Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 680 Monday December 21 1992                                                                                                               10p 

Yeltsin's troubles worry the West. Trots try to rescue anti-communism. Hamas tries to head off Marxism. CIA propaganda tries new blitz on Serbia.

The growing crisis surrounding Yeltsin's reactionary leadership of the remnants of the Soviet workers state in Russia is causing great concern to all the falsifiers of the history of the Bolshevik Revolution who thought they had got its influence well and truly buried.

The poisonous anti-communists of the bourgeois press who specialise in anti-Peking propaganda are particularly demoralised at the moment:

CHINA, the last champion of Communism, must have enjoyed the sight of Boris Yeltsin — the man who has been pounding nails into Lenin's coffin — rushing home to confront his left-wing adversaries.

As he was leaving Yeltsin displayed a frightening ignorance of international affairs by admitting that he had imagined a China of 20 years ago,'where people march to work singing songs and march home without singing'.

More pointedly the Russian President admitted that there is food in China's shops and that the deliberate pace of Chinese reform, in which politics remains essentially untouched,  shows that 'Russia doesn't need revolutions or cataclysms either'.

Yeltsin came to Peking primarily as a well-stocked arms salesman. He indicated he is keen to sell more weapons to Peking, deepening fears among south-east Asian nations that China is bent on turning vast stretches of the eastern Pacific into a Chinese lake.

The contrast between this Sino-Soviet summit and the last marks ground into the paving stones on the night of 3-4 June 1989 have been buffed away.

In 1989 the swaggering Gorbachev made his Chinese hosts appear weak and embattled. For Deng and Li — for whose overthrow the demonstrators were shouting in unison — the Gorbachev visit was a humiliation and a bother.

It was equally plain from watching Gorbachev's stiff conversations with Deng and Li, and his amiable chats with the reformist Zhao, why the demonstrators had put up signs welcoming his visit.

Now the Tiananmen leaders are either dead, in jail or in exile; Gorbachev is finished, Deng and Li are riding high, Yeltsin is fighting for survival, and the hardliners are edging their way into power in Moscow. There is no warmth for Yeltsin in Peking and this is no new Sino-Soviet bloc. The ancient revolutionaries of Deng's coterie, who once saw the Soviet Union as their elder brother, have passed through too many decades of what they see as Russian betrayal.

one could not be more dramatic or, to liberals in Moscow and Peking, more depressing. In May 1989 Gorbachev's press spokesman told The Observer:'The boss hopes the next time he comes to Peking, he won't have to see these guys.'

He was pointing at photographs of senior leader Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng. Last week Deng and Li were still in place while Gorbachev and his ally, the then party general secretary Zhao Ziyang, are lying near the bottom of history's rubbish bin.

When Gorbachev visited Peking the city was gripped by the Tiananmen demonstrations. So uncertain were China's security men of their visitor's safety, not to say his impressions or Chinese stability, that they cancelled the usual grand welcome in front of the square's Great Hall of the People.
	
Last week President Yang Shangkun welcomed Yeltsin, regularly reviled in Peking as one of the arch destroyers of Communism, not at the airport but in the Great Hall. Outside in Tiananmen, the tank tread

But other middle-class opponents of proletarian dictatorship are in continuing difficulty too, such as the neurotic followers of Trotsky's ultra-left extreme subjectivism.

The Spart variant of this academic 'theory' is more troubled than most by the embarrassment for Trotskyism of having helped undermine the Soviet workers state by 65 years sustained vilification of its centralised political power under the guise of wanting to 'improve' upon its planned socialist achievements.

So its wealthy American headquarters last month produced a cleaned-up version of Trotsky's demented attacks on the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This sought to stress (against Gould, a prominent US bourgeois biology scientist who has been dabbling in Soviet history) how remarkable were the successes in building socialism in the USSR in the teeth of vicious Western sabotage and hostility, and despite the handicaps of Stalinist revisionism for leadership.

This falsification of the real damaging role played by Trotskyism in constantly vilifying the Soviet Union and its ruling party raises so many interesting points before returning to grotesque anti-Leninist abuse at the end (see below) that they are worth repeating:

Drawing on observations gleaned during a brief trip to Moscow and Leningrad last summer, he arrives at his conclusion about the "failed experiment" of Marxist economics. Gould's wrong headed conclusion is based on a misunderstanding of what Marxism represents, and ignores the whole historical development which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 1917 October Revolution and its subsequent development was no isolated lab test in a Petri dish! Any evaluation of what happened in the former USSR that leaves out the historic context, the tremendous external pressures upon it and its impact on the rest of the world, cannot be scientific, and will certainly be wrong.

Gould does not pretend to be a political theorist per se, but when he addresses such questions, we can ask that he do so with the rigor that he would apply in his own field. We doubt that he would make such sweeping statements about scientific opponents without a careful study of their works. Gould's view of the Soviet collapse reminds us a bit of a would-be biologist coming upon a mass of drowned caribou at a river crossing and, upon viewing the evidence before his eyes, pronouncing the species not viable.

Gould accepts the Stalinist caricature of Marxism as a kind of mechanistic determinism. "He was still a child of his mechanistic age," writes Gould, and "embodied a related conviction that directions of change are progressive, predictable and well-nigh inevitable." Marx "hoped for a predictive theory of history, with progressive stages proceeding in a punctuational manner from primitive communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism and finally to true communism."

This comes not from Marx but from Stalin's primer on Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 1938 edition, or one of those unreadable Soviet "diamat" manuals that present a mechanical and deterministic distortion of dialectical materialism. Marx, in his 1857-58 manuscripts on pre-capitalist economic formations, the Grundrisse, also wrote of an "Asiatic mode of production" in ancient Mesopotamia, India, China and elsewhere. Yet these writings were suppressed by the Kremlin for decades, because they didn't fit into Stalin's simplistic schema, which reduced Marxism to a pseudo-materialist catechism. In contrast, Trotsky wrote, in his speech on "Radio, Science, Technology, and Society" (March 1926):

"Liberal scholars—now they are no more—commonly used to depict the whole of the history of mankind as a continuous line of progress. This was wrong. The line of progress is curved, broken, zigzagging. Culture now advances, now declines. There was the culture of ancient Asia, there was the culture of antiquity, of Greece and Rome, then European culture began to develop, and now American culture is rising in skyscrapers."

In fact, even in the first lines of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels noted that class struggles ended "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." This is a theme which echoes throughout their later writings. Engels' 1891 introduction to Marx's The Civil War in France warned of the dangers of a European war involving tens of millions of men at arms. This was written over two decades before the cataclysm of World War I. Marx and Engels' dialectical outlook showed how existing and developing economic forces pave the way for social change but don't automatically "determine" that this or that political leadership will accomplish a particular historically possible task.	

The basic premise of Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" is that species are stable for long periods, on the multimillion-year scale of geological time, until some geographical isolation separates a formerly genetically "homogeneous" population, or some climatic change or catastrophic event opens up new niches into which new species rapidly evolve. This "punctuation" is then followed by a new stasis. The nature of the changes during the "punctuation" are governed by what Gould calls "contingency"—i.e., along the rocky road of evolution, genetic change is essentially random and nature's path unpredictable, subject to the impact of powerful environmental events.

