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 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074    [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                          
No 0890 Feb 11 1997                                                                                                                               10p

Mounting chauvinist irritation is a clear sign that capitalist injustice and irrationality and mess is exceeding modern mankind's toleration levels. The get-rich-quick free-enterprise rat-race is heading for the crash barriers. A profound study of Leninist science is more crucial than ever. Confusion still holds back workers, - from gross Trot anti-communism to plaintive Stalin apologetics.

An eruption of controversial national questions reveals how near the free-market anarchy (the inter-imperialist trade-war system) is approaching towards total economic crisis.

In France, National Front fascism surges forward; in Germany, 1930s levels of unemployment revive fears of Nazism; Japan warns Britain to stay with the EU common currency or else; Scottish devolution confuses the whole spectrum of petty-bourgeois politics; and Trot nutters try some snide 'national-socialist' abuse against Scargill's SLP.

International conflict is the graveyard of capitalism via which the workers class struggle finally gets the best chance to seize state power off the bourgeoisie.

Government-busting rows over European Union matters arise out of this central position for society's fate of the huge (and uncontrollable) might of monopoly-imperialist competition.

It is the cut-throat dictates of anarchic privately-owned wealth which ultimately control the lives of everyone, the weaker monopoly-bourgeois included.

The House of Commons British bourgeois political circus is in the confused dithering mess it is because of the weakness of British imperialism now, compared to its German and French European 'partners' and to its American and Japanese 'rivals'.

Tory, Labour, and Liberal never know whether they are coming or going on different aspects of European integration or convergence because of the historically weakened position of British imperialism in all directions.

Decisions are difficult because German domination looms if further into Europe, but American and Japanese domination looms if further out of Europe.

And this dilemma from the relative weakness now of the British scientific and industrial base compared to its younger rivals where the ruling class is less hidebound, arrogant, privilege-ridden, and sclerotic, - inevitably means incapacitating splits throughout the whole British establishment, and in all its bourgeois parties, Tory, Labour, Liberal, and nationalist.

The new Trot attacks on Scargill's Socialist Labour Party are a good place to start because they unwittingly dredge up some Marxist-Leninist understanding on the national question which is far more favourable to the SLP than to the Trots.

The CPGB, whose Weekly Worker fronts for 57 varieties of Trotskyite middle-class individualism, all hostile to Scargill's attempt to build a mass workers party dedicated to the abolition of capitalism, has just cobbled together the following diatribe, sneering at the achievements of the workers states since 1917, casting doubt on the worthwhileness of the continuing defiance of imperialist blockade by Cuba and others, or the need for it, - and virtually telling workers that SLP socialism 'will also only bring you the Gulag'. 

This unbelievably hostile nonsense contains such out-of-touch meanderings that could only have been penned far up an ivory tower, - and a very middle-class one at that:

If we examine as a whole all the amendments put forward for the May conference, you ran see that a struggle is going on within the SLP between two different 'socialisms'. In the one corner, comrade Scargill with his bureaucratic national-socialism, which is handed down and rules over the working class. In the other corner, an emancipatory, internationalist socialism, which comes from below and represents the rule of the working class. We must ensure that the SLP membership is not left with the grey and monochrome socialism implicit in the policy documents, Europe being a perfect case. 

At packed meetings throughout the country, comrade Scargill has been announcing,"Out of Europe: into the world!" The loyal, enthusiastic, but slightly disbelieving audiences have been told that this can be done by trading with places like Cuba and New Zealand (and North Korea as well, perhaps?).

It would be the working class which would have to pay the price for the national-escapist fantasies presented above - regardless of whether it was an SLP government or not which acted upon them. The North Koran juche path advocated by the Scargillites, which sees Britain trading Havana cigars and wool with remote comers of the world, would inevitably lead to a dramatic plunge in the living standards of the working class. The weekly visit to Sainsbury's would end up a truly depressing affair, as workers gaze longingly at the shelves where the Bordeaux wine and Brie cheese used to be. Whatever the good intentions of comrade Scargill may be, such a 'socialism' would sooner or later be directed against the working class. What is more, the subsequent demoralisation would result in an abrupt collapse of support for the original dream-makers. 

At the May conference we were rather insultingly told by comrade Brian Heron and some of his wannabe acolytes that immigration controls were necessary to "keep reactionaries out" - which apparently included all-white South Africans. Communists suspect though that immigration controls, or worse, would be needed to keep the working class in, desperate to flee the austere shores of the 'new Jerusalem'.

Clearly this branch of petty-bourgeois conspicuous consumption has no guilt or doubt about the right of the British imperialist share in monopoly-capitalist world exploitation to go on living off the fat of the land whatever the international economic crisis brings in terms of totally collapsed countries and markets in all directions, and even greater mass starvation and poverty than is already afflicting the planet. So much for the CPGP's pretensions to 'international socialism'. It does not sound as if the Weekly Worker-ites will be prepared to share much with the starving billions in the Third World (see p 8) if their phoney hammer-and-sickle banner ever gets to wave over anything.

This sneering theme against socialist 'backwardness' is continued in another section which makes utter gibberish of everything that Lenin discovered about imperialism, - stupidly assuming that the market mechanisms of imperialist monopolisation which prepare the social and technological ground for socialism, can be equated with its political mechanisms.

Just the opposite. Economic monopolisation does just bludgeon on, virtually uncontrollable, because of freemarket anarchy. But the essential politics of monopoly-imperialist crisis is war, not peaceful political integration which 'just has to be accepted as virtually something neutral', as the CPGB suggests, failing to mention war as the politics of imperialist crisis at all:

In reality, for all the SLP NEC's 'wishful' thinking, the ever increasing and accelerating integration of Europe - as part of the process of worldwide integration - supplies the only basis for real socialism.

