Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review	
Subscriptions  £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50 London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd]     
No 1015 October 6th 1999                                                                                                                                    10p

Revelations of virtual CIA invasion in the 1980s of Poland and Afghanistan to organise the 'anti-communist revolts' in these two key areas re-raise every problem of 'socialism' in the West and worldwide. Trot and Revisionist complicity in open counter-revolutionary betrayal of the workers states frames the picture of total treachery to Marxist-Leninist class-war solidarity at the core of the fake-'left'. So far, China has kept proving that self-liquidation and counter-revolution was not a necessary 'solution' to bureaucratic Revisionism, the outcome which all fake-'leftism' conspired towards. And until such theoretical understanding is sorted, a successful mass party is out of the question. Third World revolutions will clear the air. Haider’s triumph brings a future World War III into clearer focus.

The BBC Spying Game series' brazen admission that fullscale CIA war brought down the workers states in Poland and Afghanistan, - and that the Revisionist leadership in the Socialist Camp knew it was happening, - is a colossal boost to the cause of communism and anti-imperialism.

Only the most dangerously naïve and backward 'socialists' ever had any doubts that Solidarnosc and Mojaheddin were anti-communist 'revolts' dreamed-up, organised, financed, and tactically-led throughout by Western agents, - as the EPSR reported weekly in detail from their launch in 1979 and 1980.

But to now have the still-CIA-dominated Western media (anti-communist crusade) openly admitting some of the full details of how these two key socialist revolutions were totally politically, economically, and militarily sabotaged by the immense power and influence of Western imperialism, helps expose all the counter—revolutionary anti-communist tendencies fouling the 'socialist' movements in the West.

Just like the grinning Solidarnosc slimeballs 'justifying' themselves in BBC interviews, the anti-communist Trots, Revisionists, and others in the West who went mental in their adoration of the completely bogus 'rank-and-file socialism' of Solidarnosc, will claim they knew nothing about the whole racket being a CIA and Vatican stunt, and they will point to "genuine mass support" that this fake Polish 'trade union' won.

But such 'excuse'-making is just adding insult to injury. Crucial international class-war battles have just been fought out in the last 20 years of this century, severely undermining workers-state development and causing a huge lurch in the course of history, and it is derisible irrelevance for anti-communist petty bourgeois Trotskyist mentality in the West to pretend it fought on the wrong side "by mistake".

There was no 'mistake'; and for the Solidarnosc leaders to now pretend that the container loads of printing and copying equipment and supplies which poured into Poland from the West via costly and elaborate covert operations - (enough to set up 700 separate subversive publishing units in Poland) - was "the work of the AFL-CIO (the American TUC), as we thought" is just contemptible nonsense. 1) the bureaucratic class-collaborating corporatist unions in the USA (and elsewhere in the West) have a modern record of unrelieved pro-imperialist reactionariness; 2) all are crawling with police and anti-communist agents; 3) most are incapable of organising to protect their own membership, let alone go halfway round the world to outwit the KGB and its sister security-defence institutions in the Socialist Camp. To believe that the AFL-CIO was going to organise a 'rank-and-file socialist revolution' in Poland is simply ludicrous.

Even more bankrupt is this pretence of 'not knowing' that the might of Western imperialism, (especially its subversive agencies) was behind Solidarnosc, - seeing that much detailed analysis of the CIA's strategy and fingerprints, all over Solidarnosc and the Mojaheddin, was well in evidence for anyone who cared to look for it, often filling the EPSR every week. The 57 varieties of fake-'leftism' in Britain (and elsewhere) just did not want to know about the imperialist foundations of this anti-communist stunt.

Nor is the clearly counter-revolutionary mentality of these middle-class 'communists' of the 57 varieties remotely lessened (let alone 'justified') by the Revisionist rottenness of the East European bureaucracies, - so degenerate and corrupt (politically speaking) that they eventually liquidated themselves anyway, following Moscow's lead.

The argument for anti-Soviet treachery used to be that there were no workers states in East Europe, that it was just state capitalism under a new ruling-class and a totalitarian tyranny no better than (or even worse than) the West, and always willing to act as stooge for imperialism anyway, etc, etc, etc.

The astonishing developments since 1989 have buried that utter nonsense in total shame and humiliation (although still not acknowledged, of course, by a single anti-communist Trot or Revisionist). The proletariat in Russia and East Europe has been reduced to complete degradation since the workers state structures and planned socialism were deliberately destroyed from 1989 onwards by the 'free market' and bourgeois ('parliamentary') democracy. Living standards have been halved and worse; life expectancy has fallen dramatically; mass unemployment and homelessness are rampant; begging is commonplace; the countries are now riddled with open crime and corruption; the GNP and state power of the former Soviet Union has so vanished that it represents a historical phenomenon unprecedented in all history; any shred of 'balance' to US world-imperialist domination has thereby completely disappeared, leaving the whole Third World more vulnerable to Western diktat more than ever before; not a scrap of state power or influence (economic, political, military, or cultural) now remains with any East European country; the working class is full of contempt at what has happened and still tries to vote communist where it can; etc, etc, etc.

