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 0863 July 23rd 1996                                                                                                                        10p

Actual events in the international and class struggles are the only objective test of a correct Marxist analysis. Perceptive theory about the latest developments in the world imperialist crisis, confirmed by revolutionary struggle, is the best 'programme' by far.

The suspicion alone that TWA 800 was blown up by Middle East 'terrorists' is all that anyone needs to know to resolve the polemical disputes currently dividing and paralysing the communist movement.

Just imperialism's anxious response is enough to rout the naff 'programme' of a typical vanguardist sect, and at the same time explode the hollowness of the Open Polemic line deploring 'vanguardism' and 'leader centralism'.

The OP's latest 10,000 word attack on the CPGB for getting it wrong about how to rebuild a serious communist party for Britain and internationally, is astonishing for not mentioning one single issue from the real world of the international class struggle. The entire rigmarole is about the 'proper' procedures for polemics and democracy, and alleged breaches thereof.

The only Marxist challenge to the CPGB, - and to Open Polemic, - is to show that their theory of what is happening in the world is either wrong or non-existent, - in either case a hopeless basis for developing an active communist party.

Only real life can demonstrate the correctness of any understanding about how anti-imperialist struggle is going to be crowned with the sustainable world socialist revolution, even on such questions as inner-party democracy. The OP's 10,000 words are all utterly wasted. They are up a completely blind subjective alley.

All ideas about anything come from mankind's individual and collective struggle for survival. The best theory about what to do next can emerge however it wants, but what it needs to be is correct. The way to stop a leader's ideas from misleading people is to get better leading ideas, not insanely challenge the natural order of things which observes leadership at work throughout all history. 

Who usually takes the leading role inside OP? Who gave the lead for this latest challenge to the CPGB? Whoever it is, better leading ideas are needed. If no one did, then the useless results only prove the point even more. This fear of leading ideas sounds more like a problem for psychoanalysis than a matter for political polemic.

What the CPGB need telling is that their world view is completely cockeyed, not that they are suffering from a nasty dose of vanguardism. They have hopelessly got wrong the character of the epoch they are living in.

Only in imperialist propaganda and the Weekly Worker is it "the US dominated new world order", printed without ironic quote marks around it, which has allegedly imposed "a NEGATIVE (original emphasis) resolution of revolutionary situations" via insisting on the settlement of such 'hot spots' as Palestine, South Africa, and Ireland which are under the imperialist guise of being 'peaceful and democratic' but which in the CPGB's version of reality are simply defeats for the anti-imperialist struggle.

The way imperialism has approached the TWA 800 disaster, to take just the latest highest point of class-struggle development, hardly tells the story of an all-powerful US-dominated world order currently able to impose its will on everybody, never mind the CPGB's incredible claims that the dismantling of apartheid was a 'defeat' for anti-imperialist development, or that the Sinn Féin/IRA national liberation struggle has just collapsed, another 'victim' of mighty Washington's negation, - matters at last in polemical dispute between the CPGB and the EPSR(see below).

And finding imperialism's horror-struck panic-stricken response to TWA 800 was by no means just some chance lucky event for the EPSR world view that this remains the epoch of the crisis of world imperialism, marked in particular by the catastrophic imminent collapse of US supremacy which will drag down the rest of imperialism with it in a holocaust of trade war, insoluble anti-imperialist struggle, and eventually mutually-destructive inter-imperialist war.

The EPSR's entire understanding of Marxist 'programme' rests wholly on the continuous attempt to provide an up-to-the-minute analysis of world developments which can confirm (or disprove) the basic revolutionary theory or perspective.

Is US imperialist lone super-power hegemonism totally dominating the planet, or is the capitalist system about to crash into the greatest period of revolutionary turmoil and upheaval in all history? All elaborated 'programmes' and 10,000-word essays on correct political courtship procedures are a bit redundant by comparison, as the Bolsheviks discovered in 1917 when Lenin tore a way through the long awaited "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" with scarcely a glance at the pained protests of myriad proceduralists, and charged straight on towards the proclaiming of the dictatorship of the proletariat minus all 'democratic' compromise as the only means of guaranteeing the defeat of the counter-revolution, negating in seconds (or as long as it took for the idea to form) what the Marxist political circles had toiled so laboriously with for nearly 20 years of programme-writing. 

"An ounce of revolutionary movement is worth a dozen programmes", as Lenin explained. Theory and programme must be formulated and elaborated, but theory and programme which are not renewed and kept up-to-date an a weekly and daily basis are worse than useless to the revolutionary movement.

If it was an anti-imperialist bomb which got TWA 800, the CPGB will presumably tell all workers to believe that it was just a one-off despairing gesture which will quickly be pacified at source by all-powerful US imperialism, - educating the working class towards defeatism (its greatest weakness) as the EPSR would see it, but educating the working class towards reality, as the CPGB would presumably explain it.

Even the US imperialist circles and the bourgeois media in general, themselves as keen as anyone to demoralise the working class with defeatism, felt incapable of putting too pro-imperialist a gloss on things as the CPGB wishes to present  - as the capitalist press itself was obliged to report:

INTENSE speculation that TWA Flight 800 was destroyed by sabotage is a potent reminder that terrorism is an ever-growing problem for the international community. Far from being outdated by the ending of the Cold War, it offers a low-cost, potentially high-yield weapon for the weak, with relatively little risk to the perpetrators.

International terrorist groups operate transnational, criss-crossing frontiers to evade justice, and using safe havens in Western cities to plan, promote and fund terrorism overseas.

Terrorist groups are using the Internet to gather information on weaponry and techniques and to spread propaganda and threats. The Oklahoma bombing showed how deadly traditional terrorist explosives can be. But now that a Japanese religious sect has crossed the threshold to using a chemical weapon, Sarin, it is all too possible that some other fanatical hate-filled group will use a chemical or biological weapon or even a crude nuclear device. Micro-proliferation to substate organisations should be a major concern of the G7 states.

Terrorism is likely to remain a particular threat to the US because there are numerous groups, militarily and economically weak, some with support from rogue states, which have a burning hatred against America, the sole remaining superpower. Nor is that threat confined to US targets overseas: the World Trade Center and Oklahoma bombings proved that US cities are no longer immune to terrorist attack.	

Twenty-seven per cent of international terrorist attacks cause fatalities, the highest percentage recorded since the upsurge of modern terrorism in 1968. Moreover, as diplomatic and military targets have become better protected, they have switched without compunction to attacks on soft targets. This is reflected in the switch to sabotage bombing of airliners.

Three planes have been destroyed by this means since Lockerbie, with the loss of all passengers and crew; over the Niger desert and in Colombia in 1989 and in Panama in 1994. Many other attempts have been thwarted by intelligence and police efforts, including a plot to blow up 12 American airliners in Asia last year. The trend towards huge lorry bombs in urban centres around the world from Buenos Aires to Moscow is another sign of the terrorist’s growing lack of discrimination.

