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 0733 January 11th 1994                                                                                                                       10p 
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Loss of Cold War gimmickry has totally undermined imperialist ideology. The monopoly-capitalist world is now floundering in crisis without any believable perspectives. Tory propaganda stunts are collapsing by the minute because British imperialism is deeper in trouble than almost all its rivals. Cabinet hypocrisy is likely to draw more and more serious fire as the unsolved economic crisis deepens.

The eclipse of the Cold War's most melodramatic phase by the much more urgent, immediate, and irresistible demands of sharpened inter-imperialist trade war conflict for world supremacy has plunged the West into an ideological crisis as painful, dangerous and humiliating as its economic mess.

The modern international-propaganda epoch of the 'free-world' order has only two main frameworks. One has been the imperialist system's 'civilised world leadership' act (of first the 'Great Power' private-understanding kind marked by things like the Entente Cordiale and the Old Alliance on the surface and by ruthless back-stabbing behind the scenes; of next the League of Nations 'approved' and 'regulated' Great Power imperialism; and finally the United Nations 'democratic' monopoly-capitalist 'world order').

The other has been this same system of imperialist domination at its various stages of evolution but temporarily overridden by the more urgent immediate requirements of counter-revolutionary anti-communist solidarity, - the Cold War.

The Reagan regime's startling decision to at last acquiesce to Moscow revisionism's longstanding pleas for fullscale class-collaborating disarmament agreements with US imperialism at the price of the USSR abandoning all last vestiges of support for a serious revolutionary anti-imperialist worldwide struggle, - has currently left imperialism with no ideological framework at all.

The unerring and instinctive anti-communism of all bourgeois thinking is as widespread and malignant as ever but it now lacks a viable focus given the break-up of the 'evil empire', - the Soviet-led socialist camp of socially-advanced and economically-competent workers states with a European history.

The religious/abstract 'fear of communism' was difficult enough to maintain as a 'philosophy' of capitalism when imperialist subversion could instigate counter-revolutionary incidents every day all along the 'iron curtain' erected by Western reaction.

The abstract 'fear of communism' becomes even harder to keep going as a 'free world' motivator when those workers states have liquidated back into free-market anarchy.

Inter-imperialist trade-war cut-throat competition has been tentatively posed by bourgeois ideology in all capitalist countries as the coming issue since the momentous events concluding the Cold War.

But in general, the capitalist states remain historically terrified of being seen to be going down the same old road of inter-imperialist warmongering once again.

The 'reformist' compromises forced on capitalism post-1945 by the colossal influence of communist revolution rapidly spreading worldwide after the anti-imperialist wartime triumphs of the world's first workers state, the Soviet Union, - have inevitably made a straightforward return to the old imperialist 'leadership' domination (minus its anti-communist 'justification') very suspect. Class relationships in the international market economy have obviously been given a potentially much more challenging content by nearly 50 years 'free-world' anti-communist collaboration.

In addition, bourgeois subjective idealism has lost vastly more of its historical credibility, virility and elasticity now after a phenomenal century of inter-imperialist wars and destruction, and revolutionary communist advances.

The confidence of imperialist propaganda in pretending to proclaim the 'end of history' after the self-liquidation of the Moscow revisionist bureaucracy was paper-thin. The US imperialists have acted with anything but implacable resolve and irresistible competence in attempting to throw their weight about under the 'sole superpower' 'new world order' on issues like Somalia, for example; Saddam Hussein; Bosnia; the GATT talks; North Korea's nuclear developments; the collapsing Russian economy; etc, etc.

The Clinton regime is looking astonishingly fragile and unsure of itself, almost paralysed and self-destructive on many issues, hardly much better than the very troubled British ruling-class regime under the post-Thatcher Tories. The Clintonites come across as corrupt and incompetent carpet-baggers, — and yet they were elected because of the rampant, seedy crookedness of the outgoing Reagan-Bush administration.

The 'end of history' nonsense is looking more and more like a very significant pointer to a potentially catastrophic vacuum in 'modern' Western imperialist ideology rather than just a piece of very misleading silly triumphalism. It looks like certain bourgeois instincts half-realized that with the Cold War gimmicks at an end, Western imperialism might find itself dangerously short of any credible philosophy or historical perspectives at all.

Where is the 'free-world' order supposed to be heading? Towards a rational solution and settlement of all international problems? Towards satisfaction for thousands of millions of have-nots in Africa, Asia, or Latin America? Towards domestic societies everywhere based on reason and compatible worthwhile personal development? Towards a publicly-supported and understood world economic system with guaranteed survival and ecological improvement, plus patent honesty in all its operations and undoubted fairness for every single consumer and producer?

The trade-war and ludicrous 'over-production' crisis, created solely by the cheating-profiteering motive at the very heart of the capitalist system, is stampeding towards the worst slump catastrophes and the greatest ecological disasters in history, and with the most diabolical and destructive inter-imperialist war and fascist mayhem to come on top of that.

The Third World remains in ferocious revolt against imperialist exploitation and domineering unfairness.

There are currently more unresolved wars and civil wars going on earth than at any time in history, with new conflicts or potential conflicts emerging all the time.

And domestically, even the most economically well-placed and stable of imperialist societies is experiencing an unprecedented state of siege internally from crime, violence, and general lawlessness.

And all of this reflects, - and is reflected in, - the most devastated demoralised turmoil in bourgeois ideology ever in capitalism's history.

Obviously many of the specific upheavals in class and personal relations of all kinds, and in 'morality' generally, will not necessarily be easy to resolve within any new stable socialist societies formed out of this mayhem of capitalist degeneracy, and many of them would probably provide rewarding debates right now, even before any clarity at all has been provided by any remote perspective on getting rid of decadent and finished-with bourgeois morality, - such is the timeless and universal interest within some of the knottier contradictions within questions of family, upbringing, and personal human relations generally.

But while not needing to hesitate about putting the boot into the yeo-yeoing morality scandals and hypocrisy now undermining the Major regime, it is worth noting the whole wider picture of total bourgeois ideological uncertainty and its significance.

The historical time is running out for the imperialist system itself. It can no longer find any comfortable propaganda perch on which to rest because its complete revolutionary overthrow is on the way from an utterly swindled, put-upon, and disgusted world population; - and the ideological network holding ruling-class capitalism together via millions of unthinking middle-class-minded beneficiaries is bound to be falling apart simultaneously to coincide with that inevitable collapse.