But still the Trots want to pretend that the working class in East Europe has "lost nothing" since 1989, or even pretend that workers are "better off", - all in order to still justify their pre-1989 counter-revolutionary agitation that there was "no socialism" in East Europe, only "a corrupt ruling-class system worse than in the West" (or anywhere on earth, just about), and that reactionary Western subversion stunts did not matter (or could even be supported) because there was nothing to sabotage in East Europe anyway that was any use to the working class and to the struggle for socialism.

But now that US imperialism's determination to sabotage the workers states at all costs, - even risking open war with the Soviet Union as is now clear, - has been abundantly proved yet again by the Spying Game (firmly confirming, once more, what was already clear), - the counter-revolutionary petty bourgeoisie of the 57 varieties want to hide behind the fresh 'excuse' that their collaboration to help imperialism destroy what was 'different' in East Europe still doesn't' matter because "the Revisionists were about to destroy it themselves anyway"!!

More insult to human intelligence to add to the injury already done to anti-imperialist progress.

The workers states as such, - and even the Revisionist ideological degeneration of the bureaucracies, - did not NEED to go that way (historically speaking) necessarily. In 1989, China also was a similar workers state run by a similar Revisionist bureaucracy. But after long consideration, the Chinese workers state decided to STRENGTHEN the dictatorship of the proletariat, not dismantle it, when challenged by Western-inspired and orchestrated counter-revolutionary agitators.

The results could not have been more startlingly different. China's planned economy roars ahead, and imperialist aggression continues to watch its step around China.

The ex Soviet Union has become a decrepit laughing stock, by turns either humiliated or ignored by US imperialist world domination, or else patronised like a beggar.

The corrupting power of Western 'world opinion' possibly addled brains more completely in Moscow because of the closeness of European petty-bourgeois illusions about economic and political development. Perhaps Revisionism in Beijing did not capitulate completely to ludicrous middle-class mindlessness about 'democracy' and the 'free market' because of a different historical relationship to Western influences in general.

But the growing weight of Trot and Revisionist 'Marxist' and 'communist' opinion in the West, which was refusing to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat and increasingly playing down the crucial importance of workers-state socialist structures to modern world history, unmistakably added to all the other influences of Western opinion which drew Moscow bureaucratic minds towards increasing Revisionist nonsense.

This Trot attitude of "there's no socialism in the Socialist Camp and therefore nothing worth defending" was directed even more poisonously against China (for racist reasons) than against the Soviet Union, and the CIA's well worked-out counter-revolutionary provocations deviously ensured that key agitators at Tiananmen Square would fraudulently sing The Internationale (in line with the CIA's provocative counter-revolutionary agitation in Poland to build a 'trade-union for rank-and-file socialism', - i.e. Solidarnosc).

The bogus singers for 'international communist revolution', - all now happy in their affluent Western exile, - were just as fanatically backed by the fake-'left' in the West as had been Walesa with his phony 'rank-and-file socialism' (he is now as close to open fascism as the most reactionary Catholicism has always been), and as had been Havel with his 'socialism with a human face' deception (he has just made the Czech bourgeois state a member of NATO). All fake-'leftism' can only ever end up either indirectly backing counter-revolution against proletarian dictatorship, or else condoning it by remaining silent whenever questions of necessarily defending the dictatorship of the proletariat ever arise.

However Beijing finally ends up, the clear Marxist-Leninist call in 1989 was to rout the pro-Western agitators and preserve the dictatorship of the proletariat. The EPSR's massive output explaining and justifying this, exposing the counter-revolutionary essence of the agitation, - all published week-by-week at the time, as the events unfolded - underlines the crucial importance of communist theory for giving real leadership to independent working-class politics. Albeit unreliably and unreassuringly from an international communist revolutionary perspective, the Chinese workers state has nevertheless gone on from strength to strength whereas the former Soviet Union has collapsed into total ignominy.

And just to confirm that ANY proletarian dictatorship (however badly mismanaged and misled by Revisionist or Voluntarist ideological nonsense and however bureaucratically disadvantage represents a challenge to total imperialist domination of the planet, - the 50th anniversary of the Chinese workers state has just been given an abusive, lying, distorted, sour-faced reception by the Western media as racistly hate-making and as warmongeringly vilifying as any fascist-Goebbels propaganda ever seen since Cold War anti-communist propaganda began to dominate the world from 1917 onwards.

And although the steadfastness to a Marxist-Leninist understanding of the necessity for a world communist revolutionary solution to the incurable problems of imperialist warmongering crisis cannot be relied upon from the Revisionist ideological muddle in Beijing, nevertheless the clear communist requirement worldwide to declare open solidarity with the dictatorship of the proletariat in China, — against its only possible alternative anywhere or any time, namely the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, - will still not be responded to by one single element of the entire 57-variety Trot and Revisionist swamp.

And well in tune with all this fake-'leftism', of course, will be the SLP, which will totally ignore the opportunity which the Spying Game revelations (coinciding with China's anniversary), offers for putting THE major question of the era in front of the working class, - the way forward for mankind of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the ONLY way forward. Not one peep will the SLP utter on this issue.

