Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in  various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
(Weekly.  Subscriptions £10/3 months;  £30/p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50. London SWl7 9NL.] [Post Office Regd.]
No 758 Tuesday July 5  1994                                                                 10p
Southwest sales conf.Sat. 2 pm. Receipts, sleepbags.

Royal soap opera 'success' is hardly the answer to Britain's trade-war problems or collapse of bourgeois confidence in general. The monarchy is out of date, just like imperialism itself. Dollar crash will scupper all. 'Loyalism' dying on every count.

The supposed wave of sympathy from television viewers for the heir to the British imperialist throne (following the display of feeble and frustrated embarrassment in his BBC interview) is not what is needed at all.

The ruling class in Britain needs to be slightly feared and respected for its domination of society, government, and the economy to stand any chance of continuing for much longer.

The bourgeois system in Britain is currently in the deepest crisis ever in its history. Winning back some position of authority is its greatest requirement. The long sycophantic commercial for Prince Charles has done exactly the opposite for the ruling class, - lost it yet more credibility.

The man, and the whole Royal scene, is a living farce. The bourgeois establishment invented this game of a constitutional monarchy. No one obliges them to continue with it. They must still think it serves their best interests. And that tells the world a lot about the decadent and demented judgment and circumstances of the British ruling class. If this is the best that the British state can manage for ordering its affairs and showing off its best features to the world, then no country has very much to fear from British trade war competition or political, military, and diplomatic rivalry. And it is not a problem of the individual concerned, even though he is almost certainly a very accurate and revealing reflection of exactly what an Upper Class Twit of the Year is like. Those sections of the bourgeois press who have ridiculed Charles and the monarchy for this daft television stunt, are still missing the point in a big way. A more substantial personality in the star role would hardly solve the difficulty.

The real mess lies in the entire constitutional structure. Having a silly circus act, with by convention no political understanding of its own, at the head of the state in these difficult times of profound imperialist crisis, - is suicidal and very symbolic of British ruling-class degeneracy in general, - regardless of how much it is insisted that the monarchy is only the ceremony and not the substance of the British bourgeoisie.

Maintaining such an expensive and useless parasitic aristocracy reeks of the epoch of effortless and arrogant British colonial supremacy, - which is just what the capitalist system in Britain needs to distance itself from if it is to have any chance of surviving for much longer in the vastly sharper conditions of inter-imperialist conflict which now prevail compared to the 19th century hayday of Pax Britannica.

The whole of imperialism is doomed as this next trade war turns into a shooting war, - the third outbreak of inter-imperialist world war this century, - but some of these older rivals will be condemned from the very start if they fail to learn new tricks and new ways. Britain is now the prime candidate for the imperialist chain breaking at its weakest link, trapped in sclerotic and conceited old styles of doing things which cannot compete with the speed and ruthlessness of more modern monopoly-capitalism.

The bourgeois press bleat (see last week's Bulletin) against 'foreign' newspaper barons (Murdoch, Black, etc) 'undermining British confidence in the European Union (EEC) and EU confidence in Britain', has failed to grasp a much more important point and priceless opportunity of the sustained attack by that part of Fleet Street on the obstructive uselessness of the British monarchy.

It is precisely these outside voices which alone seem to be able to see just a fraction of the wider truth that it is the whole constitutional compromise with moribund aristocratic privilege and colonial-epoch arrogance which both symbolises and adds to Britain's backwardness, not just the specific silliness of having a hereditary head of state, or the particular problems connected with the actual individuals involved and their idiosyncrasies.

That historic compromise with the aristocracy in the 17th century may have been just about manageable when the British imperialist economy spurted so far ahead of the rest of the world during the 18th and 19th centuries but it is becoming a ludicrous additional burden to bear in the 20th century twilight of the British ruling class when things have become hard enough anyway because of general decrepitude.

Of course, even if a bourgeois republican revolt were to gain even more ground than the present loud clamour against the monarchy from part of the press and political establishment, it can scarcely now do any good in the longer term perspective because the imperialist system is heading towards historical collapse generally, and the whole British bourgeois scene is unhealthy enough to be one of the prime candidates for early revolutionary overthrow.

But the fact that so much telling criticism of the damaging problems caused by the British state's monarchical institution can get made but be followed by not the slightest possibility that any serious political reforms of such a daft burden might even be contemplated, ---- is a weighty indicator that the whole class set-up in Britain is almost beyond any new lease of life at all.

Fear of everything seems to have taken over. The ruling-class fear where it might all end if they try to change things. They equally fear where it might all end if they fail to change things. They bring to mind a Roosevelt saying from the terrible shock to imperialism of the 1930s Great Depression when fear of revolution stalked the whole bourgeois world, - 'There is nothing to fear but fear itself'; which was a total lie but which did point to imperialism's great weakness of having lost all confidence in any leadership available.

The British ruling class are beginning to lose all confidence in any leadership available, - and the new Great Depression has not even started yet. There has not even been the new equivalent to the 1929 Great Wall Street Crash yet (due within months). And yet the British bourgeoisie are already frightened to paralysis on many issues.

Worldwide, there are endless capitalist propaganda attempts to 'talk up' the markets, particularly lately to 'talk up' the US dollar so that the exchange markets do not continue to lose confidence in the American currency (because of the USA's incurable domestic-budget and foreign-trade deficits). In Britain, there are non-stop efforts to 'talk up' belief that there is an economic recovery taking place, and that there is no time like the present for major commitments to investment for future 'guaranteed stable inflation-free growth and development', etc.

But the 'talking up' is just not working, - not anywhere throughout the bourgeois world.       

The capitalist philosophy of subjective idealism can only be pushed so far in conflict with objective reality.

The capitalist press itself gives some clues as to some of the specific difficulties which are hammering away at the petty-bourgeoisie in particular, afflicting their confidence in the ruling-class system in general and in its recovery:

As price wars extend from newspapers to banking, the ritualised new-right cry is to think of the benefit to the consumer. But we are producers, too — and there is a balance to be struck. The orgy of redundancy, downsizing and intensifying competition is having knock-on effects upon our incomes, our sense of security and the willingness to spend and save. It imparts a new macroeconomic instability as inefficient as the micro-initiatives are efficient.