Unfortunately for the leadership of the SLP, even as they pen their Canute-like protests, political events and history are leaving them behind. The Dublin conference in mid-December 1996 of finance ministers and heads of state saw a significant acceleration of the process of European integration. Finance ministers discussed proposals for a legal framework for the euro; for a new version of the currently defunct exchange rate mechanism (ERM); and a "stability pact", designed to stop countries joining the single currency from 'mismanaging' their financial affairs. In addition French and German government officials are now circulating documents which contain proposals for a 'Euro-tax' which if implemented would see a single tax and social security system for Europe. Britain does seem locked into the "legislative one-way street" which Norman Lamont fears so much.

The Dublin conference should have acted as a massive alarm clock, telling the SLP leadership that the 'socialist' pound sterling - with or without comrade Scargill's face on it - is never going to be, and could never possibly be so. However, the reasonable suspicion communists have is that Dublin, and the Dublins to come, will only act to increase the fear and loathing of the 'national socialist' wing of the SLP for all things European.

This is what we see. The SLP policy document, somewhat comically, castigates the "pro-Europeans" in New Labour who have "fallen victim to the Great Illusion... That the good things which may be found in this or that other European country... were brought about by the Common Market".

In reality, as we know, it is the SLP leadership which has been seduced by the "great illusion" - the idea of socialism in one country. 'Small is beautiful' could be the slogan emblazoned on the SLP's Europe/International documents - which could partially help to explain the uncritical adoration of Cuba that exists in the SLP. While this springs mainly, of course, from a healthy affinity with Cuba's courageous resistance to US imperialism, there is always the suspicion that for some in the SLP Cuba is elevated to a model for socialism precisely because of its backwardness and isolation, rather than despite it. Whatever our stringent criticisms of Fidel Castro and the state bureaucracy, Cuba has been forced to go it alone - a necessary evil, perhaps, but certainly not the positive gold which comrade Scargill seems to imagine.

This has not gone unnoticed. In fact, it is only to be expected, as most SLP members would regard themselves as internationalists. It must also remain a permanent embarrassment to those members of the NEC who come from a Trotskyite/Fourth Internationalist tradition, which holds that the very idea of 'socialism in one country' is anathema. There was an early rebellion against the eyes-down, national socialist outlook, much to the horror of the SLP tops. The policy workshop conference of March 2 1996 rejected the initial document drafted by the SLP, entitled 'Europe and the left, the great illusion'. The European discussion group issued its own call for a 'United Socialist States of Europe', Trotsky's much quoted formulation. Obviously, this was a healthy sign. When picking up the document you are hit by the overwhelming sense of fear which animates the SLP's approach to Europe - the fear that the scary outside world will sabotage SLP-controlled Britain's forward march to socialism. Some members of the NEC really do believe they are drinking at the 'last chance saloon'. The SLP policy document, presented to the May 1996 founding conference and agreed later by the NEC, makes this quite explicit: "There is nothing in the constructions of the EEC [actually the EU - EF] for working people. The treaties and the massive bureaucracy effectively make any move towards socialism difficult, if not impossible. There is nothing in them for any genuine internationalist or socialist to support" (my emphasis, p34).

Outrageously, these Trots then affix to all this nonsense the claim that they are strictly following Leninism in their diatribe, and that their analysis exemplifies the understanding of 

"Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky that real socialism can only be constructed on the shoulders of the most advanced capitalism, which is inextricably interlinked, which is international, which is global."

As a general observation on capitalist economic development, the last is in a sense true, of course. But in terms of capitalist political development, it is in danger of being grotesquely misleading in the hands of such posturing petty-bourgeois dilettantes as these Weekly Worker armchair 'revolutionaries'.

Lenin expressed himself somewhat differently on the question of socialism in one country and the slogan of a United States of Europe as the 'only way' to envisage socialism arriving successfully onto the scene:

Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists ... but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America, who have been badly done out of their share by the present partition of colonies, and the increase of whose might during the last fifty years has been immeasurably more rapid than that of backward and monarchist Europe, now turning senile. Compared with the United States of America, Europe as a whole denotes economic stagnation. On the present economic basis, i.e., under capitalism, a United States of Europe would signify an organisation of reaction to retard America's more rapid development. The times when the cause of democracy and socialism was associated only with Europe alone have gone for ever.

A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism until the time when the complete victory of communism brings about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic. As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others.

Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world - the capitalist world - attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states. The political form of a society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic, which will more and more concentrate the forces of the proletariat of a given nation or nations, in the struggle against states that have not yet gone over to socialism. The abolition of classes is impossible without a dictatorship of the oppressed class, of the proletariat. A free union of nations in socialism is impossible without a more or less prolonged and stubborn struggle of the socialist republics against the backward states.

It is for these reasons and after repeated discussions at the conference of R.S.D.L.P. groups abroad, and following that conference, that the Central Organ's editors have come to the conclusion that the slogan for a United States of Europe is an erroneous one.

From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism -  i.e., the export of capital and the division of the world by the "advanced" and "civilised" colonial powers - a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary.

