Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
[P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box SO, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]
No 1057 Sep 12 2000                                                                                                                                               10p
M/C seminar Oct 14

Phony 'Marxists' reveal their true counter-revolutionary game by sucking up to 'left'-Labour reactionaries, and accepting self-proclaimed 'communist' credentials from every sectarian backwardness in the book. The anti-communist bourgeoisification of working-class opinion behind the Labour imperialists demands tough ideological conflict, not electoral soft-soap. World revolutionary perspectives against international imperialist crisis are the best answer to racist diversions, - not 'moral principles'. Catastrophic fake-'left' record on Kosovo and Ireland shows how the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism must be the issue for new party-building, not the bogus 'unity' of fraudulent 'alliances'. Dumb SSP 'left reformism' is in the capitalist camp, not the socialist camp.

Blair's fuel-tax crisis p6.

The agitation among fake-'left' sects for a 'Socialist Alliance' – (embryo-joint-major communist party), instantly awards the title 'revolutionary groups' to all participants without any question or debate. Such subjective judgements about themselves by these middle-class anti-communist dilettantes are not just utterly worthless but are the first and biggest rotten deception on the working class supposedly being appealed to with this empty-headed 'unity' posturing.

The subjective desire to be a 'revolutionary' and to make a 'revolution' is not unimportant, but it has very little to do with Marxist scientific understanding of imperialist crisis and the revolutionary process, without which all talk of being 'revolutionaries' is just so much wind. 

The incipient mass consciousness (which alone will be able to give correct leadership the backing to make a successful revolution possible) is not just self-declared either. These two major ingredients have to be fought out (in a process of learning-to-fight the imperialist system) in such a way that the revolution will be ready to grasp the moment (when the old order cannot really rule on any longer).

This process has to start with a clear sober acceptance of the inevitability of revolution as the only possible real way forward out of the increasingly chaotic and degenerate mess that collapsing capitalist society is creating, and also with a clear sober acceptance of the disciplined proletarian-dictatorship society which alone can possibly replace the anarchic bourgeois order. "Everyone free to do what they like once the ruling class is off our backs" is in fact closest culturally to the current growing anarchy of late capitalism as it increasingly runs out of philosophical leadership-credibility, and tries to prop up its 'democracy must rule' fraud by just turning a blind eye to more and more anarchy in a vain effort to avoid 'alienating' any more than a few scapegoated minorities. 

The whole of capitalist culture is now oriented towards crass individualism for its own sake. Acres of television is now dedicated to watching 'personalities' just 'being themselves', – whether 'famous' like Skinner & Baddiel, Denise Van Outen, or Julian Clary, e.g., or just 'ordinary people' like the Blind Date, Big Brother, or Castaways participants or all the soft-porn revellers in all the holiday-island 'documentaries', – the theory being that if enough of the 'public' can be sucked-up-to in enough dumbed-down ways, on scores of increasingly-racy 24-hour television channels, and if a blind eye can be turned in practice to the drugs booze inebriation culture as at the Notting Hill Carnival, the Kingston rave, and the 'larging-it' Friday night routines everywhere, – then no one will ever have any time or brain for serious political discussion about the capitalist system falling apart.

Obviously, this attempted brain-washing by wall-to-wall cultural mindlessness will fail, and revolutionary understanding of the ultimately barren and destructive all-round degeneracy of the capitalist system will spread from the Third World to the First World. 

But for serious communist movements to get going again in the West, the political implications of universal cultural anarchy need to be faced up to from the start. The kind of mob-rule which the biggest capitalist newspaper group wanted to stunt-up on the very limited paedophile issue (for circulation gains) has obviously tapped some deeper mass-revolt mechanisms which will be nothing but totally damaging to capitalism in the long run. 

But its obvious potential for racist/fascist diversions too cannot be ignored, and the shallow mass fun mentality of Ibiza individualism is at best a feeble and uncertain basis on which to hope to win wide support for an organised revolutionary-communist response to Nazism reviving.

The hope that international situations will never recur that will require such a response is a vain one. Neo-nazi skinhead racism is now rampant in some areas of Germany, France, and other continental countries, for example. And given bourgeois society's refusal to even consider examining the very nature and structure of capitalism itself as the cause of mounting social disorder and unpleasantness, –  where else are minds (which are intellectually limited to popular-television and Mediterranean-resort culture) likely to seek 'causes' for why society is going rotten than in the obvious thing they see that is 'new' or 'different' in postwar life, – namely the arrival of large ethnic minorities all over Britain.

Such small-mindedness will need fighting on a far broader front than just single-issue anti-racist campaigning. Without an understanding of world imperialist crisis and the inevitability of communist revolutions everywhere, trying to mobilise the current working-class mentality to eschew blind-alley race-prejudice with the slogan: "Unconditionally oppose all immigration controls" is worse than useless. This barminess, widely supported in the Trot press, is the fruit of posturing that 'moral principles' should, and can, rule politics. 

This is subjective-idealist nonsense at its worst. The fascist victimisation of asylum-seekers is odious and dangerous filth that working-class communities must be fought-with over, as hard as possible. But it is just as big and loony a diversion to try to persuade workers to go round saying "Asylum-seekers welcome here" instead. Economic migrants are not all necessarily petty-bourgeois-minded opportunists, eager to embrace all the West's crap values, but the chances of them being outstanding communists and determined revolutionaries are even less likely.

What people fed up with life in Turkey/Albania/Bangladesh/Nigeria/etc, really need to be doing is taking up the fight for revolution there, not helping swell the illusion of the 'good life' under Western imperialism, and distracting local anti-capitalist struggles with welfare demands, which are more pure reformism.

Not for ages after world socialist revolution will a planned new planetary order be sufficiently well-established to start creating a genuine 'freedom for all to move and live where they want'. And it can only create more confusion than clarity to adopt it now as a slogan supposedly disruptive of capitalism. What the world proletariat needs the ruling class off its back for is not "for everyone to be free to do what they like" but for the working class to be free to build a strong, affluent, secure, educated society where voluntary mutual discipline can eventually resolve all difficulties with the best reasoned argument available.