The epicentre of the marketisation process, as noted in a path-breaking paper from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, is among the wages of the bottom 10 per cent of the labour force, which in real terms have not changed since 1978. Yet that weakness is only a proxy for the growing inequality of income that defines not just top and bottom but within groups whose income distribution and life experience used to be broadly similar — as work by Stephen Jenkins for the Rowntree Trust recently highlighted. The market whirlwind can hit one group of workers in the same street while the others remain unaffected; or one middle-class professional family can be devastated by redundancy while another prospers. It was ever thus; now it is a great deal more marked.

The insecurity as much as the inequality of income is entering the very marrow of the British consumer's soul. It is making him and her more price conscious and more leery of running up large debts, especially to trade up in the housing market. As the post-war settlement dissolves into the Hobbes-ian brutishness of competitive individualism and job insecurity, so the old relationships determining consumption and saving are weakening and a much more volatile series of relationships is replacing them.

This is most clearly observable in the housing market. It is not home ownership per se that is the problem; it is, as a paper for the Rowntree Trust by Professor Duncan Maclennan argued last week, the interaction of home ownership with a volatile financial system and increasingly insecure patterns of employment. When conditions are buoyant the interaction generates a boom; when conditions are bearish the interaction generates a bust. More security of employment more stability of income, more fixed-rate mortgages, more stable behaviour by lenders, more rented accommodation and less pressure on the young to buy would change the situation — but that would require wholesale reversal of the market experiment. In its absence we have a boom-bust housing market.

HOUSE prices fell 0.7 per cent in June, according to Britain's second biggest building society, the Nationwide, confirming fears that April's tax rises and higher fixed-rate mortgages are dampening any fragile recovery in the property market. NatWest Bank yesterday increased its fixed rate mortgages by around 0.6 per cent for the second time in two months. A two-year fixed rate mortgage will now cost 7.59 per cent and a 10-year fix 9.59 per cent.

The Halifax, yesterday revealed a noticeable decline in housing market activity after April, preventing a strong recovery in prices.

A Halifax spokesman said: "Put together, the two house-price indices show that house prices remain flat and are not going anywhere. Since Easter there has been a strong lack of confidence. People do not perceive any economic recovery."

Nationwide's operations director, Brian Davies, said: "Market confidence remains fragile, reflecting the moderate pace of economic recovery and persisting concerns about employment prospects."

The 'recovery' talk could not have been more insistently directed at the middle-class than on the question of the housing market where the appearance of the phenomenon of negative equity (where more fixed mortgage debt is owed on a house than its now falling value can cover if sold) has so shattered all the confident cocky assumptions of the petty bourgeoisie seeing their 'capital' soar inexorably during the seemingly endless house-prices boom years.

But all the 'talking up' in the world seems unable to restore shattered confidence after such a massive blow to people's personal pride and arrogant class expectations.

On a broader front, there must be a suspicion that it is just the cut-throat reality of the murderous international trade war itself which is beginning to sap the confidence of the bourgeoisie everywhere.

It has long been axiomatic that despite all their aggressive class-propaganda for the virtues and sanctity of the 'free market', capitalists in fact do not like competition at all. They hate it. The bourgeoisie has always dedicated its entire history to trying to find ways of wiping out the competition by hook or by crook, and achieving as close to a monopoly position as possible.

In a long boom period there is competition but there is also the big possibility for all of the big competitors to all survive safely.

It is only when the slump comes that the capitalist system really starts its cut-throat competition. The really serious market-rivalry for capitalists (and cut-price benefits for consumers from 'competition' as monopolies threatened with bankruptcy from loss of market share, start cutting back as hard as possible on profits, dividends, and bosses perks, in some cases) begins when trade war means a fight for survival. Then some of the cartel rackets start to break up, and some of the more grotesque profiteering margins and cynical easy-money scalping of gullible consumers comes to an end.

It is this atmosphere of real competition which can start to alter the whole behaviour-patterns of the bourgeoisie, and start to undermine confidence in deep and sometimes surprising or unexpected ways.

Even in Japan which has been doing better than anyone in the trade war so far, this new atmosphere of slump-competition to try to ensure not going to the wall first, has been a shock to the system:

To lose one Prime Minister amid accusations of corruption and scandal is unfortunate. To lose two looks like carelessness. To lose three in 10 months smacks of institutionalised chaos.

Last week a new Prime Minister took office: he is Tomiichi Murayama, a Socialist, who has taken power by doing a deal with his mortal enemies, the rightwing Liberal Democratic Party. Even by the standards of Japan's famously tortuous politics, this is remarkable.

For nearly four decades, Japanese politics was run in an orderly, if not wholesome, manner: the Liberal Democratic Party controlled everything. There were brutal power struggles between factions, but all were contained within the one, dominant party. In those turbulent times the political secretary to Noboru Takeshita, then Prime Minister, hanged himself. In a suicide note he said: 'Behind the scenes of this peaceful democracy the same bloody power struggles to the death are taking place as were waged time after time by medieval warlords.'

Then last year the LDP fell apart after a tidal wave of corruption scandals, in which nearly all the LDP leaders were caught taking huge bribes and then lying about them.

Today, the Japanese parliament is a seething cauldron of confusion, with 11 parties and 14 independents convinced that, if they cut the right deals, they too can get a share of power. The fact that they were all schooled in the LDP means that they know all the dirty tricks of the trade. This would matter less were it not that Japan's recovery from recession is being hampered by an over-strong yen, and clear-headed leadership is needed.

The Japanese public is deeply frustrated by all this. Thus Murayama has started his first week in office with a popularity rating of only 30 per cent. The public's cynicism and unhappiness is deepened because last year, when the LDP was toppled from power by Japan's 'Mr Clean', Morihiro Hosokawa, there were promises of radical reforms to curb both corruption and the voting system. In those heady days, Hosokawa could command popularity ratings of 80 per cent.

