Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx

Economic & Philosophic Science Review 

No 1059 September 26th 2000

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Manchester seminar Saturday Oct 14.

Re-juggling Third World debts in Prague, or pension funds in Brighton, can never quieten the sense of injustice everywhere against a fundamentally unequal system which cannot exist without class exploitation and imperialist 
domination. And no amount of energetic agitation or apologising will stop all 'reformists', - from anarchy to New Labour - remaining mere stooges of unavoidable monopoly-capitalist hegemony, and abuse. No Logo and Greenpeace are pointlessly ignoring history, - to no avail. CIA counter-revolutionary philistinism will continue to brainwash the world until an objective philosophical assessment is made of what went wrong with the workers states and revisionist bureaucracy. Pure anti-communist prejudice merely leaves the 'new' anti-capitalism hog-tied. The monopoly-bourgeois pretended belief in 'democracy' is just a stick to beat resistance-to-imperialism with, in Serbia or anywhere else.

The international camp of anti-corporate protest which has now moved to Prague to lobby the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank summit, is useful revolutionary agitation but philosophically negative.

The naive mixture of anarchism, ecologism, anti-globalisation, anti-monopoly reformism, and single-issue politics (feminism, etc) has attracted every petty-bourgeois bandwagon going, as well as more purposeful anti-capitalism.

But the superficial level of the intended challenge to the 'free-world order' has only gone so far because the sick historical epoch of Western-inspired hostility to communism has not been confronted. Until the bureaucratic-revisionist failings are assessed rationally and critically-creatively, - and the disastrous effects of the internationally-orchestrated brainwashing by CIA mindless philistinism understood,- then all such 'anti-capitalism' will remain mere gestures.

There is nothing wrong with new generations experiencing the feeling of "finding out for themselves, and in their own way" what is wrong with monopoly imperialism; but having decided that they do not like the influence on the world of Nike, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft, etc, or the way they operate, - the debate really does then need to move on to what human science has already discovered previously about the imperialist bourgeoisie, and what mankind tried to do about it, - and how far it got, and why it got no further.

Reinventing the wheel is as pointless in historical science as in any other science. The Marxist-Leninist analysis of capitalist economic crisis and imperialist war is now proven science to the point of predictability (for more than a century past) about 'over-production' trade-war disasters and Great Power aggressive warmongering, both against each other and for the export of capital to the colonies, (now reinvented as neo-colonial 'globalisation'). 

The need to maximise profiteering exploitation (or be swallowed up by a bigger rival) drives monopoly-capitalists forward exactly the same as ever; and class war remains the only answer to the effective dictatorship over the world by bourgeois private-enterprise and the 'free market', controlling things through ownership of the media and the capitalist state machinery, and beyond any serious challenge by 'democracy'.

But exactly what should be done about it all, - and why, - are the very elementary questions about philosophy and human relationships which the 'new' anti-corporate protest movement has not even started to seriously discuss, - precisely because prejudice against the history of the workers states since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution is as massive (and as ignorantly unexplored) among these near-anarchists as it is throughout the rest of bourgeois opinion. (i.e. all spontaneous, deliberately non-Marxist opinion).

What the mass protesters are clumsily, hesitantly stumbling towards is the most colossal philosophical conclusion that history has ever presented, - consciously summed up by Lenin as "Either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or the dictatorship of the proletariat". There are no alternatives. There is nothing in between, one, or the other.

The 'democracy' and 'reformist' gibberish continues pouring forth in a flood of anarchic cynicism, - never really believing it will work, and often just protesting for protest's sake - as a lifestyle. GM crops are rubbished; 'No to wars is chanted about Kosovo; airport runway sites are occupied; fascist racism is targeted; asylum-seekers are campaigned-for;. Third World debt is denounced etc, etc, much of it performed heroically, and some whales have even been saved from some kinds of death.

But a planned logical harmonious way of running the planet is as far away as ever, and many of the perceived ecological problems just grow worse (global pollution; natural disasters from harmful geopolitics; waste of planetary resources; ,etc) while the vast majority of grotesque economic injustices and inequalities become so monstrous that the 'reformers, are just humiliated routinely.

So safe are these protests thought to be (or relatively harmless) that bourgeois press and television coverage is now giving wide publicity to all sorts of demonstrations and direct action movements. Some establishment circles clearly regard such outspoken 'reformists' as a useful release-valve for real anger lurking below. However, life is never that simple, of course, and things do not always work out exactly as the authorities would wish. The petrol blockade to force a reduction in government rates of fuel duty took the whole country by surprise; and the jury acquittal of the 'plainly-guilty' GM-crop destroyers has greatly puzzled and alarmed the state machine.

But neither cause is remotely triumphant yet, and both provide excellent examples of how ultimately futile are all single-issue protests. A point or two may be won here and there; but the juggernaut of reckless profiteering and insensitive exploitation just goes on posing more and more problems for mankind, getting bigger and bigger, and more uncontrollable, all the time.

