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 0856 June 4th 1996                                                                                                                                         10p 
Sales conference Northwest Saturday Aug 10. Rcpts plse.

The beginning of the end for 'Northern Ireland', the bogusly-named British colony in the Occupied Zone, now looks in sight, as demanded by materialist philosophy.

The stirring triumph of the Irish national liberation struggle as it continues to press for Ireland's reunification and for the dismantling of the British imperialist colony in the Occupied Zone, richly confirms the Marxist view of history.

Last week's sensational electoral success, followed by the daily retreat now in British imperialism's negotiating positions, has demonstrated that Sinn Féin and the IRA have scored an astonishing victory over the ailing might of British monopoly capitalism during the past 20 years or so.

As throughout this historical triumph for the national right to self-determination against the stubborn resistance by part of the established imperialist world order, it is best left for the capitalist press's own admissions to reveal how the decadent British ruling class has been forced into retreat:

Sinn Féin will be allowed to hold talks on the future of Northern Ireland for three months before an arms decommissioning agreement, under a deal to be announced by the British and Irish governments today.

Under the plan talks would continue for three months before the IRA and other paramilitary organisations would be required to start handing over weapons.  Sinn Féin had been concerned that the talks would not be genuine and would become bogged down over decommissioning.

Senator George Mitchell, the special adviser to President Clinton, will be given an important role in chairing the talks  on decommissioning and in the main political strand of talks on the future of North-South relations in Ireland.

An RUC source said: "The election puts the republican movement in a strong position. They see no need to make any gestures unless they arc confident they will get exactly what they want."

But the IRA, buoyed by Sinn Féin's record 15.5% vote sent a hardline message in response.  A senior republican source said a ceasefire before June 10 was unlikely.  Such a move could come only when the British government had shown it was "committed to serious all-party talks", the source said.

The IRA has developed a mortar, described as one of the most destructive weapons in its arsenal, according to an analysis by Jane's Intelligence Review.

The review, quoting intelligence sources in the Republic, says that the "mark 17" mortar was developed during the ceasefire and has been tested in the Carlingford Lough area south of the border.

So convincing is this sweep of history behind the national liberation struggle that one former Green-Tory Irish Premier Albert Reynolds has even begun arguing that the negotiations for a complete new deal for Ireland, (replacing the hated Partition racket imposed by British bayonets in 1921 to thwart the triumphant national-liberation war then), -  should begin next Monday without bothering any further about an IRA ceasefire.

The independence movement's formidable political skills, blistering conviction, and unbeatable guerrilla-war determination and ability have undermined the rickety colonial structure in the Occupied Zone to such an extent that London already made it clear more than 10 years ago with the Anglo-Irish Treaty that the fictional country of 'Northern Ireland', just a lingering British colonial racket artificially gerrymandered out of six of Ulster's nine counties at gunpoint, was no longer sustainable in the long term.

The EPSR's Marxist analysis has throughout the troubles explained how British imperialism would be eventually pushed out of Ireland because of its rapid international economic, industrial and political decline, and because what's left of London's global strategic and military interests no longer see this expensively-subsidised outpost in Ireland, hated by the locals and impossible to provide adequate security for, as worth maintaining any longer.

The main stumbling block all along to any speeding up of the snail's pace withdrawal outlined in the Anglo-Irish Treaty and subsequent British moves, was the acute embarrassment for the British ruling class, and for the imperialist West in general, of being seen to have been forced to do the right thing at last in Ireland by an armed urban-guerrilla revolutionary struggle.

It is this fear of humiliation, slowing things up, which has had to accept more public capitulation this week, forced to swallow hard, and grin and bear it, by the quite masterly political grasp shown by Sinn Féin and the IRA, ruthlessly pushing home their advantage, - as the capitalist press itself is at last beginning to have to admit between the lines (after having done nothing for the last 25 years but sneer at the national liberation struggle for its 'clumsy brutal incompetence, its grotesque insensitivity, and its utterly doomed hopelessness', etc, etc, - backed by the relentless black propaganda campaigns initiated in Whitehall manufacturing such disinformation blitzkriegs as the Irish joke industry, etc (it takes six Paddies to change one light bulb, don't forget).

As Paisley will tell anyone who will now listen (becoming fewer in spite of the DUP's increased role which only reflects a reactionary British-bourgeois desire to drive a hard bargain in the coming negotiations about a new set-up for Ireland), - the London establishment has given in to national liberation demands on issue after issue (mainly for the removal of ridiculous preconditions to negotiations which were totally unrealistic, and purely for propaganda show, in the first place).

Now, US imperialist arm-twisting, - pressuring the British ruling class throughout to remove this civil-war blot and national liberation struggle humiliation from off the 'free world' record, - is likely to take a direct role with Senator Mitchell chairing the tricky North-South rapprochement agenda, and sanitising the West's embarrassment that the IRA will continue refusing to dismantle its guerrilla-war combativeness until some real negotiating progress has been made on a new deal for Ireland.

The wretched colonial bourgeois might yet have to be publicly humiliated a bit more to curb their 'No Surrender' arrogance even more firmly, but the only worthwhile future deals for them now lie in a reunified Ireland ultimately, for as long as it can remain capitalist.

The fake 'Marxists' in Britain will continue, of course, their imbecile sectarian screech that the IRA has sold Ireland out to 'new world order' imperialist exploitation, utterly ignoring their own idiot past predictions that national-liberation could not be achieved anyway, and blind to the colossal importance to workers worldwide that this magnificent anti-imperialist triumph, arms-in-hand, will have. 

Trotskyite 'revolutionary socialist' daydreams will drivel on pointlessly. Real Marxist-Leninist science will go from strength to strength. Build the EPSR.  Douglas Bell

SLP's birth remains a milestone of historical change but a poor signpost to the future. Scargill's route leads nowhere. Without theory, mass defeatism reigns supreme. 

Scargill's Socialist Labour Party has quickly established a bureaucratic club atmosphere throughout its branches, which is no great surprise.

