Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
 No 0841 February 2oth 1996                                                                                                                                 10p 

Right and 'left' critics of Irish national-liberation struggle have history against them. The occupied colony of non-existent 'Northern Ireland' is a doomed imperialist anachronism which cannot last. Fake-'Marxist' critics are ludicrously missing the point.

The Irish national liberation struggle's decision to resume its war for full independence from British colonial domination over any part of the island, continues to disorient bourgeois thinking of all kinds.

The IRA's confident resolve to end the ceasefire and to again take on the full might of the British imperialist military, police, and security forces has especially disturbed the critical realism of 'reformists' in Britain, and the fake 'Marxism' of the petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' sects.

The conceited arrogance of these comfortable and complacent circles has never believed that what have often been dismissed as nothing but a 'bunch of murdering bog-trotters' could become a partial instrument of significant historical change.

If 'reformist' decades of 'Official Opposition' to Tory imperialist government could do nothing at all to improve or disrupt London's obviously failed Ireland policy, then what could mere 'handfuls of desperate gunmen' achieve, it was assumed, — especially when they had once been universally dismissed as just 'racketeering criminals' and were treated as such, denied any political-prisoner status or prisoner-of-war status at all.

Least of all could the putrid 'progressive intelligentsia' of Britain conceive that the tiny national liberation struggle could be capable of the only really farsighted, magnanimous, and truly civilised behaviour in this whole affair by helping to get imperialism off the hook by declaring a ceasefire in the first place. The IRA's peace-talks proposal was just dismissed as 'defeat', 'capitulation', or 'realisation of the hopelessness of their aims' by all strands of British bourgeois opinion, — right, centre, and Trotskyite.

The ending of the ceasefire a week ago left all, & bogus 'Marxism', embarrassingly exposed as understanding nothing of the national liberation struggle in Ireland, or anything about the international crisis of the imperialist system either (as examined in the previous Review).

But the sectarianism of the middle-class fake-'left' in Britain never ceases to astonish. Instead of licking their wounds and trying to learn something, these anti-communist 'revolutionaries' have merely started repeating their stupidity.

The national-liberation struggle really is just "defeated despair', they have resumed saying; and beneath a pretence of defending the IRA's right to fight, they just repeat their old criticism of it all as 'futile', and refuse to help expose the obstacles to Sinn Féin's anti-imperialist stand.

Under a superficial headline appearance of cheering on the national liberation struggle to new defiance and to routing its critics in the wake of the Docklands explosion, the 'Leninist' rump who captured the CPGB title (Communist Party of Great Britain, now defunct) have really only told IRA/Sinn Féin not to bother, thus emphasising their inability to understand the international class struggle in all its complexities, and the cosmetic shallowness of their ultra-left sloganising, much like the Sparts.

These Trot CPGB anti-communists only ever lived inside the Eurocommunist swamp for so long, without suffocating, because their feigned 'pro-Soviet' and 'pro-Lenin' protestations were as phoney as Trotskyism's always have been throughout its existence (see ILWP Books vols 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc).

These petty-bourgeois posturers loathe and despise the historical reality of the dictatorship of the proletariat as much as any armchair socialist 'intellectual' philistines have ever done. At any crisis moment when the only actual workers state power that has ever existed was under ferocious bourgeois imperialist propaganda and subversion pressure (such as the 1980 CIA/Vatican 'Solidarnosc' bogus 'trade-union' counter-revolutionary disruption of the Polish workers state), — this Islington-acceptable brand of 'Marxism-Leninism' always made sure that its basic 'pro-freedom' (i.e. anti-communist) sentiments were well understood.

Despite copious volumes of nauseating 'left' verbal diarrhoea, these 'Leninist' frauds could never bring themselves to say that they wanted the dictatorship of the proletariat in Poland to ruthlessly crush the obscene 'Solidarnosc' petty bourgeois degeneracy.

Now, similarly, they cannot bring themselves to say that they want the Irish national liberation struggle to complete its toppling of British colonialism in the Occupied Zone of Ireland, — in spite of its 'New fight for Ireland' and 'For the IRA, against the British state' headlines in their Feb 15 Weekly Worker issue, because once again they don't really believe in it.

In both cases, although relating to vastly difference sectors of historical significance for the international class struggle, the reason these Trot sectarians cannot grasp the objective necessity of the situation (if it can be achieved by the revolutionary forces available) is because they only really ever listen to their own subjective idealist self-promotion.

They had no sincere commitment to keeping Polish workers-state power going in 1980 because they dream exclusively of the 'perfect revolution' somewhere, someday, which will not suffer the obvious defects and mistakes of the postwar proletarian dictatorship in Poland, or the long history of revisionist crimes and difficulties of the USSR, etc, — a 'perfect revolution' which, of course, only they could ever lead (or people like them.)

These Trot-'Leninist' poseurs similarly have no real stake in an IRA/Sinn Féin national liberation victory over British imperialism because their actual ignorance of Marxist philosophy means they can see no real historical value in such a triumph. Such a thing just does not exist for them, — so tunnel visioned are they in their petty-bourgeois fantasies of leading "really worthwhile socialist revolutions" everywhere.

Extricated from all their 'right-on' verbal camouflage of the 'up the revolution' variety, the basic class pessimism (petty bourgeois) of these 'revolutionary' fantasists can be established from their own words, taken from their two frontpage statements:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberation struggles and hot spots throughout the world are being resolved in imperialism's favour.

The failure of Irish republicans to take any other course is a failure of the whole of the working class oppressed under the same British state.

It is this failure that has left republicans in the north facing monolithic opposition, with all bourgeois parties singing with one voice, and no independent working class voice to be heard.

This failure has meant that it is not just the republican struggle upon which imperialism is wreaked its revenge. The British state has wielded its weapons of oppression, steeled in the north of Ireland, against the working class on its mainland. Troops against the miners in 1984-85, police tactics against anything from anti-poll tax demonstrators to anti-road and even anti-live animal export demonstrators. Repressive legislation, honed against revolutionaries in the Six Counties, has been brought home in the Criminal Justice Act.

