Back issues
No 1398 31st December 2011
Leninist revolutionary clarity, not more "democracy" illusions, is increasingly crucial as Third World rebelliousness meets more fascist repression and election trickery. Fake-"left" increasingly exposed for their craven and cowardly capitulation to NATO Nazi war- provocation Goebbels propaganda and sham "rebellion" stunts to provoke yet more war scapegoating as desperate capitalism flounders ever more in the greatest economic and political meltdown disaster ever seen. But museum-Stalinist defencism of scapegoated countries is just as confused and dishonest, full of posturing bravado to cover up its theoretical confusion and decades of wooden revisionist muddle before, offering nothing but ineffectual pacifist posing when the call for total revolutionary struggle to end capitalism is vital
The savagery of renewed killings and beatings in Cairo, on top of months of arrests, street thuggery and the deaths of hundreds of heroic protesters, indiscriminate arrest and torture of thousands more, underlines even further the fascist reality of imperialism in crisis, and confirms the urgent need for a return to Leninist revolutionary perspectives.
The declaration by the British ruling class that it is preparing for "live ammunition" shooting of "rioters", including even children; the brutality of police suppression of austerity protests in countries like Greece (and the revival of the fascist-right there, still lurking decades on from ending of the vicious torture and oppression of the 1960s Washington-backed reactionary military "junta"); the equally threatening "technocrat" austerity dictatorship imposed on Italy, (and, by stitched-up joke "elections", on Spain too), and the crude heavy-handed eviction of multiple "Occupy" anti-capitalist protests in the US – have all further underlined that the same bourgeois violent dictatorship reality lies behind the fraud of "parliament" and "steady reforms" in even the most "privileged" and well-off "rich" countries.
Capital is nothing but the dictatorship of big money and its owners, and all pretences of "freedom and democracy" the greatest lie ever told in history.
Neither peaceful protest, mass Ghandi-like passive resistance in the teeth of killing and torture, nor dogged determination alone will prove sufficient to rescue the world from the catastrophic disintegration now being imposed on it by complete implosion of the capitalist profit making system (which underlies all the rising turmoil from piracy to riots and mass protest) and the path towards World War Three which is the ruling class's "answer", blaming and scapegoating everyone in all directions for the problems which its outmoded, corrupt, greed-ridden and incompetent "market system" alone is responsible for.
The urgent need is for a return to Leninist revolutionary perspectives for a complete overthrow of imperialism as the only way to end its epochal slide into disastrous Depression and world war.
Until that happens there is far worse oppression and suppression to come as the catastrophic failure of capitalism – the greatest economic and political collapse in all history – drives an increasingly desperate and fearful ruling class once again into destructive and devastating World War conflict, heralds of which are already sounding in the diplomatic spats and insults being flung around over the collapsing Euro question as the different national ruling classes blame everyone else for their problems.
Endless patching of the crisis with yet more unbacked fantasy credit – which has kept the international trading and finance order in place for six decades and still just about upright since the full crisis broke in 2008 – cannot forever prevent yet more sudden lurches into even worse chaos than already seen in the "credit crunch" as almost daily the bourgeoisie itself warns in ever more pessimistic statements and declarations.
No matter what the ruling class does, all claims of "upturns", return to growth, "stimulating the economy etc are so much hogwash.
Only by ruthlessly driving up world exploitation and pushing rival economies deeper into the muck can any of the major powers hope to survive the ever greater hurricane of market and finance collapse to come.
That means war turmoil.
No reformist "defence of workers conditions" has a hope.
Only conscious revolutionary struggle to END capitalism, overturning and suppressing arrogant capitalist domination and exploitation, can stop the rapidly growing international antagonisms in trade and currency wars from becoming the next great World War in some form.
The need is to create working class rule to build a planned socialist world economy and a rational balanced use of resources for the benefit and thoughtful development of all mankind.
Spontaneous eruptions from Cairo to Western city streets are signals of a new level in the rising rebellion which is undermining ruling class confidence and arrogant domination throughout the Third World and increasingly into the heartlands of the very "richest" nations too as the economic disaster accelerates into all-out Depression everywhere.
These events are teaching the world huge lessons.
But day by day they are also demonstrating to the masses of the Third World that continuing as they are, they will either be thrown back and suppressed by ruling class reaction through "election" trickery and manipulation or, when that fails, be massacred and intimidated by outright fascist violence, from Thailand to Honduras,
The deeper the crisis grows, and more pushed back the ruling class, the more brutal and openly vicious will it become.
Failure to understand the concrete conditions of the world crisis, the balance of forces, the nature of different regimes, the past achievements and past mistakes of the great revolutions and the workers states they achieved, and the real class interests involved in each and every situation leaves the rising struggle not only vulnerable and confused but often heading in the wrong direction – as the huge counter-revolutionary turmoil of the Libyan blitzkrieg has demonstrated in the last year, fooling and bemusing the world with a totally provoked sham upheaval preposterously declared to be "just like" the Arab revolts in Cairo and Tunis, when it was the exact opposite.
(Which still confuses petty bourgeois "democrats" scratching their heads over why the French for example offered police aid to Tunisia's dictator but then backed the "revolutionaries" in Libya -- and wilfully failing to see the obvious answer that it was because the Libyan rebels are on the other side, stooges for imperialism, counter-revolutionaries overthrowing a regime capitalism did not like and installing a reactionary pro-capitalist order - all part of the SAME "police" aid to suppress the Arab Spring).
One of the strongest weapons the ruling class has in fighting against the massive upwelling of spontaneous revolutionary revolt in the Middle East and elsewhere is confusion, parody, pretence and disinformation, stampeding counter-revolution into action under the sham guise of "more rebellion" against "dictators" (or as bogus choreographed "colour" revolutions in the former workers states etc).
These hoodwinking pretences have been swallowed hook, line and sinker by most of the reformist, and revisionist fake-"left", just as they have swallowed endless anti-communist disruption against the workers states post-war, like the bogus Vatican and CIA funded "trade union" Solidarnosc in Poland, whose pro-imperialist fascist nature rapidly emerged and which has restored the most reactionary capitalism in Poland since it took over.
The old swamp of fake-"lefts" is being left high and dry by the crisis, its cowardly capitulations, demonstrating nothing but total grovelling to the ruling class, helping it oil the path for NATO-Nazi onslaught and other fascist interventions.
Virtually all of it has further demonstrated its utter capitulation to bourgeois pressure in swallowing every Goebbels big LIE stampeding stunt by the bourgeoisie to foster COUNTER-revolution; from its cravenness in supporting the "war on terror" nonsense of the last decade which underpinned the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, to weighing in on the foul NATO-Nazi destruction of Libya and the current extension of that provoking civil war to destabilise Syria (and Iran beyond it) almost certainly ready for the next phase of Washington warmongering.
