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 1016 October 13 1999                                                                                                                               10p 

It is capitalism which is going right off the rails. And in time honoured fashion, the Tory ruling class is setting about making a virtue of necessity, becoming more blatantly reactionary. Embracing Pinochet, denouncing all things European, etc. is a high-risk strategy, but this traditional heart of the imperialist establishment has much experience of brutalisation as the key to crisis-management. New Tory nationalism signifies fatal European upheaval, but is less distant from New Labour demagogic chauvinism than might seem. Both jingoist postures wish to prepare for the imperialist system crisis while still concealing it. Understanding of Blairism in the 'left' swamp reduces daily, giving workers no lead. Populism, stooging for imperialist fascist aggression, is nothing new, even for Labour. Working-class recovery from pro-imperialist illusions and corruption is the real shift in the labour movement. Train service incompetence and imperialism's fascist crime concealment register capitalism's decay and stain both parties.

The Tory political dinosaur can be readily dismissed as part barmy and part whisky sodden but its almost self-parodying lurch to the right is much more than just an astonishing joke which people are struggling to take seriously.

The Conservative Party remains a major establishment institution and its conference embrace of xenophobic isolationism and aggressive chauvinism will have struck the right Fortress-Britain tone for the NEXT stage of the inter-imperialist trade war.

Hague's populist derision of Blair for being part of 'the Establishment' himself (public school, Oxbridge, barrister, prime minister, big business friends and backers) while pretending that New Labour was at war with the Establishment for "holding the country back with its conservatism", may win little applause for now but could get a majority clapping before much longer.

And the Tories' main attack on Blair's own Labour Conference speech for its embarrassing synthetic sentiment, its soundbite deceptions, and its spin-doctoring hypocrisy has already been ringing even more bells.

Blair is the complete posturing windbag, and if the Tories want to get back into office, just letting New Labour's endless public-relations gimmicks flounder in their own worthless froth might be all that is required.

Playing the racist and nationalist cards is unlikely to harm Tory fortunes in the slightest once international imperialist economic crisis knocks the cheap phony glitter off Blair's performance politics. On the contrary, the capitalist world-trade war which will be an inevitable part of the deepening (and insoluble) crisis of 'surplus' capital and 'overproduction' will be playing right into Hague & Co's hands.

The pledge to negotiate a British right to veto ANY and EVERY tiny aspect of European Union decisions or activity that does not suit London is tantamount to effectively pledging to pull Britain out of the EU. It is inconceivable that Germany, France, the Benelux, and the rest would for a moment put up with such contemptuous conduct. A state can either be in the EU's coordinated co-operative political and economic collective endeavours, accepting all benefits AND responsibilities (as this monopolists cartel sees them), or else it can part company. Taking roles in all decision-making but then accepting only those decisions considered really suitable is an impossible condition for any group-working to put up with.

Hitherto, UK insistence on having its own separate special relationship with EU legislation has been limited to, in the main, the opt-out from the joint currency, the 'Thatcher rebate' row, and a few legalistic questions, - all of which have nevertheless inflamed tremendous hostility from the other Union members. Hague's demands for a right to veto on EVERYTHING would be the last straw.

Withdrawing from the European Union would signify an enormous crisis in European and world politics, and for British capitalism's senior management party to already declare such an intention, although possibly still years away from the chance of implementation, should be seen as a measure of just how diabolical the underlying economic crisis must be at this moment now.

But since this is also THE great secret of the bourgeoisie, - never letting on to the proletariat exactly how ramshackle in reality is the 'marvellous free-world system' which is supposedly guaranteeing everyone's 'bright future', - then these obvious conclusions (about economic and political disaster haunting the Tories' further perspectives) largely get ignored by the capitalist media.

The Times was typical in only dimly grasping the drama of Hague's rapid rightward course and its implications for European politics:

The Conservatives will enter the next election pledged to block the new Maastricht-style European treaty to be negotiated over the next two years unless Britain is allowed automatically to opt out of any new EU regulations that it dislikes. Mr Hague has decided on the high-risk move to prove that he is serious about getting a "flexibility clause" written into the Treaty of Rome that would allow countries to sidestep future EU legislation.

He would be saying to the rest of Europe that unless it gives him the system of permanent opt-outs that he wants it will not be allowed to make further integrationist changes to the way the EU operates, including voting reforms and more powers for the European Parliament. Mr Hague's astonishing "high noon" tactics will further infuriate the party's pro-European wing and spark Labour charges that a Tory government would effectively be pulling Britain out of Europe.

It comes at the end of a week in which the party's civil war has reignited with Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine making clear that they will no longer be silenced. But a senior Tory official said last night: This is not about getting out of Europe. It is about getting our own way in Europe."

Mr Hague will face criticism that he has been naïve in displaying his "bottom-line" negotiating tactic long before he would be in any position to put it into effect.

A new inter-governmental conference will start work next year on a treaty that is unlikely to be completed by the expected time of the next election in the spring of 200l.

By threatening to veto it and standing on a policy of ruling out the single currency Mr Hague will have the most Eurosceptic Tory platform since Britain joined the EU in l973.

Thatcher's curse on the EU was rabidly and belligerently chauvinistic:-

"In my lifetime, all our problems have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations of the world....we are quite the best country in Europe."

