Back issues
No 1414 19th October 2012
The long overdue march against the cuts exposes not only the opportunist complacency and reluctance to fight of official trade unionism and Labour but the posturing and pretences of all shades of fake-"leftism". Saying "no to austerity" and "rejecting cuts" is like telling a hurricane to stop blowing. None even begin to raise the world shattering revolutionary questions that the coming Depression and World War puts in front of workers. Worst of all are empty blustering calls for "general strike" by assorted Trots (who do not remotely think it is really going to happen) and who give the working class no idea of what would happen next. They do not raise the revolutionary perspectives which are vital and their poisonous anti-communism feeds the world imperialist counter-revolution and suppression. Building scientific revolutionary leadership is vital to END capitalism
The pretend "left" of the "British Labour movement" is making much of the "march against austerity" finally and belatedly organised by the official trade union movement, but still utterly failing to give the working class the slightest lead about the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism which the crisis confronts it with.
The production-for-private profit system has run into a brick wall of overproduction and "too much capital", and to a far greater extent and depth than at any time in history, almost certainly heralding the end of a complete 800 year epoch of capitalist rule, and in fact the whole pre-history of class rule altogether (slavery, feudalism).
It is sliding unstoppably into the foulest chaotic, destructive, warmongering fascist mess of all history, already well underway in the non-stop warmongering of Washington's "shock and awe" blitzkrieging of country after country for the last twenty years, and the shattering economic turmoil destroying lives everywhere.
World trade war protectionists tensions, market take downs and international bankruptcies are already rampant and intensifying day by day (Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and soon Italy and even the UK).
All these developments are an inseparable part of the great catastrophe now unfolded through the monopoly capitalist world and driven completely by its unstoppable, intractable and irreversible economic failure.
Only total destruction of the capitalist ruling system and its replacement with the firmest working-class disciplined rule to build planned socialism can pull the world out of the spiral of disaster.
But that demands revolutionary consciousness and leadership built in, and with, the working class, exactly what the fake-"left" is not offering despite any amount of bluster and strutting about "rejection of austerity" and even "general strikes to bring down the Coalition".
Nothing else but consciously built revolutionary struggle, sorting out all the great problems and mistakes of the past, can solve the failure of the gigantic "globalised" production for private profit system which degenerates with every passing day heading for ever worse financial chaos, crime, domestic repression and international blitzkrieging terror and war.
All kinds of defensive struggles are possible and necessary but apart from some piecemeal fending off, cuts are irresistible – except by the total ending of this historically outmoded, bankrupt, and increasingly destructive system and its replacement by the common ownership of the means of production, eliminating for ever the distortions and contradictions which come from the syphoning off of a lion's share of all that is produced for the benefit, indolence, pleasure and power of a tiny minority of "owners" (see Marxist economic quotes box, Marx's Capital, The Communist Manifesto, Lenin's Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism).
The "austerity" impositions are way beyond just wilful political nastiness by "greedy Tories" – though the stench of their foul, arrogant, self-seeking and callous "Poor Law" indifference would make a skunk sicken.
This is the struggle of a doomed ruling class against its historic demise.
The cutthroat struggle of all the world capitalists for rapidly collapsing markets leaves them no choice but to try and impose the most draconian and barbaric cuts everywhere (despite their own fears of the massive rebellions and revolts this will cause – already obvious in Egypt for example) if their system is survive, the end of which they cannot comprehend, let alone accept.
Any capitalist ruling class in the rapidly unravelling world economic system which does not impose ruthless speed-ups, wage cuts and elimination of (or payment for) all "wasteful" additional benefits for workers (like safety standards, health provision, education, dole money, housing, etc etc) will itself go under, wiped out by the vicious trade conflicts now erupting, directly or through the shark like movements of international capital and credit and expressed also in the increasing sharpness of international "diplomacy", the cover for major inter-imperialist tensions, around the European future, over the Libyan war, Syria and more.
The real, fascist, character of all imperialism (see Kenya cuttings below) in crisis will meantime grow more obvious as slump disaster forces the ruling class to try to impose the most draconian increases in exploitation, or go under in the great cutthroat trade war and currency turmoil now unleashed across the planet.
The savagery of the "belt tightening" already imposed on the lowest levels of the working class, the unemployed and disabled etc, domestically and internationally, while the rich continue their grotesquely enormous bonus and "emoluments" increases, has only just started and cannot be stopped, let alone be reversed, within a continuing capitalist world order any more than water can be made to run uphill.
The ruling class hide their true intentions behind the continuing hoodwinking pretences of the "parliamentary democracy" racket and the barefaced lying pretences of "all in it together" sacrifices, "defending the NHS etc" and "restoring growth", buying time while their prepare for all-out class war.
But the "young blood" Tories in the "Britannia Unchained" group give away the true agenda in their plans to tear up all protection and "benefits" for the desperate and geriatric British economy, imposing the savagery of open workers' competition with the Third World, to drive workers in even this "privileged country" into the same desperate poverty conditions as those imperialism has long imposed elsewhere throughout post-war neo-colonialism.
In the last crisis, and the world war it led to, the desperation of fascist exploitation pushed workers down even further, to the utmost limit of being literally worked to death in the camps and labour gangs.
To limit the questions to "Not to War" and "No to Cuts" struggles even now as the entire fake-"left" does in practice (including those blustering about "general strikes"), is to fatally disarm the working class in the teeth of the greatest hurricane of world economic disorder, trade war conflict, blitzkrieg destruction and domestic fascist repression that has ever threatened humanity.
The great TUC demonstration's biggest service therefore will be first and foremost to show up yet further the complete bankruptcy of the "Labour Movement" leadership and all multiple fake-"left" parties which hang around it.
Most of them plough on with the old reformist and "left" pressure, and "left" electoral politics in one form or another, tied like Labour and the official TUC class collaborators, to the stoogery of bourgeois "democracy", the greatest hoodwinking fraud even perpetrated on ordinary people (disguising the actual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie), even though Parliament is almost universally despised, held together only by the continuing participation of the opportunist "Labour Movement".