Labourites, official trade unionists, Trotskyists and assorted revisionists have not only swallowed wholesale the entire Western world conspiracy to provoke such civil war "rebellion" in first Libya and now against Syria and Iran – a complete stampeding deluge of hysterical hearsay allegations, fabrications, wild exaggeration and unsubstantiated accusation deluged from the Western media to set in motion the most reactionary and fascist ragtag "opposition" to the bourgeois nationalist anti-imperialism there – but have mostly reproduced, embellished or even added to the poison themselves.
Anarchist rejection of this confusion by rejecting all "leadership and authority" does not solve any problems either, leaving the working class open to every scheming twist and turn of bourgeois propaganda, manipulation and misleadership with nothing to guide it, as the "Occupy" movement has shown with its video links to the Western provoked Syrian revolt for example.
Worse still this disastrously disarming theoretical feebleness is anyway swung every which way by the betrayals and confusion of the fake-"left" it supposedly rejects.
But even the few fake-"lefts" who have avoided the obvious intelligence agency manipulated campaigns, willingly and criminally embroidered by the monopoly capitalist media, are little better.
One of the few to correctly oppose imperialism's stampeding of sham "rebellions" in the Middle East in Libya, Syria, Iran etc, and the petty bourgeois reactionary, fascist and monarchist counter-revolution to confuse, intimidate and suppress the genuine and spontaneous Arab Spring revolt (Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen) has been the CPGB-ML.
But its "theoretical" justification is most incorrect.
In the latest of its papers it uses a four page insert to strut its alleged "principles" to berate the safer targets on the fake-"left" (uselessly leaving them unnamed and only vaguely specified, as with most revisionist pretend polemic) but for a very unprincipled purpose – to cover up all the old Stalinist rottenness which has laid the world open to such trickery in the first place, and to justify the further confusion now being caused by its posturing "revolutionary defencism" bravado and "victory" sloganising for assorted regimes, most lately Libya's Muammar Gaddafi.
But its uncritical support for regimes demonised by imperialism is not bravery and "principle" but more confusion, all dressed up as a"special theory supplement" which pretends to be calling for a return to the great Marxist works of Lenin, Marx, Engels.
But it has nothing to do with Leninist understanding of defeat for imperialism as the key slogan to advance while simultaneously making clear to the working class the need for total distrust in the regimes which are forced into conflict with the major imperialists in order to ride class pressures beneath, or at least zero confidence in the often barmy (usually religious) ideologies of other militant groups.
Feeding illusions in such figures as Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi, instead of focussing on the need for imperialism itself to be defeated while making clear that these "leaders" are not communists, only spreads ever more distrust and confusion over alleged "communist" theory, already widely rejected after sixty years of retreat from revolutionary socialist grasp.
Worse, it would help bolster and strengthen the very ideologies and regimes that stand in the way of revolutionary communists, frequently torturing imprisoning and suppressing them as Saddam Hussein did.
What is the point of calling for "victory" for the thug gangster Saddam Hussein, first implying and the overtly stating him to have been "good" for the working class in Iraq or for the world in general??
What is the point of building working class faith in the revisionist Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic whose disastrous leadership in the end failed to make a stand against the NATO blitzkrieg in 1998 which was a harbinger of the endless warmongering imposed by Washington on the world ever since under one lying excuse, Goebbels pretext or outrageous provocation after another??
And what is the point of telling, indeed urging, the world to support the erratic anti-communist Gaddafi? No matter what good things he has done for the population of Libya or crypto-socialist measures his Jamahiriya has carried through with the oil revenues of the last forty years, or even the generous support to African indigenous development Libya has given (to help release it from IMF servitude and strictures e.g.), and its overall anti-imperialist stance (helping the IRA/Sinn Féin national liberation struggle for example) all of which both Lalkar and Proletarian have listed in classic wooden revisionist cataloguing detail as the imperialist onslaught has escalated.
Setting out such a line only demonstrates a complete failure to grasp even the basics of Marxism which are for defeat and removal of world imperialist rule, the sole cause and source of all the problems facing everyone including all the local antagonisms, social breakdowns, civil war conflicts.
Only the most wooden logic – bourgeois non-dialectical logic – has any difficulty in understanding that imperialist defeat, even if it should be by a Saddam, or some Ayatollah ideologically stuck in the Middle Ages even, – by whatever means it takes in other words – in no way implies a call for victory.
"My enemy's enemy" is not necessarily at all my friend therefore but just "my enemy's enemy" which might strike useful blows because of the class forces acting on it at the time but which equally should not be trusted to do so, either now or later.
The lesser enemy is anyway not the immediate problem and might be usefully, or necessarily, put to one side in dealing with the main target to be taken up later.
All this has been many times explained by the EPSR and particularly in the light of Lenin's profound dialectical grasp of tactics expressed in the August 1917 attack on the new bourgeois revolution by arch-Tsarist (Black Hundred fascist) general Kornilov, as explained at the end of the first section. Mostly these pieces have directly taken up and polemicised with Lalkar's museum-Stalinism (which is only the earlier sometimes conveniently hidden other face of the Brarite Proletarian). On Serbia first, necessarily at some length because of the complexities of understanding the issues given past echoes of a workers state in Yugoslavia:
But given that many attitudes and institutions continuing from the great achievements of the FRY workers state were still alive in Serbia at least, could not 'defend Yugoslavia' have been valid just on the basis that Serb national resistance to the more predatory Western domineering was a legitimate anti-imperialist struggle for self-determination, and the only hope of serious future opposition to imperialist domination in the region?
Serb nationalism could indeed play such a role, and it was the EPSR which uniquely argued from the start of the nationalist break-up of Yugoslavia that in all this degenerate retreat, Serb interests had the best historical claim to international communist sympathy, had contributed most to the FRY-workers state to make it a going concern and therefore least deserved to lose out through its break-up, and again by tradition had the most potential for developing future revolutionary socialist resistance to imperialist domination.
In such circumstances of imperialism's deliberate overthrow of the remaining FRY workers-state structures after what Belgrade Revisionism had already done in terms of ideological and economic-control damage (both prior-to and contemporaneously with Gorbachevism's final liquidation of workers-state perspectives in the Socialist Camp at large and in the USSR in particular), there was no equality of 'self-determination' interests between the Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and autonomous minorities, — the EPSR argued.
But translating that understanding into a slogan of 'defend Yugoslavia' or any notion of 'support' for Milosevic is a vastly different matter. Although inclined to favour the Serb struggle over that of the Croats, Bosnians, or Kosovo Albanians, say, for disputed territory or strategic interests, — the defence of Serb nationalism was hardly a progressive answer to the break-up of the Yugoslav workers state.
It was also a degenerate retreat too. The progressive line open for anyone to call for was to defend the Yugoslav workers-state federation as such, calling on ALL workers of every nationality in the FRY to do just that, and calling on workers internationally to support such a call.
