Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.
Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
No  981   Tuesday  Jan   12   1999
Subscriptions — £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications PO BOX 50, London SWI7 9NL] [ Post Office Regd]          10p

The whole bourgeois world is becoming divided and demoralised by approaching economic catastrophe. When the dollar implodes, total uproar will follow. The German Euro zone is just preparation for all-out inter-continental trade war. Decadent imperialism's hopeless New Labour stooges face disaster in all directions and in whatever they do. Even falling down will soon be seen as quite an achievement. With capitalism itself now going wrong, all that Blairism represents is pointless propaganda tinkering, and increasing nastiness towards all but the fat cats. The fake-'left' again capitulates to anti-socialist brainwashing instead of fighting it. Until falsified anti-Soviet history is taken on, bourgeois ideological nonsense will reign supreme. Latest Trot distortions of Marxist science exposed.

It is the depth of the crisis of the imperialist world system which is causing
(a) splits in the Establishment inside the USA and Britain but also inside their Euro-imperialist rivals;
(b) uncontrollable scandals humiliating New Labour;
(c) the continuing inability of the fake-'left' to mount a serious challenge to capitalism.

Baffled bourgeois commentators are trying to pretend, — with their fingers tightly crossed, — that the astonishing spectacle of the American ruling class undermining their own political authority, nationally and internationally, with the grotesque impeachment scandal, is because the USAis now so strong that it has no enemies left. Without a challenge to US world domination, it is argued, America's political leadership out of complacent boredom has started knocking lumps out of each other just for entertainment.

Such an explanation goes against all the evidence of history and completely ignores the outstanding facts now.

Far worse splits in the American internal establishment took place in the 1960s,— Kennedy assassinated, Johnson resigning from running for a second term, the tortured and violent Democratic Party convention, and then the bitter Humphrey-Nixon election contest, — — but not remotely because there were no outside challenges or enemies.

Just the opposite. The USA had been humiliated over Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, and what to do next; the Soviet missiles in Cuba crisis further shattered America's
'all-powerful' prestige, as did the Soviet lead in the space race; and then Vietnam defeats virtually turned the whole USA into a demoralised conflict-ridden basket case. 

No wonder the ruling political circles so tore themselves apart.

But why be so divided among themselves now within the elite political racket in Washington, — only the second impeachment in all history, and over something apparently so trivial, — — and being approached in such a tortuous and constipated way???

Because the international economic and trade-war crisis of the free-market system threatens INCOMPARABLY greater disasters for America's world domination than remotely contained in the brief challenge by the workers states during the Cold War (who were so hampered by revisionism), — and because no one has a clue how to set about SOLVING the international economic and trade-war crisis.

It is the possible collapse of the dollar itself, and the collapse of the entire postwar system of debt-financing of the whole historical might of US imperialism in its world-dominant political positions which is now on the cards.

And such a dramatic historical transformation, — with America being one of the first economies to collapse rather than the last, — would not be limited to just a return to isolationism, or just a return to a powerful US continental economy prior to its neo—colonial spread into becoming the world's banker and gendarme.

The incredibly inflated better-off American living standards and lifestyles, benefiting from worldwide acceptance of American government debt via prized dollar 'loans' and gifts, —and benefiting from the artificially extended production boom that all this credit created, — — would collapse too. 

For very many of the better-off Americans, and for the tens of millions of worse-off Americans especially, such a dramatic collapse of the US economy itself would pose the revolutionary question in the USA among the first rather than last. 
The determination by German imperialism to tie up the whole of powerful West European economic imperialism into the single Euro currency (and subsequent political and military union as soon as possible after) to stand AGAINST the dollar's potential disaster worldwide, — grows more and more significant by the day. The most devastating all-out inter-imperialist conflict of all time for world economic and political domination looms.

This also registers somewhere at the back of the brain of American imperialism, and the USA's position in strict financial terms is not good, — massive internal deficits, massive international debts, and massive balance of payments deficits.

And far from being universally loved and baled out because of having 'saved the world from communism', the Americans are going to find that (a) that is nothing like true; revolutionary communist advances are going to start pouring forward in every corner of the globe very shortly; and (b) every single bourgeoisie will be out to secure their OWN survival if they can, and will cheerfully scupper the American ruling class if that is what it takes.

Far from no longer having any challenges, America's world domination is not only about to face its biggest-ever test, but it is also doomed to lose its world domination in the greatest imperialist humiliation of all time: NO wonder the US ruling class so despise each other and cannot wait to stab each other in the back.

The British Establishment's current New Labour management is if anything even more sordidly treacherous and lacking in confidence, — and for the same facing-the-abyss reasons only multiplied tenfold. 