But, naturally, the argument still rolls about what is the point of the EPSR supporters understanding this when no one else does (or else just faintly still grasps it from a wholly useless museum-Stalinist backwater which can never elaborate, and therefore never rectify, the peasant-conservative origins of Revisionism within Stalinism)?

But the purpose is quite clear. While successful anti-imperialist struggle obviously requires a mass movement eventually, a correct understanding for that mass movement (on programme, strategy, and tactics, - in short on understanding the whole of class-struggle history that has gone before and the whole of class-struggle history that is to come) can be kept alive for a long time by a relative handful of dedicated, hard-working comrades; - and by all historical precedents so far, is very likely to be so kept alive for quite lengthy periods of Revisionist reaction.

But the problem of the inability to break out of isolation does not really reside with the correct Marxist-Leninist ideas being kept alive. It rests much more with the slowness of commonly-grasped experience to finally produce a whole background of facts, arguments, and opinions which ultimately force the working masses towards a new viewpoint and new conclusions.

Workers can and do get won over individually by clearer-expressed, better-written, more successfully packaged and presented and pinpointed explanations of revolutionary communism. But while no stone should be left unturned in that endeavour, it is required shifts in the general climate of opinion which will still be decisive to get a mass communist movement revived.

Surely the SLP experience proved this point. The EPSR's Marxist revolutionary world view was unmistakably expressed as a contributed suggestion to how best to develop the SLP. The number and nature of the vicious attacks on the EPSR, and its willingness and ability to instantly respond at great length to all attacks, demonstrates that there was no failing in putting forward Marxist-Leninist ideas and getting them noticed.

The brick wall that was run into was the impossibility, at this stage for the broader 'left' circles attracted to the SLP, to respond to communist understanding, (and not a problem of 'style', or 'timing', or 'presentation' as whined by various fainthearts, opportunists, backstabbers, and freeloaders, who are simply looking for excuses to soft-pedal, themselves, on an all-out revolutionary communist approach to politics).

Leninism demands endless subtleties and variations of tactics, of course, and no bullheadedness.

But Leninism also requires no trace of confusion or half-heartedness where decisive fundamentals of class philosophical understanding are concerned. Revolutionaries, for example, can fully understand how easily workers can be misled into chauvinistic or even xenophobic delusions by the belligerent treacherous drama of inter-imperialist trade war, and do not need to shun sympathising with workers in their confusion, and should certainly avoid all self-righteous moral hectoring of workers on this issue.

But the practical catastrophe of one national group of workers being misled into blaming a rival national group of workers for their economic plight which is solely down to the CAPITALIST SYSTEM, can never be fudged, no matter what pain such explanations might need to cause. Equally, no misunderstanding must be left unchallenged that an excess of 'foreign' capitalists is the cause of working-class problems, or could ever remotely be so, organised in a customs union or an imperialist trade-war bloc (EU style) or whatever. The notion of too many 'foreign’ capitalists is just as national-reactionary as the notion of too many 'foreign' rival workers, - both equally playing into the trap of making workers seek chauvinist solutions (rather than class-war solutions against ALL capitalists, whatever their nationality and however grouped). The ONLY socialism is Leninist socialism, which refused to go along with the nationalist clamour in 1914, corrupting 99.99% of all workers in all countries of Europe which said: "No foreign capitalists invading 'our' country to exploit 'our labour' and abuse 'our' women", etc.

The sole acceptable class-war view as far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, was to see inter-imperialist war as the priceless opportunity to take advantage of any defeat for the Russian exploiting state to overthrow it, and by that way ALONE rid Russian workers of the degradation of imperialist crisis is warmongering.

If capitalist states start carving each other up in super-imperialist cartels, or open trade war, or even all-out shooting war, it is a signal for workers to concentrate harder than ever on seizing the opportunity to overthrow their OWN ruling class, and urge the working classes of the 'foreign' countries to overthrow their 0WN 'foreign' capitalists at the same time. It can only be DISASTROUSLY disruptive and mis-educative to indulge in the faintest trace of chauvinist opportunism to work up indignation against 'foreign bosses', in any way, shape or form.

Given such immovable bedrocks of fundamental communist class-war understanding, it is easy to see that the anti-Marxist, anti-communist cautiousness deliberately employed by Scargillism could not be prevented from bitterly attacking the EPSR's Leninist influence if that's what the SLP leadership wanted.

Why it was wanted is easily explained by the generally unchanging anti-communist climate mentioned above which no fake-'lefts' have the slightest interest in challenging or see the slightest need to challenge. And in the continuing savage anti-communist climate in the West, to not wish to take a stand against all this relentlessly reactionary brainwashing (which makes any thought of new workers states and socialism out of the question) is effectively to join IN WITH such mind-bending condoning it by ignoring it.

And the truth of course, is that that is exactly where Scargillism wants to be, - bogusly posing 'leftist' but always lifelong keeping a clear separation from any fixed or identifiable communist involvement.

But this major question of modern history can never go away, - as is always indirectly and unwittingly proved by the fact that the West's relentless anti-communist propaganda just dare not let up for one second.

Yet equally clearly, this monolithic front against the workers states cannot but crumble eventually.

