Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 0844 March 12th 1996                                                                                                                                   10p 

Sick colonial warmongering by US imperialism and its stooges will ultimately re-educate workers that all anti-imperialism is grist to the mill. Patient Sinn Féin winning.

The desperate measures of bourgeois-idealist national liberation struggles are still creating turmoil throughout middle-class public opinion in the capitalist countries.

The Hamas bombs, and the disgracefully ignorant, unthinking, and hysterical response all round the Western world to that development, - have helped whip up the doomed chauvinist stupidity which is going to hasten the total collapse of the 'free world' exploitation system.

As the decadent dregs of British imperialism continue with their arrogant heads in the sand over the need to openly acknowledge Sinn Féin/IRA's victory in the independence war and to openly accept the justice of Ireland's reunification, destroying the sick and fraudulent 'unionist' bluster in the process, - so US imperialism and its stooges continue their ludicrous delusions of being able to keep Palestine colonised by Zionist usurpers, China divided from its province of Taiwan, and socialist Cuba under tyrannical embargo and the permanent threat of re-conquest.

In every case, the out-of-date remnants of sordid imperialist diktat are trying to cling on to brutal military superiority to get their way whilst condemning the anti-imperialist struggles for their "violence" and "refusal to accept the necessity of doing things the democratic way".

In every case, this is lying propaganda and a cover-up using the status quo, itself the result of past imperialist undemocratic tyranny and a continuing gross injustice, to force the anti-imperialist movement to jump through hoops or put up with further damage to its own interests.

But in all cases, however long it takes and whatever temporary retreats might be forced onto the national liberation struggles, it is clearly imperialism which is going to lose eventually. The world of 'Western freedom' is a chronically diseased racket of arms race bullying, stooge fascist stunts, and colonial exploitation. 

As well as being profoundly unjust and a racist nonsense, this Western capitalist hegemony and its 'market domination' is fast becoming an economic disaster for everybody as well as politically and socially intolerable for the vast majority. It is historically doomed to be overthrown by the forces of mass proletarian revolution.

The latest panic on Wall Street may yet again fizzle out into nothing, - this time. But next time? The whole point being that panic fear of a new Wall Street Crash and an arms-stoking inter-imperialist trade-war. Depression is now simply never out of the picture. Not one single word has ever yet been written disproving the Marxist science of economic crisis, nor can it be, or will it be ever written. The very nature of the capitalist system is periodic catastrophic crisis when so-called 'surplus' capital at the climax of every credit-driven inflationary boom must be wiped out before the survival of the fittest capital can return to making profits.

This weekend's panic was apparently over fears that US interest rates would have to start climbing again soon to head-off further inflationary fears, thereby slowing much-needed economic expansion once again.

But all that can really be guaranteed in such a convoluted psychological jungle is that fears about losing a trouble-free profitable future are now besetting monopoly-capitalist interests all over the 'free' world, coupled with specific anxiety that the chronic budget deficits of US imperialism, repeatedly built up in order to save the West from slump and communist revolution, are finally going to prove unrepayable and will destroy all confidence in the US dollar itself, the worldwide capitalist currency, bringing to civilisation the greatest chaos in all history.

It is to the background of this ridiculous mess and anarchic confusion that the US imperialist state continues to dictate to the rest of the world how all affairs are to be conducted.

The American imperialist bourgeoisie feels free to tell independent Cuba how to behave, threatening it with economic ruin and worse if it does not tolerate armed provocations along its international frontiers from the deposed Cuban ruling class (stooges of US imperialism and the Mafia), - just because Cuba is only 90 miles off the southern coast of Florida, USA, (trying to turn the clock back to when Cuba was literally a plaything of US colonial interests before the world-shattering Castro revolution won independence.)

But at the same time, Washington is threatening military terror to China for daring to warn its own Chinese province of Taiwan against the separatist intentions of the temporary US imperialist stooge regime there, despite Taiwan being only 90 miles off China's southern coast and an unchallengeably Chinese-speaking integral part of China.

Hopefully, the communist regime in Beijing will continue to tell US imperialism to mind its own business or else. In China's case, the combination of the West being terrified of communism plus racially fearing the 'unknown yellow peril' has meant little opposition so far to America's dangerous bullying brinkmanship, grotesquely interfering in China's internal affairs. 

But on Cuba there is already outspoken hostility to Washington's outrageous vindictiveness towards the socialist regime there, contempt for the disgusting Cuban reactionaries in Florida being bribed and trained to their dirty tricks by the CIA and other aggressive imperialist circles, and dumbfounded amazement at the USA's stupidity in potentially allowing its trade relations with the rest of the world to be harmed by fascist calls to extend the embargo against Cuba. 

This would mean imposing sanctions on every country which traded with Cuba, virtually the whole of the rest of the world, as well as allowing all Cuba traders to be sued in American courts for 'profiting from US property confiscated by communist Cuba', etc. 

But even the capitalist press and some less barmy Cuban reactionary exiles are admitting that the warlike stunts by the Cuban Contras in Florida are intolerable to Havana, and can do no good anyway:

Brothers to the Rescue is no humanitarian project.

'This was the product of the extreme right-wing of intransigent and intolerant people who love political control. They want a war against Fidel and while they customise their organisation for humanitarian reasons, in reality they seek confrontation. The result is four dead.' 

SITTING in his Miami office the former Cuban guerilla leader, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, laughs at the idea that the aerial confrontation was anything but predictable. 'Everybody here knew something was going to happen to the planes,' he said. It was an open secret.'

Now he runs Cambio Cubana, a group dedicated to change on the island through exclusively peaceful means.

