysteriously appearing, lavishly-funded, human rights organisations, for “war crime” arraignments, or even outright military intervention into assorted “totalitarian” states on the flimsiest of pretexts.
But let there be a military coup sweeping out the genuinely elected government of the poorest people in Thailand (and the whole Third World), and then two years of growing protest in front of the cameras, and eventually, the sight on film of soldiers calmly picking off the demonstrators with live fire, killing dozens, recorded and on world TV, and with one of the people’s leaders shot down by a snipers’ rifle even while he was talking unarmed and calmly to a journalist, and it will be treated as just a normal event.
Reporting from Thailand has been utterly neutral in tone, declaring only that “the Government moved tonight to end demonstrations” etc.
How would that have been reported from Harare, or Belgrade, or Beijing, or Havana? (where precisely such filmed evidence of shootings and beatings, etc, especially including the non-existent supposed Tiananmen massacre, simply do not exist)????
Contrast it to the endlessly repeated “martyrdom” footage of one single frenzied petty bourgeois demonstrator killed, no-one quite knows by whom, in the middle of a deliberately provocative anti-state pro-Western “democracy” march in Tehran, which was pushed and prodded by weeks of constant anti-regime Western propaganda pumped in from the BBC and Voice of America, alleging, without evidence, that the Ahmadinejad election was fraudulent, and deliberately stirring up as much of a petty bourgeois frenzy and hysteria as possible to try and instigate an atmosphere of violence.
There was no open election in Thailand, but a puppet government put in by a military coup which the West casually and calmly dismissed as “a bloodless affair” two years ago, with not a word of protest, just as it has let ride the bloody coup and militarily controlled puppet election procedure in Honduras last year.
Both regimes serve imperialist exploitation interests and regional domination.
Western reports continue to present Thailand as “one of the few major democratic governments in south-east Asia” despite conceding in recent news reports, as the violence has grown more difficult to ignore, that there have in fact been nine, count them NINE – military coups since the 1930s to sustain an authoritarian monarchy and intensively exploitative economy with some of the worst sweat shop conditions in the world (see “left” liberal writer John Pilger’s reports 15 years ago for example, of young girls chained to the factory benches where they worked up to 16 hours until they dropped asleep.)
One report, once the Bangkok slaughter had virtually dispersed the Red Shirt poor protesters, declared that as a matter of fact there was growing turmoil in the south-east of Thailand which had already taken 4000 lives, but it “had not attracted much attention” from the world’s press – as if the journalists and editors, and the Western intelligence agencies which monitor and control their coverage, are not responsible for that omission.
Could it be there has been no reporting of the Thai turmoil before because the comfortably Bangkok-based press bureaus have spent all their time trumping up stories of alleged “oppression”, and “suppression of self-determination” rights, against next door Myanmar (Burma), feeding the artificially hyped “democracy” movement led by the British (Oxford) trained Aung San Suu Kyi, constantly trying to disrupt and topple the nationalist anti-imperialist government which took over the country once the British Empire was thrown out, and which (like anti-British-imperialism ZANU in Zimbabwe), has been constantly sniped at and undermined ever since because it does not properly toe the line allowing in Western exploitation, in the way Thailand does (including setting up the world’s biggest prostitution economy for the GI’s on rest-and-recreation leave from murdering the Vietcong in next door Vietnam, throughout the 1960s and 70s).
Where are all the “get involved fighting for the freedom of Thailand” websites and tearful Hollywood celebrities agonising like they do over the “rights” of the backward feudal saffron priests in Myanmar and Tibet?
They don’t exist.
Where have the politicians been with their usual pompous condemnations – including the fat-arsed fake-“left” opportunists like the monstrous Labour (and therefore capitalism) supporting Diane Abbott, who has had nothing to say on Thailand despite mass press attention as a Labour leadership candidate.
Nowhere – because the entire “freedom and democracy” racket is nothing but a front for the continuing world domination of capital and suppression of any challenges to it.
But despite this ultimate dictatorship character of bourgeois rule (a fascist tyranny of prisons, police and intimidation which lies beneath the surface permanently of even the most liberal republic, and which is emerging more and more in its true colours as the slump accelerates), the ruling class continues to feed the illusion that the vote “counts for something”.
It fears the revolutionary lessons that will be learned if it throws this weapon away.
The development of “universal” suffrage built over the centuries (under careful manipulation and sophisticated expensive advertising and press control) has been one of the cleverest and most cunning methods evolved in all history for maintaining class power with the least amount of trouble, bolstered by the compliance of the fake-”lefts” and reformists who sold the working class the lie that their future was guaranteed through steady, “legally” won economic and social progress.
It was kept alive in the post-WW2 period by the endless dollar-printing artificial “boomtime” and bolstered by idiot Stalinist revisionist delusions which declared capitalism to be permanently hamstrung by economic crisis and the growing strength of surrounding workers states which made it “containable” by “the struggle for peace”, or even in the case of most European mainstream CPs, to be changeable by the “peaceful road” parliamentary way.
Step by step, and only as far as necessary at present, is the ruling class watchword therefore for dismantling all this.
But it is coming.
The parliamentary expenses scandals are symptoms that the game is on its last legs, exposed historically and threatened by the giant upheavals that the catastrophic capitalist crisis is already pushing to the surface.
As the EPSR long ago analysed, Blairite spin and glitz was empty posturing which the ruling class turned to, to rescue its democracy and parliament Lie with one more burst of “emperor’s new clothes” after the disastrous confrontationalism of Thatcher had crashed into the poll tax upheavals.
