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 0873 October 01 1996                                                                                                                                       10p
EPSR readers meetings Sat. Oct 12  Southwest.Rcpts./bags

To fight as effectively and ruthlessly as the Zionists is what Palestinians must now do to reclaim from its colonising usurpers their right to live in the whole of their country. Capitalist exploitation will teach them how. US imperialism's 'New World Order' again in shreds. 

(plus on front page capitalist press quotes on corruption - see below - archive ed)

The essence of the Zionist presence in the Middle East, - colonial reaction, - has foully reasserted itself as was bound to happen, making nonsense of the impossible 'peace' process.

As Marxist-Leninist understanding has always grasped, there is a fundamental contradiction between the implantation of the Zionist Western imperialist-stooge regime in the postwar settlement, and the national-liberation interests of the Palestinian Arabs who alone in the world have been denied their place in the great end-of-empire decolonisation since 1945.

The Oslo accords were nonsense from the beginning, a fraud on the Palestinian nation, and an intolerable affront to the basic Zionist mentality that the whole of the mythical biblical Holy Land must belong to God's chosen people, a challenge to the Zionists' determination to smite anything they think threatens their controlling rights.

The rightwing Likud coalition has never hidden its contempt for conceding any meaningful self-determination to the Palestinians, and has vowed never to allow Palestinian statehood. Rightwing vengeance assassinated Labour leader Rabin just months ago for his Oslo 'Peace', and Netanyahu's elevation to prime minister has unleashed more reactionary provocations than ever against the Arabs, the latest being the tourist tunnel under the Arab old city of Jerusalem to rub in the Zionists' controversial annexation of the whole town.

But almost any issue would serve to touch a match to a perpetually explosive situation of the Zionists continuing to annex and colonise more and more of the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in derisive hate-filled defiance of the joke 'spirit' of the Oslo 'peace' sell-out.

And vowing ever-increasing menace, Netanyahu is now threatening to reoccupy the whole of the Palestinian 'self-determination' areas and take the light weapons, which alone the Zionists permit the Arab authorities to have, back off them, the ultimate colonial humiliation.

The fight put up under this stooge Palestinian regime has temporarily saved Arafat's position, but his brand of servile class collaborating 'nationalism' is doomed to be superseded soon, possibly by the Muslim fundamentalist posturing initially, but eventually by communist revolution.

As the Review explained three years ago immediately after Oslo, the underlying imperialist economic crisis would in time destabilise not only this 'peace' farce but the whole US imperialist bogus 'New World Order' as well, even including the reactionary-stooge tie-up between Washington and the Zionists themselves.

Netanyahu is scarcely hiding his readiness to tell any American intervention to go to hell too. And serious US retaliation, comparable to the loss of funding threat of last year, is restrained by Clinton's electoral needs from the huge Jewish vote in the USA, in November. Thereafter? Even more of the Review's outline perspectives from August 1993 (Nos 715, 716, 717) may begin to be borne out:

The most aggressive warmongering rightwing sectors of Zionist colonialism, - its essential historical character, are unhappy about the Gaza-Jericho 'self-rule' pittance for the Palestinians because it retreats towards formal acceptance once again of the existence of a Palestinian nation and of its right to some sort of homeland on the territory it has lived in for more than 2,000 years.

But all of this land is coveted by Zionist imperialism which has long not-so-secretly entertained the unexpressed hope and intention that by continuously postponing any return of the occupied territories to the Palestinians and postponing any halt to 'security settlements' by new Zionist colonisers on the occupied lands "because of continued Arab terror disruption of Israel and a refusal to live in peace with Israel", etc, - the UN resolutions about restoring Palestine as a state would eventually fade away, wiped out by the fait accompli of total Zionist colonisation.

Zionist reaction might yet wage war on this Washington pressure for this hopelessly messy and unsatisfactory 'peace' agreement because it could be seen as the thin end of the wedge for an eventual re-flourishing of state-organised Palestinian resurgence which could justifiably ultimately demand the return of all Palestine's colonised lands, - including the 54% which Western imperialism monstrously first awarded to the Zionist colonisers in the infamous 1947 UN partition plan (which created the 'Israel' colony for US imperialism), but which would certainly want full Arab-state sovereignty over the 23% of Palestine (the whole West Bank and Gaza) left to the Palestinians by UN resolution 242.

The Zionist colonisers’ ideological and monopoly-capitalist material interests have long been edging towards a final rupture and showdown with their Western (mainly US) imperialist patrons because of the ultimately fundamentally irreconcilable contradiction between the Zionist-colony-stooge stunt as a permanent thorn in the side of too-aggressively resurgent Arab nationalism, and the real showdown of slump and trade-war throat-cutting within the entire imperialist market system which potentially puts all interests on opposite sides of the barricades.

Zionist luck may hold out and find itself still the closest to US imperialism's side in the huge warmongering sort-outs to come in the Near and Middle East.

But the amazing story of the near financial bankruptcy of the Saudi feudal monarchy as the world slump deepens, coupled with US-imperialist state bankruptcy, opens up all sorts of vastly different perspectives.

At the height of the postwar inflationary boom, imperialist intrigue could buy off the Palestinians with Saudi and UN money, keep Arab nationalism generally within controllable bounds by different deals and/or treachery to bourgeois Arab nationalists of different kinds, and still allow US imperialism to nurture its aggressive-Zionist colonising plaything.

With the dominant US-imperialist world structure now in kinds of trouble because of the uncontainable international capitalist-market crisis, more serious US-imperialist warmongering deals could easily as likely be struck with Arab nationalist forces as with Washington's longstanding Zionist stooges.

Saudi Arabia itself is virtually another US imperialist colony in the region but one with potentially far greater value for Washington (than the barmy Zionist religious zealots and colonial fascists) because of its oil, its size and location, and its longstanding central role in all Arab nationalist as well, as in all Islamic affairs.

Any one of these four considerations could easily outweigh in importance the Zionist connection for US imperialism at any time.

With Arab Islamic fundamentalism already on the move in Saudi Arabia in line with that country's enormous unresolved problems and in line with nationalist/anti-imperialist developments everywhere else in the Middle East, many possible new future Saudi-US imperialist arrangements might require a much-reduced Washington commitment to Zionist intransigence, or even a complete reversal of America's previous colonial-support role.

Zionist extremism could delude itself that it already has enough military muscle to defy any such actual or potential US pressure, contemptuous as it is of American bourgeois decadence in general, and that the Jericho-Gaza retreat is already thin-end-of-the-wedge enough.

The idiot jabber about Middle East 'peace' and 'one hundred years of conflict solved at last', etc, exploits one of the most sinister bourgeois propaganda conspiracies ever, - that there is no science of history at all, that there is no pattern to it, and that every problem on earth can be solved just on the basis of what people are prepared to think and wish for.

Such idealist wishful thinking about the Zionist colonisation of the Near East and the impossible contradictions this has created far Arab nationalist aspirations (and for inevitable future inter-imperialist conflicts in the region as the world free-market trade-war crisis comes to a head), - will not reduce one single problem.

