Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point  however  is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
(Weekly. Subscriptions £10/3 months; £30/p.a. )  [P&P  Bulletin Publications,   PO Box 50, London SWI7 9NL)  (Post  Office  Regd.]
No 897 Tuesday April 1 1997                                                                                                                           10p

Lib-labs softpedal the Tory sleaze because they all pig at the same Westminster trough. Trot sabotage of Socialist Labour right in line with the imperialist establishment's need as the economic and political crises deepen. The CPGB's anti-leadership anti-communism takes its cue from the 'New World Order' delusion. But the defeatist Trots get it wrong again. It is imperialism which is getting beaten, not anti-imperialism, in Occupied Palestine as in Occupied Ireland. Inter-imperialist conflict is king. Blairism will be irrelevant. France's class-war turmoil is the future.

British capitalism is governed by big business, and the all-party House of Commons is the place where everything is fixed up.

All capitalism is extortion and unjust exploitation, - the minority who have the property, the capital, the connections, or the know-how, profiting out of the majority who are less fortunate.

This domination and injustice is all repackaged as "fair, legal, and democratic" by the parliamentary system, which is inseparable from the lobbying influence of big business.

There were large numbers of MPs, including Liberals and Labourites, on the payroll of the supposedly 'corrupt' lobbyist Ian Greer, as well as the identified 'crooks' like the resigned or challenged Tory MPs, - because that is how the system works. This is why Hamilton is being so thick-skinned in refusing to be made a scapegoat for something they are all up to, in one way or another.

This is why the Tories are finding it so hard to get rid of Hamilton, - and why the LibLab reptiles join in Major's chorus of "let's get back to the real issues", and "let's leave the false start of a Punch & Judy show about sleaze".

But it is precisely the essential corruption of the capitalist system which is the real issue.

Because all exploitation (profiteering) can only breed crookedness, deception, and cheating at some stage, then the whole system is built on "being economical with the truth".

If crime and corruption are eventually accepted as impossibly incompatible with a truly civilised society, then capitalist profiteering has got to be seen as a backward way of running things.

Blairism's open embrace of capitalism has only made explicit what was always obvious, - that Labour's prime role in life was to prop up the capitalist system by helping the ruling class make it more workable, via various 'reforms', none of which changed anything essential about finance capital's domination of the whole exploitation racket.

Now Blair & Co have openly joined the new Yuppiedom, and will continue with Tory policies for vast new prisons to house the more aggressive, resentful, or inadequate among the majority left behind by the rat race.

All opportunists and careerists will cheer Blair on. The more thoughtful will wonder what is the point of a society which can only breed more and more crime and corruption in all directions, and increasing cynicism all round.

Job insecurity; injustice in wealth and income; graft and corruption at the top, and its reflection lower down the pecking order in crime and hooliganism; cynicism about all government, local and national; - this is what is bred by the capitalist anarchy of the commercial and economic rat-race.

What the overwhelming majority of people would like is the chance to build cooperative go-ahead communities where all the resources available, at present wasted on a huge state bureaucracy and other ruling-class self-preservation measures, could be redeployed by everyone working together to rapidly improve the quality of life and prospects for all.

Crime and hooliganism can only be eliminated by working out proper career structures and education programmes for everyone. Guaranteed full employment for all under a planned socialist economy would then mean steady improvements for all.

Serious participatory community development, - with a chance to really change everything to suit local needs in schools, public transport, health services, housing, the environment, roads, parks, play areas, etc, will only become possible, - and local bureaucratic indifference ended, - with a completely new type of government.

Everyone knows that local representatives, either in parliament or Town Hall, can do little for a community independently of central government wishes and financial control.

Tory, Labour, or Liberal representatives will always agree to spending cuts when ordered to by central government, acting on instructions from the IMF or from world money-market pressure on the pound.

Only an SLP government would make the historic break from domination by international finance-capital.

This would stop local services being forever only the plaything of central politicians' electoral ambitions, with a peerage or a fat company sinecure to follow political retirement in the service of big business. All local representatives, - MP or councillor, - of the three capitalist parties follow these careerist rules, breeding widespread cynicism about all government.

As the economic and political crisis of the imperialist system grows daily more rancid, Socialist Labour is increasingly having its challenge to capitalism sabotaged not by the Establishment but by so-called 'lefts'.

The Trotskyite petty-bourgeoisie, with all the arrogance of their class, persist in ordering the SLP workers party about from their entryist perch on the party's fringes.

A coven of individualist libertarian loonies had installed itself in Vauxhall, southwest London, under the opportunist cover of Socialist Labour's inevitably spontaneous and disorganised launch.

But with nearly 18 months experience now of Trotskyite parasitism, seeking to use the SLP purely as a vehicle for their own sectarian recruiting, - Socialist Labour has now begun to sort the wheat from the chaff, and has disbanded the anti-SLP antics of the Vauxhall posturers.

"The NEC's decision must be vigorously opposed by all members of the party",

predictably reply these hostile class forces from their ambush site, the Weekly Worker propaganda sheet of the CPGB Trots, a medium under the strict authoritarian control of the CPGB gurus.

So why have an NEC of the Socialist Labour Party at all in that case? What is the point of an NEC but to take executive decisions in defence of the party's policy and constitution? If every decision is routinely to be rejected, why have an NEC at all? 

The remaining tiny group of bogus 'lefts' in the SLP, still too stupid to see through this middle-class Trotskyite sabotage racket, cannot answer.

Serious workers with a progressive class consciousness will easily understand that to rebuild a strong workers party with a disciplined commitment to a total socialist transformation of Britain, then the more firm and businesslike leadership it is capable of the better.