The arguments about the "best way to achieve recovery" and "defending" the working class by "voting against cuts" are at best fiddling while Rome burns and mostly opportunist evasions and diversions.
There is no "stopping" the crisis and no "defending living conditions until the upturn comes".
Lenin was utterly contemptuous of such opportunism:
These arguments are a sheer insult to the workers. Who does not know that we Social-Democrats [the political name for communists until 1917- epsr] are not against the struggle for reforms, that, unlike the social-patriots, unlike the opportunists and reformists, we do not confine ourselves to the struggle for reforms, but subordinate it to the struggle for revolution? Who does not know that this is exactly the policy repeatedly formulated in the Zimmerwald and Kienthal manifestos? We are not opposed to elections and reforms aimed at reducing the high cost of living, but our first concern is openly to tell the masses the truth, namely, that it is impossible to eliminate high living costs without expropriating the banks and big industry, i.e., without social revolution.
What does every Zimmerwald manifesto call upon the proletariat to do in retaliation to the war, in connection with the war?
It calls for revolutionary mass struggle, for the worker to turn their weapons against the enemy in their own country (see the last International Socialist Committee manifesto: An die Arbeiterklasse* end of December 1916), i.e., to turn their weapons against, their own bourgeoisie, their own government.
Should this not make it clear to every thinking person that the policy of repudiating defence of the fatherland is linked with the really revolutionary and really socialist struggle against the high cost of living, with a really socialist, and not bourgeois-reformist, utilisation of the election campaign?
Is it not clear that the social-patriot policy, the "fatherland defence" policy in the imperialist war, is the policy of reformism, i.e., a bourgeois-reformist and not a socialist struggle against high prices, merely an election campaign struggle?
How is it possible to "postpone" a congress which is to decide the "defence of the fatherland"' issue (i.e., to choose between social-patriot and socialist policy) "on the plea" that it is necessary to combat high prices, etc.? ? Grimm and the social-patriots advance this false and fraudulent argument to obscure from the workers the truth that they want to combat high living costs, conduct the election campaign, etc., in a bourgeois-reformist spirit and not in the Zimmerwald spirit.
OPEN' LETTER TO CHARLES NAINE Jan 1917.
But Lenin was arguing under different circumstances in the middle of the First World War and we are not actually in Third World War (yet) the "lefts" and cynics might argue.
But not far off it, must be the reply, with two decades of warmongering and blitzkrieging already under Washington's belt, extended and intensified by coups, torture and NATO blitzes under the "black civil rights and feminist" Obama/Hilary Clinton presidency (helped in by the "lefts"), the deliberately provoked civil war in Syria tearing yet another demonised "rogue" state to shreds, and the drumbeat threats of more to come already loud and insistent against Iran, and potentially Sudan, Zimbambwe, Cuba and even giant China.
This endless war chaos is the prelude and warming up for total universal war on a never before seen scale.
War is needed by capitalism if it is to even try and sort out the huge accumulated developmental imbalances in the monopoly capitalist order (expressed in the impossible, inconceivable, unrepayable, gigantic, multiply bankrupting debts and surpluses of the world trading system).
It has to wipe out the "surpluses", and the rival capitalist powers holding them, to "unclog" the world profit mechanism, which is utterly paralysed by the enormous mountains of accumulated capital sloshing around the financial system in a desperate and increasingly fruitless hunt for ever more elusive and unreachable profitability.
It is the fight to the death for shrinking markets and investment.
Japan's surplus is as much a potential target for Washington as China; or Berlin's industrial clout and financial power of the consolidating European bloc around Germany; or the idiotic bonapartist Putin's Russia with its revived capitalist ambitions to be "taken seriously" in a world that does not have room for the existing monopoly capitalist producers, let alone another major power.
Or they could all explode at each others throats at once.
The world is facing an utter brick wall, a dead-end, a disastrous overwhelming breakdown and disintegration of the entire "logic" on which its society, economy, production, culture and polity is built.
This is not just the worst and deepest crisis since the 1930s as most groups put it, nor even since the South Sea Bubble and the Tulip speculation of the early capitalist period as one "left" group colourfully suggests.
Is not even the deepest crisis ever.
It is not "a crisis" in that narrow bourgeois economic sense at all, to be compared with "the last crisis" or the one before.
It is THE CRISIS, as Marxism understands it, the historical breakdown of all that has gone before, already expressed in the disintegration of society in drug-riddled, pornography saturated, violence-celebrating, killing, blitzing mayhem and mind-numbing philistinism and now heading into the most staggering penury, mass unemployment and Depression and war horrors ever witnessed.
Whole cities in rich America already lie in desolation, like Cleveland.
Mexico has been reduced to an unbelievable gangland of beheadings, and torture.
The Middle East is being ripped apart by war and civil war.
Europe is heading into appalling chaos.
Leninism says that of course workers should take up a fight against every class-war move made by imperialism to push the economic burdens of the crisis onto their shoulders, and in some cases here and there it will be possible to temporarily slow up and resist the cutbacks in wages, pensions and working conditions, dismantling of the NHS and other social services.
And it is clear that many people will initially be drawn into struggle around the issues that immediately affect them, from wage and conditions fights to battles against hospital, library and schools shutdowns and much more.
But all these attacks are part of the overwhelming crisis unrolling now and each one raises the questions of the total revolutionary overthrow of the whole of capitalist society and the state which violently defends it on behalf of the ruling class.
Only this perspective, constantly put forwards, in each struggle gives the solution; seizing the means of production and taking them into common ownership for rational planned production tailored for the real (not artificially wasteful, consumerist) needs.
That requires a working class capable of doing do, - one with a clear revolutionary grasp capable of organising and cooperating internationally for planned production while defending itself against the inevitable storm of sabotage, subversion and fascist counter-revolution which will follow (and which has been unleased against every communist state or struggle to achieve a communist state since 1917).