Desperate efforts by the Tory A-team to drive the working class back failed, despite its civil war onslaught on the miners, in an eventual tide of sleaze and incompetence.
But Blairism and its “spin” and promises was never anything but empty noise which would burn out like a cometary fragment as soon as it hit the realities of crisis and collapse, as it has done in new tides of sleaze and fascist warmongering stoogery.
The shallow “new politics” being spun now by the transparent Cameron (as cartoonist Steve Bell has accurately captured) is a further desperate ploy by the ruling class to keep the parliamentary fantasy spinning a tiny bit longer in order to push through the class war measures it needs with as much compliance as it can get from the petty bourgeois and avoid stirring up too much class resistance.
But it has come at some cost, burning the boats of the LibDem “middle ground” with a sound kick-in-the-teeth administered to the pacifist minded elements of the increasingly estranged petty bourgeoisie.
They voted for the Tweedledoo Liberal-Democrats, and in places even for the Tories, because of their disgust with the fascist, lying warmongering, sleaze, domestic punishment-culture, torture and surveillance cover-ups and empty reformism of the Tweedledum New Labourites, – only to be rewarded by with a Tory government which is still detested and the more so it tries to implement savage cuts.
The ground for such ruling class “toff” collusion between elite schoolboy Cameron and elite schoolboy Clegg was long prepared as a reserve, not least with the conspiracy to oust Charles Kennedy as the LibDem leader under the nonsensical notion that he was unsuitably “alcoholic” – a ridiculous singling-out charge for a Parliament which has more (cheap) bars per square metre than any other club in London’s West End.
In reality Kennedy was politically knifed by a deliberately orchestrated parliamentary and press campaign under instruction from leading elements in the ruling class, because of his opposition to the Iraq war which, ineffectual and tepid as it was (and “patriotically” reversed once the war started), was still intolerable to a panicking British state desperate to keep in with the leading imperialist US power as capitalism’s crisis unfolds towards international trade war and eventual all out warmongering.
The new “coalition” is the thinnest possible pretence of legitimacy, stitched together in desperation and fragile as an Egyptian pharaoh’s mummy.
The ruling class is trapped by the disastrous cataclysmic collapse of the centuries old bourgeois capitalist profit system into the greatest Slump disaster ever.
Far from being another “recession” as they ludicrously keep pretending, bolstered by the cynical and knowing pantomime arguments from the stooge Labourites about how to “best secure the upturn”, (and the undermining scepticism of the all the pretend revolutionary fake-“lefts” about whether this is really a severe crisis or not), – the credit-crunch, sovereign debt implosion is the greatest disaster of the entire 800 year rise of capitalism and its nearly two centuries of world monopoly imperialist dominance.
They all know it.
But the ruling class will do anything to keep such understanding away from the working class because it confirms the total historic bankruptcy of its exploitative profit-making as a guide to human organisation and society.
It is unravelling unstoppably into the most terrifying market and finance collapse ever seen.
From the latest economic signals, it will be laden with potentially runaway inflation at the same time, as the common sense of every worker could easily deduce from the printing of trillions of new paper dollars and Euros, the desperate panic measures which have been the only way complete meltdown financial disaster into domino-toppling bank and market collapses has been avoided so far.
The “quantitative easing” desperation by the ruling class, is a last throw of the dice to try yet again to stave off the worst.
But as Marxist science alone has understood and constantly warned, against all the dilettante and fake-“left” pretend revolutionaries (when they mention it all), there is no argument with the iron laws of capitalist production for private profit.
Marx showed incontrovertibly (see finance box page 6) the relentless increase of production by every capitalist to try and capture the profitable sales of the entire world market can only lead to huge “overproduction” and “over-accumulation” of capital, and the insane crisis failure of too much stuff being produced when those making it, the working class are constantly sucked dry of the value they make (which is the only source of value other than natural resources), so that they cannot buy it.
The result is always a return to market paralysis and “over production” disaster, with goods piling up unused and unsellable, and “surplus” capital sloshing around the world in an ever more unstable hunt for non-existent profits, so desperate for investment in the latest crisis that it would even find a way to lend tens of billions of dollars to people with no money at all to pay back their obligations.
The complex stretching of production by ever more elaborate credit and currency mechanisms (including endless dollar printing for the last fifty years), has hugely intensified an already intractable problem of market and currency failure.
Printing even more money now out of thin air puts off the great collapse only in the way that maxing out a credit card and borrowing from the local loan shark puts off paying personal bills.
It makes things far worse shortly afterwards.
Disaster has been building throughout the capitalist world for decades, lurching past one partial world collapse after another.
In 2008, the centre imploded.
Whatever transient “growth” may now be pretended, there is no return to “boom” and the shallow consumerism of the past. Whole countries are going under, and the sharks of the international financiers, currency dealers and bankers are circling hungrily around every wounded victim, ready to tear them apart (and each other too).
The vicious currency, credit, banking and trade wars erupting, and growing more savagely cutthroat by the minute, now demand that any ruling class that wants to survive must impose the most draconian speed ups and cuts on its working class, to extract maximum surplus value, or go under immediately as victims to more ruthless monopoly national bourgeois interests.
Workers in the smaller players like the Greeks, the Irish, the Icelanders, and shortly the Spanish and Portuguese are already getting harsh lessons in the realities of the oncoming catastrophe.
The parasitical City-distorted economy of Britain is possible even more vulnerable.
It can only get much worse.
