Perspectives 2001 — Part Two
May–September issues 2000
TWO. Thinking that 'free-world triumph' means imperialist war-fascism epoch has ended will be a fatal mistake. 'Human rights' fraud is just a cover for western domination.
22. That the expectation of ceaseless revolutionary struggle needs to be the mentality at the heart of a genuinely Marxist philosophical outlook, is well demonstrated by the US imperialist retreat in June 2000 over the case of Elián Gonzalez, (the 6-year-old kidnapped from Cuba to go on a failed reactionary 'boat people' disaster, (seduced by Miami's bright lights) and then kidnapped again by the American authorities, preventing the lad being restored to his father in Cuba.)
The worst thing and the greatest danger that could flow from this 
fiasco is to think that 'maybe Washington is finally seeing reason' on its previous barbaric fascist imperialist bullying and blockade of Cuba, and 'maybe Cuba will now be left to live in peace,and maybe conflict with imperialism will no longer be necessary', etc
Workers states will all the time be able to take advantage of all sorts of weaknesses and anomalies in the frequently chaotic and unpredictable lurches and splits in general imperialist policy, but the fatal mistake would be to return to the Stalin Revisionist nonsense that maybe imperialism's fascist aggressive nastiness will just fade away as far as causing further major war and destruction threats to significant workers-state developments are 
concerned. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A thousand and one sick sad calculations could be behind the USA's decision to pull back now from this outrage, but all of them undoubtedly unfailingly nasty, and boding no good for Cuba or any other workers state.
The anti-communist propaganda failed to carry public opinion with it this time; rival 'friendly' imperialist-state opinion may have been extremely unfavourable; important vulnerable reactionary Third World regimes, especially elsewhere in Latin America, may have been suffering an adverse fall-out from Washington's outrageous behaviour; even far worse setbacks or disasters might be in the pipeline for imperialism imminently (such as a revolution somewhere, or a Wall Street Crash); and as much existing bad publicity as possible might have been needed to be cleared out of the way as soon as possible, such as finally letting Elián go home; etc, etc.
The details are not important to this particular argument. Maybe it was thrown in as additional makeweight with the sops tossed to American farmers who have been complaining bitterly about losing valuable trade-to-Cuba opportunities to foreign rivals because of the US embargo on American business deal with the socialist island, now to be just partially relaxed in response to energetic lobbying by corporate America.
The point to stress, however, is that imperialism as a historical force, remains on unalterable course to eventually be compelled to try to stifle the life out of every scrap of workers-state new-history still around, or threatening to return. The contradiction between the development of workers states and the survival of the imperialist bourgeoisie (which ha ruled the world for the last 700 years) is ultimately absolute.
And however much this historic battle between class systems for the further advance of civilisation might be influenced by more pro-socialist propaganda, (managing to accrue out of this brief minor recoil from antagonising Cuba by US imperialism ), - the monopoly-capitalist bourgeoisie will only finally be toppled from their world ruling-class position by revolution.
23. The astonishing international uproar against Mugabe’s ZANU in Zimbabwe provides another current example of this crucial lesson for the only realistic world philosophy available to progressive mankind for some time to come. This completely manufactured ferocious vilification against ZANU is entirely because it has dusted down some class-war actions and rhetoric for addressing the land-reform crisis with. By openly threatening confiscation of vast monopoly-capitalist landholdings as the correct approach towards more justice and equality for the Third World's poor masses, especially where the propertyless poor are black and the rich & powerful are clearly representative of white international bourgeois culture, - the ZANU class-war threats have sent alarm bells ringing right round the world market economy. And this is particularly so because Mugabe had previously been willing to play dutifully the 'restrained international statesman' role that imperialist compromise expects and loves in former national liberation war leaders. Having won and been granted 'respect', the Western hatred could lie unbounded (for any 'national democracy' leader who then reverts to guerrilla-war rhetoric) for setting a bad example to billions which could terrify international capitalism in due course.
24. Another clue to the real issues which strike fear into the very heart of the bourgeoisie's long rule on earth, -- and thereby instruct workers on what is the crucial essence of the whole class-struggle question, -is capitalist propaganda's relentless campaigning on the matter of so-called 'workers-state violence', - (meaning the revolution’s audacity in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat to replace the existing 'capitalist democracy' world of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (and there is no alternative replacement)); but dressed up by the philosophical individualism of the imperialists as questions of 'human rights'.