Terrorism against key economic targets is another trend, as demonstrated in the IRA City of London bombings and the Manchester bombing which together inflicted damage estimated at over £900 million, in addition to the deaths and injuries caused to the victims. In Turkey, Egypt and Spain terrorist groups have systematically targeted the tourist sector in order to inflict massive economic damage.

In Latin America, South Asia and the former Soviet Union terrorism has become increasingly interwoven with organised crime and drug-trafficking, further undermining the viability of fragile and corrupt governments in those areas. The downing of the Avianca airliner in 1989 was directly linked to a Colombian drug cartel.

Hostage-taking is on the increase among desperate groups in many Third World countries, where both Western governments and host states seem apparently powerless to mount rescues. There has been a 33 per cent rise in the kidnapping of foreigners in the 1990s.

President Bill Clinton and other world leaders are right to highlight terrorism as a significant challenge which has to be faced by the entire international community.

The terror network has become labyrinthine and is more active than ever within the United States. FBI investigators now talk about a ‘spaghetti junction’ of international terrorist connections, replacing the pattern of the Seventies and Eighties, when terrorist cadres were sponsored by states, notably Syria, Iraq and Libya. Now they form a loose network of amorphous, like-minded Islamist groups drawing ideological inspiration and logistical assistance from 'rogue’ states including Iran and Sudan.

Today’s extremists are part of a worldwide growth in Islamist groups known as jihadis, or holy warriors — radical fundamentalists with global connections working to overthrow Israel and conservative Arab regimes and hurt the Americans who stayed behind to protect them after the defeat of President Saddam Hussein in the Gulf war.

While former President Ronald Reagan blamed Libya and bombed Tripoli after attacks on US servicemen in Germany, President Bill Clinton has no such target.

‘Time was when you could say, “That’s Gadaffi, and we know he’s in Tripoli”,’ said an official at FBI headquarters in Washington yesterday, ‘or “that’s Abu Abbas, or Abu Nidal, and we know he’s in Baghdad”, and follow the connections. Now you get some guy showing up in New York off of a first-class seat on Pakistan Air saying he wants political asylum, disappears and then starts blowing up Wall Street. Turns out he came up with idea with a friend in a motel in Manila.’

This reference is to Ramzi Youssef, on trial in New York charged with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and conspiring to blow up 11 American airliners in a single day as they flew home from the Far East. Youssef did indeed arrive at JFK airport with an Iraqi passport, said he wanted political asylum and was given an appointment he failed to attend.

The alleged plot was discovered when police were called to Youssef s apartment in the Philippines to investigate a fire. They found explosives, a pipe bomb and a computer disk containing details of a plan to blow up aircraft belonging to Delta Northwest and United airlines. Youssef was later arrested in a cheap guest house in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Shortly afterwards he was extradited to the US to face charges of masterminding the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Days later two American diplomats were gunned down in Karachi in protest against the extradition.

The extent and complexity of that investigation is a cautionary precedent for the TWA disaster inquiry. ’The scope of the investigation was immense,’ says its chief James Kullstrom. 'The trail went to the Middle East, the Far East, and back to New York.'

Another likely common factor with the new investigation is the obscurity of the accused: two months into the trial Youssef remains the most enigmatic figure. No one is even sure if that is his real name — when he was seized in Pakistan he had 11 other passports, including one from Iraq.

He once told an Arab newspaper that he was brought up in Kuwait, where his Pakistani father was an employee of Kuwait Airways, leaving three weeks after the Iraqi invasion of the emirate in 1990.

Pakistani intelligence documents tell a different story, that Youssef was an Iranian Baluch who lived for a number of years in Iraq.

Ten men, many with Afghan combat experience, have been condemned to a total of 240 years for the World Trade Center attack allegedly masterminded by Youssef. Here another complex thread weaves into the tapestry, twisted by bitter irony.

FBI investigators explain with a grimace how many Afghan fundamentalist Mujahideen fighters armed and trained by US intelligence and military advisers in their war against the Soviet Union were then incorporated into the international militant Islamist movement after the retreat of the Red Army, were offered Iraqi or Sudanese passports, settled in Sudan and were retrained.

Three of the four men executed for the Movement for Islamic Change attack on the Saudi National Guard last November were Afghan war veterans encouraged by Saudi intelligence to fight in the Western-backed jihad against the Soviets.

With former Afghan volunteers also leading Islamist insurgencies in Algeria and Egypt, these are ties that bind.

This is the pattern that focuses the FBI on the terrain where it can be most effective —the US itself, which has recently become a haven for fund-raising and even training by militant Islam.

In 1989 Islamist fundamentalists from all over the world converged for a conference in Kansas City, Missouri, which heard speaker after speaker urge a jihad against Israel and the US and even boast of armed actions. Among them was Sheikh Mohammed Siam, a leader of Palestinian Hamas, and Abdullah Anas, leader of the Algerian Islamic Front.

The rally was sponsored by a Texas-based group called the Islamist Association for Palestine. There have been similar gatherings in Chicago and New Jersey, accompanied by fund-raising drives centred on specific mosques and groups, including the Islamic Committee for Palestine, based in Tampa, Florida, and accused by a recent television documentary as being 'the primary support group in the United States for Islamic Jihad’ — the codename used by the international terrorist network and signature to the only claim for the TWA 800 bomb received by the US authorities to date. The call came from Tampa.

The Clinton administration has tried to tackle the problem with a pincer movement. On one hand, the President has continued to pursue the policy set by the 1991 Gulf war, showing that the US is prepared to defend its interests in the Middle East and access to oil markets by sponsoring friendly Muslim countries. Clinton’s praise for Muslim religious values and a high-profile visit to a mosque at Jakarta in November 1994 illustrate this.

At the same time, he has introduced — by American standards — draconian anti-terrorism legislation and sought legal ways to curb fund-raising by armed groups.

The attack on the US Marines at Dhahran and now — if it is connected to radical Islam —	the TWA massacre suggest that the estimable strategy, designed to embrace the vast majority of American Muslims and isolate the extremists, is under severe strain both at home and on the international stage. 

Now TWA 800 may of course turn out not to have been a 'terrorist' bomb, - but the bourgeois ideologists above amply make the point that one bomb more or less would not alter the general pattern of the imperialist powers facing increasing difficulty from anti-imperialist struggle, - the complete opposite of the defeatist character which the CPGB insists on ascribing to the present world epoch.

The above capitalist press coverage could not be clearer that there is now such a vast sweep of anti-imperialist struggle brewing, just in the Middle East and/or Muslim world alone, that the US counter-revolutionary agencies are almost at their wits end stumbling to try to keep track of them all, let alone penetrate them all and destroy them.

Elsewhere, a whole new guerrilla revolutionary army (the EER) has appeared suddenly in Guerrero state of Mexico, entirely separate from the Zapatista national liberation army (EZLN) challenging Mexican state power in the Chiapas region of the south.