This was followed by the barest of coded messages indicating that domestically, an openly racist flavour behind specifically English nationalism might be next on the Tory agenda:

"We are wonderful. All we have to do is convince the electorate and get back into government, not because we want power over people but because we want things so that we allow people to live their lives in their own way and provide for their own families, and provide for the English-speaking peoples."

Far from Thatcher secretly deriding Hague, as some press stories conveyed, the Tory leadership deliberately stage-managed Thatcher's appearances at Blackpool Conference to help Hague & Co break new ground to the right, as some capitalist papers are observing:

But her notorious comment last week that 'in my lifetime, all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations' is reflected, surprisingly, in the research for Hague's big conference policy statement, the Common Sense Revolution. Its intellectual inspiration was exclusively North American.

Prior to the conference, Shadow Cabinet members heard from Bret Shundler, Republican Mayor of Jersey City, how he won when only 9 per cent of voters are Republicans. His appeal to Democrat poor was: 'Do you want to be a millionaire, or do you want to go on eating dog food?'

Hague was also inspired during his February visit to Ontario, in Canada, where the Common Sense Revolution was used as a slogan by Progressive Conservatives to win the 1995 election.

Ontario's Premier, Mike Harris, promised - and delivered - 30 per cent income tax cuts, welfare reforms, an end to positive discrimination over jobs and fewer politicians. He reintroduced academic selection, moved schools from local authority control to parent-dominated boards, and imposed 'no strike' clauses on head teachers and their deputies. His reforms provoked massive strikes.

Harris was re-elected in June with a harsher programme called Blueprint. He wants parolees to take drug tests, and to take benefits from those guilty of welfare fraud, and to make parents pay for criminal damage by their children. Absent fathers will lose driving licences if they fail maintenance payments. Welfare claimants aged 16 or 17 must stay in school. Single parents must attend 35 hours of parenting classes. Teachers will be retested every few years, the national anthem will be sung each morning in schools.

Hague's strategists hope such hard-edged ideas will show up Tony Blair. Finkelstein explains: 'He talks a lot about being tough on welfare shirkers, for instance, but we are going to do something about the problem so that, if you are unemployed and refuse a job, you lose your benefit.'

Behind it lies a strategic decision not to engage Blair on centre ground, but project William Hague as a right-wing radical, the new Thatcher in trousers.

And Hague's own speech, although carefully more cautiously expressed, nevertheless unmistakably gave its main weight to this vicious class-war rant:

I say keep criminals in prison longer. Make sure the sentence served is the sentence given in court. Lock away with life sentences drug dealers who sell to children. Make every prisoner do a full working day. Help our police get out from behind their desks and on to our streets. Stop turning a blind eye to the graffiti and vandalism and truancy - go to war on crime like no government has ever dared before.

Let's have a Common Sense Revolution for millions of hard-working families in this country who pay too much tax. So our Tax Guarantee is this: the next Conservative Government will bring down the total of all taxes taken together as a share of the nation's income. They'll be no place to hide tax increases. They'll be no stealth taxes. Guaranteed.

I guarantee taxpayers that any unemployed person who can work, and who is offered a job, either takes that job or loses their unemployment benefits. We're going to transform our job centres so that they get paid by results.

A Prime Minister who has the brass neck to stand before his Party conference vowing to set the people free while at the same time centralising power, increasing taxes and undermining personal responsibility, can only be the perpetrator of the Great Labour Lie himself.

He even claimed that "the Establishment" was holding the country back. He's a 40-something, public school-educated barrister from Islington, with a 200-seat majority in the House of Commons. Who does he think is the Establishment? The man is a fraud. Anyone who so misunderstands or so wilfully distorts who we are as a people or where we come from as a nation cannot possibly know where we should go to next as a people and as a nation.

We believe in the strength of the Union and our four nations as one nation. That means making the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly work. But it also means that voters of England must be properly represented in the British constitution. I say that issues that only affect England should be voted on only by English MPs.

For a crucial moment has arrived. A battle of ideas has commenced over the value of nation in the modern world. There is the foolish idea that a single European state is inevitable and that we will miss out on great opportunities if we don't go along with it. Above all else, Conservatives will resist this miserable, defeatist creed.

It must make sense, not to turn Europe into a fortress against the future, but to build a Europe that reaches out to eastern Europe and the rest of the world.

It must make sense not to turn our back on the continent but to exploit the opportunities of Britain's membership of the European Union and the Single Market. But it must also make sense not to drive for ever closer political union but to create a flexible and open European Union of nation states. When we're in government the next new EU treaty must contain a flexibility clause or else I tell you there will be no new treaty.   

And it must make sense, too, not to feel guilty about having a national currency, but to use to the full the freedom that comes from having our own. And I say to the people of Britain that the only way to save the pound is to vote Conservative at the next election.

I say to the people of Britain: if you believe that our country is unique in the world but is in danger of losing its identity; if you believe that Britain is a place where you should be rewarded for doing the right thing, but now you are penalised for it; if you believe in Britain as a country where the law is enforced and respected, but that now it is not respected enough; if you believe in Britain as a country that will work with its neighbours but never submit to being governed by anyone else; if you believe in an independent Britain. Then come with me, and I will give you back your country!