It seems increasingly clear that this bomb and the IRA statement to end the ceasefire were part and parcel of the strategy of negotiations and commitment to the ‘peace' process.

This was not a breakaway aimed at restarting the war against British imperialism.

Republicans in the north, left isolated by the lack of solidarity of workers in Britain, now see little alternative.

The ending of the ceasefire in these circumstances does not contradict the fact that what is taking place is an imperialist-brokered peace in the context of the US-dominated new world order. In many ‘hot spots' around the world, the negative resolution of revolutionary situations have been accompanied by flashes of violence, contradictions and temporary ‘setbacks'.

The basic solution remains the same. The working class of Ireland and the UK needs an independent revolutionary communist party of its own.

Though all struggle is for the moment directed towards what can only be an imperialist-brokered ‘peace', the battle is far from over.

The new situation makes new demands and places new responsibilities on all revolutionaries. To take our common fight for liberation forward demands a unity capable of destroying once and for all the British imperialist state which keeps us all in chains. Revolutionaries in Britain and Ireland need to be organised for that task now.

Dissected in this way from their deliberately confusing overall gobbledegook, they clearly paint a picture of the IRA's ending of the ceasefire with the Docklands bomb being nothing more than just another insignificant incident in a historical pattern they regard as already well entrenched and unaffectable by purely nationalist aspirations, - (as they view the IRA/Sinn Féin fight.)

As these anti-communists see it,"imperialism has got the whip hand worldwide at the moment; the nationalist attempt to influence the historical outcome via pressure on
the bourgeoisie is doomed; the Docklands bomb was just another part of this same hopeless peace process; and the only real way for Irish national-liberation interests to extricate themselves from a losing scenario is to join forces now with such revolutionary hotshots as the CPGB and go directly for a communist overthrow of imperialism in Britain and Ireland."

It would, of course, be the EPSR's own wish to join in such a happy dream, but meanwhile the immediate practical way forward is at least to make a correct analysis of objective reality, - the international balance of class forces and the decisive movements within it, - not to sow total confusion by a complete misreading of what is going on.

The first crucial requirement is to grasp the nature of the epoch we are living in. Far from it being the time when everything is resolved in imperialism's favour, it is just the opposite, - the epoch of terminal imperialist crisis.

Purely temporarily, a brief 'new world order' period is taking place which gives a superficial appearance of US imperialism easily dominating every situation with its bullying 'unchallengeable' military and economic might.

But the immediate obvious reality of this 'order' is total unsatisfactory chaos, - and underneath it all, an inter-imperialist crisis of unprecedented proportions is relentlessly brewing, - as the more honest critical-realist outpourings of the bourgeoisie itself, of course, continuously confirm (see endless past Reviews). The artificial postwar inflationary boom and arms race can only result in eventual all-out trade war, markets collapse, and warmongering confrontation between all the great 'free-world' powers (and their various areas of stooge influence.)

The revisionist self-liquidation in the former Soviet Union is part of the crisis of bourgeois anti-Leninist ideology, the crisis of international class-collaboration,-  not a crisis of anti-imperialist struggle. The Cold War 'balance of class forces' was always essentially a phony balance at root because the revisionist Moscow ideology no longer believed in anti-imperialist revolution as the essential way forward for civilisation (see ILWP Books vol 13).

Liquidating that colossal revisionist influence on the world (especially on these anti-communist CPGBers), exposing it as a 'Leninist' fraud (Gorbachev used to quote Lenin too, the posturing oaf), - was an essential step for helping revive international revolutionary science, a step which should have been fought for not through the Trot Eurocommunist anti-Soviet anti-Leninist continuous treachery to the East European workers states in their difficulties, but through unconditional support for the proletarian dictatorships, only criticising (from a communist angle) Moscow's pro-world-collaboration delusions.

The examples these defeatists give of 'imperialist domination' are only superficially plausible, concealing the underlying anti-imperialist reality.

South Africa, for example, is currently a sad spectacle of bourgeois-nationalist delusions usurping the ANC's revolutionary defeat of apartheid-imperialism temporarily, but in no way able to detract from the colossal overall historical significance (for Africa and the world) of that final mass-movement triumph over monopoly-capitalist international tyranny. Reaction wanted to, and did, hold onto apartheid for as long as possible. Reaction only finally gave in when it could see that a deal with the ANC nationalists would be better than risking total communist mass revolutionary overthrow later on. So which direction is history heading for, towards imperialist domination, or towards communist domination? Obviously, more towards revolution all the time.

So the anti-imperialism of the Irish national-liberation struggle is going with the grain of history, not against it. And only some superficial word play enables these bogus 'Leninists' to label Irish republicanism a 'failure' - by identifying it as part of "a failure of the whole of the working class oppressed under the same British state".

But what is failing the whole working class in Britain is its entire anti-communist past leadership, - Labour, TUC, Trots, Eurocommunists, and bogus 'lefts' of all descriptions, all of them complete philistines who only ever posture about 'Marxism' in order to kill it with revisionist distortion and demoralise the working class. And that is a failure much to be welcomed as opening the door at last to a serious revival of Leninist science, greatly in harmony with the revolutionary spirit with which Irish republicanism has triumphantly challenged British imperialism.

And it is just not true that "all bourgeois parties are singing with one voice" against Sinn Féin and the IRA on the Irish question. Last week's Review quoted dozens of capitalist sources denouncing Tory muddle and weakness for the renewed war tensions. The flow of bourgeois condemnation of culpable imperialist trickery and decadence has not diminished:

The target, rather, was IRA ideology, which maintains that they are in a state of war with the British regime and that their arms are legitimate. So what Britain sought was not an actual end to the capacity but the defeat of a concept.

But even the concept may be of less importance than the search for a way of forcing the other side into a retreat, a search which the IRA and the British have been conducting. This urge to dominate was long ago identified in conflict theory as one of the reasons why conflicts go critical and why resolution efforts fail.

Hindsight shows that the persistent raising of the decommissioning issue, whatever the theoretical rights and wrongs, was a mistake, and one which London tried to back away from too late.

