Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in  various ways. The point however is to change  it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
[P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]
No 830 Tuesday November 28 1995                                                                                                 10p
Budget, Balkans, Ireland – inside.

Revisionist liquidation of the USSR now revealing the bankruptcy of anti-communism as the 'new world order' collapses in disarray. Trot & SWP denial of the colossal significance of the workers states experience for 20th century history is doomed to ridicule.

The petty-bourgeois class character of the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) has become more striking than ever in the period of the 'new world order'.

The 'triumph' of anti-communism following the collapse of revisionism has paradoxically only served to bring out the full wretchedness of the Trotskyites and fake-'lefts' of every description.

It is through the final self-liquidating defeatist folly of the Stalinist ideological inheritance that the colossal importance of the first 78 years historical experience of workers states has been made manifest.

Now that the Soviet Union and the world communist movement is no more, the enormous significance of its anti-imperialist and planned socialist achievements is outstandingly obvious to all but the wilfully blind, and anti-communists poisoned by petty-bourgeois class hatred. 

But far from accepting that the contribution by the fake-'left' in the West to the Cold War isolation of the Soviet camp has now been shown to have had some catastrophic unforeseen consequences, the SWP centrists are more panic-stricken than ever to ensure that not one shred of re-examination of their fatuous 'neither Washington nor Moscow' posturing should see the light of day.

Revealing patterns of history can no longer even be discussed for fear that they might clearly reveal imperialist crisis as the driving force of the 20th century, and record the valiant struggle of the USSR and the Third International, albeit grotesquely mistake-ridden, to turn the tide of counter-revolutionary reaction, led by industrially and technologically superior imperialist warmongering, from the 1920s to the late 1980s.

Collectively, the SWP are getting older, and more and more stiflingly middle-class.

One of their latest rejuvenation fixes has been the Loach-Allen Land and Freedom vicious slander of communism's heroic efforts to halt the advance of fascist-imperialist reaction in the Spanish civil war.

The film is turning into a giant love-in for every anti-communist neurosis that middle-class ideology has ever spawned.

A recent seance of the SWP freemasonry in Manchester went into such raptures over Loach's scurrilous work that all their old mutual sectarian hatred with the WRP was forgotten, and they simply failed to notice that their star guest speaker, a civil-war veteran, shot the theme of their meeting (and the film) down in flames by explaining that far from helping the fight against Franco, the DIY leftist 'revolutionary' anarchy behind the Republican lines would have brought defeat as early as 1937 but for the aid and military-instruction stiffening from the Soviet Union and the Communist International.

Voices of opposition, attempting to raise these and other historical questions bringing out the need to view the Spanish civil war in its entire historical context, including the long dismal record of Trotskyite 'revolutionary' dilettantism compared to the outstanding 20th century achievements made by proletarian dictatorship, - were either quickly terminated, or not given a hearing at all.

The extreme subjectivism of Loach's film which could leave a politically naïve audience imagining that the Spanish Republic was not destroyed by fascist imperialism led by German, Italian and Franco forces, aided and abetted by the rest of the West, but was destroyed by jack-booted Stalinism, — was simply ignored.

The actual historical circumstances of the late 1930s, of the still desperately weak and under-developed Soviet workers state entirely surrounded by the total world might of hostile armed-to-the-teeth imperialism just looking for the slightest excuse to all collectively unleash a completely destructive holocaust against the USSR, was just not mentioned at all, and no one else was allowed to mention it either.

And the only reply to the observations that the anti-Franco frontline forces, armed and trained by the Soviet Union and the International Brigade, were the only real obstacle to the international fascist-imperialist coup against the Spanish Republic, and that the 'leftist' adventures behind the Republican lines by the POUM and others were criminal treachery, - was the stubborn repetition that 'socialist revolution' was on the cards in Spain, would have easily sorted out the Franco reaction (and presumably the entire international warmongering imperialist mayhem which was on the advance at that epoch), and that only 'Stalinists' wholly prevented this potentially greatest-ever turning point in human history.

Well, this is certainly film-making on a slightly more epic scale than Raining Stones; but Loach, of course, cleverly leaves all of this Trotskyite 'revolutionary' logic severely alone, limiting his emotional appeal to gaining sympathy for the 'lovely, honest, openly-socialist, openly-democratic, real rank-and-file revolutionary' sentiments of his fetchingly red-bandannered 'ordinary anti-fascist volunteers', - strictly non-Stalinist of course.

So gushing were the SWP about this simple spontaneous revolutionariness, which was only prevented from transforming the world there and then in 1937 by 'bureaucratic Stalinist terror', - that one ecstatic workerist climax embraced also "all those inspired honest international workers who volunteered to go out to Spain to fight for the socialist revolution", etc.

The problem with this argument is that the workers International Brigade was 99% Communist Party originated, and inspired by Stalin. And rightly or wrongly, they actually went out to Spain to try to halt the advance of fascist warmongering, - which was clearly not the agenda of the POUM and anarchist muddle-heads who kept on dividing the Republican forces.

As the meeting was told, the questions of revolutionary consciousness and leadership in these specific historical circumstances is indeed a fascinating one which it would yield invaluable lessons to re-examine endlessly, in honest scientific debate.

Not only did the SWP ignore this offer, it is doubtful that they had the faintest idea what was being talked about. Their triumphalism implied that if the capitalist film industry could go on making heart-warming 'revolutionary' films like Land and Freedom, and the SWP could go on doing the working class's leaflets and banners for it, - then the 'perfect socialist revolution' could be just round the corner. 

What need for 'boring history lessons'?

Such rank-and-file activism has been substituting itself for working class revolutionary consciousness since before the 1920s when these centrists first came up with their insane anti-communist 'ultra-left' abuse that the Soviet workers state was not socialist but 'state-capitalist', - and therefore to be betrayed, slandered, and vilified to every Western petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' heart's content.

And in more than 100 years, centrism itself has never so much as laid a finger on the imperialist bourgeoisie or its system anywhere.

