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 782 Tuesday December 20 1994                                                                                                                   10p

No Bulletin next week.

The degenerate writhings of the collapsing bourgeois-imperialist system govern all world developments. All efforts to project or create an alternative society which do not start from this reality are doomed to futile confusion

Some of the confusion over understanding why it is progressive for greater Serbian nationalism to put some limits on the fragmentary petty-bourgeois opportunism of the Bosnian muslim separatists and the Croatian fascists, but reactionary for the greater Russian nationalists to put their foot down on Chechen separatism, - comes from the continuing difficulty to fully grasp the extent to which the epoch must be seen as overwhelmingly the epoch of imperialist crisis.

The domination over every life on the planet by the relentless degradation and breakdown this century of the monopoly-capitalist system, - including the domination over life in the socialist camp despite many passages of heroic resistance and defiance by workers states since 1917, - is still badly misunderstood in the aftermath of the terribly misleading influence of Moscow's revisionist thinking and Trotskyite stupidities.

While the achievements of the workers states, - in the teeth of the undying hatred and sabotage by the international bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois ultra-'lefts', - were truly magnificent achievements of all-time historic worth and significance, -despite the terrible mistakes and suicidally whimpering endings in some cases, - of infinitely greater importance was the need to continue the Marxist-Leninist scientific fight for the final overthrow of the imperialist system.

Materialist philosophy realises how every single development of revolutionary workers-state organisation since 1917 has been a colossal step forward for civilisation, demonstrating how life can progress without a capitalist-market bourgeoisie in charge of society, and laying down valuable markers for future guidance. It is only the shallow opportunism of ultra-'left' subjective-idealism which sets up a moralising search for perfection as the criterion for judging proletarian dictatorship, always forgetting to put bourgeois dictatorship, which the whole 'free'-world lives under, to the same tests.

But materialist philosophy realises even more that as important as actual socialist advances were and are, taking on the huge remaining bulk of imperialism in unending international class conflict is even more important.

All changes in the international balance of class forces must be analysed first and foremost by what overall contribution they make to the further weakening of imperialism's positions.

The worst disservice Stalinist revisionism ever inflicted on the cause of the world's workers was in starting to weigh up the Soviet Union's developments solely from the point of view of the strengthening of socialism and in isolation from the endless struggle to undermine international monopoly-capitalism, - operating under the insane revisionist defeatist/retreatist 'theory' that class war might not ultimately be necessary to overthrow the bourgeoisie internationally because capitalism might eventually just quietly accept that socialism is simply a superior economic system.

It is, potentially, eventually infinitely superior, - but not necessarily able to prove itself so in the first hundred years or more of its new arrival, just as capitalist forms of social organisation took more than 400 years to prove on a worldwide basis their superiority to feudalism. And whatever else happens, the one thing that is certain about the bourgeoisie's response to socialist successes is that it will never give up hope of managing to organise counter-revolution, just as the landowning feudal aristocracy never stopped, for hundreds of years in some cases, trying to claw back some power for themselves, or delay the process of giving more up.

By eventually effectively denying the permanently poisonous reactionary influence on earth of the imperialist system, looking by Gorbachev's time for an extension of peaceful coexistence (a temporary diplomatic tactic, for Lenin, of merely refraining from hot war for purely ideological reasons where it was not strictly necessary) into a 'merging of the best of both systems', - revisionism imposed a misleading pattern of thought on the 20th century for Stalinists and anti-Stalinists alike, conveying either that the existing Bolshevik Revolution was already enough to settle the outcome of class war struggle once and for all, - or else that the 'perfect' revolution, when it finally came, would do just that.

In both directions, the actual crucial practice of slowly and steadily placing more and more limitations on imperialism's freedom of action by revolutionary extensions of the socialist camp (Vietnam, Cuba, etc) or by the national liberation struggles (Angola, South Africa, Namibia, Nicaragua, etc), - was ignored in favour of illusions about when and where and how imperialism either had already been effectively toppled, or was one day dramatically going to be soon.

Both attitudes tend to lose sight of the fact that it is imperialist crisis which still overwhelmingly dominates all reality, - severely influencing the outcome of what revolutionary breakthroughs have already taken place, and making all daydreams about 'perfect' revolutions to come utterly irrelevant.

The crucial thing for mankind to grasp is that 'free'-world degeneracy, 'democratic' corruption, and 'social-market' economic crisis are all essentially only understandable and treatable ultimately in the process of the revolutionary transformation of society, and nothing else. Past revolutions were unavoidable. Future revolutions are inevitable. And scientific Marxist-Leninist theory to continue making the most effective advances that are possible against the dying monopoly-imperialist system is absolutely vital.

But it is imperialist/capitalist economic and political crisis as the driving force of historical development and understanding which must remain the starting point and continuous reference when analysing all phenomena in social change.

Ludicrously vast amounts of life went on in the socialist camp which totally ignored what patterns were being imposed on world society by the out-of-control careering imperialist economic juggernaut as it plunders on from outrageous boom to confusing crisis, and then, later on, towards the unstoppable renewal of the inter-imperialist arms race and eventually into part III of the World War for imperialist supremacy.

This retreat from reality and into idealistic notions of socialism's and the world's future eventually undermined and deranged the revisionist bureaucracy totally. It also left much of the population of the socialist camp very naïve and confused about the real world. But even today, socialist Cuba, for example, continues to pump out international publications which are almost totally devoid of any really useful analysis of imperialism's rampaging ongoing crisis; and consequently, their descriptions of internal developments never quite lose their naïve idyllic quality in spite of the heroic way in which the people of Cuba, and its leadership, have faced up to the brutal realities of US imperialist subversion of their revolution.