This is always likely to happen when the issue of who dominates is allowed to become central.

Old powers with a tradition of thinking of themselves as the centre of the universe are prone to a reflex of dominance.

Peace theory says that you approach settlement by sidelining issues of dominance, which are really the old war questions of who is winning and who is losing in a different form. Peace moves along, then, on an imperfect basis, dependent for quite a long time on the avoidance of at least some of the hard questions. Then, when they are finally looked at again, they may have changed, or the parties may have changed, which is the same thing. That change, if it comes about, arises from an acceptance of the complexity of what history has created, its entanglement of peoples, its overlapping of jurisdictions, its neighbouring of the strong and the weak. The irony of many conflicts at the end of the century is that in most cases the antagonists know that they cannot achieve their objectives by war and therefore have a common interest in peace, but they carry on making war because, futile and dangerous as it is, it is easier than making peace.

This may well be very constipated critical realism as a British bourgeois tries to digest British bourgeois-imperialist decadence, but this is just one more added to the scores of examples of the British capitalist state being told by its own side that it is already well on the way to being judged guilty by history for the 1996 ceasefire breakdown.

It is British imperialism which is terrified of losing face by having to capitulate to an armistice in a major conflict with a 'bunch of criminal gunmen, six of whom it takes to change one light bulb', etc.

The 'urge to dominate' is the living historical essence of the imperialist-economic exploitation system (monopoly capitalism) and could be nothing else. This bourgeois realises this. There is only one 'old power with a tradition of thinking of itself as the centre of the universe' involved in the war in Ireland, - British imperialism.

And there is only one side which is obviously 'avoiding looking at the hard questions, spinning things out, hoping that something might change', - and that is British imperialism, putting off the time it hopes will never come when Unionist intransigence finally has to be told "Accept a new political settlement for the whole of Ireland or be forced into one". And it is only British imperialism which knows that it is carrying on a futile and dangerous war because, in its senility and paralysed confusion and 3-vote majority in the House of Commons, it feels this is 'easier than making peace'.

Having missed the underlying message of modern history on the question of US imperialism's purely temporary chaotic 'new world order' which is masking the greatest economic, political warmongering catastrophe ever suffered by international bourgeois society, — the CPGB fake 'Leninists', also miss essential revolutionary lessons which have been learned in the course of their long list of recent working-class 'failures', and which could not have been learned in any other way. In other words they are setbacks essential for the transformation of a 'reformist'-minded, class-collaborating British imperialist working class towards becoming a revolutionary class.

The defeat of the 1984-85 miners' strike was crucial among them, helping towards the demolition at last of the illusion that 'left' trade-union pressure on a bourgeois government, with the hope of a 'reformist' Labour government to take over subsequently to give workers all they want, can solve the class contradictions of the modem trade-war imperialist crisis (which in fact can only find a solution in the direction of world communist revolution). History works slowly, and Scargill is a hopelessly centrist and sectarian muddlehead. But the formation at last of the SLP breakaway from the Labour Party, to challenge Labour's essential anti-socialism, anti-working class ambitions, - is proof of how history is working.

And the organisation of the 1984-85 miners' strike was in itself an enormous triumph anyway, although part of a colossal and necessary defeat for political illusions. And that organisational experience as part of an always accumulating working-class tradition of confident struggle and maturity, showed up in the anti-poll tax fight which was anything but a failure. It is also very light-minded even to write off such apparently eccentric protests as the anti-road and anti-animal-export demonstrations. What they increasingly show is that people do not like what is happening to their lives under modem monopoly-imperialism. They may be hopelessly single-issue or hopelessly idealistic in the causes they take up, and obviously a political diversion. But there is simply no way of knowing which diversions might prove to have been the route by which some people come towards an understanding of monopoly-capitalist crisis as the root of their problems, and proletarian dictatorship as its only solution.

The automatic equating of every failed or partially successful protest with total historic working class failure, expresses only one thing, - the incurably subjective defeatism of the petty-bourgeois making the observations.

The fixed idea of these middle-class 'revolutionaries', - total socialist victory or nothing, - having been inappropriately applied to essential learning processes in the transformation of the old class-collaborating British working class, - is then ludicrously incorrectly used as a measure of success in a purely national-liberation struggle. They are virtually saying that even if the peace process was a success from Sinn Féin's point of view, - a reunited Ireland, - it would be a failure.

This is irrelevant 'left' sectarianism gone barmy.

All they are really hoping for, between the lines, is that the IRA will fight these petty-bourgeois "lefts'" war for them against British imperialism. They actually want the IRA and Sinn Féin to split in the hope of "restarting the war against British imperialism", war which obviously will not cease with the liquidation of the hated 'Northern Ireland' colony and Partition, but will aim only for the total actual military defeat of all British imperialism!

This is grotesque. Why don't these super-'revolutionaries' start their own urban guerrilla warfare against the British imperialist state on their own frontline and give the IRA a hand?

This monstrous kibbutzing-in on someone else's fight by these CPGB freaks shows contempt for the subject and people's intelligence in both directions. Are they really telling the British working class to start urban guerrilla warfare against the British state in England now? In the circumstances of an as yet incompletely exposed full parliamentary bourgeois democracy system, this would certainly not be a classical Marxist-Leninist strategy, more like a stupid anarchist provocation. And the CPGB is presumably calling for no such thing, of course.

But this unstated implication of 'Right on to the barricades now, lads' is slyly useful for adopting a grandiosely 'revolutionary' posture against the IRA: 'Oh, this Docklands bomb is just a way of getting back to the peace process. It's not the start of a real war against British imperialism'.

And such irrelevant Walter Mitty fantasies demonstrate that this CPGB rump is not talking seriously about the Irish question either. Yet again, it is just another vehicle for yet more petty-bourgeois subjective-'revolutionary' verbal diarrhoea. National-liberation struggle can be a limited anti-imperialist struggle, but a wholly legitimate one from a scientific Marxist-Leninist point of view in the right circumstances, and even one to be enthusiastically unconditionally supported in certain conditions, as being an important and even revolutionary blow against imperialism. Such is the IRA/Sinn Féin struggle (see ILWP Books vol 8 and countless past Reviews).

