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 0694 Tuesday April 6 1993                                                                                                                     10p 

Sales conference June 12.

Job for Yeltsin to survive on imperialist exploitation when deepening trade-war and slump are bankrupting far better equipped states than liquidationist Russia. More colonial indebtedness could be the last straw for the FSU and the capitalist system generally. The USA's own crisis, and that of other Western powers, will be the decisive catastrophe, especially when the growing differences between them and within them come to blows. A deeper grasp of Marxism is the only way forward through the revolutionary chaos to come.

The US imperialist bid to lure the Russian liquidationist bureaucracy into a dependency on dollar aid and thereby secure a reactionary hold on the Russian state and society is almost certainly a mission impossible.

The immediate financial assistance of $1.6 billion is chickenfeed (compared to the $15 billion in interest payments alone due from the FSU (former Soviet Union) this year on already outstanding debts of more than $90 billion); and even that $1.6 billion is money which the American monopoly-capitalist state can scarcely afford, being in debt itself to the world's bankers by hundreds of billions of dollars already.

These huge unrepayable international debts which help 'surplus' capital slosh around the world's currency and stock exchange markets as 'panic' funds or 'hot' money, are at the very heart of the 'free market' crisis to start with, - the worst in capitalism's history.

Trying to prise the FSU back fully into the orbit of capitalist exploitation using these historically discredited and currently highly suspect methods is likely only to add to the total international economic and political catastrophe which is looming.

The free enterprise powers are cutting each others throats over trade war as it is, and even when they still occasionally pull together as 'free world' allies as over Iraq's dispute with Kuwaiti feudal reaction, it is carried out only in the most treacherous back-stabbing manner imaginable with most attention focused on what advantage (for trade, diplomacy, military expansion, or influence) each imperialist rival can get out of it.

And imperialism's 'assistance' to East Europe in any case will only be, and can only be, an extension of the relationship which advanced monopoly-capitalist exploitation has already had for decades with the lesser developed countries of the 'Third World' - one of outright robbery at the end of the day. Starving Africa and Asia has always had to pay back to the West more in interest payments and usury each year than it has ever received in new 'humanitarian' loans or aid.

Western consciousness that one of the most devastating blows imaginable to communist revolution can be struck if the liquidating Soviet workers state can be kept collapsing back towards capitalist mayhem, does not much alter what the anarchic forces of monopoly-imperialist marketeering can actually do about relations with weaker powers.

Despite the non-stop alarms all round the 'free' world that the workings of the colonial profiteering system should never be permitted to so develop that they push dependent territories towards revolution, revolt is precisely what will always be inevitable.

No greater concern and interventionist determination in the long postwar boom was possible than that shown by US imperialism to make sure that communism should never 'infect' the American continent.

But despite the huge affluence, cockiness, and military superiority of the seemingly endless boom times, nevertheless the unprecedented might of US imperialism, the greatest domineering power in history, could not prevent, - and then had great difficulty in suppressing, - important revolutionary movements in Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Surinam, Panama, etc, and to this day has been able to do nothing about the hugely successful Cuban socialist revolution.

And that was in the good times for American imperialism. So how will US domination cope now that the world slump is driving the whole international free-market area towards revolutionary turmoil, and now that the USA itself is catastrophically up to its own neck in potential central state bankruptcy?

Let this week's capitalist press itself give a hint:

SOCIAL unrest, never far below the surface in Brazil, has erupted over the last few days in the country's two largest cities, with demonstrations, looting and rioting.

With official figures showing a 31 per cent fall in the income of the urban population over the last decade, the discontent is a clear indication to the president, Itamar Franco, that life is becoming intolerable for many of the millions of impoverished Brazilians on the outskirts of the bloated cities.

On Thursday about 5,000 homeless people in Sao Paulo marched to the headquarters of the state government, demanding housing.

And on Friday about 4,000 street children marched through the centre of Sao Paulo in a demonstration organised by the Catholic Church's Pastoral Mission for Young People. Waving banners and shouting slogans, the youngsters demanded housing and an end to police violence.

According to figures from the Nucleus of Studies on Violence, a respected non-governmental organisation linked to the University of Sao Paulo, about 15 young people are killed in Sao Paulo each week by the police and vigilante groups. According to the military police, 6 per cent of those killed are under 10 years old. A study published last week by the civil police in Rio de Janeiro showed that the number of street children killed in Rio state rose to 424 in 1992, compared with 306 in 1991.

Earlier in the week young offenders held in one of Sao Paulo's notoriously over-crowded detention centres rioted. Though strenuous efforts were made to keep the incident out of the press, it was revealed yesterday that at least 58 youngsters had been injured, some seriously, when the military police crushed the rebellion.

Throughout last week groups of shanty-town dwellers in Rio de Janeiro plundered supermarkets at night in groups that varied from 50 to 1,000 in size, they stole a-range of goods from rice and beans to Easter eggs.

The recent explosion of social unrest may be linked to the growing frustration with President Franco, who has yet to take a single effective step to ease the escalating social crisis in his five months in office.

Powerful groups are taking the law into their own hands. Civil construction companies in Rio de Janeiro have been repeatedly accused of setting up private militias to drive shanty-town dwellers off valuable real estate on the outskirts.

The imperialist exploitation system is sitting on a worldwide explosive powder keg. As Marxist science alone can explain, the huge social unrest everywhere is, obviously, immediately sparked off by the difficult material slump conditions, but, much more importantly, is also a reflection of the historical context in which capitalist market crisis has yet again plunged mankind into fearful mass unemployment, cutthroat trade-war devastation, shattered dreams in all directions, and is threatening even more diabolical perspectives of permanent slump and poverty, fascism, and war.

These are the conditions which have already twice before this century driven mass movements to communist revolution, threatening to wipe the capitalist system and the imperialist bourgeoisie off the face of the earth, - the Bolshevik Revolution produced by World War I, and the Chinese Revolution and massive expansion of the socialist camp produced by World War II.

Inter-imperialist conflict as the most degrading and degenerate aspect imaginable of the fundamental class-war contradictions of the exploitative capitalist system, remains the main driving force making revolutionary change inevitable. Civilisation will not want to, or be able to, put up with World War III for long, or even with much more of the bitter civil-war class struggles now raging everywhere as a result of imperialist market-forces intervention and exploitation (all over East Europe,
Asia, and Africa).

Brazil is constantly teetering towards communist revolution without even yet having civil war or inter-imperialist war torments to suffer on top of the devastating capitalist slump.

