Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£10/4 p a. £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.] 
No 0872 September 24 1996                                                                                                                             10p

Without a Marxist perspective on imperialist crisis, the SLP can neither go much beyond centrist ridicule of Labour's reactionary class-collaboration with capitalist slump-exploitation plans, nor hide its own obvious divisions about how ruthlessly to undermine Labour's lying treachery at the coming election. Much 'left' critical-sympathy with the SLP is completely bankrupted by the same flawed world view.

Increasing activity around the labour movement as the economic-crisis conflicts sharpen in class-war and international trade-war terms, and as the General Election approaches, continues to suffer from lack of a correct historical focus.

Either there is none at all, - often accompanied by an actual philistine distaste for any such Marxist-crisis analysis, as with Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, - or else there is a completely wrong defeatist perspective, - as almost invariably with all the ultra-left petty-bourgeois 'alternative leaderships'.

Blairite propaganda is becoming ever more frenzied; trade union struggles are reviving; the significance of the SLP's challenge to Labour grows more obvious; the 57 varieties on the Trot and anti-communist 'left' strive to readjust to life without the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet workers state to sneer at endlessly.

But the stirring up of all this action remains undiagnosed; and without a correct estimate of what stage has been reached in the long-term battle between the working class and capitalist exploitation, to the background of mounting inter-imperialist conflict, - the fight for socialism will stay disoriented.

The overwhelming character of the epoch, - the crucially dominating pattern of events which will determine all class-war repercussions and largely govern their potential development, - is the economic and political crisis of the imperialist international system.

This is the irresistible driving force which makes revolutionary upheaval and change inevitable, due to the irreconcilable conflict of interests between capital and labour in periods of extreme crisis.

Revolutionary situations cannot be manufactured. They are created spontaneously out of the turmoil of dramatically altered relationships between the classes in the cauldron of dire national difficulties imposed by cut-throat inter-imperialist competition, clearly demonstrated in the 20th century's unmissable pattern of inter-imperialist wars followed by enormous revolutionary upheavals, worldwide.

Marxist-Leninist philosophy is entirely about making the working class fully conscious of these perspectives, and it is the lack of such understanding which more seriously disarms workers, locked in class war with the bourgeoisie, than anything else.

Scargill's claims to any sort of 'Marxism' at all remain a sick and nasty joke on the working class all the time his party resists widening the scope of its vision to go beyond the silly treachery of Blairism and the superficially plausible antidotes to it, to identifying the course of all reaction worldwide and the only possible answer - international revolution.

The point is not "to fill workers heads with remote and irrelevant world-revolutionary schematism", as SLP philistinism has foolishly put it (or not "what one revolutionary said to another revolutionary in 1917" in its crasser form) but to explain more fully to workers where, why, and how resurgent demands for socialism have arisen, and what will become of them.

The SLP newspaper has just published its first issue with some acceptable rhetoric against New Labour's Blairism; but the derision of LP opportunist treachery is purely episodic, saying how New Labour has betrayed socialist principles, abandoned a century's hopes and dreams, turned its back on trade union struggle, ditched workers interests in all directions, etc, to fully embrace global capitalism and the 'free market' to the detriment of common ownership and the welfare state, - but without remotely attempting to say why this is all happening.

Without saying why Blairism, it is impossible to say what this astonishing Blairist phenomenon is going to lead to, and therefore what should be done about it and what mental preparations the working class ought to make in order to meet what is coming.

And because nothing of this is analysed, the SLP remains confused and divided about exactly how this challenge to the Labour Party should be fought out. And however well this indecision is hidden from public view, the non-existence of clear statements and clear courses of action on certain issues speaks loudly enough without any SLP splits being uncovered.

The first Socialist News editorial makes implicit this lack of an SLP perspective by shaping up to tackle the difficult question of conservative prejudice in many workers minds which believes in voting Labour next time (regardless of Blair) just to get the Tories out, - but then by abandoning the tackle with only a fraction of the hard issues dealt with.

The statement is silent on how wide a challenge to Labour should be mounted; should Labour be challenged in every constituency possible?; should Labour be challenged in marginals, risking losing the seats to Tories?; should 'left' Labour MPs be challenged like Benn, Skinner, and Corbyn?; are SLP MPs wanted, and what use will they be?; what is the importance of this coming elections and what is likely to happen thereafter?; etc, etc, etc.

The editorial does seem to challenge the notion that the most important thing for the working class is to get the Tories out, - by getting Labour elected, - at all costs; but it never quite states this challenge bluntly. It certainly comes nowhere near declaring: "Do NOT vote Labour", or even "Only vote Labour if there is no SLP candidate standing".

The SLP is silent on all these crucial issues and so much more besides - all because of muddle-headedness from the lack of any clear thinking, or any thought at all, about long-term perspectives, or even about any immediate past, present, and future perspectives short-term.

For the same reason, Socialist News is equally vague elsewhere about the so-called Scottish devolution question, and about how much politics to raise with Labour-affiliated trade unions in struggle, - both divisive and key issues, - and much else besides.

All of this uncertainty and lack of any direction flows from the failure or the inability of the SLP leadership to work out what is happening in the world to cause Blairism and other phenomena, and why.