Proletarian dictatorship, on the other hand, wiped out from history the legendary reactionary bourgeois-feudal autocracy in Russia which was the scourge of half Europe, central Asia, and the Far East; entirely wiped out warlordism and comprador bourgeois colonialism from mighty China which was a huge source of reaction throughout the Third World; and thereby opened the door to the whole national-liberation struggle which has truly changed the world by wiping out the direct
Western empires, thus preparing the way for future socialist revolutions which will even dwarf 1917 and 1949 in scale and significance.

The SWP hate all thought of such historical reality more than any other type of bourgeois could possibly do, because only by denying the historical necessity of Marxist-Leninist proletarian dictatorship can these middle-class 'revolutionary' activists find a role for themselves and their trendiness.

So they just ignore the hopeless contradictions in their demonology of Stalinism which has the KGB somehow acting as an unchallenged law unto itself in fascist-encircled bourgeois Spain in 1937 at the height of the imperialist warmongering build-up to imposing World War II onto the whole of mankind, and has this KGB deliberately sabotaging the 'collectivisation of agriculture', for example (and other incipient 'spontaneous revolutionary socialist developments'), - whereas the even more degenerated Soviet revisionist influence in China in 1949, in Vietnam in the 1970s, and Cuba in 1959, not only showed no such inclination, but worked magnificently to achieve the exact opposite result, namely the establishment of fullscale socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Do the SWP perhaps acclaim these subsequent Soviet-inspired socialist transformations, while still perversely castigating the 'deliberate failure and betrayal' by Stalinism in 1937?

Not at all. They hate the subsequent expansion of the socialist camp more than they hate anything else in all of history.

What is being dealt with here is not an 'alternative approach' to the real history of the 20th century, but a total avoidance of that actual history by a strain of wilfully self-inflicted subjective-idealist fantasy 'philosophy'.

As one of the forms of middle-class ideological retreat or self-preservation, immunising oneself from the world's difficulties, - it is no different from, say, the Jehovah Witnesses only half-digesting real historical events over the past 80 years because they are mere play-acting, shadow-boxing preliminaries to the truly Great Development which is now imminent.

Belief in the arrival of 'real socialism', - somewhere, somehow, at some glorious date in the future, - is just like the belief in the arrival of Armageddon and the Day of Judgement, when everyone will finally get their just deserts.

Meanwhile, the 'believers' within these sectarian religious freemasonries of every description, get on with being passive, mildly posturing, little bourgeois, content to basically put up with imperialist domination of the planet because they 'know' that all the unrighteous (basically anyone who isn't them) will face a come-uppance sooner or later.

Thus the SWP do not think that the bourgeois imperialist control of the planet through the international domination of monopoly-finance capital was ever really challenged by the spread of the system of workers states led by the USSR.

Their sympathies, therefore, have never truly been with the mass movements of real revolutionary heroics which furthered that challenge to Western imperialist domination, such as the colossal defeat of fascist-aggressive armed imperialism by the Soviet proletariat, the routing of Western imperialist dominance by the Chinese proletarian revolution, the humiliation of US imperialism by the communist masses in Indo-China and Vietnam, the overthrow of American mafia imperialism by the Cuban revolutionary mass movement, the defeat of apartheid colonialism by the communist—inspired ANC, etc, etc.

Faint lip-service is paid to such titanic struggles when it cannot be avoided, - struggles which alone have explained to mankind how and in what direction the future triumph over imperialist reaction really will be obtained.

But what the SWP and other petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' frauds really like doing is closing their minds completely to all of that, pretending that it doesn't exist, and concentrating their entire thoughts and emotions instead on heroic little rank-and-file failures here and there, which preferably totally ignore the big picture of the world struggle against imperialist reaction.

Thus the Grunwick strikers, gay feminist lobbies, victimised individuals, anti-racist actions, wrongful police persecutions, etc, - all of these routine 'human rights' conflicts are the only 'real' world that middle-class dilettantes such as the SWP recognise, - especially when such protests are totally devoid of any international revolutionary consciousness, and even more especially when such protests are defeated, - for then the recruitment for this sect, which lives for the 'perfect revolution' in its head, is at the highest.

When the bourgeois-imperialist system was conducting its international propaganda blitzkrieg on world public opinion to vilify communism and all its acts under the dictatorship of the proletariat in the workers states in order to make possible capitalism's continued repression throughout the 'free world' (giving rise to all these endless human rights abuses) - such single-issue isolationist mentalities as the SWP just did not want to know, - or rather they invariably jumped in right behind imperialist reaction to add their twopenny-worth to the general anti-communist hysteria, just as Loach is now doing over 1930s Spain.

The SWP were challenged about one of their more recent treacheries to the international anti-imperialist struggle when they went into ecstasy in 1980 over "a little Polish electrician's heroic struggle for human rights, Lech Walesa, and his brave rank-and-file Solidarnosc trade union, the real people of Poland", etc, etc, - convinced, of course, that he would be defeated, and that they would have another fabulous martyr for the lost cause of "real rank-and-file socialism" (or "socialism with a human face" to quote another arsehole anti-communist charlatan Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia) which Lech & Co were allegedly fighting for.

All the actual historical revelations since 1980 of how Solidarnosc and Walesa were nothing but a completely CIA and Vatican organised counter-revolutionary racket, bribing a huge membership and paying for endless anti-communist publicity stunts with the crooked proceeds of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, where God's Banker Roberto Calvi siphoned off tens of millions of dollars of illicit Vatican profits (from laundered drug money, and a dozen other scams) to secretly finance imperialism's greatest-ever anti-communist offensive, - were just ignored by the SWP.

They even chose to ignore Walesa's open public espousal of near-fascist pro-imperialism subsequently, - and that of Solidarnosc too, all factions. It is the "ten million originally-inspired ordinary working-class people who believed in Solidarnosc that matter" of course.

Of course they do, because they also have been cruelly betrayed and defeated, - more mythical martyrs to the cause of the 'perfect socialist revolution', even though these ten million never even existed.

This SWP mentality is a very vicious deception, every bit as nasty as the fantasy worlds of Transcendental Meditation, the Children of God, L Ron Hubbard's Diatonics, Jehovah Witnesses, the barmy suicide love-in sects of James Jones, David Koresh, etc, etc, - indeed every unpleasant hallucinatory auto-suggestion that parents worry about protecting their children from.