Would that the careless genetic modification of crops really was the last straw, breaking the back of popular toleration of ruthless commercial pressures dominating the food and drug industries; but the scandals of tobacco pushing; thalidomide; mad-cow disease; DDT; nuclear-bomb tests; germ-war experiments; dioxin defoliation of Vietnam; fishfarm epidemics; battery-chicken epidemics; etc, etc, etc , for hundreds of cases; all show that GM-crop experiments are far from being a "uniquely dangerous" stunt for the benefit of the weedkiller monopolies (seeking to guarantee their financial interests either way). 

Longterm thoughtlessness has always incurably characterised the largescale commercialisation of agriculture, and always will, - by the very nature of 'free market' cut-throat competitiveness. Either be the biggest and best as quickly as possible, or go out of business. The law of domination by monopoly conflicts and contradictions is the universal and only commercial law under the capitalist system, globally, and for all time.

The same with idiotic gathering and spending of state revenues and taxes. If only an exorbitantly high rate of duty (on motor fuels, - which almost everyone has a serious basic logical need of just to get around or to have things brought to them), - was the only item of excessive government finance-raising, coupled with outrageous, foolish, or unjustified spending (paying for the absurd monarchy; the utter uselessness of the money-grabbing careerism called 'parliament'; the dedicated farce for ideologically brain-washing or dumbing down the public, known as the BBC; the unelected and wholly reactionary & primadonna judiciary; the equally backward and counter-revolutionary dictates corrupting the police; the disgraceful export-credit-guarantee racket insuring the arms industry against losses for supplying pro-imperialist dictatorships with weapons all round the world; etc, etc, etc).

But not even the posturing dimwittedness which imposed the Dome fiasco on a no-longer triumphant British imperialism; or the crooked PFI (private finance initiative) which will guarantee, well into the future, more and more ludicrously large privatisation hand-outs to big business from state coffers (and peoples taxes), - will be halted by any amount of mere protesting or just single-issue direct actions.

The permanent racket of dishonest and unresponsive government of a fundamentally bent anarchic, and uncontrollable 'freemarket' system, - will totter on no matter how much disgust or contempt is expressed against it, or how sceptically people refuse to give it further serious support by failing to vote with any enthusiasm for any of the mountebanks getting funded to run huge election-publicity campaigns.

The GM-crop debate seems to have won more sympathetic coverage than most 'reform' campaigns, and, perhaps not surprisingly, seems to have won much broad public support too, including even a Norfolk judge and jury, apparently. And the debate and furore are welcome. But neither Greenpeace nor its opponents get to the real point of long-standing doubts that any 'ethics' can survive at all at the monopoly-imperialist level of domination of the largescale commercialisation of the food and drug industries (as outlined above). 

One opponent of GM-crop trashing, Richard Dawkins, tries to argue that: "The evidence is not yet in. Particular kinds of genetic modification may be a very bad idea. Or they may be a very good idea. It is precisely because we don't know that we have to find out. That is the purpose of experimental trials such as the one sabotaged by Greenpeace," - and then compounds his naive forgetting of what monstrous damage corporate-imperialist 'experimenting' has deliberately or incautiously inflicted on the world in voluminous living memory (tobacco; thalidomide; nuclear testing; germ-war experiments; etc, etc) by identifying the nervous direct-action protesters with: "The airforce general in 'Dr Strangelove' who took devastating direct action in defence of four precious bodily fluids";, missing the point of Kubrick's brilliant anti-corporate-imperialist film completely. How can bourgeois intelligence be so stupid? (Dawkins is the Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University)?? The airbase commander (from memory, Colonel Jack D Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden) sends his B 52 wing off to nuclear devastate the USSR (and the rest of the world in the process) - and seals his base against all the efforts by the world leaders, the US Army, and the English Group-Captain liaison officer (Peter Sellers) to countermand his order, - because of precisely his conviction that corporate-imperialist power must be right, and must prevail without any question. 

Dawkins even has the stupidity to jeer that "12 people at random" (i.e. the Norfolk jury) would be moronic enough "to think that GM is a substance like DDT". But who is the moron? DDT was precisely a "safe" corporate-imperialist scientific development which went catastrophically wrong for the entire planet, poisoning or deforming millions of humans and other animals, and making the malaria mosquito that it was aimed to wipe out, so resistant to such insecticide that the lethal parasites it carries are now more of a world health menace than ever. Why could not the not-yet-safely-tested genetically-modified crops turn out to be a similar longterm ecological disaster for the planet???? Dawkins, the great science-populist, makes a complete ass of himself because he remains a political bourgeois.

Sadly, the hero of the Norwich courtroom and of the cut-down maize-field near Lyng, Lord Melchett of Greenpeace, - completely misses the point too in his reply to Dawkins. "The trials are not about human health at all... the Government and its scientific experts long ago accepted that contamination is inevitable, but think it does not matter. Nor are they about whether GM crops will pollute the soil they grow in. They are simply about whether farmers growing GM Crops will use more or,  less weedkiller." 

But specific crucial financial information for investment purposes of one particular industry (facing ecological difficulties because of past bad practices) really strains at the mote while missing the beam in the offended eye. The whole history of corporate malpractice is offensive and dangerous, not just this particular money-making pretence about 'GM-crop safety experiments' being conducted by the vast weedkiller industry to make more reliably-profitable investment decisions. 