All purely national struggles can contain within them something essentially reactionary in the epoch of imperialist crisis and its only answer, - international socialist revolution.

But where Bolshevism is totally dormant, nationalism can sometimes play a progressive role in organising a successful revolt against imperialist bullying and oppression which could turn into fullscale socialist revolution given Marxist-Leninist scientific leadership, but which can aid the communist fight against imperialism anyway.

The decisive question about nationalist struggles is how do they assist the fight to embarrass or unsettle imperialism's efforts to continue totally manipulating the planet in the interests of the big monopoly-capitalist powers and social forces.

In the Balkans, the West was determined from the start to break up the Yugoslav socialist federation at all costs so as to weaken the peoples and political forces of the region, guarantee against any communist workers-state comeback, and secure the area for monopoly-capitalist exploitation in a free-for-all for all big-money comers.

Serbian nationalism put a spoke in that wheel, certainly not from the purest unmixed motives, but with an undoubted anti-imperialist content in practice to the extent that the West's machinations were completely frustrated, so badly so that the NATO powers have fallen out with each other (on an inter-imperialist rivalry basis) more damagingly than at almost any other time so far since the great 'free'-world confidence trick recommenced in 1945.

There in the Balkans, the petty nationalist opportunism of Croat catholic South Slavs and Bosnian muslim South Slavs against the majority Serbian South Slavs is obviously purely fragmentary at this stage of the historic fight for the emancipation of the workers of the world from imperialist crisis, and moreover is playing directly into imperialism's hands, manipulated by the West down to the very last propaganda detail, - as the Bulletin has put on copious record.

In the Caucasus, on the other hand, the Chechens are challenging the authority of the Moscow government in circumstances where imperialism is desperately keen for the Yeltsin regime to survive, flourish, and put its foot down firmly on all potential national-liberation revolt against monopoly-capitalist exploitation.

Russia is too big for the West to freeze it out entirely from a place at the big table of imperialist share-out of influence and authority. Therefore Russia is invited inside the tent to help piss out on the small exploited nations clamouring outside.

Serbia, on the other hand, was not thought to have been big enough to have to share the spoils of imperialist authority with, or potentially too trouble-making, and so the West has thrown a few crumbs to petty nationalists there so as to deliberately disrupt the majority-Serb influence.

Putting several millions of Caucasians with their utterly separate nationalisms, racial cultures, and languages all under the totally foreign Russian domination makes as much or as little sense as encouraging the minor cultural differences of a few million South Slavs, all speaking Serbo-Croat, to insist on separating Croatia and Bosnia from Yugoslavia, the country of the South Slavs.

What must be decisive is how are all the workers of the world, including the Chechens, the Croat Catholics and the Bosnian muslims, - all best helped in an epoch of universally dominating imperialist crisis. All are best helped by the further frustration of imperialism's plans for continued international total manipulation. And that means undermining as much as possible, by any means, the Yeltsin semi-fascist regime in Moscow, and the semi-fascist regimes in Croatia and muslim Bosnia.

Not surprisingly, the Serbs, with a certain amount of popular justice on their side (plus some very advanced organisational philosophy inherited from nearly 50 years of living in the Yugoslav workers state), have performed brilliantly in their anti-imperialist struggle.

Also not surprisingly, the wretched Moscow regime, on the other hand, is conducting itself as miserably and ineffectively as could be hoped for doing such dirty business on behalf of the poisonous reactionary purposes of Western monopoly-capitalism.

So badly is the Moscow offensive going, in fact, that win or lose, Yeltsin's disgusting regime could be brought down by it. That would be good.

This alters nothing about some of the unsavoury aspects of Chechen 'national' history; but it does emphasise how the national question needs to be viewed bearing in mind the higher strategic revolutionary struggle against imperialism as a whole.

The worst fake-'left' confusion of all, of course, is when the Trots exalt petty nationalism into some barmy 'innate revolutionary genius' which was all the rage at the time of Ayatollah Khomeini's semi-bogus stand against 'the Great Satan', and has re-surfaced now around these Bosnian muslims, and even around the Chechen tribal bandits.

But no serious-minded revolutionary workers would trust any of these petty-nationalist opportunists any further than they could throw them.

As the Bulletin alone has consistently explained, it makes every sense to cheer on the defeat or embarrassment of imperialism at the hands of nationalist revolt, but does not necessarily make any sense at all to praise or build any illusions around that nationalism as such.

This is as true of the Serbs as of the Chechens, in spite of the praiseworthy reminders of the philosophical organisation achieved by the Yugoslav workers state which have reappeared in the Serbs' anti-imperialist struggle.

This was true of the fight by Saddam Hussein's Iraq to challenge the outrageous colonial-feudal Western manipulation of the disgusting Gulf sheikhdoms such as Kuwait, arbitrarily carved out of the Arabian peninsula by imperialism to act as local 'independent' stooges for monopoly-capitalism's dominating oil interests.

This was also true of the Iranian revolution against the Shah's fascist-dictatorship stooge-role for the West in the world's richest oil-bearing region. Overthrowing the Shah moved things forward. Doing it under the phoney 'revolutionary' banner of islamic fundamentalism only held them back from moving ahead too far for the interests of private enterprise capitalism and subjective idealism, (the bases of all religion in the modern world).

