Perspectives 2003
No 1166 January 7th 2003
EPSR Perspectives 2003; the worst war and slump devastation in the entire degenerate history of capitalism. Socialist revolution is civilisation's only way out. (Draft)
1
The Western imperialist economic system (and its global domination) is irretrievably condemned to ever-worsening economic 'overproduction' crisis and slump, and to ever more hysterical US-led warmongering as a cover-up diversion from capitalism's humiliating collapse (and for use as an 'excuse' for economic devastation which the slump was going to create anyway).2
The difficulties limiting the freedom to act for US warmongering aggression, the sole superpower, come from growing state bankruptcy; domestic class conflict; Third World national liberation struggle and socialist revolution; resistance by China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, etc to an American diktat; inter-national conflict with such emerging powers as India, Brazil, etc; and inter-imperialist-war problems yet again with ail the old major rivals for leading nation like Japan, Germany, France, Britain, etc, etc.
In the ever-deepening contradictions within this entire, ever changing balance internationally of class and national forces, it is US imperialist warmongering aggression which must inevitably face humiliating failure and defeat.
3
It is the inevitable incurable recurrence of uncontrollable imperialist CRISIS which ultimately dictates the potential patterns of world developments; and it is in the DEFEAT or BREAKDOWN of existing ruling-class structures within the endlessly complex turmoil of that global economic-system crisis that the forces for socialist REVOLUTION finally come together for the taking of power forever away from the capitalist bourgeoisie to allow the PLANNED flourishing of the whole planet for the equal benefit of everyone on it and the generations to come.
4
Regardless of this all-important historical context however, it is with the specific detailed unfolding of this greatestever epochal change that the whole world is unavoidably obsessed.
How, when, where, and with what outcome, will US imperialism step-by-step lead the doomed monopoly-capitalist system to its ultimate warmongering shame and disaster????
5
At this stage of this unprecedented-and enormously complex crisis of global civilisation, a strong possibility seems to be emerging that American domineering, the decisive subjective force for the moment, could end up shattered and humiliated from a succession of disastrously failed campaigns against a vast and varied array of regional and ethnic national liberation struggles (to end Western exploitation, and against local socialist revolutions everywhere (to overthrow bourgeois slump).
6
There is a wide perception that the warmongering hysteria against the Saddam Hussein regime, like the imbecile "war on terrorism" itself, is just the figleaf excuse for allround imperialist war mobilisation.
The American ruling class knows that its global economic and military domination (and the colossal wealth benefits that go with it, unprecedented in all history), is seriously threatened by the international 'freemarket' crisis and by the national liberation revolts that the slump and the even-more-menacing future perspectives are causing everywhere.
As is obvious, Sept 11 was merely a symptom of the far-deeper and far-more-terrible trouble that the international imperialist system is really facing because of economic collapse.
The world had already, post 1945, grown up out of its direct colonial era via universal national liberation revolution. The total neo-colonial economic domination which replaced it could only possibly last for as long as the USA's suicidal post-1945 inflationary-boom lasted, in which America perpetually printed millions of billions of dollars to prop up every anti-communist regime (no matter how rotten its fascistic militaristic wretchedness) to keep world trade permanently expanding.
The iron laws of 'surplus capital' economic 'over-production' rule when these bank-created credits finally finance so much profiteering production on a global scale that apparent gluts start appearing in every product (while the world's masses still remain exploited wage-slaves, viciously-so in the Third World) so that total global output cannot possibly find sufficient paying customers to buy it all at a profitable price .
At that point, capitalism's neo-colonial game is up. The Third World (and proletarians everywhere) will rise in revolt against a return to 1930s slump.
Bourgeois politics and economics can understand all this just as well as Marxism.
The invasion of Afghanistan and the war on Iraq (with other 'Axis of Evil' states to follow) are just the pretext for a general US imperialist mobilisation to go to war in whatever direction is needed in the approaching unprecedented turmoil (of a system in breakdown and with no further historical room to manoeuvre).
7
Only ANOTHER post devastation (post-1945) reconstruction booms fuelled by non-stop currency inflation (replacing the present US dollar which, it must be assumed, faces unavoidable total collapse in the coming turmoil) seems at all possible, even; - and for that prospect to survive the tidal wave of revolutions (the post-1917 and post-1945 phenomena, added together and multiplied by 1000% that will be sparked by the warmongering devastation, is even more unlikely.
For this to be a realistic perspective of capitalism's degenerate future, it is NOT necessary to artificially conjure a picture of an American imperialist leadership sitting around saying: "Right, we have economic problems we cannot solve, so let's wage war on the whole planet".
All that is needed is to piece-together the historical logic of endless imperialist warmongering patterns; plus the farcical 'explanations' for the current wave and past decade of US imperialist blitzkrieg mania; plus a reminder of the essential class-power dominance (and willingness to use it) at the heart of all 'freemarket' relationships (both within nations and between nations); plus an acceptance of the Marxist analysis of crisis-devastation under capitalism:
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modem conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.
It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed.
And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered; and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.
The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
(Communist Manifesto).
What the imperialist system THINKS it is doing, or PRETENDS to be doing, while all this unfolds, is only an issue for communist propaganda to deal with as it explains what is ACTUALLY happening, in real class-war terms.
8
Assumptions that imperialism "cannot WANT total war devastation" trap workers into fatal illusions that "maybe the moral pressure and embarrassment from the whole world saying 'No to war' will humiliate Bush and Blair into stopping", etc, etc; or "maybe they'll see they cannot win against the entire Third World and so will give up", etc, etc.
The only sane course of reasoning is to assume that the imperialist system will follow its historical record to the letter and inflict unbelievably barbaric warmongering devastation on mankind with no thought of stopping until FORCED to stop by being overthrown.