Ultimately the ruling class must be ready to fight to the death against the great national monopoly rivals to survive at all, as the antagonisms and hostility erupt finally into all out war between the world capitalist heavyweights, exactly as has happened twice before in the world wide devastation of the twentieth century.
The British ruling class is in a blue funk about the upheavals it knows are coming, and already reaching boiling point from the whole Middle East to Athens to Bangkok.
Its class authority and coherence have never looked more feeble.
The complete failure to manipulate the election using the old media and advertising methods (and all the other tricks and manoeuvres that make elections such a joke) reflected its difficulties.
The entire vote, such as it was, was essentially of protest, some despair and most of all cynical rejection of all parliamentary politics in especially the working class areas.
Notably, the election did not demonstrate some re-kindling of enthusiasm and interest for the “democratic” process, and particularly not for the leading parties, the assertion clung to by the more desperate-minded commentators in their glitzy, fabulously expensive “election studios” and hyped up coverage.
Carefully examined the figures show the opposite.
Turnout was extraordinarily uneven, a telling symptom of volatility in itself, showing as little as 50% in the most solidly working class, traditionally Labour constituencies, in the north, the big industrial conurbations, Scotland, and East London, and with only the more petty bourgeois “left” areas in London climbing a little above that.
Class loyalty momentum and old, partly-corrupted consumerist illusions still pulled out some support for Labour and indicates that there is a way to go yet for a total break by all workers with capitalism’s bogus democracy.
But even that minority was not showing enthusiasm so much as defensiveness in the absence of any clear leadership elsewhere, and the “cynical contempt” grows apace as described a decade ago in the EPSR [Issue 1016 13-10-1999]:
...the essential movement is in the working masses and not the Labour Party whose ideology has ALWAYS been unshakably petty-bourgeois COUNTER-revolutionary, and therefore ALWAYS essentially hostile to the real international interests of the working class, and pro-capitalist. Clause IV has NEVER been anything else other than a devious bait for the working class, passed in 1919 to keep the working class loyal to Labour in the wake of the 1917 Soviet Revolution.
But the century-long relationship was between Labour and a basically pro-imperialist working class. That thoroughly-empire-corrupted working class had the bourgeois Labour Party it wanted, - counter-revolutionary, class-collaborative, pro-Western-privilege, anti-communist.
Slowly, the collapse of British Empire and the collapse of the relatively easy privileged international position of Britain, its working class, and its living standards (relative to the rest of the world) started to give workers in Britain less and less stake in the ‘triumphs’ of its ruling-Establishment system - under either of the ‘alternative’ parliamentary-majority governing parties.
So far, this steady divorce of the working people from the deceitful and exploitative posturing of either ‘democratic government’ party has most obviously expressed itself in nothing more specific than a cynical contempt for all ruling regimes and an increasing reluctance to go out and positively vote for any of them.
A tiny overall increase in turnout which pulled up the average does not change the picture, and if anything confirms it. Almost exclusively this was limited to the Tory counties and well-off suburbs and even there the vote rarely climbed over 70%.
Votes were clearly cast against New Labour rather than for anyone, excepting perhaps among a thin layer of the better-off petty bourgeois where class interest in maintaining the status quo via the “democracy” lie has been given a temporary boost.
Panicked fears at the oncoming slump have tapped all the foulest self-regarding “I’m alright Jack” instincts of the upper middle-class and “county set” to impose slump disaster on the urban poor and working class.
“Charity begins at home” has always been the sour proverb of the self-seeking trampling individualism of the bourgeois epoch.
Hostility to Labourite emptiness and failure is far wider, stemming from its craven lying opportunism pretending “economic success” and new public investment entirely on the back the false and fraudulent inflationary surge set in train by the early Bush presidency, and which was clearly heading for disaster as Marxist science could see clearly.
Bush pumped out hundreds of billions of new dollars in huge tax breaks for the rich and endless tens of billions more into the world trade system via Iraq and Afghanistan, in order to try and keep the wheels moving after the 2000 dotcom bubble collapse, and the Asian currency black hole before that, helping create the conditions for the disastrous 2008 collapse in the first place, even before the latest quantitatively-eased trillions hit the fan.
It was all backed up by the turn to vicious fascist warmongering to “shock and awe” into silence any objectors to this massive bullying swamping of the world with worthless dollars, the only means for the dominant imperialist power of the US to keep its now completely bankrupted “black hole” of an economy going, by sucking in the world’s resources without any intention of ever paying for them, even at the obscenely unfair exploitation rates of “normal” capitalist trade.
But even such turnout increase is misleading and out of a context, since it misses the huge proportion of the population that has long since stopped bothering to register at all for the vote racket.
As always, it is part of the lie of “democracy” that the bourgeois media and government statistical information plays this down, not only failing to mention the overall voting figures but making it almost impossible to find out.
But something can be deduced. General population statistics give a figure for people of working age (over 16) as 62% of a 61 million population. So that is 37.82 million. Taking out the roughly two-fiftieths of that under 16 who can’t vote (say, 1.5 million) just over 36.3 million who would be able to vote if registered.
The total vote was 29,650,000. In other words, nearly 7 million people did not vote, about 19.2% of the population.
So the Tory vote is 36% of 80.7%, just 29% of the population, and mostly concentrated in the southern areas which benefit most from the parasitic finance and “service” industries of the City.
The long historic trend of the working class rejecting Labourism, and the parliamentary fraud, continues.
But it is still missing the crucial perspective and leadership that which transform growing discontent into the coherent struggle to overturn capitalism.