The Zionist colonisation on the one hand represents old-fashioned European physical arrival and seizure of the best land and total domination of all activities in the area, the past pattern of history which was utterly repudiated and defeated by the post-1945 national-liberation struggle which put an end to the mighty physical empires carved out around the globe by France, Britain, Holland, Portugal, Spain, etc.

Colossal political and military-revolutionary struggles brought independence from immediate Western political control for Arab nations from Morocco to Iraq, often after the most enormous bloody wars and self-sacrifice, as in Algeria against the huge established French colony and against nuclear-armed Paris's determined fiction that Algeria was a departement, or 'part', of France.

Only the Palestinian Arab nation, nearly 6 million strong, cannot call its homeland its own, with more than half of the people still living the life of the evicted, either in detention inside Occupied Palestine, or in refugee camps outside it.

There is no way that the Palestinian national-liberation struggle can end until all nearly 6 million Palestinians are back in their homeland and in independent control of their own destiny (in formal political terms), or until they are all wiped out by steady Zionist attrition (but the Palestinian population has already more than doubled since the first Zionist land-grab in 1947 set up 'Israel' as effectively an American imperialist colony but under 'United Nations' flags of approval).

In other words, there is no real way in which 'peace' can be established. The Zionist seizure of total political and economic domination and of all the best land and water resources can hardly be shared in such a tiny area with an Arab population even more numerous than the present quantity of 4 million Zionist colonisers.

In addition, it is just gibberish to suggest that the aggressive Zionist 'success' story in 'making the desert bloom', etc, could possibly continue under some mythical 'lion lies down with lamb' imaginary world where the gigantic US imperialist subsidies to Zionland (as its controlled armed thug and stooge in the area) would cease because Washington no longer had need of a hired gun in quite the same old way, - (the politics of the region concerning Arab nationalism and longtime Soviet anti-imperialist backing for it having moved on dramatically since the Western inter-imperialist trade war was unleashed in earnest, forcing the USA to slow down the Cold War, which in turn gave Moscow revisionism the green light for total class-collaborating capitulation to the West.

The whole basis for the 'success' character of the Zionist colony is transformed if once the enclave ceases to be the frontline cutting edge for anti-communist imperialist domination of the region.

Deprived of these immense financial and military subsidies which [make] the Zionist colony a completely extraordinary presence in the Near East, the colonisation would in theory settle down to being just economically-superior parts of a 'shared' land, - somewhat along the lines of the barmy pretence which the current 'reformist' Zionist regime is trying to put over (in order to gain more time before any serious capitulation to Palestinian irresistible needs and demands has to be contemplated).

But this is complete fantasy. Either triumphant Zionist reaction will continue to rule the roost. Or else resurgent Palestinian nationalism must rule the roost. As soon as either is neutered, the other must dominate. There has never been a vacuum in political and economic power yet in history, and one is an impossibility now.

The fiction that the Zionist colonisation can just 'settle down' to a 'calm, benign maturity' with 'happy flourishing Palestinians all around', etc, is pure nonsense, and that this is so is reflected in the ridiculous entity for Palestinian 'self-rule' set up in Jericho and just parts of (and not even the whole of) the postage-stamp sized Gaza Strip.

The pattern tells it all, - total Zionist control married to token Palestinian 'independence'. It is an impossible marriage, and it won't work.

On the other hand, Zionist colonisation has also always represented the general thrust of Western imperialist interests into the Middle East (as well as a specific land-grab by specific monopoly-capitalist circles).

And it is the towering international crisis in this area of activity which is really putting all the question marks over the continuation of the Zionist colonisation rather than any particular changes within the immediate colonial relations themselves. 

Completely new perspectives for developments in the Middle East are not opening up, for example, simply because the Palestinian sector of the Arab national-liberation movement is finally moving towards catching up with the rest of Arab independence, -although this is happening too.

They are much more opening up because the post-1945 set-up for imperialist control of the Middle East has been completely undermined by the irresistible onslaught of inter-imperialist trade war.

Huge upheavals are approaching in the existing US-dominated world order.

The steady sharpening of Arab nationalist struggle or anti-imperialist struggle generally in the Middle East, - frequently coming more and more under the guise of opportunist Muslim fundamentalism, - plus the sense that US imperialism has told the Zionists to make a gesture or two and that the Zionists have felt it smart to respond, - provide examples of a widely-grasped intuition that the old order cannot last much longer and that massive changes are inevitable.

The essence of the problem is US imperialist bankruptcy and its terrible setbacks at the hands of Japanese and German trade-war competition.

And Washington's financial troubles sitting at the very top of the international market's bank-debt volcano, are compounded by the American imperialist bourgeoisie's political and cultural decadence which makes hazardous the very chances of survival of the imperialist system itself given the appalling catastrophes that the sheer size of the USA's lumbering decay will inflict everywhere.

Given these difficulties for the continuation of the old order due to the insoluble and inevitable crisis of relatively 'surplus' capital investment which can no longer all make a viable profit in the 'free' market (see Marx), and which must explode into all-out trade war followed by shooting inter-imperialist war not long after, - then it becomes even dafter to imagine that the old pattern of US imperialism dominating anti-imperialist Arab nationalist revolt (while at the same time encouraging Zionist colonialism's development as a further pro-Washington monopoly-capitalist weapon in the area), can continue.

The American connection to Arab reaction seems to be one of the keys to this labyrinth.

Possibly even more important for US imperialism than the role of its Zionist colonising stooges as a scourge of effective Arab revolution has been the role of Arab feudal reaction in keeping nationalism's anti-imperialist aspirations at bay, - particularly the role of the abysmally decadent but crucially powerful (because of its oil wealth and its guardianship of the holiest Muslim shrines) Saudi monarchy.

But this medieval tribalism is now at last almost certainly in terminal trouble, brought on by a combination of its phony stance as chief (financial) 'supporter' of the Palestine nationalist cause, now at last being exposed because the whole of Arab nationalism has got to make further progress or perish, - plus the immediately damaging economic effects of the same world capitalist-system crisis which is making Arab nationalism's promises now look so thin.

These observations underline the fatal inadequacy of both the longterm fraud of hitherto Arab nationalist leadership to really satisfy the legitimate demands of the region's population, - an inadequacy which Saddam Hussein's theatrical posturing was precisely designed to exploit, - and also of the lax bank-credit regime established by US imperialist international domination as a world model.

Washington's reactionary coalition just about held together to defeat Saddam Hussein, - but at a terrible cost, as is now becoming clear. Saddam is an oafish demagogue, but his bourgeois nationalist venom was enough to possibly fatally poison the feudal Arab reactionaries he gestured against in Kuwait and beyond.

But what is the bloated American bourgeoisie's real pecking-order position in the world now? Only in the coming markets crash of the great postwar inflationary bubble will that be found out.

And one of the key areas of inter-imperialist conflict is going to be the Middle East both in terms of its crucial international oil wealth and its central position in the role of the great Arab nations in the coming conflicts and for the further role of Muslim fundamentalist reaction.

