Back issue
No 1379 1st December 2010
Fake-“left” calls to “Stop the Cuts” are not just pathetic and inadequate but a complete diversion from the need to warn the working class of the massive unstoppable disintegration of capitalism which is unstoppably unrolling. Student revolt is good but a long way from “turning the tide”.
Ireland renewed crisis is not a last spasm of a one-off bank collapse but the latest symptom confirming the historic failure of capitalism. Nothing has been solved by money printing. Revolutionary politics is vitally needed
The febrile excitement of the “left” Labourites, official TUCers and the fake-“left” pretend-revolutionary swamp over a few smashed windows and militant shouting by the student protests, underlines their complete lack of grasp of the depth and seriousness of the desperate crisis which is tearing the capitalist historic order into shreds.
Recent events pile the evidence high of how capitalism’s disastrous failures are unstoppably plunging the entire world into total chaos.
In short order the economic crisis has resurfaced with a vengeance as Ireland is pushed back down into desperate poverty and deprivation by the vicious sovereign debt demands of international capital (with Portugal and Spain, and possibly all Europe close behind), its national pride (fought for with centuries of sacrificed lives in desperate anti-imperialist struggle) now mortgaged by Green Tory corrupt wheeler-dealing and capitalist profiteering to German bank dominance and international currency speculation; NATO is reeling from its summit admissions of defeat in Afghanistan and the complete stooge government paralysis in Iraq where the occupation and “freedom” degenerates daily into more bloody chaos, a complete shattering failure for the US Empire’s plans to bully and intimidate all Third World resistance into the ground; “elections” everywhere are proven even more clearly to be a farcical nonsense and no more so than in the British “Mother of Parliaments” and now the “Great Democracy” of the US where the cynicism, greed and indifference of the ruling class has seen a complete collapse in just two years of the latest spin-hype Obama-ism, the latest fraudulent attempt to keep the people fooled a little bit longer by the bourgeois parliamentary racket.
These are symptoms of the complete and total unravelling of the entire post-war system of exploitation and dominance by US led monopoly capitalism.
More, they are symptoms of the disintegration of the entire centuries-long capitalist history of exploitation and wage slavery.
They challenge the entire world with the greatest and most profound struggle in human history – far beyond the great Russian Revolution in 1917 and the enormous anti-imperialist and communist battles of the Second World War into Eastern Europe and the bitter and mass sacrificial fights of the post-war wave of anti-colonialist and communist struggles from Africa’s many upheavals to China, Vietnam, Cuba and Korea, Latin America and the most doggedly heroic of all in the Middle East around Palestine.
But the gigantic revolutionary world significance of these events – the further proof of the unstoppable catastrophic unravelling of the crisis and the growing Third World resistance it has engendered does not even surface in the “left” analyses.
Worse than that, their limited and defencist reformist sloganeering to “Stop the Cuts”, or “No to War” and “withdraw the troops” is not only painfully inadequate for the gigantic Slump disaster and war, but also a massive distraction and deliberate diversion from the revolutionary necessities which grow more urgent by the day.
Only complete shallowness could pretend that the students represent the “beginnings of the turnaround.”
Only complete shallowness could declare at the launch of the “Coalition of Resistance” that burying all political differences in order to form a “united left” to “build on the Stop the War Campaign” – where the total ineffectuality of protest politics has been ruthlessly demonstrated over a decade as the marches have dropped from the nearly 2 million to a pathetic scrappy few thousands last weekend – was any kind of resurgence of the left.
Just the opposite. The desperate floundering of the Heinz variety mix of fake-“lefts” is being utterly exposed as the world spirals downwards and their politics are revealed as unable to keep up or grasp what is happening.
A dozen attempts at “Socialist Alliances” have crashed in flames or petty backstabbing squabbling like that tearing the opportunist, and potentially reactionary, nationalism of Tommy Sheridan’s “Scottish Socialist Party” into shreds currently via the gleeful bourgeois libel courts (or the Healyite WRP before that).
It is their political failings, not any supposed moral standards or not, which lead to endless collapses and demoralised wailing about the “weakness of the left” because they deliberately ride over or just tried to brush under the carpet the glaring differences and theoretical problems of the past.
Without the injection of a Leninist revolutionary argument, and the chance to debate and polemicise it in open discussion the COR and any other movements will be just as disastrous.
It is a humiliating admission for this “great gathering” of the senior and seasoned figures of the alleged “left” to be reduced to tailending the anarchist youth.
The rage, anger and enthusiasm for resistance expressed by the student marches against the monstrous ruling class education cuts and contemptuous fee increases, which will wipe out the chance of higher education (and even senior school chances) for all but the very wealthy are totally justifiable – and only the most stuffy and privileged of the middle class and Establishment have not expressed at some twinge of delight at seeing the Tory headquarters invaded.
And as the only mass political “actions” yet seen in Britain since the laughable and shabby farce of the more-fraudulent-then-ever “general election” (with the tiniest positive voting levels ever seen and almost universal contempt), the marches help expose the shameful “leadership” of the TUC and mainstream Labour movement which has completely failed to mobilise any response at all in the working class to the slump cuts and dictatorial Tory class war savagery being escalated day-by-day, not even the kind of strikes and militancy seen elsewhere in Europe for example (which are still a long way from what is needed).
The entire class-collaborating Labour and TUC establishment has been notable for its ineffectuality, deliberately and criminally heading off any rising class feeling.
But they are always backed and buttressed by precisely the fake-“lefts” and their endless labour establishment wheeler-dealing support for allegedly “more militant” figures to achieve a supposed “shift leftwards” here, or “extra militancy” there but which only ever serves to bolster up the whole opportunist racket and never challenges or exposes it.
A few smashed plate glass windows and anarchist firecrackers in the streets do not constitute the “turning of the tide in pushing back the Tory cuts” as some of the fake-“lefts” were crowing in excitement in the days afterwards, and again once the sixth formers and schoolkids had joined in a fortnight later and as their rallying crying at the Coalition of Resistance launch.
Even if they did, it is a complete fraud to suggest that the issue facing workers (and their student offspring) is simply one of “stopping Tory cuts” and that a bit of “street action” or even a lot of it, will suffice.
Even some of the young marchers could do better than that, at least to the extent of spray-canning the word “revolution” onto a government building, even if this shallow anarchist vandalism has little grasp of the true significance of what it is saying, or little notion of how it could be achieved.
Let the youth be drawn in to all kinds of protest and be confronted with the political issues of the struggle against the crisis now unfolding with accelerating pace across the world of course.
Let them see the harshness and brutal savagery to come, as capitalism is forced to push through its class war cuts or go under in the economic hurricanes sweeping the entire interlocked world finance system, as Ireland is bitterly learning.
