Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
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No 0725 November 9th 1993                                                                                                                            10p 
Discussion

Trot sectarianism writhes in suicidal ultra-left posturing agony. All subjective bourgeois ideology now on the rack of the most seething revolutionary ferment ever to begin in history. Spart provocations against genuine revolutionary solidarity with Cuba exposed. The proletarian-dictatorship anathema to Trots will prevail. Build Leninist theory more urgently than ever.

The squirming by the fake-'left' now that its treacherous anti-Sovietism has been fully exposed for the anti-communism that it is (see Bulletin 724 and many previous editions) is currently troubling the most extreme ultra-left sophisticates in the swamp.

At long last, one group of middle-class Trotskyite 'revolutionaries' has felt obliged to pursue the logic of ultra-leftism to the bitter end, and to continue demanding the 'revolutionary' overthrow of the Castro regime in the name of 'more workers democracy', and therefore 'better socialism' and 'better anti-imperialism'.

Simultaneously, the Sparts have once again also felt obliged to return to their old anti-communist vomit over Poland and the Solidarnosc counter-revolution that all these petty-bourgeois fake 'revolutionaries' were so energetically cheering on because it allegedly promised more 'rank-and-file socialism'.

Last week saw the SWP lying through its teeth that Solidarnosc was fine until winning the 1989 elections and that it was only "since then its leaders have embraced all the Thatcherite rubbish coming from the West".

Only total morons or the most depraved reactionaries could try to put across such a deception in order to continue trying to bamboozle the working class.

Now the Sparts, who were cannier than the rest of the swamp in getting off the Solidarnosc bandwagon in late 1981 when they felt that the stench of the CIA/Vatican counter-revolution was getting too strong for intelligent workers to no longer notice, are trying to pretend that it was only "in late 1981 when Walesa & Co first made their bid to restore capitalism in Poland". Crap.

By late 1981, the Bulletin had already published more than a whole year's weekly issues attacking Solidarnosc for the counter-revolutionary fraud that it was, most of those Bulletins containing easily intelligible evidence from the 'free' world bourgeoisie's own media admissions proving what complete stooges for Western imperialist values Walesa & Co were.

Only the cretinous middle-class subjectivism of the swamp, so determined to hate the dictatorship of the proletariat and so determined to prove that 'nice' and 'real' so-called 'workers democracy' building 'genuine socialism' was so easily available, prevailed however.

That same petty-bourgeois subjective idealism is prevailing now with the Sparts.

These people know that they are lying about their coverage of Solidarnosc in that early period. They know that all the evidence was available long before the "end of 1981" to prove that Solidarnosc was nothing but a CIA/Vatican counter-revolutionary racket.

But the last thing these posturers are interested in is setting the scientific historical record straight so that the working class should for all time have the full benefit of the better lessons to be learned about Solidarnosc anti-communist hysteria, and the devastating effect of bourgeois counter-revolutionary culture.

The only thing this phony Spart 'revolutionary' pose is interested in is how it can continue to hoodwink workers into not rejecting the poisonous subjective-idealism of Trotskyism.

The Sparts' new contribution on Cuba is a massive 6-page ultra-left propaganda undertaking, oozing with 'anti-imperialist' sympathy and 'solidarity' with Cuba suffering under the murderous US-imperialist blockade, and correctly explaining the damage to the Revolution that the lack of Leninist world-proletarian-dictatorship perspectives (although not quite termed as such by the Sparts, of course, - significantly) has done in the past and will continue to do.

But its philosophy, unstated, is pure garbage, This claims that because the Cuban revolutionary leadership lacks a Leninist perspective for completing the international socialist revolution as the only ultimate guarantee of survival of workers states anywhere, - therefore this present Castro regime should be overthrown.

Thus the old Trotskyist incantation of the 'political revolution' is religiously resurrected, - the totally bogus 'extension of Marxism' which Trotsky invented just to cater for his personal ambition to seize the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and Soviet workers state after Lenin's death but without wishing to be too clearly seen to be a counter-revolutionary, once the party had decisively rejected him.

This fiction claims that such a 'political' revolution would in no way challenge the socialist gains of the proletarian state or its class-dictatorship composition, but merely overthrow the political bureaucracy.

In practice, of course, such a distinction is farcically speculative, to say the least, if not a grotesque provocation.

As Lenin explained in a famous passage from Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder when analysing the discomfort of petty-bourgeois fake-'Marxist' 'revolutionaries' over the dictatorship of the proletariat:

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

Elsewhere, Lenin also explains bluntly that the historical form which Marxism's long-awaited proletarian dictatorship had finally taken in practice, - was a party dictatorship.

And the main theme of the more than one dozen volumes of works written by Lenin from the October Revolution to his death is the defence of this dictatorship against every kind of crank utopia which wanted to see a babel of conflicting workers parties all squabbling in the soviets to supposedly achieve 'real workers democracy', which as Lenin explained a thousand times would have meant the certain immediate overthrow of the whole revolution by imperialist reaction.

And the last great warnings of Lenin's lifetime, from the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party onwards, were all against allowing any factional splits to develop within the dictatorship party, for to do so would mean certain early loss of the whole revolution.

The only practice there has been in history of proletarian revolution has seen Marx's brilliant theoretical analysis of the need for proletarian dictatorship richly confirmed a thousand times over, - from the slaughter of the weak Spanish parliamentary republic by Franco's fascist forces in the 1930s which only a firm workers-state dictatorship might have had a chance of withstanding.

A coalition of workers party voices and a naïve faith in parliamentary methods as opposed to proletarian dictatorship saw the Allende 'socialist' regime overthrown in 1973 by fascist reaction.

