Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change  it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
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No 945 Tuesday April 7 1998                                                                                                                                10p

Another Easter defeat for colonialism's rotten record in Ireland. British imperialism is on its way out, humiliated by revolutionary nationalism; and the new deal will take Ireland's reunification a huge leap forward. The ending of colonialism in Ireland will speed the fight for socialism in Britain, - and everywhere else.

Although the detailed agreement for a new Ireland has still to be revealed and then campaigned for, it is already well beyond doubt that the essence of the event historically has been the triumph of Irish national-liberation struggle over 'No Surrender' British colonialism.

These 'peace process' negotiations would never even have been thought of if the British imperialist diktat of 1921, - the monstrous Partition of Ireland at British bayonet point, - had continued to have its way behind its vicious Orange-mafia ruling class fronting a police-military dictatorship within permanently gerrymandered artificial boundaries.

The heroic fight by Sinn Féin/IRA which has trounced the British ruling class politically and worn down its military resistance by guerrilla-war armed revolution, has finally forced the imperialist system to retreat and abandon the unjust and intolerable colonial status-quo of the bogus statelet 'Northern Ireland'.

Ireland's immediate reunification, the only justice, will not be conceded yet. But that this whole process is about dismantling the infamous tyranny of the 'Northern Ireland' colony is unmistakable.

Enfeebled British imperialism has been admitting its defeat at least since the 1985 Anglo-Irish Treaty. The whole game since has been all about concealing the victory of the Sinn Féin/IRA armed revolutionary struggle, and about saving face all round for the British so as to avoid as much murderous 'loyalist'-thug backlash as possible.

The initial 'Unionist'-colonist-response to the Mitchell draft agreement today underlined that problem, with Trimble's party expressing deep gloom, the Alliance posturers demanding Blair's immediate presence, and Paisley threatening an instant bloodbath, - just as he had "always predicted would happen".

A different aspect of the sourness of British reaction came from BBC Panorama last night which slyly twisted its whole 'report' to the question of was the new halfway-house deal yet another 'betrayal' by Sinn Féin leaders which would only spark off yet more 'Troubles' just as Michael Collins' halfway-house deal did in 1921. This sneakily tried to plant the notion that the blame for the last 77 years murderous tyranny and bloody sacrifice lay at the door of Irish nationalism instead of on British imperialism which imposed the 1921 Partition under the threat of all-out war on Ireland if Sinn Féin did not accept.

And if the whole civil-war and national-liberation-war troubles explode again now, it will once again be solely the responsibility of decadent British imperialism which lacks the guts or ability to admit the injustice of its entire colonial record, or to take the firm steps to put things right, - as should happen now with the 'Unionist-loyalist' gangsters being put in their place by British state actions to accept the immediate reunification of Ireland. The resistance to it would then be over in months. As it is, there is likely to be some backlash, - and possibly from both sides opposed to concessions in any direction.

But this latest British fudge is not comparable to the 1921 armed Partition of Ireland. It is the exact opposite of that. It is an international declaration by British imperialism that it intends at last to shortly get out of Ireland for good, as opposed to the 1921 declaration of a "British Irish territory permanently for the rest of time, to be called 'Northern Ireland'."

The name will still remain for a short while. But the reintegration processes for Ireland, to be launched by this new agreement, point only to the eventual reunification of Ireland.

And there is no comparison, either, between the strategic choice facing Irish nationalism in 1921 and the prospects now. Ireland was one country in 1921 and the overwhelming majority had already told British imperialism to get out, including at the 1918 democratic elections conducted by British colonialism over all Ireland. If Partition had been rejected, and had not been imposed at bayonet point, Ireland would surely have had its whole independence, all at one go, within a decade or two, and almost certainly after 1945.

The heroic Irish nationalist struggle of the late 20th century has always had to fight from a complete minority position, in complete contrast to 1921, - a minority within the new 'country' of 'Northern Ireland', and a minority within the Irish population of Ireland as a whole, - most of whom have been corrupted into apathy and complacency by an easier life in the Republic.

But despite this tiny minority position, the Sinn Féin/IRA national-liberation struggle, still outpolled even by the catholic SDLP within the Occupied Zone, has nevertheless fought this British colonial tyranny to a standstill.

In such circumstances, to accept a negotiated snail's-pace withdrawal deal from British imperialism counts as one of the most colossal anti-imperialist triumphs in all history, and makes abundant strategic sense.

The gibbering Trotskyite idiots who from their armchair-socialist positions deride Gerry Adams & Co as 'careerist bourgeois politicians selling out to imperialism' sound as much like agents for the British Establishment as do the BBC.

But the greatest gainers of all from the colonial retreat will be the British working class and the struggle for socialist consciousness here.

For as long as the British working class remained dominated by its own imperialist government, repressing another nation,- for just so long would it remain impossible for British workers to triumph over the imperialist system themselves.

