Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
[P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]
No 915 Tuesday August 26 1997                                                                                                                         10p
Reformism is worse than dead but, without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary advance to socialism. The understanding of unalterable faults in the international imperialist free-market structure is crucial to the ability to develop a serious political-education programme for the working class. Single-issue campaigns and sectarian activity can be a cover for outright hostility to comprehensive scientific-socialist theory. Much New-Labour reaction has been prepared under a 'politically correct' cover. The SLP should raise its sights.

The greatest problem facing workers everywhere is lack of leadership, and this in turn is the result of a steady degeneration in theoretical understanding of capitalist crisis since earlier this century.

A correct scientific assessment of the imperialist system's insoluble contradictions has nothing to do with crisis-mongering or wishing catastrophe on the world in order to get a revolutionary political response.

Grasping the general pattern of inter-imperialist conflict due to the uncontrollably destabilising effects of private monopolies accumulating vast inflationary-capital 'surpluses' anarchically, - is far from being an 'academic' question.

Not a single phenomenon on earth can be analysed sensibly, shorn of the realisation that the great imperialist powers must inevitably sooner or later dictate a new period of devastating international strife and suffering.

The idea of pressing ahead with 'socialist' or 'anti-capitalist' struggles while in the meantime keeping an 'open mind' on whether the imperialist system is going to collapse or not, is just a giant debilitating delusion.

A purely reformist mentality is bound to predominate before long. Life will be lived in the name of 'small victories' here and there, or of 'changes' forced on capitalism which will make it 'more tolerable' or even 'better' for surviving under.

And in no time at all, entirely conservative attitudes to 'keep this going at all costs' or 'preserve that at least' will begin to prevail on matters of previous government welfare concessions or on issues of organisation or campaigning within the labour and trade-union movement.

At that point, the door slides open easily for a drift to the negative syndicalism of the import-controls kind and Little Englander chauvinism; of the jobs-demarcation inter-union disputes; of racial tensions; and of the completely reactionary 'anti-scrounger' outlook so disgracefully evident in New Labour's 'welfare-to-work' sanctimonious gimmickry, or in Clare Short's monstrous insensitivity towards the wretched people of Montserrat.

But don't just blame New Labour's leading opportunist reptiles themselves for all this reactionary degeneracy. It all flows ultimately from the benighted stagnancy of only ever thinking about the world in a completely non-revolutionary way.

But the key to the never-ending pattern of evolutionary change mixed with revolutionary leaps is grasping the nature of the revolutionary leap, especially in something as complex and as consciousness-driven as the history of social change.

The short record of the 20th century is one of epoch-shattering revolutionary achievements eventually stifled temporarily by the illusory appearance of 'more safe' and 'more secure' supposed 'advances' made by 'reformism' under capitalism.

The welfare concessions made by the imperialist powers, masking the real and unchangeably vicious workings of the capitalist system in the raw, will obviously be completely misleading and misunderstood unless placed in the clear context of the terrifying jolt given to the imperialist bourgeoisie by the 20th century's history-making revolutions.

But it is only the firm grasp of Marxist scientific theory which makes such an analysis possible, and then keeps in sight the absolute primacy of revolutionary transformation where the decisive longterm international pattern of social change is concerned.

Anti-theory philistinism mingles inseparably with material changes to make its appeal through humanity's lowest common denominator, - a complacent wish for comfort, or at least not too much discomfort or 'unnecessary agitation', etc.

An 'improving' status-quo is reformist thinking's greatest foundation. 

An economic crash would help disturb the ground. But thereafter, only 150 volumes of Marxist-Leninist philosophical and historical materialism will be of any use.

If in doubt, ask MI5 who still keep voluminous files on any left in Britain remotely suspectable of having ever had a grasp of revolutionary theory of any kind, as has just been revealed.

But the British labour movement traditionally has a dismal record in its attitude to theory. Its early indifference to world-revolutionary perspectives based on the pragmatic advances of the trade-unionist and reformist epochs was later cemented by decades of glib Stalinist revisionist plodding or by even more glib anti-communism, frequently disguised with the thin veneer of Trotskyism or other ultra-leftist posturing.

This philistinism has always decided to keep an 'open mind' about a serious Marxist-Leninist interpretation of the broadest patterns of 20th century history, - meanwhile getting on with entryist careerism up the Labour Party or the trade unions, or winning bourgeois media publicity through endless bogus 'exposures' of the 'counter-revolutionary Soviet camp' (but mostly laughably missing the actual Gorbachev counter-revolutionary betrayal when it finally came, or even supporting it as a 'progressive' development'.)

Any 'open mind' about anything had long since been forgotten in such an all-round Niagara of opportunism, - revisionist, reformist, or anti-communist.

A close companion of this anti-theory philistine tradition, and often effectively masking it, - has been a wide variety of narrow-minded sectarianism.

This again helps fail to give proper leadership to the working class by permitting intense concentration on sectional interests, or on a few limited issues, while giving the appearance of complete dedication to the all-out fight.