Others agree. You can taunt a rattlesnake only so long before it bites and, like a rattler, Castro had given a loud warning,' said Miami Herald columnist and novelist Carl Hiaasen.

Brothers to the Rescue has flown into Cuban airspace 25 times in less than two years, 'causing the authorities to warn the US that the group must be prepared to face the consequences'. The last complaint came in January when Basulto buzzed Havana, dropping pro-democracy leaflets.	

The predictability of the tragedy was reinforced when, the day before the fatal flight was to lift off, Juan Pablo Roque, a former Cuban air force pilot and member of Brothers to the Rescue, turned out to be a double agent and defected back to Cuba. At roughly the same time, Richard Nuccio, the senior US policymaker on Cuba, was on the phone to the Miami Herald predicting a clash between the Brothers and the Cuban government.

Cessnas left the sun-drenched tarmac of Miami's Opa-locka airport. Flying south, Basulto, the lead pilot, radioed Havana to announce that he was crossing the twenty-fourth parallel, where Cuban air control takes over.

The Cubans warned him off but the Cessnas flew on, Basulto dipping his aircraft three miles into Cuban airspace before heading north towards Miami and home. Behind him, the two other planes took the full force of Castro's retaliation.

'I was here when I heard the news about the planes being shot down,' said Emilio Caballero, sitting under the portraits of dead warriors in Alpha 66's heat-dulled offices. First there was great sadness, and then we got mad. Very mad.'

Like Menoyo, Caballero knows Castro personally, having gone on double dates with him before the revolution, but unlike Menoyo he still talks war. We have the capability, the boats, the guns, the men and the women to be there in 48 hours.'

Outside, old soldiers roused themselves to watch a rerun of Hawaii Five-O.

Castro said that he was sitting at home reading a book about perestroika — which may be a joke — when the planes were shot down. 'They are professionals' he said of his pilots. 'They did what they believed was right but I take responsibility for what happened. We have been patient but there are limits.'

The Cuban state organised a rally denouncing the Americans and supporting Cuba's right to defend its borders, but the people just seem tired. Much exposed to violence over the years, they have watched exile groups strafe Cuban beaches and invade the island, killing fellow islanders in their attempts to bring about a fresh revolution. As many of Miami's exile groups know, the Cuban people have become notoriously unsympathetic towards latter-day revolutionaries.

Meaning counter-revolutionaries, of course, which is all they are on Taiwan, - counter-revolutionary remnants from the old regime who only escaped being overthrown by communist revolution in 1949 along with the rest of China's capitalist reactionaries because of US imperialist intervention. But their days are numbered, as are those of the Cuban Contras.

The more blatant savagery of Zionist imperialism tends to create even greater bourgeois confusion over the 'terror' by Hamas than by China or Castro. The Trotskyite weasels of the CPGB, for example, while so far managing to avoid running for cover too grossly on the problems of 'terror tactics' raised against the USA, China and Castro, - cannot wait to put the boot into Hamas to announce their solidarity with their fellow petty-bourgeois of Islington by declaring:

Hamas has used suicide bombers to kill more than 60 people over an eight-day period. The bombings are a display of individual and indiscriminate terror by a reactionary organisation.

So, presumably, long live the state of 'Israel', the colonial stooge of US imperialist domination of the Middle East, is the logical conclusion of these bogus 'communists'. It seems that Brother Arab can fight to regain his Palestinian homeland from its Zionist usurpers just so long as he avoids anything as 'unpleasant' as Islamic martyrdom to gain vengeance for the millions killed, maimed, imprisoned, or exiled by their Zionist-imperialist conquerors since 1945. It is difficult to be contemptuous enough of such 'Marxist' frauds who are just panicked into this sad collapse of courage and reason merely by the pressure of petty-bourgeois public-opinion hysteria, manipulated by the disgusting capitalist press.

Islamic fundamentalism is certainly a reactionary ideology, but then so is all bourgeois nationalism when compared to communism. But that is not the argument. The argument is about the right of national self-determination sentiments in China, Cuba, Ireland, or Palestine to fight to remove or resist foreign or stooge imperialist domination in any way they choose, - a basic Marxist revolutionary understanding, of enormous importance and value to the whole world anti-imperialist struggle. Let imperialism in Occupied Palestine suffer from whatever damage its disgusting and backward tyranny there provokes.

And the Zionist provocation there is unending, suicidal, - as is clear even from the anti-Arab capitalist press:

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Jonathan Blass advocated an indiscriminate and total war: "After years of unanswered intifada and terror, we should go to war, make the enemy pay a price it will find unbearable, and win."

The sort of war Rabbi Blass called for "would mean wiping out the refugee camp in Hebron where the bombers originated and expelling its inhabitants to Lebanon or elsewhere... letting the terrorists know that if Israeli women and children are no longer safe, their own families will no longer be immune."

Ma'ariv, one of the most strident of the Hebrew dailies, was equally ruthless.

"If the intifada was a children's game, we will now be adults," read its editorial. "We will descend into their lives day and night until they have found no respite for their murderous souls. Not one hundred security men, not one thousand, but tens of thousands: police, soldiers, border patrol and GSS [secret service]. We will impose on the Palestinians an absolute closure, no man will leave his home."

For most practical purposes the West Bank is occupied territory again, and the Gaza Strip, almost hermetically sealed by its 30-mile security fence, is a giant prison camp. With tens of thousands of Palestinians cut off from their jobs in Israel, the economy of the self-rule areas is suffering cruelly. Aid officials say that each day the border is closed costs the Palestinian economy around £2 million.

Curfews and road blocks have played havoc with West Bank business, and residents have been panic-buying food and petrol. Only a trickle of goods is being allowed through the checkpoints around Gaza.