Colonial attitudes utterly corrupt any notions of socialist consciousness within a working class, as Marx pointed out noting the anti-Irish racism rife among British workers last century where the immigrant Irish in England received the worst 'colonial' treatment. Sadly, some anti-immigrant racism will linger on. But this retreat by British colonialism from Ireland, - at last in effect admitting that it has been wrong in its treatment of the Irish, - will make the anti-racist fight that much easier.

Douglas Bell

Propaganda for socialism needs to abandon its hangdog defeatism quickly as capitalist crash conditions gather strength. Revisionist hostility to theory just as damaging as sectarian Trotskyite ultra-leftism has been. Workers want to see a completely knowledgeable leadership, not dumbed-down soundbites. Endless excuses and stunts for evading Marxist scientific methods are all now living on borrowed time. Philistinism in all its forms must be rejected. The march of historical events will undermine bourgeois ideology's grip. 'New World Order' nonsense on its last legs. The higher that imperialism's market-technology achievements soar, all the more devastating will be the results of their collapse. Trot impressionism consciously disrupts the fight for Marxism. Leninism is the only scientific approach for correcting party policy, and building a successful leadership.

In the struggle to build support for Socialist Labour among workers, it would be a grave mistake to forget the colossal damage done to the historic cause of socialism by revisionist complacency.

Revisionism wrecked the entire Third International, and eventually led the Soviet bureaucracy to self-liquidate in one of the sickest and saddest exhibitions of human folly on record.

At its heart lies anti-theory philistinism, - essentially a petty-bourgeois class attitude based on a patronising contempt for workers and their potential.

In the USSR, this took the form, in part, of reducing the non-stop fight for the most advanced theory, based on the latest highest historic points in the development of the international class struggle, to teaching 'diamat' to 'Marxism' classes, - dialectical materialism as a sort of abstract catechism which simply ignored large areas of current world reality.

In time, popular understanding of the needs of the international anti-imperialist struggle became dumbed down sufficiently to allow the bureaucracy to sink ever-deeper into a non-Leninist stupor.

Outside the Soviet Union and the rest of the Socialist Camp, the Third International parties pursued an increasingly complacent and quietist line, simply denying that there could be any major flaws in the work of the CPSU and the Soviet bureaucracy, and simply closing their eyes to inconvenient and contradictory world developments.

Communist Party leaderships did not want to know any more for themselves, did not want their memberships to know any more, and did not think that their memberships wanted to find out or understand any more of the world. Serious theoretical differences between the Soviet and Chinese parties, for example, were simply denied to exist for years. Attempts to merely discuss the possibility of taking a more objective view of weakness in the Soviet bureaucracy while still remaining 100% unconditionally supportive of the USSR as far as all Western imperialist subversion of it was concerned, - were recoiled against in horror.

By becoming just propagandist parties, rotten bourgeois advertising traditions were able to take root on the 'left', insisting that simplified slogans were all that the working class needed or wanted. A widespread attitude crept in that political statements to workers should not be "too complex, or too long-winded, or they will throw your leaflets in the bin".

This coincided with the disorienting delusion that the reactionary brain-washing influence of tabloid sound-bites could be countered, - and could ONLY be countered, - by the labour movement producing even slicker superior propaganda of its own.

This never happens, historically. Bourgeois propaganda does get defeated in the end, - but not by this mechanism. All reactionary ideology collapses in the end, - including the most dictatorial, brain-washing, total-censorship control imaginable, - because the developments of history itself begin no longer to flow in the direction desired by the ruling class.

The Sun newspaper's grip of dumbed—down backward political attitudes among millions of working-class readers will not be overcome by zippier, sharper soundbites from a rival left-wing 'Moon' or whatever.

The appeal and penetration of this sort of propaganda is mostly created and dictated by the material itself that it is dealing with, - shallow chauvinism, aggressive opportunism, crass consumerism, etc., - the 'loads-a-money' suppressed-racist culture of cocky and successful imperialism.

How could enlightened political propaganda, which brings no rewards and even proves costly for those who adopt it, possibly distort its own intrinsic style to be able to beat this lowest-common-denominator mass-hysteria at its own game? Why would any serious political commitment WANT to 'win' workers attention by out-page-threeing the Sun's page three? What would such attention be worth? What could be done with it other than to stoke up some shallow biased response or other which was only at the same emotional and intellectual level as the prejudices that The Sun was feeding in the first place??

The ultimate aim of the socialist revolution is the complete and profound re-education of the whole of society. The party that is to win the allegiance of the working class to lead the building of socialism should begin in the way it intends to eventually go on.

The re-education should start with the party itself and with those workers who come towards it. There is no question at all of the fight for socialism "waiting around" for the bourgeois propaganda mythology to crack wide open and fall apart as worldwide slump totally undermines all the years of triumphalist boomtime imperialist complacency. Thousands of party cadres have to be trained to the highest level of political understanding possible, - NOW, - in action. 

The SLP's greatest weakness is its condescending philistinism on this question, - deliberately styling its Socialist News for an audience with a shortish attention-span, it would appear, by discouraging polemical arguments which might be 'too complex', or serious crisis-analysis which might be 'too theoretical', etc.