Such bilious vindictiveness is an accurate picture of the capitalist system's rat-race individualism and self-protecting elitism, - particularly red in tooth and claw as devastating international economic crisis and a11-out trade war looms for the third time this century, preparing the ground for World War III.

Complaints from Tory wets and some of the press that the Conservative Party has merely rendered itself an unelectable laughing-stock with this Thatcher-themed rightwards lurch at Blackpool have missed the point completely, analysing the Common Sense Programme as a list of specific proposals instead of as a general philosophical statement of class-war and inter-imperialist-conflict intentions.

In the Observer, Andrew Marr got closer to the immensity of the shift in historical axis which the Europe-in-crisis issues raise, but of course missed the essential background to the conflict which is the problem of the whole postwar imperialist status quo sinking without trace now because of incurable international economic crisis:

A critical moment has arrived. A battle of ideas has commenced. Barely reported, these are the words of William Hague in Blackpool. Ideology may be dead, he implied, but our public life is about to be lit up by a struggle of ideas the like of which we have not seen since the heyday of socialism. Begun by politicians and writers, it will spread out to touch every self-examined, thoughtful life in the land.

For the Conservative leader, the battle is about 'the value of nation in the modern world', and that is certainly part of it. More widely, it is about what sort of people we are. It is not a struggle between Euro-federalists wanting to dissolve Britain into an alien authoritarian mush, and the patriots fighting for the Britain of 1939, the Britain of their childhoods or their parents' childhoods. There cannot be a successful authoritarian 'super-state' among the democracy-trained and mature people of modern Europe. And the Britain of 1939 is no longer waiting, available on ice for a future generation.

No, it is about values. It is about different societies and economies; with whom do we stand? Are our first treaty-based loyalties to the European Union? Or are they with our language-partners in America?

This is the kind of grand historic choice which any government, struggling to get best-possible bargains in a complicated world, instinctively rejects. In office, Margaret Thatcher, signing up to European treaties while hymning the Atlantic link, rejected it. So did John Major. Speaking at Bournemouth, Tony Blair said baldly that 'there is no choice' between the US and the EU. And yes, if we ever had to turn our backs culturally and emotionally on America, it would be a national and individual disaster for the British.

But as members of the EU we make choices every day about the kind of capitalist or market-based civilisation we are - about trade and food issues, about our attitude to welfare, employment, the death penalty, high and low culture -which are not American choices.

Lady Thatcher put it most vividly: 'In my lifetime, all our problems have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations who have kept law-abiding liberty alive for the future.' This was a little too vivid for the Tory leader, but the following day Francis Maude sang the response: 'We can look towards America; a high-tech, low-tax, lightly regulated economy...where success is not a dirty word... Or we can look to the Continent - higher taxes, more regulation...The simple fact is that our economy is aligned with North America, not with the Continent.'

There is an inexorable logical and political force pulling the Conservatives towards a position of outright withdrawal from the European Union. Norman Lamont predicted it years ago. William Hague's arguments for renegotiation point, after a period of diplomatic argument, to the same end-point.

It is slightly odd for the Tories to be drawing attention to the fact that unheard-of political and philosophical debate is a key future stage of the developing crisis of the system, but it confirms what Marxist-Leninist understanding in the EPSR has long explained must become inevitable. The post-1945 'recovery' by the imperialist 'free-market' system has not only totally undermined Stalin's ludicrously wrong and disarming perspectives on steady imperialist economic decline (Economic Problems of Socialism, 1952, leading directly on to Revisionism's insane self-liquidation in 1989 when such decline had failed to materialise), - but it has also credit-expanded its path (towards its end-of-90s greatest capitalist collapse in history) by brainwashing the whole world's population in an equally unprecedented way.

As the 'free world' crashes, - demonstrating that the entire 83-year Cold War content of anti-communist and anti-workers-state propaganda was complete nonsense, just covering up the incurable and lethally-damaging and dangerous flaws in the unreformable capitalist system, - all of that counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet, anti-socialist thought-control has to be virtually replayed through the public's consciousness.

It will be a huge, huge debate, but fought out in increasingly bitter class-war struggle, of course. Blair's treacherously disarming deceit that "class war is dead" could not be more ludicrously remote from reality and leading the working class in completely the wrong direction.

It remains to be seen what the rest of the fake-'left' make of these calculated Tory far-right outbursts. The tardy academic bureaucracy at the CPGB, of course, had failed to arrive at a single Tory-conference comment by last issue (WW, Thursday Oct 7), but having already toyed with loony speculation that the Conservative Party was preparing a new 1912 Carson Rebellion/Curragh Mutiny in harness with Orange UDI reaction and Army revolt at loss of Empire (both historically impracticable and baseless now) to turn back the clock on Ireland, - these posturing Trot anti-communists might get lucky with an ultra-left rant against Hague's bleak preparations. The SLP can almost be guaranteed to miss this illuminating Tory class-war development entirely.

Almost in touch with this huge theme, the Weekly Worker did add some fascinating belated thoughts on Labour's conference, likening Blair's startlingly barmy demagogy ("To every nation a purpose. To every party a cause. And now, at last, party and nation joined in the same cause for the same purpose: to set our people free") to the notorious bombast of imperialism's last great world crisis, "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer".