The whole history of international economic imperialism is an outrage, for hundreds of years of colonial exploitation, genocide, torture, and torment. Thousands of cases of monstrous international chemical pollution or other ecological disasters are down to the imperialist powers, just in the postwar period alone. It is the monopoly-capitalist system itself which is the culprit, incurably so, - not any specific (and presumably therefore 'reformable') corporate decisions. 

Melchett and Greenpeace are totally misleading everybody with their ideological justification for their direct-action campaigns. Sort out the GM-crop danger, maybe, but then that still leaves the whole world to put right, and ever-more-terrifying problems surge forward with every month that passes.

Every part of this 'new' anti-capitalist movement, now demonstrating in Prague, deliberately shirks the key philosophical question about life's difficulties at present, and where they come from: namely, is capitalism, riddled with crime and corruption, and dominated by uncontrollable monopoly-imperialist power, - a viable society any longer, or not?? 

Greenpeace are plainly pro-capitalist. Melchett's commitment to direct action is strictly limited to his pet concerns like GM-crop pollution dangers. It is only valid "in defence of a clear moral principle", he writes, and then goes on to declare the clearest counter-revolutionary solidarity possible with everything else that the capitalist state protects: "Greenpeace disagrees with the aims of those who blockaded refineries, - (the true cost of petrol and diesel, taking account of climate change and damage to human health, is far higher than the price we pay at the pumps), and with their methods. It was a clearly implied threat and self-interested, motivated by issues often unrelated to transport ....

"We do not conceal our identities or evade arrest. We challenge particular laws, but not the rule of law. We take responsibility for our actions, and are happy to be judged. fairly, for them." 

In other words, it is just another game on the playing fields of Eton. Even if it has to be admitted that there is a class system, - with one law for the rich, and another law for the farmers, hauliers, fishing-boat owners, and taximen whose whole way of life is being crushed by monopoly competition, (and for the vast mass of ordinary people who supported their blockade because of their own sense of the injustice of the monopoly-capitalist system), - - - then Melchett & Co remain convinced that this is still the best possible of all possible worlds. The only "damage to human health" this oh-so-well-meaning patrician 'reformer' (i.e. smug, self-righteous, complacent bourgeois) is interested in is from physical pollution.

The destruction of aspirations and livelihoods, and feelings of total alienation, inequality, and unfairness, clearly only merit "pull your socks up" advice from his lordship. Private property and exploitation will still rule in a 'green' world, it seems. And on this subject, of course, the bourgeois professor is on exactly the same wavelength as his bourgeois lordship: "Is this really the sort of country we want to live in? Is this how we want to decide policy? That is where the Greenpeace verdict seems to be leading us. 

"The Government may be ruefully wondering whether it has been hoist by its own petard. Was it wise to encourage those outbursts of mindless 'feeling' and all that hysterical caterwauling over the 'People's Princess'? Has feeling become the new thinking? If so, the Government may bear some indirect responsibility". 

The straining populist Dawkins gets his lines crossed again. Icon-worship is precisely a combination of an individualistic monopoly imperialist 'star performer' private-enterprise system, plus bourgeois ideology's inability or refusal to take human understanding consciously beyond the God-fearing stage of immature civilisation. 

New Labour and the capitalist media were simply milking this sad 'groupie' culture as part of monopoly-imperialism's ongoing deliberate intention to keep mass public opinion as permanently dumbed-down as possible, - the same monopoly-imperialist system that would like to make new fortunes out of GM-crop developments precisely without too much fuss about possible long-term dangers from a hoped for sufficiently dumbed-down mass public opinion. (Not surprisingly, therefore, Dawkins also misses the point, - or hates the idea of it, - that some of the sadly expressed groupiness around the sad rich girl Diana was also sparked by the unwitting rebellious spoke she enjoyably put into the 'smooth establishment's' wheels).

Another prominent element of Prague protest is 'No Logo', the cult book by a young American bourgeois Naomi Klein. It takes a broader swipe at corporate imperialism than Greenpeace, but it is just as philistinely anti-history, and therefore anti-communist. Klein claims that the eclecticism of this 'new' anti-capitalism is an answer to the shirked key question: 'Is capitalist society viable, or isn't it?', which she downplays as a problem of 'lacking vision', and which she dismisses anyway: "What critics are really saying is that the movement lacks an over-arching revolutionary philosophy, such as Marxism, democratic socialism, deep ecology, or social anarchy, on which they all agree." 

Well, not quite. Not knowing what to do is definitely a problem, but why have such a 'new, anti-capitalist movement' at all, is the first question. Is capitalist society viable, or isn't it? 

Ignoring this, Klein then claims that all these petty-bourgeois anarchist elements are doing just fine without a coherent philosophy. 

"Before they sign on to anyone's 10-point plan, they deserve the chance to see if, out of the movements chaotic decentralised multiheaded webs, something new, something entirely its own, can emerge." 