This is fine, so far as natural history is concerned. But when Gould considers a complex social question such as the USSR, his concept of "punctuation" guts Marxism of its key factor: the "contingent" factor is not nature's random choice but rather the presence or absence of conscious leadership. Take the work Gould cites, Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx describes in great detail how at many key points in the period 1848-51, the faction-ridden French bourgeoisie could have moved to prevent Bonaparte's coup d'état. Marx lays bare that the fundamental question was a clash of class forces: the proletariat lacked the strength and leadership to take power in its own name, while the bourgeoisie, in fear of the ghosts of 1789 (and the proletarian masses of 1848), dawdled and surrendered political power to Bonaparte in order to preserve its economic class interests. And the bourgeoisie's response was no accidental fluke of "contingency"—the big financiers made a conscious choice that their sacred property was better defended by the empire than by the republic.

One might ask Gould, if Marx and Engels were such mechanical determinists, convinced that communism inevitably follows from capitalism as night from day, why then did they devote so much time to organizing a revolutionary political party, from the Communist League to the First and Second Internationals?

What does it mean, as Gould claims, that "Marx's economics has failed"? The economic system which issued out of the October Revolution proved the power of centralized planning. In describing his visit to Russia, Gould describes the Moscow subway system as "the world's best," and applauds "the wonderful paleontological museum in Moscow...one of the world's best both in content and display." How does Gould account for these achievements? Is it "Marx's economics" or capitalist market forces that are responsible for the fact that the museum is now closed indefinitely? Central planning performed wonders in transforming the Soviet Union from a backward peasant country to a modern industrial and military power that was capable of defeating the Nazi juggernaut in World War II and was the first to launch satellites into space. As American Trotskyist leader James R Cannon said in 1939:

"The Russian revolution showed in practice, by example, how the workers' revolution is to be made...by its victory, and its reorganization of the social system, the Russian revolution has proved for all time the superiority of nationalized property and planned economy over capitalist private property, and planless competition and anarchy in production."

The Civil War of 1918-20, in which 14 foreign armies invaded the young Soviet republic, devastated the country. A generation later the Nazi invaders killed 27 million Soviet citizens and turned much of Russia into scorched earth. Twice the economy was rebuilt on socialized property forms, despite the constant capitalist economic pressure, most recently manifested in a colossal arms race designed to bankrupt the Soviet economy.

So what did happen in the USSR? Where Gould claims that the Soviet collapse proved Marxism wrong, Trotsky long ago predicted that the continued domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy would necessarily lead to capitalist restoration. In his article, "The Class Nature of the Soviet State" (October 1933), he wrote: 

"The further unhindered development of bureaucratism must lead inevitably to the cessation of economic and cultural growth, to a terrible social crisis and to the downward plunge of the entire society. But this would imply not only the collapse of the proletarian dictatorship but also the end of bureaucratic domination. In place of the workers' state would come not 'social bureaucratic' but capitalist relations."

Trotsky pounded away at this theme, warning in his article "The Workers' State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism" (February 1935) that: 

"The inevitable collapse of the Stalinist political regime will lead to the establishment of Soviet democracy only in the event that the removal of Bonapartism comes as the conscious act of the proletarian vanguard. In all other cases, in place of Stalinism there could only come the fascist-capitalist counter-revolution." 

And again in his comprehensive analysis of the Stalinist degeneration, The Revolution Betrayed (1937), he sharply posed the two alternatives: 

"Will the bureaucrat devour the workers' state, or will the working class clean up the bureaucrat?"

The first point is that this is a very sanitised version of what was Trotsky's actual anti-Soviet biliousness in reality, - initially denying all possibility of building any socialism at all in the Soviet Union, and thereafter endlessly ridiculing the political heart of the USSR whenever possible, - as was analysed in ILWP Books vol 5:

Trotsky began his counter-revolutionary campaign with predictions of bureaucratic disaster in the 'New Course' in 1923 and ended it on the same note with his final writings in 1940 predicting bureaucratic disaster in the coming war with Hitler.

Every single thing he wrote in between had the same sole purpose, - to undermine confidence in the Soviet workers state by predicting its disaster as a result of its 'bureaucratic state apparatus'. And, of course, the one thing which guided the Soviet Union successfully through one of the most perilous, difficult, and heroic periods of all human history - leading eventually to the greatest achievements ever in the record of civilisation - was PRECISELY that very 'bureaucratic state apparatus', - (or the Party and State leadership of Bolshevik dictatorship, as Leninist reality describes it.)

"Bureaucratism has reached an excessive, truly alarming development," 

Trotsky starts off in Ch 1 of the 'New Course'. 

'The fact that the party lives on two separate storeys bears within it numerous dangers...

...The rapid development of private capital...would show that private capital is interposing itself more and more between the workers state and the peasantry, is acquiring an economic and therefore a political influence.... such a rupture between Soviet industry and agriculture, between the proletariat and the peasantry, would constitute a grave danger for the proletarian revolution, a symptom of the possibility of the triumph of the counter-revolution.

"What are the political paths by which the victory of the counter-revolution might come if the economic hypothesis just set forth were to be realised?...the political process would assume in the main the character of the degeneration of the state apparatus in a bourgeois direction.... If private capital increased rapidly and succeeded in fusing with the peasantry, the active counter-revolutionary tendencies directed against the Communist Party would then probably prevail....

"The counter-revolutionary tendencies can find a support among the kulaks, the middlemen, the retailers, the concessionaires, in a word, among elements much more capable of surrounding the state apparatus than the Party itself....

"...the negative social phenomena we have just enumerated and which now nurture bureaucratism could place the revolution in peril should they continue to develop.... bureaucratism in the state and party apparatus is the expression of the most vexatious tendencies inherent in our situation, of the defects and deviations in our work which...might sap the basis of the revolution...Quantity will at a certain stage be transformed into quality. (Ch 4). 

Hand-in-glove with this age-old bourgeois anti-communist propaganda trick of constantly predicting disaster for the new system as a way of trying to undermine any enthusiastic support for it, Trotsky also used the other well-known demagogic practice of 'reporting' widespread demoralisation in order to achieve precisely that consequence.

Trotskyism's claim-to-fame at the end of the 1930s (and subsequently) about having been right about 'Stalinism' all along, and of being 'for' socialism in the Soviet Union but 'against' its 'degenerate betrayal' by Stalin is, of course, the most viciously misleading nonsense, as this series demonstrates. Trotsky was against building a powerful STATE of proletarian dictatorship, the sole guarantee of socialism. He was for all kinds of subjective illusions, in which his supporters still wallow - under capitalism.