But in the FSU, not only is civil war widespread, but the social development in the Second World (as opposed to the Third World) was already sufficiently culturally advanced (far better than the First World in many respects) that being driven back to permanent mass unemployment, exploitation, and slump degradation is likely to become intolerable far more rapidly than in Brazil, say.

Western monopoly finance (as noted above) has already had a go at developing "capital investment assistance" to take advantage of exploitation opportunities in the FSU.

The result is already clear. About $15 billion was due this year in interest-payment tribute alone to the international bourgeoisie, and the only possible perspective is for Russia to get itself ever deeper into debt with the Western banking usurers, just like every other part of the planet has done and is doing. 

That is precisely the basis for characterising the entire epoch as domination by monopoly-finance capital, which in turn must grow ever more parasitic and warmongeringly aggressive against rival imperialist claimants to the fabulously-rewarded position of dominant power, and against upstart revolutionary movements trying to destroy the whole basis for capitalist exploitation (e.g. the savagely brutal and destructive American war of annihilation against the Vietnamese revolution).

Yeltsin spelt it out in Vancouver, warning that if Russia were made to appear too greatly dependent on Western aid or investment, then the 'communists' would be able to claim loss of national sovereignty as an additional objection to the current disastrous privatisation course.

But for Russia to play any sort of 'successful' part in the world capitalist market mayhem, then it is precisely large amounts of Western invested capital which will be needed.

International 'free' trade requirements are obviously for the very latest fashions, lifestyles, and technological gadgetry which are inevitably 95% dictated by the most powerful Western monopoly interests. Soviet investment and know-how was obviously much more concentrated on supplying real needs, - which is not remotely the same thing, necessarily, as supplying the latest anarchic market fads and frauds.

And even if and when monopoly-imperialist investment exploits Russian labour and natural resources up to world market levels of profiteering 'efficiency', the problems for the West of keeping the FSU within the 'free world' orbit are only just beginning.

There is currently looming the greatest trade war in history. Russian-origin goods can only compete with all the rest of the rivalling products, - as has already been seen in the North Sea fish wars where cheap-produce Russian cod, etc, is alleged to be causing the real backs-to-the-wall hardships which have driven French and British fishermen, for example, literally to blows, already causing naval sea power and police actions to be invoked, backed by Tory tabloid jingoistic headlines demanding 'firm military action' against the 'filthy Frogs', etc.

Yeltsin has already demanded that trade barriers be the first things to be demolished in Moscow's incipient adherence to the wholehearted Western imperialist road.

But if seasoned banking and trading powers like Britain and the USA are already finding the competition from Japan, Germany, and South-East Asia too hot for them, and face record unemployment and bankruptcies, then what sense does it make to encourage yet another big-power competitor into the trade-war field?

Those who lose out in the inter-imperialist trade war are, by historical precedent, heading towards revolutionary turmoil.

In Russia's case, the horrors of slump degradation must either require Russia to win the inter-imperialist trade war itself, which seems a bit unlikely; or else go aggressively into a new inter-imperialist shooting war just like in 1914, - which seems even more unlikely; or else be driven back towards its original revolutionary solution to endless capitalist-market mayhem, either by slump or war defeat.

Even the IMF's vague promise of an extra $20 (bn) in credit to Russia (provided some firm reactionary political and economic order can be imposed, by fascist dictatorship if necessary, the 'democratic' world not being too bothered) stands, & even if it does not prove to be the last straw on the back of the world indebtedness camel (which is bound to cause a total 'free'-world banking collapse eventually because of a total collapse of confidence that the milch-cow of exploitation can be kept going indefinitely once it becomes clear that the immense debt mountain can never be repaid), - -then the picture is still relentlessly dismal.

What better circumstance could there be for the imperialist West to offer aid and investment to the non-market-oriented, basic-socialist-planning-oriented East than when surplus-rich West Germany took over the quite highly developed and efficient (compared to the USSR) East Germany.

But look what happened. Far from the new territories creating a West German boom to end all West German booms, it has only brought something close to economic disaster, - as the capitalist press and politicians themselves are admitting:

IN A book that has broken publishing records, former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt castigates German politicians for 'inadequate leadership' after reunification and warns his fellow countrymen in the West that they must accept lower incomes for years to come.

His controversial book, written to wake the Germans up to the crisis they face, sold out its first print run of 100,000 — an unprecedented feat in Germany for a work of topical non-fiction — when it was published by Rowohlt-Berlin last Thursday. Immediately another 100,000 copies were printed.

The book appeals for those with responsibility to tell 'the whole truth' that 'we must wait until far into the next century' before productivity and living standards in the East reach those in the West; and that, to achieve it, 'the west Germans must realise their incomes will have to fall back to the level of 1990, and remain there for a considerable time'. In fact, Germans know this but no one tells them directly, least of all Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

But Acting for Germany is not a party-political book; it is rather a general critique of a western German society that has grown fat, complacent — and self-righteous.

Schmidt is one of the few to say his fatherland is in a crisis. But 'the word crisis means simultaneously danger and chance'.

In an earlier passage, however, he made a dark prediction. 'Either we pull ourselves together to a new beginning, or we let everything just run on — and we run into insanity and moral-political degeneracy.'

Schmidt does not want to believe that. 'I am no pessimist,' he says. 'But I am worried about the inadequate leadership provided by our political class and our parties.'

This is hardly the desired outcome from the point of view of Western imperialism generally, and US imperialism in particular, who are in nothing like as strong a position to help out ailing (by market standards) East Europe as Bonn was. The slump-hit rest of the West needs a further savage blow to its living standards (by trying to pay for the FSU to be corrupted back into 'successful' capitalist ways) like it needs a hole in the head.

As noted, although nonsensical chickenfeed as far as Soviet 'market-economy' needs are concerned, the latest US $1.6bn offer could on the other hand prove very costly for the Clinton regime.

The Western imperialist policy for the world slump appears at the moment to be nothing more than a ludicrous attempt to keep on with exactly the same old - inflationary gimmick that has precisely led to the present impasse in the first place.

Washington is toying merely with fairly token defence-spending cuts at the moment, - and is even not very sure-footed about getting them through.

But either way, it still only adds up to a programme nothing like deflationary enough to drag the huge lumbering US imperialist domination stance from out of its time-warp.

Running the world for nearly 50 years militarily and economically with the dollar paper bill regarded as being as 'good as gold' has bankrupted the American capitalist-state finances.

Only savage deflation can, under the anarchic capitalist free-market system, cut American anti-communist government spending and popular living standards sufficiently to reverse the present constant huge losses in the US foreign exchange and domestic budget accounts:

STEP by step the full material and moral cost of the Reagan presidency is reaching the records. The latest chapter comes with the confirmation by a United Nations panel of his administration's disingenuous role in El Salvador.