The monster Western imperialist military turnout to get a piece of the action behind the majority of conservative Arab regimes in resisting the Iraqi aggression against some of the remaining feudal/imperialist backward remnants in the region, - proves the irresistible attraction of the wealth and influence there to every monopoly-bourgeois power.

And far from the Gulf War settling anything as part of US domination's bogus 'new-world order', the very fact of Saddam Hussein's startling onslaught, - plus the huge cost of putting it right for the decadent conservative regimes around, - shows in which direction the tide of history is moving, - away from rule by feudal-imperialist reaction.

Far from the Middle East turmoil settling down after the savage disciplining meted out to Iraq, insecurity and aggressiveness has only increased in every direction.

Not only is Western imperialism no longer ruling the roost, but its US monopoly-bourgeois hegemonists are being more universally embarrassed daily, - as even the capitalist press itself admits:

THE FALL of Kabul and the open warfare between Israeli and Palestinian forces last week were doubly connected. They signalled a strategic reverse for US foreign policy across the Islamic world. And they shared a common source: President Saddam Hussein’s blunt defiance of the Washington assumption that the region could become a stable American protectorate.

With five weeks to go to the election, President Bill Clinton’s claims to have boxed in the Iraqi leader, brokered a peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and managed the alarming rise of Islamic fundamentalism all now lie in tatters. But the implications of an inflamed Middle East and beyond, from Jerusalem to Kabul, go far further than the US election campaign. Desperate American diplomatic efforts to engineer a calm-inducing emergency summit between Yasser Arafat and Binyamin Netanyahu were still unavailing as the news reached Washington that fundamentalist Taliban forces had taken the Afghan capital and announced the introduction of Sharia (strict Islamic law).

It was a reminder that almost all Clinton’s much-trumpeted diplomatic achievements, from the Northern Ireland ceasefire to the restoration of democracy in Haiti, have run into trouble.

His hopes of establishing a peaceful and unified multi-ethnic state of Bosnia have been frustrated by elections that simply entrenched ethnic distinctions. There is still no agreement on what kind of international peacekeeping force will remain next year, or if the US will participate.

The elections have been denounced as a fraud by the International Crisis Group.

Unrestrained, fundamentalist reaction in Kabul may seem superficially like another anti-communist triumph for US imperialism, but such primitive lawlessness and superstition-riddled nonsense is hardly an advert for progressive American control of the planet. And in reality there is no control at all. Fundamentalism is still obliged to put on a great show of defiance in Iran; it hounds the USA's Zionist sidekicks constantly; in Sudan, Algeria, etc, it still flirts with anti-Western rhetoric alarmingly; in Egypt it undermines the USA's second most-favoured stooge regime; in Saudi Arabia, it threatens revolution. Fanatical extremism reigning in Kabul will only add another headache to US domination's insurmountable problems, and Taliban's White-Terror pointless savagery against Najibullah will only remind revolutionaries of why Red Terror was born historically, to make sure such outbreak of atavistic vengeance-barbarism never gets a chance to raise its ugly head. Once in power, the dictatorship of the proletariat wants to make certain that it stays there until a communist world of total scientific education and unrationed relative plenty has been built. It only confirms one of the greatest paradoxes of history that in the long run, the dominant characteristic of the Stalinist inheritance was being too soft. Build Leninism. JB

The capitalist press says it all about the basic corruption of its own Parliament.

The case would further have shown that the Guardian's original claims about cash for questions were entirely true - though they represented but the tip of an iceberg. Mr Hamilton was not an isolated bad apple - though he has for many years been earning considerable sums on the back of his parliamentary career via Ian Greer's lobbying firm. A nauseating portrait would have emerged of MPs on the take and of how Mr Greer's insidious, spider's web caught up dozens of MPs, high and low. If there are two men more relieved than Mr Hamilton and Mr Greer not to be in court this week, they are surely John Major and Michael Heseltine, no longer required to come and attempt on oath to defend the indefensible.

In any other democracy, MPs who secretly take money from millionaires to advance their causes in Parliament are put behind bars. In Britain, they stand for re-election. That is the simple, staggering truth about a Parliament which connives at corruption under the pretence of defending the privileges of its members.

The British position has been justified by the comfortable theory that Parliament can punish its own miscreants, after an investigation by the Privileges Committee and its report to the House. But the Privileges Committee is a jurisprudential joke. It has no investigative procedures, no legal methods (such as cross-examination) to test for truth. It is the committee of a gentleman's club, with an in-built Government majority, astute only to ensure that those who are caught not disclosing secret payments should be thrashed with a feather.

'Sometimes he [Mr Greer) would ask me bluntly whether Mr Al Fayed had his money ready.'

'Mr Hamilton was as persistent as Mr Greer, if not more so, in 'asking for his envelope.'
- Mohamed Al Fayed's ex-personal assistant

'I remember on several occasions that prior to a meeting with Mr Hamilton, Mr Al Fayed would make a remark ...that he was coming to collect his money and would prepare an envelope for him with a bundle of £2,500 (in) notes in my presence.'  
- Mr Al Fayed's secretary

'On at least two occasions when I was sitting at the front  desk, an envelope was brought down to me from Mr Al Fayed's s office and I was informed that Mr Hamilton would be stopping by to collect  the envelope.' 
-Mr Al Fayed's security man

Downing Street last night insisted that the of the libel action was purely a "matter between Mr Hamilton and the Guardian".
And who is the most important prop of this House of Commons racketeering? The Labour 'Opposition', meeting this week in its own gagged conference in Blackpool.

No democracy for Gerry Adams to talk at Westminster about his heroic fight for his country's legitimate national-liberation from British imperialist-colonial gerrymandered tyranny. No democracy for the pensions lobby at conference. But all the democracy in the world for the graft and corruption lobby around Parliament. Sack them all. Revolutionary justice would be too good for the crooked racket which is House of Commons 'government'. JB

Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No. 189.  Sunday 22nd September 1996

Discussion.

Understanding the epoch.

To make sense of any moment of history, whether Spain in 1936 or Iraq in 1996, the only sane place to start from is the overall balance of world class forces. And central to the class-struggle history of the twentieth century has been the pressure of unresolved imperialist crisis, ultimately setting the pace for all decisive world developments.

This has been true even where the immediate pressure of overproduction crisis has been temporarily alleviated after the blind brutality of slump and war has wiped out vast masses of the world's productive forces.

World War I notoriously failed, either decisively to see off the challenge to the Anglo-Saxon status quo, or alternatively to subordinate British imperialist degeneracy to a new world order. Worst of all for imperialism, it laid the foundations for the establishment of the world's first workers' state.

WWII unleashed further national liberation and communist development. And now it can be seen that, for all the advantages to imperialism of the postwar boom, the Pax Americana and Cold War arrangements never had a hope of suppressing crisis from the world market system. Instead the US ran up ever huger deficits at the heart of the world dollar economy and ever huger credit inflation, guaranteeing unprecedentedly explosive consequences once trade war comes back to set 'free world ally' against 'ally'.)