The core struggle is for revolutionary understanding and education in the working class to develop the leadership.
But far from explaining the devastating and epoch-ending depth and extent of this world crisis already bankrupting whole countries, which has to be the starting point, the complacent garbage of "defensive reformism" (a contradiction in itself since failed "democratic" reformist politics were sold to the working class on the principle of winning "steady change for the better" and "step by step towards socialism") is idiotically punted out by the "left" Labourites and "radical" TUC leaders and echoed by the great swamp of "lefts" like the latest eclectic hodge-podge of Trotskyist, Labourite and assorted one time Stalinist revisionist groups gathered together in the "Coalition of Resistance", the latest variant on the unworkable "Socialist Alliance"s of the past.
One by one these, and assorted other attempts to fudge together some "common denominator" groupings to provide "unity on the 'left'" have always collapsed because they come nowhere near sorting out the critical issues of the need for revolutionary perspectives at heart of all struggles (and put to one side a host of crucial philosophical and political issues which follow – from the nature of the Soviet Union and what went wrong with it (and what equally importantly went brilliantly well), to their complicity with imperialist warmongering in Syria and Libya).
Most of them over the long decades of the post-war "boom", fed by the endless dollar printing of US imperialism, did not even raise the question of the coming disastrous and sudden meltdown failure of the world economy, either through sheer philistine incomprehension, cynical indifference, or the petty bourgeois complacency which underpins the reality of their "revolutionary" posing.
Crisis notions were ignored or attacked as "old hat discredited Marxist 'catastrophism'" and the small Leninist movement struggling to put forwards this understanding was sidelined, ignored and even suppressed, thrown out of meetings, trade unions and centrist political parties (the Socialist Labour Party for example) for raising revolutionary issues.
The "credit crunch" has made such complacent dismissal impossible.
After a century of trying to rubbish him, even the bourgeois media is beginning to admit that "Karl Marx may well have got it right" and that "capitalism has built within it the contradictions that will always return it to slump and Depression".
An hour long BBC portrait of Marx by the economics editor Stephanie Flanders even managed to develop the theory for the complications of the credit-crunch, explaining how monopoly capitalism had used the creation of paper credit, both public and private, via such tools as the credit card, to extend its production long beyond the point at which it should otherwise have collapsed.
Part of the insoluble contradictions of capitalism discovered by Marx, is that the expropriation by capital of the "surplus" value produced by workers, and its re-investment to expand production "as if there were no limit" always leads eventually to slump because, put simply, the workers produce far more value in goods than they are paid, but are also most of the customers for the output – and they cannot afford to buy it all (see quotes box and all of Marx's Capital) eventually leading to spiral of collapse and Depression.
By allowing purchase "on tick" the evil day when the Slump arrives was put off for decades.
What the BBC, which is after all the central propaganda organ for the British ruling class, did not explain, are a dozen other factors to do with the ruthless exploitation of the Third World in virtual slave labour conditions (with no credit cards to be profligate with), to produce the super-profits poured into the central capitalist economies which alone allowed this credit, the background printing.
Nor did it underline that this artificial credit has simply accentuated the already devastating contradictions so that when they finally broke through, far greater Slump disaster had accumulated, with the world on the edge of complete breakdown in autumn 2008.
It has only been held back since by even more demented credit creation than ever in the great swamping Quantitative Easing trillions, which are only the shortest of short-term answers, temporarily holding off total meltdown in the most powerful countries via stoking up massive inflation at the expense of the masses and of the capitalist rivals holding credit surpluses like Japan and China and Germany.
But all the fake-"lefts" still only pay lip service to the reality of the crisis.
It might be mentioned here and there or be discussed in special "economics" articles but always remains on the agenda for the future while "in the meantime" the same old "left pressure" electoralism is proposed, herding the working back in behind the completely bankrupt hoodwinking fraud of bourgeois democracy supposedly "this time" to be for the working class.
A proper "left party" would just "vote against the cuts" says one of the latest groupings, the Trade Union & Socialist Coalition for example.
So that will be alright then! - despite the total bankruptcy of the last 150 years of exactly the same "voting" reformism, currently seeing all its "gains" and "social wage" benefits dismantled and sold off.
But even those which declare themselves "militant revolutionaries" still only call for more extreme versions of the same "left pressure" – with no explanation of the real depth and paralysing intractability of the crisis and how revolution is supposed to be achieved.
The bravado about "general strikes" posited by the SWP and Workers Power groups is just noisy and irresponsible bluster.
Of course workers should take up all possible struggles against the cuts, and by all means pile into mass struggles if they spontaneously gather momentum – and even "bring down the Tory government".
But this would make the revolutionary questions even more crucial since such gigantic political events would precipitate a cascade of consequences involving state force, potential right wing coups, arrests, police onslaughts, all kinds of violent eruptions, street chaos, anarchic collapse of social and local economic provision, and much much more both in Britain and internationally.
It would sharpen the civil war pressures hugely.
As the EPSR has many times insisted there must be a conscious fight for theory:
...the clearest possible Marxist-Leninist science on the impossibility of successful sustained socialist revolution until sufficient of the working class has been united behind a correct common philosophy and understanding of the world, and how it has to be changed, by which particular class forces (EPSR 1066).
What the degenerating and bankrupt pustulence of the insanely greedy ruling class will not be stopped by is even the biggest mass "protest", nor even by the strongest of "left pressure" such as general strikes as some of the more posturing Trotskyists are demanding (without saying a word about the real revolutionary implications).
It raises a million questions about the 1926 events and why those failed, and more from the great trade union battles of the post-war period and the ultimate defeat not of the working class but of all the old reformist ways of struggling.
The miners' strike civil war state violence (police and secret intelligence) of 1984 is but a taster of what lies in store.
None of the posturing bravado of the Trots and fake-"left" poseurs even begins to pose these issues to the working class or even much spell out what is supposed to happen in a general strike (which it is guaranteed the Trots do not remotely truly believe is going to happen) nor the real implications of toppling the coalition.