And only 15 years from the stupid fake-'left' Trots like the WRP and the IMG proclaiming Khomeini as an 'intuitive revolutionary genius' and prancing along in street demonstrations shouting 'allah o akbar', - the really sinister reactionary essence of this anti-Marxist 'revolutionary' posturing is coming to the fore, - as even the capitalist press itself is admitting in the small print:

The extraordinary thing was that the general spoke from Iran itself, from under the mullahs' very noses, and so blasphemously advertised his wish to collaborate with "the Great Satan" in bringing them down.

Yet even that is not all that extraordinary. For others grow bolder too, like the 134 writers who last month demanded an end to censorship.

And the calculated challenges of the "elite" are matched by the sudden, spontaneous eruptions of the "street". The last of these, bloody riots in the northern town of Qazvin, so shook the regime that, in panic, it partially reversed the decision which had provoked them.

Some, like the general, say Iran is on the brink of an "internal explosion", mainly because of the steadily declining economy.

The economy goes to the heart of the mullahs' pretensions to rule. From the outset, the revolution was racked by a religious-secular duality.

Khomeini, with almost god-like presumption, imposed a return-to-roots theocracy on a 20th century state. The clerico-revolutionary establishment, now headed by his successor as "supreme guide", Ali Khamenei, then assumed temporal power as its instrument.

But Iran also had a secular, modernising tradition, which inevitably clashed with Khomeini's medieval anachronism.

The mullahs came grudgingly to acknowledge that, as they put it, the "scientific" management of affairs was as vital for their survival as the "canonical". But they still feared the "scientists", and the westernising process they embodied.

That is why, on Khomeini's death, they could only entrust the presidency — at the apex of the modem state apparatus inherited from the Shah — to one of their own, Hojatolislam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
 
He was to reverse the disastrous decline in living standards wrought by the revolution, launch an ambitious industrialisation programme, harness the talents of experts, bring back exiles, promote private investment — and prove that the "scientific" and "canonical" could co-exist.

But President Rafsanjani is failing abjectly: hardly anyone disputes it any more. As Gen Rahimi says, "the street is hungry and weary", unemployment is "rampant". The mullahs have "occupied all posts, pushing the experts out of all vital areas", and unless they are brought back there "will be no progress in 50 years".

Every day the clerics' loyalist press carries anguished letters like this: "I am 44, father of six, grandfather of five; I have been looking for a job for three years, sold all I had, and, though ashamed, borrowed from everyone I know. One of my daughters wants to marry, but I don't have the means. I will accept any offer — but is there an honest mullah who can help this desperate father?"

The popular conviction is that there is not — nor can be. For the failure is not just President Rafsanjani's, or just economic. It is because the "canonical" cannot cohabit with the "scientific".

Confronted with proof of failure — the discontent — the mullahs now have one, almost insane, answer: yet more of the "canonical", yet more control for themselves at the expense not only of the secular-modernists but of moderate mullahs and their supporters who believe there is indeed a place for religion in politics. They have virtually abandoned coherent policy-making, reform and innovation of the kind President Rafsanjani was seeking, subordinating that to preserving their power at any price.

They answer the protesting writers with vituperation: "Mossad and CIA agents, enemies of the revolution, communists, royalists, spreaders of corruption and sexual deviation". 

They also show again their abiding, neurotic obsession with outward forms and observances. There are more campaigns against a Western "cultural aggression" that is "more dangerous than Western armies"; against women who permit wanton wisps of hair to peep from their all-enveloping chadors; against videos and satellite dishes; against "un-Islamic" haircuts, "un-Islamic" watches, or road signs so depraved as to show little boys and girls holding hands on their way to school.

They answer "the street" by further consolidating their means of repression. They have long ceased to trust their loyalist creation, the Revolutionary Guards, let alone the army, and have been developing the Basij al-Mustadhifeen, the Mobilisation of the Deprived.

This is as profane a debasement of religious ideals as one could imagine, a setting of the people against the people, or rather the lowliest against the broad ranks of the less lowly.

Drawn mainly from the peasantry, the poorest and most backward, the Basij were once the backbone of martyrdom-seeking "human waves" in the war with Iraq. Plied with privileges, such as unearned places at universities, they have been transformed into the shock troops of internal control.

And now, after the Qazvin riots, parliament has conferred on them what amounts, under Islamic law, to immunity in the suppression of popular unrest.

Ayatollah Khamenei and his clerico-revolutionaryestablishment have taken to sabotaging everything President Rafsanjani, in his "scientific" self, is trying to do. With renewed tirades against "the Great Satan" or muscle-flexing in the Gulf, they upbraid him for his "weak" foreign policy. With their parliamentary rejection of his domestic reforms, such as the reduction of subsidies, they render all but impossible the task of "reconstruction" they had assigned him.

Retreating thus into a citadel of intellectually narrowing, institutionally calcifying, morally degenerating immobility, the mullahs come under growing assault from society.

It is a measure of their own sense of insecurity that the mullahs exploit this fear, playing up, for example, the mindless mayhem of that other, extreme example of Islam gone wrong, Afghanistan.

They even turn the violent aims of their most implacable foe, the Mojahedin e-Khalq, to their advantage. Few Iranians care for Massoud Rajavi's brand of Islamic messianism, which resembles nothing so much as Khomeini's.

It is doubtful whether — as the mullahs ritually contend — the mojahedin are behind all the recent bombings. "These so serve their purposes," said the opposition figure, "that I wouldn't be surprised if they planted some themselves."