This centrist phenomenon has drawn forth an interesting and encouraging response from the working class, explaining much about the historical epoch being entered into currently, but is still only attracting a preponderance of conservative-minded busybodies as cadres.

The ethos is left trade-unionism. Scargill has not changed a bit. But what is fascinating for serious students of the world socialist revolution is that the site at which Scargill is now doing his posturing has been shifted by events.

The whole political spectrum has been moved on, one or two spaces, by the rapid maturing of the greatest-ever crisis in capitalist history.

Illusions in 'democracy' and in parliamentary 'pressure' still prevail, however, - in spite of a growing contempt for all parliamentary capitalist politics being one of the signs that people are becoming increasingly bitter about threats of insecurity which the monopoly-imperialist 'free market' system cannot stop constantly throwing up, and more aware of what a corrupt racket is the entire political, business, and social leadership of this country (and every major state of the 'free world').

Scargill's 'independent' left syndicalism has for the moment seemingly provided an adequate-enough rejoinder to Blairite Labour's total anti-socialist revisionism, as far as the average activist is concerned with a limited grasp of how the historical contradictions of imperialism's 'new world order' just keep on growing.

Militants of all descriptions have been shifted mightily by events into declaring Labourism as no longer providing any kind of answer for the problems of the working class. But they still have been shifted nowhere near enough to want en masse to start challenging the 'left' tools themselves of popular democracy; - instant reformist solutions within the existing framework of things; a demagogic preoccupation with how things look; and tolerating conventional leadership charisma by deluding itself that the problem of opportunism is solved by just an ostentatious show of factionalism; etc.

Scargill has at last been forced to say that Labour is now no good for the working class, and has had the sense to immediately try building a party to replace Labour.

But in no way is it a party of a new type (in the famous words of the socialist movement in the Tsarist Empire which first actually abolished capitalism and its ruling class as the dominant force in society.)

The SLP is very much a party of the old type which will use every bureaucratic and demagogic trick in the book in order not just to keep its original founders firmly entrenched in the leadership (which is hardly a surprise; it would be astonishing if they did not act like this), - but to ensure that no fundamentally new thinking should clutter up or confuse Scargill's basic left-syndicalist aims.

This is centrism's crucial philistine defect, in general, and has proved to be the immediate great stumbling block in developing the SLP.

Workers have responded with open minds to the party's launch, as they were almost inevitably going to do. This is not a problem.

But routine trade-unionist mentality of all kinds has also immediately stepped forward to volunteer to man (and woman) the lifeboats.

United action in defence of its economic interests is the vital university of working-class political learning, and 'left' reformism has long provided such basic class conflict with a political perspective to go beyond the endless economic class compromise to the aim of 'abolishing capitalism', or Clause 4, in other words.

But even the most superficial 'Marxism', as Scargill has proclaimed the SLP to be following, requires an internationalist revolutionary perspective and an education programme which arms workers with a complete exposure of world imperialism's entire economic and political racket, both short-term and longterm.

The long detailed EPSR campaigns exposing the ultimate bankruptcy of dollar hegemony and international finance-capital's postwar credit boom; the endless tyrannies by the 'free world' leaders in the anti-communist Cold War that went with that boom; the viciousness of Third World exploitation by the West's 'free market forces'; the (limited) achievements of the socialist camp in social and economic reconstruction in the teeth of imperialist Cold War disruption and undermining; the inspiring hopes of future triumphs from the properly-understood real successes of anti-imperialist struggle around the world (e.g. Ireland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, etc) at the moment of their advances; the continuous reanalysing of the setbacks to the international anti-imperialist struggle and the reasons for those failures or defeats (e.g. Chile, Grenada, the self-liquidation of CPSU revisionism, etc); - all of these issues and many more constitute the essential arena of the struggle for a full revolutionary consciousness for a workers movement which wants to build socialism.

This, of course, is the major theme of Lenin's What is to be done:

The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the worker's learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events, to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population.

The worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real "inner workings"; he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected.

It can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc. These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity.

Tsarism in 1903 was a whole panorama of international imperialist tyranny and trickery all under one roof. It was not necessary for Lenin to spell out in those passages the crucial requirement for working-class revolutionary consciousness to above-all be international in its grasp, as will similarly be clear to everyone now without further explanation.

What Lenin goes on to discuss, of course, is the essential role of a regular newspaper with which to constantly strive for the very latest (and therefore the very highest) point of revolutionary theoretical assessment of the international balance of class forces, ignorance of which or failure to understand which must obviously make it impossible for any party to lead the working class to an ultimately successful struggle for socialism.

On these questions, the foundation of the SLP is already clearly an utterly doomed enterprise. Not only do they not have any ability or interest to give the working class a lead on all the topical events going on all around them, endlessly manipulated by the capitalist media to perpetually sow reactionary consciousness and prevent the faintest development of any revolutionary socialist consciousness. The SLP founders will clearly have no such understanding or capacity even when they do finally get round to publishing (or getting their NUJ contacts to publish) some sort of regular journal.

To grasp the need to agitate on all aspects of the international class struggle in order to build a successful socialist movement, you already have to be doing it. Lenin merely elaborated on and made more appropriate arrangements for (in Russia's specific 20th century circumstances) what was already Marxist philosophical practice, - explaining the consciousness and perspectives of all of conflict-ridden capitalist society based on its past and present contradictory realities.

And because being determines consciousness, and not vice-versa, - the previous form of Scargill and his opportunist pals carries importance.

Scargill's previous political career was left-syndicalism loosely attached to reformist Labour; and while he has made some courageous apologies for misleading workers in the past, he did stick with the parliamentary illusions of 'left' Labourism for a remarkably long time.

Even more significantly, he has said virtually nothing about there being anything fundamentally suspect or deluded about that form of politics, - merely that it was mistaken in its trust, and has now been 'Betrayed'.