The anti-China lies waver in intensity all the time, depending on which sector of monopoly-imperialist gangsterdom (i.e. big business) is desperate to do deals with this colossal potential market.

Inter-imperialist rivalry weakens the solid anti-communist front in the same direction (as competing major powers seek various ways to extend their international influence, and as lesser imperialist powers seek arms-trade and other technological advantages from the fast-developing Chinese planned economy).

The East European ex-workers states have themselves the potential to totally transform all historical perspectives if and when they turn back towards communist revolution again as their only hope of progress.

But most of all the overwhelming majority of mankind stifling in Third World poverty, exploitation, and fascist tyranny simply will not put up with the injustice, unfairness, and likely devastation of imperialist crisis for ever, - and communist revolution is their only natural outlet.

By confirming what any fool could already have worked out (that the supposed measure of 'socialism' in the workers states in this century has in fact only been mainly the measure of how successfully destructive imperialist-organised counter-revolution and sabotage has been), this trivial bit of Spying Game personal boasting about who played the most important role in the 'overthrow of communism' and how they did it, has helped sharpen communist understanding worldwide.

The spending of at least $1 billion a year by Washington just on the Afghan counter-revolution alone, - which could not possibly have been a secret to Moscow, and is now admitted openly, - will further alert revolutionary workers worldwide to the total treachery to the anti-imperialist cause that Stalinist Revisionism (sustaining the complacent Moscow bureaucracy) finally perpetrated. Leninist studies should benefit accordingly.

Such cocky counter-revolutionary revelations will not do any harm to such ideological struggles as that of the EPSR (which has consistently exposed the essential Western counter-revolutionary drive which accounted always for by far the biggest part of all supposed 'Gulag' atrocities, crimes, and mistakes attributed to workers-state failings). 

The real disaster from Stalinist bureaucracy was not any arbitrary harshness or lawlessness towards the people of the Socialist Camp but its lack of firmness in consistently understanding the permanent perils of imperialist crisis and counter-revolution or in ruthlessly mobilising and propagandising against them, - as seen in this final capitulation by Gorbachevite Stalinism, and as regularly analysed by the EPSR.

The colossal anti-imperialist achievements of the workers states this century were just thrown away by this final puddled echelon of complacent Stalinist Revisionist bureaucracy. It need never have happened, - so no getting off the hook for the entire swamp of fake-'lefts' who actively promoted counter-revolution (posturingly described and presented as a non-existent 'political revolution' against what was already a workers-state proletarian dictatorship). And the international working class should never cease trying to ensure that it never happens again by unceasingly agitating everyone everywhere for a return to Leninist science.

But now that the main world current of Revisionism has largely self-liquidated (by destroying its own main workers state, and its own Socialist Camp, and most of its own little-remaining prestige), the decks are also paradoxically cleared for a far more complete return to Leninism than might otherwise have been achievable. Zhuganov & Co limp on in Moscow, but without a scrap of revolutionary understanding of what new Bolshevik deeds the incurable crisis of warmongering imperialism is now relentlessly making necessary again. Revolutionary theory, - Marxism-Leninism, - is the only possible way forward now to renewed revolutionary success.

The counter-revolutionary nest-fouling by the entire 'left' swamp of so-called 'revolutionary socialists' in the West (the 57 varieties) will also be well and truly exposed by first their help in bringing actual counter-revolution to East Europe, and then by all signs of Bolshevik revival there so as to resume the steady workers-state and proletarian-dictatorship progress from where Revisionist muddleheadedness (aided and abetted by Trotskyism) caused it to break off through self-liquidation.

It also seems possible that the astonishing Revisionist self-liquidation may have, in addition, pushed shameless imperialist reaction into far earlier total depravity and warmongering aggressiveness than might otherwise have been the case, thus hastening the revolutionary process where CPSU suicide might seem to have only delayed it at first. The US imperialist bullying mentality currently knows no bounds. It is pumping itself up towards a new Vietnam disaster, which would be a splendid boost for world revolution.

The electoral triumph of Hitler-loving Jorg Haider in Austria is inseparably a part of a capitalist system increasingly plagued and perplexed by visions of uncontrollable crisis.

The course of unchangeable cut-throat free-market competition is relentlessly back to fascist-slump and war, just as in the 1930s.

What is 'fascist-slump' pedantic anti-Marxists will provocatively ask on the fake-'left'? It is the unmistakable pattern of all capitalist crisis where the viciously degenerate and terrified ruling class will ALWAYS get first go at deliberately breaking the mould of 'normal' parliamentary politics when they see the likelihood of bourgeois-dictatorship control slipping out of their hands if merely kept genteely in place by the usual 'democratic' frauds, - and ALWAYS turning to racist-divisive and xenophobic provocations (and fascist encouragement) to give such mould-breaking some really powerful material to go to work with. The mass unemployment and the angry despair of the inevitable economic slump accompanying capitalist crisis does the rest. As its decadence and demoralised fear grows, the imperialist bourgeoisie will CONSCIOUSLY lay plans for fascist-slump 'solutions' to its problems, which inevitably can only end in warmongering chauvinism and inter-imperialist war. Insanity obviously, but that is exactly where bourgeois-capitalist control of civilisation can only end up putrefying towards.
 