What would replace the Tory government assuming such a mass movement could be developed and coordinated?
The Trots do not say.
The working class is left to assume that a Labour government would replace it then?
After all the great "revolutionaries" of the SWP always fall back on supporting the Labourites, or monstrous "left" mountebank opportunists like Ken Livingstone as allegedly "better than the Tories".
But in what way would this change anything?
Labour would simply run the same old parliamentary fraud which has bamboozled the working class for nearly the last two centuries, and brought it to the current disaster??
And if not Labour, or "left" Labour, exactly the same would be true of any supposedly "true lefts" in the bourgeois democratic racket however much is was supposed to be a "genuine socialist government this time" - the same old refrain of the multitude of fake-"left" parties have pumped out for decades without ever exposing and denouncing the bourgeois "democratic" election racket for the giant fraud it is.
Bolshevism's understanding was always that the only reason the revolutionary party would participate in elections was to use the platform of alleged "freedom" to expose the hypocrisy and lies of the capitalist dictatorship reality of parliament, which is a manipulated opportunist corrupt racket and which would have no power over the real decisions taken in capitalist society (by the ruling class and big capital) anyway even if its representatives were pure as the driven snow.
All these Trots are doing is a mighty playacting show of "left" bravado which would leave the working class floundering.
For all its seeming militancy, none of this gets near beginning to explain the enormity of the crisis which workers now face and the gigantic questions it raises, including the entire examination of the last 100 years of working class struggle and anti-imperialist war and conflict, the world development of socialist societies, the titanic achievements of the Soviet Union and the other great workers state experiments, and the philosophical and political mistakes (Stalinist retreats and Trotskyist anti-communism) which led to their liquidation despite their strength and organisation, and despite continuing economic progress (since the notion of the "collapse" of communism, especially of the huge Soviet Union, is itself one of the great lies of history - it gave up the struggle though revisionist idiocy, ideological complacency and confusion).
None of it even introduces the most critical issue of all, that of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, vital for safeguarding and ensuring the building of a new socialist society and the central question which is never mentioned by any of the "lefts".
Without these issues being massively debated and revolutionary clarity being rebuilt the working class is not just all at sea but completely vulnerable to fragmentation, confusion, diversions, and all the panoply of antagonisms, scapegoating, racist division, chauvinism, and other deliberate lies which capitalism constantly pours out, and which constantly frustrate any efforts to change the world.
It can be fooled, led up the garden path and potentially be slaughtered (metaphorically and/or actually) by the ruling class's long experience in manipulation, propaganda lies and trickery, and by the anti-communism which has been pumped into them in the great non-stop exercise of brainwashing lie propaganda about "totalitarian nightmares" which began with the success of Lenin's great revolution in 1917 and has continued with ever increasing volume ever since, eagerly sustained and supported by the self-same Trotskyists blowharding about mass strikes now.
But there is much worse.
Far from helping disentangle the constant lies of capitalism the fake "lefts" play right into the hand of capitalism warmongering confusion and counter-revolutionary trickery.
Just now the Trots are busy helping feed out the stinking lies which have stampeded world public opinion into supporting the CIA instigated (and undoubtedly named) "Free" Syrian Army civil war standing alongside the most degenerate feudal undemocratic backwardness and repression in the world in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, as they do so.
This confusion helping sustain the pro-Western distortion of the Arab Spring, which has drenched the world in media distortions and outright lies to deliberately provoke both the Libyan and Syrian "revolts" as counter-revolutionary mayhem to destroy and disrupt the rising tide of genuine revolutionary turmoil in Egypt and the Gulf states.
Their parroting of the Goebbels lies and distortions pumped out non-stop against these demonised regimes alone would be enough confirm the treachery of the Trotskyist groups.
Like the Second International before them, they are total stooges of capitalist ideology, joining with the imperialist propaganda onslaughts on the Third World's upheavals as sharply shown after 9/11 when they all rushed to "condemn" the "atrocities" of the shattering attack on the New York World Trade Centre and ever since poisonously siding with the collations of monarchists, petty bourgeois racist fascists, backward sectarian feudalists, and religious reaction which have been prodded and provoked, funded and armed, by Washington and its local stooges.
They willingly fall for every false "dissident", "trade union" and "street revolt" which the imperialist intelligence agencies have either taken up, or organised from the beginning, notable against the workers states of the post-war period (Hungarian "uprising", Prague "Spring", Poland's Pilsudski fascist loving "Solidarnosc etc etc) and subsequently against demonised bogeyman "rogue states".
And at the same time they deny the significance of the real turmoil constantly growing deeper in the Third World especially as capitalist "shock and awe" blitzing continues.
These are the real signals of world rebellion, being generated increasingly close to the centre of even the richest and most powerful parts of capitalism and despite their confusion, anarchic, or religious or fragmentary and desperate or even despairing character, continuing to grow.
The Egyptian upheaval along with Tunisia and the Gulf signalled a giant qualitative jump to a new level of mass rebellion rapidly catching alight throughout the Middle East (and delighting the masses wider afield), terrifying the ruling class and forcing it to activate long plotted but uncertain reactionary groupings to overturn the sporadic anti-imperialism of Gaddafi and now Syria.
Both are a disaster for the West, requiring massive intervention from NATO and the most backward of the Arab feudalists, and exposing even more the foul reactionary nature of Western "freedom" and "rule of law" posturing in a dozen directions (eg showing up Turkey as a Western stooge once more, the grotesque fascist nature of the Obama presidency, stirring up the genuine self-determination of the Kurdish region being brutally suppressed by Ankara).
The Trots facile strike "heroics" in other words are a criminal deception and treacherous misleadership covering up the petty bourgeois dilettantism and irresponsibility of these armchair warriors exposing their underlying hostility to every genuine struggle which has erupted on the planet.
They always ignore or "condemn" the actual eruptions of the world masses, because in spite of their bluster they hate the messy real life struggle,
Yet these events are the most critical to explain, showing that the revolutionary movement of the planet grows day by day.