9
The creeping, Third-World, neocolonial disaster-route for the final humiliation and defeat of imperialist system crisis is a perspective suggested by the pattern of dominant issues of today and by American propaganda about them.
From the quite specific hurt-to-pride inflicted by a rather isolated and somewhat unusual Third World national liberation source on Sept 11, - the stung, arrogant bosses of US imperialism have made a case for blitzkrieging two whole sets of "axis of evil" countries whose resentments, ambitions, and general courses of action are not remotely summed up by Bin Laden's Islamic martyrdom philosophy.
And as well as targetting and inflaming cultures and state powers as diverse as Somalia, Iran, and North Korea and just about everywhere in between, Washington's Nazi counter-revolutionary hysteria is also itching to go blitzkrieging against "other problems" too in Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Argentina, Philippines, Indonesia, etc, etc.
Islamic nationalism is certainly one very real category of broad anti-imperialist resistance to continued Western domination of a world order which is now clearly failing everybody; but it is an obviously silly and half-hearted pretence to suggest that the whole vast difficulties thrown up by capitalism's global system slump can be "explained" by Islamic nationalism, and "sorted" by more Middle East colonial warmongering.
And even crazier is this "excuse" for the continued relentless bombing of Iraq where the regime's revolt against America's domineering authority owes least of all to Muslim religious fervour.
The US imperialist 'war' is plainly against the effects of capitalist crisis, and nothing else.
10
This is the basis for regular EPSR suggestions that the warmongering hysteria outlets for American ruling-class economic panic could see its blitzkrieging militarisation adventuring into Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, or Cuba, almost as readily as into Iraq, Yemen, or Syria, etc.
11
But are they going to do it anyway (04/01/03)??????
And with what result?????????
These remain the immediately difficult questions.
But at the same time, the answers seem likely to dictate the longer term pattern of history.
That the sick, 'objective' factors of imperialist crisis-degeneracy have whipped up this American warmongering hysteria is hardly disputable.
Bush & Co may well be the most ignorant, reactionary, fascist minded dogs that ever came up with the surface-scum of US corporate corruption, arrogance, and nastiness.
But no serious Democratic opposition to warmongering has emerged in the USA. And in Britain, the cheerleading for American military might is being led by a Labour/TUC government.
And anti-Bush doubts elsewhere in Western imperialism are ridiculing the regime's moronic qualities, but not remotely challenging the West's general "right" to even consider a warmongering "solution" to the planet's economic problems. They only say that for the moment, Iraq is not the correct target, or not a particularly useful, or "justified" target, etc, etc, etc.
Thus, the case is already accepted that in general, imperialism might have cause for widespread warmongering. Even most fake-'lefts' say that "the West has a case for sorting out Islamic terrorism'' (or garbage confusion to that effect),
12
The results could be the most fascinating mess and the most diabolical turmoil in all history.
The inter-imperialist warmongering vengeance which destroyed the 'over-production' surpluses as the "solution" to imperialism's previous great tradewar, glut/slump, economic crises left some imperialist powers so badly defeated that straightforward proletarian revolutions or national liberation revolutions arose from all the degeneracy, suffering, destructiveness, and mayhem (the Bolsheviks in 1917; China and the rest after 1945).
In these new unprecedented circumstances of capitalism's monopoly-power pyramid having elongated to ludicrous proportions of uneven development (with the American superpower now incomparably more powerful than all the rest put together, in terms of military might and political influence worldwide), the further piecemeal progress for civilisation from inter-imperialist defeats for "the weakest links in the imperialist chain" is harder to envisage sage .
It is easier to picture the all-powerful USA attempting to imppose a militaristic "solution" almost singlehanded onto the crisis-unruliness problems of the capitalist system.
Other imperialist powers would not be disinterested in American militarism smiting Arab nationalist revolt (e.g.) so effectively that the movement for local national ownership of local national resources, for example, was badly intimidated (reversing past nationalisation of Middle East oilfields, e.g.).
But such a total reversal in the tide of history might also leave other Western imperialist power more on the sidelines, waiting to see the USA come a cropper, rather like in Vietnam when American imperialism suffered humiliating defeat while pretending to be "fighting for freedom on behalf of all mankind", etc.
13
And the difficulties the USA now faces in dictating world developments everywhere are, if anything, even greater than they were at the time of IndoChina.
Certainly there is less inspired, fully-fledged, communist revolutionary spirit ostensibly haunting the planet than there was then; and no Soviet socialist camp to provide support for local anti-imperialist struggles.
But en masse, the ordinary working people of the world are today far more economically, socially, and politically advanced than they were 40 years ago.
And capitalism's easily-won glamour/glitz contest with bureaucratic Revisionism for worldwide public opinion is now precisely the cause of all imperialism's problems. Having "won the battle of history", all capitalism's old evils are now flooding back, demonstrating to the world that it has been made a fool of by the idiotic "freedom" propaganda of the entire Cold War. Now with no "red menace" or "evil empire" to blame for everything going wrong, Western imperialism's total triumph is poised to bring the world only total economic devastation and total warmongering ruin, - all by its own solo efforts.
And the next surge of worldwide communist revolutionary response to capitalist degeneracy will no longer be fatally handicapped by Stalinist Revisionist daydreams of permanent peaceful coexistence with imperialism, supposedly resulting in the "peaceful road to socialism" internationally, - a sick "theory" which has inflicted more counter-revolutionary damage on the international working-class than almost anything else.
Islamic anti-communism and other feudal backwardness may still screw up the 'Arab street' to some extent, but the new generations of the Middle East (and throughout the Third World) will rapidly master every anti-imperialist political and fighting ability that generations before them mastered in China, Algeria, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, etc, etc.