So don't look to the SWP for concern about the removal of the East-European workers states (for all their weaknesses and mistakes) as a barrier to total US imperialist world domination, — they could not care less, no more than could the Natural Law Party.

But when a big-star film-maker like Ken Loach puts on a couple of hours of "triumphant socialism" anti-communist make-believe at the Corner House, then you can fantasise so much that you could almost start levitating. No need to think now about the little anti—communist runt Loach sitting quietly in his 'special branch' WRP meetings eating shit from Gerry Healy. 

And when is the film coming out about the fantasy-world fake-'left' in Britain, - all the 57 Trotskyite varieties, - where the grossest human exploitation rules, vilely taking advantage of those sad, innocent, naïve aspirations that the SWP so prizes in workers and in its would-be recruits, a rotten real-life drama that Loach has personal experience of (unlike his total ignorance about Spanish and world revolutionary history), and could easily access endlessly more personal knowledge of? But perhaps the bourgeoisie would not finance such a film exposing anti-communism.

Away from the Trotskyite fantasy world, the 20th century can now clearly be seen as the first great epoch of incipient workers-state planned socialist development. Just as the capitalist free-market system took several centuries to fully establish itself and its superiority over the feudal absolutist world, so will the socialist system take some time, and several false starts, before it finally proves its complete superiority to capitalism.

But these sensational first breakthroughs of the 20th century are what history is all about, the absolutely heroic achievements of the Soviet workers state in initially routing and overcoming the total blockade and devastation by the invading armies of 14 imperialist powers to back up the counter-revolutionary White Terror, then in achieving a planned development of the completely destroyed economy in a miraculously short time, just in time to meet the next great imperialist onslaught behind fascist imperialism, planned by the West from the early 1930s onwards.

It was because of the USSR's still hopeless inadequacy to take on a renewed combined onslaught of all imperialism, whose economic and technological development had far from stood still, and was now led by rabid fascist military aggression, - that Soviet hands were to some extent tied as to what it could do for the Spanish Republic, a bourgeois state totally abandoned by the 'free world' to a fascist coup and whose parliament had only a tiny handful of communists in it.

But the Soviet Union did all it could to defend Spain, the only help Spain got, - as did the communists, of Spain and the International Brigade who were the acknowledged backbone of the Republican forces.

Could a bold strike for total proletarian revolution have won the day in Spain, and thereby transformed the fight against Franco and the world fascist-imperialist offensive completely, there and then?

The permanent trouble with this SWP/Trot fantasy world is that they are the greatest revolutionaries that have ever lived in the whole of world history.....when it comes to fighting other people's revolutions with hindsight. On their own account, there has never ever been a 'left', or Trot, or rank-and-file 'revolution' anywhere at any time, or even remotely approaching one.

The idea, of course, that proletarian-dictatorship power was there for the taking, there and then in Spain in 1937, without the slightest chance of instant total imperialist invasion there and then to crush it totally without trace, - is such utter bollocks that it is hard to take seriously. Fascist-imperialist counter-revolutionary aggression was on the march worldwide, - with every intention of stifling every last gasp of socialist revolutionary aspiration everywhere on the planet.

The whole of Western policy from the 1930s onwards was turned towards using the renewed fascist-imperialist trade-war crisis for blitzing the Soviet Union first and foremost, to finish off the work which had been left undone after 1917.

Nothing on earth could have halted this renewed slide of the world-dominant monopoly-capitalist system back towards inter-imperialist warmongering (other than a sudden conversion by the whole world proletariat to total communist unity behind a single inspired Leninist leadership, which not only did not happen, but was not even remotely realistic in the actual prevailing conditions of universal anti-communist hysteria of the time, - a fear and hatred of the Soviet Union which the predecessors of the SWP and the Trots were in fact hell-bent on increasing and spreading as far and wide as possible, in step with the major thrusts of imperialism's international anti-communist propaganda).

There was no wave of revolutionary fervour, leading towards imminent revolutionary situations, raging round any part of the 'free' world at that moment, - as there had been in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, for example, of which the Bolshevik Revolution was itself the prime example.

Unquestionably, imperialism had managed to consolidate itself, renew its international economic development, continue to impose colonial tyranny over five-sixths of the planet, and sabotage and agitate against the world's first workers state so effectively that it was able to get Germany rearmed, refuse all peace and disarmament appeals, and start signing treaties (such as Munich) which openly encouraged further fascist-imperialist aggression, now all directed plainly against the survival of the Soviet Union.

Workers in the West, organised into communist parties (a tiny minority of the working population), of course all resisted this anti-communist reaction and renewed drift to warmongering. Plenty of other 'workers' (like the SWP's forbears) put up no such fight, being more than happy with all the anti-Soviet hysteria.

The strength of fascist-imperialist aggression was eventually such that far from a handful of 'left' anarchic adventurers taking over the Barcelona telephone exchange (while the Republican forces had their hands full with trying to halt the Franco offensive) being a halt to German imperialist ambitions and an instant end to the fascist warmongering threat to mankind, - not all the powers of Western imperialism united against Germany could halt the Nazi war drive. The whole 'free world' was being thrashed by German imperialism, - until the Soviet workers state stepped in.

Nor did the working-class of the whole 'free world' rise up either against the renewed imperialist warmongering (as the Trots always implied would happen, behind a bold move for proletarian power in Spain), even when finally forced to make a choice about being dragged back into another imperialist war for profits when universal conscription was imposed at the beginning of the Second World War. There was no 'spontaneous' revolt anywhere.

The only organised refusal, of any size, against fighting in the imperialist war was led... by the Communist Party, and hardly to the universal approval of the 'left' petty-bourgeoisie either. The Communists were in fact vilified and attacked, - for allegedly 'refusing to fight fascism'.

It was, of course, 100% correct for the Communist Party to denounce the inter-imperialist war.

It was warfare which was intended by the West to be unleashed solely against the Soviet Union via the treacherous Munich Agreement to encourage German imperialist ambitions eastwards rather than westwards. Brilliantly, the Soviet workers state turned the tables on the West. After long being refused any sort of mutual defence arrangements against any future potential fascist aggression because the West wanted Nazi Germany to crush the USSR, the Soviet Union signed its own non-aggression pact with Hitler, thereby reversing German imperialist ambition back westwards.

