Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 1060 October 3rd 2000                                                                                                                             10p 

Blairism, a sad product of 'free world' crisis, is already in trouble itself. How, why, and to what extent, are crucial ingredients for correctly analysing the balance of class forces and what are the realistic perspectives for socialist-revolution,  - but the entire fake-'left' is there, holding back workers from any such understanding. Anti-imperialist consciousness is now rampant again worldwide, and cannot have retreated far in the West, contrary to petty-bourgeois Trot defeatism's opportunist manoeuvres around the 'Socialist Alliance' electoralist cop-out. And defeatist philistinism, from the SLP to the SWP all deliberately shirking revolutionary conclusions, will be routed not by propaganda but by world events.

A remarkable capitalist press admission, buried at the bottom of p2 of The Guardian, sums up the crisis of capitalism and the ideological mess that anti-communism has got the West into, better than anything:

The NHS is turning to Cuba for inspiration on how to improve its services. Officials from the Department of Heath and 100 GPs visited the Caribbean island which, despite being short of medicines and money after decades of a US-led economic embargo, manages to deliver excellent healthcare at a fraction of our cost.

Later this month a delegation of Cuban doctors, led by Cuba's deputy health minister, will arrive in Britain to share the secrets of their success.

The interest in Cuba comes at a time when the Labour government is intent on radical reforms of the NHS to make it patient-centred and more cost-effective. Cuba has a stunning record in both regards, with patient representation at every level, helping to organise the way the health service is run.

The health secretary, Alan Milburn, has repeatedly said he wants to see GPs take a leading role in the reform of the NHS, and it is the quality, dedication and large numbers of family doctors in Cuba that have contributed most to its impressive health record.

When Fidel Castro came to power, Cuba's mortality rates matched many other places in the developing world, with a life expectancy of 48 for men and 54 for women. Now it rivals anywhere in Europe or the US.

Male life expectancy is 74, the same as in the UK. Women can expect to live to 76 years old (79 in the UK) and infant mortality is 7.1 per 100,000 births -  not much higher than ours.

However, one major difference between Cuba's health statistics and ours has caught the attention of officials: here, healthcare costs £750 a head annually. In Cuba it costs £7.

Among those who went on the Cuban trip earlier this year were the principal medical officer of the Department of Health, Phillip Leach, the eminent academic Sir Brian Jarman and the president of the Royal College of GPs, Sir Dennis Pereira Gray.

Patrick Pietroni, a dean of postgraduate general practice at London University, who led the visit, said: "What we can learn is how they have managed to produce these healthcare statistics which are sometimes better than ours at 1% of the expenditure. They have more family doctors, who are better trained than our GPs."

"When we went to Cuba what was so impressive were the three-storey buildings called consultorio. The ground floor was the practice, the first floor was the doctor's flat and the second floor was the nurse's flat. No Cuban lives more than 20 minutes or so from one of these."

They also have fewer patients. Cuba has 30,000 GPs, the same number as Britain but has only a fifth of the population. There is one family doctor per 500 to 700 people in Cuba, compared to one for 1,800 to 2,000 here.

Cuba has 21 medical schools but Britain has only 12. Cuba has 37,000 practice nurses. The UK, which has a shortage of all nurses, has just 10,300.

Some of the good health of the Cuban nation is, paradoxically, the product of adversity. Food is rationed and meat is scarce, so much of the diet is fruit and vegetables. Because there is relatively little public or private transport, most people walk or cycle everywhere.

Immunisation is compulsory and thanks to the interest and investment the state is prepared to make in health, Cuba has a vaccine for meningitis B, which is now being investigated in the UK - although the prevalent strains in Cuba are not the same as here.

But despite the success, insiders say many Cuban doctors use the opportunities they have in travelling to conferences to make contacts and leave Cuba for more money and better career prospects abroad.

All the obvious good points are self-evident, - that a rationally-planned society, free of the burdens of capitalist-class wealth and domination and of degenerate profiteering brainwashing by corporate-glitz consumerism, - can achieve miracles of community self-organisation and healthy living, freely and equally available to all.