There is no other way forwards for mankind.
Such leadership is not coming from the fake-“lefts” inside Labourism and the official trade union movement or outside it among the “comrades” of the revisionist “left” or the Trotskyists.
Just the opposite. Without exception they entirely rowed in behind the old game of parliamentary representation in the election campaign, helping prop up this corpse of “parliamentary democracy” instead of handing out the shovels to dig its grave and bury it along with the moribund and bankrupt monopoly capitalist epoch.
The opportunism of the fake-“left” pseudo-revolutionaries knows no bounds, as they justify the chase to support various “left” Labourites (who just spent 13 years keeping the lying duplicity of the Blairites and Brownites in place whatever posturing verbal (and knowingly ineffectual) protests they made).
Their tricksiness was on full display in the five days of coalition talks. Any sincere fighter for the working class, knowing what is coming in the Slump (as they all clearly do) would surely grasp any chance to prevent or at least ameliorate, the ruling class onslaught, including assembling whatever kind of piecemeal left coalition could be managed (if they really believed parliament worked), in order to “keep out the Tories” as they postured.
But instead, assorted Labourite heavyweights were wheeled out at critical moments to sabotage any such talks, notably John Reid, the right-wing Blairite who has said not one word for years and suddenly appeared, with full TV exposure, in mid-talks to pump in a totally defeatist “the numbers don’t add up” comment.
This sinister intervention, leaving the way open for the Tories, was bolstered and supported even more tellingly and disgustingly by the slimy insincerity of “left” posing MP Diane Abbott, with another critically timed outburst saying the same, helping seal the collapse of talks with a “left” stamp of approval.
These “lefts” don’t want power when the real fight is on, preferring to retire and sound their empty drums in loud posturing pretence, safely avoiding all actual responsibility.
Abbot is going one further in dragging the working class back into the Labour Lie; she is now playing the same PC feminist and black nationalist single issue cards in the Labour leadership contest as the blitzkrieging Barack Obama has used to rescue dominant American “democracy” from its more obvious and failing Bushite fascism.
It is interesting that the working class was having none of it, and the vote levels for the assorted “left” unity parties, alternative candidates, trade unionists, Respect, the SLP, etc etc not only did not take off, but mostly dropped back to minute levels.
But more is needed. Every fight of the working class now raises issues of the whole structure of the economy and society. How can “jobs be protected” at British Airways when it is true that the company is going bankrupt??? Capitalism can only survive by driving workers into the ground (as “left” trade union leader Bob Crow at RMT hinted recently, pushing them all the way to Third World conditions).
Workers can only survive by changing everything.
Every fight for survival, as increasingly every class battle will be, questions all of bankrupt capitalism.
It path towards war destruction will emphasise the point a thousandfold.
Only revolution for a planned socialist world will change things.
That needs Leninist leadership to cut through decades of anti-communism and “left” opportunism.
Build the revolutionary party now.
Don Hoskins
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Torpedo accusation against North Korea reeks of Western war stunts
The extraordinary Western hysteria against North Korea, accusing it of deliberately torpedoing the sunken South Korean warship in March, has all the hallmarks of the Gulf of Tonkin fabricated incident which was used to begin the Vietnam war in the 1960s, and even more the outright LIES about “weapons of mass destruction” ready to fry the population of Western Europe “within 45 minutes” with which the Bush/Blair axis launched the barbaric massacre blitzkrieg against Iraq.
Without access to the detailed investigations it is impossible to make any judgement technically about the accusations.
Notably much of this is kept back as “classified” conveniently.
But there are already highly suspicious aspects to the alleged “evidence” including the fact that the supposedly recovered torpedo motor, which constitutes the crucial “smoking gun”, was found only “in the area” of the recent ship sinking, and has only been put forwards weeks after the event.
Since the incident was close to North Korea, in border waters which the West one-sidedly declared its own and which have not been recognised as territorial water by Pyongyang, there is every chance such a find might come about from other past activity.
Even odder is the rust-covered and scale-covered condition of the motor and propeller, obvious in the photographs of the displayed “evidence”, out of line with the short time it could have been on the seabed and where corrosion would be unlikely to take the form of air-induced rust.
Dispute rages in internet discussions too around released timings of the explosions, location of the ship at the time, onboard communications and much else, suggesting the supposed “no other explanation” declaration of South Korea and “British and US experts” is nonsense.
The area has been heavily mined in the past by the US, which had a provocatively placed radar facility on the island off which the sinking took place.
Nothing is ruled out and Marxist understanding would not pin itself to any definitive statement until more emerges.
But the key question to ask is Lenin’s famous dictum of “who stands to gain” from the allegation.
Pyongyang, constantly under Western “rogue state” demonisation threat, alongside Iran, Sudan, Burma, and other workers states like Cuba and China, and kept in isolated fear for its own existence in a world dominated by Washington’s crisis warmongering, has no reason to provoke potential invasion and war by some arbitrary act.
It did, after all, experience almost total annihilation in one of the most vicious and destructive of all Washington’s non-stop anti-communist interventions and tyrannical bullying invasions (over 200 coups, fascist stooge takeovers, massacres, assassinations, death squad terror operations, invasions (such as Grenada), and outright wars), since 1945.
The Korean War in the early 1950s was brutal, with the capital 95% flattened by American carpet bombing and tens of thousands of its people (and the heroically supportive Chinese Red Army) slaughtered, injured or made homeless.