The best the USSR could hope for was that it could keep imperialism from uniting against it when imperialism eventually went back to war, which no one anywhere was going to stop, least of all the 'left' adventurers from Spain, certainly not under pro-Soviet communist leadership.

For all the obvious defects and deficiencies of Soviet revolutionary understanding and leadership, already apparent, Stalin's tactics were a master-stroke,- dividing Western imperialism so totally that when the USSR was attacked itself eventually, it immediately had all the Allied support it could want, which had been denied it in Spain.

So completely had the Soviet Union turned the tables on the West's fascist machinations that it was the Western imperialists who were more glad of the Soviet alliance than vice versa as German aggression proved unstoppable for so long, - until the Red Army and the Soviet planned workers state got a firm grip of the situation, a historic watershed which will in time be seen as significant as 1917 itself.

Only after the imperialist self-destruction in war did (and only could, realistically assessing the situation) the wave of 'spontaneous' revolutionary struggle resume against imperialism, under the unchallenged leadership, of course, of the proletarian—dictatorship communist parties, - in China, Indo-China, Korea, Eastern Europe, etc. - all the time, naturally enough, to the total (if occasionally unspoken) hostility of the petty-bourgeois fake-'lefts' all round the world.

By 1980 in Poland (and elsewhere), the wretched revisionist degeneration of the Soviet leadership and the remnants of the Third International had well set in.

But to take the Solidarnosc line against the Polish workers state was not just a naïve vile treachery, it was open class-collaboration with imperialist counter-revolution which was so obviously behind Walesa & Co that only the wilfully blind petty-bourgeois 'revolutionaries' could fail to see it (see ILWP Books vol 3).

Revisionism has self-liquidated totally now, but the only sensible line for international revolutionary workers to adopt throughout the Solidarnosc stunt was to call, as loud and long as possible, for the Polish workers state to reassert its authority, as a first step towards renewing its own international revolutionary understanding, which by this time had degenerated a long way from Leninism.

The Trot line of the 'political revolution' against the failing workers states was always totally unrealistic. The workers states were always far too successful for that, in spite of their weaknesses and defects, - as is now becoming apparent with the re-election everywhere of all the former communist parties, including just winning the Polish presidency away from Walesa in a completely Western propaganda-dominated and Church-subverted poll, - such is the nostalgia now for the plain successes of the workers states, even if uninspiring and unimaginative because of the wretched revisionist philosophy.

Trotskyism's long-lost 'political revolution' was just more fantasy-world subjective-idealist nonsense.

No Trots or SWP 'lefts' can address any of these matters now. They just won't do so. They simply resort to Western propaganda-fed lies about there having been 'popular revolutions' of some sort or other in East Europe.

There were no revolutions of any kind, popular or otherwise. There was just a slow long-drawn-out self-liquidation by the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, imitated by the revisionists everywhere, - and seized upon eagerly by anti-communist counter-revolutionary cliques of any and every description, whatever Western influences could muster.

The bureaucratic leaderships, brainwashed by their own revisionist stupidity, simply destroyed their own workers states, - in Gorbachev's case, for example, in the insane belief that the introduction of bourgeois democracy and free-market commercialism would make the Soviet Union flourish as never before, and make him the most popular political leader in the world. What a moron.

The SWP still try to raise the fear-filled bogyman about 'KGB terror' in Spain, and invoke Orwellian nightmares of Animal Farm and 1984. It is just total crass crap from beginning to end. The one great crime of revisionism from first to last was that it did not insist on the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat, firmly enough. It let all manner of bourgeois-democratic and liberal woolly-mindedness flourish inside the Soviet Union and the Communist International, eventually capitulating totally itself to class-collaboration and the dismantling of the dictatorship of the proletariat, putting its faith, glitz-bedazzled by phony Western consumerism, in the ludicrous free-market lottery of parliamentarianism.

By the end of this feeble degeneration, the much harder Marxist-Leninist grasp of proletarian dictatorship as the kernel of revolutionary understanding, had lived in vain.

But 78 years of accumulated living experience of a variety of workers states under the dictatorship of the proletariat, - still going on in China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc,- has not at all been in vain. Just the opposite. The international anti-imperialist struggle is now well-armed with priceless knowledge. Not only is a capitalist class not at all necessary for triumphantly dramatic and successful workers-state development. The entire might of the imperialist system itself can more than be held at bay by a system of workers states, even in some of the formerly poorest countries on earth.

The next imperialist slump and fascist-warmongering crisis, not long delayed now, will mean the next great upsurge of workers-state proletarian dictatorships. They will far exceed in achievement even all the great things that have gone before. Paradoxically, the really important death to flow from revisionist self-liquidation will be the death of anti-communism, not the death of communism.

The middle-class smugs of the SWP are enjoying imperialism, not socialism. But when their hobby of 'doing things for the working class' is further on in the imperialist crisis, their gimmick which distinguishes them from other 'left' reformists, - using words like 'revolution' and 'Marxism' occasionally, etc, - will not be enough.

Any party, centrist or otherwise, which starts to do well will be ferociously challenged by anti-communist propaganda, raising historical questions of all kinds to cloud the picture for revolution. 

Workers themselves will want explanations of what the 20th century means. And no revolutionary cadres-will be able to take a step without being able to offer a scientifically correct explanation for how the world has got into its present position and with the history that it has. 

The SWP charlatans will be found out very rapidly. Build Leninism.  Reg Potts

British imperialism continues to go bankrupt.

The frightening contradictions of monopoly-capitalist ruling-class decline which made this Budget so difficult to compose, are also evident in the even more painful contortions the Tory Government has put itself through over Ireland.

The Empire has died, but the establishment bourgeoisie is still struggling to come to terms with the collapse of political and economic power which this fact both reflects and augments.

British imperialism is heading relentlessly towards a terminal crisis. It has been losing in the trade war for decades, and still cannot hold its own. And now the political-demise consequences of all that are coming home to roost from all directions at once.