But typical of such bureaucratic academicism on the 'left', the CPGB completely missed the all-important link to SYSTEMIC CRISIS between the 1930s and now. It remains to be seen how much of the fake-'left' alerts workers to the telltale similarities between the rallying nationalist rhetoric tried by both Blair and Hague. This chauvinist flag-waving and invocation of national destiny is far more driven by objective international trade-war conditions than either major party of bourgeois-democratic illusions and subjective posturing is prepared to make known.

Laughably, the Weekly Worker ascribes New Labour's equally vicious threats to make public scapegoats of all 'inadequate' families (jailing parents for child truancy; starving the jobless who refuse workfare; punishing 'errant fathers' financially for family breakdowns; etc, etc) not to any capitalist government's needs when preparing for looming fascist-slump conditions, but to some entirely fictitious 'transformation' in Labour whereby ONLY NOW (!) can workers find it impossible to "maintain or believe that Labour any longer (!) seeks to represent them or further their interests AS A CLASS".

This is not just a bizarre bit of poor guesswork about when the working class ceased to believe in Labour as 'its own' party (the In Place of Strife battles versus Wilson & Co in the 1960s and the Winter of Discontent against Callaghan & Co in the 1970s had already spelled that out fairly adequately, plus the steady decline in Labour's total vote, ever since, a diminishing working-class enthusiasm not actually halted by Blairism's 'landslide' either in votes or in reality, which was largely a petty-bourgeois phenomenon).

This patronising assertion about working-class gullibility much more reflects the CPGB's own petty-bourgeois lazy thinking and lingering comfortable illusions, which declare elsewhere that the trade unions will not cut off their £6million annual subsidy to Labour but will "maintain their allegiance and hope (in vain, one suspects) for better times".

Only "suspects"??

But serious Marxist-Leninist science has been crystal-clear for a century that Labour represents only bourgeois treachery and pro-imperialist class-collaboration in the understanding of ALL worker—communists, without exception.

This WW Revisionist muddle gets worse:

“The extent to which the link between the (Labour) Party and the class can any longer be regarded as a living organic one, rather than a formal historical one, is now (!) open to serious question.

Labour is well on the way to transforming itself from a bourgeois party of the working class into a bourgeois party of the bourgeoisie.”

Yes, but the essential movement is in the working masses and not the Labour Party whose ideology has ALWAYS been unshakably petty-bourgeois COUNTER-revolutionary, and therefore ALWAYS essentially hostile to the real international interests of the working class, and pro-capitalist. Clause IV has NEVER been anything else other than a devious bait for the working class, passed in 1919 to keep the working class loyal to Labour in the wake of the 1917 Soviet Revolution.

But the century-long relationship was between Labour and a basically pro-imperialist working class. That thoroughly-empire-corrupted working class had the bourgeois Labour Party it wanted, - counter-revolutionary, class-collaborative, pro-Western-privilege, anti-communist.

Slowly, the collapse of British Empire and the collapse of the relatively easy privileged international position of Britain, its working class, and its living standards (relative to the rest of the world) started to give workers in Britain less and less stake in the 'triumphs' of its ruling-Establishment system - under either of the 'alternative' parliamentary-majority governing parties.

So far, this steady divorce of the working people from the deceitful and exploitative posturing of either 'democratic government' party has most obviously expressed itself in nothing more specific than a cynical contempt for all ruling regimes and an increasing reluctance to go out and positively vote for any of them.

Dropping Clause IV has been a largely cosmetic operation by New Labour and has made little real difference at all to generations of Labour Party subservience to the City of London, to big business, and to the international markets and imperialist-domination world system.

Such 'transformation' as there has been in Labour ideology from 'Old' to 'New' has been almost entirely in style rather than substance in that large sections of 'liberal' society and of the bourgeois business establishment have temporarily been wooed across to Blairism because of the 18-year-gestation of alarm that Tory-capitalist 'success' should have ended up breeding such internal Establishment bitterness and divisions (Heath v Thatcher v Heseltine v Major v Lamont v Clarke v Hague, etc, etc) and such widespread public hostility to the system (Tory sleaze, railway privatisation, GM exploitation, consumer price rip-offs, etc).

Sections of bourgeois and business opportunism have captured Blairism as much as Blair & Co have won over new Ruling-Class and Middle-Class constituencies with their shallow posturing demagogic stunts which in reality fool nobody.  

The most futile exercise is to try analysing Blairism for itself, in its own terms. Just like Old Labour before it, New Labour is simply a bourgeois response to something the capitalist system suddenly had need of BECAUSE OF FEARS OF WHERE THE WORKING CLASS MIGHT GO NEXT as the imperialist establishment tottered into an unbroken period of decline. Bogus 'reformism' obviously had to be the attraction before and after 1917. 

As classic 'reformist' posturing and promises are no longer believable, new presentational fireworks were the essential requirement for New Labour, but covering up an obviously completely blank programme. Current imperialist-system needs will fill in Blairism's actual development and further perspectives, - and, as seen above, there are already remarkable similarities between New Labour's astonishingly reactionary stance in actual government on most issues, especially Foreign Office and Home Office affairs, and the slightly more deeply thought-out New Tory plans for comparable cheap nationalism for weathering the storms ahead.