Unrealistic? The Castro regime in Cuba is doing exactly that in almost exactly similar circumstances, — constantly threatened with air-bombardment obliteration, but seriously (and believably) taunting US imperialism and its vicious sanctions blockade to just come and try it, and face being humiliated and beaten in any final invasion-occupation attempt on Cuba, however many bombs were dropped first.
And although this would have been the argument anyway, — just to remove any doubts, Castro has just told an international cultural congress held in Havana exactly this himself....
..."In the case of Cuba" he stressed, "we'll never give in. Here we have sacred values to defend, and the men and women responsible for this Revolution would die before making one sole concession of principles to the U.S. empire, before renouncing one iota of our sovereignty."
Despite Castro's own very uncertain grasp of the full role that the struggle for Marxist-Leninist science ought to be playing in the world, and how such a struggle should be organised, plus the dubiousness of many past Cuban decisions on where to stand in the international anti-imperialist movement (too long in Moscow's shadow, e.g.; misleading about Allendeism; badly wrong in backing Maurice Bishop; etc, etc;) the Cuban workers state makes no bones about its unyielding refusal to ever readmit parliamentary (bourgeois) 'democracy', and as such can he unconditionally supported with confidence in all disputes with imperialism, no matter how critically the continuing Cuban weakness (in world revolutionary theory and fully analysing the Revisionist mistakes of the past) has to be assessed.
Cuba is a proletarian-dictatorship workers state and defiantly determined to remain so. For all its theoretical weaknesses in terms of world revolutionary leadership, Cuba can be confidently held up as an example to follow for workers everywhere.
Although a long way from complete clarity, the notion to 'defend Cuba' or 'support Cuba' could never fail to be a blow for progress and a likely source of encouragement for anti-imperialist struggles everywhere, — given the immediate current paucity of conscious Leninist revolutionary movements on earth.
What is a bit surprising about the 'defend Yugoslavia' persistence is that the outcome of such precedence of hope over experience is already known. In the circumstances, Milosevic nationalism looked a backward-moving dubious quality to expect to rout imperialism with, compared to the former triumphs of the Yugoslav workers state.
Humiliating muddle and embarrassment for NATO was nevertheless still a possibility, for various reasons, and earnestly to be looked forward to. 'Let NATO be defeated' was the EPSR's forward-looking argument.
But 'defend the Milosevic regime' was not at all necessarily implied by sloganising for NATO's humiliation, and was a bad idea. The Milosevic regime was not any kind of model for workers anywhere to aim for or emulate, degenerating backwards as it was doing from the greatness of the Yugoslav workers state, and it was a pointless diversion from contemplating NATO's imperialist rottenness to pose a Milosevic triumph (by saying 'support Yugoslavia') as the way to establish it.
And the confused argument that 'defend Yugoslavia' was not the same as 'support the Milosevic regime' was shown up by the actual outcome. Such remnants of workers-statehood as there might be still hopes of finding in the FRY former territories might well be claimed to have appeared in the defiant resistance by the populace to the ferocious NATO aerial blitzkrieg and in the phenomenal skilled determination and efficiency with which the Yugoslav armed forces won the ground war in Kosovo (against the KLA and the colossal might of the NATO airforces), and prepared brilliant defensive positions which might well have inflicted a shattering and possibly even an epoch-making defeat on NATO's ground forces when eventually they would have been obliged to invade Kosovo (unless Western imperialism wanted to be completely humiliated even without a fight).
What happened? The degenerate Revisionist-nationalist politics of Milosevicism proved utterly unreliable as anticipated, — and utterly decisive, as anticipated.
Defeat for anti-imperialist struggle as such is not necessarily always a disaster. Much can be learned. Circumstances are sometimes impossible but need to be fought against anyway.
But misleading the international working class into a belief in or hopes in Milosevicism WAS a bad idea, and remains a bad idea.
The situation for real Leninist revolutionary internationalists outside Serbia was exactly the same as that for any communists inside Serbia. Attacks on Milosevicism while the NATO/KLA onslaught was in full spate would have been out of the question.
'Defeat for NATO' would have been the only line, while at the same time refusing to spread any support or illusions in Milosevicism, and ready (if strong enough) to overthrow his regime when his ultimately disastrous 'resistance' to imperialism failed. It would have replicated the Bolshevik attitude towards Kerensky's regime when the Kornilov counter-revolution tried to restore the autocracy in August 1917.
'Defeat Kornilov' but 'No illusions in or support for the Kerensky regime'.(EPSR No.1006 14-07-99)
Things are more sharply delineated still with the war on Iraq:
It is only the DEFEAT of Western imperialism (including the British ruling establishment) that workers who seriously want a socialist transformation can be interested in.
That does NOT mean wanting a victory for Saddam Hussein in the slightest. It means ONLY that the West's outrageous warmongering adventure/distraction to massacre "evils abroad" as a cynical fascist imperialist cover for catastrophic economic and social failure at home SHOULD COME A GIGANTIC CROPPER.
That way, there will not be 'world rule' by barmy Saddam or even barmier Osama (who have not the slightest thought or interest in world rule anyway, and least of all any means to achieve it, but merely want to drive out US imperialist domination and military tyranny over their homelands), - but simply massive strides towards a completely new world of working-class power everywhere, cooperating and building a planned socialist planet.
And it is quite simply the petty bourgeois CLASS content of trade-unionism's traditional 'reformist' class collaborationism which will always prevent the fake-'left' from wishing to see the DEFEAT of 'their own' state (i.e. 'their own' ruling class !!!!), since it will always be a bourgeois state UNTIL it is defeated; and that state will ALWAYS make sure it is fighting "deadly foreign enemies" whenever there is a grim domestic crisis to be covered up. EPSR No. 1166 07-01-03)
This sad jibber is all the same daft 'armchair socialism' but from different angles.
None start from imperialist CRISIS and the enormous possibilities coming soon of the history-making DEFEAT and overthrow of imperialism resuming, via communist revolutionary process.
"Defeat for Western imperialism" is the only slogan for the whole world in this situation.
But for lefts to continue to attack the Saddam regime themselves while making this call would make nonsense of it.
Yet it would be equally hopelessly misleading of the Iraqi masses to help create any illusions or confidence in the corrupt and degenerate Saddam regime by saying its presence is needed in a military bloc with the left if imperialist invasion is to be defeated.
Utter nonsense. The Iraqi people can defeat imperialist aggression, and in reality do it far better if there were no Saddam degenerate regime than if it staggered on.
But to press on with civil war actions and sloganising against Saddam while in the middle of an imperialist onslaught on Iraq which the Saddam regime for its own rotten interests was actually fighting against too, would be needlessly dangerous tactical folly.
"DEFEAT FOR WESTERN IMPERIALISM -but no confidence in Saddam" is the Bolshevik solution from the ABC of Marxism-Leninism (compare with the Kornilov-Kerensky situation, August 1917).