Any real COMMANDING strength of the British imperialist economy has all but disappeared. Its major industries and financial services are now foreign—owned to an incredibly large extent, and domestic control over Britain's economic fortunes relentlessly continues rapidly to reduce, both through further international takeovers or outright defeats, or because the UK establishment can find no contented role for itself, being despised both in Europe and in Washington (and just about everywhere else too).

But as well as British imperialist economic might, there has also disappeared quite quickly the prestige of Labour's 'new polities', which, because it was based entirely on making a good PR impression but with no substance, has obviously begun falling apart as soon as any bad impressions started to be made.

Blair, Cook Mandelson, & Co lived by the shallow soundbite and will therefore die by the shallow soundbite too. New Labour — new sleaze. If fat cats (the Major government) are bad, then mere fat-cat posturing on borrowed money (Mandelson) has got to look doubly stupid, — as have Cabinet enforcer Jack Cunningham's private jet flights everywhere costing us £6,560 each when he went back and forth to Europe seven times as Agriculture Minister when he could have travelled First Class for £438 return each time; and as have the monstrous expenses on redecoration on the offices they took over from the Tories (just £80,000 on wallpaper alone for the Lord Chancellor's apartment, etc).

And after a spate of enforced resignations by leading New Labour office-holders because of all kinds of ludicrous scandals, now the Foreign Secretary's abandoned wife of 28 years standing has spilled the beans on what a highly degenerate gaggle of back-stabbing opportunists this unprincipled Blair regime really are:

Margaret believes that politics eroded her husband's personality. As a young man Cook was passionately left-wing, pro-CND, anti-cruise missiles and anti-Scots devolution.

Yet, during his short time as foreign secretary he has supported the use of those once-loathed missiles against Iraq and is part of an administration that has a nuclear deterrent and is establishing a Scottish parliament.

"Robin," she explains, "had to choose between his principles and his career. He chose his career. He can't quite forgive himself. He has terrible guilt."

Because he has behaved dishonourably?

"Because," she says baldly, "he has sold his soul to the devil." Did he think that, too? 

"Yes," she says. "I said that to him once, and he agreed with me. Robin realised he had sold his soul and felt bad about it, but his ambition beat him. He felt that Tony Blair had sold Labour's soul to the devil, too, to get elected in 1997." 

Robin Cook was close to John Smith, the former Labour leader. Smith's sudden death left Cook "completely in the cold politically" as Robin was not close to Tony Blair and "hated" Peter Mandelson.
Cook entirely failed to recognise Blair was the coming man. "I was barely aware of Blair at all when he became leader," says Margaret. "Robin had never mentioned him."

Cook soon changed his tune. "When Tony Blair became leader, Robin was so subservient! His obsequiousness made me sick. Robin would get cross with me for not being 'warmer' when Blah-rang the house. I'd just say, 'Who is it? Just a minute.' Robin expected me to go, 'Oh Tony, what a great honour'."

Cook was also at odds with Gordon Brown. The roots of their feud go back about 20 years but essentially boil down to the fact that Brown was a younger, fast-rising star in the Scottish Labour firmament. Their enmity intensified after Smith's death. "Robin used to spit blood about Brown. It got so bad that if Robin was in a black mood, I would just ask, 'What has Gordon Brown been up to now?' "

Margaret, who has witnessed the spats between new Labour's big beasts over many years, says: "It's unbelievable the amount of energy that goes into the fighting and feuding with each other. Their relationships are very unstable, childish and punitive. It's pathetic. It's playground politics. They are all so competitive, they just all want each other's jobs."

So who are Cook's friends? "He's fond of Frank Dobson but part of Robin's problem is that he is so rude, has no courtesy and is incapable of making friendships for friendship's sake. It was almost as if he was always thinking in his head, 'What could this person do for me?' "

New Labour's latest eye-dazzling propaganda blitz is to threaten to introduce the fat-cat exploitation standards that its ministers so love into the world of state-school education.

Profit-making educational companies are to be invited to take over "failing schools" and even entire LEAs (local education authorities) and the services they provide if "standards are not improved and public services are not delivering" Education Secretary Blunkett declared at the weekend.

And one businessman,— an entrepreneur manufacturer of paint and fireproof coatings (and a staunch Thatcher admirer) — is ready to step in to buy a school or two, the capitalist press reported at the weekend, as are two American corporations.

So it's back to Hard Times and Mr Gradgrind,— schools run strictly for capitalism's functional needs with no further pretence of 'general education'.
Not that it will necessarily make much difference because state schooling in general is still abysmally failing the real needs and potential of modern society which is ready by all sorts of measures and for all sorts of reasons to go through a massive leap in educational achievements and educational expectations.

But not under capitalism; and in one sense it makes little difference if the bare minimum state education currently provided for the average school leaver is administered privately for profit or publicly by LEA direct labour. 

Both sources suffer from niggardly financial constraints and sadly restricted vision, perspectives, and ambition, — — even the best and most expensive of private education (which is hardly what Blunkett and New Labour have in mind for "failed" state primary and secondary schools).