A total paralysis on questions of revolutionary theory saw the Grenada socialist revolution overthrown by US imperialist invasion in 1983 after the ruling New Jewel party leadership had split over issues which an understanding of proletarian dictatorship alone could have resolved.

The Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua was half destroyed by imperialist military intervention, and then committed total suicide by falling for the delusion of 'parliamentary democracy' and giving Washington's $ billions the chance to win the elections.

Gorbachev abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat, - and the anarchy of bourgeois-parliamentary ideological confusion had let reaction in within months to totally wipe out the brilliant gains of 70 years of workers statehood.

Now the Sparts want the dictatorship of the proletariat abandoned in Cuba so that the workers state collapses there too.

With sophisticated cunning, these middle-class 'revolutionaries' make a big show of their academic Marxist-Leninist scraps of learning and admit that fighting for revolution outside of Cuba, - including, most importantly inside the USA itself, - is the first duty of international revolutionary support for the Cuban workers state. 

They also correctly point to Havana's feeble Leninist understanding in aligning Cuba with international popular-front disaster after disaster in solidarity with endless Third International revisionist degeneracy, further demoralising workers everywhere, including in Cuba.

And with even more slippery cunning, the Sparts of course avoid saying that they want the dictatorship of the proletariat abandoned on Cuba.

But not once in 10,000 words do they support the dictatorship of the proletariat either. They just ignore it, just like they now ignore the 12 months after August 1980 when the Sparts were indelibly exposed as hunting with the petty-bourgeois counter-revolutionary pack to bring down the Polish workers state proletarian dictatorship.

The Sparts declare:

"What's needed in Cuba is..a proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy that is leading the country to counter-revolution, and to replace it with a regime based on democratic workers soviets, in which all parties that stand for and defend the workers state can put forward their programs....The Castro regime is viscerally hostile to this. If at first it didn't have a consolidated bureaucracy (decisions were taken more often with whoever was sitting with Castro in his jeep), it was nevertheless bonapartist rule by a petty-bourgeois layer that was separate from and hostile to the working class."

Slyly, the Sparts deliberately tie this latest damning-of-the-Cuban-Revolution-with-faint-praise to their doctrinaire Trotskyite 'support' for world revolution by opposing 'socialism in one country' to undermine existing workers states: 

"We have insisted that this narrow, nationalist, bureaucratic regime was a roadblock to extension of the revolution, that there has to be a proletarian political revolution in Cuba to open the way forward. If 'socialism in one country' was a nationalist lie and an impossibility in the giant Soviet Union covering a sixth of the globe, the Castro-Stalinist version of socialism in one small Caribbean island 90 miles from the most powerful imperialist power on earth is far, far more so,"

the Sparts jeer derisively.

"The bureaucratic Castro regime is at a dead-end" 

they continue. 

"The Stalinist betrayers of the revolution, by blocking its extension internationally, would lead to social counter-revolution, as has now occurred in East Europe and the Soviet Union, as threatens China and Vietnam, and today looms over Cuba. 

Without considerable state aid from a far more powerful workers state, the deformed workers state on this island of 11 million people cannot survive on its own forces."

Cuba's nationalist tinge and its partial retreat into NEP economic consolidation after the catastrophe of the revisionist suicide of the USSR is then derided as nothing but a counter-revolutionary retreat towards capitalism:

"In Cuba, the more right-wing elements are already looking further and are dreaming of some kind of peaceful counter-revolution, i.e., some kind of social-democratic variety of capitalism.

"Castro put forward a whole series of slogans, which were: 'Save the fatherland, save the revolution, and save the gains of socialism'. When a Stalinist starts talking about preserving the gains of socialism, hold on to your wallet."

This degenerate drivel gets even worse when these Sparts actually resort to the cheapest CIA-manufactured bar-room philistinism:

"There's an apocryphal joke about this," they go on in derision at some of the economic planning mistakes Cuba has suffered. "Castro gets up before the Council of Ministers and says, 'Che, I don't understand how you could have done this. I mean, we were all sitting around this table, and I asked 'Who here is an economist?' And you raised your hand.' Che responds, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you asked, 'Who here is a communist?'".

This Spart abuse is so irresponsibly decadent as to not really need much argument to place this academic Trotskyism in its correct reactionary dilettante light. This stuff is pure counter-revolutionary provocation.

But some of the issues raised in the course of this depraved subjective-idealist rubbishing of the Cuban Revolution are worth discussing.

How should correct and proper criticism of Cuba's non-Leninist weaknesses and mistakes be presented when the very survival of the workers state is under siege-like conditions of imperialist blockade and sabotage, relentless bourgeois counter-revolutionary propaganda, and suffering from revisionist own-goals? Is there legitimate value in firmly predicting that Havana's many popular-front retreats on some international revolutionary challenges have made Cuba's own revolutionary survival not just harder but even impossible?

First, however, let the obvious crippling defect of the Spart "everything is rotten" Trotskyite approach (see ILWP Books vols 3, 4 and 5 for Lenin's quotes on Trotsky's destructive defeatism) be registered.

From the start, these armchair-socialist advocates only of the 'perfect' socialist revolution simply totally ignore the above Leninist scientific analysis of proletarian dictatorship consisting largely of authoritative political leadership, and the further Leninist wisdom that if proletarian dictatorship does not rule, then only bourgeois dictatorship can possibly rule.

Their opening phrase about 'ousting the bureaucracy' is just a philistine deception. They only mean the Castro group leadership, and the Castro group leadership is the heart and soul of the Cuban Revolution, as even any imbecile could tell you.

But the Sparts have the whole Castro-movement revolution down as something "hostile to the working-class" and a bourgeois bonapartist dictatorship.