Blairism is just an empty vessel, - just philistine petty-bourgeois opportunism but being used by the imperialist system. Only with outright fascism could Blairism remotely approach "transforming itself and its role" in the declining British imperialist scene. And as EPSR analysis has consistently demonstrated, fascism itself is not really different from routine imperialist-warmongering aggression and ethnic-racist divisiveness, - the same old divide-and-rule that the imperialist system has lived by since imperialism began, (playing the Orange card; letting asylum-seeker/immigrant problems fester; demonising certain 'foreign' hate-figures like Saddam, Gaddafi, Milosevic, etc; treating the incurable cancer of racism throughout capitalist society with a 'race-awareness' elastoplast; etc).

Whether imperialist-system behaviour is formally or informally fascistic makes a difference only in how blatant or aggressive the public propaganda about imperialist warmongering and violence is deemed to need to be. The current Pinochet extradition fiasco proves this point well. Slightly shockingly, the New Tory plans, thinking ahead to the authoritarianism which is going to become vital and widespread throughput the capitalist system, don't feel too ruffled when their more hardline exponents like Lamont and Thatcher choose to publicly identify with 'the man who saved Chile from communist chaos by firm public order, independent national pride, and a free enterprise economy', etc.

But New Labour is no less hostile than the Tories to the idea that imperialist regimes anywhere should one day face a day of reckoning for the crimes they committed. For the real butchers of the Chilean working class in 1973 were not the local military and secret-police stooges at all but the Western-world imperialist-system string-pullers who put Pinochet & Co up to it, - as the capitalist press itself is now belatedly lifting the lid on very marginally:

The US government has released more than 1,100 previously classified documents from the CIA, defence and state department archives which detail efforts to provoke violent protests and economic chaos in Chile as part of US efforts to destabilise the regime of President Salvador Allende. The heavily censored files, released on Friday, are just a fraction of those compiled in 1968-73, when the US waged a secret campaign to undermine Allende, a Marxist who wanted to nationalise foreign businesses, including US copper interests.

Human rights activists and Chileans whose relatives died in the bloody aftermath of the 1973 coup have protested that damning policy papers have been withheld or so censored that they reveal nothing new.

Many of the US activities before and after the coup in which General Augusto Pinochet took power were uncovered and widely publicised by the 1976 Church report of a senate investigation into US involvement in Chile.

A report by the Chilean government says 3,197 people died or disappeared at the hands of secret police during Gen Pinochet's 17-year rule.

US involvement in Allende's downfall is widely known, but the extent of US aid to the coup plotters is not.

Chile was seen by the then president, Richard Nixon, and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger; as a potential "second Cuba". They decided, in the words of one cabinet member, to "make the Chilean economy scream".

Strikes by lorry drivers financed by the US paralysed distribution, ratcheted up the sense of chaos and forced Chileans to queue for petrol, food and medical treatment.

The released documents confirm that the US was providing weapons as well as funds to the saboteurs.

Some of them have been heavily censored, including those about the murder of Rene Schneider, the commander in chief of the Chilean army, which nevertheless confirm earlier evidence that the US aided his killers.

A CIA document from 1970 details the role of US intelligence officers in the killing of Schneider, who was regarded as a "stumbling block" in coup preparations. It reads: "Station met clandestinely evening 17 Oct with two Chilean Armed Forces officers... they asked that by evening, 18 Oct Station arrange to furnish them with 8-10 tear gas grenades. Within 48 hours they need three .45 calibre machine guns (Grease Guns) with 500 rounds ammo each."

US officials also revealed a secret intelligence-sharing operation which used Nazi groups throughout South America and Europe to track down enemies of the Chilean state.

The Latin-American German colony known as "La Dignidad" allowed "the Chilean Dina [secret police] to draw on their national and international contacts, and cooperates with Dina officials by turning over to them information on subversives in the area".

Friday's release of the documents led to renewed protests that the CIA had refused to follow the spirit of the presidential order.

The US government is skewing this history" said Peter Kornbluh, an investigator for the non-profitmaking National Security Archives.

"They are in an attempt to whitewash their own role in fomenting acts of violence in Chile."

It has also proved controversial because of the revelation that US intelligence may have played a part in the death of two Americans, including the journalist Charles Horman.

Horman's death and his family's subsequent search for the truth was brought to international notice by the 1982 film Missing, which blamed US intelligence agencies for drawing attention to the reporter.

A state department memo of August 1976 states: "This case remains bothersome. The connotations for the executive [branch of government] are not good.

"In the Hill [Congress], academic community, the press and the Horman family, the intimations are of negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in Horman's death."

It revealed that even under the most benign scenario, US intelligence provided or confirmed information that helped motivate his murder by the Chilean government.

Relatives of Chileans murdered by the armed forces are also lobbying for the documents to be fully released.

Patricia Verdugo, a Chilean historian who has written extensively about the military regime, said the full release of documents would let Chileans recover their collective memory and understand history.