Yet the kingmaker behind Hosokawa's coalition government, which was making 'clean government' its central plank, was an LDP man who had himself come under fire for alleged corruption. Ichiro Ozawa defected from the LDP in the middle of last year, set up Shinseito ('Renewal Party'), and broke the LDP's 38-year-long grip on power.

Tsutomu Hata, who recently resigned as Prime Minister after the Socialists withdrew from his coalition, said that this system meant that 'no candidate could discuss serious issues — even members of the same party stab each other in the back to show die voters that they can deliver the best goods to the constituency'.

Reforms to curb corruption and have MPs elected by a mixture of single-seat constituencies and proportional representation have been passed, but parliament still has to demarcate the new constituencies. Bets are being taken as to whether the Socialist-LDP coalition will dare be so cynical as to call elections under the old framework.

The 50th anniversary of the Bretton Woods system which all-powerful US imperialism set up after part II of the unending inter-imperialist war for world supremacy to impose the dollar as the universal currency on the planet, to be regarded 'as good as gold' (until it collapsed off the gold standard in 1972 following the Vietnam catastrophe), - has caused some discussion about whether a yen-dominated world could replace dollar domination now that the US currency is under worldwide siege.

Regardless of the news from Japan of the imperialist economic crisis showing as much sickness there as anywhere, the whole idea is historically nonsense.

The epoch of American imperialist domination was much more than just a technical-financial matter of which major trade-war rival had the biggest bank reserves (then the USA, now Japan).

The whole previous actual pattern of world colonial-imperialist history had set up the American monopoly-capitalist bourgeoisie to take on the responsibilities and the enormous advantages of international gendarme-imperialist leadership, - accepted by everybody however reluctantly.

The USA was overwhelmingly the biggest power ever in history, in its economic prime the only power conceivably big enough to play the role of world policeman. It was also the only natural successor to the whole previous history of 400 years of the world imperialist system which had been totally dominated by the West European powers (largely France and Britain, backed by the USA, Holland, Belgium, etc). And the first great rivalry to that dominant tradition (first from Germany and then from Germany-Italy-Japan) had just been terribly defeated once again.

The epoch of US imperialist dominance was also much more than just another big imperialist bully rising to the top of the heap. 

It happened in the mid-20th century when the question of communist revolution overthrowing the capitalist system in its entirety all over the planet was already a very live issue. The American imperialist era could only have taken place under all the paraphernalia of the new United Nations 'first real world government of democracy and justice', etc, backed up by all its 'humanitarian' quangos like the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, anti-colonial committees of various kinds, the IMF and World Bank 'aid' to developing rations, etc, etc, - all topped out by the 'anti-colonial' USA, the 'greatest democratic republic in the history of the world', etc.

Nothing could ever replace all of that bullshit.

Trying to now set Japan up at the head of various international 'humanitarian' and 'democratic' development agencies, so called, would have even the most downtrodden and benighted people on earth shaking their heads in disbelief. This whole 'benign world government' farce has come to a juddering halt with the steady decline back into ruthless trade-war back-stabbing and brutal neocolonial bullying by the United States bourgeois imperialist ruling class whose culture is now the last word in philistine degeneracy, - shallow, glitzy, racist, mafia-ridden, drug-crazed tyranny both domestically and internationally.

More than 100 coups or small wars of fascist-nazi outrage have been inflicted by US imperialism on the Third World since 1945. Not a single military-dictatorship butcher has been in power, from Idi Amin to the white apartheid regime in South Africa, from Pinochet to Somoza, from Suharto to Ngo Dinh Diem, who has not been put there or kept there courtesy of the CIA.

Monstrous new Nazi-imperialist strategies are ever on the production line in Washington, and the next colonial-bullying outrage will not be more than months away.

Any of the more than 100 crimes of colonial tyranny past and present would do to illustrate the essence of US imperialism's historic role which can never be repeated. Let the latest mealy-mouthed imperialist press report of the aftermath of prolonged US colonial-fascist tyranny in El Salvador give a tiny part of the picture, - the Death Squads, of course, all hand-picked, trained and controlled by the CIA:

EL SALVADOR'S death squads are probably still intact and active despite the 1992 peace agreement between the government and its guerrilla opponents, according to sources close to a United Nations-sponsored inquiry into the squads.

The government agreed to the inquiry into the death squads after several senior FMLN officials were murdered at the end of 1993.

The country's new president, Armando Calderon Sol, was sworn in yesterday and promised to speed up implementation of the accords with the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). But the links between Mr Calderon Sol's Arena party and the death squads cast doubt on the future of the agreement. Sources familiar with the UN-sponsored investigation say that the group has found strong indications, not only that the death squads still exist but that their members include civilian and military public officials.

The group's report which was due to have been handed to the outgoing president Alfredo Cristiani, on Tuesday, will now be presented on July 31.

Diego Garcia Sayán, the head of the human rights division of the UN observer force, Onusal, said that the evidence of continuing death squad activities was one reason for the extension. The others were several recent acts of violence and requests from "political and social groups" — primarily the FMLN — for further investigation, he said.

He said the draft report "could be reformulated in the course of the two months" until July 31.

During the civil war in the 1980s, the death squads—most, if not all, of which were directly commanded by the army and security forces — killed thousands of suspected guerrilla sympathisers. No one has been convicted of a death squad killing.

Under the 1992 agreement, the government agreed to disband the police and national guard, which were strongly implicated in death squad activity, and to create a new civilian police force, the PCN.

The old national police (PN), which Unosal has accused of systematic human rights abuses, has not been disbanded, however. Worse, "the contamination of the new police force with existing police units notorious for abuse poses a serious, and potentially permanent problem", according to a Human Rights Watch report published in March.

The PCN, which is commanded by a former army major close to Mr Cristiani, has ignored quotas and retraining schemes intended to ensure it did not simply incorporate PN personnel and methods into the new force. The government has also refused to release the names of members of disbanded units, making it impossible to enforce the quota scheme.