Even more remarkably, a chief sympathetic 'critic' of Socialist Labour, the CPGB's Weekly Worker, fails just as abysmally to tackle all these questions in its 'first impressions' of Socialist News, - and for just the same reasons, - an even more hopeless perspective, if anything, than Scargill has. The SN is accused of a general lack of theory or depth, but the itemised criticisms are as piecemeal and lacking any 'overall conception' as the SN itself is said to be. Only the shallow and routine Lee Hurst interview gets a journalistic comment from WW which is itself shallow and routine and hardly worth making. But about the telltale editorial and its most politically revealing content (or lack of it), - not a word. On the SN's vacuousness about strategies for the Scottish devolution question and for Labour-affiliated trade-union struggles, the Weekly Worker is unsurprisingly equally silent.

The CPGB's attention remains sterilely fixed on exposing and ridiculing the SLP's dreadful witchhunt against suspected 'left entryists' which has so shamefully and tragically sabotaged SLP work for months with bans and proscriptions around Manchester, for example.

But as imbecilic and self-damaging as is this paranoid factionalism, depriving the SLP of valuable opportunities for normal debate and cadre development, and risking making it a local laughing stock on the left, - fighting such narrowminded petty tyranny is hardly the main political issue raised by the SLP's launch and further evolution.

It is the inevitable limitations in the public political stance of the SLP on the main social, economic, and philosophical problems facing the working class which matter crucially, - questions like, as above, what positions to adopt on the coming election, on Scottish devolution, on the Common Market, on Labour-affiliated trade unionism, on US imperialist domination, on Ireland, etc, etc. Sadly for a newspaper which has done its bit for more constructive polemics on the left, the Weekly Worker continues in confusion on many of these questions itself, which in part is both cause and effect of this barren witch-hunting saga.

It is not the bans and proscriptions as such which make SLP policy so limited but the historical slot it is possibly going to fill of being a centrist manifestation, drawing workers forward with words about a socialist revolution to abolish capitalism, but essentially holding them back by never venturing far beyond routine reformist parliamentary strategy and tactics, and above all in not training a revolutionary party.

Now, to anyone remotely politically coherent, this has always been the inevitable fate of Scargill's SLP from the start. Completely misguided nonsense about being able to turn the SLP into the revolutionary party will only have misled all would-be members into the wrong approach to such broad party work from the beginning, possibly inviting more trouble from witch-hunts than might otherwise have arisen.

It is the policy limitations dictated by the centrist slot which the SLP is possibly going to fill which should be the main worthy target for communists to work to overcome inside the SLP (as far as the broad interests of the working class are concerned and its education), - not the factional racketeering which will always go on anyway.

The best thing for communists to do (invited to be members of the SLP by secretary Sikorski himself in his backpage article in SN1) is avoid giving the appearance of advocating recruitment to another party while working in support of the SLP. The Weekly Worker's CPGB recruitment ads are not the most sensitive things to peddle inside SLP members meetings.

Doubts must also persist that the witch-hunted may have exacerbated their situations (and may still be doing so) by pursuing tit-for-tat factionalism of their own instead of getting on with the struggle to push SLP policy as far out as possible in its revolutionary-words posturing, and SLP actions as far distant from reformist practising as possible.

Is it a good thing to try to discipline rightwingers out of the SLP in retaliation for their witch-hunting small-mindedness? Is it a good thing to force SLP activities to be abandoned because of an unresolved witch-hunt? The answer must be NO.

The SLP may become an influential centrist arena for the possibility of opening up all kinds of new consciousness for the working class. It is precisely its broad-front character which will allow the SLP to play such a role, undermining the bankruptcy of 'left Labour' reformism. Trying to force the SLP back into a narrower mould of being THE revolutionary party in a period of clearly continuing minority position for such a party, would seem a bad and hopeless mistake to make. Centrist arenas are not Marxist-Leninist party embryos. Those who think it would be fun to drive Arthur Scargill out of the SLP because of his Morning Star directorship have missed the point entirely of why Socialist Labour was of any interest in the first place, - precisely as a major labour-movement breach in the tyranny of LP bourgeois parliamentarism, albeit in only a feeble centrist garb itself, but well worth supporting.

The struggle should continue to get the SLP's constitution rewritten to allow wider genuine affiliation from the left, but meanwhile crucial policy battles raging right now must not be missed.

The challenge should be put through Socialist News immediately for the blatantly unfinished editorial on the coming important general election contest to be completed. The SLP has got to start making up its own mind about exactly what it is as a political movement, and what precise period of development it thinks it is operating in.

The reality is that workers need telling: 'Do NOT vote Labour; it is worse than useless', but all the signs are that the SLP is shirking this conclusion, and at best is going to settle for the hopeless compromise of 'Vote SLP where possible; vote Labour everywhere else'.

This would be a dreadful miseducation of the working class, springing entirely from SLP (and 'left') muddleheadedness about the decisive character of the epoch.

This is the time of the greatest, the most devastating crisis in all imperialist history. The LP being a bourgeois labour party as it has always been, the crisis burdens are going to be inflicted on the working class by the capitalist parliament and state whichever party is in office in Downing Street and in the Commons. Not one scrap of 'parliamentary democracy' as presently exists will remotely be of any help to the working class in this colossal conflict, now looming, because the final thrust of this crisis will have gone way beyond questions such as emergency feeding stations for the mass unemployed, or reopening some NHS services for the very sick, etc, but will be about whose rule?, - that of parliamentary democracy or the dictatorship of the proletariat? At such a historical juncture, the last people workers should be encouraged to believe in are such opportunist parliamentary cretins as Benn, Corbyn, Livingston, and Skinner, etc.