In turn, Western ruling-class government behaviour must unavoidably begin to follow the same disintegrating and wayward pattern of all bourgeois conduct and philosophy on the broad scale, and the personal antics of individual Tory government ministers in Britain, for example, will inescapably go down the same route to chaotic confusion, contradiction, despair, and anarchy.

Increasingly, the paralysis and disintegration of revisionist ideology in the socialist camp (petty-bourgeois, philistine, class-collaborating ideology) will be seen historically as the crisis of anti-communism, as it was immediately described by the Bulletin, - not the crisis of communism or of proletarian dictatorship as all subjective idealists (including the anti-communist 'left' swamp) immediately interpreted it.

Stalinist revisionism had already long-since destroyed the Leninist fight for revolutionary theory as the only longterm viable leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle.

Leaving aside the immediate shocks to all revolutionary anti-imperialism from the USSR's collapse, the most significant factors of the self-liquidation of the philistine bureaucracy under Gorbachev included the possibility at last of clearing the decks in the anti-imperialist main thrust of history by eliminating the phony 'balance' of the Cold War game under which it was pretended that imperialist warmongering aggression and colonial domineering was being 'held in check' by the 'principled' opposition to it by the Soviet workers state and its allies.

Moscow's revisionist longing for eternal class-collaboration with imperialism meant that in fact there had been very little 'principled' holding-in-check of imperialist aggression, subversion, and exploitation at all, - but only a lot of self-interested attempts (extremely valuable in the anti-imperialist struggle, for all that) by the socialist camp to help defend the increasing size of the anti-imperialist camp from the worst excesses of Western aggression.

But that never remotely amounted to the kind of 'balance' which middle-class revisionist ideology (the Third International CPs, etc, and camp followers) kidded itself had been achieved, - the sort of halt to unbounded imperialist aggression for all time which would mean that completely new non-revolutionary perspectives had opened up for the final 'peaceful solution' to the problems of the imperialist-crisis era, with 'all wars being outlawed', etc, (in the actual words of the grotesque philistine Gorbachev's shameful and criminal pipe-dream.)

The imperialist epoch is indeed coming to an end, - but through communist revolution and the international dictatorship of the proletariat, (the only possible state basis for the planned-socialist transition towards communist society and one of the first things to be dismantled in the demented Gorbachev liquidation of the Soviet workers state).

The phony 'balance' Cold War era in the end was merely helping to delay the resumption of the development of Leninist revolutionary understanding of how the ever-sharpening class-war crisis of the imperialist system should be turned into a successful revolutionary overthrow of the entire monopoly-capitalist bourgeoisie worldwide.

The valuable experience for mankind of the actual state-structure developments of the world's first planned-socialist societies necessarily had to be defended unconditionally to the very end, and beyond (while all the time keeping up a relentless onslaught on revisionism's hopeless defeatism and misleadership of the international proletarian struggle).

But now that various conditions have come together to create the imperialist system's renewed plunge back into the worst destructive excesses of all-out trade war, slump, and inter-imperialist arms-race conflict (to follow very shortly), the final disintegration of revisionism can now be seen to have been a necessary preamble to this crucial resumption of Leninist theory worldwide.

Without that final destruction of the malignant influence of Stalinist revisionism's disastrous 'theories' of non-existent 'peaceful roads to socialism', 'permanent peaceful coexistence', 'popular front' tailending of treacherous petty-bourgeois 'democracy', etc, etc, - a complete dismantling of Leninist theory, - the international labour movement could never have been freed from its anti-revolutionary shackles.

It was always the ILWP's view that the most decisive renewed revolutionary advances against imperialist crisis would be made on the class-war-front line of Marxist-Leninist struggle, - within the mass movements forced to confront the monopoly-imperialist bourgeoisie for state power and requiring the leadership of the most advanced theoretical understanding of the world yet achieved in order to be able to do so successfully.

Only through some largescale revolutionary triumphs against mature imperialist counter-revolutionary states and bourgeois philosophical trickery could the philistine complacency of the existing workers state leaderships (however many of them did not mentally disintegrate totally in failing to grasp the complexities of the renewed world imperialist 'revolutionary crisis) be eclipsed.

It is now obvious that the pattern of eclipsing the influence of those degenerated revisionist bureaucracies 'theories' was to be basically brought about by this philistinism amazingly self-liquidating into total capitulation to the shoddy shallow glitz of market imperialism and all its bourgeois ideological imbecilities.

And it is the current profound philosophical turmoil in the international monopoly-capitalist arena which is one of the most valuable indications as to what was the real historical significance and actual development involved in the so-called 'end of history' and 'end of communism' drama.

Ever-wider sections of public opinion are coming to realise that something is going very seriously wrong with the triumphant so-called 'free world'.

The facts and figures of economic anarchy, dislocation and confusion all prove it (tens of millions unemployed all round the world, chronic unrepayable personal and national bank debts everywhere, more and more cut-throat suicidal trade-war competition and chauvinistic xenophobia breaking out all over, not the slightest hope of any end ever to the relentless capitalist arms race (warmongers of death) and the ever-spreading inter-ethnic wars, civil wars, and inter-state wars mushrooming everywhere).

Even more intriguingly, the bourgeoisie's own ideological-turmoil increasingly reveals the revolutionary-crisis depths of despair and adventurism to which the capitalist order is being driven by its own insoluble and intolerable contradictions.

Some middle-class fear and frustration is already beginning to predict total disaster for the whole free-market system:

A. Gary Shilling, who runs an economic consultancy and investment firm in Springfield, New Jersey, is one of America's more celebrated bears. With signals set fair for the U.S. economy, he discussed his contrarian views with Lawrence Mulkin of the International Herald Tribune.

Q. What is different about this recovery from all other postwar recoveries?

A. It is taking place in the midst of a decade-long correction from the 1980s when tremendous debts piled up in every sector and indeed throughout the world, there was excess hiring here and abroad, and a massive real estate boom which left tremendous amounts of excess capacity. Unwinding those excesses is a drag on the whole business cycle, and on top of that we have the unwinding of defense spending and exports pouring out of the newly industrialized countries.

All of this is giving us a world of slack demand and excess supply —a deflationary world which is very different from the upswing of this 50- or 60-year cycle back in the 1960s.

Q. What cycle?

A. After World War II. you had a strong upward phase with new technology and the huge rush to the suburbs with a lot of housing and road-building, consumer electronics and appliances.