The recent decision by Warren Christopher, the secretary of state, to appoint an independent inquiry into US activities in El Salvador during the Reagan years is only the latest attempt to disentangle the dismal history of the period. It followed revelations by the UN Truth Committee, which interviewed 2,000 witnesses for its 800-page report into human rights abuses.

The document was immediately discounted by Elliott Abrams, the US official with primary regional responsibility at the time. Mr Abrams declared the well-researched findings a "post-cold war effort to rewrite history". The Reagan administration's Central American record, he said "is one of fabulous achievement". It depends on the point of view. Among the achievements detailed in the UN report were the torture and massacre in December 1981 of 500 or more villagers by the American-trained Alacatl Battalion during a counter-insurgency drive named Operation Rescue.

Within two months of the atrocity, Mr Abrams was telling the Senate foreign relations committee that the story was an opposition exaggeration. He demanded that the Senate certify the Salvadorean government's improved human rights record so that it could qualify for further military aid.

Not that the White House or the state department were really ignorant of what was going on. Captured documents in US possession at the time clearly recorded the activities of the military and the deathsquads. They showed that the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero was arranged by the rightwing leader Roberto d'Aubuisson, with his associates apparently drawing lots for the privilege of carrying it out.

The US ambassador of the time, Deane Hinton, frustrated at seeing his detailed reports ignored by Washington, went public with his allegation of 30,000 official murders in three years — and was immediately disavowed by the White House.

Time and again Mr Reagan assured Americans they were helping to build democracy in Central America. Meanwhile, his vice-president, George Bush, was secretly handing a list of nine death squad organisers to the Salvadorean president, Alvaro Magana Boija, and demanding they be dealt with. Nothing happened, of course, and the US Drug Enforcement Agency even recruited one of those on the list.

The American taxpayer contributed $6 billion to this exercise in democratisation, when the domestic agenda was dominated by sharp reductions in every variety of social support. A million of America's poor were deprived of food stamps and there were cuts in social security, unemployment benefits, and child nutrition.

On the domestic front, meanwhile, his economic mismanagement had transformed America from the world's largest creditor into its largest debtor. When he left office, the US external debt had soared to $660 billion and was costing $50 billion a year to service.
It was always clear that Mr Reagan and his senior staff consistently preferred ideology to reality. Thinking the right thoughts far outweighed competence and probity as a qualification for office.

More of Mr Reagan's appointees were disgraced or convicted than in any other administration this century. By the time his second term ended in 1989, 225 of his staff had been accused of ethical transgressions or criminality. Special counsel had to be appointed on six occasions to investigate the more serious allegations.

Among the senior officials forced to resign were the labour secretary, the CIA deputy director, two national security advisers, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, the head of the Federal Aviation i Administration and the head of the Veterans Administration. The defence secretary was pardoned by President Bush before he came to trial and the full ramifications of the Iran-contra affair have yet to emerge.

The evidence continues to mount that Mr Reagan's extreme reluctance to hear the bad news has cost his countrymen dear. On the tenth anniversary of his Strategic Defence Initiative — with $27 billion so far paid out — there is not a single viable component available for the system.	

President Reagan was sold the idea of a Star Wars defence against Soviet missile attack by Edward Teller, the man responsible for the hydrogen bomb.

There is no evidence that Dr Teller had ever investigated the feasibility of the scheme and the greater part of America's scientific community was appalled when it was announced. Certainly Mr Reagan himself had no way of assessing it.

When it was first announced, the plan was supposed to render nuclear missiles "impotent and obsolete". The first components, it was claimed, would be in place in the early 1990s. A recent report by the General Accounting Office, the US budget watchdog, declared flatly that officials involved in the project had repeatedly exaggerated their progress.

Even the army, not renowned for abandoning large-budget projects, became so disillusioned that it cancelled one of the core elements of the project, the tracking system supposed to distinguish real warheads from decoys.

Tests of another component, the interceptor rockets dubbed Brilliant Pebbles, were officially described as "a 90 per cent success". According to the accounting office's investigation, that was only true because the criteria for the tests were drastically revised.
"Nothing was obtained for one original goal and three other goals were only partially satisfied," it reported.

The accountants said that the director of the programme, Henry Cooper, "twisted the truth to claim successes where none, in fact, existed".

Sooner or later, the failure to eliminate these deficits (a failure of will to accept US imperialism's defeat in the trade-war competition with German and Japanese imperialism) is going to totally undermine confidence in holding US government bonds worldwide, and eventually in holding dollar reserves themselves (only another form of US government debt).

And adding to the dangers of such a markets collapse of confidence in one or more currencies is the equally bankrupt position of British imperialist government finances, made worse by the greatly enfeebled role of British science and industry in the increasingly lethal world trade war, - even more perilous than that of the similarly bloated and decaying US bourgeoisie.

Some of the capitalist press's own commentaries on the hopeless indebtedness of the British government's finances and balance of payments position even go so far as to refer to the classical Marxist analysis of the essential decadence of finance capital's dominance over industrial capital (as the imperialist system slides towards eventual decline) by blaming the parasitism of the rentier class in the UK (although without, of course, implying the slightest notion of a necessary revolutionary solution to this impossible contradiction at the heart of the market's relentless monopolisation tendencies):

BRITAIN'S one-party state and ailing economy may seem disparate universes — but they are profoundly linked. The same culture and value system so hostile to production is fostered and nurtured by conservative governing structures, whose priorities are financial and administrative. Britain's rentier state begets a rentier economy and financial system; improvement in the latter requires reform of the former.

As economy and polity alike stagnate in a Sargasso Sea of amoral drift, the links between the degraded public domain and a decaying productive sector will become more obvious. 

The first straws in the wind are a new interest in production and manufacturing, together with official acknowledgment that Britain should not, after more than two years of recession, be suffering from such a severe structural trade deficit. Importantly, the Governor of the Bank of England recognised last week that the situation could not continue indefinitely and worried whether, as a result, Britain would even be able to grow at its trend rate of growth. Had Britain a more robust productive sector, he implied, then it could support a higher pound, more stable prices and more employment, absolving the authorities of the agonising decision they will soon face of slowing down an already barely recovering economy because a balance of payments and sterling crisis is looming — and so more inflation.

Gerard Lyons, at DKB International, calculates just how weak Britain's trade position now is. Exports in 1992 covered 61 per cent of consumer good imports, 96 per cent of intermediate goods and 102 per cent of capital goods imports, he says — and that at the tail-end of a long recession. In 1980, exports covered 60,170 and 151 per cent of imports from the same categories — a calamitous fall-away.

