Hitherto, philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx.
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
(Weekly.  Subscriptions £10/3months. £30p.a.) [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                
No 0876 October 22 1996                                                                                                                            10p

EPSR readers c'ttee, Sat Dec 7 Northwest. Rcpts,pse.

The 'social concern' humbug from the church, the political trough, and the moral crusaders, promises to do everything to capitalist society except the one really useful thing - to get rid of it. Teach parenting skills by all means, but first lock up all the hypocritical capitalist politicians advocating it.

The mass campaigning which has broken out in Scotland, Belgium, and England to ban handguns, clean up the justice system, and to curb violence and promote good citizenship, is basically a revolt by middle-class values which can only get anywhere, however, by turning to communism.

The new outburst of protesting against the realities of capitalist society is laughably out-of-date naïve nonsense as far as reformist illusions are concerned that the universal ruthlessness, corruption, and cynicism of free-market anarchy from the very top of business and politics to the very bottom of gutter prostitution, drug pushing, alcoholism, and homelessness can be "reformed out of existence by a smile, a prayer, and a bit of charity", etc.

Every single indicator demonstrates that under capitalism, all social problems have only been steadily worsening, - which is part of the reason why there is such an upsurge of public complaining. Reformist delusions and charitable concern to rid society of its nastiest features have been out and about since capitalism began, and they would ebb and flow just as vehemently - and just as ineffectively, - for as long as capitalism lasted.

But part also of this new outbreak of dissatisfaction, and its more widespread nature, confirms another much more interesting aspect of capitalist society which is that the very mechanisms of the system on the one hand continually re-create, incurably, a never-ending tide of crime, sleaze, despair, and cultural depravity, - while on the other hand they persistently gradually transform the awareness and aspirations of the vast mass of the people so that this unchanging corruption is no longer tolerable.

What will be discovered, of course, is that the crookedness and degeneracy is absolutely synonymous with the very essence of the capitalist system, and is inseparable from it. And what people will also slowly realise is that what they really don't like about capitalism is its very fundamental alienation and exploitation of everybody and every thing, without which it cannot operate.

It is pointless for the British party leaders to all join with Widow Lawrence in seeking a nationwide, grassroots movement led by teachers, the police, and parents "dedicated to healing our fractured society and banishing violence". The cut-throat competitive drives of the capitalist market survival system will breed more new crimes, new dodges, new variants on old depravities, and new Blitz-sleaze diversions before the do-gooders have even finished reading the minutes of their first boring committee meetings.

British imperialism's only serious growth industry is now prison building, and totally unselfconscious articles are now appearing in the bourgeois press recording the local economic regeneration benefits that have come from the siting of one of the government's new prisons in the locality.

The gap between reality and these new Campaign of Light worthies is now such a vast yawning chasm that more than a few "Worried, of Stevenage" or "Concerned, of Ilford" types will crash in and be awoken with a bump.

What eventually dawns on them is that the whole system is as sick and bent as a nine-bob note, - from the graft and demagogic posturing of the political leaderships, to the endemic City racketeering of big business which the Serious Fraud Office can never catch up with, to the loony incompetence and arrogant complacency of the entire judiciary and legal system, to the routine fascist violence of the military and the police, - - all of official society is just a venal stunt, continuously playing the masses for complete suckers.

What people also find out as British imperialist fortunes regularly decline in the worldwide inter-imperialist cut-throat trade-war competition is that the rat-race description of the essence of the capitalist free market comes steadily closer to home as hire-and-fire ruthlessness develops into a necessary survival mechanism for even the 'nicest' and 'friendliest' of firms and institutions, as the Great God of "cost effectiveness" is imposed relentlessly on every organisation within ailing British capitalism.

Ultimately, the anxious public start putting two and two together and making four. The youth violence on the streets which caused a tragic murder in a North London schoolyard and has sparked off the Widow Lawrence crusade is at base only an indirect outcome of the very survival-of-the-fittest mentality which lies at the heart of all capitalism, kill or be killed, in figurative terms, which all too often turn into the literal truth as people become more and more ruthlessly determined to survive and to succeed, and more and more cynical about the 'morality' of those who have made it to the top of society and who routinely preach at everyone else, via the churches, the political hustings, the courts, the media, and parliament to "pull their socks up" and to "play the game", etc.

But 'justice' only eventually gets renowned for fitting people up for actions the ruling class does not approve of, - from the Birmingham Six and countless other framed Irish national-liberation suspects, to Colin Wallace, framed for selling the beans on Secret Police illegalities seeking to maintain British colonial rule over Ireland, and then countless minor individuals stitched up for petty offences which it suited police and court complacency to frame them for. Meanwhile scores of really big City criminals go absolutely free.

This sense of injustice everywhere gets through to the most ill-read or illiterate street levels of response to capitalist society's challenge, and lives of amoral criminality are relentlessly spawned in their tens of thousands.

To stop violent street gangs killing innocent headmasters and the like, a very long chain of cause and effect has to be gone through which can only end up indicting the capitalist system itself for breeding new generations with ever shorter tolerance for notions of 'fair play', and ever greater determination to kill or be killed, metaphorically speaking, or never to be pushed around, in street-fighting talk.

The connections between capitalist economic crisis and the Dunblane school massacre may seem harder to fathom, but many aspects of it are already obviously pointing the protesters in the direction of conflict with society's ethics in general and not just with its particular gun-club laws or the clash of individual rights with the broad general interests of public safety and standard-setting.

The worthwhile question to ask is not why gun technology exists, or why specialist sporting societies exist, or why does anyone in capitalist society feel the need to have the right to self-protection in the home. What mattered at Dunblane was why did the 'authorities' allow an obviously emotionally-retarded and inadequate individual to make such a public nuisance of himself for so long with his peculiar 'boys club' activities in spite of countless complaints against him, and why above all did they repeatedly license this weirdo to have any number of guns in his possession, especially in the light of actual police complaints about his fitness to have them?

The answer is because the 'authorities' around Dunblane and Stirling and everywhere else in Britain are weak and corrupt parasites on the people, running a system which it is plain to anyone is becoming more and more farcically unrepresentative of real people's interests, and more and more degenerate.

It is a system of get-rich-quick opportunism and influence-peddling which atomises and individualises every competitor in the rat-race, and makes unrewarded efforts for the collective good look like a completely gormless thing to do. No wonder that there was no way in which widespread concern that the oddball Hamilton needed careful watching could be translated into successful social control. 