Few SLP MPs are likely to be any better, but at least Socialist Labour has acknowledged that a fight for socialist justice to replace class-exploitation tyranny is as much to be fought outside parliament as inside it, and it is outside parliament that the most decisive class-war battles will take place.

By design or accident, the Socialist News editorial approaches the essential philosophy of the above when addressing labour-aristocracy traditionalism with the words:

"Get New Labour into government, they argue, and there can then be a renewed struggle to 'influence' the rigntwing leaderships of both New Labour and the trade unions. After the general election, the left can mount a serious fight for socialist principles and policies.

The Socialist Labour Party believes this position is deeply flawed, and that it does further harm to a trade union and labour movement that has become both demoralised and immobilised.

We believe that the changes made by New Labour are more fundamental and serious than any previous betrayals of principles or policy by Labour Party leaderships."

Apart from the dubious defeatist tone (it reads as if it is meant to imply that the whole working class is immobilised and demoralised which is far from the case. It is the 'official' labour movement which is in this mangy condition), - this line of reasoning is fairly accurate.

Its weakness is that it does not then go on to spell out that getting Blairism elected, 'tempered' only by the feeble parliamentary 'leftism' of Bennskinner, etc, would not only be as bad as another Tory victory as far as imposing the coming slump burdens on the working class was concerned, but could be worse because it would be dressed up as not the capitalist system's fault, but the fault of being 'blown off course by international trading conditions', etc, etc, - all the usual Labourite excuses for running the imperialist racket on behalf of the international bourgeois ruling class in the occasional interludes between formal Tory rule.

The SLP first needs to spell it out that the working class is in no need of any further history lessons about how bad Labour is by putting them in office 'just one more time' to carry out the usual betrayals and 'finally convince everyone' that a break with Labour is 'at last now called for'. The majority of the working class has had no illusions in the Labour Party's snivelling opportunist treachery for a very long time.

Even more importantly, the coming crisis is just not going to be like any period of slump burdens before it, that Labour has helped to impose on the working class. This time, the very life of the working class may be at stake. The approaching all-out class conflict is not going to be of a mild stimulating order in which workers will be able to make only gradual gentle changes in their judgment such as would fit in with left pressure having the time or opportunity to persuade a Labour Government to reconsider socialist principles. It will be a period of complete revolutionary turmoil, giving workers the opportunity only of joining the revolution or the counter-revolution.

A clearer grasp of the crisis of imperialism explains all this without difficulty. The postwar anti-communist inflationary boom has been deliberately printing trillions of world-consumption dollars for decades to keep revolution at bay.

The clear-out from such a 'surplus'-capital crash when such endless credit-creation finally chokes the profiteering system, will be a historical cataclysm of political, economic and warmongering disaster like nothing else in recorded time.

The astonishing phenomenon of Blairism, the final formal warning to the masses that socialist ideas are bad for them, bad for Labour, bad for the country, just bad, - is part of the desperate preparation by bourgeois society to disarm the working class TOTALLY prior to armageddon, destroying its trade union rights and now its political stake in parliamentary democracy and the welfare state as the Labour Party is deliberately led further to the right than even Tory policies go. The self-liquidation by the class-collaborating revisionist leadership in the Soviet workers state was engineered (by disarmament bribes and other inducements) in the same direction of TOTALLY defusing every possible socialist stimulus to the working class in advance of the most far-reaching social-revolution upheavals in all history.

What are the obvious implications of these dramatic changes? That the evolution of society is now faced with such a revolutionary leap that even the living contradictions by which it is held together are bursting apart in anticipation of the giant changes to come, swept aside by the preparations for the mother of all prolonged international class-war battles, exploding within a holocaust of inter-imperialist warmongering conflict. Revisionism's phony 'international balance with imperialism' has vanished. Labour's phony 'parliamentary balance with capitalist slump-tyranny' has vanished.

The illusory 'shop-floor balance' of 'trade-union rights' has vanished. In its sickness, bourgeois society now must have class-war and international war uninhibited. It will have it. All barriers are down, - physical-phony, and ideological-illusory. What's left? All-out socialist revolution, or total chaos.

SLP MPs and councillors will usefully expand the centrist arena in which revolutionary consciousness can be fought for, but the severest health warning to the working class should be issued with all electoral successes: 

"Don't be misled, this is only part of the preparation for the revolutionary struggles to come which uncontrollable capitalist crisis will impose on society. In the 'free market' (which even Socialist News puts in inverted commas), parliamentary democracy can never be anything other than an instrument for bourgeois-capitalist rule."

Even more tragic, therefore, to read SN's article on Scotland calling for, astonishingly, a "genuinely democratic Scottish parliament" which "would re-energise the Scottish economy by investing in housing, health, education, and industry, including the power to nationalise key industries as appropriate. It would also provide a platform from which the fight for a socialist future among the Scottish people could be pursued. This would contribute to the socialist struggle throughout Britain."