Despite wholesale privatisation, the virtual extinction of the closed shop, the growth of huge inequality of incomes as incentives, the collapse of trade union membership and managers winning the "right to manage", there is not the productive capacity at hand to capitalise on the opportunity presented by devaluation and upturn. Ten out of the last 13 years have not seen even sufficient investment to replace capital scrapping in the manufacturing sector. The reason is that Britain's anti-production or' "rentier" culture and the values that underlie it remain firmly in place, paradoxically inflamed by the very reforms that were meant to exorcise it.

IT IS all-pervasive. Partly as a hangover from the Empire; partly as a result of state structures constructed to encourage administration and the exercise of sovereign legislative power; and partly as a result of the dominant political party drawing so much electoral support from the Southeast. The British upper middle class is wedded to values that are distant from the complex and demanding world of production. They remain dividend and rent-seekers rather than risk-takers; wedded to property speculation rather than entrepreneurship, and attracted to the fee-charging professions and Civil Service rather than competitive business.

Building non-hierarchical teams, applying technology, recognising obligations to a wider community and taking a long view are wholly foreign.

The worldview goes very deep. It is reinforced daily by "business" news that emphasises bids, deals and short-term profit performance; it expresses itself as a national preoccupation with inflation rather than unemployment; and the pre-eminence of the City of London in Britain's business life ensures that the country's commercial elite trusts free markets not only as an ideology but also as a way of making fabulous salaries./

THE BANK of England's vain efforts to prop up the pound which culminated in Britain's humiliating departure from the exchange rate mechanism on Black Wednesday wiped out the whole of the Government's foreign exchange reserves.

The Government has consistently refused to publish the scale of the reserve losses on Black Wednesday, and changes to the monthly gross official reserves figures do not give a true picture of the Bank's intervention in the foreign exchange markets.

A better indication of the underlying position can be gleaned from the Bank's own February Quarterly Bulletin which shows that at the end of September — the month of the currency turmoil — official debt amounted to $41,536 million. This compared with gross official reserves of $42,677 million, leaving a net reserve position of just over $1 billion. In August, net reserves totalled $22,899 million.

Although the BEQB shows the debt outstanding on September 30, some had already been paid back in the two weeks between Sept 16 when sterling was forced out of the ERM at the end of the month, using a special $6 billion loan taken out under the multi-currency revolving loan facility. This payment does not show up in the figures and implies that Britain's net reserve position was even worse, plunging heavily into the red on Black Wednesday.

The $21,758 million turnaround in net reserves between August and September points to substantial Bank of England intervention in the foreign exchange market in the run-up to Black Wednesday, although it represents only part of the total support operation — revealed last month to be close to $30 billion.

France is also commonly thought to have exhausted its foreign exchange reserves in defence of the franc in September.	

Disclosing the level of Britain's foreign exchange reserves has always been a black art — but there are just enough clues in the official statistics to show that in the days after Black Wednesday last September the British government owed more foreign currency than it possessed. For the first time since the 1970s, the net reserve position went into the red.

In his memoirs Lord Lawson says that he believes the Bank and Treasury in the 1976 sterling crisis disguised a similar deficit in the net reserves by selling dollars in the forward market and buying them back in the spot market; and as the great British public are kept ignorant of the level of future liabilities in the Bank of England's forward book, everybody was duped into thinking that the rise in reserves represented by the Bank of England's spot market purchases represented the true position. It didn't, of course, but what mattered was disguising how awful the real situation was.

Lord Lawson used the same trick in reverse to hide a potential rise in reserves in 1987; and for all we know the Bank has been using the ruse now to do what Labour is thought to have done in 1976. From where else has the foreign exchange come to pay back $8.5 billion of foreign exchange loans in the last three months of 1992 and so now improve the net reserve position?

Confidence in the claimed 'underlying strength and stability' of the British capitalist economy and of the imperialist system in general can hardly be boosted by the notion of the Tory government having to deliberately create cosmetically false reserves positions by sleight-of-hand in order to keep the wolf from the door. Such tricks will not work for long.

And what will the capitalist ruling classes do for a gimmick anyway when the imminent next Great Crash of all the markets takes place, echoing the Wall Street disaster and worldwide banking and stock exchange catastrophes of 1929?

There will be no hiding the real bankruptcy of key links in the imperialist chain then. Everything will begin conspiring towards the deepest and most universal crisis in capitalism's entire history, coinciding as it will with a climax of corruption scandals from the Vatican to the Common Market headquarters in Brussels, from the IMF to the Salvation Army, from Hollywood to the Holy Land, from the United Nations to NATO, from the Tory Party to the Green Party.

So grim are the prospects for Western imperialism's continued hegemony in the world once a markets collapse devastates any remaining confidence in the anarchic capitalist system, that serious splits are now being hinted at even between the USA and Britain, usually the most conspiratorial of cut-throat imperialist competitors, but now seemingly at odds over everything, according to bourgeois press reports themselves:

A GROWING rift between Britain and the United States on key foreign policy issues has thrown the Yugoslav peace process into disarray, and threatens to lead to confusion in the United Nations Security Council over its handling of Iraq, Libya and North Korea.

While a resolution authorising the use of force against planes violating a five-month-old no-fly ban over Bosnia was finally agreed at the UN last night, Britain and other European Community countries reluctantly swallowed a watered-down draft resolution on the peace plan for Bosnia drawn up by the international mediators, Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen. After sudden American objections, which one British official described as "a bombshell", the resolution now merely "commends" the plan.

The belated no-fly resolution is itself a diluted agreement, accepting Russian insistence that it be enforced only over Bosnian airspace, and thus excluding any "hot pursuit" of offending aircraft or any attacks on Serbian airbases.

On both sides of the Atlantic, officials yesterday sought to ascribe the differences to teething troubles as the new US administration comes to grips with its foreign policy dossiers, and as its European allies adjust to the Clinton White House.

The US refusal to endorse and give unequivocal support to the Vance-Owen plan for dividing Bosnia into 10 semi-autonomous provinces, based in part on ethnic lines, took Britain and France by surprise, when they discovered on Tuesday the Americans were not prepared to accept the draft text of a new sanctions resolution against Serbia and Montenegro.

On Iraq, suggestions by the US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, that US policy should be "depersonalised" by playing down the need to topple Saddam Hussein alarmed the British government and led to a belated White House statement that the policy was in fact unchanged.