The unpleasantness of Western corruption is also clear, - persecuting Cuba for 40 years with a vicious trade blockade and endless political subversion provocations, just because it has rejected capitalism and chosen the socialist path of development, - but then damaging the planned egalitarian economy even more, and throwing addition political mud, by endlessly seducing 'defectors' away to the West with huge bribes.

Less clear, and to be examined at greater length in coming EPSRs, is the rotten light these admissions cast on the reactionary cowardice of the British Labour Party and its 57 Trot varieties of 'left reformist' hangers-on, some of whom are still posturing for "a revolution against Castro" to hide their bigoted anti-communism behind their middle-class bogus pose of "real socialism", and all of whom join the CIA's stooges Cook, Blair, & Co in refusing to seriously challenge US imperialism's fascist persecution of Cuba.

The NHS has been undermined by the sick values of the joke 'free world', and it is a measure of that sickness that NHS leaders have to go out to Cuba for inspiration under Labour, but a Labour now totally dedicated to imperialist nastiness and anti-socialism.

Blair's bravura propaganda performance at New Labour's Brighton conference only extracts a repeat of what the EPSR said about this government-by-spin-doctored-bullshit when it first started out three years ago, - to live by PR (public relations exercises) means to die by PR as well.

The Downing-Street stooge for international monopoly-imperialist interests missed the point completely about why his regime has suddenly become so unpopular, - because people are reaching the conclusion in droves that they just don't like the capitalist system, - whether it is served up by Thatcherism or now by Blairism. He found slick new sound-bites to deal with every alleged mistake or criticism levelled against Labour's record in office, - except that one.

It is impossible to deal with. There is no answer to the growing universal feeling that after defeating the supposed 'communist menace to civilisation' and after supposedly 'winning the battle of history', the capitalist system has merely finally shown itself to be not a resolute "problem-solver for all society's difficulties", but the exact opposite once left in triumphant sole control of human destiny (supposedly), - nothing but a source of more and more anxiety, insecurity, divisive bitterness, and fear.

No one is yet saying consciously that they just don't like capitalism, obviously. Philosophical reasoning of various kinds has been almost eliminated by the euphoric philistinism of triumphant consumerism, - class-conscious political philosophy in particular. But this situation could be transformed with dramatic suddenness. The subjective factor is currently all over the place. But objective factors can change that thinking in a trice. 

The collective historical memory and accumulated wisdom of working-class revolutionary struggle is unquestionably potentially deeper and richer today than it has ever been. On a world scale since the first proletarian anti-capitalist struggles more than 200 years ago, the total capacity and ability to wage serious mass revolt against the imperialist bourgeoisie has risen relentlessly, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Nowhere on earth is really safe anymore for direct colonial armed domination (as the US imperialist forces, easily the mightiest blitzkrieg power ever built, are continually discovering to their great embarrassment all round the globe). This know-how and political maturity to confidently rout armed neo-colonial aggression is a factor of the coming-of-age of the international proletariat generally, still steadily developing all the time.

More spinning and empty sound-bites were possibly the daftest stunt Blair could have tried at Brighton, despite the huge sweated actor's performance he put into it, milking his supposed 'sincerity' appeal to the maximum. It might turn out to have been a catastrophic miscalculation. As already agreed, people have not yet remotely spelled out to themselves exactly what it is they dislike about what is going on in the political and economic world. Blair's blatantly transparent attempt to smooth everybody over; that the fundamentals of this government's perspectives are right, and that it is just one or two details that are still being got wrong, - might be precisely the goad needed to make people question those 'fundamentals', since no one is at all convinced that what has soured the mood around this New Labour government is just a few untidy edges or stray threads.

It is the whole business of what Blairism stands for that is alienating people, in reality, - even if not many are yet in a position to give conscious expression to this deep anti-capitalist alienation. But New Labour is now on very thin ice because it is things like the continuous monstrous inequalities of rewards in life which give people the feeling that their noses are being rubbed in it, every time they read about some totally incompetent administrator, or company director somewhere, getting early retirement on ¾ of some colossal salary or getting a huge golden handshake just for leading some organisation into bankruptcy or for some other failure or misdemeanour, - while they are getting unjustified gip from some bossyboots manager at their own place of work. Blair's admissions of 'mistakes' about the wasted millions on the Dome extravaganza, while pensioners were humiliated with 75p extra onto the pittance they already get, were possibly some straws which helped to break the camel's back. But by admitting this smallscale 'wrongdoing', Blair was not just implicitly claiming, but was loudly posturing, that everything else about life under Labour was quite wonderful, - the best possible of all possible worlds. "There is only globalised capitalism" as Brown pretended to the protesters in Prague. "There is nothing else".

