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 SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]
No 901 Tuesday April 29 1997                                                                                                                   10p

All capitalist-organised work is exploitation, and nothing will change under the new government. Only Socialist Labour offers a civilised future of guaranteed lifetime employment for all,- working for the common good. New Labour will force workers to become more dominated than ever by the exploitation-driven jobs market. Sectarian Trotskyite idiocy can never stop sabotaging the SLP. Reject its reactionary petty-bourgeois individualism.

An election victory for the bourgeois ideology of 'self-reliance' has always been a certainty in a bourgeois election, but the only serious impact in the campaign has been made by Socialist Labour.

Tory, Liberal, and Labour have been variously endorsed by the capitalist press, and massively promoted by television, for making the system safe again for private enterprise and the profit motive.

The SLP has reopened the political class war for society to continue developing as a whole community where the flourishing of every single person would be the condition for the happiness of all, as it should be.

As SLP broadcasts and its candidates alone have said, a modern society with all its potential wealth, organisation, communication, and know-how, and in view of its total interdependence, should simply no longer contemplate leaving literally millions of people at the bottom of the economic and social ladder to fester on in poverty, disadvantage, and despair.

Such a vast pool of educational under-achievement, cultural deprivation, and hostile resentment can only speak loudly about the falseness and insecurity of the rest of society, living in a fool's paradise of shallow consumerism and endless protection worries for the home and family.

As an extreme expression of this insoluble contradiction, what is the point of having 'made it' in life if they are 'achievements' which cannot be shared in some way or other with anyone and everyone?

In some more critical parts of the bourgeois world already, the position has been reached where those 'making it' have to surround themselves with high barbed-wire fences around their homes, and squads of private security guards policing their districts.

Such a basically unsatisfactory way of life obviously screams out in such raw-conflict communities as El Salvador (see subsequent story), but such incipient civil war has also long been the condition in the most successful imperialist countries such as the USA, - as the capitalist press itself has to admit:

Steven Wiley, head of the FBI's violent crime section, told the Senate judiciary committee in Washington that criminal groups claiming affiliation to LA's two main gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, were reported in 180 communities in 42 states. Their members total 652,000 and they have been responsible for nearly 7,000 murders in 10 years, a record of mayhem to inspire the producers of another LA export: violent Hollywood movies.

A quarter of them live in LA, many in the South Central district, the black-Hispanic ghetto where the 1992 riots began, provoked by a white jury's acquittal of four white policemen who were video-taped beating a black, Rodney King, after a car chase.

Today the gangs are as busy as ever. South Central is much the same as it was five years ago — down-at-heel and high in unemployment — despite a chorus of promises after the riots.

After the smoke had cleared from the 600 destroyed or damaged buildings stretching 50 miles across the city, Bill Clinton visited LA promising a $6 billion renewal programme during his forthcoming presidency. Yet today 200 burnt-out vacant lots remain, most of them in South Central. A fifth of the area's residents are out of jobs: in some places the figure is 70 per cent. More than half South Central's residents live in poverty.

The figures are an indictment of American business and government, two legs of the "tripod" on which the "Rebuild LA" programme depended to revive the inner city area. The third leg was the community.

If just one leg failed, the head of the programme warned five years ago, the tripod would collapse. In the event, only one leg held: the community.

Of the $6 billion promised by Mr Clinton, the government has provided only $430 million for development. Of a network of 100 community development banks he promised for inner cities, only one has appeared in LA. In its 12 months of life it has made just 13 loans.

Of the 125 promised "enterprise zones" with tax incentives to attract industry, only one has been established in South Central, with minimal impact.

Commercial banks have earmarked $310 million over 10 years for the development, but their lending rules preclude poor, crime-ridden communities such as South Central.

Mr Clinton could, at the stroke of his pen, order a change in the banks' lending practices, but he has not done so.

This week the Rebuild LA organisation's mandate expired with the presentation of its final report to Mr Riordan at the conference at which he made his buoyant speech. In an inimitable LA touch, the conference was sponsored by Michael Milken, the former junk-bond manipulator and jailbird.

Mr Riordan is a multi-millionaire Republican entrepreneur. In his first term, which has just ended, he increased the police force by 2,000, a move which reassured his mainly white, well-off, suburban supporters.

In Mr Riordan's recent re-election 65 per cent of the voters were white. But whites are not seen in South Central.

In the past five years only modest rebuilding has occurred in South Central, mainly through community efforts by Hispanic newcomers. Otherwise, conditions remain much the same as in 1992, when blacks torched, and Hispanics and whites looted, during three fearful days and nights.

The ingredients are, therefore, in place for another explosion. All that is needed is a spark, a provocation such as that provided by the acquittal of Rodney King's attackers in April 1992.

Even in less affluent Britain, there are now twice as many commercially-hired property police and security guards as there are regular state police. But crime still increases and becomes more and more audacious.

Ever greater unfairness and injustice in the get-rich rat-race must eventually recreate a mass movement, for socialism and for a completely new way of running society.

At the same time, more and more of those who have "made it" will wonder what is the point if it is within a society heading only towards escalating lawlessness, graft, and corruption, and sharpening resentment and class conflict.

The SLP has laid down a great marker in this election. More than 60 candidates for socialism this time; hundreds of candidates for socialism next time.

