Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.—V.I.Lenin
I.L.W.P. BULLETIN
Weekly newspaper of the International Leninist Workers Party (P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL)((GPO Regd.)   
No 649 Tuesday May 19 1992                                                                                                                        10p 

The battle for propaganda must be won before the anti-imperialist struggle can prevail worldwide

As the political and economic crisis of the 'free world' deepens inexorably, it remains vital for the West to continue getting away with rubbishing communism or any idea of a planned-economy socialist alternative to capitalism.

As East Europe's catastrophic collapse into profiteering exploitation, mass unemployment, poverty, philistinism, and crime after the arrival of the free market reveals, it was not the disciplined if unglamorous and unspectacular progress of the socialist camp which was the real 'problem' for the world but exactly the opposite, - the glitzy irresponsible shallowness of Western consumerism.

The tedious revisionist bureaucracies running the workers states obviously failed to turn their countries into environmentally-sound social and educational showpieces with which to counter-attack the West's relentless political anti-communism.

This was certainly economically difficult largely because of the enormous defence-burden and state-security-burden costs which the proletarian dictatorships were forced to bear by unremitting 'free world' military encirclement, nuclear threats, political subversion, and economic sabotage.

It was put politically out of reach by the hopeless revisionist subservience to imperialism, begging the West for permanent peaceful coexistence and class collaboration. 

But despite these cowardly delusions, and until they reached total liquidationist betrayal under Gorbachev, the USSR was a history-making triumph.

For all its weaknesses, the first 70 years of anti-imperialist achievement by the Soviet workers state must sooner or later begin to be seen again as an immense beacon lighting the way for the world's proletarian masses, once more reeling under the burdens of monopoly-capitalist crisis. 

Trade-war destruction, economic slump, and internationalist warmongering, currently afflicting half the planet, all point unerringly towards inter-imperialist war (WWIII as a follow-up to World Wars I and II) being unleashed anew as powerful monopoly-bourgeois forces increasingly seek to dominate the difficult world situation or blame someone else for the disasters.

The planet's first workers state in 1917 was the inevitable scientifically-predicted answer to imperialism's slump/war degeneracy and it was a world-shattering triumph, - the most dramatic-ever leap in human development. The capitalist class and the landed aristocracy were expropriated. Ruling class society was overthrown, - replaced by a totally planned economy and welfare-state ethos.

The entire weight of bourgeois propaganda internationally has since 1917 been strained to the utmost to maintain total silence about these colossal achievements, and to simply blacken the USSR's reputation by any means possible, - spreading disgusting disinformation about "communist plans for world enslavement and zombiefication" etc.

Now these lies are needed more than ever as the capitalist system once again plunges mankind towards a catastrophic worldwide slump. It is essential for the West to rub it in that the FSU's (former Soviet Union) very own bureaucrats now cannot wait to denounce socialism and ingratiate themselves with monopoly-imperialist circles around the NATO colonial-war alliance.

Because revisionist defeatism eventually undermined the leadership of the world's first workers state, the relentless Cold War hostility by the 'free world' (i.e. capitalism's territory), plus the temporary cheap glitz of postwar-boom economic success for the major imperialist powers, eventually bludgeoned the feeble bureaucrats in Moscow into opening the USSR's doors to total class-collaboration again, crucially destroying the painfully-constructed state of proletarian dictatorship which alone could enable Soviet socialism to withstand the unremitting imperialist subversion.

But the fact that weak revisionist bureaucrats, 70 years after the epoch-making Bolshevik Revolution, have been bamboozled by bourgeois ideology into liquidating the Soviet planned economic society, - cannot possibly obscure for long the vital socialist message of the world's first workers state.

It did work. The feudal landowning and capitalist classes were abolished. And so successful was the USSR that formerly-backward Russia was dramatically transformed into the world's greatest superpower - all in just 70 years despite the country's main industrial and economic centres being twice totally devastated by deliberate imperialist invasion during that period.

And not only did the USSR's planned economy flourish mightily in that time, and eventually stood up to every degenerate warmongering threat and encirclement which imperialism mounted, - but it was also able to lend a motherly hand to 20 or more new workers states in the aftermath of imperialism's appalling WWII holocaust, and act as midwife to the whole national-liberation struggle which sensationally wiped out the entire colonial empires of Western monopoly-capitalism post 1945.

Because bourgeois propaganda will remain so determined to deny all relevance of communism's achievements to the scourge of warmongering imperialist economic crises which have so dominated 20th century world history, and even continue denying that there were any achievements at all, - it is crucial for the growth of the new anti-imperialist movement internationally that the full significance of those 70 years without a feudal landowning class or a capitalist class and without any say for western monopoly-finance capital (the major stock markets, trade cartels, money-banking groupings, IMF, etc) in Soviet or socialist camp affairs, be clearly and scientifically understood.

If the West's continuing non-stop anti-communist propaganda succeeds in still deceiving workers about how brilliantly the planned full-employment non-profiteering Soviet economy (which abolished slums and poverty as well as a moneyed leisure class), actually solved the problems bequeathed by imperialism's unending burden of warmongering slumps (following every get-rich-quick boom), - then the anti-imperialist movement will remain confused and divided over the programme, strategy and tactics it must scientifically pursue in order to topple the international monopoly-bourgeoisie.

The most insidious obstacle to a renewal of Marxist-Leninist inspiration worldwide is the sick destructive influence of the petty-bourgeois fake-'left' which for 70 years has sneered carpingly at every development of the workers states, pretending a wish to be 'even more' revolutionary' than the states of proletarian dictatorship and to be critical 'only of that which is preventing completion of the world revolution', etc, - but in reality filled with nothing but contemptuous hatred for the actual realities of working-class power.

This middle-class ultra-leftism is the most monstrous philosophical weapon being used by bourgeois class interests to wall off workers from a dialectical materialist understanding of precisely what historical conditions must of necessity be entailed by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It was not at all ever a question of merely the mistakes of the workers states being criticised, feigning sympathy with Soviet efforts, but something entirely the opposite, - a completely academic ivory-tower delusion that somehow the world's first workers state was not the 'real revolution' at all but just a preliminary doomed skirmish. The 'perfect' revolution will come along later to show the world how it really should be done.

But this fake-'left' stance is nothing but the most appalling philosophical deception on workers. There is never going to be any 'perfect' revolution, and no such thing could ever exist. There would never be another revolutionary onslaught on imperialism at all anywhere if such petty-bourgeois dilettante attitudes were to prevail.

They will not prevail, of course. Fortunately, they will be swept aside by renewed spontaneous proletarian revolutionary determination born of the absolute necessity for mankind to do something about the coming imperialist slump-warmongering debacle.

This despicable parasitic ultra-left posturing has merely been a peculiar feature of the bourgeois world and its morality which survived alongside the new proletarian-discipline order in the curious interregnum of the Cold War when the capitalist and socialist eras temporarily uneasily coexisted side-by-side following the inability of the first great wave of workers-state transformations to sweep the whole of the planet all at one go. 