Israeli forces, in particular a new anti-Hamas unit to be headed by the Shin Bet chief, Ami Ayalon, will have carte blanche to re-enter the autonomous territories ostensibly controlled by President Yasser Arafat's forces.

The foreign minister, Ehud Barak, went further, strongly hinting that Israeli forces were now free to strike at the Islamists, even in neighbouring states.

He told the American ABC television network that the government would carry on its campaign against Hamas "anywhere". Asked if that included foreign strikes, he twice replied: "Anywhere means anywhere, period."

The argument is at its most persuasive when delivered in the fetid refugee camps of Gaza or the West Bank. — or for that matter among the even more sordid camps of Jordan, Beirut, or Damascus. The two million Palestinians who live under Israeli domination, and the three million who live beyond it, are indeed among the wretched of the earth. At least two of the latest band of "martyrs", who expressed their love of religion by blowing themselves and their neighbours to bits, lived in the primeval squalor of al-Fawwar refugee camp on the outskirts of Hebron.

Defeated in 1947-48, expelled in droves from their ancestral homes and lands, and treated as pariahs, the Palestinians feel their humiliation all the more acutely for laying huge store by essentially male concepts of honour, dignity, and "face".

There are places where it is possible to share their resentment. Places like the Erez checkpoint on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip, where on some mornings tens of thousands of workers, mostly day labourers, are herded through steel pens by callow Israeli conscripts, before being allowed to earn pittance-wages in the fields and on the building sites of the Jewish state. But only on some mornings: now, and at frequent intervals over the past 30 months of a miserable peace, Erez has been peremptorily closed.

Israel says the closures are vital for security. But Palestinians know they are collective punishments, on a grand scale. Every day of closure costs the battered Palestinian economy around two million pounds: more than all the gifts and promises of the international aid donors put together. And the 20 pounds or so a day labourer can earn for anything up to 16 hours of work and travel and humiliation, at least goes into the mouths of his family, rather than the bank accounts of more fortunate Palestinians. For that is the latest misfortune to be heaped on the suffering Palestinians: to find themselves after a generation-and-a-half of fine flowing rhetoric about liberation, living in a series of splintered cantons, lorded over by the PLO but still under the Israeli thumb.

For all the uncertainties and fears, places like Gaza City, Ramallah, and Bethlehem are immeasurably happier now than they were under the Israeli guns. The occupation and especially the intifada, or popular uprising of 1987-91, are still grimly remembered. It wasn't just the rioting, the gunfire, the volleys of stones and rubber bullets, but also the more minor irritations: the curfews, the ban on walking on Gaza beach, and the checkpoints and searches.

There's the rub: all these daily humiliations are still there. A Gazan may walk on the streets in safety, and go with the family to the beach, but he may not get to work. To go from Ramallah to Bethlehem means a long and dangerous detour round the sealed off city of Jerusalem, where Palestinians live in separation from their West Bank families.

Now, in the fevered aftermath of the Hamas bombings, all the old horrors are revisiting the Palestinians. Yesterday, Israeli troops were busily inflicting more collective punishments, welding up the entrances to the homes of some suicide bombers and destroying others, and flooding West Bank roads with patrols and checkpoints.

In Ramallah, more troops and police, in Palestinian uniforms, were rounding up Hamas suspects. The town was all but deserted, with most shops closed and little traffic on the normally frantic streets. The PLO forces have so far picked up at least 350 men. Dozens more have been arrested in Israeli-controlled areas, including the father, two brothers, and two uncles of Yavha Ayyash, the assassinated bombmaker.

"This is dangerous." says a schoolteacher in Kalandia camp, near Ramallah. "It is making a kind of unity between the Palestinian people. In general they are not against peace but they are not ready to surrender to Israeli rules. Occupation still exists, either directly or indirectly. Every day they are confiscating land. The situation is getting worse by the minute. We are in a big jail. More bombs will come. Any violence causes more violence. The Israelis are still killing, and will kill again in the future, and Palestinians are killing Israelis. It is an endless chain of violence."

In Sawarhe, a village on the outskirts of east Jerusalem, Mohammed Abu Ammar supports an extended family of 17, on an income of 100 shekels (about £22) a day as a cleaner for an Israeli company. He said yesterday that he could meet his family's needs for a month. After that, they would go hungry if the closure continued. "In a few days or after a month it will be stones and bombs," he predicts grimly.

Hussan, a young man who asked not be fully identified, says that Hamas was working "in a classic way", and offered his own impeccably turned theory of their motives.

"It [Hamas] will make a lot of attacks and cause a lot of Israeli reactions. If Israelis start to kill Palestinians, the Palestinians will then support Hamas, They want to show that they [Hamas] are much more than the PLO.  

But to answer the Zionist warmongers, - it is precisely by 'winning' the wars already that their problems have arisen, - a subject population in total revolt with little more to lose, and growing in numbers, in resentment, and in natural evolutionary technological and political ability all the time, - an undefusable time bomb under Zionism.

The Zionist provocations are inhuman, and the Palestinians will eventually have the beating of this fascist tyranny. It is inevitable however many millions of the Palestinian people the imperialists try to kill. The world's historic conditions have been transformed since the American Indian nation was destroyed and put into reservations by the Western imperialist settlers. Colonisation has become totally reactionary in concept and, in the long run, in practice too. In the epoch of dying imperialism, national self-determination is the beginning of the way forward for civilisation, and the Palestinian nation must reoccupy the whole of Palestine, sooner or later.

Ireland's longterm reunification is just as certain, even if the immediate next steps are less clear. Once again, the hypocritical obscenity is observed of the imperialist power telling an island nation close to it that Britain will decide who can join talks about Ireland's future, not Irish nationalists like Sinn Féin.