Meanwhile, the rat-race to flourish or survive is going to become a whole lot nastier, with ever-increasing job insecurity as firms come under growing trade-war pressure to get more and more productivity and profitability out of workers. Short-term contract rip-offs will mount; work conditions will speed up and deteriorate.

Continuing mass unemployment will carry on giving the bosses the whip hand, - "Do as we tell you, or back on the dole".

This is the real poverty trap, - totally undermining the working class's ability to fight back easily.

The capitalist press itself admits all this in its more objective moments, - and also admits that New Labour will remain firmly on the side of the 'self-reliant' capitalist philosophy, in effect denying that the rat-race will inevitably produce losers and failures in growing numbers. 'Get on, or get lost' is the attitude recorded from New Labour's spin doctors:

THE cabinet which Tony Blair looks virtually certain to form on Friday will not raise benefit payments above the level of inflation for the next five years.

"There will be no real-terms increases in benefits under the Labour government," colleagues recalled their leader saying when one NEC member urged the meeting to include special treatment in the manifesto for those on incapacity benefit who were hit by last year's rule changes. There was no protest from unions or left-wingers when Mr Blair emphatically said No.

Coming barely 24 hours after the Guardian's report that Britain has more children living in poverty — one in three — than any other EU state, the stance will be criticised by some poverty lobbyists. But Labour is adamant that the right combination of carrot and stick will reverse the trend toward a permanent underclass.

"The best way to tackle poverty is to to help people into jobs — real jobs," says Labour's manifesto, which goes on to make plain to under-25s who reject training, voluntary work and other options that "rights and responsibilities must go hand in hand, without [the] option of a life on full benefit".

The manifesto's promise of "a pro-active employment service to develop a package of job search, training and after-school care to help [lone parents] off benefit" also hints at tougher treatment for single mothers and a crackdown on the growing problem of housing benefit fraud.

From Margaret Thatcher's arrival in power to her departure, the average income rose by 36 per cent but the income of the bottom tenth fell by 14 per cent and that of the top tenth rose by 64 per cent. 

One cause was rising unemployment, another the fall in wages for low-skilled jobs, with many paying less than £50 per week. Between 1979 and 1993 poverty increased from 6 to 24 per cent among couples with young children and from 19 to 58 per cent among lone parents.

The Government's own figures show nearly 14 per cent are now totally dependent on welfare. That's about 8 million people and even this is an underestimate because of the thousands of people, most of them young, who don't register in any statistics — they have disappeared, at least from officialdom.

Throughout this century people have defined themselves by their work. They were miners, engineers, printers, draymen, tanners. And they were predominantly male. But as the manufacturing industries collapsed, more jobs were taken by women and millions of badly educated men could no longer define themselves. 'I'm a printer' could be said with pride; 'I'm on benefit' is a mark of exclusion.

The decline of manufacturing coincided roughly with the destruction of the old working-class communities. Factories closed and the old terrace houses were 'slum-cleared'. Between 1960 and 1970 entire tracts of inner-city Britain were cleared and their residents shipped out to soulless estates or tower blocks.

A way of life was destroyed and out of the destruction sprang the underclass. Many prospered, adapted to new work methods, saved money and bought their homes. A social revolution took place as Britain moved from a society that rented to one that owned. But the old, the infirm, the unemployed and the badly educated were left behind.

As their poverty grew, so the attitude of the rest of society hardened. Over the past five years both Labour and the Conservatives have accepted that the underclass must, to a greater or lesser degree, take some responsibility for the state it is in.

Not surprisingly, the Tories, the party of individual enterprise, adopt this approach. Labour, however, has historically held that poverty and its social consequences are the responsibility of the state and society.

No more. Take Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair's chief spin doctor: 'New Labour stands for the ordinary families who work hard and play by the rules...New Labour's enemies include the irresponsible who fall down on their obligations to their families and therefore their community.'

The same military metaphor is conjured up by Frank Field, the Labour MP widely tipped to be given a job of sorting out social security in a Blair administration: 'Welfare is the enemy within, whose rules actively undermine the moral fabric of our character.'

Education is crucial because the defining feature of the underclass is its lack of the skills necessary for a modern economy. Between 1945 and 1970 getting work was easy. But the decline of manufacturing industry has ended the supply of manual jobs and virtually destroyed the old apprenticeship system.

In the last century there was another term for the underclass — the mob. Politicians are increasingly speaking of the new poor as if they are a mob — to be controlled, restrained, kept in their place. It's a dangerous strategy. We all know what mobs do when they know they have nothing to lose.

And this scenario can only grow dramatically worse, because the great saviour of postwar capitalism, - the ever-rising expansion of world trade, - is plainly no longer having the same trickle-down re-distributive effect as before. Really cut-throat competition is taking over. The working class is facing super-exploitation, degradation, and tyranny everywhere.

Even in Britain, still a successful imperialist competitor by comparison with some, - poverty continues growing relatively, - and even absolutely in some areas.

In the less well established regions of the now international free market, these intolerable conditions for modern cultured working people are pushing societies towards class-war explosion points:

It is in small provincial towns like Yuzha that the dark side of Russia's increasingly brutal social contrasts can be seen. Here in Ivanova region, the poorest of the unemployed, the elderly and the sick are going hungry.

The economy of Yuzha has all but collapsed, and with it the will to do anything about it. At the centre of the town and its troubles is a textile mill built in pre-revolutionary times by a wealthy merchant.