Western imperialist military repression does not only not stand a chance. The coming defeat for its wretched colonial-domination ambitions as the worldwide policeman, forcing everyone to accept capitalism's degenerate slump and its sick warmongering bullying, will bring down the bourgeoisie's monopoly imperialist rule in the West itself.
14
This ultimate outcome of the destructive contradictions involved in bourgeois capitalism's relentless monopolisation pattern, becomes the logical perspective taking Marx's original class analysis into account.
This looked to the proletarians of the MOST ADVANCED capitalist countries finally setting the seal on the world socialist revolution.
The spread of Third World revolutions trying to take the planet forward with socialism (beginning with the first workers state, built significantly on (& with the help of) Tsarism's Asiatic empire) hinted for a while at a different final pattern for the triumph of socialism eventually, spreading via the East to an unchallengeable position of superiority in the end.
History's huge Revisionist backward step, self-liquidating the Soviet workers state, etc, - has restored the decisive conclusion to socialism's triumph, - namely, proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, to an even more influential role of also giving birth to the first trulyindisputably IRREVERSIBLE indication of socialism as civilisation's ONLY historical path forward.
If the USA itself adopted the route that only a workers state could henceforth even begin trying to solve society's needs, then surely the endless speculative perplexities of how the WORLD socialist revolution would finally come about and look, - -would at last take on some realistic dimensions.
Once the American working class and petty bourgeoisie themselves conclude that they have far more to lose from continuing to back US imperialist warmongering in its efforts to colonially-police the world, - and far more to gain by ending this degenerate, final monopolisation catastrophe of the capitalist imperialist system, -- then it is hard to envisage any other nations in the modern world coming to any different conclusions.
15
Conditions and traditions for socialism and revolution in the USA are the least problem of all. The revolutionary civil war to end the feudal-slavery aspect of anti-Black discrimination is still a "good" precedent in general culture, and still only 140 years ago, when the parents were alive of some people who are still alive today.
The American Revolution itself, to end foreign domination, is still a powerful cultural tradition, only 220 years old, and aspects of it can still be heard echoed throughout modern US society.
The huge ethnic working-class minorities, still vastly discriminated against, - could almost make a socialist revolution on their own. And the workers movement in general developed powerful communist traditions and ferocious trade-union struggles from the beginning.
On top of all that, the anti-war movement over Vietnam was almost unprecedented in its style, scope, and achievements, - registering a quite remarkable objectivity about that war's stupidity in spite of the humiliating pain of failure for the US.
The philistinism and ignorance of the American political scene remain sickeningly high, but the potential for quite dramatic transformations should not be underestimated.
16
It is the fate of the economic crisis which will be decisive.
The worsening situation for Western crisis has suddenly lurched dramatically lower with the admitted failure of American economic policy; the humiliation of the Blairs and Blairism; and the open ridicule now rising against imperialist warmongering from every quarter.
The brutal sacking of US Treasury Secretary O'Neill and White House economic adviser Lindsey, from the abrupt way it was done, cannot be interpreted as "merely accommodating policy change" or "ensuring better results" in the way that the comatose bourgeois press is doing.
Such a bruising is plainly a furious panic measure.
A leap in the level of unemployment in the USA was the supposed "final straw for White House patience", but with instant gossip for "new initiatives" only about more tax cuts and a weaker dollar, then a spectre emerges of this Bush regime being utterly bankrupt as far as "serious and responsible economic theory" is concerned, and interested only in aggressive tradewar as "securing the American interest" in the most highly damaging way imaginable, - an extension into the international products market's difficulties of the Texan gunslinger's "those-who-aren't-with-us-are-againstus" crude warmongering.
The capitalist press noted the aggressiveness, and speculated about how the gloomy overall assessment might be awful news for New Labour's mindless assumptions that a return to worldwide boom conditions would rescue its pie-in-the-sky spending programme from disaster in 2004. But either naively or insanely trustingly, there was no comment on the catastrophic trade-war implications of the USA playing the currency devaluation card to make its exports cheaper, all imports to the USA more expensive, and let world trade (which is virtually dependent on fat-arsed American credit accounts sucking in the 'surplus' products of the entire planet) collapse completely.
Massaging the dollar down and the price up for all imports into the USA, could be as clear a hint of trade war as will be forthcoming immediately.
The further implications of deliberate dollar devaluation could be truly cataclysmic.
The entire Cold-War, anti-communist, post-1945 world has basically only been kept going by the 1944 Bretton Woods imperialist warmongers fatwa that henceforth, the paper dollar would be internationally regarded as being "as good as gold". Creating an economically successful "free world" (free from the otherwise inevitable communist revolutions which were sensibly sweeping the planet following the monstrous death and destruction from capitalist warmongering that the planet had just had to suffer (WWII) to get the imperialist system out of economic crisis (the 1930s) yet again), - was relatively easy when all Washington had to do was to 'manufacture' ever new billions and trillions of dollar credits for propping up any and every 'anti-communist' regime that could be invented (military dictators, fascist nutcases, feudal despots, and farcical corrupt 'democracies' of every description), while simultaneously bribing mercenaries and opportunist turncoats to undermine, denounce, or defect from every socialist revolution or progressive government that mass revolt against capitalism had thrown up.
The result now is that trillions and trillions of 'surplus' dollars from all this endless anti-communist political racketeering, 'legal' and illegal, currently slosh around the world's markets at frightening speeds and in incredible volumes, all still looking for a profitable investment or two.