Two PN units, including the 600-strong anti-narcotics group, were transferred into the PCN without adequate screening or retraining, according to Onusal officials. The unit is one of three named in a recently declassified 1983 CIA cable as having provided most members of a police death squad which had an "informal liaison" with a paramilitary group belonging to the Arena party.

Mr Calderón Sol was among the closest associates of the late Roberto D'Aubuisson, founder of Arena and architect of much of the death squad activity in the 1980s. His earliest political activity was as a member of the Salvadorean Nationalist Movement, a far-right group which former members say carried out bombings and murdered leftist sympathisers.

Although Mr Calderón Sol is not thought to have taken part in these activities himself, another declassified US intelligence document claims his house was used to plan a kidnapping. The new president has denied this and it has also been played down by US officials.

In the presidential election on April 24, Mr Calderón Sol won by a margin of more than two-to-one over Rubén Zamora, the candidate of the leftwing alliance which includes the former guerrillas. The scale of his victory has increased fears that, rather than reviving the flagging peace process, he will feel able to let it die.

Other commitments the Cristiani government failed to fulfil include the transfer of land to guerrilla supporters and reforms of the judicial and electoral systems.

Onusal, whose mandate expires at the end of November, appears more concerned to declare the process a rare success for the UN than to ensure full compliance. "The UN just wants to get out of the place as soon as possible with its victory intact," said one disgruntled UN official.

The bourgeois ideology of subjective-idealist philistinism has ignored the collapse of the dollar off the gold standard in the early 1970s as something whose "consequences have been absorbed" etc, - again refusing to see any pattern at all to postwar world developments. Nothing has been "absorbed" in reality.

Now, on the 50th anniversary of Bretton Woods, bourgeois mental dribble is contemplating a "possible return to fixed exchange rates" now that the dollar is once again in crisis, as well as speculating on "Japan taking over", etc.

This is all gibberish. The huge forces of Third World communist revolution have been held back by hook or by crook. In terms of the unprecedented 'world currency' solution of 1944 declaring the dollar 'as good as gold' and virtually officially declaring an epoch of US imperialist international domination, - that dollar pollution has now finally come to a catastrophic end. The 1972 collapse from the gold standard was very significant. Philistine bourgeois confusion has since been able to set in again simply because it has taken another 25 years for the other boot to drop. Dollar pollution went on expanding regardless after 1972 after some initial 'discipline' promises from Washington. Now the world's colossal mountains of dollar debts are no longer repayable. They are almost certainly on the way to becoming totally valueless. Utter economic catastrophe stares the 'free market' system in the face. The idea of renewing the dollar pollution, or of trying to replace it with yen pollution, is ludicrous. The final 20th century 'free market' illusions have held back the Third World communist revolution for an unexpectedly long time, but nothing can hold back history now.

In terms of the political/military solution to the imperialist crisis, it is inseparable from the dollar-pollution catastrophe.

It has already been seen how the US imperialist authority and know-how has become increasingly suspect worldwide. Many recent colonial-nazi escapades and provocations have become a humiliating disaster for the US government and its military forces. But the idea that anything else could replace this US imperialist international gendarme role is utterly preposterous.

It is because imperialism itself is out of its time that everything is now going so clownishly wrong for the 'free world' leader, not just because of the particular stupidities of the American ruling class or its current abysmal 'democratic' regime. The power on earth has never even been dreamed of that could try to replace this decadent ailing dinosaur of super-imperialist world leadership, now humiliatingly collapsing everywhere and dragging everything else down with it.

The end of the American imperialist epoch has not properly begun yet, and there will be much new unpleasantness to come, possibly soon in the Balkans where Washington continues to contemplate winding up its Bosnian muslim stooges to unleash an even more sustained warmongering provocation than has relentlessly been the case hitherto, as the capitalist press itself admits in the small print (when not screaming obscenities at the Serbs, the only really viable nation-state force in the ruins of the Yugoslav socialist federation, wrecked by deliberate Western free-market and separatist subversion):

BOSNIAN government forces appeared to be gaining the upper hand and taking key territory from the Serbs in fighting that raged in central Bosnia at the weekend, almost halfway through a one-month truce that was supposed to have halted hostilities throughout the republic.

The government gains come immediately after the Bosnian military commander urged his fighters to embark on a fresh "liberation war" against the Serbs who hold 70 per cent of Bosnia. The offensive by the mainly Muslim forces may also prefigure larger and more crucial battles in north-central Bosnia, condemning the international powers to failure in their latest — and probably last — attempt to mediate a settlement of the 27-month war.

General Rasim Delic, the Muslim commander, has called repeatedly for the Muslims and
Croats, including Croatia proper, to join forces to drive back the Serbs.

Despite the current talk of peace among Western leaders' and diplomats in Geneva, Corfu and New York, Gen Delic told his officers in Sarajevo last week that the time was ripe to go on the offensive.

"So far we have been conducting a defensive war, now we are going into phase two, a war of liberation," he said. "It means that our soldier has to overcome that psychological barrier, to get out of the trench and move."

In an interview published in Croatia yesterday, Gen Delic reiterated the message. And there was little talk of peace processes, negotiations, or partition plans.

United Nations officials said there was heavy fighting all weekend over what was Serb-held territory south of the town of Doboj, between the Muslim strongholds of Zenica and Tuzla. Muslim forces, seeking to gain control of a vital road link between the two towns, managed to push the Serbs back towards Doboj.

The Muslims are apparently determined to secure the road link which would allow them to supply Tuzla all the way from the Adriatic coast, with an eye to mounting a much bigger offensive on Brcko.

Brcko is the pivotal point on the northern corridor connecting Serbia proper with large swathes of Serb-held northwestern Bosnia and south-western Croatia. The corridor is at its most narrow and vulnerable at Brcko.

There is widespread speculation that the Muslims and the Croats, re-allied in a US-sponsored Bosnian federation, could mount a twin offensive on the corridor at Brcko, with the Croats attacking from the north and the Muslims from the south, in an attempt to choke the large Serb areas to the west.