And if such bourgeois forces are, according to the Sparts, not building socialism (not surprisingly, it could be added), - then the logic is that these bonapartists have really been building capitalism from the start, - as indeed some of the later Spart abuse actually implies.

So why this relentless US imperialist campaign to wipe out the Cuban Castro-ite Revolution? Either the world's leading imperialist ruling class is utterly insane. Or the Sparts are congenital liars, and the most disgusting frauds that the fake-'left' swamp has ever produced.

And the Sparts' nauseating petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' subjectivism even exposes its own phony demand for the international expansion of the socialist revolution as the 'only antidote to Castro's hostility to the working class', etc.

Because in 1963, long before the Sparts could posture as being anti-Castro "only in the interests of extending workers-state power worldwide," which Castro is incredibly alleged to be opposed to, - the Spart forerunners were already trying to blast the Cuban Revolution out of the water to prevent it from 'harming the working class or damaging the cause of building socialism internationally.'

The 'perfectionist' petty-bourgeois ideology employed against the Castro movement then was slightly less subtle than now, using such phrases as:

"Trotskyists cannot give confidence and political support, however critical, to a governing regime hostile to the most elementary principles and practices of workers democracy....Peasant-based guerrilla warfare under petty-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime....For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism....Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerrilla road to socialism....This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement",

etc.

Reading between the lines, these ivory-tower 'revolutionary' middle-class perfectionists would clearly have actually preferred the Cuban Revolution to have been strangled at birth. Giving it credibility would be 'suicide for socialism', the Sparts declared.

All of this makes the Sparts' current line of wanting Castro out so that the Cuban Revolution and world socialism can both be saved seem even more suspicious. And that suspicious swells to downright scepticism that the Sparts mean a single word
they say when their own journalistic description of present-day Cuba (to establish their 'revolutionary' credentials for acceptance as worthy arbiters of what should now happen to the 'counter-revolution-bound' Castro regime) is examined:

In the first place, it's important to emphasize that this tiny island achieved the highest standard of living for the working class of anywhere in Latin America. The official statistics list a Gross Domestic Product of $2,500 per person. That is roughly the same as Argentina, but you can't directly compare statistics for a workers state with those for a capitalist country. For one thing, the level of inequality is immensely less in Cuba. You can just see that the working-class districts in and around Havana and Santiago de Cuba are much better off than the huge slums surrounding Buenos Aires.

And you see it in a host of statistics: infant mortality in Cuba is now down to 9.3 per thousand, less than New York City, and it has continued to fall during this severe economic crisis. The Cubans say proudly that despite all the shortages they haven't closed a single hospital — compare that to Harlem and recall Sydenham Hospital. Life expectancy at birth is 72 years for men and 76 for women. The literacy rate of 96.2 percent is above that of the U.S.; 88 percent of school-age children go to secondary school; there is a huge number of university students and graduates, a majority of whom are women.

You could go on like this at length.

Cuba had the second-highest food intake per capita in Latin America, with a calorie consumption of over 3,100 a day. Ninety-five percent of the population has electricity. With 22.5 percent of the workforce employed in industry (and another 16 percent in construction and transport), it was far and away the most industrialized country in Latin America. With a 1988 industrial output per capita of $1,335, Cuba was closer to the level of a backward European country, like Portugal ($1,591), which many of Cuba's statistics are similar to. But all of a sudden, this country has been brutally thrown back into a pre-industrial period.

Today Cuba is now facing the most serious and critical moment since the revolution, something that everyone there understands. The situation is excruciating, because they are caught between the American blockade and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. People will tell you that from 1989 on, as the Soviet bloc began crumbling—with capitalist-restorationist governments in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the capitalist reunification of Germany—they never thought they would even make it this far. Their attitude is, well, we're somehow here, but it can't go on.

The fact that Cuba has been able to hold out against this tremendous pressure is a direct result of the collectivized property. Take the question of energy and transportation. Due to the Soviet cutoff of oil to Cuba, energy supplies were slashed to about 30 percent of what they were. That meant a number of industries have been cut way back, and transport was effectively militarized. They imported more than a million bicycles from China, and Cuba started producing its own bikes. They also began manufacturing carts to serve as horse-drawn taxis—it's infuriating to see this forced regression to a pre-motorized state. And if you have to go further than a bicycle or horse and buggy will take you, you wait at a transport point. There is a policeman at each one of these points, and he simply flags down every passing state-owned vehicle—whether it's a flat-bed truck, or a bus, or a little car—and it stops, and people are put on it. People often have to wait for two hours for long-distance transport, but it works and we saw very little discontent with that.

The blackouts when we were there were about eight hours a day per neighborhood. They went up to 16 hours a day in August when they shut down some industries altogether for vacation, although now they have been reduced again. It's put in the paper when you're going to have it. So some people we met, they had a blackout that afternoon when we were sitting there, and the mother of the family was saying how silly her sister-in-law was, who had defrosted the refrigerator that morning; if she had just read the papers, she would have had it defrosted for her that afternoon. Of course, given the paper shortage it is extremely hard to get a newspaper at all: they eliminated all of the dailies except Granma, cut them back to weeklies.

But what may become the focus of the crisis here is the question of food. Hungry bellies cost a lot of votes, as the Sandinistas found out in 1990. Whereas people will put up with a lot if they have a perspective, there's no prospect of it ending, and it is really, really bad—there is very little to eat. Here let me read you the ration list in Centro Habana: Bread—one roll a day. That's it. Rice—five pounds a month. Sugar— six pounds a month. Cooking oil—half a pound a month. Dried beans—ten ounces a month. Cigarettes—well, they have tobacco, so they get four cartons a month. Chicken—half a pound every two months, "cuando llega" (when it arrives). Eggs—16 a month. Fish—two pounds a month, that's the main source of protein, which they continue to get because Canada lets Cuba fish off Newfoundland. And milk is available for children up to the age of seven, but nobody else.