This pantomime cannot last. It is the British imperialists and their 'Unionist' stooges who have to give way and conform, not Sinn Féin. And the mesmerised bourgeois media know it, leading their national news all day with an obscure anonymous interview in an obscure Republican rag:

In an interview in An Phoblacht/Republican News, the weekly newspaper of Sinn Féin, an IRA member said the IRA saw the need for armed struggle "given the current political conditions".

"There is not the necessary dynamic to move us all away from conflict and towards a lasting peace on the basis of a viable process which, by its nature, ensures that the core issues at the heart of the conflict are addressed and resolved," he said.

The interview follows an article by Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams in a New York newspaper which claimed that the IRA was ready for 25 more years of war "in the absence of viable alternative".

IRA leaders, he wrote, had also told him that they were prepared to restore the ceasefire and wanted to stop the campaign of violence and pursue the objective of ending British sovereignty in Ireland through political means.

Mr Adams described in the Irish Voice newspaper some of what took place when he and the nationalist SDLP leader, John Hume, met the IRA leadership last week.

His memory of the meeting produced a detailed summary of what IRA leaders told him had influenced their decision to call the ceasefire in August 1994 and then end it.

The account claims that the credibility of the IRA army council had been put on the line by its cessation decision. The British were finally seen to have been "waging war by other means" and seeking to split the IRA.

The Irish prime minister, John Bruton, was accused of making "no significant attempt" to advance an Irish agenda in Ireland, in Britain or internationally. This had undermined the basis on which the ceasefire had been based — that a "pan-nationalist alliance" of Dublin, the SDLP, Sinn Féin, and Irish America would act as pressure on Britain and the Unionists in place of the IRA campaign.

Mr Adams said that one or two IRA leaders graphically spelled out their commitment. "We sued for peace, the British wanted war. If that's what they want we will give them another 25 years of war," said one.

But in an ominous sign that the IRA will not sign up to the conditions for getting Sinn Féin a place at the talks on June 10, a representative also said: "There will be no surrender of IRA weapons under any circumstances and to anyone. We will accept no preconditions whatsoever."

A further comment illustrates one of the peace process's most intractable contradictions. "We pursue armed struggle because of conditions in the six counties [Northern Ireland] and the British claim to sovereignty in Ireland.

"We know the conflict has to be ended but this requires a real peace settlement. In that context we can live with the pursuance of republican objectives through unarmed political or social struggle."

The disdainful British tone in pretending indifference to Sinn Féin until it "accepts democracy" is all a pose. It is Sinn Féin that can afford to wait, not Britain, as the capitalist press itself admits, hinting at far vaster damage at South Quay than £200 m first estimated, and other costs too:

YOUR REPORT that tourists will not be deterred by the IRA bombs from visiting London is ridiculous. Our travel agent readers all over Europe are already reporting that customers are cancelling trips to London and rebooking other cities instead. Ironically, some are choosing Paris which itself suffered a massive downturn in tourism last autumn after the Islamic fundamentalist bombings.

As your story rightly said, American tourists are not cancelling. But that is not the good news it may seem. Few Americans have made bookings yet for the summer — so they don't have reservations to cancel. Many are unlikely to consider plans for London at all this year. The true impact will become clear in the next few months.

The British Tourist Authority would do well to stop this PR nonsense claiming that tourism will not be hurt by the bombs. Perhaps they should push alternative British cities and the countryside instead of burying their heads in the sand and ruining the whole country's credibility.

Travel Trade Gazette,

Despite appearances, Gerry Adams has never been in a stronger position. It is only the false signals of deliberate bourgeois propaganda which say Sinn Féin is "excluding itself".

From being an IRA proposal 18 months ago which imperialism looked dubiously at, demanding to know if it was real or permanent, etc, and cockily sneering that the IRA had "had enough" and was "giving up", etc, - the ceasefire is now something the whole Western world is imploring the national-liberation struggle to reinstate, happy to immediately accept it at face value.

The condescending spin put on this request that it is "what the people want" or "to bring Sinn Féin in from the cold" should not fool a wooden post. The June 10 all-party talks could even start without Sinn Féin but they would still be Sinn Féin's talks, - a constitutional conference on a completely new future for Ireland, held in Belfast, at which the government of the Irish Republic will have a full say, something which 'No Surrender' unionism vowed never would happen, - and never would have but for Sinn Féin/IRA.

Trimble & Co's respectful visit for talks in Dublin last night was a historic climb-down in advance of June 10, to help blur the message of colonial capitulation. And Adams will again triumph in the USA, in spite of imperialism's "no to violence" smokescreen. Clinton is delighted with the June 10 capitulation by London. It helps his re-election, thanks to Sinn Féin/IRA twisting London's arm. But June 10 must produce. Irish nationalism is waiting. Douglas Bell

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

• United States backs terrorists working under the cover of a humanitarian organization, despite having previously admitted the illegal and perilous nature of the group's actions, which were the object of repeated public, private and diplomatic warnings

• One of the pilots from the Brothers to the Rescue organization who arrived in Havana a few days ago charges that he received instructions to bring into Cuba explosives aimed at sabotaging the national energy system and carrying out assassination attempts on Cuban leaders.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, which created the basis for undisputed hegemony, the United States, always supported by its Western allies, began an unbridled race to convert the Security Council into a sort of universal tribunal to judge any country which disobeys the United States' will, and to utilize troops, under the United Nations flag, as a planetary police force.

Under these circumstances, the Security Council, which has had an abominable record due to its biased behavior and subordination to the interests of the superpowers, and whose operations are controlled by the arbitrary veto power, has become a dependency of the U.S. State Department.

