Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
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No 0843 March 5th 1996                                                                                                                                   10p 

Zionist revenge is the real 'terror' tactic, but it will be useless against the Palestinian national liberation struggle's legitimate guerrilla war fight. The West's anti-terror propaganda shoots itself in the foot too over Ireland's winning fight for reunification.

The chorus of screeching philosophical outrage against "terrorism" by Zionist and British imperialism on behalf of the whole 'free world' is a hopeless contradiction and doomed to bitter frustration.

The most grotesque propaganda nonsense is being churned out against the Palestinian and Irish national liberation struggles by the press, Parliament, the pulpit, and the BBC, in the delusion that a stampede of middle-class 'public opinion' can succeed in preserving monopoly capitalist colonial privilege where military tyranny has failed to subdue rebellion.

The pretence that the Palestinian Arabs have gained (and stand to gain) much more by 'peace' than by 'terror' is a pathetic lie. The 'peace' imperialism has offered them is a humiliating reservation treatment on the worst land and with no real political or economic rights, - just like Zionism's parent US imperialism dealt with the USA's original inhabitants, the so-called Red Indians.

And even that miserable 'peace' settlement forced on the weaker Palestinian Arab circles with added pressure from the all–powerful Western imperialist international financial and military dominance and by other Arab nationalist stooge regimes in the pay of the West, — was only conceded as a consequence of the Palestinian intifada rebellion which the Zionist military dictatorship and police-state repression could not break and were forced to compromise with in the end, — conceding at last the pocket-handkerchief sized 'state' in embryo for the Palestinians, initially around Gaza and Jericho, but now becoming a patchwork quilt size and shape with more town autonomy being handed over here and there on the still Zionist-occupied West Bank.

The Zionist 'peace' offering is a total fraud, as every Palestinian and almost every Arab in the world knows. It concedes little or nothing, and far too late, and only as a result of Arab Palestinian total rebellion anyway. The will to fight of the 5-million-strong Palestinian nation, still basically living in enforced exile, can only continue to grow, as the world anti-imperialist struggle grows relentlessly, alongside the ever-increasing technological and social/political understanding and ambition of the entire Third World (now all ripped into enlightened development by the endless expansion of monopoly imperialist industrial and commercial international exploitation.)

Colonial profiteering creates fabulous wealth for tiny handfuls of monopoly-imperialist bourgeois, but it also forces the masses everywhere ever closer towards the redevelopment of international communist revolutionary consciousness.

Hamas is an appallingly religious-reactionary diversion, driving the Palestinians into revolt but an ultimately sterile one, as happened under Islamic fundamentalism to the anti-imperialist revolution in Iran after 1979.

But nevertheless it remains a revolution (where Arafat's conventional bourgeois nationalism has already been forced into such humiliating pro-imperialist class collaboration that Arafat's early downfall must be a near certainty)

And all the time, Hamas is better learning how to wage guerrilla warfare, in line with the steady expansion of the Third World proletariat's technological education anyway, courtesy of capitalist exploitation.

Palestinian national aspirations can never stop strengthening relentlessly. The whole of Palestine was their homeland. Their folk memories go back over a thousand years to every corner of that land. The Zionists are modern colonists, just like all the other modern imperialist colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries by America, Britain, France, and the rest of West Europe, — inspired entirely by the early 20th century European imperialist mentality, born and bred in imperialist Britain and then taken up by Jews in modern imperialist America.

This Zionist colonial state of occupied Palestine will smite formidably. Their savage determination and efficiency to brutally repress the Arabs is in no doubt, — blowing up the family homes of last week's suicide bombers, and inflicting Nazi-style collective punishment also on the refugee camp one of them came from. The Zionists gun down suspects at will and with impunity  — or so they think.

But the Hamas suicide bombers have now given their answer to the Zionist cold-blooded assassination of Yahya Ayash, a leading Hamas militant,  — 120 Zionist colonists killed.

And now the world's most blatant and monstrous imperialism is threatening to turn the whole West Bank and Gaza Strip open prison back into a closed prison under total lock and key plus revenge killings of Arabs whenever they step just slightly out of line.

This can only make even more certain the day when total Arab revolt destroys this colonial prison entirely, which is coming anyway:

The homes in the El-Fawwar refugee camp belonging to the two Islamist suicide bombers responsible for the horrific attacks on February 25 were destroyed yesterday by the Israeli occupying army. It was a collective punishment.

El-Fawwar camp, just a few miles south of the flashpoint West Bank town of Hebron, is, according to one Hebron resident "a large reservoir of human misery". Open sewage channels divide its tiny streets. Young children run about barefoot in the mud.

Neglected by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, El-Fawwar is, according to Khaled Amareh, a well-known Islamic commentator, a time bomb waiting to go off. And it did — last Sunday.

In the aftermath of the bombs, their mothers and other female relatives — the men had already been arrested for questioning — sat under blankets in their leaking and bare brick homes.

With tears in her eyes Ibrahim Sarahna's s mother, aged 60, told of how happy and proud she was for her son, who had died like a hero and had gone to Allah. "He was very quiet and prayed a lot. The children loved him. He was always laughing and smiling," she said.

But now she had no one to look after her. Her five other sons were still in prison.

Ibrahim had been the family's hope. He had registered at Hebron university and was earning money to pay his way by teaching at the local United Nations school.

Majdi Abu Wadeh, described by his mother as "normal" and "very kind", was a high-school student. He had been jailed a few times.

The residents of El-Fawwar are contemptuous of the Israeli-Palestlnian peace process. Most, if they voted at all in January's first Palestinian elections, chose Hamas supporters. In Hebron the turnout was 18 per cent.

Mr Amareh said he was not surprised the two bombers came from El-Fawwar. "It is one of the most despicable camps and a consistent target of Israeli repression because it is just next to an army base." he said.

"Last Sunday's bombs should sound an alarm bell in all of us. If the callousness continues, other camps will try to emulate what the two guys did to make people wake up," he said.

Mr Amareh believes there is a chance the two could have acted independently of Hamas — anyone can make a bomb. "What counts is the decision to make a bomb. The rest is detail" he said. "If you have the determination and the motive, you can do it — and there is no shortage of motive."

Eventually there will be one Palestine, and all the Arabs will go back home. All the postwar incoming colonists of a modern imperialist mentality from New York and other Western cities will go back to where they belong. What few religious-nut Jewish pioneers wish to remain on land which genuinely belongs to no-one else, can stay and become Palestine citizens.

The outraged Western propaganda has tried every avenue for boosting imperialist resistance, including Thought For The Day which likened Hamas to the school bully who should be stood up to and shamed into desisting! And yet it is the Arabs, who have had their land stolen from them and been forced to live permanently in an open prison, who are termed "hysterical" and "fanatical"!