In the long run historically, the fact that the imperialist bourgeoisie was not all conquered all at the same time is hardly surprising. This 'failure' of proletarian revolution's first wave to complete the job is in one sense not a failure at all.

It is vital, of course, to learn the lessons of what really did 'go wrong' in terms of isolating CPSU revisionist-bureaucratic retreats and rationalisations which deludedly sought to prolong and justify the impossible situation of a world half-imperialist and half-socialist. (See ILWP Books vols 3,4,5,6,7,11,12,13, etc).

But petty-bourgeois ultra-leftism in its vitriolic abuse of 'Stalinism' and its treacherous joining in with the imperialist counter-revolution in stabbing the workers states in the back in supporting the Vatican-CIA 'Solidarnosc' reactionary-nationalist stunt, for example, which is leading straight on to fascism
in Poland, - had nothing whatever to do with explaining how and why the first great wave of revolutionary proletarian dictatorship in the Soviet socialist camp had eventually run out of steam and been unable to complete the task of leading to the worldwide overthrow of imperialism.

Every aspect of middle-class fake-'left' biliousness against the Soviet workers state and the socialist camp which grew up around it was philosophically oriented towards declaring 'this is not real socialism - this is a total denial of what real socialism is supposed to be about', - completely sick in their armchair-socialist petty-bourgeois self-absorption with projecting models of the 'perfect socialist revolution to come', etc.

Every tiny detail of Trotskyism's "analysis" of the USSR starts only from the philosophical premise of: "It is all really no good; quite spoiled; everything is rotten", - and then condescendingly picks over the specific prospects with feigned 'sympathy' or pretended 'understanding' in order not to appear too hysterically anti-communist like the rest of the bourgeois spectrum (of hostility to proletarian dictatorship) sneering in from the outside.

Thus Trotsky in 'The Revolution Betrayed':

The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character; (b) the tendency towards primitive accumulation created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the planned economy; (c) norms of distribution preserving a bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new differentiation of society; (d) the economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes a swift formation of privileged strata; (e) exploiting the social antagonisms, a bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism; (f) the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses; (g) a further development of the accumulating contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism; (h) on the road to capitalism the counter-revolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; (i) on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy. In the last analysis, the question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces, both on the national and the world arena.

But this passage, frequently quoted favourably by modern Trots to show how "well-disposed" middle-class ultra-leftism "always was towards the Soviet Union", in fact reeks of monstrous detachment. It was not an academic question but a matter of life and death for millions of people on the planet affected by the outcome of the real frontline conflict between anti-imperialism and the Western monopolies.

The entire Trot philosophical posture is from the standpoint of "this is not yet the real socialist revolution; this is not yet real socialism; this is not yet a real workers state", etc.

But in fact it was the only first-ever workers state that there will ever be in history.

And for all its weaknesses and wrong turnings, the astonishing impact of the Soviet workers state on world developments throughout most of the 20th century will remain an indelible influence on human society's struggles for all time.

An appalling tone of agnostic fence-sitting factionalism in Trotsky's attitude is unmistakable, as though what was being decided in the USSR was some one-off bizarre experiment, and that real consciousness was continuing elsewhere, inseparable from the subjectivism of the analyser Trotsky.

The piece also reeks with outrageous sleight-of-hand verbal deceptions.

It starts with a savagely treacherous sneer at the Soviet Union as a "contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism". It was, in fact, the world's first workers state, - a watershed in all human history.

Slightingly, it dismisses the expropriation of the landed aristocracy and the capitalist class which is the essence of that historical transformation, as "productive forces still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character", which deliberately totally ignores the real point of the phenomenal interest in the USSR as the front line in the international class war, - proletarian dictatorship versus bourgeois dictatorship. The socialist character of the state property was much more government [governed - ed] by it being a workers state than by the level of productive forces. The state property under the postwar British Labour government's wholesale nationalisation occurred under far more advanced productive forces than 1930s USSR but it had not the remotest socialist character because of the reality of the continuing bourgeois dictatorship as the state form in Britain. The point about so-called 'primitive accumulation' (market-trading for profit) was obviously true but no surprise and only mentioned in order to sound pompous and to make derisive propaganda play with words like 'primitive', 'want', 'pores', etc.

The so-called 'bourgeois character' of distribution was nothing more than the well-established Marxist-Leninist scientific description of that stage of socialist society development requiring 'to each according to his work' rather than 'to each according to his needs'. It is given a deliberate abusive twist here by Trotsky to smuggle in his slander about a 'new ruling caste' ('new differentiation of society') supposedly having taken over in the USSR as a not-quite new ruling class. Modern Trots, of course, refuse to say what became of this new 'ruling class' when Gorbachev-ism simply liquidated the CPSU and the dictatorship of the proletariat and gave over power to the counter-revolutionary petty-bourgeois opportunists in the nationalist camps, anti-communist intelligentsia, and black-market mafia, - the first case in history, it would have been, of a 'ruling class' liquidating its own rule.

This criminal misrepresentation is then increasingly hysterically elaborated to a descriptive climax of "revolution betrayed", - though still with socialist property relations and mass socialist consciousness, he adds, (in case any of his audience had actually gone to the USSR to see the anti-imperialist workers-state development for themselves before the returning clouds of imperialist warmongering threatened, under the encouragement the West was giving to German imperialism to expand eastwards, to invade the USSR and totally obliterate all the socialist gains.)

After some further agnostic fence-sitting, saying it will either be a) or b), Trotsky delivers his final boot-in-the-groin in implying a 'world arena struggle of living social forces' as deciding the fate of the USSR as though, the Soviet workers state itself was irrelevant or incapable of playing any role in its own defence.

But the historic defeat of WWII German/Italian imperialist aggression was being nurtured in Soviet socialist development at that very moment (utterly disregarded by Trotsky in his specific speculations predicting Soviet disaster from the coming war - see ILWP Books vol 5), and an important indirect part in the defeat of Japanese imperialist aggression too, - thus helping shape the entire character of the planet after WWII.

The entire anti-colonial national-liberation struggle, which spectacularly drove Western physical empires off the world scene post 1945, was also incubating inside growing Soviet influence on international affairs.

All of this was contemptuously ignored by Trotsky (in implying that world influence would all be in the opposite direction, -from outside onto the sickly wavering USSR), - out of his incorrigible petty-bourgeois class bias which wanted to write off the Soviet proletarian dictatorship at all costs as being a horrible abortion (prejudiced not in the least by the fact that the Soviet workers state had rejected him, Trotsky, as leader after Lenin died (tragically early)).

Last week's Bulletin discussed at length the rottenness of the Trotskyite fraud that it was alright for 'anti-Stalinists' to stab the USSR in the back at any time on any issue 'because the "political revolution" would indeed, sooner or later, "overthrow
the bureaucracy", as Trotsky put it.