All the time that Washington still agrees to stand by these (effectively) huge debts on the US Treasury to the rest of the world, then the dollar s ultimate collapse is delayed. This requires the USA to continue to run these unbelievable balance-of-payments deficits and government budget deficits (which keep the rest of the world trading more or less profitably).
But once the accumulative consequences erupt from this sustained false USA living standard (in reality), and the whole illogical, unstable, corrupt, and blatantly fraudulent "capitalist economic miracle" starts to totter, - then there could commence the long-feared rapid chain reaction of scores of unviable economies going bankrupt all round the 'free' world, - with the giant US economy itself at the very heart of the degenerate catastrophe.
That
the crooked extravagant ways of the anti-communist free-spending West
are subject to the iron laws of economic science (sadly always lagging
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behind the ever-new actual developments in the world of imperialist
crisis and counter-revolutionary arbitrary warmongering) has been obvious
at many critical moments in history when propaganda nonsense could
no longer keep capitalist civilisation flourishing smoothly, and huge
burdens had to be borne by suffering humanity (World War I, the 1930s,
World War II, etc).
And the inescapable relationship between determinist economic laws and arbitrary imperialist warmongering was also made clear when the hideous cost of the monstrous (and failed) Western imperialist blitzkrieg to stop Indo-China and Vietnam from going communist, led to the formal value of dollars in gold being abandoned forever (and having to be abandoned) as US Treasury 'debts' took more and more of the strain of maintaining the bogus 'free' world.
As many clues to the ultimate collapse of the joke 'free world' system, and the joke of America's unrepayable 'debts', can be deduced from the now demented drive in Washington to commence international warmongering threats in all directions.
Increasingly, conviction will grow everywhere that all that is emerging is a historical pattern of imperialist warmongering at all costs (in times of serious economic crisis which could threaten the very survival of the capitalist ruling-class system).
Currently, American warmongering propaganda hysteria is openly verging on the levels of demented hatred and BigLie distortions which make even the barbaric nonsense of notorious Hitler-Goebbels warmongering propaganda of the Nazi-German imperialist-aggression era seem tame and unextreme.
Despite badly-split bourgeois opinion registering huge hostility to a blitzkrieg on Iraq throughout the world in general, not excluding the majority of Western and NATO powers, and even inside not just the USA but Washington itself, - nevertheless the rich and powerful monopoly-capitalist clique around Bush & Co is bulldozing everyone relentlessly towards only total war and humiliation for Iraq as the sole option.
Few serious or influential Western sources are really convinced that the Saddam regime is an actual threat of any kind to the peace and security of the 'free' world or even any small specific part of it (the Zionist illegal colonisation of the Palestinian nation's homeland possibly excepted).
Not many believe Iraq even has any serious weapons of mass destruction, or wants to try using them against the overwhelming power of its US imperialist enemies. Fewer still think that Iraq has anything whatever to do with al-Qaeda terrorism, or that destroying the Saddam regime would form any sensible or worthwhile part in Washington's proclaimed "war on terrorism" (itself an idiotic concept), even arguing that an onslaught on Iraq, unjustifiable by any measure imaginable, could only possibly INCREASE the incidence of terrorist hatred of the USA currently growing in the world, not reduce it.
Yet despite the blatantly crass stupidity of America's position, now universally acknowledged, - warmongering destruction of Iraq remains the linchpin of the Bush regime's international policy.
Why??? Because the 'free world' is heading for collapse in uncontrollable economic catastrophe, and a huge cover-up is needed, plus endless 'excuses' for the economic debacle of capitalism.
17
Still too nervous and politically naive to denounce "capitalist freedom" outright, (now being so wholeheartedly embraced by New Labour), workers have certainly been sensing that enough is going wrong with the pensions scandal; the stock market collapse; the ludicrous housing market; more unsolved problems than ever in schools, higher education, and the health service; hopeless road congestion and public transport chaos; and now the beginnings of unemployment fears and falling living standards which are agitating all the public service professions (firemen included); -- enough to raise doubts about this "enemies abroad" scam, and wonder why such expensive and dangerous foreign military adventures are so suddenly "urgently needed".
Workers' confidence in Western propaganda will then have taken a hammer blow from Chancellor Brown's astonishing and abrupt casual confession that all his rosy economic forecast figures were totally wrong after all (as the EPSR's alternative collapse outlook, always taken from capitalism's own sources and admissions, as again below in this issue, has consistently demonstrated, for years, would prove to be the case).
But the even more corrosive suspicion of a global system failure in economic, political, military, and philosophical domination has now started merging in with the fears that the whole "New World Order" lifestyle aspirations are nothing but utterly deceitful garbage.
Workers will fully grasp this (and its revolutionary consequences) last of all.
In these newly developing conditions where all manner of glib fake-'left' nonsense-programmes of centrist confusion (talking 'revolution' but still basically relying on reformist pressure to sort imperialist crisis out), will flourish, - it is important to keep on reviewing all the crucial sources of Western monopoly capitalism's breakdown.
First and foremost, the imperialists CANNOT make their economy work any better once it has reached a stage of global 'overproduction' crisis (the endless greed of all the giant arrogant multinational corporations, endlessly investing in slicker production, so as to capture world market leadership off each other, using the profits of sweated-labour to do it, thereby creating more products in the end than can be bought back by the ever-more-scrimped-on wages of the world's workers).
The anti-Marxist 'left' posturers (Socialist Alliance, etc) hate such science because of its unavoidable revolutionary-communist implications (dictatorship of the proletariat, etc), and so try to dismiss the consequences of such analysis as "catastrophism" or "crisisism".
But Marxism is unashamedly a philosophy of history moving ONLY in class-war revolutionary upheavals, when the old way of ruling has run into a total CRISIS of no longer being able to satisfy everyone's evergrowing aspirations because of that very class domination screwing everything up.