The alien class philosophy of petty-bourgeois individualism thinks entirely differently. Not only do these astonishingly shallow 'revolutionary' poseurs routinely reject virtually everything that the Scargill leadership (which founded the SLP) stands for, and every important decision it makes, - but they also then insist on simply taking the law into their own hands, ignoring the party and its leadership completely, and cockily announcing their own schedule of 'SLP activities'.

Thus it is the CPGB Trots, - bitterly hostile to the foundation of Socialist Labour on its own terms (which did not allow the 57 Trot varieties free rein to enter the SLP and use it in a sectarian manner purely for a recruiting ground by stoking up permanent hostility to the SLP leadership), - and clearly a rival independent party from Socialist Labour, - who now announce that 

"At their last meeting, Vauxhall members agreed to host a national meeting of SLP members on Sunday April 13 in London to rally support" 

in defiance of the NEC.

Routine decisions about how affairs in the SLP's own party should be conducted, are thus being monstrously subverted by an antagonistic class force of conceited petty-bourgeois opportunism whose decisions are in fact made 99% by people who are already outside Socialist Labour anyway, either booted out for earlier wrecking activities, or else who never bothered leaving their CPGB ambush site in the first place.

This insolent CPGB 'announcement' of what these middle-class saboteurs dictate should happen next inside Socialist Labour is slyly worded to say "Vauxhall members agreed..." etc. In other words, the undercover sect of illicit Trot entryists, hostile to the SLP, had their own private meeting to "agree" these things without opposition from the remaining tiny handful of healthy SLP members not yet driven off completely by these insane destructive activities, in Vauxhall.

The regular Trot hypocrisy against the leadership of the SLP workers party, sneering that

"such a situation is not acceptable in a democratic workers party", 

reaches its disgusting crescendo in another provocative affront, entirely designed to cause a violent response from SLP members so that the police can involve themselves against Socialist Labour, - of a CPGB Trot, not a member of the SLP, continuing to pose as the "SLP candidate for Brent East", and continuing to turn up to Brent East candidates' debates (the seat Ken Livingstone is defending for New Labour) and taking part as the "SLP representative", contemptuously disregarding all Socialist Labour's many public pronouncements that this despicable petty-bourgeois charlatan is not a member and is nothing to do with the SLP.

The basis for this demented disruption of Socialist Labour is, of course, the arrogance bred by the apparent triumph of anti-communism in modern developments.

These bourgeois class elements, utterly hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat of the Soviet workers state, now feel supremely confident that counter-revolutionary actions of almost any kind can now be got away with against anything that can be labelled 'Stalinist'.

These types are the complete creatures of bully-boy imperialism which believes it has "won the battle of history" and has "vanquished communism for ever".

The pretence of these creeps is that they are "only against Stalinism"; but the reality of the international class forces which succeeded in undermining the CPSU revisionist leadership, causing it to self-liquidate in its philistine Gorbachevite confusion, is that all communist revolt will now be mercilessly persecuted wherever possible. The pipsqueak voices of these Trots and ex-revisionists who join in this sneering witchhunt while still pretending to be "in favour of the socialist revolution" do not bother the imperialist ringmasters of this red-baiting circus.

The statistical evidence explains why. There are 57 Trot parties, at least. They have been around in various guises for 70 years. They have never come remotely close to building a mass workers movement.

Socialist Labour, on the other hand, already has workers pouring in although it has only been going for five minutes, and is already able to put up 50 candidates or more in the coming election to signal a real socialist-movement challenge at long last to the corruption of bourgeois parliament.

The same pattern is regularly repeated on the propaganda/censorship front where the Trots get various mentions from time to time, but news of the SLP is a suspicious rarity.

The assault on Socialist Labour by these bourgeois-Trot forces tells the same story. It is unthinkable that these posturing middle-class 'revolutionaries' would dream of feeling comfortable and confident about just disrupting the activities of a rival political party, the SLP, unless they felt that society at large would generally approve of them putting the boot into these "worrying Stalinist tendencies" as they began to smear Scargill & Co months ago.

These CPGB Trots and their Weekly Worker adherents know damn well that chanting the witch-hunting drumbeat of "Stalinism" will be right in tune with the brainwashing propaganda deluge that the whole of Europe has been steeped in (by the CIA's masterly control of the world's news agencies since the self-liquidating collapse of the Soviet workers state), completely distorting all of 20th century history.

And it shows that the Trots know what a good wicket they think they are batting on when they deliberately throw in other good, politically-correct, witch-hunting words as well, such as 'homophobic' with which to try to slander the anti-Trot political development of the SLP, (discouraging sects and factions from turning the SLP into just a faction-ridden anti-leadership recruiting ground for Trotskyite anti-communism).

Socialist Labour is almost certainly the most democratically-minded and least unconstitutionally-manipulated mass workers party ever to have developed in Britain, but that still makes no difference at all to these pre-programmed disrupters (who in reality could not give a damn about any kind of democracy and least of all about that for workers, - as their own behaviour shows by telling lies in signing up to abide by the SLP constitution and decision-making in the first place; then refusing to accept all decisions they don't like; and finally announcing completely undemocratic 'decisions' about what the 'SLP' is going to do next!).

It is the SLP's very determination to organise a properly-disciplined mass workers party, as united behind correct and agreed leadership decisions as possible, - that had already decided these Trots ("bourgeois intellectuals hostile to the workers movement" as Lenin described Martov, Plekhanov, and Trotsky) to disrupt Socialist Labour from the start.

This modern McCarthyite witchhunt against the SLP thus serves the whole of the bourgeoisie well who wish, above all else, for the destruction of any possibility of any good memory surviving of the great achievements of the Soviet workers state or of the disciplined way in which mass workers parties used to be organised which made those achievements, - in Russia, Cuba, etc, and in their worldwide support.