US imperialism has been frantic about the Zapatistas after the near catastrophe of the collapse of the Mexican peso last year, - and now this:

In a first public appearance less than an hour’s drive from Acapulco, a group of 80 to 100 masked and uniformed men and women carrying automatic weapons presented themselves as members of the 500-strong guerrilla organisation, formed about a year ago.

Local peasant leaders and the former opposition presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas were marking the first anniversary of the massacre by police of 17 peasants at Aguas Blancas when the EPR members descended from the surrounding hills.

They read a manifesto calling for the overthrow of the “anti-popular, anti-democratic, demagogic and illegitimate” government and announced their decision to launch an armed struggle, before firing volleys into the air and withdrawing.

In its manifesto, and in brief answers to reporters' questions, the EPR made no reference to links with the EZLN, which has in the past claimed that several other states harboured sympathetic armed groups.

Guerrero, which is regarded as perhaps the most violent and repressive state in Mexico, was the scene of a bloody counter-insurgency campaign in the early 1970s, after the Party of the Poor (PDLP) launched a guerrilla war not far from the scene of Friday’s incident.

Since 1992 there have been recurrent rumours that new guerrilla groups were forming in the state.

Two years ago, a leak from military intelligence suggested that a shipment of 20,000 AK-47s was on its way to Guerrero from the US.

Tension has been particularly high since the Aguas Blancas massacre, in which about 200 policemen ambushed unarmed members of the Peasant Organisation of the Southern Sierra (OCSS).

The state governor, Ruben Figueroa, who had ordered that the OCSS be stopped “at all costs” before they arrived at a planned demonstration, was forced from office nine months later.

In an unprecedented move, the federal government had referred the case to the supreme court, which found that the governor had engaged in a brazen cover-up.

However, the state attorney general last month absolved both the former governor and other senior officials of any wrongdoing, effectively closing the case.

It looks as if it is going to take even more than the world-record IMF loans during the currency emergency to buy off this trouble. And that is just Mexico, one of the better-off Latin American countries. US armed forces are currently hovering in Occupied Panama near the borders with Colombia because of a threatened communist guerrilla-army takeover in the northern provinces there. Another dozen Latin American and Caribbean states are close to similar turmoil. Certainly Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, and Haiti were pacified, up to a point. But far bigger revolts are on the horizon. And Cuba is still unpacifiable.

And what will US imperialism do when the whole of giant Brazil goes up in flames? Even the capitalist press senses more revolutionary crisis than US-dominated 'new world order':

WITH his last breath, Oziel Alves Pereira mouthed “MST” — the initials of Brazil's Sem Terra (Landless) Movement—	before he became the latest victim in a low-intensity war racking Brazil.

The killing of Pereira and at least 18 other MST demonstrators staging a protest near Maraba in the north-eastern state of Para has become emblematic of a broader struggle over land in Latin America.

Forensic reports suggest the 17-year-old was shot execution-style, at point-blank range, after state police dispersed the protesters.

A local priest denounced the killings as premeditated— a claim strengthened when a man identifying himself as a local farmer alleged on Globo television that landowners had paid police to rid them of squatters.

The massacre in late April has dramatically exposed the contradiction between President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s commitment to social reform — including land distribution — and to modernising the economy. 

The process of rural modernisation is land intensive — and excludes the rural poor.

Founded 12 years ago, MST is the most well-organised of groups throughout Latin America which have long advocated the occupation of unproductive or idle land as a solution to rural poverty. Its leaders say there are 5 million landless peasants and labourers in Brazil.

The concentration of land in Brazil is staggering: 1 per cent of landowners control 44 per cent of productive farmland, while 53 per cent of farmers eke out a living on 2.6 per cent of the land.

Inequality, epitomised by entrenched landowning elites, has been exacerbated by the emergence of vast estates, spurred by federal incentives, which ostensibly seek to exploit economies of scale for export production. Many, however, serve as a simple hedge against inflation.

The Para massacre occurred in an area dominated by vast mining and livestock projects, laying bare the issue at the heart of the debate over land use — that unchecked commercial development fuels social conflict.

This debate can be seen as a struggle for the soul of agrarian reform between market prescriptions aiming to maximise the productivity of extractive land use, and the social needs of Latin America’s 150 million rural dwellers.

MST’s rightwing critics deride its efforts as a futile attempt to recreate inefficient subsistence farming.

Outside Brazil, nowhere has the market outlook prevailed more than in Mexico, where deregulation of tenure was one of the sparks that ignited the Chiapas rebellion.

Tension over land has been heightened by the region’s broader economic transformation, in particular the removal of import barriers. Indigenous Mexicans face the prospect of eating tortillas made from United States maize, and highland Peruvians already eat potatoes from Europe.

The most dramatic symbol in Brazil of the clash between market and social agendas came in January in the form of decree 1775, which exposes previously demarcated Indian lands to legal claims by rapacious corporations.

Mr Cardoso gave an unequivocal electoral commitment in 1994 to tackle inequality. But Para has fuelled suspicions that his commitment to social reform was merely a footnote to his macroeconomic imperatives.

While the snail’s pace of social reform may say more about the scale of inequality in Brazil and its political system, the outcry over the massacre has confirmed that the high hopes that accompanied Mr Cardoso’s accession have evaporated.

Stung by criticisms, he has doubled the budget for an existing land reform project, dusted off land reform legislation languishing in congress, moved to tackle police impunity and unveiled a social spending package.

But while Mr Cardoso’s rediscovery of a social agenda may be the most fitting tribute to Pereira’s sacrifice, it is a gesture unlikely to address the irreconcilable clash in the countryside between market and social demands.

• Ten people died in a shootout after hundreds of landless peasants invaded a ranch in north Brazil on Wednesday, authorities said; landless people’s leaders said ranch gunmen had killed peasants.

And Brazil is far from being the poorest country on earth by a long way.

And in the even more desperate areas, the free-market system is making things worse by the day, leading to the most gross inequalities in living standards in modern times, with absolute deterioration in the lives of billions of the most wretched, - as the United Nations itself has just reported:

THE RICH, they will always be with us. But never in the history of the world have they been present in such quantities and in such flamboyant contrast with the poor as now. The year’s most halting statistic has come in the UN’s new Human Development Report. Take it in slowly: the total wealth of the world’s 358 billionaires equals the combined incomes of the poorest 45 per cent of the world’s population — 2.3 billion people.

The mantra of the moment is still “trickle-down” economics: the rich are encouraged to earn as much as they like — buttressed by huge salary increases and fat stock options — in the hope that the poor will be richer than they would otherwise have been from the crumbs that fall off the tables of the rich.

In practice it hasn’t worked like that. The UN figures show that 100 countries have actually suffered economic decline or stagnation which has reduced the income of a quarter of the world’s population. In 70 countries people are on average poorer than they were in 1980 and in 43 countries poorer than in 1970.