HORROR AT events in former Yugoslavia pushed many on the left to demand Western intervention against Serbia.

They blamed Serbia for the war in Croatia in 1991-2 and took Croatia's side.

They blamed Serbia again for the Bosnian war which began two years ago and called for military action to save Sarajevo and support the Bosnian government.

But the fighting was never so simple—as a new book, Seasons in Hell by Guardian reporter Ed Vulliamy, explains.

Vulliamy charts the descent into "a three sided war" and truces how at every stage Western governments gave the go ahead while refusing to accept refugees.

Atrocities

He tells the story of atrocities and mass graves, of homes torched with people locked inside, of mortars fired at children playing, of snipers who picked off fleeing refugees.

However, he understands this terror is a product of a war of partition.

But there was a legacy of divisions in the countryside. As Yugoslavia broke up, all politicians sought to channel support on "nationalist" lines.

The current Bosnian government president Izetbegovic founded the exclusively Muslim SDA.

Vulliamy describes how, by the end of 1991, "the language of formal politics was that of ethnic sectarianism", and Izetbegovic embraced this "as eagerly as any".

Local Serb and Croat leaders founded parties allied to Milosevic and to Tudjman.

The Croat government fought alongside the Bosnian government to begin with, but used its forces to seize as much territory as it could and then turned on the Muslims.

The Bosnian government forces were squeezed—poorly armed and without a parent state to back them.

Bosnia's Muslims inevitably became the greatest victims of the fighting.

Yet when the chance arose, as it did for example in the village of Bratumac in late 1992, Muslim units showed they were just as capable of cutting the throats of civilians.

Serbs in Croatia identified with Milosevic and fought Tudjman because, as one told Vulliamy: "We had lost our jobs; employers were forcing people to kiss the Croatian flag and we refused. I lost my work and money, and I'm not going to lose my village too."

Left wingers who cling to the belief that Izetbegovic's Bosnian government offers a solution are mistaken.

His party is exclusively Muslim, and his government depends on the former industrialists and thriving wartime speculators of Sarajevo.
New York Times Service

PECIGRAD, Bosnia-Herzegovina — This Bosnian village set in undulating countryside has become the most active front line in Bosnia over the last week and the heart of a bizarre but intensifying conflict that has set Muslim against Muslim in a fratricidal war.

The 26-month war has seen virtually every permutation of conflict among and between Muslims, Serbs and Croats. But none is stranger or more intractable than a battle raging in the northwestern Bihac area between the Muslim-dominated army of the Bosnian government and the Muslim troops of a wealthy businessman named Fikret Abdic, who has declared autonomy from Sarajevo.

The crackle of automatic-weapons fire could be heard almost constantly Tuesday as a commander in Mr. Abdic's militia, Hasim Ahmetasevic, pointed across rolling fields and wooded hills to positions taken by the Bosnian Army in the offensive that started 10 days earlier.

"They are just over there now, about 250 meters away," the officer said, indicating a hill called Krecana just east of Pecigrad. "Our position has become more vulnerable."

As if to prove his point, a sniper's bullet whistled a few feet overhead, and Mr. Ahmetasevic ducked for cover behind a stone wall. Asked how he felt as a Muslim, to be a target of bullets from the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Army, he said: "Even two brothers can fight. This did not happen by my will, but because the government in Sarajevo wants war and more war."

United Nations officials in the capital of Mr. Abdic's so-called autonomous province of western Bosnia, Velika Kladusa, say fighting in the last week is the most intense since Mr. Abdic declared autonomy in the northern half of the Bihac pocket on Sept. 27 and installed himself as president of an almost exclusively Muslim community of about 50,000 people.

Mr. Abdic, head of one of the largest companies in the former Yugoslavia, a food and agricultural products conglomerate called Agrokomerz, has denounced what he calls the destructive Muslim nationalist politics of the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic.

Instead, Mr. Abdic has opted for a freewheeling network of political and economic alliances with the neighboring Serbs in the occupied Krajina areas of Croatia and with Croats, too, trading in virtually everything, including food and weapons. His essential message, his aides say, is that if people are making money, they will eventually forget about ethnic differences and war.

What seems clear is that Mr. Izetbegovic's government has decided to use the month-long Bosnia-wide cease-fire that was agreed to with the Serbs on June 10 in Geneva to try to finish with Mr. Abdic. Although the cease-fire should, in theory, apply to this part of Bosnia, too. it has not taken hold.

"At least 100 people have been killed and several hundred wounded over the last 10 days." said Monique Tuffelli, chief official of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' office in Velika Kladusa. "One has the impression that the Bosnian government forces are closing in."

Serbian forces in Krajina have gone to the aid of Mr. Abdic, shelling the advancing Bosnian Army from positions just north of Velika Kladusa. UN officials say they believe that the Serbs would be quite unlikely to allow the Bosnian Army to defeat Mr. Abdic, as he has become a useful ally, tying up Bosnian Army units that might otherwise be shooting at Serbian forces.

Mr. Abdic's chief adviser. Mehmed Kostic, said that he had 10,000 soldiers in his army and that "we are quite capable of taking back the ground we have lost." He suggested that there was no possibility of compromise.

"Sarajevo wants to impose an Islamic state with Islamic law. though we cannot accept this," he said, using an argument frequently advanced by the Bosnian Serbs. "But we see this autonomous province as a model for the only system that will work in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a series of self-governing cantons trading actively with their neighbors."

Mr. Izetbegovic is known to be infuriated by Mr. Abdic. and he recently asked the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, his new ally in the Muslim-Croatian federation in Bosnia, to make sure that any trade between Zagreb and Velika Kladusa ceases.

But Mr. Kostic said: "Nothing serious has changed. We still have our trading corridor with Zagreb, and we still trade with our Serbian neighbors."

As American imperialist authority fades, so will inter-imperialist warmongering rivalry begin to escalate, at first probably confronting each other's interests via proxies, as in the Balkans conflict, again as the bourgeois media themselves admit:

And although the international community is trying to paper over its differences on Bosnia, it is also clear that Britain and France, in an alignment inconceivable in the days of the cold war, stand alongside Russia on the Bosnian crisis in opposition to the US.