Build Leninism. RB

Letters

Earthquakes, etc, raise socialist concerns.                                                                              
                                                                                            In a disaster the best lesson of all for the working class is the contrast between capitalist callousness, indifference, profiteering and inefficiency (as in Turkey) and the state-led heroism, humanity and voluntary self-sacrifice displayed during the equally disastrous Yangtse floods in China last year.

In the one case the horror and impact of always unavoidable natural disaster is hugely magnified by governmental corruption, and with it a history of money-grubbing construction, leading to shoddy jerry-built structures; by fascist attitudes and aggressive nationalism leading to refusal of "foreign" aid (from Greece); and by elitist militarism combined with fear of revolution (which led to troops looking after troops rather than be used for rescue).

Monstrous ruling class callousness is further revealed in the frantic haste to rebuild the devastated area, which is the main industrial base for Turkey and therefore its main area of exploitation and profit. So ruthless is the pressure to get on with profit-making again (particularly in the intensifying world competitive conditions which are escalating rapidly in the ripening slump crisis) that there has been an abrupt halting of rescue operations after few days, when all past experience has shown that trapped people can be rescued up to two weeks after the event.

In the other case, the ability of a workers' state to organise and inspire its people to confront disaster together, and thereby save lives, property and communities, as well as to strengthen themselves, was stunningly demonstrated last summer when, over two months, the PLA and other forces were mobilised to cope with freakishly high river levels. Under past regimes these monsoon terrors have killed tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.

But in the workers state, despite being hampered by revisionist leadership and the retreat from continuous revolutionary struggle and debate, the underlying transformation of society produced by overthrowing capitalism, is clearly shown. The rational collective spirit of people sustaining each other against adversity, both physically and emotionally, comes into its own. Acts of giving are the norm.

There is plenty to say, perhaps, about a natural tendency of most ordinary humans anywhere, to show acts of courage, as workers and rescuers have done in Turkey. At the level of ordinary humans, national differences have been overridden to send aid (from Greece e.g.) and individual examples of courage are seen daily.

And there is something to be said (or the capitalist press would falsely have us believe - much to be said) about mistakes in China and especially the continuing influences of capitalism inside even this biggest workers state. There are sometimes examples of corruption and "western style" consumerist illusions there too (though vastly exaggerated by western correspondents and newspapers who overplay these events and downplay the mass events).

It is true that China, like all workers states so far in the late imperialist (capitalist) epoch, is not separate from the imperialist world around it, but endlessly compromised with it and by it and, more importantly, subverted by it, both unconsciously through trade and economic influence, and consciously by direct propaganda and hidden CIA activity etc. Only the strength of understanding (Leninism) would be able continually combat the revival of "all the old shit" of petty bourgeois attitudes and behaviour. Sadly that is missing.

But even the most inspired (Cuba is an even better example) workers state would never be able to stop being a besieged encampment until the hatred of capitalism for all workers’ independent achievements is ended. Which is to say workers states will only be stable and able to build properly, without constant attention to the immediate anti-imperialist struggle, when capitalism is completely ended.

There is no room permanently or even long term, for both systems in the world, however mighty the achievements that have been shown (and mighty they have been in all the workers states, especially the Soviet Union which sadly succumbed to the insidious pressures of capitalism eventually, deluded into giving up the revolutionary fight.) Either the struggle will eventually finish off the disastrous capitalist system or unceasing counter-revolution will prevail.

But despite these caveats, in crises like the earthquake, or other large-scale natural calamities, the general picture of how the two systems can cope is starkly and unmistakably drawn and contrasted - in the workers state the best potential characteristics of humans are unlocked and mobilised, because the underlying exploitation and alienation of society has been eliminated. It is more natural to help and aid those around you than not. In the class-divided competitive and alienated capitalist world, the permanent antagonistic competitive divisions within society, at all levels, force selfishness, self-interest and indifference to the fore, especially when they are class interests.

Those whose instincts and experience are better and more cooperative, - the proletariat and working class, - are precisely those who are helpless from past impoverishment, lack of education and lack of resources. Usually they are the major victims anyway.

The bets are that none of the left press will make anything of these issues, and especially the crucial points about the central responsibility of capitalism for the horrors and huge contrast with the workers states. Most of all the supposed great new mass hope for the British working class, the SLP and its now almost meaninglessly bland Socialist News, will be both too late and too ineffectual and hesitant to use such a major opportunity for political development. To do so would mean tackling head-on the western anti-communist onslaught of relentlessly hostile propaganda and subversion against workers states like China.
     
Even before the SLP cynically and deviously ordered the suppression of any discussion verging towards open Leninist polemic and thereby development of communist perspectives, and before arbitrarily expelling its popularly and newly elected vice president, the EPSR editor Roy Bull, the Scargillite party had already demonstrated its edginess and fear of open support for the workers states, and especially China, in its press and conferences.

Tentative articles or motions opening up such questions were stalled and delayed, and then swamped by (bourgeois democratic) notions of "even handedness" to allow other-point-of-view articles with openly anti-Communist perspectives.