It makes a huge political difference, however, for Blair's regime to be publicly confessing yet again that it sees no future beyond what the capitalist system can offer, however administered (via free schools out of taxes or via pay schools out for profit).

Such an impoverished vision is New Labour's death warrant.

On a limited basis and for a limited time, it is not worth disputing the possibility that privatisation might occasionally lead to more 'efficiency', or  'cost-effectiveness', — even in running a school.

But (a) education is not paint production; and (b) the whole problem facing the whole world right now (if New Labour haven't noticed) is where are capitalism's methods, — and capitalism's INSOLUBLE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC CRISIS taking mankind???

In the same day's capitalist press admissions, it was revealed that the Portsmouth area hospitals trust is so suffering from the National Health Service beds and staffing crisis (where endless other privatisation schemes have already left their negative imprint on the NHS) that the public were having to be appealed to for unpaid voluntary 1abour to keep the hospitals running, and avoid a red-alert disaster.

How interesting. The only real resource at the end of the day for running a modern society in 1999 is a willing people, — which is exactly what Marxism explains must eventually happen. 

The crude profit-motive of labour exploitation (which is all that Blunkett's "I'll privatise you" bludgeon is all about) increasingly gets out of step with the aspirations of contemporary human relations which have become so highly advanced and sophisticated in mobility and communications, breeding ever-greater potential for independent-mindedness.

This can turn cynically negative against socialism in an 'everlasting world boom', but could turn savagely against capitalism's exploitation anarchy once boom turns into intolerable worldwide slump — and even worse. 

On a completely rational basis, any government could in theory achieve popular support and involvement for running society in almost any improved direction imaginable.

But New Labour is utterly in thrall to the free-market anarchy of the capitalist system overall, — and increasingly in detail too on the daily challenges of government.

And it is capitalism which is currently plunging half the world into the most terrifying economic crisis in living memory, stoking up revolt and civil-war conflict in all directions, and driving individual states and power blocs towards increasingly bitter conflict on an ever-wider scale. 

It is a system which it only takes half a brain to see has utterly outlived its time, — but the antics of the New Labour leaders indicate in all sorts of ways that they lack even that capacity.

The local initiative to harness community help in the Portsmouth area to rescue the NHS crisis will be a rare exception to prove the rule (of this demented New Labour sale of its soul and its principles to imperialist-stooge opportunism as the only worthwhile motivation to organise society around). 
This joke line of 'hard-choice efficiency' will not remotely stem the international capitalist economic disaster, and it can only result ultimately in a social explosion. 

Not the least bit in tune with all this because of their hostility to theory, the Philistine fake-'left' exhibited their factional defeatist sterility yet again at Christmas when theIndependent Labour Network newly, formed around sacked New labour MEPs Ken Coats, apparently spent all day festering on a platform recommendation that any new party name to be adopted (for election purposes under the new rules) should avoid words like 'socialist', 'workers' and 'left' so as not to restrict voter appeal!!

This negative tail-ending of Cold War anti-socialist propaganda is as uselessly impressionistic and opportunist (as far as the working class is concerned) as New Labour's own cowardly variants.

And this failure to mount a constant all-round challenge to the whole of prevailing anti-socialist ideology is what splits the fake-'left' into ever-smaller factions, and is also what drives most of these groups further and further to the right.

It should be obvious that if a movement fails to deliberately nail (through constant propaganda and education) the regular Cold War lies about 'planned socialism failing' in the USSR (it was sabotaged by Revisionism); about 'Soviet imperialism' (in reality astonishingly selfless unending free aid and trade preferences to almost half the Third World at one stage, asking for nothing in return); about 'Soviet censorship and cultural tyranny' (in reality the greatest flowering of autonomy, language and literature, etc, for over 170 nationalities (previously crushed under Tsarism) that political records have ever known), plus the 20th century's greatest classical music output by far (composition and performance), an equally outstanding contribution to cinema art and to written literature of all kinds, and at least the avoidance of nonsense-painting that Western countries have made fools of themselves with, even if socialist realism produced too much triteness); and about 'Soviet life's shortages and deprivations, etc' (but now with living standards HALVED under resumed capitalism, and society breaking down into chaos in all directions, the actual colossal ACHIEVEMENTS of planned socialism are newly becoming evident); etc, etc; then any hopes for its own socialist aspirations will suffer endless ideological hostility, including around the working class where capitalist-world prejudices will all survive unless consciously taken on and demolished.

The various remnants of the old Communist Party are living proof of how hopelessly rightwing the intellectual drift becomes once the fight has been abandoned against anti-Soviet nonsense.

So dementedly fired up has the CPGB become with petty bourgeois class hatred of the 83 years achievements of the dictatorship of the proletariat so far in history that the Weekly Worker has grown completely schizophrenic.