The workers state has been constantly under threat ever since, near strangled by Western economic blockade (euphemistically called “sanctions”) and constantly threatened by aggressive and intimidating behaviour from the south, run by fascist tinpot gangsters for most of that time and occupied by huge US military and nuclear bases.
Neither has it given any signals of a belligerent build-up, ready to take advantage of an act of deliberate aggression.
Nor is that the nature of a workers state, none of which in the world (Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam), have ever done such a thing, and have no reason to.
Their justifiable military and weapon developments, and interventions in East Europe and Afghanistan have always been vital defence against counter-revolution, stimulated by the non-stop subversion and threats of capitalism, or the tragic self-damaging ideological failing of an attempted revolution in Kampuchea (shattered beyond bearing by horrific US illegal carpet blitzkrieg for years previously).
South Korea’s reactionary regime, a constant tool of US military and political anti-communism in the region, on the other hand is as trapped as the rest of imperialism by the giant unfolding crisis collapse of the world profit system and with every reason of its own, as well as under American pressure, to be winding up the warmongering atmosphere.
South Korea remains a highly fragile economy after the currency collapses forced onto Japan and south-east Asia by the rest of imperialism in the late 1990s, despite supposed “recovery”.
The world shattering credit crunch is taking it back to the brink.
But as some of the capitalist media also hinted, the bigger crisis warmongering game by the US Empire may also come into play, to push forwards its demonising agenda against Iran, the prime target for imperialism’s next bout of war victimisation.
Using a stunt against Korea may have much to with leverage against revisionist Beijing, hoping to trade a deal not to make a fuss over Korea (on China’s border) with a concession to vote through escalated anti-Tehran sanctions in the UN Security Council.
Setbacks and defeats for Bush abrasiveness in Iraq and Afghanistan have made overt warmongering all but impossible for the moment, so the “political correctness” (and fake-”left” fed) illusions of Clintonite feminism and Obama black nationalism have been used to head off growing US internal class discontent caused by those failures, while keeping the warmongering constantly on the boil (stepped up in Afghanistan for example).
Washington wants to use the “diplomatic” path to pretend “legitimacy” for squeezing and bullying Iran, by winning UN Security Council votes and has been leaning on Russia and China to sign up to sanctions.
Russia’s rotten Putin Bonapartist balancing act, teetering between restored oligarch gangster capitalism and the remaining traces of its long and honourable workers state history, has vacillated to and fro trying to calculate a nationalist imperialist position (with all the addled logic of past revisionism thrown into the mix for good measure).
The still remaining workers state of China has been more suspicious of imperialist pressure despite some dire non-revolutionary capitulations in the past to Western “terrorism” nonsense.
But Stalinist illusions in “avoiding conflict” as the best way to eventually “outgrow” capitalism (the deadening unrevolutionary nonsense set in train by Stalin himself in the early 1950s, declaring that imperialism could be contained by “peace struggle” from henceforth, (conveniently justifying a retreat from revolutionary perspectives already long in train)) have long strongly affected thinking capacity in Beijing as throughout the Third International dominated post-war “Cold War” order.
Its ambivalence towards the feisty North Korea, which despite its own revisionist “personality cult” peculiarities, has correctly made itself as indigestible as possible for any Western subversion or further aggression, stems from the same revisionist “peaceful cooperation” fears of the “boat being rocked too much”.
The calm way the whole issue has been handled by Washington “restraining” Seoul, and its downplaying on the imperialist news channels, suggests just such calculation is in train, setting up a deliberate diplomatic row.
But whichever way it plays, capitalism’s total agenda is to keep on the war path, the only way it has ever found out of the historic failure and incompetence of its overproduction crisis.
There is no “peaceful path” into mankind’s future, nor gradual democratic change.
The questions of revolution are becoming starker daily, despite revisionism and Trotskyist opportunism, and demand a revival of clear Leninist science, developed by a revolutionary party, struggling out the understanding through polemic and argument.
It must be built.
Alan Moss
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LEAFLET for April anti-cuts march in London:
Battle against the cuts – but trade union “protest” and “left” representatives in Parliament will solve nothing. To stop the crisis – overturn capitalism. Build Leninism and revolutionary understanding
The great lie being told to the working class is that there is any solution at all to the devastating crisis which is now ripping through all the “great nations” of the world.
“When the upturn comes” or “the best way to solve the credit crunch”, or arguments about “better regulation” for the banks are all knowing, consciously cynical diversions by the politicians heading the attention of ordinary people away from reality of a total, catastrophic failure of the capitalist system.
So too is the fake-“left” reformist notion of “making the bosses pay”.
Rapacious in-your-face greed deserves total contempt – but even stripping all their money away will not solve this crisis.
It would be a useful start of course. But the profit making system of Western capitalism is bankrupt.
It all has to go.
Only ending the monopoly capitalist rule of the planet will change anything.
The sheer pant-wetting panic of the ruling class in October 2008, when the banks failed and the government was hours away from closing down the cash machines nationwide, told the true story.
Capitalism is a system of massive contradictions which can only ever bring the world to complete collapse and disaster, in sudden domino implosion.
Without the insane printing of hundreds of billions of paper dollars to flood the markets temporarily it would have happened 18 months ago.
Only by “quantitative easing” was the ruling class salvaged from utter financial chaos and the terrifying fear of social breakdown and revolt.
But it cannot last for very long.
The underlying reality of capitalism is that its inbuilt contradictions will always bring it back to disastrous collapse and failure of markets.