This complete fraud of supposed 'totalitarianism' versus supposed 'humanitarianism' has been used as a get-out clause by more millions of petty-bourgeois-minded people than anything else for escaping into anti-communism from the pressures in the West against loyalty to the workers states and to the socialist revolution.
Serious scientific research may one day be able to sort out the actual record of any mistakes, disasters, or wrong-headedness which workers states might have been responsible for, but a bloodcurdling worldwide torrent of lies, distortions, and rumours has been pouring out against the dictatorship of the proletariat from day 1 in 1917 and continues to this moment against China, Cuba, Korea, etc, and unceasing in retrospect against the USSR, constantly alleging 'millions' of deaths here, there, and everywhere.
If that same research were also to count up the totals allegedly killed by the revolution since October 1917, in all the newspaper, magazine, book, and broadcast hysteria of the whole bourgeois world, it would come to many, many hundreds of millions of dead bodies. Populations would have been decimated. As it happens, the population of Tsarist Russia/USSR went from 140 million in 1917 to nearly 280 million by 1989, despite having almost an entire generation of young men killed liberating Russia and Europe from imperialist war-aggression in 1941-45 which killed more than 20 million Soviet citizens, - a dramatic population increase for a European state. Over the same 72 years, the population of France, for example, which lost very few people in World War II, went from 50 million to 52 million.
And the positive stability making possible that huge Soviet population increase, has disappeared completely following the destruction of the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1990, and life expectancy, plus population totals and projections, are now in serious decline.
What Western brainwashing has also never bothered to explain is why would any workers state regime, such as the USSR, - which never had an unemployment problem, - only labour shortages because of its planned economy, and which only became an ever-greater power with its ever- expanding highly-educated and scientifically skilled mass population, -ever want to just start killing all its own people for no reason?
The defence of the workers states against non-stop counter-revolutionary attempts or provocations by surrounding imperialism since 1917 is obviously a different subject entirely. After armies from 14 of the leading capitalist countries staged a counter-revolutionary invasion of the Soviet Union after 1917 and destroyed virtually the whole territory with bombing and scorched-earth terror, and then financed and armed a further two years devastating civil war, followed by endless sabotage against the young workers state, the tension in the USSR was enormous within the rush to build the country up before the next terrifying invasion threat from vastly-stronger imperialism materialised just 12 years later when Nazi Germany began its colossal master-race rearmament programme, financed by Western bankers and politically turned a blind eye to, by the other Great Powers (despite its obvious fascist-aggressive dangers, and despite being forbidden by the Versailles Treaty) because of Hitler's determination to find more Lebensraum for a Greater Germany to the East, - meaning the Soviet workers state would soon be invaded and put to the sword again.
The notorious 'Fifth Column' of fascist traitors had already helped in the German-financed destruction of the soft-left Spanish Republic from 1936-39. Bureaucratic paranoia in Moscow was regrettably high. The Stalinist Revisionist degeneration from the higher scientific grasp of international class struggle of Marxism-Leninism laid the rest of the USSR's existence up to 1990 open to many mistakes of all kinds.
The same can be said of all the other workers states, in different ways and for different reasons.
But with what conclusion? That workers revolutions should never attempt to build their own states because they may have to use the power of the dictatorship of the proletariat to survive, and that these new regimes in different countries (usually previously backward) might not always be able to run things perfectly, or avoid mistakes or wrong-headedness??
This is not a serious approach to history. Such philosophical idealist irrelevance can only fill the minds of the most academic 'revolutionary' posturers in the West, - without exception, all in the anti-communist counter-revolutionary camp in reality.
Another interesting propaganda point is that made by the 'Tiananmen Square massacres' which the whole planet has a graphic grasp of and will unfailingly bring up whenever a communist world (as an alternative to capitalism) is spoken of. What is fascinating is that of some 30,000 days that workers states have existed since 1917 for massacring the hundreds of millions of murdered people supposedly to their credit, only Tiananmen is always confidently quoted as an 'example' of this happening. Other named 'massacres' confidently quoted might just include the Katyn Forest, or Hungary 1956, or the Ukraine famine, or the Moscow-Trials, - but not much else.