What the sudden dramatic unpopularity of Blairism seems obviously to be saying is that there has got to be something better, - something much, much better. This huge New Labour catastrophe for all of bourgeois politics (because the Tory alternative is only more of the same crooked, grasping, opportunist nonsense) might also be a nail specifically in the coffin of all government by crude advertising hype and brainwashing propaganda. Having been found out once, for Blair to then give the public just more of the same distasteful PR medicine might have been an unwise step too far. Of course all 'jam tomorrow' electoral promises have always been taken with a pinch of salt, and of course people's growing sophistication about the routine exaggeration of party political propaganda in general has made people steadily more cynical and unshockable. But in a long drawn-out epoch of class struggle, nothing is more certain in this type of history than that at some stage, when all the circumstances are right, minute quantitative changes will undoubtedly turn into a major qualitative change. Is that what is happening now? It is utterly impossible to know for sure, - and difficult enough even to intelligently speculate about, where the international class struggle has now got to in history. But surely most of the accumulated evidence over the last 180 years of systematic class struggle by workers against the capitalist bourgeoisie still points only to the endlessly-spontaneously regenerating notion of planned world harmony and public-ownership-cooperation as the obvious and only alternative to the cut-throat competitive 'free market' of property ownership, monopoly private enterprise, and eternal grotesque injustice and unfairness. And on an international scale, a qualitative leap out of the everywhere quantitative rise in anti-imperialist indignation and readiness-to-fight, would seem to be relatively imminent (in epochal terms). In other words, nothing fits better as a general description of the current scene of universal political upheaval than that the world is edging towards revolutionary conclusions, - simultaneously about how much crooked capitalist brainwashing propaganda can be tolerated, - and about what the 'something much better' could be with which to replace the lying sordid capitalist rackets people are currently obliged to live under, - whether courtesy of the appalling posturing New Labour losers, or of the equally opportunist Tory losers.

With one prominently-reported, specialist-selected focus group, - almost exactly the same pattern of opinion emerged (in line with some of the above conjectures, - bitter about being fobbed off with propaganda, cynical about politics in general, and edgy or concerned about just how serious are some of the economic difficulties (matched by people's grievances), and about whether anything would be done about it: 

TONY BLAIR'S Labour conference, speech did nothing to stem the tide of anger, cynicism and "active dislike" that floating voters now feel towards him, according to a specially-commissioned focus group.

'Their attitude towards Tony Blair was harsh and unforgiving. They simply weren't buying it any more," the report on the group's comments concluded. "It is hard to imagine what he could have said that would have got through to them, and penetrated-their bitterness and sense of letdown."

There was also general disaffection with politics in general - with little positive shift towards the Tories or William Hague. That perception echoes the results of the latest MORI poll for The Times earlier this week, which found that the images of Mr Blair and Mr Hague are now worse than any previous pair of Prime Ministers and Opposition Leaders for twenty years.

The focus group findings are also expected to be similar to those being sent to Labour and Tory leaderships this weekend.

The Times group of seven floating voters m Enfield was interviewed before and after seeing a videotape of the Prime Minister's speech on Tuesday. At the end of the session, none was certain that they would vote Labour at the next election.

All had negative feelings towards Mr Blair and several were conscious that their view had changed significantly "in the past two or three months." They identified the fuel protests as a turning point.

The voters were unswayed by the Prime Minister's defence of his record, his insistence that he was listening and the argument that he could not give in to competing demands. Typical comments included: "He didn't even take time out to talk to these people" and "he says he listens, but how come he didn't realise how serious it was quickly enough".