Exclusive concentration on 'the' party, - to the point of refusing to publicly polemicise with rival versions of 'the' party, or even allow members to hold private discussions with other 'faiths' or even exchange newspapers with them, - is one infamous form of this sectarianism, notorious among Trotskyism's 57 varieties.

But other shapes adopted by philistinism, to hide itself in sect-like activities, are even more insidious such as all single-issue protests around a specific trade-union struggle, or individual injustice cases, or particularly offensive new laws, or one special aspect of imperialist tyranny such as nuclear weapons, etc.

The correctness, or usefulness, or even necessity of such fights is not the question here. What needs stressing is the easy popularity of such struggles precisely because they avoid participants having to get involved in the major historical problems of revolutionary theory, and often deliberately promote themselves on an anti-theory basis. 'No politics here' is the frequent daft shout in many such campaigns, - smart when evading Trotskyite sectarian squabbling, but foolish when preventing scientific socialist lessons from being drawn from the struggle in hand, crucial for that struggle's further and better success.

Worse than these specific single-issue fights for encouraging anti-theory philistinism have been the generic 'liberation' struggles on behalf of women, gays, blacks, etc, which have all consciously sought out a 'minorities' culture, deliberately preventing any all-embracing involvement, and even more confusingly have insisted that the fight could be won whether capitalism goes or stays, and that such a victory would be the real 'revolution', or the real 'liberation'.

This is all nonsense, of course. Prejudice, discrimination, and unequal treatment is, of course, intolerable, and it must be bitterly felt. But 'liberation' through such single-issue struggles is a nonsensical illusion.

The capitalist system and its culture is the great repressor and exploiter, even though sometimes completely invisible behind seemingly 'pure' racism, sexism, or homophobia, etc. 

But capitalism it is, and capitalism alone, - which controls ultimately the creation of all culture in modern society. And only when the capitalist system ceases to corrupt human behaviour and thinking will it become possible to begin the complete eradication once and for all of such barbaric backwardness from civilisation as racist, sexist, or homophobic prejudices, or any other immature discriminatory attitudes towards any minorities whatever, merely for being themselves.

And everyone, of course, for all kinds of reasons, has a serious historical interest in getting rid of the capitalist system. 

Tragically, the frequently sectarian, and often sociologically nonsensical, single-issue campaigning by such 'liberation' fronts actually helps philistine ignorance in society reinforce itself sometimes, rather than help break it down.

Now, specific campaign demands in themselves are obviously the norm in any form of human struggle, at any stage of the revolutionary process. The difficulty being identified here is the perspective within which these demands are framed.

And it is not just a problem if single-issue fights are merely projected without any reference at all to the overall longer-term perspectives for getting rid of the capitalist system itself, in its entirety.

The disaster is the deliberate philistine substitution of one-off 'liberation' fights for the socialist revolution as a whole, which is viewed with dismissive or cynical contempt.

And it is a real disaster, which will not be resolved until widespread Marxist clarity is able to clear up all this ideological confusion surrounding all the protest movements.

The 'unity' of all campaigners against aspects of capitalist society can be called for until the end of time but it could never succeed in unifying.

Only on one basis is any worthwhile unity ever possible on any subject, and that is the unity of correct scientific understanding of the matters in hand, including the crucial questions of how society actually works, and even more crucially how it is going to develop in the immediate and longer-term future.

"Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary practice" Marxism-Leninism explains. Meaning that until the historic class struggle is fully understood, successful intervention in that class struggle that will lead to lasting victory is impossible.

Specific campaign demands will continue to arise spontaneously. What should always then be fought for is the correct revolutionary perspective within which to frame these demands so that they should cease to be single-issue delusions, whether 'won' or 'lost'.

The demands remain campaigns for 'reforms'. And some may even be 'won', resulting in real and worthwhile changes. And many will take part usefully neither knowing or caring about what political perspectives have been discussed as the context for the particular struggle.

But the really important achievement of such battles is when they are precisely fought out to the background of the struggle for correct perspectives on the overthrow of capitalism as a whole, illustrating or illuminating that fight in ways vastly more significant than that single battle itself, even when won and as vital as such victories obviously are.

The great miners strike of 1984-85 taught many magnificent lessons about working class struggle but the most crucial understanding it established was of the impossibility of ever returning to the illusions of a programmable boom period of Labour 'interventionist' government, implying public democratic control over the economy while it remained essentially capitalist and free-market oriented.

'Reformism' was effectively sunk by the 1984-85 strike. And the vital lessons of all of that would have been far more decisively learned had all the concerns of that struggle been taken in alongside a tradition of all-the-time politically testing every major working-class experience for what new light it could throw up on the longer-term perspectives for getting rid of capitalism altogether by, in effect, the social revolution.

And that scientific mentality can only flourish as a result of the deliberate pursuit of the Marxist-Leninist socialist philosophy.

It is only when a comprehensive historical understanding starts to develop that real leadership can begin to be constructed in the working class.