A United States of Europe under capitalism is tantamount to an agreement on the partition of colonies. Under capitalism, however, no other basis and no other principle of division are possible except force. A multi-millionaire cannot share the "national income" of a capitalist country with anyone otherwise than "in proportion to the capital invested" (with a bonus thrown in, so that the biggest capital may receive more than its share). Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, and anarchy in production. To advocate a "just" division of income on such a basis is sheer Proudhonism, stupid philistinism. No division can be effected otherwise than in "proportion to strength", and strength changes with the course of economic development. Following 1871, the rate of Germany's accession of strength was three or four times as rapid as that of Britain and France, and of Japan about ten times as rapid as Russia's. There is and there can be no other way of testing the real might of a capitalist state than by war. War does not contradict the fundamentals of private property—on the contrary, it is a direct and inevitable outcome of those fundamentals. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics. 

Slogan for a United States of Europe     Sotsial-Demokrat No.44     August  23,   1915

This means more multinational Gulf Wars, or Balkan Wars, or African Wars, such as have drenched half the world in blood in recent years, but with increasing degrees of inter-imperialist rivalry and hostility over the spoils and the political/economic outcome, to the point where the imperialists start shooting at each other.

The CPGB sneers at the SLP's negative view of the EU's monopoly-integration perspectives.

But it is clearly the SLP which is closer to Leninist science on this question.

Thus if the emphasis is put on the 'socialist' United States of Europe, it makes all kinds of incorrect or downright misleading assumptions about the actual historical path leading to the establishment of the first workers states and ultimately a completely planned socialist world.

If the emphasis is put just on the market-inspired integration and political cooperation projects, monstrous illusions are sown about what the relationships between states hold in store as economic crisis advances.

The worst fault the Trots exhibit with their sour contempt for the existing workers states and their predecessors, is to fail to grasp the socialist revolution as a very long historical process rather than as a one-off great glorious happening, or series of happenings.

As Lenin explained on countless occasions, including in the above piece, "the socialist revolution should not be regarded as a single act but as a period of turbulent political and economic upheavals, the most intense class struggle, civil war, revolutions, and counter-revolutions".

The 20th century has made a brilliant start:- proletarian revolutions establishing workers states, the first ever, to cover nearly a third of mankind and a quarter of the earth's surface at one point, and lasting more than 70 years at the first longest stretch, - 70 years phenomenal advance and development and anti-imperialist triumph, - all without an entrepreneurial bourgeois ruling class in sight.

The historical picture is very muddled at the moment because of the terrible consequences of revisionist philosophical retreat and low-culture bureaucratic opportunism. Theoretical chaos killed the USSR.

But where earlier periods of revisionist defeatism and opportunism were eventually pushed out of the way by a newer higher surge of Marxist science (e.g. Leninism), so the present revisionist nightmare will eventually be displaced by an even brighter and more widespread Marxist-Leninist resurgence than even the Bolshevik Party represented.

But sneering at the present workers states, or sneering at predecessor workers states, is just counter-revolutionary individualist posturing by incorrigible anti-communists, - and no help at all in the revival of scientific (i.e. actual) world revolutionary socialism.

It is no coincidence, of course, that the CPGB Trots also get wrong the question of Scottish nationalism and devolution, being complete stooges for the petty-bourgeois illusions around a separate Scottish parliament, along with the Labourites, Liberals, Scots Nats, and other pro-capitalist groupings.

The Trot call for self-determination to correct the 'democratic deficit' but for a Federal Republic at the same time to weld all workers in Britain together for the fight for socialism, - is posturing, anti-Marxist opportunism which goes against the flow of history and could be absolutely counter-revolutionary.

Tory disharmony between Dorrell and Forsyth over the question of what powers a separate Scottish assembly could keep if the Union is maintained at Westminster, merely reflect ruling-class uncertainty and unease on the matter but in no way "make the case" for an 'independent' Scots parliament.

All that this disarray underlines is that any measure of 'democratic' posturing about devolution is only likely to play straight into the hands of the wretched Tartan Tories of the SNP.

Help put the bogus issue of the 'democratic deficit' as the main agenda, - and the real imperialist-stooge frauds of Scotland's "independence", - the petty-bourgeois Scots Nats, - will have had all of their work done for them.

A 'devolved' or 'independent' Scotland in all of the opportunist projects put forward, remains an imperialism-dominated Scotland.

There is no 'democratic deficit' because Scotland is not oppressed, not in any serious scientific political meaning of the word.

All that 'devolution', or 'independence', or 'self-determination' can achieve is to replace the present imperialist establishment, - (ruling-class English, ruling-class Scots, ruling-class everything else, running and governing Scotland), - with a more locally-flavoured (possibly) imperialist establishment (ruling-class Scots, ruling-class English, ruling-class everything else).

The Scots can secede from the Union right now. All they have to do is vote SNP all over a majority of Scottish seats, - and any Edinburgh declaration of independence by a self-declared SNP government is not in the remotest danger of being challenged by the armed forces of the Crown. There is not the slightest possibility of such a development. British imperialism has almost been destroyed by the armed volunteers of less than one million Irish in the Occupied Zone of Ireland who refuse to accept the authority of the Crown. If all five million Scots backed an Edinburgh declaration of independence (which London was foolish enough to reject) as they would, - the very idea of taking on the armed volunteers of the whole Scots nation would leave the British military chiefs demanding peace talks before a shot had been fired.

The whole idea of any London resistance to an SNP majority declaring immediate independence for Scotland is simply unthinkable. It would not happen. Talks would begin immediately, and the best imperialist arrangement possible would be agreed in no time by all sides.

So all talk of 'oppression' and 'democratic deficit' just plays into SNP hands.