Contrary articles in themselves would not be a problem as long as they allowed the development of the arguments. But that was not their purpose and no further debate was allowed once they were printed. Now, even that much discussion has been manipulated off the agenda. It is hard to understand why anyone could carry on supporting building the SLP, or remaining in it, without continuously challenging this reversion to old trade-union smoke-filled room manipulation and Stalinist-style censorship and deviousness.

These earthquake and disaster events scream out for discussion and analysis, having already seized the worlds' attention and demonstrated powerfully the culpability of the capitalist system itself for the scale and scope of the disaster. The capitalist press has been unable to hide some of the issues:

With the rush to the cities and the building boom of the past 20 years, the country's 400,000 building contractors are now the focus of national fury. Their buildings entombed thousands last week. The Turkish Contractors’ Association admits that most are cowboys.

Across north-west Turkey, natural factors and shoddy building work had deadly consequences. In Adapazari local geology combined with political malpractice to undermine construction regulation.

Like earthquake-hit Mexico City, Adapazari — which grew from an island in a lake — spread out over dried-up alluvial mud and gravel. When a smaller earthquake struck in 1967 there was no bedrock to absorb the shockwave.

For more than a decade, builders obeyed official guidelines not to erect homes more than two storeys high. But after Turgat Ozal became prime minister in 1983, the guidelines were increasingly ignored, and buildings rose with five, six or seven storeys. Last week the cost of such short cuts became apparent. Struggling to shift debris from the wreckage of bis uncle's home, one engineer said: "The developers ought to pay for this. The steel is okay but the concrete is like sand."

In Istanbul, where more than 1,000 people died, there is a disturbingly close relationship between the regulatory authorities and builders. In the Avcilar area of the city, where most of the victims lived, the head of the municipality’s public works committee, which has the power to decide what gets built, is himself a building contractor who has put up 25 properties in the district.

While the stench of up to 10,000 rotting corpses hangs over the twisted remains of apartment blocks in Golcuk, the buildings where up to 300 sailors died have been cleared and demolished. Fleets of lorries are working 24 hours a day to remove the rubble. Disinfecting lime covers the streets.

Outside the naval base 250,000 civilian quake victims live in squalid, rain-lashed tent cities lining the roads. Up to 10 people share tiny tents with no communications, no electricity, no showers, little drinking water, and just two toilets for as many as 3,000.

Inside the military compound electricity has been restored, dozens of field toilets erected, and telephone points have been set up outside the neat rows of portable cabins and steel -tamed tents which house thousands of cadets and officers. Mobile phone vans charge up cellphones.

Diggers work under arc lights to plug leaks in the water mains, so that soldiers can wash and bulldozers can be hosed down when they get dirty. Every night a water truck washes the pavements. Petrol stations in the earthquake zone have been destroyed, forcing those whose cars survived the quake to abandon them by the roadside.

Inside the naval base, petrol and diesel never run out - nor does the endless supply of vehicles parked in giant car parks. While the piles of rubble go uncleared in the town, much-needed heavy-lifting equipment stands unused in the base. Senior generals, who command almost one million men - the largest standing army in Nato - have been openly condemned as '22nd rate' by the media. Newspapers have called on Bulent Ecevit. the Prime Minister, to resign.

'When this disaster happened, I went to the naval base to ask for help, but they shut the gates to the people,' said Servet Ates, 55. 'They told me: "No. We have got damage, too". They just put themselves first, solve their own problems, and then forget about the people.'

Top brass and politicians refuse to discuss the wave of popular criticism publicly -last week the government shut down a television station which exposed the inept official relief effort because Ecevit said it was 'demoralising' the people.

The bourgeois press is by no means going to draw out of this, however, the obvious points that it is class divided society and capitalist dictatorship which has created and sustained the developments in Turkey over much of the last century, and which have now produced this appalling outcome. Early attempts to cover the disaster downplayed the whole thing with the usual "positive" emphasis on miraculous last minute rescues and so forth. But the overall death toll was consistently underestimated.

Least of all is the bourgeois press going to point to history of past events of this kind which have directly triggered explosive political transformations - both the spontaneous uprising and overthrow of the hated and repressive Shah of Iran in the late 1970s and the equally dramatic Nicaraguan revolutionary events followed earthquakes, and earthquakes in which the incompetence and indifference of the ruling class was suddenly illuminated.

Neither of those events was caused as such by the earthquakes - it was the underlying ripeness of the capitalist crisis as it surfaced in these particular places which drove them as it drives all movement in the current period - but they certainly lit the touch paper.

The imperialist crisis worldwide now is much riper and in general ready for dramatic upheaval, as a million and one economic and political events indicate,  from the brutal NATO bullying in Yugoslavia (preparing the whole world for the slide towards generalised chaos and war) and war threats in South Asia, to endless nervousness about the massively escalating US deficit and the obviously unsustainable Stock Market bubble.

But the swamp "lefts" from the Trots through to the museum Stalinists are not going to be teasing the subject, let alone opening up the kind of debate in the working class that can develop the leadership to take any fight forwards.