And this domination of all world development by imperialist crisis remained the decisive motor of history when it was the masses themselves who were making revolutionary history, and even when the Soviet workers' state so grew in power and prestige that it could convincingly project itself as a great power thrown into the balance against US imperialism itself.

It was conscious Bolshevik struggle that won the leadership of the revolution and carried it through to proletarian dictatorship, and it was the awakened masses that recognized the Bolshevik slogans as their own. But it rather adds to, than takes away from, this massive achievement to recognize that it was crucially the crisis of world imperialism, bearing down on weak-link semi-feudal autocracy, which created the revolutionary situation which put the Russian working class and its leaders to the test in the first place. Bolshevik leadership was as successful as it was precisely because of the remarkable degree to which it proved able to explain all this.

The feats of heroic armed resistance which broke the back of German imperialism's fascist anti-Soviet aggression (a lesson in the real meaning of 'mass democracy' which needs pushing down bourgeois propaganda throats at every opportunity) were likewise an inspiration to every communist and anti-imperialist struggle in the world, and set certain constraints on how US imperialism could henceforth organize its own world hegemony. 

Yet the root cause of revolution in China and anti-colonial struggle in India etc. lay within the same crisis contradictions of imperialism which gave birth to October 1917, however valuable the Soviet example and assistance proved to be in making the break from imperialism's stranglehold.

Paradoxically, the better armed and more materially powerful the postwar Soviet workers' state grew, the more cosily postwar Moscow revisionism was able to settle into illusions about peaceful competition between two systems, with a parallel 'socialist world economy' supposedly eventually set to outpace the capitalist world economy and take away its markets. The phase of the USSR's 'superpower' existence, whilst welcomed by all genuine Marxists as a necessary defence of the workers' state against imperialist encirclement, actually corresponded with a lessening in likely eventual importance of the Soviet Union's role in world revolutionary situations coming along in the future, once the long postwar boom could be sustained no longer and the crisis of imperialism sharpened again.

Only anti-communist Trot defeatism will want to distort this contradictory reality into more 'proof' that 'Stalin should never have tried to build socialism in one country'. The problem lay not in the enormous economic, social, technological and cultural achievements of the Soviet workers' state, - all invaluable evidence of what the working class can achieve, even against unbelievable odds, as soon as it proves possible to make a proletarian dictatorship break with world imperialist rule, expropriate the exploiters, defend the workers' state against all comers, and start planning social production around social development instead of private accumulation.

The problem was rather the combination of objective and subjective factors (material difficulties of building socialism in isolation and surrounded by enemies, and the relative weakness in the available Bolshevik leadership after Lenin) which unhappily led to a retreat from Marxism-Leninism into revisionism.

The lengthy ideological decay was uneven, and capable of partial recovery under pressure of class-struggle development. The most obvious example of partial recovery was the WWII revolutionary mobilization of Soviet workers against fascist invasion. 

Sadly, the central significance of this heroic and costly class struggle in defence of the gains of October got tidied away again in the haste to draw daft 'democracy versus fascism' popular frontist conclusions from the astute tactical wartime alliance with Anglo-Saxon capitalism against German capitalism.

Right up almost to the end, the contradictory reality of Third International class leadership retained the capacity to half-revert to Bolshevik form under pressure of events, with e.g. assistance to Vietnam, Afghanistan and Cuba, and vigorous defence of workers' state borders in practice (even as the theoretical defence of proletarian dictatorship wavered).

But as imperialist crisis sharpened towards trade war and slump once more, long-decaying Moscow revisionism rapidly found itself right out of its depth, first rattled by the revived 'evil empire' rhetoric whereby Reaganism tried to frighten its West European and Japanese competitors back into line, then grabbing gratefully at the subsequent olive branch (proffered by Washington once it was clear that more direct ruthless competition against its rivals would have to take precedence over warmed-over McCarthyism).

Moscow revisionism was an early, and very easy, victim of imperialist crisis. The 70 years of planned socialist achievement under proletarian dictatorship rule were in the end just casually written off (by an anti-Leninist leadership completely remote from any sense of what it really means to be standing at the head of an 18 million strong communist party, itself at the head of the world's first workers' state, as the third great wave of imperialist crisis comes crashing in), with Reagan II finding himself pushing at an open door where Reagan I had shortly before been vainly banging his head.

Moscow revisionism is dead, long live communism. The Trot 'political revolution' line was never more than a cheap petty bourgeois trick to stab workers' states in the back whilst grandly proclaiming allegiance to a higher 'true democratic socialism'. The manner of the workers' states passing has scotched this party trick for good, now that the 'democratic socialists' Havel, Walesa and Yeltsin have unleashed market anarchy on society, with dire results which only the most loopy anti-communist prejudice can ignore. 

Yet revisionism, by walking away from the very proletarian dictatorship whose recognition and defence is the touchstone of all genuine Marxism, has signed its own death warrant. Revisionism, by the manner of its leaving, is revealing more about the core significance of proletarian dictatorship science in the anti-imperialist struggle than the Third International tradition managed to say in decades.

But this remains a closed book to those voices in the reconstituted CPGB who failed in the consistent defence of the Soviet workers' state so long as it survived, yet now seize on its liquidation by revisionism as proof that every 'hot spot' in the world is about to be resolved in imperialism's favour.

The Third International leaderships, on whom was previously foisted 'prime responsibility' for every weakness in workers' state socialist development (neatly excising the central role of world imperialism and its crisis from the picture), are now yet more clamorously blamed for everything in the world that has 'gone wrong' since they gave up the ghost.

'The overthrow of apartheid not at once advanced to all-Africa communism? The success of the Irish bourgeois national liberation fight is not at once developing into an armed communist onslaught on British capitalist class rule itself? Why, only the loss of the Soviet Union could possibly account for this dreadful outcome' - such is the funereal subtext drumming gloomily under every Weekly Worker editorial.

Sooner than grasp the nettle of explaining how the sad loss of the Soviet Union needs to be understood as an early episode in a much more far-reaching disintegration of ALL the postwar arrangements (by which imperialism re-floated its exploitation-oppression game after the LAST barbaric imposition of warmongering imperialist crisis), and sooner than make honest use of the opportunity this cruel historical turn paradoxically offers to start cutting through all that 'official communist' revisionist fug, cutting back to the recognition of crisis-contradiction within world bourgeois society itself as the only possible growth point of the next great wave of proletarian revolutionary development, - the CPGB continues to potter fastidiously around the edges of all cutting-edge development, awarding all the players marks out of ten for moral turpitude or political correctness, but never quite getting to the analytic core of any question.

Coverage of Washington's renewed blitzkrieg against Iraq is a case in point.

Under the inexplicable headline "US calls the tune", WW 157 explains US aggression thus:

Every so often the US administration wakes up to the awkward realisation that Saddam Hussein is still in power in Baghdad. Perhaps the USA wants him there in preference to a pro-Iranian or leftist regime, but Saddam does not fit well into the Brave New World of total American dominance, and sometimes he decides to remind them of his continued existence. 