It has wobbled and teetered from the edge of one disaster to the next for the whole post-1945 period.
Each time the inevitable collapse has been put off by printing more dollars to defer the evil day of reckoning – constantly, for decades.
This insane inflationary pollution of the world trading system simply piled up even greater problems for the next time, with ever more violent symptoms bursting out in oil price hikes, inflationary surges, Stock Market “Black Monday” failures, currency collapses (in Asia), national bankruptcies (in South America) and stagnation and Slump for two decades in Japan.
Finally, the greatest economic and political collapse in history, has imploded in the heart of the world’s greatest super-power, the centre of world finance.
And as soon as the even more demented dollar trillions work their way around the global trading system it will implode again in some form.
Just what that will be – more bank failure, ripping sovereign debt defaults (already threatening to destroy smaller countries like Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia ...and the UK), brutal trade tariff wars or a combination of all them remains to be seen in detail.
But that it will bring the greatest Slump Depression chaos ever is incontestable.
It will not be solved by a few cutbacks in social services, slashed pensions and increased unemployment.
Those will be vicious enough and are already devastating lives and livelihoods throughout the world, bringing misery, hunger and fear.
But even the ruthless and savage cuts promised once the election trickery is out of the way, are only a tiny part of the story.
Marxist scientific theory and historical experience both show that only massive destruction of “surplus” capital (forced onto the rival capitalist blocs) can clear the “overproduction” of goods and finance from the system, to allow a clear field for restored investment and profitability.
It has taken the form of ever intensified military arming and eruptions of blitzing war to force the burdens outwards in orgies of destruction and savagery unparalleled in all history.
The first Franco-Prussian inter-imperialist war began a pattern of slaughter and demolition which has escalated by orders of magnitude since, into the history changing First World War, wiping out great swathes of West and East Europe.
Then the appalling international destruction of World War Two pulverising and burning dozens of major cities and even complete countries, killing whole populations, and unleashing the horrors of gas, biological and nuclear war.
The world has been gearing up for the Third World War for the last decade, led by the incredible armed might of superpower USA, from skirmishing attacks on Somalia, Sudan and Afghanistan, to the NATO pounding of tiny victim Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan in full, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Lebanon (via the demented Jewish-Zionist US-proxy in occupied Palestine) – and with more demonised victims being made ready from Iran to Sudan and Myanmar, by Barack O’Bomber just like Bush.
But all this is only to keep the international exploitation tyranny going, suppressing all rebelliousness and preparing the world population for war again, ready for the real conflicts, those between the great capitalist rivals which must eventually erupt.
This is the real face of the oncoming disaster: devastating Slump to make the 1930s look tame, and war destruction on a scale a hundred times greater (and faster) than even the horrors of 1939-45.
It will not be stopped by protest – neither “Stop the War” or “Make the bosses pay”.
In fact such slogans, in the end, are a complete diversion from the only understanding that matters – a revolutionary perspective which says the ruling class must be toppled.
By all means the urge to resist and demand a stop is a starting point.
But the world needs completely restructuring on a socialist basis to remove for the ever the private ownership of the means of production which causes the collapse and chaos (as Marx showed 150 years ago).
Planned rational socialist economic development is the answer, carried out with constant full international cooperation between all the people of the world.
It needs to take up the enormous positive side of the giant achievement of the Soviet Union workers state and Eastern Europe, but far better and on a world scale.
All that demands building a revolutionary party, taking up and challenging the great swamp of mistakes and anti-communism which has passed itself off as the “left” for the post-war decades of monopoly capitalist dominance.
Even now, as the crisis has demonstrated incontrovertibly the truth and clarity of Marxist-Leninist understanding, these groups still punt out the old reformist and parliamentary notions.
It all reflects the dire confusions and mistakes of the Soviet Moscow revisionist leadership which degenerated philosophically from Stalin onwards, tainting the historically titanic achievements of the workers state (a 70 year long proof not only of the capacity of the working class to survive without bosses, but the total superiority of science, culture and social development possible in socialism).
The errors and the paranoid crimes they led to (though nothing like the hysterical exaggerations of Western propaganda) need confronting and understanding so that the world can develop the urgently needed Leninist revolutionary leadership that alone can bring the working class to power.
Failure to do so has left a floundering mass of dull-witted confusion and hostility to revolution, either through revisionist capitulation to “the parliamentary road” idiocies of post-war Moscow or “containing imperialist warmongering” – or a sour petty bourgeois rejection of everything achieved in the USSR and other workers states, the Trotskyist line which disguises a deep hatred of workers control in reality, despite notional mouthings about revolution.
Such is the opportunist stew they have festered in for the last six decades that not one of them can give the working class even the simplest of exposures now of the parliamentary racket, even as it is collapsing in on itself.
The working class has correctly turned away from the charlatan lies and opportunism more and more every election, to the point where hardly any of them vote at all.
What is the point of telling them to go back and vote for yet another “representation” racket as the TUSC (Trade Union & Socialist Coalition has set out to do (even calling for some Labour MPs to be supported).???
What is the point of setting out yet more reformist “criteria” and voting in more “promises” even if they are “left” ones??
It is an opportunist nonsense and confusion.
It will only sustain the ruling class democracy trick when it should be put out of its misery.
By all means let the parliamentary platform be used if possible to give a voice to the working class which might not be there otherwise.
But only to say what a giant fraud is, and always has been, pulled upon them by “freedom and democracy”.
The contradictory point of using parliament, is to denounce parliament and the great capitalist conspiracy.