Inequality has not only grown between countries but within them. Average income per person in Britain is £11.096 but the bottom 20 per cent earn only £2.548. according to the UN, or only slightly higher than the bottom 20 per cent in Hungary.
As the Human Development Report notes, total economic wealth in the world (global GDP) is $23 trillion, of which only $5 trillion, or 22 per cent is accounted for by developing, countries, even though they have nearly 80 per cent of the world’s population.

And it’s getting worse. Between 1960 and 1991 the richest 20 per cent of the world’s population increased their share of total global wealth from 70 per cent to 85 per cent while the poorest 20 per cent saw their global share fall from a meagre 2.3 per cent to a disgraceful 1.4 per cent By 1991 more than 85 per cent of the world's population received only 15 per cent of its income.

The perspective is not one of US imperialism dominating the world's "hot spots" with imposed pacification, but on the contrary of the imperialist-system control of the planet being completely overwhelmed by the scale of the coming revolt by the dispossessed.

Meanwhile, the notion of imperialist domination and US pacification, even temporarily, is completely misleading nonsense. Not only is there the continuing terrifying prospect of an unwinnable trade war between the USA, Europe, and Japan, but the European countries are also now challenging, in unprecedentedly blunt language, Washington's right to dictate to its former Cold War allies on such matters as trade with Cuba, restrictions on which some EC states have outspokenly rejected. In the background, the world’s stock exchanges and currency markets now seem to hover permanently on the brink of the most devastating crash in their whole history. And to cap it all, US imperialism has just learned that its world-beating 'smart' weaponry which supposedly won the war against the sitting duck Saddam Hussein, was nothing like as effective as originally claimed by Gulf War propaganda, and is also proving prohibitively expensive, - too expensive for the Federal Government budget.

It is splits in the imperialist camp which designate the epoch we are living in, not the supreme unchallengeable power of a single mighty imperialist control. The new Tory splits over European integration policy are the most soul-destroying ever, shattering ruling—class nerves on the brink of a terribly destabilising election period. And the knives are coming out ever more publicly, - and ever more back-stabbingly sharp, - as the very absence of any winning perspective for British imperialism (and therefore for imperialism in general) becomes all the clearer. By the very nature of capitalism, imperialism faces an insoluble crisis, not an unchallengeable Pax America, - as prominent disillusioned bourgeois are more and more frequently telling the capitalist press:

In Fighting Among Allies — America and England at Peace and War, Sir Robin argues that Britain needs to have a more modest view of the so-called special relationship with the United States, which he describes as “an especially close relationship” that is not unique.

He targets those Eurosceptic Thatcherites who suggest Britain can side with Washington instead of Brussels, claiming that Britain will not enjoy its privileged position with the US if it remains on the margins of Europe. His statement confirms the suspicion that Bonn has become more important to the US administration than London.

Sir Robin complains that France and Germany make all the key decisions about Europe, Spain and Italy exercise a moderating role, and Britain is on the sidelines, jeering at the action.

The former envoy — who also served in South Africa and was said to be a favourite of Baroness Thatcher — argues that Britain has to ditch its divide-and-rule approach to Europe, playing France and Germany off each other.

‘‘The Franco-German relationship will continue to more important to both countries than the relationship with Britain is to either of them,” he writes.

The memoir traces the root of the problem to Britain's failure to sign the Treaty of Rome in 1957, citing it as a strategic disaster far greater than the ill-fated Suez invasion a year earlier.

Britain is a weak link in the imperialist chain, which is why its humiliation at the hands of the Irish national liberation struggle is such an important and heroic story, simply not recognizable in the CPGB's idiotic dirge about the IRA/Sinn Féin being forced to abandon its fight "by becoming the latest 'victim' of enforced US imperialist pacification. Where? When? How?Who noticed? The CPGB tries to reply to EPSR views (to be dealt with subsequently) but still, Trot-like, cannot put a time or place on the 'betrayal' of the revolution.
They want to give up trying. Tales of a Sinn Féin/ IRA sell-out are a defeatist nonsense.

The CPGB 'reply' then simply invents things the EPSR has never stated in order to knock down so many Aunt Sallies, specifically, mainly, that EPSR positions represent "so much praise upon the Stalinite bureaucracy"; or "there is always JV Stalin who can save us all the time and effort and build 'communism' for us"; or "why do we need a Communist Party at all with all these 'surrogates' and 'substitutes' floating around, - Red Army, JV Stalin, ANC, Gerry Adams, etc"; or "uncritical cheerleaders for Sinn Féin/IRA"; or "the national-liberation struggle is the preserve of nationalist movements"; or "communists can emerge like supermen after the national liberation stage"; or "pro-IRA internationalism is flowering inside the British working class"; and much more such gibberish, not one word of which was uttered by the letter to CPGB (see below). Just who "has taken leave of his senses",(to quote some more CPGB nonsense)?

To identify Trot defeatism as a fake 'revolutionary' petty-bourgeois mentality fantasising only about the 'perfect revolution' implies no support for Stalinist revisionism at all, which is where the CPGB began life, not the EPSR. To see the Sinn Féin/IRA national-liberation struggle as a defeat for British imperialism does not remotely imply an uncritical approach to the laughable ideological limitations of petty-bourgeois nationalism, or that national-liberation struggles must be the preserve of nationalist movements (Cuba, Vietnam, and China to some extent, are obvious proof of the opposite, communist leadership). It would have been better if there had been communists around to lead the Irish national-liberation struggle. To see that British imperialist setbacks are the route for British workers to break from a pro-imperialist position is not remotely the same as saying that "pro-IRA internationalism is flowering inside the British working class".

The CPGB is just lying and distorting to make its 'reply', and still failing to explain how the defeat of apartheid was a 'setback'. The overthrow of reaction by revolutionary struggle cannot always proceed directly to the total victory of the socialist revolution, as Vietnam showed, after the French defeat, via a negotiated outcome, - especially when the ANC and SACP leadership is non-communist or even anti-communist. But to see the overthrow of apartheid as a victory for imperialist reaction is just perverse silliness, lacking the slightest grasp of historical development. Ditto in Ireland. The CPGB suffer from Trot sectarianism of the most blinkered self-aggrandising kind, just like their crooked failed guru Yurukoglu, or that other degenerate Trot hero, - the rat-fink Orwell (see next Review), stooge of the British imperialist secret police.

Even the bourgeois media has started dishing the dirt on this latest disgrace for failed British imperialism, - willy nilly informing workers of the important real retreat by colonialism, just the opposite of the CPGB's demoralising nonsense about Sinn Féin and the IRA giving up:

The Order did not come out of William of Orange's famous victory over James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, but from a much less epic skirmish, the Battle of the Diamond, a glorified sectarian row at a County Armagh crossroads in 1795. It was inspired, not by the historical reality of William of Orange, but by the need to give the sanction of the past to contemporary events. Its founders were embattled people forging a weapon for present conflicts.	One, embodied in initiation rituals and unseen by outsiders, is a way of giving a Biblical resonance to the often squalid realities of sectarian competition. Anthony Buckley of the Ulster Folk Museum, who has had more access to the secret rituals than most outsiders, notes that most of the Biblical texts used in them emphasise a common situation: "that of an individual or group living in a foreign land or among sinners or heathens”.