This is insane delirium, real treachery. But what is worse, the would-be 'left' voice of the SLP, the Weekly Worker, is afflicted with equally catastrophic confusion. This declared on Sept 12: 

"What is needed by the people of Scotland is....a sovereign Scottish parliament, to deliver the right to self-determination and to decide how they wish to be governed."

This is the same silly centrism as the SLP's 'left' parliamentary delusions. It is useless historical lumber. Workers in England do not need yet another bourgeois parliament elected before they can be told that the revolutionary abolition of capitalism is the only way forward from capitalist crisis now. Even the SLP's editorial has almost grasped this. What suddenly has happened to workers in Scotland, always the most class-conscious and militant of all sections of workers in Britain, that they are now supposed to need yet another bourgeois parliament (or constituent assembly, or whatever) before they can be told that the abolition of capitalism is the only way out of this crisis?

People without a Marxist perspective argue that the SNP is making waves with its bourgeois 'independence' racket. Well, so what? As far as opinion polls are concerned, as well as real temporary influence, Blair is making even bigger waves by far with his New Labour nonsense. So should revolutionary policies in England now be tailored to suit people's shallow impressions of Blairism? Perhaps along the SWP’s centrist line that a Labour Government would at least be better than another Tory Government?

It is a ridiculous tail-ending suggestion, utterly humiliating in association with claims to 'Leninism'. The phony 'democratic deficit' argument is just thrown in mindlessly to help petty-bourgeois fake 'revolutionariness' to justify its cowardly capitulation to reactionary Scottish nationalism. There is no 'democratic deficit', as the SNP themselves admit when they declare that as soon as they have won a majority of Scottish seats, they will regard it as a mandate to proceed with full independence. They are obviously correct, and no London-despatched armed forces would attempt to stop them.

Blairism and Scottish bourgeois-parliamentary 'independence' may create waves in very shallow sickliness of the approaching capitalist crisis but neither of them has the remotest wish, ability, or intention to challenge and overthrow the international imperialist free-market system. On the contrary, both middle class diversionary frauds are hell-bent on getting themselves closer to the soul of the international imperialist free-market racket that they feel they are being deprived of in their present oppositional existence. Both diversionary stunts need utterly denouncing and opposing. Neither in England nor Scotland are workers so weak, ignorant or naïve that they need immunising against the seductiveness of Blairism or Scottish nationalism by being a bit exposed to some of it first, or some of its notions. The working class in Britain is well mature enough everywhere to be told the truth straight and blunt, - that the capitalist system is once again going to plunge the whole of world society in the most appalling slump and warmongering crisis to which the only possible answer is for the working class to take over power.

Once again, this is the Weekly Worker being in the same dim anti-Marxist league as the Socialist News in not only not remotely understanding this epoch of imperialist crisis but not even being aware, seemingly, that such a concept crucial to Marxism even exists. For where is there any justification in terms of the imaginary 'new-world-order'-US-imperialist domination which would make sense of this apparently universal decision by all varieties of non-Marxism to tailend the SNP's reactionary nonsense?

What the Scottish nationalists need telling is not that they deserve their own parliament, and especially not that such a parliament would meet the progressive needs of all the people of Scotland, - but that they are an insufferable gang of petty-bourgeois pro-capitalist frauds whose backward chauvinism will play completely into the hands of the international imperialist crisis and be a total disaster for the people of Scotland (and everywhere else), and that only the socialist revolution can now take Scotland forward.

The real problem with the Weekly Worker is that in fact it does not really believe that it is the socialist revolution ahead or nothing. It is hopelessly dominated by complete theoretical confusion which is frightened to tell Scottish nationalism that tackling this towering crisis of world imperialism with a Scots parliament is not just completely useless, but worse than useless. The Weekly Worker cannot convince itself that a Scottish parliament will not be able to do at least some good. But this is reformist anti-Marxist balderdash. A Scots parliament would be merely a step towards a more exclusive slump-coffin for Scotland. Workers in Scotland need this like they need a hole in the head. What they need is Marxist-Leninist leadership which cannot flourish without a correct world view which fully grasps the immense crisis of imperialism now dominating all international affairs.

And as was argued in EPSR 866:

"Whatever 'deficits' exist are created mainly by the workings of the monopoly-capitalist free market, and the English capitalists themselves have just as many grievances against how they get carved up by US, Japanese, German, and French capital, etc, as the Scots do about how the market gives London an advantage. What do those recommending a capitulation to Scots bourgeois nationalist claims wish to see happening in England,  - that the English nationalists should be tail-ended when they complain about the 'democratic deficit' with the European Union or other international trading arrangements? 'No' to EU withdrawal; just bring down capitalism.

There are real or imaginary 'deficits' all round under imperialism by its very nature as a monopoly-accumulation/exploitation system. Greater 'national self-determination' under continuing capitalism is the reactionary direction in which every craphead petty-bourgeois political tendency will degenerate as the world economic crisis deepens, - just as they all so degenerated towards social-chauvinism in in the Second International, (founded by Engels and officially Marxist one hundred percent), - with the exception of the Leninist party, of course, and a couple of other continental groups.

But the only real answer to these 'democratic deficit' postures is to get rid of the imperialist free-market system. Any continuation of the imperialist free market after any 'democratic deficit' rearrangements will see hardly any real or worthwhile changes in the workings of the capitalist system at all. Monopoly-imperialist economic power will continue to strengthen its domination of the planet whatever happens. It is totally the wrong epoch for capitalism to be able to fabulously extend 'democracy' on a local, - or international, - basis.