Sabotaging the SLP is of interest to the spontaneous interconnections of all bourgeois ideology, right and 'left', because the world imperialist system is deep in trouble, and there is not a bourgeois subconsciousness on the planet which does not then think in terms of 'Oh, no, not a return to the Soviet workers state and all that discipline', etc, meaning a properly-organised workmanlike society where serious and rational study, and the professional achievements of a labour culture, become society's highest good, - not social climbing and consumerist posturing, achieved only at the expense of exploiting the poorest masses all round the globe, which is the 'Western way of life'.

How serious the SLP is about reorganising a proper communist work ethic around the Socialist Labour Party and the future society in Britain, to be organised by an SLP government, remains to be seen; but the signs are sufficient to appal the Trot dilettantes; and the time for such thinking is made absolutely right by the wholesale mess into which the imperialist international economy and political straitjacket is rapidly sinking.

Revolution is back on the agenda in a big way, and workers in Britain need to start thinking about exactly what is involved.

The British ruling class, for instance, is in unprecedented turmoil. Never in history has the bourgeoisie's major ruling party, the Tories, been in such disarray, and at such a crucially difficult time of imperialist economic weakness for Britain while facing an imminent international trade war of unheard-of proportions, and at the same time as a dramatic switch has been attempted to a new style of phony 'opposition', - New Labour.

Blairism is receiving massive Establishment encouragement because the old Labour Clause IV 'socialism', - joke that it always was in practice under such a relentlessly bourgeois party, - nevertheless has been considered too great a potential danger to be leaving around in the crisis-conditions the planet will shortly be plunged into, as the entire ruling class (and not only of Britain) knows full well, - the greatest upheaval of markets-crash, ferocious trade war, ruinous slump, and strutting chauvinism that the world has ever seen. 

Opportunity was taken of the "socialism is dead" atmosphere in the world since 1990 to kill off Clause IV. No wonder all the bourgeois are so appalled that Socialist Labour has risen back up again like a phoenix so rapidly.

But all this has only served to undermine the self-confidence of the ruling-class party, the Tories, even more. Knowing what a weak hand they have to play internationally, and knowing how potentially volatile a revived workers movement could be in Britain, the Tories seem to have lost their nerve and their know-how completely.

But Blairism will not save British capitalism, that is for certain. All it is likely to do is to alienate the working class even more, eventually, with its contemptible shallow opportunism and public-relations gimmickry trying to patch up imperialist economic contradictions of which the philistine Blairites have not the slightest understanding.

Deep down, the Tories must know this too. Hence the even greater alarm about what is going to happen to the country next, and hence the even louder noise of disgraced operators falling on their swords where too flagrantly caught out, or even more noisily not falling on their swords as in Tatton when they think they can still get away with it because the general leadership of the great bourgeois Establishment is in such disarray itself.

But even this ruling-class mess, as great as it is, does not of itself yet tell quite the full picture of imperialism's difficulties as is told in France.

There, anyone who fails to see that all-out class war is virtually next on the agenda, just is not looking.

The weekend's astonishing confrontations in Strasbourg where tens of thousands turned out in effect to insist on a future for France which does not continue the present 'free world' course of inter-imperialist contradictions which is bound to lead the world back to fascism, - tell the whole story.

The huge demonstration of agitated slogans simply said 'no to racism' in an attempt to face down the strutting National Front congress there.

This, however, is just a well-meaning but hopeless farce. Free-market competition has been designated to rule the planet for the next infinite period of years; and free-market competition is just inter-imperialist conflict spelt differently; and inter-imperialist contradictions have no other resolution but inter-imperialist war eventually, which is where Le Pen and the National Front come storming in.

"Three million unemployed; three million immigrants. Too many" scream Le Pen's slogans archly. One of Hitler's reported slogans was: "500,000 unemployed; 400,000 Jews. The answer is simple".

Good luck to the magnificent Strasbourg demonstrators in facing down the National Front chauvinist strut temporarily, if that is what they achieved. 

However, the inter-imperialist economic crisis roars on totally out of anyone's control. Marxist economic science, which no one has ever refuted, clearly explains how a destructive crash or slump must intervene periodically to destroy the relative capital 'surpluses' which the anarchic system of profiteering and credit-creation has created, especially in the globalisation era of uninhibited monopoly takeovers of giant multi-nationals by giant multi-nationals.

Such market crashes have invariably been accompanied by inter-imperialist wars in the modern era, or by the warmongering threats of war, the arms race.

Now is no different. And how big a crash must be anticipated in the light of the postwar boom stretched to unprecedented lengths by the deliberate anti-communist counter-revolutionary actions of US dollar imperialism, to keep the world from going Red.? It will be the mother and father of all slumps, to coin a phrase.

And all the signs of conflict are already in place, quite regardless of all the indirect indications such as can be deduced by the relentless rise of National Front fascism in France.

What does Le Pen go on about? The 'unfair' way France is tricked inside the European Union by Germany, and in the world as a whole by US imperialism.

What is the reality? Let the capitalist press tell its own story of inter-imperialist conflict, with much skulduggery, treachery, and deep worries about who is winning and who is losing, and what fearful consequences will ensue from such defeats in the international trade war and unspoken war for political domination:

ZAIRE'S military helped engineer the legally dubious dismissal of the government by parliament in what some politicians describe as a veiled coup to alter the civil war. France is quietly backing key military leaders to try to prevent a rebel victory and salvage some credibility from its greatest foreign policy setback in Africa in years.