The idea that this will be automatic upon the overthrow of the world imperialist system is insane. As all past revolutions have proved, there would initially 'automatically' be much total anarchy. A new party-led proletarian dictatorship order is the only possibility for preventing world imperialist counter-revolution and for getting planned socialist reconstruction under way.

Without thrashing out an understanding of all this elementary stuff and much much more besides, all this 'socialist alliance' posturing is just a disastrous diversion hoodwinking the working class. As discussed earlier, the proof lies in the mess the 'left' swamp has made of trying to organise a fight against imperialism over two of its recent crises, – in Ireland and Kosovo.

Championing 'Kosovo-Albanian self-determination', – where that is exactly the CIA's own stunt for getting an armed-stooge toe-hold in the Balkans and for further destroying the vestiges of Yugoslav workers-statehood, – is leading the working class in perfect counter-revolutionary education, not revolutionary education which could only have had 'Defeat for imperialism' on its banner, nothing else). 

Equally bankrupt were the fake-'left' alternatives to this pro-KLA nonsense, such as the social-pacifist 'Stop the war' idiocy, – dripping in utterly useless and diversionary 'moral principles', – and the historically disastrous 'Defend Serbia' slogan which just eliminates, at a stroke, more than 70 years bitter international working-class experience of the never-ending catastrophes of Stalinist revisionism, corrupting and then finally wrecking nearly all the gains of the Third International and the Socialist Camp. 

'Defend Serbia' or 'Defend Yugoslavia' effectively means defend Milosevicism, not defend a viable workers state. And Milosevic revisionism was no better than Stalinist revisionism, dooming the anti-imperialist workers states' struggle to defeat from way back because of its total theoretical bankruptcy in being unable to develop, into modern times, the Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding of imperialist crisis as the dominant driving force of the world still, and of international socialist revolution as the only possible working-class policy for the planet.

But to fall for long-laid insidious CIA propaganda-influence and adopting the 'self-determination for Kosovo Albanians' nonsense was a hopeless way to try to fight Milosevicism's backwardness, and catastrophically played directly into aggressive US imperialism's hands. 

The infamy of this 'playing-at-revolutionaries' mindlessness may linger to haunt the Trot 'left' badly, as Washington's international warmongering preparations continue to grow relentlessly and ruthlessly, – even humiliating its 'United Nations allies' contemptuously in fixing up its own imperialist-stooge 'state' around its KLA Albanian mafia long-term clients, – as the capitalist press itself is now frequently admitting, as just this week:

AMERICAN officials in Kosovo are being accused of interfering with an investigation into a senior Kosovo Albanian politician implicated in murder, drug-trafficking and war crimes.

Ramush Haradinaj, a former commander of the Kosovo liberation Army (KLA), was the key US military and intelligence asset in Kosovo during the civil war and the Nato bombing campaign that followed.

In the latest twist in the saga of an. increasingly flawed electoral process, United Nations police in the province complain that US personnel withheld evidence about a gunfight involving Haradinaj, who  now leads a key political group.

UN investigators say US officials from their country's main base, Camp Bondsteel, removed forensic evidence from the scene of the gun battle, including bullets retrieved from walls. The scene, in the western village of Strellc, is well out of the US Army's area of responsibility, in the south-east Kosovo.

Following the shooting Haradinaj, known in the province simply as Ramush, was flown by helicopter to Camp Bondsteel and on to be treated for shrapnel wounds at a US Army hospital in Germany. UN investigators were denied access to him then.

Evidence from the incident was eventually handed over after angry telephone calls from Fred Pascoe, the American policeman heading the UN investigation.

The news of the American military's reluctance to cooperate with the investigation comes amid a catalogue of accusations linking Haradinaj to murder, drugs trafficking and war crimes.

The shooting revolved around a dispute between Haradinaj and members of the Musaj family, who accuse him of ordering the murder of their brother and three other men shortly after the arrival of Nato troops in Kosovo in June 1999. The men were all part of FARK (Armed Force of the Republic of Kosovo), a rival group to the Kosovo liberation Army.

Three Musaj brothers had visited Haradinaj's father to demand the bones of their brother, a right they had according to Albanian custom. Haradinaj admits he went to the Musajs' home at around 1am to stop them from visiting his father again.

This is the second time this year Haradinaj has been caught up in violence. He was injured in a fight with Russian soldiers at a K-For check-point in the spring. Western diplomats say he has damaged his party's prospects in UN-organised local elections due next month.

The controversies do not however, appear to have damaged his contacts with US military or political figures.

His party officials were invited to discuss the future of Kosovo at a meeting organised by the US State Department, and he is now in Washington on a fund-raising trip and as the guest of a US Congressman, Benjamin Gillman.

Haradinaj is seen by the international community as useful. British officials describe him as 'one of the few former commanders of the KLA who can deliver'. They say he was crucial in smoothing the transition of the KLA from a guerrilla, army to a civilian guard.

But one former British soldier, who served with the Kosovo Verification Mission, described him as 'a psychopath', and accused him of terrorising his own troops and the local population into loyalty. 'He would beat his own men to maintain a kind of military discipline,' he said. 'Someone would pass him some information and he would disappear for two hours. The end result would be several bodies in a ditch.'

The ex-soldier man said he saw Ramush 'deal with' an Albanian family who had let Serb police into their house. The incident matches a human rights report by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe last year which told how seven masked men entered a house in the village of Gornja Lucka. Two men were beaten. A third was taken away and never seen again.

During this time Haradinaj maintained daily contact with American military personnel, the ex-soldier said – a link taken over by Nato at the beginning of the bombing.

Another alleged victim of Ramush's men was Suad Qorraj, who had operated a satellite telephone for a rival KLA commander during the war. His family say he went missing on 23 June 1999, two weeks after the end of the war. On 1 August Suad's charred remains were found in a forest.

A year on from Suad's death, Haradinaj still wields considerable power in western Kosovo. 'He can very easily bring the area to a halt' says Robert Charmbury, UN administrator of the biggest town in the region, Pec.
      