One scientist who we talked to was in his mid-30s, and he explained that it's not just the lack of food, but how demoralizing this is. He said. "Ten years ago, I would have never bought anything on the black market, I support the revolution. But you have a family, you have kids, so you go out and you buy some milk on the black market, and then you feel so awful. You just feel demoralized because you've done it."

This damning-with-faint-praise then quickly resorts to its more usual bilious cynicism about the regime's allegedly dubious motives, its 'totally bureaucratic incompetence and self-serving', and its absolutely 'visceral hostility to the working class', etc.

Most honest workers will conclude from the Sparts' own admissions on just a meagre part of the truly heroic socialist transformation of Cuba over the past 34 years under Castro that this regime certainly has a strange way of showing its 'visceral' hostility to the working class.

They would also query why there was no deeper explanation from the strange ultra-left 'revolutionaries' about how their apparent 1963 predictions of disaster for the working-class on Cuba and for socialism generally seem to have been so criminally
incorrect.

And they would also want to hear more fully from the Sparts about another curious contradiction, - again as best highlighted in the Sparts' own admissions:

The Yankee imperialists feel they now have a free hand to go after all their enemies. And right at the top of their "enemies list," as Nixon called it, whether there is a Republican or a Democrat in the White House, is Cuba. Three and a half decades after the revolution, American rulers are still so incensed at the effrontery of the semi-colony not just in its backyard but on its back doorstep overthrowing capitalism, and the fear that this could inspire revolution elsewhere in their Latin American neocolonial empire, that Washington is determined to strangle the island, which it is continuing to do with its draconian embargo. That was intensified last year with the passage of the Torricelli Amendment, which would never have been passed without the support of the Democrats. And they're still squeezing.

Most normal objectively-minded people would conclude that such an 'overthrowing of capitalism', striking such terror into the heart of the most dangerously reactionary monopoly-imperialist ruling class in all history, was just about the essence of what the proletarian-dictatorship revolutionary socialist epoch, so crucially important to the future of civilisation, was all about.

But as already noted, for academic middle-class Trotskyite 'revolutionaries', life is much more importantly about them and their semi-religious dogmas being proved correct.

This Spart voodoo quickly moves on to immediately put right any workers who might be impressed by Washington's hatred of the Cuban Revolution into thinking that its achievements merit unconditional and enthusiastic support by revolutionaries everywhere. Not at all, sneer the Sparts at once:
	
Cuba is a key question for revolutionaries around the world, particularly in the U.S. and Latin America, and it has been a defining issue for the Spartacist tendency from our origins in the Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Workers Party. While the SWP was hailing Fidel Castro as an "unconscious Trotskyist" the RT noted that his petty-bourgeois nationalist guerrilla movement, which originally sought to carry out a program of bourgeois-democratic reforms, saw itself forced to expropriate the capitalists, both foreign and domestic, as the only alternative to submission to or defeat by U.S. imperialism. And that while the origins of Castro's 26th of July Movement were different from the Stalinist parties, the nature of the Castro regime and its political program were qualitatively the same as the Stalinist-ruled degenerated and deformed workers states.

The 'logic' of this put-down is pure doctrinaire pedantry. The Castro group might well have ended up not quite where they had fully anticipated going in the first place, and have been surprised at this, etc. But what else is new? Marx and Engels started out as Young Hegelians. The crucial historical pointer of proletarian dictatorship could not even begin to be seriously contemplated until after the defeat of the Paris Commune forced revolutionary minds to think about it. It took Lenin a whole lifetime of titanic and dramatic experiences, many of them surprising and unexpected, to become a complete Leninist. And Trotsky only became a total reactionary opportunist after four decades of working at it, etc, etc. (See ILWP Books vol 5).

Of course there is a continuing problem of the Castro movement's somewhat spontaneous and revisionist-spoiled attitude to the vital struggle for revolutionary theory, - just as there was indeed an ongoing (and increasing) problem of revisionist degeneration throughout the entire socialist camp, from Moscow outwards.

But this 'political revolutionary overthrow' is just an academic fantasy. Clearer Marxist-Leninist understanding has always needed, and still needs, to be as resolutely fought for as possible. And it has to be considered as at least a possibility that such a struggle for Leninist theory might not always have been comfortable tolerated by workers-state authorities. And there is not the remotest call for any fetishistic exaggerated 'respect' for workers-state authorities as such, comparable to Third International revisionist fawning and the humiliating 'cult of the individual' phenomenon.

But starting out 'following' the Cuban Revolution with the aim from the beginning of overthrowing the Castro leadership will strike all normal workers as being just utterly and weirdly perverse. These Sparts write about the 'deformed and degenerated' workers states in an ultimatistic way as if they were something from outer space and not the result of real living human experience, the first in history of trying to build workers states in the teeth of unremitting imperialist hostility, subversion, sabotage, and destruction, - including many catastrophic disasters, but much more importantly including many priceless triumphant achievements for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It is much more the zombiefied approach of the Sparts (and all Trot anti-communists) to these moving developments in civilisation's record which seems more fittingly described as 'deformed and degenerated'.

These Sparts are just deluded liars and fools, or worse. There never has been any regime of just 'democratic workers soviets' anywhere or anytime in history nor ever will be. Leadership will always be crucial, and correct revolutionary theory the vital element of that leadership.