This must rank as one of the filthiest 'Big Lie' techniques of all reactionary propaganda's annals.

It remains blindingly clear from Marxist science as well as unmistakable from the actual historical record, that there never has been any ultra-left 'political revolution' anywhere, there never will be, and that the only 'overthrow' of a workers state that could take place would be a counter-revolution.

And that is precisely what has happened in East Europe, but not one word will any ultra-left petty-bourgeois say anywhere about the Trotskyite treachery in freely stabbing the workers states in the back for half a century, including helping on such reactionary excrescences as Lech Walesa's neo-fascist-nationalist 'Solidarnosc', the feudal-barbarous Afghan mojaheddin, the Saudi-financed Ethiopian separatists, the nazi-loving Baltic nationalists, the 'freedom-loving' pro-imperialists from Sakharov to Havel, - regardless of the clear counter-revolutionary disasters which all this 'anti-Stalinism' helped bring about (plus not the remotest 'political revolution' anywhere in the offing).

Yet still the devious Trots pile on the 'big lie' propaganda to try to keep on confusing the working class and to protect their own reputation as 'theoreticians' of 'revolution'. In the May 1 USA Spartist 'Workers Vanguard', the following astonishing cover-up muddle is printed:

"The ICL (Sparts) stand before the working class and tell the truth. Only workers political revolution to sweep away the counter-revolutionary regimes now in power can save the Soviet workers state".

This is more deliberate confusion-mongering. Having backed Solidarnosc for a year before removing all traces of this counter-revolutionary folly from their records, the Sparts hate to face the fact that they have already helped to drive the East European workers states to self-destruction, hence the confusion about exactly how you save a 'workers state' from a 'counter-revolutionary regime'.

And by exploiting that unexplained muddle, it then becomes possible to slip in (hopefully unnoticed) a totally new slant on the long lost 'political revolution'. Now, all of a sudden, it can apparently mean just any old workers revolution against any old kind of regime. The gain for Trotskyism from such chaos? The first step in re-writing the records yet again so as to obliterate the whole sorry saga of advocating stabbing the Soviet workers state in the back for 50 years on the grounds that only good can come from the subsequent 'political' revolution which would preserve the socialist state and working-class power but eliminate the 'bureaucratic degeneration' which made it 'not really socialism', etc. This 'political revolution' was never anything but a rotten unscientific fiction by unscrupulous petty-bourgeois anti-communist dilettantes.

Just as there has never been a 'perfect revolution' by any Trots anywhere, so there has never been any 'political revolution' by them either. All there has ever been is class hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a posturing 'left' refusal to unconditionally support workers-state power at every opportunity in every conflict with bourgeois anti-communist ideology, and counter-revolutionary stunts of the Solidarnosc kind:

Lenin dismissed these armchair-socialist fantasies of petty bourgeois dilettantes in his 1920 article "Left-wing" communism - an infantile disorder":

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a most determined & most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by its overthrow (even if only in one country), and whose power lies not only in the strength of international capital, in the strength and durability of the international connections of the bourgeoisie, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small production (which) engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. For all these reasons, the dictatorship of the proletariat is essential, and victory over the bourgeoisie is impossible without a long, stubborn and desperate war of life and death, a war demanding perseverance, discipline, firmness, indomitableness, and unity of will...

"The victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia has clearly shown,..that absolute centralisation and the strictest discipline of the proletariat constitute one of the fundamental conditions for victory over the bourgeoisie...

"Would it not be better if greetings in honour of Soviet power and the Bolsheviks were more frequently attended by a profound analysis of the reasons why the Bolsheviks were able to build up the discipline the revolutionary proletariat needs.

With a collective Bolshevik jeer of 

"What old and familiar rubbish. What 'left' childishness",

Lenin highlighted the ludicrous essence of petty-bourgeois revolutionism: 

The mere presentation of the question-'dictatorship of the Party or dictatorship of the class; dictatorship party of the leaders or dictatorship party of the masses' - testifies to the most incredible and hopeless confusion of mind.... Classes are led by political parties.. directed by more or less stable groups composed of the most authoritative, influential and experienced members who are elected to the most responsible positions and are called leaders. All this is elementary...Why replace this by some rigmarole?.

"Repudiation of the party principle and of party discipline, - such is the opposition's net result. And this is tantamount to completely disarming the proletariat in the interest of the bourgeoisie. It is tantamount to that petty-bourgeois diffuseness, instability, incapacity for sustained effort, unity & organised action which must inevitably, if indulged in, destroy every proletarian revolutionary movement.

"From the standpoint of communism, the repudiation of the party principle means trying to leap from the eve of the collapse of capitalism not to the lower, or the intermediate, but to the higher phase of communism.

"We in Russia are going through the first steps in the transition from capitalism to socialism, or the lower stage cf communism. Classes have remained and will remain everywhere for years after the conquest of power by the proletariat....Small commodity producers...must be re-educated and remoulded only by very prolonged, slow, cautious organisational work. They encircle the proletariat on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere which permeates and corrupts the proletariat and causes constant relapses among the proletariat into petty-bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternate moods of exaltation and dejection. The strictest centralisation and discipline are required within the political party of the proletariat in order to counteract this, in order that the organisational role of the proletariat (and that is its principal role) may be exercised correctly, successfully, victoriously. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a persistent struggle, - bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative, - against the forces and traditions of the old society. The force of habit of millions and tens of millions is a most terrible force.....

Whoever weakens ever so little the iron discipline of the party of the proletariat (especially during the time of its dictatorship) actually aids the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. 

Lenin's description of how petty-bourgeois revolutionism joins with bourgeois reaction to deride the

prolonged, slow, persistent struggle - bloody & bloodless, violent & peaceful, military & economic, educational & administrative - by the proletarian dictatorship against the terrible force of the habits & traditions of the old society' 

is remarkably prophetic of the most decisive offensive against Leninism in modern history in support of Solidarnosc in Poland. The entire reformist, Trot, & Eurocommunist revisionist swamp joined forces with Reagan, Thatcher, the Vatican and the CIA to try to prevent the Polish workers state from reimposing centralised discipline over the Catholic revolt for bourgeois democracy (See ILWP Books vols 3, 6, & 7).

Walesa's fascist worship of 'new order' capitalism in Japan, Sweden and Pilsudski Poland eventually caused a minority of the left swamp to jump off the Solidarnosc bandwagon. But, e.g. the 'Leninist' still refused to give unconditional support to the Polish workers state because these fair-weather fence-sitters feared further 'embarrassing difficulties' for Warsaw. The RCG, on the other hand, merely sat tight and said nothing at all - until finally condemning the Solidarnosc lobby's anti-Soviet clamour in the West in a belated down-page story as if nothing could be less important than the CIA/Vatican attempts to finance, spark off, and sustain counter-revolution in East Europe. Competing with these two academic grouplets by bearing Trotskyism's banner of feigned 'solidarity with the socialist camp' were the Sparts, who red-faced took eleven uncomfortable months to stumble from an appeal for worldwide military action in support of Solidarnosc to an unexplained about-turn to dismiss it as a CIA company union.