The people round Scargill have an even more dubious background, - ex-IMG types basically, it seems, who reneged on Trotskyite sectarianism's 'independent' posturing when it was overshadowed by the apparent entrist success of Militant Trotskyism, and sneaked into the Labour Party as well in a period which must have been approaching reformism's maximum putrescence and foul deception of the working class. What an inglorious bunch of dishonest crooks, one might almost be tempted to say. Any newspaper of fearless scientific-socialist truth and farsighted revolutionary theory which they produce in the autumn is bound to come in for the closest-possible scrutiny.

More trial and error could conceivably lead the SLP crew to a greater awareness of the essence of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary socialist leadership; but on the form shown so far by Scargill's stung reaction to Blair's open revisionism, and his apologies for only belatedly seeing it coming, and the form shown by the ex-IMGers in getting even less across to the working class about the justification for their patchy record, - there is no great basis for expecting this to happen.

The entrenchment at annual conference and regionally of already solidly philistine cadres is therefore no great surprise. The echoing by SLP functionaries of Scargill's conference demagogy that no English worker wants to hear about what one Russian revolutionary said to another in 1917 is infinitely more depressing than the NUM leader's complacent backwardness because they entirely lack Scargill's saving grace of at least having led one of the great anti-imperialist struggles in West Europe since 1945, - the 1984-85 miners strike against pit closures and speculative de-industrialisation by monopoly-finance capital. In Scargill's case, his anti-theory philistinism could in certain circumstances just be overlooked as the mildly amusing idiosyncrasy of a formidable pragmatic syndicalist. In the case of the SLP minions, their philistine conceit is all there is.

This half-hearted centrist movement will, however, nevertheless be obliged to reflect something of the working class's feelings or its better interests on major political conflicts ahead, - whether it be colonial swindles, warmongering scandals, grotesque capitalist corruption, sickening 'Opposition' class-collaboration, the further savaging of the welfare state and working-class conditions, or whatever.

And while possibly occasionally giving a lead to workers on some exposure of ruling-class degeneracy or reactionariness, it will still be possible to enthusiastically back SLP campaigns therefore, and help other workers to develop deeper socialist consciousness.

Workers in general remain unconvinced about how deep is capitalism's crisis, and thus what outlines it must inevitably tend to follow ultimately. There is particular reluctance to believe that the system can ever quite crash down again the way it did in the 1930s after the 1929 Wall Street collapse.

One problem facing a revolutionary challenge to ailing British imperialism (and probably elsewhere too) is that US imperialism, in its unprecedented might and reach, has seemed to be able to pick up the pieces where a collapsing imperialist 'ally' has floundered, - and walk off with all the prizes as well as leaving a smooth non-revolutionary continuity behind it.

This, of course, is a temporary historical illusion only. In reality, the verdict is still awaited on how, for example, the wretched Palestinian nation fared after the chaotic retreat by British imperialism from its colonial role there had left everything in such an explosive mess.

Incredible volumes of US imperialist hand-outs and equally well-balanced military stoogery have been poured into the Zionist colonial enterprise, into Egypt and other potential Arab political volcanoes in the Near East, and into backing the reactionary feudal oil interests in the Middle East which hitherto had largely kept reaction or moderation successfully funded in the Arab and Muslim world.

But still the grotesque contradictions exist, - worse today than ever, - of an intolerable modern Western-Zionist colonisation right in the heart of the Arab nation, plus the permanent insult of, in reality, US imperialist domination of Arab oil wealth, and therefore of Arab political and economic independence. The powerful forces of colonial liberation, national self-determination, and eventually socialist revolution will inevitably continue to push all Middle Eastern affairs towards the powder keg. Then, the apparent ability of world or US imperialism to keep Western monopoly-capitalist continuity going worldwide will be seen to be an illusion.

Even before another Great Crash or serious international revolutionary explosions shake up people's thinking about what history has in store, other factors could begin to play a role in reviving socialist consciousness such as the early return of a Labour Government which then begins to behave just as viciously in 'saving public funds' by reducing working-class living standards, cutting social services, and increasing workplace insecurity through bowing to 'unanswerable market forces', etc., quickly demonstrating that capitalism is the basic problem and not the Tory Government.

The limping centrist phenomenon might then, paradoxically, start to make more resolute progress, as might, even more peculiarly, a last-ditch 'left' revival inside Labour itself, with the Benns, Livingstones, and Skinners once more pretending that 'socialism has a chance again inside Labour'. The old forms of struggle do not die that quickly or easily. A stake through their heart might seem a not inappropriate metaphor for considering when these bloodsucking delusions affecting the working class will be ended. Most of the time, natural conservatism of people's instincts is frustrating but liveable with. On occasions, it is completely maddening. It is of vital importance for the revolutionary movement to learn absolute patience with historical developments always taking far longer than anticipated.

Another potential factor in helping to thaw out some socialist consciousness in workers' minds frozen up with Cold War anti-communism and counter-revolutionary cynicism could be developments in Ireland where the real decadent weakness of British imperialism (both absolutely and in its declining position in the world) is being made increasingly evident by the triumph of the Irish national-liberation struggle which bourgeois propaganda has been so desperate not to admit (and which the fake 'Marxists' in Britain from the CPGB to the Trots have helped keep hidden).

Further obvious retreats by Britain towards conceding Ireland's reunification (which it was a monstrous act of colonial tyranny to destroy in the first place by the brutally-imposed Partition barbarism of 1921, gerrymandered onto artificial bits of six of Ulster's nine counties at bayonet point), - albeit at a continuing snail's pace just like the slow withdrawal preparations which have been stuttering forward inch by inch over the past 12 to 15 years, -  will help remove further blinkers from British workers' understanding of the real world, thus negating still more of the Cold War anti-communism which has in the past helped make little imperialists out of all British workers, and always undermined any developments towards socialist consciousness.