Everything, of course, can be argued about, and should be. But only total charlatans can pretend to be Marxist-Leninists yet never even mention the thorny and complex issue of proletarian dictatorship, - let alone always keep it at the very heart of all revolutionary debate and struggle as the ILWP has consistently achieved. Only complete frauds like the Sparts could go a whole year advising the working class to support Solidarnosc counter-revolution, but then retreat from that position with never a word of admission or explanation as to what went wrong with the analysis, followed by a continuing 12-year cover-up to this day of this ludicrous and shameful opportunism. Only posturing academic middle-class muddleheads could liken their blind-dogma derision of Cuba's 'peasant-guerrilla road to socialism' to Lenin's fight against the SR programme on tactics in 1917. The Bolsheviks could and did take power. The SRs were not going to, and didn't. What has any of this got to do with the Castro movement's glorious Cuban Revolution which has managed to terrorise the greatest imperialist power on earth for 34 years, building socialism.

Surely any approach to the clearly damaging revisionist weaknesses in the Cuban Revolution's make-up must begin only with truly unconditional solidarity, and that means solidarity first and foremost with the proletarian-dictatorship essence of the Cuban workers state (or any other workers state). Thereafter, any friendly or constructive criticism that arises should be made.

There is nothing but the most hostile sniping in this Spart approach, as there has never been anything else in the whole Trotskyite 'everything is rotten' subjective-defeatist rotten history.

Is Cuba's survival impossible, and is it correct to warn the working class of such a prediction?

The most curious and suspicious thing about this Trot approach is that the one crucial piece of advice which revolutionaries worldwide should keep on drumming out to the Cubans as loudly and insistently as possible, - do not even contemplate for one second relaxing the dictatorship of the proletariat by one millimetre, - is the one bit of advice which the Sparts don't make. Are there signs of a worrying liquidationist tendency growing inside Cuba? Of course there are, as there were bound to be.

And they should be as widely and energetically argued against as possible, - openly in front of the working class internationally, - just as the Bulletin has always done from its very inception.

But agitate and organise to overthrow the Castro regime? This would have been deserved suicide in 1963 when the Sparts seem to have ducked this issue, possibly intimidated off it by the colossal worldwide fervour behind the Cuban Revolution.	

For a group of hostile Trotskyite interlopers to try it in 1993 when Cuba is under the most desperate imperialist siege and needs all the rallying round its revolutionary leadership that it can get, - would be even more deservedly suicidal. Why don't these Trotskyite stooges for bourgeois subjective-idealism just get a boat and sail into Havana harbour with their 'Down with Castro' banners?

Plainly it is only from within a non-factionalising polemical struggle inside the revolutionary movement that the programme, strategy and tactics of any workers state can hope to be influenced. Trotsky's hate-filled bilious factionalising opposition to the revolutionary party leadership as such (from the 1923 'New Course' onwards) was doomed to catastrophe from the start, and this middle-class sectarian subjective mentality has never looked back.

There has never been a Trotskyite socialist revolution. The world has never come anywhere near a Trotskyite revolution of any kind. There has never been an anti-imperialist revolution overthrowing capitalism which just consisted of 'democratic workers soviets'. There has never been a revolution in history which Trotskyism has offered genuine unconditional support for.

What there has been in history are the anti-imperialist revolutions which have taken place, with all their faults, and weaknesses, and difficult learning processes.

And what there has been against them, apart from their own revisionist self-inflicted wounds, has been the fake ultra-left middle-class sectarianism of a few noisy handfuls of Trotskyites, mysteriously winning acres of bourgeois media publicity and star columns, mysteriously being encouraged to play a huge parasitic role in the Labour Party for decades, and growing fattest of all in the wealthiest imperialist countries of all where bourgeois individualism and subjective idealism is the absolutely rampant philosophy, maiming millions of intellectuals and workers in the course of the most devastating and sustained ideological onslaught in the whole history of civilisation, - anti-communism's relentless and unendingly subtle and varied campaigns.

For the record, this Spart dogma has also always acted with sectarian provocations over Ireland, either denouncing or denying the anti-imperialist triumphs of the IRA/Sinn Féin national-liberation struggle on the ludicrous doctrinaire basis that such advance still did not amount to revolutionary socialism. (Well of course it didn't. It is a bourgeois nationalist struggle, but no less importantly and triumphantly anti-colonialist for all that, aiding, not harming, the anti-imperialist struggle generally. But even if it had found its way towards some sort of socialist perspectives, it is guaranteed that Trotskyism would have denounced it or damned it with faint praise anyway).

But regardless of all sectarian middle-class provocations, the world continues heading for the greatest explosion of anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles ever, with worldwide proletarian dictatorship as the only possible eventual aim. The stock exchanges keep twitching in panic, business confidence plummets, GATT looks lost, imperialist warmongering twitches at the Korean workers state, Britain's snail's-pace humiliation-withdrawal from Occupied Ireland inches forward, and Royal parasites threaten press curbs to keep their lavishly-subsidised playboy antics private. Build Leninism. A. Carr

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. 44 Friday November 5 1993

Imperialist idealist philosophy in complete chaos.
The Pope senses which way the historical wind is blowing and adapts the Vatican line. Fake left swamp lag behind. The dictatorship of the proletariat remains the only answer

All imperialist idealist philosophical thinking is being thrown into turmoil by the momentous class-war tremors beginning to shake the foundations of even the most complacent, rich, and arrogant bourgeoisies of the United States and Western Europe.

The simplistic certainties of the 'free West'/'evil empire' politics, of the cold war 'capitalist freedom and democracy' versus 'communist totalitarianism and denial of human rights' have been shattered.

The relentless build up of inter-imperialist tradewar rivalry - (caused by the iron laws of capitalist economic development, of economic overproduction and mountains of surplus capital) - has again established itself as being the real essence of capitalist development, rather than the phony 'competition between 'two systems' and the supposed 'triumph of capitalism' over communism.