For all their confusion and erratic, even sometimes self - defeating character as just "riots" or "terrorism" or "insurgency" these great upheavals are the early signals of the world revolutionary struggle against imperialist domination that the crisis is generating and the Tunisian and Cairo-inspired Middle East mass turmoil even more so.
But even deeper philosophical reasons underlie the Trot and fake-"left" repudiation of these developments, or failure to spell out their world revolutionary significance, because they are the confirmation, along with the long-denied (and sometimes still denied) "catastrophic" economic crisis, of the revolutionary future for mankind which Marxist-Leninism science identifies. As EPSR 1066 put it:
It is the mass spontaneous eruption of revolutionary circumstances which educates the party, not vice versa. These are all petty-bourgeois fake-'left' dilettantes who only pretend to like the idea of 'revolution' but want nothing to do with its messy reality in actual fact, - scalded casualties of Cold War anti-communism and of non-stop anti-Marxist philistinism reinforced by every aspect of affluent Western lifestyle.
Spontaneously-evolving revolutionary conditions come first. The communist consciousness to lead and succeed with revolution, - a confident Marxist-Leninist philosophy for the whole working class, - can only be built up out of the accumulating experiences that 'revolutionary' is exactly what history really is, and exactly what the necessary essence of all real movement ultimately must be.
Staggeringly some of the "lefts" are still sneering at the idea of a crisis at all, as a never-ending 'dispute' in the ex-Stalinist and now crypto-Trotskyist Weekly Worker paper of the preposterously named CPGB does week by week, absurdly suggesting capitalism is "on a growth path".
Like all the issues in its eclectic "open" letters pages this is never fought out to a conclusion to guide understanding, but left as part of a petty bourgeois "democratic" soup of conflicting opinion, missing the point of theory altogether.
Marxism is for open polemic, against the sectarianism of the fake-"lefts" eclecticism or refusal to argue, as a disciplined struggle to reach a conclusion about newly emerging developments in the class struggle to guide the action of the working class. Tested against reality this understanding may need to be amended and developed - again by the struggle in a Leninist party carried out in front of the working class.
But even when the glaring reality of the crisis is accepted in the "open" Weekly Worker, theoretical understanding is immediately belittled and the obvious revolutionary conclusions evaded in a flurry of anti-theory defeatism:
It is ironic that the various socialist groups, having predicted the crisis of capitalism for years, are too weak to take advantage of it. We have the greatest financial crisis since the South Sea bubble nearly 200 years ago.
That rallying cry of monetarist orthodoxy, letting lame ducks go the wall, has been jettisoned. Banks that would be bankrupt in an instant are too big too fail and have consequently received unlimited government bailouts. Real unemployment is over 3.5 million and, as with the 1834 Poor Law and the abolition of Speenhamland parish relief, the unemployed are being held responsible for their own predicament.
There is a wholesale reversal of the post-war settlement, which involved the creation of the welfare state, the 1948 National Assistance Act and the national health service.
The queen is alleged to have asked a group of economists why they did not predict the economic crisis.
Perhaps we should ask the same of the socialist gurus and the pet economists who preside over their fiefdoms.
Marxism is supposed to be scientific socialism, yet it operates in code, with dialectics being reserved for the socialist high priests. Socialist groups have no greater understanding of the crisis of world capitalism than any bourgeois party. I make no claims to an understanding of the dismal science myself, but it seems to me that we have witnessed the transfer of production to the third world and Asia, whose labour western societies have lived off, having defined the rules of the game via the dollar and euro. If this is true, then it raises questions about whether revolutionary change is possible in the west, even theoretically.
Speak for yourself and the other "fake-"left" sectarian groups, riddled with guru figures, is the answer to this poisonous swipe – Leninist Marxism will continue to make its arguments with and in front of the working class and develop the open polemical struggle to advance and improve the urgently required consciousness of the objective world class struggle required by growing ferment; welcoming criticism of its mistakes and taking on board better understanding if it is able to show its validity.
The guru groups, (CPGB too) are those that far from "predicting" the crisis as this piece slyly pretends (to have a straw-man target), mocked and even suppressed all such understanding, in awe to the apparently (to them) unstoppable success of the US dominated post-war monopoly capitalist "boom".
What is this sneering at "dismal" economics anyway and contemptuous dismissal of allegedly unintelligible (code) philosophy and dialectical materialism, except writing off all Marxism, starting with Karl Marx's 30 years of battling study in the British Museum to grasp the essence of capitalist exploitation (the greatest economic study ever made) and Lenin's lifetime of polemical battles on this understanding to establish the scientific material truth of the world and the balance of class forces (or dialectical materialism as it is known)???
That is for the bird's as far as these petty bourgeois academics and dilettantes are concerned.
Could bankrupt philistinism get much shallower?
Yes is the answer, in yet more endless squabbles over organisational forms among the assorted Trot and revisionist sects as reams more of this article does, never sorting out the critical questions and writing-off revolution in a final casual side-swipe!!!
The only groups "too weak to take advantage" of the crisis are just these fake-"lefts" whose bankruptcy and anti-communist failure is more and more exposed by the real world, where the crisis is confirming the fundamentals of Marxism as never before.
And it is this material reality of crisis which will teach the working class the truth and make the science of Marxism increasingly popular as it is seen to be the only explanation which makes sense – however much long decades of Western complacency and tides of anti-communism have pushed it into a minority.
But that requires far more battling to deepen understanding and to expose the weakness and opportunism of the fake-"lefts".
On the other wing of "left" confusion, the Lalkar/Proletarian CPGB-ML group of Museum-Stalinist is as guilty of posturing and pretences as the Trots.
Here and there it will tie a few paragraphs into its articles about capitalism needing to be "overthrown" in order to solve its otherwise intractable contradictions and a workers state be established. But this, is still an "ultimate" aim while everyone gets on with yet more useless and disarming "Stop the War" ineffectual pacifist moralising.