The steady growth in towns of bourgeois workers and entrepreneurs could ultimately no longer tolerate being restricted by the landed aristocracy, and the monarchical feudal systems all eventually had to be overthrown.
The steady growth of working-class aspirations and anti-imperialist aspirations has been challenging Western monopoly capitalist world domination for a long time, with ever-increasing dimensions and success (Paris Commune; Bolshevik Revolution; national liberation triumphs post-1945; etc; etc).
Imperialist rule has now reached a stage of economic, political, social, and cultural rottenness, decadence, and plain failure, protracted by ever-more-vicious armsrace bullying, that the system's greatest-ever CRISIS now looms, and is fully to be expected by even the faintest grasp of Marxist science.
The steady avalanche of capitalist-crisis events worldwide can never stop driving things forward; and while centrism is more a step sideways than ahead, it nonetheless provides some new ground for Marxism to try to seed; and once a Real Labour project is out in the open, it is likely to be only a matter of time before something like it catches on again, - filling the slot that (with widely varying success and failure) various movements have tried to occupy in the past (ILP, Bevanism, CP Revisionism, Bennism, SLP, Socialist Alliance, militant, etc) of "pushing the labour movement 'left'".
It is always ultimately a failed fatuous exercise because it always runs like the clappers away from revolutionary consciousness, without which socialist transformation (of Britain, or anywhere else) will always remain impossible. If workers do not UNDERSTAND why they should take the power and become the new ruling class of Britain (or anywhere else) at the head of a workers state, then it will never be done, and the de facto bourgeois dictatorship of Britain will rule on for ever, routinely toppling 'left' parliaments by capitalist-media-dominated propaganda or elections, or by Pinochet-style coups as toppled Allende's 'left' parliament in Chile in 1973 masterminded by the CIA (which has more agents submerged in Britain than anywhere else in the world).
But while centrism is thus running away from Marxist pro-workers-state consciousness, there is nevertheless still the opportunity to make more progress for revolutionary science and serious anti-reformist experience.
Well in advance of the event, it is certain that class-collaborating chauvinism on international affairs will be centrism's weakest link.
Some opportunist posturing will always be found (as now) to emote against 'the disgraceful billions for bombing innocent men, women and children in Iraq but not available for a loyallyserving working class in Britain', etc, etc,
But this is the philosophical pits, a total cop-out.
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.
The anarchists have the right revolutionary approach in terms of personal commitment, but remain essentially a protest movement, hostile to the only GREATER force which can eventually effectively put the whole capitalist-imperialist system out of business, - namely, the dictatorship of the proletariat organised in strong workers states which will at last give the chance for the world to grow slowly and steadily into a cooperative socialist society supplying all human needs equally, planet-wide, (but not withering away with the job only half done, as the Soviet workers state did under the puddled influences of Revisionism).
The only Marxist answer to 'all-powerful' imperialist warmongering remains simple but still totally ignored by the entire fake-'left'. Out of uncontrollable and incurable economic crisis, the billions of internationally exploited victims of the ruling class's economic, military, and police domination rackets will eventually be FORCED to an organised level of fightback able to CRUSH the persecutors. At the same time, crucial and inevitable SPLITS in the imperialist ranks will facilitate this final overthrow of the out-of-date and now poisonous capitalist system.
The fake-'lefts' all continue to morally expose and denounce the ruling-class tyranny on single issues, here and there, and call endlessly for huge reform campaigns to oblige Western governments to change their ways, etc, etc, etc.
But all too often, when serious revolt, in any shape or form, starts to threaten Western interests, the fake-'left' gurus and sects will choose respectability rather than cheer on imperialism's setbacks, and invent all sorts of spurious reasons for not putting the boot themselves into the West at its moments of defeat.
Instead of US imperialism getting the jeering it deserved at the time of Sept 11, it was the inevitably crude and wacky 'suicidal fundamentalist terrorism' of al-Quaeda which drew the fake-'left' indignation and scorn. Ditto North Korea's nuclear weapons response to US imperialist nuclear encirclement and non-stop menace.
And throughout the history of Cold War conflict between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (the capitalist-imperialist Western system) forcing the working class to adopt the dictatorship of the proletariat as socialism's only defence against non-stop attack and subversion, and forcing those workers states inevitably into many wrong turnings, mistakes, or excesses, - - it was always the 'crimes' of the dictatorship of the proletariat that the fake-'left' came down against, never the West's responsibility for imposing the whole Cold War situation in the first place by its continued worldwide imperialist domination.
But even though the Cold War's supposed great victory for "freedom" over "communist tyranny" has now left the world facing the worst warmongering and the greatest-ever economic slump disaster in history, proving the utter emptiness of that lunatic "freedom" claim, - the fake-'left' still remains the incorrigible stooge of "democracy" and "the Western way of doing things", - i.e. of continued imperialist domination.
Not a scrap of perspective is ever given on the coming collapse of the 800-year world rule by Western bourgeois colonial tyranny, and the inevitable emergence of new proletarian-dictatorship workers states to take up the fight against imperialism abandoned by Stalinist Revisionist stupidity.
Not once dare they ever breathe a word that all-out revolutionary conflict is the only way forward for civilisation.
The development of an organised ability to fight back successfully against imperialist domination continues its steady progress in small pockets like Palestine, Colombia, Nepal, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Philippines, Venezuela, Cuba, etc, etc, on which the EPSR tries regularly to report.
The fake-'lefts' like Lalkar and the SLP are CRIMINALLY MISLEADING the working class by not just saying nothing at all about imperialism's preparations for WORLD WAR but actually helping the West in its global brainwashing by Scargill's latest denunciation of North Korea's alleged nuclear weapons.