The texts alluded to on banners and in emblems and rituals “provide object lessons in how the Israelites and later the Jews dealt with a very similar situation of having inherited a promised land which had hitherto belonged to somebody else”. The ideal they inculcate is that of men who have been tried and tested, tempered for the hard struggle for survival in a harsh political landscape. The Garvaghy Road, to religious Orangemen, is a local version of the plains of Jericho.

The other is its ability to present an appearance of unity at times of division The Order really is experienced by many Protestants as a social space in which religious and class differences can be set aside.

The danger of disunity, moreover, has seldom been so obvious. The once formidable monolith of Ulster Unionism has fractured. At the elections for the Northern Ireland Forum in May, no fewer than five Unionist parties won seats.

The depth and ferocity of these divisions was on public display at the opening of the negotiations last month, with Paisley and McCartney accusing Trimble of selling out the Union, and the loyalist fringe parties accusing the other Unionist parties of conspiring to exclude them. Never before has Unionism been so openly divided within itself.

The appeal of the Orange Order as a symbol of Protestant and Unionist unity is, in this context, obvious. The rallying-call from Portadown may be based on a spurious notion even of Orange tradition itself, but it revivifies the simplifying myth of a steadfast people defending its ancient rights.

David Trimble and others in the Unionist leadership must know how thin this illusion really is. Even if the Orangemen win, the prize for victory — the futile gesture of walking down a street protected by ranks of armed policemen — is pathetic.

When such symbols take on such importance for their own sake, it is clear that the confident unity of purpose they are meant to be symbols of really is a thing of the past.

Exactly as the EPSR has always explained, the tide of history is ousting outdated British colonialism.

A new Ireland, no longer still partly an imperialist possession, is being born, - not socialist revolution, of course, as only Trot-fantasy 'revolutionaries' suggested it could be, but an important anti-imperialist national-liberation revolution nevertheless, successfully fought for arms-in-hand against overwhelming odds. Only anti-Marxists could fail to appreciate this tremendous achievement. Build Leninist science. JH

Letter to Weekly Worker, CPGB.

Your 'peace' bomb article (20/6/96) reads like a case history of the Trot mindset. You are determined to see defeat ('Revolution Betrayed') whatever happens so that you can mentally wallow in 'perfect revolution' fantasy-land.

Why avoid the simpler explanation that the Docklands and Manchester guerrilla war operations were a continuation of the 25 years previous guerrilla war? Because that would undermine your determination to believe that Sinn Féin/IRA have sold out. Hence, 'peace' bombs.

As 'proof' you quote a republican source saying 'no ceasefire unless Sinn Féin is at the talks'. But
forcing British imperialism into a negotiated retreat from the original gerrymandered 'No Surrender' Partition was precisely the aim of the national-liberation struggle, so how does forcing talks on procrastinating London equal sell-out?

These 1996 IRA operations were "not a breakaway aimed at restarting the war against British imperialism",you say. No,they're part of same war. It has not ended yet. The only confusion is in your heads. What you are really trying to say is that what hasn't restarted is a revolutionary socialist war. True, but ludicrously irrelevant. It has always been a national-liberation war, but for all that, a mighty blow against imperialism nevertheless. And not sold out, or defeated.

It was indeed "a very loud knock at the negotiating door" as you say with another sneer. But how does it differ from 25 years of previous loud knocking (other than being more damaging and dismaying to imperialism than ever)??

The republican movement "left isolated"? It has succeeded in putting unprecedented international political pressure on imperialism in recent years, culminating in at last forcing 'new deal' talks (after 75 years of 'No Surrender' obduracy, maintaining the fictitious 'separate country' of non-existent 'Northern Ireland'); and winning 40% of the Irish voting strength now in the Occupied Zone, an astonishing achievement against the modern world's anti-'terrorist' propaganda.

What wouldn't the CPGB give to be just a fraction as 'isolated' among English workers.

Exactly when did the IRA become a 'victim' of the New World Order? And what mortal blow was struck by imperialism precisely?

You can no more put a date and place on this defeatist fantasy than Trotskyism ever could on the development in the 1920s which was supposed to prove that the Soviet Union had ceased to be a workers state building socialism and had "sided" via the Comintern, with "the bourgeois order" to take a "cynical counter-revolutionary role" (Transitional Programme 1938).

You have the defeatist mentality of the petty-bourgeois 'left' which rallied to Trotsky whose slanders began as early as the 1923 New Course declaring that nothing now lay ahead of the Soviet workers state but "ossification", and by 1940 was dementedly gloating about "the new aristocracy's....incapacity to conduct a war" (Stalin - Hitler's Quartermaster); and that "Stalin cannot make a war with discontented workers and peasants and with a decapitated Red Army" (German-Soviet Alliance); and that "The level of the USSR's productive forces forbids a major war" (The Twin Star: Hitler-Stalin).

As German imperialism discovered after wiping out 'advanced' West Europe, some "ossification"'.

Only the Trotskyite petty-bourgeois defeatist mentality could treat the overthrow of apartheid as a setback, as you do. Imperialism only retreated to a peaceful settlement with the ANC to avoid an even worse revolutionary defeat later on. The same in Ireland. But these are not defeats but victories over imperialism, by revolutionary armed struggle.

Your conclusion "without the British working class behind it, Irish national-liberation can't win" is the heart of your problem. Marxist science declares a completely contrary reality: that until Britain is forced to concede Ireland its full independence, then the British working class will never break from imperialist domination, (see Economic and Philosophic Science Review 858).

Real life is proving it. The more British 'control' gets humiliated by the IRA and Sinn Féin, the more British people say 'Get out of Ireland'.

Your sour defeatism undermines the national-liberation struggle. Marxist recognition of its titanic achievements cheers it on.

Letters

THE NATIONAL QUESTION 

The correspondence in last week's South West Bulletin (No 179) on the national question clarified most things excellently but still contained one unfortunate formulation, - the one declaring "enthusiastic support for the Irish self-determination struggle" which then adds its "further recognition" that British (and therefore world) imperialism has been pushed back precisely by this revolutionary nationalist armed struggle.

Philosophically, these are the wrong way round.

The right to self-determination is not an absolute principle. Marxism has never dealt in absolute principles of any kind. It is not a morality.

The right to self-determination is recognised as a sound guidance to what will be practical common sense in most cases involving the national question. Ignore it at your peril. Make intelligent use of it wherever possible to drive the class forces of the world imperialist bourgeoisie back further. Transcend the national sovereignty question in order the better to eventually to reach the full flowering of everyone's national aspirations via the full flowering of every person's aspirations in a fully rational communist world.