In the '70s things started to get overdone, and we had an inventory cycle where everybody thought we'd have shortages forever and stocked up on commodities and goods to buy before prices went higher. Everybody ended up with far too much, which led to a sharp recession of the type you hadn't seen since the end of World War 1.

In Phase 3. which was the 1980s, the economy really was starting to slip but nobody noticed it because everybody was out enjoying the greed and glitz and borrowing and spending and just having a wild party like the 1920s.

What inevitably follows is the correction, the unwinding phase, and you can variously date that from the 1987 stock market crash, or in the spring of 1989 when the U.S. economy essentially ceased to grow. That started a little later in Europe and Japan, and the whole world now is basically in the same boat. The precedent for this is not in anybody's database. There are no figures going back to the '20s and '30s — so they just don't exist as far as most economists are concerned.

Q. Let's go forward to the shortest of the short term. We've had a good Christmas. What's your outlook for the New Year?
A. We're still in a stop-go economy. The strength in the last three quarters has been fueled by the consumer, who has accounted for more than 100 per cent of the growth in gross domestic product. That's fine if the consumer has the wherewithal to do it. but spending is growing more rapidly than income.

Furthermore, there's been this mad rush to go out and buy houses because people think mortgage rates are going to go up. That borrows from the future — it's in effect pre-spending, and it includes all the follow-on effects in terms of home appliances and furniture. In the upper income brackets, people have had their heads in the sand about tax increases, which are retroactive to the start of 1993 for incomes over $I50.000. If those people lake only half their tax payments out of spending and the rest out of savings, that will still cut back the overall growth of spending by 25 percent in 1994.

Q. But the new taxes are designed to have the rich keep their money in their business and invest it for (he future.

A. What people are doing is investing to get rid of bodies, not to expand capacity. You may put in a computer, but that's to cut costs; it yields profits, not jobs. That's a very different form of productivity growth from the postwar period when we put in new machinery and a lot of people's jobs were upgraded.
•

Q. What are the implications for the rest of the world?

A. We are not providing an engine to help the world out of the morass, but they're not helping us either, because the rest of the industrialized world is pretty much in the same boat. Some have been gaining because of the tremendous burst of growth in China. But China is an enigma. It has a stop-go economic policy. It's hard to see who is in charge, and it has inflation problems. We re bullish on China in the long run, but it certainly is stretching it to say they're going to continue this kind of growth and therefore will continue to help their neighboring countries boom. And as they gain market share in the industrialized countries and unemployment lingers, we're going to see protectionist pressures to limit imports.

No sooner said than done. The problem of cut-throat surplus-capacity conflicts on the credit-fuelled world market is now so extreme that even such a windfall as unexpected expansion opportunities into the vast Chinese market can only quickly degenerate into just one more arena over which the imperialist trade-war rivals can squabble and from which the biggest-stick imperialist power (the USA) can claim itself 'vitally threatened':

THE Clinton administration yesterday announced it is slashing Chinese textile imports by $1.2 billion (£0.85 billion) in retaliation for what it said were massive illegal shipments of Chinese products through other nations.

The US trade representative, Mickey Kantor, said quotas will be reduced later this month by up to a third on more than 80 categories of products ranging from jumpers to cotton trousers.

The administration complains that around $2 billion in Chinese textiles and clothing has been illegally shipped to countries like Honduras, Panama and Hong Kong, relabelled and sent on to the US.

In London, a spokeswoman for the Department of Trade and Industry said last night that the European Commission "is looking into allegations that the same things are happening to imports of Chinese textiles into Europe".

As the Bulletin explained straightaway, such is the advanced condition of inter-imperialist trade-war crisis that even the opening up of East Europe to monopoly-capitalist penetration might be as likely to produce as many moans against 'new trade-war competitors' (as Russian & Co began to encourage free-market profiteering and exploitation) as greetings of political or economic delight at new recruits to the monopoly-ruling'-class capitalist racket. And so it has proved.

There are plenty of signs that Shilling's pessimistic comments were not nearly gloomy enough for true objectivity, especially during all the repeated instances now of the world's stockmarkets increasingly showing traces of the most unhealthy exaggerated volatility.

Recent days have seen dizzy new records set in share prices and dealings all round the world, - and with not the slightest real economic developments globally to justify such fever. Just the opposite, - as these capitalist press admissions are trying to tell everyone, when read carefully:

THIS time it will all turn out differently, the Wall Street banker insists as he races from a meeting with Argentine oil executives to a delayed appointment with Brazilian media moguls.

He brushes aside fears that Latin America's latest capital bonanza will end, like all such previous episodes, in defaults, losses and the destabilisation of the region.

For now, at least, deal-making overrides any such worries. On the aircraft bound for Buenos Aires, Santiago, Sao Paulo or Mexico City, the business class seats are filled with investment bankers, fund managers and legal advisers. These financial paratroopers are engaged variously in helping governments to privatise state companies, assisting local companies to raise money through international bond and share issues — or, in some cases, just trying to spot the next local stock market to go into orbit. 

For Latin America, the deluge of foreign money represents a remarkable turnround from the struggle during much of the 1980s to staunch a massive capital haemorrhage. Those years of outflow had such devastating economic consequences on the region that they became known as the lost decade.

The capital inflows have been welcome, kick-starting economic growth in several countries. But they are by no means an unmitigated benefit. 

The pace of the debt build-up is once again arousing concern among some economists. Growing foreign currency exposure among some newly privatised banks has already led monetary authorities in Mexico to impose restrictions on borrowing activities.

No less serious is the risk that the inflow, much of it "hot" — highly speculative and short-term in character — will create a bubble in the financial markets, damaging the real economy when it eventually bursts. Foreign money would then rush out as fast as it came in.

By some estimates, as much as half of the recent capital inflows into Latin America may be short-term, footloose money attracted by the relatively high interest rates countries in the region still have to pay to borrow foreign currency. The pursuit of high yields has even tempted large speculative sums into the local money markets where, because of tight monetary policy in many countries, interest rates are often several times greater than in the US, where they are at their lowest levels since the 1960s.

INVESTMENT in peso-denominated Mexican Treasury certificates or bolivar-denominated Venezuelan zero coupon bonds is a high-risk game because of the possibility of local currency devaluation. Even so, foreign investors were calculated to hold the equivalent of $18 billion of short-term Mexican Treasury peso paper, at mid-1993.