Last week, the Government was given this grim news by its own capitalist supporters:

A RECORD trade deficit in October prompted business leaders last night to urge Chancellor Kenneth Clarke to resist pressure to cut taxes in next week's Budget.

UK trade with non-European Union countries, which makes up nearly half of all trade, plunged deeper into the red last month and hit an all-time low of £1.2 billion.

According to the Central Statistical Office, the value of exports fell by 7 per cent in October to £5.3 billion and imports rose by 1.5 per cent to a record £6.5 billion.

Richard Brown, deputy director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: "We have been warning of a slowdown in export growth for some time. The chronic nature of the deficit must rank highly in economic policy. Any deficit must be paid for and cannot be sustained indefinitely.

"We urge the Chancellor to think seriously in his Budget of addressing the twin issues of export promotion and import substitution, and to focus on providing the stable economic environment so vital to British businesses. Artificially stimulating UK consumer demand through income tax cuts at this time threatens to suck in more imports and widen the deficit further."

City analysts said October's figures were much worse than expected and suggested that the better September balance of £0.7 billion was a blip.

Paul Mortimer-Lee, an analyst with Paribas Capital Markets, said: "These are unmitigatedly bad figures. They point to a real widening of the deficit."

Jonathan Loynes, an HSBC economist, said: "The underlying picture continues to deteriorate at an alarming pace. Most disappointing is the fallback in exports after signs of recovery in the previous month. September's jump in exports to the US. which revised hopes of a pick-up in line with the rebound in US activity in the third quarter was almost totally reversed, suggesting September's increase was largely a one-off."

And sterling has been shaky for months in fear that a desperate Tory Cabinet would try to get out of its humiliating political unpopularity at the moment by some give-aways for voters, consumers, and backbenchers.

Yet Major & Co do need to try some gimmick or other, or risk catastrophe at the next polls.

Clarke's Budget pretends to just keep 'essential public services spending' ticking over while continuing the relentless drive to solve British imperialism's economic crisis at the expense of ordinary people, by one means or another. Permanent mass unemployment will remain; education, housing, public order, health, etc., will all continue to be penny-pinched services giving rise to nothing but dissatisfaction and complaints. OAPs are re-urged to fend for themselves; and tiny tax changes will do little for the 'feelgood' factor. The UK domestic and trade deficits continue in crisis, even worsening. The 'neutral' budget is in hope that markets turn no worse against British aims.

But either way, British imperialism will remain as sick as ever, - and it will continue just as moribund if and when the cretinous Labour opportunists get back into office, - which is when the crashing collapse of monopoly-capitalism's whole rickety house of cards might set in. Blair & Co are toying with exactly the same seedy gimmicks, covering up a terrifying imperialist-crisis reality, as the Tories are. British imperialism can only afford more and more cuts in public spending, no expansion. And no 'clever' mix whatever of tax changes or monetary measures (bank-rate cuts, etc) is going to help the British colonialist mentality start to win the international trade war again, - ever. The historical momentum of the capitalist system's last great boom-expansion has long been with other parts of the planet, but the triumphant powers there, - the USA, Germany, Japan,  etc, - are eventually just as doomed as dying British imperialism when the boom shortly turns into the most appalling trade-war warmongering slump in all human history.

Meanwhile the limping British economy has so totally undermined the last vestiges of the British colonial spirit in Ireland that the final stages of retreat are now imminent, - and the reunification of Ireland, - and the burial of the abominable Partition, - are now about to enter their last snail's-pace phase (see ILWP Books vol 8).

The shoddy amateur theatricals of the past 15 months by London, - threatening to let the peace process be aborted, - have all been about trying to save face for the British ruling-class, hide the IRA victory, and made sure the Orange-colonist die-hards do not cause too much trouble as the bastard colonial statelet of non-existent 'Northern Ireland' is put to rest.

A massive amount of tediously detailed processes yet remain to be drawn up, agreed, and then lived through, but the essential business of completing Ireland's national-liberation struggle, - by re-establishing Dublin's key role in the affairs of all Ireland over the past year, - has already been achieved. Ten years ago, before the Anglo-Irish Treaty, such a position for Dublin in the affairs of all-Ireland was unthinkable.

The victory for the IRA/Sinn Féin national liberation struggle, backed by anti-British rival international imperialist influence (mainly the USA & West Europe), marks a colossal vindication for all anti-imperialist struggle, and a triumph for the dialectical-materialist understanding of history. Build Leninism. DB

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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.  V I Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colston St Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 148.   Sunday 26th November 1995

Dayton posturing solves nothing and threatens to drive open Balkan-sized splits in the 'free market' West.

The Balkans 'solution' is nothing of the kind, neither for the Serb, Croat and Muslim citizens of the former socialist Yugoslav federation (whose welfare in any case never remotely interested Clinton, Kohl, Major or the rest), nor for imperialism itself (whose world crisis is really the cause of all the grief).

With the phony balance of the Cold War gone, and trade-war pressures now dominating everything, the West's struggle to make the re-balkanisation of Yugoslavia stick by means of an imposed imperialist 'peace' partition looks more than anything else like speeding up the 'balkanization' of the West itself.

In the course of the war, the divisive pressure of imperialist crisis on the West has been made all the more acute by the remarkable levels of dogged resistance to imperialist diktat mustered by the nationalist-revisionist remnants of Yugoslavia's proletarian revolutionary traditions, in the face of everything that NATO terror and Goebbels propaganda threw at it.

But regardless of any further surprises the now fragmented Serb resistance may yet hold in store for the promised 60,000-strong imperialist occupation, it is clearer than ever that it is imperialism itself that finds itself ever more profoundly divided and disorientated, and anti-imperialist revolt around the world which historically is left holding more and more of the cards.

Old Cold War opportunists like Denis Healey are sidling away from the US adventure, anxious to pretend that not all capitalism is as cynically murderous as Washington reveals it to be:

The US and its allies intervened in the civil war on behalf of the Croats against both the Serbs and the Bosnians. In fact, the US, even before it intervened directly, had been helping both Croatia and Bosnia to break the arms embargo. Croatia now has a massive army which is very well equipped and which is costing 12.5 per cent of its GDP. It was built with the help of US instructors advisers. I learned the other day that the Croatian Tiger Brigade, when it invaded Krajina recently, was wearing American uniforms. 