They are already getting a taste of the police brutality being unleashed again (against all the demonstrators irrespective of whether they were allegedly ‘violent’) and all their illusions in “the democratic Western way of life” (built upon decades and decades of brutal exploitation of the Third World which has never experienced anything but fascist tyranny by the rich countries) are going to be thoroughly challenged by the unfolding crisis in the real world:
Video footage has emerged showing mounted police charging a crowd of protesters during this week’s tuition fees demonstrations, the day after the Metropolitan police chief said tactics “did not involve charging the crowd”.
Tens of thousands of school and college pupils and university students demonstrated in largely peaceful protests across the country against government plans to increase tuition fees and scrap the education maintenance allowance, but there were violent scenes at the central London protests. Hundreds of protesters were corralled or “kettled” by police, and later advanced upon by mounted officers.
Many who were in the crowd complained of being charged by police on horseback.
Police have denied that mounted officers charged at protesters; however, a five-minute video posted on YouTube last night shows a number of officers on horseback advancing at speed through a crowd of people.
Jenny Love, 22, who graduated from Bath University in July, said mounted officers “charged without warning”.
“When the horses charged I was fairly near the front of the demo, where we were very tightly packed in, and found myself very quickly on the floor where I assumed the foetal position and covered my head while people simply ran over me,” she said.
“Thankfully another protester picked me up before I could suffer any serious damage.”
Love described the charge “as pretty terrifying” and said she suffered bruising during the ordeal. “I’m very angry that the mounted police were ordered to charge on a crowd containing many people like me who were only interested in peaceful protest,” she said. “Police chiefs should think themselves lucky that no one was more seriously injured.”
Naomi Bain, a member of support staff at Birkbeck University, was at Whitehall on Wednesday to protest against the government cuts. She said: “We were right at the front of the crowd. I’ve been in a lot of protests before, so we weren’t particularly scared of police shouting at us and telling us to move. We were standing our ground – until the horse charge.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so frightening. I’ve seen police on horseback, but this was like a cavalry charge. There was a line of police on foot, and they just moved out of the way, then maybe a hundred yards down the street there was a line of police on horseback. We’d been standing firmly and just moving back slowly, but when the police on horseback charged, that was the moment when we absolutely ran.”
Bain said she was standing with school and college pupils, some as young as 15, when mounted police advanced. “There were people who fell down who would have been under the horses’ hooves if they hadn’t been grabbed – and these were really young kids as well.”
Jonathan Warren, a freelance photojournalist who was at the protest, said mounted police advanced “with no warning”. “There was a line of police officers, which parted, and then the police on horseback just started charging,” he said, adding that protesters were left “angry and scared”.
But what the students need just as much as the working class is a revolutionary perspective and they will get no such understanding from the fake-“lefts”, even from those that have recently begun to use the r-r-revolution word at least, (after years of hiding it away in back-page articles and academic discussion) acutely aware that the working class consciousness is going to run ahead of them fairly rapidly as the crisis deepens relentlessly unless they peddle hard to keep up with their posturing and pretences.
But not one of them is urging the building of a rational party of open polemical struggle for revolutionary scientific understanding without which there can be no revolutionary leadership and the overturning of capitalist degeneracy to finally build planned socialism, coordinating the entire world in a single coherent cooperative production system for human needs not private profit.
Those that will at least make a token mention of the need to overturn capitalism as part of their analysis (like the revisionist Lalkarites to their occasional credit), still cling to the same “Stop the War” pacifism and “Fight the cuts” and “Don’t let the workers pay” reformist defencism as the rest, when it comes to the lead they offer.
In other words they don’t really grasp the reality and depth of the crisis any better than the rest.
In other words the constant refusal by the revisionists to tackle the past mistakes and errors of the first titanic historic experiments in workers state building and particularly the disastrous retreats from revolutionary perspectives which began at the time of Stalin (and under the influence of his theoretical errors) is as hampering to their understanding as any of the poisonous bitterness of the petty bourgeois Trotskyists whose deep down middle class prejudice rejects all of the enormous achievements of the USSR and other workers states, throwing the giant achievements out with the bathwater of the mistakes and errors there have been.
Mistakes there were in the first stupendous, history-changing attempts to build socialism, unavoidably as Lenin always knew, in nascent working class rule, struggling to take mankind to a totally new level of culture, science, organisation and cooperation with only the uneducated and long-repressed resources of the held-back working class to get there.
But the way to deal with that is to examine all the mistakes and difficulties openly, and fight to understand them and overcome them, not ignore them like the revisionists or declare the struggle a hopeless failure like the always defeatist and pessimistic Trots, who could see nothing of the staggering achievements of the Soviet Union and workers states which demonstrate for the first time that the supposed “cleverness” (so excessively paid for) of capitalist owners and bosses is entirely unnecessary to run things, and in fact prevents the development of a new quality of existence and cooperative creative society.
It has only been a few steps from the “lefts” gloom to the rank brain-dead opportunism of the revisionists and its complete abandoning of the core understanding of the need to fight for the dictatorship of the working class in favour of “peace struggles” or even full-on and deadly disarming illusions in the “peaceful road” and parliamentary methods (which Pinochet’s Chile gave savage lessons on), or to the all-out hostile anti-communism which underpins all the Trotskyists, and crypto-Trotksyist shadows like the joke “CPGB” (which hijacked the name but nothing else of the British Communists) which long ago became completely reactionary opportunism, backing every Western stunt going to subvert the practical building of socialism such as the Catholic Church/CIA funded Solidarnosc “trade union” in Poland which brought down the Warsaw revisionists and helped precipitate the pointless, idiot, Gorbachevite liquidation of the Soviet Union itself in 1989.
[As an aside it can be noted that the predictable Pilsudski-fascist legacy of that reactionary charade, cheered so mightily by the “rank-and-file” fetishism of the Trotskyist parties, who fall for every Western CIA “democracy” subversion stunt in the book (like the days and days of Western press front-page bilge about Burma recently), is now running Poland and goes from bad to worse with the slump disaster:
David Cameron’s alliance in the European parliament is falling apart after the group’s Polish leader left his own party because it was too rightwing and then faced calls from fellow members to step down.
Michal Kaminski, the Polish leader of the European Conservative and Reformists group, announced that he had left Poland’s Law and Justice party, Cameron’s main ally in Europe, because it had been taken over by extremists.
Fellow MEPs in the alliance have told the Guardian that Kaminski should step down as leader of the ECR because he no longer has a mandate to lead.
The developments are a major embarrassment for the prime minister and William Hague, the foreign secretary. They took the party into an alliance with the Law and Justice party in July 2009.
Kaminski told the Sunday Telegraph :”I cannot accept that my party is being taken over by the far right, and being dominated by the far right. I don’t like the direction Law and Justice is going so I’m going my own way now.”
Two other MEPs have also indicated they will leave Law and Justice. Others are expected to follow in the wake of local elections in Poland in which Law and Justice came second with 27% of the vote, against 34% for Civic Platform, the governing party.