But that would not necessarily be the small thing or the joke that is sometimes suggested. Who would be the first international imperialist power institutions to pour into Scotland instantly, virtually propping up and taking over the bemused SNP stooges? The major American finance-capital monopolies and industrial giants, the CIA, the IMF, the Pentagon representatives, the FBI, etc, etc.

If people seriously think of Scotland as merely a stooge of English imperialism, (it is in fact a partner, and a very influential partner in terms of personnel and profits if one examines the history of British imperialism and British colonialism), - then they should certainly get ready to identify a future 'independent' Scotland as a stooge of American imperialism.

Some self-determination arguments even try quotes from Lenin, such as The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, the Feb 1916 theses. All the quotations are completely irrelevant since Lenin is solely discussing nations which are specifically "oppressed", in the full scientific political meaning of the word.

The Scots are not "oppressed". They can regard the English ruling class, or all the English for that matter, - as the most cheating, exploitative, untrustworthy, incompetent, cowardly, unpleasant partners it has ever been the misfortune of any nation to have to endure, - but that still does not make Scotland an "oppressed" nation.

And what is relevant from that work by Lenin, restated scores of times in many other works, is his repeated explanation, here and elsewhere, that modern centralised integrated states, which have begun to overcome and outlive past national-chauvinist small-mindedness, bucolic stupor, - as well as petty racist envy of all kinds, - are a crucial part of how imperialism prepares mankind for world socialist unity, - with even something so apparently harmless as the federal republic, - so beloved by the posturing Trots, - as little more than a barely tolerated necessary evil if it was the only way to replace imperialist oppression:

The closer a democratic state system is to complete freedom to secede, the less frequent and less ardent will the desire for separation be in practice, because big states afford indisputable advantages, both from the standpoint of economic progress and from that of the interests of the masses and, furthermore, these advantages increase with the growth of capitalism. Recognition of self-determination is not synonymous with recognition of federation as a principle. One may be a determined opponent of that principle and a champion of democratic centralism but still prefer federation to national inequality as the only way to full democratic centralism. It was from this standpoint that Marx, who was a centralist, preferred even the federation of Ireland and England to the forcible subordination of Ireland to the English.53

The aim of socialism is not only to end the division of mankind into tiny states and the isolation of nations in any form, it is not only to bring the nations closer together but to integrate them. And it is precisely in order to achieve this aim that we must, on the one hand, explain to the masses the reactionary nature of Renner and Otto Bauer's idea of so-called "cultural and national autonomy"54 and, on the other,  demand the liberation of oppressed nations

Obviously, Scots can declare their right to self-determination any time they want, under any circumstances, and naturally it will be respected.

But what a tedious diversion this is compared to the really serious question of the day which is the overthrow of the imperialist system, - the 'abolition of capitalism', as the SLP puts it.

What possible advantage is all the clamour for Scots devolution, or independence, or self-determination, on this burning subject? It is of ZERO use.

It is in fact a complete ball and chain on the struggle for revolutionary socialist consciousness to flourish again in Scotland as it has so brilliantly done in the past where the Scots workers have always been right in the leadership of the fight by the working class in Britain for social justice. It is a total diversion.

Speculative arguments about how an SNP-run imperialist Scotland would be easier to topple than a British-run imperialist Scotland are just pointless fantasy. It might happen, but it might also be the greatest disaster ever to befall the Scots.

The historical record of relatively tiny, relatively isolated nations overthrowing imperialism - and getting away with it, - is very bleak indeed.

Cuba is the smallest, - and has the advantage of being an island, and having a completely different language from its main imperialist oppressor. But anti-imperialist revolutions were toppled in Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala (1953), Afghanistan, South Yemen, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, etc, etc, etc. Only in relatively giant Vietnam, China, and Russia did revolutions occur which imperialism was forced more or less to tolerate, for a while, after a style. An independent Scottish socialist republic? Imperialist intervention, subversion, and corruption sound inevitable.

A working-class revolution in Britain against the increasing collapse and uselessness of the British ruling class in the inter-imperialist trade-war crisis? It sounds much more formidable.

Some of the confusion which now attaches to the national question is a legacy of the absolute chaos in which communist theoretical understanding was left by the revisionist self-liquidation of the CPSU and the remnants of the Third International.

And one of the chief difficulties there is a continuing misunderstanding about how revisionism crept up on the Soviet workers state.

Significant leftovers from the Third International still refuse to even consider putting any blame on Stalin himself out of a nervous incapacity to dialectically hold fast the screeching contradiction between the obvious world-shattering anti-imperialist achievements of the USSR under Stalin, powerfully nudging forward the world socialist revolution, - and the equally blatant mistakes and misleadership which served to counteract those colossal achievements.

One common way out of this contradiction is to see no flaws at all in Soviet and Third International politics before Stalin's death, and to trace all subsequent crimes and errors to Stalin's 'revisionist successors'.

To keep going, such a paralysed delusion has to rely, for example, on some very dubious readings of history around the Popular Front policies which the Stalin leadership imposed from the 1930s through to the 1950s and beyond in capitalist countries, invariably with disastrous results.

Obviously, no tactics are ever ruled out by Marxist science, and they can be endlessly flexible and variable. And all of the Trotskyite and other anti-communist muddying of the waters around the Popular Front struggle in Spain in the 1930s, for example, leaves the subject open for endless reappraisal, etc. 

Equally, the US-run and financed imperialist revival (in West Europe and elsewhere after World War II ended) certainly possibly posed the question of a controlled holding operation or a controlled retreat of Communist Parties of the Resistance such as in France or Italy in the light of American and British occupation and the understandable unwillingness or inability of the Soviet Union to declare war on US imperialism there and then.