And the most important constant function for this leadership is, straightforwardly enough, to constantly give a new lead to workers whenever new political situations arise, which is basically all the time.

The working class will eventually become the mightiest force in society, giving a lead to all workers by hand or brain, when it has supported the growth of a leadership which can quickly provide a correct new rallying cry at every new turn in the international class struggle, or get close enough to the right understanding that any details not immediately perfectly understood can soon be corrected by the first experiences of taking the fresh assessment of things into practice via political campaigning, and discovering in practice that some nuances or other, or even major planks of a platform, have not been quite in place.

For the working class, its political leadership which is going to take it to socialism must begin to be in a position to answer every question on behalf of workers that comes up in society and in international conflict. A successful working class political leadership must eventually embrace the best wisdom on every subject on earth, or at least have access to it via sympathetic independent intellectuals and scientists or industrialists.

Only when inspired with such comprehensive and understanding leadership will the working class begin not merely to become suspicious of, or scorn, the domination by bourgeois ideology, but also start wanting to actively expel ruling class influence out of every aspect of society by entirely overthrowing the ruling class itself, the complete social revolution.

Single-issue economic demands will never get there by themselves. At some stage, the working class is going to have to feel that the old society and its entire culture simply cannot continue in the old way any more, and should feel that the workers themselves should become the new 'ruling class', one which after a temporary dominance will be able to get rid of all ruling classes for ever.

But such thinking can never develop until a working-class leadership develops which will be capable of providing a sound lead for all workers on every matter, involving the whole working class in that struggle for correct theory, and beginning the long process of the final complete emancipation of the working class via universal higher education, obliterating 'mental' and 'manual' labour categories, and freeing everyone so much from necessary drudgery that all will have the time and inclination to pursue for pleasure new specialisation after specialisation, new career after new career, etc.

Specifically, the SLP needs to press on confidently in thinking about itself as the best and only trustworthy educator of the working class.

It needs to aim for more and more authoritative comment on every new international situation as it arises, and on every contentious domestic issue in the news as and when it happens, such as up-to-date commentary on the GCSE results and their implications and education questions in general; the drugs issue; the scabby Labour Government behaviour on every subject; the latest developments in the transport and environmental crisis; the disgraceful treatment of the Montserrat islanders; the unnerving finance-capital turmoil in the southeast Asian 'tiger' economies; the dramatic further retreats by British imperialism from its untenable positions in Occupation of northeast Ireland; the ridiculous nonsense of the Millennium Dome; the emerging irrelevance of the devolution diversion in the face of government turmoil everywhere in the bourgeois-capitalist free-market system, made even more pointed by the scandal of careerism and opportunist corruption riddling the present government party in Scotland; etc, etc.

The SLP is obviously at present limited by its material possibilities of getting publications out, and getting statements circulated in face of media censorship.

But the real worry is that the SLP is not yet routinely thinking in terms of providing its own complete political education to its membership. There are numerous avenues and methods for developing discussion of SLP positions, but few of them are being utilised. The suspected biggest problem is the traditional one of a lack of confidence or farsightedness to even think in terms of a complete and independent SLP philosophy on everything, issue by issue, day by day, to give real leadership to the working class

And the key to the problem of developing such confidence is having the sound scientific understanding of society's future development to start with so that most issues are fully understood almost as soon as they have happened.

Imperialism's crisis of impossibly contradictory rival capital 'surpluses' grinds relentlessly on towards renewed inter-imperialist trade war followed by political conflict.

And endless stream of further evidence is supplied by the capitalist media themselves, and provides an inexhaustible source of educational material for the workers party that is going to lead the class to the building of socialism.

One of the current latest scandals is the continuing imperialist arms race, including the systematic ongoing build-up of nuclear arsenals.

Why? Because the imperialists know better than anyone what endless political and economic crises their aggressive and exploitative system staggers into routinely, and they also know from history how these great periodic inter-imperialist confrontations for world trade and financial hegemony and domination usually end up:

THE United States is engaged in a massive secret programme to build a new generation of nuclear weapons, according to an internal US government document revealed yesterday. The document, a copy of which has been passed to the Guardian, exposes Washington to accusations that America has embarked on the design and development of new warheads using simulated detonations to evade the terms of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Among the weapons involved is the W-88 Trident missile, backbone of Britain's nuclear deterrent, which is being modernised to such an extent that the improved model will amount to a new "Trident II".

The 300-page document — obtained by a physicist formerly of the secret Los Alamos nuclear laboratory — unveils a weapons programme which is, says Dr Matthew McKinzie, bigger than at the height of the cold war. The programme envisages growth by $4 billion (£2.5 billion) a year, compared with the equivalent of $3.7 billion during the cold war.

The Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan, nicknamed the Green Book, is an internal report compiled by the energy department, which manages and maintains the nuclear arsenal. It was declassified and obtained by Dr McKinzie's Washington-based arms control monitoring group, the Natural Resources Defence Council, which is suing the government for breach of the test ban treaty.