The Alliance party is discussing the possibility of a pact with the Kosovan Democratic Party (PDK), led by Hashim Thaci, former political leader of the KLA. Such a deal might squeeze out the election favourites, the Democratic League of Kosovo. Whoever wins, senior UN officials are concerned about Haradinaj's long-term impact on the province. 

One aide claims Haradinaj  is now financed by Naser Kelmendi and Ekrem Lluka, both of suspected of involvement in smuggling. UN police reports, seen by The Observer, go further and describe Lluka as trafficking in drugs and cigarettes internationally.

Meanwhile the Musaj brothers have fortified their home for fear of what Haradinaj will do next in the next few weeks. 'If he doesn't attack us before the elections he'll attack us afterwards,' said Sadie Musaj. 'Nothing will happen [to him]. He has strong people behind him.'

What sort of genuine 'self-determination' is really expressable by the joke 'democratic wishes' of ordinary Kosovo Albanians in these circumstances??? Such academic unworldly 'revolutionary' posturing by these Trot fake-'lefts', is just an obscene joke. 

And having played right into the hands of the CIA's game-plan to set up a new sort of 'Israel' in the Balkans around the Albanian mafia, for use as a permanent US military base or as a local armed thug-provocateur in the region (the role that Zionist-Occupied Palestine plays in the Middle East), – where are all these 'Socialist Alliance' heroes of the 'revolution' to try and put right the monstrous delusion about 'Kosovo Albanian self-determination rights' that they helped the CIA to create???? Nowhere to be seen, or else resting contentedly on their anti-communist laurels.

This irresponsible 'left' posing in the dangerous arena of world warmongering imperialist crisis has a key philosophical connection to the blather these anti-communist petty-bourgeois dilettantes make sure is always in workers faces over the bankrupt labour-movement situation in Britain. It deliberately exploits an inevitable failure of imagination by the proletariat worldwide. Without Marxist science (which can only be spread by a consciously-established party of Marxist-Leninist leadership), – no workers, anywhere are spontaneously, – in any great numbers collectively, – going to be able to grasp the full widespread international warmongering horrors that the impending volcanic imperialist crisis is going to deluge on everyone. 

In the total catastrophic turmoil that is now the Balkans (see above and previous issue), there was never a cat-in-hell's chance of Kosovo Albanians (or anyone else) being able to work out some peaceful idyll of 'democratic self-determination'. Hanging-on-like-grim-death to any kind of survival at all, is the only realistic concern in this part of East Europe,'liberated' by mafia-capitalism, as it is over most of the former Soviet workers state territory, and will increasingly become the case for the rest of East Europe too before long. 

Over such vast areas, it is impossible for the international trade-war system, already reeling from a cut-throat 'overproduction' crisis itself, to spread anything but the worst kind of mafia-capitalist savagery. 

And it can only get worse. The only thing worth telling the proletariat about anywhere, – in Kosovo, and throughout the former workers states, – is the inevitability of world socialist revolution as the only possible replacement for the crooked collapsing mayhem that is life for any truly 'ordinary innocent Kosovo Albanian people', for most of the former USSR people, and already for the majority of people throughout the entire capitalist Third World anyway.

The fake-'lefts' deliberate exploitation of the international proletariat's failure of imagination, is exactly what their anti-communist opportunism wants to put over on any workers drawn into this 'socialist alliance' deceitful stunt. As later-on seen around MSP T Sheridan's 'revive municipal-socialist housing' fraud in Glasgow, the whole plan is to try to tranquillise the working class with the total delusion that the only thing wrong with capitalism is a lack of more 'good left reforms', – which electing Sheridan, and the like, will supposedly put right, – presumably just the same way that the 'Militant' electoral control of Liverpool in the 1980s (the forerunners of the SSP) was supposed to inaugurate a 'socialist paradise' there. The only thing worth checking all 'left' electoral promises for is any included detailing of how the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is to be carried out that will be needed to back them up. 

It is exactly the same with all 'left'-electoral speechifying, – around 'left'-Labour, the 'Socialist Alliances', the SLP, or anywhere else. As Lenin graphically explained, giving support to spontaneously-erupting reformist campaigns against particular capitalist evils is fine, – as long as 5 minutes of any speech is devoted to saying how easy it would be to reform things to give greater equality, fairness, and justice – if only the capitalist rulers really wanted it to happen, and how much better life would be if only those reforms could be introduced, – but 25 minutes of the same speech is devoted to spelling out exactly how the capitalist rulers are to be overthrown and the circumstances of world imperialist crisis in which it will have to happen before any serious socialist reform of society could even start. Not much Socialist Alliance or SLP electoral propaganda dared even mention the word 'revolution'. 

And the fake-'lefts' newspaper articles are just as rancidly rotten, endlessly telling the world on every issue how determined people are to fight for change, and how much better life will be when these reforms are carried out; but never a word about how any of this 'left' reformism could come to pass. Peddling just this "use your ballot to put an end to the evils of capitalism" electoral line is merely putting across, on behalf of the ruling class, its counter-revolutionary soft soap. 

And boasting about the odd 10% vote gained here or there out of minuscule turn-outs is similarly just breathing life into a totally wealth-rigged electoral system which instinct tells the proletariat to virtually boycott, and which is in danger of bankruptcy or invalidity because of this lack of support throughout capitalism. Electoral tribunes had one basic use for Marxism-Leninism, – to exploit as a platform for revolutionary propaganda.

So the 57 varieties of Trot and Revisionist anti-communism will gather in Coventry and subsequently in Scotland to merely all posture their rival sectarian 'brilliance' and not even discuss basic principles of Marxist-Leninist science or communist struggle. Immediate strategies and slogans (towards the Labour Party, e.g.) will make possible just a little of the necessary debate on the political fundamentals of renewed revolutionary party-building in Britain. But the envisaged level of that debate, still discussing New Labour as a 'workers party' even in the most 'revolutionary' contributions, is not encouraging. 