Deprived of cheap cotton from Uzbekistan, the factory laid off all but 1,400 workers, then was privatised and sold on to an investment company in Moscow. They were not answering the phone this week, even to the town's mayor. 

The result is that 18.5 per cent of the Yuzha region's population of 30,000 are officially registered as unemployed. Twice that figure are thought to be out of work. Yuzha has the dubious distinction of being the poorest region in Russia. More than 80 per of the population live below the poverty line.

With these statistics come others — 14 new cases of tuberculosis this year alone, and an infant mortality rate of 24 per thousand. The town's one safety net is a soup kitchen and hostel which feeds 30 people at at time in 20-day shifts. That way the queue of 400 of the town's poorest get three weeks of a good diet once a year.

There was little chatter in the small room as its hungry people hurriedly ate. Three pregnant single mothers sat at one table, while Chernobylsi — the former army reservists who shovelled radioactive fallout from the reactor — sat at another.

Elsewhere, the Chernobylsi have blocked railway lines in protest at the non-payment of their pensions. Mr Sekelin said: "We are too frightened. I am a boilermaker and I need work, and besides, who wants to shed more of their blood for this country?"

The phone on the desk of the town's head of administration rang every few minutes,. Valentina Sisuyeva belonged to the party created by the Russian prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, but her support for the fat cats of Moscow soon crumbled.

"Look. I am a woman. I am not a politician. The cotton from Uzbekistan has not come. The army is crying out for clothes, but there are no orders, and the factory has been bought by a New Russian. I don't know what is going on inside."

No one in the Lipatova household had eaten for three days. Not Valentina, aged 37, nor her mother, aged 70, who was moaning on the bed, nor her white-faced seven-year-old son Sacha, who was sick with the flu.

"The fridge still works," Valentina said, as though surprised. "But it's no use; it's empty."

When the state benefits still arrived, the household of six lived on a diet of potatoes, chicken cubes, bread and tea. But Valentina last received dole money a year ago. Her mother's pension of £33 and the £15 child benefit are three months late.

No one stirred in the two-bedroom flat in a log-built house. "There's nothing to eat," said Valentina, her hand sweeping over a table covered in years of grime.

"What do you expect?" said a neighbour, steering his goat into a pen outside. "Too many children. While the rest of us are out digging potatoes, her husband sits on his arse looking out of the window." Even poverty has its pecking order.

Valery Ruzavin, a plasterer who last worked six years ago, feeds his family by fishing. About 31b of fish earned 8,000 roubles (90p) in the local market, with which his mother bought potatoes.

The lights went out in the flat two years ago.

The 170-page document from the United Nations children's organisation on the plight of children in the former Soviet Union, central Europe, and the Balkans, painted a distressing picture of rampant poverty, family breakdown and sexual abuse, alongside rising juvenile crime, murder and suicide rates, and the reappearance of tuberculosis and diphtheria.

The disintegration of the Soviet system generated "great hopes that the needs of children would be better met in the short term", the report said. "These hopes have been largely betrayed."

Throughout the region there were more children living in care in 1995 (about a million) than in 1990. John Donohue, the Unicef official responsible for eastern Europe, said the children institutionalised in homes and orphanages were "ensnared in a trap".

"In many ways the children are worse off [than under communism] and this is a scandal," said Caspar Kajth. the report's co-author.

In central Europe, the number of children living in poverty has more than doubled in the Nineties to 2.5 million, while in the 18 countries surveyed 8 million people had been displaced by war and ethnic conflict since 1989.

"In countries like Moldova, Georgia or Armenia, the public child protection system has virtually collapsed."

The number of infants, aged up to three, being placed in homes has soared by 75 per cent in Estonia, and by about 40 per cent in Latvia, Romania, and Russia.

The social dislocation caused by the radical changes since 1989 has had a dramatic impact on traditional patterns of family life. Marriage rates have fallen sharply and the divorce rate has soared.

In Russia, the report said, one in three children of divorced parents "never see their father again and only 4 per cent of divorced fathers maintain a regular relationship with their children".

In Estonia, 44 per cent of births in 1995 were to single mothers, while in Russia, Bulgaria and Moldova, one in five babies born in 1995 were to teenage mothers.

Juvenile crime, depression, and abuse of children by adults are rising inexorably. The teenage male murder rates rose more than fivefold between 1989 and 1995 in Lithuania, and male teenage suicide rates in the same period almost doubled in Belarus.

Polish social workers believe half the prostitutes on the Polish-German border are under 18, while 11- and 12-year-old prostitutes work in Lithuanian hotels.

The report said: "The region is increasingly portrayed... as a sex paradise where customers can easily obtain children."

Even these capitalist press reports themselves occasionally ask or speculate about how much longer will the masses internationally continue to put up with such inhuman and totally unnecessary oppression.

Some of their reports also supply part of the answer, of course. Now that capitalist 'freedom' has the social and economic control, it is going to use it in armed class force, legally or mafia-run, to make sure that no outspoken opponents of the new corruption survive to speak out too long:

A DARK film about corruption and mafia connections at the top of the ruling class in Boris Yeltsin's Russia is making waves even before its release next month.

Not only does it draw a picture of an amoral government rotten to the core, but high up in the credits is a familiar name — the president's former bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, billed as "main consultant".

If the behaviour of Russia's security services really resembles that shown in Schizophrenia, the country is in deep trouble.