That is busy hiding the reality of the Great Slump and war to follow.
The aim is to keep the working class away from revolutionary politics.
But only a revolutionary perspective is able to make sense of the struggles it will increasingly be forced into in order to survive at all in the crisis.
It demands a Leninist movement of revolutionary discipline and scientific understanding, built through polemical struggle in front of the working class.
Build it now.
Don Hoskins
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Sharpeville: Brutal massacre that galvanised armed struggle to end apartheid, along with the international anti-apartheid support movement
South Africans have marked the 50th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre by joining a commemorative rally in the town’s stadium that was addressed by the country’s Deputy President, Kgalema Motlanthe.
On 21 March 1960 in the township, the apartheid regime’s police officers opened fire on an unarmed demonstration of thousands of black South Africans protesting against discriminatory laws, in particular the pass system that controlled travel and employment. Sixty-nine people were shot dead, most of them in the back as they were fleeing the gunfire; at least 180 more were wounded.
The commemoration also marked the killings of 29 people in 1985 marching in the town of Langa to mark the 25th anniversary of Sharpeville.
“The Sharpeville and Langa massacres were a tipping point in that they triggered revulsion and disgust locally and internationally,” Motlanthe said at the ceremony.
The pass, referred to by non-white South Africans as the ‘dompass’ – the ‘stupid pass’ – had been introduced by British colonialists in the 19th century and its use tightened in the 1950s, including being forced onto women. The pass laws controlled travel and employment of holders and black people faced arbitrary arrest if they were not carrying it.
Thousands of black South Africans rallied peacefully against the pass system that day 50 years ago. They turned up outside the Sharpeville police station without their passes and demanded the police arrest them. The police responded by massacring the protesters and in the following weeks and months, under a ‘state of emergency’, thousands of black South Africans were rounded up and detained without trial. The African National Congress and other political parties were banned.
Sharpeville was a pivotal moment in the history of the South African state and the resistance movement that ultimately brought one of the 20th century’s most tyrannical political systems to its knees. The massacre radicalised a generation of South Africans and prompted the ANC to launch an armed campaign against the state as people became convinced that peaceful resistance would be literally shot off the streets.
The Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) or ‘Spear of the Nation’ became the military wing of the ANC and had the honour of later being classified as a ‘terrorist’ organisation by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the United States.
Sharpeville drew the world’s attention to the abhorrent reality of the apartheid state and its violations of human rights, and was the spark for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign that developed over the following decades until it became powerful enough to have a meaningful political and economic impact on the regime – helping to force it to the negotiating table with the ANC.
In 1966 the UN General Assembly declared 21 March the International Day for Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Today, 21 March is celebrated as Human Rights Day in South Africa. In 1996, the ANC chose Sharpeville as the site to usher in the era when then-President Nelson Mandela signed the progressive new South African constitution into law.
“To adequately commemorate the victims and survivors of the Sharpeville massacre and other bloodbaths, we must ensure the progressive realisation of the socio-economic rights as envisaged in the Bill of Rights,” Motlanthe said.
“This means as government working with our social partners, we must strive to improve the quality of life of all our people by providing shelter, basic amenities, education, and security.”
While racial segregation and oppression of the black majority had been entrenched by European colonial settlers, both Boers and the British, for hundreds of years, apartheid was made official policy in 1948. Legislation was passed that classified people – and the rights they were entitled to – on the basis of their skin colour or ethnicity – ’black’, ‘white’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’.
The regime began consolidating the process of segregating different racial groups geographically and eventually tried to corral the black population into ten ‘bantustans’ or ‘homelands’. Formalised in 1958, these were designed not only to drive black people from their land to be replaced by white settlers, but also to deprive them of their South African citizenship and (already limited) franchise under the guise of having ‘autonomy’ in the impoverished bantustans.
The bantustans, which allowed the regime to rid itself of social responsibility for the majority of the state’s citizens, were only recognised as ‘sovereign states’ by South Africa – and Israel.
Addressing the UN four years after the Sharpeville massacre, Argentinean-born Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara said: “We speak out to put the world on guard against what is happening in South Africa. The brutal policy of apartheid is applied before the eyes of the nations of the world. The peoples of Africa are compelled to endure the fact that on the African continent the superiority of one race over another remains official policy, and that in the name of this racial superiority murder is committed with impunity. Can the United Nations do nothing to stop this?”
The fierce state repression of the 1960s failed to prevent an upsurge of youthful struggles for civil rights in the 1970s, with a mass student demonstration in Soweto in June 1976 being met once again with ruthless violence. This time several hundred school students were shot dead.
Throughout the 20th century the oppressed people of South Africa fought back with courage and determination in the face of brutal repression – using strikes, protests, armed struggle, civil disobedience and more. The Sharpeville and Soweto massacres were defining moments in this struggle in terms of galvanising the resistance and shocking the international community into taking action against the regime.
Today, as a democratic South Africa struggles to overcome the legacy of the poverty and racial inequality caused by 400 years of colonialism, it also demands that the new apartheid state, Israel, be similarly isolated through boycott, divestment and sanctions.
Nelson Mandela has said that justice for the Palestinians is “the greatest moral issue of the age”.
“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” he said.
Following the Sharpeville massacre, the death toll rose to 69 and the number of injuries to 180. In the following days 77 people, many of whom were still in hospital, were arrested for questioning – most were later released.
On 24 March the government banned all public meetings in 24 districts of South Africa and on April 8 the PAC and the African National Congress (ANC) were banned and a state of emergency was declared.