Now although Western sources have subsequently admitted that not a single life was actually lost on Tiananmen Square itself (despite the terrifying pictures of tents, bicycles, and barricades crushed by tanks), - nevertheless there was undoubtedly a civil war skirmish in Beijing in 1989, and up to 150 people lost their lives in total in that centre (and one or two others), - as agreed by all slightly-more-responsible anti-communist Western hysterics. And at least 50 of these were state officials (soldiers, police, postmen, busdrivers, etc) murdered by the mob.
But if around 500 million is the total butchered by communism since 1917 after adding up every single Western horror story published or broadcast since then, then the accounting for them by Western anecdote, which never progresses spontaneously far beyond Tiananmen when proof is demanded, would still leave 499,999,900 butchered by communism unaccounted for.
Throw in the most exaggerated anti-communist estimates of deaths due to 'workers-state responsibility' the Ukraine famine, Moscow Trials, Katyn, and Hungary, and there are still more than 495 million dead at communism's hands since 1917 that most people cannot remotely quote a source for, - place, incident, struggle, or whatever. Yet no one has difficulty in remembering Auschwitz and the holocaust which killed several million Jews, Gipsies, communists, trade-unionists, Soviet prisoners-of-war, etc, etc (although never described as the victims of capitalist democracy (which voted Hitler into power in 1933) as opposed to everyone always bringing up the victims of communist rule).
The Somme and other places of trench-war butchery of tens of thousands at a time are also easily remembered. Yet people cannot put a place or a time to at least 495 million people killed allegedly by communism since 1917. But the name Tiananmen, on the other hand, is never forgotten by anybody, a 'massacre' of just 100 people.
If 'labour camps' is the supposed answer, why are there no names to them? Without any research necessary, most people can name genuine labour death-camps from the same period of history, capitalist labour death-camps: Auschwitz, Belsen, Birkenau, Treblinka, Dachau, Buchenwald, Maidanek, etc.
Russian names too difficult? But everyone has heard of Lyubianka the KGB's prison HQ.
Actual historical records will one day disprove this 'Soviet death-camp' nonsense. Conclusion? That there have never been any 'mass victims' of workers states at all, any time, anywhere; that the entire 500 million are just the nonsensical fiction of relentless Western anti-communist brainwashing, prolonged to this day thanks to hordes of anti-Communist fake 'left' thronging the labour movements in the West.
And the 100 killed over a 10-day period around the counter-revolutionary stunt on Tiananmen Square (of erecting a replica Statue of Liberty, masking this clear pro-imperialist orientation by CIA-planned ironic singing of the Communist International by the crowds of petty-bourgeois-minded students bribed to go there??? It should only serve to remind the working class that:
1) there would hardly be a counter-revolutionary phenomenon against workers states finally taking power in different countries if it were not for the international imperialist forces and market influences surrounding such states;
2) the truly-astonishing volume of anti-China propaganda that flooded the world for months around that not-very-major incident (in terms of not representing any serious counter-revolutionary force to challenge the Chinese workers state) and has continued to pour out ever since 1989, - indicates graphically how the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the turning point of all world history, guaranteeing the eventual end everywhere of the capitalist era, and the eventual triumph of a completely new socialist civilisation of international cooperation on earth;
3) it would have been even better if the Chinese workers state had acted far more vigorously, decisively and rapidly in defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat against this blatant pro-Western-democracy stunt, and could indicate to the world-public much clearer understanding of the need to be far more vigilant and alert to the counter-revolution's tricks, and to act far more ruthlessly, the next time that Western influences manufacture such a provocation, (which will surely come if China learns the lessons of the Gorbachev catastrophe, and instead of fatal class compromise with 'market forces', keeps on strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat instead.)
25. Spontaneous anti-communism on the 'left' will dismiss such EPSR Perspectives concerns as "not in the real world", etc, and will prefer to believe that networking and manoeuvring to provide platforms and rub shoulders with 'left' Labourites like Livingstone and Benn at many a tedious 'Marxist summer university', or in semi-detached electoral support, or in drawing up 'joint tickets' with lesser chattering-class celebrities like Paul Foot, Mark Steel, Jeremy Hardy, and Ken Loach, - is the only thing that "really matters".
The pretence is that such activities can make possible "real polemics" for eventually hammering out a "real programme for socialism". It is all total delusion and a grotesque hoax on the working class.
Such opportunist lash-ups can never produce serious worthwhile polemics because such 'personalities' have nothing to gain and everything to lose by genuinely debating with the mass socialist movement. A 'performance' is all there is ever time for.