The film is the first to deal directly with one of the most sinister aspects of post-Soviet Russia: the murders of hundreds of media personalities and businessmen which have gone unsolved in the 1990s. The film's director, Victor Sergeyev, says that 500 have died.

Schizophrenia opens with real footage of the funerals of the two most celebrated victims: television personality Vladimir Listyev, shot in his home, and investigative reporter Dmitri Kholodov, blown up by a bomb in a briefcase.

Part of the fictional plot is based on a true story said to have been told to the star and co-writer, Alexander Abdulov, by one of Russia's most notorious mafia godfathers, about a secret service officer sprung from jail by his former bosses to carry out a hit on a powerful banker.

One of the chief villains is a deputy prime minister who secretly orders an Aeroflot jet on a Moscow-Paris flight to be blown up in mid-air to avoid being exposed by one of the passengers.

Mr Sergeyev's message is clear: murders go unsolved because those who are supposed to solve them are prevented from doing so, usually because they themselves are involved.

The idea is voiced on every street corner and in countless newspaper articles. But to have it put so directly by Lenfilm — the respected St Petersburg studio which, with its Moscow counterpart, make up Russia's Hollywood — is new.

"It's as if we have marched towards a democratic society, to a state with democratic values, a state in which human rights and the inviolability of human life are enshrined in the constitution — and yet the words of the constitution, and what really goes on in practice in this country, are two different things," Mr Sergeyev said in his office in Lenfilm's crumbling, colonnaded Petersburg headquarters. Since he began work on Schizophrenia, he has become the studio's chief executive.

"The main idea of this film is to scream out — because it's already too late to speak, you can only scream — that we cannot go on living this way."

Since being sacked, Mr Korzhakov has gone into politics, getting elected to parliament in a by-election in Tula, south of Moscow. He has become notorious for hinting at compromising material he possesses on the circle around Mr Yeltsin, and endorsing Schizophrenia may be part of his effort to present himself as an honest soldier astonished at the corruption in the Kremlin and the government White House.

He has formed a loose alliance with Alexander Lebed, a key future presidential challenger who makes the fight against corruption and the mafia one of his war cries. At one point in the film, the hero is seen against the backdrop of graffiti that says: "Lebed Is Our President".

By attaching his name to a film which casts Mr Yeltsin's Russia in such an evil light, Mr Korzhakov again raises the question of what he was up to in his five years at the president's side as Kremlin power-broker.

And Mr Sergeyev, though he says he voted against communism rather than for Mr Yeltsin, played an active part in the president's re-election campaign.

None of all the above conditions are widespread yet in Britain, but what is the unmistakable trend of social development in Britain over the last 30 years or more? Obviously, conflict is getting worse. Life is getting harsher.

New Labour's silly office-seeking-opportunist mentality is completely distanced from any such understanding. If Blair & Co think seriously about anything at all, they pretend to believe that what needs doing in Britain is to just gently tinker with a few bad moves made by previous Tory governments.

But this is just crass ignorance. History simply is not made this way. No history ever has been merely the result of the particular flavour or idiosyncrasies of any particular bourgeois regime.

It is historical periods which dominate, - their character set by far more profound circumstances than the chance outcomes of general elections or party-leadership elections, or the individual stamp of ensuing leadership.

To remain capitalist in a period of British imperialist decline, all bourgeois governments, - New Labour included, - will have to relentlessly keep taking back all the boomtime conditions and welfare rights conceded to the working class when earlier circumstances allowed and when historical developments were greatly in favour of workers' militant struggle.

A period of New Labour government ahead, or any pro-market government, will not only have to continue forcing the burdens of British imperialist decline onto the backs of the working class. It will almost certainly have to pile on the burdens of world imperialist crisis as well, - an international trade-war slump of possibly terrifying proportions.

It is an insane notion that a few tinkering reforms can put things right with Britain, - as New Labour pretends.

It has always been an insane notion that capitalism's problems can ever be turned round by tinkering reforms of any kind, or any quantity.

The evolution of British imperialist society forms a complete graph historically, - not remotely pre-determined, but next-to-impossible to alter once the specific historical circumstances had unfolded.

A peak of world supremacy was reached. A long decline then set in as the workings of the monopolisation system produced ever-more competitive rival powers.

British imperialist defeat and collapse is now the overwhelmingly likeliest agenda.

Bourgeois parties are all paralysed on specific longterm perspectives and immediate decisions on Europe, for example, because of demoralisation and the impossible difficulties facing ailing British imperialist competitiveness. Devolution rears up likewise, confusing all.

It is for all these reasons that workers in Britain, more than anything else, need a correct programme of future change. Why and how will a revolutionary socialist transformation be reached?

Socialist Labour is the first mass party to give a correct lead, - or to avoid giving an incorrect lead, to put it more precisely at this early stage of the SLP's development. It says it will build a mass party for an immediate transition to socialism and the abolition of capitalism, leading the fight both via the electoral contests which the bourgeoisie permit, and via extra-parliamentary struggles (against unjust laws and developments) which will go on whether the bourgeoisie permits them or not.

The Labour Party has not remotely given such a correct lead in modern times. The Communist Party always incorrectly told workers they could one day rely on being the 'left' wing of a successful 'socialist' Labour government. Militant and other Trots always incorrectly told workers that their entryism would one day in fact provide that 'left-wing socialist' leadership of the Labour Party.