Such holdings, not usually included in a country's foreign debt figures, can add significantly to the published level of external borrowings. In the case of Mexico, the inclusion of foreign holdings of peso financial assets raises external debt to $126 billion at the end of 1992, compared with a published figure of $97 billion two years. earlier.

"The danger is that some piece of bad news could send these speculators all rushing for the door," says one economist. "This could push interest rates even higher, or trigger the devaluation that the speculators fear. They would lose money, but it could also damage the economy. The Mexican banks would be particularly hit. They have been taking very short-term dollar and peso deposits and lending the money for rather longer periods."

"If the money leaves overnight, the banks will go bankrupt, unless the central bank provides enough liquidity," says Guillermo Calvo, a senior economic adviser at the International Monetary Fund. Devaluation of the peso would also be a blow to banks that have sizeable dollar liabilities.

In a recent research paper, Mr Calvo and two other economists, Leonardo Leiderman and Carmen Reinhart, conclude that the capital flows to Latin America have probably been influenced less by reforms in the region than by the lack of investment opportunities in the US. Capital flows into Latin America have been matched to a significant extent by outflows from the US — while the flow out of Latin America during much of the 1980s was matched by US inflows.

"Speculative bubbles" on the Latin American exchanges have been an unfortunate side-effect of both the 1978-81 and 1990-93 capital inflow episodes, according to the IMF research paper.

Comparing the two episodes, Mr Calvo and his co-authors conclude that, despite the economic reforms, the region is more vulnerable today to external shocks than during the 1970s. Although debt indicators have fallen from their crisis peaks, they are still higher than at the outset of the last borrowing bout.

And, while Chile and Mexico have increased national investment in their economies, the region as a whole does not appear to be using the capital inflows adequately to finance investment projects. This raises questions about "how the Latin American countries will generate the resources required for repaying the new external debts that are associated with the current capital inflows", the research paper says.

ACCORDING to an estimate by economists at the Inter-American Development Bank, net capital inflows, as a percentage of the region's GDP, rose by four percentage points between 1990 and 1992, while domestic investment rose by only two points. Mr Husain does not worry. It is inevitable that consumption will rise quickly for a time after the 40 per cent drop in real wages during the 1980s, he says.

Undoubtedly, the capital inflows have greatly increased the difficulties of economic management. If the inflows are sterilised, by exchanging foreign currency for government bonds, this will add to budgetary expenditure, and might increase interest rates. The higher rates will make the country still more attractive to foreign speculators, but act as a disincentive to private sector business investment in productive capacity.

Where inflows are allowed to expand the monetary base, they may exacerbate inflationary pressures. In most cases, the inflows have pushed real exchange rates up sharply, whether they are pegged to the dollar, as in the case of the Argentinian peso, or floating within bands, like the Mexican peso. The real exchange-rate increases in the 1990s have been as great, and in some cases greater, than occurred during 1978-81 — a development that led to big devaluations for Mexico and Uruguay in the early 1980s.

Greater demand for imports and the reduced competitiveness of exports have also produced soaring trade deficits. Mexico's more than quadrupled to $18.8 billion between 1990 and 1992, while the Argentinian trade accounts swung from a sizeable surplus to a deficit. Latin America as a whole in 1992 registered its first deficit for a decade.

To counter some of the worst effects, both Mexico and Brazil have introduced restrictions on some kinds of hot money inflows. Increasing marginal reserve requirements on bank deposits, as in Chile, is one option now widely being considered.

THE Defence Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, has spent this week touring the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia in an attempt to protect British weapons orders from the wave of budget cuts ordered by governments in the region.

Last week King Fahd of Saudi Arabia announced a cut in the kingdom's budget of 20 per cent, and analysts say that defence, which accounts for more a third of the budget, is unlikely to remain untouched. Within days of the Saudi announcement, Kuwait and Oman — two other stops on Mr Kindred's itinerary — also promised to roll back spending.

Tens of thousands of jobs could be at risk in Britain if the Saudis decide to re schedule their British contracts, as they are already doing with the Americans. Talks are taking place between Washington and Riyadh to re-structure the entire $30 billion arms purchases programme agreed after the Gulf war.

The re-scheduling has been caused by an alarming fall in recent weeks in the oil market and the failure of Opec and its partners to agree on the production cuts needed to firm up oil prices.

"The British will have to face it just like any others, payments may be slowed and delayed, as with the American orders," one Saudi commentator said.

He added that the kingdom had been irritated lately by the slow pace of the offset agreement, which requires British suppliers to re-invest in Saudi Arabia.

Most of the payments to British Aerospace for the Tornados are made under a complicated oil barter system. But with oil prices falling, the Saudis face a dilemma: maintaining the value to British defence companies means increasing the amount beyond the 500,000 barrels a day allocated to the British equipment. This is happening at a time when Saudi Arabia, as the largest Opec producer, is under pressure from other exporters to reduce its 8 million barrels a day output.

Meanwhile, oil analysts are warning that the Saudi budget cuts may have to be deeper than the 20 per cent already envisaged.

The budget is reported to have been based on a $15-a-barrel oil price, whereas the current price for the country's light crude is $12.90. One energy institution predicts that the Saudis are heading for a deficit of nearly $9 billion at a time when their liquid reserves were down to $7.5 billion.

And while the stock markets are busy soaring to record highs, they are also simultaneously already showing that they are just as capable now of plunging to record depths the very next day:

The key Hang Seng index fell more than 6.5 per cent to 11,374.5 as heavy selling wiped off 793.4 points.

Analysts said that eager buying of Hong Kong shares by major Japanese investors had pushed the market to record levels earlier this week but these investors had decided to take profits.

The wave of selling in Hong Kong companies continued around the world, and in London the price of HSBC, which owns the Midland Bank, fell 6 per cent and Cable & Wireless lost 18 per cent. The UK market soon recovered and by the end of the day the FTSE 100 index of leading stocks had jumped some 24 points as more than 1 billion shares were traded.

This anarchic volatility (the essence of the free market) is precisely what is convincing some capitalist supporters to anticipate openly the ultimate catastrophic contradiction, - self-destruction of free-world prosperity and stability at the hands of market 'competitiveness' itself:

The world has been here before. Karl Polyandry's seminal book of 50 years ago, The Great Transformation, traced the rise of the great 20th century political extremisms, fascism and communism, from the ashes of the free-market experiment in the 19th century. There were four great interlocking institutions. he wrote, which made the order work: the gold standard, free trade, the minimal state and the balance-of-power system. But it was the self-regulating market that was the font and matrix of the system — and the ultimate source of its destruction.