There was also a strongly negative reaction to his attack on the "Tory cuts guarantee" with the focus group disliking politicians' habit of attacking each other with one saying: "He wants to be careful: his halo's slipping, he'll strangle himself."

However, the report of the focus group - which was run by Andrew Cooper, who has run similar exercises for John Major and Mr Hague - concluded that there was "absolutely no enthusiasm for the Conservative Party either.

The mood was one of general disaffection", although there were suggestions that the Tories would win with a different leader, that the Conservatives "will say the same things as Tony Blair next week", and that "a lot of people might turn to the Liberal Democrats".

The findings bear out the results of the latest MORI poll for The Times which shows that Mr Blair's image as a leader has declined sharply since last spring, with more than half the public regarding him as out of touch with ordinary people.

Trivial, obviously, on one level. But in current historical context, Blairism has rescued 'democratic' capitalism from the small crisis it faced when the uninterrupted 18 years of the 'real thing', Thatcherism, ended not in the no-longer-assailable triumph of raw capitalism, but in its absolute opposite, - complete disillusionment at the underlying tackiness, graft, and incompetence of it all. It was precisely the 'exciting', phenomenal razzle-dazzle of Blairism, imported from across the Atlantic, which was supposed to give free-market glitz, (and grasping) a totally new lease of life, a sort of thousand-year-reich of non-stop propaganda for the dumbed-down masses (minus only the concentration camps). To say it has not lasted well is to understate the crisis. It has been a catastrophe. No question of another 997 years of such bollocks. If it lasts another 997 days, it would be surprising.

The big question is: What does 'democratic capitalism' do next?". Judging by the ragbag of policies Hague is desperately trying to cobble together to trounce Blair's sweaty muddled paralysis with - shoot itself in both feet rather than just in one, would seem to be the answer. Attention must turn to the obvious fact that a really determined clear-thinking anti-capitalist movement could now have a huge almost decisive impact on the class struggle. But fake-'leftism' is everywhere in the way, and urgently needs taking on.

Various forms of defeatism, (technically speaking, a petty-bourgeois mentality born out of the privileged lifestyle of the working-class intelligentsia in this country), - make sure they flood the arena where the serious debate should be about exactly how imperialist crisis now falls apart, and exactly how truly revolutionary-upheaval politics alone can fill the vacuum if a genuine socialist revolution is to be the real aim. The electoralism of the 'Socialist Alliance' of Trot and revisionist sects is a prize example. Without any discussion, it seeks to channel rising anti-capitalist anger straight back into the 'left reformist' death trap that has notoriously already totally castrated generation upon generation of would-be socialists.

The SWP is the epitome of this 'left reformist pressure' delusion, masquerading as it does with a typical Trot 'revolutionary' flourish about it. But it is the same old 'left labour movement' bait that has always snared the working class for more than 100 years of 'democratic capitalism' in Britain. Its current rag reflects the excitement of the petrol-blockade humiliation to Blairism and the other come-uppances New Labour is currently suffering, but promptly directs attention back to the far-fetched idea (misleading anyway) of the trade unions and a Labour government now taking advantage of the nation’s threatened standstill to "Tax the oil companies" during this 60-day deadline, so as to 'take pensioners out of poverty; abolish Third-World debt; refund the NHS; bring in a completely nationalised transport plan'; etc, etc. So far, so clueless, completely missing the point of discussing what revolutionary implications there might be in New Labour's humiliation at the hands of small businessmen (hit by monopoly competition and fuel-tax inflation) supported by the entire motoring public. The one thing the petrol-blockade wasn't was 'politics as usual', but the SWP immediately wish to squash any real crisis-curiosity by thrusting the whole issue back on the TUC's plate, surely destined to becoming a major plank in the counter-revolution in years to come.

This tactic does not even have the merit of putting the TUC on the spot in order to smoke out its reaction in order to destroy its influence. The TUC and Labour's counter-revolutionary class essence was already incontrovertibly established as a main support of British imperialism as early as 1920-21, and has only grown steadily more reactionary ever since. The clue to SWP-Trot conservative thinking lies in their fearful horror of a Tory revival replacing Blairism, sweating out of every pore of the Socialist Worker article. 'Force our agenda on New Labour or the Tories will be the beneficiaries', etc, etc. Here is the essence of this petty-bourgeois defeatism. Their first real thought always is 'What do we lose if things get out of hand?'. It is a fundamentally counter-revolutionary class position.