Lalkar to its credit, at least falls on the correct side in exposing the monstrous imperialist warmongering against first Gaddafi and now Syria.
But with much huffing and puffing about "principled stands" it then tells the working class to support the appalling vacillations and soft-opportunist bourgeois nationalism of the Ba'athists in Damascus, just as in the past it has supported Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and others, going so far as to absurdly suggest these bourgeois nationalist regimes (or revisionist nationalist like Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic) represent gains for the working class in themselves.
This is pure reformism, a complete abandonment of the understanding that the only way forwards for the working class, everywhere, is the ending of the degenerate capitalist system which is the overwhelmingly significant and dominating issue for everybody everywhere.
So would not the struggle for a workers dictatorship be as important in Syria or Iraq, or Serbia, or Zimbabwe as anywhere? Do these regimes contribute in any way towards such a fight?
Not only do even the best of them not positively advance an international understanding of imperialist crisis and Marxist struggle, they mostly have suppressed it.
In what way would the working class have benefitted from putting all its trust in the former CIA stooge Saddam Hussein with his monstrous gangster thug record? Here is what the EPSR said on that (in issue 1179 08-04-03):
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.
But in the wider picture, such specific tasks facing world socialist progress are just a distraction if over-emphasised, remaining temporarily incompleted details in a vast list of things needing to be done worldwide.
...All this logic-chopping pedantry about Iraq's specific fate really IS single-issue posturing of a "one-country-socialism" daftness in the present context of WORLD revolutionary tasks against the ever-widening world warmongering imperialist crisis. It is reformist tinkering. In 1917, the priority was to not let extreme reaction bring a complete halt to the revolutionary process.
To that end, the need to overthrow Kerensky gave way to the need to defeat the Kornilov rebellion. In 2003, the priority for the whole world is to see US imperialism defeated as soon as possible, wherever possible.
For Syria (Libya) the same applies essentially; not only is it nonsensical for the working class to be called on to support vacillating and completely erratic anti-imperialism of either Assad's local nationalist capitalism or Gaddafi's completely bizarre individual Green Book philosophy (hostile to Marxism as much as to imperialism) anyway, but this additionally throws out completely the wrong emphasis limiting the issue to particular countries (and from that slogans just about "Defend Syria" etc).
But imperialism's agenda is only very incidentally to deal with irritating (but previously carrot-and-stick -containable) "rogue" regimes.
The Libyan Nazi-NATO invasion and the imperialist coordinated civil war to destroy Syria are to contain the great wave of Arab revolution and generally push forwards the Washington-Pentagon warmongering crisis-intimidation of the whole world, while keeping the necessary militarisation atmosphere simmering for far more warmongering needed as the slump deepens.
This limited view is another part of the Lalkarites' complete failure to grasp the overriding significance of calling for defeat of imperialism, as the great source of world problems and war, not "victory for Assad".
"Stop the War" becomes even more glaringly nonsensical too.
The world needs to build Leninism Don Hoskins
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
G4S Guarding the Olympics and cash in Ireland - running detention centres in Occupied Palestine
by Mark Moloney
GROUP 4 SECURICOR (G4S), the multinational firm that couldn’t manage security for the London 2012 Olympics, is helping to operate detention centres in Israel and occupied Palestine which hold child prisoners.
For many, the Olympics security shambles was the first time a lot of people had heard of the company but the security firm which started as a night watchmen service with four guards on bicycles in 1935 has evolved into a multi-billion euro operation and its logo is popping up everywhere. The British-Danish company is amongst the world’s three largest private-sector employers with more than 650,000 staff in 125 countries. In 2011, its income was more than £7.5billion, with after-tax profits of almost £200million.
In Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the company has lucrative contracts protecting oil, gas and mining facilities. It is dangerous work: last year, 76 G4S employees died while on duty; in 28 of these cases, the workers died while under attack’.
In Britain, the company runs six prisons and operates the electronic tagging programme of prisoners. It also protects dozens of embassies. Two hundred Lincolnshire Police civilian support staff carrying out front-office, custody and control room duties were transferred to G4S in April 2012.
In Ireland, G4S employs around 5,000 people, mainly in cash-in-transit and security services. It currently manages the Central Criminal Courts complex in Dublin under a €291million public-private partnership deal.
In Israel, G4S provides security at Israeli prisons and detention centres, many of which house political prisoners (including child prisoners) and others which hold internees.
According to a report into the G4S by ‘Who Profits?’, a project which monitors and publishes information about commercial entities which co-operate or profit from the ongoing occupation of Israeli and Syrian land by Israel, G4S operates a central control room for the entire Ofer detention compound. Ofer is a military prison housing more than 1,000 political prisoners, including children.
In December 2010, a delegation from the Council for Arab-British Understanding visited the facility. British Labour Party MP Sandra Osborne said she was “shocked to the core” when they saw 13-year-old boys shackled by the legs and handcuffed while being led into the military court based there.
The company also kitted out two other Israeli prisons, Ktzi’ot and Megiddo, which between them house more than 3,000 prisoners of which between 100 and 200 are under the age of 18.
Not only does G4S work with the Israeli Government but it is business as usual for commercial entities based in illegal settlements.
G4S provides security and personnel to businesses and shops in Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank. Under UN law and the Geneva Convention, these settlements are completely illegal. G4S states that contracts with companies based in these settlements are “not discriminatory or controversial” yet apart from the illegality of these outposts under international law, they also help operate an apartheid regime whereby the services provided in them are not available to Palestinians.
G4S also boasts that it provides ‘services’ at Israeli checkpoints along the Gaza border and the Apartheid Wall which separates Israel from the West Bank. It adds it is a “leading supplier” of electronic equipment to the Israeli police force.
The Arab Spring has proved good for business G4S executives told investors last year that civil unrest and protests across the Arab world had resulted in rising demand for private security services. In Egypt and Bahrain, G4S had “visibility among government heads of security” and “built the brand”, G4S said.
In the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia, G4S helps train security forces at the Naif Arab University for Security Sciences while local G4S staff received a two-month bonus for their support for the ruling regime during popular protests earlier this year.