Free trade led to social misery which the minimal 19th century state could not check; adhering to the gold standard forced whole populations to adjust to the consequence of rising and falling credit; peace required a stable balance of political power which the new powers could not respect; and the supremacy of commercial values over those of trust and co-operation undermined the very bonds upon which the market depended. 

Communism and fascism alike, in Polyandry's view, rose as protective if equally destructive responses to the potential "annihilation of the human and natural substance of society" that the market imposed.

IS IT too fanciful to see the process repeated 100 years later? Robust welfare states have helped European economies weather intense economic dislocation with unemployment averaging 10 per cent — but now they are to be qualified and rolled back. Managed exchange rates, together with capital controls, gave national governments some choices over economic policy; now they are being eroded or abolished. Regulated labour markets have protected the working class from the impact of rapid change and low wages; now deregulation is the watchword. Above all, states need to be compelled to collaborate to keep the international trading system open and stable; but collaboration means compromising rising nationalisms.

The means of regulating the market system, and thus ensuring social stability and offering genuine political debate, are being steadily withdrawn. It may all be anathema to the new right — but such is the juice that allows the capitalist system to run. The world is taking the same course as it did in the late 19th century — and the results promise to be no less destructive.

If it were only a battle of ideas, the situation would be less serious; but it is the veto on politics placed by the global capital markets that is the real source of the crisis. This development is the most remarkable event of the last 20 years, and the figures are astonishing.

FOREIGN exchange turnover and the scale of foreign borrowing now dwarf the size of national economies, and trade flows are comparatively small. The total level of world merchandise trade in 1993 is two-thirds of US GDP; it will take turnover in the foreign exchange markets less than a fortnight to reach the same total — leaving aside the cross-border derivative, bond and equity markets.
Globalisation is a term used too loosely, characterising finance rather than production and trade. There is global management of production by some companies, but what is surprising, given modern technology, is how little production is organised on this basis — and how firmly national most economic variables remain.

Saving, investment and productivity rates vary dramatically between countries instead of conforming as would be expected in a genuinely global market. The production economy is merely international, still dominated by national companies conforming to national rules and trading goods across frontiers.

But not in finance. Here an anonymous global capital market rules and its judgments about governments' creditworthiness and sustainability of policy are the ultimate arbiter — and much more important than the opinion of national electorates. It is before these that so many governments quail. If they do not obey the new-right policies that the market approves, then their debt and currencies will be sold — forcing them to face an unwanted policy-tightening.

This year some of the political consequences of this new world will become clearer. Germany's extreme parties will surprise us with their strength, as they have in Russia — while the situation in Italy, Japan and a host of smaller countries looks no more stable. It may be that their economies and societies need to be reformed — but it is the speed and one-way manner of the choices that present the problem.

It is the insane ruthless anarchy and corrupt irresponsibility and hypocrisy of the whole capitalist exploitation system ultimately which is going to demoralise and alienate more and more sections of petty-bourgeois public opinion.

Every Tory gimmick of recent years has ended up just adding to this frustration and irritation despite being designed exactly to overcome it, and the latest 'back to basics' gibberish looks doomed to the same fate.

With four election victories in a row, these are supposed to have been the years of unparalleled Tory triumphalism and the most decisive fundamental shift in favour of uninhibited free-market forces in modern capitalist history.

But the reality is that the British ruling class was barely keeping its head above water throughout this period, - either economically or politically.

British imperialist decline, relative to its main imperialist rivals, has continued relentlessly.

And despite all of the hysterical propaganda and the most blatant cover-up by the media of Thatcherism's routine crookedness and incompetence, not to mention its crass philistinism, - Thatcher herself had to be turfed out ignominiously in the end.

Many other 'success' stories ended in total disaster too, - Lawson, Lamont, Parkinson, etc, - and now Major is going the same way.

The bogus charters and the moralising vindictiveness against the needy and unfortunate are a sick disgrace after nearly a century of more enlightened ruling-class thinking, on general social advancement and welfare.

There is a good abstract argument for reward disciplines to be applied to many fields of human activity in order to provide the best motivation and get the best outcome for all concerned, - including in child upbringing, family responsibilities, personal relations, and duties towards the community, etc, etc.

But this seedy, sordid, hypocritical, incompetent Tory ruling class is hardly the loved and respected institution to persuade people to broaden their outlook, show more discipline and sacrifice, and think of the communal wellbeing.

None of its agitational or propaganda gimmicks need to be analysed as good, bad, or indifferent because they are all simply irrelevant. With current perspectives in this country, no great social transformation is ever going to occur as a result of preachy exhortations by this decadent and historically doomed ruling class, - not necessarily because all of its gimmicks are scarily cringe-makingly naïve, ill-timed, or insufferably opportunist or hypocritical, although they all are, - - but because Tory rule (i.e. capitalism) is the very foundation of the current framework of all human problems. Unless the current catastrophic capitalism-imposed crisis-stage of all human relationships is tackled in its very framework of anarchic, exploitational, hypocritical unfairness dictated by the universal profiteering market values, - then everything to do with current society's problems is only going to get steadily worse.

The particular Tory propaganda gimmicks as a diversion from capitalist society's deepening crisis are neither here nor there. They all fail because the British ruling class is heading for a catastrophic historic defeat in its inter-imperialist trade-war conflicts (to the background of a general defeat for the entire imperialist system at the hands of the approaching most widespread international communist revolutionary explosion ever). Nazi German gimmicks in the 1930s were even more tawdry. But the German imperialist ruling class still had plenty of historical development to offer, and public opinion became willingly blinded to the stinking hypocritical nastiness of it all because temporarily 'Germany was a winner' once again, - regardless of what those victories were, or how they were being achieved, or what new catastrophe it would all end up in.

The attempted populist political element in all this diversionary Tory gimmickry is clearly fascist in its nature, seeking to assert the values of the 'nation', the 'family', the 'will', etc, just as the Hitlerites used to do.

Public opinion is being robustly healthy in rejecting Tory hypocrisy about 'decency' and 'neighbourliness' from a government which deliberately welcomes harsh slump unemployment medicine for millions of families as a 'stern but unavoidable reminder from the market place that Britain must do better', etc.