In argument, the fake-'lefts' will always try to hide behind the extreme hypothetical case: 'Would it not be better to keep a Labour Government in power, policed by 'left' demands, than let a crisis degenerate into the hands of a fascist regime?'.

Such straight-line 'logic' really is the absolute enemy of dialectical reality. It is the 'Popular Front' argument all over again, (which is the biggest farce of all, seeing what a treacherous pseudo-'revolutionary' meal generations of petty-bourgeois Trots have made of Stalinist revisionism's stupidity in Spain, alleging 'deliberate cowardly betrayal of the revolution by the Soviet-backed Republican/International Brigade forces', etc, etc, (thereby turning what should have been a powerful critical exposure of Stalinism's theoretical disasters into a pointless blood-feud hatred of the Soviet workers state based on the imbecile crap of the non-Marxist counter-revolutionary non-existent 'political revolution' which merely cemented disaster all round)).

But the Popular Front is still bourgeois democracy, and far from being any barrier to fascism, bourgeois democracy in crisis is precisely the gateway to fascism, and to nothing else unless socialist revolution sweeps the parliamentary idiocy aside as immediately and as thoroughly as possible. 

So with New Labour. Far from being any hypothetical barrier to any predicted future fascist menace, 'reformist' parliamentary democracy in crisis would exactly be the gateway to such fascism. 

And in dialectical paradox, the surest way to now keep the door open for the return of a Tory government is by trying to keep Labour government propped up now, helping it remain halfway 'sanitised' or 'respectable' supposedly, by 'not harming it with too many revolutionary denunciations at this stage', etc, etc, - by just "policing it with 'left' reformist demands at this stage", etc, etc. This was exactly the lunacy of the Popular Front debacle in Spain. The socialist revolution was not given a chance, - but fascism stormed in anyway.

After New Labour, the Tories or worse, will return, possibly regardless of what real support for socialist revolution can be mobilised at this early stage of the great international imperialist crisis. But suppressing talk of the need for socialist revolution 'in order to help Labour prevent a return of the Tories, or worse' is the one way to guarantee such a return, - and to consciously prevent workers finding out just how much revolutionary understanding there is around, and prevent the working class from even hearing about such possibilities.

And all because of, in reality, utter cynical disbelief in socialist revolution of any kind by all these Trot fake-'lefts', lifelong counter-revolutionary opponents of the Soviet workers state, hiding behind ultra-leftist completely bogus 'Marxist theory' but all the time in practice continuing their opportunist sucking-up to 'left reformism', just like now.

This petty-bourgeois defeatism, blocking an understanding of communism, takes other tacks with rival 'revolutionary' groups to the SWP. The ex-'Militant' stooges for 'left reformism' inside Labour for nearly two generations, now the Socialist Party, are currently combining 'Socialist Alliance' electoral posturing on behalf of capitalist 'democracy' with an ultra-left pretence that the small-business petrol blockade "had some of the features of a general strike", and was "a turning point in Britain", with a "situation so explosive" that "events could trigger an upheaval", a situation where "the enduring image which remains is the colossal potential power of the working class" because "there was a strong 'plebeian' element", which "if the leadership of the labour movement had intervened to give support to the protests but channelled it in a positive, working class, socialist direction, many of these protesters could have been won to the labour movement" etc etc.

All obvious sentiments, but all presented as blatant 'revolutionary' posturing rather than as part of any serious analysis of the crisis of the world imperialist economy coupled with the crisis of, specifically, its current 'parliamentary democracy' forms in Britain, - the 'left reformist' one of which the SP treacherously supports in its 'Socialist Alliance' opportunism.

Another Trot-minded gang of petty-bourgeois counter-revolutionary defeatists, the CPGB, in turn deride their SP 'Alliance' colleagues purely for point-scoring purposes, jeering that Taaffe's description of "nothing short of a pre-revolutionary situation in Britain" is just "an article of faith, all Taaffe has got left as he desperately tries to hold together his crisis-ridden organisation."