The whole of Leninism, - the above quotes and every other word he wrote, - bellows forth a dialectical combination of ruthless criticism of any confusion over or retreat from a scientific Marxist analysis of class forces and action to be taken in the best interests of the world socialist revolution, plus the most militant & unconditional support for any attempt to overthrow capitalism and build socialism, such as is represented by the Polish workers state.

In 'Proletarian Revolution & Renegade Kautsky' in 1919, Lenin wrote:

Dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it necessarily does mean the abolition of democracy for the class over which the dictatorship is exercised...

"The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws....

"Kautsky picks at all manner of trifles down to the argument that under the Soviet constitution elections are indirect; but he misses the essence of the matter. He fails to see the class nature of the state apparatus, of the machinery of state. Under bourgeois democracy, the capitalists by thousands of tricks (which are the more artful and effective the more 'pure' democracy is developed) push the masses away from the work of administration, from freedom of the press, the right of assembly, etc. The Soviet government is the first in the world to enlist the masses in the work of administration. The toiling masses are barred from participation in bourgeois parliaments (which never decide important questions under bourgeois democracy: they are decided by the stock exchange and the banks) by thousands of obstacles, and the workers know and feel, see & realise perfectly well that the bourgeois parliaments are institutions alien to them, instruments for the oppression of the proletarians by the bourgeoisie, institutions of a hostile class, of the exploiting minority.

"The Soviets are the direct organisation of the toiling & exploited masses themselves, which helps them to organise and administer their own state in every possible way.

In 'Third International & its place in history', Lenin added:

'The proletarian-peasant Soviet Republic has proved to be the first stable socialist republic in the world. As a new type of state, it cannot die..

"For the continuance and completion of the work of building socialism, very much is still required. Soviet republics in more cultured countries where the proletariat has greater weight and influence will have every chance of surpassing Russia once they take the path of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

"The bankrupt Second International is now dying and rotting alive. Actually, it is playing the role of lackey of the international bourgeoisie. It is truly a yellow International. Its most prominent ideological leaders, such as Kautsky, laud bourgeois democracy and call it 'democracy' in general, or, - which is still more stupid and still more crude - 'pure democracy'.

"Bourgeois democracy has outlived its day, just as the Second International has outlived its day... Even the most democratic bourgeois republic, never was and never could be anything but a machine for the suppression of the toilers by capital, an instrument of the political rule of capital, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The democratic bourgeois republic promised and proclaimed majority rule, but it could never put this into effect as long as private ownership of the land and other means of production existed.

" 'Freedom' in the bourgeois-democratic republic was actually freedom for the rich. The proletarians and toiling peasants could and should have utilised it for the purpose of preparing their forces for overthrowing capital, for overthrowing bourgeois democracy...

"Soviet, or proletarian democracy has for the first time in the world created democracy for the masses...Never before in the world has there been such a state power as the Soviet power, the power of the majority of the population... 

It suppresses the 'freedom' of the exploiters and their accomplices...'freedom' to fight for the restoration of the rule of capital, 'freedom' to compact with the foreign bourgeoisie against the workers and peasants of their own country…

"Whoever has read Marx and has not understood that in capitalist society, at every acute moment, in every serious conflict of classes, the only thing possible is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat, has understood nothing either of Marx's economic or political doctrines.

All round the 'free' world, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie could not be clearer, - or in clearer trouble, - as the capitalist press itself is forced to admit:  

GEORGE Bush and his most senior advisers last year ordered a cover-up to conceal their mistaken, illegal, and ultimately disastrous, secret support of Saddam Hussein and Iraq before the Gulf war, a leading congressman has charged.

The cover-up began in April, 1991, when Nick Rostow, general counsel to the National Security Council (NSC), and Boyden Gray, Bush's White House general counsel, convened a high-level meeting of all federal agencies and departments which had overt and covert dealings with Iraq.

According to Congressman Henry Gonzalez, the intent of the "Rostow Gang" was "to minimise public exposure to the embarrassing, failed US policy towards, Iraq... and to frustrate, evade, and stifle Congressional investigations". To do this, the White House established a "secret mechanism" to take control of all Iraq-related government records, then made the records virtually impossible to obtain — even if their existence was known.

Gonzalez claims that the deception goes back to 1980, and is still continuing, but that its principal focus is from August 1988, when the Iran-Iraq war ended, to August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Using classified documents, memos, and minutes, he has published evidence that
• Bush, and the Secretary of State, James Baker, personally directed a "reckless" appeasement of Saddam and misled Congress, despite knowing that Iraq was engaged in a worldwide, nuclear weapons-related arms procurement effort and US laws were being broken;
• US intelligence was secretly fed to Saddam until weeks before the Kuwait invasion, a fact the CIA director, Robert Gates, concealed from a Senate panel;
• Commerce Department records of US military-related exports to Iraq were altered, deleted, or, in some instances,
• Bank regulators' investigations into money-laundering and the diversion of Agriculture Department food aid for arms for Iraq were deliberately obstructed;
• The National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and the Deputy Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, who both previously worked for Kissinger Associates, had a clear conflict of interest relating to a celebrated bank fraud.

Gonzalez says the affair amounts to a "mugging of Congress" and the American people. It might be said to encompass three other scandals — the so-called October Surprise, Iran-Contra, and BCCI. Bush and his advisers had financed, equipped, and succoured the monster they later set out to slay, and were now burying the evidence.

Gonzalez is no radical firebrand or partisan sensation-seeker; nor is he anybody's fool. A Democrat, in Congress for more than 30 years, he chairs the House Banking Committee.

For more than two years, Gonzalez and his committee have painstakingly attempted to investigate a $4 billion fraud at the Atlanta branch of the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). Appalled by the evidence of government wrongdoing they uncovered, and frustrated by efforts to block the investigation, Gonzalez went public in March. He has kept talking.

In a series of extraordinary speeches, he has placed volumes of classified government documents on the Congressional record, creating what may be termed the Gonzalez Papers.

The indictment has been summarised by Gonzalez himself: "Behind closed doors, and out of the sight of the people and the Congress, they [Presidents Bush and Reagan] courted Saddam Hussein with a reckless abandon that ended in war and the deaths of dozens of our brave soldiers and over 200,000 Muslims, Iraqis, and others."

"With the backing of President Bush, the State Department and NSC staff conspired in 1989 and 1990 to keep the flow of US credit, technology, and intelligence information flowing to Iraq despite repeated warnings by several other agencies and the availability of abundant evidence showing that Iraq used BNL loans to pay for US technology destined for Iraq's missile, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programmes."