This is described as "the internet come to life" with an emphasis on 'information' rather than on 'ideology'. It is, of course, naive anti-communist gobbledegook come to life, no doubt well intendedly anti-capitalist, but utterly meaningless as far as the vast Third World masses are concerned (the supposed beneficiaries of Prague's 'end Third World debt' protests) who cannot conceivably find use for anything short of world communist revolution and world proletarian dictatorship (of a completely new cast, new interpretation, and new perspective from the wretched international class-collaborative mess that Stalinist revisionism made of the Third International, - ultimately.

Klein's petty-bourgeois anti-Marxist uselessness for assisting in this sole real way forward for mankind is re-emphasised scores of times throughout her views. Her supposedly "radical critique of the global economy" is merely new packaging for her core beliefs which remain "identity politics", i.e. feminism. 

"This is not a rejection of feminism. It is a return to the roots of feminism. Early feminism was very involved in anti-sweatshop action, and the "current anti-sweatshop movement very much sees it as a feminist issue, since it is overwhelmingly women of colour who are being abused by the systems. I feel that we lost our way in the late 80s when feminism became disengaged from its roots, which originally had critiques of capitalism and consumerism. I am a feminist, and this is a feminist book." 

The Third World's masses should have complete contempt for such fatally divisive and patronising garbage. It is a daunting-enough task to hope to win over enough of the international proletarian masses to support a programme of world communist revolution against the relentless brainwashing propaganda of Western pop-consumerism, local ethnic and religious prejudices, budding national-chauvinism, etc, etc, without this crass additional obstacle of wholly imaginary 'solutions' to the effects of world imperialist exploitation crisis via 'sexual politics' or 'identity politics', cruel 'reformist' diversions of the most cynical destructive kind imaginable.

Of course all human relationships are likely to find their very meanest expression in the foully exploited conditions of the Third World, including all male-female relationships without exception. But what utter self-deluding barminess it is to pretend that human happiness, for men or women, has remotely found any 'solution' in the privileged West despite 50 years of reaction[ary] feminist divisive politics, playing right into the hands of the divide-and-rule imperialist class-domination system, (or to pretend that capitalist culture as a whole has even remotely started to drop its sexist treatment of women. There is a bigger sexploitation and pornography industry today than there has ever been, including a huge expansion of the sex trade in Britain and the USA. Capitalist culture makes sex-objects of women (and men) as much or more than it ever did. And the majority of women still reluctantly go along with using their feminine assets to get on in life. And so it will remain until the capitalist-commodity corruption of all human life comes to an end with the over-throw of capitalism, not the overthrow of sexism, which is impossible all the time that capitalism is endlessly recreating things as commodities all the time).

	Klein and others like her are self-righteous demagogues representing the very essence of bourgeois philosophy, - subjective-idealism, - which deludes 'reformists' into misleading the world that "if enough good people insist vigorously enough that something is wrong about the world and should be changed, then it will be changed". Utter total bollocks. Apart from completely minor trivialities, the imperialist exploitation system will get away with whatever the needs of the imperialist exploitation system dictate. As capitalist TV documentaries themselves admit, there is almost as much slavery in the world today as there ever was.

There is far more sex slavery and drug-slavery than there ever was. Taking its cultural cue from great-nation warmongering bullying of smaller powers, an ever growing violent criminal underworld is now virtually beyond the control of the law in every major Western inner city. For what they are worth, the 'good intentions' of Klein & Co to 'reform' the world do not need to be disputed because the broad total effect of all their striving will be absolute zero, - but sadly not utterly irrelevant because the diversionary influence of all this 'reformist' garbage on the struggle for real revolutionary consciousness is entirely disruptive and disorienting. Let petty-bourgeois anarchy protest as much as it likes. But let revolutionary workers not touch with a bargepole its pernicious philosophy, other than to destroy it.

But containing all such ultimately ineffective 'reformist' protests (regardless of how much 'direct action' disruption is inflicted simultaneously on capitalism functioning successfully) is not going to ensure the monopoly-imperialist system's survival, however. For by far the deadliest contradictions in capitalism's free-market workings are not even on the Prague demonstrators list of needed 'reform ' as yet, - but they will prove utterly fatal to the bourgeois property racket's very ability to survive. 

The Prague IMF summit's formal agenda is far more lethal than any number of 'reformist' protesters outside, chanting for an end to Third World debt obligations. First is the international currency crisis, - a dramatic , $7 billion intervention on the money markets by the great powers to try to drum up confidence in the Euro and to reduce the enormous destabilising balance-of-payments inflationary pressures on the US 'economic engine' of the Western world from the panic flight into the dollar by worried investors everywhere. Blair is in the international doghouse for thoughtlessly shrugging a non-committal reply to a question about whether the intervention would work, or would it need to be repeated. But the question is meaningless, in reality. Of course such stunts cannot 'work' in the long run. The free market is the essence of the capitalist system. At a suitable moment in the steadily worsening 'over-production' crisis globally, truly panic stricken investors (from the very smallest punter to the very largest banks) will ditch any currency they choose, and in uncontrollable quantities, effectively wrecking the currency, or the financial standing of the state regime backing it, - if their own financial survival depends on it.