"What we have is a massive nuclear programme," Dr McKinzie said, "which is a great deal larger than at the height of the cold war — which in the present security situation is staggering."

The document shows the energy department and navy secretly underpinning work on new prototypes for nuclear weapons, and on improvements to existing warheads, two of which are the W-76 and W-88 missiles, fitted to the Trident submarine.

Dr McKinzie said yesterday that the report shows the US government aiming to get round the test ban treaty by developing new weapons systems which do not need underground testing.

Robert Bell, the director of arms control at the national security council, said last year that the effect of the test ban treaty was "to rule out opportunities to create new weapons". But the internal report talks about "the development of advanced new types of nuclear weapons" and says that "laboratories are currently working on programmes to provide new or modified designs" to nuclear weapons.

Dr McKinzie said the work is intended to increase the power and precision of the next generation of weapons.

The Energy Department document is one of the nation's official plans for work on nuclear arms, which involves 25,000 people in a highly secretive industry.

"The laboratories are currently working on programs to provide new or modified designs," the document says, adding that the work "will exercise a broad range of design skills."

The document says the work on some types of warheads includes steps toward redesigning the heart of the hydrogen bomb, its atomic trigger.

As the powerful arms dealers frankly admit, less business is bad business.

But surely in this age of new humanitarian credos such as that pronounced by British imperialism's fresh New Labour stooge as foreign secretary, this arms-race stuff will soon become a thing of the past?

Not when billion-pound profits can be made out of terrified ruling classes the world over, all fearful of being toppled at some stage by the real proletarian democracy of a workers state, or of running into devastating conflict with economic rivals in the cut-throat imperialist market place:

BRITAIN and the United States increased their shares of the world arms market in the past year, despite their governments' claim to be adopting a moral lead in foreign policy. 

The annual arms survey by the Congressional Research Service in Washington, published at the weekend, shows the world arms market expanded last year for the first time in many years, up 5 per cent to $31.8 billion (about £20 billion) in weapons sales, after steadily shrinking since the cold war.

France and Russia, the other two big arms exporters, both decreased their share.

Britain's dubious promotion from fourth to second biggest weapons' merchant — announced earlier this year — comes as Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, promises overseas policies based on humanitarian ethics.

With $14.8 billion worth of trade, Britain comfortably overtook France and nosed ahead of Russia, which turn bled into fourth place.

The US also increased its already giant global share to 35.5 per cent — $11.3 billion worth of trade — while Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state, promises a new emphasis on post cold-war humanitarian priorities.

Arms exports from the US are likely to be further boosted in the coming year by the Clinton administration's announcement this month that long-standing restrictions on the sale of advanced weapon systems to Latin American countries — imposed because of human rights concerns — will be lifted.

And how suspiciously quiet Germany and Japan are on this sensitive subject when their technological excellence in all things is famed the world over, and when their specific histories consist of such indomitable militarist traditions and such famed aggressiveness. Who can believe that their canny quietness and their immense vulnerability to trade-war dirty tricks and conspiracies does not have them secretly preparing for renewed inter-imperialist conflict too, - in everything but the actual mass-mobilisation now, openly, of the necessary scientific, industrial, material, and personnel resources to adequately take care of German and Japanese interests when push comes to shove in the trade war.

The formation of the SLP was an inspiring historical development, inseparable from an understanding of the crisis itself.

And the SLP phenomenon by no means stands alone, - again as noted in quiet corners by the capitalist media themselves:

IT'S ABOVE 40 degrees. Three thousand people from 60 countries huddle in the sparse shade in all corners of a squatted farm in Andalusia, southern Spain. It is announced in English, Spanish, French and Italian that people should conserve water and beware fires. The phrase "melting pot" has seldom seemed so apt.

Reclaimed 10 years ago, nine families live and work this land, organising themselves as a collective. It's a fine symbolic place for the grand-sounding Second Inter-galactic Encounter For Humanity And Against Neo-Liberalism. For the past nine days, grass-roots activists, squatters, indigenous tribes, anarchists and trade unionists have been meeting in gymnasiums, schools, nurseries and occupied land to establish what they call a "network of resistance" to the prevailing global economic system.

"We are here to discuss how the economic policies are affecting everyday lives all over the world," says Dalia, a masked "commandant" from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). "We call these economic policies 'Neo-Liberalism': basically the privatisation of services, and pro-market free trade which has created economies bigger than the state."

The inspiration for the gathering comes from the EZLN rebels, who on New Year's Day 1994 came out of the mountains and jungles of the desperately poor Chiapas State in Mexico and seized six towns, which they still control. Last summer, they constructed camps and appealed on the Internet to "all oppressed peoples of the world" to join them for the First "Encuentra" — or encounter. Four thousand people travelled to Mexico, and an annual event was born.