But not completely convinced that Taafe's 'revolutionary' posturing is solely ascribable to the factional disintegration into about six warring parts of what once was 'Militant', and hedging their bets, the Weekly Worker dilettantes add: 

"Of course, if you continually and incessantly predict an upturn in the class struggle, then sooner or later you will be proved right." 

But despite this slight doubt that not all "crisisism" is necessarily eliminated by derision of Taaffe's posturing, the final CPGB verdict is definitely low-key, to put it mildly:

"We are living in a period of reaction of a special type, where workers do not have a vision of themselves as a fighting class, let alone a vision of a new society. In these circumstances, it is criminal to passively await salvation in the shape of economic slump", 

etc, etc. This, despite an earlier sneer that Taaffe's 

"soothsaying has nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism or science. For that, our analysis needs to be based on hard reality, not wishful thinking".

Disregarding the monstrous counter-revolutionary slander that Marxism is obviously not considered a scientific understanding by these Trots (it is the greatest science in fact), this defeatist misery shores up its opportunist support for 'SA' capitalist 'democracy' by concluding (by deduction) that imperialist economic crisis is not a factor in New Labour's humiliation because the Weekly Worker's "hard reality analysis" finds there is no such crisis.

Trying to cover up this defeatism by insisting that the crisis can only be called a 'slump' (merely one feature of an imperialist economic crisis, and not necessarily its most revolutionary implication by a long chalk) merely goes round in circles. Blairism has suddenly, dramatically, been faced with the possibility of political collapse just in the last few weeks, - but don't bother analysing for aspects of imperialist-system crisis, the CPGB advise workers in WW353. The "period of reaction of a special type" rules on undisturbed, it is claimed.

These Trots don't necessarily even believe a word of this themselves, of course. It just happens to suit some current sectarian back-stabbing, - to help keep the opportunist 'Socialist Alliance' point-scoring bubbling away merrily, to continue duping workers into following this electoral-careerist fraud as a pretend opening towards "real socialist revolution" but which in reality either acts as a diversion from, or openly, prohibits, all-out conflict over revolutionary theory (Marxism-Leninism) without which all prospects for socialist revolution will be placed further away than ever, not brought closer. 

But even as just a throwaway piece of academic point-scoring, this "we've heard it all before about imperialist crisis" cynicism reflects a deeply reactionary complacency and philistinism. The cyclical crisis from the last great inter-imperialist bust-up (World War II) to the next all-out cut-throat competition caused by 'over-production' of capital-investment, is already destined to have been drawn out to 62 years length at least. But since it does basically consist of one round of inflationary credit-expansion after another (to keep the world trade boom going 'endlessly', but always only with the final ultimate consequence of creating a far greater 'over-production' crisis at the end of it than ever seen before in history (just as all previous imperialist international economic crises have always broken all previous records)), - then at what point can the 'inevitability' of such a collapse be denied to any useful purpose?? At no point at all, except for dilettantes who are precisely not interested in a truly scientific analysis, open to all, of the capitalist system's incurable flaws and unavoidable revolutionary crash at some point (and who do not even consider Marxism a science), but who are only interested in cutting a 'radical' posture to impress the social circle with. 

This "period of reaction of a special type" is the most idiotic impressionism, and only thinly separated from the notion: "Isn't everyone else thick", beloved of every intellectual petty-bourgeois 'progressive' individualist who has ever lived. Superficially, the masses are being fooled in a big way about the 'triumph of capitalist consumerism'. But Marxist science only sees the molecular process at work of advanced free-market production and life-styles relentlessly sophisticating the international working class and giving it self-organisational experience and confidence, as well as glimpses of a potential social existence, all of which basically unfit it for exploited labouring much longer under the grotesquely unequal class system of congenital injustice and grossly unfair rewards.

Far from "passively awaiting salvation", - getting all this across consciously to the working class is a massive undertaking, but an essential one if defensive resistance to capitalist-boss carve-ups and penny-pinching is ever to be replaced by deliberate revolutionary-socialist consciousness.