But the real problem is the deluded theoretical assumptions which lay behind any enforced Popular Front policies, - and the key to this is what happened subsequently to these West European Communist Parties.

They all went completely revisionist-reformist, and to pretend that there is no connection between this degeneration and the incorrect world view which lay behind the Popular Front tactics is to stretch credulity too far.

It is clear from the reading of Stalin and all Soviet history up to and beyond his death that a grotesque illusion developed that imperialism could not revive its economic expansion after 1945, that imperialism would slowly fade away as a serious challenge to socialism, and that the socialist international economic market would eventually overtake capitalism in production and development.

This nonsense directly gave birth to such class-collaborative perspectives as the Peaceful Road to Socialism which the British CP (and others) had in place (and Moscow approved) well before Stalin's death.

It continued the theoretical nonsense of 'good and bad imperialism' which saw the wartime 'allies' as potential permanent peacetime partners for the Soviet Union, - against the possible revival of 'bad' Nazi and Japanese imperialism.

As Korea, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, etc, etc, all proved, the West's Cold War imperialism was every bit as nasty as German or Japanese imperialism, and hundreds of times more violently effective, - imposing more than 250 acts of counter-revolution and tyranny on anti-imperialist struggles around the world since 1945.

It is an insult to the titanic achievements of the Soviet workers state to refuse to acknowledge the responsibility of Stalin's own disastrous theoretical mistakes for the total revisionist degeneracy which eventually overtook the CPSU.

Without the notion of the Stalin leadership's errors reflecting the still relatively weak position of the working class historically in terms of world leadership ability, surrounded by the still prodigious powers of continued imperialist expansion and development after 1917, - the final demoralised collapse of the Soviet workers state only sets up some needless and unpleasant mystery, presumably to do with the nature and development of workers states and socialism in themselves, - which plays right into bourgeois ideology's hands.

But there is no mystery. The world communist leadership made some catastrophic strategic mistakes, - ones which must be learned from, and which never must, - and never need, - be made again.

Workers international revolutionary experience and know-how should be vastly richer and more sure-footed in the next great surge forward of socialist-state building following the next great warmongering collapse of imperialist economic anarchy.

The Review examined some of Stalin's obvious mistakes in 1992 in a series of polemics against Lalkar:

'If the confusion continues about why the Bolshevik revolution eventually want wrong, then nothing will have been confirmed or corrected about Leninist science, and priceless lessons of history will have been wasted.

Lalkar tries, in this latest effort, to get round a long-standing difficulty with their 'explanation' of Soviet decay, - namely that by blaming only the work of Stalin's successors for being a class-collaborating retreat from Leninism, it left unsolved the huge mystery of why this supposed 'Marxist genius' Stalin was so dumb as to surround himself with total counter-revolutionary arseholes in the leadership of the Soviet party and state.

The new line is to pretend that Stalin was fighting hard against revisionism inside the CPSU to his dying day, aware that it was all around him, - a legacy of long-established international 'Marxism' around the Third International in the 1930s led by an obscure Pole called Prof. Oscar Lange (who apparently had some role in the Polish workers state after World War II.)

To stand up this barmy theory of a beleaguered 'Marxist genius' Stalin doing his best but failing to rout rampant revisionism in the Third International, Lalkar goes nap on Stalin's last published work "The economic problems of socialism in the USSR" completed in September 1952.

Calling it "a work of genius", Lalkar highlights criticisms which Stalin levelled against some academics called Yaroshenko, Notkin, Sanina, and Venzher. But reading lectures to bureaucrats about the importance to communism of transforming human relations rather than just raising levels of production, still does not address the problem of the quality of Politburo leadership which Stalin, had built up around himself.

And as perceptive and stimulating as are Stalin's analyses in "Economic problems" of the ultimate fate of commodity production under socialism, and of collective—farm property, etc, the Lalkar concentration completely ignores far more relevant quotes from the pamphlet which throw light on the political direction Stalin was giving to the entire world revolutionary movement at this tine, - the CPSU included, - and the economic problems resulting from crassly incorrect general political philosophy.

What sort of 'genius' was it which reached the following conclusion in "Economic problems" (1952):

But at the same time China and other, European, people's democracies broke away from the capitalist system and, together with the Soviet Union, formed a united and powerful socialist camp confronting the camp of capitalism. The economic consequence of the existence of two opposite camps was that the single all-embracing world market disintegrated, so that now we have two parallel world markets, also confronting one another.

It should be observed that the U.S.A., and Great Britain and France, themselves contributed — without themselves desiring it, of course — to the formation and consolidation of the new, parallel world market. They imposed an economic blockade on the U.S.S.R., China and the European people's democracies, which did not join the "Marshall plan" system, thinking thereby to strangle them. The effect, however, was not to strangle, but to strengthen the new world market.

..since the war  these countries have joined together economically and established economic cooperation and mutual assistance. The experience of this cooperation shows that not a single capitalist country could have rendered such effective and technically competent assistance to the people's democracies as the Soviet Union is rendering them. The point is not only that this assistance is the cheapest possible and technically superb. The chief point is that at the bottom of this cooperation lies a sincere desire to help one another and to promote the economic progress of all. The result is a fast pace of industrial development in these countries. It may be confidently said that, with this pace of industrial development, it will soon come to pass that these countries will not only be in no need of imports from capitalist countries, but will  themselves feel the necessity of finding an outside market for their surplus products.