"My father was killed 23 years ago and he didn't die in a shootout as the military insisted. He never used arms. He wasn't an armed terrorist but in fact was a union organiser," she said as she recounted how the tortured corpse of her father, Sergio Verdugo, was found in July 1976, on the banks of the Mapocho river in Santiago.

If the whole truth came out about the West's unending record of counter-revolutionary savagery committed all round the world since 1917 (and long before that too), either directly or via such stooges as the Pinochet regime, generations of British-government Labour leaders would all be in the dock as much as their Tory or American counterparts. 

EVERY Western government without fail has participated fully in this counter-revolutionary fascist mayhem of reactionary coups, Contra-insurgency operations, assassinations and sabotage, or direct imperialist invasions to keep the world 'safe' throughout this century for international monopoly-capitalist domination and exploitation.

The CIA's preparations for Pinochet, by the above admissions, began at least as early as 1968, and the then British LABOUR government would have had to have been kept informed so that its own MI6 spying activities protecting British interests in South America did not foul up the plot. There was indeed massive evidence at the time of the 1973 fascist coup that MI6 agents were fully involved in the filthy murderous butchery. 

The 1974 LABOUR government was certainly guilty for 5 years (until losing in 1979) of knowing all about the fascist massacres and torture in Chile, and of not only not doing anything about it but actually helping harass dissident Chilean exiles and refugees in Europe and elsewhere who pleaded for international intervention.

As the BBC's Spying Game TV series has been showing (see last week's EPSR), the West loved armed intervention to bring down the progressive Afghan Revolution to help usher in the last 10 years of brutal benighted rule by fanatical Islamic sects, who have gone on butchering mercilessly, closing down schools and hospitals, locking women behind the veil once more, etc, etc, - all 'justified' on the grounds that there were 'freedom fighters' who needed help from the 'democratic world'. But no question of the West ever intervening to help the Chilean 'freedom fight' against Pinochet's fascist-military dictatorship; just the opposite, keep arming and protecting that brutal regime. The same with fascist South Africa. Nothing but continued covert trade with the Apartheid regime, and never a suggestion of intervention to help the freedom fighters there.

Now the series has revealed the full monstrous part played by Western subversion in the overthrow of the Czechoslovak workers state, virtually helping create the much-publicised 'dissident' movement, using CND's European (END) arm to further the intense anti-communist propaganda campaign, and financing and organising endless provocations to sabotage and humiliate the regime. Now the Czech plight, back under capitalism, is a huge expansion of the prostitution and white-slave trades; the instant collapse and division of the country of Czechoslovakia; total economic domination and exploitation by German monopolies; and a joke puppet 'democracy' regime now despised by everyone. The Czech and Slovak Republics have possibly not yet degenerated to the halved living-standard misery of Russia, but workers' thinking in the Central European former workers states is growing just as hostile to their new capitalist 'freedom', - as witnessed in Sunday's colossal vote in the east of Germany for the former communist party, winning more than 40% of the votes in East Berlin itself, but also now expanding in West Germany.

Both New Labour and New Tory, indistinguishable stooges for the imperialist system, feel uncomfortable with the furore over Pinochet and wish that the whole issue of all imperialism's past brutal fascist crimes right round the world could remain undisturbed and forgotten like 95% of it still manages to do.

The real question for all imperialist-system regimes is FUTURE warmongering fascist aggression, not digging up the skeletons of the past.

The New Tory reactionary mentality is already so far advanced that the idea is even being floated of scuppering the imperialist retreat from colonial domination in the Occupied Zone of Ireland arranged for under the Good Friday Agreement which came as the climax to a series of Tory-signed withdrawal deals before that. This would imply a military attempt to halt Ireland's eventual simple-majority reunification destiny, and abandon previous acceptance that British imperialism's position in Ireland was as doomed to steady decline and futility as the rest of the decaying Empire, overtaken by world developments.

Mandelson's appointment implies NO change necessarily in New Labour's agreement to continue implementing the internationally-agreed snail's-pace withdrawal by Britain from Ireland, just ensuring that no obvious hands-down propaganda victory is being handed to Sinn Féin and the IRA to match their real political and guerrilla-war victories on the ground. Mandelson might well manage the choreography of the 'even-handed' withdrawal much better than the muddleheaded Mowlam who has been no match for the hardline Unionist propagandists and No—men.

But neither New Labour nor New Tory will ever make the trains run on time, the symbol of aggressive national-chauvinist bombast since Mussolini, - nor stop them crashing. The real leveller in all this is general imperialist decay and decline (RELATIVE to what modern people truly need from society) which NOTHING will ever now reverse. The Paddington disaster was the inadequacy of the whole system of profiteering private enterprise and not just of its privatised railway companies putting their greed first before safety. Under the country's corporate-bureaucracy ethics, the nationalised industry was not much more rationally organised either, or run with much more dedication or inspiration. Both nationalised and privatised railway industries reflect a dishonest class-divided society where only careerist Philistinism prospers and where lying propaganda, deception cover-ups, and corruption are the only real official state religion. Privatisation only adds to the blatancy and humiliation of the rip-offs and the injustices.

But the savage knocks the privatisation racket has suffered out of the Paddington scandal are profoundly interesting and revealing. The supposed 'success' of the capitalist private-enterprise system is paper-thin. A new coat of paint and huge fatter salaries all round, plus much more public relations exercises, works nicely when the capitalist credit-expansion system is still booming-along, domestically and internationally.