Even tiny fake-'left' sects, quite close to each other in the anti-communist political swamp, find it impossible to seriously objectively polemicise with each other; and the majority of Trot and Revisionist groups cannot even tolerate internal polemics which genuinely pose a choice and real conflict over the correct next politics to adopt.
Manipulative authoritarian guru-worship or leading-clique-worship prevails throughout the fake-'left'. The 'socialist alliances' will never get the world's need to clarify the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat onto the agenda, let alone thrash out any agreement on it, which is life or death for the future of socialist revolution.
And the pretence of arriving at a "real socialist programme" via such LSA posturing opportunism is just as silly and nasty a joke on the working class. Electoral 'left reformism' is all that such back-scratching hot air can produce, and the time will come when that 'democracy' fraud is regarded by workers as just the foulest treachery on offer.
Necessary serious polemics struggling to precisely clarify the next new understanding and class experience on the long development towards socialist revolution, can only possibly flourish within an already-agreed deep and wide-ranging platform of basic Marxist science on crucial historical and ideological questions.
In theory, such attempts at objective responsible struggle could be seen as working within a larger amalgamated framework such as Socialist Labour, (once the separate-recruitment Trot factionalists, just using it as a membership source, had been booted out). But the NUM authoritarian guru clique never had any intention in reality of letting any political or philosophical thinking flourish but their own illiterate museum-Stalinism, and trade-unionist anti-theory philistinism, further proving the point about the impossibility of polemics within such a deliberate electoral opportunist lash-up.
Running an occasional journal of trade-union struggle-anecdotes which consciously rules out any polemics on historical turning points in the anti-imperialist international class war, or any 'internecine strife' against anti-communist ideology around the SLP, is not what is needed by workers at this crucial moment for understanding imperialist crisis as the revolutionary driving force and proletarian dictatorship as the only possible answer to it. War or Bolshevism is the only realistic choice open to the working class of the entire planet (as the Yugoslav people recently discovered, criminally ill-advised by the SLP along with the rest of the anti-Leninist fake-'left' swamp to try to stem NATO/Nazi imperialist aggression with social-pacifist 'No to war' nonsense) and for the Trot and Revisionist world of retread 'left-Labour' electoral opportunism to pretend that petty-bourgeois 'summer university' celebrity posturing; Ken Livingstone's electoral coat tails; and Follett's follies making possible 'fresh recruitment from New Labour', is the real world, is to live in a pipedream.
26. Such affluent middle class concerns in the West are almost sealed off from the actual life of the overwhelming masses on the planet, whose different existence entirely can be deduced from capitalist-press admissions about the Third World on virtually any day of the year.
Catastrophic declines in living standards and intolerable deterioration in circumstances through tyranny, war, or natural disaster are an ever-widening experience as sharpening imperialist crisis means that the rich become ever richer and the poor ever poorer, even on official UN income statistics.
The astounding phenomenon is seen of countries like Mongolia, supposedly 'liberated' from Soviet communist tyranny only 8 years ago to join the 'free world', now using national elections to practically unanimously vote their former ruling Communist Party ('Soviet stooge-tyrants' of yore) back into power, - such has been the cataclysmic experience of monopoly-imperialist geared world market forces on an economically-small and relatively fragile country.
Sadly, as has happened all over East Europe, where similar communist election 'shocks' have taken place, Revisionist nonsense still dominates understanding, as under Moscow's tutelage previously; but now that the dictatorship of the proletariat has been dismantled, replacing planned command economies with market forces,- the 'reform socialist' gibberish of these former ruling parties is utterly useless for helping to really change the situation.
The world's torment from the slump/overproduction crisis of the monopoly-imperialist-biased (i.e. the West market forces) is growing relentlessly worse. Already there are flames of revolt everywhere, from Indonesia and the Philippines in the Far East to Colombia and Mexico in the Far West, - the whole world over.
The post-communist 'new order' was doomed from the start to be able to produce nothing but new communist revolutions, - as the EPSR was explaining must happen even as Gorbachev was dismantling the dictatorship of the proletariat to join the 'free world'. It is the outstanding achievements of the planned workers states since 1917 which represent the only progressive, stable, and secure future for civilisation and the planet. Build Marxism-Leninism.
Continue to Part Three
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