But some of the bourgeois media are beginning to dimly grasp the hopeless contradiction imperialism faces in the modern world, a conflict which only the exploited proletarian masses can eventually win:

The trouble now is, however, that the very methods which Peres must adopt — and insist that his peace-partner adopts too — threaten to undermine them both.

Peres faces a great irony. For so long as extremists on either side have the will to act, the mechanics of the peace process itself now assist them. The perpetrators of last week's bombings came from Hebron, still outside Arafat’s control altogether. But the more territory Israel cedes to Arafat's National Authority, the more territory there is for the "terrorists" to use as a haven.

Altogether, Hamas has killed some 120 Israelis in 15 suicide assaults since its campaign began. After each one Israel goes through the ritual of sealing off the occupied territories. It is both a necessary sop to Israeli opinion and a collective punishment of the Palestinians.

But until now it has always lifted the blockade in the end. For it knows that the Palestinians can no more tolerate an interminable closure than their own people can the terror. But it was becoming a vicious circle. Once the closure is lifted it enables the suicide bomber to infiltrate, but the longer it lasts the more it adds to the reservoir of terrorists, because terror feeds, not least, on the poverty and hardship the closure only serves to increase. Peres cannot but be aware of this vicious circle. But now. in announcing his "total war" on Hamas, he is resorting in apparent desperation to the long contemplated policy of complete and permanent "separation" of Israel from the West Bank and Gaza. That is bad and contradictory enough. But, perhaps worse still, he is demanding of Arafat in the peace process the kind of action against his own people which could break him.

Since he established himself in Gaza, Arafat has undertaken campaigns of repression against Islamic militants which have earned him continuous reproaches from Palestinian, international and even Israeli human rights organisations. He has made himself the object of hatred at least as fierce as that which Peres has earned from his own extremists. When his police killed two activists in their homes, sympathisers’ staged demonstrations calling for his blood.

Yet even before yesterday’s mayhem, both Israelis and Americans were demanding yet more of Arafat, Hamas is much more than its military extension. It is the whole social and religious infrastructure from which it springs, the whole climate of fervour by which it is inspired.

Polls do indeed show that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians oppose the terrorist strikes, largely because of the material hardships they bring in their wake. But as ever the Palestinian heart is in disagreement with the Palestinian head, and every strike is followed by unseemly rejoicing that extends well beyond the immediate family of the latest "martyr".

SO IN such a climate there will always be at least a minority of Palestinians with the will to go on with a terror against which, as Israel's leading commentators acknowledge, there is no real deterrent.

It was the Israelis themselves who, in early January, broke this undeclared ceasefire when they booby trapped the most wanted fugitive of all, "the engineer" Yahya Ayash. The latest bombings were the inevitable, promised retaliation for that.

But the same capitalist press on colonial embarrassments nearer home still cannot avoid spluttering imperialist knee-jerk reactions when it comes to the IRA thorn in the side of embarrassed and paralysed British colonial mess in Ireland. Listen to this bilious retired colonel from his estate near Tunbridge Wells:

WHY, I wonder, do we work so hard to polish Gerry Adams' already gleaming ego. The easy answer — offered out of habit and without much thought — is that the president of Sinn Féin is a potential influence for peace. Two bombs in as many weeks suggest that, if he is arguing for an end to violence, nobody in the IRA is listening. Meanwhile, by treating him as if he is essential to a permanent settlement, we glorify and glamorise intransigence, bigotry and extremism. Long ago, I was taught that terrorists had to be detached from the decent people who give them misguided support. Adams unites sentimental Republicans with the pathological killers who think that murder is part of a political process. Every time he visits America or meets civil servants, the idea that Ireland unfree will never be at peace gets a new lease of life.

Ireland, although wrongly partitioned, has been free for 70 years — admittedly for part of the time an elective dictatorship, but there are a lot of those about. It is absolute nonsense to think of Adams as one of the colonial revolutionaries who went on to lead independent countries. Makarios, Mugabe and Kenyatta spoke for whole nations of subject people who — being denied the vote — had no choice but to challenge their oppressors by force of arms. Northern Ireland is a democracy which rejects the idea of unity with the south. It is democracy that creates Adams’ problem. For he leads — or at least he fronts — the fringe party which De Valera (the father of the Irish Republic) abandoned. And it does not even attract majority support amongst Northern Ireland’s Republican minority.

To suggest that Adams and Gandhi are both part of the same anti-colonial struggle is a shameful perversion of history. It also leads to other logical absurdities which ought to be knocked on the head.

Chief amongst them is Sinn Féin’s response to demands for the surrender of IRA arms — a question which would be less stupid if it were only rhetorical. When, they ask, are the British forces going to contribute to the peace process by leaving Northern Ireland? The proper reply to that demand for reciprocation — terrorists on one side and military "in aid of the civil power" on the other — is: "don’t be silly". The troops are there at the will of an elected government and their presence is legitimised by the approval of a representative parliament. The army has made mistakes, but it is not to be compared with thugs in balaclava helmets who shoot off-duty policemen in their living rooms.

The suspicion that the IRA had got politically above itself — whilst remaining morally beneath contempt — was confirmed by an item in last Friday’s television news. The Government, a young reporter said, is anxious not to push its arguments too far, in case, when a compromise was reached, the murder squads regarded it as "loss of face" and thought that amour-propre requires them to start killing people again. There cannot be much point in trying to negotiate — which means reason — with men whose warped personalities impel them to commit indiscriminate murder so that they will be treated with greater respect.

By giving so much publicity and apparent power to their chief apologist — coffin-carrier to one of the Shankhill Road bombers who blew himself up whilst murdering children in a fish and chip shop queue — we may well be holding the peace process back. We are certainly diminishing the importance which is accorded to John Hume — the man who kept the hope of peace alive and. by his dogged daring, fought on for hope to be made a reality while the rest of us despaired.

The people of Northern Ireland would vote for a ceasefire by a huge majority. And the negotiations for a lasting settlement could begin — attended by all those political parties which had campaigned for peace during the referendum. Lions would lie down with lambs and only jackals would be excluded. Gerry Adams would have to choose between speaking up for decency and being relegated to the status of anachronism. He would end his posturing on the Falls Road under the wall painting of Bobby Sands and it would put him in the proper historical perspective. More important it would permanently detach him from the decent people of Ireland.