Sickest of all with these poseurs, and their hopelessly philistine and sectarian petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary' milieu, - the suspicion is inescapable that really it irks them to have to identify with the Sinn Féin/IRA struggle as it is, - superficially very unpopular with the British public, - but that their posturing lifestyle requires them to find a very 'left' reason for avoiding doing so. This was certainly part of their weird middle-class psychology with regard to the Polish workers state. On the only realistic anti-imperialist way forward, - for the Polish workers state or the Red Army to crush the 'Solidarnosc' counter-revolution without trace (which would have run into a hurricane of hatred and abuse from Western public opinion), - these fake 'Leninists' were very unenthusiastic, even though their intellectual alertness made them want to distance themselves from the Solidarnosc fraud in favour of real 'real socialism'. Are all these 'revolutionary' summonses to unity in the IRA's direction just a sick way of avoiding wholeheartedly defending the national-liberation struggle's right to fight the actual war it is fighting now? (albeit with often-stated disagreement between what a Marxist-Leninist movement might choose as the best strategy and tactics, and what bourgeois nationalism might choose).

There can be no historical-hindsight theoretical justification for all these fake-'Leninist' lines on the grounds that these CPGBers were right not to look for a Polish workers-state victory over Solidarnosc because they knew its deeply revisionist-flawed condition was bound to be a disastrous loser eventually, - as eventually it did lose, totally and spectacularly, collapsing completely.

What the working class needs to understand from any and every struggle is in which direction the longterm historical trend necessarily most go. The Paris Commune was bound to lose because of its many flaws, most of which Marx and Engels saw from the start. But they wholeheartedly urged it on as the only way to go historically in the longterm. The Easter Rising 1916 was doomed from the start for its premature, idealist putschist nature. But Lenin welcomed it ecstatically as a glorious 'revolutionary' explosion of what was to come in European history. The 1984-85 miners strike was handicapped from the start, as the Leninist ILWP fully explained at the time.

But the Review's predecessor paper worked wholeheartedly and enthusiastically for the victory of such a mass working-class struggle to the end, even though knowing failure was coming, because it was the only way historically for working-class experience to go.

The Polish workers state represented the only period of proletarian dictatorship there has been on earth so far, - the Soviet camp experience started in 1917 and continuing on now via China, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, etc. Undoubtedly, the world will have to return again and again to this proletarian-dictatorship experience, - as the former Soviet Union is beginning to do now, and as much of East Europe has already done, voting in Communists on the belief that this was bringing back some of the stability and colossal social and economic achievements of the former workers states.

While obviously mistake-strewn and revisionist-corrupted, these proletarian dictatorships nevertheless represented the only alternative way forward from capitalism. They died from the collapse of Marxist-Leninist understanding of this fact, sabotaged by revisionist imbecility, that believed socialism and capitalism could harmonise their better achievements; that capitalism had overcome its crisis-ridden essence; that Western living standards were what they seemed superficially, - the result of the market mechanism rather than of worldwide colonial exploitation; and that imperialism had somehow divested itself of its essential arms-race warmongering counter-revolutionary nature.

The 1980 Polish workers state (and Moscow, by extension) needed an unconditional defence based on criticism of the above delusions. What it got from various opportunist CPGB factions and other Trot sectarians was no unconditional defence at all (i.e. no defence at all), and just a bit of sympathy from the slyer ones who could see through Solidarnosc, but conditional on the Polish workers state giving up its proletarian dictatorship anyway, and Moscow too. None of the fake-'left' willed the East European workers states on to victory, - the correct Marxist-Leninist scientific stance even though these particular flawed regimes might well already have been doomed in the long run.

But as the Review has frequently already asked various sectarian 'left' posturers, - where do they stand now on China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc? They have all inherited many revisionist faults in their understanding, and have undoubtedly made mistakes. It may turn out with historical hindsight that these regimes were already irrevocably flawed even when still battling on against imperialism in 1996. But who is now going to say as a policy: Let China collapse against counter-revolutionary imperialist propaganda pressure and economic-sabotage threats? Only incorrigibly sectarian idiots who don't live in the real world but only in the 'perfect revolutionary' world of their own fantasies.

Leninism says defend the Chinese workers state unconditionally in all its contradictions with the 'free' world. Constructively criticise it only as part of the struggle to return the whole world to a true Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding of imperialist crisis and the vital role of proletarian dictatorship in securing civilisation's future, consistent with completing the communist revolution internationally.

The ultra-'left' all-or-nothing defeatism only survives in the short term because only the renewed surge of spontaneous world-revolutionary struggle can prove their pessimisms wrong, basing itself as it must on taking up the Soviet proletarian dictatorship experiences from where they were left off under creeping revisionist imbecility. And that revolutionary surge is, naturally, far longer in coming than anyone can imagine, want, or expect.

Some of these criminally light-minded Trot dilettantes do actually call for the overthrow of the Castro revolution in Cuba, for example, in favour of an even better 'real socialist' revolution, - from the safety of their armchairs in Islington, of course. And while the CPGB are not yet this sectarian-barmy, the notion of them being 'right' not to call for Poland's proletarian dictatorship to assert itself and crush Solidarnosc in 1980 is just as sick, - living only for the fantasy 'perfect revolution' that never comes.

And even if longterm historical hindsight eventually proves them 'right' to give the thumbs-down to the Irish national-liberation struggle's present perspective (of forcing British imperialism to negotiate away a completely new political set-up for the whole of Ireland) in that it still might fail (because superseded by other developments, such as World War III, or sudden spontaneous socialist revolution erupting all over Britain), - they would still be wrong. The Irish revolutionary-nationalist perspective to force British and world imperialism to concede total Ireland independence, or face an added and increasing revolutionary hazard to what the West already has on its plate worldwide, - is eminently conceivable, and would also happen to be a very worthwhile revolutionary (arms-in-hand) pushing back of imperialist forces by popular struggle.