World history has moved on so far since the earliest Marxist categorisation of Labour as a 'bourgeois workers party' that such a label is now more misleading (to stress) than it is helpful. That newly-emerged Labour Party had at that time never been remotely close to holding government office in Britain, and the 20th century's great 'reformist' trick on the working class, promising a complete socialist society through parliamentary laws, was in its untested infancy. No less than nine periods of Labour government of British imperialism later, even the Blairites are too ashamed and embarrassed to try to pretend that this is a party of any kind of 'socialism' any more, nor really much of a workers party either, in the sense of openly embracing a class fight, as original Labour was eager and proud to proclaim it was doing.

Labour is now not just totally a bourgeois party, but is even laying claims to being the senior bourgeois party, backed by far more sections of the capitalist classes than the Conservative Party is. The trade-union connection is a complete red herring (to the extent that it is even pretended to play a role any more). Unprecedented levels of international economic exploitation under American imperialist domination postwar, plus the Cold War, took anti-communist class-collaboration by the trade-union leaders to a qualitatively new stage of corruption and ideological bourgeoisification. With the system on its last legs, the bought labour-movement leadership is now an indispensable partner in keeping capitalism going. 

Western imperialism could never have fought genuinely against its own labour movements and the albeit revisionist-corrupted workers states at the same time. Taking advantage of Stalinism's stupidities, the labour movement of the inter-war years General Strike and International Brigade became the complete anti-communist counter-revolutionary article under the first-ever majority Labour government after 1945 and a key part of the West's preparations for nuclear annihilation of the workers states and the postwar restoration of imperialist empires in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaya, Algeria, Belgian Congo, and throughout the US colonies, etc, etc, etc.

The anti-communist class degeneracy Western workers have undergone (based on the unprecedented consumer-goods boom a majority have experienced in the leading free-market trading and investment countries) is a reactionary development incomparably worse than the jingoistic warmongering crassness which gripped every nation in 1914-1918, and from which only utter degradation and defeat rescued healthier proletarian class attitudes once again later on, beginning with the 1917 Russian Revolution. The same aggressive imperialist rottenness had been re-established among Western workers by the 1930s, in some cases worse than ever before. 

Soviet defeat of Nazism's most aggressive representation of Western imperialist warmongering gave a massive boost to workers-state construction in the world after 1945, but the dawning of the epoch of by far the mightiest and most dominant imperialist power ever, – the fabulously wealthy US imperialist hegemony, – meant that simultaneously, aided by Moscow's revisionist stupidity, the Western working class was being set up for its most reactionary political degeneration yet, with its labour-movements totally corrupted by counter-revolutionary anti-communist opportunism. Even the 'liberal' capitalist press is obliged to note this sick historical turnaround:

Any thought that the aftermath of Nato's Kosovan imbroglio might have dimmed Tony Blair's enthusiasm for "humanitarian wars" has been dispelled. His government has emerged as the most interventionist British administration since decolonisation. No opportunity is now to be passed up, it seems, to raise, the 21st-century crusader's flag across the globe.

The increasingly grim Sierra Leone adventure, with its kidnappings and yesterday's bloodstained, military rescue, is the third time in 18 months that New Labour has used British armed force outside UN control. Sierra Leone has also been the biggest independent British overseas military operation since the Falklands war.

Thirty-nine years after the union flag was hauled down in Freetown on almost two centuries of bloody colonial rule, British squaddies have now been back in significant force for months, their commanders directing the conduct of a gruesome and intractable civil war.

With barely a murmur of public debate at home, British troops are once again shooting Sierra Leoneans dead in their own land, while Royal Navy gunboats patrol the west African coast and the limb-hacking rebels of the Revolutionary United Front are routinely compared to Nazis, the standard designation for all post-1945 British enemies.

The scaled-down British "training mission" and its backup security units denounced by the UN commander for their "Rambo tactics" — are embroiled in a wider conflict with, among others, renegade British-armed militias. More paratroopers have been shipped out to hold an indefensible line. The declared intent is not only to rescue hostages and maul the erstwhile government-supporting "West Side Boys", but also to take back control of Sierra Leone's lucrative diamond fields.

The Blair administration's intervention sprees began with the four-day Anglo-American missile onslaught against Iraq in December 1998. The bombing raids there have continued, outside the terms of UN resolutions and opposed by a majority of the permanent UN security council members, while the US and Britain's enforcement of the failed sanctions regime — described by US Democratic congressman David Bonnier as "infanticide masquerading as a policy" — is now almost universally recognised as having created a humanitarian disaster.

But it was Nato's self-proclaimed war of values over Kosovo that triggered Mr Blair's clarion call last year in Chicago for a new wave of worldwide intervention, based on what he described — echoing the liberal imperialists of the late 19th century — as a "subtle blend" of self-interest and moral purpose.   A year on, reverse ethnic cleansing proceeds apace in Kosovo.

But the full flowering of Mr Blair's new line has been in Africa, where the Unites States still fears to tread in the wake of its Somali debacle of the early 1990s. After weeks of British interference in the internal crisis in Zimbabwe — with British ministers repeatedly championing the cause of white landowners who made up the backbone of the racist Rhodesian regime, while denouncing the black leadership which defeated it as "uncivilised" — Blair's paratroopers were despatched to Freetown to fill the vacuum left by the disintegrating UN peacekeeping force Britain refused to join a year ago. 

The fact that Iraq, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone are all former British colonies does not seem to trouble the cheerleaders of the new "doctrine of international community", enveloped as they are in a blanket of cultural amnesia about the horrors of Britain's colonial past. It is less than 50 years since British soldiers shot dead striking Sierra Leoneans on the streets of Freetown, were paid five shillings for each Kenyan Kikuyu they killed, nailed the limbs of Mau Mau fighters to crossroads posts and had themselves photographed with the severed heads of Malayan guerrillas.

With such a record, it might be thought that Britain was the last country on the planet to sort out the "savagery" of its once-captive subjects. The world, we are told, has moved on. But for the people of Africa — burdened with western debt, arms, mercenaries, mineral-hungry multinational companies and commodity prices that have been falling for more than 40 years — it has not moved on enough.