A million more things could be said about this particular currency crisis, reflecting as it does the incurable unevenness of development of the private-enterprise imperialist system; the ultimately irreconcilable rival world-trade ambitions of US monopoly-capitalism versus German monopoly-capitalism versus Japanese monopoly-capitalism, etc, etc; the inevitability of 'overproduction' crisis as all the rival powers overreach in trying to win more of the world market; and the unstoppable weight of panicking funds flooding around the world from market to market (stock or currency exchanges) trying to get out of what is 'dodgy' and into what is 'safe'; etc, etc. But the first main thing to say about it is that it has happened. And once it happens once, it can only happen again (and it is already, in fact, the umpteenth major monetary scare of the last 10 years).

In other words, the 'free market' anarchy system is, as Marxist science s	always explained, ultimately utterly uncontrollable. And the final events in every historic series of partial panic crises is always a total markets crash, followed by world-trade collapse and vicious all-out international trade war, accompanied by ever-deepening slump everywhere. And all this cut-throat mutually-destructive rivalry is only ever ended by warmongering brute force to destroy 'surplus' capital everywhere, then obliging the vanquished opponents to suffer the humiliating burdens of postwar reconstruction to get a new international boom period going again, - starting the whole catastrophic cycle off once more.

The IMF intervention to prop up the Euro, restrain the dollar, or anything else, is a complete joke, performed purely to try to con the world's markets that there really is some rational supra-national control in place to make sure that the ultimately irrational 'free markets' do not destroy themselves yet again. There is no such control, nor could there ever be, under a private enterprise system. The IMF's attempted oil-price intervention is an even bigger fraud. It is farcical to pretend that still backward Middle East major oil-producing countries are responsible for higher fuel-pump prices (and for subsequent knock-on inflation) when Western governments impose the lion's share of those prices in colossal fuel-tax revenues. And it is even sillier to pretend that the retail petrol corporations could 'show some restraint' in passing on to the motorist the higher world-market price of basic crude.

The oil industry faces cutthroat competition and overproduction problems similar to any other free-market trade, and although strategically crucial, any attempted local 'control' of such a vital commodity could never hope to escape the influence of the world free market in oil for very long or by any great distance A wholly publicly owned world economy could be planned sensibly. The IMF pretence of doing it under capitalism is just a smokescreen prior to more warmongering bullying and brutality by Western imperialism against necessary raw-material sources which refuse to jump to the West's tune, such as was inflicted on Iraq in the Gulf War, and such as the USA persuaded its then client Saddam Hussein to inflict on Iran for many years a decade earlier. 

If the OPEC countries really did start challenging Western imperialism's world domination, naked threats and contrived blitzkriegs would soon try to put a stop to it. 

In spite of these realities, every element involved in this 'free world' chaos, - the C1intons, the Blairs, the Dawkins, the Kleins, and the Melchetts of this world, - will all ultimately swear that 'democracy' does, can, and must rule everything, and that 'the rule of law' is the only final 'justice'. It is the biggest heap of steaming gobshite ever to offend human reason. 

One of the most monstrous campaigns in history of illegal outside propaganda influence, subversion, -  and provocations to open violence, - has just been inflicted on Yugoslavia by Western imperialism which would make the previous period of Western imperialist skulduggery, intervention and provocations against the smaller but non-kowtowing states of Europe by Hitler & Goebbels Germany look almost mild by comparison. The EU imperialist coalition from Brussels tried to openly bribe millions of votes by publicly announcing in advance that the crippling economic sanctions would stay on Yugoslavia if Milosevic won the elections, regardless of what the Yugoslav people might suffer just for exercising their vote "in the wrong way". And the Goebbels 'Big Lie' technique of loudly announcing to the world that Milosevic had lost long before the ballots had even opened, - and then screaming it louder than ever, non-stop, in the days while the votes were being cast and then counted, - was taken to extremes by Cook, Albright & Co that Goebbels & Hitler could only have sat back and admired, moist-eyed.

Getting the entire petty-bourgeoisie onto the streets in non-stop demonstrations is exactly the tactics the CIA employed to bring down the Mossadeq nationalist regime in Iran in a counter-revolutionary coup in 1953, and the same mass middle-class protest tactics to bring down Allende in Chile in 1973, - everyone out banging saucepan lids for days on end while the CIA and the fascist generals got their counter-revolutionary coup forces together. And as against Milosevic's wavering revisionist regime now, exactly the same Washington-inspired stunts were used all over East Europe a decade ago to bring down the wavering workers states then in things like the 'velvet revolution' behind the West's fulltime local agents.

Obviously, there is no point in the international working class rushing to the defence of Milosevicist revisionist confusion. That is the bankrupt past retreat from Marxism-Leninism which left the workers states in paralysed chaos all over East Europe. But the Western intervention is by far the worst thing to have happened to East Europe, - as, oddly enough, has just been admitted in two capitalist reports from the IMF and the World Bank themselves, - reading between the very carefully worded lines:

But the region still bears the scars: the economies of Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan and Ukraine are around a third of the size they were in 1989, one in five people is living below the poverty line, up from one it 25 ten years ago, and life expectancy, particularly for men, is falling.