If Gonzalez's charges are only half correct, this could be Bush's Watergate.

In a 1984 State Department memo to [then Vice-President] Bush, the thinking behind Washington's decision was explained simply enough.

"The war between Iran and Iraq directly affects our vital interests," it stated. Although US policy prohibited the sale of military hardware directly to Iraq, the memo described Iran as the intransigent party and concluded that "victory by either side would have a seriously destabilising effect on the region...We must therefore seek means to bolster Iraq's ability and resolve."

The secret courtship began before 1984. Credit programmes, for instance, commenced in 1983. And as the investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, has shown, Reagan started to provide Baghdad with highly-classified intelligence data in the spring of 1982.

The affair continued, with undiminished ardour, despite the 1988 end of the Iran-Iraq war, which had been its principal justification. It was reinforced by Bush's National Security Directive No 26 of October 1989, which made the "pursuit of improved political and economic ties" with Saddam an overriding priority.

Support in the 1980s took many forms; Overtly, it involved the extension of US loans guarantees worth billions of dollars, via the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) and the Export-import Bank, and the licensing by the Commerce Department of American military-related technology and equipment sales to Iraq (but not weapons).

As Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Project On Nuclear Arms Control, has shown, sales to Iraq of US products useful for making atomic bombs or long-range missiles, mushroomed between 1985 and 1990. 

"It was all money, it was greed," a congressional investigator told the Guardian. "The US government knew, the British government knew, that Iraq was spending 50 per cent of GNP on arms procurement. Did they care about stopping it? No. It was a competition with the Germans."

UPFRONT support also involved allowing banks with Iraqi connections — such as BNL in Atlanta and US branches of BCCI — to raise loans for Iraq on the back of the US credits. At the covert level, support, or connivance, was more devious. Circuitous military hardware transfers, for example, were well known to, and monitored by, the CIA, and particularly by Robert Gates, now the agency's director.

As revealed last year, missile technology and military equipment was routinely shipped to South Africa or Chile, and on-sold to Iraq between 1984 and 1988. That breached US arms embargoes against both countries but, for example, it got Saddam his US-made cluster bombs and 155mm cannon.

According to Gonzalez, and congressional sources, the arms trade involved Iraqi front companies set up in the US and Britain with government knowledge; the likes of the Chilean arms manufacturer, Carlos Cardoen, boss of Industrias Cardoen SA, and Armscor in South Africa.

It was in this context that British police and US Customs seized what were apparently Californian-made nuclear "triggers" destined for Iraq at Heathrow in March, 1990. And that Gerald Bull offered his supergun design to Baghdad — parts for which were made in Britain. The CIA was aware of this project; as was Mossad, the Israeli secret service — which probably proved fatal for Dr Bull.

Indirect support for Saddam involved turning a blind eye to the operations of BNL and BCCI, despite accumulating evidence that US banking laws were being broken, and that kickbacks linked to the arms trade were an integral part of these banks' activities. Indeed, the CIA itself banked at BCCL.
 
The Gonzalez Papers, supported by investigations by the Banking Committee and US media, as well as independent inquiries by the Guardian, include a number of charges after August 1988.

The Commerce Department allegedly, continued to license military-related exports to Iraq despite reports by the US Customs Service, among other agencies, that Iraq was avidly pursuing "sensitive nuclear technologies" and chemical weapons capacity.

In June 1991, a Commerce Department inspector reported that unexplained deletions and changes had been made to the department's licence records. The "Rostow Gang" took "physical possession of various Commerce Department documents".

An Energy Department intelligence officer dismissed an urgent written warning by one of the department's top weapons experts, Bryan Siebert in April 1989, that Iraq was making a "major effort" to acquire nuclear weapons, including fuel-making equipment and nuclear triggers in the West.

The shopping list included parts for gas centrifuges used to enrich uranium, of the sort found in Iraq by UN inspectors.

These actions were in line with the wishes of the Secretary of State and Bush's National Security Directive No 26. Backed by his deputy, Lawrence Eagleburger, James Baker personally intervened to ensure that CCC and Export Import Bank credits continued to be granted to Iraq until 1990 despite the government's own evidence that $900 million worth of the credits, linked to an Agriculture Department food aid programme, were being misused by BNL to raise loans for Iraqi arms.

Gonzalez also has evidence that US-underwritten, BNL linked grain and other agricultural commodity shipments were diverted to Eastern bloc countries and bartered for arms, and that although Washington knew about it, Baker personally reassured the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, in October 1989, that the credits would continue.

Documents obtained by Gonzalez indicate that the Justice Department, headed by the then Attorney-General, Richard Thornburgh, delayed indictments in the BNL Atlanta fraud case for more than a year.

They were not brought until the day of the Gulf war ceasefire. The trial is due to begin on June 2. The principal defendant, former manager Christopher Drogoul, claims the US government knew all about his activities. Last week his bail was revoked and he was arrested, after the Gonzalez evidence was made public.

IN relation to BNL, Gonzalez has drawn a parallel with the BCCI investigations in the US, also allegedly impeded by Thornburgh. There is considerable overlap of principal players and activities, and similarities with the manner in which BCCI operatives sought to gain influence in US political circles.

Gonzalez points out that both Eagleburger, and the Brent Scoweroft worked for Henry Kissinger's consultancy before joining the Bush Administration in 1989. Both did work on behalf of BNL, a client of Kissinger Associates.

Contrary to testimony by Gates and other CIA officials during last year's Senate confirmation hearings, US intelligence sharing with Iraq continued until the Kuwait invasion. It is claimed that Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait with current US intelligence in hand.

The Gonzalez Papers include numerous other charges, backed by documentary evidence, that officials repeatedly "misled" Congress about US-Iraq ties between 1988 and 1990. A pattern was established of "efforts aimed at thwarting congressional investigations... and obstructing justice... Even faced with subpoenas, the Administration has refused to turn over documents to Congress."

The basic point, Gonzalez said in a recent speech, was that Bush "did not want the public to know that the White House had provided aid to the Iraqi war machine". The president wanted to hide the fact that he and his top advisers had continued to support Saddam in defiance of US law, the Constitution, and common sense.

In effect, the "reckless" and "failed" policy towards Saddam, wrapped up in secrecy, incompetence and malpractice was a principal, if not the principal, cause of the Gulf conflict.

AUTHORITIES in Milan have uncovered a vast network of corruption and embezzlement in which senior politicians, mainly from the Socialist Party, are accused of accepting bribes worth hundreds of millions of pounds over the past 13 years to finance their election campaigns, in return for awarding lavish public sector contracts to certain businessmen.

The investigators, Judge Italo Ghitti and prosecutor Antonio di Pietro — both old anti-Mafia hands — have threatened to name political figures "at the very highest level" within a few days.