A lot of this continuation of a traditional dislike of theory in the British labour movement can be blamed on decades of Trotskyite academic pontificating by 57 varieties of pseudo-'revolutionaries', taking up where the bombastic opponents of original Leninism left off in the first place, - the 'swamp' in Lenin's colourful phrase. But much can also be laid at the door of generations of 'Marxist education' routinism in the Communist Party tradition, and aped by most of the rest of the 'left'.

The typical pattern was to start with some basic Marxist-Leninist text or other, read it in context, and study its role in the history of labour-movement struggle, and noting any contemporary relevancies.

But endlessly analysing all current issues in domestic and international politics, - and re-examining classic Marxist-Leninist historical lessons in the light of what new significance is lent to them by more recent developments, - or what is proved less relevant about them now because conditions have changed, - is an infinitely more valuable way of studying Marxism, and the only seriously scientific way if it is genuinely intended to pursue a strict Marxist-Leninist philosophical line in politics, and seriously apply Marxist-Leninist historical-materialist theory to the world, struggling to extend the gains of that theoretical approach all the time.

But both Trotskyite and Stalinist parties alike have traditionally failed to do anything of the sort, - and not only in the notoriously anti-theory British labour and trade-union movement.

And the situation is as bad as ever today with entire sectarian movements and magazines endlessly discussing supposed Marxist 'theory' about organisation, programme, perspectives, factionalism, centralism, leadership, etc, etc, - but all totally in the abstract, with scarcely any reference at all to current real contradictions and conflicts in the international class struggle which could alone give such 'theorising' any real relevance or any hope of achieving enlightenment.

This eye-rolling embarrassed fear about the struggle for a correct theoretical complete analysis of the international balance of class forces and the tasks and opportunities facing the anti-imperialist movement worldwide, remains the weakest and most vulnerable aspect of the fight for socialism by far.

The fresh alarms this week over Japan's economic crisis demonstrate the point. EPSR has been following the imperialist system's growing catastrophe of credit-fed capital 'surpluses' in great detail since trade-war pressures, arising from profitability contradictions all round the world, began to have such dramatic impact on American foreign policy (basically preparing for inter-imperialist World War III) from the late 1980s onwards.

The onset of collapse conditions has clearly been seen coming for years, and reported in detail in the Review.

But derision about 'crisis-mongering' is all that the entire 'left' has had to say. The collapsing of the pinnacle of US imperialist world power, unprecedented in history, - which is what this great crisis is really all about, - is so far from being recognised by other so-called 'Marxists' that several of the Trot sects insist on preaching the exact opposite, - namely that Washington's 'new world order' has been relentlessly imposing 'peace settlements' on any 'hot spot' that offends the American ruling class. The Irish national-liberation struggle and the Palestinian revolution are always given as prize examples of this total rout, supposedly, of anti-imperialism by an unchallengeable, supposedly, USA.

Before much longer, the actual TRIUMPH of the Irish national-liberation struggle over British imperialism, American imperialism's junior partner; and the nearly uncontrollable explosion of Palestinian resistance to Zionist imperialism's relentless colonisation of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan valley, (the WHOLE of which is the Palestinian homeland) - will scupper this utter nonsense about American control.  

But this is nothing. US imperialism's greatest arena, and by far its most important area of dominance, is the supposedly unendingly prosperous international free market, supposedly unstoppably bringing wealth, enlightenment, empowerment, and democracy to all people on earth, permanently, from now on. The alarming crashing of that free market paradise, around most of the Far East, and now beginning to stretch widely beyond, - is the greatest possible humiliation and setback to this alleged unchallengeable American imperialist epoch. It is THEIR Bretton Woods, IMF, World Bank system, but they cannot prevent it from going bust:

JAPAN, the world's second largest economy, stood on the brink of disaster yesterday as it effectively slipped into recession, threatening to send shock waves around the globe.

The country's leading business survey, the tankan, published by the Bank of Japan, sank to its lowest level in three years, indicating that Japanese businesses have no confidence in the future economic outlook.

Corporate Japan's gloom was summed up by Norio Ohga, president of the electronics giant Sony, who said: "The Japanese economy is on the verge of collapsing. If the economic situation continues to decline... this will no doubt have a damaging effect on the world economy."

Gerard Lyons, chief economist at the Japanese bank DKB International in London, said: "This confirms that the Japanese economy is in deep recession.  The rest of the world should sit up and take notice, particularly the Bank of England's monetary policy committee. If they hike interest rates when they meet next week, we might as well shove our heads in the sand."

Tokyo shares dived as the tankan numbers hit dealers' screens, with the Nikkei closing down 539 points, or 3.3 per cent, at 15,703. Speaking in English in Tokyo, Mr Ohga warned that the high-flying US economy could take a hit if Japan's economy continues to slump.

Japan owns half of the world's savings and any move to repatriate the funds to shore up its debt-laden financial system could have severe knock-on effects.

The global financial system has already been shaken by the collapse of Yamaichi Securities Co, which folded in November after admitting to concealing 264.8 billion yen (£1.2 billion) in losses. Another 26.6 billion yen was discovered yesterday.