The Security Council's arbitrary actions and its open Intervention against numerous countries, its disdain tor the principal of national sovereignty, its undemocratic methods and usurpation of functions have led not only to a deformation of the United Nations' goals and activities, but also to the absolute preponderance of the United States in the Council's decisions.

In the case of Cuba, the United States' enormous capacity for applying pressure combined with the chance circumstance that the United States currently occupies the Council's rotating chairmanship.

The United States did not hesitate to use these two advantages in its favor on Sunday, February 25, to convene a hasty round of consultations at which the ambassadors quite correctly argued that they lacked sufficient information about the incident and that they had to consult with their respective capitals.

WITH a diligence that Cuba has desired on numerous occasions, having endured dozens of aggressions and withstood a brutal blockade which has been condemned four times by the General Assembly, the UN Security Council met in the early hours of Monday, February 26, to examine the situation created by the shooting down of two pirate airplanes in Cuba's airspace.

This situation illustrates the cost for small and independent countries of living in a unipolar world under the hegemony of the United States.

In a timely and energetic manner, Cuba and a growing number of other countries have been issuing warnings about this situation, which reveals the urgency of working for the democratization of the United Nations and for finding procedures which make the Security Council more representative and more impartial.

Without allowing much time, and above all without supplying any new information, the United States, in its position as the chair of the Security Council, called a hasty Council session in the early hours of Monday, February 26, without the presence of the current Cuban minister of foreign affairs, who at that moment was traveling to UN headquarters in New York for the sole purpose of attending the Council meeting.

Various members of the Council pleaded in vain to the United States' ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, who chairs the Council, to wait a few hours for the arrival of the Cuban foreign minister.

Instead, the U.S. Department of State delayed as much as it could in issuing the visa to Foreign Minister Robaina, who was waiting in Mexico to travel to New York.

Actually, thanks to the decorous attitude of some important members of the Council, the declaration which was approved is far from what the United States intended.

On the other hand, the truth is that before the Security Council registered its concern, Cuba lamented the loss of human life as a consequence of the irresponsible violations of our sovereignty, and we agree with that point of the declaration. But we cannot fail to recall that 73 persons, among them a number of adolescents, who had not violated the laws of any country, died in a brutal sabotage over Barbados; that the criminals who committed the sabotage are being protected by the United States; and that the Security Council has never issued any lamentation of those deaths.

We must carefully define what is a civilian aircraft. Many crimes have been committed against our country with supposedly civilian planes originating in the United States. We should recall that counter-revolutionary pilots in ‘civilian aircraft' bombed Havana and several other places in Cuba. For years, explosives and incendiary substances were dropped from ‘civilian aircraft' on our cane fields and other economic objectives; ‘civilian aircraft' have been utilized to bring spies and saboteurs into our country; and even more seriously, ‘civilian aircraft' have been used to carry out biological warfare:

As for the investigation of the ICAO, even though it is part of the U.S. maneuver to bring the incident before the Security Council, we do not fear it. On the contrary, we accept it and urge that it be carried out rapidly and impartially, and that it take into account all the antecedents and circumstances of gross provocation that we have suffered, due to the reiterated violation of our airspace and the risks they entail for air navigation and for our country.

We hope that for its part, the United States fulfills its obligation to cooperate fully with the investigation, in accordance with the selfsame decision of the Security Council.

There is something, however, that Cuba will not discuss with the Council or with experts from any organization, and that is our right and duty to protect our country's sovereignty, preserve our borders and defend our country's independence, no matter what the cost. •

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

Fascist-émigré tails wag US imperialist dogs

THE U.S. government and people are being threatened by a monster of their own creation.

The monster created by the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), is questioning the executive branch's authority to conduct the country's foreign policy, conferred upon it by the Constitution of the United States. Now the Democratic president is being threatened, along with the institutions the U.S. public so treasure who offered information, analysis and proposals to fight the CANF legislation, generally known as the Helms-Burton Bill — even though it would more aptly be called the Mas Canosa-Bacardi Bill.

The New York Times reported on July 12 about criticisms of the bill, some even coming from the very ranks of the Republican Party, led by Louis Delonge. It explained that many consider the bill an attempt to protect the decreasing sales of Bacardi rum, headquartered in Miami, since it would pave the way for the company to sue the French distributors of its Cuban competitor, Havana Club. The Times added that people are calling it the "Bacardi Rum Protection Law of 1995." Later it came out that one of the firm's lawyers participated, along with Mas Canosa, in the elaboration of the bill.

The Bacardi Company is one of the principal financial backers of the CANF lobby, along with the funds supplied by Washington 15 years ago.

Alarcón said the newest dimension of all this is that the president of the United States could never normalize its policy toward Cuba. He explained that up until now, Washington had only challenged what happened after the Agrarian Reform Act of March 1959, the expropriation of land and other property of U.S. citizens. He added that some parts of the bill seek to give a retroactive nature to the prerogatives of U.S. citizens, considering them as people who can acquire the property after the fact.

The president of the National Assembly said that a U.S. commission created in August 1960 to evaluate the claims by U.S. citizens provoked a great controversy in that country's press.

The task of reviewing and passing judgment on 5000 cases was criticized for being too complex and costly for Washington to be able to discern the values and justice of each claim.

"Now there's something new," he said emphatically.

Alarcón clarified that it's not just claims from the Bacardi group and the sugar magnates, or those like Nicky Gutiérrez, the descendent of landowners. He said that if this law is passed, claims could also be filed by the famous embezzlers who made incalculable fortunes robbing the public funds of the Cuban people, Batista's war criminals like Esteban Ventura, and the descendents of U.S. mafiosi who operated in Cuba like Meyer Lansky and Santos Trafficante.