In consecutive paragraphs, the cleverly posturing academic half of its brain explains why it is crucial to demolish the whole of current bourgeois ideological brainwashing before socialist ideas will ever have a chance with the working class, but then the emotional anti-communism takes over and instantly re-vomits as truth every ludicrous propaganda distortion and racist scaremongering nonsense that 'free world' gibberish used for survival against 'the evil empire', etc:

Communist politics is about more than strikes, student grants and other so-called bread and butter issues. A prerequisite for anything decisive is securing ideological hegemony. By definition that involves as much the past as the present. History, therefore, is a weapon, either for revolution or reaction.

Where we require the unvarnished truth about history with all its different social formations, antagonisms, violent ruptures and democratic movements, our rulers need myth, seamless apologetics and resignation. To maintain and reproduce domination in the realm of ideas the bourgeoisie employ, flatter and promote all manner of philosophers, academics, theologians, journalists and broadcasters. These dons and  divines, pundits and postmodernists manufacture or propagate a history which downplays or obliterates those below. Capitalism is presented as the natural order or the last word in civilisation. Piecemeal change is their totem. Revolution only brings disaster and disappointment. Revolutions and revolutionaries are therefore with equal disingenuousness de-revolutionised or demonised.

Here in Britain the revolutionary past of the bourgeoisie is denied by being remade as other. Aristocratic cavaliers are the dashing heroes of biography, film and novel. Roundheads become dour proto-Stalinites. Charles I is bumbling but well-meaning, inoffensive and courageous, Oliver Cromwell narrow-minded and bigoted.

What of our dead leaders? Marx, Engels and Lenin have all been transformed from active revolutionary politicians into mere interpreters of the world by reformists and left-leaning academics. They have also been deemed responsible for the gulags and the system of terror instituted by Stalin in the 1930s by rightist academics and their closely associated anarchist co-thinkers. Of course; such a calumny is sustainable because not only was Stalin's 'second revolution' — ie, the 1928 bureaucratic counter-revolution — carried out under the guise of Marxism, but so too were the Chinese, Korean, Albanian, Kampuchean and other bloody and disastrous experiments in national socialism.

'Official communism' in power created and lived an anti-Marxist Marxism. From the materialist theory of universal human liberation Marxism became a creaking idealist doctrine of (non-capitalist) statist oppression and exploitation. In the absurd propaganda claims, ideological trappings and actions of Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung and Hoxha and their descendants the permanent persuaders of capitalism found their truth.

The retreat from Marxist scientific understanding of the world was, of course, the ultimate disaster for the Revisionist bureaucracies, and their one really certain betrayal of workers interests. 

But the rest of this sick diatribe depends totally for its effect on the West's most crucial Great Lie of all, — namely the barmy notion that the only socialist revolutions and workers states there have ever been actually set out to OPPRESS people. 

Such disgusting nonsense is pure Daily Telegraph, and slyly made all the easier to brainwash people with when only the most backward or racially and culturally different countries are mentioned where the working class took power — Korea, China, Kampuchea, Albania.

Well, as the truly degenerate existence now in Russia,—  and its obviously degenerate existence under Tsarism, — demonstrate to anyone who can retain a fraction of objectivity in their thinking, the workers states were a colossal achievement and a clear ADVANCE for all the countries where they were built, without exception, and only the most disgraceful anti-communist liars (like the CPGB, rivalling the worst that 83 years of demented bourgeois brainwashing have spewed forth in anti-communist propaganda) will say otherwise.

And don't be fooled by the Weekly Worker pretence that they just want to protect Marxism. They do not understand its first principles, and they DELIBERATELY distort and undermine Marxism in exactly the same way as they hideously distort the truth about the workers states.

A Weekly Worker attempt to prove past EPSR philosophical achievements "unscientific" has ended up in the usual swamp mess of endless distortions pretending that Marx favoured factional alliances as opposed to a firm party line.

The author's real target is Marxism itself, of course, —  presenting it as "emancipatory" in allegedly embracing a variety of theories all at the same time.

The aim is to end up concluding that the EPSR's longstanding perspectives on total imperialist economic crisis—catastrophe and revolutionary proletarian-dictatorship upheaval worldwide is "un-Marxist".

This Dec 17 piece is way out in suggesting that Marx's appreciation of theoretical achievements preceding his own is the same thing as regarding rival contemporary theories as all being potentially equally valid.

This non-sequitur builds on the essay's incomplete idea that competing theories lead to the truth (i.e. towards relative truth) when it is their putting into practice which is the crucial ingredient.

The 19-year battle to prove the EPSR right and everyone else wrong about Ireland, e.g. is a long-distance pursuit of theory (about British imperialist decline and world imperialist crisis) into the practice of seeing Ireland's completed national-liberation having at last to be conceded (under layers of misleading propaganda by an embarrassed Orange-colonist Establishment and by various anti-Marxist schools of petty-bourgeois defeatism and fake-'leftism'.)