Large-scale losses have also been uncovered at several other institutions, placing a question mark over the health of the whole financial sector, which is just embarking on "Big Bang" reform.

Analysts say it is taking place against a dire economic backdrop which has seen:
• growth unlikely to reach its target in this financial year of 0.1 per cent, the first time in 23 years the economy will have contracted;
• plunging property prices:
• stagnant consumer spending.

The implications for crisis-hit Asia were depressing, given that Japan took roughly 20 per cent of all Asian exports, second only to the US,  which absorbed  about half Asia's output.

FEARS that Britain's hard-pressed manufacturing sector is on the brink of recession were fuelled as the soaring pound and crashing exports to South-east Asia sent the trade deficit ballooning last month. Today the Confederation of British Industry warns of "clouds darkening the economic horizon" on news that exports to Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia halved over the past year.

Sales of British goods to Thailand are down by 60 per cent, to South Korea by 51 per cent and to Malaysia by 44 per cent, exacerbating a downward spiral in the trade figures since early 1997.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics yesterday showed that last month Britain was in the red to the tune of £1.6 billion with countries outside the European Union. This was double the deficit expected by the City and the largest shortfall on record.

Sudhir Junankar, the CBI's associate director of economic analysis, said: "These are difficult times for British manufacturers.

"Sterling's continued strength and concerns about the impact of the Asian economic crises are undoubtedly having a dampening effect on export demand."

Factories are cutting prices to find customers for their goods, according to today's CBI monthly industrial trends survey.

Only 22 per cent of manufacturers say their order; books are above normal for the time of year, against 24 per cent who report that they are below par. Export order books provide an even gloomier picture, with just 14 per cent of firms saying they are above normal against 45 per cent saying they are below normal.

Treasury officials giving evidence yesterday to the Commons Treasury select committee hearing on the Budget acknowledged that there was a risk of manufacturing sliding into recession this year.

DEVELOPING countries face a deepening crisis as rich governments' aid budgets sink to new lows, the World Bank warns today. Their problems will be compounded by the fall-out from the Asian crisis which has caused private investors to pull out of emerging markets.

"This is a year where we saw not just the opportunities but also the risks of international capital flows," said Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank's chief economist "The East Asian crisis — and its worldwide ramifications — reminds us of the risks that private capital poses for all countries."

The Bank forecasts that three of the five countries involved in the crisis, Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea, will suffer economic contraction or zero growth this year, while growth rates in Malaysia and the Philippines will fall sharply.

Third World countries not involved in the original crisis will also suffer from the fallout, according to the Bank, as investors lump them with the countries in trouble. Long-term investment flows to developing countries may fall in 1998, adding to the problems caused by the ongoing decline in aid from rich countries.

Official aid from western governments, which remains the most important source of development finance for the poorest countries, declined last year to $37.3 billion, a drop in real terms of 12.3 per cent on the previous year, and the fifth year in a row that grants and soft loans to the most needy countries have declined. Aid budgets are nearly a third lower than 10 years ago in real terms.

"There is a real danger that... we are reaching such new lows that we will not be able to provide the development needs of the world's poorest countries in today's global economy," said Masood Ahmed,  the Bank's vice-president for poverty reduction.

Aid budgets have fallen to 0.25 per cent of rich countries' annual output, compared with 0.35 per cent when the West was at its most generous.

The Bank says donors have been getting stingier at a time when more people need aid. The number of people living on less than a $1 a day rose from 1.2 billion in 1987 to 1.3 billion in 1993, while access to education and health services has worsened.

"The decrease in foreign aid threatens many of the poorest countries in the world, which are most in need of capital but have the least ability to attract private money," said Professor Stiglitz.

The Bank blames the turmoil in Asia mostly on under-regulated, weak financial sectors in the    countries concerned. But destabilising "hot money" flows turned what began as a problem in the Thai property market into a crisis for the whole region. Investors rushed to pull out money from the crisis-hit countries, compounding the structural problems.

NEARLY three-quarters of Russia's budget will go on servicing its debts unless cardinal policy changes are made, Russia's prime minister in waiting, Sergei Kiriyenko, warned yesterday.

In an apocalyptic sermon to the upper house of parliament yesterday, he warned regional leaders of the disastrous state of the economy. The little-known 35-year-old, nominated for the post by President Boris Yeltsin but still to win the backing of the communist-patriotic bloc in parliament, said a quarter of Russians lived below subsistence level.

In a harsh attack on his predecessor, Viktor Chernomyrdin, who regularly claimed that the economy was growing, Mr Kiriyenko said: "There is practically not a single person in Russia today who would feel, as an individual, the economic growth of which the previous government spoke."

Russia's foreign debt stood at more than £78 billion in January. Rescheduling delayed repayment until this year, and in 2003 Moscow is due to start paying back the billions borrowed.

The backlog of unpaid wages has grown inexorably. The private sector owes employees £5.7 billion, while the state sector owes £700 million in wages. The backlog of pensions in both sectors has reached £8.8 billion.