Washington reluctantly bowed to west European and Russian pressure last week in Geneva when for the first time it endorsed a partition of Bosnia that would give the Bosnian Serbs 49 per cent and a joint Muslim-Croat state 51 per cent.

But while the French and the British are trying to get the Americans to lean on the Bosnian government to accept that formula, US officials maintain that they will not coerce the Muslim leadership into a deal.

Earlier this week, Russia's Balkan envoy, Vitaly Churkin, responded to Muslim-Croat claims for 58 per cent of Bosnia by stating that the 51-49 formula was non-negotiable. French and British officials then stressed that a settlement had to be reached on that basis or they could decide within two months to pull their United Nations troops out of Bosnia.

But already in view are renewed direct inter-imperialist confrontations over the increasingly antagonistic trade war. 

Extending the feud by Britain inside the EU against German-French domination over the next commission president, it is significant that France has now joined in with German trade-sanctions threats against the imports of British beef products.

Meanwhile, British bourgeois-imperialist confidence continues to dwindle on all fronts.

And nothing could be more symbolic of the unease at the heart of the ruling-class system than the outdated way in which the colonist remnants in the Occupied Zone of Ireland should be culturally so oriented towards their supposed loyalty to the Crown, now so tarnished as the emblem of British power and authority. The Nazi-level depravities of terror-torture inflicted on the Irish national-liberation struggle (as remarkably confirmed by the Channel 4 coverage this week) by the 'forces of the Crown' render this bogusly 'neutral' and non-comprehending monarchy even more odious and futile as an institution, making the colonists' 'loyalty' look more and more like a kiss of death for both partners.

And a preview of further Channel 4 coverage later in the week notes how the demoralisation of the colonist community begins with bourgeois paralysis:

This month, 25 years after British troops arrived in Belfast, the mood in the Protestant heartland is troubled and uncertain.

Now,	it is working-class Protestants who feel they are on the losing side, caricatured across the world as bigoted rednecks. Looking fearfully across the peace wall which divides the Shankill Road from the Falls, they see an increasingly confident Catholic community which has made enormous gains, political and economic. Most bewildering of all, it seems to many Protestants that this has happened as a result of the IRA's terrorist campaign. 'Violence works' is a phrase one hears grimly repeated again and again to explain the rise in support for loyalist paramilitary groups.

Jackie Redpath, who runs the Greater Shankill Development Agency, analyses the experience of loss and defeat. 'You have to understand that the Protestant community is a community in retreat — physically, politically, economically, culturally.' He points to the decline in population in the Greater Shankill area over the past 15 years from 120,000 to 56,000 as younger families have moved out. To many of those who remain this planned redevelopment, which has inevitably left an imbalance of elderly people, is evidence of a deliberate strategy to drive Protestants from this part of Belfast. Some of the most bitter arguments about the re-routing of Orange parades have been when the police have diverted them from streets which were once Protestant but are now occupied by Catholics.

This physical retreat has been accompanied by a sense of political defeat and betrayal. Most loyalists, even those who are prepared to admit that discrimination against Catholics was a major cause of the Troubles, will also reel off a list of political losses over two decades.

The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 and, more recently, the Downing Street Declaration have aggravated the suspicion that Britain has no long-term interest in maintaining the Union. In this context, Prince Charles's apparent indifference to the Williamite settlement, which Orange marches commemorate, is simply another example of how far even the Royal Family has drifted from loyal Protestant Ulster.

The economic decline of industrial Belfast has fallen particularly hard on the Shankill Road. Workers employed in places such as the Harland and Wolff shipyard were overwhelmingly — and unapologetically — Protestant. If you were a teenager in the Shankill 25 years ago you had automatic access to a job. Now Harland and Wolff, which employed 20,000 in its heyday, has fewer than 2,000 workers. Mackie's, the engineering works, had 7,500 on the payroll at the start of the Troubles. It now employs fewer than 200. Unemployment is 25 per cent in the Shankill area, comparable to Catholic West Belfast.

To Protestants, who believed they were entitled to jobs and who defined themselves by the work ethic, the effect has been devastating. May Blood, a veteran trade unionist, spoke of her shock. 'A young man said to me: "Why would I work? My father never worked." Twenty-five years ago you would never have heard a Protestant say that.'

Recent research has revealed another shocking statistic — dramatically low levels of educational achievement. Only a handful of children in the Shankill Road pass the 11-plus each year and very few go on to higher education. It was partly to deal with this that Sally Paul and other women at the Hummingbird Centre started a programme of courses to encourage parents, particularly single mothers — of whom there are many — to help their children.

One of their most striking discoveries was the lack of knowledge among many working-class Protestants of their own history and culture. 'How could we know? We were only taught English history, the Battle of Hastings and so on,' Sally Paul said. One woman in her own adult education class refused to believe that the Protestant community had only arrived in Northern Ireland in the seventeenth century. Now the centre runs Irish language classes as well as history.

This remarkable initiative focuses a spotlight on another part of the loyalist community's sense of loss and confusion about its own identity. There are 23 different Protestant churches in the Shankill Road, each offering a different view of Divine Truth. Even allowing for the fact that the defining characteristic of Protestantism is the individual's relationship with God, this makes for intense fragmentation.

It has also made it much more difficult to develop community projects: one of the strengths of the Catholic community has been the leadership provided by a monolithic church.

In this, as in many other fields, one has a sense that people in the Shankill are looking half enviously, half angrily at how the Catholic community has emerged, apparently stronger from the experience of the past 25 years. There is the suspicion, for example, that 'the Catholics have all the best poets, the best musicians, the best writers'.

The problem extends beyond cultural identity. The flight of the Protestant middle classes from politics, the perception that many appear to be ashamed of their roots, adds to the sense of many in the Shankill that they have been abandoned by those who should be providing leadership and solidarity. These include a perfidious British Government intent on pushing them into a united Ireland, the territorial threat from Dublin and the violence of the IRA.