The bill states that the president of the United States can only lift the so-called embargo after the U.S. Congress has approved the new Cuban government and the latter has indemnified the capital and interest of Americans and Cuban-Americans.

This proposal would raise the level of indemnification to over 100 billion dollars. Alarcón stated that the process of investigating, identifying and liquidating claims so that the U.S. Congress could certify Cuba's government would take over 100 years and involve several generations of Cubans.

"Ultimately, all of them would be subjects of the United States, since the bill requires that claimants be U.S. citizens." Therefore, everything of value in Cuba would be the property of U.S. citizens, one might add. Not even the Platt Amendment, which blocked Cuban sovereignty at the beginning of this century, attempted to do that.

Alarcón revealed that these intentions are not new; ultra-right U.S. and Cuban-American groups' have had such thoughts tor years. Now that these forces are in the majority in the U.S. Congress, the way has been opened for broadening the conflict with Cuba.

According to jurist González Chapeaux, the bill recently approved in the House of Representatives and pending discussion in the Senate threatens the independence of the executive branch, one of the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution, one of the oldest existing constitutions in the world.

The bill is really a tour de force, part of Cuban-American millionaire Jorge Mas Canosa's strategy for gaining in Cuba, as in Miami, the political and economic power which is as threatening to immigrants as it is to President Clinton. His amazing objective becomes clearer by the day: that of making CANF the platform for achieving, at the end of the 20th century, the old dream of annexing Cuba to the United States, the dream which the Helmses of the late 19th century were unable to realize.

Mas Canosa's ambition and cunning cannot be denied. When the Madrid daily El Pais asked him if the United States would take over Cuba if Fidel Castro were overthrown, Mas Canosa dared to answer: "They haven't even been able to take Miami away from us. If they haven't been able to kick us out of here, how could they take over our country?"

Meanwhile, the question of how this monster was born and how it grew deserves an examination all its own. •

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

DSAR: A people abandoned by the UN

THE RECENTLY concluded 9th Congress of the POLISARIO Front has attained its objectives, with a unanimous agreement on national unity alongside the Party and government.,

The most significant political decision was to end the September 1991 cease-fire among Morocco, the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and to return to warfare until total independence from Moroccan colonialism is won, if the agreements for a national referendum, with all the necessary guarantees, are not fulfilled.

Spanish occupation of the Western Sahara, comprising Saguia El Hamra and Rio de Oro, a region rich in natural resources and fishing grounds, terminated in 1936.

The 1958 armed uprising by the Saharawi people expelled Spanish troops from most of the territory they had occupied and resulted in the creation of a Spanish-French-Moroccan coalition via Operation Ecouvillon, the objective of which was to eliminate the independence movement.

The armed struggle, led by Luali Mustapha Sayed, who founded the POLISARIO Front on May 10, 1973, and who subsequently died in combat, forced Spain to abandon Western Sahara. However, instead of granting the country its independence, Spain transferred the territory's administration to Morocco and Mauritania.

The UN sent its first mission to Western Sahara in 1975. The envoys confirmed that the overwhelming majority of the population was categorically in favor of independence and against Moroccan and Mauritanian territorial claims.

At the end of 1975, King Hassan II, ignoring that popular desire, staged a military invasion of Saharawi territory. The POLISARIO Front's decisive response was to launch itself into an unequal war. On February 27, 1976, it founded the Democratic Saharawi Arab Republic (DSAR).

The DSAR was recognized as a full member of the OAU, in its Resolution 104/1982, while the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries granted the republic observer status, 74 countries established diplomatic relations, and the 4th UN Commission agreed that it was a case of colonization on the part of Morocco.

In coordination with the OAU, the UN began to organize a referendum for the Saharawi people's self-determination, taking as a basis Spain's a most recent census, which registered 70 204 inhabitants in the 284 000-square-kilometer territory, bordered by Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and the Atlantic Ocean.

The UN accepted an estimate of the population ten percent higher than the census total, but King Hassan II has consistently attempted to include thousands of Moroccan setters who are illegally claiming Saharawi nationality.

After the cease-fire and the direct negotiations between Morocco and the DSAR, under UN and OAU mediation UN troops were sent to the territory, and both international organizations opened observer missions in the Algerian and Moroccan refugee camps, with the cooperation of respected Saharawis. In March 1994, those offices set in motion an identification process to determine who had the right to participate in the referendum.

Morocco has put obstacles in the way of this process and the UN observers have not fulfilled their role in terms of putting a brake on Hassan II's machinations.

UN Secretary-general Boutros-Ghali has recently stated that if there are no advances in the negotiations, UN troops will be withdrawn from the occupied territories in 1996, thus announcing in advance the world's largest international institution's precipitate decision to abandon the Saharawi people to their fate.

Morocco has been carrying out a policy of repression against pro-independence Saharawis eligible to participate in the referendum, as well as limiting the movement of UN personnel.

The United States, which in conjunction with Israel has been one of the principal arms suppliers for the Moroccan army, has indicated a favorable attitude toward the referendum; however, it has not exercised its customary pressure on Hassan II in order for it to being held.

Algeria has maintained its altruistic aid to the POLISARIO Front, as has Mauritania. Although the latter's material cooperation is lower, it renounced any claim to Saharawi territory several years ago.

According to the Saharawis, although France is in favor of the referendum, it is also supporting Morocco, with whom it signed the tripartite Madrid treaty, conceding its Saharan territory to this country.

I have visited Tindouf on several occasions. The majority of Saharawi refugees are living there in deplorable conditions, and are dependent on generous Algerian aid for their subsistence. Cuba has sent several doctors, nurses, health technicians and teachers, and 1400 Saharawi students are currently in the island. Some Western European countries have also contributed help.