Meanwhile, the popular daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported yesterday that the presidential administration was secretly spending millions of pounds on an exclusive leisure centre —   including indoor tennis courts, weights and a sauna — inside the Kremlin.

This collapse will lead to unprecedented revolutionary upheavals of all kinds, the greatest in world history, and it will be the greatest humiliation of any world imperialist hegemony ever recorded, with devastating consequences to the US 'order'.

But traditional anti-theory complacency, buttressed by revisionism's tragically large influence, does not want to know.

The anti-communist 'left' swamp finds it impossible to take a world perspective on the international class struggle, or even understand what one is, — such is the grip of their narrow-minded petty-bourgeois individualism. Only bits here and there are gathered in by this anti-communist middle class, - all entirely in piecemeal, episodic impressions.

The very weekend that the Sony boss is telling the world that the entire Japanese economy, the second most powerful in history, is on the point of collapse, - which would mean that the international market would then be just one short step from the dollar's collapse itself, unleashing the greatest revolutionary and trade-war holocaust by far in the whole human record, — the CPGB Weekly Worker Trots are swallowing Clinton's latest propaganda stunts at their face value, - his 'free-world' publicity tour of Africa, - and seriously declaring as their first-line characterisation of the whole stunt:

'imperialism's new world order remains unchallenged. The United States feels free to spread its wings. It now greedily eyes up regions and areas once thought of as out of bounds, or at least not really worth the candle. Africa was one such place...But not any more. Clinton's high-profile trip to sub-Saharan Africa...is an indicator of the new strategic approach taken by the United States...'Time to enter the club and get to learn the rules', is the new imperialist message.'

But the rules are that to ward off world communism, an artificial imperialist boom, fed by endless anarchic bank credit, is stoked up to the most incredible consumerist heights ever in 53 post-war years, only to then start collapsing back down again towards more savage renewed inter-imperialist trade-war conflict, market crashes, and slump than EVER occurred before, leading to such destruction of supposedly 'profit-wrecking' surpluses of capital (and its products) that it will make World Wars I and II, (which climaxed the two previous great inter-imperialist conflicts this century), seem like child’s play.

Africa has already long been dragged in to the international free-market anarchy. All that Africa is now waiting for is to be devastated by the worldwide markets crash, crippling bankruptcies, and grotesque reversal of fortunes that is currently turning the Far East into a revolutionary powder keg.

Far from effortlessly conquering a whole new continent in five minutes for future ruthless exploitation after a flying visit by Zippergate Clinton, (an international laughing stock, who panicked at one small crowd-meeting PR stunt, who was too scared to leave the airport in another 'state visit', and who was publicly humiliated by Mandela over the USA's bullying tactics towards Libya and Iran,) - the presidential trip only confirmed earlier disasters for American 'world domination' such as Somalia, and underlined the hopelessness of imperialist wishes to establish tight control over the whole planet (the New World Order) in the twilight of the imperialist epoch when the system, in Marx's words, is no longer capable of being anything other than a restraining fetter on the potential and appetite for dramatic new worldwide (cooperative) development, which capitalism's achievements inspired, but which its irrational, clumsy, and anarchic Western monopoly domination makes temporarily unattainable for the rest of the world.

Third World and international cooperative interests will get there only by toppling Western imperialist world hegemony. Clinton's shallow and shoddy public-relations posturing in Africa was, in terms of the passage of history, much closer to African cooperative domination over decadent American-imperialist exploitation hopes than to the American imperialist deluded period when it still tried kidding itself that it could still 'control the planet'.

All this posturing Trot impressionism is the most irresponsible guru-led dilettantism by middle-class academics who in reality harbour profound hostility to communist revolution (the dictatorship of the proletariat) and therefore to the very essence and crowning glory of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. The Weekly Worker is just a counter-revolutionary disinformation sheet, interested only in PREVENTING the development of a successful socialist movement in Britain, and relying for survival on widespread ignorance of Marxism, and anti-communist gullibility, with abuse as method, hoping that its posturing 'style' of slanderous insults and personal vilification will not bring painful retribution.

Such ultra-'left' childishness, - part of the Infantile disorder of leftwing communism analysed by Lenin, - will in fact get its comeuppance by just being seen to be pathetically wrong all the time, - so sinisterly misleading, in fact, that Trots will end up being despised by workers as agents of disinformation, parachuting entryist-fashion into the labour movement in order deliberately to disrupt it, just as they have tried to do with the SLP.

Both Trotskyist AND Revisionist hostility to theory has simply forgotten, or never grasped, - or never WANTED to know, - the essence of Leninist party-building science which was that only by proven LEADERSHIP in interpreting international and domestic class-war developments correctly, and then providing the right programmatic, strategic, and tactical guidance to best further the working-class fight for socialism in such circumstances, - would a party crucially gain the confidence of the working class that it knew its business and could lead successfully.

This can never be done if the latest highest points of international class-struggle development such as the world economic crisis, or China's relations with the West, or settlement of the national-liberation war in Ireland, etc, etc, are just avoided as strong news leads, - and as powerful opportunities for the party to speak up loud and clear for working-class interests in these matters IMMEDIATELY, - because "we don't know what's happening yet"!!!