Britain was deeply irritated by the consequent speculation in Britain that President Clinton had bounced John Major into going soft against President Saddam, and has forced the Foreign Office into a series of firm denials that anything short of full compliance with UN Security Council resolutions could persuade the Government to ease sanctions.

On Iran, the US objected strongly this week to a new $160 million World Bank loan for an electricity plant, which Britain supported and which the World Bank approved on the very day that Mr Christopher told Congress that Iran was "an international outlaw...a dangerous nation".

On Libya, Britain was startled by Mr Christopher's public call this week for an international oil embargo on Colonel Muammar Gadafy's regime.

Such a stiffening of the sanctions, designed to force the extradition of two Libyan suspects in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, had been discussed. But Britain sees the move as premature.
British officials yesterday voiced "mild curiosity" — a polite way of expressing annoyance — that Mr Christopher should have called for an oil embargo against Libya, when the US, Britain and France were still working behind closed doors to overcome differences on a Security Council sanctions resolution, that has to be adopted when the present resolution expires in April. 

Differences over North Korea are expected to emerge when the Security Council comes to consider within the next few days how to handle Pyongyang's defiance of the International Atomic Energy Authority's request to inspect suspect nuclear sites. The US is eager to threaten North Korea with sanctions. Britain is more concerned to dissuade North Korea from withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On Hong Kong, Governor Christopher Patten is coming to Washington next month and is expected to urge the continuation of China's most favoured nation trading status with the US, which is being widely opposed in Congress. President Clinton was vociferous in his campaign against Mr Bush's policy of "coddling dictators" in Beijing, and here again the co-ordination of policy between London and Washington could prove difficulty.

There will be plenty more opportunities to fall out over policies towards real capitalist-class dictators (as opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat) before these universal fascist slump conditions get much worse, - as is already happening over the Salvador military junta, Washington's stooges.

The crisis for this client state of American reaction is partly a consequence of the 'new world order' idiocies which imperialist 'democracy' lumbered itself with in the course of the 'end of communism' euphoria (sparked off by the liquidationist collapse of the wretched Moscow bureaucracy), - but mostly a routine further difficulty for American colonialism as the USA's imperialist rivals carve up Washington's formerly entrenched positions in all directions.

In the increasing atmosphere of chauvinistic competitiveness between the former 'free world' allies, the capitalist press itself is not unhappy to report and try to profit from America's embarrassment:

THE Salvadorean military's belligerent rejection of a UN-sponsored investigation into the worst abuses of El Salvador's 12-year civil war is a dangerous sign of the country's growing political polarisation and a direct challenge to President Alfredo Cristiani's civilian rule.

The defence minister, General Rene Emilio Ponce, and his deputy, General Juan Orlando Zepeda, have continued their attacks on the Truth Commission report, accusing the United States and the United Nations of exerting unacceptable pressure to get rid of senior military officers accused of gross human rights violations, and issuing a veiled warning to Mr Cristiani not to give in. 

The willingness of senior officials to defy both the United Nations and President Cristiani's public commitments has angered the opposition, causing the political climate to deteriorate.

"We have a crisis and the question is: who is running the country, a defence minister who resigned or the president who has not yet accepted his resignation?'' asked Ruben Zamora, a leftwing politician and vice-president of the legislative assembly.

Mr Zamora's question has long been key to a debate that raged during the years the United States supported the war against El Salvador's Marxist-led guerrillas, declaring it had set up a representative democracy. Throughout the 1980s, critics charged that, despite democratic institutions, the army remained in charge behind the scenes.

The continuing divisions over Western policy towards Bosnia and the imperialist conspiracy to leave not one stone standing of the former Yugoslav socialist federation, show how such an appalling mess is partly just a stage for the ongoing (and unresolved) inter-imperialist rivalry and manoeuvring for trade, diplomatic, and military influence everywhere, - and partly the problem of imposing the old colonialist 'new world order' on an international population which is now more hostile to, and ready to fight against, monopoly-capitalist domination and chaos than it even was when the workers states wretched revisionist bureaucracies upheld a phony 'balance' against imperialism.

It must be becoming daily more clear in East Europe that all the West is offering them is a relentless increase in mafia-run corruption, complete insecurity economically and socially, plus far more difficult and chaotic living conditions than the workers state bureaucracies managed even in their worst revisionist complacency and arbitrariness.

The glittering prospect for Yugoslavia, for example, is to end up like Italy next door, where, with half the judiciary now under investigation for being crooks too, the Pope is about the only big institutional fish in Italian capitalism not yet under arrest:

APPEAL judges working in Naples, the citadel of the Christian Democrat Party, have been at the service of the infamous Camorra Mafia syndicates, in what their colleagues believe to be a widespread and systematic infiltration of the Italian appeal court structure by organised crime.
The revelation came from testimony by the most valuable supergrass in Camorra history, Pasquale Galasso. He was the financial "attaché" to Italy's richest criminal baron, Carmine "Fatty" Alfieri, and was arrested as part of the Operation Green Ice cocaine-ring bust last year.

Mr Galasso's rumoured allegations were at first denied by authorities in Rome yesterday. But sources at the Naples Courthouse admitted that at least two — and possibly seven —judges are being investigated for connivance with the Camorra.

As in the case of the warrant for the Christian Democrat leader, Giulio Andreotti, sources said, the Camorra is uninterested in trying to influence the examining judges who investigate and try a case, but concentrate on the more senior, politically appointed judges in the Appeal Courts.

Two judges were named as being under disciplinary notice from the national body of the magistrature, the CSM. They are Alfonse Lamberti, Councillor to the Naples Court of Appeal, and Cono Lancoba, Chief Public Prosecutor for the town of Melfi, near Naples.

The revelations come in the wake of hundreds of arrests of local politicians and their Camorra allies in the past few days, and the issue of cautionary warrants to the city's — and some of the country's — leading politicians, accusing them of criminal mafia association.

Sources said the judges had agreed to annul or reduce the sentences of convicted Camorra gangsters. Names of politicians are also said to have featured in Mr Galasso's confessions.

It was also hard for most Italians to believe that the accusation was now on paper, in black and white, signed by Judge Giancarlo Caselli of Palermo. As one paper put it yesterday, "eternity has ended".

By far the most powerful political figure in post-war Italian politics, Mr Andreotti is the symbol of all the secrecy and duplicity in this system, of the labyrinth, and the hall of mirrors in which there is no truth — at least not until now.

He sat, Janus-like, astride the state and the anti-state, greeting the Queen, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and the rest, but remaining a close friend of Lido Gelli, grand master of the murky P2 masonic lodge.