But it follows from this that the sphere of exploitation of the world's resources by the major capitalist countries (U.S.A., Britain, France) will not expand, but contract; that their opportunities for sale in the world market will deteriorate, and that their industries will be operating more and more below capacity. That, in fact, is what is meant by the deepening of the general crisis of the world capitalist system in connection with the disintegration of the world market.

This is felt by the capitalists themselves, for it would be difficult for them not to feel the loss of such markets as the U.S.S.R. and China. They arc trying to offset these difficulties with the “Marshall plan”, the war in Korea, frantic rearmament, and industrial militarization. But that is very much like a drowning man clutching at a straw.

This state of affairs has confronted the economists with two questions:

a) Can it be affirmed that the thesis expounded by Stalin before the Second World War regarding the relative stability of markets in the period of the general crisis of capitalism is still valid?

b) Can it be affirmed that the thesis expounded by Lenin in the spring of 1916 — namely, that, in spite of the decay of capitalism, "on the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before" — is still valid?

I think that it cannot. In view of the new conditions to which the Second World War has given rise, both these theses must be regarded as having lost their validity.

The conceited third-person comparison between Lenin and Stalin is laughably pompous, but much worse is the fact that Stalin's trivial proposition on the 'relative stability of capitalist markets' was always wrong, even before World War II, - and damagingly wrong because it was part of the 'justification' for the disastrously incorrect policy of class-collaborating 'Popular Frontism'.

This revisionist retreat from the Leninist science of proletarian revolutionary leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle was always an infinitely greater catastrophe for the ultimate fate of the Soviet workers state than any amount of minor bureaucratic confusion among lesser Soviet academics about economic theory in the transition from socialism to communism.

Stalin was correct to accuse this Yaroshenko non-entity of overlooking the need to keep class perspectives in sight in his proposals for a draft textbook on political economy.

But Stalin's pamphlet grotesquely ignores far more important class perspectives itself.

There has been no "relative stability of markets" in the period of the general crisis of capitalism. What there has been was the Stalinist revisionist defeatism, pre-war, which deliberately misled the Third International into retreating into Popular Frontism (out of the myopic panic that proletarian revolution could not halt warmongering fascist reaction, and that Soviet international influence should best be seen as conservatively 'democratic' and non-revolutionary, in the face of imperialism's arms-race threats to the Soviet Union).

This fear-filled imaginary nonsense about "relatively stable markets" under pre-war capitalism finds its alternative expression in equally do-nothing shallow optimism about the capitalist system's alleged postwar inability to expand again.

This was just wishful-thinking idiocy by Stalin to justify his complacency about some of the stagnantly paralysed aspects of Third International development; - and to stand this delusion up, Stalin happily commits a monstrous public revision of Lenin in the "Economic problems" pamphlet, - saying that Lenin's observation about capitalism's ability to expand more rapidly than ever before even in the midst of its decay as a system was "no longer valid".

Added to this debilitating nonsense which helped to terminally damage the entire Third International, Lalkar itself is guilty of enormous blindness in accusing Khrushchev, and Stalin's successors, of foisting the ludicrous "peaceful transition" and "parliamentary road to socialism" delusions onto the Third International.

The British CP, for one, had already adopted its British Road to Socialism fantasies of a parliamentary majority for a full anti-capitalist revolution, - and had them approved by Moscow, - before Stalin's death.

And the entire West European CP policy after WWII had been a wretched continuation of class-collaborating Popular Frontism, — with the French CP, for example, joining postwar bourgeois coalitions to revive capitalism and to keep the French empire going in Indo-China and Algeria, for example.

Worse still, it was the Soviet government which insisted that Western imperialism could regain the 'friend' of the Soviet workers state, — (continuing the wartime Alliance 'against German, Japanese and Italian imperialism), - long after the inevitably vicious counter-revolutionary essence of the new US world domination had been made clear to everyone.

In that insane perspective, it was the Soviet Union itself which helped move the United Nations proposal to seize half of Palestine to give to Zionist imperialism in 1947-48; and the USSR which supplied weapons to the Zionists to help break an international arms embargo, thus giving Zionism the opportunity to increase its land grab of Arab Palestine up to 70% of the territory (trampling even on the supposed 'limits' set by the UN's evil partition.)

Through this crass notion that socialism would outperform the cost-cutting savagery of capitalist exploitation in production for world markets, Stalinist revisionism was simply deliberately trying to bury all idea of the international socialist revolution actually taking on the imperialist powers in class war again in order to complete the worldwide overthrow of warmongering monopoly-capitalist reaction.

In words, admittedly, Stalin still correctly explained that monopoly-bourgeois warmongering was inevitable, and that imperialism would have to be "abolished" in order to remove the scourge of war from human affairs once and for all.

But because of the long revisionist decay in the Third International (from many decades of Popular Front tailending of petty-bourgeois democracy in the fight against imperialism, 'justified' by delusions that socialism would overtake and undermine capitalism anyway by outperforming it on the international market-place), - the deeds of the world communist movement under Stalin's colossal influence were ultimately a total self-liquidating disaster, with only either partial or temporary exceptions in China, Vietnam, Cuba, East Europe, Korea, etc, where local determination or immediate Soviet state interests resulted in deliberate anti-imperialist revolutionary actions.

Elsewhere, the opportunist revisionist philistinism, which finally ended up as the ridiculous self-liquidating CPGB, for example, - was already well in place in Stalin's time.