But the more crucial needs of that wider anti-imperialist revolution must be seen as potentially taking precedence over any nation's right to self-determination seen as an absolute principle of struggle. The Leninist Revolution was sensitive to the national question more than any regime in all previous recorded world history, but the importance of the security of the whole Soviet Revolution required many national self-determination movements within Soviet boundaries to be challenged "enthusiastically". Equally, Tibet's self-determination claim is obviously being used today by world imperialism solely to try to undermine the Chinese workers state.

It is the Irish national-liberation movement's enormous success in humiliating British imperialism which deserves the "enthusiastic support", not its "struggle for self-determination" as such. Emotionally close to the action, it is difficult to separate the two in the mind. But try it, say, for the Tristan da Cunha liberation front, or the Faroese national independence movement, no doubt highly worthy causes if they exist, but not apparently shattering part of world imperialism yet. When they do, Marxist enthusiasm for their success will know no bounds.
Reg Potts

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.
VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32,82 Colston St Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 180. Sunday 21st July, 1996

"Inward investment": the rouge on the cheeks of a corpse.

As Wall Street continues to loop the loop, dragging the City of London in its wake, British capitalism has of late been seeking comfort in heart-warming tales about Britain's inward investment 'success'. But such efforts at spreading good cheer end up making it even clearer how desperate is Britain's plight in the imperialist crisis showdowns to come:

Britain’s capital productivity is now higher than any other G7 country, according to new figures published by the OECD.

The remarkable turnaround over the last ten years means that investors in British industry can reasonably expect a higher return on their money than anywhere else in the developed world.

The world's three largest economies now favour the UK as their first choice destination for foreign investment. Around 40 per cent of all inward manufacturing investment into the European Union is coming to the UK, which accounts for two-fifths of all US, Japanese and, most recently, South Korean investment. German manufacturers, too, are showing renewed enthusiasm for the UK as they discover overall labour costs running at less than half those at home.
Flows of inward direct investment to the UK have been strong for the past decade. Notable examples are Nissan in Sunderland and Toyota in Derby.

For most of the past ten years Britain has been second only to the US in absolute terms and for a year in 1992 became the largest overall recipient of foreign funds in the entire OECD.

Total returns over the period measured seem higher for foreign investors in the UK than for UK investors abroad by about 0.5% to 1.5%.

Mr Michael Heseltine points out that the UK has a higher ratio of inward direct investment to gross domestic product than any other leading global economy. Since 1989 the number of Japanese companies coming to Europe has been declining but last year this trend was reversed according to the Japanese External Trade Organisation.

Nearly half the Japanese companies taking part in a Jetro survey named Britain as the most attractive European base for manufacturing … with the accumulated value of Japanese industrial investment in the - UK standing close to £20bn, there appear's to be no going back.

But not all foreign direct investment in an economy like the UK will add proportionally to the total stock of UK investment. Much recorded direct investment represents mergers and acquisitions, rather than green field development.

The reasons investors choose the UK are well known. Among them are comparatively low labour rates - though these are increasingly less critical given the high-tech, capital-intensive nature of many investments - and flexible, employment conditions. An open door to the rest of the EU and the comfort newcomers find in knowing that others have already chosen the UK are among other important attractions.

Mr John Major, the British prime minister, hails his country as the “enterprise centre of Europe”, a claim roundly dismissed by detractors who
ask why foreign companies have to lead the way.

Despite some recent improvements, it is hard to sustain claims that the country can offer across-the-board employment skills equal to those anywhere else. There is a worrying skills gap which inward investors have been quick to experience.

ministerial eyebrows have been raised by the intense and possibly counter-productive regional rivalry demonstrated during recent efforts to win the £1.7bn LG Electronics plant, which ultimately settled for Newport in south Wales.

The picture that emerges between the lines is of a declining capitalist economy with weak bourgeois leadership, reduced to earning its keep by renting out its cheap labour market, pool of inherited skills and access to European markets to whichever hot-money contender finds the investment (and associated tax-relief sweeteners) sufficiently tempting.

The inevitable process of concentration of capital across national borders, a process which can only intensify as the imperialist crisis deepens, is happening at the expense of British capitalism's world monopoly positions. Even the unitary state basis of bourgeois rule, already under enormous political pressure, is made a laughing stock as the Scottish and Welsh offices scramble to offer ’Lucky’ Goldstar a bigger bribe for their patronage. And the social cost in unemployment, insecurity, entrenched poverty and social decay, it is admitted, cannot even hope to be compensated for longterm by employment gains, despite temporary windfalls along the M4 corridor, pockets of the North-East etc.

High-profile green field developments like South Korea’s in Wales, admit the capitalist press, represent a fraction of recorded overall direct inward investment, much of which comes in the form of "mergers and acquisitions".

Since inward investment is driven by the need for rival imperialists to aggressively export capital (supplanting and extinguishing the 'host' country’s own capital expansion), the object of such investment cannot be to increase the sum total of world productive capacity. The object can only be to make sure that "overcapacity" is someone else’s problem, and to redivide markets in line with the new economic realities born of capitalism's uneven development.

The hi-tech end of inward investment offers fewer jobs longterm, not more. Even leaving aside the admission that Britain's decline is being reflected in a "worrying skills gap", such production is in any case capital-intensive, not labour-intensive.

And the ’screwdriver technology' role in international production 'partnership' to which the UK is more often relegated will remain attractive to inward investment only in proportion to the cheapness of the labour, the slackness of the social regulation, and the ease of backdoor entry into the German-dominated European market. The strategic market advantage remains in the hands of the more competitive world rivals, whilst the prestige of the British bourgeois state is further compromised by its readiness to consign the nation to third world status (whilst still bragging about its big-league 'connections' and monarch-ridden history).

It is this question of relative national bourgeois prestige, hard to quantify yet imposing visible material constraints on all involved in the struggle for market domination, which gathers increasing weight as the trade war crisis deepens. This is half-recognized by some capitalist commentary, as this on Japan:

...only five years ago, Japan was agonising over a decision to send troops to join United Nations peacekeeping troops in Cambodia.

Now, one of its diplomats, Mrs Sadako Ogata, is being cited by the US as a candidate for UN secretary general.

In other fields, such as development aid, Japan has shown over the past year that it wishes to add an intellectual contribution to its financial clout.

Japan’s attempt to redesign the comfortable cold-war model of foreign policy is part of a profound change of identity. For 40 years, until the early 1990s, foreign policy was a simple matter because it barely existed. During that time, Japan followed the US political and security lead. Tokyo’s politicians and bureaucrats were free to build economic power, unburdened by the need to assure their own defence. The US was happy to oblige, for it needed Japan to be an economically strong democracy, as a bulwark against the spread of communism in Asia.

At first, the end of the cold war did little to change that situation. But gradually, policy makers on both sides realised that the collapse of the Soviet Union had thrown that cosy interdependence open to renegotiation. There has been a growing sense of independence from the US, a sense that Japan has an alternative Asian view of the world to offer. Asia has long been critical for trade reasons, as shown by the 60 per cent of Japan’s foreign aid which goes to the region’s developing economies, but wider interests have recently come into play.