If and when the main international revolutionary requirement of a defeat for the imperialist western invaders has been achieved, the civil-war cudgels can then immediately be taken up again against the Saddam regime, entirely necessarily since no internal class struggle progress can be made in Iraq until that fascist chauvinist opportunism of phoney 'anti-imperialism' has been overthrown.
So backward and anti-theory is the petty bourgeois fake-'left' in Britain that there were 'communist revolutionary' leaflets on the Feb 15 march (CPGB, for example) calling in bold, emphasised type "Down with Saddam Hussein's Ba'athism! Down with bin Laden and political Islam!" in supposedly agitating workers to OPPOSE a "Western invasion of Iraq to rid the world of Saddam tyranny and Bin Laden terrorism", in a Labour government's stated aims.
Fake-'left' tactical muddleheadedness of these proportions is every bit as reactionary and dangerous as New Labours DELIBERATE pro-imperialist warmongering treacherous confusion.
For the rest, the ENTIRE fake-'left' continues to plod along merely exposing Labour imperialist lies, evasions, and hypocrisy, a job the fulltime bourgeois press and TV (D. Mirror; Rory Bremner; etc) is doing just as well but in infinitely more telling volumes.
All still steer clear of making a case for a Bolshevik party of REVOLUTIONARY THEORY; and even the word REVOLUTION still rarely gets any mention at all, let alone any understanding of the type of crisis imperialism is in. (EPSR No1173 25-02-03)
Some of the confusion about wanting an imperialist defeat in Iraq could disappear if the longterm historical reality illuminating the situation was better grasped, leading to a more precise description of what is needed for civilisation's further progress.
To still claim to "prefer victory for the existing Iraq state to victory by the US-UK coalition", causing Trot critics to happily conclude that "military support" for the Saddam regime was at last being conceded, is chaotic anti-Leninist political confusion.
To make it clear that fostering any confidence at all in Ba'athism would be a backward step for international anti-imperialist understanding, as well as a potentially catastrophic delusion, permanently, - the whole notion of "preference" needs abandoning as historically misleading and philosophically muddled.
Approaching the nastiest warmongering contradictions ever posed by imperialist system economic crisis, the defeat of the West's world domination is the utterly vital necessity for all mankind, dwarfing all other considerations.
Pedants who argue that defeat for the US-UK coalition "necessarily implies" calling for a victory for Saddam, or at least an expression of political/military "support" for Saddamism, are missing the wood because of all the trees around.
It is a consistently logical Leninist position to be for the defeat of extremist Kornilov reaction by any means whatever, while remaining at the same time 100% focused that no confidence whatever should be fostered in the Kerensky regime which might, for its own rotten interests, play some part in bringing about that defeat.
It is simply totally misleading to talk about "preferring" a Saddam regime victory to an imperialist one.
In the longer-term history of this greatest inter-imperialist warmongering crisis now looming over the Earth (as the most disastrous economic "overproduction" crisis ever, unfolds), it is simply the earliest possible setbacks and humiliations for Western imperialism's blitzkrieging hysteria and arrogance, by any and every means, which will seriously matter for civilisation in the end.
The Leninist grasp of the other all-round requirements of anti-imperialist struggle, implied by such an understanding of the need for the defeat of Western warmongering domination, would quickly and easily attend to everything else that needed doing, such as toppling the wretched Saddam regime, subsequently.(EPSR No1179 08-04-03)
And all this applies even when there might be some sympathy, emotionally, for the forces taking a revolutionary stand alongside, as in Palestine for example where the heroic resistance to the foul endless Zionist fascist genocidal intimidation of the indigenous population (living on this now stolen land for 1500 years, long before any modern nation state existed or even the bourgeoisie itself) has grown more and more coherent, experienced, dogged and determined (no thanks to Stalinist revisionism which long advocated the craven and impossible "two-state solution" and in the Lalkar/Proletarian guise even put forwards the Mahmoud Abbas PA as the right leadership after the petty bourgeois compromiser and opportunist Yasser Arafat had died - only to be found out as revelations poured out about CIA and Zionist money and training for these PA stooge collaborators).
It would be marvellous if there was a Palestinian Viet Cong to give Marxist-Communist leadership to the struggle against Zionist colonisation and tyranny, but it was precisely the Revisionism and Trotskyism which produced these arm-chair-revolutionary defeatists in Britain which also buried Leninism without trace in Palestine too,- [the] 'swamp'.
Hamas has a reactionary religious ideology and equally backward international sponsors and will undoubtedly fail to inspire the whole Palestinian nation, Vietnam-style, to a successful national-liberation socialist revolution.
But that the Hamas guerrilla war is leading the fight against Zionist-imperialist tyranny is also indisputable, inspiring the whole Intifada.
The socialist revolution needs its own independent propaganda in Palestine and its own fighting units, but while marching separately, they need to strike together with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and anyone else willing to topple the Zionist colonisation.
Hamas suicide bombing, for all its flaws and weaknesses both long-term and short-term from a Marxist perspective, is nevertheless WHAT IS HAPPENING on the front line against Zionist-imperialist tyranny. As Lenin explains, the socialist revolution is abandoning the fight completely by simply rejecting what Hamas is doing. The only serious critique that will deserve a hearing is one which gives alternative anti-Zionist fighting leadership from the front. All other purely academic carping should be treated with the contempt it deserves as little better than pro-imperialist, class-collaborative defeatism.(EPSR1116 11-12-01)
Despite full sympathy and agreed joint actions with the struggle of the Palestinians the caveat is still made here that the Leninist (communist) movement must stay separate organisationally and philosophically.
The "march separately" understanding is the core of the united front tactic of Lenin, and makes clear that the essence of the struggle is to maintain the clearest possible scientific world view, on which alone any real communist leadership can be founded, kept alive by constant untrammelled debate, discussion and polemic.
It does not matter how "progressive" allegedly any group or regime would be deemed, other than those which are actually workers states, or openly on the way to communist revolution, as the Nepalese Maoist movement is for example.
Even then, despite giving unconditional support to any state or movement which is opening the chance for communist development, the theoretical polemical struggle needs to continue constantly against perceived theoretical weaknesses or mistakes, as the EPSR has taken up and warned against Gorbachevism, Castro's mistakes on Grenada, (attacking the Leninist Bernard Coard for example and impressionistically supporting the opportunist betrayer Maurice Bishop); eulogising the opportunist parliamentarian Salvador Allende whose philistine anti-Leninism opened the door to the 1973 Pinochet dictatorship brutalities in Chile; failing to warn the Venzuelans and Bolivians of the need for the dictatorship of the working class leaving them dangerously prey to constant capitalist counter-revolutionary intrigue, as in Honduras), and now particularly against the dire revisionist stupidities of Beijing which has taken the "don't rock the boat" permanent peaceful coexistence idiocies of Stalin-influenced revisionism to the point of complete betrayal of the Libyan regime by voting for sanctions against it and failing to block the "no fly zone" invasion motion with its veto.