The Popular-Front class-collaborating tailending of the Labour Party (and TUC) reactionary reformism remains one of the most vivid historical marks of this retreat from Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory; but the most crucial problem was CP revisionism's attitude to the Third International's own development and mistakes, — an attitude which this tragic Lalkar article reminds us is still widespread and uncorrected. To repeat once again, it is not a matter of speculating about whether or not Stalin "should have known better" about the party and state leadership he built up and left behind him, or speculating about whether or not all of Stalin's supposed 'crimes' were really such (or just a slightly paranoid over-exuberant 'vigilance', or even all justified because the entire state and party in the USSR and all over East Europe really were all swarming with 'counter revolutionary agents of the West' who all needed exterminating.)

It is a question of Stalin's own mastery of Marxist-Leninist world analysis, — as evidenced in this very book Economic problems. Contrary to Stalin, the imperialist economies continued rapidly to expand even while on course for their greatest-ever crisis of World War II; and the crucial ingredient for meeting this challenge was the exact opposite of Stalin's defeatist complacency (of encouraging the international movement to quietly class-collaborate with reformism whilst awaiting for socialist-camp economic production to outstrip frenetic and vicious monopoly-imperialist worldwide exploitation, - a crazy perspective, - impossible, and not even wanted at present historic levels of capital investment and productivity of labour. Who wants socialist sweatshops? Who wants grotesque overproduction and overconsumption on present Western scales in the imperialist metropolises?

Higher labour productivity is a universal worthwhile goal, but the social agenda of planned workers-state economies should not be remotely comparable to the penny-pinching cost-cutting nightmares run by capitalist-class dictatorships the world over. So how could socialist-state output normally undercut imperialist exploitation output on the world’s consumer markets?)

What was required was the exact opposite of this "socialism is already winning the peaceful world market competition" complacency. Only a phenomenal deepening of Leninist theory of revolutionary international class war could have provided a suitable education for the communist movement worldwide. But about this there is not one solitary word throughout the entire 100 pages of this "work of genius" published at such a crucial time, 1952, and Stalin's last 'great' contribution to the world revolutionary struggle (and his first for years).

It is legitimate to surmise, even if it is accepted that clear evidence of deliberate "Stalinist crimes" is still lacking, that this unmistakable and crippling revisionist confusion at the heart of the Stalin-era leadership must have resulted in any amount of subsidiary arbitrary and incorrect decisions affecting international communist and Soviet internal policies.

Despite all the glorious achievements of the Bolshevik Revolution and its Third International aftermath, the whole revisionist record must now be carefully examined as a potential stinking time-bomb which ended in the total humiliating catastrophe of Gorbachevism and the collapse of the world communist movement(see ILWP Books vols 3-17).

The heart of the problem is chaotic ignorance over Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory.

The first crucial step back to health for the international workers movement is to develop the priceless Leninist ability to face up to one's own mistakes and to learn how to deal with them and profit from them. This persistent Lalkar head-in-the-sand dirge that Stalin was all right, and that the revisionist problems began only subsequently, is hopeless nonsense, well overdue for reconsideration.

Meanwhile the anarchic boom/bust imperialist economy continues roaring on like an express train towards a cataclysmic abyss of collapse and World War III...'

Mere assertions to the contrary, - that Stalin was alright and should not be attacked because that was Trotskyite anti-communism's chosen tactic, serve no purpose. Stalin's theoretical leadership, - all of it, is a major historical fact. It has to be dealt with, - all of it.

Meanwhile, the confusion about 'good and bad imperialism' is getting Keynesian reformist knickers in a twist, with the Observer editor pleading with the British bourgeois opinion makers to stop being beastly to the Germans. Just because there are threatening and uncomfortable rows over Europe, with Germany suspected of causing most of the aggravation for Britain, and just because German unemployment has reached 1933 levels the year the Nazi coup took place courtesy of parliamentary democracy), it does not mean that "Germany is about to lurch to the fascist right", claims Hutton.

But his historical fallacy is in his premise. Put another way, and much more scientifically, meaningfully, and accurately, - it was not Germany as such which lurched to the right in 1933 but the capitalist system, or specifically the inter-imperialist trade war. Germany was merely the then inevitable instrument for that lurch.

The real question is: Who is going to represent the inter-imperialist trade-war lurch to the right in 1997 (or soon after)?.

It still could be Germany again (Hutton does not know at all. He merely wants to find a way of eliminating all thought that the imperialist system at all is going to lurch to the right, this year, or ever again, - in Germany, or anywhere else).

Certainly, its unemployment crisis looks serious enough, - as even the capitalist press is having to admit.

But it could be France. Right on cue, the National Front has stormed through to another frightening electoral success in the south based on racism and anti-European French chauvinism. It is not just the anti-German Euro-sceptics, castigated by Hutton, who are already fighting dirty within the EU trade war.

Or could it be Britain where the Toyota boss's crude warning that Japanese investment into Britain could dry up if the UK fails to get into the European Union common currency venture, went down like a dose of Burma Road dysentery.

Or could it be the USA where pampered New York Jewish aggression, fresh from its Zionist colonisation outrages in Occupied Palestine, seems ready to provoke new racial domination against the Blacks.

The intolerable contradiction for the wretched Keynesians, recently exposed as secret racist-fundamentalists in their original 1930s personnel, - is that it is free trade itself, the very basis of the capitalist market economy in any guise, - which is the real threat to mankind, - at the same time as it remains its only hope all the time private enterprise remains world-dominant, - as even the capitalist press itself is beginning to reveal:

The problem with all this is that the "free" market in world agriculture does not exist, and that US supremacy in world markets derives less from comparative advantage than comparative access to subsidies. According to the OECD, each American farmer receives a subsidy of about $29,000. This is roughly 120 times the average income of maize farmers in the Philippines. The upshot is that Cargill can offer US surpluses for sale at prices equivalent to half the cost of production — destroying local agriculture and creating a captive market in the process.