Their sick humbug needs ramming down their stinking throats such as the Home Secretary boasting about his own 'good citizen' contribution of going out on a HomeWatch night patrol in Sandwich 'to reassure our senior citizens who are afraid to go out in the dark'.

Half the country is afraid to go out in the dark (official statistics). Are there 26 million Home Secretaries permanently available for night patrols in every residential area in Britain? The man is an imbecile, and the best of the joke is that he is the minister supposedly in charge of reducing crime on the streets and making Britain a 'decent' society to live in, and also a senior figure in the government which has created the crime-wave in the first place (again, official statistics) by mass unemployment (not to mention the general relentless alienation of the capitalist system permanently against all those it exploits - see Marx).

Marital morality is essentially a personal matter to be worked out privately by every individual couple in an endless balancing up of practicalities, emotional needs, family obligations, lifestyle, political philosophy, and the like. Rationally, society should only be suggesting patterns of behaviour which seem to work best for most and where people's personal doubts are reassured by what people feel generally about such matters.

The farce of fixed 'answers' against or for the nuclear family, adultery, monogamy, single-parent families, etc, etc, occurs because a rational approach to any question is the great anathema for a capitalist system in degenerate and terminal crisis.

The party of 'law-and-order' whose major preoccupation in its recent history has been how to keep on disciplining the proletarian masses and head them off from communist revolution, is properly scuppered in being asked about Tory ministers' own discipline.

The Cabinet now pleads 'no moral witchhunt' but that is precisely the vicious propaganda onslaught unleashed against 'unworthy' single mothers, purposeless unemployed, demoralised homeless, and the like, - a witchhunt, - seeking to exorcise such 'bad elements' as a way of making society pleasant for everyone else.

And even on the practical detail, the Tories are caught out in one gigantic lie. What if Howard's HomeWatch night patrol in Sandwich had caught the local vicar clambering out of the mayor's wife's bedroom window when the mayor had come back unexpectedly early from a meeting? And what if that mayor had been a formidable local tycoon figure, unchallengeable in office, who was now doing great damage to Sandwich because of a personal crisis in his life due to uncertainty about his marriage? What, in short, if this was another Prince Charles affair, or a Robert Maxwell affair, or a Director of Public Prosecutions caught with a whore affair? Or a Tory Cabinet minister leading a debauched life when the rest of the country was being urged on to more sacrifice in the national good?

The reason that the petty-bourgeois media will never quite nail these wretched Tory hypocrites is that middle-class philosophy to save its life could never contemplate challenging the ruling class with the real back-to-basics question: What right has this degenerate and failed bourgeoisie to rule at all?

But some populist-minded sections of the middle-class are getting very close to mass revolt, such is their despair at the underlying insecurity of British imperialism's future.

The Sun newspaper has moved on from vilifying the contemptible Royal Circus to regularly ridiculing the Major regime in the most provocative and flamboyant terms, sneering at the government's debauched moral hypocrisy, and taunting their stupidity and cowardly failures over such questions as Hong Kong where British imperialist weakness and fatuousness has never been so evident.
Western imperialist policy is bound to appear more and more ludicrous to more and more swathes of public opinion as the obvious unsatisfactoriness of the international monopoly-capitalist system becomes clearer and clearer, - as revolt against the slump, exploitation, and trade-war tyrannies spreads relentlessly.

The Zapatista rebellion in Mexico may seem the obvious one for communists to take as an example, given the romantic connections of that struggle.	

But when the doubting bemusement has dried up, the question still remains to why such a large and self-sacrificing movement would choose to-express itself in that way in the first place. Certainly not as a joke, for hundreds have died. No, their revolutionary communist aspirations were spot on because there is nowhere else for the whole of humanity to go, never mind the most god-forsaken corner of Mexico. Either a communist revolution, - or put up with the clown-like sordid antics of incompetent failures and buffoons like Clinton, Major, & Co for the rest of time.

It is only the Chiapas revolt which is the real thing. Everything else around is still the aftermath of the most debilitating and demoralising wasted half-century of self-destructive glitz and philistinism ever:

Yet in many respects, Chiapas is the real Mexico — persistent human rights abuse, deep-seated corruption and deepening poverty, juxtaposed to growing wealth — the hallmarks of an aborted revolution that has now fossilised into a barely disguised dictatorship.

Seventy-three years after Emiliano Zapata began raising his rebel army, land and the need for agrarian reform remain the two issues for the majority in the state. Land reform was given some impetus under President Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s, but in Chiapas it was fiercely resisted by a feudal elite. Control of the plantation economy remains based on the colonial occupation of indigenous peoples' ancestral land to ensure cheap labour.

The "ejido", a communal farming system which sprang from the demand for land during the revolution failed to root in Chiapas and Oaxaca, Mexico's most populated Indian states. In 1980, the last year for which figures are available, nearly half the arable land in Chiapas was in private hands. "That is a staggeringly high proportion in Mexico and probably an underestimate", says Roger Plant, an International Labour Organisation author.

The result has been an endless cycle of evictions, land occupations, disappearances and killings as peasants — many of whom have waited for decades for title to their land — have grown more militant as they try to assert their rights.

Meanwhile the militarisation of Chiapas has proceeded apace. Mexico's ruling PRI party, whilst sneering at its militarised Central American neighbours, has built the largest army base outside Mexico City in San Cristobal and installed a series of corrupt generals as governors, notably Absalon Castellanos whom the rebels have kidnapped.

Activists from the Campesino Organisation Emilio Zapata (OCEZ) say there may now be 200,000 landless families in Chiapas working on coffee and cocoa estates for as little as 2.5 new pesos per day — a quarter of the legal minimum wage. Since the early 1970s this minimal livelihood has been threatened by the growth of cattle ranching, logging and oil developments. Roads like the dirt-track path that runs through the mountains to the north of San Cristobal de las Casas to Ocosingo, scene of some of this week's fiercest clashes, have opened the interior.

Logging of what remains of the Mexican rainforest is now intensifying, despite its theoretical protection. Cattle ranching, the major cause of deforestation, is now the state's biggest agricultural activity, growing 14 per cent a year.

Such developments mock the state's indigenous people. Chiapas, Mexico's poorest state, is one of its richest: infant mortality is 94 per 1,000 live births and 60 per cent of its people live below the official poverty line, yet Chiapas along with Tabasco state, produces 80 per cent of the country's onshore oil.