Even as early as 1936 Trotsky was already being forced to acknowledge the 'temporary' truth of enormous 'apparent' success in the USSR. This was in order not to completely lose all credibility in a world which already knew better than to believe Trotsky's basic sermon from the 1923 'New Course' onwards that only 'disaster crisis' awaited the 'doomed' Party and State 'bureaucratic' leadership of the Soviet Union. So in 'Revolution Betrayed' of that year, the latest in his periodic updates of catastrophe predictions, Trotsky felt obliged to admit:

"Gigantic achievements in industry, enormously promising beginnings in agriculture, an extraordinary growth of the old industrial cities and a building of new ones, a rapid increase of the number of workers, a rise in cultural level and cultural demands, - such are the indubitable results of the October Revolution....

"Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of 'Das Kapital' but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth's surface, - not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement, and electricity.... a backward country has achieved in less than ten years successes unexampled in history.

"This also ends the quarrel with the reformists in the workers movement. Can we compare for one moment their mouselike fussing with the titanic work accomplished by this people AROUSED TO A NEW LIFE by revolution? (Ch l)

(And then in Ch 7)

...'To be sure, the youth are very active in the sphere of economics.. In the Soviet Union there are now 1.2m Communist Youth in the collective farms. Hundreds of thousands of members of the Communist Youth have been mobilised during recent years for construction work, timber work, coal mining, gold production, for work in the Arctic, Sakhalin, or in Amur where the new town of Komsomolsk is in process of construction. The new generation is putting out shock brigades, champion workers, Stakhanovites, foremen, under-administrators. The youth are studying, and a considerable part of them are studying assiduously. They are as active, if not more so, in the sphere of athletics in its most daring or warlike farms, such as parachute jumping and marksmanship. The enterprising and audacious are going on all kinds of dangerous expeditions.

"'The better part of our youth,' said recently the well-known polar explorer, Schmidt, 'are eager to work where difficulties await them,' This is undoubtedly true."…

"..it would be a crude slander against the youth to portray them as controlled exclusively, or even predominantly, by personal interests. No, in the general mass they are magnanimous, responsive enterprising.... In their depths are various unformulated tendencies grounded in heroism and still only awaiting application. It is upon these moods in particular that the newest kind of Soviet patriotism is nourishing itself. It is undoubtedly very deep, sincere, and dynamic...'

Naturally, Trotskyism would not be Trotskyism without these gestures towards reality being accompanied in the rest of 'Revolution Betrayed' by some of the most treacherous bureaucratic demagogy (Lenin's description of Trotsky, see above) and bourgeois-idealist subjectivism ever concocted against Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet workers state.

Where he does make these begrudging concessions to the Soviet workers state, Trotsky deceitfully makes no reference at all to his 1923 'New Course' slanders that NOTHING now lay ahead but 'ossification', 'estrangement', 'morbid uneasiness', 'degeneration', and 'initiative-killing bureaucratism'. But without turning a hair, what Trotsky now admits the Soviet state has organised is "ten years successes UNEXAMPLED IN HISTORY".

From being a "smug, negative, disdainful, neglectful, cliquish, bureaucratic apparatus" capable only of "inertia" on the one hand or "antagonistic violence towards criticism" on the other, full of only "functionaries, careerists, and political hangers-on" who are so out-of-touch that they are in danger of losing majority support and dominant state influence to the counter-revolutionary tendencies among "retailers, middlemen, concessionaires, and kulaks", the Bolshevik Party and State leadership has suddenly (and unacknowledged as far as Trotsky is concerned) become capable of organising in economic, political, and social development in an illiterate, devastated, semi-feudal, historical backwater "10 years successes UNEXAMPLED IN HISTORY".

But Trotsky's belated concessions to reality and to the REAL HISTORY of the Soviet Workers State (as opposed to the West's shallow anti-communist myths) is not in order to set the record straight. His SOLE purpose in 'Revolution Betrayed' (as in numerous other rehashes of his basic reactionary sermon) is for the umpteenth time to re-launch on a 'new' basis his 'theory' of insoluble and fatal 'contradiction' and inevitable 'collapse' of the Bolshevik Party dictatorship.

Despite his 'New Course' predictions of 'unresolvable contradictions' having proved to be complete nonsense, Trotsky arrogantly, maliciously, treacherously and irresponsibly now pontificates: (Ch 11)

"The bureaucracy's autocratic rule is coming into greater and greater contradiction with the development of the productive forces of the country, just as absolute monarchy became in its time IRRECONCILABLE with the development of the bourgeois market. ...the growth of power and independence in a bureaucracy is not unlimited..."

"...the farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow....Quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative, - conditions incompatible with a TOTALITARIAN REGIME of fear, lies, and flattery...

(See Lenin's derision above for Trotsky's 1921 reactionary demagogy about summoning a 'democratic congress of producers') 

"Behind the question of quality stands a more complicated and grandiose problem which may be comprised in the concept of independent, technical, and cultural creation....No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible...The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it CEASES to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state. In that simple and unshakable historic law is contained the DEATH SENTENCE of the present political regime in the Soviet Union." 

Compare this viciously disruptive bourgeois academic nonsense to Marxism-Leninism's understanding (see Lenin quotes above) that only THROUGH the massive STRENGTHENING of the Soviet state and proletarian dictatorship to involve ever-wider sections of the population in its administration and control would the advanced, efficient, self-regulatory, disciplined society of advanced socialism and then communism be reached. This REPRESENTS the withering away of the state. It supersedes in a non-antagonistic way the very far-advanced level of human civilisation which an efficient, invincible socialist state is. Communist culture does not develop AGAINST the dictatorship of the proletariat but BECAUSE OF it.

But in 1936, nothing could contain Trotsky's demented bourgeois subjectivism and his boundless vindictiveness and disruption against the world's first workers state because it had decided to boot him out for his incorrigible egotistical factionalism.

"Stalinism and fascism... are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity....

"The improvement of the material situation of the workers does not reconcile them with the authorities; on the contrary, by increasing their self-respect and freeing their thought for general problems of politics, it prepares the way for an OPEN CONFLICT with the bureaucracy...

"The Soviet population cannot rise to a higher level of culture without freeing itself from this humiliating subjection to a caste of usurpers.... They will inevitably drive out the dishonest, impudent and unreliable watchman as soon as they see another possibility.... (Ch 11)

".. with the working class and its sincere champions among the intelligentsia...our work will actually cause doubts and evoke distrust, - not of the revolution but of its usurpers. But that is the very goal we have set ourselves. " (Appendix).

This Trotskyist 'distinction' is utterly dishonest and shallow. The 'distrust' he admitted he was deliberately evoking in the international working class INEVITABLY fell on the Soviet workers state itself (as Trotsky would have wanted and specifically spelled out in other places) and not on the narrower popular understanding of what is implied by 'usurpers'. In other words the hatred and distrust is bound to be engendered for the WHOLE concept of the Soviet Union, and in no way limited to Stalin's mistakes.

Trotsky ended his lifelong hostility to Leninism and his half-a-lifetime's dedication to 'evoking distrust of the Soviet workers state' with his most outrageous attempt to spread defeatist demoralisation in 1940, almost gleefully predicting fascism's triumph over the Soviet regime:

"We always started from the facts that the international policy of the Kremlin was determined by the new aristocracy's....incapacity to conduct a war.