If it's good for US Agriculture Inc, it's good for the world's poor — and free trade is best for both.

In Mindanao, the largest island of the Philippines archipelago, you get a different picture. Rosa Laranjo is one of the 1.2 million peasant farmers in the Philippines whose households depend upon selling maize for their survival. Most live in Mindanao, working on scattered hillside plots in areas of severe ecological degradation.

In her village of thatched huts sitting precariously on the steep hillsides above the Allah Valley, Rosa is losing hope. "I don't know about world markets. And I don't understand how the Americans can sell us maize so cheaply. All I know is that we cannot compete. Our prices are going down, our children are going hungry, and our community is dying."

Rosa's story is a microcosm of a broader tragedy. As governments in developing countries embark on a Gadarene rush to lower trade barriers and fulfil the American dream of a global market in farm produce, vulnerable smallholder producers are being left to compete against the industrialised, and heavily subsidised, farming systems of North America and Europe. Silently, relentlessly, and away from the glare of the world's media, "free trade" is displacing communities and destroying their livelihoods with all the ruthless efficiency of a civil war.

The social consequences will be devastating. Up to half-a-million livelihoods are under immediate threat. This is in a context where one-quarter of all maize producing households already lack sufficient income for adequate nutrition, and the children suffer from malnutrition.

Throughout the developing world, "free trade" is creating winners and losers. The winners are to be found among the corporate grain traders who market US and European surpluses, the big farmers who scoop up the bulk of production subsidies, and the chemical companies who provide the inputs that produce the surpluses, and which destroy our environment. The losers are to be found in rural communities, where desperately poor people like Rosa Laranjo are competing in a market which is rigged against them.

Level playing field? This one runs all the way downhill from the US. 

And perhaps this poverty, of which the CPGB Brie and Bordeaux-wines consumers seem to be blissfully unaware, will be the real spur to the next round of socialist revolutions, - possibly starting in corruption and tyranny-ridden Latin America, in the capitalist press's own description.

The real world of the proletarian masses will take any socialism it can get, - the only kind in fact, - i.e. that run by workers states, slowly mastering the art of reorganising the entire planet on planned rational lines, as heroically begun by the earlier workers states, the world's first, this century, pioneered by the USSR and the Third International. Further historical progress can only take things up from there, correcting the mistakes, above all in theoretical perspectives and philosophy. Destroy Trotskyism. Build Leninism. PWH

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

The diabolical mechanism of hunger

BY Ulises Estrada Lescaille (Granma International staff writer)

THE DECLARATION marking the 50th anniversary of the United Nations expressed particular concern for the fifth of the world's population of 5.7 billion people who are living in extreme poverty, thus requiring the application of extraordinary measures by all the member states, including the strengthening of international cooperation in order to tackle this and other problems.

In a message sent to those attending the 27th Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Pope John Paul II expressed the opinion that the social and economic situation of today's world makes us all aware that the causes of hunger and malnutrition for millions of people are to be found within the diabolical mechanisms within economic structures, and he blamed the rich countries and their policies for this situation.

The World Bank recognizes that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing, with 1.3 billion people presently living under conditions of absolute poverty, earning less than one dollar a day per capita.

The poor are mainly located in Southern Asia and Africa, while in Latin America the poorest 20 percent of the population receive less than four percent of the income and enjoy less benefits.

Of the 150 countries that the International Monetary Fund considers developing countries only 27 have stocks on the international markets. Seven of these account for 85 percent of bond issues and over 50 percent of share issues during 1992, while 138 do not have access to the international capital markets.

According to Forbes magazine, the world's 358 multimillionaires possess a fortune equivalent to the incomes of 2.35 billion people.

The economic model prevailing in today's unipolar world, the foreign debt and high interest rates are the direct causes of inequalities in human development, in spite of temporary policies which are being implemented in order to eradicate poverty. These policies have no permanence, nor do they define how to remedy this heartrending situation once and for all.

For the resident coordinator of the United Nations, in Mexico, Bruno Guandailni, the present model of development accentuates the concentration of wealth, social isolation and poverty, and it must be changed because it also endangers the social stability of some countries, as well as accelerating environmental deterioration.

The concentration of wealth, social isolation, poverty, hunger and other calamities such as unemployment and tack of social services are not just characteristics of the developing world, but are also leaving their mark on important sectors of the developed world.

In the United States, the average worker's salary, adjusted for inflation, had decreased last September by four percent compared to 1979.

According to human development indices, the U.S. black population presently lives below the levels reached by the peoples of Barbados, Hungary and Uruguay, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

More than 40 percent of the inhabitants in the Dominican Republic lack access to sanitation, one third do not have safe drinking water, infant mortality stands at 45 per 1000 live births and 70 percent of the population live in conditions of abject poverty.

Half the inhabitants of Nicaragua live in poverty and another 25 percent suffer from hunger, while in Brazil, one of the largest powers on the American continent with 150 million inhabitants, 32 million suffer from hunger and 60 million are malnourished.

Severe poverty affects 53.7 percent of Peruvian families and is the major cause of the slight mental retardation occurring in 12 percent of that country's children, two percent of which are severely retarded, according to psychiatrist Jose Lopez of Peru's National Institute of Mental Health.

These realities, which we have listed as mere examples, are known by all. However, they are ignored by those who are directly responsible for the material disasters suffered by half the human race.

It is they who control and direct the diabolical mechanisms within the economic structures referred to by the Pope •