On his return from the 9th POLISARIO Front Congress, the DSAR ambassador to Cuba, Naami Siad Yumam, informed Granma International that his people's determination to attain their independence is stronger than ever.

The Saharawi delegates came from Algeria, Mauritania, Europe, Africa and Latin America, with significant representation from the Moroccan occupied territories.

The fundamental organizational aspects covered by the Congress were a reduction in the Party Secretariat membership and the election of new members, with Mohamed Ab-delaziz as general secretary and president of the Democratic Saharawi Arab Republic (DSAR).•

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. 161. Sunday 10th March 1996 

Markets panic reveals true worth of 'recovery' talk.

Nothing could better rub in the complete perversity of any longer entrusting imperialism with any further responsibility for the organization of modern productive labour than last week's panic on the markets.

To ordinary understanding, the news that job prospects were picking up (if at all believed) would be cheering. Not on Wall Street and the City though, as the capitalist press itself recounts:

US financial markets were in disarray yesterday, after the release of the strongest monthly employment data in 13 years dashed expectations of further cuts in short-term interest rates. European bond and equity markets also fell sharply in response to the declines on Wall Street.

The figures indicated the economy was reviving more rapidly than expected after a period of sluggish growth. On Wall Street, where some bond traders had feared a recession, the data prompted heavy selling of shares and bonds.

Within the first 30 minutes of trading the benchmark 30-year Treasury bond had dropped nearly three full points, pushing the yield to just over 6.7 per cent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 117 points in early trading.

After stabilising briefly around midday, the markets resumed their downward course. The 30-year bond fell further to yield 6.703 per cent in late trading and the Dow was off 171.24 at 5,470.45 at the close.

"We're all experiencing a paradigm shift," said Mr Richard Berner, chief economist at Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh. "The economy is shaking off its weakness much faster than anyone had expected." 

Of course the feared new 'strength' of the US economy is a shallow affair in any case, based on a single February's figures [which] could hardly avoid improving on January's, when the snow ploughs were out and government shutdowns were busy shooting the US economy in the foot. And in any case, the 'improvements' relate mostly to services and retail, with manufacture still floundering.

But much more interesting anyway than the usual defensive bourgeois bragging about one month's half-decent massaged figures is the universal sense of doom with which these 'good tidings' were greeted on the markets. The news that the economy might be showing twitches of life only succeeded in unleashing a damaging torrent of speculation over how this latest health bulletin might prejudice the patient's access to further injections of cheap credit, and panic fears that Dr Greenspan night even decide lock up the morphine cabinet and start raising interest rates again. The result was last week's giddy slide in New York and London, drowning Clarke's electioneering quarter % interest rate cut under a wave of fear that new rises will soon be strangling growth again.

As the FT admits:

The impact of the figures suggests that even after recent declines, the bond market remained vulnerable to bad news. With the prospect of the next move in US rates being upward and the re-appearance of the spectre of inflation, any consolidation could prove short-lived.

US equities will find it increasingly difficult to buck a weak bond market. Although stronger economic growth means that corporate earnings are less likely to disappoint, bond valuations had become essential to underpin stocks.

[..]the UK market looks set for further trouble. With the UK economy already looking fairly robust, gilts have little to look forward to but rate rises and pre-election jitters, while the steeper yield curve is likely to depress the stock market.

By this logic, the better the corporate growth, the greater the need to fend off inflation with high interest rates; the higher the interest rates, the weaker the bond market; the weak the bond market, the weaker the stock market as a whole; and the weaker the stock market, the shakier the prospects for corporate growth. Result: whatever new earnings might be hoped for on the back of promised new corporate growth are ALREADY discounted ahead of time, thanks to the degree to which the stock market has become dependent upon bonds.

So even a glimpse of a ghost of a half-recovery sends the markets into panic free-fall which no amount of reassurance about 'stable growth in the pipeline' can prevent.

The uncontrollability of these market phenomena is all the more striking in the light of the detailed description of the mechanics of this latest markets crisis which the bourgeois press was able to make BEFORE Wall Street took a dive, as e.g. in last Sunday's Telegraph:

What went wrong on the bond market and what does it mean? Last year, as Japanese interest rates fell to 0.5 per cent, hedge funds hit on what seemed the nearest thing to free money — borrowing heavily at near zero yen rates and investing in US Treasury long bonds, then yielding 5 per cent.

This straddle involved two gambles: first, that US bonds would rise as inflation and short-term rates came down, and second, that the dollar would not fall against the yen, wiping out the bond market gains.

Up to the end of January the straddle worked. Arbitrageurs piled in. According to Tokyo estimates, the money borrowed for this punt spiralled to $30bn. And the bond market boomed as bond markets are wont to do — pricing in rate cuts that had still to be announced.

Then the straddle went horribly awry — at both ends.

First, bond market vigilantes in New York and London began to sound the alarm about inflation longer term. They were also aghast at the ever rising US debt held by overseas central banks.

Vital to the yen-dollar straddle was that Japan's interest rates would also stay low. But on February 15 Japan's finance minister warned pensioners were suffering because of low interest rates and that a rise might be needed.

Then remarks by US Federal Reserve Bank governor Alan Greenspan were taken by Wall Street to mean rates might not be cut as much as it had hoped. Last week the bond market fell further as two Treasury bond auctions went badly wrong. "It was a catastrophe", said one dealer, "a white knuckle ride."

Meanwhile in the currency markets, the dollar began to fall against the yen. The hedge funds, now caught in a double vice, began to unwind their positions.