This becomes particularly obvious when the specific bourgeois-parliamentary 'reforms' are considered, such as the Scottish parliament and what powers it should have, and what positions should be adopted towards any referendum questions on the matter. Nothing can be said about an improved performance for a bourgeois parliament which does not instantly make itself a laughing stock because the entire record of parliamentary democracy (at this now very late stage in its history) has come to be seen universally in modem class-conscious eyes as nothing but a means of defrauding and bamboozling the masses anyway, however 'democratic' and however many 'reforms'. Parliamentary democracy is THE system of bourgeois dictatorship and brainwashing, and criminal deception, - parliamentary cretinism as communist revolutionaries correctly described it, using it only as a platform for trumpeting the need for the revolutionary overthrow of the entire capitalist 'democracy' system. To depict Westminster as "just a talking shop where MPs do not even have the right to set their own agenda" in the context of taking a participatory role in agitating for a separate Scottish parliament, - is just an exercise in self-derision and foolishness.

Lenin discussed the national question only in the light of the specific historical period being passed through, doubtful whether even an expression of "the negative demand for recognition of the RIGHT to self-determination", as he described it, to which "the proletariat confines itself" was worth expressing at all in the advanced West European countries unless one wanted "to betray one's ignorance of the ABC of Marxism":

The categorical requirement of Marxist theory in investigating any social question is that it be examined within definite historical limits, and, if it refers to a particular country (e. g., the national programme for a given country), that account be taken of the specific features distinguishing that country from others in the same historical epoch.

What does this categorical requirement of Marxism imply in its application to the question under discussion?

First of all, it implies that a clear distinction must be drawn between the two periods of capitalism, which differ radically from each other as far as the national movement is concerned. On the one hand, there is the period of the collapse of feudalism and absolutism, the period of the formation of the bourgeois-democratic society and state, when the national movements for the first time become mass movements and in one way or another draw all classes of the population into politics through the press, participation in representative institutions, etc. On the other hand, there is the period of fully formed capitalist states with a long-established constitutional regime and a highly developed antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—a period that may be called the eve of capitalism’s downfall.

The typical features of the first period are: the awakening of national movements and the drawing of the peasants, the most numerous and the most sluggish section of the population, into those movements, in connection with the struggle for political liberty in general, and for the rights of the nation in particular. Typical features of the second period are: the absence of mass bourgeois-democratic movements and the fact that developed capitalism, in bringing closer together nations that have already been fully drawn into commercial intercourse, and causing them to intermingle to an increasing degree, brings the antagonism between internationally united capital and the international working-class movement into the forefront.

The same applies to the national question. In most Western countries it was settled long ago. It is ridiculous to seek an answer to non-existent questions in the programmes of Western Europe. In this respect Rosa Luxemburg has lost sight of the most important thing—the difference between countries where bourgeois-democratic reforms have long been completed, and those where they have not.

The crux of the matter lies in this difference. Rosa Luxemburg's complete disregard of it transforms her verbose article into a collection of empty and meaningless platitudes.

The epoch of bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Western, continental Europe embraces a fairly definite period, approximately between 1789 and 1871. This was precisely the period of national movements and the creation of national states. When this period drew to a close, Western Europe had been transformed into a settled system of bourgeois states, which, as a general rule, were nationally uniform states. Therefore, to seek the right to self-determination in the programmes of West-European socialists at this time of day is to betray one's ignorance of the ABC of Marxism.

In Eastern Europe and Asia the period of bourgeois-democratic revolutions did not begin until 1905. The revolutions in Russia. Persia, Turkey and China, the Balkan wars—such is the chain of world events of our period in our “Orient". And only a blind man could fail to see in this chain of events the awakening of a whole series of bourgeois-democratic national movements which strive to create nationally independent and nationally uniform states. It is precisely and solely because Russia and the neighbouring countries are passing through this period that we must have a clause in our programme on the right of nations to self-determination.
 (May 1914) The right of nations to self-determination

Marxists are of course, opposed to federation and decentralisation, for the simple reason that capitalism requires for its development the largest and most centralised possible states. Other conditions being equal, the class-conscious proletariat will always stand for the larger state. It will always fight against medieval particularism, and will always welcome the closest possible economic amalgamation of large territories in which the proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie can develop on a broad basis.

Capitalism’s broad and rapid development of the productive forces calls for large, politically compact and united territories, since only here can the bourgeois class—together with its inevitable antipode, the proletarian class—unite and sweep away all the old, medieval, caste, parochial, petty-national, religious and other barriers.

The right of nations to self-determination, i. e., the right to secede and form independent national states, will be dealt with elsewhere.* But while, and insofar as, different nations constitute a single state, Marxists will never, under any circumstances, advocate either the federal principle or decentralisation. The great centralised state is a tremendous historical step forward from medieval disunity to the future socialist unity of the whole world, and only via such a state (inseparably connected with capitalism), can there be any road to socialism.