He also believes that if the mullahs really do start losing their grip, they will not hesitate to open fire on the masses. "They don't want to, but, in the end, arming the Basij means bloodbaths are in store."

The murder of Khojali Osman last month traumatised Khartoum and showed the limited support Sudan's Islamic government enjoys, even among traditionalists.

The regime dissociated itself from the attack, which followed police raids on concerts and a new drive to enforce Islamic dress and demeanour, but it was widely blamed for creating the climate of intolerance in which fanaticism thrives.

"These people are breeding prejudice and hatred as never before,'' said an Islamic academic.

A member of the Transitional National Assembly said: "There are many in this government who understand Islam in a shocking, horrible, ugly and twisted way. They are putting people like myself, who believe Islam can be humane, in a very difficult situation." 

Five years after Omar Hassan al-Bashir seized power in a military coup supported by the National Islamic Front (NIF), the regime fails by its own standards. It talks peace, but wages war. It claims to be introducing "participatory democracy", but overrules even the appointed assembly. It preaches concern for the poor, but concentrates wealth in a few, Front, hands. 

The state-owned telecommunications company, for example, was recently sold to a party luminary for £37.5 million, although its assets were estimated at £187.5 million. The price of Benson & Hedges cigarettes rose 30 per cent immediately after the import licence was bestowed upon a supporter, aged 27.

"It applies to all consumer goods — from soap to sugar," an economics professor said wearily. "Monopoly, monopoly, monopoly."

The concentration of wealth contrasts starkly with the misery ordinary Sudanese face because of corruption, mismanagement and the withdrawal of foreign aid that accounted for a third of GDP before 1989.

A professor who earned the equivalent of £225 a month in 1964 now makes £45. A retired couple in their eighties have a pension worth £20. A labourer earns enough to rent one room on the outskirts of Khartoum, with nothing left for food.

"The younger generation NIF are puritans and are shocked by their leaders' addiction to wealth and power when the poor are really starving," said a university lecturer. "In the military academy, 90 and sometimes 100 per cent are against the NIF, and say so openly."

Without popular support, the regime rests on ruthless security and an ineffectual opposition which lacks organisation and a programme.

As the government's base narrows, its security apparatus expands. In the past year, a new force, the "People's Police", has established 120 stations in Khartoum. There are scores of bases in the displaced camps and suburbs, supplementing two other police forces and military and paramilitary groups.

With the opposition broken, political parties banned and professional organisations hijacked, there appears to be a decline in arrests, torture and extrajudicial executions in Khartoum. But observers warn that the security grid imposed on individual neighbourhoods has hampered the dissemination of information.

"We think there are fewer people in detention and less torture," a Western diplomat said. "One of the remarkable things about the NIF gestapo is that its leader says, 'I have few people in jail because the opposition is so weak'."

Islamic fundamentalist anti-imperialism may yet have further to run in Occupied Palestine, for example, as Arafat's Moscow-influenced peaceful-coexistence popular frontism steadily dies. 

But the circumstances for real revolutionary change are fast catching up on this false fundamentalist dawn. Build Leninism. JH

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Imperialist Gulf butchery leaves a nasty taste

THREE YEARS after Operation Desert Storm, a significant number of U.S. vererans who returned home apparently safe and sound are suffering from various health problems. Meanwhile, an "epidemic of rumors" is gaining ground in the United States.

Gulf war syndrome (GWS), as it is now known, was initially attributed to stress and received scant attention from Department for Veterans Affairs (DVA) specialists. But when those affected organized a march on Capitol Hill evoking earlier marches by Viet Nam veterans affected by Agent Orange, there was a change in tone.

Mounting evidence suggests that GWS is a spectrum illness caused by a range of factors, not all related to the war; but nobody now dares to deny the existence of seriously ill veterans and some of their family members.

DVA investigators have not been able to come up with a common factor linking those affected by GWS. For the moment, they are classifying patients according to their most prominent symptoms, to assess if each subgroup shared common war experiences.

A detailed study of 166 veterans with undiagnosed health problems showed that 59 percent suffer joint pains, 56 percent experience shortness of breath and chest pains, insomnia affects 37 percent, 35 percent have poor cognition, 33 percent suffer from fatigue, 30 percent have intermittent diarrhea, 24 percent have nightmares, 19 percent reported hair loss, and seven percent bleeding gums.

Some veterans, such as reservist Nick Roberts, seem to have been more seriously affected. Six months after his return he developed non-Hodgkins lymphoma and says that he has documented 86 similar cases among 3200 of his fellow soldiers although this assertion is not scientifically confirmed. According to Newsweek magazine, Virginia Stephanakis, the Army's Surgeon General's office spokesperson, states that specialists have not noted any increase of cancer in those affected.

Some think that the bombing of Iraqi objectives could have led to germ-warfare and chemical agents being dispersed into the atmosphere, and that the troops breathed in those agents. The Pentagon acknowledges that minute traces of sarin (nerve gas) and mustard gas (a blistering agent) were detected during the desert war, and although the veterans' blood samples have not shown any germ-war agents, Senator Donald Riegle Jr. has speculated that the allied bombings could have released germs supplied to Iraq by the United States during the 1980 conflict with Iran.

If this were the cause and also the reason for the mystery, implying that medical tests were adulterated to protect state secrets, it is also a fact that chemical weapons normally cause acute and unmistakable symptoms among troops present in the launch area but not outside it. If chemical gases had been dispersed throughout the conflict area, wouldn't all the troops — Saudis, Iraqis and British, for example — present have the same symptoms?