Meanwhile, all that the confused, and decadent British establishment can get on with is insanely to allow Lesbian sufferers from retarded emotional development to declare themselves in law to be both mother and father to any unfortunate children they get hold of, at a stroke wiping out all that has been scientifically understood in 100 years of studying the complex matters of parenthood and social development. Philistine stupidity not only rules but gets worse. The bourgeoisie is losing its grip entirely. Build Leninism. Joe Harper

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 PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]    
No. 76 Friday July 1 1994

Dollar crisis exposes heart of imperialist warmongering contradictions

The real prospects for the British economy are not to be found in the latest Treasury report's prediction of 'steady growth and low inflation', a 'golden scenario' and 'quite the best prospects for many years' etc., but in the chaos the rapidly approaching dollar crash is going to unleash on the world financial markets.

The current dollar/ yen slide is part of the increasingly bitter US/Japanese trade war, and also a reflection of the extent to which Japanese and German imperialism has already undermined the US position as dominant world economic power.

Feeble British imperialism increasingly looks as if it has positioned itself in the worst possible place at the worst possible time to survive the rapidly escalating international trade war.

By its apparent readiness to abandon its European economic lifeline, at the very moment when its close ally the USA's currency is going down the pan, it looks as if it has gone from trying to ride two horses at once to falling off both simultaneously, and is now in danger of being trampled by both.

As argued in EPSR no.757, Major's rejection of the German-French nominee for EU Commission president has left the British ruling class uncomfortably looking down both barrels of someone else's shotgun, as it tries to position itself advantageously in the trade war conflicts now breaking out.

The short-lived breathing space (recovery) gained by British imperialism through Sterling's forced devaluation on being driven out of the ERM will quickly evaporate as rising interest rates and currency sabotage destroy the slight, accidental, temporary competitive advantage Britain gained only through its weakness in the first place.

The chronic instability in the world financial markets can only continue to get worse as the unsustainable and unrepayable US deficits grow larger by the day, and as the Japanese government increasingly declines to finance these debts with its trade surplus, as part of the trade war manoeuvring for economic domination.

As argued in EPSR no.714 (August '93), the dollar/yen crisis exposes the heart of the warmongering contradiction in the imperialist world order, with rival blocks once again shaping up for the third major war this century in the nonstop inter-imperialist conflict for economic domination.

The clear pattern of ever-sharpening crisis is now firmly established and clearly unfolding, and current events are richly confirming the ILWP's general economic analysis of the imperialist crisis:

No amount of 'promises to reduce deficits' by the US or 'promises to tackle surpluses' by the Japanese can change the reality that the world capitalist system now faces total collapse - centred around the implosion of the mighty US economy.

And with it will go the central dollar, a currency which not only represents the confidence and power of the world's biggest ever and most dominating imperialist ruling class, but which has underpinned all finance, investment and production throughout the non-communist world since 1945.

It has also underpinned the entire post-war anti-communist order against the continuing and unstoppable upsurge of revolutionary feeling among the world's poverty stricken masses. Aid and trade deals in dollar financed packages for a multiplicity of fascist and anti-communist CIA installed stooges around the world have allowed the stranglehold of modem colonialism to be kept in place to suck dry the Third World by ruthless exploitation.

All of this faces collapse with the dollar. And so does much more. The dollar has been the central fabric of all trade for five decades, to such an extent that it was declared "as good as gold" in the post-war Bretton Woods agreement and became used as the value marker against which all other currencies were set.

Not any more. Relentless monopoly competition from the resurgently powerful German and Japanese rivals especially has steadily eaten away at US economic, industrial and scientific power, despite endless agreements about opening up markets, reducing tariffs, 'voluntarily limiting exports' etc.

The termites have brought things to the point of total collapse, including ironically their own positions, equally threatened by world slump and war.

As early as the 1970's the pressure had become so strong that the Bretton Woods system had to be abandoned by Nixon. The pace of crisis has gradually accelerated since, despite ups and downs in the market system and credit created boosts.

It is now at breakneck speed. Since the 1987 October Crash on the Stock Exchanges the instabilities in capitalism have become massively more obvious.

Obvious that is to the science of Marxist-Leninism which has insisted, in the teeth of complacent petty bourgeois pseudo-left' ignorance and mockery about 'doom mongers', that the essence of capitalism is a system incapable of doing anything but plunging slump and more importantly, generalised war.

It is worth repeating a section from the ILWP Bulletin of July 1992 (No 657) about the dollar, not to make trivial 'told you so' points but to underline to the working class how analysing scientifically can keep the Leninist party ahead of events:

As the 'free world' press itself could not but record the mess facing the 'new world order' just continues to get relentlessly worse on every front, with the ultimate catastrophe, - a dollar collapse, - getting closer all the time, even if no one dares mention it because of the indescribably long and deep slump-devastation that will signal for the entire planet.

The US imperialist budget and trade-war deficits are now so colossal that no one seriously believes that they will ever be brought under control.

That can only mean eventual dollar collapse, and total chaos for a long time for the economy of the entire 'free market' world.

But the dollar cannot possibly collapse, indicating comprehensive defeat for the American ruling class in its trade war with resurgent German and Japanese imperialism for the dominant economic and political position in the world, - without being accompanied by such warmongering chauvinistic hatred and recriminations as to quickly put inter-imperialist World War III well into focus.

That puts Britain's position in the trade war (as being a close ally of the USA) in even greater jeopardy than ever, thus further shattering market confidence."

EPSR no.714.

This understanding of the depth and seriousness of the imperialist crisis is what urgently needs to be argued about and put forward in the working class.

As argued in last week's SWB, the current signalmen's dispute has to be understood in the overall context of escalating trade war demanding ever harsher 'market discipline'. It also has to be understood in the context of the fag-end of British Empire trade-unionism still trying to betray ever larger majorities of the working class to the benefit of a relatively highly paid 'elite' few.

These 'productivity' deals have been the nonstop and accelerating trend of trade-unionism in imperialist countries all this century, however much certain individuals, or branches may have objected to this constant 'sacrifice of the weakest'.