What happens now? The key is the huge mutual fund industry, which took in $29.6bn in January alone. These funds are the biggest prop to Wall Street, which closed 93.73 points down on a roller-coaster week. If America's retail investors turn pale at the sight of last week's events, they may switch out of the US into international funds. On Friday markets rallied on renewed hopes of rate cuts. But these, say the vigilantes, will only compound the problem longer term.

There is blood on the bond market, huge swings on the world's biggest stockmarket, and retail fund billions, swollen by global reflation, desperate for a home. These, indeed, are volatile times.

But no amount of such urgent warning whispered in capitalism's ear could stop the sleepwalker shambling over that particular cliff, just as no amount of 'circuit-breakers' or constraints on speculation can ever hope to prevent surplus capital diving over ever steeper cliffs in pursuit of ever scarier speculative opportunities opened up by the reality of a debt-burdened US dollar economy coming under trade and currency war challenge from Asian and European rivals, themselves driven to increasingly desperate measures by the onset of world imperialist crisis.

Such uncontrollable rushes of surplus capital after the latest 'sure thing', and equally unpredictable rushes back out again, are not a 'tameable' feature of the free market system but its very essence, rising inevitably to the surface as the system is pushed onto its mettle by the stresses within capitalism itself. No exchange controls in the world could ever prevent all this dead capital, "swollen by global reflation, desperate for a home", from trampling all before it in the search for a new lease of profitable life, in the process wiping out whole swathes of productive development, destabilizing markets all the way to the point of crash, wiping out entire national economies, forcing world trade into warring rival blocs, and finally establishing the conditions which make eventual world imperialist war the inevitable destination for world imperialist society, — and communist revolution the 'only possible future worth
fighting for, for the millions upon whose exploitation the failing monopoly capitalist system rests.

It is that inhuman and irrational drive to expand capital at any cost, even when the price demanded in the end will be the very future of man's civilized productive existence on the planet, which is erupting unannounced on the markets and telling its own tale to all who will listen.

And this horse's mouth judgement from the free market itself, disregarding with complete contempt all the talk about 'steady, low-inflation recovery ahead', says a thousand tines more about the real health of capitalist existence, present or future, than any claims made by the Chancellor, Bank of England Governor, Gordon Brown, Will Hutton or any other capitalist toady ever could.

Read Lenin.	DH (D Hull)

Letters (Further discussion of SLP held over until next week).

Socialist Labour: new room for revolutionary discuss-
ion.

Last Saturday's SLP policy meeting in London was electrifying. Scargill talked about the huge relief he felt at getting out of Labour, and there was a much more general sense throughout the day that the dead hand of reformism was no longer setting final limits to where political explanation could go. There was plenty of confusion in the workshops certainly, and some reaction too. But most striking was the marked absence of any general hostility to anyone taking time to try and explain the role of world imperialist crisis in all developments. It was almost shocking, after years of seeing every such attempt in just about every 'left' meeting systematically shat upon, NOT to have even tentative mention of the imperialist crisis at once greeted by eyes raised to the ceiling, theatrical yawns, irritable pleas to 'get on with business' etc.

This early experience so far seems to support the Review's judgement that the SLP needs to be supported 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" (EPSR 843).DG

Centrism will pose new tasks.

At the heart of Scargill's barnstormer at the close of last Saturday's SLP meeting was a blistering attack on the Labour party. From now on, he said, anyone who stands on a Labour ticket does so in conscious opposition to the fight for socialism. He admitted he had 'deluded himself for years' that socialism could be won through Labour. The implication at least is that it is no longer just 'new' Labour in his sights but Labourism in general.

This impression was further cultivated by the care taken to extend blame for the destruction of British manufacture back to pre-Thatcher Labour as well as the Tories. And on the subject of nationalization there was a curious leap of perspective at one point too.

One moment it was a question of 'taking back under nationalization what was stolen from the working class - and without compensation!' - enough to make Mandelson spin to death, but doing nothing to challenge the hoary reformist illusion that the nationalized mines, railways etc. were ever anything other than the private property of the bourgeois state.

The next moment, the perspective flipped over: there was to be no repeat of 'just state capitalism bailing out the lame ducks'. What must he brought into public ownership must be 'the white swans - the Prudential, Barclays Bank...' - and more, but drowned in thunderous applause.

Such revolutionary-sounding formulations of course raise far more questions than they answer, which is precisely why it is accurate to call this centrism, and why the opportunities for fighting for Leninist science are set to multiply.

Centrism responds to a movement in the working class away from reformism. Whilst Hemsworth makes it look as if Scargillism is ahead of the class, the reverse is in fact the case: it is the decay of social democratic influence among workers which is putting the pressure on centrism to come up with the goods, however obliquely this at first comes out in bourgeois electoral voting patterns.

Scargill's own gloss on the Hemsworth election results again revealed an intriguing midstream perspective switch. One moment it was all about how few votes the early Labour pioneers scored before going on to later parliamentary triumphs. The next moment the rapt audience were being encouraged to consider that 'it only took twelve men to start it in Cuba'! (Cuba in fact figured a lot more prominently in the speech than reminiscences about Labour's parliamentary infancy.)

Again, this raises then falls to answer a million questions about exactly WHAT those twelve men started in Cuba, WHAT it is about Cuba that makes it such a shining example of anti-imperialist struggle today, and WHAT class-struggle clarification must be fought for to complete the historical revolt against imperialism and bury it for good. Which of course is why centrism is centrism, and why Leninism has new understanding to make.

If it wasn't already clear enough from all the other revolutionary-sounding hints thrown out in the speech (at one point calling for "revolution...ary transformation"!), the centrist tug back in the direction of proletarian dictatorship science was spelt out in Scargill's deliberate insistence that the sole basis of socialism is "Marxist philosophy".

Hear, hear. Let's fight for it.	PH