Bourgeois critics of British imperialism see things much more clearly, - understanding exactly the successful limited war aims that the Irish national-liberation struggle has posed. These glimmerings of critical-realist enlightenment also give the lie to the newest Ulster-Unionist propaganda obscenity that IRA bombing has recommenced because Sinn Féin was unable to go through with the peace process, - standing reality exactly on its head. That it was the British imperialist camp which had to abort the negotiated peace process is abundantly clear from admissions such as these (and scores more) in its own capitalist press:

Violence was, is and always will be a potential condition of existence in and concerning Ireland, whether or not any given batch of leaders has agreed to end it.

In these circumstances, the British demand on de-commissioning and renunciation was always more totemic than substantive. If it had been satisfied, that wouldn't have removed the threat of violence. For ministers to talk about not negotiating ‘‘when one party has a gun outside the door" may have sounded reasonable but posed, in fact, an unreal hypothesis. The purpose was symbolic: to make the IRA eat dirt.

It had almost nothing to do with effective peace-making. Unmentioned in the Downing Street Declaration, it was a way of belatedly recompensing the people most put out by both declaration and framework document, the Ulster Unionists.

However, the demand was inconsistent with the strategy Major had already adopted. This was, bravely and irregularly, to override the Unionist veto on political progress. Major's text was that Britain no longer entertained a "selfish" interest in Northern Ireland. Deciding to devote himself to a new way of peace, he was prepared to shatter icons. He liberated himself from the past, and sought to bypass old entanglements. Ulster, he made plain, no longer had the same eternal place as Cornwall or Wales in British thinking. Its connection was contingent, and he would not strive to keep it alive against any majority inclination that disclosed itself in the future.

This was a remarkable shift. It proposed a new way forward whereby the mainland polity, entering an alliance with the Dublin government, simultaneously defended the status quo while acknowledging that, if the will of the people changed, it might not last for ever. The logic of this was that London would talk to Sinn Fein even though the IRA threat could plainly not be definitively written out of the script.

The point of the strategy was to create a new reality that might lead to a political settlement. It could never ordain that the threat of violence was wiped off the agenda. If all-party talks began, in parallel with rather than preceded by de-commissioning, they would be another step forward, a proof that the momentum of peace could be preserved, a way of further bedding down a new status quo. It is a great tragedy that they did not occur. If they had, there would have been no South Quay bomb.

If the de-commissioning demand was, in the real world, a chimera, then this whole political edifice Mr Major constructed was not well served by it. It was invented to satisfy the Unionists, who were thus able to impose their view on the entire negotiating procedure, and almost the entire House of Commons.

The House of Commons is important. It has been a place of reliable consensus from the beginning to the end of the peace process. But we begin to see the weaknesses of this. There was a huge majority for the process, and thus for the adventurous modifications it made on time-honoured British attitudes to Ulster. It is hard to believe, given the symbolic nature of the required de-commissioning, that the majority, given a free hand, would have allowed that to stop the process dead. If the Government had found another way of dealing with it, Mr Major would have secured the certain agreement of most MPs. But at the last, he ran away from his own logic. Instead of assembling a critical mass of British politicians behind a process that posed no genuine threat to the Unionist constituency, he let the Unionists draw their line in the sand.

We know one reason why this happened. The Tories feared for their position. Enjoying a vast majority for their Irish policy, they were and are vulnerable on every other policy. Such is the grim arithmetic of political priorities.

Worldwide, the Irish national-liberation struggle will be more listened to than decrepit British imperialist cowardice, and world opinion will judge that London is in the wrong (in spite of the pathetic renewed televised hand-wringing propaganda onslaught about the 'terrible suffering inflicted on the innocent by the evil bombers', etc) - as the capitalist press itself is further obliged to admit:

The IRA yesterday confirmed unequivocally that its ceasefire was over and offered only the most oblique prospect of a resumption in the event of progress towards talks.

A "spokesperson for the general headquarters staff" of the IRA told An Phoblacht that the decision to end the ceasefire was taken because of "John Major's cynical misuse and betrayal of the historic opportunity" it had offered.

In its first detailed explanation of the background to the Canary Wharf bomb in London last Friday, the IRA claimed that Mr Major had reneged on his commitments in order to keep himself in power.

Suggestions that the bomb had been a one-off action were rejected when an IRA spokesperson said: "We in Oglaigh na hEireann will continue to assert Irish national rights in the face of British denial for as long as is necessary."

In the two-page interview, the spokesperson stated: "There is only one place for all the political representatives of the Irish people to go and that is to the negotiating table. Current British policy prevents all those with a democratic mandate from sitting around that table."

There was also criticism of John Bruton, the Irish premier, who this week claimed he had been betrayed by the bombing. The IRA said he well knew the basis of the ceasefire.

The spokesperson denied there was any split in the IRA and said it had no problem with Sinn Féin continuing its peace strategy.

Meanwhile, Michael Ancram, the Northern Ireland political development minister, said yesterday that an election could be held without a ceasefire, but he refused to be drawn when asked if Sinn Féin could take part in such circumstances.

The Government came in for further criticism yesterday from Albert Reynolds, who said that Britain's response to the Mitchell report on illegally held weapons was the straw that broke the camel's back.

'He said that Mr Major's reaction to the report was "the greatest challenge that goaded them [the IRA] into proving they were back in existence".

After 25 years of all-out national-liberation struggle against all-out imperialist police-military repression, the IRA's ceasefire initiative demonstrated that no-one (apart from complete maniacs like Paisley) dared say that a negotiated solution, fully including the 'men of violence' was impossible.

But it has not happened because of British imperialist intransigence.

So now the choice is back to 25 more years of all-out national-liberation struggle against all-out imperialist police-military repression, or else back to the negotiating table (or at least to more serious 'talks about talks' than taken place so far). It is a choice which the unfortunate British public, indeed suffering from the horrors of an urban guerrilla war erupting in its midst, should loudly declare is no choice at all. Get back quickly to the negotiating table, is the obvious message, and start talking seriously this time about a complete new settlement for Ireland, in particular, the cowardly Labourite 'Official Opposition' worms should be told finally to either oppose imperialist reaction, or disappear from history completely.