Kaminski wishes to maintain his role as head of the ECR, but two MEPs from Law and Justice told the Guardian that he ought to leave the post.
Jacek Kurski, a one-time ally of Kaminski’s, ... accused Kaminski of “rebranding” himself for European politics. “If there’s anybody who is extreme, it is Michal Kaminski. He is doing his best to realign himself but he is the one who made homophobic comments and was once closely connected to the far right in Poland,” he said.
Dr Rafal Pankowski, author of The Populist Radical Right in Poland and an expert in extremist activity, said that the Conservatives could well find that the remaining Law and Justice Party now turned further to the right.
So much for the Trotskyist “political revolution” – they are nothing but dupes for stooge fascism.
It is this theoretical bankruptcy sustained by opportunism and petty bourgeois class positions of the fake-“lefts” which results in their total political and philosophical incapacity to either recognise the overwhelming and unstoppable plunge of the profit system into catastrophic failure, or to educate and warn the working class about it.
But nothing else could be expected from the pretend-revolutionaries of both the Trotskyist and revisionist flavours whose brains have been poisoned with petty bourgeois hatred for the workers states and the disciplines of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or addled with pacifist notions of halting the imperialist degeneration into war which is an integral part of the crisis and one of the first major symptoms, for over a decade now, of its intractable crisis failure.
None of the “lefts”’ shallow theories of “wars for oil” or “new expansionism by imperialism” to grab resources, or isolated and separate sloganising about “rights to self-determination” (which were mostly wrong anyway) has made any connection between these incidents and rampages of imperialism and its great unrolling crisis.
The EPSR alone has constantly insisted that the turn to continuous “shock and awe” Nazi, blitzing, torture and massacre, is part and parcel of the crisis failure of an entire historic system of exploitation, by a desperate and terrified ruling-class which sees its beautiful, luxurious, indolent, power and wealth slipping away in the complete chaos of the humiliating incompetence and unsolvable contradictions of its system’s inevitable implosion.
Least of all does their long, capitalist-boom class-collaborating wheeling and manoeuvring for electoral or union advantage, prepare them for the sheer scale and significance of the events unrolling now – seeing it as only a worse “recession” than usual (even if admitted to be “worse than the 1930s) that can be “resisted” with the ruling class “made to pay”.
It takes an astounding shallowness for example to describe the current second-round savagery of additional cuts being imposed on Ireland as an “aftershock” of the 2008 banking crisis as one “left” writer did in the bourgeois press this week.
By this view the crisis was “an event”, caused by “mistakes” or perhaps “out of control” greed and excess leading to a period of depression and cutbacks as a “price” to pay which the ruling class is trying to impose on the working class and which can be “resisted”.
All of which is part of it, but nothing of such an analysis begins to grasp the complete whirlpool failure of capitalism which has been developing and lurching from disaster to disaster throughout the entire post-war period, each time being rescued by the overwhelming and never-before-seen extent of world monopoly dominance by the tyrannical and ruthless US imperialism with its unprecedented capacity to print (or the electronic credit-creating equivalent) mountains of additional and utterly worthless polluting dollars, beginning way back in the financing of the Vietnam War when near war-exhausted bankruptcy of the US forced Nixon to take the dollar off the gold standard – (the $32/ounce Bretton-Woods-agreed basis which underpinned the highly lucrative maintenance and ownership of the world’s sole trading currency), – dollars which have been pumped into the complex and hugely extended world trading system.
The relentless dilution of the dollar has continued ever since to cover the crisis, which has repeatedly re-emerged on the surface like runnels of lava bursting through yet again on a live volcano; in the 1980 slump, and the ‘87 Stock Exchange crash, in the early Nineties “recession” and the Latin American credit meltdown (wiping out the Mexican and Argentinian middle and working class and leading to the drug war horrors now), in the currency collapses ripping through south-east Asia, in the ruthless re-imposition of starvation poverty exploitation on the African continent, and forcing mighty industrial and financial powerhouse Japan into an endless stagnation, still continuing 20 years later,
This is no series of episodes but the continuing, continuous expression of the underlying crisis of the entire capitalist system (as analysed by Marx in his brilliant unchallenged and unchallengeable Capital) which bursts with ever greater devastation to the surface over and over and which finally emerged into the heart of the great Empire itself in the panic-stricken bank-failing turmoil of 2008 and which has been put off only extremely temporarily by the staggering ESCALATION of yet more dollar printing on a scale that dwarfs the already incredible output of the federal presses for the last decades.
Only the ability of the great workers state economy China, and the reluctant capitalist rival creditors in Germany and Japan, to absorb yet more dollars like heavyweight boxers soaking up punches, has currently stopped the entire dollar structure from totally collapsing.
But no one dares shout the “Emperor’s no clothes” words for fear of the hurricane which will be unleashed.
But it is coming, along with giant conflict.
The world does not simply have to deal with the vicious cuts which a nervous ruling class is trying to pretend it has the authority to make, but the next round of shattering economic failure which has been put off for just a moment.
The aggressive chauvinism being cranked up in America around the aggressive dollar dilution it is making to avoid its unrepayable debts, around the “good old German Deutschmark” Euro-isolationism of the Germans, and by the Japanese attempts to bring the Yen back to “competitive” levels, (and the sound, and correct, Chinese refusal to be forced to let America off its debts by “revaluing” its Yuan currency) are all in preparation for the day when there are no more little Ireland’s left and the Slump burdens must be pushed onto the biggest of rivals by force.
The “aftershock” phrase does not begin to grasp the crisis and merely bolsters the out and out opportunism of the Labourites and official TUCers.
It is merely another variant of the universal ruling class and petty bourgeois opportunist conspiracy to hide the reality that the capitalist slump is unstoppable.
The entire bourgeois parliamentary racket has been at this since the crash, pretending the “solution” is just a question of the proper way to do things and the alleged necessities of “frugality” etc.
The Tories pretend that it is all down to some alleged “profligacy” by New Labour.
But they and their City fatcat friends started the state sell-offs and credit boosting anyway under Thatcher’s Nigel Lawson which continued via the compliant and obscenely class-collaborating Blairites, whose only “newness” was to invent a “new” kind of Nazi-style shallow spin media hype to lie about the continuation of Thatcherism when working class discontent around the poll tax, economic failure against stronger European competition and degenerate sleaze (also extended since by the Labourites) had made continuing direct Tory rule impossible.
The “welfarism” of the Labourite period, funded by hollow credit and mostly empty spin anyway (to cover “disciplining” “feckless” workers), is no different in essence to the policies pursued by the ruling class everywhere in Europe since the Second World War, including the Tories, throwing out scraps of “benefits” and “social services” to hold back a working class that came to the very cliff edge of complete revolution in the late 1940s after the horrifying experiences of the Depression soup kitchens and the devastation of the World War it led to.