The Middle East is full of unresolved crises and trouble spots, as well as oil wealth. This is why the USA likes to shake a mailed fist from time to time and also why its dominance of the world is shaky.

One of the unresolved crises is in Kurdistan.

As description this is fair enough. But as analysis, it immediately begs some huge questions. The Middle East "is full of unresolved crises and trouble spots". Why? And are these particular 'hot spots' becoming a bigger headache for imperialism, or a smaller headache? Or is this just same kind of perennial problem which just bubbles along without much development in any direction, with 'every so often', 'from time to time', America doing some blitzing? Is US "dominance of the world" getting less "shaky", more "shaky", or is it in some mysterious perpetual state of shakiness which the laws of chance could equally tip either way, - or no way at all? In short, what is the general tendency and pattern of these events?

Why shrink from beginning with a statement of what should be obvious to any Marxist: it is imperialist crisis which is multiplying "hot spots" all over the world and undermining US world dominance worse and worse, first and foremost through the ruthless cutthroat trade-rivalry opening up within the imperialist camp? 

Why not begin by getting the context clear and the direction straight, so that the concrete specifics of the development can then be unfolded with care and examined dialectically?

Instead, the general analysis is left at this impressionist level, and the piece then hares off into a discussion on the national rights of the Kurds. The self-serving hypocrisy of US professions of concern over the Kurds is correctly identified, yet by letting the analysis get sidelined into an academic discussion about the best way to fight for Kurdish national rights, - and AWAY from the central issue of what GENERAL class-contradiction development is represented, by these events - bourgeois confusion is indeed allowed to 'call the tune', keeping the discussion firmly at the level of ideal prescriptions, safely remote from the really fruitful developments in the real world:

One lesson can be drawn: the Kurdish factions which acted as the tools of other powers have paid the price. The KDP is an Iraqi puppet now and the PUK is torn between seeking Iranian backing and trying to draw the USA and its allies into the conflict on its side. In contrast the PKK has stayed relatively free from the temptation to become someone else's pawn.

It is dear that the KDP and the PUK are politically bankrupt. The torch of Kurdish nationalist aspirations may well be passed to the PKK, whose own brand of 'Marxism’ has become steadily nationalistic - if not chauvinistic. The narrow nationalism of the PUK or the PKK is not enough to escape imperialism’s grip, but puppets like the KDP can never cut their strings 

Much more pressing lessons need drawing out than the inadvisability (for nationalists) of trusting great powers to defend the interests of small nations, or (for Marxists) of getting trapped behind narrow nationalist perspectives. Penny lectures of this sort don't turn nationalists into communists or solve the problems of revisionism, and amount to no more than prissy railing against a naughty world.

What does stand a real chance of clearing obstacles from historical progress and scales from eyes is sharpening imperialist contradiction, the real story that never quite gets told in Weekly Worker despite all the gallons of newsprint.

And the refusal to recognize the central importance of imperialist crisis in making Marxist analysis ends up making these would-be Marxists just as blind to significant development as the nationalists and revisionists whom they take to task.

How else explain the startling mis-description of Washington firing missiles at Iraq "WITH ITS DUTIFUL ALLIES IN TOW" when even the most sycophantically pro-Washington media have been shouting from the rooftops the instant shattering of the Western 'coalition', and speculating freely about the rival trade interests underlying this disunity (with European oil deals getting sabotaged by Washington's warmongering)?

The trade-war dissensions, of the most immediate and acute interest to any Marxist analysis of the situation, at first simply disappear from view. Impossible to ignore completely, the following paragraph then mumbles around the phenomenon:

Unanimity has not been guaranteed. World reaction to the USA’s action has varied. The British government has dutifully fallen in behind its transatlantic master. This has long been the case - no surprise there. In contrast, the French have been reluctant, the Russians and Chinese hostile. This has nothing to do with ideology: they know the USA is pulling a fast one and are not as willing as Britain to give the US a free rein in asserting its hegemony. The Russian commentator who said the missile launches were an election ploy so that Bill Clinton could smooth his path back to the White House spoke a truth. It is unlikely that the USA will continue in this way much past polling day, so the Gulf War will not start up again. The problems of the region will continue however.

What is to be made of this? "Unanimity has not been guaranteed", it is conceded. There has been a "varied" world reaction, it is shufflingly accepted.

No, there has been an unprecedented wave of mistrust and hostility, from the oppressed and exploited Arab and Persian 'third world', from US trade rivals in the imperialist camp, from Turkey, Russia and China. Aside from the gutless sycophancy from the shagged-out UK end of the Anglo-Saxon alliance, and the captive votes of imperialism's creatures like Kuwait, the condemnation has been near-universal. For the sake of protocol, Germany forbore open criticism, but took the occasion to announce its own intention of fielding combat troops in parts of the Balkans previously occupied by the Third Reich. Meanwhile Germany's close ally France very publicly defied America, refusing to help police the new 'no fly' annexation of Iraqi airspace. This is not "reluctance", but open mutiny.

And what possesses Washington to provoke such a "varied" response (i.e. threatened disintegration of every Pax Americana certainty)? The closest the CPGB lead comes to an answer is: the US elections. But instead of presenting this in context (crisis-stricken US imperialism trying to shore up its own domestic class-hegemony by whipping up chauvinist enthusiasm against 'Hitler-Saddam', but in the process threatening to further accelerate the break-up of US hegemonic control planet-wide), the question of domestic elections is introduced simply in order to stress the supposed shallow transience of the crisis, recoverable post-election.

The Gulf War may or nay not start again, and this phase of the crisis may or nay not subside. But the inescapable general direction is the worsening of imperialist crisis, not just 'continuing problems' in the region, with 'every so often', ’from time to time', something or other happening.

The weekend that Saddam's forces moved into Irbil, before Washington used the pretext to renew its blitzkrieg, and before the scalded reaction to that blitzkrieg around the world, the South West Bulletin made an early stab at analysing what was going on, drawing heavily on bourgeois press coverage of diplomatic, and trade relations in the region in the preceding period. Such bourgeois data about new stresses and strains within imperialist crisis, organized around a perspective which consistently looks to class-struggle contradiction as the dynamic of all social development, not surprisingly proved a better preparation for what was about to happen than anything the Weekly Worker has been able to add since:

"The latest developments in the north, of Iraq are further evidence of Washington's continuing failure to invent a new Pax Americana II, capable of dominating the world for the next fifty years as its predecessor model has for the preceding fifty.

It was the uneven development of imperialism, brought to a competitive head in the renewed crisis of overproduction crisis, which lay behind the end of the Cold War and the evermore apparent challenges to US imperialist supremacy.

And it is the same crisis which ever since has relentlessly pushed Washington into trying to build a 'new world order' on the ruins of the old, - and requires it to do so under increasingly adverse circumstances. The consequences of failure are incalculably damaging to the world standing of US monopoly interests, and in the end to the stability of the world imperialist system itself.