The totally bogus charge against EPSR of 'refusing to consider an alternative understanding' is an irrelevant diversion until the correctness and worthwhileness of analysing the latest 30-year struggle in Ireland as a triumphant revolutionary defeat of imperialism and colonial occupation is demonstrated or disproved. 

The school of purely academic Trotskyism loves this approach because it masks their own failure to use any understanding at all to give a lead to workers about this conflict which has so bedevilled politics in Britain for a generation. (All other Trot schools of thought have simply got it wrong).

The 'inflexible dogma' dismissal of EPSR views without analysing them is doubly ignorant on the question of the workers states, where a long and often painful clarification process is still going on in the Review's columns.

Tens of thousands of words have been struggled with in accounting for how the 'undefeatable' concept of Soviet anti-imperialist achievements and planned socialist achievements, now clearly wrong and badly misleading in one obvious sense, has begun to take on a different significance as a large and decisively important chunk of 20th century history, back from which civilisation will never be able to fully retreat, and which might yet resume a role of a model to be aimed for in many parts of a rapidly collapsing capitalist world of utter degeneracy and barbarism.

The EPSR's 'dogmatic' championing of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the unavoidable essence of a truly new world order remains on course as the only still-viable understanding which explains
(l) both the Stalinist state's undoubted anti-imperialist achievements and yet fatal (ultimately) theoretical errors;     
(2) how Gorbachev managed to make one revisionist mistake too many; 
(3) why Tiananmen was a vital obstacle to yet another revisionist debacle and might yet spare China the pointless torments that the ex-USSR is now going through;
(4) the ULTIMATE bankruptcy of ALL national-democratic revolutions, Eurocommunist 'alternative economic strategies', and Trot 'pure rank-and-file democracy' illusions; etc, etc. 

More historical practice will alone prove eventually what is 'dogmatic' and what isn't. Unlike the fake-'left', EPSR Marxist science will never just drop any analysis which starts to look wrong, but it will also never stop hounding the fake-'left' from the vantage point of correct EPSR theory.

However, it is only when things turn out right that theory becomes fact and begins reliably to "explain reality", which crucial bit Phil Sharpe again leaves out. 

And to call this "prediction" with a sneer in Mystic Meg's direction is to miss the point with knobs on. The aim is not to predict but to precisely explain reality WHILE IT IS HAPPENING AND BEFORE THE HISTORY IS COMPLETED, i.e. before the facts are fully known or knowable. 

What other choice does a workers revolutionary movement in living struggle have? To call this 'prediction' is simply another way for academic Trotskyism to take no stand on anything for giving a practical lead to the workers movement and its political education in action.

Far from "denying the importance of human activity and consciousness", the only point of the EPSR's existence is the struggle to guide this in the right direction. It has, for example, agitated tirelessly for all anti-imperialists to give full support to the Good Friday Agreement as a defeat for the British colonial establishment and as ultimately demonstrating the truth of Marxist consciousness that workers in Britain would never be able to start their own emancipation (from capitalist exploitation) all the time that the continued colonial enslavement of Ireland remained in being. 

It will also finally allow human activity and consciousness in Ireland to at last go beyond national-liberation preoccupations to deliberately building a specifically socialist revolution and the eventual victory over ALL imperialist influence (as opposed to 'merely' its direct colonial expression in the monstrous nonsense of 'northern Ireland' as was enshrined prior to the Good Friday Agreement and as is now being dismantled bit by bit.)

What lead has Phil Sharpe ever given to workers anywhere for developing "human activity and consciousness" on the Irish question? Has it been a successful intervention, explaining everything to everyone?? Or has he limped along behind the failed Trot defeatism about "Sinn Féin and the IRA abandoning the struggle and accepting the Partition status quo as imposed by the imperialist Now World Order" etc, etc.??

Marxism does much more than "show the structural possibility for socialism", and plainly did it predictively (in the manner described above). The whole first part of the Communist Manifesto is just one long 'prediction' of how all FUTURE capitalist developments will ultimately only "INEVITABLY" create their own proletarian grave-diggers. 

When else have such dramatically REVOLUTIONARY developments that a century has contained (as have happened in the 20th century) been predicted in detail more than 70 years in advance in the midst of a completely different way of life which had not yet even remotely reached the height of its powers and which was to fool such a talent as Kautsky 70 years later as no longer being susceptible to revolution? 

What is happening here is that under the guise of putting down 'mundane prediction', it is Marxism itself which is being rubbished.

The one prediction Phil Sharpe approves of was, of course, a complete anti-communist nonsense. There was no "crisis and collapse" of the Soviet Union "as predicted by Ticktin". The dictatorship of the proletariat was still achieving very impressive results when revisionist degeneracy deliberately broke it up in favour of the 'free market' and "parliamentary democracy'. 