...the ruling caste is no longer capable of thinking about tomorrow. Its formula is that cf all doomed regimes: 'after us the deluge'....

"The war will topple many things and many individuals. Artifice, trickery, frame-ups and treasons will prove of no avail in escaping its severe judgment. (Statement to the British capitalist press on 'Stalin-Hitler's Quartermaster')....

"Stalin cannot make a war with discontented workers and peasants and with a decapitated Red Army." ('German-Soviet Alliance').

"The level of the USSR's productive forces forbids a major war.... The involvement of the USSR in a major war before the end of this period would signify in any case a struggle with unequal weapons.

"The subjective factor, not less important than the material, has changed in the last years sharply for the worse.....

"Stalin cannot wage an offensive war with any hope of victory.

"Should the USSR enter the war with its innumerable victims and privations, the whole fraud of the official regime, its outrages and violence, will inevitably provoke a profound reaction on the part of the people, who have already carried out three revolutions in this century....

"The present war can crush the Kremlin bureaucracy long before revolution breaks out in some capitalist country...." (The Twin Star: Hitler-Stalin).

With Trotsky's declared intention of evoking international distrust of the Soviet workers state among ALL workers everywhere; - and with the Soviet Union facing the monstrous threat of fascist invasion from a German imperialism which was three times more developed and powerful than the still weak and backward USSR; and with Trotsky already, having said many times (as above) that there was nothing to choose between fascism and 'Stalinism'; then the above deliberate spread of demoralisation that the Soviet workers state was about to get slaughtered, with the clear implication from Trotsky that no fate in history could be more thoroughly deserved, must rank as the most infamous treacherous attack on the world socialist revolution in all history. (For a more detailed analysis of Trotsky's deliberate spread of demoralisation to try to weaken the Soviet Workers State, read the Workers Party pamphlet: 'For a Leninist Party and World Socialist Revolution. Against Solidarity, Trotskyism, and Bureaucratic Centrism').

And once again, it is already a profound development in human HISTORY what actually happened in the Soviet workers state's war against fascism, exposing to ridicule Trotsky's degenerate bourgeois-subjective wishful thinking. Fascism, as led by German imperialism, - the greatest counter-revolutionary strategy ever assembled by imperialism to wipe out for good from the face of the earth every last trace of the Bolshevik Revolution, - fascism was CRUSHED by the Soviet workers state, led by its Party and State leadership.

Trotsky believed his own idiotic pseudo-Marxist propaganda about economic productivity and socialist culture being allegedly incompatible with an excess of proletarian dictatorship and an absence of abstract bourgeois 'democracy'.

The exact opposite was the truth (as the ILWP Books explained at great length in vol5 ten years ago) and is even more obviously the case today after the collapse of the Soviet workers state precisely because of the insane anti-Marxist revisionism of Gorbachev in deliberately dismantling the dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of abstract 'pure' (bourgeois) democracy of the ludicrous glasnost and perestroika kind which merely unleashed all manner of petty-bourgeois 'parliamentary' and extra-parliamentary opportunism.

This careful Spart censorship of Trotsky's anti-USSR quotes from the 1930s would no doubt try claiming that the recent 'removal of CPSU Bonapartism' by the Gorbachevites was far closer to a 'further development of bureaucratism' that Trotsky warned about, rather than any 'conscious act of the proletarian vanguard' which is what the Trots pretend was not only necessary but really possible.

But this is just an appalling attempt to keep on falsifying the historical record in order that Trotskyite extreme subjectivism can continue trying to look good on the opportunist fringes of the labour movement.

Slyly, the Sparts avoid pointing out that Soviet economic development was barely a dozen years old when Trotsky was making his 'Class Nature' 1933 forecast of a 'cessation of economic and cultural growth', and keep totally silent about Trotsky's further detailed predictions in the 1930s that Soviet productive forces would be fatally overshadowed in any coming war because of this 'bureaucratic straightjacket'.

But the socialist proletarian dictatorship of the USSR in the end totally outclassed the cream of bourgeois-imperialist productive efficiency of Nazi Germany, - both in material objective factors and also in the subjective factor.

The Sparts simply falsify Trotskyism's history in order to avoid dealing with this point, which utterly exposes the bogus 'science' of their subjective-extremist hero.

These middle-class anti-communist reptiles also avoid pointing out that a further 60 years went by before there was the remotest evidence to examine, - under the Gorbachev-Yeltsin liquidationist debacle, - of the Soviet workers state running into the slightest 'cessation of economic and cultural growth'.

By what sort of fraud do these Sparts on the one hand boast to the big bourgeois Gould that the Soviet workers state was 'the first modern power to launch satellites into space', but then comfort their own petty-bourgeois Trotskyite souls by continuing to champion their subjective hero's 1933 gripe against the dictatorship of the proletariat that it is leading to a 'cessation of economic and cultural growth' and to a 'downward plunge of the entire society', etc?

And by what even bigger fraud do the Sparts then themselves do a Gould and misidentify Gorbachevite liquidationism with the entire history of the Soviet proletarian dictatorship when he was the revisionist imbecile who dismantled it, just as they claim Gould misidentifies Stalinism with Marxism.

Undoubtedly, Stalinist degeneration did eventually lead to Gorbachevite liquidationism by the single route of further and further revisionist retreats from Leninist revolutionary internationalism into Popular Front class-collaborationism.

But constant criticism of the permanent petty-bourgeois class essence of revisionist defeatism should not be confused with the entirely separate requirement for unconditional support for every workers state in every single struggle with imperialism and with bourgeois ideology, - the bedrock of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary philosophy.

These posturing Sparts still stick with that old Trotskyite criminal fraud of excusing their treachery to solidarity with the socialist states (in the face of non-stop anti-communist hysteria from bourgeois ideology) by using the bogus 'scientific' formula of a 'degenerated workers state'.

The phrase may have some occasional harmless descriptive value. But as pseudo science, it is just a piece of ridiculous impressionism (brainless middle-class subjective idealism), and a quite deliberate deception on workers everywhere to try to justify old-fashioned anti-Sovietism with a false 'Marxist' label.

The workers state is the dictatorship of the proletariat, and however great the revisionist decline in its leadership, the class interests of any workers state in any confrontation with imperialist counter-revolution or bourgeois ideology, are all that counts as far as Marxism-Leninism is concerned.

Trotskyism was disgraced for all time by its foul solidarity with a series of counter-revolutionary putsches in East Europe organised by the CIA and the Vatican millions in the post-1945 period, - ending up with the openly fascist Solidarnosc in Poland, and the openly pro-capitalist liquidationist Civic Forum and Velvet Revolution degeneracy in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc.