But crisis fears about imperialism now loom everywhere. There is massive global unease following the Far East, Russian, and Brazilian crashes. Total collapse has been stemmed for now, but a lot of the glitter of capitalism's 'triumph of history' has worn off already, and only the sleaze, corruption, injustice, and incompetence is now beginning to show through. 

It is a racketeering opportunist system where sycophantic mediocrity is the surest way to stay on the greasy pole or survive the rat race.

A historic class-interest-driven philosophical transformation in the mass of people (as understood only by Marxist-Leninist science) based on irrevocable material changes is just starting to haunt capitalism's comfortable illusions in eternal survival. The collapse of the long postwar boom's flourishing, - already widely being sensed all over the world, - will spark off a battle of ideas such as Hague could only live in terror of, - and all the rest of the imperialist system's 'governing' stooges. 

Build Leninism.  RB

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

The RUC as the policing arm of British colonial partition in Ireland has its days numbered. Good Friday rationality slowly conquering New Labour delay-paralysis.

The Sinn Féin Ard Chomhairle met last weekend in Donegal for two days of intense discussions around the Mitchell Review, the Patten Report into Policing and how to build on the electoral success achieved by the party earlier this year.

Speaking after the Ard Chomhairle meeting, Pat Doherty said: "Sinn Féin's attitude to the Patten Report will be set clearly in the context of our desire to see the RUC replaced by meaningful transitional arrangements pending the creation of all-Ireland policing structures.

"Any judgement of the Patten Report will also be set in the context of the Good Friday Agreement which set the agenda for Patten and which spoke of 'a new beginning to policing... With a police service capable of attracting and sustaining support from the community as a whole'.

"The fundamental political changes envisaged in the Good Friday Agreement have not yet been brought about. These changes need to happen if the context for a new beginning to policing is to be created.

"We are mindful also that at this juncture and 18 months after the Good Friday Agreement, all repressive legislation remains intact and operable. The British government has yet to publicise its strategy for demilitarisation as agreed on Good Friday. 

The report of the review of the criminal justice system is pending, and allegations of abuses, which are of enormous concern to nationalists and in particular allegations of collusion in the deaths of nationalists at the hands of British government agencies, are not being proactively addressed. The RUC remains a major problem in nationalist areas.

"Recognising the critical importance of the policing issue to the widespread hope and desire for a permanent peace; given the intense public discussion which the Patten report has already generated; and wishing to come to this matter in a thoughtful, considered and constructive way, the Ard Chomhairle has decided to appoint a sub-committee, to be called a Commission on Policing.

"Its task will be to engage with and monitor the processing of this issue and to report back to the Ard Chomhairle. The Commission would also have to scrutinise any legislation which the British government enacts. In the meantime, the Ard Chomhairle will continue to pro-actively engage with the two governments.

Doherty continued: "The Ard Chomhairle also discussed the current state of the peace process and the review of the Good Friday Agreement being carried out by Senator Mitchell. Many see this review as the last real chance for rescuing the Good Friday Agreement.

"Sinn Féin is wholeheartedly committed to the full implementation of the Agreement. The seriousness with which we have approached the review and the detailed submission we have made to it are evidence of our desire to achieve the establishment of the institutions and progress across all other aspects of the Agreement. Regrettably, at this time we see no evidence to suggest that the UUP leadership is serious about ending the crisis, its tactical engagement has seriously undermined the Agreement and heightened the sense of gloom which is currently widespread.

"In the remaining weeks of Senator Mitchell's review, Sinn Féin will seek to persuade the UUP leadership that the Good Friday Agreement remains our best chance for a peaceful future and that republicans are ready and willing to work with them in partnership to achieve that goat."

Reacting to comments this week from the Six-County Police Authority which criticised the report's recommendation to change the name of the RUC and proposals that a future a police service in the Six Counties should have 50% nationalist representation, Sinn Féin's Bairbre de Brún described the Police Authority as:"little more than a PR agency for the RUC" which for years has allowed the RUC to abuse human rights without any scrutiny".

Last week, De Brun and Sinn Féin Chairperson Mitchel McLaughlin met with the Criminal Justice Review Group, which is expected to publish its report in the coming weeks.

The Sinn Féin representatives made detailed submissions in relation to the establishment of a fair, impartial and acceptable system of justice. 

SPEAKING at the British Labour Party conference, Sinn Féin's Chief Negotiator Martin McGuinness warned that it would be a disaster if the Good Friday Agreement was to collapse. He said the only way to take the gun out of Irish politics was to demonstrate that politics could work.

McGuinness also urged the Ulster Unionists to agree that an Executive in the North should be immediately established and that it would then be the responsibility of all the political parties to "collectively" try to deal with the decommissioning issue.

"I am looking not just to take the Irish guns out of Irish politics but also the British guns," McGuinness added. He went on to say that David Trimble should listen to others within his own party such as Duncan Shipley-Dalton, Jim Wilson, and Stephen King and establish the Executive: "I think these people represent a large body of opinion within the unionist community, the business community, civic society and the churches who want to see the institutions established. The responsibility of dealing with decommissioning is a collective responsibility."