After supporting one corrupt dictator after another in Sierra Leone, Britain has thrown its military and diplomatic weight behind President Kabbah and his supporters, who Tony Blair insists are the democratic "good guys", against the rural-based RUF, led by vice-president Foday Sankoh until his capture by British soldiers in May.

But the 1996 elections which brought Kabbah to power were held when the country was already engulfed in civil war, did not include the RUF and were undermined by violence and ballot rigging claims. While the RUF has the worst record of atrocities, according to Amnesty International, Kabbah and his kamajor militias have also been heavily involved in torture and extra-judicial killings, and his ally Johnny Paul Koroma is responsible for the mutilation and massacre of thousands of civilians. These are the people British troops are supporting — until Koroma's former protégés, the West Side Boys, started kidnapping British soldiers.

The reality is that Britain and its friends are part of the problem in Sierra Leone and that no outside force can impose the necessary internal settlement.

The orientation of a proletariat's political internationalism is utterly decisive in its ability to play either a progressive or a thoroughly reactionary class role. 

There is no alternative now in the West but to continually confront workers with their anti-communist counter-revolutionary backwardness. Marxist-Leninist science has only ever made progress in real conflict with the trade-unionist consciousness (petty-bourgeois opportunism) and lumpen-imperialist chauvinism of the working class. In the West, it is now battling against more entrenched philistinism from shallow consumerism and unprecedented non-stop ideological brainwashing than has ever occurred before.

Marxist-Leninist science must triumph, of course, and the working class alone can and will be the sole initial ruling class in the completely new era of civilisation of international socialist cooperation. But only the most ruthlessly-determined conscious fight for the whole of Marxist-Leninist science (as the only sound basis for understanding how nature, society, and mankind have evolved and can continue developing successfully) will be enough. 

The EPSR's fight against the endless reactionary confusion in fake-'left' minds is symbolic of the non-stop conflict needed against the backwardness which imperialist triumphalism has tried to infect working-class thinking with.

Even the most 'radical' elements in the 'Socialist Alliance' are insisting that this fraudulent stunt being peddled to the working class 

"must adopt a sensitive approach to Labour lefts. Class conscious workers would not take kindly to a cavalier approach which fails to distinguish between Blairite clones and those perceived as staunch socialists" 

(Weekly Worker 349). 

However interpreted, this can only add up to utter gobshite. Such statements can only be produced by a combination of class sympathy with the rotten deception on the proletariat that petty-bourgeois "democratic process" has alone always represented, plus trivial impressionistic guesswork posturing as political wisdom. It follows on from the obscene creeping around Ken Livingstone that the London Socialist Alliance slithered to in this year's elections.

Labour 'lefts' are the staunchest of staunch reactionaries, and not 'socialists' of any kind. This sub-class of posturing petty-bourgeois opportunism, has been the essential heartbeat for 100 years of all the most vile betrayals inflicted on the working class by the Labour Party. At every important historical juncture where mass-
movement aspirations have been foully sold-out by the Labour Party, it is the Labour 'lefts' who have always come to the rescue, re-selling the disgusting deceptions of 'the reformist party' and the 'democratic parliament' to the working class, just as Benn and Livingstone are doing now with their 'polite opposition' to Blairism, and their pretence that "the wheel always goes round full circle, and the time of the 'left' will come again", etc. 

This supposedly 'well-meaning' rubbish has one objective effect only – to blind the working class to the actual pattern of history which is one of periodic imperialist-crisis catastrophe for the world's masses. It deliberately tries to pretend that gradual inevitable 'left' reforms will slowly but surely eventually tame the capitalist system, and through parliamentary means transform it into a wonderful eternal socialist civilisation. It is the foulest most treacherous nonsense imaginable that anyone could sell to the working class.

And the last thing that this 'alliance' proposal for "a sensitive approach to Labour lefts" represents is any scrap of historical awareness,(yet another way, along with all the others, that this hoodwinking stunt on the working class falls ridiculously short of anything close to a Marxist or a revolutionary political development). These 'reformist' frauds have deservedly been torn apart in previous revolutionary struggles, and it seems obvious that the working class in Britain will ultimately turn on the Labour Party with such hatred that even these 'revolutionary' apologists for Labour's 'left' apologists will not be safe from deserved scorn and vengeance. 

And with what obsequiousness, too, does this 'Alliance' plea for 'sensitivity' go on to knee-jerk a response to some veiled threat from these 'left'-Labour "staunch class-conscious socialists" who would "not take kindly" to not being distinguished from Blairite clones. Too bad. These so-called 'lefts' in Labour will be judged by the company they keep, which is that of the Blair, Cook, Robertson advocates of NATO-Nazi criminal blitzkrieg destruction of defenceless Serbia, and many other condoned or perpetrated imperialist outrages besides.

Attempted excuses about 'joining Labour, and staying in, in order precisely to turn it back into a proper socialist party' are the worst fraud of all. The Militant crowd of entryists were effectively just fake-'left' stooges for reactionary Labour imperialism then, and they have gone steadily more rightwing-opportunist since being booted out and having to form the independent Socialist Party. 

One of the most ludicrous aspects of this 'alliance' fraud is the willingness to accommodate to any amount of backwardness, from the SP or anyone else, just to be able to posture about an utterly illusory 'unity'. The SP's racist venom against the Irish national-liberation war is ingested. The SSP's cretinous petty-bourgeois nationalist retreat from anti-imperialism in Scotland is not just tolerated but is now, apparently, to be actively courted by the SWP and others because of the SSP's presumed electoral clout. 

But on this basis, why not all re-sign up to be New Labour stooges at election times. With little to choose between one retreat from revolutionary anti-imperialism into parliamentary-reformist opportunism from another, at least Blairism will still get more seats for what is yet supposedly some sort of 'workers party'. 