This 'democratic' buffoon is in fact Roy Hattersley, recently retired deputy leader of the Labour Party. His bile is that of a lifelong parliamentary fraud who still squirms at the exposure of his own criminal and degenerate uselessness now that the long injustice to Ireland (blameable as much on Labour governments as Tory) is at last to be put right - by the heroic skill and courage of the Irish national-liberation struggle which has finally forced decrepit British imperialism to discuss ending the colonial farce of non-existent 'Northern Ireland'.

Hattersley is such a disgusting worm that he cannot bear to consider what is staring everyone in the face from his remarks, - that it was precisely the 'democracy' which was the fraud from start to finish in 'Northern Ireland', and the one thing which had to be exposed by being blown apart.

Every line of this fat oaf's whinge is deceit and sly innuendo. Adams speaks with passionate conviction, not egoism; but after a lifetime's disgusting dilettantism as a leader of the bogus 'democratic' nonsense in Parliament of a plainly capitalist and ruling-class-run Britain, no wonder Hattersley hates genuine conviction. There is nothing bigoted or extreme in wanting to end the injustice of Ireland' colonial partition.

And who taught that 'terrorism had to be detached from decent people'?

It is the language of colonial-imperialist arrogance the world over. But Hattersley is so stupid from his gluttony that his own point about Makarios, Mugabe, and Kenyatta, - used against Adams in the very next paragraph as 'speaking for whole nations', - shoots his own foot. They were all the 'Godfathers of terrorism' to the then British governments repressing them, (or helping to).

And interestingly enough, all Labour governments. So where was the fat little opportunist climber Hattersley then? Was he denouncing his Labour government on behalf of these "colonial revolutionaries" who "had no choice but to challenge their oppressors by force of arms"?

The ignorance and hypocrisy of this disgusting turd of a human being is so gross that even Goebbels would have been offended.

'Northern Ireland' is not a 'democracy'. It is an artificially ripped-out part of six of Ulster's nine counties, gerrymandered to give British colonial remnants an "elective dictatorship", as this thick-skinned cretin Hattersley actually admits. All talk thereafter, including now, of 'democracy' with respect to the Occupied Zone of Ireland is pure idiocy.

The partition was a monstrous crime against Irish self-determination for all time and must be ended. Thanks only to Sinn Féin and the IRA, a minority of people who had the guts to fight for what is right when the rest of the world was filling its face in contemptible moronic complacency like Hattersley, it soon will be.

Showing the intellect of a dung beetle, the Labourite ends with the insane allegation that the IRA fought its guerrilla war for egoistic kicks, — because he heard some 'young reporter' say so!! And we pay this imbecile £60,000 a year plus expenses to represent us!!

And this police-protected slimeball wants to consider his own responsibility for the tragic casualties of guerrilla war like the Shankill shop children. The politicians of capitalist colonialism responsible for a whole history of imperialist injustice and tyranny never put themselves in the front line on purpose, thus making the risky tactics of guerrilla war inevitable, including their often tragic consequences.

Hume has not brought justice at last, Sinn Féin and the IRA have.

And doesn't the living fraud Hattersley squirm at the dead hero Bobby Sands who starved himself to death to rout British imperialism for what he believed in, - and had contempt for the luxurious club life at Westminster-on-Thames to which he was also an elected MP.

Hattersley's "Don't be silly" imperialist arrogance would make a pig choke, - not an unpleasant thought, incidentally, in having to deal with Sheffield's human tub of lard.

What this obscene stooge of detestable British imperialism should be taking up, of course, is the latest ludicrous insult to the unanswerable Irish nationalist aspiration for reunification of their country, excluding from the Belfast proximity talks the very embodiment of that liberation struggle, - Sinn Féin.

The shameful pictures of Adams & Go being turned away from Ireland's Stormont Castle grounds by a British flunkey will scorch their way round the world and return again and again to haunt the hopelessly out-of-touch British colonialists for yet another catastrophic blunder.

British imperialism is being forced out of its last colonial toe-hold on Ireland by irresistible historical forces, as the capitalist press itself is beginning to admit, however reluctantly:

The bombing has worked.

YESTERDAY'S joint communique by the Prime Minister and his Irish counterpart, John Bruton, was firm in its insistence that neither "violence nor the threat of violence"' will be allowed to influence the Northern Ireland peace process. Yet there was never any doubt about whom their new proposals were aimed at. Less than three weeks ago the IRA, apparently frustrated at what it viewed as British and Unionist prevarication over the calling of all-party talks, ended its ceasefire with a huge bomb in Docklands. Now it knows the response.

Here are London and Dublin bringing all-party talks closer than they were before the killing restarted. What does it matter if, in the interim, Sinn Féin cannot meet ministers, when it can talk to them via the most senior officials from both governments, and Gerard Kelly and Martin McGuinness can lecture them on their failure to move forward towards peace?

Gerry Adams may have had a whale of time in Washington and Dublin, but that never produced a date tor talks. It took a few pounds of Semtex in London to get that. And though the idea of an all-island referendum on violence is unhelpful to the IRA in one sense, since it could produce large-scale backing for a second ceasefire, it is very helpful in another since it would establish a precedent for all Ireland solutions to the province’s problems. As for the renewed demand that Sinn Féin once again forswear violence, well, that did not prove so difficult last time round, did it?

The IRA may indeed restore the ceasefire, should that prove convenient because when it again becomes inconvenient it can again be ended. Republicans will reasonably now conclude that when the political going gets tough they can resume violence with political impunity.

A fixed date for negotiations without preconditions had always been the central demand of Sinn Féin since the moment the IRA declared its cessation of hostilities in August. 1994.

Yesterday, that demand was met. If anything, the hurdles are lower than they were.

The original British demand that all-party talks could not happen unless some arms were first given up was abandoned after the report from the former Senator George Mitchell said the IRA would never agree.

Instead, Mr Major opted for elections whereby the Unionists would sit in the same convention as Sinn Féin, provided they obtained their own electoral mandate.

The Unionists, however, never envisaged that the elections should lead directly into all-party talks.

There is one condition for the republicans to get their seat at the table on June 10: a resumed ceasefire. They have not been asked to surrender any weapons in advance or give any other guarantees that it will be any more credible than the last.

There are also those in the IRA who clearly believe the bombs in London have paid dividends. They will see the latest Anglo-Irish communique as the corollary of resumed violence and will need a lot of persuading to give it up again. Some republicans would be prepared to accept Northern consent in return for some form of London-Dublin condominium over Ulster, especially if they have persuaded themselves that Ulster's population trends will produce a Catholic majority within as little as a decade. Yet even this speculation begs the earlier and more difficult question about where Britain really stands. The furthest that the Government has ever gone towards this hypothetical deal with the IRA is the Peter Brooke phrase, now embodied in the joint framework document, about Britain not having a "selfish or strategic interest" in Northern Ireland. But it is a big leap from there to accepting a condominium, or any other form of shared or diluted sovereignty solution.