Only the Sparts still try to deny this Trotskyite capitulation to capitalist counter-revolution, and once again they try to do so by means of another outrageous piece of historical falsification, - the deliberate suppression of one year in the Sparts' life from August 1980 to the next summer when they finally abandoned their own support for Solidarnosc when they realised at last that Lech Walesa's fascism was becoming too obvious for even the neurotic Trot subjective maniacs to overlook for much longer, no matter how much they wished the fake 'rank-and-file Polish trade union' well in its bitter anti-communism, organised from Washington, and financed by the Vatican. Not one word have the Sparts ever uttered about this telltale support of theirs for Walesa's fascist anti-communism. And not one word are they likely to utter, either.

The second point about this attempted clean-up of Trotsky's basic anti-Sovietism is that the Sparts are still only intervening in these detailed discussions of USSR historical developments as a mere opportunist ruse.

Their real belief remains that socialism should never even have been attempted in the USSR, and that it never really got going anyway.

Dropping their historically sanitised guard for a moment, the modern Sparts go on to blurt:

The idea that "socialism" could be built in a single country (and a backward one at that), surrounded by imperialist enemies, is a nationalist perversion of Marxism.

Stalin's dogma of "socialism in one country" was the ideological afterbirth of a political counter-revolution which defeated Leninist internationalism and brought to power a nationalist bureaucratic caste.

Lenin himself dealt more than adequately with this deranged petty-bourgeois defeatism, which really sums up the counter-revolutionary class essence of Trotskyism for all time:

In 1916 in his 'Military programme of proletarian revolution', Lenin wrote: 

"The victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all war in general. On the contrary, it presupposes wars. The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in different countries.

It cannot be otherwise under commodity production. From this it follows irrefutably that socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will for some time remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois. This is bound to create not only friction but a direct attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the socialist state's victorious proletariat....."

Via hundreds more incisive analyses of how socialism was in fact developing, and likely to continue developing in the REAL world, Lenin reached the final public speech of his epoch-making contribution to human history, a speech to the Moscow Soviet which ended with the words:

"We have approached the very core of the everyday problems, and that is a tremendous achievement. Socialism is no longer a matter of the distant future, or an abstract picture, or an icon. Our opinion of icons is the same, - a very bad one. We have brought socialism into everyday life and must here see how matters stand. That is the task of our day, the task of our epoch. Permit me to conclude by expressing confidence that difficult as this task may be, new as it may be compared with our previous task, and numerous as the difficulties may be that it entails, we shall all, - not in a day, but in a few years, - all of us together fulfil it whatever the cost, so that NEP Russia will become socialist Russia." (November 21, 1922).

And just a few weeks later in writing about the first steps towards cooperative farming and other cooperative enterprises in the Soviet economy, Lenin wrote even more specifically: 

"The power of the state over all large-scale means of production, political power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured proletarian leadership of the peasantry, etc., - is this not all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society out of cooperatives, out of cooperatives alone......it is all that is necessary and sufficient for it."

But in the same year, 1922, when Trotsky was already preparing his factional attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik Party and Soviet state leadership (first launched with his 'New Course' pamphlet at the end of 1923) Trotsky reiterated his demoralised middle class defeatism about the possibility of building socialism in the USSR, (later rationalised into ceaseless counter-revolutionary denunciation and vilification of the USSR.)

In a new postscript of a new edition of his 'Peace Program' pamphlet, Trotsky wrote: 

"The assertion reiterated several times in the 'Peace Program' that a proletarian revolution cannot culminate victoriously within national bounds may perhaps seem to some readers to have been refuted by the nearly five years' experience of our Soviet republic. But such a conclusion would be unwarranted. The fact that the workers state has held out against the whole world in one country, and a backward country at that, only testifies to the colossal night of the proletariat, which in other more advanced more civilised countries will be truly capable of performing miracles. 

But while we have held our ground as a state politically and militarily, we have not arrived, or even begun to arrive, at the building of a socialist society. As long as the bourgeoisie remains in power in the other European countries we will be compelled, in our struggle against economic isolation, to strive for agreement with the capitalist world; - at the same time it may be said with certainty that these agreements may at best help us to mitigate some of our economic ills, to take one or another step forward; but real progress of a socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the major European countries." 

It is the hallmark of petty-bourgeois subjectivism to turn an inability and unwillingness to see the world as it really is into a defeatist despair to see everything destroyed, as a demented and belated 'justification' of original hopelessly out-of-touch anticipations. In this way have the Trotskyists become the most rabid haters and vilifiers of the socialist states, utterly bankrupt themselves to build a successful revolutionary movement anywhere, but all the more determined therefore to help the comfortable capitalist 'free' world to slander and undermine the socialist camp.

Everything about Trotskyism is phony, and their subjective posturing can be heard and seen in everything they do, if it is listened to carefully enough.

What sort of wishful-thinking daydreamers could be bothered writing in November 1992 the following drivel:

Had the German proletariat made its October, subsequent history would have been very different. The isolation of the Soviet Union would have been broken and the way opened for socialist revolutions throughout Europe, cutting off the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy. And a certain Austrian-born corporal would have spent the rest of his days hanging out in Munich beer halls.

But that's not the way it worked out, and mankind has suffered greatly with the outcome.

It is certainly true that the line of historical progress of society is not a smooth unbroken one, but goes up and down in zigzags. But what is this notion of everyone having a good cry over the last 70 years of human history?

They have seen the most exhilarating triumphs in the whole record of civilisation, - the establishment of the world's first workers state as the world's most powerful state, - the spread of revolution to the world's most populous state and most ancient culture - China, - and the development of communist and other successful anti-imperialist struggle to every other part of the world, - all of this putting in view at last, for the first time in human history, the perspective of a rational world society of scientific humanism and an end to the class-divided, warmongering, race-hatred, supernatural-spirit-ridden pre-history of mankind.

And just as academic in its way, as that bleak view that 20th century history has caused 'mankind to suffer greatly', is their Trot ultra-left posturing over the most recent debacles in the former Soviet workers state:

In his own way, Gould sees something that we have insisted on since Yeltsinite counter-revolution gained the ascendancy in August 1991: that this ushered in an unstable interregnum. From our statement then that Moscow workers should have torn down Yeltsin's barricades, to our call for workers committees to seize control over food supplies last winter, we have called for workers political revolution to sweep away the capitalist-restorationist regimes and place the proletariat in power.

Still this parrot cry for the stale old 'political revolution' just to prove how 'Marxist' these Sparts are, - another totally bogus 'scientific' fiction from the Trots.

Workers committees will hopefully seize power sooner or later, but just sloganising for it brings precisely zero progress to that development.

Having postured earlier about 'leadership' being, truly, the essential historical ingredient for the advance of socialist revolution, the Sparts then fail to explain the nature of world-perspective revolutionary theory as the essence of that leadership; and, more to the point, what that perspective should be now, and should have been throughout the period under discussion.

And Trotsky's non-stop clownish subjective errors do not remotely come close to the leadership wisdom that was needed throughout this period. Leninism is the theory which alone can provide the necessary leadership for the socialist revolution (see Lenin's writings against Trotsky, 450 pp, Progress, 1972).

Under Lenin, mistakes were dealt with promptly and frankly in the first years of the Soviet workers state, and all manner of highly complex domestic and international difficulties were found solutions to.