All the Trotpredictions had been TOTALLY WRONG for 70 years, and were totally wrong at the end, too, because of this failure to grasp the most essential point of the whole of Marxist-Leninist science, —  namely, that proletarian dictatorship alone holds the key to the whole future of civilisation. Lose that and everything is lost, as Russia has proved negatively, and China, after Tiananmen, has proved positively.

Of course the limitations on life from bureaucratic behaviour in the workers states, and the criminal injustices this could lead to, were appalling. But leaving aside the lethal consequences that flowed from the obviously still-inadequate Soviet workers state being thrust for 70 years onto the very front line of the international class war, which imperialism throughout fought more ruthlessly and powerfully than ever before, — — it is a common observation by anyone who actually lived in the USSR for any length of time that the general predisposition to arbitrary bureaucratic viciousness and unreason in human behaviour in the British labour movement has always been infinitely worse and more depressing than ordinary existence ever was under the Soviet state, even at its most ridiculous. 

Hopefully, there will no longer be a front line against world imperialism when the first 70 years of a British workers state unfold, in which case bureaucratic arbitrariness might possibly avoid some of the tragic consequences that the world's first workers states experienced. 

But does not the present theoretical and factional feebleness of the British'left' and labour movement (which would make a workers state in Britain tomorrow a certain nightmare to start with) cause at least the suspicion that the Trot accusations about "defending the stalinist bureaucracy" is not much more use than a shallow swear-word when trying to get to grips with these hugely difficult questions?

On the world imperialist crisis, it is Phil Sharpe's 'predictions' which are just wrong. It is now rapidly heading towards worldwide revolutionary upheaval (see previous 10 million EPSR words for the full scientific analysis of this 'prediction'), but this is neither more nor less 'determinist' than the Communist Manifesto. 

Developing consciousness and human activity, consciously fought for, will alone finally make it happen. But just as Phil Sharpe can now tut-tut Karl Marx for being a bit of an idealist on the quiet (and also a bit of a 'homophobe' too, wasn't he? And how come Weekly Worker has ignored that little problem so far?), — —  then it is seriously beyond question that forthcoming proletarian revolutionary fights WILL master the necessary revolutionary consciousness as well as or better than the Bolshevik Party did in semi-literate Tsarist Russia.

Weeks? Months? Years? Well, at this stage of imperialism's now clearly uncontrollable economic problems, that really is pointlessly splitting hairs.

As for "the SLP replacing the proletariat as the instrument of revolution", the EPSR has expressed no such view but so far sticks to its original assessment of the SLP as the potential centrist midwife of various possible revolutionary situations, but this still does not amount to "no party philosophy" or to a 'multanimous' party, which spells utter sterility not just for revolutionary leadership but even for an effective centrist mass movement which the entire historical experience of the whole international working class indicates must take a serious PARTY form and not possibly just that of an alliance of factions (all 57 varieties).

More openness to the role of theory would be good for the working class, but not openness to the role of factions, an entirely different political perspective entirely. The EPSR has never "sought to make Trotskyism a scapegoat for the collapse of the Soviet Union". 

1, the dictatorship of the proletariat did not 'collapse' but was DELIBERATELY broken up by revisionist stupidity; 

2, Stalin's failure to grasp the crisis of the imperialist system as the continuing great driving force for all modern historical development (which would obviously include the need to see continuing REVOLUTIONARY struggle everywhere as the inescapable concomitant) has always been at the heart of the EPSR's analysis. 

How has Phil Sharpe missed this?

Finally, the EPSR has never spelled out much 'theory of sexuality' of its own, as alleged, but merely deplored the reactionary nonsense of 'politically correct' reformism which preaches that "homosexuality is the same as heterosexuality" (so plainly stupid as  to be not worth arguing about) in order to foster the insane illusion that capitalist society backwardness can be 'reformed' out of existence.

But no matter how insistent or bizarre the assertions of biological and social transformation, capitalist society will carry on endlessly breeding the potential for foully exploitative, discriminatory, racist, sexist, or national-chauvinist behaviour towards any minorities or outsiders it chooses to scapegoat for just as long as capitalism survives.

Some bold pretence of 'gay liberation' was spreading in Weimar Germany until Hitler was democratically elected Chancellor by the Reichstag (as leader of the most successful party at the democratic elections in 1932). 

To pretend that any capitalist society can guarantee civilised rights permanently — for any minorities which could be discriminated against — is a monstrous illusion.

Regardless of past workers-state backwardness on these issues, getting rid of the capitalist system alone makes possible the only secure future for ALL mankind, — in all its countless varieties of lifestyle, culture, sexuality, and everything else.