The peace process began because Britain was finding the price of the Ulster conflict too high. The explosions in the City and the threats to Heathrow had even greater implications than the already high and seemingly unending security commitments in Ulster.

Having got the ceasefire, London seemed in no hurry to go for a political solution.

If that was true, even at a subconscious level, then the end of the ceasefire shows that it was not an adequate approach. The Canary Wharf bombing marked a policy failure for Britain, which the Government has appeared very eager to remedy ever since. Last week’s Major-Bruton communique showed an agreed sense of urgency which had been lacking on the British side before. It is simply untrue to pretend that British policy has not been influenced by the resumed bombing campaign.

But where is that policy aiming? The question still demands to be asked. If, as logic suggests, the answer is towards some sort of new Anglo-Irish constitutional settlement in Ulster, then Britain is going a very odd way about it.

Instead of approaching each step in the process as an opportunity to secure such a goal, the Government gives every appearance of being dragged and chivvied there against its better judgment by the Irish. The logic of British policy is that Britain ought to get round the table with Sinn Féin.

And Sinn Féin will play a major part in the eventual reunification process. The dying farce of British colonial spite and arrogance is kept alive only by the stooge imperialist mentality and stupidity of the joke Labour 'parliamentary opposition'. 

Build Leninism. Douglas Bell

Battle for revolutionary theory is the key to a correct approach to both party building and work inside broad centrist electoral fronts. The sectarian petty-bourgeois 'left' gets it all wrong again

Scargill's SLP looks well on the way to becoming the mass phenomenon of centrism which Marxist analysis in the Review has long been predicting most appear at a certain stage in the terminal revolutionary crisis of the imperialist system.

Sectarian groups of petty-bourgeois 'revolutionaries', more or less openly Trotskyite, like the CPGB(L), the HDG, the TUG, the various Socialist Alliances, the Militant, the SWP, etc, etc, are all making more or less nonsense of this phenomenon and of what to do about it.

The fake-'left' is in total confusion about what unity is, and where it comes from, - and about how to build 'the' revolutionary party. The CPGB ('Leninists') are one of the more openly entrist Trot groups, describing the SLP as representing "the most important political opportunity for pro-communist party forces in at least a generation," whilst swearing that they are "out to build and strengthen the SLP, not to smash it up for our own narrow advantage."

They are, however, "not in favour of unity for unity's sake", and they "enter the field arguing for a reforged communist party, a revolutionary vanguard organisation of our class". This will be

"a unified revolutionary party with a single leadership, structure, and political line" 

which 

"would allow factions and organised trends, but would fight in a disciplined and unified way on agreed actions. We are for a combat party of the class, structured around a revolutionary programme and the revolutionary action that flows from it." 

They chide other groups like Militant Labour for not joining up with the SLP, but urge them in their various Socialist Alliances to 

"take forward the type of principled joint work that can help resolve differences in practice.

"We must agitate for the SA forces we work with to join and build the Socialist Labour Party as revolutionaries. This will focus the debate away from programmatic questions in the abstract, or the next series of general solidarity meetings, and onto the question of what sort of party we need, - a disciplined Bolshevik organisation, or a 'broad church'-style social democratic organisation with different affiliated organisations? In other words, are we for revolution or reform?"

Leaving aside that this is the crudest-sounding entrism imaginable, moving in on Scargill's party like a bunch of cuckoos or parasites to fashion it exactly how this CPGB sect has manipulated all its previous unprincipled existence (first inside the Soviet communist tent, boasting louder than anyone about 'world official communist authority', and then outside it, pissing in harder than anyone else), – these sectarian ramblings even give bogus 'unity'-posturing a bad name.

Their problem starts and finishes with their apparent absolute ignorance about what constitutes 'unity' for the revolutionary working-class forces.

Clearly, the revolutionary party can only ultimately unite on an agreed and correct (more or less) understanding of the world, - a colossal longterm struggle. Over the last 130 years, Marxist-Leninist science has made prodigious advances for achieving this revolutionary consciousness, but currently there is absolute chaos again worldwide on this question. There is profound ignorance throughout the 'left' on all basic Marxist-Leninist theory, and nothing but the most shallow sectarian opportunism in practice.

Scores of fundamental disagreements reflecting contradictory class positions keep the entire bogus middle-class 'left' at each others throats, disputing the meaning or significance of almost every detail of 20th century history. All of them variously write gibberish about Ireland, or Tienanmen Square, or Solidarnosc, or Gorbachev, or Stalinism, or Trotskyism, or the Labour Party, or nationalism, or imperialist crisis, or ex-Yugoslavia, etc, etc, etc, etc.

This all represents a total philistine swamp of confusion, riddled with petty-bourgeois anti-communism, which could not unite for anything worthwhile in a million years, - whatever the determination was to help put body and soul into unity through joint work in practice.

But without agreement on correct revolutionary theory, - the meaning for class war of all previous history of struggle, and its crucial lessons for all present and future struggles, - then there can be no correct revolutionary practice.

And so all these posturing sectarian appeals for 'unity' for everyone while papering over all the very real differences which have shattered the anti-imperialist struggle for long periods under large areas of capitalism, - are worse-than-useless hot air.

Lenin himself touched upon this problem:

The main point of the Bureau's resolution states unequivocally the following: "Any practical step towards unity must be preceded by a preliminary clarification of existing differences."

This decision is a perfectly correct one.

If we do not want to present the working class with a hodgepodge of miscellaneous elements miscalled "unity", and if we want real unity of action, the first obligatory step in this direction must be to ascertain exactly what the "points of disagreement" are. Let us first ascertain exactly the "points of disagreement" by means of a "general exchange of opinion", and then it will become clear whether it is possible to talk about any practical steps towards unity. That is how the question is formulated in the Bureau's resolution. We whole-heartedly approve of this formulation. We responded to the proposal of the International Socialist Bureau by calling upon the workers calmly and thoughtfully to discuss our disagreements once more, and to express their views on the points of disagreement. We, for our part, promised to do all we could to help familiarise our foreign comrades with the existing differences. The resolution published in Proletarskaya Pravda, No. 9, gives a quite correct summary of the points on which we and the liquidators32 disagree. This is what our reply to the Bureau’s proposal should be, and of course, there could be no other line of action for those who have serious consideration for the Bureau's decision to promote a "general exchange of opinion on the points of disagreement".