This monstrous act has been glossed over month by month by Lalkar/Proletarian and even where briefly mentioned is slickly avoided with the apologetically pious and fatuous hope that China "learned its lesson" and "has done better" on Syria!!! Meanwhile the regular junkets to Beijing to do comradely "hailings" continue and the annual eulogy meetings without a word of criticism.
What is needed is a major theoretical debate openly, to understand how the Beijing leadership's complacent revisionism has its roots in the mistakes and errors of the past.
But that would mean taking up the crucial issue of analysing and exploring all the past difficulties, of Moscow's errors, right back to the disastrous flaws in Stalin's philosophical understanding.
These failings find their way right through into the Proletarian.
The dialectical subtleties of Lenin's tactics and the "united front" disappear completely (except for the term itself, simply misused as another way of saying "popular front" – as discussed below).
Instead it effectively takes a reformist (or perhaps "supra-reformist") position.
According to this the reason for defending the assorted scapegoated victims of imperialism is because they represent progress in themselves.
Get imperialism off their backs, by calling for their victory and the various reforms, concessions and advances they have made in their own countries (listed in catalogue detail in various Lalkars and Proletarians) will continue it is implied.
Even more vaguely it is hinted this will spread (through Gaddafi's extensive financial aid to pan-Africanism for example – another giant chunk of reformism which, elevated to a political strategy in itself, is counterposed to, and ultimately hostile to, revolutionary Marxism, the only path out of Africa's exploitation and subjugation along with the rest of the Third World).
All sorts of consequences follow this nonsense.
Firstly, to give it any kind of "credibility" at all, it is necessary to elevate the various scapegoats and victims of imperialism's Slump-war drive into heroes, including such gangster monsters as Saddam Hussein, installed into Iraq by the CIA originally to bloodily suppress a nascent communist regime and the author of the ten year long trench carnage of the Iran-Iraq war at Washington's instigation (to suppress another thorn in the side of US dominance).
Shamelessly the"special theory supplement" does just this:
Around the world, there are a number of basically decent communist parties, some of them with deep roots amongst the working people, many of which are leading and waging principled and courageous struggles for socialism, yet who nevertheless fail to take a consistent anti-imperialist stand. Such parties have, for example, prevaricated in the face of the war against Libya, just as they did in the case of Iraq before, claiming that they could not give unequivocal support to such national-revolutionary leaders as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, as they were not communists.
Moreover, they have followed the imperialist media's lead in maligning these leaders as 'brutal dictators' when in fact imperialism's objection to them is that they directed their countries' resources to developing infrastructure and industry, to lifting their peoples out of poverty, and also supported anti-imperialist struggles in all parts of the world. They died as heroes and martyrs leading their peoples' struggles against imperialism for sovereignty, independence and control of their national resources for the benefit of ordinary people. Indeed, in these respects, they set examples that many communists could do well to emulate.
Some communist parties, in both Latin America and Europe, have also striven to find fault with and to slight the revolutionary governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, which are presently seeking ways to open a road to socialism in their countries.
Secondly but more importantly all attention is thrown away from the general imperialist causes of the warmongering, to the specific defence of a single country.
Just as "defeat for imperialism" does not at all imply victory for any specific victim regime so calling for "victory for Saddam" or Gaddafi does not develop anything but a very limited perspective of "defeat" for the invader around the specific country being invaded.
But the Marxist understanding of defeat is as part of the all-encompassing crisis collapse of an entire class-rule system which has dominated the world for the last five centuries (and was a rising power against feudalism for three hundred years before that) and which has exhausted all of its historical potential.
Defeat is the opening up of opportunity for the revolutionary overturn of this entire system finally, to clear the decks for mankind to build a rational, fair, balanced, and peaceful socialist world with a worldwide planned unwasteful economy harmonised with nature and the real (not forced consumerist) needs of all.
Realising perhaps that this preposterous eulogising (above) might not carry the day the supplement then goes on to mobilise a series of highly selective quotes from Marx, Engels Lenin and Stalin and Mao Zedong to "prove" that Marxism supports the "victory" slogan.
All this done under the pretentious umbrella of "returning to the great works" of Marxism.
No objection to that of course since the 100 volumes of Marx, Engels and Lenin constitute a vital resource and foundation for all Leninist understanding and everyone would be urged to read as much of them as they can.
But Lalkar is being disingenuous. It purpose in this is simply to find a series of highly selective quotes taken out of context and to add to them a is a farrago of misinterpretation and confusion, bolstered by adding in Stalin and Mao Zedong as "great works" too.
What they achieve is to show how wrong the Stalin and Mao's grasp was and perhaps give further clues to the early flaws which developed into as to later fatal retreats.
It starts with pretending Marx's "internationalism" equates to a call for support for all anti-imperialist movements bolstering that with Lenin allegedly calling for unequivocal support for bourgeois nationalist movements:
Lenin insisted that, "all communist parties must assist the bourgeois-democratic liberation movement in these [oppressed] countries, and that the duty of rendering the most active assistance rests primarily with the workers of the country the backward nation is colonially or financially dependent on". ('Draft theses on national and colonial questions for the Second Congress of the Communist International', Collected Works, Vol 31)
But Lenin was describing a world of direct colonial rule and battling with past rigid "Marxist" dogmatism that saw a sequence of stages of revolution going on in each country, rather than grasping that the overall world dominance of imperialism meant smaller bourgeois nationalism, newly awakened, would play an anti-imperialist role. But even then, Lenin was cautious as the EPSR explained when more fully using these quotes decades ago to expose the same specious "self-determination" arguments being used by the Trots to justify supporting the reactionary Albanian demands in Kosovo to break-up Serbia further :
Even by 1920, it was far from automatic that ANY bourgeois-nationalist 'liberation'-posing could be guaranteed 'progressive'; and the KLA are REACTIONARY.
Lenin reported to the Second Congress of the Third International:
"We as Communists should and will support bourgeois-liberation movements in the colonies only when they are genuinely revolutionary, and when their exponents do not hinder our work of educating and organising in a revolutionary spirit the peasantry and the masses of the exploited. If these conditions do not exist, the Communists in these countries must combat the reformist bourgeoisie. (From the Commission on National and Colonial Questions, July 26, 1920).
In his Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions for the same Congress, Lenin wrote:
"Communist parties should render direct aid to the revolutionary movements among the dependent and underprivileged nations (for example, Ireland, the American Negroes, etc) and in the colonies. Without the latter condition which is particularly important, the struggle against the oppression of dependent nations and colonies, as well as recognition of their right to secede, are but a false signboard as is evidenced by the parties of the Second International.....
"The Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e. those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations."