The following September 224 people lodged civil claims against the government but the government responded by introducing the Indemnity Act which relieved all officials of any responsibility for the Sharpeville atrocities. No police officer involved was ever convicted.
The massacre made the world question apartheid; it was brought up in the UN Security Council for the first time.
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Foul hypocrisy of constant “human rights” posturing to demonise and threaten “rogue” anti-imperialist and workers states by rampaging, civilian-killing, torturing West
Speech by Bruno Rodriguez Parilla, minister of foreign affairs, Republic of Cuba, in the high-level segment of the 13th session of the Human Rights Council, Geneva, March 3, 2010
Those who profess themselves the guardians of human rights and try to question others are precisely those who are directly responsible for the gravest, most systematic and most flagrant violations of human rights, most of all the right to life.
They are the authors of the colonial system which served to plunder the countries of the South and condemn them to under-development. They are responsible for the present international economic order that is silently murdering millions of human beings, victims of hunger, poverty and preventable and curable diseases. It is they who are imposing modern wars of conquest that are occasioning millions of deaths, generally civilian, and shockingly known as “collateral damage.”
They are also the benefactors of pensée unique, of exclusive models, of excluding values, of media warfare, of the construction of immanent truths, of the subculture of commercial publicity, of the imposition of conditioned reflexes, of the embedded, mendacious, docile and brutalizing press that justifies or conceals the slaughter.
The manipulation of terrorism was used by the United States and its European allies to launch the wars of domination and the conquest of energy resources in Iraq and Afghanistan which have cost two million human lives. It also served to justify the forced disappearances, torture, secret prisons and detention centers where humanitarian international law is not recognized and neither is the condition of human beings. It was the pretext for “patriotic laws” like those that the United States government has just extended, which encroach on liberties and guarantees won by the civil rights movement in struggles that took centuries.
Who will answer for the brutalities committed in Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantánamo and other centers of torture and death? When will those responsible be brought to trial, and impunity be brought to an end?
The deputy foreign minister of Sweden made a strange and arrogant speech this morning, passing critical judgments on nine countries; however, he did not utter one word about the Swedish government’s complicity with the secret flights carrying kidnapped persons that made stopovers in its territory. We trust that some day its prolonged investigation in that respect will be concluded and that it will deign to inform this Council of the results.
Who, in the European countries, will answer for the secret flights, the secret prisons in their territories and the participation in acts of torture?
What has been happening in Palestine over the years constitutes a veritable genocide. Thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives as the result of indiscriminate military attacks and ironclad sieges and blockades that are depriving them of the most elemental means of subsistence.
The military dictatorships in Latin America, imposed and sustained by the United States for decades, murdered 400,000 people. In Cuba alone they provoked 20,000 deaths.
The right to life is constantly being violated in the world. The very existence of the human species is seriously threatened by climate change, for which the same persons who are unleashing and leading wars of conquest are historically and currently responsible. The disgraceful Copenhagen meeting, with its fraudulent and exclusive practices, constituted an act against humanity’s right to life and survival.
Mr. President: For half a century, Cuba was the victim of acts of aggression and terrorism on the part of the United States. A total of 1,577 Cubans lost their lives or were left disabled.
The masterminds of mid-flight bombing of a Cubana Aviation airliner in 1976 are enjoying their impunity, protected by the government of the United States. A dengue epidemic, the result of a bacteriological attack, caused the death of 101 Cuban children: One of a series of explosive devices placed in Havana in 1997 caused the death of a young Italian.
The so-called Cuban Adjustment Act and the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy incite illegal emigration and cost lives.
The economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed in Cuba is an act of genocide, typified in paragraphs (b) and (c) of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and a massive, flagrant and systematic violation of human rights.
The anti-Cuba policy of the United States, which the government of President Obama has not changed, is costing Cuban people’s lives.
A new subversive escalation, with wide media coverage, has been launched against Cuba. It does not respect any ethical principle whatsoever. It attempts to present mercenaries as patriots, and agents on the payroll of the United States in Cuban territory as dissidents.
The powerful machinery of the empire has not hesitated to utilize a reoffending prisoner, sentenced in due process for common crimes and subsequently recruited in prison, in order to present him as a fighter for human rights. In order to obtain spurious political dividends, he was launched to his death, in spite of sterling medical care. As President Raul Castro Ruz stated, it was a lamentable event. He is another victim of the subversive policy of the United States against Cuba.
Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, there has never been one single case of murder, torture or extrajudicial execution in Cuba: there has never been one “death squad” or one “Operation Condor”. Cuba has a meritorious and impeccable pedigree in the protection of the right to life, including via altruistic cooperation beyond its borders.
Mr. President: I would have liked to refer to concrete aspects of the serious work that this Council is undertaking, to approach the issue of the review of this body that must take place next year in order to expose the attempt to subjugate it, change its composition and its procedures, in order to impose political interests on it. I would have liked to refer to the Universal Periodic Review mechanism, which has demonstrated its usefulness, in spite of its imperfections and the confirmed lack of self-criticism of the powerful. I would have liked to defend the Council and emphasize the importance of preserving it free of politicization, discrimination, selectivity and double standards.
I can assure you that Cuba will continue contributing with effort and tenacity to ensure that the Human Rights Council maintains its independent direction and consolidates cooperation as the true way for the promotion and protection of human rights in the world.
I must proclaim, in the name of the heroic and noble people of Cuba, that no campaign will separate us from our ideals of independence and freedom.
Thank you very much. •
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