The class-collaborating trade unionist and Labourite tradition has had a long comfortable existence making a deal with capitalism; that in return for a share of the super-profits being squeezed from the Empire colonies and the sweatshop and plantation near-slave labour imposed on the Third world (think bananas, cheap supermarket tea, constant revelations about cheap T-shirts and “throwaway” fashion, coffee, chocolate, sneakers, etc etc etc) it would keep the lid on all the revolutionary pressures and aspiration in the working class, corrupting it with reformist notions and the gamut of consumerist philistinism
It can no longer afforded because capitalism has hit the buffers.
But as every analysis of the past indicates, the Tory class savagery of the coming cuts will simply accelerate the downwards spiral.
The ruling class knows it too – and its real purpose is a class war onslaught to try and intimidate and demoralise the working class.
In that sense the cuts are actually “unnecessary”.
But the pretence by the Labourites that if cuts were made “more slowly” it would give the economy “a chance to grow” is an equally lying fraud.
For a start the working class still gets hammered and the scale of the cuts would be devastating.
But more importantly it will do nothing to stop the crisis which is caused by the worldwide failure of the entire capitalist profit system.
There is not a hope of “recovery” coming.
It is a deliberate Goebbels lie to disarm the working class from the understanding that the bottom is falling out of the world.
Anything to stop the understanding that capitalism itself is incurable.
The Labourites even point to the world crisis whenever they are trying to wriggle of the hook of being blamed for the disaster.
But they don’t tell the working class the meaning of the terrifying whirlpool failure – that the long capitalist “boom” has been stretched far beyond its limits and has broken totally.
But the “left militant” TUC line, like that pumped out at the Coalition of Resistance meeting by the fake-“left” supported new secretary of Unite, Len McCluskey, (and supported by alleged “left” Labourite MPs like John McDonnell) that there “are alternatives to cuts”, is equally a giant diversion from the truth.
Even if all the wealth of the ruling class (which runs into hundreds of billions salted away in banks, overseas holdings and tax avoiding island vaults) was to be forcefully coopted IT STILL WOULD NOT SOLVE ANYTHING.
How is it proposed that the working class could direct all or even part of these funds anyway???
The ruling class organises the entire society to ensure that it keeps its hands on its property – via the enormous fraud of “democracy” with behind that the full weight of military, secret services, and police whose central function is to defend that class rule and its wealth and privilege.
But even if the British ruling class could be “persuaded” to hand over everything it has (which the reformist would never do anyway) it still would not change the crisis.
As the smaller countries have learned, the savagery of the markets would wipe out any individual capitalist country that tried to redistribute the wealth in this way.
Nothing but revolution can stop this disaster.
No protests, liberal “reasoning”, demonstrations, one-day strikes, General strikes, or riots, will change anything essential.
The additional class-war cuts savagery of the ruling class might be delayed, and all these actions are more or less powerful signals of movement and resistance against the crisis and a giant stirring of potential in the working class.
But they will remain sterile and pointless unless they are made part of developing revolutionary experience and determination.
Marching the workers in Greece to the top of the Acropolis and back as the revisionist KKE “communist” party has done, or paralysing the whole of Portugal with a General Strike may demonstrate willingness and mass discipline but without a core of revolutionary Leninist perspective it can only lead eventually to demoralisation.
The “pressure” of the marches through Athens has not stopped the cuts in wages, pensions, job levels and social services (such as they have been anyway in partly Third World Greece).
Portugal put through its “austerity budget” on Friday and is looking as vulnerable as the Irish to the circling sharks of the bond markets, suggesting even worse to come.
And more than 100 000 demonstrating in the centre of Dublin will not stop the pain being imposed as this bourgeois piece captures:
...we are undergoing, an identity crisis so viral and all-engulfing that we don’t know who we are any more. Far from the gloomy headlines and crushing statistics lies the full truth of what we face now. We tuck our children into bed not knowing if they have a future in our country. In every home in the land, there has been private anxiety and panic. Our government has no moral authority to remain in power. People feel frightened, alone and unled.
...I’ve stopped buying the newspapers, because I can’t bear my children to see them. I am afraid of the radio news.
Having spent the last decade in a fog of intoxicating self-congratulation for our economic success, we now face the reality that it was illusory. Inept politicians, greedy bankers and property speculators have wrecked the certainties on which our recent notions of ourselves were founded.
Psychiatrists tell us that grief comes in four distinct stages: denial, anger, bargaining and depression, before finally the goal of acceptance may be reached. In the last year, the country has staggered its way through that grim quartet of emotions. We made ourselves believe that the boom would last for ever, denying the facts when it became clear that it wouldn’t. We then told ourselves the fallout wouldn’t be as vicious as some predicted, even as the dole queues lengthened and businesses collapsed, and every single one of us had a family member or colleague who lost a job or couldn’t pay the mortgage any more. Then followed the grotesque period of passivity and botched action, which the historians of 21st-century Ireland will ultimately remember as the doom of a country’s self-image.
When we needed sane leadership, we got evasions and platitudes. The goodwill that people had for the taoiseach, Brian Cowen, a demonstrably decent man, was squandered. His administration came to be widely mistrusted and – I hate to use the word – loathed. We were told that we were all in it together, even as the millionaire speculators were subsidised by the taxpayer, their lavish pensions and remuneration packages guaranteed. About 300 people in Ireland continue to live like rock stars, while 4 million of us foot the bill. We have socialism for bankers, the ferocities of the market for everyone else. We are cheated and lied to, and every family is now paying. The poor pay more than most.
I was young in the 1980s. I know what a recession is. But I cannot remember the boiling anger that now exists here, the sense of betrayal and injustice. A teacher told me recently that he could think of no reason to stay living in Ireland. Many politicians of all parties are despised. The radio phone-in shows have stories that would break a stone’s heart. People have been appearing in court pleading for their homes not to be repossessed. Businesses are closing. Thousands are emigrating.
And there is a wider, if sometimes unacknowledged, context for the anger. It is that we know the culpability belongs to so many, not to few: not only to the developers and their venal friends in the banks, not only to a succession of appallingly reckless Irish governments, but to our very society itself, and its every official element. This is what is making Ireland so deeply uneasy. We have been disastrously seduced by the lies of authority.
We sustained the mediocrities and buffoons who have led us into the swamp, assuring ourselves in the privacy of our deluded consciences that happiness is index-linked to the purported commercial value of the arrangements of bricks that make our houses. We face hard, brutal years
Ireland’s experience is precisely confirmation that the crisis is out of control.
Great ranks of prime, brand-new housing stand empty in every town while the mass face homelessness and deprivation.
Where are the demands to simply seize them? And seize the factories? And the farms?
Could the working class now be any worse off if the capitalist bond markets withdrew their funds?
If the banks collapsed?
Would they starve??
But Ireland is a great food producer!!! It feeds half the UK (which is a reason why the British ruling class has panicked and against all its instincts poured money into supporting the hated Euro).