Mr Andreotti has been immersed in Christian Democrat politics for half a century, the full history of the republic. He first entered the government of De Gasperi back in the 1940s, and was still prime minister, for the seventh time, last year.

He has repelled 28 attempts to involve him in successive scandals, and always emerged lily-white. Few believed that even the current tempest would touch him until the investigations into corruption began to close in over the past three days from his party's bastion of Naples. All yesterday, Italian television was brimful with the disbelieving vox populi.

Mr Andreotti was called before the judges in 1969, after the bomb in Milan's Piazza Fontana which heralded the "years of lead" and turned out to be a neo-fascist outrage.

He was the prime minister who held firm during the kidnap of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, preferring to see his mentor, who had forged the hated alliance with the communists, die rather than negotiate with his captors.

He was invoked many times in the case of Michele Sindona, mover of funds for the Mafia, the P2 and the Vatican, standing up in parliament to defend his friend and divorce his criminal past from what Mr Andreotti insisted was a man with the church's interests at heart.

He was named by Roberto Calvi's widow as the mastermind at the heart of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal. "Are you the Big Daddy of the P2?" he was asked by the parliamentary commission.

But it is the Sicilian connection which stands finally to sink Mr Andreotti — a fall which the judiciary is dating from the murder of his loyal lieutenant, Salvatore Lima, commander of Christian Democrat votes on the island and always rumoured to be the Mafia's man.

He was untroubled when Mr Lima was principal defence witness for Mayor "Don" Vito Ciancimino, his protege at Palermo city hall who was convicted last year and this weekend had more years added on to his existing conviction sentence for Mafia association.

He showed rare anger when Mr Lima was killed and branded a Mafioso, calling those who said so "worse than his killers".

The two men had been friends and allies for 30 years, and only now will Italy find out exactly what kind of friends they were.

By then, Mr Andreotti was the obvious candidate to succeed Francesco Cossiga to become head of state. But soon after, Judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were blown up, and Palermo's judges had opened the files on the most elusive politician of them all. Mr Andreotti never made it to the presidential palace.

The pattern of collusion is a proliferation of the arrangement alleged in the cautionary warrant sent to Mr Andreotti, which describes a system of guarantees and favourable "adjustments" to sentences in the Appeal Court, secured by Mr Andreotti and implemented by its president, Judge Corrado Carnevale, who is also under investigation for Mafia association.

Working in a top floor corner of the Naples Courthouse, the anti-corruption and anti-Camorra judges have embarked on their remarkably speedy series of warrants and arrests which have decapitated the Christian Democrat Party. But there are manifest divisions within the court structure about the scope and pace of their inquiries.

This is not the first time judges and magistrates have been examined in Naples. Four years ago, it emerged that magistrates had joined in teams of "Collaudi" — special monitors of earthquake aid funds. But like all the Collaudi, they were soon involved in the 8 per cent rake-off that the monitors were taking on contract distribution.

There were two riots in political assemblies yesterday, with scuffles outside the parliament started by demonstrators from the Fascist Youth party. There was a more serious punch-up at the Naples Council, after the fascist MSI group threw water-filled balloons around the chamber.

Reeling from arrests, the regional authority of Campania, of which Naples is capital, resigned yesterday, leaving the area without government. There have been 367 arrests in three days.

Bourgeois apologists are already at work in the capitalist press to assure everyone that Italy is still a roaring economic success and that there is no real alternative in Italy to doing things 'the Italian way', etc, and that everyone accepts it and no one really minds, etc.

But this is just degenerate philistine nonsense. It is precisely because the development and expansion of the old society (profiteering capitalism) has so changed the lives of people organisationally and technologically that new philosophical, political, social, and cultural goals set themselves before civilisation, - as has happened in every different epoch of human history. For many thousand years, society has no longer been about just satisfying material needs as such, but about satisfying material needs in a context of always further developing appropriate social cohesiveness that will keep civilisation growing and improving, - part of a long evolutionary process taking man from purely animal law-of-the-jungle behaviour towards the eventual triumph of reason and fully rational planning. Capitalism's slump and corruption chaos is simply no longer tolerable any more, - anywhere.

Everyone senses that there is a lot more going wrong with the 'free world' system than just the clown-like crudities of the Clinton regime; or the drunken farce of Yeltsin; or the murky secret funding operations behind the Tory party; or the daylight robbery of workers pension funds by the Establishment; or the police admission in Britain that rising crime is beyond their control; or the ludicrous continuing fraud of Britain refusing to talk to the Irish national liberation movement or concede Ireland's reunification, both of which must happen eventually; or the EEC trade-war contradictions, etc, etc, - to all of which partial 'solutions' might be suggested or attempted but all of which also imply that something is going wrong much more deeply behind all of these surface irritations and stupidities.

The difficulties of grasping the scale and character of the imperialist crisis, the greatest in the history of the capitalist system, continue to leave a fog of confusion and unease over all human affairs.

Many local and international political struggles are marked by a notable degree of paralysis and stalemate, reflecting the uncertainty of what is happening in the enormous economic problems facing the world.

The nervy Clinton regime, elected by less than 20% of the total eligible adult electorate as a result of a sullen protest against the financial debacle of Reaganism which got even fewer votes, - has not the faintest idea what to do about the USA's continuing monstrous deficits in the foreign trade and domestic budgets, and appears to be letting inflationary government credit-creation rip again, just like Reagan.

The British ruling class is equally vulnerable, running up a £50 billion government debt creation just to try to patch things together for a while longer, hoping for 'something to turn up', or for the 'green shoots' to start emerging out of the brown manure everywhere at long last.

As elsewhere in the Common Market and as in the United States, the really ruthless slump measures, needed for slaughtering the still relatively high living standards of the masses, are still being shirked to some extent.

Instead, the Tory establishment is everywhere a bit nervous about all-out confrontations with social and economic protests. In this shattering loss of confidence and dimwitted inability to pronounce any firm perspectives at all, little else appears to be going on at times than shuffling crisis management.

The joke 'opposition' is no help, now not bothering to pretend to believe even in 'reformism' any more (a total fraud as far as 'changing capitalism' is concerned, in any case). Even 'left' Labourites like Skinner could do no better with Heseltine than jeer him because he had 'failed to find any new market for coal', a line which rightwing Tories who oppose aid to the mining industry might have come out with.

Which leaves a huge problem for the anticipated steady growth of protests against the deepening slump. With no serious perspectives on offer from the old political superstructure, what will happen to ideology? What will all the protesters think about all the time, and what will they then do next?