One French official insisted: "[The US] has three targets: Nigeria, Zaire and South Africa. They will take control of this continent if no one stops them."

Last week, France tried to pressurise the European Union into legitimising a force ostensibly to protect aid workers and humanitarian routes to Rwandan refugees. Critics saw it as an attempt to block the fall of Kisangani. Britain killed the plan.

The French priority had been to try to force a ceasefire. But the UN Security Council call for a ceasefire had no teeth. Washington and London scuppered an attempt to create a multinational intervention force.

A TEAM of United States military specialists is beading for Zaire to study airfields, roads and communications

"This does not represent any commitment or intention by the United States to deploy other forces into the region," a Pentagon spokeswoman said.

French officials say Paris recognises the ailing Mr Mobutu as a lost cause. But it baulks at the prospect of Laurent Kabila and his rebels seizing control. They are within striking distance of the diamond fields of the central provinces and vast mineral resources of the South.

Each rebel victory has been a blow to France's presumption of influence in Africa. Three years after the United Nations Security Council gave Paris a green light to send its troops into Rwanda — widely seen as a poorly disguised attempt to defend a  regime — French attempts to persuade the UN of its altruism in seeking to send its soldiers into Zaire have fallen flat.

But imperialist powers undermining each other to damage a rival's international economic and political relations, - and eventually to result in sharpening class war at home as this week has been demonstrated in Strasbourg, - is by no means the end of the story either.

For what is supposed to happen in these exploited colonial areas when one imperialist profiteering tyranny tries to muscle in on another? In theory, the dominant imperialist power might be expected to buy off any incipient revolt with a new relationship of bribery and corruption, - and that may well be what is intended in Zaire, and what indeed may happen.

But that corroding strategy has not always worked so successfully since 1945, as the anti-imperialist revolutions showed in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere.

And the fear that a new round of capitalist slump-crisis similar to that which pushed the Western world into warmongering crisis in the first place, causing such anti-imperialist revolt around 1945 and just after, - is never far from the monopoly bourgeoisie's mind, as indicated in this nervous capitalist press report:

Among Kabila's allies at that time was Che Guevara, the Argentinian-born revolutionary leader, who visited Africa in 1964. Che, a hero to a generation of left-wing students in the West, wrote approvingly of his contacts with Kabila, saying that the rebel leader "understood perfectly that the principal enemy was North American imperialism".

Kabila, a short, jolly man, has carefully failed to spell out his recent political philosophy, but the rhetoric of his followers is still all about the class struggle, the dominance of the imperialist Americans, the state as oppressor and the freedom of the masses.

Western powers, who for years saw support for the anti-communist Mobutu as vital at a time when Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe were leaning towards Moscow, have largely deserted him. His standing at home has plummeted amid rampant poverty and appalling corruption.

"Mobutu's return means nothing for Zaire or his retreating army," said Seth Sendashonga, a former Rwandan minister and now a regional political analyst. ' 'It is too late for him to save the nation from the rebel advance."

Nor is the problem linked just to outdated French colonialism, as some complacent Western propaganda might want to imply. The trade war conflict is gripping all of the contestants, big and small alike, and it is impossible to over-exaggerate just how seriously they are taking it. This capitalist press report tries to treat it lightheartedly, but it still ends up with the question: Why are these 'allies' doing this to each other at all, and what does it all mean?

It's estimated that in Germany there at least 300 spies - and some commentators say 1,000 - on the loose in this edgy jobs market.

It wants those agents to go home. And for those who stay, it wants to know what they are up to. "The Germans want to control us. But they never will," says a US agent who has worked in Germany for years.

In an unprecedented row, the first incident of its kind since the US occupied Germany in 1945, Bonn has just ordered an American agent out of the country for trying to recruit a government official and seeking inside info on German economic policy towards Iran. The dispute is symptomatic of the broader German displeasure with foreign spy services who still think they can have the run of the country and it also illustrates the changed nature of the espionage game in a new, globalising, multi-polar world where old alliances no longer matter.

"Sometimes you have to send a very clear signal to the Americans, otherwise they don't get the message,'' says Wilfried Penner, head of the German parliament's home affairs committee, which monitors the activities of the intelligence agencies, "It's one thing co-operating in Nato, where we accept American dominance. But when the Americans exploit that to pursue their economic interests and spy on us, then things get critical."

Mervin Lasky, the veteran Berlin-based commentator and ex-editor of Encounter, the intellectual house journal of US cold warriors, says: "This is a new development. The Americans had up to 100 guys running around this country. What do you do with all these agents? It's one thing checking out plutonium smuggling. But now they want to know what Mercedes is doing. This causes conflict with your allies."

With the old certainties and fixed rules of the Cold War gone, the spooks and spies now treat allies as potential adversaries in the quest for money, contracts and economic power. Industrial espionage, prising out hi-tech secrets and bargaining strategies in trade negotiations of rival governments and companies, are the front-line prizes in the new spy wars. "About 25 per cent of our work is finance-orientated these days," says one Western insider.

The US source adds:"In both West and East, a lot of agents in the field have switched from gathering military info to civilian secrets. Many of the best computer hackers in the business, for example, are ex-KGB officers. Technology is walking out of this country and it's heading East."

The Russians are estimated to maintain about 140 spies in Germany, the Americans anywhere up to 100. In addition, the US National Security Agency maintains huge eavesdropping station in Bavaria, where some 1,000 staff can monitor much of Europe's telecommunications traffic.

"The Russians are very active and so are the other East Europeans," says Penner. "It's not state secrets they're after but areas of industry where Germany is in the lead — for example, information from the chemical or computer industries."