Only when this foul class compromise is challenged, when individual disputes are raising the matter of the whole working class against the whole capitalist system, will it begin to be possible to break the stranglehold of petit-bourgeois reformist treachery in the trade union movement.

This means challenging the whole 'left' illusion that somehow some kind of 'pay dispute' or anti-redundancy dispute, justified and courageous as they may be, will somehow become a 'fight back' against the capitalist system.

It can only become that when it's consciously made that, and that can only happen with conscious revolutionary leadership.

The crisis of world imperialism is rapidly making the whole reformist trade-union perspective redundant. When Knapp & co. complain that the old BR management would never have got into this kind of a mess, and a deal would have been done, he is simply expressing a stinking reactionary desire for the 'good old days' of cosy class compromise.

That this is no longer so readily available is to be welcomed, because it weakens the power of the treacherous reformists and strengthens the hand of those who argue for the overthrow of the whole capitalist system.

Build Leninism.

D.Watts

The unease of the middle class is yet another sign that capitalism is in very deep paralysis and terminal decline. The revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is the only solution to market collapse and currency wars between the US and Japan.

Total despair of the middle classes in observing the terminal decline of the British bourgeoisie in not being able to compete with Japan and Germany, is not a "passing phase that will soon pass":

BRITAIN'S middle classes are in torment. They feel forsaken by the government, fearful about the future and threatened by a disintegrating social fabric of the nation.

Heading a list of worries encroaching on the security of their lives are job dissatisfaction, rising taxes, falling house prices, the crime rate and poor health care and education.

The disturbing findings come in a Mori survey. Redundancy fears are high. Of those in work, 35% are worried about the prospect of losing their jobs over the next 12 months, while one in five families has had recent experience of unemployment.

Only 12% of the middle classes now trust Tory politicians to look after their interests, against an overwhelming 74% who do not - a devastating verdict on 15 years of Conservative rule.

There is concern and cynicism about education and health. Nearly three-quarters (73%) do not believe a university degree will guarantee a good career, while a majority of 42% are not confident of getting high quality state education for their children, outnumbering the 41% who are. A similar four in 10 do not feel confident of getting high-quality treatment on the NHS. One family in seven (14%) say they have experienced poor healthcare.

Politically, middle-class angst represents an extreme danger for the Tories. Only 12%, and a third of those who remain Tory supporters, believe they can trust Tory politicians; 74% of the sample believe they are untrustworthy compared, with 60% mistrusting Labour politicians.

More than three years after the prime minister stood outside No 10 and declared his belief in a classless society, his middle-class electorate say he was whistling in the wind. By nine to one (81% to 9%) the poll rejects the idea that Britain is now a classless society.

The risk for the Tories is that they have alienated their traditional middle-class supporters with policies that attacked the professions and brought a mood of brutal realism to business and the civil service. At the same time, though, the new middle classes, who flocked to Thatcher in the 1980s, could easily revert back to Labour, having sampled the Tory diet and found it wanting.

Thatcher based her whole politics on the basis of reactionary anti-working class 'beggar-thy-neighbour' anti-communism. But this was always on the assumption that the bourgeoisie would be able to indefinitely keep the middle classes on the side of reaction, or at least content that they were the only class that could lead society. Any type of leadership is obviously completely lacking from Major & Co in the Tories, and all the other 'democratic' parties, as explained in SWB No 63:-

"The whole 'democratic' capitalist system has never looked more tired, clapped-out and unsuitable.

Open calls from his own side for Major to resign and make way for a 'stronger leader' can only get louder.

The demands for strong leadership, though, merely emphasize the hopelessness of their situation, and each new 'strong leader' is inevitably going to end up looking an even bigger clown than his predecessor, further undermining any remaining scraps of confidence in the capitalist 'democracy' system.

How will 'strong man' Heseltine, for example, succeed where 'strong woman' Thatcher failed? The Thatcher years of strident petit-bourgeois hectoring leadership 'confidence' — the time of the 'economic miracle' — when Britain was 'proud' again, etc., etc. -- simply collapsed like a burst bubble when the insane credit-fuelled boom inevitably crashed, leaving millions unemployed, millions in debt, and a disintegrating social fabric.

What economic miracle can Tarzan have up his sleeve to transform Britain into a first division capitalist power, ready and able to take on and defeat Japanese, US, or German economic might in free market competition, — which is what is required of the British bourgeoisie if they hope ultimately to survive in the 'free market'.

There are, of course, no such miraculous tricks up anyone's sleeves, only endless secret deals, backstabbing rivalry, temporary alliances etc., with British capitalism somehow hoping it will end up on the winning side."

Although the recent protests by the middle classes over, for example, the Poll Tax, motorway expansion programme, school interference, the run-down of the NHS etc. show that the slump is deeply affecting their standard of living, obviously these reformist politics have no great effect on the ruling class, as they would only vote for the alternative Parliamentary opportunists (LibDems, Labour). But when even these very limited prospectives are used against the capitalist class, they feel compelled to start banning all forms of gatherings, then surely they must be in serious trouble, which they are.

A reason why the middle class exists (among others), is to teach the masses to trust and comply with bourgeois order; state institutions, leaders, laws etc. But when this class starts to rebel (no matter how fragmented, half-hearted and seeped in the most appalling anticommunist cynicism), this is certainly a bad sign for the capitalist order. But no matter how uncomfortable it is for the bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie will not be any more then either a protest group or a class which must follow the working class to overthrow capitalism, as Lenin stated in 'The State & Revolution' (1917):-

"The overthrow of bourgeois rule can be accomplished only by the proletariat, as the particular class whose economic conditions of existence prepare it for this task and provide it with the possibility and the power to perform it. While the bourgeoisie breaks up and disintegrates the peasants and all the petty-bourgeois groups, it welds together, unites and organises the proletariat. Only the proletariat by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploits, oppresses and crushes often not less, but more, then it does the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation."

Build the ILWP to lead the working class in overthrowing the rotten British capitalist class for good. M.C. (Cardiff)