All were horribly wrong, and all these traditions horribly misled the working class, - and still do.

The Militant pose, and other such Trotskyite posturing by middle class 'revolutionary' sects, was and remains the worst deception on the working class.

What any individual Trots thought they believed, or pretended to be sincere about, is utterly irrelevant.

The reality of all the Trot evolutionary developments, sooner or later, has been a switch essentially to labour-movement careerism, either inside the Labour Party, or inside the trade unions, or as 'independent' voices kibbutzing in from outside.

The Militant fraud is typical. All that they actually achieved in history was to burrow their way up the Labour Party hierarchy, ending up with a couple of MPs and a few hundred councillors.

And then what? The whole stinking edifice collapsed about their ears, leaving their 40-year posture of "leading the working class to socialism" a complete failure and an utterly demoralising waste of time and sacrifice.

It is complete idiocy to claim that "at least all that 'left' pressure won more progressive reforms than would otherwise have been carried out by Labour". It did not need Militant to make Labour a reformist party. It was always a reformist party. It was never anything else. 

And its greatest 'reforms' were carried out under a rightwing imperialist, - Attlee,- before Militant were ever heard of. (And even those 'reforms', like all 'reforms', of course could not possibly resolve any of the real problems facing the working class in history.)

The other reality about Militant history is their known sectarianism and the blatant careerism of many of their leading practitioners, such as Derek Hatton.

And it is these persistent indicators which point to the truth about Militant so-called 'sincerity'. The repeated sectarianism and the repeated careerist opportunism exactly fit the real position of 'Militant' concerning the "international socialist revolution" which they always postured so mightily about.

In fact these subjective individualist chancers were all died-in-the-wool anti-communists.

They were born out of the between-wars anti-communism which slandered the Soviet Union as having turned counter-revolutionary and become a stooge of German imperialism, a nonsense put a stop to for serious-minded workers by the colossal achievement of the Soviet workers state in destroying German imperialist aggression in just four years (1941-45) when the whole of imperialist Europe had been overrun in mere weeks; then in abolishing capitalism from all East Europe in the postwar period; and then in chaperoning the worldwide national-liberation struggles which wiped out all the West European international empires in the same postwar period.

But these modern Militant Trots adopted their renewed sectarian anti-communist garb of opportunist entryism into the Labour Party precisely during this further period of phenomenal revolutionary-socialist success for the Soviet workers state.

These are doctrinaire programmed anti-communists. Their catastrophic 'Labour-entryist' world view was the pure subjective-idealism of a petty-bourgeois class outlook. Their endless sectarian careerism is the product of their incurable individualism, the other telltale signature of fake-'left' middle-class 'revolutionaries'.

Typically sectarian-opportunist, these Trots have now abandoned their failed Militant clothing without a word of explanation to the working class about their prolonged 40-year failed Labour-entryist strategy, or even any sensible words about the name-change,(- some nonsense about 'militant' having become a dirty word in international politics.)

Typically sectarian-opportunist, these Trots refused to join Arthur Scargill's new Socialist Labour Party, insisting on the 'importance' of their own 'individual history', - one they have never had the courage or good sense to make a full historical analysis of, and one they have even now abandoned the name of, - again without a word of sensible explanation.

Typically sectarian-opportunist, these Trots have now re-emerged as 'the Socialist Party' just when Scargill has launched 'the Socialist Labour Party'. And now they are busy running candidates against the SLP, and joining in the slandering of Scargill as a 'Stalinist dictator'. They are anti-communist to the last.

For years, these Trots pursued the 'left' option for stardom inside the Labour Party.

Now they are pursuing the same individualist option, dreaming of stardom, outside the Labour Party (because they were thrown out), but outside the main new workers development as well, the Socialist Labour Party. Good riddance. The SLP is far better off without them. Endless Trotskyite opportunist factionalising would quickly destroy the SLP. Keeping these anti-Soviet sects out has led to a little damaging confusion in the SLP's development. Letting all the Trots in to run riot in sectarian recruitment and anti-leadership manipulation would have led to infinitely greater damaging confusion.

The sickest thing about Trotskyism is how it precisely chimes in with the interests of the more general expressions of bourgeois individualism, constantly harping on the 'individual democratic rights' of different sectarian 'members' of the permanent anti-leadership 'opposition' within the SLP.

The Trots are an exact fake-'left' mirror image of the anti-collectivist philosophy of the petty bourgeoisie for 'self-reliance'. They utterly misunderstand the essential Marxist science of freedom being the recognition of necessity, and the flourishing of every individual being the condition for the well-being of the whole of society.

The notion of "the right to be irrationally wrong about everything, but to still have the right to keep on saying it and to demand society's respect" is a phoney bourgeois idea, - nothing whatever to do with Marxism (which is only interested in the right to be rational).

It is put up as a bogus libertarian ideal under capitalist society to enable harmless cranks to create the pretence that the monopoly-bourgeois dictatorship simply does not exist, and that 'real democracy' rules, with everyone allowed to say what they like and get the rest of society to agree with them, even though they are wrong or even barmy.

In reality, of course, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will NEVER allow itself to be voted out under ANY conditions. 'Democracy' is strictly for show. All sorts of emergency reserve powers would be called into operation by the Privy Council, etc, if ever a socialist majority in Parliament was actually about to abolish capitalism.