The 'triumph of capitalism' has exposed it more than ever before as a system of permanent crisis, impossible contradiction and savage injustice.
	
The tradewar crisis is now so firmly set on its inevitable track towards all-out confrontation, and the economic outlook so bleak, that, without the cement of anti-communist thinking to keep their brains together, the petit-bourgeois fake swamp has simply collapsed into complete confusion.

All the arguments about a 'reasonable' way forwards for mankind being through reforming the 'uglier aspects of capitalism', or the so-called 'revolutionary' middle-class "left" dreams of perfect revolution which gives everyone instant justice and a great lifestyle, and which is 'nothing like the Soviet Union was', are being shown up as certifiable lunacy.

The fake-"left" swamp now have a new spiritual leader to guide them out of their chaos - the Pope. In fact, they've always followed him, but it's just become even more glaringly obvious.

In Britain the entire Trotskyite movement and most of the Stalinist so-called communist parties simply followed the Vatican/CIA propaganda line about the Solidarnosc trade union movement in Poland being a movement for 'workers democracy', rather than the anti-working class counter-revolutionary movement to restore capitalism that it really was, and as has been subsequently proved beyond any doubt whatsoever.

Now that the consequences of this counter-revolutionary movement in Poland, and in the Soviet Union, have been clearly seen, in social chaos, soaring unemployment, renewed exploitation of the working class etc., and now that workers are beginning to clearly state a preference for the 'old order' of guaranteed employment, social benefits etc., the fake-"left" swamp find themselves in the same ideological boat as the Pope in trying to explain this phenomenon away.

In a recent interview the Pope put forward his ideology of a 'renewed capitalism with a human face', which sounded very like the conclusions of the recent Bristol fake Marxist forum. Leaving aside for a moment what the Pope actually said, the questions which were put to him, by themselves, reveal an enormous amount about the deep uncertainty affecting bourgeois thinking over the 'triumph of capitalism':

What do you believe your role to have been in the fall of communism? Many, including Lech Walesa, think that it was decisive.

Why has communism had the success it has had in history, and how do you explain the fact that it is still a force to be reckoned with in certain Western countries, while in others, such as Lithuania and Poland, it has returned to power through elections?

And this return to power of communists in certain ex-communist countries, bow can it be explained?

You fought hard and passionately against communism. But now in the countries which have freed themselves from it, moral degradation abounds, drug use and prostitution are widespread. In the ex-Yugoslavia there is a war which makes mockery of the concept of civilisation. Do you ever ask yourself if it was really worthwhile to defeat communism?

When you said, during your recent visit to the Baltic countries, that there was a "kernel of truth" in Marxism or socialism, your remarks caught many by surprise.

On the one hand, then, there is the developed West. But it is too much focused on economic questions, as you have observed. On the other hand, there is the ex-communist Europe which, thanks to the suffering it has endured, still gives evidence of a lesser degree of superficiality in life. In the rapprochement going on between these two Europes, which of the two stands to gain more?

When I hear you speak like this, I begin to wonder if you are not more strongly opposed to capitalism than to communism. Is this the impression you wish to give?

The Pope's pronouncements, like the fake-"left's", are typically full of hypocrisy, doublespeak, lies, contradiction and religious voodoo. They are however very revealing in that, unlike the fake- "left", he senses which way the historical wind is blowing towards mass working class revolt against capitalism - and feels the need to start criticizing capitalism now in order to better influence and mislead the anti-capitalist movements.

He's changed his line a bit since 1981 when, to undermine the Polish workers state, he sung the praises of capitalism, and his protégé Walesa kissed the hand of Thatcher and worshipped the glories of the 'free market West'. Now the Pope has decided that:

"The proponents of capitalism in its extreme forms tend to overlook the good things achieved by communism: the efforts to overcome unemployment, the concern for the poor...In communism there was a concern for the community, whereas capitalism is rather individualistic."

"the unjust, totalitarian system which defined itself as socialist or communist" should not mean throwing out those "seeds of truth" in socialism.

"The transition from one system to the other is very difficult. Its costs are also very high: a rise in unemployment, poverty and human misery"..

At the root of many of the serious social and human problems besetting Europe and the world today, the Pope says, "are the distorted manifestations of capitalism"…

Although the capitalist system has become more benign, partly thanks to "the influence of socialist thought", in some countries it remains "in its savage state, almost as it was in the past century".

...and about the recent electoral results in Poland, indicating workers' preference for life pre the Solidarnosc counter-revolution he concludes, like the SWP, that:

"This is not so much a matter of a return of communism, as it is a reaction to the ineffectiveness of the new governments" –

If he isn't already, the Pope will soon be embracing 'liberation theology' at this rate.

Of course when 'liberation theology' was, because of the influence of the socialist camp, to some extent supporting anti-imperialist movements, e.g. in Nicaragua and El Salvador, against the 'savage and unacceptable' capitalism of US 'backyard imperialism', the Pope couldn't denounce them and it fast enough.

Mealy mouthed weasel words about the injustices of capitalism are easy to make - Hitler made quite a few himself. The one class force in history ever to do anything about it though, the dictatorship of the proletariat, is what every single fake-"left" and stinking rightwing reactionary hates with every ounce of their strength.

Reading the E&PSR 724 about the SWP's sly treachery towards the working class, and reading what the Pope has to say about the collapse of communism, it is very hard to find a fag paper of difference between the Pope and the SWP:

"A crucial part of Western bourgeois ideology's abiding ignorant confusion spread about the real significance of 1977 and its world-shattering aftermath of Soviet workers-state development, is the role played by the middle-class 'revolutionaries' of the fake-"left".