But—and this is the whole point—no task is more unpleasant, undesirable, and unacceptable to the liquidators than that of ascertaining our main differences on questions of theory, programme, tactics and organisation. All their subterfuges, distortions and abuse in connection with the Bureau’s resolution are solely designed to obscure its demand for a preliminary clarification of differences. Both Mr. L.S. and Mr. D. run ahead zealously: could we not somehow "unite" without "certificates" giving the ideological "service record" of those uniting? Could we not do without "quotations from old journals and newspapers"?— Mr. L. S. worries. Could we not stop recalling "the past"?— Mr. D. pleads. We understand them very well: there is nothing pleasant for Mr. L. S. in the recollections of articles about the "underground" (Luch No. 15 [101]), or for Mr. D. in recollections of the "fight-for-legality" slogan. 

We shall not deny the liquidators the amnesty for the "errors of the past", for which they plead. The past, as such, does not interest us; what does interest us is the work of today and tomorrow. As regards that work, we want to know whether the campaign against the "underground" conducted in the liquidationist press is to continue, whether they will continue to argue that the "three pillars"33 are inapplicable at the present time, whether they will defend the distortion of the programme by the August bloc people34 and so forth.

The clarification of these questions and of the degree to which we differ on them is, according to the Bureau’s resolution, a precondition to any progress towards unity, if we are not to accept "unity" in the liquidationist meaning of lumping together, without regard for principles, all who care to call themselves Social-Democrats.

We say: the organisation to be created as a result of unity should be based on such and such principles—acceptance of the old programme, a definite form of organisation, uncurtailed slogans,35 resolute tactics, etc. But you immediately declare that this formulation of the programme, tactics and tasks of the organisation, is nothing but a "complete list of liquidators’ sins". We are sorry for you, but neither we nor the Bureau know of any method of building new organisations other than by clarifying their programme, their tactics, and so forth.

We are guilty of a still more grievous sin, however. Not only have we proposed the conditions for the creation of an organisation, i.e., clarified the terms of peace, but we have, moreover, submitted these terms to the bar of the workers’ opinion.

We maintain that there is no other way of carrying out the Bureau’s decision than the one we have chosen.

The Bureau calls upon all those who profess to be Social-Democrats to clarify their differences as a preliminary step towards solving the problem of unity.

The resolution we published responded to the Bureau’s appeal by giving a "list" of views on the basic questions of programme, tactics and organisation, and by submitting our "list" to the workers, for their consideration. If the liquidators were to follow our example, we would have, in the more or less near future, the clearly formulated opinions of all parties. 	

But the liquidators, of course, will to the very last shun this path, for the simple reason that neither a precise formulation of their political views nor the submission of these views to the bar of the broad circles of the workers is in the interests of their group.

Under these circumstances they will inevitably strive to substitute for the definite "clarification of differences" demand by the Bureau, petty personal squabbles, distortions, and wilful misrepresentations.

ONCE MORE ABOUT I.S.B. AND LIQUIDATORS 
Proletarskaya Pravda No. 11 December 19, 1913

Trotsky, however, has never had any "physiognomy" at all; the only thing he does have is a habit of changing sides, of skipping from the liberals to the Marxists and back again, of mouthing scraps of catchwords and bombastic parrot phrases.

In Borba you will not find a single live word on any controversial issue.

This is incredible, but it is a fact.

The question of the "underground"? Not a word.

Does Trotsky share the views of Axelrod, Zasulich, F. D., L. S. (Luch No. 101) and so forth? Not a murmur.

The slogan of fighting for an open party? Not a single word.

The liberal utterances of the Yezhovs and other Luchists on strikes? The annulment of the programme on the national question? Not a murmur.

The utterances of L. Sedov and other Luchists against two of the "pillars’"'? Not a murmur. Trotsky assures us that he is in favour of combining immediate demands with ultimate aims, but there is not a word as to his attitude towards the liquidator method of effecting this "combination"!

Actually, under cover of high-sounding, empty, and obscure phrases that confuse the non-class-conscious workers, Trotsky is defending the liquidators by passing over in silence the question of the "underground",  by asserting that there is no liberal-labour policy in Russia, and the like.

Trotsky delivers a long lecture to the seven Duma deputies, headed by Chkheidze, instructing them how to repudiate the "underground" and the Party in a more subtle manner. This amusing lecture clearly points to the further break-up of the Seven. Buryanov has left them. They were unable to see eye to eye in their reply to Plekhanov. They are now oscillating between Dan and Trotsky, while Chkheidze is evidently exercising his diplomatic talents in an effort to paper over the new cracks.

And these near-Party people, who are unable to unite on their own "August" platform, try to deceive the workers with their shouts about "unity"! Vain efforts!

Unity means recognising the "old" and combating those who repudiate it. Unity means rallying the majority of the workers in Russia about decisions which have long been known, and which condemn liquidationism.

But the liquidators and Trotsky, the Seven and Trotsky, who tore up their own August bloc, who flouted all the decisions of the Party and dissociated themselves from the "underground" as well as from the organised workers, are the worst splitters. Fortunately, the workers have already realised this, and all class-conscious workers arc creating their own real unity against the liquidator disrupters of unity.

BREAK-UP OF THE 'AUGUST'  BLOC Put Pravdy No 37, March 15, 1914

The publicists’ alliance that we see today among the leaders of Narodism (Chernov, Rakitnikov and Sukhanov) and various Social-Democratic intellectualist factions that are either openly opposed to the "underground", i.e., the workers’ party (the liquidators*, Dan, Martov and ChereIvanin) or else help these liquidationist workerless groups (Trotsky and Slier, Bazarov, Lunacharsky and Plekhanov), is in fact nothing more nor less than an alliance of bourgeois intellectuals directed against the workers.

We regard Pravdism as the expression of the workers' unity on the basis of genuine recognition of the "underground" and of definite decisions that co-ordinate and guide tactics in the old spirit (the decisions of January 1912 and of February and the summer of 1913).

It is a fact that this workers’ unity is built on the firm basis of integral, complete and, in principle, consistent decisions on all questions affecting the lives of the Marxist workers.	

Bourgeois intelligentsia's methods of struggle June 1914.

Nevertheless, formally and outwardly, the Narodniks appear to be much more "united’ than the Marxists are. There is no definite split among the Narodniks, no intense, stubborn, systematic and prolonged inner struggle among them. It seems, at first glance, as though they are all the time held together by certain common ties. In their literature one constantly comes across proud references to Narodnik "unity", in contrast with the "Marxist" (and most often "Bolshevik") "tendency towards discord and splits".

Those who want to understand the meaning and significance of what is taking place in the working-class and socialist movements in Russia must ponder very, very carefully over this contraposing of "Marxist splits" and "Narodnik unity".