The main witness in the case is a former director of public works, Mario Chiesa, who was arrested in February. His testimony, along with that of eight businessmen picked up last week and now under house arrest, has added to the reputation for corruption of Italy's leading financial and industrial city.

The Socialist Party's national leadership is prepared for a crippling scandal just as its leader, Bettino Craxi, mounts his bid for Italy's vacant presidency. The scandal has expanded in the last few days from the health service in the city to encompass its airports, metro and transport systems, and World Cup soccer stadium. Bribes are said to have been laundered through a Swiss bank before reaching the Socialist politicians.

The case began with the arrest of Mr Chiesa, a senior figure in Mr Craxi's party apparatus, a close friend of Mr Craxi's son, Bobbo, who is secretary of the Milan party, and campaign manager of the former Socialist mayor, Paolo Pillitteri.

Mr Chiesa was found accepting bribes in the running of an old people's home. It then emerged he was also selling council property at knock-down prices to companies in which he and other Socialist officials had interests.

Suddenly, last week, the Chiesa investigation took off.

His testimony on a minor bribe blazed a trail to a number of industrialists alleged to have made payments to party officials across the whole health service and hospital system in Lombardy, from 1979 until this year. Eight were arrested on Thursday and charged with serious corruption. After two nights in the cells they agreed to testify.

First, Judge Ghitti and Mr Pietro identified a provable £75 million worth of bribes paid to political officers in return for contracts to build, furbish and even provide meals for leading hospitals in the city. The figure has now risen to some £250 million, but even this, said one investigator, "is a fraction of the total".

Most prominent among those arrested was Clemente Rovati, head of a consortium of 17 building companies and the construction giant Edilmedio-llanum. Judge Ghitti believes Mr Rovati is at the centre of a web of illegal political funding.

Another is Fabio Lasagni, who quickly confessed to paying a £3 million bribe to a Socialist politician, Matteo Carriera, to build a geriatric hospital called Redaelli, worth £45 million.

The indictment covers an awesome list of other bribes tabulated in detail. But the industrialists' lawyers have said their clients are "victims obliged to pay" by the political purse managers. The testimonies of the businessmen — which one lawyer said "are preparing us for terrible times" — led to the first political arrests at the mid of last week.

The Socialist regional executive for Lombardy, Micheli Colucci, was put under cautionary arrest, as were Milan's public spending chief, Alfredo Mosini, (also a Socialist, and a ministerial aide who has confessed to "a moment of weakness" while director of the city's main Fate-benefratelli Hospital. A third Socialist politician, Matteo Carriera, who has run a vast public building agency called ITAB since 1976, has been called to testify under warrant and was arrested yesterday, along with two other officials.

A member of the Christian Democrat national executive, Roberto Mongini is also being held — he is another director of the Fatebenefratelli and the airports authority, also under investigation. All are charged with corruption and abuse of office.

But the rot extends far beyond the misdeeds covered by the formal charges laid to date.

The labyrinth of companies controlled by Mr Lasagni, Mr Rovati and another man, Gabriele Mazzalveri, have been involved in some of the most important and expensive spending programmes in Milan's recent history. Mr Mazzalveri's lawyer said on Monday that his client had "told everything" and confessed to paying "hundreds of millions of lire" to politicians for contracts including work on the metro system and Milan's airports.

Above all, there was the upgrading of the great San Siro soccer stadium for the 1990 World Cup. Improvements were initially budgeted at £32 million, but the cost rose to £90 million (Barcelona's Olympic Stadium cost £40 million).

The trio's ATM consortium was involved in the "stadium built in gold", as it came to be called, under the supervision of the current secretary of the Lombardy Socialist Party, Bruno Falconieri, who was recorded describing San Siro as "the Oxford of all contracts".

Mr Falconieri said this week that the stadium spending was  "in order and well documented".

Interrogations of the eight businessmen revealed that the bribes were earmarked for political campaigns — mainly the Socialists' — right up to and including the general election of three weeks ago.

Just who is has been receiving the money at the apex of the party should be revealed soon. According to sources, "there are two or three names in circulation" and Mr Chiesa is said to be ready to supply the names of more businessmen and "political controllers at the top level". Some sources say that the inquiry is closing in on Bettino Craxi's closest political circles.

"Milan: national capital of bribery", wrote the Milanese newspaper Corriere Della Sera this week. "The city of ‘Made in Italy', of the Scala Opera House and of the theatres is filthy."

To those familiar with police-community relations in Los Angeles all of this was predictable, It is the inevitable explosion that will result when unanswered cases are allowed to fester until they become social dynamite.

For years now there has been a steady stream of complaints against the Los Angeles police department and its chief, Daryll Gates, alleging a policy of excessive use of force when arresting criminal suspects. These complaints, however, generally came to nothing when brought before a police review board dominated by officials from the police hierarchy.

Repeated calls for an expanded review board that would include civilians have gone unheeded. Exacerbating this already unfavourable situation was the fact that most complainants in a police brutality case have not been able to provide sufficient evidence to support criminal charges against officers of the law.

That was why the Rodney King case was welcomed by civil libertarians. The brutality long acknowledged against the LA police department was finally captured live on video tape. When the images of Rodney King, sprawled on the ground being viciously clubbed by a group of white cops, were broadcast on the national television it elicited outrage from all sectors of the public including the Oval Office.

For millions of Americans witnessing the event it was a prima facie case of police brutality. This was why the announcement of a not guilty verdict provoked shock and outrage across the nation and led to an immediate outburst of rioting in Los Angeles, with echoes as far away as Michigan and Texas.

The question that demanded an answer was how the jury could arrive at a not guilty verdict when all the world saw the evidence on television. The normally cautious David Dinkins, mayor of New York City, was moved to remark: "As a lawyer I'm hesitant to comment, not having seen all the evidence. But from what I saw on the tapes and read in the press it looked like an open and shut case of police brutality."

Mr Bush, who expressed outrage at the King case more than a year ago as thousands of black soldiers were returning from the Persian Gulf, yesterday made it clear that arson and looting would be suppressed by any means necessary.

Mr Gates's contribution was to call the looters "gang members and drunks who were just waiting on an opportunity". It is difficult to believe that more blood — mainly black blood — will not be spilled.

The factors leading up to the present crisis in Los Angeles are not unique to that city. There are similar problems with white police brutality, and the lack of legal redress for black victims, in every major American metropolis. Some lawyers, both black and white, believe that American society is so racially polarised at present, that it is nearly impossible to find a predominantly white jury who will convict white policemen for the abuse of their authority by using excessive violence against blacks and other non-white minorities.

Bill Farrell, an Irish Catholic lawyer and writer who has written about white supremacy groups, concludes from his observations: "The question of venue was everything in this case. The minute they got the trial moved from Los Angeles to the Simi Valley the cops had won.