Just why this particular grassroots rising has been embraced internationally can be seen both in its timing, and in its breadth of appeal. The Zapatista uprising coincided with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico and the US, which gave US multinationals massive new rights in the country. Zapatistas fired the imagination of millions afflicted by a general feeling of helplessness. "This was a new type of struggle, and a successful one, which has become a new focus of the left," said Andrew, from Ireland, at the Encuentro last week.

The Zapatista analysis of world events has begun to emerge as a consensus from the growing opposition to the new, post-communist, free trade economic order, as a potent critique of governments who ignore their weakest citizens in favour of economic growth. Neo-liberalism, an ugly word in English, has another sense in Latin America, where it is the dominant political force and a byword for globalism and stateless power. It is also applied to Thatcherism, the EU-Maastricht policies in Europe and IMF adjustment programmes in Africa and Asia.

But if the language used is sometimes new, the themes that it seeks to address are mostly age-old. In Spain, the 3,000 people divided into 24 groups to discuss everything from nationalism, marginalisation and immigration, to struggles for culture, education and information. And with women making up a third of the Zapatista army, it included the fight against patriarchy and for land and ecology.

The messages that people brought were of grassroots optimism, but also of a parallel, growing repression.

On the optimistic side, there were the experiences of 20,000 Nicaraguan families who manage their own co-operatives on four million hectares of land.

Swami, an Indian pacifist, once tortured by being subjected to 32 nights without sleep, described how people recently took apart, brick by brick, a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet as a symbolic act against capitalism. And how, as a statement of disapproval, 50,000 people gathered simply to laugh at a government building.

Maloop, from Forte Prenestino, a squatted social centre outside Rome, told how 4,000 Italians had demanded — and got — two free trains to travel to join the march against the Euro Summit in Amsterdam in June, blockading Milan's main station for eight hours before the authorities gave in.

The optimism was matched by harrowing tales of death, torture and persecution. Jose Das Grasas outlined the problems of the meninos de rua, the millions of Brazilian street kids. Debli, a Nigerian in exile in Denmark, updated people on the Ogoni struggle against General Abache's regime and its complicity with the multinational Shell. And, of course, there are the death squads and constant threat of annihilation faced by the Zapatistas in Chiapas.

For the 30 UK activists who travelled to Spain, it was illuminating, if only because there was no obvious surveillance, no security guards, or large numbers of baton-waving police with tear gas. Their struggles at Newbury or Manchester, at street parties or squats, may have seemed like children's games in comparison to the life or death experiences they were hearing about, yet they found they were welcomed as equals — and the notion of taking over a motorway or living in trees astonished many.

"It's the act of standing up that is important," said one. "Humanity is the common goal. And it doesn't matter whether you are in Basildon or Bangladesh."

Following marches in Madrid and Barcelona, described as the most multi-national demonstrations since the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, the Encuentro will now roll on with the creation of the International Network of Alternative Communication (RICA), a kind of activists' news agency.

Barnsley bureaucratism may seem out of place by comparison, but the implications of Scargill's move (whatever eventually becomes of it) are not so far distant from the message which this Spain get-together conveys, — that at some stage, the mass movement will revive universally, and bigger than ever in history, as well as potentially far more knowledgeable than ever. And clarity about what must finally be done on the question of repeated capitalist crisis is growing all the time.

Again it is the capitalist press itself which has just revealed that under Swedish social democracy, hitherto rammed down communist throats as the really 'good' and 'human face' example of how 'socialism' should be approached, - there existed for more than 40 years a policy of enforced sterilisation and Nazi eugenics which would have made Hitler Germany blush with shame. For more than 40 years, ending only in 1976, the Scandinavian reformist stooges for the international imperialist system routinely terrorised all who did not conform to the arbitrary standards established for physical appearance, mental capacity, and potential ability in parental duties by the National Institute for Racial Biology.

Set in motion before Hitler had even come to power, these policies resulted in the living death of more than 100,000 Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians.

For utterly specious reasons, Labour Party types from Wilson onwards have always pretended to be so enamoured of Swedish 'socialism' and welfare-state provisions; and Blairites are huge fans of all this deceitful reformist nonsense.

Not surprisingly, Lech Walesa, the prize stooge for the CIA and Vatican non-stop subversive offensives to wreck the great achievements of the workers state in Poland, never stopped posturing about how delighted he would be to live under 'socialism with a human face' in Sweden, for example.

Well now the capitalist press itself can utter the final comment on all this hypocritical bilge which has been swallowed by generations of reformist idiocy in Britain and worldwide:

Among those sterilised were unmarried mothers with several children, people judged to be habitual criminals, even a boy considered "sexually precocious". "Grounds for recommending sterilisation: recognisable Gypsy features, psychopathy, vagabond life," reads a document cited by the paper.

Hõghammarsskolan had the makings of a classic borstal — a kind of prison where the children's mail was read, laughing was banned and unruly children were beaten with sticks and placed in isolation cells.

But it was also at the front line of an explicit eugenics policy which began in the Nordic countries before Hitler came to power in Germany and did not end until 1976, when concern began over low birth rates.