It is now two years since the Americans wrecked the Vance-Owen plan. 

IN THE meantime, 100,000 more people have been killed there. The invasion of Krajina meant that there were 200,000 Serb refugees; the invasion of western Bosnia meant that there were 100,000 Bosnian and Serbian refugees; and the invasion of eastern Slavonia, or its occupation even if it happens peacefully, could load to another 150,000 Serbian refugees. The hero of that tragedy, applauded by the US administration and opposition together, applauded in Britain by Lady Thatcher, and — I hate to admit it — by some of my leftwing friends in the Labour Party, is a man called Franjo Tudjman. He is a former communist general, who, when he became the leader of Croatia adopted the flag and insignia of the wartime fascists who fought with Hitler against the allies. He has just demonstrated his contempt for his admirers by promoting a man called General Blaskic the day after he was indicted at The Hague for war crimes against the Bosnian Muslims at Mostar. Could cynicism go any further?

IN THE past few days, President Clinton has bullied the presidents of Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia into agreeing proposals for a settlement in Bosnia. Apparently President Tudjman was able to represent the Croats in Bosnia since he has effectively incorporated them into his own state; they were allowed to vote in the Croatian elections. President Milosevic made concessions on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs without consulting them. Yesterday, after they had made clear they did not consider themselves bound by the agreement, Milosevic had to force it on them.

Although Radovan Karadzic and Radko Mladic are forbidden by the agreement to hold any position in the Serbian part of Bosnia, President Tudjman appears to be allowed to keep the Croatian war criminals as military and political leaders of the Croats in Bosnia. Moreover, although the agreement provides for the return of 2 million refugees to their original homes, there is no sign that President Tudjman will permit this in Krajina and Slavonia, or even in the areas round Mostar currently occupied by the Croats.

The deal into which Ambassador Holbrook bullied the three presidents was concerned primarily to boost President Clinton's election chances. However, it has already created a major rift between the president and the Republican Congress, which denies him the right to contribute 20,000 Americans to the Nato force intended to see the agreement implemented, and has widened the gulf between the US and Russia. Most seriously, it threatens to split Nato, since the British and French governments have let it be known that they strongly oppose permitting the rearmament of the Croats and Muslims in Bosnia — a bizarre provision, since rearmament is supposed to run parallel with negotiations on disarming the parties to the conflict. The whole agreement may well blow up in President Clinton's face if fighting starts again when the winter ends and American casualties mount while his election campaign reaches its peak.

Before editing, that piece ended with a reality-defying insistence that "the only answer to these global security problems is the United Nations". But the logic of the argument leads much more naturally to that picture of splits within NATO and within US imperialism itself. 

Of course anti-communism has to back off from such pregnant conclusions, for fear of discovering in such splits the revolutionary growth point of renewed social development. Sooner than admit that imperialist crisis is what is driving all developments, including eventually its own overthrow at the hands of the working class, Healey must limit his criticisms of imperialism to whingeing at the Americans for putting a spoke in Britain's otherwise 'all-conquering' diplomacy, and pretending to a continued reformist confidence in the UN which he knows himself to be grotesquely misplaced.

As imperialist thieves fall out and the propaganda line wavers, the real state of affairs in the former Yugoslavia starts to filter through, most notably in the warning from Admiral Lacoste (a former head of French intelligence) that this US adventure could end up with "the creation in the heart of our continent of artificial entities where no one can live a normal life... a Europe cast in the nightmarish street-gang lineage of Los Angeles". Or the suburbs of Paris, as Washington might hasten to add, - further proving that the warmongering instability being reimposed on the former socialist federation is not some freak interruption of the 'new world order', but the very trade-war essence of it.

The "street gang" mentality of turf wars is only a faint copy of the dog-eat-dog struggle for market domination which is getting set to tear all world civilization apart again:

Bosnian government and Croatian forces sought to establish a few more faits accomplis before the United Nations gives way to Nato, probably next month.

They marked the end of the UN mission by attacking UN troops and raiding their stockpiles, while burning and looting recently vanquished territories that are to be returned to the Serbs under the peace accord.

UN officials said Croatian forces looted and burned houses in the central Bosnian towns of Sipovo and Mrkonjicgrad, near the front line. Both towns were seized from the Serbs in September. In one of the final moves in the negotiations that produced this week's peace pact, the Croats agreed to return the towns.

In the north-western town of Velika Kladusa, meanwhile, Bangladeshi peacekeepers on the brink of quitting the Balkans were attacked in their base by soldiers from the Bosnian army's Bihac-based fifth corps. The troops fired over the heads of the Bangladeshis before stealing UN armoured vehicles, munitions, food and fuel. UN officials said.

THE United States raised the prospect yesterday of a Nato showdown with Bosnian Serb forces hostile to the Dayton peace deal when the defence secretary, William Perry, insisted that part of the proposed 60,000-strong Nato force would need to operate on Serb-held territory. "It is critical that Nato forces have access to Bosnian Serb territory," Mr Perry said.

Croat fascist gangs who loot and burn the homes of refugee 'citizens of multi-ethnic Bosnians' (Serbs) whilst the Sarajevo 'government' mobsters egg them on (until the US-imposed Muslim-Croat alliance no longer serves Tudjman's turn and Muslims revert to playing 'untermensch' to the Croatian 'supermen'): these horrors are not something imposed upon 'the long-suffering West' but the most unalloyed expression of the sick degenerate rivalries which are now key to ALL international relations under pressure of imperialist crisis. Meanwhile, as Muslim and Croat forces harry the departing UN forces with impunity, the US gangsters announce in advance that the incoming NATO troops will be making a point of kicking Serbs around (they hope). But even as the US prepares the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Sarajevo and Eastern Slavonia, the mask slips to reveal the true face of the 'liberal, secular, multi-ethnic sovereign Bosnia' in whose defence all this supposedly is being done.

WHEN Tuzla List, one of two independent newspapers in this north-eastern Bosnian town, wrote that local officials of the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) were adding their children's names to a register of war orphans to get charity payments, 16 politicians sued. The court heard the allegations were correct, but gave the paper's editors one-year suspended sentences for "malicious comment".