Chiapas produces 50 per cent of Mexico's hydro power, yet half the population has no access to drinking water or electricity. Its dairy and beef industry make the state the biggest source of protein in the country, but its people have the highest protein deficiency.

Owning the minimum acreage necessary to support a family is a life and death matter in the state. But in an area where nearly one third are pure-blood indigenous, it has vital cultural significance, too.

A plot of land or "milpa" has been described as an Indian's "symbol of the right to live." For many Ch'ol, Tzeltal and Tzotzil Indians in Chiapas, land ownership is a condition of "Indian-ness." Those without usually leave their villages, severing ancestral ties, religious customs and languages to begin the process of "mestizaje" — Westernisation.

As the rebels pointed out, 1994 brings new threats. The subsidised American wheat that will flood the Mexican market under NAFTA will complete the PRI's abandonnment of subsistence agriculture — the almost sacred production of beans and maize or Indian food as Chiapanecos see it. Further integration into the money economy and mestizo society is inevitable.

Since 1992, agrarian reform has taken on new meaning in Mexico. The inalienable right to land under the ejido system has been abandoned as part of what the government describes as "the modernisation" of the agricultural sector. Some 20 million communal farmers on 28,000 ejidos can now sell land, hire labour and form joint ventures with the private sector.

The impact of the capitalisation of subsistence agriculture is already clear — big ejidos are buying out smaller ones, shedding labour, mechanising and creating a new breed of landless peasant Mexico, as the rebels told the world, may yet have another revolution.	

The appearance of Mexican guerrillas for the first time in 20 years should surprise nobody. Theirs is a cry for help that has been made by successive generations since the Aztecs were crushed by the Spanish nearly 500 years ago. Chiapas is a state of Mexico but culturally its people are closer to those in neighbouring Guatemala. Rebels in the Zapatista Army derive from the same indigenous groups as those in the Guatemalan URNG coalition. The difference in their enemies is purely geographic.

The history of Chiapas mirrors that of Guatemala. Guerrilla resistance has been crushed while the tri-partite problem; economic deprivation, racial discrimination and political helplessness remains. Both will encounter the same problems again. This is not just a local issue. Different versions of the same story stretch from San Salvador to Rio. The lesson is a simple one. Unless governments act to redress mountainous economic disparities throughout Latin America they will be silencing peasants with violence for another 100 years.

And a warning was given to the more affluent world by revelations of US nazi nuclear tactics of what is in store for everyone else when this new depraved crisis of the monopoly-imperialist system really gets into its stride:

THE door to a secret chamber of nuclear horrors is slowly being prised open in the United States, revealing government-ordered radiation experiments on retarded children, pregnant women, and convicts and a range of other clandestine atom-age projects which have shocked and frightened the American public.

The government's human experiments, undisclosed atomic weapons tests, and deliberate radiation releases over populated areas began in 1945 after the atomic strike on Japan in August of that year. In some cases they have continued almost until the present day. They remained hidden for so long because of what Hazel O'Leary, President Clinton's new energy secretary, calls a culture of deception.

"We were shrouded and clouded in an atmosphere of secrecy," Ms O'Leary said recently. "And I would take it a step further: I would call it repression."

□ At least 19 mentally retarded boys were fed radioactive milk mixed with cereal in experiments conducted by scientists from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1940s and 1950s.

The experiments, funded by the atomic energy commission, were not fully explained to the boys' parents. They were told, in a letter, that "we are considering the selection of a group of our brighter patients, including your son, to receive a special diet". The boys were told they were participating in a science club.

□ About 800 pregnant women were dosed with radioactive iron in a government-backed experiment at Vanderbilt university in Tennessee in the late 1940s. The objective was to gauge its effect on foetal development. A follow-up study found a higher than normal cancer rate among the women's children.

□ In experiments conducted at jails in Oregon and Washington states, the testicles of more than 130 male inmates were exposed to high levels of radiation from X-ray machines.

□ Eighteen patients with apparently dangerous illnesses were injected with high concentrations of plutonium at laboratories managed by Chicago and two other universities in experiments between 1945 to 1947. The injections were apparently made without the patients' informed consent..

Similar experiments using injections of radioactive calcium were conducted on terminally ill cancer patients in New York.

Chilling, too, was the publication this week of a 1950 memorandum to senior atomic energy commission officials from a radiation biologist who worked for the agency. The memo, written by Dr Joseph Hamilton, warned that human experimentation was probably unethical, possibly illegal, and perhaps a breach of the Nuremberg Code of 1947.
	
If the information became public, Dr Hamilton said, there would be a lot of criticism "as admittedly this would have a little of the Buchenwald touch".

Build Leninism. Alf Lee

South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No.51 Friday December 7 1994

British imperialism continues its humiliating retreat from Ireland. Tory 'Back to Basics' nonsense reveals chronic lack of ruling class confidence. Zapatistas' rebellion exposes imperialists' 'end of communism' propaganda, and heralds many more revolutionary uprisings against imperialist oppression.

The British ruling class have never looked weaker, more divided, more paralysed, and more incompetent.
The silly hypocrisy of their public 'we're not negotiating' stance, pretending that the Major-Reynolds 'peace' declaration is the final word, to which the 'desperate-to-surrender' IRA must sign up or face humiliation, is just adding to their problems. 

The British government, having been defeated by the Irish national liberation struggle led by Sinn Féin/IRA, is now trying to negotiate a face-saving retreat. In the government's arrogant attempts to present its humiliating defeat as some kind of 'victory for constitutional democracy' against the 'men of violence', it is simply digging a deeper and deeper hole for itself.

Even if the government does find a form of words which enables it to withdraw without looking like that's what it's doing, nobody will believe them anyway. Every statement from the British side so far has turned out to be a lie within a few days.

This last ignominious end-of-empire colonial defeat for British imperialism is taking place against the background of the worst-ever general crisis of imperialist overproduction, which is plunging millions around the planet into abject poverty, and relentlessly undermining the bourgeoisie's self-confidence.

The pathetic 'Back to Basics' knee-jerk campaign and 'moral values' sermonizing is no more than a reflection of this lack of confidence from a bourgeoisie who have been economically sidelined by their more efficient and powerful rivals.