The Americans, and to a lesser extent the British and the French, pursue similar campaigns. Der Spiegel magazine says the NSA complex at Bad Aibling in Bavaria was instrumental in winning the US $6 billion in aerospace contracts from Saudi Arabia against European competition. The buggers monitored communications between Europe's Airbus consortium and the Saudis to keep the Americans abreast of the Europeans' bargaining strategies and offers to the Saudis, and so the Americans were able to outbid Airbus.

Less than two years ago, France kicked out four CIA agents after unveiling a US spy ring after the minutiae of French trade policy negotiating terms. "These intra-Nato rivalries are slipping out of hand into the public arena,'' says Lasky. "The US will say it needs to keep an eye on the Germans to see they are not up to nefarious things, developing ABC weapons or nasty gases, or are on the brink of an industrial breakthrough. The Germans resent that."

That's putting it mildly, according to US agents whose field work now regularly brings them into angry confrontation with the German equivalent of the Special Branch. "The German cops try to scare us," says the US agent. "They walked into my house and put a 9-millimetre pistol to my head, in front of my wife and kids. They've detained me twice since 1989. We never get charged. Then our superior talks to their superior and it goes up the ladder and we get released."

Such tactics do little to encourage the intelligence-sharing that the Germans are demanding. The Americans refuse to share with the Germans the non-military intelligence gleaned from the NSA complex in Bavaria. In Munich, with occasional British participation, the Americans interrogate and sometimes recruit immigrants from the Balkans, the Middle East and the ex-Soviet bloc who have poured into Germany in hundreds of thousands in the past six years. They do not share those pickings with the Germans either.

One thing Washington does share, is information gleaned from its satellite spying. For how much longer? The US is furious at what it perceives as a barefaced snub, since Germany and France have decided to embark on a "European" spy satellite project of their own. They cannot afford it. Since it was announced at a Franco-German summit in 1995,  the project has already been shelved. It will be vastly inferior in capacity to US technology. By first endorsing the project, then suspending it, Chancellor Kohl has managed to upset the Americans and the French for no net benefit.

German intelligence is also heavily politicised. In Whitehall or Washington, governments may come and go but the secret services carry on regardless; seemingly above the law. By contrast, Konrad Porzner, Germany's spy chief and a Social Democrat, resigned last year after losing what was essentially a political tussle with Kohl's intelligence troubleshooter, Bernd Schmidt, a Christian Democrat.

Much to Bonn's exasperation, the old mistrust lingers. "German intelligence is leaky, not very good and can't be trusted," says the same source. Such talk enrages German officials. "Ordering this American diplomat out is an unmistakable signal to the US," Penner declares. "They are used to treating our country like a frontline province, and not just the Americans. But that's no longer on. Our friends in the West have to realise there have to be limits to their activities and Germany has to make sure both East and West restrict their spying here. Germany has regained its full sovereignty but it still has not got through to the US secret agencies that the situation has changed."

"Oh sure," responds the American agent. "Life is getting tougher for us here. Since the Wall came down, the mentality's changed. Now there's no longer a threat, they want to control their own affairs." But he is not alone in predicting that the unusual move to expel an American spy could backfire and that Bonn may yet rue the day.

"These days it's all backstabbing and competition between and within agencies. They're cutting back and dropping agents. Now technology is the key. Everything's economic about who's got the best and the cheapest product, about the best way to produce it and keep jobs. So we either have to wait for another war or change our outlook. Spying's not so much fun anymore."

To describe inter-imperialist rivalry in the 20th century as "not much fun" could be the understatement of all time.

And to the further objection that such conflict all still seems a long way off, the endlessly explosive situation in the Middle East should correct that misunderstanding.

The colonisation of Palestine by Zionist-Western colonialism, a throwback to the imperialist scramble for Africa and Asia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has not always impressed itself on people's minds as an open festering sore of potential international conflagration because the Zionists have usually always been winning so easily, backed as they unchangingly have been by the almighty fire power and financial clout of US imperialism, always using the Zionists as its tame hired gun in the region to put down Arab nationalist revolt whenever Washington felt that a Nasser, or an Assad, or a Saddam Hussein, or an Arafat, etc, was getting too big for his boots, and threatening US oil interests potentially via a dramatic spread of Arab or Muslim national-liberation fever for a true equality with the Western oil exploiters for these Middle Eastern states. 

But as the EPSR has never tired of pointing out, one day the relentless capitalist exploitation of the Arab masses is going to start producing what Marxism explained the capitalist system must always eventually produce, - a proletariat which begins to acquire such skills, social know-how, and political awareness that it begins to be transformed into a class which will no longer want to put up with being exploited and dominated any longer, and which will start to develop the political understanding and organisational talent and discipline to do something effective about it, at long last.

In other words, to put it bluntly, the Arab masses will eventually learn to fight just as effectively or even better than their Zionist colonising tormentors.

As even capitalist press reports are beginning to indicate here or there, obliquely or indirectly, that time may be approaching now:

ISRAELI columnists call it "Israel's Vietnam", "that cursed place", that "Moloch" devouring its young manhood. They are referring, of course, to South Lebanon, the last violent frontier of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Last month's helicopter collision took their anguish to new heights. It was an accident, but, in a deeper sense, an all but inevitable one.

"There is no means, no patent," wrote one, "that the Israeli army has not tried to reduce casualties in this war — but the war wins." Its burden is "carried on the backs of young men not yet 20 years old, doing what is required of them between a spoiled, self-indulgent home front and a difficult, cruel front line".

Before visiting it, I asked Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, Hizbullah's operational chief, what I might find. He laughed: "An enemy terrified of every house, tree, bush and boulder."