The SSP is claimed to have 'formidable campaigning strengths' behind 'charismatic' MSP Tommy Sheridan, but what use such traditional 'left' skills are put to is what matters. Preparing for an alliance with the SNP (Scottish National Party) for an 'independent' capitalist Scotland will create more ludicrously reactionary confusion than can possibly be imagined, and would leave the working class in Scotland more vulnerable to the perils of a warmongering imperialist world crisis than ever before. Even more routine SSP reformism such as the campaign to stop the disposal of Glasgow's last 94,000 council flats and houses may get Sheridan much more publicity, but what is its perspective politically? Nothing more than to prop up the total illusion of 'municipal socialism', just as Militant solely achieved when running Liverpool council. 

All that such parliamentary electoralism of this type can ever do in reality, is to run municipal parts of the capitalist system, nothing else. That means running capitalism locally on behalf of the ruling class and the imperialist state, – as Liverpool Militant graphically illustrated when forced to sack council staff because of centrally-imposed budget restrictions, etc, etc, etc, etc,etc without end. Council housing is running down precisely because it is a contradictory nightmare to try to build a culture of publicly-owned housing and other amenities which is ever-improving, – inside capitalist economic crisis conditions which are becoming ever more insecure and cut-throat, ever more brutally philistine and self-centred, and periodically ever more patchy or catastrophic from a living standards point of view. 

When 'municipal socialism' runs into debt, drugs, and crime problems on council housing estates, within a world of ever sharpening international capitalist crisis conditions, – it is this bogus 'reformism' which is going to be routed as utterly useless and utterly unwanted. The noble tradition of attempted co-operatives under capitalism (whether in housing or anything else) has never been able to be more than a diversion from what the working class really need to be concentrating on, which is the taking of state power. The 'socialist alliance' stunt is just a sicker, less-honourable type of diversion. RB

The perfect capitalist-system crisis.

As if to demonstrate the points in the previous article exposing the reformist pointlessness of fake 'leftism', the fuel-tax drama has exploded on the Blair government showing how world imperialist economic crisis will impose a pattern of upheaval politics, utterly divorced from routine class-collaboration which the labour movement evolved into, and will pose only revolutionary solutions, which will make Marxist-Leninist science the sole way forward for mankind.

This particular problem may not become a major turning-point this time, but the background ingredients are precisely those which will transform all economic problems everywhere into a world revolutionary crisis in time.

Blair could just be committing political suicide by taking a hardline 'we will not be coerced by anarchy' stand. The small or self-employed businessmen mainly behind the halt-road-transport action, – farmers, hauliers, taxi drivers, fishermen, etc, – may have a dodgy past international rightwing political history, and may not be everyone's favourite people, but they are winning widespread sympathy because the damaging economic uncertainty which so-called 'free-market forces' (i.e. monopoly-imperialism) are imposing on their lives is matching the growing insecurity that everyone is feeling, living under capitalism, about everything else.

The really serious 'anarchy' and 'threats to good order' arise entirely from the capitalist system itself, nowhere else. A major 'over-production' crisis is relentlessly pushing the whole world market network towards a catastrophic crash (see Marx's Capital, vol III, chapter 30 for details) and the cut-throat trade-war conflict, building up everywhere, is the real story of the capitalist system (marking all its periods of revolutionary upheaval), – not the delusory periods of 'peaceful, prosperous boom' which are mere interludes, however long they last.

The haulage industry, for example, is now under siege from competition within the supposedly 'single-market' European Union, except that it obviously is not a single market in that fuel prices, fuel-tax levies, road-tax levies, insurance costs, road-toll charges, etc, etc, vary widely right across the whole of Europe now in the EU. Right or wrong, the British haulage industry thinks it is facing life-threatening unfair conditions when fuel-tax per litre is only 35p in many EU countries but 71p in the UK, and big-lorry road tax is £3,200 per annum here but only £610 in Holland, and insurance there is 40% cheaper too, for example. 

Farmers are feeling even more hard done by as EU and world-glut prices have on average halved their incomes over the past three years from wheat, meat, milk, and other staples, etc, – while world fuel prices, – and the government's fuel-tax take, – have gone on rocketing.

The latest dramatic escalation in world oil prices has been the last straw, and Blair's refusal to respond to heartfelt protests (in the way that the French government has been forced to respond), could be like waving a red rag to a bull. Last week, French hauliers won a 15% reduction in road fuel tax (although some complaints still go on). French farmers won a 30% state fuel tax reprieve for themselves.

Now hauliers, farmers, taxi drivers, tour-bus operators, fishermen, etc, etc, across half Europe are out blockading motorways, refineries, service stations, distribution depots, harbour quays, etc, etc, and Britain has joined in with growing enthusiasm for the fight.

The governments (like Britain and Germany) which have declared a refusal to give way "as an important point of democratic principle", etc, etc, telling the affected industries to accept the rigours and honesty of market competition, and explaining that government tax-takes will be undermined if they have to yo-yo with every political grouse as well as with every price fluctuation, up or down, – are clearly looking at the longer-term implications of all this mayhem. The global monopolisation process is unstoppable under the capitalist system, whether inside the European Union or out of it. And cut-throat competition, plus bankruptcies and market crashes, are increasingly inevitable too. 

But that is the capitalist system, and there is no other. 'Free-world' imperialism must dictate to everyone eventually to 'like it or lump it'. The power of world-trade globalisation will sweep aside any artificial 'preserved market' attempt to stand in its way by simply attacking the currency and international-bank credit ratings of any country which refuses to fall into line. If the protests go too far, the idea of a revolt against the whole capitalist system might be encouraged, which world imperialism regards as the worst possible thing that could happen. That's why Blair & Co are so keen to be seen taking a firm stand 'against anarchy', etc.

But ever-greater monopolisation of the world economy inevitably means ever-greater unevenness of economic development, – and ever greater dislocation and hurt when 'over-production' anarchy starts bankrupting 'failures' in the crude vicious way it alone knows how. Trade war will then be taken up as a 'national' cause everywhere. Real war comes next. 

Preparing for revolutionary science is the only thing that makes sense. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

UK imperialism begins to fall foul of its own reformist do-gooding stooges as profiteering 'globalisation' starts imposing worse deals.

HAVING GIVEN UP on getting the World Bank to comply with even its own environmental and social development policies, 200 non-government organisations from 55 countries have called for the institution to withdraw altogether from financing oil, gas and mining projects.