There is no new 'golden age' of British capitalism around the corner, just relentless decline and slump, so looking back on a supposed 'golden age' when things were better for the bourgeoisie, and wishing it could be the same again, is all that the ruling class now seem up to doing, and not very well at that.

This latest campaign is simply serving to focus on the ever-widening gulf between the lifestyles of the parasitic rich minority - who can afford two families and a Christmas holiday in the Seychelles, several luxury homes and cars (thanks to a fat ministerial salary paid for by the taxpayer) - and the majority of the population, who find supporting one family in its basic needs a struggle. The vomit-inducing 'moral values' of capitalism simply boil down to one principle: you can do whatever you can afford to do and get away with it. According to Yeo and the rest of the parliamentary hierarchy, it only becomes a 'moral' principle if the state has to pick up the bill, and as he could afford to pay to support his mistress's child, then it was OK. 

One law for the rich, and one for the poor then. Yeo should really get a Citizens' Charter badge for his public demonstration of Back-to-Basics morality. His behaviour has been entirely consistent with capitalist 'morality'. The fact that he's been forced to resign simply demonstrates how seriously weak the government is, and how everything they do goes disastrously wrong.

The Dearing Report on education, which has just recommended ditching 80% of the last 14 years' worth of Tory back-to-basics reforms in order to get back to the basics is yet another example of how seriously the ruling class has lost its way, and its confidence.

Even more ridiculous than the Tories' reforms, though, are the unions and teachers claiming the Dearing Report to be a victory. 
A victory for what?

The education system is not in chaos simply because of the Tories' bureaucratic reforms.

These were introduced, with widespread support from many teachers in the first place, to try and put right a hopelessly arbitrary and chaotic education system in the late 1970s, and they obviously and clearly haven't worked.

Pulling back now from these bureaucratic excesses is not going to solve the problem of inadequate education for the majority of children. If anything, things will simply get worse, because it is now obvious that no-one knows what they're doing, and a cynical complacency is likely to take over.

While Dearing's compromise package may get Patten off the hook, and placate temporarily a few teachers, it will do nothing at all to raise the educational prospects for the majority of children.	

The education system, the health system, the political system, the family, and even individuals' behaviour, all reflect to some degree the general economic state of capitalist Britain. 

Bureaucratic reforms, or even very clever ones, cannot alter the overall pattern of economic decline, as Britain loses out to its more powerful economic rivals, goes bust, and sees its 'great public institutions' fall apart.

The currently running New Year 'good news' campaign to convince everyone that we're now living in an economic recovery period and the 'renewal of Anglo-Saxon world supremacy', pointing to recession in Germany and Japan as if it were some kind of victory for the US and Britain, is the most ignorant gibberish of all time.

While a handful of capitalists are undoubtedly getting obscenely rich, through record stock market levels etc., it is also the case that throughout the capitalist world the problems of mass unemployment, mass poverty, mass debt, mass homelessness and disease, simply get greater all the time.

The revolutionary assault on the Mexican capitalist state by the Zapatista guerillas once again demonstrates how the twentieth century remains the epoch of wars and revolutions, and that far from being an anachronism, or dead, communism will soon, once again, become the demand of millions of proletarians around the world as the devastating reality of imperialist trade war becomes even more widespread and comprehensible:

AS GOVERNMENT spotter planes buzzed circles in the grey sky and young policemen shivered in the local jail, soldiers of the peasant army that captured Altamirano and three other towns swarmed over the squat concrete town hall on Monday, smashing it apart with sledgehammers.

"The orders we have are to knock it down," said a leader of the rebels in this rural town in southern Mexico, a thin 20-year-old who identified himself only as Jesus. "Our thinking is that we have to build socialism."

That the cold war had ended seemed to mean nothing to the hundreds of insurgents who stunned their countrymen on Saturday by announcing themselves as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and declaring war on the government The struggle they describe is the timeless one of poor Indians against "the rich"; the new world they envision is simply one where things would be better.

"There is no longer any way to survive the situation in Mexico," said Jesus, who described himself as the child of poor peasants from another part of Chiapas state, near the border with Guatemala.

"There is no work, no land, no education," Jesus said. "There is no way to change that in elections," he added, echoing the proclamations of his superiors without seeming to mimic them. "This is not going to be a war of two or three years. This could be a war of 25 or 30 years."

Zapata's death in 1919 is seen as part of the wider betrayal of the revolution's ideals which left Mexico in the hands of the aptly named "Institutional Revolutionary Party", or PRI.

The PRI has turned Mexico into the world's oldest one-party state, keeping a tight grip on power since 1929, through a blend of fraud, bribery, violence and appeals to revolutionary nationalism.

Zapata's cry of "Land and Liberty" still strikes a chord with Mexico's dispossessed. In the decades after the revolution, many large, ranches were handed over to the peasants, but the cream of the agricultural land stayed in the hands of the wealthy. Now the PRI has reversed even that land reform, allowing market forces in to demolish the communal landowning structures put in place by the revolution.

"The ones with the money will end up with the land, just like before," grumbles Diego. Along the way the government's claim to be the true heirs of the revolution has become increasingly untenable. 

The North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the US and Canada, which came into force on New Year's Day, will make matters worse. By some estimates, 90 per cent of Mexico's maize farmers, some 1.6 million families, will be put out of business by a tide of cheap US maize once Nafta removes all barriers to grain imports. It is no accident that the new generation of Zapatistas chose the first day of the Nafta era to launch their attack.

There will be more and more revolutionary uprisings against imperialist savagery as the realities of GATT, NAFTA and other trade war deals begin to bite, and not only in the 'satellite' countries of imperialism, but in the imperialist nations themselves.

The working class of Los Angeles, for example, may find common cause with the Zapatistas, or other similar rebellions, identifying the common enemy of US imperialist greed and oppression.

The conditions for many in the cities of North America are not much better than 'third world' living standards, as millions more are thrown out of work, and off benefits. Similarly in clapped-out Britain, where the latest piece of independent research puts unemployment levels at about 5 million, and even official figures showing 3 million children now living in poverty. The social cohesion and 'status quo' reformism on which capitalist democracy depends must be near to breaking point.

With the Labour Party dead on its feet, and 'super left' Trotskyite reformism rotting alongside it, and 'parliamentary road to socialism' illusions gone with the liquidation of the Moscow revisionists, the opportunities for Leninist scientific socialist leadership get better all the time.

Build Leninism. Build the ILWP.
D.Watts