In April, though, the company lost its contract protecting EU Parliament buildings following objections from meps and campaign groups - including the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign - over the company’s record in Palestine and Israel.
The Boycott Israel Network, which advocates a consumer, cultural and artistic boycott of Israel as long as it violates international law, says:
“Brutal systems of discrimination such as Israeli apartheid are maintained because companies like G4S are willing to do business with them, in total disregard of the human consequences and of international law.
“G4S is an example of a business that cynically views the practices of such regimes as good for business. Action must be taken to prevent corporate complicity with Israeli violations of international law.”
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Hypocritical Western crocodile tear “outrage” on Lockerbie as it sponsors Cuba air terror bombing
by Jean-Guy Allard
“THE cia has trained and freed a Frankenstein,” declared Peter Kornblugh, director of George Washington University’s National Security Archive, in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year. Precisely. All of the empire’s arrogance and disdain for the lives of those it seeks to dominate are reflected in statements made by Orlando Bosch, who ordered the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines passenger plane, and his accomplice Luis Posada Carilles. Bosch described the victims as “four or five Black girls” and Posada boasted, when asked about his terrorist history, that he “sleeps like a baby.”
The bombing of the airliner in flight, off the coast of Barbados, during the tenure of George Bush Sr. as director of the cia, has received much less media attention than the similar Lockerbie crime, when a U.S. airliner was downed during this same Bush’s stint as Vice President, in charge of security issues.
The U.S. government holds within various archives of its enormous intelligence apparatus, a wealth of evidence demonstrating the responsibility of Bosch, Posada and other cia henchmen for the so-called Barbados crime, which took the lives of 73 innocent people.
The plot to destroy the Cubana Airlines plane was hatched in a meeting held in the Dominican Republic, under the directions of Bush Sr. and organized by one of the cia’s most loyal servants, the veteran agent Sacha Volman.
One of the participants, Cuban Ricardo Morales Navarrete, alias “El Mono”, working for the Venezuelan political police, the disip, later confirmed to General Manuel Contreras of the Pinochet secret police in Chile, that the meeting was held “on orders from the cia” with the most important “bosses of all the anti-Castro groups that existed, especially in the United States.”
Morales, who had been head of intelligence and counterintelligence for the disip, explained that the meeting held in the Dominican city of Bonao was to plan the assassination of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and “the destruction of a Cuban airliner.”
There, on June 11,1976, coru, the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations was created, within the executive offices of the Canadian Falconbridge mining company, by some 20 terrorist dons from Miami. Also in attendance were those who would later meet in the Anauco Hilton in Caracas to iron out details of the airliner bombing.
Bosch and Posada were there, of course, as well as other experienced terrorists: Frank Castro, who led the summit; Gustavo “El Gancho” Castillo and Ricardo Morales Navarrete.
An fbi report dated November 2,1976, indicated that the group was in Caracas just “a few days” before the sabotage which destroyed the Cubana airliner mid-air. Plans related to the bombing of a Cuban plane were discussed in a bar within the Anauco Hilton, according to the document, which identifies the participants as well.
Castro, Castillo and Morales have never met with justice although they are equally responsible for the deaths of the 73 victims, as are Posada and Bosch.
Castillo was one of the most active assassins in the Cuban National Liberation Front (flnc). Among other crimes, he was involved, along with Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo and Orestes Ruiz, in the assassination of Cuban official Artagñán Díaz Díaz in the Mexican city of Merida, on July 24, 1974.
At the time of the meeting in Caracas, Castillo was a fugitive from Mexican justice and worked full-time for the coru, under Frank Castro and Orlando Bosch.
A cia authorized terrorist, “El Gancho,” died exactly one year ago in his Hialeah, Florida home, under the protection of the fbi and the cia “sponsors of terrorism.”
Ricardo Morales Navarrete was killed in a Miami bar and his body never found. A clean job performed by those who were interested in definitively silencing the man with a reputation for talking. Contreras himself confirmed this.
Orlando Bosch died last April in a Miami hospital at the age of 83. In his last public appearances he reiterated his call for a violent insurrection to overthrow the Cuban Revolution.
Posada has become the darling of the terrorist crowd in Miami, where he makes public appearances applauded by those who yearn for the days of the Batista dictatorship. Roger Noriega took responsibility for neutralizing the U.S. judicial system and making sure Posada got off easily in a trial in El Paso where he faced charges of violating immigration law.
Frank Castro also continues living with absolute impunity in the Dominican Republic, where no one has taken the initiative to remind him of his terrorist past.
And a scandalous enigma remains.
The well-known cia agent, Antonio Veciana, terrorist boss and founder of Alpha 66, revealed in Miami in 2007 that Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Pérez told him that he had ordered his chief of security, Cuban Orlando García Vázquez, to keep quiet about the case of the Cuban airliner, “Keep your mouth shut and don’t talk about the subject.”
Veciana said, “The United States government has a copy of the report Orlando García made to Carlos Andres Pérez about what happened.”
Pérez never wanted to reveal the contents of the secret report, “to avoid hurting Posada,” he said, but he did make sure that the government kept a copy.
Pérez died last December 25 in Miami, as a result of a heart attack. In the days following his death, several boxes of documents which he had brought secretly from Venezuela were discovered. “The fbi was informed of the contents... and was interested in reviewing them,” one of the former president’s daughters, Cecilia Victoria Pérez Matos, said, offering no further details.
The issue was never again addressed. As in the case of the explosion of the ship La Coubre, with its hundred-some victims, the U.S. government - with its list of countries which sponsor terrorism - makes sure that as little as possible is known.
In the meantime, the cia and its interventionist apparatus have continued to expand. Its tentacles have multiplied and its operators, covert and otherwise, have never stopped developing plans to harm Cuba and its people, which Washington still dreams of dominating. •
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World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).