And the continued academic posturing of the "we know all about the oil question" variety only prolongs the misunderstanding about this imperialist crisis. It isn't really about oil at all, as such.
It is about global 'over-production' in general, - the insane 'surplus' of economic investment of all kinds; and about warmongering DESTRUCTION to eventually end that 'overproduction' and the catastrophic slump in world economic activity that it is going to cause.
And like these Lalkar petty-bourgeois academic 'left' frauds, the capitalist press commentary on the oil carve-up also misses the ESSENTIAL point which is that the oil industry needs seizing, along with everything else, as part of a controlled DESTRUCTION of ALL so-called 'surpluses' which are deemed to be "causing" the world slump.
The reactionary folly of Scargill's 'peacenik' blather about there being "no defence for having nuclear weapons" and "no defence for breaking agreements not to develop nuclear weapons", - insultingly delivered against North Korea from a complacent, deluded, and racist position of make-believe 'rational Western civilisation' which kids itself that anti-war campaigning and protests will 'put an end to war' one day, - was also spelled out by another remarkable capitalist press admission about the utter contempt which Western states have for disarmament 'agreements', and about the relentless determination of American imperialism to drive the arms-race forward to world breaking-point:
Respected scientists on both sides of the Atlantic warned yesterday that the US is developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.
This unmistakable warmongering threat to the world by a superpower already far beyond any serious rivalry, -- together with more BBC revelations about the extent to which the 'left' in Britain has always been totally riddled with police spies and secret agents of all kinds,- adds up to the clearest picture imaginable of what a total fraud is all Scargillite posturing about anti-war protests being the answer to the degenerate conflict ridden collapse of the capitalist system.
Campaigning throughout the entire labour and trade-union movement and its 'peace' arm for a rational 'parliamentary democracy' answer to the arms-race warmongering crisis being inflicted by the global imperialist system is just a joke.
Just campaigning at elections on a programme of 'sensible, if far-reaching, reforms' without explaining that the capitalist state is an unelected dictatorship over all of the people and will have to be destroyed before the chance of any real working-class socialist development in Britain can even begin, - is pure disarming of workers, setting them up for the slaughter of the imperialist warmongering crisis that is to come.
There can be no point in riddling the labour movement with spies and police agents if the only purpose of it is to take notes of the names, addresses, and agendas, etc, etc.
The only point of such a mammoth, illegal police-state operation has to be for giving the hidden establishment dictatorship its exact detailed battleorder for SUPPRESSING that entire labour movement the moment that any 'left' pressure looked like actually winning the day at Labour Party or TUC conference for a complete socialist takeover of Britain.
There is no other purpose for such a massive expensive spy operation being there.
There is no need for it, just to find out if socialist motions are being proposed, discussed, and won. These results, - and 'left' election successes, etc, are always instantly joyfully shouted out loud by the 'left' the moment that they happen.
No, the only aim of such infiltration can be to exactly pinpoint the precise key 'militant' figures, right down to rank-and-file levels, who must be rounded up in their thousands in their entirety to ensure that the Pinochet-style coup is immediately completely successful the instant that it has to happen, should something like an Allende electoral, victory for 'socialist' policies occur in Britain.
But given that warning that this is the ONLY policy that the capitalist state bothers to prepare for in the event of a total 'socialist' programme being voted-for in Britain, then why does the whole fake-'left' including Lalkar and the SLP just carry on spouting for reform agitation as if nothing has happened?
What is this but the crassest Allendeism, - just waiting to be rounded up by a police-state coup.
The other great turning point in how 'democracy' is to be assessed for evermore, is indicated by an eye-opening essay which the Guardian has just seen fit to print, - presumably in its occasional safe posturing mode of academic liberalism.
It reads as follows:
When people ask me what it was like grow ing up in Hungary in the 1970s and 80s, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state. They are invariably disappointed when I tell them that the reality was quite different and that communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact rather a good place to live.
Victor Orban,the recently defeated right wing Hungarian prime minister, described my generation -those whose fate was sealed by the "failure" of the 1956 uprising - as "the lost generation".
But Hungarians like myself, who grew up in the years of "goulash communism", were actually the lucky ones. The shockwaves of 1956 bought home to the communist leadership that they could only consolidate their position by making our lives more tolerable. Stalinism was out and "Kadarism" - a unique brand of liberal communism (named after its architect, Janos Kadar) from which Mikhail Gorbachev would later draw inspiration for perestroika - was in.
Instead of a list of achievements in health, education, transport and welfare, let me offer some personal observations on what living under goulash communism was really like. What I remember most was the overriding sense of community and solidarity, a spirit I find totally lacking in my adopted Britain and indeed whenever I go back to Hungary today. With minimal differences in income and material goods, people really were judged on what they were like as individuals and not on what they owned. Western liberals may sneer at such movements as the Young Pioneers, which sought to involve young people in a wide range of community activities, but they reflected an ambition to build a cohesive society in contrast to the atomisation of most "advanced" nations today. I was proud to be a Pioneer; contrary to popular belief, we did not spend all our time, sitting round campfires singing songs in praise of Lenin, but instead learned valuable life skills in social interraction and building friendships.
I was also privileged to be bought up in a society where the government understood the value of education and culture. Before the war, in the Hungary idolised by snobbish, reactionary writers like Sandor Marai, secondary education was the preserve of the wealthy classes. My mother and father had to leave school at 11; under the Kadar regime, they were given a second chance to resume their studies as adults. Communism opened up new opportunities for people of my background and led to a huge increase in social mobility.