But perhaps the strangest thing about the zone is that you rarely clap eyes on this "enemy" — strange, that is, until you grasp that its very invisibility is a measure of the "Islamic resistance's" effectiveness. For Israeli soldiers now do all they can to reduce their exposure — by such means as helicopters — when move they must.

The few Israelis I saw in a two-day visit were visible only because of Hizbullah's latest operation. They were in convoy to the key outpost of Dabshe. Hizbullah had just launched another dawn raid on this treeless height above the market town of Nabatiyah. The Israelis admitted that a sergeant had died.

It was a small-scale clash, but the stuff of which, repeated a thousandfold, Vietnams are made.

In the ensuring Israeli bombardment, the people of Nabatiyah took to their basements while inhabitants of the zone went about their business as if they belonged to one world and the bedlam of outgoing fire to quite another.

In a way that is so. But Israeli protection did not account for their sense of security; it was their knowledge that they need not fear Hizbullah. Under the American-brokered "rules" of this conflict, neither side is allowed to attack civilians. Hizbullah shows far more respect for them than the Israelis.

"You hear of dozens of civilian casualties over there, but there are hardly any here," said a Christian resident.

The winning of hearts and minds is a key aspect of a Hizbullah strategy which is succeeding in  threatening the rationale of the zone itself.

For the 2,500-man South Lebanese Army (SLA), which serves as a sandbag between Hizbullah and northern Israel, has been most affected by it.

Its morale is at its lowest ebb. So is its manpower. Fifteen-year-olds with identity cards falsifying their age and grandfathers man the roadblocks.

CASUALTIES in the SLA have fallen as Israeli ones have risen. Antoine Lahd, the dapper general who deserted the Lebanese army to serve Israel, said this was because "my men know the terrain better". But the real reason is that the Israelis now do what their protégés cannot do for them. According to the  United Nations, the Israelis have recently doubled their strength in the zone to 2,000 men, taking over some SLA positions. They have spent $10 million improving these — yet still they cannot staunch the fatal drain of young men.

Young is the word. It is a curious but revealing fact that Hizbullah fighters, numbering a mere 400 or so, are old by comparison — anything up to 35, usually married, often university students or professional men.

"A regular army can fight with raw recruits," said an officer of the UN force in Lebanon, Unifil, "if it has good commanders, but these guys are their own commanders — and they are really good." 

It shows in the casualty figures. In the past, against Palestinians, the Israelis got used to inflicting disproportionate losses. But Hizbullah has narrowed the gap to one Israeli killed for as few as 2.7 of their own. That is a good ratio for any attacking force and it is being achieved not merely by the fearlessness that conviction can inspire, but by planning and patience.

Recently, six guerrillas waited three days within 100 yards of an elite counter-insurgency unit before attacking without loss.

Hizbullah steadily updates its arsenal. In December Israel withdrew its US-built M60 tanks from the zone, replacing them with its own Merkava-3's: Three soldiers had just died in M60s when they came under fire from Hizbullah's newly acquired HEAT armour-piercing missiles.

One "weapon" Hizbullah usually takes into battle is a video camera. In boosting its supporters' morale and lowering the enemy's, it is possibly the most effective weapon of all. To General Lahd, films of Israeli solders being blown apart by mines or the Hizbullah flag being planted atop the Dabshe outpost are cheap showmanship. But not so for Sheikh Kaouk.

The latest, hour-long offering is widely available. Last week you could buy it for £4 from the Lebanese ministry of tourism itself. The "Islamic; resistance" was staging an exhibition there.

There are constant strains, between the Lebanese state and Hizbullah because Rafiq Hariri, the billionaire prime minister, wants to restore Lebanon as the business centre and playground of the Middle East. But there is also a bizarre convergence of purposes imposed by larger realities. Hizbullah is now more entrenched in the Lebanese and regional power systems than ever Yasser Arafat was.

Hizbullah's motivations, religious and patriotic, and the vitality of its fighting machine, are reason enough why it will not go away, and why the Israelis are deluding themselves if they think it will.

But no less important are the larger Iranian and Syrian purposes which Hizbullah also serves — and never mind that Iran's purpose is to undermine the "peace process", while Syria's is merely to strengthen its hand in that process.

Since Israel's last great onslaught on South Lebanon last April, Iran has reportedly been supplying Hizbullah massively.

For the first time, Israelis are openly talking about withdrawal. Yet it is not just the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who considers that a virtually impossible option. So too do leftwing doves such as Yossi Sarid.

"Who," he asks, "does not want to get out of the Valley of Death that is Lebanon?" But, without agreement, that would be "ill-considered, irresponsible and very dangerous". For "on the same day, or the next, Hizbullah would be sitting on the border".

And what would they do then? Cease their operations or carry them into the heart of Israel? That is a question I put to Sheikh Kaouk.

The last thing he will do is answer it. Israel's Vietnam? Yes, to be sure, and it will be "bigger than America's". But would Hizbullah go on, beyond the mere liberation of Lebanese territory? "The enemy is deeply confused about that — and long may he remain so."

Add in the Palestinians themselves, a far bigger population than the poor of South Lebanon or the Islamic fundamentalists of the whole area combined, - and with ultimately the most unbeatable need and will to fight of all, - and the days of Zionism's easy victories look more numbered than ever.

And the Palestinians themselves have already done plenty of very skilled and heroic fighting of all kinds over the years.

And they are getting better and better at it very quickly now. And the very latest twist in the long-drawn-out national-liberation struggle against Zionist colonialism has been to concede armed Palestinian statehood, of a sort, right in the territory of Palestine itself.