As unlikely as it may seem, Labour's class-collaborating servility to British imperialism on the Irish question may be forced to shift by the sheer weight of public opinion. Letters columns to the bourgeois press are no more scientific than the radio and TV vox pops, but all round there does seem to be more refreshing open-mindedness on this issue than ever before:

MY house was rocked by the Canary Wharf bomb. The people of London are not prepared to carry the burden of unionist intransigence any longer. The British government, under pressure from the unionists, has spent the last 18 months throwing up obstacle after obstacle to serious negotiations over Northern Ireland.

The reason is equally obvious; any negotiations must involve compromise, and that means some weakening of unionist power. The unionists are not prepared to cede an inch, and have successfully blackmailed the Government into playing their game.

We owe the bigots of Northern Ireland nothing and it's time we got rid of this expensive colony, just like we've got rid of dozens of others in the past 30 years.

WE are constantly being told that the "democratic process" is the best way, the only way, to resolve conflict. That being so why cannot the people of Ireland (the whole of Ireland) decide the future of their country? Is not the existence of Northern Ireland a denial of democracy?

ARTHUR Aughey's appeal to "democracy" in support of David Trimble's election proposals is disingenuous (Comment Page, February 12). The conflict has been caused by majoritarian "democracy" within the sectarian Northern Ireland framework. The two main unionist parties would simply perpetuate the problem by insisting that an election within this framework is the only route for admitting Sinn Féin to all-party talks.

Such a single-issue election would lead to further sectarian polarisation. Trimble's proposal was intended to delay all-party talks, reduce the Dublin government's involvement in the peace process and marginalise the small loyalist parties — their more reasonable stance since the ceasefire began has shown up the inflexibility of Trimble's and Paisley's mainstream unionism.

John Major, supported by "opposition'' leader Tony Blair, adopted Trimble's proposal, rather than accept the Mitchell advice to call immediately all-party talks. It seems this triggered the IRA's appalling return to bombing.

Arthur Aughey claims elections would make it "the people's peace process", but the delay and further marginalisation of the small loyalist parties and Sinn Féin would destroy any chance of there being a "peace process" — another pyrrhic victory for the main unionist parties.

John Hume's proposal for immediate referenda North and South, on the two questions of rejecting violent methods and the need for all-party talks, should be extended to Britain. For too long the main unionist parties have been the "tail wagging the dog".

I am surprised and disappointed that the Guardian's editorial (February 10) has joined the "whitewashes" of John Major and the Government in the latest IRA bombing outrage. The IRA and very likely Sinn Féin are responsible for this act, but as to the question whose fault it has been, you could at least reserve your judgment.

I think also that you are mistaken as to the effect of this bombing. It is not another "blitz" and John Major is not another Churchill. The IRA is obviously trying to avoid human casualties, going for destruction of real estate, and money seems to be valued these days more than anything else. After all, if it is for material gain, this government kowtows to such objectionable people as the Saudi royals and the Nigerian dictator, General Abacha. Multi-million losses in the heart of the City have their eloquence.

But Ireland is far from British imperialism's only, or even essential problem, as the following article examines. As even the capitalist press grasps, the arms-race scandal is more about terminal imperialist crisis than lie exposures:

Because of increasingly unrealistic efforts to maintain both civilian and defence high technology sectors, trade is often no longer a favour that the advanced countries bestow on less developed societies that, like Iraq, had money to spend, or, like China, can offer the attractions of a huge market and of cheap, skilled labour. We are getting to the point where we need them more than they need us.

Behind the story of the sale of equipment to Iraq lies another, larger story, that of the increasingly tough task of maintaining advanced quasimilitary economies in a less and less favourable environment. The dozen or so larger advanced nations are wedded to the idea that they must be able to support a varied high technology sector capable of producing both complex civilian and military products, and maintaining sophisticated multi-purpose armed forces. But this is getting to be a harder and harder trick to do.

The past 25 years have demonstrated that the maintenance of an advanced military-industrial-intellectual complex is becoming more and more difficult. Fewer and fewer countries can keep up anything like the whole range of advanced industry, weapons production, and the research centres to support them. This has gone far beyond the question of not being able to produce all the military equipment that a "respectable" power should possess. Nor is it just a question of jobs. It is also a matter of gaps developing in the array of advanced civilian industries. At a time when military technology Is increasingly dependent on civilian spin-offs rather than, as was the case for many years, the other way round, this warns of a double loss of potency, both industrial and military.

This is why, incidentally, the British government's argument that the supply of non-lethal defence equipment is more permissible than that of lethal equipment, arms proper, is wrong.

Imperialist decadence is dying. Build Leninism.

Douglas Bell

Letters

SICK SELL OUT

After 21 months of ANC majority power South Africa is showing all the paralysis of the decadent older democracies. Interest rates are running at 18.5% and mortgage rates likewise. This has led to an inrush of foreign money looking for the highest possible return but has crippled investment in industry and the jobs and improvements in infrastructure which are so important to this country.	

The delivery of housing is well behind schedule with millions of rands not spent because private industry will not risk building "low cost units" when people will not be able to buy them. Shacks are almost free, houses cost money.

The fiscal policy seems to be to attract as much foreign capital as possible through high interest rates and then use this money, - rather than money generated within the country, - to build houses, a primary health care system, reform the education system, electrify most of the country, etc etc. The bottom line is that interest rates will have to be kept artificially high to keep the foreign money inside SA in order to complete these long term projects. Meanwhile, South Africa's industrial base suffers and fewer and fewer jobs are available.

Not one member of the government has publicly pointed out the lunacy of this monetarist policy. Both Chris Liebenburg, finance minister, and Chris Stals, Director of the Reserve Bank, are Government of National Unity (GNU) appointees, and therefore have the blessing of the ANC as the majority party in the GNU.