What was needed then was a rational continuation of struggling as best possible, openly and honestly, with all the further complications of completing the world socialist revolution.

What happened was a retreat from the most advanced revolutionary theory into bureaucratic defeatism. But who could really have done better apart from Lenin himself, had he lived and not died of stroke complications from a feminist fake-'left' assassin's bullet.?

But far worse was the worldwide petty-bourgeois anti-communist reaction which these Soviet revisionist difficulties helped to create. Stalinism led to many sad but ultimately solvable problems. Anti-communist poison worldwide has, through the influence of Trotskyites and others, polluted generations of workers everywhere. That is the real 'suffering' of the 20th century.

It is in anti-communist hysteria and sabotage that 99.99% of all the worst historical falsifications and arbitrary crimes of the 20th century have originated, - as was touched upon by ILWP Books vol 5 in 1982:

Compared to the criminal cover-ups and institutionalised lack of accountability of the 'free' world capitalist states for their endless crimes against humanity such as the Vietnam war, the build-up of Hitler fascism, two world wars, endless counter-revolutionary overthrows of progressive regimes, etc, etc, - the 65 years of Soviet history have been a revolutionary open book of minute examination, criticism, and removal of leaders - and not only in the majority of that time (either side of Stalin's 20-year-period of unrivalled ascendancy) but also during Stalin's period itself.

The need for unconditional solidarity with the 'Kremlin regime', - while in no way reducing the requirement to expose, analyse, and learn from every mistake, - asserts the rootedness in Soviet historical conditions of Stalinism.

There is a world of difference between stressing this and the completely false assertion that 'Stalinism was inevitable', an anti-Marxist philosophical approach.

It was precisely the need better to understand the real material political and economic circumstances (of the Bolshevik Revolution and the world socialist revolution) that alone could have continued Lenin's masterly leadership through the indescribable hardships and difficulties of Soviet Russia's survival, after Lenin's premature death, thereby possibly helping to soften the bitterness and sharpness of the internal struggles of the Soviet workers state and avoid some of the more tragic injustices and errors.

The Soviet socialist revolution that had to be fought for in reality, however, was the multi-million struggling mass, - with all its faults and weaknesses, - that was left AFTER Lenin's death, - struggling with an already-hard-to-control bureaucratic-conservative framework and surrounded by the unexpected durability of the imperialist system and the unexpected strength of counter-revolutionary revisionist ideology.

This emphasises how in the Russia of the time there was no comparison between the prodigious genius of Lenin and the abilities of the rest of the Bolshevik leadership, not that Stalinism was inevitable.

But it also emphasises that such a high level of mastery and understanding did NOT emerge after Lenin's death, - or anything like it, - from any quarter. Individual points of correct criticism - in retrospect sounding very 'far-sighted' or 'wise' sometimes - can be found among all the factions and pretenders to the Soviet leadership. But the historical record shows, - led by Lenin's demolition of Trotsky's inability to grasp how socialism had to be built and the proletariat's Party dictatorship and alliance with the peasantry implemented (in the trade union debate), - that the overwhelming majority of the Party and the working class CORRECTLY united around the Stalinist majority leadership in the DECISIVE all-out struggle after Lenin's death. Stalin as an individual would no doubt have been inclined towards authoritarian arbitrariness anyway, (although no more than Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, as individual egotists, had shown signs of being.)

But what conspired to give Stalin's particular limitations such a prominent historical role later on was largely the hopelessly subjective and sectarian factionalising and INCORRECT policies of the other groups in the post-Lenin period. (See past Bulletin analyses of the hopelessly wrong policies of the most 'talented' anti-Leninist pretender - Trotsky).

Notions that Stalin's personality cult and authoritarianism were 'necessary' because of the peculiar cultural backwardness of the semi-feudal vastnesses and poverty of the Tsarist empire run into the same philosophical objections as the 'Stalinism was inevitable' argument smacking of anti-Marxist fatalism and ruling out that better understanding based on a higher level of Leninist struggle could have provided the needed leadership without the damaging weaknesses of the Stalinist leadership.

What is needed now against the wretched remnants of Gorbachev-Yeltsin liquidationism extending Stalin's initial retreats from Leninism, is not subjective ultra-left rehash of all Trotsky's old mistakes, demanding instant idealistic revolutionary fireworks in all directions all at once in that hopeless totally academic way which marked down Trotskyism as a lifetime of complete failure until August 1917, the day he pretended to accept the correctness of the Bolshevik Party with his tail between his legs. What is needed is a serious correct review of Soviet history in struggle with the international balance of class forces hitherto favouring imperialism but soon destined at last to give majority support worldwide to further development of communist revolution.

The Sparts' faint Trotskyite praise of Soviet revolutionary achievements is just cynical humbug, providing them with an opportunity for continuing their own empty ultra-left posturing.

When international solidarity was needed in practice to try to reduce the anti-communist hysteria created to back Polish counter-revolution in 1980, for example, or Hungarian counter-revolution in 1956, etc, all the Trots lined up with bourgeois-idealist anti-communism.

To this day, the Sparts cannot get the shit off their boots from flourishing so long knee-deep in anti-Soviet slanders and provocations of the 'Stalinism is the syphilis of the labour movement' kind, branding Moscow as imperialism's 'main counter-revolutionary agency' among workers for decades, leading the Trots to criminally betray from day one the heroic Cuban socialist revolution.

But while these middle-class Trot 'revolutionary' posturers go on feigning 'support' for the better achievements of Soviet history but continue ignoring Cuba's real-life titanic anti-imperialist struggle, this remaining bastion of the socialist camp keeps up its defiance of the America monopoly-bourgeoisie's armed tyranny, - as in this speech in October at the UN General Assembly by Castro's foreign minister Ricardo Alarcón:-

‘This Assembly is taking place in crucial and definitive times. Now, as 500 years ago, we are faced with attempts to remake the world and establish a different order of relations among states. Today as yesterday, we must determine whether the future will allow human solidarity to flourish, or whether it will be riddled with selfishness; whether it will lead to the eventual emancipation of the dispossessed, or will perpetuate their tragedy forever; whether we are embarking on another colonialist adventure, or whether hope will finally open its arms to the poor of this earth.

In the same way that the existence of the cold war did nothing to change the Third World's fortune, its disappearance is showing no signs of benefiting the Third World's peoples... There is nothing that allows us to imagine that the present circumstances of unipolarity and hegemony will produce more favourable effects for our peoples. On the contrary, we are presented with even greater dangers, given the triumphal bravado of those who at once possess the greatest military power, insuperable historical ignorance, and the crassest moral insensitivity.

If there really does exist a spirit of international cooperation and if the cold war has really ended, why don't the great powers drastically reduce their military spending and channel these freed resources toward the development of underdeveloped countries? How can it be explained that now, of all times, there is an attempt to relegate international development cooperation to an even lower and more hypothetical level, to limit even more the United Nation's already diminished participation in it, And to furthermore establish unacceptable conditions and restrictions on development?