At the top of the list of the NGOs' concerns is the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline project, which involves drilling 300 oil wells in the southern Doba region of Chad, then pumping the oil along a purpose-built 1,100-kilometre pipeline to Cameroon's Atlantic coast at Kribi. The project is anticipated to produce 225,000 barrels of oil each day.

The COTCO/TOTCO consortium, which will run the project, comprises ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, with a 40% share, the Malaysian oil company Petronas, with 35% and US oil giant Chevron, with 25%.

ExxonMobil and Chevron have appalling environmental and human rights records. Chevron is currently being sued in US Federal Court for violations of international human rights law over its complicity in Nigerian police killings at its oil facilities in the Niger River delta. Besides its long history of oil spills, ExxonMobil has been implicated in murders of local people at its sites in the Doba region.

The World Bank Group board announced on 6 June its intention to fund the pipeline project, describing it as "an unprecedented framework to transform oil wealth into direct benefits for the poor, the vulnerable and the environment". The Bank will loan $93 million to the two countries to finance their equity share in the project and a $100 million International Finance Corporation loan to the joint-venture pipeline corporations. The IFC will also mobilise up to $300 million in syndicated loans from commercial banks.

Chad and Cameroon are deeply in debt and are dependent on World Bank goodwill for further aid and loans. The consortium hopes that such "leverage" will ensure that neither government interferes in its business.

DEVASTATING

NGOs in Chad and Cameroon say the project will be environmentally and socially devastating.

The Doba region is at the centre of escalating conflicts between the area's largely Christian and animist inhabitants and the Muslim government in the north, over demands for southern self-rule. The Chadian military has killed hundreds of civilians in the region, including massacres in November 1997 and March 1998 which the government has refused to investigate. The unrest means that adequate environmental impact surveys have not been able to be conducted along large sections of the Chadian pipeline.

In Cameroon, the pipeline traverses major rivers 17 times, passes through areas inhabited by the Baka and Bakola pygmy peoples and cuts into the country's Atlantic littoral forest. According to a report by the US-based Environmental Defense, the pipeline, and attendant roads and construction sites, will threaten loss of biodiversity and intensify deforestation; Cameroon already suffers one of the world's fastest rates of deforestation.

The pipeline's terminal, in Kribi, is a single-hulled floating refinery located in front of the Lobe waterfalls, one of the rare waterfalls that flow directly into the ocean. Kribi is nestled between two nature reserves and is presently dependent on eco-tourism.

The environmental studies have come in for prolonged criticism from environmental groups and local communities. The first report was deemed inadequate by the World Bank but the second, despite its length (19 volumes), fails to fix many of the earlier report's problems. For example, the plan still does not include an adequate oil spill response plan, despite great dangers of spills.

Further, according to the Bank Information Centre, the project's plans do not address the lack of legal recognition for Cameroon's indigenous people, the lack of local participation and consultation, or the lack of a budget for involving indigenous communities.

The centre lists five World Bank policies that the project violates: the indigenous peoples, environmental assessment, involuntary resettlement, economic evaluation of investment operations and information disclosure policies.

REVENUES

The World Bank claims that its involvement is due to "the crucial importance of the project in fighting poverty".

However, a study by Harvard Law School's human rights centre found that only 4.5% of direct revenue will be spent on development in the affected communities; Baka and Bakola communities will receive only US$600,000. The management structure for dispersing the funds is stacked with local elite figures.

The remainder will be absorbed by general government expenditure. Cameroon has indicated that most of its revenue will be channelled into repayments on its crippling foreign debt, much of it held by the World Bank.

NGOs in Chad and Cameroon also point out that their governments have little or no commitment to development and will use the funds to strengthen their capacity for repression.

Cameroon has been listed by Transparency International for two consecutive years as the most corrupt country in the world and both countries have been condemned by the US State Department for repeated human rights violations. Both governments have closed, or threatened to close, organisations that have criticised the governments' handling of the project, and Chad has imprisoned a member of parliament who criticised the original project agreement.

A leaked 1995 World Bank report even recognises the low government willingness to tackle poverty and expresses concern at financial mismanagement.

"Once the money is flowing," far from enriching the two countries, speeding up development and weakening the hold of the elite.' as the World Bank claims, "the unholy trinity of oil, power and corruption will make corrective action difficult", Environmental Defense economist Korinna Horta notes.

A leaked copy of the Project Appraisal Document, which forms the basis of the project, puts net revenues at US$9 billion over the 28 years. Of that sum, US$6.5 billion will be retained by the consortium operators.

ExxonMobil already earns four times the total annual revenue of Cameroon and 40 times that of Chad; the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline will increase the ratio in ExxonMobil's favour.

BENEFICIARIES

While perhaps the most flagrant, the Chad-Cameroon pipeline is not the only example provided by the platform of 200 NGOs. Other World Bank-funded or guaranteed oil, gas and mining projects named as environmentally and socially devastating include:

The Bolivia-Brazil pipeline, operated by Petrobras, Enron and Shell, which crosses three fragile ecosystems from Santa Cruz in Bolivia to Porto Alegre in Brazil, and will open up sections of the Amazon Basin to further deforestation and adversely affect indigenous communities; Basic Resources International Limited's oil development in the middle of northern Guatemala's Peten region, which includes valuable rainforests and wetlands, and which expands the existing Xan oilfield, located in the middle of the Laguna del Tigre National Park; Cameco's Kumtor goldmine in Kyrgyzstan, central Asia, one of the world's largest gold deposits, which has suffered three chemical spills in two years, including one in which 1.54 tonnes of highly toxic sodium cyanide were spilled into the Barskaun River; The Lihir goldmine in Papua New Guinea, operated by one of the world's largest mining company, Rio Tinto, which will dump 362-million tonnes of waste rock and tailings directly into the ocean, a practice that is generally banned around the world: and The Omai goldmine in Guyana, one of South America's two largest goldmines, whose tailings dam burst in 1995 releasing three-million cubic metres of cyanide-laced waste into the Omai River.