The Government runs capitalism in imitation of the lunacy of the older "democracies" and talks of the necessity of a growth rate of 6% next year against the backdrop of a boom which is a reaction of the capitalist system following the stagnation of apartheid.

In no way can this kind of growth be maintained under capitalism, where crash must follow boom, and these cycles grow ever shorter, with booms peaking lower, and crashes also plummeting to new depths.

Labour Minister Tito Mboweni's confession on the TV show, hosted by the despicable and effete Dali Tambo (scion of Oliver and Adelaide), that he is a social democrat typifies the ANC in government. Gone is any pretence of even any ill-defined socialism let alone any solid communist leadership. Many prominent members of the SACP left between 1989 and 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The argument that communism doesn't work is feeble given that Mboweni cannot give any examples of countries which have been able to upgrade living conditions for the majority of its citizens, - as SA has to do, - under social democracy. 

Scandinavia did not have such differences between rich and poor and have now reverted to the insane market forces argument. Only the communist countries have achieved massive progress - something half admitted as the health minister recruits Cuban doctors to work in the rural areas where SA doctors refuse to work. Sensible argument has nothing to do with this. Opportunism and class allegiances do. Of course, Mboweni never gave any indication of his being a social democrat while he was in exile in East Germany and Lusaka and while he and his cronies queued up for youth congresses in communist states.

Meanwhile the SACP grows. The last figure given publicly was 7,000 joining per month. Relations with Cosatu are strained as the GNU try to privatise state assets. A recently returned exile, as yet unemployed, opined "What was it all for?" This opinion must be being echoed round the country. While the gravy train creaks on (two week economics courses in the USA for some!) 300 shacks are destroyed in yet another squatter camp fire after a candle overturns.

The only solution is to build Leninism, opt for slow but steady growth, and guarantee jobs and houses for all with the standard of education and health which communism was able to provide and which the world has never seen before or since.

Sarah Watson Pretoria

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 158. Sunday 11th February 1996

In the end the answer to the question "What future for Britain?" has got to be for capitalist Britain, none; for British workers, revolution.

Once, boom capitalism in America swept into Detroit and raised production in the area to giddying heights, sucking vast numbers-into modern proletarian development in the process. But when overcapacity loomed and it became urgent to seek more glittering opportunities for capital expansion elsewhere, Detroit was left behind as a jobless rusting wasteland.

Capitalism, given the chance, repeats this pattern endlessly, building up and burning down productive development in the sterile pursuit of profit. Britain's devastated coalfields tell a similar story about the longer term decline of British industrial strength, and indeed capitalist Britain as a whole is faced with a future much like like that of capitalist Detroit, but on a much vaster scale.  Its historical role as first off the starting blocks (in the race to industrialize, colonize and monopolize) now only serves as a yardstick by which to measure the depth of its descent and the class-senility of its ruling elite.

From being the workshop, colonial master and monopoly-capital giant of the world, Britain is (with some help from the Irish, and a lot more from its imperialist rivals) painfully waking up to its true situation, as the crisis-driven search for capital expansion opportunities looks ever more askance at UK Inc., except as a cheap-labour springboard into German-led Europe.

The background pattern of uneven development postwar against which this accelerating decline is being played out (seeing capital expansion boosted astronomically in hot spots like Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, whilst other great swathes of the world's population get left out in the cold) is now getting overlaid again by this century's even more disastrous uneven development pattern of artificially prolonged credit-fed boom reaching dizzying heights of capital expansion, then collapsing all the way back and beyond into trade war recrimination and fascist warmongering slump worldwide.

The deficit-burdened, credit-inflated sickness of the giant US economy reveals the sole surviving 'super-power' to be also the most significant source of crisis-contamination, turning all attempts to 'stabilize' the 'post-Soviet' world into ever bigger nightmares — as witness the latest proposed IMF loan to Russia, already earmarked by the buffoon Yeltsin for election bribes in a presidential campaign which makes the counter-revolution look more desperately unstable than ever:

He promised to pay the entire national backlog of unpaid wages next month, amounting to about £1.8 billion, or about a third of the loan Russia hopes to receive shortly from the International Monetary Fund.

Mr Yeltsin boasted in an unscripted aside: "I physically have the cash to do this." And he went on to explain that he would break into Russia's £8.5 billion fund of hard currency and gold reserves. The president said with a smile: "I have tied a noose around my neck. I have nowhere to hide."

The announcement is certain to worry the IMF, whose director, Michel Camdessus, arrives in Moscow next week to finish negotiations for a £5.8 billion loan.

Speaking earlier yesterday to Afghan veterans, Mr Yeltsin attacked Turkey as a threat to Russia's southern borders. He said: "The Turks have always threatened us and right now they are helping the Chechens."	

The international embarrassment continued when Russia's minister of atomic energy, Victor Mikhailov, promised an attack on the Czech Republic if it joined Nato. In comments to reporters outside the auditorium where Mr Yeltsin was speaking, Mr Mikhailov said: "The plan to expand Nato means that one day in the Czech Republic there will be tactical nuclear weapons. For me, that means the day will come when we will have to destroy those bases." 

At the podium Mr Yeltsin, hoarse from a day of walkabouts, was in swashbuckling mood. He boasted that he had pressurised President Clinton, Chancellor Kohl, and other Western leaders to ensure Russia received the IMF loan.

He said Russia was at a crossroads and could still slide back into its communist past. "We will do everything possible so that we Russians and our country will not perish under the old red wheel."

This growing crisis of imperialism is the indispensable context for understanding the shifting political scene at home.

The '80s deindustrialization of Britain (over which Thatcherism nominally presided, but whose scale and pace were driven by the impact of renewed world imperialist crisis on Britain's partially concealed longterm decline) is being followed in the '90s by a less visible but ultimately still more deadly stripping away of capitalist Britain's prestige in the sphere of financial services. When Barings collapsed, it didn't have the obvious social impact of closing down dozens of pits; but the cumulative effect of such events (Barings run by the Dutch, Warburgs run by the Swiss, German influence increasing in the Square Mile, the Stock Exchange unable to outgrow antiquated aspects of its market-making activities) threatens to tear the guts out of British capitalism.