Nurtured by social democrats but reminiscent of National Socialism, it resulted in the sterilisation of more than 100,000 Swedes, Danes and Norwegians whose race, lifestyle or mental capacities were deemed undesirable. Ninety per cent of them were women.

'The day I was called in to the doctor's office — I was 16 — I knew I would be made to sign the sterilisation form. It happened to all the girls,' said Maria, now aged 72 and divorced, and living in Gävle, north of Stockholm.

'I ran down to the basement and cried in the toilets. I was determined not to sign. I thought of suicide, but decided I would not give them the benefit of seeing me dead. I decided to refuse to sign. But when they got me into the office they said that, unless I did, I would stay there forever,' said Maria.

AS a teenager in Sweden during the Second World War, Maria Nordin had what we now call learning difficulties. She was shy, her eyesight was poor and she could not see the blackboard. She was not the kind of person that the builders of the nascent Swedish welfare state wanted more of.

When her headmistress suggested that she be moved to an institution for her own good, Maria's peasant family was too big and too poor to object.

Coercion was the method usually used, in a policy which at different times was racially or financially motivated.

The policy was applied to alcoholics, travellers, those who physically did not conform to a look established by the National Institute for Racial Biology, and other people, called 'mentally slow', who were considered unlikely to be able to fulfil 'parental duties'.

Before Sweden passed its eugenics law in 1935, a government commission recommended: 'The care of the weak and helpless has become more enhanced. From this stage it is not a big step to prevent the birth of individuals who, most likely, must become a burden to themselves and others.'

In Sweden, hospital administrators could refuse to grant abortions to women who would not be sterilised. In the 1960s and 1970s, Swedish housing workers were asked to report tenants whom they believed should not procreate. In one cynical application of the policy, young men in borstals were routinely sterilised in the spring before being sent to work on farms in the summer.
 
Denmark's law was passed in 1929—before Hitler instituted sterilisation of mentally handicapped people. In Norway, campaigning for the law, introduced in 1934, was led by a prominent left-winger who considered Nazi sterilisation policies insufficient because they only applied to hereditary complaints.

According to the Swedish daily newspaper Dagerts Nyheter, which last week revealed the extent of sterilisation in the Nordic countries — 6,000 Danes, 40,000 Norwegians and 60,000 Swedes — the trend was consistently led by left-wingers and met with some limited opposition from conservative politicians.

Historians quoted by the newspaper said the spirit of Sweden's move in 1942 to require travellers and gypsies to register was born of the same racism as fuelled the Nazi extermination programme.

To Maria Nordin, the issue is far from resolved; only last year she was turned down after she asked the Swedish government for 100,000 kronor (£8,000) in compensation, a figure she now considers too low.

'I cannot put a price on all the years I was childless and on all the comments from people who asked my husband and me why we did not have children,' said Maria. She worked as a nanny after leaving Hõghammarsskolan, then married her ex-husband with whom she ran a florist's.

'I wrote to the government last year after I read about a woman who got 40,000 kronor (£3,000) in compensation. I was so disappointed when I was turned down.

'It seemed like this conspiracy of silence would continue forever. I have not been able to tell people about what happened to me — there has been no understanding of it until now,' she said.

Swedish historians believe that the country's unwillingness to admit that eugenics had a role in supporting the modern Swedish state is tied up with a reluctance to come to terms with the past.

Gunnar Broberg, a historian whose research has contributed to the latest revelations, said: 'We like to think that this state of mind [eugenics] is in the past. Many people do not want to address the complications of our history.'

But Sweden has, even in recent years, been criticised for policies which, while providing a social safety net that in the 1970s was the envy of many European countries, require profound conformism.

Yesterday Margot Wallstrõm, the Swedish Minister for Social Policy, issued a belated reaction to the revelations. She said: 'What went on is barbaric and a national disgrace.'

The culture of capitalist exploitation and of the survival-of-the-fittest free-market ethics have never ceased to rule in Scandinavia. Its 'reformist socialism' has always been a complete deception, talked up only in order to provide the 'free' world with more deceitful anti-communist ammunition.

And all anti-revolutionary 'socialist' complacency will never be able to provide anything else other than anti-communist deceptions and stunts. Build Leninism, and spread Leninism as far and wide as possible. Roy Bull

Bangkok crisis spells disaster ahead for parasitic monopoly capital worldwide.

Renewed whiteknuckle rides on the markets in London and New York are best understood in the wider context of overall markets instability worldwide, on most spectacular display in recent developments in Asia.

South-east Asia has long been claimed by apologists of the capitalist system as proof that the free market really is capable of endless self-refreshment historically, with vast new Asian markets clutched at as a hoped-for bottomless pit of super-profits to keep parasitic monopoly capitalism living on the hog's back for eternity. 