Obviously, it is a show which genuine socialist parties are obliged to perform in too, - precisely the better to be able to denounce the entire capitalist-dominated racket and to be able to summon workers for a real struggle, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, to build a mighty class movement eventually capable of overcoming even all the Special Powers and Privy Council trickery in the world.

But all that Trotskyite posturing for "individual democratic rights" against a collective mass socialist movement can achieve is more publicity for bourgeois ideology to deride the SLP, for example, and give further life to bourgeois disinformation's ability to keep workers confused.

Some SLPers are still being fooled by the plausibility of fake-'lefts' hovering around Socialist Labour, feigning a 'joint interest' against the Tories, capitalism, and Blair. Clearly, the EPSR's struggle to expose the anti-communist class roots of petty-bourgeois intellectualism, its victims, and its effects & influences, needs to strengthen, not diminish.

The whole of Trotskyite history is marked by its fetish for single-issue idealism, diametrically antagonistic to Marxism's collectivist historical perspective.

Communists will accept the Cuban socialist revolution for what it is, - clearly a workers state, with the bourgeoisie abolished, and battling right on the front line against world (mainly US) imperialism, - a magnificent historic advance, - full of flaws, faults, and imperfections, obviously, - but a breakthrough development to be enthusiastically fought for and defended by all serious-minded workers and socialists the world over, - urging the Cuban comrades wherever possible to vastly deepen their revolution's grasp of Marxist-Leninist science which is their gravest weakness.

Trotskyite petty-bourgeois individualist philosophy, on the other hand, may make the occasional opportunist gesture of one cheer for Cuba (because all the best of the working class is cheering Cuba on) but is really only concerned to sneer at Cuba for supposedly 'getting things wrong'.

Trot derision ranges from "It is doomed to give socialism a bad name, because socialism cannot be built in one country, Cuba or anywhere else" to "Castro is a Stalinist dictator" or "Such a homophobic regime does not deserve to survive". etc. In all of this ivory-tower 'socialism' from the comfort of armchairs in the affluent West, all this counter-revolutionary disinformation is the product of single-issue idealism, the philosophy of petty-bourgeois individualism hostile to Marxism-Leninism.

Empty or downright misleading slogans such as 'permanent revolution' or 'no socialism in one country' are Trotskyism's hallmark in which some supposedly 'logical' idea or other is pursued to its absolute extreme, transformed by mere windy verbiage into a 'historical necessity', and then used as just a stupid sectarian cudgel with which to bash away at the serious collective revolutionary struggle. Deep down, the real aim is one only, - to give each individual sectarian his philosophical motivation, convincing himself he is right, and convincing himself he is correct to court martyrdom in pursuit of this 'supreme issue', etc.

But only idealist 'history' is made in this way, not real history. And Marxism is the science of real historical necessity.

The Cuban revolution goes on alone because it has no choice. Only in idealist fantasy can the Cuban socialist revolution break out of its total US-imperialist blockade-isolation by marching or sending emissaries into Haiti, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil, etc, to stir up successful revolutions there in order to totally undermine and defeat US imperialism all in one go, - which is the fantasy world which the Trotskyite "no socialism in one country" armchair socialists live in.

It always remains the great mystery, of course (not really), as to why these self-proclaimed 'mighty' Trotskyite sects, all 57 varieties, never club together to go and start what they claim Cuba should go and start, - exporting revolutionary war to further undermine US imperialism, whose blitzkrieg reaction would then, theoretically, be halted by the inflamed response of still more revolutionary proletarian millions even further round the American empire, - which is supposed to be how Cuba would escape annihilation for invading Haïti, or Puerto Rico, for example.

As it happens, the Cuban socialist revolution has in fact carried out some of the most heroic and self-sacrificing acts of generous international revolutionary assistance in the whole history of progressive civilisation, sending important troop contingents and ill-affordable economic and military resources to Namibia and Angola to wage successful war against reactionary South African apartheid-intervention against the national-liberation revolutions in those countries, and risking major imperialist intervention against Cuba itself in retaliation.

As it also happens, the Cuban workers state did in fact indulge in some revolutionary fantasy by sending its most outstanding revolutionary emissary, Che Guevara, to first Zaire and then Bolivia to try to spark off anti-imperialist revolutions in those countries, both ending in failure and eventually in the death of Guevara.

The Cuban revolution is weakest where it should be strongest, - in the mastery and further development of Marxist-Leninist theory, the one really crucial export for all revolutionaries worldwide.

Fake 'communists' deride the Cuban workers state for its 'human rights' crimes, for its 'Stalinist dictatorship', for its 'collectivisation of poverty through its counter-revolutionary policy of socialism-in-one-country, instead of the collectivisation of wealth through permanent international revolution', etc.

Real communists, on the other hand, would back Cuba with unconditional support in all of its conflicts with bourgeois ideological derision, whether from rightwing 'free world' imperialist disinformation or from fake-'left' petty-bourgeois individualist subjectivism, (which is the other side of the same counter-revolutionary 'democracy' coin.)

But real communists would also like to polemicise with the Cuban revolutionary party on disputed questions of Marxist-Leninist science which could mislead the international working class and harm the Cuban workers state itself (see countless past EPS Reviews on such polemics), - (incidentally giving the lie to the unserious and irresponsible Trot parroting of "totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship and cover-up" and "the denial of the freedom of criticism", etc.)