When Sinan Alic, the editor of Front Slobode, the other independent paper, reported that 114 local Serbs and Croats had been driven from their homes in Tuzla by refugees from the Bosnian Serbs' capture of Srebrenica, an armed man came to the paper's office and warned Mr Alic that his family would find his body in a lake if he pursued similar stories.

"Perhaps I'm a fanatic or crazy," says Mr Alic. "We continued to publish the names of people driven out." A few were allowed to return, provided they shared their homes with refugees.

As peace in Bosnia appears to be taking hold, pressure is mounting on Tuzla's "non-nationalist" model. "It's sad but true that the refugees from Srebrenica have been used as political capital by the SDA," says Sinan Alic. The SDA, the ruling party in Sarajevo headed by President Alija Izetbegovic, is trying to ensure it will win Tuzla when elections are held after a peace agreement. Before the war, less than half the town's population was Muslim. Now it is around 90 per cent. 

In the region, which includes the surrounding villages and the main refugee camps, the Muslim population has doubled to 660,000, or up to 96 per cent. The region's Serb population has fallen from 82,000 to 15,000. The Croats are down from 39,000 to 19,000. 

The rise of ethnic politics was boosted by last year's Washington agreement establishing a Muslim-Croat federation. The accord set up a system of cantons for Bosnia, but Tuzla and the nearby town of Zenica are the only parts considered peaceful enough to have cantonal authorities. Their example is not encouraging. The representatives are appointed by the government in Sarajevo.

Such capitalist press rubbishing of Western democracy's stooges is embarrassing enough for Washington. But what counts in the end is whether imperialism gets its own way or not. The USA cannot automatically count on getting its way even just in terms of stunning everyone into temporary passivity by flooding the region with GIs.

Even assuming the rifts in the US ruling class and the rifts between the US and Europe can be papered over long enough to get the imperialist occupation under way, it doesn't take much historical memory (US defeat in Vietnam; failure of German imperialism to defeat Serbs in WW2) to see that Washington could prove to have bitten off a lot more than it can chew.

Nor do the trade-implications of the 'peace' necessarily offer much cheer to US economic supremacy:

The blockade has disrupted trade links between countries to the south and east with markets in western Europe, a particular headache for fresh food exporters.

At one stage the landlocked former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was doubly squeezed, by the Serbian embargo and a Greek blockade.

The impact of the embargo is hard to measure. It came at a time when countries in the former Soviet bloc had seen traditional markets disrupted by political change and were desperately trying to switch towards new markets.

Figures from the World Trade Organisation indicate that while the collapse of the Soviet bloc had a devastating effect, the embargo has been a key factor in hampering efforts to redirect exports.

Bulgaria's exports of merchandise, for example, slumped from $16.2 billion (now £10.3 billion) in 1989 to $5 billion the following year. In 1992, when the embargo was imposed, they were down to $3.5 billion. Two years later they were barely ahead, running at $4 billion.

Romania shows a similar pattern. Merchandise exports reached $10.5 billion in 1989 but were less than half that 12 months later and had fallen to $4.5 billion in 1992. Last year they stood at $6.15 billion.

It is not only the reopening of trade routes. For some neighbours, ex-Yugoslavia was an important market.

Take Hungary, for example. Before the war began in 1991, trade stood at around $250 million-300 million. Now imports from rump Yugoslavia stand at zero and exports are about $103 million a year.

According to a senior Hungarian industry and trade ministry official, Ferenc Nagy, the chemical, timber, metal and oil industries stand to benefit most from the lifting of the embargo.

The 1991 trade volume between Hungary and Serbia amounted to $240 million—of this, Hungarian exports accounted for $170 million and imports for $70 million. A total 53 per cent of Hungary's trade with the former Yugoslavia was with Serbia.

During the embargo, Serbia-bound Hungarian exports shrank to an annual average of $25 million and imports came to a halt.

As soon as Hungary declared on Thursday that it was lifting its embargo against rump Yugoslavia there was an immediate boom in the town markets along the southern border with Serbia. Some of Hungary's export companies are moving just as quickly.

"We didn't wait one day after the end of the embargo; our partner from rump Yugoslavia is here and we are discussing the future," says Andras Dusza, PR director for Raba, a motor parts and lorry manufacturer based in Gyor, halfway between Budapest and the Austrian border.

Russia, too, is among those looking to rebuild trade links, though the economics ministry reckons it will take three to five years to return to prewar and embargo levels. "Economy ministry calculations show that Russia lost up to $3 billion over these three years," said a spokesman.

If the imperialist 'peace' does hold for any length of time, and the UN suspends its economic warfare against Serbia and Montenegro, a new trade arena at once opens up far rival imperialist interests to wrangle over. Whilst this might imply a replay under trade-war conditions of the Cold War stand-off between Washington and Moscow, more serious challenges to US supremacy from Germany and elsewhere must soon eclipse such apparent unbroken continuities with the post-war settlement.

If Washington is, in addition to arming and training reactionary stooges all over the Balkans, also busy turning Albania into an armed camp for its future aggressions, this must in the end have less to do with containing Russia than with establishing an advanced guard to back up its domination of the region's markets (oil, weapons), in contention not simply with Moscow but, more decisively, with its much better established imperialist rivals in Europe and Asia, — whilst simultaneously trying to keep bourgeois regimes in the Islamic world on side, in order to keep a grip on the oil and to keep the lid on social revolt.

But America will find itself fighting these next trade-war battles in a world whose geopolitical shape is shifting unpredictably away from the old Pax Americana certainties. As the capitalist press piece half admits, the Yugoslav war has to a degree concealed the extent to which old trading lines have already been recast by the Soviet collapse.

Hard to evaluate as such changes are, it must in general be the case that in the long run Washington has potentially the most to lose from changes to a status quo founded on its postwar supremacy within imperialism. The capitalist press concedes as much in commentary like this, charting America's relative decline from 1973:

The US infant mortality rate is among the highest in the developed world. America's schoolchildren rank last among the big industrial nations in their grasp of science and mathematics. And while America's postgraduate education remains among the world's finest, the cost has risen by at least a third in real terms since 1980, far outpacing the average family's capacity to pay for it.