The Great-Russian and Ukrainian workers must work together, and, as long as they live in a single state, act in the closest organisational unity and concert, towards a common or international culture of the proletarian movement, displaying absolute tolerance in the question of the language in which propaganda is conducted, and in the purely local or purely national details of that propaganda. This is the imperative demand of Marxism. All advocacy of the segregation of the workers of one nation from those of another, all attacks upon Marxist “assimilation", or attempts, where the proletariat is concerned, to contrapose one national culture as a whole to another allegedly integral national culture, and so forth, is bourgeois nationalism, against which it is essential to wage a ruthless struggle.

The question of the “national culture" slogan is of enormous importance to Marxists, not only because it determines the ideological content of all our propaganda and agitation on the national question, as distinct from bourgeois propaganda, but also because the entire programme of the much-discussed cultural-national autonomy is based on this slogan.

The main and fundamental flaw in this programme is that it aims at introducing the most refined, most absolute and most extreme nationalism. The gist of this programme is that every citizen registers as belonging to a particular nation, and every nation constitutes a legal entity with the right to impose compulsory taxation on its members, with national parliaments (Diets) and national secretaries of state (ministers).

Such an idea, applied to the national question, resembles Proudhon's idea, as applied to capitalism. Not abolishing capitalism and its basis—commodity production— but purging that basis of abuses, of excrescences, and so forth: not abolishing exchange and exchange value, but, on the contrary, making it “constitutional", universal, absolute, “fair", and free of fluctuations, crises and abuses—such was Proudhon's idea.

Just as Proudhon was petty-bourgeois, and his theory converted exchange and commodity production into an absolute category and exalted them as the acme of perfection, so is the theory and programme of  “cultural-national autonomy" petty bourgeois, for it converts bourgeois nationalism into an absolute category, exalts it as the acme of perfection, and purges it of violence, injustice, etc.

Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the “most just", “purest”, most refined and civilised brand. In place of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism, the amalgamation of all nations in the higher unity, a unity that is growing before our eyes with every mile of railway line that is built, with every international trust, and every workers’ association that is formed (an association that is international in its economic activities as well as in its ideas and aims).

The principle of nationality is historically inevitable in bourgeois society and, taking this society into due account, the Marxist fully recognises the historical legitimacy of national movements. But to prevent this recognition from becoming an apologia of nationalism, it must be strictly limited to what is progressive in such movements, in order that this recognition may not lead to bourgeois ideology obscuring proletarian consciousness.

The awakening of the masses from feudal lethargy, and their struggle against all national oppression, for the sovereignty of the people, of the nation, are progressive. Hence, it is the Marxist’s bounden duty to stand for the most resolute and consistent democratism on all aspects of the national question. This task is largely a negative one. But this is the limit the proletariat can go to in supporting nationalism, for beyond that begins the “positive" activity of the bourgeoisie striving to fortify nationalism.

To throw off the feudal yoke, all national oppression, and all privileges enjoyed by any particular nation or language, is the imperative duty of the proletariat as a democratic force, and is certainly in the interests of the proletarian class struggle, which is obscured and retarded by bickering on the national question. But to go beyond these strictly limited and definite historical limits in helping bourgeois nationalism means betraying the proletariat and siding with the bourgeoisie. There is a border-line here, which is often very slight and which the Bundists and Ukrainian nationalist-socialists completely lose sight of.

Combat all national oppression? Yes, of course! Fight for any kind of national development, for “national culture" in general?—Of course not. The economic development of capitalist society presents us with examples of immature national movements all over the world, examples of the formation of big nations out of a number of small ones, or to the detriment of some of the small ones, and also examples of the assimilation of nations. The development of nationality in general is the principle of bourgeois nationalism: hence, the exclusiveness of bourgeois nationalism, hence the endless national bickering. The proletariat, however, far from undertaking to uphold the national development of every nation, on the contrary, warns the masses against such illusions, stands for the fullest freedom of capitalist intercourse and welcomes every kind of assimilation of nations, except that which is founded on force or privilege.

Consolidating nationalism within a certain “justly” delimited sphere, “constitutionalising” nationalism, and securing the separation of all nations from one another by means of a special state institution—such is the ideological foundation and content of cultural-national autonomy. This idea is thoroughly bourgeois and thoroughly false. The proletariat cannot support any consecration of nationalism; on the contrary, it supports everything that helps to obliterate national distinctions and remove national barriers: it supports everything that makes the ties between nationalities closer and closer, or tends to merge nations. To act differently means siding with reactionary nationalist philistinism.

There can be no doubt that “national culture”, in the ordinary sense of the term. i. e.. schools, etc.. is at present under the predominant influence of the clergy and the bourgeois chauvinists in all countries in the world. When the Bundists, in advocating ‘‘cultural-national” autonomy, say that the constituting of nations will keep the class struggle within them clean of all extraneous considerations, then that is manifest and ridiculous sophistry. It is primarily in the economic and political sphere that a serious class struggle is waged in any capitalist society. To separate the sphere of education from this is, firstly, absurdly utopian, because schools (like “national culture” in general) cannot be separated from economics and politics; secondly, it is the economic and political life of a capitalist country that necessitates at every step the smashing of the absurd and outmoded national barriers and prejudices, whereas separation of the school system and the like, would only perpetuate, intensify and strengthen “pure” clericalism and “pure" bourgeois chauvinism.