At the conference in Bournemouth, Tony Blair criticised the Tories for using the issue of the Six Counties and the peace process as a political football in internal British politics. Meanwhile, responding to comments by Tory Shadow Spokesperson on the Worth, Andrew Mackay, regarding possible meetings with Sinn Féin, the party's Vice President Pat Doherty said: "Sinn Féin has always expressed our willingness to meet with any party in our efforts to move the peace process forward and this includes the Tory party. The need for dialogue with a broad range of opinion is all the more urgent given the current crisis in the process.

"We will now attempt to make arrangements to meet at the earliest possible date. We are mindful however, that the Tory party has, up to now, been using the peace process as a political football in its domestic battle with the Labour Party rather than engaging in any positive effort to secure the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. In fact, it was our concern at their pro-unionist and party political approach to the peace process that moved us to seek a meeting with William Hague earlier this year."•

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

Revolution's advance in Colombia brings possible US military intervention (and disaster) closer.  

The massive offensive by FARC revolutionary forces in many parts of Colombia has shocked imperialism to its boots.

Like the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968 it has left US and all Western imperialism reeling — and has changed the picture utterly. The capitalist media have been so fearful of the example of successful revolutionary struggle spreading round the world, that they have carried just one or two reports of the assault on the neo-colonial order in Colombia:

"Colombia's left-wing guerrillas have launched their biggest offensive in 35 years of civil war, in an attempt to corner President Pastrana's Government before peace talks scheduled for July 20.

"Using tanks made from tractors wrapped in steel sheets, and missiles made from gas canisters, thousands of rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia have raided 25 towns.

"They have also launched their biggest advance on the capital, Bogota, which has stayed detached from the civil conflict in which 50,000 have died in three decades.

"Television images showed police barracks, supermarkets, banks and hundreds of homes in the towns being destroyed by the advancing rebels. Yesterday Colombia continued under siege with reports of guerrillas advancing towards Bogota by bombing police stations, banks, bridges and electricity stations and blocking roads outside the capital.
...the Red Cross claim that more than 300 soldiers..have been killed in three days of countrywide fighting and that Colombia's armed forces are beleaguered and unable to contain the assault by the 15,000-strong rebel force."

Like the Indonesian revolt which overthrew the imperialist puppet dictator Suharto, and the revolution of Mexico's Zapatistas, the revolution against the US-dominated capitalist order in Colombia blows a massive hole in imperialism's pretense that after the Soviet Union's collapse, socialist revolution is a dead issue.

As the FARC-EP have said: "The collapse of the USSR hasn't fed all the hungry in the world."

Capitalism has solved none of its problems - despite Gorbachev's disgraceful revisionist liquidation of the USSR. Instead, capitalism as a world system is sliding so much nearer to all-out trade war and slump that the major rival imperialist ruling classes of the US, Germany, Japan, plus hangers-on Britain and France arc desperately plunging into warmongering, such as the fascist NATO blitzkrieg on Yugoslavia. 

Carried out by "Democrat" Clinton, Labour's Blair and German "lefts" using Goebbels levels of propaganda about "human rights" and the "freedom of small nations" the imperialists then bombed into the ground as much as they could of the only force in the area that wouldn't bow to their diktat - formerly socialist Serbia, which had been the heart of the Yugoslavia workers state.

Now these same Western fascist bandits are having to INVENT a reason why the genuine struggle for social justice of the Colombian masses can be attacked by Western "democracy".

The crash of a US "drugs reconnaissance" plane over southern Colombia has all the hallmarks of a desperate CIA stunt to get public opinion around the world to start believing the "drug dealers" smear against the FARC-EP revolution.

The capitalist news agencies have been immediately told to pour on the hate propaganda full blast: "Barry McCaffrey, the White House drug policy chief... told press conference in Miami before leaving for a scheduled visit to Colombia that the US was facing an emergency there, and should do more to help its government combat guerrillas funded by drug money.

"The US military has maintained that its efforts in Colombia are focused solely on the drug war, describing the fight against the rebels as an internal matter.

"But Mr McCaffrey said he did not see such a dividing line. 'We're going to have to make sure that Colombian democracy isn't done away with at the point of a gun."

So the biggest drug dealers in the world, caught shipping drugs from the White House in the Oliver North-Reagan Irangate scandal, who have strewn drugs around the world extensively to damage rebellious populations - including their own ghettoes, and who have financed death squads and CIA counter-revolution around the world with drug money, notably the Nicaraguan Contras, bluster out the truth.

The US aims to assassinate the Colombian revolution if it can because it is a revolution.

The Colombian state is a "democracy"?? Only in that it is a typical capitalist Third World regime dominated by the power of the Western cartels, and run in the interests only of the super-rich, the landowners,  and corrupt stooge politicians. When the Union Patriotica made an open civil struggle for social change in Colombian cities and towns in the 1980s it was gunned down by right-wing vigilantes backed by the police and the army - showing for all time that the forces of reaction in the country needed to be overthrown.

Whatever Pastrana says at the peace talks, the only guarantee of any progress in Colombia will be an armed people in control, and the political defeat of the pro-imperialist forces.