The theoretical inadequacy of the swamp was no better illustrated than in the quasi-Trotskyist Weekly Worker, which with its special past links to Turkish "left gurus"' was best placed of all to make a detailed concrete analysis of the situation. It did perhaps point to fear of revolution as the basis for the extraordinary and arrogant refusal to pitch the Turkish army into the rescue fray. The ruling class, with the short-sightedness of all doomed classes, chose instead to pamper the army in a grotesque display of privilege and isolation, supposedly ready to deal with any civil uprisings and turmoil that might yet erupt, but obviously helping cause the discontent that might lead to such. But despite its excellent links with Turkey the WW could go little further than the bourgeois press in a largely descriptive piece about the region, the jerry building racketeering, the development of trade unionism, industrialisation, and the crudeness of the bourgeois dictatorship in a country without the massively developed capital base of the richer nations. 

If anything, its characterisation of those developments as signals of "medium developed" capitalism, plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie worldwide which equally wants to suggest a semi-racist perspective of backwardness, crudeness and reduced standards to "explain" the overtly cynical and callous behaviour of the Turkish ruling order.

It is standard practice for the "advanced" countries to sneer at the crudities of the "less democratic" countries when it suits them and to suggest that some superior "historical weight and maturity" accounts for "higher standards" etc., (usually in supposed "democratic practice" but equally in many more practical arenas such a building control or medical practice and so forth). Nothing could be further from the truth.

Only a greater length of capital accumulation plundering the empires and nowadays Third World) has made any difference. The richest countries can afford a more thorough and stable illusion (about "democracy" and its supposed benefits) to prevail with a few extra crumbs thrown to the working class to try and convince it to stay "on side".

But of course the huge differences in wealth distribution in the USA for example, the depths of poverty and despair on the Scottish Edinburgh estates or the poverty sinkholes in places like Peckham in London, or Salford in Manchester, or the ghetto estates ringing Paris and Marseilles and so on, show that poverty both relatively and sometimes even absolutely, is as great and devastating in the richest economies as in the poor. Berlin's Turkish "gastarbeiters" especially will know of these experiences even in wealthy Germany.

And racketeering and poor standards are prevalent throughout the richest nations; witness the cigarette packets embedded the concrete of the collapsed Ronan Point housing blocks for example, or the much more recent examples of appalling dangers on nuclear facilities. Even as the Turkish story broke, it was being gruesomely revealed that masses of potentially life-threatening slaughter-waste from possibly BSE cattle was being stockpiled in secret around the country in the most casual and dangerous manner.

British imperialism cannot learn any lessons about profiteering and lack of standards from the Turks.

But anyway Turkish capitalism, as the Weekly Worker manages to touch on without drawing out its real significance, is as tied into WORLD capital, as any other part of the system. Writer Aziz Demir actually sees this as a positive factor, suggesting that the rescue operations, in the area with international corporate capital investment, were better funded.

Perhaps they were. But it is hardly the key point to make when the much bigger lesson is to be drawn that it is international capital, not some "backward Turk money" that is responsible for the chaos and destruction of the failed rescues. Small wonder Weekly Worker's lame end-point calls for nothing more than a reformist campaign for "aid and help". Not "liberal aid" of course, heaven forfend, but British Trade Union Aid, gained by "compelling" (!!) the British trade unions (!!) - part of the most degenerate reformist anti-Communist tradition in the world) to provide assistance.

Maybe they will though perhaps not because the pseudo-left "compel them". It would not damage the New Labourite anti-communist pro-capitalist class-collaborating TUC's pathetic spinning for one second, to send charity donations for Turkish workers.

It would in fact reinforce whatever threads of credibility they have left.

The pseudo-lefts of the CPGB don't even tease the questions of overthrowing capitalism, therefore, and suggest instead a pathetic gesture that will SUSTAIN one of the elements of one of the leading imperialist states, Namely the UK.

But the struggle to end the system altogether is the only answer to all crucial problems now facing mankind, including how to deal with nature, both in coping with calamities and day to day in a balanced ecological manner.

Imperialism is at the heart the Turkish horrors. When it suits them, the big imperialists take Turkey under their wing; - it is part of NATO (and the vile onslaught on tiny Serbia),and it is soon to be part of the European Union imperialist bloc most likely. It cooperates closely with another trained-up imperialist stooge force, the Rottweiler Zionists; it is part of the crucial anti-Arab imperialist ring around the resource-rich Middle East. It has been slaughtering the Kurdish autonomy struggle for decades with barbaric blitzkrieg and torture. It houses US anti-Communist forces and intelligence facilities on a wide scale (which the Weekly Worker mentions in passing) - it is part of the anti-Communist cultural and trading onslaught and plundering of parts of the former Soviet Union such as Turkestan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and related areas.

Turkey is a piece in the overall imperialist jigsaw, part of the great flows of capital and exploitation across the planet.

Globalisation is not some new buzz concept but the absolutely fundamental tendency of capitalism as Marx, Engels and Lenin long ago pointed out. It is the ever growing unstoppable integration (and development) of the world's population and its working activity, that makes the private ownership of the means of production ever more ludicrous, hampering and constricting for work and production,not to say unjust.