It is difficult at the present time to obtain information on the medical condition of Iraqis and Saudis, already accustomed to the zone's inclemencies. However, fewer than 50 British troops have reported unusual illnesses, and theirs are less acute than U.S. personnel affected. Could there have been a risk run exclusively by U.S. troops, that not even Iraqi soldiers, who were at a total disadvantage, were exposed to?

Other potential factors which could possibly be the cause are exposure to gases and smoke from burning oil wells and the indiscriminate use of pesticides, which could provoke multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), which causes violent physical reactions to everyday chemicals.

The prime candidate for GWS, though, seems to be pyridostigmine bromide, which the Pentagon administered to 400 000 troops, in an effort to protect them from the effects of chemical weapons.  Many of the troops did not know what the substance was. It is used in the treatment of muscular disorders and it was therefore assumed harmless by military doctors. Some specialists insist that the dosage was toxic and the Senate committee on veterans' affairs discovered that in tests more than three percent of the recipients suffered adverse reactions. This means that some 12 000 soldiers would have been affected in this way.

Suppositions and suspicions can reach incredible limits. Currently, numerous veterans of Operation Desert Storm are enduring the insufferable consequences, also transmitted to some of their family members. The causes of GWS have been unknown for three years.

Who is going to unravel the mystery? The U.S. government has the means, but the veterans believe that it lacks the will. There are doubts over the thoroughness of investigations into the cases of veterans with health disturbances and many veterans think that there will be attempts to hide negligence, errors or any studies related to some top-secret and prohibited biological arsenal. The truth is lost in an epidemic of rumor and supposition. When will it come out? •

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

There can't be sustainable growth for one part of the world and underdevelopment for all of the rest

BRIDGETOWN (AIN). — The following is the text of the speech given by President Fidel Castro in the First Global Conference of Small Island States: 

Mr. President: Excellencies:

The powerful discuss new forms of dividing up the world. The poor and the small countries try to work out how are we going to survive in the next few decades.

If we are islands a few meters above sea level, we ask ourselves what will happen when the water level rises and if we can stand up to the droughts, the hurricanes and the other natural disasters awaiting us.

It is not only a case of our cultural and human values. It is a case of our very lives, of our existence as nations.

We are not the guilty ones. Others colonized us and exploited us. The consumer societies ruined the environment; they killed off millions of species of plants and animals; they poisoned the seas, the rivers and the lakes; they contaminated the air; they saturated the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other harmful gases; they made holes in the ozone layer; they used up deposits of oil, coal, natural gas and enormous riches of solid minerals; they wiped out our forests and ruined their own.

What is left for us? Underdevelopment, poverty, dependence, backwardness, debt and uncertainty.

What are they talking to us about now? Sustainable development. Magnificent. We want that, we aspire to that.

But is such development possible in immensely rich countries that can only survive by growing, and can only grow by using up the natural resources? What do they need more wealth for?

While Switzerland has a gross national product of 34 000 dollars per capita, Bangladesh — with more than 100 million inhabitants and threatened with ending up underwater — only earns 210 dollars per capita.

The difference between the rich and the poor is growing bigger all the time. Is that contrast the absurd and irrational example offered to the people of the Third World?

The arms race continues, the arms trade augments, the most powerful nations are the ones which sell the most. They don't care if they are profiting off the death of others. Why should they worry about the environment and about whether the islands are sinking in the sea?

For the highly developed societies the problem is not to grow, but to distribute, and not only to distribute among themselves, but to distribute among everyone.

The sustainable growth that is spoken about is impossible without fairer distribution between all countries. There can't be sustainable growth for part of the world and underdevelopment for all of the rest.

Like it or not, humanity is now one big family and we all have the same destiny. There should be less misleading words and a change of philosophy, since such a selfish philosophy has only led us to the catastrophes we face today and the worse ones that we will face tomorrow.

Let's raise the banners of truth over our islands. The poorer and smaller we are, the more steadfast and courageous our words should be.

We don't resign ourselves to the sad role of those Roman gladiators who bade farewell to their masters with a well-known and bitter cry: "Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you!" We should say to them instead: "We will die, if it is necessary, but we won't die as slaves." 

We will die exclaiming that we will fight for our future, that we will fight for our truth, that our peoples, our children and our grandchildren also have a right to life.

World Socialist Review
edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Same evil under a different name

DURING THE last months of 1993 and the months that have gone by so far in 1994, we have been hearing about the socioeconomic recovery of Latin America; indicators of gross domestic product growth are published and there are affirmations that the "lost decade" is behind us.

We, as Latin Americans and simple human beings, would be the first to cheer if these misleading figures represented an improvement of the quality of life of Our America's peoples.

This paradox of neoliberalism made it possible for 20 out of 24 industrialized countries to be more protectionist in 1992 than they were ten years earlier. While the bankers and envoys -spokespeople of those countries - talk to us about a neutral state and an open market, their governments are busy investing 300 billion dollars a year in agricultural subsidies. Tariffs and tariff-related obstacles in the North mean a three-percent reduction in the GNP of developing countries.

With regard to Latin America and the Caribbean, a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) study says that "Latin America and the Caribbean have a growing share of the world's population, a decreasing share of the economy and world markets, and a growing share of the world's poverty."