In all cases the pattern is the same: the projects have been disasters for local peoples and ecosystems, World Bank involvement has been critical to whether or not the projects have been carried out and the prime (frequently the sole) beneficiaries have been among the largest, wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world.

According to a report published in April by the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network and the International Trade Information Service, despite its public commitment to tackling climate change, the World Bank has put 25 times more funding into programmes involving fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming, than into renewable energies. Of its fossil fuel programs, nine out of ten favour Western transnational corporations, several of which belong to the Global Climate Coalition, an industry lobby group devoted to stalling action on climate change.

No wonder one of the cries from protesters in Washington DC was: "More world, less Bank!" •

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

500 years of capitalist-colonialist oppression in Brazil have changed nothing essentially about exploitation.

Brazil will commemorate the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Pedro Alvares Cabral and the Portuguese in Porto Seguro, Bahia. What Western Europe is still calling the "Discovery", opened an era of slavery and exploitation that continues to this day. The Brazilian and Portuguese Governments have planned enormous and costly commemorations to celebrate.

In opposition, people's organisations throughout Brazil have united under the banner "Brazilian Movement: 500 Years of Indigenous, Black and Popular Resistance" to show their indignity at such insensitive celebrations "from those who still suffer and struggle against the plunder of the old colonial mentality".

The "Brazilian Movement" initiative aims to "demystify that official lie and reveal the historic truth lived by the plundered indigenous people, by the enslaved black people, by the exploited and excluded sections of the population". This truth reveals the hidden historic realities of genocide, discrimination and racism.

The situation of blatant Apartheid suffered by indigenous, black and destitute people in Brazil is also the responsibility of global financial institutions the International Monetary Fund (IFM) and the World Bank. These two organisations have maintained social inequality with their "development" policies for the South American nation.

Brazil is the tenth largest industrial economy in the world. In terms of development, it ranks 120th. A recent United Nation's Report found that 32-million people in Brazil are living in absolute poverty. Brazil's richness was strongly based on slavery, a concept that provided the basis for economic inequality, influencing the way society and institutions developed after abolition.

Under military dictatorship until 1985, the country's parliament remains unrepresentative of marginalised social groups, while hundreds of senators and deputies defend the interests of the wealthy. Brazil has never had a left-wing government.

The legacy of slavery is still alive in the treatment of the Afro-Brazilian community. Half of the 160-million Brazilians are black or mixed race, but officialdom in Brazil is white, and TV is positively Scandinavian. Legislation against racism exists, but cases of racial discrimination rarely ever get to court and if they do, are invariably held up. Discrimination is commonplace. Most black people driving are taxi-drivers, chauffeurs or bus drivers. Few are car owners. The majority of street children, prostitutes, prisoners, unemployed and victims of police violence are black. Only 1%-2% of black people study in universities.

Although officially abolished in 1888, bonded labour continues in many parts of Brazil today. On the 1999 Report, Human Rights Watch found that there are still 614 people involved in forced labour, though indicating an important reduction from the mid-'90s, when "tens of thousands of labourers were found to have been forced into labour".

Another consequence of the so-called "civilisation process" that the Portuguese and Brazilian Governments are proudly celebrating today was the genocide of Brazil's indigenous people. At the time of the Portuguese arrival, there were approximately six-million indigenous people, in 1,400 different groups, living in Brazil. Today, there are only 300,000 indigenous people left, in 200 different groups, speaking 170 languages.

In the 1970s, economic moves to "conquer" the Amazon saw the Indians as a barrier to 'progress' (e.g. road-building, gold digging and mahogany exporting). Roads were driven directly through Indian reserves, spreading disease and introducing prostitution and alcohol.

Indigenous groups are fighting to get their communal territories officially marked, but the encroachment and invasion continues. Loggers and gold prospectors have murdered Ticuna and Yanomami Indians. River pollution leads to further deaths, through food poisoning, and malnutrition. Cases of violence against Indians have increased in recent years. Members of the indigenous community are marching in force towards Porto Seguro, the centrepiece of the celebrations, where the Portuguese landed 500 years ago. in Porto Seguro, which is part of the indigenous Pataxo land, the Brazilian Government has placed a 12-metre steel cross, a museum, shopping complex and landscaped pathways. This month, the military police invaded the Pataxo reservation to destroy an alternative monument created by the Indians.

Although Brazil, which is the size of Europe, is underpopulated, there are 20 million landless peasants. Less than 3% of the population owns two-thirds of Brazil's arable land. The Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sen Terra, MST), made up of landless and peasant families, campaigns for agrarian reform and for an end to rural violence. While 60% of Brazil's farmland is idle, 25-million peasants struggle to survive by working in temporary agricultural jobs.

In 1985, hundreds of landless rural Brazilians took over an unused plantation in the south of the country and successfully established a cooperative there. They gained title to the land in 1987. Today, more than 250,000 families have won land titles to over 15 million acres after MST land takeovers. In 1999 alone, 25,009 families occupied unproductive land. There are currently 71,472 families in encampments throughout Brazil awaiting government recognition.

MST has created 60 food cooperatives as well as small agricultural industries. Its literacy program involves 600 educators working with adults and adolescents. The movement also monitors 1,000 primary schools in their settlements, in which 2,000 teachers work with about 50,000 kids.

But MST activists have been targeted by the government and land-owners. In the last ten years, more than 1,000 people have been killed as a result of land. conflicts in Brazil. Prior to August 1999, only 53 of the suspected murders have been brought to trial.

All the cities in Brazil have shantytown areas, homeless families and growing numbers of street children. Many people lack adequate employment, health services and education. Only 50% of school children are in school. Over 1,000 children per day die from malnutrition-related diseases. Thousands of children survive on the streets, with approximately one child a day being murdered by death squads. 

The Campaign Against Hunger was formed in 1993, while the National Street Children's Movement fights for children's rights and an end to police violence. But millions of workers in informal employment continue to have no support. Working conditions are dreadful and accidents are commonplace.

Five hundred years after its first contact with Europeans, Brazil is a country still struggling to come to terms with the consequences of that invasion. •