The consequences of the second great depression are laid out in two reports released last week by the World Bank and the IMF. The Bank's report paints a grim picture of the social impact on relatively prosperous countries. Most of the new poor are educated people who enjoyed secure jobs before the collapse.

The IMF makes the same point, that the former eastern bloc countries have experienced something which has been largely absent from the west for nearly 70 years, a generation which grew up expecting a decent job with a living wage and security in retirement has been thrown into penury.

The truths behind these miserable half-admissions are what the Prague protesters need to come to grips with. Carpetbagger capitalism and mafia philistinism was all that could come in on the ruined (deliberately) planned economies within a free-world market which is already dominated by multi-national imperialist corporations, - so much so that Czech prostitution rings servicing a rampaging sex trade all along the German and Austrian borders are now one of the 'free' Republic's sizable foreign-exchange earners. Screwed by German imperialism in 1938-39 with the Munich blessing of the 'free world'; and now screwed again, so to speak, by the same combination after the undermining of the workers states.

The continuing world trade boom will inevitably eventually bring some advanced industrial development to East Europe, improving living standards once again, - as the Volkswagen takeover of Skoda has accomplished in a small way. But the advantages remain very marginal, and extremely partial. And what happens when the incurable 'overproduction' mechanics of anarchic world imperialism finally crash the international trade boom in ruins? The only future for East Europe; and the certain future; is a renewed attempt to keep communist revolution on track next time. Everything else which may have crossed the Prague protesters minds is a complete waste of time.

But Clare Short's ability to jeer at the protesters there that they haven't a clue what to put in place of the World Bank and the IMF (she means the racket of Western imperialist world domination) is looking enjoyably short-lived. Blairism has tried to revive its fortunes in Brighton with some capitalist press support from circles worried about a total collapse of the system, but the game is up for these stooges of imperialism. The world was supposed to become a paradise of just endless problem solving once the 'communist menace' was lifted from mankind in 1990 and the 'free world' had won the 'battle of history'. As the EPSR explained repeatedly, at great length and in great detail at the time, that self-liquidation by revisionist stupidity could only signal the stepping up of all the really nastiest contradictions of the now uninhibited imperialist exploitation system of grotesquely uneven development, inequality, and injustice.

Blairism thinks it has had a bad three weeks, but its problems are only just beginning. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

After such a long national-liberation struggle, obituary tributes to political and guerrilla-war heroes are a regular and proper, if sad, feature of Republican News. They always make quiet, under-stated reading, but all the more stirring for that, such as this example. Such stories convey a side to the fight against imperialist reaction which nothing else can match. Gerry Adams writes of a close comrade, Terry Clarke.

CLEAKY CLARKE is a friend of mine. He is looking at me now from a framed photo on the wall above me. There's him and Todler and the Dark and Bobby Sands and Tom Cahill and me and Jimmy Gibney and Tomboy enjoying the sunshine in Cage Eleven. He had hair then. A wispy thatch of ginger which receded in the years after that. Little wonder. Cleaky did 21 years in jails North and South. Twenty-one-and-a-half years to be exact.

I have known him for all those years and for almost a decade more. Most of this time he got me into trouble of some kind or other. In jail and out of jail. Even when we were in or out at separate times. He was one of my heroes. A mixer. A raker. A winder-upper. But a hero nonetheless. In fact, when I think of it, we are surrounded by heroes and heroines.

Cleaky's love of life shines through all his exploits and difficulties. These commenced insofar as politics is involved in 1971. In October, he was arrested and sent to Crumlin Road Prison. A few weeks, later he escaped. .

Cleaky was not part of the original escape plan. He was asked to help, saw his opportunity and went over the wall with eight others. The Grumlin Kangaroos were born. Cleaky headed south. He described this as his long-rifle phase but he remained steadfast in his commitment to the struggle. Consequently, he and 15 others, or if you believe Cleaky's lifelong friend Martin Meehan, he and his right hand man, took on the British Army at Drumgooley . in South Armagh.

According to media reports, in the ensuing four-hour gun battle the British fired 20,000 rounds. The only casualty was a prize pig. Cleaky and several others were arrested later that evening. They were charged and taken to Mountjoy Jail in Dublin, from which he unsuccessfully tried to escape. This was probably very fortuitous because they were all released after several weeks.

Later that year, in October, he was arrested again in Belfast. At his trial he refused to recognise the court and told the judge that he had no right to try him for defending his country and that the day would come when their roles would be reversed. The judge promptly doubled his sentence. He then went to the Cages. There he again tried to escape along with others, including another Ardoyne legend, Larry Marley.  They were captured and charged.

Several months after the Long Kesh Prison Camp was destroyed in October 1974, 12 republicans were taken to Newry courthouse to face various escape charges. The bars in the holding cells were not up to scratch and once again Cleaky, with eleven others in tow, was off at the gallop. While the others got away, himself and big Deuce were caught before they could reach the border.