Events in Bangkok and beyond are a rude awakening. Since the collapse of Thailand's currency, the baht, instability has gone on to shake the Indonesian and Malaysian economies too. And the very moves which are being made to contain the crisis speak volumes about the real balance of forces shaping up for the trade wars ahead, and about the crisis of overproduction at the root of all the difficulties, from the plunging baht to the monstrous and unsustainable overvaluation of share values on Wall Street and in the City. 

America had to move hell and high water to get the rest of the "free world" to shuffle reluctantly behind the last massive IMF bail-out of a bankrupt nation, after a stampede of foreign capital out of Mexico left its economy in a state of collapse.   

Washington piled on the pressure then because, without such an internationally funded bail-out, Mexico's economic crisis (and insurrectionary political consequences) threatened to bring down the house north of the border as well. A glimpse of just how successful this "rescue" has been is afforded by a recent article in the Telegraph (11/8/97), noting that the "difference between economic boom and bust" in Mexico now hangs on the fortunes of the drug industry, whose £9 billion annual income adds up to 5% of that country's GDP.

Now that Thailand is looking less like an economic "tiger" and more like a second Mexico, the US and the IMF have been doing their best to avoid footing too much of the swingeing bail-out bill, in particular leaning on Japan to help pay the mortgage on the New World Order.

Japan has shown willing to help finance a rescue plan, but clearly wants a stake in a different kind of world order, presumably one more in keeping with its "Co-Prosperity Sphere" imperialist ambitions of the '30s.

The revival of such aggressive imperialist instincts is not in essence anything to do with some special Japanese "psychology", "culture" or "militarist tradition". It is rather the routine product of a world imperialist system once more going down into the ditch of overproduction crisis. It was stark economic necessity which prompted Japan's involvement in the bail-out.

The Financial Times (12/8/97) reported that, as "the Japanese market has become saturated and markets in other industrialised countries are marked by fierce competition", Japan's car manufacturers "are eager to expand their operations in south-east Asia, where they are already a dominant force". For example, Toyota alone commands nearly one third of the market for cars in Thailand, which it uses as a bridge to other Asian markets.  

The massive commitment of Japanese capital and productive capacity throughout the region could all be transformed into so much "dead" capital and "surplus" capacity overnight were the Thai bailout to fail. Already, Nissan suffered a 60% drop in its June sales in Thailand, compared to the same month last year, and has plans to shut down plant and reduce output.   

Nor can the burden of overcapacity easily be shifted by dumping Thai products onto Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines or Taiwan, since they are equally desperate to ease their own domestic market saturation by driving up exports.  

Indonesia's currency, the rupiah, fell two weeks ago to a record low against the US dollar, despite Bank Indonesia spending £307 million in one day trying to prop it up - like Lamont on Black Wednesday.

The Thai bail-out is a classic example of the capitalists, on one level, all rallying around to "stabilize' the world capitalist system whilst simultaneously, on another level, revealing the very trade-war divisions which are guaranteed to tear all of free market" world society to pieces.

It also turns a sharp new light on the recent pact between Washington and Tokyo on the latter's proposed future role in 'assisting US peacekeeping in the region". Is it really to be supposed that Japan has decided to tear up its "pacifist" constitution and confess to an unsurprised world that it is in fact an armed bourgeois state, solely in order to subordinate its own imperialist ambitions to those of the USA? No chance.

America wanted this military pact with Japan for two reasons: to burden its trade rival with bills for military spending it had earlier shouldered itself; and for as long as possible to keep the inevitable resurgence of Japan's imperialist ambitions marching to a Pax Americana tune.

It might suit Japan to whistle that tune for a while yet, and for Japanese politicians to bounce their own public back into militarism by raising a Red scare over supposed threats from China or North Korea. But what is really driving Japanese imperialism back to arms is the same thing that is driving them to square up to the USA in the trade war, namely the overproduction crisis of imperialism itself, now rumbling with sporadic menace on Wall Street and in the City of London.

If Tokyo really did crawl into line behind US imperialist aggression in the region, the potential for military humiliation and political destabilization would be enormous indeed. As the Financial Times points out (16/7/9-7): "In the event of a US clash with North Korea...a Japanese fighter jet engine repair plant in Nagoya would become a clear military target". 

And the Telegraph, reporting China's accurate description of the US-inspired pact as a would-be return to "Cold War thinking", concedes that "Chinese hostility to the guidelines will have some impact in Japan, where there is concern that the new policy could embroil Tokyo in a possible conflict between Beijing and Taiwan".

But right now, far from wanting to go to war with China on America's behalf, Japan seems just as eager as everyone else to get access to China's enormous market, on China's own terms, and just as ready to prefer a moderate but reliable return on its capital (under rules imposed by the workers' state), to the much higher rates of return available elsewhere in free-market Asia - only accompanied by the constant threat of catastrophes like the one currently enveloping the region.

Take Japan's shipbuilding industry. Its own market has been saturated, with all the key players competing for the same dwindling list of domestic orders. Now the FT reports (16/7/97) that one of them, Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI), has announced it is to build small and medium-sized vessels in China, jointly with the Chinese. KHI also plans to build motorbikes in China under a similar arrangement.