The bourgeois press's first reaction to Saddam's move confirms Washington's Catch 22 situation,...

The crisis of imperialism is piling problem upon problem for Washington. No sooner has the uproar in the Balkans subsided sufficiently to start papering rigged electoral "democracy" over the partitioned counter-revolutionary ruins of socialist Yugoslavia, than the Middle East erupts again, with mad dog Zionism preparing the way for a new Intifada, and America's prolonged half-hearted meddling in northern Iraq falling foul of the new instability governing relations within the ranks of America's enemies and protégés alike.

Ba'athist opportunism seems to have concluded that, since everyone else and his dog are having their say about the jurisdiction of northern Iraq/Kurdistan (including the Americans, the UK, Ankara and Teheran, plus two gangster varieties of nationalist opportunism ready to hire out the fate of the long-suffering Kurdish people to the highest bidder), then its own political survival as posturing 'defender of national sovereignty' now depends on same gesture of national independence.

Shelling the inhabitants of Irbil is just the latest in a very long line of vile butchery, most of it financed, equipped, and ignored by the West, so long as it fitted in with the general divide-and-rule anti-communist line of march. When the Kurds of Halabja were being poison-gassed by Baghdad in the '80s, there was no talk of 'safe havens', just a deafening silence broken only by the ringing of cash registers.

Washington’s subsequent 'conversion' to the self-determination rights of Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south was from the first a mere cynical excuse for the division and weakening of the modern unitary Iraqi state, as its punishment for disobeying the imperialist master. That is the "deeply flawed and fragile status quo" whose possible "disruption" fills Washington with such "paralysing fear".

Saddam's earlier Kuwait-invasion attempt to win a new lease of bourgeois opportunist life for his regime (by showing willingness to start unpicking the unjust and oppressive arrangement of artificial borders and puppet states, first colonially imposed by France and Britain and then taken over and 'refined' by the United States, whereby control over Middle-Eastern oil resources remains firmly in the grip of Western imperialism) was brutally stopped in its tracks, and the new "status quo" imposed at the point of a gun.

But for all the fascist reprisals (bombing of civilians; incineration of thousands of troops in full retreat; use of the authority of the United Nations to subject the Iraqi people to a murderous economic war, depriving children of milk and the sick of medicine), the new "status quo" has only created for US imperialism even more intractable problems and even more unforgiving enemies.

The subsequent stoking up by imperialism of the civil war disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia was the next grisly mess to dominate this new 'post-communist' era (in which wars were supposedly to become a thing of the past now the 'evil empire' was buried). Lying news management around 'the plight of little Kuwait' gave way to similar Goebbels nonsense about 'plucky Bosnia' versus the 'demon Serbs'.

Now the farce around the Bosnian elections makes it clear that the Balkans mess in turn is no nearer resolution, with the long years of war merely giving way to a vicious mockery of 'civil peace', with a weak and divided imperialism incapable of doing anything other than leaving everyone to stew in the mutual ethnic and confessional hatreds unleashed by the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia.

What keep these 'hot spots' boiling up uncontrollably, and what prevents their resolution to the longterm advantage either of US imperialism or of imperialist stability in general, is the crisis in relations between the key imperialist players which keeps turning up the heat under all these developments.

The real news this weekend is not in itself that Saddam has just had a bite at a 'safe haven', but that the disastrous instability of world imperialism, disorganized around the US dollar, has just taken another disastrous lurch in the Middle East, entirely of its own making.

Close attention to the shifting post Cold War relations between Ankara and Washington, Ankara and Tel Aviv, Ankara and Teheran, Ankara and Baghdad etc. is a much more promising starting-point for making sense of Iraq and the Kurds than asking, 'which Kurd leadership is genuinely for self-determination?' or 'which Kurd leadership is closest to Marxism?', or 'which promotions, demotions, assassinations, coup rumours, mutinous regiments or political opposition forces might offer the best hope for Kurdish self-determination/the socialist revolution in Iraq?', etc. (interesting as all such aspects could be, once the correct perspective had been established).

With Turkey's unstable semi-fundamentalist coalition regime now set on turning all its former Cold War international relationships upside down, German-led Europe (not to mention its own NAFTA 'partners') in open revolt against Washington's attempt to declare no-go areas one 'pariah' national market after another (Cuba, Libya, Iraq, Iran), and mad dog Zionism slipping the "peace process" leash in Palestine to create ever new intolerable depths of insurrectionary resentment across the Arab and Muslim world,- the old Cold War landscape is at every turn transforming further beyond Washington’s recognition or control."

- South West Bulletin no. 186, 1.9.96.

How much more obviously beyond Washington's control have things gone a few weeks later, with large parts of northern Iraq back under Baghdad's sovereignty, Turkey refusing use of Incirclik airbase, the Arab League in open condemnation, and the whole Middle East looking more and more like a powder keg of anti-imperialist revolt just waiting for the right spark.

The same subjective idealist muddle which seeks to ignore the central role of imperialist crisis in all development (and actively deny it even when regularly confronted with the evidence, endlessly rationalizing its own defeatism over Ireland, overthrow of apartheid etc.), thereby making itself dull to the sharpness of detailed concrete development (e.g. the gas deal between Iran and Turkey), suddenly becomes super-alert when it comes to spotting 'might-have-been' possibilities of development in history, redesigning the past with the same abandon with which it imposes Trot heaven on the future - over Spain in the thirties, for example.

Edit away all the shadow-boxing with the 'wrong kind' of Trotskyism, and the 'lefter-than-thou' fencing with anarchist confusion and the foul POUM counter-revolutionaries, and this is what comes crawling out of the pages of Weekly Worker in the name of 'communism':

Land and Freedom pointed the treacherous role of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and the Stalinite bureaucracy, which worked overtime to crush all those revolutionary forces which were not content to meekly defend the People’s Front regime.

For the Stalinites, whether in the Kremlin or in Barcelona, the role of communists was to defend the gains of the so-called bourgeois democratic revolution against fascism - any talk of socialist revolution was denounced as either ‘ultra-leftism’ or ‘Trotskyism’. In Loach’s film we see the bitter consequences of this approach: the mass arrest, torture and physical extermination of many revolutionaries. This was JV Stalin’s contribution to the Spanish revolution - to strangle it. For those with eyes to see, the Kremlin and its agents were the carriers of counter-revolution.

the real tragedy of the Spanish revolution: the complete absence of any revolutionary leadership. There was no revolutionary party that could lead and inspire the masses, or provide the revolutionary programme which would outline the path to be taken and the goal to be achieved - state power.

The lack of a Bolshevik Party made counter-revolution and defeat the virtually inevitable trajectory.