Basically, capitalist society in its essence just could not give a damn about the problems of the Hamiltons of this world and the communities around them.

It is only concerned with 'getting on' for the crafty minority who can make it really big, and those who would imitate them, and it is that minority which in the end dictates everything about capitalist society.

Only when such a ruling class is totally eliminated economically, politically, and socially will it be possible to start building a society where communities can get together and with collective wisdom try to deal sensibly and successfully with all the problems that life poses.

The Belgian experience is most encouraging, with nearly half a million on the streets in order to protest precisely at the way in which the 'authorities' have been farcically mishandling the murderous paedophile scandal and its disgraceful cover-up, trying to protect big names. The demonstrations have the makings of a cultural/ political leap towards taking up revolutionary opposition against Belgium's ruling class, which is why the government has wanted to be seen appearing ready to act so quickly on the people's protests.

But such instant reformist capitulation will do no good in the long run, for although the paedophile scandal may subside, another racket of outrageous degeneracy is bound to be near at hand. The Belgian public are learning fast.

British enlightenment is much more constipated, probably due to the residues of past imperialist fat on which bourgeois and middle-class complacency can stagnate a while for the moment, and to the greater diffuseness of the ruling-class hierarchical system whereby responsibility for any things which go wrong always seems so impossibly hard to pin down.

Such is the pragmatic absence of social-theory threads in British society's awareness of itself that last week's Catholic Church sleaze and vice scandals are quickly forgotten by the time of this week's controversial political manifesto, coinciding with the Widow Lawrence's calling for a return to family values, good citizenship, and all the virtues of self-discipline, - challenging enough (because there is votes in it) to demand some instant ingratiating responses from the political party leaders saying how they feel the bishops' hypocrisy blast is not directed at them and how they can agree with all its propositions, etc, - and not a fornicated female worshipper, or a taken-advantage-of counselling applicant, or an abused innocent choirboy in sight. Hallelujah. Oh, and no mention of the capitalist system being the cause of all the degeneracy in society either, - the Vatican and its affiliates also being very large investors around the world, as well as best friends of countless military dictatorships and mafias protecting capitalism everywhere.

Now this grotesque humbug alone, and the lunatic medieval god-believing that goes with it, plus the political circus immediately agreeing with everything the Cardinal says, - ought to be enough to convince the whole nation instantly that this entire gang of crooked bastards should all be locked up straightaway, and among the first to be removed from their totally pernicious public influence, plus the politicians who agree with this moralising drivel, of course.

But the fight for Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding is still at a very low ebb in British society, not helped, of course, by the continuing benighted antics of the fake-'left' in Britain.

Blair's 'family values' harangue is an insult to the masses whose families largely get broken up (undoubtedly contributing greatly to social difficulties) because of economic and social deprivation, and because alienation and exploitation at the hands of the ruthless capitalist jobs market (damaging the diligent and the feckless alike, the skilled and the less experienced similarly) is the only wretched aspiration they can possibly have in life. Get the capitalist system off people's backs, you imbecile Blair, and then humanity and family values can start to flourish universally.

Where all this Blairite, RC, and Widow Lawrentian moralising is leading to, of course, is to a beefed up fascist clamp-down on everyone and everything. The schoolteachers' spokesmen were straight in, insisting on " discipline, discipline, and more discipline, and let's really dish it out from now on", etc, etc. Which is fine for immediately getting through the week at Comprehensive Sinkhole X but totally useless for any nobler or more far reaching purpose. For that, something new has to be held out to about half the working class which will never be able to aspire to anything better in their lives than a permanently insecure existence in and out of the capitalist jobs market, with never any real perspectives or satisfaction from such exploitation drudgery, or really brilliant rewards either.

The something new is a planned socialist society for everybody, of course. But the anti-communist crusading against the Soviet experience goes on relentlessly, naturally, denouncing Stalin's weaknesses and mistakes for the ten thousandth time, but in the process making reconsideration of planned socialism's incomparable advantages over capitalist anarchy still undiscussable, of course.

Every posturing bourgeois creep in the business is always at this, from publishers and academics to film-makers, broadcasters, and journalists. But what is ludicrously sad is how the ultra-left still tolerate so much anti-communist ignorant prejudice in their Trotskyite ranks.

A key to this problem is not just the widespread anti-Soviet opportunist ignorance which prevails, but the possibly even more disastrous basic misunderstanding of what Marxist-Leninist scientific socialism is all about.

The CPGB's Weekly Worker continues posturing mightily about its credentials as the nucleus of the 'revolutionary party' of the future, but it continues wavering all over the place on the very fundamentals of both a correct world view and a correct Marxist method, and yet seems determined to make itself immune to criticism on either count, in spite of all its protestations about 'rapprochement' and an 'open struggle between various tendencies'.

Lenin is quoted on the need for open polemics within the struggle for correct communist leadership, but the whole point of Bolshevism is misunderstood, which was to establish which line was the right one and to then move on, freely admitting one's own mistakes and learning the lessons from them, but insisting that others' mistakes be driven out by the correct line as well, allowing factional differences to be kept incubating only in the event of new developments occurring which warranted reopening of old issues, and only to the extent that the incubated differences were not totally incompatible with the correct line of the party anyway, making sure the party was not held back by divisive factionalising or unnecessary picking at old wounds. Lenin was for unity, but believed that the split was the only way to get there, - unity needing to be based solely on fundamental agreement about the world. He wanted to drive out Menshevik nonsense, not embrace it to death.

All of such Leninist approaches certainly required decisions to be made sooner or later. The Weekly Worker's problem is that half its polemics just go on endlessly about purely formal and contentless aspects of communist struggle, round and round in circles. The other half which more usefully dispute actual developments in the international class and national struggle (from whose progress alone, real lessons about a correct world view and correct Marxist methods can be learned), - are likewise left to just drift on, or are even suppressed.

To give an example, a major challenge has been made in the EPSR and in letters to the Weekly Worker on the defeatist outlook of the CPGB, particularly over Ireland, South Africa, and the Middle East where the US imperialist New World Order is said to have been scoring endless victories over revolutionary and national-liberation struggle.

The question of a correct perspective on the world is the most crucial ingredient of all struggle for revolutionary theory, without which a successful revolutionary party will never be built. But Weekly Worker replies to this polemic have been all over the place, full of daft mistakes and contradictions.