For the families of Latin America, that means, according to the UNDP, that poverty is the most serious problem afflicting Latin America and the Caribbean. It is estimated that between 80 and 120 million inhabitants of the region live in economically marginal conditions that make it impossible for them to have access to education and public health care.

According to OAS Secretary-General Baena Soares, in eight countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, 20 percent of the population receives barely 2.4 percent of national income, whereas the wealthiest ten percent of the population receives between 33.4 and 46.2 percent. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of poor people in the region increased by 66 million. Nine out of every 20 Inhabitants live in conditions of "critical poverty," which means that they do not have the necessary means to acquire the basic family food basket.

These are the indicators that the apologists of neoliberalism do not mention; the number of people living below the "critical poverty" line was 143 million in 1980 (41 percent); 175 million in 1992 (43 percent) and 192 million in 1993 (45 percent).

And within the general context of Latin America's population, the most defenseless and vulnerable sector — children— suffer the most. One hundred and fifty million children live in poverty; 79 children die of hunger every hour, and 15 percent of children die before the age of five. According to official figures, out of every 1000 children in Central America 360 are born in homes without safe drinking water, 150 are born underweight and 56 die before their first birthday.

Furthermore, for every 1000 children born in Latin America, an average of 55 die and in some of these countries the figure is 105 per 1000. A total of 80 000 children die every year from easily preventable diseases; of them, one in 15 are under five; 64 out of every 1000 die before the age pf five; one in 20 die before their first birthday.

Economist Camilo González Posso wrote on this subject in his prologue to the book El fin del neollberalismo: el neoestructuralismo (The End of Neoliberalism: Neostructuralism), in which he expressed. "Like only a few other periods of this century, the contradiction between growth and survival is obvious and the tendency toward a concentration of wealth and inequality within nations and between nations is becoming more pronounced."

What is behind the bombastic title of neoliberalism that has been given to the obsolete and reactionary formulas of capitalism?

What share, what benefits accrue to our continent when it comes to the current technological revolution, which over the last two years has been characterized by the accelerated development of microelectronics, biotechnology and the technology of new materials, particularly robotics, computers, and communication and transport systems based on microelectronics? With biotechnology, the market for live organisms is receiving a boost in fields such as tissue culture, embryo transfers, cellular fusion, fermentation and genetic engineering.

Each new wave of this scientific-technological revolution increasingly separates the First World and the Third World, widening and deepening the gap until it becomes an abyss.

The richest 20 percent of the world population currently receives an income that is 150 times higher than the income of the poorest 20 percent. This wealthy club carries out 81 percent of world trade among its members, concentrates 82.77 percent of world production and controls 96 percent of research and development resources.

UNICEF estimates that the annual cost of providing the world child population with sufficient nutrition, clean water, basic medical attention, primary education and family planning services, would be 25 billion dollars. However. in 1990 the military expenditures of the industrialized countries totaled 792 billion dollars and those of developing countries totaled 123 billion.

In Cuba, the 1993 infant mortality rate was 9.4 for every 1000 live births and the life expectancy at birth is 76 years. From 1980 on, there have been no child deaths reported as a result of tetanus or diphtheria, diseases with serious consequences in marginal regions of Latin America and malaria, which is a scourge in these places, disappeared in Cuba in the '70s. As for meningitis, which was formerly a serious health problem, Cuba now reports an incidence of 0.5 per 100,000. These are concrete facts that the 5.5 billion inhabitants of this planet wake up to every day.

All of the figures included in this piece were the result of painstaking research carried out by different UN international agencies.

What these agencies or any others can't calculate is the amount of desperation, rage, hate, despair, frustration and discontent that is building up in the Third World.

In this part of the world, like a gigantic pot, the pressure is building up and already in many parts of the continent, social uprisings against all of this injustice, masked with pretty names like "neoliberalism," "new world order" and "representative democracy," are bubbling up to the surface and making themselves known. •

South West Bulletin
 [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]    
No. 100 Thursday December 15 1994

The Bourgeoisie everywhere are terrified of the example that successful communist revolutions have set to the world's proletariat.

The Russian invasion of Chechenia brutally demonstrates the warmongering degeneracy of the 'new world order'.

From the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 until the self liquidation of the Soviet workers state in 1989, the hundreds of different nationalities and ethnic groupings which made up the former Soviet Union lived together in relative harmony as the new Soviet system struggled to overcome the oppression and inequality left by centuries of Russian Czarist feudal tyranny.

The historic achievements of the Bolshevik revolution in overcoming the legacy of Russian imperialist oppression and 'foreign' imperialist intervention inspired successful anti-colonial revolution and national liberation movements around the world.

The abandonment of proletarian dictatorship and the re-introduction of capitalist 'democracy' and 'free market' anarchy has rapidly led to the whole region once again being riven with poverty, inequality, ethnic strife, civil war, and Russian 'big nation' bullying.

The chaos now enveloping the territories of the FSU is not so much a reflection of the 'failure of communism' (although revisionist retreat from Leninist science fatally undermined the will to fight), as the inevitable consequence of imperialist crisis in which wars to dominate the world's markets are now driving all development.

This is all a very far cry from the glitzy 'freedom' promised to the Soviet people by imperialist propaganda.

Meanwhile in Britain a prominent liberal journalist is witch hunted from his job because of alleged past Soviet sympathies expressed in his work.

The bourgeoisie everywhere are terrified by the example communist revolutions have set.

Build Leninism.

D. Watts

Don't export middle-class hang-ups to Cuba.