It would be a mistake, though, to look back with hindsight and pronounce Franco’s victory inevitable, or to overestimate his strength. In reality, Franco was making a gamble and was unsure himself as to how much support he could whip up. Franco was not invincible - he could have been defeated. By being bold, Franco and his forces eventually won the day. If the revolutionary forces had possessed an equal boldness, counter-revolution could have been vanquished. The defeat of fascism in Spain would have galvanised the proletariat in the rest of Europe - perhaps even threatened Hitler’s regime, which was still insecure.

For the last two months Anti-fascist Militia Committees had sprung up all over Catalonia, and were acting as a pole of attraction for militant workers and revolutionaries. Spanish soviets were coming into existence.

The working class was to be relegated to the role of spectator at best.

At worst, the workers were being set up for counter-revolution. This turned out to be the case. Predictably, one of the first steps taken by the Generalidad was to dissolve all the revolutionary committees which had arose on July 19, and earlier. July 19 had seen the formation of the Central Committee of the Militias - ie, militia committees, supply committees, workers’ patrols, etc. This marked the stage of dual power and posed the question of state power. For the revolution to succeed it required the centralisation of these workers’ organs into a disciplined, national organisation. The bourgeoisie - and the PCE - feared the new-born Central Committee.

The Generalidad ordered the Central Committee to be dissolved and all its powers to be turned over to the ministries of defence and internal security. The militias, the people armed, were to be absorbed into the bourgeois standing army and then turned into their opposite a force to defend the bourgeois order, not overthrow it.

An infamous decree was passed.

Article 2 stated: “Resistance to dissolving them will be considered as a fascist act and its instigators delivered to the Tribunals of Popular Justice.”

Most would agree that this signified the beginning of the end of the Spanish revolution.

A counter-revolutionary chain of events followed from the Article 2 decree of the Generalidad. This eventually saw the POUM being expelled from the government in December. In June 1937 the POUM was outlawed by the central government, which had been formed in November and included anarchists in its ranks. POUM leaders were arrested, on the grounds that the POUM was a “fascist organisation”. The unfortunate Nin was tortured and murdered by Stalin’s gangsters, the NKVD The PCE played a willing and active role in this orgy of terror and murder, their first loyalty being to the republican government and the Stalinite bureaucracy. The October Revolution itself became besmirched by the usurpers of Leninism and proletarian internationalism.

The ‘official communist’ movement, personified by JV Stalin, played a venal and counter-revolutionary role. The events in Spain were the logical result of the doctrine of socialism in one country: ‘Sorry, Spain, we’ve got the franchise -none for you.’

The answer to weak communist leadership in 1930s Spain is not retrospective, anti-communist bile in the 1990s. And the question of the subjective role of political consciousness cannot even begin to be seriously addressed, in the absence of any real attempt to analyze the objective world balance of class forces within which all political leadership operated.

Saying that Franco wasn't inevitable, and that a bit more revolutionary boldness could have seen him off, and maybe reversed the whole counter-revolutionary fascist phenomenon, must remain at the level of academic wishful thinking, unless it is demonstrated that material possibilities for proletarian dictatorship advance existed in agrarian, semi-feudal, priest-ridden Spain which were temporarily denied to the modern workers' movements in Germany, France, Britain etc.

Weak-link breakthroughs are in themselves not impossible, as above all October itself proved, and Stalinist efforts to prove conclusively that proletarian dictatorship advance could never have prospered in such 'pre-capitalist' conditions (see e.g. Harpal Brar, Trotskyism or Leninism) amount to a philosophical distortion of the Marxist understanding of necessity, trying to cover up Stalinist weaknesses and making worse blunders in the process.

But the skewed perspective that leaves out of account the wave of counter-revolutionary reaction which followed on the world proletariat's first great twentieth century breakthrough into workers' statehood, seeing only Stalinist blots on a clean page of revolutionary opportunity, is just the 'optimistic' backside of all the subjective idealist gloom about the present.

As revolution in Estonia, Hungary and Germany succumbed to the bloody frenzy of international reaction, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were forced to acknowledge that earlier hopes of a Europe-wide break with imperialism coming to rescue the Soviet revolution from isolation must be relinquished. Instead, Lenin - long before Stalin - started to argue relentlessly for the need to build socialism on the ground where the revolution had taken its stand. Sooner than clutch at the mechanical 'permanent revolution' optimism (treating the Soviet workers' state as a ram with which to batter real world development into submission to the dictates of subjective idealism), Lenin led the Bolshevik majority (soon to be led by Stalin) to the understanding that the only sound basis for revolutionary confidence lay in recognizing the opportunity which splits in imperialism had created for the building of socialism in one country. There was no string of workers’ states to take the strain of further world revolutionary advance at this stage, but all the same the mutinous international proletariat, had thrown enough of a scare into bourgeois everywhere to start taking some of the united heat off the young Soviet republic. If only the Bolsheviks could keep their heads and learn to derive maximum benefit from the ACTUAL contradictions that existed within the class enemy (e.g., by playing America off against Japan over trade agreements), carving out a space within which the foundations of socialism could start to be laid, then the revolution could win a future for itself.

Subjective-idealist slander from Western 'lefties' against this insistence on communist science over wishful thinking was already in full swing in 1920, with some luminary from the American Socialist Party citing this policy as evidence of the collapse of Soviet communism. Lenin's reply (Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks, 1920) was that: 

"no better proof of the Russian Soviet Republic's material and moral victory over the capitalists of the whole world can be found than the fact that the powers that took up arms against us because of our terror and our entire system have been compelled, against their will, to enter into trade relations with us in the knowledge that by so doing they are strengthening us. This might have been advanced as proof of the collapse of communism only if we had promised, with the forces of Russia alone, to transform the whole world, or had dreamed of doing so. However, we have never harboured such crazy ideas and have always said that our revolution will be victorious when it is supported by the workers of all lands. In fact, they went half-way in their support, for they weakened the hand raised against us, yet in doing so they were helping us."

The great success in industrial and military strength won in Stalin's five-year plans and the hard-fought collectivization class-struggle in the countryside (proving that socialism was indeed going to be built, in one country if necessary) was what made it more realistic for "the forces of Russia alone" to throw a significant material weight behind the resistance to fascism in Spain.

As is well known, the Soviet workers' state was alone among states in giving massive military assistance to Spain, whilst German and Italian imperialism were able to rely on Britain and France's tacit acquiescence as they carried on their butchery against the Spanish people. Well known to the whole world, - but not of the remotest interest to this 'everything is rotten' Trot slander, anxious only at any cost to convict the Spanish Communist Party, the CPSU and Stalin personally of "working overtime to crush revolutionary forces" and "strangle the Spanish revolution". What a grotesque substitution of sick fantasy for Marxist analysis this has always been and how much worse it stinks now that the revisionist fog begins to clear around the ACTUAL historical achievement of proletarian dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

There was no revolutionary leadership, complains the article, but soon finesses this judgement by giving both POUM and Trotskyism 'mistaken-but-revolutionary' status, and identifying "the Kremlin and its agents" as "the carriers of counter-revolution".