The essence of the abuse hurled in the EPSR's direction on these matters arises from petty-bourgeois hatred and fear of EPSR championing of proletarian dictatorship as the key to future historical development, and of the clearer and more effective grasp of all Marxist-Leninist political and philosophical science that this understanding makes possible. 

"Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggleto the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested", as Lenin explained in State & Revolution.

The daftest paradox of ludicrous middle-class 'socialism' is that with all Stalin's flaws and weaknesses to choose from, the thing they hate most is his one undisputed gigantic historical achievement, his determined maintenance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The moment it was abandoned by revisionist imbecility (the theoretical preparation of which via countless avenues was Stalin's really great crime), real bureaucratic degeneracy and capitalist chaos ensued, and the astonishing successes of Soviet society began to wither away.

But that new Soviet Unions everywhere is now the only way forward for mankind is beginning to be recognised by all but the most psychotic anti-communists and individualists.
Editorial Board.

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

Trimble's Nobel-speech poison exposed with the contempt it deserves by Republican News.

DAVID TRIMBLE'S speech in Oslo must rank as one of the most reactionary diatribes ever delivered during decades of Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies.

Most attention initially focused on its ungenerous and unstatesmanlike tone, with Trimble succumbing to the temptation to have a swipe at Sinn Féin from an international platform. This party political note soured most observers and did the unionist cause much harm.

But closer examination of the speech reveals a deeply conservative theme as Trimble attempted to use philosophy to justify the political cod-acting and filibustering of the unionists as they resist the implementation of the Agreement to which Trimble was a party on Good Friday.

This is not surprising as it has since emerged that Eoghan Harris was one of the authors, if not THE author, of the speech. Many passages are pure Harris, including the one about Sinn Féin "drinking from the dark stream of fascism".

There was a thinly-veiled swipe at John Hume also with the SDLP leader's well-known speaking style described as "the kind of rhetoric which substitutes vapour for vision".

Another classic piece of Harris-speak, this time actually acknowledged as such by Trimble, was his talk of the need for "acts of good authority... acts
addressed to their own side". This refers to the need for politicians to 'police' their own side, to stamp out errant ideas much as Harris hoped to do when he was a producer in RTE and urged that the "leaky national consensus" be repaired through censorship and propaganda.

Trimble's tone was suffocatingly patronising and the thrust of his address was warning about what cannot be done and ought not to be attempted, rather than pointing forward to what is possible with leadership and effort.

While Hume spoke of conflict resolution Trimble refused to recognise that this is what he, as First Minister designate, is supposed to be engaged in. In a passage which has the Harris fingerprints Trimble said:"Given that the Ulster British people are coming out of the experience of 35 years of 'armed struggle' directed against them they have given our appeals a generous hearing."
There was pointedly no recognition here of the shared suffering of all in the conflict or acceptance of the common responsibility for past conflict and present resolution of conflict.

The speech posed as an impassioned plea for the practical in politics at a time when the practical steps outlined in the Good Friday Agreementare being blocked by Trimble and his party.

Trimble, or rather Harris, took as his text the work of Edmund Burke. Burke was an 18th-century Irish politician in the British parliament and a member of several British administrations whose pleas for modest reform masked a deep reaction. He became the leading and most eloquent opponent of the French Revolution and thus allied himself with all the despots of Europe. He defended monarchy and aristocratic privilege and in his Reflections on the Revolution in France painted up the old feudal system, personified in the absurd and pampered French Queen Marie Antoinette, as the only tried and trusted system of government.

Burke is one of the heroes of Conor Cruise O'Brien, like Harris a key ideologue in the anti-nationalist/anti-republican ranks. Indeed, Trimble's speech could be described as thoroughly anti-republican in every sense of that term. The republicanism represented by Sinn Féin is of course attacked but the ideas he put forward on a broader scale attack the basis of democratic government.

Burke's tirade against the French Revolution was answered brilliantly by Thomas Paine in his pamphlet The Rights of Man. This book had unprecedented sales in Ireland where it was avidly read by Trimble's Presbyterian forebears and inspired them to become democrats. Theobald Wolfe Tone, founder of Irishrepublicanism, described the book as the Koran of Belfast. 

Harris/Trimble tried to brand political idealism as fascism just as Burke branded the French Revolutionaries as the "swinish multitude". Ironic indeed given that we have been marking the 200th anniversary of the United Irish Rising and the part played by French Revolution-inspired Ulster Presbyterians in that Year of Liberty.

Ironic also that Trimble delivered his diatribe 50 years to the day after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations on 10 December 1948. This is the leader of a party that resisted the equality elements of the Good Friday Agreement; that resists the idea of an Equality Department; that will tolerate only cosmetic changes in the RUC; that opposes demilitarisation; and that maintains its links with the sectarian Orange Order.

It is easy to be mesmerised by the unfolding political events of the peace process. Underlying these events, however, is an ideological battle between the progressive republican outlook and the reactionary conservatism which pervades unionism.