On the boards of joint-stock companies we find capitalists of different nations sitting together in complete harmony. At the factories workers of different nations work side by side. In any really serious and profound political issue sides are taken according to classes, not nations. Withdrawing school education and the like from state control and placing it under the control of the nations is in effect an attempt to separate from economics, which unites the nations, the most highly, so to speak, ideological sphere of social life, the sphere in which “pure" national culture or the national cultivation of clericalism and chauvinism has the freest play.

In practice, the plan for “extra-territorial” or “cultural-national” autonomy could mean only one thing: the division of educational affairs according to nationality, i.e., the introduction of national curias in school affairs. Sufficient thought to the real significance of the famous Bund plan will enable one to realise how utterly reactionary it is even from the standpoint of democracy, let alone from that of the proletarian class struggle for socialism.

(October 1913) Critical remarks on the national question

As can be seen, Lenin is even challenging the 'progressiveness' of separate nationality-based schooling systems inside a unitary advanced capitalist state, implying that the different Scottish education, and the religious-denomination schools in Britain should generally be regarded as brakes on society's systemic standardisation and modernisation on all cultural matters under advancing monopoly-imperialist technology and organisation, preparing the basis for socialism.

Lenin clearly regarded Britain as a foremost country of advanced and completed bourgeois-democratic reforms for which the next appropriate historic development would be the socialist revolution under a workers state. British imperialism is heading for the grave, not a period of democratic renewal and reform. And as the inter-imperialist trade-war crisis deepens, it will more and more become a question in Britain of only the socialist revolution or a brief period of extreme reaction in general class-war terms. The current Labour and Tory cut-back programmes to savage past welfare-state 'civilised reforms' shows the direction backwards in which developments in Britain are being forced by its declining relative international trade-war strength. If there is a concession or two to local nationalism on the constitutional front, then it will only be done in the expectation that it will lead to even more ruthless public spending cuts in order to "make the national finances healthy and strong again", etc.

And even if, against all logic of historic development, further room for 'progressive democratic reforms' can miraculously be espied within sclerotic British imperialism, and even if a return to nationalist narrowness and petty local chauvinism could be interpreted as 'progress' in the well-integrated and assimilated British unitary state, - then the Bolshevik policy even for such a prison-house of nations as Tsarist Russia (only just overthrown by brand-new and undeveloped bourgeois democracy) was still just for a Soviet Ukraine, a workers state.

The capitulation to the SNP's petty-bourgeois nationalist diversion in Scotland is insultingly declared to have become unavoidable because of, somehow, the de-proletarianisation of the Scottish working class, (which already in 1920 was almost ripe for a fullscale Bolshevik Revolution, such was its consciousness), -  the explanation offered by the Euro-communist revisionist liquidators of the Communist Parties such as Hobsbawm and Jacques.

This is fantasy. Jobs change, experience frustrates, militancy ebbs, consumer culture atomises, boom affluence breeds individualism, - but the working class remains the working class, and alienation and exploitation remain alienation and exploitation. A major revisionism of Marxism has to be announced if it is claimed that at the decaying end of the imperialist epoch, the revolutionary proletariat starts to disappear.

What is really vanishing is not the Scots working class and its legendary fighting ability, but the quantity and quality of worthwhile revolutionary leadership that is on offer from the 'left' parties and groups. It is the useless vacuum where political leadership should be that has been de-proletarianised, - swamped by philistine light-mindedness, dilettantism, opportunism, and revisionist anti-communism. The fake-'left' is describing its own weak ignorance only, when it pretends that the working class in Scotland can no longer respond to a revolutionary lead, and that the only approach that can get a hearing is the tail-ending of the Scots Nats bourgeois nationalist diversion by calling for self-determination and a federal republic as the immediate programme.

A political leadership needs building with a specifically developed and confident grasp of the whole Marxist-Leninist science of imperialist crisis and proletarian dictatorship which will tell Scottish workers what they really want to hear, - that the capitalist system is a bent and inadequate racket and that only a workers state building planned socialism can do ANYTHING to seriously halt the crisis, - and that EVERY shade of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois opinion, especially the nationalists, has deepdown historic class motivations for only one thing when promoting their national chauvinism, - namely to head off a proletarian revolution at all costs. The promotion of the national issue at this stage of imperialist decay and capitalist crisis will play one objective role only, - to delay or obstruct the real class conflict now poisoning society, - the decision whether society should remain the plaything of bourgeois 'market forces', grotesque injustice, consumerist sleaze, cultural decadence, and universal opportunist criminality, - or whether society should be seized by a revolution of the masses and totally reconstructed on a planned, civilised, purposeful basis, under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

That is the choice. All the rest is just 'left'-posturing reformist dilettantism.

Particularly silly is the attempt to describe the call for a workers state in Scotland as 'economism', a term of abuse Lenin employed against 'left' reformists who only wanted workers to agitate on wages and conditions, but not politically for the social revolution.

A workers state in Scotland means the social revolution. It is not a wages demand.

It is an incomparably more advanced level of political struggle than tail-ending the SNP for a pointless 'right to self-determination and a federal republic', which does not challenge the real depths of the capitalist SYSTEM crisis one little bit.