Yet quietly in the WW's news coverage and commentary, the line on the IRA's alleged sell-out and capitulation to US imperialism has gradually been toned down, but without any acknowledgement that this was happening because mistakes had been made previously. And at the same time, further polemics on this dispute from EPSR comrades have been not printed, especially when highlighting major gaffes by the CPGB as outlined in the following letter the Weekly Worker chose not to publish:

"In reply to the Ted Jaszynski letter of Sept 19, the eventual imperialist support for the black bourgeois-nationalist revolution in South Africa was obviously to avoid an even worse overthrow of apartheid (a great feudal-colonial bastion for reaction throughout Africa which the West had backed solidly) by possibly communist revolution. But eventually being forced to give in over apartheid was a defeat for the world imperialist system and reaction, not a victory for imperialism at all.

Once the inevitability of national-liberation had been accepted by the West, there was no chance that conditions for an immediate socialist revolution would be allowed to develop (i.e. could not be avoided for the present).

The Ford piece of June 20 which started this argument made no mention at all of "a great victory for the South African masses", and you have only introduced these words on Sept 19 because you cannot defend Ford's formulation which was wholly defeatist, labelling South Africa's national-liberation, alongside the IRA, as "a victim of the US-dominated New World Order - i.e. the negative resolution of revolutionary situations" where imperialism is "imposing a 'democratic' and 'peaceful' settlement" (original emphases and commas).

That lays the whole stress on a non-existent socialist revolution and the clever 'triumph’ of US imperialism in avoiding it. It is historically bankrupt for missing the whole point which is that in the end, against all the previous vicious imperialist support for the apartheid regime, - open and covert, trading and financial, technological and military, cultural and diplomatic, etc, - revolutionary struggle defeated apartheid and to that extent defeated the imperialist system.

Thus in broad historical terms, the overthrow of apartheid was a defeat for imperialism, not a victory.

And your problem is that you do not understand the epoch you are living in. You are philosophically defeatist, not just misleadingly inaccurate. And nowhere was this more revealed than in TJ's astonishing gaffe in his Aug 29 letter, about which WW's subsequent silence speaks eloquently about your seriousness.

This authoritatively asserted that "previous thorns in imperialism's flesh are gradually being brought to book".

One of the named 'victims', the scarcely stable or formidable Saddamist apology for bourgeois nationalism, had within days administered one of the worst humiliations to US imperialism ever, physically wiping out two entire CIA agency networks of hundreds of traitorous Iraqi operatives which had cost hundreds of millions of dollars and five years effort by the might of US imperialism to put in place, and winning such universal sympathy that Washington's alliances in the region were left in ruins.

The key to this debacle was the character of the epoch, - splits in the crisis-ridden imperialist camp, and the ultimately irresistible rise of the revolutionary East, the historical forces which will eventually clinch the triumph of the world socialist revolution (see the lengthy analysis in Economic and Philosophic Science Reviews 870 & 871 of Lenin's 'Better Fewer, But Better' and the mistaken West European orientation of the CPGB's draft programme), and which push Saddamist and Islamic-fundamentalist reaction to successfully antagonise US imperialism.

Is it not time that your hopelessly defeatist and incorrect world view was gradually brought to book? Do you feel no responsibility at all for such glaring mistakes in your paper, misleading the working class?

You will also be proved dismally incorrect about Ireland too. British imperialism's ludicrous 'Northern Ireland' colonial anachronism is finished, defeated by revolutionary national-liberation struggle, however slowly and gradually the doors are opened to Ireland's reunification. You are indeed being fooled by the present appearances of London dictating terms to Sinn Féin. The significant historical negotiations were on the walls of Derry where the Apprentice Boys colonialism was prevented from marching. Drumcree was the false signal, to defuse more Orange diehard reaction. Keep watching.

The self-liquidation by unreformable revisionism which opened the door to the destruction of the Soviet workers state by counter-revolution, was obviously a contradictory development, - a tragedy but in the end part of the necessary deck-clearing if millions of workers worldwide were to be freed from their loyalty to the USSR which sadly also meant their loyalty to the grotesque class-collaboration with imperialism and the anti-revolutionary corruption of Marxist-Leninist theory which the CPSU represented finally, via its gradual decades-long bureaucratic stupefaction.

Outrage at anti-communism and anti-Soviet slander in no way contradicts positive views that the anti-revolutionary CPSU leadership had by 1990 become more of an obstacle to world socialist developments than the continued existence of the Soviet workers state was a benefit. The "enormous leap forward in revolutionary struggle worldwide" was a description of forthcoming developments made possible by revisionism's disintegration, not of something that is supposed to have happened already, as you imply. Your confusion is self-inflicted.'

A fortnight after not printing or commenting on that letter, WW slipped the following paragraph into its front-page item on the sensational humiliation of British imperialism from the national-liberation struggle's double bombing of the Lisburn Barracks HQ of the colonial power:

The IRA’s bomb in the Six Counties stole the Tories’ thunder. With the 'peace process' clearly off the rails, all the rhetoric against 'men of violence' could not hide the fact that Major’s tough talking has failed to bring any results for imperialism, even in this arena.

Now this is a remarkable change of language from WW's original June 20 position ridiculing the IRA's "peace bomb" in Manchester as part of a desperate plea by the 

"isolated revolutionary nationalist movement" 

in which 

"Gerry Adams wants the best deal he can get, -  under an imperialist-brokered settlement". 

And "hardly surprisingly" because of this isolation, 

"the IRA cannot see any end to the war in the Six Counties and has become a victim of the US-dominated new world order i.e. the negative resolution of revolutionary situations....imposing a... settlement" (original emphases).

But no acknowledgement as to why this dramatic change in the line.

The suspicion grows that as well as a catastrophic inability to face up to a bad mistake it has made, the Weekly Worker's bizarre reading of Lenin's open polemics as meaning unstructured eclecticism, - allowing as many views to be put forward as can get into the paper, - has resulted in one CPGB voice fundamentally contradicting another voice in the same issue.

In an editorial 'letters' piece in the eternal empty rigmarole with the RDG and ISG refugees from the SWP, the Oct 10 WW stated the following astonishing nonsense:

The comrade is irked. Apparently, because both the ISG and the RDG “share a state capitalist view of the former USSR", they “should be in a more advanced state of rapprochement’. Why? Surely at root the rapprochement process must be about Party and programme, not this or that understanding of the USSR. Organisations built on common-denominator politics do not lead revolutions; they split.