The Oslo speech, while lost on its international audience, was clearly a defensive blast against the tide of progress which is rising in Ireland. Trimble has the choice to sail with that tide or to be stranded on the sandbar of history. It is time for both governments to face him with the choice. l

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

British colonial Ireland gradually giving way to a united and independent Ireland, — a republican review of a momentous year of national-democratic revolutionary change.

IRA ceasefire holds despite loyalist killing spree which claims the lives of eleven nationalists... Sinn Féin negotiates transitional agreement in advance of British withdrawal... Sinn Féin holds two Ard Fheiseanna, endorses the Good Friday Agreement and ends 75 years of abstentionist policy in the Six Counties... Overwhelming majority of Irish people support Agreement... Sinn Féin win18 seats in northern assembly elections... Sinn Féin to have two Ministries in northern coalition and All-Ireland Council.

Any one of those headlines would have been enough to make 1998 an eventful year for republicans. Given that they all happened is mind blowing.

Thirty years of single-minded struggle does not prepare one's mind for compromise nor for the type of changes made in recent times. So it has been a very difficult year. Many republicans are still trying to come to terms with the enormous decisions they took this year.

Most difficult of all was the decision to participate in a northern assembly based at Stormont. And while the new assembly and the old Stormont regime are as different as day and night it was a hard pill to swallow after campaigning for over 20 years on a "no return to Stormont" banner. 

 So was the proposal to replace Articles 2 and 3 with a new definition of the Irish nation based on its people rather than its territory, in return for the British government scrapping the 1920 Government of Ireland Act which partitioned this country. 

But republicans are used to taking and making hard decisions. We do so on the basis that they advance the struggle for a united and independent Ireland.

Prior to this year everyone knew his or her role in the liberationstruggle. It was clearly defined. You were either on the streets, preparing to be there or carrying out other duties in Sinn Féin or the IRA.

The context within which the liberation struggle was waged is slowly changing. Now republicans are on the threshold of achieving real political power. For the first time since 1918 a radical republican presence will be in national and regional institutions — the northern Executive and the All-Ireland Council — institutions which will govern the lives of the people who live on this island.

For the first time since partition there is a real chance that the armed wing of unionism (which played such a central role in forcing nationalists to lower their political horizons — until 1969 and the emergence of this republican generation) will be removed and replaced with a normal, unarmed police service which nationalists and republicans can join. The replacement of the RUC and the removal of the RIR will put nationalists and unionists on an equal political footing in the Six Counties.

For the first time in the 800-year-old turbulent relationship between these islands there is a real chance that the British gun will go home and the Irish ones will remain forever silent. In such a non-belligerent and non-threatening atmosphere the central ideal of the United Irishmen, of uniting Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter, becomes possible in a peaceful and democratic environment. This in my view, in the fullness of time, will be the enduring legacy of 1998.

In this bi-centenary year of the 1798 Rebellion there is the prospect of moving the two great Irish traditions, nationalism and unionism, closer together. In this way the ancient enmity and animosities can be overcome, and the road paved to anew, agreed, shared independent country. The Good Friday Agreement is the framework within which all this can happen.

But much else needs to happen to facilitate this development. The far-reaching change heralded by the Good Friday Agreement must be visible.

Sinn Féin must be in government without any preconditions; equality must deliver for nationalists in the field of employment, and with respect to our cultural identity, language and ethos. The Irish Tricolour and other nationalist symbols and emblems must be recognised and accepted wherever unionist and British symbols are on display.

There must be no glass ceilings for nationalists; nationalists must have ready access to every sector of society in the Six Counties. A human rights culture must pervade all elements of the administration of justice removing the paraphernalia of war which has maintained partition.

The All-Ireland institutions must be substantial and dynamic, capable of being an engine to peacefully bring us into a united and independent Ireland. All barriers based on artificial majorities and vetoes must be removed.

At a personal level it has been a challenging year. The pressure has at times been unbearable for all involved, particularly in the week leading up to the Good Friday Agreement.

Their skill as instinctive — as opposed to trained — negotiators was a revelation in itself. In a hothouse atmosphere they remained cool, they absorbed and refined the fine detail of numerous position and made them acceptable.

The path to Sinn Féin's rooms was well-trodden, night and day, that week, by Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair, Mo Mowlam, John Hume, John Alderdice and their many, many negotiating teams. Transatlantic phone-calls to President Clinton were a part of the negotiating tapestry.

The republican struggle was served with the expected distinction that week and since. It is quite clear, whether republicans are in prison, on the streets or in the negotiating chambers in Belfast, London, Dublin or Washington, the struggle for a united Ireland will continue.

Looking back on that week, it was a whirlwind of people, papers, meetings and millions of words. And overlooking it all in the Sinn Féin negotiators' room was the portrait of Bobby Sands. l