With it becoming increasingly clear that few worthwhile concessions are to be gained out of the teeth of the devastating universal slump, will not mass ideology develop towards a 'Let's fend for ourselves' mentality in a wide variety of forms.?

Anarchic challenges of every description to established law-and-order are mushrooming everywhere. In such circumstances, a serious fight to improve the grasp of revolutionary theory is more vital than ever.

Spontaneous revolt against capitalist slump will always start to develop a subjective ideology from the moment it is born. And however ready to take up the idea of revolution such mass protests become, their spontaneous thinking is bound to be handicapped by bourgeois-idealist concepts of all kinds, particularly anarchism and syndicalism.

There will be no problem for Leninism getting inside such mass movements which will embrace all of the relevant community, Leninists included, - at work, at school, in the unions, in the community, on single-issue protests, etc, etc.

The problem will be to keep ahead of spontaneous mass thinking in developing the understanding of the revolution.

The year 1917 remains a classic guide as to how Leninism must be absolute master of programme, strategy and tactics in order to guide the mass movement out of the confusion that will be sown by buckets of anarchist and centrist muddleheadedness and opportunism spread by hordes of petty-bourgeois mentalities which will inevitably clamber on board the revolutionary bandwagon.

Centrists will pop up from all kinds of backgrounds, suddenly saying: 'Of course we must have a revolution. And here's how to do it,' - proceeding to speak revolution in words, but to lead to hopeless compromise with parliamentary 'democratic' opportunism (bourgeois dictatorship) in practice.

Building a deliberate party of Marxist-Leninist study is the only way to prepare for the coming crisis.

A cadre party will be crucial. And the only way to build a cadre party is to start building it. Build Leninism. Spread the Bulletin. Any other struggles for objective Marxist science taking place beyond the ILWP's ken will have no trouble in making themselves known and playing as leading a role as they are capable of. Reason can and must prevail. JH.

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. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 13 Friday 2 April 1993

Imperialism' crisis deepens all round as corruption scandals rock governments. The fight for revolutionary theory will answer the
capitalist slump. Fight for revolutionary science

The overriding feature of the 'day of action' strike protests about job cuts, privatization, pay-limits and the general deterioration of working conditions, in the pits, on the railways, the buses, and in every other sector of industry and workplace in the country, is the lack of any coherent explanation about why all this slump misery is happening, and the total lack of any perspective with which to fight it.

The rising anger and rejection of capitalist slump policies by workers is inevitably going to mean more strikes, more walkouts,
more sit-ins, work-to-rules and many other forms of action both in workplaces and on the street as workers spontaneously fight in order to try and defend their livelihoods in the teeth of the biggest slump-crisis in the history of capitalism.

The TUC/Labour 'leadership' and its 'left' groupie hangers-on who all urge workers to protest just 'a little bit harder' or attend a few more rallies, to 'demand' a bigger slice of the cake' or 'fairer deal', is the most foul treacherous misleadership, which tailends spontaneous working class anger and resistance, and tries to drag it back behind futile reformist demands which can only lead to demoralization and frustration.

Capitalism cannot provide a decent life for the majority of people, and never has been able to. The relatively high standard of living of the majority of the working class in Britain (compared to most of the world) is now being savagely cut back because of the worldwide capitalist slump and Britain's weak competitive position in relation to its major imperialist rivals.

Capitalism cannot afford to provide a good public transport system, or good healthcare, or good schools, or good housing, or full employment, however much the Labour or Tory or any other party might want it to.

Capitalism needs to ruthlessly exploit people, and will continue to do so however many days of protest there are.

Capitalism cannot simply change its mind and become 'nice' and give everyone good living standards if enough people shout loudly enough about it.

The inevitability of this worldwide capitalist slump because of the surplus value crisis of capitalism) and the historical context in which all working class struggle is taking place, is what needs to be understood.

The fullest possible explanation of the entire imperialist crisis needs to be argued for in the labour movement, and the only solution to the crisis - the overthrow of capitalism and the seizure of power by the working class - is the only perspective to fight with.

This understanding cannot arise spontaneously in the working class, it has to be fought for, against the entire rotten cowardly tradition of the existing TUC/Labour leadership.

The greater the political understanding of the current crisis, and the more clearly the anti-communist, reformist, class -collaborating cowardice of the TUC/Labour leadership is exposed and driven out of the labour movement, the more united and effective will working class struggle with a new Leninist leadership – become.

Just how stinking reactionary and ignorant Labour reformism can be is revealed by Militant's recent claim to be "the party that rid the nation of Thatcher" because of its opposition to the poll tax.

Having now been forced to stand openly as a party, and admit that they exist, unable to hide in the reactionary Labour party any longer, they are trying to prove their 'militant' fighting credentials to the working class.

Unfortunately for Militant the working class are already well and truly aware of their credentials.

It was the Militant who ran Liverpool and did nothing to solve the city's massive problems of unemployment, poverty, poor housing conditions, etc., but spent years posturing around the town hall proclaiming their right to raise extortionate rates, which helped towards paying for their fat attendance allowances.

It was the Militant who tried to issue their entire workforce with redundancy notices, something which even the Tories have not yet tried to do with an entire council.

And whatever happened to Derek 'Degsy' Hatton, the great  'militant socialist leader' of Liverpool city council? He became a capitalist.

The Tory party got rid of Thatcher, stabbing her in the back in a blind panic over party divisions on Europe, and growing unease over the effects of the collapsing inflationary Lawson boom, and the general catastrophic economic mess that was unfolding. Within the overall context of ruling class panic, the spontaneous widespread anger over the poll tax contributed to their general sense of unease, but poll tax itself was by no means the issue which brought Thatcher down. To claim this is simply anti-Marxist ignorance.

Militant merely tailended the spontaneous anti poll tax revolt and opportunistically tried to claim leadership, wildly exaggerating their own importance, and always trying to obscure and prevent any revolutionary understanding being fought for in this movement, ensuring it could never become more than reformist protest politics.

The great 'victory' of poll tax 'defeat' was in reality the immediate hiking up of VAT by 2½% to make the working class pay for it, and the introduction of a new council tax, which is just as outrageous as the old tax it replaced. No wonder Militant were the only people 'celebrating' its demise last Wednesday.

The disgusting hypocrisy of bankrupt played-out labour movement operators, reeking of the most arrogant conceited opportunism, is matched only by the equally arrogant hypocrisy of the ruling class, the other side of the coin.

Capitalism's political superstructure is crumbling under the pressure of economic slump (see EPSR 693), which is laying bare
the inner workings of capitalist democracy as nothing more sophisticated than largescale criminal racketeering.