Craig asks the ISG comrades: “How (could you) consider unity with the non-state capitalist CPGB and not talk to the RDG?" Well, comrade, maybe the ISG leadership had a better understanding of Partyism than you display in your article. Perhaps they understood that the process was not about labels or ideologies, but, fundamentally, what we all as revolutionaries understand by democratic centralism and Party.

And yet in the very same issue of WW, and addressed to the very same state-capitalist counter-revolutionary mentality, it is correctly insisted that fundamental differences in world view are absolutely crucial to whether communist unity is even remotely to be considered:

The latest issue of Socialist Worker fails quite miserably to address the real issues raised by the Afghan catastrophe. Hardly surprisingly though, as it refuses to recognise that there was even a revolution in Afghanistan in 1978. For it, all that happened in that year was that a “group of army officers staged a coup and put the party in power”. Worse still, if we are to believe Socialist Worker, the effect of this ‘’coup” was actually to “increase poverty in many parts of the country. That drove many of the poorest peasants to ally with their old landlords in rising against the regime in the name of Islam” (October 5).

From such a reading you would get the distinct impression that it was the revolution of 1978 which was responsible for the subsequent war and bloodshed, not the brutal imperialist-backed counter-revolutionary forces. Indeed, the SWP seems quite keen to provide ‘excuses’ for the islamic counter-revolution. Thus, we are told that “When the Russian troops left the country the war had created incredible suffering” - if only the Red Army had not intervened, things would have turned out OK, we presume. As for US imperialism, we are blandly told that it made “much of the plight of Afghanistan while the Russians were there”. Weasel words which exonerate the bloody role of US imperialism.

Still, we should not be surprised. Unfortunately, Socialist Worker has a history of playing the reluctant cheerleader of islamic counter-revolution. We saw this over Iran, where the SWP actually supported the bloody Khomeini regime on the grounds that it was ‘anti-imperialist’ (or, at least, ‘anti-US’).

The SWP is consistent in that it cannot bring itself to condemn the Taliban as “reactionary” either. Which is a bit curious really, as the February 1987 edition of Socialist Review stated that a mujabadeen victory “would probably produce a reactionary fundamentalist government well to the right of Khomeini” - the same edition, of course, called for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The SWP was not alone, it has to be said. The Revolutionary Communist Party’s now defunct The Next Step argued along similar grounds, saying that Soviet withdrawal was necessary, as it enabled the US to use “the Afghanistan conflict to gain a foothold in Central Asia” (February 26 1987). Workers Power also replicated these specious views.

Revolutionaries who cannot tell a revolution from counter-revolution, or are afraid to label reactionaries for what they are, will mislead the working class, if not sabotage the revolution itself unless they are capable of openly correcting these mistakes.

And an article on Afghanistan in the previous Oct 3 WW issue declaimed outright counter-revolutionary anathema on groups for getting it wrong, and not even on anything as important as the USSR, a position on which is fundamental to all questions of revolution or counter-revolution, but merely on the more obscure Afghan question:

In 1989 The Leninist described those leftists who saw a Soviet withdrawal as the best condition for the Afghan working class to assert itself as being blind to reality. In 1989, The Leninist said: “The blood of Afghan progressives is not only on the hands of the mujahedin, the imperialists and Gorbachev. It is on the hands of the RCP, the SWP, the Euro-communists and all those who refused to defend the Afghan revolution. You are all guilty and we shall make sure that the working class never forgets your crime.”

In cases such as these, communists are loathe to be proved correct. The mutilated body of Mohammed Najibullah serves as a bloody reminder of your betrayals.

This same piece, incidentally, also contained one of the most public and barefaced non-apologies for a serious political mistake that has ever had the nerve to be published: 

As The Leninist, precursor of the Weekly Worker, said in issue no2, the Soviet intervention “represented the extinguishing of the flame of the revolution” and that if it was not recognised as such “the revolution will either have to suffer major amputations or face death” (Spring 1982). Yet, paradoxically, the Soviet intervention shored up the length of time the PDPA government survived.

With the Soviet pull-out in 1989, it was clear the PDPA would not survive, yet many including the US Secretary of State - thought its collapse would be imminent. That the Najibullah government survived nearly four years was testimony to the support in the cities for many of the changes the revolution had delivered.

So in 1980 workers are agitated worldwide to oppose any Soviet intervention to rescue Afghan revolutionary progress from imminent throttling at birth by overwhelming CIA-backed counter-revolutionary subversion massively from Pakistan by the most reactionary tribal and religiously-benighted forces imaginable. It was catastrophically wrong advice. But by 1989, and still by 1996 in this CPGB review article, no explanation is forthcoming about what lessons have been learned by the Weekly Worker from this colossal mistake. 

Certainly the CPGB was by 1989 in a position to correct its earlier mis-analysis, and to denounce others for the same mistake it had originally committed. But what lessons had been learned about the CPGB's faulty methods, or faulty world view, or faulty estimation of the epoch we are in, or complete misunderstanding of the Soviet workers state, tinged probably with their own milder version of Euro-communist anti-Sovietism and anti-communism? Would not those important conclusions, if ever they were drawn, be equally as important to reproduce now, or write down now for the first time if that would be the case?

On the earlier CPGB insistence to RDG that party and programme principles were far more decisive for communist unity than agreeing with each other about what the world looked like, an attempt may be made to claim that Lenin's "One Step Forward'* epic recording the birth of the Bolshevik tendency was all about the principles of party rules, and nothing else. This, of course, is a common and complete misconception. The fiercest split was certainly over the definition of party membership, but embodied in that conflict was the whole spirit of Lenin's understanding of all the vexed political questions also argued about at that Congress such as the class role of the peasantry, the problem of Great Russian chauvinism, the decisive role of a single-minded party organ as the main organiser and educator of the party, and the crucial question of a professional revolutionary organisation reaching agreed decisions and acting upon them versus a loose federation of independent individuals and dilettante groups who could basically do what they liked without any organisational control or discipline and yet could still claim as decisive a say in the party's affairs and direction as they could muster.

All were matters hurtling towards a need for decisive resolution by the main group of Leninist revolutionaries who were already massively active and influential in Russian revolutionary affairs precisely by virtue of their agreement on the Leninist world view, already so distinct from that of Martov, Plekhanov, Trotsky and the rest, and within a few years to become so completely hostile to the rest of the RSDLP's social-chauvinist, or social-pacifist, or conciliatory positions, leaving the Bolsheviks completely uniquely identified in the minds of the workers of Russia. Have these indecisive purely formal wrangles around the CPGB's as yet amorphous and empty rapprochement activities remotely this urgent and decisive character of the RSDLP Second Congress?