There is colossal distrust of what use Arafat will be putting this to, of course, but the real point is that once again, it is the very advancement that the logic of Western exploitation is itself forced to take things to, that is the essence of the question. An armed Palestinian state, on its own territory, and with more than 5 million Palestinians in existence altogether, the vast majority of them burning with inextinguishable hatred of the whole Zionist colonisation of their land, and thirsting for revenge, - will potentially soon be lined up against 4 1/2 million colonising Jews, many of whom have no real appetite for continuing the imperialist repression or who have simply bloated themselves beyond much use in that department any more.

The Western imperialist press, always criminally biased against the Arabs and in favour of the Zionist colonisation out of the imperialist system's huge sense of guilt towards the Jews as a consequence of the tyranny which inter-imperialist World War II and its slump-fascist precursor inflicted on such minorities, - is itself beginning to reflect even this, however unwillingly or unconsciously:

Friday's atrocity illustrates Israel's dangerous dependence on Palestinian help to keep its own citizens safe.

Israeli sources admit freely that since the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, the ability of the Shin Bet secret service to gather intelligence and forestall attacks has been badly weakened.

During the long years of Israeli rule, the structure of occupation helped maintain control: licences and permits were granted and prison terms shortened in return for intelligence. But when Col Rajoub took over, one of his first acts was to arrest and then "turn" Israeli agents.

Yesterday, sources on both sides agreed that co-operation between the secret services had been limited since the March 9 meeting: routine contacts had been cancelled by the Palestinians and information supplied by the Shin Bet had not been acted on.

No one doubts that the Palestinian Authority can keep the peace if it chooses.

The Tel Aviv attack was the first suicide bomb in a year. Now Israeli officials predict that more may be on the way.

The hopeless injustice, intolerable tyranny, and sheer anarchic mismanagement of the international imperialist 'market' system is a perspective not greatly in fashion with any section of the bourgeoisie, including its middle-class Trot 'revolutionary' posturers.

While posing as such 'socialist' tearaways that they cannot bear to see Scargillism (which they pretend is reactionary Labour Party Mark II-ism) imposed on the working class, even by Scargill's own party, - the reality is that their real mentality is unrelieved petty-bourgeois defeatism. What they really think is that imperialism is unbeatable everywhere. Their 'revolutionary' posturing is just a dilettante's game.

They have particular contempt for the ability of the smaller national liberation struggles to achieve much on the anti-imperialist front.

Regular EPSR readers will be aware of how throughout 1996, the Review relentlessly exposed the ignorant fearfulness of these born individualist pessimists. In unguarded moments, they declared how the IRA had capitulated completely to irresistible US imperialist 'imposition of a peace process' which was simply going to disarm the IRA and leave the national-liberation struggle with nothing, and the British imperialist colony of the Occupied Zone (so-called 'Northern Ireland') completely intact.

When the IRA exploded this ignorant philistine defeatism, the CPGB Trots still sneered "peace bombs". Only later did they drop this nonsense, without a word of explanation, of course, as to what was the meaning of all this slanderous disinformation in favour of the imperialist propaganda machine, which for decades has been reassuring British public opinion that 'terrorism' was bound to be defeated, that there was no way in which it could ever win anything, and that it was on the very verge of surrendering at that very moment, etc, etc, etc.

So how does Labour's offer of immediate peace-settlement talks involving Sinn Féin fully at the table at once if a ceasefire is in place, reflect on this defeatist Trot perspective? 

It further blows it right out of the water. At this historic juncture, the IRA are unbeatable, and well the British Establishment knows it, as Blair will already have been told.

Britain's imperialist 'allies', to gather international goodwill and credibility where they can, also continue to advise the UK to create a completely new settlement for the whole of Ireland, finally ending the hated and infamous colonial partition of that cruelly maltreated country, imposed at bayonet point in 1921.

In detail, any foreign policy of imperialism can always change dramatically overnight.

But what CPGB petty-bourgeois defeatism always gets completely wrong is the general trend of history. All their posturing is in the end completely anti-Marxist, as well as being completely futile.

Bourgeois propaganda is their only true sustenance. They are anti-communist and counter-revolutionary in the deepest possible way, always easy prey to big bourgeois propaganda, whether for 70 years against the workers states; or against Scargill's tactics in the 1984-85 strike, demanding a ballot along with the Establishment; or ridiculing the SLP now; or belittling the Irish national-liberation struggle, falling for such hokum as the following, unusually exposed in one of the capitalist press's own reports:

IT IS dangerous to read newspapers casually. That's how the germ of a myth is planted. Next thing you know, it has grown into a fact. A glance at a headline, a swift scan of the introduction, a note of the picture caption, and you are on your way to a firmly held misconception.

Take the stories which informed us to prepare for a new American ambassador to Ireland. President Clinton, the Times pronounced 10 days ago, "is about to make a decisive shift in his policy on Northern Ireland ... while at the same time slapping down Jean Kennedy Smith." 

Two days later the Daily Telegraph told us that Kennedy Smith "is expected to be recalled by President Clinton because her strongly pro-nationalist views are now at odds with White House policy on Ireland."

But, significantly, there were no sources.

And there was also a rash of likelies, said-to-bes and expecteds, and a succession of tell-tale weasel phrases: "likely to be recalled"... "tenure appears to be ending"... "Clinton poised to recall".

There was all sorts of important supporting evidence. For instance, Kennedy Smith's recall hinged on the appointment of Madeleine Albright as Secretary of State. The Times said she had asked for talks with Northern Ireland Secretary Sir Patrick Mayhew during a visit to London later this week, something her predecessor never did during his years in office.

With great authority, the paper's diplomatic editor, Michael Binyon, wrote: "Her decision is a clear signal that during the second Clinton Administration policy on Ireland will revert to the State Department... The second signal... is that Mrs Kennedy Smith has decisively lost influence, both in the White House and in the formulation of US policy on Ireland."