At the same time, US corporations have reduced spending on capital investment and research and development, at least in relative terms. Capital expenditure is now running at around 2 per cent of gross domestic product, half the 1980 level. R&D expenditure, which grew at three times the rate of the economy in the period 1953-68, has since then lagged behind.

Among the various explanations for this, one of the gloomiest comes from the US economic historian and journalist Mr Jeffrey Madrick. In a recent book* he argues the economy, after well over a century of remarkable expansion, hit the buffers with the first oil shock of 1973.

From the civil war until 1973, Mr Madrick computes average real annual growth in US GDP at about 3.4 per cent. Since then, it has run at about 2 per cent. Year by year, the difference is slight. Over time, the effect is devastating.

Mr Madrick's explanation of the change falls, under two headings. First, America historically possessed the huge advantage of the biggest developed market in the world. Second, US companies pioneered the methods of mass production to serve that market.

Since then, the growth of world trade has robbed the US market of its unique character: other regions round the world have forged markets on an American scale. At the same time, mass production has been superseded by Japanese-style flexible manufacturing. As part of its recent restructuring, US industry has now caught up with these methods, but it has lost its comparative advantage.

The same applies in perhaps the most important area of all, technology. Take one of the most doggedly competitive of all US companies, General Electric. Besides being America's biggest company by market value, it continues to slog it out with international competitors in high-tech markets ranging from aero, engines to medical equipment.

Mr Lonnie Edelheit, GE's head of research, is careful to defend GE's research record. R&D spending is running at about $1.7 bn a year, and is highly productive. The company is filing for more patents than ever, at around 1,000 a year. 

But, he concedes, spending is lower than it used to be. This is partly because of budget cuts at the US Department of Defence, which traditionally played an important role in funding US industry. Even excluding the defence contribution, R&D is declining in relation to, sales. GE long since abandoned basic research as unproductive. Now, its longer range applied research is shrinking too, in favour of more immediate projects.

Mr Edelheit's explanation is historical. Take, he says, his company's invention of the modern X-ray tube in 1913. At the time, GE was probably the only place in the world with the relevant technology.

"Even in the mid-1970s," he says, "when we invented the CAT scanner [a medical scanning device], very few companies could have done it, and not the Japanese. But now everyone has the technology: Siemens, Philips, Toshiba, Hitachi, the Koreans and the Taiwanese. Everything we do has to be done more quickly." 

Any rival that wants to shove the USA aside must nerve itself up to out-compete on every level, not just economic. Hence Japan's emergence as a major player in the phony world 'aid' racket, and Germany's sly shift back into exporting its troops. Hence too French foreign minister Herve de Charette's insistence that the Barcelona conference on trade and security relations between the EU and its mostly Islamic) neighbours around the Med should be free of Americans:

"We feel like getting together among ourselves," he said. "The United States will be there only as a spectator, that's what the European Union decided. When they create a body in north America or in the Pacific, no one thinks for an instant of admitting the European Union."

What gives the Barcelona talks their bite is the combination of trade-war themes (how to set up a "Euro-Mediterranean Economic Area" to set against NAFTA, APEC etc.) with an increasingly desperate counter-revolutionary problem: how to keep the lid on the unstoppable social aspirations of the modern proletariat, themselves a creation of the very imperialist system which is now in world crisis. Some flavour of this seeps through in the bourgeois press:

...two factors bedevil relations between the EU and its Mediterranean neighbours. One is rapid population growth — over the next 15 years it is predicted that the combined population of the 12 non-EU countries represented in Barcelona will increase by half, to almost 300 million.

The other factor is a tragic imbalance between the high expectations — and qualifications — of the area's growing number of young people, and the capacity of its economies to satisfy their aspirations and exploit their talents.

One consequence of this imbalance is rising immigration to Europe, much of it illegal. Many believe that another is the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.

There is a tendency in northern Europe to see Mediterranean co-operation as an unnecessary luxury. For the French, on the wrong end of a fundamentalist bombing campaign; the Italians, whose government was almost brought down this month by a row over illegal immigration; and the Spanish, with two acutely vulnerable enclaves in North Africa, it offers a long-term hope of practical solutions to problems.

The northern countries endorse Western European Union and Nato papers arguing that the main strategic threat to Europe comes from fundamentalism. Yet they have so far succeeded in getting more EU aid directed to central and eastern Europe. Last year, the EU spent 1billion ecus (£800,000) in the former Soviet bloc, compared with 407 million ecus in the Mediterranean.

A run of southern EU presidencies has enabled the Spanish vice-president of the Commission, Manuel Marin, to redirect its attention. At the Cannes summit last July, EU leaders agreed more or less to double aid to the Mediterranean. For the period until the end of 1999, it has been set at 4.685 billion ecus. A similar amount is expected to be lent by the European Investment Bank.

The gap in prosperity between north and south in the Mediterranean area is vast, and non-EU members may find it difficult to put the aid to productive use, let alone take advantage of proposed trading opportunities.

Their ability to do so will also depend in large measure on the EU's willingness to open its markets. Although there is bound to be resistance, ironically it is the EU's southern members who are most likely to lose jobs and profits if cheap Moroccan grapefruits and Egyptian T-shirts enter on equal terms.

A more fundamental question is whether peace and stability can, in fact, be "bought" in this way. The EMEA has overtones of the United States' Alliance for Progress in Latin America, which was an outright failure.

What the EU is proposing is guaranteed to flood the mainly Islamic nations on the southern and eastern rims of the Mediterranean with Western products, advertising and the value system of Europe's consumer society.

So was there not a risk that the EU's Euro-Mediterranean initiative might augment the very danger it sought to allay?

Mr Marin was unequivocal. "Fundamentalism is not the result of the spread of Western values, but of the fact that these values spread and then cannot be satisfied," he said. "The only way to quell extremism is by offering people real hope of prosperity."

But as the piece has a second before admitted, over the United States' "Alliance for Progress" in Latin America, that is precisely what imperialism cannot offer. Which is why it will prove intolerable to the masses of modern world society, and will be overthrown.

Fight for Leninism. Build the ILWP.

DH    [Dominic Hull]