Among us Marxists and near-Marxists there are also no few groups and grouplets which are practically almost independent of one another, and which sedulously preach "unity" (quite in the Narodnik spirit), and still more sedulously condemn "Marxist splits".

What does it all mean? Are we to envy "Narodnik unity"? Are we to seek the reasons for this distinction in the pernicious qualities of "certain" "leaders" (a very widespread method) or in the Marxists’ pernicious tendency towards "dogmatism", "intolerance'’, and so forth?

Consider the facts. These tell us that the Narodniks are far more tolerant and conciliatory, that they are far more "united", and that the abundance of groups among them does not lead to sharp splits. At the same time the facts tell us quite incontrovertibly that the Narodniks are politically impotent.

Strange, is it not? Are not the "conciliatoriness'", and all the other splendid spiritual qualities of the Narodniks merely sterile things?

That is exactly what they are—sterile! The "unity" of the varied intellectualist little groups is bought by the Narodniks at the price of their utter political impotence among the masses. And with us Marxists, too. it is the Trotskyists,42 the liquidators, the "conciliators", and the "Tyszka-ites",43 those who shout loudest about group unity, who display the same intellectualist impotence.

This conclusion is that attempts to create "unity" by means of "agreements" or "alliances" among intellectualist groups, which in fact express tendencies that are injurious to the working-class movement (Narodism, liquidationism, etc.), lead only to complete disintegration and impotence. Both Narodism and liquidationism have proved this by their lamentable example.

Only in opposition to these groups and grouplets (in a strenuous struggle, which is inevitable under bourgeois conditions and amidst a host of petty-bourgeois vacillations) is real unity building up among the working-class masses led by the majority of the class-conscious proletarians.

Naïve people will ask: How are we to distinguish the intellectualist groups which are causing damage to the working-class movement by disintegrating it and condemning it to impotence, from that group or groups which ideologically express the working-class movement, rally, unite and strengthen it? There are only two ways of distinguishing one from the other: theory and practical experience. It is necessary seriously to examine the theoretical content of such trends of thought as Narodism and liquidationism (the principal petty-bourgeois trends that are disintegrating the working-class movement). It is necessary to carefully study the practical experience of the mass working-class movement as a means of rallying the majority of class-conscious workers around integral and considered decisions.

He who gives close thought to the theory of Marxism and close attention to the practical experience of the last few years will realise that the elements of a genuine workers’ party are rallying in Russia in spite of the motley, noisy, and vociferous (but essentially futile and harmful) groups of Narodniks, liquidators, and so forth. Unity of the working class is emerging from the disintegration of these groups and their isolation front the proletariat.

Narodism and Liquidationism Proleterskaya Pravda No 12 December 20 1913

The revisionist and Trotskyist and reformist groups have been disintegrating rapidly over the last 10 years, helping to re-establish the correctness of Marxist-Leninist science. But only on the continued relentless exposure of non-Leninist muddleheadedness around the workers movement can this embryonic revival carry on developing.

Entryism into Scargill's centrist movement misses the point, which is not to try to turn it into the revolutionary party (which would be impossible without exhaustively shaking up every vexed historical question of Marxist-Leninist theory and practice), but to support it as a broad electoral front where a revolutionary-socialist critique of imperialist crisis can be properly and usefully (for all concerned) argued for, and worked for in practice too, thus further helping clarify everyone's
understanding.

The CPGB's wish to impose their own pet DIY ideas of "Bolshevik organisation" self-delusion on Scargill is just about the silliest irrelevance imaginable. Any broad centrist-movement development would properly steamroller over such inconsequential pedantry from "revolutionary" constitution-mongers.

But equally properly, a broad centrist movement could be engaged on issues of policy, strategy, and tactics against the parliamentary-imperialist status quo, which could be more or less helpful to a revolutionary education of the working class depending on how the arguments go.

The turn by a significant swathe of 'left' trade-unionism towards political centrism is irrelevant to the structural-discipline culture of a tightly-knit Leninist cadre party, but does place huge demands on the correctness of revolutionary theory in its very broadest sweep.

For example, a dramatically successful SLP could take everyone's interests forward with a sound policy on Ireland, exposing Labour's wretched bi-partisan toadying to British imperialist decadence. Such a policy development would benefit from grasping what is the international-balance-of-class-forces situation concerning Ireland, and what next feasible developments are there which might aid and encourage the worldwide anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle and understanding.

The EPSR's Marxist-Leninist method aims to provide exactly this scientific analysis of all phenomena in the crisis of the world imperialist system and its repercussions internationally and reflections in class and national struggles, without which building the party of world socialist revolution is impossible, and making useful experiences or advances within broad centrist or soviet movements equally unlikely.

For the Trots to be telling Scargill's centrist movement their profoundest wisdom on the need for "a single leadership, structure, and political line" but with "factions and organised trends" which would somehow nevertheless "fight in a disciplined and unified way" to create a "combat party of the class" is not just putting the cart before the horse in a big way but is all horsemanure anyway. A new well-supported Leninist cadre party may well eventually emerge again in Britain and the world partly via broad electoral-front developments around the SLP; but an agreed world view is essential first, and of that there is not only now not the slightest sign among the Trots and revisionists, but there never has been. Crucial failures to successfully elaborate Marxist-Leninist science had begun to sow ultimately fatal misunderstandings in the international anti-imperialist struggle from the 1920s onwards. But re-analysing all the subsequent developments, identifying the mistakes, and resolving all the differences over them, has never been what the sectarian petty-bourgeois 'revolutionaries' have wanted, nor do they relish it now. Their long history of anti-Soviet and anti-communist opportunism makes them what they are and what they unfailingly always eventually manage to present themselves as being, - a philistine irrelevant poison in the workers movement. And that especially applies to their idiot pretence of knowing something about how a revolutionary cadre party of Leninist theory should be organised. The appalling back-stabbing factional record of 57 varieties of Trotskyite sectarianism tells its own ridiculous story.

The way forward for anyone who wants to help get the party of Leninist revolutionary theory back on the move is to seek agreement about how the world is to be analysed from a scientific Marxist point of view. If a correct understanding of the inter-imperialist trade-war economic crisis, of Labourism, Scargillism, the Middle East, Ireland, the former USSR, Chinese revisionism and its workers state, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, can begin to be worked out, then the problems of leadership and organisational structures will remain minor issues. Lenin's party was never disoriented by such matters. Post Lenin, they became huge difficulties in all directions because of mistakes in the revolutionary theoretical analysis of the world that began to be made by the Stalinist circles, and even worse by the Trotskyite circles.