"This is a white, middle-class, pro-cop community. Many active and retired white cops live there. The only people in this immunity who deal with minorities on a regular basis are the policemen. And they deal mostly with criminals. My research has shown that your average all-white jury is not going to convict white cops when the victims are black".

Martin Garbus, one of America's premier trial lawyers, says "This was a great victory for the cops. It demonstrates once again that juries don't vote on the law, and rarely vote on the facts, they vote on their biases and prejudices".

Garbus also agrees that it was a racist decision and that this decision was largely assured when they changed the venue from Los Angeles County.

Though many whites have expressed outrage at this verdict and have publicly denounced it as a racist sham, others are equivocal on the role of racism, or else deny its existence altogether. In a nationally televised telephone interview on NBC's Today show yesterday an anonymous white female juror said that she was perfectly satisfied with the verdict and that "race played no role at all in our decision." This was enough to cause the normally cool and placid Bryant Gumble, the black host of the programme, visibly to lose his cool.

Gerald Horne, a professor and attorney who is running for the US Senate in California, said of the result, "The whole criminal justice process has been racialised. I think the defence lawyers succeeded in characterising this as a case of protecting the thin blue line that is civilisation's only defence against barbarism."

It should be remembered that the acquittal of the police in this case follows a long-standing pattern, a recent example of which was the effective slap on the wrist given to a Korean grocer for the murder of a 15-year-old black girl whom she shot in the back because she thought the teenager had stolen a bottle of fruit juice.

The grocer was sentenced by a white judge to a few months of community service. This incident occurred in Compton, California, just a few miles away from the present conflict.

Every day, new areas of proletarian defiance of bourgeois-imperialist authority emerge. Yesterday the people of Bangkok faced the bullets in order to tell their pro-imperialist racketeers to get out. The day before, the masses in Nigeria went on the rampage over unemployment and corruption. The day before that Irish workers in Coalisland openly taunted the British police-military dictatorship to get out of their country. Tomorrow, the anti-imperialist struggle could flare up in any one or scores more countries.

And what will the imperialist bourgeoisie do about it? Nothing but plunge on uncontrollably towards renewed inter-imperialist warmongering armageddon, totally confused by insoluble economic crisis and trade war, and incurably drawn towards hate-filled chauvinistic recriminations against each other, matched by arms-race anarchy over which even those controlling it have no real control - as the bourgeois media itself describes:

PRESIDENT Bush has made the US the world's "pre-eminent arms pusher" in the past 12 months, congressional Democrats claim. This is despite his insistence at the end of the Gulf war that he wanted to halt the international arms race, they say.

After disclosures that the Pentagon has spent millions of dollars helping US defence contractors to sell their products at foreign trade fairs air shows during the past year, Senator Joe Biden has demanded an official investigation by general accounting office watchdogs.

He said recently: "This policy is the ultimate perk for Pentagon contractors. Nothing could more effectively undermine our ability to lead a multilateral effort to slow the worldwide proliferation of destabilising weapons."

He said he wanted to know exactly how much public money had been used to transport and exhibit US military hardware at six trade shows held in the past 12 months.

According to Lt-Gen Teddy Allen, director of the Pentagon's defence security assistance agency, the US defence industry sold weaponry worth a record $22 billion (£13 billion) to foreign governments in 1991, a 64 per cent increase over the year before. In a recent interview, Gen Allen described US arms export sales as "the only growth industry in town".

Pentagon officials confirmed that the derision to give financial assistance to US arms exporters was made at a meeting last spring chaired by the defence secretary, Dick Cheney.

The officials said the Pentagon co-ordinated weapons displays and sales helped to promote US global security goals and compensated US contractors for cutbacks in domestic military spending. They also claimed that West European countries gave similar subsidies.

In March last year, at the end of the war with Iraq, Mr Bush said he hoped to see a slowdown in the proliferation of weapons of all kinds. He said that, in particular, "it would be tragic if the nations of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf were now...to embark on a new arms race".

This week, the US hosted the opening in Washington of multilateral talks on curbing arms proliferation in the Middle East

But critics said the administration had effectively cashed in on the exposure given to US weapons by the Gulf war. The largest part of the 1991 increase in US arms sales abroad concerned exports to Middle Eastern countries such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.

A Californian Democrat, Howard Berman, yesterday joined in the attack on what he called the administration's double standard. He said he would introduce a legislative amendment preventing public money from being used to subsidise US arms contractors' foreign sales drives.

"I find it more than a little ironic...that at the same moment the president is making strident noises about curbing arms sales in the Third World, his administration has made the US the pre-eminent arms pusher worldwide."

One example of administration assistance to US exporters concerned the Singapore air show earlier this year. Gen Allen said that it cost $400,000 to transport one helicopter to the show. Thirteen other Pentagon aircraft were also sent, including a Marine Corps jump jet. The jet, costing $30 million, crashed on the way back to its base in Japan.

So for this year, the US has announced, or said it was considering, sales of sophisticated weaponry to countries as diverse as Finland and Argentina, The administration has relaxed export licence controls on a wide range of high-technology products with military applications.

IT WAS a long war, the cold war. Its impact was as profound upon the West as it ever was upon the now pitied and broken East — even if it has not suited the victors to draw too much attention to how much their own political economy was dependent upon it.

Italian domestic politics, for example, together with the United States' willingness to absorb mountainous Japanese exports, were cold war phenomena as much as cruise missiles and spies. Now that it has disappeared the West has lost both a political compass and economic ballast; not to mention a rival-ideology which defined the political left and right in Asia, Europe and the US.

In Italy the link between the cold war and domestic political stability was perhaps most obvious, if understated; the ideological rivalry between the Communist and Christian Democrat Parties exactly mirrored that between the two super-powers. Italian communism, had always distanced itself from its Soviet sibling, but not so much that the Christian democrats could not use it as the hostile enemy against which to build successive anti-communist governing coalitions. Christian democracy, for all its failings, could present itself as the party of Nato, civilisation and the West

Communism's demise has cut the ground from beneath the Italian Communist Party, reducing its legitimacy and ideological appeal. Despite a name change its vote has fallen calamitously; and now the force which has compelled the fissiparous Italian parties to cohere has collapsed — and with it order in Italian politics. A governing coalition has to be formed that will reduce the Italian budget deficit to meet the terms of the Maastricht Treaty; but without the mission to exclude the Communist Party, can a deal be brokered between the Christian democrats and the rest?

Nor is it only Italian Christian democrats who have reason to rue bygone days. The US political establishment defined its relation both to the rest of the world-and its domestic electorate through the prism of the cold war. From the Marshall Plan through Vietnam to Star Wars, successive US administrations made anti-communism the lodestar of their foreign and defence policies. Presidents could enlarge their power in the name of national security, even awarding themselves a war-making competence that had eluded their predecessors.