Take over the farms and food processors!!!
And where are the great world capitalists going to put their funds anyway if the contagion was to spread????
And what would they buy with these funds if the working class began to take over factories and plantations?
Too early say the fake-“lefts” – all such talk is premature.
And in one sense it is for it challenges the working class to organise on a revolutionary basis, which would immediately bring it into conflict with the ruling class state forces.
That would demand an even higher level of revolutionary understanding.
But that only underlines the urgent need to build deep and living revolutionary understanding.
It is only “premature” because the working class has been led far away from revolutionary notions for decades.
Who by? The fake-“lefts” and reformists, the parliamentary revisionists and the pacifist protesters, all rushing around pretending to be “revolutionaries” but bringing none of this to the surface.
But there is a growing readiness for revolution in Ireland.
The turn is revealed this week with the bye-election victory in Ireland of the Sinn Féin, whose past revolutionary nationalist form was clearly the critical factor for its support, now that the crisis has bitten.
Sinn Féin’s heroic nationalist politics have been mingled with much better socialist instincts than most other movements in Britain or Ireland throughout its history.
Its politics are sadly a long way from Leninist grasp and the need to make the overturn of capitalism the key question.
But the vote for them is the best available.
The need is for Leninism however. Conditions have never been riper nor more urgent for revolutionary class war to finally overturn this foul degeneration which is heading for all-out world war once again.
Even the biggest economies are savaged by the surges and lurches of the desperate speculators:
The men clustered in the shade of trees, in the 90F heat of a car park in Atlanta, form the lowest layer of America’s so-called middle class. They stare, alert like greyhounds, at the vans leaving the hardware store. When one pulls up they rush, 15 or 20 together, to the driver’s window to negotiate. The hired man leaps in with his bag of tools: he’ll earn $10 an hour, cash, for basic building work.
But even the lowest layer has layers within: the Hispanic men are recent migrants; mainly young. The African Americans are older, gaunt. “They’re only hiring Mexicans,” one tells me, and gives a hard-faced stare when I ask why.
At Goodwill, a charity-run job centre in Atlanta, you can meet the next layer up: former legal clerks, accounts secretaries, computer technicians – the whole story of black self-advancement is present in this room. But now it’s all one story: most have been out of work for months, some for years.
Go to the pristine cul-de-sacs where this supposed middle class lives and you will find, every couple of streets, a lawn as high as a wheatfield, indicating a home that has been repossessed. Even the survivors hang on by a thread. Juan and Kenyoda Pullen have been renting here since their home was repossessed. Sometimes the rent does not get paid. When they lost their jobs – as postman and bank clerk – their combined income dropped from $75,000 to $14,000 a year.
Do you still feel middle class, I ask them. They do, they say, “though we’re not really certain what that means any more”. America’s “middle class” was always a construct of ideology, indeed the expression of a dream. For the black and Mexican casual workers in the car park the dream is the thing they have in common: they are there because they prefer work to welfare. They believe themselves to be entrepreneurs and will battle against the economic headwind to the point of self-abasement to avoid admitting otherwise.
Yet America’s middle class is disappearing. A lifestyle sustained for 30 years by rising debt is dissolving as the credit dries up. And the question beyond the crisis is: can it ever come back?
Figures released last month by the US Census Bureau show it will be hard. Middle incomes are lower, in real terms, than in 1999. The median income, stagnate for a decade, fell by 4.2% once the crisis hit. Since December 2007 more than six million Americans have been pushed below the official poverty line.
It is dawning on millions that the term middle class might be a misnomer. But the label “working class” does not fit either: in the US it denotes a lifestyle choice involving trade union activism or support for the grittier baseball teams, not a sociological category.
This sudden collapse in lifestyle will have economic and psychological impacts long after the crisis is over. Since the 1980s US growth has been driven by the spending power of the salaried workforce. In turn the consumer has been the dynamo of global growth.
To get things back to the way they were the US has to find a way to create nine million jobs, plug the gap in disposable incomes and reopen the personal credit system to the millions excluded from it. Judged against that, the Obama fiscal stimulus has failed.
The credit system, having created the crisis, compounds the agony: the “payday loan” stores – shameless and neon amid the closed-down high streets – do brisk business. So do the credit reference agencies: Juan Pullen told me he’d actually been refused a job because the employer had checked his credit score: “They think credit indicates character; bad credit equals bad character,” he shrugs. Unable to borrow or earn, a whole generation is being shut out of the American lifestyle.
Meanwhile, some states have begun a race to the bottom: slashing welfare, labour regulations and local taxes to attract investment. High-wage companies close and relocate to low-wage states, and foreign investment flows to the towns where labour costs are lowest. These states are being transformed by the arrival of low-waged Hispanic migrants even as the rightwing politicians who support the economics rail against the demographics.
As a result the so-called Sun Belt, identified by Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in the 1970s as the new political bedrock of conservatism, now feels like the unhappiest place in America. Median incomes in the south are, on average, $8,000 lower than in the northeast; poverty rates are higher than anywhere else in America – and so are the racial and religious tensions.
In the midterm elections politicians have promised to “do something” for the middle class. The kindest thing they could do is tell the truth: Americans have been living a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages – and bridging the gap with credit. And it’s over.
In a free-market society the real middle class is always a minority: if your street has a gate and a security camera at the end of it then you are middle class. A real middle-class kid can afford a college education, not a web-based degree. The real middle-class family does not skip meals or find its automobiles trapped in the repair shop because of unpaid bills.
And even in America, if you are standing in 90F heat, jostling with 30 other guys for a few hours’ work, it is the man in the station wagon curling his finger at you that is middle class – not you.
This chaotic economic failure is compounded by the complete collapse of the great presidential bourgeois “democratic” system’s capacity to hoodwink and fool the working class.
That process took a giant lurch forwards in the US mid-term elections and the complete meltdown failure it showed for the spun-up Obama/Hilary Clinton presidency which in just two short years has destroyed all reformist PC feminist and black nationalist notions that have helped divert attention away from revolutionary politics (via the fake- “lefts”)
Despite the spending of unprecedentedly huge sums of money on TV and press advertising, the usual gamut of dirty tricks and slander and the demented frenzy of the petty bourgeois Tea Partyers, given hours of uncritical airtime by the reactionary media, the mid-term elections showed the utter contempt of the working class for the entire process of elections.
Resistance, hostility and hatred relentlessly increases throughout the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America - in short the entire oppressed Third World - and will coalesce more and more into revolutionary struggle
And that will be joined by the great mass of ordinary workers in even the richest countries as they shake-off the last traces of illusion in bourgeois “democracy” which have hoodwinked them and held them tied to the ruling class for two centuries.
The world is living in system that hit the buffers in October 2008 and is holed beneath the waterline, kept afloat only by “quantitative easing”, pushing total world dollar collapse closer daily.