No, there are not only no strands with anything like a Leninist coherence, but there is not even the vaguest agreement on what it means for a party to have a united world view, or how important it is.

There is even a doubt that the CPGB itself has got one. No, for the moment, this Weekly Worker rapprochement is just going round in aimless circles, going nowhere fast.

Once more by way of example, interesting developments on Ireland are yet again being ignored by WW. All the signs are still towards an international political deal which will effectively put a constitutional stop to the former existence of the British 'Northern Ireland' colony, already de facto dead, and buried, - the Orange-fascist supremacy and the 'legal and eternal' Partition abandoned for ever, and Ireland's reunification only now a matter of time and demography, - a massive revolutionary triumph over imperialism, arms in hand, by national liberation forces, exactly as the EPSR has described it all along, and not remotely a victory for imperialism as the CPGB dilettantes describe it.

Major's Bournemouth speech curiously promised legislation on decommissioning in the autumn. How could that happen without a serious all-Ireland political settlement? And this hint was followed by the sudden Unionist backing down to allow discussion on a new deal to precede decommissioning wrangles. And all of this followed the IRA's devastating Lisburn bomb which utterly humiliated British imperialism and its colonial occupation once again.
 
Let the British bourgeois press, so bitterly hostile to the armed national-liberation struggle, itself recount the signs:

SENIOR Government sources last night welcomed a “significant breakthrough” in the Ulster talks process, when David Trimble’s Ulster Unionists reached agreement with the nationalist SDLP on the terms for an agenda.

The deal, which has eluded the parties for four months, means that substantive negotiations on the province’s future can finally begin 

The joint UUP/SDLP proposals are close to what George Mitchell, President Clinton's special adviser and the talks’ chairman, proposed at the start of the year. 

They suggest a full plenary session of the talks will open without the decommissioning of weapons dominating the agenda. This has now been downgraded to the second item, and significantly makes provision for “mechanisms necessary to enable further progress to be made on decommissioning alongside negotiations”.

The move has delighted all parties in the talks except Ian Paisley’s DUP and the UK Unionists led by Robert McCartney. “It means decommissioning will never take place, they will talk and talk but nothing will be done about it,” said a party source. “They are paving the way for Sinn Féin’s entry into the talks.”

At the weekend the Progressive Unionist Party spokesman David Ervine, who is associated with the Ulster Volunteer Force, warned that rapid progress in the talks was the only hope of maintaining the loyalist ceasefire.

Marjorie Mowlam, shadow Northern Ireland secretary, also held a meeting yesterday with 12 loyalist inmates of the Maze prison in a further sign that loyalists will maintain their ceasefire. UVF and UFF inmates earlier told their political representatives they supported the view that the ceasefire should hold.

Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Northern Ireland Secretary, said: “There are increasing signs of hope that we will get now into the substantive business.

In a speech to supporters in north Belfast, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams said the key to another IRA ceasefire lay in John Major’s hands.

If the EPSR is wrong about Ireland, a major rethink on the epoch would be required. If WW is wrong, it must do the same.

Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice. Keep struggling to build Leninism. 

Douglas Bell

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. V.I. Lenin
South West Bulletin 
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32,82 Colston St Bristol BS1 5BB]  
No.192. Friday 18th October 1996

Imperialism haunted by the coming markets crash.

There can be no escape for monopoly capitalism from the imminent disastrous consequences of its own system of permanent crisis. Like some character in a Greek tragedy (replayed as bloody farce), the more strenuously imperialism strives to avert the catastrophic market collapses, trade war anarchy and revolution-provoking world war that it can see coming its way, the more assuredly it seals its own doom.

For all the false bluster about the 1987 crash, Black Wednesday, Mexican peso meltdown, Barings collapse etc. being 'no more than warning blips, even giving the 'free market' system a useful prod in the direction of setting its house in order in good time' etc., what the ruling class is telling itself in the pages
of its own 'heavyweight' capitalist press points in an altogether gloomier direction.

It turns out that, in the very process of trying to anticipate and limit the consequences of fresh market disasters coming down the line, the long-suppressed dislocation between Pax Americana (i.e. all the pecking orders established around the US-dominated postwar settlement) and the real world (i.e. the radical new disposition of relative forces emerging under the unstoppable pressure a: capitalism's own incurable unevenness of development) is bursting to the political surface in yet more thoroughly destabilizing ways.

A 'technical' discussion at the IMF about the best way to deal with the 'next Mexico' to hit the skids at once transforms into a snarling new turf war over whose debt-provisioning commitment is to buy how large a slice of economic and military clout in the world.

And the whistling in the dark over the 'tiger economies' (intended to convince doubters that, however temporarily daunting for existing vested interests, the emergent capitalism of SE Asia all the same carried the torch for another great epoch of world capitalist expansion from which the whole exploitation game could benefit, if only matters were handled correctly) has suddenly fallen silent, with all the latest 'smart' talk on the markets apparently about which 'tiger' will be the first to pad over the cliff in Mexico's footsteps, with Thailand reportedly current hot favourite.

Nor can some of the gloomier bourgeois-critical commentary hold back from putting its finger on at least a fraction of the dire consequences certain to come crashing in upon borrowed-time British imperialist degeneracy from such developments. And throughout more and more of this kind of capitalist journalism, there runs an ever-more visible scarlet thread connecting all that is described: the utterly dominating role in all economic and political development of screaming trade-war contradictions opening up within the imperialist system itself.

It is this flavour of live development, however lop-sidedly, unscientifically and self-servingly expressed by these class-war and tradewar-contaminated sources, which makes such bourgeois self-criticism such invaluable material for Marxist analysis, and so worthwhile placing on extended record - all the more so given the virtually total IGNORANCE of the living crisis of imperialism still on dogged display in every page of almost every self-described 'revolutionary left' publication in Britain:

AMONG the reasons the richest industrial countries have been so anxious to double the IMF’s emergency credit lines to $50 billion is that a new Mexican-style crisis is feared, this time in the Far East.

The upsurge in the Pacific economies has stimulated enormous private sector capital flows, which have been substituted for domestic saving, potentially leading to an unstable financial situation.

The question has been which Asian tiger would be the first domino to fall.