That is the whole point of giving LEADERSHIP to the working class, - to make far more sense of the world than the bourgeoisie and its propaganda is making of it. The bourgeoisie in the end CANNOT EXPLAIN its own crisis. It will offer any number of explanations but the truth (the INSOLUBLE contradictions of its free-market economic system). It will blame the 'enemy within' working class; it will blame the 'hostility and unfair trading' of foreign countries; it will blame the 'immigrant and ethnic minority' population; etc, etc.

But it CAN, and MUST BE, and WILL BE defeated on all these lies. But it will never happen unless the workers party starts building up its credibility as soon as possible, - on ALL issues which the bourgeois media put before the working class in order to brainwash it and control its thinking, - by thoroughly exposing the ruling class's lies about Ireland, about the economic crisis, about the Gulf, about Europe, etc, etc.

These exposures of ruling class lies need putting out immediately, - at the very same moment that bourgeois propaganda is blitzing every subject in order to achieve total thought-control over the working class. A daily press is eventually needed, and publication as often as possible until then, and with single statements put out regularly on all major crises until publication can become more regular.

This eventual defeat of capitalist-state brainwashing (when events clear to everyone on the ground become so much out of line with what the ruling class is saying about them - as in the 1917 imperialist war which Russia was LOSING catastrophically), - will also never come about if whatever propaganda the workers-party can put out is deliberately dumbed-down "so that they don't throw it in the bin".

This attitude shows nothing but the most patronising contempt for the working class. What a workers party wants to worry about is can it provide ENOUGH words (that make sense) to satisfy the increasing demands that the working class will make for COMPLETE EXPLANATIONS of everything.

The overwhelming fate of most would-be successful workers parties in history has been their eventual irrelevance because they completely lose touch with world developments or they just die from bureaucratic complacency and opportunist suicide. None have ever died from trying too hard to understand the world, or trying to give leadership based on that understanding with which to rout (eventually, when circumstances turn in favour of socialist revolution) the non-stop avalanche of brainwashing propaganda spewing out of every orifice of bourgeois society.

The wish to avoid giving a lead to the working class "because we don't know what's happening yet" on important current complex matters where the whole picture of imperialist decadence, self-delusion, disinformation, and every other kind of reactionary rottenness can be exposed to the working class in the most favourable circumstances imaginable, - when the troubled bourgeois themselves are making such matters the big new issues of the day, - must be suspiciously close (in its generation) to the pathetic 'swamp' mentality which pretends that "80% agreement on things is good enough for the party of the working class". But this is degenerate petty-bourgeois nonsense.

Coalitions of forces may be kept going by a workers party for shorter or longer periods for all kinds of reasons in different areas of its work.

But this has not the slightest connection with the anti-scientific rubbish that the successful workers party itself, - in its essential understanding and leadership thrust, - can remain permanently 20% uncertain about what it wants to say to the working class. This is just a recipe for perpetual dither and paralysis.

Inspired and successful leadership of the working-class struggle for socialism is only ever likely to prosper if there is 100% belief in a party's cause. Enthusiasm, confidence, and conviction are all mutually reinforcing. No party in history could ever have arrived at 100% of the truth all the time. But to pretend to be fighting for the truth while posturing about "80% agreement being good enough" is to fight with one hand tied behind the back.

This middle-class agnostic cynicism is good for building one thing only, - the 'swamp' itself. There, the pretence about 'agreement', - any percentage, - is all that is needed for full participation in the never-ending farce of factionalising, entryism, prima-donna resignations, philistine opportunism, personal vilification, and treacherous back-stabbing. This swamp of petty-bourgeois Trotskyite individualism will never produce any worthwhile agreement about anything. It is a wholly alien class force to the revolutionary socialist needs of the proletariat.

The successful workers party needs to throw itself wholeheartedly into an all-out FIGHT for 100% of the truth, - all the time; and therefore for 100% agreement, because the only basis for any worthwhile agreement that will last is to ground it on a TRUE ANALYSIS of what is going on in the world and what needs to be done about it (e.g. work within Labour or build separately from Labour; build a loose alliance of all the 'lefts' or build a unitary party; support the workers states achievements in the 20th century, or denounce them as fascist hellholes: etc); - and only by taking firm decisions on such matters, and applying them, is it then possible to discover IN PRACTICE how correct a party's analysis has been, and what needs to be reassessed to make it completely accurate.

But this FIGHT for the truth will get nowhere if revisionist complacency (or Trotskyite agnostic posturing) refuse, for different reasons, to accept that the truth can even be arrived at.

The fear of even 'bothering' the working class with an attempted analysis of the world has reactionary connections too. It reeks of the revisionist complacency which used to BLAME the working class for falling gullible to bourgeois propaganda but which ended up itself believing more in capitalism's self-promotion than workers even did, becoming Eurocommunism, and then self-liquidating completely. Being suspicious of theory is little removed from philistine hostility to theory. Insisting that 'workers won't read anything complicated' raises the suspicion that the person saying it cannot be bothered to read it.
 