The fact that China too is helping in the Thai bail-out, to the tune of 4,600 million, further highlights America's difficulty when it tries to go on using all the old Cold War furniture after the house has collapsed. It might suit America's own interests to go on pretending on occasion that China is the real threat to Asian stability, but who in Asia will believe them? After all it is the world capitalist economy, as organized around the US dollar, which is busy scattering Asian currencies like ninepins, not Chinese socialism.

Meanwhile, according to the FT (15/8/97), although "China's foreign exchange reserves had risen to $l26bn, up $21bn from the beginning of the year...Beijing keeps firm control of capital transfers, in effect blocking any sharp movement in the Chinese yuan's exchange rate" - even though market wisdom dictates that such inflows of foreign capital automatically translate into dangerous currency inflation.   

Such wisdom, however, can see no difference between the People's Bank of China, managing funds on behalf of a workers' state, and a capitalist bank, holding funds on behalf of a handful of monopolists who possess the national economy as a private fiefdom.

And the apparent relative immunity of this immense workers' state to the current crisis in the region drives this "market wisdom" into the comical position of wanting to blame China for everything!   

"Analysts suggest," continues the FT through gritted teeth, that "China's rigid control of its exchange rate has kept its exports cheap and exacerbated the competitiveness problems of rival manufacturing economies in south-east Asia" (15/8/97).

None of which holds any promise of Chinese immunity from trade war or subsequent shooting war, sadly, let alone any prospect of Stalin's 1952 Economic Problems fantasies (about socialism outcompeting capitalism at its own game, narrowing the latter's already permanently shrinking markets to its eventual extinction) being realized in an Asia of the next Millennium.

But all of which bogs down still further America's hopeless game of trying to rally old "free world allies" behind safe old Cold War themes, appealing for capitalist-class solidarity at the very moment when trade war divisions are most insistently raising their head.

Build Leninism. Dominic Hull

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

IN THE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION
64 percent do not back U.S. against Cuba

by Nidia Diaz (Granma daily staff writer)

OF all of the lies that the United States has had to finance in order to prop up its campaigns of pressure and blackmail, those directed at Cuba have been the most costly. And in spite of this, the signs that U.S. myth-making is wearing out are beginning to be reflected in the international arena.

For the seventh consecutive year, the so-called Cuba case was discussed within the United Nations Human Rights Commission on instructions from the White House, and for the seventh consecutive year; the condemnation sponsored by the Treasury Department against our country received less support than ever.

Nineteen votes in favour of the U.S. resolution, 10 against (five more than in 1996) and 24 abstentions was the final tally in the latest episode of this cheap drama that Washington has taken upon itself to stage in Geneva, and for which, in its arrogant self-worship, it pays off many of its spectators, going so far as to provide travelling allowances and first class airfares for those who need to cross the Atlantic.

You don't need to be a mathematician to confirm that of the 53 members on the Commission, only 19 backed the U.S. government, and many of those, without a doubt, did so to avoid facing the ire of the North.

The others, who total 34 (between votes against and abstentions) or rather 64 percent of the HRC, oppose this arbitrary and immoral U.S. policy of attempting to universalize an issue based solely upon the bilateral conflict that Washington is bent on prolonging against Cuba.

The text of the resolution voted on, although presented by the ventriloquist designed for this stage, Carl Johan Groth, cannot conceal the signature marks of its true authors. Everyone, even those who aligned themselves with it, knows that it responds to the campaigns of lies and disinformation that are orchestrated against the Revolution and the Cuban people from the pages of the Miami Herald and the microphones of the falsely named Radio Martí.

In order to make it more digestible, they use the services of a ragged and disgraced band of followers who couldn't find a more unworthy way of earning their daily bread.

It has become symptomatic for a United Nations Commission, purported to watch over the fulfilment of human rights, to permit a resolution against one of the organization's member states which doesn't mention a single-word about the U.S. blockade that this member state has been subjected to for more 35 years and which in itself constitutes the most aberrant violation of a people's economic, social and cultural rights.

The servility to Washington of the resolution on the so-called Cuba case is such that in the three pages of text against Cuba, there is not so much as a mention of the blockade or the Helms-Burton Act, even when the international community has almost unanimously condemned them.

The United States will continue to mount this kind of campaign against Cuba in its zeal to discredit us. But this year's voting, and the comments made on the subject during the proceedings in Geneva, demonstrate that as time goes by, there are ever fewer willing to get tangled up in nothing more than a political vendetta against a nation which decided over a century ago, through the will of the majority of its people, to confront the difficulties and dangers that could result from the defence of its sovereignty and independence.

One thing is certain. While the so-called "Cuba case" becomes further worn out in the United Nations Human Rights Commission, due to its inconsistency and coarse fabrication, the example of the Cuban Revolution is gaining greater vitality in a world in which, despite the pressure and blackmail, fewer and fewer are willing to stick to the wrong path •