Certainly, the situation in Thailand is starting to look dicey. The finance minister, Bodi Chunnananda, has resigned amid slumping investor confidence and shrinking demand in key sectors, including construction, property and finance — all symbols of a bubble economy. Similarly there has been a focus on recent uncertainty in Indonesia, as the stability and human rights record of the Suharto regime has become an issue.

 ...the Far East's deteriorating economic position could come home to the City of London...there is a great deal of sensitivity in the loan books of Standard Chartered and HSBC to political and economic conditions in the Far East. Both banks have benefited much from the healthy growth of the East Asian economies.

But both banks might have to adjust their provisions and future profits, should that explosive growth slow or be reversed....around half the loans of UK banks to emerging markets economies — some $20.6 billion — are in the Far East.

In early 1995, western governments led by the US rode to the rescue of Mexico with a $40bn support package after the devaluation of the Mexican peso in December 1994 provoked a run on the currency and caused widespread anxiety among international investors holding Mexican bonds. The international financial community has spent the months since then trying to piece together the policy lessons it learned from this costly episode. The hope is that these lessons will help it prevent and cope more adeptly with Mexico-style crises in the future.

The G10 nations put forward proposals to ensure more equal burden-sharing among parties to a crisis such as that in Mexico. Particularly vexing to governments following the Mexican crisis was that while governments were providing large sums of money to help Mexico, a group of US creditors holding high-yielding Mexican government paper - and whose unwise lending had exacerbated the crisis -were being paid out on time.

...the G10 countries came to the conclusion that in the future bondholders should not expect to be bailed out by governments or official institutions. The G10 concluded that the IMF should be allowed in exceptional cases to step in to lend to debtor governments even while they remain in default with bondholders.

... some officials doubted that G10 governments would apply their apparently tougher stance even-hand-edly. They suspected that holders of small countries’ bonds would be left to bear losses but that the international community would still be under pressure to organise a bail-out in the case of crises which threaten serious losses for a wide range of important financial market participants.

Whether the policy lessons learned from Mexico’s experience will be fully and properly implemented and whether they will help avert another Mexico-style crisis remains yet to be seen.

The urgency of Mexico’s problems has diminished. But the characteristics that gave rise to its crisis - large current account deficits, heavy reliance on short-term debt and excessive monetary growth, combined with fast and at times tumultuous political change - are becoming evident in several fast-growing Asian economies such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Perhaps it is in these countries that the lessons learned from Mexico may soon be put to the test.

...the western democracies can no longer provide greater resources to the IMF on their own. That the IMF needs the cash is indisputable. Record-setting rescue packages for Mexico, Russia, Ukraine and others have drained the Fund - a serious situation should, for instance, one of the heavily indebted countries of the Pacific (Thailand is often mentioned) run into difficulties.

A MORE fundamental change in the economic order could occur if and when the IMF receives a long-overdue capital increase.

The capital increase will provide an opportunity to take note of the changing economic order. 

Since the last increase, in 1989, the global economy has changed dramatically: the end of the cold war, the rise of Pacific Basin countries, dramatic changes in Latin America and the emergence of China as a global economic force. None of these changes is properly recognised in the IMF’s capital structure. 

As part of the exercise, the larger newcomers will receive quotas — the IMF’s equivalent of shares and votes — through a complex formula based on their gross domestic product and role in the: global economy. This redistribution is thought unlikely to affect the big five at the IMF - the US, Japan, Germany and France and Britain.

However, the sheer size of the Chinese economy, the importance of Russia despite its shrinking output and the wealth of some of the Pacific countries inevitably mean that below the big four there will be some drastic shifts. The broadening of decision-making being seen in Basle and in the arrangements to borrow will also be reflected within the IMF.

The real victims of this change may turn out to be the G7 - and Britain in particular. The G7 is starting to look unrepresentative. Moreover, it is facing strains in the run-up to European monetary union. Once a leading group, of European countries, including Germany and France, have joined EMU, lesser members of the G7 - Britain, Italy and Canada - could rapidly become second-class players on the international stage. Whereas the US, Japan and the Euro-bloc countries will be able to speak with one voice on critical issues, such as currency alignments, the outsiders could come to be seen as irrelevant.

This possibility has begun to trouble senior UK monetary officials. Britain’s influence could be squeezed by rising emerging markets on the one side and the monetary-power big three (the US, Japan and EMU countries) on the other.

When the IMF and World Bank were founded a little more than 50 years ago the US and western Europe were clearly the world’s dominant economic countries. But as Asia, Latin America and eastern Europe gradually make up ground - albeit with setbacks along the way - the structure and outlook of these institutions looks increasingly out of date.

The tensions are already showing. Some of the more successful developing countries are pressing for bigger “shareholdings” in the IMF to reflect their growing economic strength: other nations are reluctant to be leapfrogged. Industrial and developing countries also remain divided on proposals to give central banks in poor and transitional economies greater access to foreign exchange reserves via the Fund’s overdraft facility.

Efforts to establish a $50bn credit line for the IMF to be used in the event of further financial crises of the sort which seriously affected Mexico have also focused attention on the reluctance of international institutions to adapt. The members of the misnamed Group of Ten - the US, Canada, Japan and eight European nations - have asked several emerging market countries to join them in doubling the credit line which they already provide to the IMF. At the same time the G10 nations have refused, these countries full membership of their club, which discusses developments affecting the world financial system.

These examples illustrate how difficult it is to balance the desire of developing and newly industrialising countries for recognition of their growing importance in the world economy with the unwillingness of mature industrial countries to allow their accustomed influence to wane. This dilemma has also hampered efforts to expand the membership of the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers’ bank) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (the industrial country think-tank). It will no doubt cause problems, too, when the European Union embraces the former communist countries of eastern Europe. 

A similar tension also afflicts the powerful Group of Seven -which comprises the US, Japan, Germany, Canada, France, Italy and the UK. Russia already enjoys a semi-detached status and would like to become a full member, while China will have a serious claim to join in the future. Meanwhile, the separate representation enjoyed by the four European members will be brought into question when some or all of them begin sharing a single currency.

...the main reason why the architecture of the international financial system has proved so difficult to reform is that the distribution of global economic muscle only changes slowly. Those catalytic events which expose the weaknesses in the system - such as the Mexican financial crisis - are rare and indeterminate in their impact.

The growth differential between the industrial and developing world is not readily seen but remorseless. Decade after decade, growth in the industrialised world has been slowing. On average, the OECD economies are likely to average growth of only 2 per cent a year in the current upswing, compared with 3.3 per cent a year in the 1980s and 4.3 per cent in the 1970s.