This ambition can be seen in the attitude Japan has taken to Burma, where Japan has resumed aid before western countries

It can also be seen in the vigour with which Japan is seeking to persuade a reluctant US that China should be permitted entry into the World Trade Organisation.

But this sense of Japanese imperialism's new importance evaporates when the focus narrows to Japan's GDP (gross domestic product). So conditioned by postwar US hegemony is most economic commentary that Japanese economic performance is read entirely in the light of its 'success' or 'failure' in approximating to the role designed for it to fill in the Washington-oriented world dollar economy.

Such commentary, whilst quick enough to pick up on the way that imperialist crisis (by any other name) has forced Tokyo to 'rationalize' its home production base, stimulate home demand, and transfer production abroad, seems to have no inkling whatever of what such a new crisis-driven pattern of development might suggest about the future course of Japanese imperialist aspirations.

The effects of this insistence on measuring Japanese ambitions exclusively on a wooden GDP yardstick are at times unintentionally comic:

To make matters worse, there has been an acceleration in the amount of production to be moved offshore in the search for lower costs. Migrant companies send goods back home, detracting from GDP, and without reducing the overall surplus of industrial capacity. In the year to last March, 18 per cent of total production was offshore - up from 3 per cent 10 years go - according to a survey by the Japan External Trade Organisation. That proportion is forecast by Jetro to rise to nearly 27 per cent by the end of the decade. 

Reducing the "overall surplus of capacity" in the region would of course look like obvious common sense from this Anglo-Saxon point of view, whence the problem is perceived not objectively (as the overproduction crisis of world imperialism) but in relation to a subjective trade war position (the drowning of 'their' markets in exported 'surplus' Japanese/Asian production).

To Japan, however, the solution to the "surplus capacity" problem can only lie in the export of capital, the neocolonial commandeering of regional productive expansion, and the conclusive domination of world markets. It's in this context too that Anglo-
Saxon gloating over Japan 'getting a taste of its own medicine' at the hands of local competition needs to be put:

Although the gradual recovery of the Japanese economy has helped the country’s leading steelmakers - battered by recession and the high yen back into the black, in addition to the rise in raw materials and sluggish export demand - the industry is facing increasing competition from China, Taiwan, Korea, the US and other countries.

In the face of rising capacity, the Japanese strategy has been to cut down export volume to maintain prices. This is likely to affect their export revenues once Asian steelmakers step into take market share, say industry analysts.

POSCO, Korea’s state-owned steelmaker, has especially started to export aggressively. The company has announced that it will be putting more emphasis on exports to China and south-east Asia this year. With demand in the region expected to rise only slightly this year, Japanese steel companies could see their export revenues displaced as POSCO is poised to take market share, believes ING Barings in Tokyo.

Adding to the pressure is Japanese companies’ increasing enthusiasm for cheaper steel from overseas. Japanese trading companies are taking advantage of lower priced Korean steel and are now planning to supply steel produced in Korea to Japanese manufacturers based in Asia.

Marubeni, a leading trading company, recently announced that it would form a joint venture with Daewoo of Korea and a Thai corporation in order to supply low-cost Korean steel to Japanese car and electronics companies with manufacturing bases in south-east Asia... domestic steel users are turning to imports from Korea and other Asian suppliers. POSCO, for example, has cracked the Japanese market, supplying steel to car makers including Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan Motor and Honda Motor.

In order to counter such trends, Japanese steelmakers have started to follow the car and electronic manufacturers overseas. In the next two years, the country’s leading five steel companies are expected to have cold-rolled steel sheet plants in Thailand.

Amid the adverse climate, the country’s steel companies have intensified their efforts to cut costs by personnel reduction, asset sales and debt reduction.

According to UBS Securities in Tokyo, overall employment levels have been cut drastically, from 23,000 in 1992 to 19,000 last year, while the number of workers in the steel divisions have fallen by 25 per cent from 16,000 to 12,000 during the same period.

When it's a case of 'proving' that inward investment into Britain, even if it doesn't solve unemployment longterm, at least 'spurs on our own people to greater efforts by the salutary effects of competition', capitalist commentary pretends to find crumbs of comfort in the lash of market forces. But when it comes to analyzing Japanese imperialism's forced responses to crisis pressures, the Anglo-Saxon view is blind to any possibility that the pressure of competition might REALLY be unleashing some unfinished historical business by putting Japan once more on its mettle.
   
Decrepit British monopoly capitalism is past learning anything new, and exposing the old nag to the 'fresh air' of ruthless competition is more likely to kill it off for good than get it to win more races. Japanese monopoly capitalism, on the other hand, though hobbled by its long national subordination to US hegemony, remains an incomparably more live and dangerous imperialist contender for world market domination.

The age of direct colonial occupation may be gone, but everywhere the world is in neocolonial chains, and Palme Dutt's 1936 analysis in that sense holds true today:

The fight between the rival imperialist Powers for the possession of colonies is a fight for domination, for monopoly, which is expressed in and dependent on sovereignty over a given series of colonies.

Why did British imperialism strain every nerve to free itself from the American monopoly of raw cotton, organising the Empire Cotton Growing Association since 1902, and developing with enormous subsidies as well as with vast construction works like the Assouan Dam and the Sind Barrage, the growth of cotton in the Sudan, in India, in Kenya, in Uganda, in Iraq ? (until the point was reached in 1933 when President Roosevelt was paying subsidies to the American cotton farmers to plough up their crops for which there was no market, while Britain was paying subsidies to turn the Sind desert into a cotton plantation)? Why did British imperialism send its agents all round the world prospecting for oil to free itself from the American oil monopoly, tearing up the Turkish Empire in the hunt for oil, dominating Persia, creating the new State of Iraq, fomenting civil war in Mexico, until today its rival oil monopoly has spread its tentacles in every quarter of the globe? Why has American imperialism strained every nerve to free itself from the British rubber monopoly, whose deadly power was shown in the Stevenson restriction scheme, leading to the United States pouring out millions to develop the growth of rubber in its South American “colonies”? The answer is obvious. This is the expression of the fight of the monopolists. And in this fight colonial possessions or the semi-colonial forms of political dependence of States within the sphere of influence of the monopolist Power are essential. 

The battle continues - for oil, for copper and for steel too.

Is cheap Korean steel going to unseat Japan's hegemonic ambitions in the region? The information provided by the above-quoted capitalist commentary itself makes this seem unlikely. Japan is responding both by 'rationalizing' its own domestic steel production and by organizing its own steel mills in Thailand, so laying further foundations for another go at the “Co-Prosperity Sphere" exercise in monopoly domination of the region (first attempted in the last great warmongering crisis of world imperialism). 

The spur of competition from the 'Tigers' could turn out to be what it takes to tear Japan finally from its postwar US leading-strings. South Korea and the rest are far more likely to feature as future neocolonial satellites than as imperialist rivals.