And frequently concealed within this dissembling is the daftest trap of all, for socialist activists to fall into, which goes: "I could understand it if I wanted to, but most workers could not, or would not want to understand it. You have to know how to talk to the working class."

This is the acme of self-justifying, self-deluding philistinism, unfortunately commonplace among workers who have acquired a little learning themselves, but have not amassed quite enough and have got stuck at the very misleading stage of believing that since they have made some educational advances for themselves (formal or political), then it makes sense to judge everyone else by how 'thick' they are. It is a complete fallacy, of course, and makes no sense at all in general terms. The wisdom of a class, and its ability to act upon that understanding, is in the end determined by objective historical conditions, and not by "brightness' at all. The masses in Tsarist Russia were largely illiterate, but they created one of the most astonishing achievements in all history, the world's first socialist revolution, - and they consciously fought for it, argued for it, and sacrificed for it heroically. How 'thick' were they?

The working class everywhere need and deserve the BEST understanding that a party can possibly muster, its HIGHEST POINT of grasping theoretically the most up-to-date developments in the international class struggle and imperialist crisis.

And what will ALWAYS happen at some stage is that the would-be party of leadership will be BEHIND the working class in understanding, to the great danger of the socialist revolution, - and not ahead of it at all. The best thing that would-be workers-party builders everywhere can do, permanently, is to buck their own ideas up. They will never be good enough, or complete enough, or accurately expressed enough to meet the historic requirements of the working class that is to make the socialist revolution.

To hear refugees from the cursed revisionist school of political muddleheadedness declaring that the working class 'will not respond to complex arguments' - must be the height of foolish hypocritical humbug. What about the revisionists failing to respond, - for 40 years or more, and to the simplest of observations which even the 'thickest' person alive would have had the ability to understand, had they not been so blinkered too. Revisionism, in all its anti-Marxist wretchedness, needs attacking just as relentlessly as middle-class anti-communist ultra-'left' Trot sectarianism.

Another way of posturing in front of the working class as 'leaders', but ludicrously avoiding the essential steps needed for such responsible trust to be conferred, occurs within petty-bourgeois academic opportunism which loves the pedantic pursuit of 'programme'-mongering, or 'rank-and-file democracy'-mongering, or other workerist fetishes, - but does feel obliged occasionally to deal with real world analysis instead of purely abstract point-scoring, - but then simply ignores or denies previous pronouncements if they turn out to be false.

But genuine Marxist science obviously cannot possibly survive and develop unless it constantly gives a full account of its own mistakes and what pricelessly has been learned from them.

The whole of Trotskyism, for example, simply refuses to answer for its lifelong counter-revolutionary posturing that far from wanting the overthrow of the Soviet workers state which its non-stop vilification of the USSR would cause people to imagine, the Trots really wanted to STRENGTHEN the Soviet Union via "the political revolution".

This 'political revolution' was always a completely imaginary 'Marxist' concept without an iota of scientific reality, - a totally specious anti-communist nonsense posturing as "the next great stage of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary understanding".

Soviet leadership could always have been improved upon with better grasp of the international balance of class forces and the next detailed directions history was heading in, naturally. But the dictatorship of the proletariat could not have been improved upon, - only reversed into capitalist restoration by any new 'revolution', which could only have been a counter-revolution.

So it proved in reality. Trot anti-communist hysteria eventually had its way, and the Stalinist bureaucracies tumbled, mostly self-liquidated by their own revisionist stupidity. But not one workers state or planned socialism was improved upon, even where there had been the greatest volume of Trot-backed 'rank-and-file-socialism' - posturing such as around Solidarnosc in Poland, - the Vatican's very own counter-revolution, organised by the CIA. 

In every single case, counter-revolution and the vilest capitalist restoration triumphed the moment that the dictatorship of the proletariat was undermined.

The Trots now simply ignore this monumental exposure of their one great 'theory' as completely bankrupt nonsense. Except with the extreme anti-communist Trot nutters, the once world-renowned 'political revolution' theory has been laid quietly to rest, and hidden away.

Current Trot provocative sects occasionally still try their arm at giving leadership to the working class by analysing actual events so as to say where the international balance of class forces is heading next, and what intervention the working class can and should make into the present class-war struggle worldwide.

And just as always, when their 'theory' proves bankrupt, the Trots make no attempt to assess their mistake so as to learn lessons from it, but simply turn their back on their mistake, ignore it, and hope that everyone else will soon have forgotten about it too. Nothing is heard now about 'Solidarnosc, the future of socialism'; 'Gorbachev, the realisation of the political revolution for building real socialism'; 'Militant Marxist entryism into Labour, the way to the socialist revolution'; or 'political revolution, - the only way for the workers state to survive or flourish in China, Cuba, etc', - all prominent Trot 'theories' of the immediate past.