The suspicion is hard to shake that one of left syndicalism's final harmful influences on British workers will be on the question of import controls and other Little-Englander similar failures of imagination to which 'left' Labourites have been so prone in the past. The SLP policy delusion that taking Britain out of the European Union will be a worthwhile antidote to some of the worse effects of monopoly-capitalist crisis is a sad instance of unreconstructed reformism still unchallenged in the thinking of the SLP founders, and it reflects a widespread prejudice, of course.

The pragmatic traditions of a successful imperialist country automatically suggest that if something is not working to advantage, then change it. In the long run, history works slightly differently. Monopoly-imperialist expansion will carry on being all-powerful, dominating the international economy. In or out of the EU, both the good and bad effects of ever-greater monopolisation will continue to totally influence the lives of everyone on earth. Only minor patterns in trade and legal matters will be affected by membership or non-membership of the EU, together with some possible loss of economic growth because of the self-fulfilling achievements of EU common market monopoly protectionism versus the US and Japanese imperialist blocs and against the rest of the world in general. The bad effects of monopolisation, loss of sovereignty, and German domination can only come to a head and be resolved for all Europeans, in or out of the Common Market, when the imperialist world markets themselves totter towards the crash.

At that point, everything must then be resolved about future history for all of Europe and for the rest of the world too, and Britain's membership or non-membership of the EU or the EMU or anything else at the time of the markets collapse, will be a minor past detail of total irrelevance. Looking at the problems of capitalist crisis in this reformist way by the SLP can only serve one purpose, - to close workers' minds to the real problems facing mankind of the imperialist system heading for a worldwide bust-up, war, and revolution, - and what political consciousness needs to be prepared in the working class to meet this colossal historical upheaval as it approaches.

The SLP remains an appropriate broad-front political movement within which to argue out all these questions, but apart from the requirements of conventional formally-correct democratic behaviour, there seems little point in not continuing to challenge the SLP at every opportunity about its clear disservice to the working class by coming onto the scene as the new broom to sweep clean from all the old opportunist parliamentary dishonesty, yet keeping quiet about the one truly titanic mess hanging over workers and menacing their lives, - the explosive crisis of the capitalist system.

Every day, the bourgeois press itself tells of the omens:

THEY'RE calling it the "brown-agenda" - the search for ways through the murky soup of poverty, homelessness, pollution and deprivation afflicting the world's ever-expanding cities.

The scale and depth of the global urban crisis, says the official report obtained by the Guardian before next week's conference in Istanbul, is far greater than previously thought. And it is steadily worsening as huge urbanisation takes place across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

"A low-grade civil war is being fought every day in the world's urban centres," said Wally N'Dow, head of conference. "Big numbers are risking their lives every day. Many cities are collapsing. We must wake up to the fact that it is no longer business as usual. "Urbanisation is bringing about one of the most significant transformations in history. The problems are staggering," he said. There are now more than 600 million people officially homeless or living in life-threatening urban conditions. More than a billion lack sanitation and a further 250 million have no easy access to safe water.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, he said: "The overwhelming speed at which the world is urbanising leaves little time to adapt We are witnessing daily urban catastrophes. Youth is going to seed. Drugs are rampant in cities, crime and terrorism is increasing. We risk a complete breakdown in cities. People feel alienated."

Most urban centres in the developing world will face extreme water shortages within 15 years, threatening life and health, Mr N'Dow warned. "More than 1 billion people cannot get clean drinking water. Dirty water causes 80 per cent of diseases in the developing world."

The United Nations report says one of the main reasons for the rapid deterioration in world cities in the past decade is economic structural adjustment programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund. These, it is said, have increased poverty, homelessness and unemployment in more than 50 countries, including some of the poorest in the world.

Structural adjustment programmes were devised in the 1980s after the international debt crisis. They have demanded that developing countries privatise and deregulate industries, cut public spending and reduce or eliminate health and education subsidies.

"In most countries undergoing structural adjustment, large numbers of people have lost what had been relatively stable jobs. One of the effects in the south has been to cut public spending and to reduce budgetary deficits. The cuts are usually in sectors not considered as priority or core productive sectors which in many cases included human settlements," says the report.

But the blame is put on the rich for much of what Mr N'Dow calls "the emerging anarchy" in the world's cities. He criticised the United States and other OECD countries for not accepting that people have a right to adequate housing and blamed liberalisation of trade and the activities of multinational corporations for accelerating urbanisation.

"The world's aid agencies and development banks mostly give low priority to what is being called the brown agenda of sanitation, housing, air pollution and waste which adversely affect the poor most," he said.

The report paints an alarming picture of growing crime accompanying urbanisation. "The process of urbanisation goes hand in hand with a rise in urban violence that outstrips the growth of cities," said a UN adviser on urban poverty in a parallel report which will be presented to the conference.

"Violence is the product of a society characterised by inequality and social exclusion. The offender has often been stimulated by a social environment dominated by consumerism, competition and by the mass media which propagate and legitimise violence," said Franz Vanderschuren.

According to studies in the US, watching violence encourages aggressive behaviour, increases violence and desensitises viewers. The annual cost of urban decay due to violence in the US is estimated at $50 billion (£33.3 billion).

It warns of the social and political risks in having very large numbers of "unoccupied and very frustrated" young people. One of the contributors to the report says that cities are increasingly prone to politicised urban violence, fundamentalist or mafiosi activities.

The UN will hear that at least once every five years 60 per cent of people living in cities with more than 100,000 people are crime victims. Most is committed by the young against property.

But every day, the SLP sleeps on, saying "We want no more truck with all that old revolutionary rubbish. It's all finished, dead, and buried, all that revolution stuff", and with this philistine ignorance which Scargill himself has set the pattern for, the SLP becomes not a new way forward for the working class but yet another new fake-'Left' obstacle to progress. Its anti-theory complacency must be relentlessly challenged, - and the sick welfarist philosophy behind it, - 'We have the absolute right to be wrong', - even more so.