There are foul and disgusting ethnic wars currently raging ALL OVER the world, thanks to the capitalist system. The Hutu-Tutsi slaughter around Rwanda and the inter-tribal perpetual butchery in Angola are only the latest flare-ups to catch the eye; but the Arab-African ethnic cleansing rivalry for southern Sudan and the nearby Tigrayan-Eritrean-Amhara-Oromo four-way conflict around Ethiopia have been raging for a generation, wiping out casualties by the million. An utterly savage caste war in Bihar, India's most populous state, sees entire villages and their inhabitants routinely obliterated on either side.
All are terrifyingly murderous, the Serb-Albanian confrontation in Kosovo as bad as any. But what shred of evidence is there for so much of the fake-'left' in Britain and elsewhere to have decided that the armed challenge by Albanians (to Serb self-determination in territory settled by Serbs for a thousand years or more, and currently part of the tiny Serbian state-independence) is so worthy of 'international communist' support???
Is the KLA really a proletarian revolutionary movement??? Or is it a bourgeois-democratic nationalist movement which is out to create conditions within which a proletarian-revolutionary development can flourish??? Even when fighting against a genuine imperialist-colonial power, the Communist International was advising caution in backing purely bourgeois 'liberation' demands. (EPSR No1000 25-05-99)
Proletarian is even sneakier in its next quote where Lenin sets out again a perspective dividing the world between "oppressor and oppressed nations and recognising that communist interest could be to support newly awakened revolutionary movements even when they were bourgeois nationalist". It casually elides this key phrase:
It is especially important for the proletariat and the Communist International during the epoch of imperialism to establish concrete economic facts and to approach all colonial and national questions not from the abstract but from the concrete point of view. Minutes of the Second Congress International.
But Proletarian relentless pursues the abstract, even more cheekily in its next Lenin quote where Lenin berates those who wrote off the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland as nothing but a "petty bourgeois putsch", effectively condemning it, just as the entire fake-"left" (including Lalkar for a while when it was embedded in the Scargillite SLP) condemned and denounced "terrorism" after the 9/11 attacks, taking imperialism's side.
Lenin's attack on this capitulation did not however mean any unconditional or uncritical support for the ideology of the Irish nationalists as the Proletarian implies and as it, wrongly, continues to do now.
Again past EPSR's – which have an unprecedented record of understanding and fighting for understanding of the enormous importance of the Irish struggle and its defeat of British imperialism – was clear on the limitations of the IRA/Sinn Féin:
The Ireland question also illuminated the Marxist scientific understanding that "defeat" for one's own imperialist state does not necessarily at all imply any interest in wanting "victory" for the targets of the police-state tyranny by the imperialist colonial warmongering,– even in the hugely sympathetic case of the Irish national liberation struggle to which cause anyone with the slightest scrap of progressive humanity has been irresistibly drawn for centuries.
Nor is it just an academic hair-splitting point to stress that – in spite of the huge excitement (shared by Marx and Lenin among others) at the many highlights of splendid defiance, magnificently lauded in 800 years of world renowned Irish rebel culture, – the independence struggle is still by no means the end of the story, and probably particularly rapidly in modern times, the socialist revolution is still going to have its problems with this purely nationalist (inevitably bourgeois nationalist) "solution" in Ireland.
So there is still no purpose in creating confusion by popularly calling for "victory to the IRA" (apart from, of course, after the exceptional cultural circumstances of enjoying a few pints and a few rebel songs).
"Defeat for imperialism" really is much more accurate, scientific, and sufficient, fully reflecting the colossal importance for the British and international working class's OWN socialist emancipation (well observed by Marx in Britain's case that with Ireland unfree, the English working-class was obviously going to be still subservient to its own imperialist ruling class) that a DEFEAT for British imperialism would mean, "echoing round the world" as Lenin described the first modern era explosion of the Easter Rising 1916, which to Lenin's disgust was dismissed by the Scargillite Revisionist opportunists of his day as "to be condemned as terrorism by middle-class religious putschists, and not TU-approved", just like Sept 11 in fact, "condemned" by the cowardly Scargillite Stalinists, with their fellow Lalkar Stalinist Revisionists looking-on, keeping silent. EPSR No.1195 29-07-03)
The limitations of the victorious Sinn Féin nationalism have become even more obvious as the devastating world credit crisis has particularly savaged Ireland. While continuing to recognise the huge significance of their victory in forcing reactionary colonialist Unionism to agree a joint state and the dismantling of the old colonialist police forces, all major steps towards a now inevitable united Ireland and a giant humiliation for ossified British imperialism (which continues to cover up its retreat by using the snail's pace withdrawal to lyingly pretend nothing has been given away) it is clearer and clearer that Sinn Féin can and will go no further than reformist changes when the near collapse of Dublin's finances (and Britain's soon enough) demand a revolutionary socialist response.
Stimulating small business is not the answer to the wipeout failure of world finance.
The recent EPSR must admit to a mistake itself in taking this sympathy too far, joining Sinn Féin recently in condemning the dissident Irish nationalists for their sporadic renewed "terror" attacks.
While still arguing that this die-hard offshoot nationalism has failed to understand the enormous advance made by the Provisional IRA struggle and expressed in the Good Friday Agreement and the later Aberdeen settlement – a major defeat for the British – it remains the case that none of the "terrorism" rising through the world can be condemned by Marxism – being solely caused by and attributable to the antagonisms and contradictions of capitalist imperialism.
It is not even clear exactly what discontents are driving the "dissidents" and as previously stated, the only Marxist response can be to better understand and better focus and thereby lead the anti-capitalist anti-imperialist fight.
Meanwhile it is a bit rich anyway for the Brarites (which underpin both Lalkar and Proletarian) to now pretend their undying support for Sinn Féin when they not only stood by and watched, but actively participated in, the expulsion of Roy Bull (then editor of the EPSR) from the Socialist Labour Party precisely for arguing against the Trotskyists, who filled the SLP Socialist News paper with sneering write-offs of the Irish struggle as a "sellout and betrayal" (detailed account of this is in EPSR No1245 24-08-04).
None of the Marx and Engels in other words backs the Brarites at all and their view that-
the sole deciding question (about supporting 'victory' to a national movement) is not whether the movement in question has such a character (clearly progressive) but whether a country a party or a movement is fighting against imperialism.
So they turn to Stalin and Mao. But the particular short Stalin quote says nothing more than that some bourgeois nationalist movements had a revolutionary character despite the lack of a proletarian element and might help weaken imperialist colonial domination.
But the decisive issue as Lenin added was whether such struggles would facilitate the development of the communist movement, to be judged on concrete circumstances, the more overriding of which is that oppressed colonies and direct colonialism no longer exist.
Where imperialism is attempting to re-establish this now, the "defeat for imperialism" understanding is still the clearest and least ambiguous.
The Mao quotes refer to very backward undeveloped colonies or semi-colonies still awaiting the development of capitalism at all where bourgeois national forces might be drawn into struggle against imperialist domination, as the reactionary China Kai Shek was obliged to do after the invasion of powerful Japanese imperialism.