Some contemporary themes will soon be silenced too. The supposedly 'all-powerful US imperialist New World Order' zapping 'hot spot' after 'hot spot' all round the globe, - will not limp on for long, its non-Marxist delusions utterly devastated by the very Marxist economic collapse of worldwide markets. And the Trot application of this impressionistic nonsense to Ireland ("the IRA have sold out"; "Adams has turned bourgeois careerist"; "Sinn Féin have accepted that imperialism cannot be bombed into concessions") will soon be silenced too after this week's historic dismantling of the British colonial status of 'Northern Ireland', - supposedly 'Never to be Surrendered'(see previous story). This won't stop these middle-class anti-communists from their ultra-left Trotskyite posturing, but it can help the working class see through them as counter-revolutionary disrupters. The real problem behind all anti-
communist hostility to theory is that the entire spectrum of non-Marxist 'socialism struggle' does not actually believe that the phenomenal achievements of the modern capitalist world will ever arrive at insoluble crisis.

So astonishingly slick, powerful, and clever is present-day international big business, its money-making capability, and its sensational technological advances that it must seem to average public opinion that there are no problems which the might of the imperialist monopolies cannot solve.

Murdoch is seen as unstoppable, as is Zionist colonisation's 'Silicon Valley' high technology supremacy in the Near East, etc, etc. And Blairism is shown as dominating the working class's Labour Party more completely than ever.

But all of this superficial dominance is built on sand if inbuilt unalterable contradictions in the free-market method of monopoly-capital accumulation always eventually produce devastating collapses and conflicts within which the very quantities of 'civilisation' which capitalism's advances have created declare, as they will, that they cannot put up with the injustice and catastrophe of crashes and slump. 

Inter-imperialist conflict will shatter ALL of this atmosphere of can-do capitalist achievement in no time. And ONLY the mass of the population, on whom the real burdens of the suffering will be placed (as now in the Far East) will be able to do something about it, - by making the rational socialist revolution.

Build Leninism. Alf Lee

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

DEADLY IMPERIALIST EXPLOITATION

AT FIRST GLANCE, the workers on the northern Atlantic coast of Honduras appeared to have fallen foul of a bizarre and gruesome new epidemic.

Doctors and medical authorities were alarmed by the spread of respiratory diseases among local people, along with a rise in the incidence of both cancer and sterility. But what caused most concern was the emergence of a particularly grim and hitherto unheard-of phenomenon — infants born dead, without brains.

Moreover, these births were not isolated occurrences. According to medical workers in the region, the number of such births now stands at eight per thousand.  And rising.

One factor common to the communities of the region is that most depend for their livelihood on the large banana plantations that dominate Honduras's northern coastline.

This led doctors to scrutinise the pesticides being used on the plantations, in particular those owned or operated by the US fruit production firm, Castle & Cooke. Quickly, they narrowed the possible source of infection down to what they now believe is the real cause. The US firm, it is charged, has been using highly-toxic, often lethal chemicals on its farms, while failing to either inform or protect its workers from the obvious dangers posed.

Medical facilities in the region are treating increasing numbers of banana workers for ailments such as tuberculosis, acute respiratory diseases, asthma, pneumonia, skin rashes and burns, cancer and sterility. Medical workers in the region have called on the Honduran authorities to investigate the problem as a matter of urgency.

Some have gone so far as to characterise the company's reckless and criminal use of the lethal chemicals as little short of "genocide" committed against the impoverished workers.

According to the testimony of some of those affected, planes belonging to Castle & Cooke regularly spray company plantations with tonnes of the highly-toxic chemical Nemagon, which is used to kill off parasitic worms (known as nematodes) within the banana crop.

In the United States (where the chemical is manufactured) sprays such as Nemagon are used sparingly, if at all. Only specially-trained workers are permitted to apply them to crops and then, only in a strictly controlled and regulated environment.

A former banana worker in Costa Rica recalled recently the potency of the pesticides he was employed to inject into the earth around banana trees.

"You would inject it and all the animals, the crickets, frogs, lizards and all the insects would die — immediately." The pesticide in question was Nemagon.

Indeed, Nemagon is already known within the agri-chemical industry as a highly-dangerous substance. During the 1960s and 1970s, literally hundreds of thousands of banana workers worldwide became sterile after working with DBCP — the chief constituent of Nemagon.

That mass sterilisation (which affected an estimated 10,000 banana workers in Costa Rica alone) is now the subject of a 'class action' (large scale) lawsuit in the United States. Central to the claimants' case is that the companies which manufactured DBCP continued to produce and market it after it was found to have caused sterility in US workers.

Crucially, however, that marketing was targeted at companies working outside the US. A weak regulatory environment and an inability (or an unwillingness) to enforce what protective laws do exist means many large fruit corporations in Latin America continue to use chemicals that are either strictly controlled, or banned completely in wealthier countries.

Indeed, the World Health Organisation has classified many of the pesticides currently used in Central America in its 'dangerous' or 'second most dangerous' categories. Several of those used also appear on the Dirty Dozen list of the world's worst pesticides, compiled by the US-based Pesticide Action Network.

Among the largest fruit corporations in Central America are Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita. •