The EPSR's analysis is there to be shot at by allcomers, which is the only healthy way to proceed. It will stand or fall by whether or not it is able to survive the test of time, of practice. In other words, has the Review's attempted Marxist interpretation of the world of the last 16 years begun to be able to correct its mistakes and to get things right. It is in doing this that 'the' revolutionary party is going to be built, not any other way. Read Lenin. Support the Review.

Reg Potts

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. 160. Friday 1st March 1996 

Asian capitalism won't be able to save itself from warmongering imperialist slump, let alone British monopoly capitalist decadence.

The West's Bangkok summit with the Asian world, underneath all the phony economic optimism, hooey about human rights and calculated anti-communist paranoia whipped up against China, is really about the ever more desperate search for a way out of the deepening imperialist crisis.

Recent commentary on the dizzying growth of the arms trade in south-east Asia shows what a lure such pockets of growth are for market-hungry capital, and also what depths of fearful armed instability this scramble to escape the crisis imposes with redoubled ferocity upon the peoples of the region:

Last year south-east Asia overtook the Middle East as the world’s third largest weapons market after the US and Europe, buying over $9bn in weapons - 22 per cent of world sales.

This spectacular shift into high-tech long-range aerial and naval capabilities, including talk by several countries of acquiring modern submarine fleets is leading many to claim that Asean is on the brink of a dangerous arms race.

Thailand’s request to the US government for 16 F/A-18 jet fighters equipped with advanced AIM-120 air-to-air missiles has brought this concern across the Pacific to the US Congress, which must approve the sale.

Noting that no other country in the region had such missile technology. Mr Lord said: "We want to help Thailand with legitimate defence needs but we also have proliferation concerns with respect to certain advanced missiles and the potential competition in this area."

Analysts predict that average Asean defence expenditure will rise by 2 per cent a year in real terms over the next decade. The prospect of the region being home to 22 submarines, more than 1,000 jet fighters and remotely piloted vehicles backed up by high-altitude air defence systems and controlled by electronic warfare systems is within reach.

Unexpected flare-ups could boost that figure. "China’s decision [last month] to buy Su27 jet fighters off Russia is not likely to result in a slowdown of Asean defence spending," said Prof Julius Caesar Parrenas at the University of Asia Pacific in Manila.

"The most likely scenario for conflict over the next few years is probably some sort of naval skirmish between China and one of the Asean claimant to the Spratlys," said Mr Herman Kraft at the Institute for Strategic and Development Studies in Manila. "It is difficult to envisage actual military conflict between any Asean members."

Washington's pious caution over proliferation masks on one side fear that US stranglehold on the region's arms trade could be under challenge, and on the other the related fear that the speed and unevenness of cocky local capitalist development could further destabilize the shaky world dollar economy, with disastrous consequences for all of capitalism.

But once Sunday School is over, all such fears will as ever get trampled down in the rush to win contracts, with US imperialism doing its damnedest to stay ahead of the field. Because what is at stake for each capitalist can never in the end be 'the free market system' in general, but the survival and expansion of the particular mass of surplus capital of which that capitalist is master (and slave).

Of course the firmness with which socialist China defends its sovereignty, or even fights its own corner of the trade war which imperialist crisis imposes, will enter into the calculations of all involved in the struggle for Asian market domination, certainly. Dividing the imperialist enemy along his own self-inflicted trade war lines has famously proved its worth in the past defence of workers states, and is a tactic that is bound to be revisited in future struggles.

But it's not socialist China's existence or intentions which are at the root of imperialist struggles for domination of Asian markets, in arms, cars, financial services and everything else, but the trade-war pressures building up inside imperialism itself.

China's problems over the Spratlys are a relatively insignificant by-product of a much more general deterioration in international relations under pressure of imperialist crisis. And the latest flare-up over disputed islands, since Greece and Turkey's recent spat in the Aegean, has taken place, not between Pyongyang and Seoul, but between capitalist Seoul and capitalist Tokyo, with both laying claim to two rocky islets in the Sea of Japan. (Koreans burned Japanese flags after Japan's foreign minister complained about a wharf being built on the islets, on which there is already a detachment of Korean soldiers.) Yet both are US 'allies', and between them are 'host' to nearly 10,000 US troops. Such developments are a measure of the degree to which the decay of America's postwar authority and the renewal of imperialism's crisis are putting pressure back on older fault-lines, with one Korean reportedly telling his Japanese TV audience that "Japan will never understand unless it is conquered and occupied for 30 years".

However much the 'free world' hopes to steer the warmongering pressures first onto China (as, in the '30s, it was conspired to push the warmongering onto the Soviet Union), and however 'unthinkable' today's scribblers find the prospect of respectable ASEAN members ever going to war with each other, it is in reality the cut-throat competition for market domination which is driving all this, and cannot long be denied its pound of flesh.

Under the thin guise of plaintively wishing America's role in the postwar status quo could indefinitely be maintained so the fat Japanese bourgeois could go on coining it under a Cold War umbrella of dollars and NATO warheads, it soon enough becomes clear exactly why Japanese imperialism will go into the trade war storms ahead armed to the nuclear teeth:

KUCHI Miyazawa, Japan’s former prime minister and an adviser to the government, has warned that if his country loses or throws off the protection of the US defence umbrella, it will "be forced to become a nuclear power". His preference is that "Japan should not be a big military power in the coming century - provided that Japan, the US and China can effectively work out a cooperation agreement."

Given the many pitfalls in the way of such a project, he said, "there has to be a call to China to join us in this cooperation." But without the US as a balancing power, he argued, peace and security in Asia could be threatened.

"Some of the Asian countries believe that Japan is the real threat," Mr Miyazawa said. "Some believe that China is a threat. So the linchpin is the American presence."

If the Americans withdrew, "and if China became a big military power and was seen as threatening Japan, then it may lead to Japan becoming a big military power."	

He continued: "It may be easier for Americans to understand if they realise that the alternative [to the US military presence in Asia] will be a nuclear Japan.

Among the younger generation there was a growing nationalism, a desire for self-reliance and a rejection of the former occupying power.

"In the foreign ministry many younger officials wonder why Japan should not stand on its own feet."

He declared himself encouraged by the "quick reaction of the Americans" to the popular outrage against US military bases that followed the rape last year of a 12-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl. He believes Washington will come up with a plan to shift the burden of bases from tiny Okinawa.

The island forms only 0.6 per cent of Japan’s land area, but is an increasingly reluctant host to 75 per cent of the US bases.

Mr Miyazawa cautioned resurgent nationalists: "I tell them, remember that the Germans were the smartest people in the world and they engaged in two world wars, lest our memories should fade."