One great cause of defeatism among workers, the best weapon the ruling class has for keeping its dominance, is the prevailing episodic impressionism that "things just happen in life, just one after the other", and that the people who rule society "always find a way out of their problems".

A correct description of the historical process is the best and only way out of this blindness. It will give the working class the necessary confident understanding that capitalism is in crisis, and, no, the ruling class do not have a way out, and cannot possibly find one, short of World War III (which as a 'solution' would be the greatest revolutionary recruiter ever). Build Leninism. Joe Harper

Letters

A complete understanding of imperialist crisis and how to overcome it is the only worthwhile leadership the SLP (or anyone else) can give the working class

If the SLP is to have a recruitment strategy that has any chance of success in depth, or indeed any point to it, - the party needs to grasp hold of the thorny question of political theory much more firmly than it has so far. 

Ideas about street sales, market stalls, and booths on May Day fairs are all fine, and doubtless 101 other possibilities can be explored for getting to 'meet and talk' to potential members. But they all miss the point of asking why anyone will want to join anyway, and if they do, can they achieve anything without a much clearer idea of where we are going than the working class has ever grasped before.

A battle to understand the scientific perspectives of Marxism - which requires a hugely deepened discussion throughout the working class and especially by its most interested and class-principled members - is essential if the complex chaos of capitalist and imperialist slump is to be overcome and socialism imposed by the proletariat.

Suggestions that there should be much more discussion are excellent as far as they go, and certainly much better than old-fashioned notions that "all this internal argument is a waste of time" and old-style trade union exhortations to "get on with the fight". What fight? How? And why has even such titanic and heroic "getting on with it" as the 1984 miners' struggle failed not only to improve the working class's lot but even to stop the relentless progress of the capitalist slump?

Discussions, if they give an opportunity to explore the major historical, philosophical and political questions that the working class needs to grasp if it is to take power and end capitalist slump, would both mark out the SLP as something different to past reformism, and be part of the mechanism for allowing it to develop. Political clarity and debate of millions of questions is what the mass of people will he demanding with ever greater urgency as the slump really bites. The party that offers it is the one that will be able to recruit.

This should be the priority for attracting the working class, - giving it a lead in getting out from under the old anti-communist hostility to theory encouraged by the ruling class as part of its worldwide anti-communist crusade. Not for nothing does the ruling class encourage soap operas, pop, fashion, tabloid journalism and other light-mindedness.

A serious thoughtful working class is a dangerous working class.

If a party takes a lead in fighting for a scientific grasp of the world, questions of organisation will find a natural place in supporting that task (and will be that much easier). If organisation becomes a fetish in itself, it will dominate and swamp the battle to raise understanding in the working class which is the only leadership that will be able to change anything.

If the new party immediately starts swamping itself with all the old activisms and organisational bureaucracies of the past 150 years of the labour movement, if will not be worth building anyway. Even if thousands joined, it could produce no better leadership, that way, than the tired clapped out fraud of Labourism, now ripe and rotting into the semi-fascist humbug of Blairism.

The SLP is a new phenomenon that has come into existence because of a huge political vacuum opening up within capitalism as its worldwide economic and trading crisis deepens steadily towards an explosive warmongering "resolution".

The old reformist perspectives are dead, transformed by the robot-speak of Blair already into a vapid echo of Toryism at best and the groundwork for fascism at worst.

The SLP is the first party to fill the space caused by the deepening need for a struggle to end capitalism: born talking of Marxism, and for that reason attracting attention from the working class which senses the need for new perspectives. Why? Because of the slump. Beneath the surface of things (and not so far, as even a cursory reading of endless finance and economic articles in the capitalist press makes clear), the clogging of the world finance and production system by ever greater mountains of inflationary credit is bringing capitalism to the edge of the biggest slump-disaster in history. Another $40,000M has just been 'created' (printed or electronically conjured up) for the IMF, to help stave off the even bigger collapse somewhere that the recent bailing out of bankrupt Mexico has made inevitable.

The disastrous abyss of collapse and bitter struggle between the huge worldwide monopoly imperialist blocs for ever-diminishing profit opportunities, must erupt eventually, in war.

The entire century has witnessed nothing but the destruction and warmongering caused by the unstoppable drive towards trade war, diplomatic hostility, and periodic eruption of hot war that is endemic to capitalism in this epoch. It is witnessing now the degeneration into the biggest slump crisis in history and its inevitable outcome, world war, for the third and greatest time.

Allied to this has been the equally inevitable development of anti-imperialist and communist revolutionary resistance and struggle against ever-intensified imperialist colonial (or neo-colonial) exploitation and against the eruptions of crisis and warmongering that comes with it.

The "mad cow war" may be farcical but it is also a deadly serious indication of the return to chauvinistic political hostility as the trade war pressures build up.

The edgy British ruling class is right in the forefront because it is now so marginalised historically and economically.

These pressures, unnerving the ruling class in all the imperialist countries, have reached devastating proportions in the UK, where the last and deepest anti-colonial struggle in Ireland, is achieving victory.

It is the crisis which has opened up the opportunity for the heroic nationalist struggle to break through, in turn compounding and deepening the economic, political, scientific and cultural demise of the British ruling class.

If it understands this ruling class enfeeblement,- the prospects for the working class to take a grip on history in the impending chaos, and establish socialism by ending capitalism, have never been greater. Small wonder that the ruling class can no longer trust its reformist Labour shadow to keep the lid on growing discontent, especially when the need to impose ever greater slump exploitation faces the capitalist order in Britain more urgently than in most of the stronger rival imperialist powers (though they are getting there too).

Labourism, right on cue, by design or historical spontaneous petty bourgeois class-instinct, has stripped itself of any remote hint about socialism  (such as Clause Four, e.g.) for fear of what such inflammatory phrases might have on working class consciousness.

But to interest the working class (ie. to recruit workers to the fight) means more than re-establishing the "left pressure" notions of "old" Labour. Those perspectives were never going to change anything.