Among the industrial countries, the current upswing has been choppy as well as slow.

Most economists are looking for the US economy to weaken during 1996 and into next year

If the US expansion does decelerate - with or without further assistance from the Fed - then the maintenance of a reasonable rate of world growth will require a greater contribution from other regions. This will be all the more important if the US expansion is further undermined by a sharp   fall in Wall Street share prices, which on some measures have become perilously overvalued.

The logical candidate to take up the reins of recovery is Japan, which should be rebounding from recession. But in spite of the huge surge in output during the first quarter of the year - inevitably reversed in part during the second quarter - the underlying strength of the Japanese economic upturn remains in doubt.

Worryingly, a fall in business confidence was revealed by August’s tankan, the quarterly survey of business sentiment. This is the first to take place during an economic recovery phase for 25 years. It is unclear the extent to which this reflects “hollowing out” as manufacturers relocate their activities to other countries or whether it signifies concern about the underlying strength of demand.

For its part, the Japanese government looks to be taking no chances. It has plans in place for a further fiscal boost in the autumn to add to the cumulative 8 per cent of national income already pumped into the economy by the public sector.

Eventually, this fiscal stimulus will have to be withdrawn and it remains to be seen how the economy will respond unaided.

In almost all European countries fiscal tightening is taking place - accelerated by the targets laid down in the Maastricht treaty for participation in the EU’s proposed single currency. This belt-tightening has robbed the upswing in Europe of much of its momentum,

The biggest question marks hang over Italy and, especially, France, 

...weak growth points to a continuation of the confidence crisis in France with one-in-eight of the workforce unemployed and its achievement of the Maastricht budget deficit target only in sight because of creative accountancy.

All in all, the G7 economies will be lucky to record growth much above 2 per cent this year and next.

A recent study by economists at the IMF concluded that the economies of the South have become more resilient to slowdowns in activity in the North.

But events in recent months have cast doubt on this conclusion. Several Asian economies have suffered a sharp fall in exports, as weaker industrial country demand has helped to trigger a slide in semiconductor prices. Growth has decelerated abruptly in both Singapore and South Korea, where the share of exports accounted for by electronics exceeds a half and a third respectively. Malaysia and Thailand have also suffered, but Indonesia and the Philippines have so far bucked the trend.

...many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have fallen further behind the world’s economic leaders. 

Africa’s share of world trade has more than halved since 1980 and -  excluding South Africa - its share of the developing world’s foreign investment inflows has fallen by two-thirds over the same period.

In asking whether organisations such as the IMF and World Bank are adapting sufficiently to Shifts in economic power, the acid test should be their ability to promote the catching up process and to help to narrow the gap between the planet’s leaders and laggards. This involves promoting structural reform and sound economic policies, encouraging countries to integrate themselves fully into the global trading system, helping to alleviate unsustainable debt burdens and trying to ensure that the inevitable financial crises which afflict emerging market nations from time to time do not prove contagious.

And pigs might fly. The truth about SE Asian (or any other) emergent capitalism is that imperialism is damned either way, whether the overheating 'tigers' just keel over now, sending shockwaves through the world financial and trading system, or survive a bit longer to challenge the decadent uselessness of the existing status quo with one or other alternative version of a 'new world order'. Perhaps Seoul can slow its own ballooning trade deficit (20% increase in the first half of 1996, related to downward pressure on the price of semiconductors, petrochemicals and steel) by following the older-established imperialists still further down the road of export of monopoly capital:

Siemens, the German electronics giant, is building a £1.1 billion semi-conductor factory on Tyneside, offering two reasons for its choice: there will be enough experts to work there and because we offer a Thatcherised, docile labour force, prepared to work all shifts, do overtime, and - most  important — to earn much less than Germans.

SIMILARLY, the Korean conglomerate LG is investing twice as much in South Wales. The main reason is that wages in South Wales are lower than they are in Korea. How long can this downward spiral go on? Forever? Possibly so. The French have hardly started, which is why they have dangerously high unemployment, propped up by the CAP, a lunatic device designed to turn, at mind-boggling expense, the whole of Europe into a theme park devoted to how life was lived a century ago. Government attempts to join the real world are greeted by riots and strikes.

The spiral is already affecting the Asian tigers we are invited to admire. Very little manufacturing goes on in Hong Kong: wages, higher than in Britain, cost too much. Singapore farms work out to Bangladesh and India, and is thinking of moving into Africa.

But in the and where can such a line of development possibly take Korea and the others? The fact is that, e.g., Singapore is N0T about to make the world 'safe' for a whole new epoch of foul capitalist exploitation-rule by recolonizing India and Africa (not even on behalf of Japan), which is effectively what it would take to make any such new capital-export exploitation arrangements stick as the norm far a post-Pax Americana 'new order'.

None of which of course stops every last imperialist and would-be imperialist staking everything on whatever promises least implausibly to further its own market-domination prospects in the immediate future, however demonstrably unsustainable in the long term (and destabilizing for all capitalism) the proposed line of development may be. Imperialism and its apes can act in no other way. Seoul must aspire to run ever-greater swathes of British industry, Jakarta must further swell the already groaning world overcapacity in cars with a 'national car' of its own, Singapore must set up colonial outposts in Bangladesh, - and Malaysia must invent a 'cleaned-up' Islamic version of the Stock market in the hope of making itself the Switzerland of Asia, channelling capital from the oil-rich middle-east:

It may seem ironic that many of the best customers in Malaysia’s Islamic finance boom are not Moslems. But behind the irony is an insight into the country's emerging status as a centre for Islamic stockbroking, banking and finance: by stretching Moslem definitions, Malaysia’s financial architects have designed Islamic instruments that are in some cases more attractive than their conventional counterparts.

“Most of the demand for our Islamic housing loans have come from the Chinese [minority],” said one local banker with a rueful smile. “If I am not mistaken, they are mostly Buddhist, or Christian.” he added.

Backed by the nation’s leaders, the drive is aimed at making the country a conduit for Middle Eastern and other Islamic investments in the Asian region.

...about one fifth of the world’s population are Moslems and the Middle East is one of the world’s biggest repositories of uninvested cash.

Whilst this aping of big imperialist behaviour is a further cruel and provoking imposition upon Malaysia's masses, it also a piece of national-opportunist cockiness which throws another spanner into the works of America's would-be 'new order'.