It is only out of the unconditional solidarity with the Cuban revolution against all attacks on it by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois idealist philosophy that real communists can have the standing to seriously polemicise with the Cuban revolutionary party about crucial differences on international historical lessons, such as Allende, Grenada, Gorbachev, etc, etc.

By extension, the Trotskyite oppositional wreckers trying to infiltrate and undermine the SLP could not be more wrong when screeching that the real communists supporting Socialist Labour are only in fact doing so as clone-like yes-men stooges of Arthur Scargill.

The SLP has only got where it is by genuine debate and real democratic input, and it will face many real conflicts ahead over programme, strategy, and tactics. The fight for the correct theoretical understanding of world society's development, and the practical applications that imposes on working-class politics, is something far too vast for the SLP, or any other mass movement, even the biggest, to be able to ignore for long, and there is not the slightest indication that Socialist Labour is in any way trying to ignore such discussions. 

It is precisely because the SLP is advancing successfully along correct socialist channels towards a mass workers party that the middle-class Trot oppositionist venom now pours out in endless hysterical contradictory nonsense. On the one hand, the CPGB Trots and others screech (April 25) that the SLP has become an anti-communist McCarthyite Stalinist dictatorship to which the EPSR is supposedly exclusively dedicated.

But on the other hand, the Trots moan in the very next paragraph that "the so-called Scargill 'constitution' specifically bans SLP members from being in, or supporting, other political organisations, with their own principles and publications", so why are not EPSR readers banned as CPGB members are, and other Trot entryists?

The truth is much simpler and not at all contradictory. The EPSR is one journal among many which now enthusiastically support the SLP's development, while remaining a completely independent publication and a forum for never-ending discussion of Marxist-Leninist theory on every subject under the sun. It could have turned against Socialist Labour, as all the Trot papers have done. But it staked its view of history that the SLP will become a vital development for the revival of a mass movement for the socialist revolution in Britain. Many of its readers have wholeheartedly joined in the work of building Socialist Labour as the clear majority in the SLP want it built. All the readers of the 57 varieties of the Trot papers have joined in the petty-bourgeois opposition's attempts to infiltrate and manipulate the SLP into an opposite direction from the one it chose to go in, or to destroy it by ridicule and provocation from outside.

All the swear-words which the Trots now all routinely direct, parrot-like, against the EPSR, in a desperate attempt at ridicule by slander, - in fact deal with issues (of contemporary history and debate, and near-past events) which can only keep on recurring until resolved into theoretical lessons, - the real nature of the Soviet workers state; of the Chinese workers state; of the other remaining workers states; the real class nature of Trotskyism; the catastrophic effect of Political Correctness and all single-issue reformist bandwagons on rational thought and socialist cadre-training; etc.

The EPSR will continue to polemicise on all such matters independently of anyone and everything. The struggle for correct Marxist-Leninist theory must rule. In the very long run, the ideas which win through to predominate on the pages of the EPSR will succeed because they happen to be correct, or fail because they prove to be wrong.

The EPSR keeps worrying the Trots and other detractors sick to biliousness because it keeps getting everything right.

The problem with Trotskyite petty-bourgeois idealism is that it is congenitally incapable of pursuing any rational argument whatsoever, as the EPSR's long summer polemics demonstrated exposing the crass folly of Trot defeatist subjectivism which wrote off Adams and the IRA as capitulating sell-outs, and every anti-imperialist struggle worldwide as having been pacified totally and defeated by the US imperialist New World Order (see endless past Reviews). 

For reasons of its class-philosophical essence, Trotskyism has also always been incapable of ever offering any constructive criticism towards correcting perceived mistakes in the development of the workers states. From his book The New Course, (published in the Soviet Union in 1923) onwards, Trotsky was already spewing out that "everything is rotten", etc, - Lenin's famous characterisation of Trotsky's lifelong opportunist/defeatist mentality.

But serious communist polemics are needed everywhere, all the time. The SLP will become ten times the party it is when it becomes capable of digesting any amount of published internal polemicising over developments in programme, strategy, and tactics.

Cuba would be ten times stronger as a workers state if it could respond to supportive polemics over the mistakes it makes.

A current Granma article illustrates the point, glowingly reporting on a newly-created Central Commission on Cadres where all of the emphasis is to be on moral exhortations and a Code of Ethics, - efficiency, self-sacrifice, serving others, modest, austere, upright, justice not material riches, etc.

All wholly admirable, but all entirely missing the point that only correct scientific understanding of the world, - and correct Cuban workers-state decisions, - can provide reliable future cadre leadership for Cuban socialist development.

Marxism had very little to do with morality. All freedom (to act 'morally' or fulfil anything) is ultimately dependent on recognising what is necessary in all historical development.

Cuban theory of successful anti-imperialist struggle was weak over Allende, Grenada, and Gorbachev, for example, which in turn gravely weakens the whole Cuban workers state. It was, after all, the crass ignorance of Gorbachevite revisionist opportunism (following on from similar theoretical backwardness earlier, and creating mass apathy and paralysis) which exclusively destroyed the Soviet workers state. 

Trotskyite oppositional idiocy has nothing at all in common with constructive Marxist polemics. On the contrary, it is just the destructive bleating of a hostile class force.