Miami media used to convict the Cuba Five
Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada - President of the National Assembly of People’s Power
THE U.S. government flagrantly violated the Constitution and the law to ensure the unjust conviction the Cuban Five, who will soon complete 14 years of arbitrary and illegal imprisonment. This was not an isolated event, but rather a systematic effort carried out over the course of the prosecution of the Five, which cost millions dollars of public funds. There is very limited information available about the operation, its duration, the amount of money utilized, persons involved, and other important aspects.
Given that these actions should oblige authorities - both judicial and executive - to immediately release the Five, Washington has also conspired to hide what it did, thus committing an additional crime: obstruction of justice.
This is the essence of the affidavit submitted recently to South Florida District Judge, Joan Lenard, by Martin Garbus, Gerardo Hernández Nordelo’s lawyer. The document supports Gerardo’s previous request to vacate his conviction or, as an alternative, requests that the judge order discovery of all evidence the government is hiding and convene a hearing.
Although there are many other violations in the appeal process cited - in this last, extraordinary stage - the document focuses on the government’s conspiracy with Miami media to convict the accused beforehand and make a fair trial impossible.
The substantive nature of the conspiracy was to use these media to unleash an unprecedented propaganda campaign of hatred and hostility. To this end they used a number of “journalists” - in fact undercover government agents - to produce a veritable barrage of misinformation. Between November 27, 2000 - when the trial began - and July 8, 2001 -when they were found guilty- The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald alone published 1,111 articles, an average of more than 5 per day. The Diario de Las Americas published a similar number, completely saturating the printed press.
The “journalists” were paid by Radio and TV Martí, in other words with funds from the federal budget. These individuals did additional work for the two stations and their views were disseminated in the Miami area where both anti-Cuban outlets had, at that time, and still have, direct broadcasting, and were also reproduced by local media. (This is another violation of U.S. law which prohibits official propaganda within U.S. territory.)
This wasn’t just Radio and TV Martí and the daily newspapers. These so-called journalists used local English and Spanish language radio and TV stations as well, and other publications distributed in the area, some free of charge.
It was impossible to avoid this barrage of propaganda anywhere in South Florida.
But the criminal behavior of the “journalists” - and the government which paid them - went far beyond propaganda. During the trial, the defense denounced on several occasions that these journalists were attempting to influence the jury by divulging material, some of which the judge had specifically excluded and which, obviously, they could only have received from the prosecution.
As if this were not enough, the “journalists” harassed witnesses and jurors, as well. The jury complained to the judge saying they were frightened, that they had been followed with cameras and microphones. This was acknowledged – obviously without success - to help her avoid situations that tarnished the image of the U.S. judicial system. (See Official Record of the Trial, pages 22, 23, 111, 112, 625,14644-14646).
In August 2005, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals unanimously declared a mistrial because the Miami proceedings had taken place within what they described as “a perfect storm of prejudice and hostility”, created by the local media. When the three judges rendered their historical ruling, neither they, or anyone else, could have known that the District Attorney’s Office was responsible for this perfect storm, openly violating its constitutional obligation to abide by the law and guarantee a fair trial.
The first reports of the government’s conspiracy with its “journalists” emerged a year later in September, 2006. Since then the government has opposed efforts by U.S. civic organizations to force disclosure of the payments and contracts, in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act (foia). The District Attorney’s Office has also opposed requests included in the extraordinary appeals by the Five and has threatened to resort to “executive privilege” and “national security” justifications to maintain the cover up.
The case of the Cuban Five has a strange link to the press and media professionals. In Miami the media were decisive in their conviction. Outside of Miami the Five were punished with silence.
The irrefutable document submitted by Martin Garbus poses a challenge to professional journalists. Will they let the facts be covered up again and become accomplices of those who have tarnished their noble profession?
“Many good things await René in Cuba”
“WE are in a strange situation this August 13. It’s René’s 56th birthday, he is not behind bars but he is not free; we could say that he’s in solitary, apart from when he is visited by someone in the family. He’s alone,” affirmed Olga Salanueva, wife of anti-terrorist René González Sehwerert.
“René cannot have a social life, develop relationships, befriend his neighbors, or receive anyone because there is danger everywhere. That was recently confirmed with the loss of his brother; if he had been in prison that day, at least somebody would have placed a hand on his shoulder and talked with him for a while. But in the present circumstances there was none of that.
“Parole wasn’t created for what is happening with René, it is there to aid the social reintegration of people who have completed prison terms. This is where the discrepancy lies: that is not René’s society and he cannot reincorporate himself within his family because, on the orders of the government of the United States, I was deported and came back to Cuba with my daughters; they didn’t manage to break René and neither was he a prosecution witness.
“Another objective of parole is to allow the person to be retrained. After spending time in prison, people lose their skills. René is a pilot and has no possibility of renewing his license or obtaining a driver’s license because he would have to give his personal address. It is his responsibility to economically support his family, but in what way? He should be at home with us to celebrate his birthday in real freedom.”
Yet another political maneuver is preventing justice from being done in the case of the Five. Evidencing its habitual merciless toward the Cuban anti-terrorists, the U.S. District Court of South Florida rejected the motion presented on June 22, asking for a modification of the conditions of René’s supervised release allowing him to complete the rest of the three-year parole period in Cuba.
“The district court is seeking ways to force the Five to fulfill every last minute of the sentences they were given as revenge. They are saying that René is a danger to that society and on three occasions the judge stated that he has not repented; what does he have to repent when they were in the US because of the our people’s need to defend themselves from death and terror?
“That is why they were given these long sentences. René fulfilled his to the last day, because of his commitment to doing the right thing. In a letter which I sent to the judge, I suggested that if he is a danger to the United States, then they should send him to Cuba and thus put a just end to this case; they would get rid of the supposed danger and we would receive him with all our love.
“The court’s response is evidence of the little regard the U.S. government, and their terrorists, have for Cuban families.
“Why are they trying to give René and his family more pain, when he is one of the few citizens in the world who, after leaving prison, cannot rejoin his loved ones? They are making the pain worse.”
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