Left "pressure", parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, will never topple capitalism, as a recent article declared:

It is a daydream which partly fell apart in 1985, and which it will be difficult to persuade the working class to believe in next time round. It was an illusion of the reformist era, - a 'left' illusion.

The alternative necessary philosophy is not the silly putschism of the anarchists or the Angry Brigade, or the military training fantasies of survivalist groups. The alternative is a deeper scientific analysis of where imperialism's worsening economic and political crisis will drag mankind next, and what volcanic forces capitalism's coming failings will throw up for dealing with these even greater levels of destruction and alienation.

Like all good centrism, the SLP hints at a revolutionary preparedness to go all the way against capitalism via the extended route of direct-action protests, but hesitates to explain that revolutionary situations will be created by capitalism itself, and that revolutions will be necessary to resolve such situations.

All that is hinted at by the SLP is a willingness to give revolutionary leadership. What the working class needs is a full explanation of why, when, and how revolutionary leadership will be absolutely necessary for civilisation's survival and further progress, and also how the preparation of the masses for revolution will not depend just on party agitation, no matter how brilliant, but will largely be carried out spontaneously by capitalism's own uncontrollable upheavals. 

The SLP, as a broad-front movement in the working class, is not something to be taken over by "left infiltrators".

But it is a new forum for the working class to start to understand the urgent revolutionary tasks which lie ahead:

Only the highest development of understanding is good enough for the working class. Workers will readily respond to the most advanced and complex concepts, given the opportunity. 

They are on their way towards becoming the ruling class, the only possible way of ending world domination by the imperialist bourgeoisie. The idea that this profound leap in the affairs of human civilisation is going to be accomplished with no higher reasoning available than a Daily Mirror editorial betrays the most sick petty-bourgeois philistinism and defeatism. The greatest stupidity ever by aspiring 'revolutionary' sects is the notion that workers cannot respond to revolutionary leadership unless every pronouncement is translated into the most simple language.

Read the language of Iskra articles. Head the language of Lenin's greatest pamphlets. Read the language of the Communist Manifesto."

Such an injection of struggle for this highest understanding is precisely the best way to attract and recruit workers who can develop the fight against capitalism - and the best way to prevent the SLP becoming, early on, just another reformist obstacle to what needs to be done. D.H.

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. 173. Friday 31th May 1996

US top of league in vicious self-defeating imperialist decadence alone, with Britain a pale second. Stolid German capitalism will fight the finance-capital war as hard as anyone if pushed. But imperialist crisis will make losers of all bourgeois in the revolutionary conclusion.

The self-inflicted disasters British imperialism is courting in its handling of the public health and trade war issues raised by the beef crisis are a surer
indication of Britain's likely performance in the ruthless monopoly competition storms ahead than all the dubious 'competitiveness' league tables published this week.

The capacity to lead authoritatively on something so basic as public health has got to be central to the credibility of all modern capitalist rule. With hardly a week going by without some new public information crisis (this week, a row over chemicals in baby milk), it is becoming increasingly clear what a cumulative disaster is brewing for the ruling class over its inability to command confidence on such fundamental, 'non-political' questions of public safety, and the fact that it is routinely disbelieved on such issues by the public at large. The knock-on effect on Britain's standing in the world is there to be seen in the hysterics over beef.

First the Tories spent over ten years disregarding all scientific data on BSE which might seriously dent farming profits. (Ditto Labour.) Next, when it became clear that there was a public health issue so potentially disastrous it could no longer be ignored with commercial impunity, the politicians hit the panic button, — then hid behind the scientists, claiming just to be following (doctor's) orders.

And finally, now beef markets across Europe have been plunged into crisis by London's irrational alternation of official complacency and blind panic, it is pretended that the public health issue has somehow or other cleared itself up, and that the sole problem now is how to overcome the 'unreasonableness' of the Europeans' beef ban.

Worst of all for British monopoly capital, none of all this competitive small-mindedness (neither the readiness to put profits ahead of public health in the first place, nor the subsequent readiness to lie about those priorities to everyone, nor the present readiness to move at once to trade war when the cover-up fails and market access is denied) has in practice done a scrap of good far Britain's prestige in the scramble for domination of the world market.

Whilst challenging the rest of Europe to a no-holds-barred sulking competition may play well with fascism-on-a-shoestring tabloid journalism, and help temporarily shift the domestic blame off the government, it doesn't much look like restoring Britain's former beef markets, and in the end just emphasizes Britain's increasing impotence in a Europe organized around a Franco-German axis.

And if a consequence of Britain's sabotage of Europe's meat market should be to give US meat exports an opportunity to invade (hormones and all), then Major's Last Stand could come to be regarded with still colder fury by Britain's 'fellow Europeans', whilst winning few tangible prizes from the Americans.

With the air now thick with trade-war threats (between Britain and Europe over beef; between Washington and the rest of the world over trade with Cuba, Libya, Iraq and Iran), there is an air of unreality about the recent plethora of reports in which imperialism awards itself marks out of ten for 'competitiveness'.

In one top-twenty table, Germany is tenth, and in another she doesn't figure at all. In one, Japan is in fourth place; in another, thirteenth. And in all tables, the US is at or near the tap of the tree (fourth in the World Economic Forum's chart, and first in the Institute for Management Development's).

The USA's remarkable score (given the size of her budget and trade deficits, low growth, high unemployment, urban decay, criminality in high places etc.) is supposedly to be explained by the same 'strengths' as Britain is said to possess (further down the ladder at 15 or 19). These 'strengths' are mostly to do with willingness to 'deregulate' and 'liberalize' the economy, create a 'flexible' workforce, 'rationalize' production, and run a booming financial market. In addition, the US and Britain are said to have advantages in technology.

To take the last point first: Having a residual nominal advantage in technology (due in part to a tradition of research and innovation (now squandered) originating with Britain's earlier empire position, and in part to Japan's export of capital and production know-how in furtherance of its own monopoly expansion) may get Britain a few brownie points in the charts.