The recent Polish elections, as noted above, are of course bourgeois parliamentary gibberish which cannot possibly restore the proletarian-dictatorship power of a workers state to recommence the building of socialism which is clearly what the people of Poland want to happen.

But what do avowed anti-communist 'lefts' make of this so-early dramatic turn-round in the condition of Polish public opinion which only just previously was presented by the 'free'-world's lying media as being so wholeheartedly anti-communist, anti-planned socialism, and pro-Solidarnosc-opportunism and reaction?

The SWP has been typical of the whole swamp with its monstrous piece of deception:

"Poles gave a massive thumbs down to privatisation and free market capitalism in last week's elections," it declared.

"But people who say Poles have voted for a return to the old 'Communist' regime are wrong.

"People were voting against spiralling poverty and job losses", etc.

Well of course they were. But the obviously significant point to answer, blatantly deliberately ignored by the centrists, is why a majority of Poles, with a vast array of parties to choose from, including several different sections of its supposedly beloved Solidarnosc, actually voted for the old Communist Party in order to vote for something better than the capitalist shite they are currently being served up with?

Obviously, because 'things were better under communism', as more and more millions are saying across Eastern Europe.

Will the SWP admit this? It will not. It just repeats in a new way its first-off grotesque evasion:

"Many of the politicians elected are from the old regime," a Polish socialist told Socialist Worker. "People know that. But the fact that people voted for them is a measure of how disgusted they are with the last four years of privatisation."

But of course. But why vote for the former Communist Party?, etc, etc, ad an infinitum of SWP evasions.

What these fake 'revolutionaries' don't want to admit, of course, is that their entire existence of contemptuous hatred for the workers states of East Europe as 'Stalinist tyrannies worse than fascism' has just been one long criminal distortion of the truth. These SWP centrist petty bourgeois have just one essence, — bitter anti-communism from a wholly middle-class political vantage point.

Such reactionary treachery, planted in the heart of the workers movement posturing as anti-imperialism but in reality the most hysterical anti-communism imaginable, is always bound to be marked by the most degenerate hypocrisy and lies.

Note the SWP total silence now in commenting on the wretched opportunism and reactionariness of the whole Solidarnosc phenomenon, financed and organised by the Vatican and the CIA to wreck the planned socialism of the Polish workers state:

THE BIGGEST losers in the election were the parties most associated with privatisation.

These include the various fragments of Solidarity, the union that led the revolt against the Stalinist regime in the early 1980s.

In Poland's first free elections in 1989 Solidarity won 260 of the 261 contested seats.

But since then its leaders have embraced all the Thatcherite rubbish coming from the West.

In return for huge loans and promises of massive investment they pursued one of the harshest programmes of spending cuts seen in the old Eastern bloc.

They encouraged spectacular profiteering and have overseen grotesque levels of corruption.

But the economic crisis is also splitting Solidarity.

Some of its leaders have turned to anti-semitism and extreme Polish nationalism.

Others, like the Labour Union, still stress workers' rights and argue for more state spending.

These clear signs of the most treacherous parliamentary social-democracy imaginable just get innocently reported by the SWP without a word of praise or blame, despite having filled their pages 12 years ago with nothing but ecstatic coverage of Solidarnosc's promising anti-communist achievements.

More specifically, not one word of comment do the SWP anti-communists utter about their own role in boosting Western bourgeois-ideology excitement about a 'democratic workers' reply to 'communist tyranny' always presented as being a 'constructive rank-and-file socialist response',  etc, etc.

What criminal deception by these SWP middle-class degenerates, guided only by their individualist subjective conceit and an inexhaustible hatred and fear of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the heart-and-soul of Marxism which these opportunist posturers profess to believe in.

And while covering up their own contemptible anti-communist record of past treachery to workers, their main interest lies in anti-communist deception, still wishing to blacken the whole history of the Polish workers state (and the socialist camp at large), pretending that the last thing Polish voters want is to go back to the old planned-socialism regime by voting for the old planned-socialism parties, - when that is all that the Polish voters clearly do want."

If there is a difference to be found, it is only in that the Pope is now finding something good to say about communism, though for all the wrong reasons, whereas the Trotskyite degenerates still hold on to their crazy proposition that the whole socialist development of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was a monstrous 'crime against humanity'.

This extract from the WRP's Labour Review of January 1981, sets forth the position held by the Trotskyite left swamp at the time, and which was attacked ruthlessly by the ILWP alone:

And this is not all. Even more important historically speaking, is that successful working-class political revolution in Poland would he the spark to ignite Eastern Europe and the USSR and the crisis-ridden capitalist West. The bureaucracy's role, since the 1930s, has been to police the working class of the world, not only of the USSR. This role developed after Stalin's doctrine of 'Socialism in One Country' was promulgated in November 1924, becoming definitive when by 1933 the bureaucracy had suppressed any element of proletarian control over its actions. In that year Hitler's accession to power was the fruit of Stalinism. Since then it has had to be recognised as the main counter-revolutionary force on the planet.

What now 'haunts Europe', as Marx and Engels would have said, is the spectre of Trotskyism: the permanent revolution, the political revolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union combining with the socialist revolution in Western capitalism.

This tortuous anti-communist madness has been totally discredited and disproved by reality, but is still hopelessly clung onto by the deranged fragments of the fake left, who lag behind the Pope in trying to rationalize their history of anti-communist treachery to the working class.

The Pope's vision of humane capitalism, like Gorbachev's 'merging the best of the two systems', is complete idealist crap. There is only one kind of capitalism, the savage imperialist chaos which is now ruling the roost.

Hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat is what unites the capitalists, the Pope and the SWP.

Leninist revolution is what will bring them down.