We should push it right over the edge. Begin by building Leninist open theoretical struggle. Alan Moss
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Topsy-turvy Western Nazi screaming at North Korea is a sign of the deadly danger of capitalist crisis. SOUTH Korea and its US masters, frantic with economic collapse and failure, are creating the armed and dangerous provocations against which the North is properly defending itself. China’s prevarication is revisionist stupidity playing into Western warmongering hands
The pretended “shock” and “outrage” of the Western countries over the Korean border skirmish is the most degenerate inversion of reality yet seen.
It is the purest fascism, on a par with the best strutting and shouting “hurt feelings” of Hitler himself, working up a frenzy of smug, self-justifying rant against the alleged “injuries caused to the German Nation” by the French, or Czechs, or the Austrians, or the Poles, – or Soviet Union inspired communism, shortly before launching blitzkrieg “punishments”, cheered to the rafters by the anti-communist privilege of the German middle-class and the tacit backing of the entire Western imperialist bloc.
The preposterous little squirt Tory Foreign Minister, William “share-a-hotel-room” Hague, sounds off the most pompous and arrogant phrases as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, in “condemning” the North.
But it is not North Korea which has “attacked” anybody or provoked anything.
It has only defended itself from intolerable provocation.
It is the capitalist West, desperate to distract attention from its hurtling crisis into political and economic collapse, which has deliberately fired-up the most monstrous and dangerous provocations against the North Korean workers state, one of the scapegoated targets for imperialist warmongering that has been demonised and picked on as an alleged “rogue state” for the last decade alongside Iran, and Sudan, and Lebanon and Venezuela, Cuba and Burma, and above all China.
Barely mentioned in the twisted lying TV broadcasts and the bourgeois press is the fact that the skirmish which has now taken place was a response to days of South Korean military “exercises” involving the deliberate firing of live shell ammunition over the North Korean territory by the Western forces.
These deliberately dangerous and threatening manoeuvres took place not around the thousands of miles of highly suitable island and coastal inlets of the South Korean peninsula away from the border, prime ground all for training up skills, or in the sea between Japan and Korea, or the tens of thousands of square miles of empty sea and space beyond that, that might be suitable for “exercises” and with space to spare for any stray missile shoots or artillery rounds, but in a narrow strip of water just off the coast of North Korea.
It is an area which has been subject to international dispute ever since the blitzing bullying destruction of the 1950s Korean war in which the communist north was terrified and virtually flattened by B52 bombing for three years (the capital Pyongyang was 97% destroyed, more than any city in the Second World War bar Hiroshima and Nagasaki perhaps), for presuming to throw out capitalism, suffering untold agonies not to be repeated until the Americans did even worse destruction, massacre and carnage in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
It has lived under this terrifying shadow ever since, surrounded by military bases, nuclear threats and South Korean neo-fascist tinpot government stoogery for the US power.
The island area on the sea border, unilaterally imposed by the US power, now bristles with intimidating American Empire listening posts, radar stations and military bases, bolstered and supported by further tooled-up South Korean forces, all sitting on islands and inlets which were seized and held by the South after the war without legal basis or justification.
In particular these areas have some of the best fishing grounds off the coast which the North Koreans try to use in their own space and which they are frequently blocked and intimidated from.
Generally, and much more importantly, the little offshore islands have been used as part of constant pressure and intimidation against the difficult and isolated economy, adding a looming military terror threat to the endless sanctions, blockades and financial strangulation imposed on the North Koreans for year after year after year which, against all the odds, they have survived and overcome (at huge costs, which the Goebbels-upside-down propaganda of the West has then blamed on them and the absurd notion that socialism is “inefficient”, just as it blames Cuba or Zimbabwe or other scapegoated communist or anti-imperialist regimes for the agonies and sufferings and deprivation deliberately imposed on them by strangling economic sanctions and siege blockade).
And these are threats by not just a local South Korean rival but the most powerful and bullying military force on the planet, the USA, which completely dominates the stooge Seoul government, and has maintained tens of thousands of nuclear-armed military in giant bases in the country since 1953.
It is the same US which has been ruthlessly attempting to “shock and awe” the entire planet for over a decade to try and escape its total humiliating collapse failure, starting with the bombing savagery against tiny Serbia (and runs against Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan earlier) to the torturing, barbarity and depravity of two major wars which have utterly destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan (millions), torn apart their culture, economic structures and civilisations and which have escalated world-warring savagery throughout the Middle East, running drone and death squad blitzings into Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and more.
Nor is that the end of the US involvement which is preparing yet more death-squad viciousness and terror throughout Latin America, already revived in Honduras last year, and attempted recently in Ecuador, and constantly being readied against Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, and any others who come near to expressing hostility to US interests.
Meanwhile the US military bases are expanded in Peru and Colombia to intimidate and threaten the whole region, while a vicious paramilitary war of appalling savagery is waged in Colombia against the FARC revolutionary movement under the pretence of a “war on drugs” with CIA, School of Americas, and US “adviser’s” torture and brutality training, support and advice.
This near psychotic and deranged warmongering Empire, being driven by its completely catastrophic economic and political failure into ever more aggressive bullying and blitzing (with Abrams tanks now ordered into Afghanistan which can destroy a village two miles away in almost a single blow) – this “politically correct” Obama-run Empire was using its stooges to play live ammunition war games just two or three miles away from North Korea.
And those war games come on top of an already heated atmosphere of lying Hitlerite allegations against the North from the Spring, when a rusted and barnacle-encrusted piece of seabed scrap was exhibited in Seoul as alleged “proof” of a supposed torpedo “attack” – a bizarre nonsense when the alleged weapon would have been fired only weeks previously and clearly could not have had been long enough on the seabed to gather any sealife or corrosion, a biological process which takes months and years as a dozen natural history documentaries of sunken artificial coral reefs have shown.
Even more detailed analysis on the Internet of particular contradictory aspects of the weaponry and operations of the time is more difficult to verify but undermines the Western allegation as well, which has not stopped it being propaganda-leveraged ever since as warmongering pressure from the South and its Empire masters.
It is small wonder the tiny North is jumpy and nervous.
It is small wonder it tried to defend itself when the live shells started flying among its trawlers and coastal waters, a “detail” which has conveniently disappeared from just about every Western capitalist report under intelligence agency instruction.
The principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat building the firmest possible defence against capitalist subversion and provocation is an essential for the working class if it is ever to be able to build socialism.
Even further questions have to be asked about the civilians killed allegedly.
No-one wants to see innocent people killed.
But why are there civilians living in this highly militarised and dangerous area anyway???? Who are they???
The West constantly alleges that the Taliban and other insurgents are “cheating” because they allegedly attack from areas where civilians live.
But then why should those resisting foreign invasion be obliged to play by some convenient rules for the gung-ho invasion forces to be able to gun them down with their terrifying and overwhelming firepower??