(A letter to the newsletter of Bristol Cuba Solidarity Campaign, prompted by recent debate within the campaign.)

It is a very special kind of wilful blindness, one nurtured on long decades of addle-headed popular frontism, not 'Marxism', that fails to see the difference between Hitler or Portillo banging on about strong families (as a mainstay of bourgeois authority) on the one hand, and on the other the active encouragement which workers are given in Cuba to give a lead in building strong families with a positive approach to raising the next revolutionary generation.

The last kind of 'solidarity' Cuba needs right now is the export from the middle-class left of its own subjective idealist hang-ups around gay rights, feminism, and other varieties of super-reformism.

It is very nasty and destructive work that the 'politically correct' middle class are about when a half-digested, non-dialectical grasp of the correct Marxist theory of the family (i.e. as transformed under capitalist 'free market' alienation into another agency of exploitation and oppression) translates, not into an attack on the class rule which so distorts the most intimate of human relations, but instead effectively into a perverse encouragement of the break-up of what family stability yet remains, increasingly under the hammer of exploitation, alienation and slump.

The answer to Portillo is not Slipman. The fascist push to scapegoat 'feckless' lone parents for the ills of capitalism is not satisfactorily answered by notions that somehow the rise of lone parenting represents the salutary breakup of the nuclear family, or the banishment of baleful male influence, or the emergence of vague new communalist possibilities (all of which implicitly making redundant any serious fight against the capitalist state).

The contradiction that is missed lies in the fact that it is in spite of bourgeois rule that every day, in millions of working class homes, leadership continues to be given in the struggle to keep families afloat under the intensifying strains imposed by capitalist crisis. That leadership and organizational potential, ineradicable in the modern proletariat is what, mobilized behind Leninism, will finally bury capitalism — not the idealist fantasies of the 'politically correct' middle class.

Under capitalism, no serious encouragement whatever is given to such social leadership, however much Portillo and Blair alike pretend to make of 'strong family values' and 'tough love'.

As for the reported 'gay rights' whinge (against an exhibition at the Watershed which documented Cuba's education and health achievements), deploring Havana's 'backwardness' on gay issues, the best answer (besides a loud raspberry) is to quote the capitalist press itself, which here cannot help revealing both the nihilist shallowness of anti-social forces in Cuba, and the remarkably humane and rational approach to what in the West has come to be regarded as a key 'gay issue', the treatment of Aids sufferers:

In 1989, the Frikas rebelled against Castro, Cuba, and life, by directly infecting themselves with the Aids virus, passing blood from one to the other with a syringe. They formed part of a small exclusive club, The Sanatorium Frikas, injecting themselves to get access to the sanatorium, to what the former vice-minister for health, Dr Hector Terry, described as their own "terrestrial paradise".

IN THE pillared colonial elegance of the dining room at the Inglaterra Hotel in Havana, Papo is having trouble swallowing his lunch because his glands are swelling. His Adam's apple sticks out like a nose on his throat. He wants to sit beside one of the pillars — more discreet. Papo sees himself as a leader of the "guerrilla rockers" — the Frikas. A boy from a small provincial town who liked rock music, earrings and bracelets, he spent his teenage years accumulating 20-peso fines for anti-social behaviour and "upsetting the order of the community". "I felt bad. I wanted a world of rockers where the police wouldn't make trouble for us. In the sanatorium I thought we would find a way to freedom — a community of rockers — but ii was a failure.

'Some are dead already and the others don't want to rock any more."

He likes talking about the Frikas movement and showing off his tattoos. A faded tattoo reads: Rock, Sex and Aids.

"Logical and complete," says Papo.

He took his needle in Los Cocas — Dr Terry's dream sanatorium, where $24,000 is spent taking care of each Aids patient in a country where the average worker earns less than $25 dollars a year. He took the blood of Juan Garcia, a fellow Frika, now dead.

Los Cocas sanatorium is, according to the blue-and-white road sign, 17km from the Square of the Revolution in Havana. Elouisa Albertez, 34, has worked there for almost a year as a pharmacist.

She and her husband, Stalin, live at number 1003 Santiago de Las Vagas. On the veranda her two rocking chairs are painted in the same Mediterranean blue as Stalin's Cadillac, rusting in the driveway. They are pure Party people.

Elouisa comes out of her house, wiping her hands on her apron and eager to talk about the sanatorium: "Everything is free for them. Of course they don't pay for anything. They get big capsules like bulbs that cost over $60 a time and must be paid for in dollars — but the Revolution doesn't mind how much it costs. We don't think of those things, the Revolution must look after them. They have a la carte menus for lunch: meat, chicken, different flavoured yoghurts. Each couple has their own house and they have a special shop where they can get crackers, cheese, anything they want."

Elouisa goes back inside to cook dinner from the family's monthly rations. "No, I don't resent them. They are facing the death sentence and the Revolution must make their last years as comfortable and humane as possible."

It was a garden owned, says Elouisa proudly "by a rich family before the Revolution took it for the people." Around the white walls and red roof of a Spanish villa, the gardens are planted with avocado, citrus and banana trees along pathways lined with tropical trees with white-painted bark. It is a silent Sunday evening; the air smells of freshly cut grass.

THE HOME of the man who created Los Cocas, Dr Hector Terry, vice-minister for Health for 13 years, is not hard to find. On a shabby street near Revolution Square, the locals recognise the name immediately. Terry is well known in Cuba for his fight to stop Aids spreading on the island.