Build the ILWP.
D.Watts

Rail bill farce spells out end of class-collaboration reformist era. Labourite whistling in the dark just as barmy as privatization plan, Leninism needed to fight the fascist slump without illusions.

Whichever way yesterday's final Lords vote had gone, the essence of the Westminster rail bill shambles would still have been the same: unmistakable additional proof of the end of the whole postwar reformist class-collaborationist era.

Whether yesterday had ended with British Rail's status as potential viable 'franchisee' getting rescued (by the unelected feudal hangover of the Lords) from the spineless uselessness of the Commons parliamentary 'democracy', or (as it turned out) with the 'triumph' of the Major-MacGregor diktat over the combined uselessness of both Houses, parliamentary democracy would still look just as ready for the knackers yard either way.

Smith and Prescott can moan all they like about the farcical disrepute into which the obvious undemocratic panicky arrogance of the Government has drawn 'the democratic process'. But most people watching this farce unfold will, correctly, see no great difference between the pigheaded bluster of the Government and the dishonest rhetoric and 'I spy strangers', top-hat-wearing procedural tomfoolery of their parliamentary opponents.

Again correctly, it will be no great surprise to most people to see how all these mock-battles, 'great constitutional struggles', 'principled stands' etc. are all unceremoniously shelved when the man with the bucket of pigswill arrives at the cage door. All the high drama is miraculously suspended when it's time to vote for another fat pay rise, on top of all the other goodies (lavish secretarial allowance, flexible entertainment and travel expenses, backhanders from big business, money for old rope from the media, directorships and consultancy sinecures in the City) that go with the job.

And what is the rail bill battle supposed to be about anyway? It was never about whether the railways should be owned and run by capitalists or by the working class. Nationalization was never more than a temporary feature of the postwar reformist set-up, flattering workers that key services like railways and healthcare were now 'public' and therefore out of the direct grasp of the moneybags. Meanwhile, those same moneybags, on suitably fat compensation terms, were happy enough to retire from the loss-making public-service sectors, freeing the City to invest in more profit-rich areas.

Thatcherism recognized the need to start tearing up the class-collaborating 'job for life' traditions on which reformism had grown fat through the postwar boom, as no longer affordable or politically useful as the historically declining (in relative terms) British economy saw the storms of imperialist crisis competitive relations looming up ahead.

With the '80s mini-boom receding into a resentful yuppy memory, full of rancorous 'might have beens' (see the love-hate obsession with the Thatcher Years currently swamping the screens), Major and co. are left forlornly banging the privatization drum ever less convincingly as the real international status of the British economy (i.e. deadbeat) gets daily rubbed in worse (e.g. see latest CBI report).

And equally unconvincing is the 'better rail' counter-crusade from Labour and the trade union bureaucracy, plus assorted Tory 'I'm not a rebel' whingers, Lib-Dem opportunists, unelected sanctimonious humbuggers of all stripes holed up in the Lords etc.

The pretended fervour of their campaigning in reality has exactly the same underlying rationale as the hollow pro-privatization rhetoric on the other side: i.e., to distract attention from the really desperate (and finally revolutionary) implications the world imperialist crisis holds for ordinary everyday existence in Britain in the coming period.

And even if, thanks to their Lordships, BR had found itself amended onto a more or less equal footing with the predator-'franchisees', what would have been the consequence? Endless pressure from management, reinforced liberally by Labour and the unions alike, to 'show the private competition that we can get better quality faster, more efficiently, on fewer man hours' etc.

In other words, the imposition of hardnosed management styles, the axing of jobs, the tearing up of earlier work practices and conditions etc. (all coming now anyway) would equally go ahead under the BR "devil you know", driven all the harder by the hot breath on the collar by the devil you don't - and all predictably egged on by Labour and grudgingly policed by the unions, 'for fear of the private alternative'. The Lords held nothing else in their gift but another sneakier version of the same rotten future.

The postwar era of class-collaborating reformism is dying on its feet, and deserves no sympathy or regrets from workers. For the moment the demagogic futility of Prescott and the rest (begging for Swedish-style organization of the railways at the precise moment the Swedish capitalist economy is nosediving into slump) is matched by the political bankruptcy of 'Majorism' in a stalemate battle of the zombies which makes even the living dead in the House of Lords look lively by comparison.

All that can break that logjam on the imperialist side is for the politics of national chauvinism to come together around some new leadership grouping, confident enough to put itself deliberately in charge of imposing the fascist slump combatively on the backs of workers and gearing up for permanently worsening national antagonisms within the overproduction-clogged world market on the road to imperialist war. Endless speculation on the likely source of such a new leadership grouping is possible. What is important right now is to recognize that the necessity for imperialism to move openly towards such politics is built into the fascist slump itself. 

The leadership for this need not at all come from open fascist circles like the elusive BNP leadership or from the disgruntled Thatcherite spear-carriers etc. A historically literate assessment will remember for example Labour's class-treacherous prewar role in National Government, as well as Mosley's Labourite origins. Ashdown's 'bomb-the-Serbs' sick stormtrooping bluster puts the Lib-Dem hat in the ring. And recent Bulletins have noted some of the unguarded extremes of anti-communism coming out of the fake-"left" (Grant's repatriation call, Trot open hatred of Leninism, anarchist incitement to violence against communist revolutionaries etc.).

The degeneration of imperialism into fascist slump and war will gather pace; who will 'lead' it there will be decided en route.

What will break the logjam from the other side of this historical contradiction, from the side of the proletariat, is the fight to understand all of this with Leninist science, and build the party that can learn to make a class understanding powerful enough to lead the overthrow of bourgeois rule and impose in its stead planned socialism under proletarian dictatorship.

Build the ILWP.
Dominic Hull