A broadly similar development is unfolding in relations between Kohl's post-cold-war 'new order' Reich and the former workers' states of Russia and eastern Europe, where the luxury of a new captive market for German exports is reportedly bringing with it a sting in the tail which promises to stir Bonn into the more energetic export of capital:

German exports to eastern Europe have risen sharply since 1993 and now exceed those to the US, and more of its direct investments go to the region than to south-east Asia, according to the Bundesbank.
“For German exporters, central and eastern Europe has become one of the most important growth markets in the last two years,” the German central bank said in its monthly report yesterday. Germany and eastern Europe stood to benefit from “a huge growth potential” in their trade and business relations as economic reforms spread beyond Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

But the bank pointed out that German investments in eastern Europe - currently running at nearly 10 per cent of the country’s direct investments - aimed at tapping new sales markets and low-cost labour also meant greater competition for Germany. Its foreign trade surplus with the region fell from DM8.2bn (£3.4bn) in 1993 to DM5.2bn last year, much of the decline reflecting increased imports from production facilities set up or acquired by German companies.

...eastern European countries, especially those near Germany, benefited from increasing efforts by German companies to use local components suppliers to cut production costs. German imports from the region rose by 44 per cent in two years to DM58bn in 1995.

After Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, the Bundesbank singled out the economic reforming efforts of the Baltic states, Slovakia and Slovenia. 

Altogether, German direct investments in eastern Europe totalled DM4.2bn last year against DM2.4bn in 1993. These were mostly concentrated in manufacturing - with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic receiving most of the inflow - but services and utilities also received more investment as privatisation increased.

Competition from Polish, Hungarian and Czech producers not only adds new impetus to the necessary class-war struggle back in Germany (to force through 'rationalization' of production and the demolition of the welfare state in the teeth of workers' resistance) but also drops a large hint to the German bourgeois as to the capital-export means whereby all that competing productive capacity can be integrated into a resumption of the Third Reich's interrupted plans for hegemony in the East.

Siemens is picking up the hint, making a capital-export imperialist 'virtue' out of a crisis necessity:

If Siemens is doing well enough, it is thanks to its performance abroad rather than at home.

Corporate Germany has its problems and Dr von Pierer is not inclined to gloss over them. External investment by German companies is running, he says, at about DM48 billion a year— while foreign investment in Germany is about DM14 billion.

On a rule of thumb basis, the Siemens chief executive reckons that the investment shortfall equates to somewhere between. 300,000 and 350,000 new jobs. 

On a like-for-like basis, the group will shed more than 2,000 jobs in Germany this year. Nor is it just jobs. Last year the group managed to turn in productivity gains of DM5.2 billion but much of that improvement has had to be passed on to customers or has been swallowed up by higher costs in Germany. Between the twin pressures — down on prices, up on costs — "nothing is left over from these [productivity] gains”.

Nor does Dr von Pierer believe that his company will get the kind of access it needs to fast-expanding markets in, for example, the Far East or the former Soviet bloc, without investing in those regions themselves. “Exclusive national markets with home advantages for national champions belong to the past.”

While Siemens must have a significant presence in new markets via local content — rather than supplying them from existing manufacturing plants in Europe or the US — he is also convinced that "building up local content does not shift work away from our home facilities but actually helps to boost output”.

As Siemens, and other sections of corporate Germany, seek to face the challenges posed by “market globalisation” — fiercer competition, lower international prices, technological transfer — they face another challenge. Germany’s corporate structure, especially the close links between banks and industrial groups, is coming under increasing criticism. As Dr von Pierer admitted yesterday, there is growing pressure on companies to realise “shareholder value”.

...financial markets (traditionally never the main focus of attention for corporate Germany) will impose sanctions on those companies where profitability lags behind international benchmarks.

Dr von Pierer may find that the new generation of Anglo-Saxon style capitalists, with their emphasis on shareholder value, will not be as patient as their Rhineland forerunners.

If the "close links between banks and industrial groups" are to be changed, it can only be in the direction of a yet CLOSER subordination of industrial to financial capital, as the talk of 'financial markets imposing sanctions where profitability lags' makes clear.

It remains to be seen how corporate Germany will respond to getting the whipping from "the new generation of Anglo-Saxon style capitalists" which the commentary lip-smackingly anticipates. But for the British end of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, the question 'Whipped into shape, or whipped into a corner?' has long since answered itself, with every week that passes bringing fresh evidence of decline, stagnation and monopoly corruption:

UP TO 2,500 manufacturing jobs on Tyneside and in Derby were in jeopardy after Rolls-Royce last night announced plans to withdraw from making heavy steam turbines for power stations. This always was the less glamorous end of the Rolls-Royce business and was intended as a more stable counterweight to the aero-engine business The move takes Rolls-Royce out of a part of the market it has found increasingly difficult to crack in the face of tough competition from companies such as ABB, Siemens and Mitsubishi.

Chairman Sir Ralph Robins said the market for large steam turbines had changed radically in the last few years, adding: “It is increasingly unlikely that Rolls-Royce can develop a leading global position in this sector of the market.”

Newcastle, with more than 37,000 people out of work and a male unemployment rate of 13.6 per cent, now has some 1,000 jobs under threat. British Rail mishandled the sale of seven maintenance depots with the result that it raised less than it might have done while bidders were not given equal treatment, according to a critical National Audit Office report published today.

Three of the maintenance depots were bought by Adtranz - the joint venture between ABB, the Swedish-Swiss group and Germany’s Daimler Benz - for £17.7m, two were acquired by Railcare for £6m, and one was bought by its management, acting as Wessex Traincare, for £5.6m.

BR failed to provide bidders with the same information. “The arrangement for the management of information flows agreed by the vendor unit led to some external bidders not having knowledge of financial forecasts (from non-vendor unit sources) which other bidders had," the audit office said.

The emergence during the sale negotiations of a document headed “not for National Audit Office eyes” prompted the office to urge the tightening of Department of Transport procedures for classifying confidential files.

Six companies, including two management buy-out teams, bid for a range of combinations of the six heavy maintenance depots but, by the later stages of the competition, there was little effective competition between them, the report said.

Two bidders “negotiated significant reductions in their second-stage bids, suggesting that price competition at that stage was not strong, despite the efforts of the vendor unit to avoid letting the purchasers know that they were effectively (although not formally) preferred bidders”, the report said.

The initial value of the six bids was £43.5m but this had been reduced to £29.3m by the time the final price was agreed.

The pattern of inward investment is no more proof of British capitalist health than a hectic flush is evidence of blooming health in a TB patient. Nor is the fundamental problem 'foreign investment', as a dangerous populist reserve position for the bourgeoisie would like to have it, but rather the world crisis of imperialism itself, pressing down relentlessly upon Britain's decaying geriatric class rule and demanding urgent political attention.

In the end, the only possible bourgeois politics adequate to these developments must be those of aggressive chauvinism, anti-communism, trade-war and shooting war. And it is the revolutionary communism of the working class which alone will prove capable of seeing it off.

Build Leninism.
Paddy Chambers