At a time when the Arab world is more hostile to US imperialism and Zionism than ever before (with even Jordan now forced to distance itself from Tel Aviv), and when political Islam is keener than ever to opportunistically associate itself with national independence from imperialist diktat (e.g. Turkey increasingly) and the anti-imperialism of the masses (e.g. Hizbollah), the proposal to 'solve' the glut of uninvestable middle-east capital (the regional aspect of a global surplus capital headache) by cutting out America and Europe entirely, and instead mainlining footloose Arab cash straight into overheating 'tiger' economies, looks hugely destabilising from just about every angle.

Such raw cash infusions would seem more likely to push already unstable and indebted countries like Thailand even faster over the brink than offer any stable capitalist growth far the region. And as one ' Mexico' follows another like lemmings (in Asia, Latin America, the former socialist bloc or elsewhere), what shape is world imperialist 'planning' (IMF, Group of Seven, Group of Ten etc.etc.) going to be in to organize all the 'rescues', when US hegemonic assumptions are being so relentlessly undermined all round, both by national and class revolts against the world status quo, and by imperialist trade-war rivalry?

It is back to that question of trade-war rivalry within imperialism itself that attention must return again and again, as to the key link in this chain of class-struggle contradictions. Thus some French progress in the intended direction of an integrated European war industry strong enough to rival the USA's last week further confirmed the connection between (1) the intensifying concentration of ever denser masses of capital and productive capacity into ever fewer hands which characterizes the overproduction crisis of imperialism, and (2) the inescapable warmongering essence of that crisis:

THE French government yesterday underlined its determination to push through a shake-up of its defence industry by backing the sale of state-owned Thomson to Lagardere, British Aerospace’s partner in missile manufacturing.

The disposal of the defence and consumer electronics group is a key part of French plans to rationalise the country’s defence manufacturing base and yesterday’s decision is likely to lead to increased BAe involvement in the process.

If it does get Thomson, Lagardere has said it will put the latter’s missile business into the existing joint venture between BAe and its own missiles subsidiary, Matra. That would make it likely that the British company would have to put money into the venture in order to maintain its 50 per cent ownership.

France’s prime minister Alain Juppe underlined the importance of industrial strategy as the crucial determinant in its decision to back Lagarere, rather than Alcatel Alsthom. "We have opted for the offer which was the best to further our defence interest and which would constitute a world-leading industrial group with strong export capacities,” he said.

“The Thomson Matra group which will be formed, if the privatisation commission gives its permission, will be the second biggest group in the world in professional electronics,” he said.

Europe’s fragmented defence industry has come under increasing pressure to restructure to be able to compete with the massive American defence groups produced by a series of recent mergers. The current French restructuring is seen as a crucial precursor of wider European moves.

The deal — costing a symbolic one franc — will also have to clear the European Commission’s competition authorities because the French government plans to inject some Fr11 billion (£1.34 billion) into Thomson to cut its Fr25 billion debt mountain.

There also seems to be a sense in this of British Aerospace being forced to run in order to stand still, having to up its contribution to the funding of European missile production just in order to stay in the game. The question arises whether Britain's aerospace industry nay turn out to be less a stalking horse for British monopoly interests on the Continent, than a (temporarily) convenient cash cow to be milked by the real contenders. Where can British monopoly capitalist interests expect to be when trade-war rivalry between German-led Europe and the US really gets going, squeezing out all the middle ground?

A still more obvious humiliation right now for British capitalism is the stake driving bang through the middle of its monopoly finance heart, where institutional collapse, scandal, and forced merger (not to mention unfinished decolonisation business) are playing hell with what remains of the City's investment banking industry,- again, as best detailed by the capitalist press itself:

Financial services may help compensate for the erosion of our industrial base. But they do not generate jobs. The entire Square Mile employs around 150,000 people - perhaps 100,000 fewer than 10 years ago. Far from creating a twenty-first century information replacement for the country’s industrial heart, an ever escalating proportion of Britain’s GDP is generated by fewer workers than the number of miners thrown out of work by the Government’s coal privatisation programme a few years ago. 

The ultimate irony is that although Big Bang helped Britain build on its position as Europe’s pre-eminent' financial market, the reform has also seen the industry increasingly taken over by overseas interests.

Having thrown open the City to competition, big U$ and continental buyers, have promptly swallowed up more-than half the two dozen brokerage houses trading at the start of Big Bang.

Within the hallowed ranks of the City’s merchant banks the trend has been even more pronounced, with just Hambros, NM Rothschild and Schroders retaining their independence.

In many ways what has been happening in the City mirrors the trends in manufacturing 'industry. Just as such names as Rowntree, Jaguar and Rover have disappeared from national ownership, so have some of the best-known names in the City: SG Warburg, Barings, Smith New Court, Hoare Govett.

And those that stay on top of the merger fray, drawing ever vaster capital resources into a single mass, are themselves so paralysed by the destabilising glut of capital (remaining surplus to profitable investment) that some (PDFM, and now BZW) are farcically obliged to follow the classic bad example of the daffy old lady stuffing fivers under her mattress (sinning against the whole capital-expansion point of owning capital in the first place), so in dread are they of the coming crash:

AS FUND managers get nervous about the security of world stock markets, Barclays Bank yesterday admitted that it now holds up to 5 per cent of the value of its huge £223 billion investment portfolio in cash.

The bank, which yesterday announced a restructuring programme to consolidate its position as the world’s second largest fund manager, disclosed that since the beginning of the year it had increased the average liquidity of funds from 2 per cent to between 4 and 5 per cent of all money under management.

Chief executive Lindsay Tomlinson told the Guardian that the move reflected concerns about “where the market has got to”.

The news emerged as Barclays consolidated its position as a world-ranking fund manager by announcing the merger of its BZW Investment Management arm with BZW Barclays Global Investors  - the San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Nikko Investments it took over last year.

Merging the two companies under the banner of Barclays Global Investors, will establish a unified investment strategy to help win new business, said Mr Tomlinson. It will create a fund management operation with more than 1,300 employees based in 22 countries across the world.

Mr Tomlinson added that “The entire (fund management) business is globalising and getting away from the focus on the City of London.”

Shifting the centre of European financial operations from the Square Mile to Frankfurt won't solve world imperialism's crisis for anybody. But such a blow to British monopoly finance prestige, or even the mere paralysing fear of such an outcome, all help raise British monopoly capitalism's chances of being an early and spectacular weak-link victim of that crisis.

Study Leninism.

Paddy Chambers