His method of confining sufferers to a sanatorium has been condemned by human rights groups, but Terry has had some success. He claims the proportion of infected people in the country is as low as 0.007 per cent. The country has carried out 14 million Aids tests since 1986.

Cuba's population is around 11 million.

On a neighbouring Caribbean island, the number of infected in Haiti is estimated to be as high as 15 to 20 per cent. "Yes," he says, "we have patients who admit to having voluntarily inoculated themselves with the Aids virus, but I believe many of them were taking drugs or were under the influence of alcohol at the time."

In his study, surrounded by pictures of Castro and Che Guevara, Dr Hector Terry says: "They were playing Russian roulette with their lives. Now they have seen death and the adventure is a failure. At least in the Sixties the hippies had an ideology, a philosophy. The problem with the Frikas is that they didn't have any."

Dr Terry's Aids programme was conceived on the basis that Cuba, unlike her Caribbean neighbours, had a very small Aids problem in 1986. The economic embargo excluded Cuba from access to the hard currency that brought hard drugs. The country did not import US blood products which unknowingly helped spread the disease among haemophiliacs in France, Holland and Romania. The embargo also killed off the tourist trade and lessened the risk of infection from holidaymakers.

Dr Terry defends the setting up of sanatoriums in which anyone diagnosed with Aids was forced to stay for at least three months. "We were at a crossroads in Cuba at the end of 1986. We discovered that we had 99 HIV-positive patients. We decided that they would all be sent to sanatoriums and kept apart from the rest of the population. Now, after three to six months, they are allowed to leave, but only after an education programme and when we are sure that they will not re-infect others. It is not a perfect solution, but in Cuba the disease was in the early stages and we decided that this was the only way to protect the rest of the community.

Between 1986 and 1993, the entire Cuban population aged between 18 and 60 was tested for the virus. All airline workers, soldiers, Cubans travelling abroad, prostitutes, homosexuals and diplomats were tested at regular intervals.

"When our critics attack us for setting up the 'concentration camps for Aids victims'," says Dr Terry, "I ask how much are they spending taking care of their sick?"

Any serious 'solidarity' with Cuba will always stick up for the right and duty of proletarian dictatorship there to struggle to give a lead on any and every aspect of social activity.

And spinning the yarn that there could or should exist areas of social existence (e.g. family, sex or culture) on which it is improper for revolutionary leadership to make itself heard in fact expresses not 'solidarity', but its opposite. GS

Cuba needs no lectures from Clinton on 'democracy'.

The attack on Cuba last week at the Summit of the Americas by President Clinton "only one country is not with us here, the only country where democracy is still denied" – was an attack on every worker on the globe, and not just the Cuban dictatorship of the proletariat. Cuba's planned socialist economy gives universal education and health care, and freedom from the oppression of the chaotic 'free market'.

American imperialism has supported and financed every tinpot reactionary regime in Latin and South America, along with training of death squads, in the interest of 'free trade' (in reality with US priority built-in), under the disguise of fighting communism.

And all this as the American dream falls into disintegration, its society breaking down into a quagmire. And it's not just the big cities like Los Angeles which are facing total breakdown in the everyday running of services in the communities, but the very heart of the 'American Dream' which is going to the wall:

CIVIC institutions and local government employees in Orange County in California were in a state of alarm and confusion yesterday over the implications of Wednesday's bankruptcy application by the bastion of conservative wealth.

School districts, sewage and water managements, building and transport departments, whole metropolitan communities, charities, the 18,000 county employees, and nearly a million taxpayers realised that although the $1.2 billion loan default that caused the crisis is technically a paper loss by the county's investment fund, community money is now frozen.

The county council chairman, Thomas Riley, appealed to residents "and the world" for order. But money has begun to dry up.

In the suburb of Fullerton, 8,000 gallons of petrol were denied to school buses; the town of Anaheim — headquarters of Disneyworld — stopped hiring any new employees; payments were postponed to county contractors; and county court finances were suspended.

The $20 billion Orange County investment fund was one of the country's most successful. More than 180 towns, local authorities and departments invested in the fund because of its reputation for safety and good returns. But the bankruptcy protection means its finances are frozen and neither creditors nor investors have access to their money until the fund is re-structured.

The political shock is incalculable. Orange County, which adjoins Los Angeles County and would be roughly equivalent to Surrey in England, is one of the richest and most conservative communities in America. It is the birthplace of the late Richard Nixon, and site of his memorial library, and the headquarters of aerospace and defence contractors McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell. Its airport is named after the late actor John Wayne.

The fund collapsed because its managers failed to realise that federal interest rates would continue to rise. This crippled the fund's strategy of using US treasury bills and bonds as collateral for borrowing short-term and investing in high-paying mid-and long-term corporate bonds and securities.

Although officials insisted that day-to-day finances were secure, thousands of residents telephoned county offices asking if they still had to pay their property taxes, due on Monday. They were told they did.

But what Clinton dislikes about the Cuban proletarian dictatorship, as the region attempts to pull together into a trade bloc preparing for trade war/shooting war, is that Cuba is setting an example to the masses of Latin and South America in how to run a healthy society for the benefit of the masses against the 'free trade' capitalism which brings misery and hunger to millions.

And this attack comes just weeks after the mid-term farce they call a democratic election in the USA, where only 25% of voters eligible to vote bother to even register a vote.

What is needed in the region is not more 'free trade' anarchy, but communist revolution planned socialist economies under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

PV