Or as Kohl might say: don't you go and make us do something we might regret.

Whilst for form's sake China must be painted as the threat to peace, not far beneath the surface of such remarks is angry resentment at the way America's threatened retreat into protectionism is to blame for making Japan fend for itself in the trade war ahead - with America itself, not China, looming as the major antagonist, and with the 'duty' once again falling to Tokyo to 'stabilize' the volatile Pacific Rim behind some new version of the "Co-Prosperity Sphere" of Axis times.

Meanwhile, monopoly capitalists hoping to rejuvenate their own class rule by infusions of virgins' blood from Asia's 'miracle' economies had better think twice. These capitalist 'tigers' sprang from a jungle where the boom was not yet exhausted and where the geopolitical bottom line remained the phony balance of the Cold War and the overarching authority of the US dollar, even where Asian economic growth wa6 increasingly at the expense of America's own competitive performance.

The jungle looks very different today, now that relative US economic decline has ripened into the crisis of world imperialist society, unable much longer to organize the division of the market spoils around the unchallenged domination of the mighty dollar, but incapable so far of even making a theoretical description of any credible alternative arrangement, much less achieving it in practice.

However full of Eastern promise such new Asian markets may appear to jaded US and European capital, there is no escape hatch there from the problems of the world dollar economy.

This is as much true when it comes to the central question of indigestible surplus capital choking off productive growth.

In the competition for domination of monopoly capital markets (what are politely called 'financial services'), no less than in the race to build up, deploy and sell arms, the bourgeoisie stakes its whole credibility as an imperialist player.

As examined last week, ever more ingenious ways are being sought of postponing the need for capital to be invested in actual production, to the extent that some banks will actually opt to 'buy back' their own shares as a way of mopping up their uninvestable surplus capital.

If this looks insane to ordinary common sense, apparently it doesn't look much better to some bankers either:

STANDARD Chartered, - which has been at the centre of intense bid speculation, insisted yesterday that it was not interested in a merger with any other bank.

Chief executive Malcolm Williamson dismissed suggestions that Standard Chartered was not big enough to compete, saying it was in a good position to take advantage of Asian growth. He also stressed the contrast with Barclays, which this week bought its own shares because it has too much capital. "Banking isn't like selling soap flakes — all about market share," Mr Williamson said. "I'd rather be the hardest-punching middleweight than a fat sumo wrestler in the ring with Mike Tyson." Asked if he planned to follow Barclays’ example of giving back surplus capital to shareholders. Mr Williamson said: "Certainly not. Our markets are growing fast and we get very good returns, so we need the capital. It is different in OECD countries, where you don't know where the growth is coming from and there is heavy competition." The main increase in business came in personal banking in Asia, with the troubled investment side of the bank continuing to report a loss of £20 million. Standard Chartered is still in talks with Asian buyers of its securities business, which is thought to have been responsible for the bulk of the loss. Growth of personal banking in Asia outside Hong Kong pushed up the region's contribution to profits to a third. But Hong Kong still accounts for another third of profits, raising fears about the future in the light of the colony's transfer to China next year.

Standard Chartered is expanding rapidly in countries such as Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia, where it has been signing up hundreds of thousands of new credit card customers.

This attempt to avoid repeating Barclays' mistakes, by making a big show of washing its hands of merger mania and finding an external market for its surplus capital instead of reabsorbing it through share buy-backs, guarantees no healthier a future for Standard than for Barclays. Stoking up credit-fed consumer boom by mass distribution of plastic cards left a big enough hangover in Britain. What's it going to be like the morning after right across south east Asia?

Carrying on as if the new Aslan economies were somehow immune to the crisis afflicting the whole 'free market' system is a bizarre reflection on capitalism's capacity for self-delusion - especially when it concerns Hong Kong, where the crisis is further exacerbated by the decolonizing throes of British imperialist decadence, as the bourgeois press itself documents:

The size and spread of the profits of HSBC Holdings, owners of Midland Bank, the HongkongBank Group and Marine Midland in North America, sets it apart from other UK-based institutions. With its operating profits of £3.7 billion it dwarfs even food giant Unilever, which is often viewed as being more like a small country than a consumer products firm. The same, more or less, applies to HSBC which, despite all the changes it has seen, remains Hong Kong’s flagship.

The biggest question over HSBC’s future performance is not over investment banking, which attracted some attention because of the fall in dealing profits, but over the core of the business — Hong Kong itself.

Despite all the diversification HongkongBank, including its Chinese offshoot Hang Seng Bank, remains the biggest profits contributor with a 16 per cent increase in earnings to £1.4 billion. That is very impressive, but what investors also need to consider before staking funds in HSBC is what the regulators are now calling Hong Kong risk.

It is just 15 months until the country moves under the control of Beijing.

The impact of that on a lending portfolio which has 30.7 per cent of its book in residential mortgages and a further 16.2 per cent in construction and property ought to be closely considered.

Confidence in the financial and property sectors can turn on a sixpence and it is not yet entirely clear that HSBC, despite its move to London, has fully minimised those risks in its balance sheet.

A HASTILY arranged set of three-party meetings took place yesterday over the future ownership of Trafalgar House amid growing speculation that Jardine Mattheson off-shoot Hongkong Land is ready to surrender control of the cruise liners and construction conglomerate.

Kvaemer, the Norwegian shipbuilding and oil services group which saw its overtures to the Amec construction group rebuffed last month, responded to intense market speculation with a statement on Tuesday saying it was interested in agreeing takeover terms with Trafalgar.

So as the sun finally sets on the last monopoly capitalist remnants of Britain's stinking 'no Chinese or dogs' colonial arrogance, the QE2 'floating slum’ gets knocked down to the Norwegians! Even the Australian bourgeoisie have seen which way the wind is blowing.

After all, if Asian capitalism is supposed to be a model for British industry to follow, and the preferred target for the export of British capital, Australian capitalism had better forget the Commonwealth and learn to love the pursuit of Co-Prosperity with its Asian neighbours.

So far as British relations with Asian capitalism go, the boot is on the other foot, with Japanese, Korean and Malaysian capital opportunistically expanding in a few non-unionized cheap-labour productive pockets of what is otherwise largely a British industrial waste-ground. The degenerate uselessness of British monopoly capitalism, likely soon to be pushed even further towards well-deserved oblivion by the loss of its Irish as well as its Chinese colony, is in no position to take aggressive new neocolonial advantage of opportunities in the Asian world, - even if capitalism really had a future there, or anywhere, which it doesn't.

Build Leninism. DH [Dom Hull - ed]