These signals were picked up by the Telegraph. Its page one story paraphrased Binyon, telling us that the "pro-Adams ambassador" was losing her job because "the policy of aligning America with Gerry Adams and John Hume, the SDLP leader, while maintaining a distance from London, has failed."

Then a picture of Kennedy Smith in the Times with an interesting caption: "Stays as Dublin ambassador."

In a strikingly bald-faced climbdown, the story rescinded every claim in its previous report. Albright would not be meeting Mayhew. Kennedy Smith was not being recalled. Clinton was not changing his stance. The State Department was not taking primary responsibility for Irish policy, which would remain with the National Security Council.

But this factual reverse was not reported straight. It was fatuously suggested that the reason for these reverses was entirely due to the Times's previous story. "The 'green lobby' swung into action," it said, after "the Times reported that President Clinton was planning to replace her."

Is the Times seriously asking us to believe a US president's policy can be switched in six days because of a report in a foreign newspaper? In fact, Clinton must have responded even faster to the Times because Albright was able to tell a congressional hearing as early as Tuesday, only three days later, that Kennedy Smith was staying at her post.

SINCE neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post carried any story about the Dublin ambassador's future, we are asked to believe that the American president now responds to the agenda set by the Times. The Daily Telegraph didn't even have the grace to mention the complete reversal of its story. 

So what are we to make of this episode? I turned to the Irish Times for some enlightenment. Its excellent Washington correspondent Joe Carroll tried to trace the source of the Times and Telegraph reports, an easier task in a political world which is far more open than Britain's.

He concluded that the alleged US briefing was more likely to be "an attempt to cover up the real sources, which could be nearer Whitehall."

Carroll also said that the vindictive reports about Kennedy Smith "spring more from an anti-Kennedy bias in some of the British rightwing press than from the facts." What a strange, almost juvenile, way to deal with a problem as important as that of Northern Ireland.

The capitalist press, of course, has got nothing to boast about, any section of it, in its coverage of British imperialism's humiliation at the hands of the IRA's armed and revolutionary national-liberation struggle, which all the bourgeois, including the petty-bourgeois Trots, would love to kid themselves was not happening.

A completely new deal for the whole of Ireland, dismantling the hated and infamous partition, may yet still not be reached for one reason or another, by way of historical hold-ups looming everywhere to render British imperialism paralysed from achieving anything any more.

But the trend of the future is unmistakable. Imperialism is falling ever deeper into unsustainable and intolerable crisis for everyone. Abolish capitalism. Build the SLP.  Build Leninism. RB

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

Imperialist sweatshops cannot avoid fulfilling the Marxist view of history - preparing the future revolutionary proletariat.

The existence of sweatshops is due to the globalization of the economy, through the transfer of industries such as textiles, which are unprofitable in developed countries, to others where labor is very cheap. Capital from these sectors has moved into Central America and some parts of the Caribbean, while retail stores are buying their supplies from Asian companies located in that part of the Americas.

Labor costs in Central America fluctuate from 1.35 dollars in Costa Rica to 0.40 dollars in southern Mexico, while in the United States they stand at 17.30 per hour. In Nicaragua, where the advent of sweatshops is recent (there are now 18 such companies with about 10,000 employees), they are considered the only dynamic sector. 

In 1996, clothing exports more than doubled. The average hourly wage in that country is 50 cents on the dollar.

According to the Salvadoran Clothing Industry Association, exports from these plants during the January-June period of 1995 and 1996 rose by 104 percent in Nicaragua, 90 percent in Haiti, 39 percent in southern Mexico, 31 percent in Honduras and 23 percent in El Salvador, while dropping 15 percent in Colombia and six per-cent in Costa Rica. It is clear that export growth is greatest in the countries where wages are lowest.

Legislation stipulates a minimum age for workers, hygiene standards, basic working conditions and overtime pay, but the reality of the sweatshops is quite different from that. Mistreatment of workers has grown along with profits, and government authorities make concessions and modify the labor laws to benefit the sweatshops. In other words, the lack of jobs and resources, plus corruption, weaken the law's authority.

 • A verbal war has broken out in El Salvador between government authorities and trade unions over the ever stronger presence in the country of sweatshops.

The number of sweatshops has grown by 46 percent a year in the last seven years, and it has become the principal unconventional source of exports. In 1990, sweatshops had sales totaling 81 million dollars, while in January-November 1996, the figure was 710 million, according to NOTIMEX.

In the opinion of the Central Reserve Bank, they have generated 29,000 jobs, which is one of the reasons that they have been exempted from paying taxes on the importation of machinery, equipment, tools and other items.

Trade unionists state that working conditions are inhuman, and since their pleas have fallen upon deaf ears in their own country, a delegation went to the United States and was able to testify at a congressional subcommittee hearing.

The trade union members charge that sweatshop workers must put in 12-hour days, sometimes going until midnight; that supervisors constantly shout at workers and mistreat them; that the workers are not allowed to organize themselves for their own protection in any way; and that in many plants the employees - most of whom are women - are only allowed to go to the bathroom twice a day.

When the workers of the GABO clothing factory demanded wage raises and other improvements, the management responded in the usual manner: it closed down the plant and fired 400 workers, without paying what it owed to the banks, public services and personnel.

Since these sweatshops have no permanent infrastructure, they close down overnight with no warning and the capital is transferred to some other place where the labor is just as cheap or cheaper than the previous location. 

Salvadorans often complain that capital is being moved to Honduras and southern Mexico, where - as impossible as it seems - wages are even lower and the exploitation is greater.