He was arguing for a united front with the former bitterly anti-communist bourgeois nationalist forces which had slaughtered communists for a decade, a turn about which some among the communists could not stomach. But Mao's correct policy of joint action against the bigger imperialist enemy did not for one second imply support for Chiang Kai-shek ideologically; indeed a correct united front would continue to make clear that the working class and peasantry should totally distrust the bourgeoisie, and would have to keep one eye on them ready for the kind of sudden treachery that caught out the Chinese Communist movement in Shanghai in 1927 when hundreds were viciously massacred.
In what way does any of this imply uncritical support for the likes of Gadafi or Saddam Hussein who both opposed the development of communism??
It does not.
But Lalkar/Proletarian implies without saying that a united front involves merging the interests of the communists with bourgeois nationalism if it is fighting – an error that emerged in Stalin's later tactics as the Popular Front, most of all in the Spanish Civil War when fighting for a Spanish Republic was made the priority, committing the communists to the shallow and treacherous aims of the local bourgeois-nationalism, and even calling for restraint on the holding of communist cell meetings.
But "marching separately" – i.e. maintaining the communist philosophical understanding and theoretical struggle at all times and being aware of the shortcomings and treachery of "democracy" is essential.
This a was a disastrous confusion since only the perspective of an eventual communist future might have helped give an additional inspiration to the struggle that a half-hearted "fight for democracy" could not, and which would have left a crucially important legacy of Leninist understanding even if material circumstances meant the eventual overrunning by Franco's fascists could not be stopped at that time.
It was these theoretical flaws which led onto later mistakes separating imperialism into "good" (non-aggressive) and "bad" (aggressive) types, and the long confusion that fascism is somehow a different type of capitalism to "normal" capitalism and all the embedded illusions about "democratic paths" that this has disastrously helped foster for decades.
But the "special supplement" avoids this issue just as museum-Stalinism has avoided every mistake difficulty and error of Moscow's retreat from revolutionism over the years (and many major polemics by the EPSR (such as issues 1190-96 and 1245 for example).
Most of all by elevating Stalin to the same rank of theoretical genius as Lenin, Marx and Engels, the "special supplement" not only does nothing to tackle the entire disastrous post-war record of pacifism, "parliamentary roads" reformist tail-ending and "permanent peaceful coexistence" nonsense which Moscow revisionism foisted on to the world working class movement in the wake of the Second World War, but consciously again pulls the blanket over them, thereby leaving the world working class utterly confused for longer.
All this emerged from mistakes like the Popular Front, and then Stalin's idiot revisions of Marxism which said the Second World War had finally and irreversibly cut imperialism down to size.
Certainly the titanic struggles of the USSR from 1941-5, which did the lion's share of the fighting and suffering against the aggressive war destruction triggered by imperialism's 1930s Slump crisis, defeating and destroying Hitler Nazism at a cost of nearly 30 million lives, were on a par with the original 1917 Revolution is historic significance and advance for the working class, stimulating and inspiring a wave of revolutionary and anti-imperialist upheavals that pushed back imperialism across the planet.
But the notion that this had not only permanently ended total world capitalist domination, hemming it in with workers states but had also fatally weakening its ability for expansion through exploitation, has led to disastrous muddle, opportunism and eventual abandonment of even the USSR workers state itself.
According to this nonsense the inherent aggressive tendencies of imperialism could be "contained" by a vigorous enough "peace struggle" by the communist states and workers movements within capitalism, together allegedly able to "prevent war" while communism grew steadily stronger, eventually outgunning, out-producing, out-competing and outlasting the capitalist order which would shrink away to nothing, leaving world socialism only to follow a path of slow steady overtaking of the remnants.
All that was needed was to avoid "rocking the boat" with too much "revolutionary adventurism" which might "provoke aggression", and continued permanent "peaceful coexistence", as opposed to Lenin's purely tactical conception of temporary peaceful coexistence through peace and trading deals to give the workers state time to gain strength while keeping its eye firmly on the ball of world revolution as the only guarantee of a peaceful future.
The disastrous extension of this fundamentally wrong Stalinist perspective into "parliamentary road" politics and the abandoning of the very basic grasp of Marxist Leninism, that the battle to establish the establish the dictatorship of the proletariat everywhere was central, has seen the degeneration of most "communism" across the world into nothing more than another shade of opportunist reformist parliamentary politics, the tragic opening of mass workers' movements to the very most barbarous counter-revolution, (most obviously in the 1973 General Pinochet coup and torture suppression in Chile which overthrew the "legally elected" socialism of Salvador Allende but in plenty of other struggles - including the Arab world now, effectively).
With it collapsed all credibility in the Third International too.
So the addition of Stalin's name and that of Mao Zedong, two of the leading exponents of these post-war theoretical revisions, to the list of recommended "great works" set out by Proletarian in its "theoretical supplement" is already putting everyone on the wrong path completely.
It is this revisionism which sowed the seeds for a complete undermining and discrediting of "communism" in the post-war period, spawning an endless fragmentation and confusion in the workers movement (including the opportunist Trotskyist "opposition") and leading eventually to the pointless liquidation of the powerful Soviet Union workers state, temporarily shattering all worldwide trust and causing the collapse of all faith in "communism" as a way forwards for mankind.
In the confusion multiple shades of petty bourgeois fake-"leftism" have struggled to "explain" what went wrong but all, in various ways, throwing the baby out with the bathwater by blaming what was the revolutionary strength of the USSR (and other workers states), the core dictatorship of the proletariat (variously condemned as "totalitarianism", "dictatorship" "bureaucracy" and "lack of democracy").
In the shallowest of ways this has pandered to every petty bourgeois prejudice under the sun and fear of class discipline and firmness instead of grasping that this ruthless class rule of the great majority (to prevent counter-revolution by the old owning-class) is alone the way forwards to achieving a world built by and for the mass of people (the "occupiers'" 99%)
Only by developing socialism and the conscious understanding of the entire population, step by step under this firm class leadership can society become more and more democratic until humanity reaches such a level of self-discipline and self-knowledge (individually and communally) that the very need for "majorities and votes" would become unnecessary.
It is the process Marx and Engels describe as the "withering away of the state" and which Lenin explains further in the "State and Revolution".
All talk of "freedom and democracy" without this, is simply a hoodwinking cover for capitalist dictatorship, as the world is learning, even as much of it is stripped away.
But this central issue of establishing proletarian dictatorship is not mentioned by the Proletarian either in its "special theory supplement".
And without this basic precept of Leninism, the Proletarian boasting of a "consistent" stand against imperialist warmongering turns out to be nothing more than yet more pacifism. Proletarian ringingly declares:
a position of absolute and implacable opposition to every aspect of the all the wars prepared instigated and waged by imperialism.
Implacable posturing more like.
No matter how "absolute" such "opposition", it is meaningless in the absence of explaining to the working class the complete unstoppability of war (as Lenin many times did explain) for as long as capitalism continues to exist.