The truth is quite different. There was a courageous anti-fascist lead, given by the Spanish communists and the Comintern, the political grasp of which was horribly muddled by popular frontism. There were also various forms of syndicalist, anarchist and social democratic leadership, wavering throughout between the communist lead and its opponents. And then there were the POUM ultra-lefts (so beloved of British secret police spy and hack novelist, George Orwell, and egged on from afar by a scornful Trotsky), whose response to the popular frontist weakness of the established communist leadership was to declare war - in objective reality, counter-revolutionary war - on the bourgeois republic at the height of fascism's assault upon it. So far as historical analogies ever hold water, this would be like calling for the immediate overthrow of the Kerensky provisional government at the very moment Kornilov' s White counter-revolution pressed home its invasion - and all in the name of the proletarian revolutionary interest.

The Comintern and the Spanish communists of the thirties lacked the grasp of Lenin's Bolsheviks, sure enough. Where the Bolshevik line of 'everything for the defeat of Kornilov, no support for Kerensky' kept the proletarian dictatorship powder dry, dire popular frontist illusions from Moscow had long since numbed the Bolshevik touch.

But before the imperfect analogy is retired, two points can be made. First, say the Bolsheviks HAD got it badly wrong when the Kornilov panic hit, and wavered into a position of 'support for Kerensky until Kornilov is beaten' - what then? Would it be evidence of superior communist science from an alternative leadership to raise the cry: 'Bring down Kerensky, then the revolution will really sort out Kornilov'? No, the 'cure' would be much worse than the illness.

Yet, secondly, anyone who wanted to say 'bring down Kerensky first, and revolution will deal with Kornilov later' could at least try and justify this dubious 'optimism' by reference to the great insurrectionary wave of proletarian anger and disaffection with warmongering imperialism sweeping across Europe.

What could those who goaded on the doomed Barcelona uprising point to in order to lend 'optimistic' colour to their sectarian enterprise? Only international reaction of the most ferocious character.

The Soviet Union's greater strength in the intervening period (gained precisely by the plan of building socialism in one country so despised by armchair ultra-lefts in the West) alters not a jot of Lenin's correct perspective of the "craziness" of supposing that the world could be transformed by Russian forces in isolation.

And the real crime of Stalinism against the revolutionary cause - the conservative relaxation away from the disciplined fight for proletarian dictatorship science, and back into popular front class-collaboration illusions -, whilst compounding subjectively the overwhelming problems faced by the working class internationally in this period of extreme reaction, was in no way the ORIGIN of these problems. Imperialist reaction was imperialist reaction, not a tool of the Stalinist 'syphilis in the labour movement' of sick Trotsky mythology.

Prime responsibility (a phrase with a history) for the horrors of reaction lay with the imperialist bourgeoisie. It is an upside-down version of the class struggle which so loses sight of this obvious fact that debate around a key episode in that period of reaction (the Spanish Civil War) should at once turn into a quarrel over what Russia should or should not have done. The crisis was imperialism's crisis, and whatever revolutionary opportunities may or may not have been contained within it were never finally in Moscow's gift to bestow or withhold, however great and justified the workers' state's prestige.

If, despite all the contrary evidence of the temporary strength of world reaction and the special difficulties facing the Spanish revolution, it was the case that greater boldness could have won the day for proletarian dictatorship in Spain, and then then easily 'galvanized' the proletariat in the rest of Europe - perhaps even threatened Hitler's regime, "which was still insecure", then why is it supposed that Moscow's disapproval should alone have proved the one wholly insurmountable obstacle, even if Moscow were for some obscure reason truly hellbent on holding back the revolution?

Most difficult of all for this anti-Soviet slander to explain now (with the very manner of the workers' state's temporary departure from history giving the lie to the notion of it ever having been 'just like any other state really' - what other state in history has just wasted away from sheer lack of class-ideological nourishment?) is why on earth the "Stalinite bureaucracy" should have spent so much energy fighting fascism in Spain in the first place, if all it really wanted to do was strangle proletarian revolutions at birth - or even if it just wanted to enrich itself as a parasite on society. Is it really supposed that pure hatred of proletarian emancipation drove them to pour arms, and assistance and advice (even poor advice) into the fight against imperialist reaction? What insanity!

The reality is much closer to the commonsense picture which most people will recognize, despite Loach's worst efforts: Russia tried to help the Spanish revolution get fascism off its back but it didn't work out.

To this commonsense view can be added the secondary observation that Soviet assistance was made less effective because saddled with a popular frontist approach which, step by step, unavoidably narrowed the potential revolutionary scope of the war against Franco. By the time that communists had already, on the basis of popular frontist politics, taken direct leading roles in both the government and the national army, the logic of the anti-fascist struggle made the dissolution of the militias and centralization of the anti-fascist armed forces an objective necessity. Whether or not a Leninist approach, if adopted earlier, might have produced some quite different set of circumstances is endlessly debatable, but ultimately academic. What is known is that none of the available alternative leaderships had anything remotely approaching a Leninist grasp. In the absence of THAT, no amount of last-ditch stands around workers' militias or soviets versus the flawed communist leadership was in itself ever going to improve matters for the workers at all, and could very easily shove off in the direction of Kronstadt and 'soviets without the Bolsheviks' (as in fact proved the case, with the abortive POUM coup). The fact that the CPE and the Comintern weren't revolutionary Bolsheviks of Lenin's stamp doesn't invalidate the point.

As the peacock Trotsky was at pains to point out, the POUMistas (objective counter-revolutionaries) were hardly up to Trotsky's level of demented petty-bourgeois genius either. 1936 wasn't 1917.

Blaming the Soviet Union for the wave of international imperialist reaction which gripped the thirties does nothing to clarify either the history of the thirties or the real significance of Soviet socialist achievements. Making a film about the Spanish Civil War which makes communists with flawed politics out to be the same fascist bastards as the Falangist thugs they were fighting against, and getting the film hailed as a masterpiece by every Trot and his dog, is the insane logical conclusion of this 'everything is rotten' defeatism.

But this manic elation/manic depression mode of 'analysis', - depending so crucially on a skewed perspective of the century's history which is incapable of ever looking honestly at what 70 years of Soviet workers' state existence actually amounted to in its own right, because so busily at work blaming the Soviet Union, for every setback ever suffered by the working class, - looks to be heading fast for a brick wall now that world imperialist crisis is back dominating the agenda and the revisionist fog is thinning.

The whole mindset plaguing the 'left', obsessed either with making Russia the blank screen for all its idealist wishful thinking, or with punishing Russia for failing to be the vehicle to take the world straight to 'democratic socialist' heaven, has infantilised generations of 'left' debate about the role of the Soviet workers' state and proletarian dictatorship. It is a cruel paradox (though possibly in the end a necessary one) that it has taken the (temporary and episodic) expiry of the Soviet workers' state (at the hands of its own revisionist leadership) to complete the ideological conditions under which world imperialism will hasten its own (revolutionary and permanent) departure from history - at the hands of its own creation, the modern world proletariat, gravediggers of the capitalist system.

Build Leninism.
Paddy Chambers.