Adair Turner knows this, which is why the CBI boss is unhappy at the prospect of free market forces being allowed to suppress wage levels in open competition with low-wage Third World economies. It is one thing for capitalism to contemplate deunionized workforces, disciplined by the fear of unemployment, selling their labour cheaper by the year, SO LONG AS this cheap labour pool is seen as helping capitalism cut corners in an economy which still basically holds its own in manufacture, scientific skills base, trade and financial services. It is quite another question once it is grasped that this proviso no longer obtains.

The fact is that there is no prospect whatever of British capitalism reinventing its whole history and out-tigering the new 'miracle' economies of Asia. There is every prospect however of Britain's capitalist decline revealing itself precisely in the suppression of ordinary living standards (indexed both by low wages and enforced part-time working, and by the more general deterioration of public transport, health, education etc.) by which cheese-paring bourgeois mentalities hope to avert that decline.

And that is what really stands in the way of a rational productive future for people in Britain: a failing 'free market' system in deepening crisis world-wide, and in irreversible decline at home, run here by a geriatric ruling class whose parasitical coupon-clipping mentality disqualifies them from running a whelk stall at full efficiency, let alone dealing with the class-war, trade-war and shooting-war storms ahead. That is where Britain's problems really start: not in any supposed inherent inflexibility and resistance to change from British workers, or even in the temporary ill-effects of 'short-termism' in the City or rectifiable 'lapses' in scientific education and R&D investment, but in the completely irreducable arrogant uselessness of the exploiting elite whose class dictatorship authority within capitalist society allows them to go on setting the agenda for the nation's whole productive existence.

The devastating competitive pressures on British imperialism are most striking - and, in the context of the drive to imperialist war, potentially most decisive - in the matter of the arms trade. That is why the Scott Report is more about the capitalist present and capitalist future than about any supposed 'temporary Whitehall lapse' in the past, as even some capitalist press comment can be seen to acknowledge (once most of the wishful thinking and anti-communism is edited out):

Non-lethal equipment is actually more important than lethal equipment in giving a country, particularly a rich and technically sophisticated country like Iraq, war-making capacity. There is a merry-go-round here on which a dozen advanced countries ride. Their pretensions in aerospace, in communications technology, in electronics generally, in both military and civilian advanced products, cannot be indefinitely sustained. Nearly all have staged strategic retreats from certain sectors, and gone into more and more joint projects. But still, it is not enough.

Nobody should underestimate the frightening aspects of these developments.

Chirac's recent decision to end conscription, and the decisions which await him on the future of French aims manufacturing, belong in the same category. So do the troubles of Daimler-Benz and of Fokker in Holland. Even the United States, the solitary country still able to maintain a full military-industrial base, is having difficulties, with President Clinton ringing up Gulf monarchs to sell tanks personally. Under these circumstances trade seems to become not a matter of profit or jobs nor of influence but of staving off the death of industries, and ultimately, perhaps, of ceasing to be an advanced economy.

It may be objected that the relatively small sums involved in supplying Iraq in the late eighties can hardly have made this kind of difference. But the question is not the amount but the mood of the time, when the French were picking up large arms orders and when all Western countries were competing for the quasi-military and purely civilian business which everybody calculated Iraq could still afford, or, at least, could pay for later. The ceasefire which effectively ended the war with Iran must have seemed a fair enough reason for abandoning some of the restraints in place during the fighting.

The situation is probably worse today than it was at the end of the eighties. Intelligence services in every advanced country are touting their services in economic espionage — aiming in some cases to steal one another's technology and in others to nip rival trade deals in the bud. The struggle for Iraq still goes on, with its former trade partners positioning themselves for a resumption of business and with most trying to curry favour with the regime.

This week Russia and Iraq signed agreements on oil exploitation, to come into effect as soon as sanctions are lifted. Iran is the subject of the same kind of wooing. China saw off President Clinton's attempt to make trade conditional on human-rights "advances" in his first year in office. Now the President signs an order permitting the sale of satellite technology to China on the same day that Chinese exports of nuclear materials to Pakistan are revealed. In Britain, the proposal to deport Mohammad Al-Mas'ari is in clear linear descent from the days of Matrix Churchill.

Clearly, the problem is not that bourgeois politicians and arms dealers lie through their teeth: that is just normal business practice, as more candid mavericks like Alan Clark tend to admit. The problem is that, IN SPITE OF all the customary lying and bribing and arm-twisting, Britain can no longer be guaranteed a lion's share of the lucrative (and militarily essential) arms market, risking its ability to stave off the "death of its industries" and the end of its existence as an "advanced economy".

And it's BECAUSE of that failure, and what it says about Britain's more general decline as an imperialist contender, that all the Scott Reports, Nolan Reports and Mitchell Reports in the world are proving incapable of putting back together the authority and 'parliamentary democratic' credibility the British bourgeoisie once projected internationally, and with which for so long they have browbeaten and confused 'their own' working class.

The lies are coming to the surface of political life BECAUSE the capitalist ruling class is under the hammer of imperialist crisis. The political crisis blowing up around Scott is a function of a much more fundamental class unreadiness to weather the armsracing trade-war storms ahead, and not at all limitable to questions about the rectitude of certain Tory ministers or the sanctity of Westminster's right ever to be 'told the truth' about anything (!), or to 'control the executive' (!!), as Cook and Co. comically pretend.

Labour's stinking imperialist record, currently on fulsome bi-partisan display over Ireland, has long since put them squarely in the same crooked camp as the Tory gun-runners, as will be amply proved again should 'new' Labour scramble back onto the throne.

The only limits on the arms-selling enthusiasm of these yuppie adventurers, as now for the Tory incumbents, will be those met by the unforgiving competitive demands of the market itself, probably henceforth made sharper than ever by the reluctance of would-be buyers or international collaborators to enter into costly longterm commitments with such blatant spivvery as has now been officially shown to lie at the heart of the British capitalist establishment.

Read Lenin. DH [Dominic Hull]