A successful mass workers party will need to encourage the development of constructive Marxist theory, and completely eradicate Trotskyite sectarian disruption. Build Leninism. JH

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

MLN defeats the right in El Salvador

l Salvador, with its six million inhabitants concentrated into a territory of 21,000 square kilometers, faces a dramatic situation. Its economy is parasitic, its main export product being its labor force. A total of 1.3 million Salvadorans live in the United States alone, 300,000 of whom are illegal immigrants. As a result of this emigration, 1.2 billion dollars entered El Salvador in 1996, an amount larger than the country's total exports.

The slums on the outskirts of town show the other face of a cruel society. Terrifying human degradation can be seen in the Soyapango district, with its 300,000 inhabitants. Neither in Afghanistan nor in South Africa's Soweto did I see such misery. Putrid water mixed with defecation runs through the streets. The people live in squalor, crammed into ramshackle cabins.

Agriculture is going from bad to worse. Coffee and sugar production has fallen to extremely low levels and the cotton crop is in trouble. Industry has grown in recent years but its dynamism is the result of foreign investment, which takes advantage of the low labor costs. Maquiladoras brutally exploit the workers and the national added value of exported goods is very low. There are several labor unions, but they are unable to defend workers' and campesinos' rights.

The structural imbalances which characterize the economy — which is dominated by six multimillionaire families — reflect commercial hypertrophy.

Despite the fact that the per capita gross domestic product is quite modest (below 1600 dollars), San Salvador, the capital, has enormous and sophisticated shopping centers selling products from all over the world. Every day and evening, a multitude of shoppers wander through those places, which charge prices equivalent to those in Portugal or Brazil. Rivers of beer are sold in establishments strategically situated in giant service stations, since there are virtually no prohibitions against drinking and driving.

This sick society is in a feeding frenzy. Unbridled consumerism is encouraged by a public relations blitz. The programs shown on the eight television stations (six of which are private) are interrupted by commercials every five  minutes.

The social asymmetry is amazing. The neighborhoods of the white haute bourgeoisie, like San Benito and the Escalon area, are very beautiful, pleasant, reminiscent of affluent U.S. neighborhoods. But the residents' fear can be seen in the high walls encircling the mansions, the electronic security systems and the guards armed with machine guns standing nearby.

Environmental problems are so great that they were an important issue in the election campaign. This concern is justified. Greater San Salvador, with one and a half million inhabitants, has a pollution index higher than those of Mexico City and Tokyo. The water table is contaminated by a giant garbage dump overflown by clouds of vultures. The public water system is unfit for human consumption.

Unemployment and underemployment affect 60 percent of the labor force and over 50 percent of the population is functionally illiterate. Another fact: recent statistics show that San Salvador is the most violent city in the Americas. It has surpassed Bogota and Lima: the national average number of murders per day is 22. Rapes of children and adults are frequent. Juvenile delinquency rates are frightening. Youth gangs, known as maras,  sow terror throughout the slums.

Meanwhile, former president Alfredo Cristiani has a fortune worth over one billion dollars.  According to the local press, in the week before the elections the volume of speculative trading on the stock market (which sells shares that have no real value) totaled over 900 million dollars.

What will happen in El Salvador, the showplace of unbridled neoliberalism? • 

EUROPE and the Americas have been surprised by the results of the elections in El Salvador.

The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) not only won the mayoralties in the country's major cities, but also garnered only 8000 votes less than ARENA in the legislative elections, which gives it the same level of representation in the National Assembly as ARENA,  the ruling party since the downfall of the Christian Democrats in the late 1980s.

On the early morning of March 17, the atmosphere at ARENA headquarters was somber, as I myself witnessed.

The significance of the FMLN victory is more than regional. One of the most anachronistic oligarchies on the continent has been defeated in elections by a party which was born out of a guerrilla movement with heroic revolutionary traditions. However, it would be naive to think that following these elections, the people of El Salvador will enter into a period of stability and prosperity.

We should not expect too much from the FMLN's electoral victory. El Salvador has a presidential system; domestic and foreign policy are controlled by President Calderon Sol of the ARENA party.

Nevertheless, the National Assembly has an irreplaceable legislative function. No matter what alliances  the minor parties make, ARENA will not be able to secure the legislative majority necessary for approval of its most controversial privatization projects, that of telecommunications and social security.

The FMLN defends the maintenance of free medical care in state hospitals and free education in public schools.
Determined to ensure the fulfillment of the 1992 peace agreement signed in Chapultepec, the FMLN has taken a pragmatic line. It proudly remembers the past but refuses to wallow in it. The campaign was not ideological. About five major themes were handled: the cost of living, the environment, crime, corruption and jobs.

The first words spoken by FMLN General Coordinator Salvador Sanchez on election night included a call for unity among all economic forces in order to achieve solutions to the great problems of the nation.

The FMLN proposes a social pact. Will this be possible in El Salvador?

The United States maintained a discreet distance during the campaign, abstaining from any interference in the electoral process. That position was pointed out by the Front. But we must wonder whether Washington will adopt a neutral position in the 1999 presidential elections. History shows that U.S. policy toward Central America has always been characterized by disrespect for the people's right to freely build their own future. Would the White House and the Pentagon be willing to stand back and allow the democratic process to take its natural course, considering the fact that conditions are being created for the establishment of a progressive government led by a party which emerged from the revolutionary movement?

The FMLN's surprising victory in the March elections does not correspond to what the United States considers it's interests in the region. •