The collapse of the Italian parliament into a chaotic backstabbing farce, with nearly all its leading politicians exposed as either strongly connected with, or members of, the Mafia, is only the tip of the iceberg.

As Germany sinks deeper into slump, the lid is coming off the stinking scandal of 'democracy' in yet another 'free world' country:

PROMINENT German politicians have been implicated in a series of mini-scandals involving charges of over-zealous lobbying for local firms engaged in subsidy swindles, links with the criminal underworld, dubious property ideals and secret pay-offs to political opponents.

Almost daily revelations have so shattered the public's trust in its democratic representatives that more than 60 per cent of Germans polled this week believe political corruption is commonplace. A year ago, 73 per cent thought it exceptional.

"We should not go the same way as Italy and France. The warning signals are there and we should take heed of them," says Norbert Gansel, a Social Democrat deputy, and the only MP to publish his annual financial returns.

The allegations of improper behaviour among politicians reach the upper echelons of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's government, the official SPD opposition and regional administrations.

Gunther Krause, the transport minister and spokesman for east German MPs in the Bundestag, is fighting for his political life after the latest allegations about his financial affairs and links with dubious businessmen.

A co-architect of the German unification treaty of 1990 and, until this week, a protege of Dr Kohl, the unpopular Mr Krause is reported to have had connections with an east German construction firm accused of illegally siphoning off millions of marks from the Treuhand privatisation agency.

Theo Waigel, the finance minister and leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, was reported to have turned a blind eye to the activities of a local meat concern, Moksel, accused of large-scale tax evasion and unlawful receipt of subsidies for re-exporting east German beef to the former Soviet Union.

His CSU colleague and Bavarian premier, Max Streibl, has found his position challenged within the party, after allegations that he regularly accepted free holidays and other services from a local aerospace firm. He may be forced to resign.

Björn Engholm, the SPD leader, is accused of knowing more than he has admitted about under-the-counter payments by his colleagues to a Christian Democrat spokesman in his native Schleswig-Holstein. The payments were allegedly for information received about the CDU's dirty tricks campaign against Mr Engholm in regional elections in 1987.

Mr Engholm, who has been slipping in popularity and was weakened by sharp SPD losses in Hesse state local polls this month, said he remained the party's candidate for chancellor in next year's general elections. He said he might quit as premier of Schleswig-Holstein to concentrate on campaigning.

All the accused politicians deny any wrong-doing — including Jurgen Mollemann, the former economics minister who was forced to resign earlier this year after admitting he had written letters on official note-paper to promote a relative's company.

But the public, fed up with politics as a whole and increasingly staying away from the voting booths, is convinced that politicians are abusing their privileges and acting virtually as paid lobbyists for business interests. Pollsters say the image of politicians has reached an all-time low.

Mr Gansel sees a degeneration of political and business morals, and suggests the corruption has reached the police for the first time. But members of the Bundestag are immune from prosecution for corruption.

Similarly, scandals are surfacing in Spain:

THE Spanish prime minister, Felipe González, was yesterday jeered by an audience of students as the debate over corruption turned ugly. As he tried to deliver a lecture at Madrid's Autonomous University, students shouted "crook", "thief' and chanted "out, out".

His ordeal followed the most heated exchanges in parliament since the restoration of democracy almost 16 years ago. Deputies from the ruling Socialist Party and the opposition People's Party (PP) insulted and threatened each other in the corridors of congress after the PP staged a walkout. The incidents came during a debate over alleged bribery in connection with the high-speed train line built to take visitors to last year's world fair, Expo '92.

This week saw the release of a report prepared by state financial experts for a Supreme Court judge revealing a scheme whereby at least £6 million was taken from companies and banks by a group of firms which met the socialists' election expenses.

With breathtaking arrogance the assistant to the Tory party chairman Norman Fowler calls it an "impertinence" for the secret funding of the Tory party to be looked at by a select committee. 

Whilst the British parliamentary racket has endless procedures and trickery to try and hide the truth about itself from the working class, the fact that such an investigation is even taking place, particularly in the light of the Italian exposures, shows how seriously undermined by the imperialist crisis, weak and close to the edge of an abyss the British ruling class now are.

The Tories say that schools should teach children the following 'moral values':

telling the truth, keeping promises, respecting the rights and property of others, acting considerately, helping the less fortunate and taking personal responsibility for one's actions.

Schools must also reject bullying, cheating, deceit, cruelty, irresponsibility and dishonesty.

Yet, as is pointed out by virtually everyone in the country who can speak and is not a complete moron, the government and its 'loyal opposition' lie, cheat, are dishonest, exploit the less fortunate and don't take responsibility for their actions as a matter of everyday routine.

One recent example of government 'morality' is the Matrix Churchill affair, in which ministers conspired to allow businessmen to go to jail in order to cover up their own illegal involvement in arms deals to Iraq, and then refused to accept responsibility and resign when they were found out.

Insisting that teachers should now ''challenge the view that science is the only means of understanding the world" and encourage religious superstition instead reveals the complete ideological bankruptcy of late C20th capitalism.

The instructions to teachers to become "moral agents" is completely ludicrous.

Since when have teachers, under the capitalist system, been able to be anything other than agents of bourgeois morality anyway? It's simply that the government wants to change the 'moral' message, from the phony liberal democratic bullshit about everyone 'having the right to their own point of view' and the 'right to express it' - which was never really true - to the 'shut your mouth and do what you are told' variety of bourgeois morality.

Capitalism cannot afford liberal niceties as it tries to impose savage slump conditions on the working class and eventually demand that youth put on a uniform and go to war and die for capitalism's right to make a profit.

The trade war and eventual world war tensions now building up in the imperialist system are unmistakable.

The recent clashes over 'surplus' fish capital in the fishing industry are the forerunners of many more international trade war clashes - all the way to WW3 - over steel, coal, cars, computers, food, and every other commodity as the rival imperialist powers try to carve each other up and become top dog.

Only Bolshevik revolution as fought for by Lenin's party, which first broke the imperialist stranglehold on the working class, by calling for the defeat of their own ruling class in imperialist WW1, and then overthrowing them and building the world's first workers state, can satisfy the needs of mankind and end the obscene criminal capitalist system.

The chaotic mess which the former Soviet Union is in since it abandoned proletarian dictatorship and planned socialist economic growth for the wonders of free market capitalist democracy, simply proves this point a thousand times more. Build the ILWP.
D.Watts

P&P South West Bulletin. If you would like more information about the South West Bulletin or the ILWP, please contact P0 Box 50,London SW17 9NL.