So it was back to the Cages again. Below us, the H-Blocks were taking shape. Soon it was the end of political status for newly sentenced republican prisoners. Cleaky was a PRO in the Cages. He helped to organise a very effective letter writing campaign, as well as working closely with the newly-formed Relatives Action Committees. Some time later and a few weeks before his release, he rushed to the aid of a comrade who was being assaulted by prison officers outside the gate of the cage. Several Prisoners and screws were hurt, but it was the prisoners, including Cleaky, who were charged. When he was sentenced, the administration stripped him of his political status and moved him to the H-Blocks, where he joined the blanket protest.

Cleaky was eventually released in 1984. A year later, in 1985, he was arrested on the word of a paid perjurer and was held for some months before the case collapsed.

On 19 March 1988, at the funeral of IRA Volunteer Caoimhin Mac Brádaigh, who had been killed three days earlier at the Gibraltar funerals by loyalist killer Michael Stone, two British soldiers drove into the funeral cortege, They were armed and those, including Cleaky, who saw them, believed them to be loyalists trying to repeat Stone's actions. Cleaky, who was Chief Steward, demonstrated enormous courage and great selflessness by tackling an armed man. The subsequent show trial against those who defended the mourners that day was a travesty, and Cleaky received another jail sentence.

While in prison he became ill and it was during this time that he was first told that he had cancer. The distress of that for him and his family was compounded by the conditions under which he received medical treatment. Eventually, he was released in December 1992. For a short time he worked in the Sinn Féin Press Office in Belfast. He was enormously effective, especially when challenging the frequent media misrepresentation of our point of view.

The 1980s and early 1990s also saw an increase in loyalist attacks on republicans. Cleaky was asked to take on the difficult. job of providing security for republicans at risk. He went on to do so with few resources.

To tell the truth, his ability to scrounge doors, lights, intercoms, security grills, toughened glass, bullet-proof vests and anything else that he could get his hands on, undoubtedly saved lives. It was a job he took very seriously, right up close to the end. Even from his sick bed. 

None of that surprised me. It was in the nature of the man. But what did overawe me was the way he faced his death. He did so with grace and dignity and a touch of black humour. He didn't want to die, of course. His big ambition was to live in a free Ireland and his big regret about dying was for Mary Doyle and Maire and young Séamus.

I have never believed in iconising the dead. Or the living for that matter. We are all of us human. Terry was a good and decent human being. He told me that he believed that as long as your friends don't forget, you will always be remembered. The thousands at his funeral and at the wake house is testimony that there are many of us who will always remember. All those who cared for him, the hospital staff and others, have our gratitude. So too does Mary Doyle and Maire and Séamus.

Colette and I and Gearoid and Roisin will never forget Cleaky, and our Drithle, who he nursed last week a short time before he died, will hear all his stories. Terry would have enjoyed that. He got a great send off. He would have enjoyed that also.

World Revolutionary Socialist Review

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

• McCaffrey, the US anti-drugs tsar, arriving to the military base of Las Tres Esquinas, in Colombia

US is linked to Colombian atrocities

THE latest Human Rights Watch report on Colombia establishes the links between paramilitary groups and the Colombian Army. Seven army officials - named in the report as responsible for human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, involvement in drug trafficking and paramilitary activities - attended the infamous School of the Americas in the United States, where they were trained in counter-insurgency strategies. They were, and some still are, in command of army regiments that are being funded by the US Government. The question is obvious. Is the US Government contributing towards the financing of the drug trade in Colombia, even while it publicly declares war on the drug cartels?

The Human Rights Watch report links three prominent army brigades based in Colombia's largest cities, including the capital Bogota, to paramilitary activity and attacks on civilians. The report denounces the assent of Colombian political leaders in these units' support for paramilitary groups, pointing out that "the government's resolve to end human rights abuses in units that receive US security assistance must be seriously questioned".

Previous reports and documents have detailed evidence of continuing ties between the military and paramilitary groups in the Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, Fourteenth, and Seventeenth Brigades.

HRW's 1998 report War Without Quarter: Colombia and International Humanitarian Law described in depth the murders, "disappearances," and other abuses being committed by the Colombian security forces and paramilitary organisations.

The report, released on Thursday 24 February, entitled The Ties That Bind: Colombia and MilitaryParamilitary Links shows that military support for paramilitary activity remains national in scope and includes areas where units receiving or scheduled to receive US military aid operate. And even more surprisingly, the US Government knows of the close association of these paramilitary organisations with Colombian drugs cartels.

During the investigation, carried out by HRW into the Third Brigade, which is part of the Colombian Army's Third Division and includes a region where military units receive large amounts of US military assistance, it was established that this brigade has set up a paramilitary group in southern Colombia. The HRW report points out that Colombian Government investigators linked this group - known as the Calima Front - to "active duty, retired and reserve military officers attached to the Third Brigade, along with hired paramilitaries taken from the ranks of the Peasant Self-Defense Group of Córdoba y Urabá (ACCU), led by Carlos Castaño". The Brigade also provided the Calima front with weapons and intelligence.