These disputed islands are jammed with military bases and radar and missile posts deliberately sited among fishing villages and hamlets it seems.
The interesting thing is that despite the alleged “atrocities” and disingenuous allegations of an “unprovoked” attack, this incident has not been escalated into the immediate demands for attacks on North Korea.
Obama, giving away yet again his total connivance with the US imperialist warmongering (fascist) programme has now ordered more military exercises (!!!!) to bully and intimidate the region and further the outrageous nonsense that imperialism was just “minding its own business when out of the blue the North Koreans attacked” and denying the fact that it is “exercises” which sparked the whole business.
But the more carefully briefed sections of the capitalist press like this liberal (!) Guardian piece have been making it clear that imperialism is not yet ready to push its luck against the porcupine bristles of North Korea and its correctly declared willingness to defend itself (with the huge sacrifices and discipline that has entailed over years).
Ignoring the foul intelligence agency tone and inverted-facts Goebbels-speak (even with the very worst bits stripped out) it looks like if there is any “unstable maverick” element here is Seoul, exactly as a proper understanding of capitalist crisis would point to:
Despite loose talk of nuclear war, Russia’s panicky warning of “colossal danger” and plunging Asian markets, Pyongyang’s action was a lethal but carefully calibrated, limited demarche to gain the world’s attention. It has certainly done that.
North Korea uses military power, or the threat of it, where others use diplomacy. (!!!!)
It is the only real leverage the regime has. This year, one of its torpedoes almost certainly sank a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 sailors. Although Pyongyang denied responsibility, Kim Jong-il and his apparatchiks used the ensuing furore to promulgate their own agenda – and dramatise their geopolitical essential-ness.
Last year’s second nuclear test, Pyongyang’s aggressive development of ballistic missiles, and its absurdly bellicose tirades, are grist to this well-tried technique of negotiation by force. So too was last weekend’s unveiling of an advanced nuclear bomb-related uranium enrichment facility. North Korea takes “megaphone diplomacy” to a new level: megaton diplomacy.
That said, other key players are not without blame.
The Obama administration, ready to talk to Iran, Syria, the Taliban and other Bush-era outcasts, is strangely reluctant to deal directly with North Korea. But the US policy of “strategic patience” is failing. Instead of sagely drawing back, Pyongyang’s generals are recklessly hurtling forward. Barack Obama must also face the fact that sanctions are not working – witness the spanking new uranium plant made with foreign components. And this in turn highlights another embarrassing WMD intelligence failure.
US envoy Stephen Bosworth’s hopes of pushing China to rein in its rogue ally are likely to be disappointed. Privately, Chinese diplomats are alarmed and critical about North Korea’s bellicosity. But they insist their influence with Kim is limited. Cut off food and energy assistance, as some US hawks urge, and the most probable result will be a refugee crisis engulfing China’s border, plus yet more military brinkmanship.
Beijing’s policy is defined by self-interest: it wants stability, predictability and a benign Asian trading environment. Hence its statement today urging calm and a resumption of the six-party nuclear talks.
South Korea is no better placed to control or channel events. President Lee Myung-bak came to power three years ago promising to take a tougher line with Pyongyang’s panjandrums. And for a while, he did. Now Seoul’s discarding of its “sunshine policy” looks like a mistake – and Lee looks weak. A politically feeble Japan, that once imperial Asian power, shelters furtively behind its US-made anti-missile batteries. Russia is reduced to the role of bystander by an enigma it professes not to understand.
Yet Korea is not all that much of a mystery. This is, for once, a conundrum with a solution. ...
First, the regime wants respect, through recognition of its legitimacy, however distasteful that idea may be. Second, it wants a peace treaty – finally ending the Korean war – that guarantees its territorial sovereignty and banishes the spectre of regime change (they watched the Iraq movie, too).
Third, Kim wants an end to international sanctions and diplomatic isolation – the monicker of America’s chief bogeyman is no longer for him. Fourth, he wants food aid, electricity, financial assistance, investment, trade. Finally, the ailing dictator wants backing for the postulated dynastic succession of his youngest son, a scheme that could yet collapse amid acrimony or worse.
And what could the North offer in return? That’s plain, too: an end to megaton diplomacy, the abandonment of its one-country nuclear arms race (as almost happened in 2007), normalisation of relations and, potentially, an enormous East German-style market opportunity for all those eager Chinese and South Korean businesses.
Such a deal might well be seen as a “reward for bad behaviour”, in the White House’s cautionary words. But we can surely live with that.
The conclusion would seem to be that it is the local difficulties of the South Korean capitalist economy - which was already nearly slaughtered by the earlier round of the giant unfolding capitalist collapse which unfolded in the currency collapses of the late 1990s (imposed on Japan and the south-east Asian countries by the more powerful financial manipulation of the huge dollar controlling US banking and finance system) which is leading to the dangerous provocations.
There may well be further nuances and complications in this particular warmongering provocation that will yet emerge, and it is not guaranteed that it will simply die down in compromise as intimated above.
South Korea has never effectively recovered from the 1990s and is highly vulnerable economically as the now universal markets collapses spread across the world.
As the piece describes, it has torn up rapprochement and increasingly been turning to warmongering noises to distract its own population (who are increasingly frequently demonstrating against this Seoul reactionary regime anyway.)
Adding to the complications are North Korea’s connections with the real target of desperate imperialist hatred, Beijing and its staggering growth and economic export success which has been further slaughtering the already bankrupt capacities of the giant US economy, withstanding the crash impact far more effectively because of Beijing’s workers state capacity to re-direct investment as needed.
For all that China has been using capitalist methods to force the pace of its development, and at enormous cost throughout its society in false illusions, widespread grubby petty bourgeois ambitions, consumerist shallowness and backward greed and self-seeking - what Lenin described as the constant revival of all the old shit from capitalist society for as long as the traces of the old society remained and which the backward ill-developed peasant society of China has, and will have to for a long time yet, compromise with - its workers state superstructure has remained intact so far.
It has been able to set an overall temporal and geographic planned framework for the capitalist developments which is a thousand times more efficient at channelling investments than anarchic unrestrained “free market” capitalism, and thereby speed up the transformation of its economy (and tackle dire backward poverty) at such a pace that it is already outstripping anything the West can achieve, and with it out-competing, out-researching, out-marketing and outperforming the capital-clogged moribund failure of Western capitalism (about to get much less efficient still as rapacious finance markets impose desperate cutbacks).
The poisonous Trots and the reactionary Labourites will doubtless be joining in the Western clamour in one way or another, with more or less complicated slyness about “speaking out for the rank-and-file” or the “ordinary men, women and children” used to justify a stream of poison, as they do constantly against Iran for example or as they all did universally at the time of 9/11, “condemning” or declaring “criminal” the Third World outburst against the New York WTO, and demonstrating thereby and for all time their complete capitulation to ruling class interests and against the rising Third World rebellion.