For the majority of the planet's inhabitants, the mutations of relations between the countries of the North mean nothing. If there is some desire for them to become significant to them, resolute and effective action against the hunger and poverty that flagellate hundreds of millions of people in the Third World must be undertaken. There must be action against children's malnutrition and the curable diseases that kill thousands of children each day in a permanent and silent war that some prefer to ignore.

The economic crisis, the Third World's foreign debt - which has already reached $1.5 trillion -unequal terms of trade, growing hunger and misery for the immense majority of humanity's peoples are more serious than ever, its consequences shake even the most solid of the world's economies. Revealed subsidies and other selfish policies threaten to block agreements that have been reached for years to regulate international trade, and could provoke a disastrous confrontation between the great economic powers. This demonstrates that the history of capitalism cannot escape its terrible self-destructive laws. Each day the intention of those who plot the reorganisation of the world, in order to dominate it, becomes clearer. They would preserve for the people of the South - that is three quarters of humanity - a permanent state of underdevelopment and poverty that forces them to continue providing the wealth for the well-fed minorities of the North. The international agencies would be converted into mechanisms of domination and interference to ensure a world system where the powerful nations would impose their corrupt concepts and values. The new conquistadors no longer bear the cross; instead, they brandish only the sword and purse and their only gospel is their lust for profit.

They claim cynically to be exponents of a better society and go to the extreme of trying to claim the monopoly on democracy, liberty and human rights.

Today's hegemonic forces boast of the supposed superiority of their societies, way of life, ideas, beliefs and values and try to impose them at all costs on other peoples, with the same arrogance as their colonial ancestors and their fascist mentors.

It is not only their ideas they want to impose, but also their 'justice' which lacks the slightest fairness and which within the United States itself imposes the worst sanctions, including the death penalty, almost exclusively on blacks and Hispanics, with frankly racist criteria. What sense has the US Supreme Court's decision legalising the right to kidnap anyone of any nationality anywhere in the world, and how can it be tolerated? Has humanity ever known such highhandedness and abuse of power at any other time in history?

Encouraged by the setbacks of European socialism, they are attempting to decree an end to socialist ideas and impose capitalism in its most uncontrolled form, as the only, definitive and permanent model throughout the world. They proclaim so-called neoliberal formulas like dogma to be obeyed by all and present them, without even blinking an eye, as the only recipe for the happiness and prosperity of humankind.

Many millions of dollars that could be used for nobler ends are being spent on selling these ideas. The peoples of the Third World have not forgotten that it was precisely the insatiable voracity of capitalism that condemned them to a long and difficult colonial experience, that crushed them with racism and discrimination, and submitted them to the backwardness and misery that continues to plague them. Capitalism is and has always been the main cause of our peoples' ills, and will never be able to solve them.

The euphoric promoters of so-called neoliberalism are overflowing with joy at the bankruptcy of certain socialist projects which, as is known, barely lasted a few decades, were tried out under adverse conditions and in relatively less developed countries.

Those who are so elated by the failures of certain socialist societies should be able to prove that capitalism solves humanity's problems, or at least has solved them somewhere. After all, it is the system that has predominated throughout the world for centuries, and has only completely developed certain of the richest countries.

After more than 200 years of capitalism in a rich, developed, powerful country like the United States, the US population still lacks a health system, and millions are demanding jobs, housing, education and protection in their old age, or suffer the effects of drug addiction, violence and other social scourges. Tens of millions of people are the victims of racism and racial discrimination in their worst forms. The most powerful of countries has not been able to solve any of these problems with capitalism, despite 200 years of development, despite its own vast resources and its shameless exploitation of other nations over that prolonged period.

Some turncoats can kneel before this calf of fool's gold. But in order to understand the failure of capitalism as a social project, one doesn't have to read Karl Marx. It is enough to take a walk through the ghettos of New York or Los Angeles. The American Dream might dazzle a few weak minds, but for a large and growing sector of that country, especially millions of African-Americans, Latinos, native Americans and Asian-Americans, for the unemployed, poor and homeless, that dream has been and continues to be a bitter, sad and endless nightmare.

How is it morally possible to present as the universal archetype profoundly unjust societies where unrestrained consumerism, and a plethora of insolent minorities, exist side by side with many who suffer a life as miserable as that of the poorest people in Third World countries? In terms of human solidarity, those societies have nothing to teach us, and much to learn from us.

The truth is that the kind of society they want to impose is not only intrinsically unjust and inhumane, but also threatens the survival of the human species and life itself on our planet. The irrational consumerism of the rich exhausts non-renewable resources, poisons seas and rivers, makes the air in cities unbreathable, adversely affects the weather, dangerously increases the sea-level, does irreparable damage to the soil, ravages forests and extends desertification, increasing the misery of hundreds of millions of human beings. The environment is also the victim of an endless war that has already caused the death of many different species and endangers many others. When will it be humanity's turn to disappear, a victim of its own senseless behaviour? How long will we continue to pay homage to a lifestyle that condemns us all, without exception, to extinction?

I am addressing this Assembly at an extraordinarily difficult time for Cuba. The economic, commercial and financial blockade the United States imposed on the Cuban people has now lasted more than 30 years and today it is intensifying and widening.

While speaking hypocritically of peace and international cooperation, Washington bans the entry into US ports of foreign vessels involved in any kind of trade with Cuba, seeks to oblige companies based in other countries to observe its anti-Cuba policy and thus grossly violates not only the most elemental rights of my people but also the sovereignty of other countries and the fundamental principles and norms of international order.

The United States pursues Cuban economic and commercial activities throughout the world; it tries to prevent us from acquiring fuel, food and medical supplies; it pressurises investors and business people; on more than one occasion it has managed to intimidate others and frustrate entirely legitimate operations in its obstinate and criminal determination to starve our people into submission.

Never before has a people been attacked in such a severe, protracted and absolute manner in peacetime.

What they are attacking is a small, poor country with little territory, very limited natural resources, lacking in important energy sources, whose chances of development are forever linked to foreign trade, which receives no credit or financial backing from international organisations, and is even limited to certain types of humanitarian aid, and now they want to prevent us from trading.

The blockade is being intensified just as Cuba is going through an extremely difficult economic situation owing to the dissolution of the socialist bloc, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the abrupt and radical changes in its relations with those countries with which it conducted 80 per cent of its trade, and the abrupt elimination of the equitable and fair prices under which these relationships took place. This represents for Cuba a loss of 70 per cent of its purchasing power, which fell from $8.14bn in 1989 to $2.2bn this year. In fact Cuba is faced with a double blockade which every day becomes tighter and more relentless.

Today we are facing situations that are extremely critical and cause enormous damage to our economy with inevitable repercussions on people's living standards, on consumption levels, on our production plans and on the country's development. Given these difficult conditions, the imperialists hope that if they make the blockade harsher and more oppressive, they can bring about conditions of such misery and hunger that our people will surrender.

But this is hope born of stupidity. Whosoever seeks to annihilate us is ignorant of the fact that Cuba's principal resource, its only true wealth, is its people.