But with empire long gone, and the substitute US-financed postwar boom gone too, basking in the reflected glory of Japanese scientific achievement on Tyneside is thin comfort for British imperialism. As one capitalist (IMD) soothsayer told another (OECD) soothsayer on the radio, Britain's "attractiveness" as a relatively cheap and flexible labour market is all very well, but is no substitute for successful "aggressiveness" in carving out world market share.

The USA has more recently enjoyed enormous advantages derived from its 50-year domination of the imperialist world, including first pickings of all the world's best scientific resources.

But now that US growth rates are in decline (a phenomenon that is itself in part a consequence of the longterm depressive effects upon capitalism's ability to make profits when such intensive application of technology to production diminishes the relative importance of living labour within the composition of capital), and now that its market share is under attack, it will take more than protectionist blather about sacred 'intellectual property rights' to keep America's technological 'edge' sharp.

As for all the bragging about Anglo-Saxon capitalist ruthlessness, on both sides of the Atlantic, in creating a "flexible workforce' (through de-unionization and the threat of unemployment), privatizing everything in the public arena from pensions to gaols, and using the capital generated by all this frenetic 'liberalizing' activity to ginger up the finance markets, two things need to be said.

First, the Anglo-Saxons aren't alone in this game, and may find themselves rapidly challenged by those that are now being patronized as slow-footed.

And second, the direction this game is headed is war and revolution, with "winners" and "losers" alike heading for class-political extinction at the hands of the very social forces which capitalist crisis itself brings into play.

German influence has already been felt on the Square Mile. Reading between the lines of recent capitalist press speculation, though, this could be peanuts compared with the scale of ruthless finance capital 'achievements' reunified Germany might yet be provoked into bringing to market, against the grain of some of its own allegedly more stolid manufacture-save-export traditions.

The privatization of Deutsche Telekom is seen, for example, as just a first step towards building up the German stock market to take on the Square Mile and Wall Street. On the way, the 'quaint' German pensions system gets casually torched, to be replaced by Anglo-Saxon style privatization:

German and foreign banks are preparing feverishly for the Telekom issue, which will be followed by a second share tranche by 1999. Telekom itself has embarked on a widespread promotional campaign to address potential shareholders.

Since last year's new issues were mostly successful - notably Adidas sports equipment and Merck pharmaceuticals - bankers hope retail and institutional investors in Germany will flock to buy Telekom shares in November. They are also relying on investors in Europe, the US and Asia to help ensure that the issue goes well.

But even if the Telekom issue does succeed, the German stock exchange will still lag well behind other markets in relation to the size of the economy. Many more initial public offerings (IPOs) will be required to produce a heavyweight market that can even contemplate rivalling other big financial centres such as London, New York and Tokyo.

It is here that the talk turns to pension funds, a vast source of equity, venture capital and other investment in the US, UK and other countries but lacking the size in Germany to have much impact. Most pensions are provided by the state pay-as-you-go system, with companies generally adding to these from their own internal (book reserve) schemes.

But the PAYG system threatens to burst at the seams. High unemployment and a slack economy is causing a pensions crisis in Germany. Companies are also finding that the book reserve schemes which served them so well as a source of cheap capital during post-war growth periods are now more of a burden.

With the state and corporate sides of the pension system causing increasing concern, many bankers see a gradual move to pension funds of the Anglo-Saxon type as inevitable.

Since these would invest heavily in equities to provide the best long-term returns, the capital market could benefit enormously.

German companies' book reserves total some DM270bn, equivalent to a third of the country's stock market capitalisation. Ronaldo Schmitz, a director of Deutsche Bank, says that if companies could be persuaded to put some of their reserves into the capital market, "this would liven up the stock exchange considerably''.

Gerhard Koning, former head of corporate finance at Commerzbank, agrees. "The fact that these pension reserves stay with the companies is one reason the German capital market is so underdeveloped," he says.

"The market economy in Germany - in terms of equity - is still in its infancy," says Andreas von Buddenbrock, a Frankfurt-based executive at Merrill Lynch, the big US investment house. Market capitalisation in Germany is only a tenth of that in the US, although the US economy is only three times as large.

Theo Waigel, the finance minister, has revealed that he is planning to overhaul the generous state pensions system by the end of 1997, and recently proposed that all retirement pensions should be made subject to income tax.

"The government is saying a little more each day," comments Rolf Passow, chief executive of DIT, the funds group belonging to Dresdner Bank.

Although the idea is long out of date in the UK, Germans still believe that their state pension and company pension combined will be enough to finance a generous lifestyle in old age. Mr Passow thinks that rather than try to disabuse the public, fund managers should remain discreet at this stage.

 If we say too much about the problem there'll be a huge uproar." 

German capitalism famously produced 'miracles' of productive growth postwar. The "book reserve" pensions - the nearest thing in real life to the simple-minded conception of pensions as 'deferred wages' being held in trust by the employers -was then a ready source for 'cheap capital' (because 'borrowed' from workers at zero interest) which could be invested in further productive growth.

Still in 1993 it was by dint of manufacture and export that Germany broke out of 'recession'. But now that, as it seems, the next breakthrough must be at the level of finance capital rivalry, the Anglo-Saxon status quo had better watch its back. If the German capital market is "underdeveloped" and "in its infancy", its manufacturing base is the reverse, and appears to offer an enormous scope for "capitalization". When DM270bn worth of pensions gets pumped into equities, this could indeed "liven up the stock exchange" - and not just in Germany.

A similar 'culture change' in German banking is reportedly underway, to the FT's patronizing approval:

The prospect of increased competition among Europe's financial centres with the creation of a single European currency has sparked a frenzy of innovation in Germany's bond market, ushering in long-overdue reforms.

Most European countries regularly issue money market debt, highlighting Germany's competitive disadvantage once Emu takes effect. "If Germany doesn't offer money market instruments, international investors will go to those markets that do," says Mr Christoph Anhamm, bond strategist at Union Bank of Switzerland in Frankfurt. "But instead of trading just in short-dated instruments, they might end up doing their major business there - which would be a great loss to Germany."