But imperialism's need to exploit ever more workers means that it is creating ever more sophisticated people who can see and understand their own degradation and frustration. The capitalist system's gravediggers are also being globalised and will not be long in rising up to challenge the now long overripe capitalism.

Crises like this are a major opportunity to understand the problem, and to grapple for the answers; a major chance on the ground for spontaneous outbursts against the system.

Nothing would be better than to see the Turkish workers join the Colombian insurgents, the Mexican upheavals in Chiapas, the East Timorese fight, and other developing anti-ruling class fights in Indonesia (Acer e.g.), the unbreakable Irish struggle, the swirling discontent of Africa, the dogged continuation of the Vietnamese, Chinese, Cuban and North Korean workers states.

But if this earthquake does not trigger full scale revolt then the much bigger man-made earthquakes of capitalist economic collapse (perhaps the dollar, maybe the Stock Exchanges, or bank failures)  The incredible inflation and stretching of post-war capitalist production has reached unbelievable levels. The crash and slump is coming as sure as volcanoes erupt, faultlines slip and hurricanes blow.

And then the working class will shake the old order to pieces, and build workers states that can evolve into world communism.

But only when they fight to discuss, understand and build leadership can anything be done. The Trots aren't doing that, the SLP isn't either.

Leninism is the only way to do it. So build Leninism. Don Hoskins.

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

Patten Report conveniently forgets about RUC murderers.

CLAIMS in the Patten Report,  the RUC hadn’t killed anyone since 1991 have been met with incredulity by nationalists, as the RUC was responsible for the deaths of four men from West Belfast during 1992.

Page 50 of the Patten report states: "There has been no case of the RUC shooting anyone dead since 1991." In February 1992, RUC man Allan Moore ran amok in the Sinn Féin office on the Falls Road, shooting three men dead. Sinn Féin activists Paddy Loughran and Pat McBride as well as Michael O’Dwyer, who was seeking advice at the time, died in a hail of shotgun fire.

On 25 November that year, IRA Volunteer Pearse Jordan was targeted and killed in a shoot-to-kill operation by undercover RUC squads.

His parents, Hugh and Teresa Jordan, attended one of the Patten Commission's fact-finding missions in West Belfast in 1998 where, in front of 800 people, they handed Chris Patten a six-page submission on Pearse’s killing. The document clearly stated that he was shot dead by the RUC in November 1992 while unarmed.

No RUC officer was ever charged with this "shoot-to-kill" murder.

An angry Hugh Jordan Pearse’s father, told An Phoblacht: “If the Commission can ignore our submission, then what faith can people have in the whole report?

 “We will write to Chris Patten to find out why he ignored the murder of our son."

Speaking to An Phoblacht about Patten's omission, Barbara Loughran whose husband Paddy was killed in Sinn Féin’s Sevastopol Street office, said: "At the time, the RUC tried to deny responsibility for the murders by claiming that because the officer was off duty and used his own weapon they could not be held responsible."
    
Belfast High Court, however, has ruled that the RUC have a duty of care to the families of those Moore killed and injured.

On the morning of the attack, Moore left Newtownabbey RUC Barracks with his licensed automatic shotgun, despite the fact that he bad refused to see a psychiatrist for assessment regarding an incident the previous weekend when he fired shots over the grave of dead RUC friend while in a drunken state.
    
When An Phoblacht contacted the Policing Commission, we were told that in the case of the Sevastopol Street killings, there was confusion surrounding the man involved and the fact that he was off duty.

“In the case of Pearse Jordan there appears to have been a typing error," we were told.

Hugh Jordan has responded furiously to this claim, branding the entire Commission a “joke".

He also points out that the report claims that 16 people were killed by plastic bullets but the real total stands at 17.

“The report, with all of these errors, went out all over the world," he says. “Are they going to send out a revised and corrected edition? Even if they do this, it will be unable to correct the political damage that the report has done. Clearly Patten has gone in with a political agenda and has ignored the victims of the RUC."

******************

IN THE OPENING SALVO of the campaign to save the RUC, the Northern Ireland Police Authority has said that changing the force's name will not lead to any significant increase in Catholic recruits to the force.

The Authority Chairman Pat Armstrong also criticised moves to redress the religious imbalance in the proposed Northern Ireland Police Service through the use of 50/50 recruitment quotas.

He warned this could “stand the principle of appointment on merit on its head" and alienate the Protestant community, The Authority outlined several misgivings about the findings of the Patten report on policing.

All of this is so predictable as to be less than newsworthy, other than to point out that the 50/50 spilt is exactly what unionist hero of yesteryear, Sir James Craig, agreed with Michael Collins in the Craig-Collins Agreement of 1922. Among other things it agreed was “an advisory Committee, composed of Catholics, to be set up to assist in the selection of Catholic recruits".

Also, today’s exclusively unionist Police Authority wouldn’t pass muster in the Craig-Collins plan, which agreed “a committee to be set up in Belfast of equal numbers Catholic and Protestant with an independent Chairman, preferably Catholic and Protestant alternately in successive weeks, to hear and investigate complaints".

Isn’t it amazing the way Six-County unionists just don't know their own history? •