Their Trotskyite venom about “political revolution” against alleged “bureaucratism” (a sneaky way of calling for outright counter-revolution as endless examples have shown from the downfall of the Polish workers state onwards (leading to an eastern Europe of former socialist countries now all now mired in festering neo-Nazi SS celebrating fascist petty nationalism)) will be mobilised to confuse and corrupt the masses now being drawn into politics everywhere by the slump (and not least the young student rebellion).
But while Leninism has no interest on this other than to defend unconditionally the existence of the remaining workers states (Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea), that does not mean making no criticism of their leadership and philosophy.
Just the opposite, the sycophantic and cringe-making “Hail the Peoples Republic of China” sloganising which the Museum Stalinists of the Lalkar/Proletarian type routinely pump out in lengthy screeds, is precisely not the way to defend them, just as it never was the way to defend the Soviet Union.
There is a lot to criticise about Beijing revisionism, and the barmy personality cult excesses of Pyongyang’s leadership too, which fail totally to develop anything like the revolutionary lead and philosophy which is critical to maintaining the workers state (and to counter “all the old shit” which the huge employment of capitalist economic methodology has made near universal).
Beijing in particular is saturated with the imbecilic notions of “peaceful road” development and somehow “containing” capitalism, the idiot notions first fostered by Stalin’s deliberate re-assessment of the supposedly reduced and constantly diminishing strength of capitalism in his 1953 post-war book “Economic Problems” (see EPSR 1190-96 for example for a full polemic).
Beijing’s overall “don’t rock the boat” approach to world politics, not only leaves it irresponsibly saying nothing to the world working class about capitalism’s terminal collapse and the revolutionary transformations which are rapidly unravelling into total chaos, but ultimately fails to defend even its own interests which will be and are constantly threatened by capitalism’s crisis.
The capitalist press piece’s asides about China’s “self-interest” are possibly all too true, reflecting the disastrous mess that even the cleverest of workers state diplomacy can get into once a world revolutionary Leninist perspective has been abandoned.
China’s recent UN security council vote going along with the notion of “sanctions” against Iran to “prevent it getting nuclear weapons” is a disastrous miscalculation, based on the very most deluded “non-proliferation” hypocrisy of the West, and reflecting just how badly wrong revisionist understanding can be, to the point of being completely reactionary in some aspects (never forgetting the ultimate Gorbachevite idiocy of liquidating the vast achievements of the Soviet Union and its powerful workers state defences for no good purpose in favour of the shallow “benefits” of the “free-market” which even a beginner in Marxism-Leninism could see would be crashing in ruins before long (though it eluded all the fake-“lefts” and their derision of “barmy Marxism” whenever the EPSR’s lone voice warned the working class on this matter)).
As the EPSR has long explained the rising tide of “terrorism” and anti-imperialism around the world, however confused and hampered by barmy religious ideology still hanging over from feudal times, is nevertheless a powerful symptom of the changes in world class force balances that indicate the grindingly oppressed masses of the world have been changed for all time and will never be contained any more.
It is the powerful mass rising, surging forwards here, drawing back there, which will eventually be transformed into the world revolution, just as soon as it is able to build a coherent scientific revolutionary consciousness.
Leninism does not “support” the insurgencies as such – there is no point in confusing the world with the notion that these ideologies are the answer for the working class.
Defeat for imperialism is key which is why going along with moralising rejection and condemnation of the world struggle, including its multiple “terrorist” forms at present is not only pointless but stupidly (or reactionarily and cravenly) feeds the very “war on terror” excuses and Goebbels lies that imperialism is using to pump up its drive to war, its deliberate and cynical “way out” of its humiliating and disastrous failure as a system.
It is finished historically and needs to be torn down so that the working class can build a rational sane world of planned production, cooperation and the steady development of human understanding and reason.
Marxism says, as Lenin did with the attack on petty bourgeois Kerensky-ism by the Kornilov Tsarist (fascist) reaction in 1917, that it wants to see the main enemy defeated and however it happens, by whatever anti-imperialist forces, it will be a major step forwards for the working class.
But those like Lalkar/Proletarian which abandon leadership to simply support without comment whatever unscientific ideology is found locally (adopted precisely because of the failure of revisionist “communism” and its pacifist agenda) are not helping.
Lalkar/Proletarian is now tangled in contradictions over the workers states too, its simple Stalinist tail-ending eulogising of Pyongyang (with comfortable and cosy “solidarity” tours a frequent feature in its pages with suitable posed photos of handshakes etc) and its rights to have nuclear weapons to defend itself (correctly) in clear contradiction to its equally “all hail” sloganising about the People’s Republic of China (more cosy meetings) even though Beijing is saying exactly the opposite and pressurising North Korea to abandon its weapons, bemused by the hypocritical pretences of the West to be for “disarmament”.
Turkeys, voting, and Christmas are words that spring to mind.
How does Lalkar/Proletarian deal with their simultaneous uncritical support of Cuba where the titanic revolutionary hero Fidel Castro has expressed himself appalled at the Chinese security council vote and its compromises with US imperialism’s vicious anti-Iran scapegoating, which he believes is a deadly threat with the potential to unleash even nuclear war in the Middle East (not inconceivable), (Castro’s own revisionist limitations produce an equally obscure and evasive analysis (like not actually naming China for example) in his pieces some weeks back, but while that needs much more analysis, the key point here is that it does not square at all with everything else Lalkar/Proletarian says.)
The answer is of course is that they follow the revisionist opportunist method of completely ignoring it, just as they ignore every awkward polemic or glaring political error and mistake they have ever made (like telling the world that arch reactionary Palestinian stooge Mahmoud Abbas and his pursuit of the two-state solution in Palestine was the path forwards - now quietly and conveniently forgotten).
Dozens of evasions and dishonest theoretical sleight of hand tricks have been pulled by the Brarites, covering up for Stalin’s mistakes, tragedies and sometimes criminal paranoia, and for the trade union philistinism and anti-communism of Scargill for eight years (still unexplained) and their own blunders and errors (dozens - see past (ignored) EPSR polemic).
There is a lot more to be said and explained on all these questions, not least because the world crisis is tangling all the fake left ideologies in knots as it rapidly unfolds.
The EPSR does not claim it has been able to deal with any of the issues in the full depth they deserve.
But what it does say is that it long ago established that only the open battling to expose the problems and difficulties in front of the working class, would be able to develop the clear body of Leninist scientific understanding (by working through these questions by polemical struggle, exposing false and petty bourgeois positions) that the working class needs with increasing urgency as the slump deepens.
That is Leninism and it urgently needs building.
Don Hoskins
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
In our recent issue of 3rd Sep 2010 a Socialist Review item on Aboriginal oppression in Australia was wrongly attributed to Granma. It was from An Phoblacht (by Emma Clancy)
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