A corollary of the government's education policy was its commitment to the arts. Again, the emphasis was on bringing the maximum benefit to the largest number of people, and not just the wealthy in Budapest Theatres, opera houses and concert halls were all heavily subsidised, bringing prices down to a level everyone could afford. The government opened up "cultural houses" in every town and village, so that provincially based working class people, like my parents, could have easy access yss to the arts.
Book publishing was similarly supported, so that prices remained low and bookshops proliferated. With 1 forint (1.5p) editions of a wide range of classic works available, reading became a national obsession. For those who believe a rigorous censorship existed, I can tell you that among the most popular published foreign ;writers were PG Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley and W Somerset Maugham, hardly Marxian propagandists.
Now, 13 years after "regime change", much of this cultural heritage has been destroyed. Museums, theatres and galleries have had to sink or swim in the new economic "realism" : As ticket subsidies have been withdrawn, once again it is only the rich (and German tourists) who can afford to go to the opera. Hundreds of smaller art cinemas have been forced to close; while the big Hollywood multiplexes move in. Television has dramatically dumbed down, too. When I was a teenager, Saturday night prime time meant a Jules Verne adventure, a poetry recital and a Chekhov drama; now it means the same dreary diet of game shows and American action movies as in Britain.
Reform politicians sarcastically refer to Kadar's "velvet prison", yet they have surely created a prison of their own, where large sections of the population have been sold to the foreign-owned multinationals, which control 70% of the nation's production and threaten to pull out of the country if wages or workers' rights are improved. My best friend's husband works for such a company, and tells how visits to the toilet are strictly timed and taking a full lunch break is seen as showing lack of commitment to the flan. It's all a far cry from the paternalistic state-owned companies of 20 years ago, with their nurseries, subsidised canteens, holiday homes and free sports facilities.
Communism in Hungary certainly had a downside. While trips to other socialist countries were unrestricted, travel to the west was problematic and only allowed every second year. Few Hungarians (myself included) enjoyed the compulsory Russian lessons. There were petty restrictions and needless layers of bureaucracy and, of course, we were living in a one party system where freedom to criticise the government was limited.
Yet despite all of this, I firmly believe that, taken as a whole, the positives outweighed the negatives. Today Hungarians have the theoretical right to travel to the west whenever they like, yet the fall in real wages has been so dramatic that few of them can now afford even to go to Lake Balaton.
The "patriotic" politicians who shouted so loudly about Hungary's "occupation" by a foreign power under communism, are now strangely silent when the country is effectively controlled by New York financial institutions and unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
As a young adult in Hungary, I grew accustomed to a diet of news stories about the "imperialist" west and its wicked plans for global domination and control of the world's resources. We were all aware that this was the official party line and so its effectiveness as propaganda was limited. Now, more than 10 years on, with the US (and Germany) having connived in the breakup of Yugoslavia, colonised Afghanistan and now planning to invade Iraq for control of the world's oil supply, it is surely obvious that what we were told about western intentions was true.
I have seen both communist and western news management and know which is the more devious - and therefore the more effective. I witnessed the way media manipulation works in the "free world"; when we were told the Stop the War march I went on in London recently was attended by just 150,000 people and in the dismissive coverage Britain's biggest-ever peace demonstration was given in most newspapers.
Education, or rather the denial of it, is the key to all attempts at social control. Gorbachev said that education, in his view the greatest achievement of 70 years of communism, also paradoxically helped bring about its downfall. Put simply, the communist regimes educated their people to such an extent that they developed the critical faculty to challenge, and eventually overthrew the system. After three years of living in Britain, I see no danger of that happening here.
Presumably, the gamble is that this was all long ago and far away, and that neither socialist-camp reality nor nostalgic individualism are ever likely again to have the slightest influence on events in East Europe where unstoppable US imperialist stooging and mafia capitalism are degenerating the new capitalist-state regimes there ever deeper into backwardness and ignorance.
Such cynical defeatist calculations are missing something.
If this woman has been able to work out such a profound and convincing understanding of all of modern life's problems, both East and West, - then what is to stop virtually the whole of the former East European socialist populations sooner or later reaching the same verdicts themselves????
And in time, of course, what is to stop the Western populations coming to similar conclusions about the sterile emptiness of life on the cut-throat competitive merry-go-round of the capitalist system and its anti-community cynicism, philistinism, and individualism.
Once again, this remarkable capitalist press admission challenges, - from the opposite direction this time, - all of the stupid, self-damaging assumptions by which 'left' reformist pressure has limited itself for more than a century to proposing a mere parliamentary majority' as the pretended "socialist answer to all the problems of the working class", something which even the most limitedly class conscious workers will never have regarded as anything but utterly unrealisable 'pie-in-the-sky'.
Taking state power into the hands of the working class is what matters, nothing else, - as this woman's moving testimony demonstrates.
But far from ever acknowledging what has been plainly understood by all class-conscious workers for more than a century, - that without a workers state (dictatorship of the proletariat), no real socialist transformation of the economy and society can even begin, the fake 'militancy' of 'left' Labour and 57 varieties of Scargillism, Revisionism, and Trotskyism has never once dreamed of making the proletarian-dictatorship ESSENCE of the actual living SOCIALIST states (see above) the heart and soul of their anti-capitalist propaganda and agitation.
In that sense, the whole history of over 100 years of fake-'leftism' in Britain has been one giant fraud on the working class, especially when viewed from the aspect of the utter theoretical bankruptcy in which the labour movement has now been left, menaced by renewed imperialist warmongering but totally incapable of even uttering the word 'revolution' as the only plausible answer to the towering warmongering crisis of the policestate tyrannical capitalist system, - anti-socialist spying regimes (Pinochet CIA style) more completely and universally intact than ever before.