War is inbuilt to the competitive monopoly capitalist order and particularly so as it hits the accumulated contradictions of production for profit which repeatedly bring it back to breakdown, failure, slump and irreconcilable collapse into bitter intractable competition for remaining markets.
Simply "opposing" war amounts to nothing more than the ineffectual "Stop the War" lobbying which the Lalkar/Proletarian is still advocating as a strategy, allegedly able in itself to hamper or even stop the ruling class making war, even as Stop the War has imploded almost totally following its utter failure and the cowardly and disgusting capitulation of the rest of the fake-"left" (and anarchists too) to the NATO Nazi onslaught.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks were "implacably" opposed to such social-pacifist trends, one of the many parts of his works the CPGB is not quoting in this highly selective "supplement".
But then Lenin and the Bolsheviks grasped and explained the development of war in a profoundly different way to this Stalinist bilge. In their perspectives the unrolling process war development was total, expressing a complete breakdown in all class relations, international relations and very other aspect of society, and the desperate battle for an out-of-time ruling class to stay in power.
In the Proletarian perspective which starts the supplement, war is episodic, a series of separate aggressive incidents, described as "predatory"and "expansionist".
And for all that a token gesture is made to the current unignorable economic crisis, this sequence of wars is nothing more than an updated version of Stalin's 1952 perspective of an imperialism which while it still has the capacity for outbreaks of war is a long way from complete war breakdown. This core flaw in Stalinist leadership was described in past (and still ignored) EPSR polemics with the Lalkarites:
Stalin's ponderous muddle counterposes "another world war" to "wars between capitalist countries generally", and by totally avoiding giving any serious warning about how titanic and brutal will be future imperialist onslaughts (as Lenin did and as is actually unfolding again now), Stalin creates an unmistakable impression that major, global, imperialist onslaught is no longer on the cards.
He cements this ludicrous, disastrous, delusion, - totally undermining the Communist International all the way to self-destruction, - with the crass revision of Marxist-Leninist science to declare that the monopoly capitalist economic system can no longer expand its production because of losing territory to socialist property. (EPSR 1192 08-07-03)
Proletarian's view set out in the first few paragraphs of the "special supplement" has necessarily adapted following the pointless liquidation of the Soviet Union by the Gorbachevite final degenerated end-point collapse of this complacent revisionism.
But its perspective still talks of a "series of wars", still reflecting the same partial Stalinist view of capitalism simply getting on with its "inherent tendency to aggression" and expansionism, a view of a system which is a million miles from grasp of an epochal failure of the world class based society in an interlocked crisis desperately driving towards utter breakdown and precipitating necessarily the greatest revolutionary crisis of all history.
Not "warS" but War, to make a shorthand of it, is the essence of capitalism, and not predatory but crisis-driven desperate elbowing for influence and strategic position against rivals, not just to seize wealth and resources, but perhaps deny them to others, or gain military and political strategic position:
Hear what the CPGB-ML says:
The most cursory glance at the contemporary international situation shows that imperialism's inherent tendency to wage wars of aggression has not in any way disappeared. If anything it has become enhanced, notably after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of central and eastern Europe, since when we have seen numerous wars of colonial reconquest, such as those against Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, most recently, Libya.
Moreover, faced with what is emerging as the gravest economic crisis in the history of capitalism, the pace and intensity of imperialism's inexorable drive to war is increasing yet further. The imperialist powers are presently at war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. They are also waging unofficial and proxy wars in Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and other countries. They are abetting and bankrolling the Israeli Zionists' war against the Palestinian people. This year they have also waged war against the Ivory Coast. And the list continues.
Even with war already raging on so many fronts, a further war is now being prepared against Syria, the danger of which grows with each passing day. Syria, in turn, is seen as a stepping stone to an attack on Iran ... and so on. Just as the wars of the 1930s, waged by the fascist powers against Spain, China, Korea, Albania and Ethiopia, paved the way for an attack on the socialist Soviet Union and an all-out world war, so today the imperialists' ultimate target is the People's Republic of China, a conflict which, if it came, would once again plunge the whole of humanity into the abyss of war.
Even this last section is completely wrong.
For all the general hatred of capitalism against the USSR's titanic development and achievements (which relentlessly continued even with the philosophical flaws and weaknesses of Stalin's Moscow leadership) the drive to destroy it was not eventually the cause or even the main feature of the Second World War:
....World Wars I and II started off in exactly the same way of smaller nations being militarily bullied by a major power in order to grab for itself some envisaged advantage in the constant Great Game of inter-imperialist economic and political rivalry.
The PROCESS is unmistakable. It is a process of crisis-driven, arbitrary, prestige posturing, military sabre rattling, and economic political arm-twisting.
But since there is no SOLUTION to the incompatible rival economic interests of the major imperialist powers (as world slump and economic devastation become the arena of never-ending competition), than it is a process which can only ultimately end in a new World War of some kind or other.(EPSR 1159 17-09-02)
WW2 broke surface as an inter-imperialist struggle, just as the First World War had erupted from the growing rivalries for colonies and markets, and so much is this so that Stalin was able to take advantage of the desperate antagonisms early on by playing off one imperialist power against the other.
In possibly the cleverest move of his life he made the 1939 pact with Hitler which turned Germany on West Europe and bought the Soviet Union a vital two years before the war drive began eastwards, by which time German forces were already partly engaged and the USSR had been able to move its industry to the Urals and establish vital production capacity for when war inevitably was finally turned against it too.
This pact, in practice, recognised that there were no inherent differences between one set of imperialist bandits and the others.
However much Germany had been cast in role of "aggressor" it was no more or less a warmonger than Britain (bloody owner of a ruthlessly and genocidally plundered Empire), France (ditto) or America, still cleaning the blood of the Native Americans, Filipinos and Central Americans from its hands and expanding rapidly with the "big stick".
China may be a general target now in the same way as the Soviet Union but the key point to be making is that it is inter-imperialist tensions which are heading for explosion point as the Euro rows currently indicate and past differences over warmongering (Germany refused to participate in the Libyan onslaught for example reprising some of the US-European differences which emerged earlier in the Iraq war).
China could anyway be drawn in eventually not simply for its workers state base but because of the extent to which that state organisation has utilised capitalist methods, and despite flaws and weaknesses, overall much more efficiently, humanely and productively than any other rising power has ever done, out-competing sclerotic imperialism not just in labour costs but increasingly in inventiveness, imagination and innovation.
It is a major economic rival already.
But to see world war as the result of an attack on China as the culmination of a series of allegedly predatory wars is completely missing the driving force of history in capitalist crisis.
The telling phrase above is "if it comes".
There is no "if" at all about the crisis and none at all about the war turmoil failure of where it must go.
And only Leninist revolution can stop it, led by a Leninist revolutionary party.
Build Leninism
Don Hoskins
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