The federal government could augment its power against the states; and the Pentagon become the vehicle for an industrial policy otherwise prohibited by the language of free markets. For the Republicans it was a long run trump against New Dealism, with the fear of being tarred as communists setting an upper limit to Democrats' ambitions to construct a European style welfare state. Both parties found themselves supporting the individualistic capitalism that has proved so destructive of US industry — anything else was to make concessions to Moscow. Without the cold war, could Republican victories been so frequent?

American prosecution of the war was total. As the occupying power in Japan, the US constructed not only a constitution that strictly constrained Japanese defence spending and grounded political power in the Diet, but connived with the Japanese right in suppressing communist unions and leftwing parties. To build up a bulwark against communism along the Asian littoral the Americans invented the Liberal Democratic Party, Japanese consensual politics and sponsored export growth to the US.

Toyota as much as Sony, therefore, are partly creatures of the cold war. Without their access to US export markets they could never have established the production runs upon which to lower their unit costs. And without the need to support Japanese growth the US would not have indulged the flagrant protectionism and subsidy that allowed Japanese industry to reach world pre-eminence. The greater enemy was communism; and if the US ran an exploding trade deficit with Japan so be it.

In Europe, too, Germany was a cold war construction. Its famous constitution was drawn up along the US model so that another Hitler would be all but impossible; and like Japan its military potential was constitutionally limited to self-defence.

On the front line against Comecon and partitioned, it developed as an economic giant and political pygmy.

GERMANY became the EC's paymaster, content to leave the political leadership to the French and thereby securing French adherence to the so-called European project — understood in Paris to be co-determinous with French aims to run Europe. The US could indulge the Common Agricultural Policy; if that was part of the price of building up a western bulwark to Soviet ambition, again the greater gain was superpower containment

As for Germany, its politicians found that the combination of well-defined political limits and economic strength allowed them the funds to look in two political directions at once. Ostpolitik might cut across the rivalry of the blocs, but as the ties were economic rather than diplomatic or military that could be allowed. And as a loyal member of the western alliance, Germany's chequebook could always be trusted to be as open in the West at it was in the East

At the same time the lack of ideological and foreign policy options underpinned the consensual social market ideologies of the two great domestic parties, the Christian and social democrats. Where else could so little divide two great political parties that they could govern in a grand alliance as the CDU and SPD did in the late 1960s?

But this structure and culture cannot bear the load placed on it by Germany's new found status. Chancellor Kohl has found that Germany can no longer afford not to make political choices and simply pay allcomers what they demand; the claims of the EC budget, the CAP, East Germany, transfers to Eastern Europe, and payments to the Russians have forced a well-documented explosion in Germany's budget deficit present and projected — no more can be found. Equally, the consensual political structure is producing stasis over budgetary savings; and consensual wage bargaining is breaking down before the demands of German workers to maintain their living standards. The Bundesbank, like Sony and Toyota, is finding that its success depended on cold war structures being in place. Never before has it had to arbitrate between such a dash between monetary and fiscal policy to impose its counter-inflationary discipline; and it could always rely on the good sense of German workers. But then Germany during the cold war never had to confront the budgetary consequences of being the central state at the heart of Europe.

In short the entire economic and political furniture of the post war years is dissolving before our eyes — and the Japanese and Europeans in their different ways are being forced to accommodate a new reality. Without the cold war, are the Japanese trade surpluses with the US any longer endurable? Can the Italian state confront its endemic tendency to fracture? Can Germany play its appointed role as Europe's anchor of monetary and price stability? What is the EC itself now for?

In the Group of Seven meetings of industrialised countries and in the interminable Uruguay round of trade talks the fissures are obvious. National interests are back; and there is no common enemy to unite the West. Was the cold war the golden age, when communism absolved the capitalist powers from rivalries that may now prove irreconcilable, and created reputations that can no longer hold?

For years the Germans have been led to believe by their neighbours that their respectability depends on their subordinating their national interest to the joint decisions of the Community. It is better that that pretence be stopped. A reunited Germany can't and won't subordinate its national interests in economic or in foreign policy to those of the Community indefinitely. Whether rightly or wrongly exercised, Germany's new pre-eminence is a fact.

[Germany is] best accommodated in a looser Europe in which individual nation states retain their freedom of action. [A common foreign policy] is liable to express the interests of the largest single actor. The Commission...hopes to construct a centralised super-state in advance — and irrevocably — so that new members will have to apply for entry on federalist terms. And it's just not on.

Imagine a European Community of 30 nations ranging in their economic productivity from Germany to Ukraine and in their political stability from Britain to Poland — all governed from Brussels, all enforcing the same conditions of work, all having the same worker rights as German unions, all subject to the same interest rates, monetary and economic policies, all agreeing on a common foreign and defence policy and all accepting the authority of an executive and a remote foreign parliament over '80 per cent of economic and social legislation'.

Such a body is an even more Utopian enterprise than the Tower of Babel.

If the EC proceeds in the direction which the majority of member state governments and the Commission seem to want, they will create a structure which brings insecurity, unemployment, national resentment and ethnic conflict. Insecurity because Europe's protectionism will strain and possibly sever the link with the US on which the security of the continent ultimately depends.

Unemployment because the pursuit of policies of regulation will increase costs and price European workers out of jobs. National resentment because a single currency will leave the electorate of a country angry and powerless to change its conditions. Ethnic conflict because not only will the wealthy countries be faced with waves of immigration from the south and from the east, also...a single currency will have one of two consequences. Either there will have to be a massive transfer of money from one country to another, which will not in practice be affordable. Or there will be massive migration from the less successful to the more successful countries.

[There has been] a refusal throughout Europe to debate the issues which really matter. This silent understanding, this Euro snobbism, between politicians, bureaucracies, academics, journalists and businessmen is destructive of honest debate.

Thatcher's enraged outburst against creeping EEC federalism is not as out-of-touch as some uneasy commentators have pretended. Monopoly-capitalist circles' internationally are becoming increasingly sceptical about even the simplest inter-state collaboration in the light of the trade-war's cut-throat competitive reality.

Domineering uneven development, which is what Thatcher is campaigning about, has always been the result of 'free-market' anarchy. And inter-imperialist warmongering recriminations have always been the outcome of all trade-war big-power manoeuvring. 

But to lead the working-class revolt against this degenerate philistine anarchy, there must be scientific understanding which puts all of these class-war crisis issues in their historical perspective, and which above all grasps the true revolutionary significance of this century's earlier titanic anti-imperialist developments of the states of proletarian dictatorship.

Continuing colossal anti-communist deceptions by the imperialist bourgeoisie's propaganda dictatorship over the planet, aided and abetted by the petty-bourgeois fake-'left' with their hatred of real proletarian rule, points the way towards renewing the struggle for revolutionary theory and parties of Leninist leadership. Without a full understanding of the Leninist theory of proletarian dictatorship, the working-class forces will remain divided everywhere, and the anti-imperialist fight will be left to hit-or-miss spontaneity. Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin. Gerry Mole