Of course the Scots, and every other nation, must always have the 'right' to anything they choose for themselves, but this vague abstract bourgeois right is simply not saying anything relevant to the present crisis where the integrated and assimilated proletariat of Britain is facing a unified-state ruling class in all-out conflict over the only next viable stage in the history of civilisation, - the overthrow of decadent monopoly-imperialist class power by the dictatorship of the proletariat, meaning the workers of Scotland, England, and Wales taking the power away from THE ruling class. If the deliberate organisation and political agitation towards this end gets known in Scotland popularly as 'for a Scottish workers republic', it will not affect one class political essence of what needs to be done. 

Socialist News is just as timid on the current trade-union scene as on Scotland. Of course support the dockers, etc. But why does not the SLP address the leaders of these struggles and ask them publicly where they stand on the question of their unions' affiliation to Labour and its criminally reactionary turn against the working class? Do not all workers, especially leaders of trade-union struggles which rely on the working class for support, have an obligation to the overall fight by all workers against Labour and TUC treachery and the coming slump and super-exploitation crisis, - to state publicly where they stand? Is it good enough, for instance, for the Liverpool dockers, say, to have only dispute-solidarity relations with local Labour MPs and councillors which help provide support for winning the dispute against MDHC but leave the Labour parliamentary cretins smelling like roses, just at the peak period of Blairite treachery? is it right for the Labour Party connections of Bill Morris and the TGWU, which reflect on the future for all anti-union legislation under the next government and therefore on what can be said and done against that legislation now, - should not be discussed publicly precisely while this dockers dispute is on?

These are questions which undoubtedly should best be asked publicly by the SLP as an organisation which can encourage its members to aid the dockers struggle. They are not questions comfortably put by isolated individuals at private support meetings where people have only come together to give what help they can.

Build Leninism. Build a proper world view on the revolutionary crisis of imperialism. Jack Bradshaw

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

In late May, on the anniversary of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), that guerrilla movement led by Marulanda carried out a military escalation with actions in Cauca, Meta, Tolima, Santander, Antioqula, Cundinamarca and Boyacá departments, among others, and battles just 50 kilometers outside of Bogota.

Simultaneous with this rebel offensive was the historic trial to determine President Ernesto Samper’s responsibility in the acceptance of drug traffic money in the 1994 electoral campaign that brought him to power. Samper is the fourth Colombian president in that country's history to be brought to trial, which at press time was still inconclusive. The judges are 165 members of the House of Representatives.

According to the press, the trial has been carried out under very tight security, and has provoked a political and economic crisis. A group calling itself Dignity for Colombia has threatened to murder Juan Carlos Gaviria, brother of the former president, as well as all the legislators who vote In Samper's favor. The group is also demanding Organization of American States (OAS) intervention. This intimidation has been accompanied by death threats within the House of Representatives and at the defense table, despite the supposedly strict security measures.

But once again, the rumors of an unannounced Invasion refer to Washington and not to the OAS or the UN. And Senator Fabio Valencia has called for Samper’s resignation, no matter what the trial's verdict, to avoid “strong international pressures, especially from the United States, which would aggravate the country's already deteriorated economic situation," according to AFP;

To back up his position, Valencia said that the State Department is concerned about the recommendation made by the House of Representatives' investigating commission that the president's trial should come to an end, indicating that it would impose sanctions if Samper remains in power.

In any case, the U.S. government “isn't going to keep quiet,” he added.

Behind these suspicious rumors is the friction between Bogota and the United States since Samper took office, the guerrilla advance, and the convenience of manipulating Colombian sovereignty In order to enjoy the strategic advantages and possibly to interfere in the Non-Aligned Movement, of which Colombia is president until the next summit.

So far, the invasion has not been announced (was any U.S. invasion ever announced?), but there is no doubt that there have been threats and interference.

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

U.S. battleship New Jersey in Panama Canal. For Yankee imperialism, the canal and 13 American military bases alongside it are the linchpin for domination of Latin America.

• THERE have been persistent rumors since mid-May of a possible invasion by U.S. troops along the area that borders Panama, although the Southern Command has denied them. The reasons alleged are to fight drug trafficking, although there seem to be other causes which in the end, of course, would have the same result.

Wire stories appearing last month about such operations led many Colombians to believe that the United States had cast its eye on the banana-growing region of Urabá. "They're just a meter away from invading,” Conservative Senator Fabio Valencia stated, although Defense Minister Juan Carlos Esguerra responded that the operations reached exactly to the point where Colombian airspace begins, and that the region's sovereignty is guaranteed by 10 000 troops belonging to a commando and two battalions in the zone.

This military presence, which has been growing since 1988, is more the result of the internal conflict with the guerrillas than in defense of sovereignty, some specialists commented to IPS. There are those who say that the wave of violence is not due to confrontations between guerrillas and paramilitary groups, or drug trafficking, but rather “straw men for U.S. banana distributors who want to enter the region, no matter what the cost.” In 1995, Urabá — a town of 700 000 inhabitants — had 952 violent deaths and 52 disappearances, a figure which has gone to 165 in 1996.

The situation is so bad that some have proposed the intervention of UN peacekeepers, in order to transform Urabá into a tropical Bosnia, although such a proposal has been rejected by Colombian authorities.

Aside from banana riches, the ecology and drug trafficking, it must be taken into account that some consider Urabá the most strategically important zone in the Western hemisphere, which even offers possibilities for an inter-oceanic canal which would be an alternate route for the Panama Canal. Furthermore, the guerrilla army's advances concern more than a few right-wing analysts.