"Elias" a former army intelligence officer and gunman for one of the drugs cartels, told HRW that "during his employment as an intelligence agent, he witnessed close links between drug traffickers, paramilitaries and the army. In his interview, he described the distinction between drug traffickers, paramilitaries and the Colombian Army as virtually non-existent", and the report points out that the connection between the army and drug traffickers was already known to the US embassy in Bogota "since at least 1990". For example, HRW obtained much of the cable traffic generated by the embassy and related to the activities of the Tangeros, a paramilitary group led by former Medellin cartel member Fidel Castaño.

But, the really worrying aspect of the relationship between the army and paramilitaries is the continuous harassment and violence inflicted on civilians. In 1998 and 1999, army intelligence gathered information on Colombians associated with human rights protection, government investigative agencies and peace talks, who were then subjected to threats, harassment, and attacks by the army, "at times with the assistance of paramilitary groups and hired killers".

"One prosecutor told Human Rights Watch: 'I signed one case to authorise an indictment of a paramilitaries before lunch, and by the time I returned to my desk after eating, a death threat, hand delivered, was there, with intimate details about the decor of my apartment, to let me know the killers had already been inside."

Colombia's indigenous and peasant communities have suffered greatly under army rule. The HRW report refers to different massacres carried out by paramilitary/army forces, one of them the massacre in the village of El Aro. At the time, October 1997, General Carlos Ospina, who is listed as having been trained at the School of the Americas in 1967, was in charge of the Fourth Brigade. On 25 October, a joint army paramilitary force surrounded the village of El Aro and the 2,000 people who live in and around it. Survivors told HRW that while soldiers maintained a perimeter around El Aro, an estimated 25 ACCU members entered the village, rounded up residents, and executed four people in the plaza. One witness told a journalist who visited El Aro soon afterwards that families who attempted to flee were turned back by soldiers camped on the outskirts of town. Over the five days they remained in El Aro, ACCU members are believed to have executed at least 11 people, including three children, burned 47 of the 68 houses, including a pharmacy, a church, and a telephone exchange, looted stores, destroyed the pipes carrying potable table water to homes, and forced most of the residents to flee. When they left on 30 October, the ACCU took with them over 1,000 head of cattle along with goods looted from homes and stores. Afterwards, 30 people were reported to be forcibly disappeared.

In a letter to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Human Rights Watch urged the American Government to strengthen human rights conditions on any security assistance to Colombia's military. The letter expressed grave concern that a $1.3 billion aid package proposed by the Clinton administration does not require any steps directed to break the obvious links between the military and paramilitary organisations.

"When an aid package of this size is debated in Washington, it's crucial that the facts be clear. And the facts we've established about links between the Colombian military and paramilitaries are truly alarming", said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Right Watch (HRW). 

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

CIA's sinister role during the Pinochet dictatorship

U.S. government declassified over 1000 further secret documents confirming the sinister role played by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prior to, during and after the 1973 military coup in Chile headed by the general.

Information that came to light in previously released documents clearly demonstrates that the U.S. intelligence services helped to create the conditions for Pinochet's rise to power,

According to those sources, as soon as Allende came to power in 1970, President Richard Nixon personally ordered CIA Director Richard Helms to destabilize his government.

During the following three years, Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his secretary of state, implemented an invisible economic blockade of Chile by halting loans to that nation from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and dissuading foreign investment:

At the same time, the CIA financed the most conservative Chilean opposition groups, to the tune of several million dollars.

After the military coup, the United States continued sending economic and military aid to the Pinochet regime in spite of the atrocities committed during its first 19 days; some 2000 people were murdered and over 13,500 detained.

Although relations chilled somewhat after Jimmy Carter's election as president in 1976, they improved again in the '80s during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

The Clinton administration has avoided any clear statement on what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright qualified as U.S. errors in Latin America.

Likewise, on the same day as the new documents were declassified and the decision against Pinochet was announced, Clinton recognized the right to clarify the truth concerning the Chilean dictatorship's crimes, but stressed that the publication of reports on that period should be dose in an appropriate manner.

On announcing the three-stage declassification of the documents last year, the State Department warned that such a process would take into account the need to protect U.S. national security interests.

One of those documents involves the CIA in the murder by the Chilean security forces in September 1973 of young U.S. journalist Charles Horman, who was working freelance in that South American country. Horman was the person who inspired the film Missing, with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.

One of the State Department documents reveals that, at best, the CIA supplied or confirmed information that contributed to the killing of the reporter, perceived as something of a threat by those involved in the coup, given his manifest sympathy for Salvador Allende's constitutional government.

The material released was the second release of classified information after that of last June. According to White House spokesman James Rubin, the review process is ongoing and the last batch of documents will be published at the beginning of next year, covering the years 1968 to the end of the Pinochet dictatorship.

Horman's widow has expressed the hope that Henry Kissinger will be brought to trial at some point for the role played by the United States in her husband's death.

"Pinochet should be tried and sanctioned in an exemplary way in Chile, together with those who backed and financed the coup d'état and the dictatorship," Cuban Foreign Ministry spokesman Alejandro Gonzalez reiterated to Granma International.