The German Banking Association, which represents the private sector banks, issued an urgent plea for the reform of the German capital market ahead of European Monetary Union. Arguing that Germany would lose its greatest asset - the D-Mark - with the advent of Emu, the association warned that the country would be left with no advantages over its neighbours unless its capital market were overhauled - fast.

"Germany can only remain competitive in a unified European financial market if it can offer competitive products," it said..

And even the Bundesbank, which has always prided itself in its fierce independence from any political or commercial interests, is grudgingly ushering in bond market innovations to help boost Germany's regional competitiveness.

The Bundesbank had warned for years that financing long-term public-sector deficits at the very short end of the yield curve would foster a short-termist attitude that runs counter to Germany's tradition of long-term price stability.

In a crucial concession to Bonn and the financial markets, it recently relaxed its hitherto staunch opposition to money-market instruments - which it always argued would hamper its monetary policy management - by signalling that it is prepared to accept the issuance of debt with maturities of less than one year by the government - albeit a limited amount.

So who knows? The way things are moving, Germany could one day move up the IMF and WEF and OECD charts to be almost as competitive even as... the United States!! What a joke. By any sane comparison, German economic performance long since out-competed America.

But if the criteria are to be the viciousness with which the national bourgeois fight the class war, and the lunatic heights of contradiction which can be sustained between financial markets and their productive foundations (e.g. between share prices and corporate earnings, as one expression of this), then so be it. The United States won't be short of challengers there either.

Meanwhile, the capitalist press itself continues to give the liveliest account of what American 'competitive success' in financial markets really amounts to:

AMERICA'S ardour for the stock market shows no signs of abating, despite Wall Street worries of a crash, with individual investors pouring $99 billion (£65 billion) into mutual funds in the first four months of this year.

The staggering flow of money compares to a total of $128 billion salted away into mutual funds in 1995. Many investors are putting their money into the riskiest types of funds, aggressive growth funds, in search of the highest returns.

According to the Investment Company Institute, a mutual fund trade group, these aggressive stock funds absorbed more than a third of the $20.6 billion of net inflows recorded by domestic stock funds in April.

Analysts say it is the flood of money into mutual funds that accounts for the seemingly inexhaustible rally in the stock market, but some of them are worried.

"The last market I remember being labelled as liquidity-driven was in 1987," said Byron Wien, equity strategist at Morgan Stanley. "It ended badly enough that I feel a spinal shudder every time I hear the phrase."

Retirement accounts make up as much as 40 per cent of total stock fund sales and these investors maintain that they are in for the long haul. But "baby boom" investors have yet to experience a prolonged bear market and the big imponderable is how they will react as their nest eggs erode in the face of a prolonged downturn.

In the past, investors have taken advantage of dips to put money into mutual funds, but they might lack the stomach to ride out a 20 per cent plunge in the stock market, which is what some analysts predict for this year.

The huge concentration of power in a handful of mutual fund companies in the event of a market dip has also sparked concern. The top 10 funds control about half of the industry's $3,000 billion in assets. There are fears that so much power in the hands of a few mutual fund managers could destabilise the market even more than in 1987, should all head for the exit at the same time.

THE Dow Jones index - a century old yesterday - has already risen 12.6pc this year after a 33.5pc surge last year. The index began 1995 below 4000: now 6000 is less than 240 points away, requiring a rise of just 4pc - but some on Wall Street predict a dramatic drop cannot be far away.

This sharp rise in share prices comes at the same time as corporate earnings growth is slowing.

Analysts at Merrill Lynch expect earnings, which grew by just over 30pc last year, to remain flat in 1996. Coca-Cola, of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, is trading at 34-times 1996's expected profits.

The smaller stocks have been the main recipient of the record levels of mutual fund money pouring into the market during the first quarter of the year: about $4 billion of new money is hitting the market each week.

Michael Metz, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer & Co, says: "The really critical question is how long this lunacy lasts. My feeling is that it'll be a wild summer and then it'll be over.''

What an inviting prospect to put before the world's peoples! Work hard, tighten your belts, endure poverty, backwardness and humiliation, take orders from the IMF and World Bank, support Washington against Cuba at the US, and then just MAYBE..you could get to join the self-proclaimed lunatics at the top of the 'competitiveness' charts!'

This salt in the wound of uneven development is one more reminder that, all the time this crisis develops, it is simultaneously developing all the forces which will eventually dig capitalism's grave.

Imperialism is the highest, and final, stage of capitalism. What most strikingly characterizes this highest phase of modern capitalist development - the concentration of capital - is also what finally condemns ALL of imperialism to extinction, useful only as a painful stepping stone to humanity's future communist progress. All this imperialist 'competition' is in the end just competition to decide who among the parasites will play the most aggressive leading role in undermining the common ground of class exploitation on which all these parasites depend.

The tendency for many capitals to concentrate into few, for industrial capital to be subordinated by finance capital, and for finance capital itself to gather into ever denser masses, is an inescapable key feature of modern monopoly capital development, which reactionaries like Redwood can be left to protest against in isolation from capitalism itself. Failure by any section of modern capitalism to actively promote this process (because of poor performance in the trade battles, currency wars, take-over campaigns, etc.) simply means that it will fail as capitalism, its failure contributing to the 'success' of its rivals and of the tendency of concentration in general.

But the greater the success in actively promoting this endless quest for complete monopolization of all the world's markets at the expense of all competition, the more intolerable becomes the crisis of imperialism, the faster it drives on to imperialist war, and the more insistently imperialism itself prepares the way for its own revolutionary departure from world history.

News now coming in of Sinn Féin's startling successes in the Irish elections once again lends political sharpness to the picture of economic humiliation and defeat which is now the lot of fading British imperialism.

Build Leninism.

Paddy Chambers