On the other hand, the forces thrown up by this bourgeois-class debacle are objective, spontaneous-revolutionary forces initially, - historically irresistible in the long run given the conscious worldsocialism leadership which eventually must come.
Palestinian resistance is of this indomitable character, among many current world examples. There will be many, many more, and far greater, revolutionary explosions to come.
And having the 'left' and unions everywhere riddled with police spies and CIA agents won't save capitalism but only alienate people more and more, - and expose again the shallowness of 'left' pressure which consistently denies that a dedicated REVOLUTIONARY struggle and understanding is the only answer to endless police-state tyranny.
If Scargill "knows" that TU 'militancy' was always utterly riddled with police agents, then why has an openly and consciously REVOLUTIONARY party (of genuine planned cut & thrust to expose all time-servers) never been proposed??
If Scargill "knows" that state-tyranny was all-the-time poised to intervene against TU "democracy", then why was the illusion persisted with that Congress and Labour Conference votes could defeat capitalism "by majority decision"???
Simultaneous admissions (to the BBC spy revelations) that the RUC deliberately let the Omagh dissident bomb go off in order to try to sabotage the Good Friday Agreement confirms the same message, - that the greatest enemy of working class and anti-imperialist progress in the world is the reformist "democratic state" itself. Build Leninism.
18
The people who believe that "no to war" will put an end to imperialist death and destruction have not thought through the implications of insoluble capitalist economic crisis at this juncture,and are also ignoring history.
A world economic 'over-production' catastrophe, ten times worse than the inter-imperialist conflict for global supremacy which required the destruction in World War I to "resolve", will have infinitely more disastrous consequences on today's planet, - especially bearing in mind that the WWI throat-cutting for colonial 'market' supremacy did not in fact end in 1938 or restore economic equilibrium.
That
impossibility for the rival imperialist powers to PEACEFULLY sit out
an 'overproduction' crisis .jpg)
and trade-war mayhem was merely temporarily
adjourned in 1918 (because of fears of Bolshevik Revolution spreading
from Russia to ALL of the major participants in that monstrous capitalist-system
bloodbath)
Market chaos, and aggressive colonial warmongering in a desperate race to dominate global raw-material sources,had put inevitably-renewed World War back on the agenda within 15 years of the Versailles Treaty (concluding the supposed "war to end all wars').
Inter-imperialist war because of 'overproduction' crisis remained the essence of World War II (regardless of the West's sub-plot to try to get the USSR destroyed in the course of the arms-race insanity); - and this time, its global devastation was so colossal (several hundred times that which had been achieved by WWI) that the huge international reconstruction required after the war (1945) was sufficient to keep ALL the major imperialist powers happily expanding economically for the following half century.
That has all now come to a grinding halt, and the bourgeois-capitalist system is simply INCAPABLE of seeing any way out of the renewed 'overproduction' crisis other than via renewed tradewar mayhem, arms-race belligerence, and warmongering aggression (for TOTAL global-market domination) regardless of the humiliating deep slump about to engulf the planet which will make the 1930s Depression seem like a little local difficulty by comparison.
And THAT is what was being spelled out by US imperialism last year when warning all countries to never try to catch up with the American arms-race lead or face pre-emptive strikes for daring to. The USA already has the whip hand in the arms race and has no intention of relinquishing it, least of all in the coming period when vicious tradewar conflicts are going to put all the major imperialist powers at odds with each other, with increasing frequency, and when utterly bankrupt smaller countries could be going ballistic at their plight, - or revolutionary; or both, ( - the "threat to America from failing states" in Bush's double-talk, which can only be solved by "the path of action", regardless of whether the USA's former 'allies' stand with America or against it).
A clearer declaration of non-stop warmongering intentions than that could not be imagined. And this 'Pax Americana' is not incurably belligerent because it is America; or because it is the morally and intellectuallychallenged Bush Texan oil mafia; or because people have not protested "no to war" loudly enough; but because the global imperialist economy will now be steadily ruined for everybody (by insoluble 'overproduction' crisis) unless the most enormous destruction mayhem breaks out. This will enable the monopoly capitalist bourgeoisie, (who OWN the world) to eventually resume their secure and delicious profits-amassing preeminence, - with the American ruling class the most supremely mighty, luxuried, and ego-massaged top dogs in all history.
With easily the most to lose, and being the best-equipped to survive it,Washington WANTS turmoil. That way, the USA can continue to flourish (it cynically thinks and hopes) when the world 'free-market' economic system (for which America has most responsibility, being the overwhelmingly dominating power) has crashed in humiliating chaos (precisely BECAUSE OF its grotesquely unequal and uneven MONOPOLY development).
Instead of any guilt or apologies for the catastrophic mess to the world's economy that capitalist 'freedom' has brought, the dominant bourgeois ideology of the US imperialist state will whip up national chauvinist defiance to fever pitch in order to blame any and everybody else on Earth for the disaster, except themselves. The 'no to war' global lobby will be treated with utmost contempt.
Although one specific warmongering adventure might be stopped by public pressure, imperialism's unalterable mode of existence (of never-ending armsrace warmongering-posturing) can obviously only be got rid of by getting rid of the capitalist system itself and its inevitable monopoly-imperialist bourgeoisie, always rising to the top of things. Monopolisation tendencies, and the vicious corruption and domineering that goes with them, are incurable under capitalism.
Through its domination of propaganda ideology, the monopoly bourgeois system has an infallible method of ultimately thwarting however much public opinion has been mobilised against warmongering adventures: Simply stage a phony 'provocation'.
Germany attacked its own Gleiwitz radio station to start WWII. The USA made up the Gulf of Tonkin incident to start the Vietnam War.
What next?
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