Those who think they can bring Cuba to its knees are mistaken. Our people have travelled a long road to arrive at their total emancipation.

We can also count on the solidarity of other peoples. We know that the oppressed, the exploited, the victims of discrimination are numerous in this world and they are placing their hopes in Cuba's survival.

We shall continue to resist for the sake of our dead and for those who hope for a better life. We shall not betray the mandate of our forebears nor the trust of the peoples. We shall be capable of resisting and we shall resist.

We shall continue to fulfil our most sacred duty: saving the country, the Revolution and socialism. On their behalf we shall continue with our struggle, without vacillating, facing all obstacles, however harsh and difficult the situation may be, ever onward to victory.

Far from 'fighting' the degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution as the Trot academic circles always claim, this petty-bourgeois ultra-left idealism merely struck a ridiculous posturing pose of 'Now let's have a revolutionary overthrow of the revolution and start to build real socialism', etc.

Such a ludicrous provocation at a time of worldwide Cold War difficulties for rallying pro-revolutionary forces (the post-1917 rise of imperialist fascist aggression followed by the post-1945 US imperialist domination) was guaranteed to do nothing but split the anti-imperialist struggle and further play into the hands of Stalinism's paranoid class-collaborating caution, while criminally ignoring or betraying such further real proletarian-dictatorship advances against the West as the socialist revolutions in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, etc.

Trotsky predicted nothing. All he did was basically declare 'Everything is rotten' from 1923 (The New Course) onwards, and has been proved 'correct' only in the ludicrous sense of Soviet revisionist socialist ideology having paralysed itself 65 years later with class-collaborating confusion when the only viable response to renewed worldwide imperialist economic crisis is a further leap in Marxism-Leninism's revolutionary perspectives.

It is imperialism which is in a crisis of breakdown degeneracy, not planned socialism, and Gorbachevism went completely off the rails because class-collaboration with imperialism (the creeping trend of the revisionists throughout the long post-1945 inflationary imperialist boom) was exactly the wrong philosophy to try strengthening at such a moment.

The only successfully strengthening philosophies from now on will be anti-imperialist philosophies, and only Marxist-Leninist science can eventually go all the way to complete success.

The Hamas Islamic fundamentalism is making more of the running in Occupied Palestine against the Zionist colonialists at the moment because it is slightly more willing to make a fight of it than the well-fed bourgeois nationalism of Arafat and the PLO.

But while this fundamentalism may prove to be an unsurprising technical and generational advance in inspiration over discredited PLO bourgeois idealism, its own nationalism (as opposed to dialectical materialism) and obscurantism will inhibit it from taking revolutionary struggle against imperialism too deeply and too far, - as has already been made laughably apparent with the deflated Khomeini-ite boasting against 'the Great Satan' from Iran a few years ago, which could do no more than stub its toe against the despised US imperialist stooge Saddam Hussein.

However, Zionism's own brand of ethnic cleansing, - relentlessly eliminating every last Palestinian from their homeland eventually if Leninist revolutionary national-liberation war does not put a stop to Zionism's western colonisation, - is causing the rest of imperialism some indigestion.

And while the 'free' world chokes on its humbug of turning a blind eye for 45 years while a nation of no less than 5 million (the Palestinian people) has been ethnically cleansed from its homeland, while intense theatrical warmongering self-righteousness is heaped up on Bosnian Serbs for refusing to have their homeland hi-jacked for a minority Muslim state by the traditional class-collaborating circles in the region who last helped tyrannise Serbian anti-imperialist resistance in
the pay of the German Nazi invasion, - more hypocrisy looms over new anti-Serb slanders.

Months of Western TV propaganda lies have been screening hysterical bias against determined Serbian national independence (which was only provoked in the first place by the West with its criminal break-up subversion against the Yugoslav workers state, encouraging non-countries like Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia to put their Serbs in a minority position) in favour of all the old Croatian and Bosnian fascist fabrications against 'Greater Serbia imperialism'.

But no sooner do the Serbs fight back with their own Belgrade television control warning their masses against the spread of these CIA and German intelligence-originated slanders on Western media, - than an outcry goes up about how 'wrong' it is not to present balanced TV reports.

The same screaming has been launched against Serbian conduct of its own elections. But not one word has been heard from the West about their own anti-communist stooge Savimbi in Angola who promptly relaunched civil war when the Western-monitored elections there (to achieve peace) went against him.

Bourgeois hypocrisy's Goebbelsian peak has been reached over the alleged 'rape camps', run by Bosnian Serbs against Muslim women, simultaneously appearing in all the world's media just like a new CIA or German BND propaganda campaign would be expected to, - even down to the weird apology that 'this story is not like the reports from Romania of 80,000 killed around Timosoaria in 1989 by Ceausescu when it turned out in fact that only a few hundred people died in the civil war struggles'.

It is in fact exactly like that anti-communist garbage. And why would any individual journalist doing the 'rape camp' story in 1992/93 feel personally obliged to apologise for a universal 1989 Western Goebbels stunt anyway? Only if this new 'story' came from the same factory as the earlier one, - and a thousand more anti-communist myths since 1945 such as the Tiananmen 'massacre' where precisely no one died at all on the square, and no more than a couple of dozen in all China, despite
the scale of the petty-bourgeois counter-revolution against the dictatorship of the proletariat.

That grotesque propaganda campaign against the Chinese workers state is looking sick at the moment, for as long as revisionism in Peking does not slip any further towards the ridiculous liquidationism which eventually paralysed Moscow.

But it remains to be seen whether Western imperialism is going to have the sustained strength and unity to prevail against the Serbian remnants of the Yugoslav workers state.

The Western imperialist economy remains in diabolical conflict and contradiction, - with IBM threatening to become a hospital case which could symbolise the whole of the American monopoly-bourgeois strength.

Possibly the West's trade war blows may start in earnest against each other before the imperialist gangsters get round to trying to inflict new Nazi invasion tyranny against Serbia (to which end another pathetic CIA propaganda campaign has been launched trying to 'prove' that the wartime Yugoslav communist partizans never held down 17 German SS divisions, but merely a few handfuls of third-rate support troops, etc). But despite these Western 'free' world TV lies, there seems to be a strange reluctance for any of the imperialist capitals, to commit themselves to be the first to declare war on Serbia. Why might this be?

One remarkable casualty of this renewed anti-communist warmongering drive in the West has been Wedgwood Benn, ridiculed by the Bulletin months ago for his criminally stupid support for militarist hysteria in the imperialist countries to 'stop Serbian genocide'. Now this 'reformist' imbecile claims 'not to be sure' that all the anti-Serb warmongering is a 'good thing' after all. But no apologies, of course, for his earlier criminal light-mindedness.

But better than reformed reformists for backing the anti-imperialist struggle is the further development of the Leninist movement.

The best internationalist support for anti-imperialist struggles abroad is to deepen the anti-imperialist struggle at home, - and that means building Marxist-Leninist science. Alf Lee.