Preparedness to take advantage of collapse conditions, when the imperialist system simply cannot rule on in the old way any longer, is a practical matter of purposefully readying the worker-core of the future insurrectionary party in as many revolutionary tactics and strategies as can be anticipated and understood. It is a huge part of Marxist-Leninist science.

The reality, of course, is that the posturing middle-class ultra leftism of the Trot dilettantes is not remotely interested in Marxism-Leninism as a science for working-class revolution but only as an occasional stylistic crutch for flourishing. The 'Socialist Alliance' elections-conference material circulated to hundreds of would-be affiliates, groups, and organisations, contained not one scrap of political material of any kind, either embracing the crisis of the imperialist system or disputing it. Apart from one brief reference to New Labour no longer being popular, the entire conference material for this meeting of the whole 'left' (at this crucial turning point in Britain) from its 'official' leadership, consisted of almost interminably bureaucratic or otherwise meaningless/pointless 'liaison' or 'participation' rules & regulations for using (or avoiding) the label Socialist Alliance in accordance with bourgeois election laws for the next national balloting. What an unbelievable farce.

As well as the point briefly referred to earlier about how the accumulated civilisation memory of more than 100 years of revolutionary socialist struggle cannot possibly disappear from society in the way that the "period of reaction of a special type" seems to be implying, there is also the colossal matter of serious widespread revolutionary struggle spreading right across the whole international imperialist agenda to help remind workers in the West that temporary local limitations of class consciousness are virtually irrelevant in the context of the massive worldwide influence, both directly through example, and indirectly through economic effects, - that universal anti-capitalist upheaval will eventually have. Which "hard-reality analysis" should carry more weight as to what the future holds for British workers? - the superficial 'fact' that many have temporarily gone along with the shallow confidence-trick that "capitalism has solved all mankind's problems' - or the exhilarating tempestuous realities of the global imperialist system now in flames and crisis virtually from one end to the other, - from the huge populations of Indonesia (fourth largest in the world) and the Philippines in the Far East, - to Palestine and the Gulf (still) in the crucial Middle East, - to key points around Africa (the Horn, Nigeria, Congo, Sierra Leone, etc) and around Central and South America (Mexico, Colombia, etc) and with the whole of East Europe and Central Asia only very very temporarily 'pacified', (effectively depending on how long catastrophic robber-capitalism can last in Russia, where Putin has just been able to hold on, needing stuffed ballot boxes to 'defeat' the return to power of bureaucratic revisionism (under Zhyuganov, which even so was voted preferable to the corrupt nonsense and incompetence going on now. How interesting that the 'Kosovo self-determination rights' fake-'lefts' in the West have tolerated the anti-Milosevic furore from the CIA propaganda machine but have accepted the West's silence over Putin's genuine vote-rigging)).

But elections in the end are almost largely incidental. It is how the imperialist crisis pressures are pushing mass class forces, and where to, which is finally really decisive,(always providing sufficient historical class consciousness has been able to be developed about the revolutionary situation). Cue Scargill's SLP for yet another daft blinkered opus. This time, a (welcome) specially publicised statement on the unusual situation surrounding the petrol blockade. It even gets headlined "A crisis that will continue". Promising? Sadly, it rapidly deteriorates after the headline, first into immediately ludicrous auto-biographical self-justification as in: "This crisis, particularly in respect of oil and petroleum, was predicted by Socialists like myself years ago", - instantly confirming that the sudden dramatic mess that political Blairism has got itself into (representing a large slice of modern imperialist class-war political tactics) is not remotely what this press release is about. Second, it isn't even about the wicked EU monopolies carving up small businesses and employment in Britain such as the haulage industry. Bizarrely, the hauliers are denounced for "not protecting the wages, conditions and jobs of energy and transport workers, or of consumers". So no sympathy there with the hugely popular petrol blockade against the imperialist government's pump-price fuel-tax rip-off. Lastly, is any light shed on the international imperialist economic implications of this latest flare-up of the perennial oil-crisis question, so as to indicate where the revolutionary struggles against imperialism might surge next??? Venezuela? The Gulf? Nigeria? The Caspian? The Far East?? Not one word of explanation is uttered, - just the usual list of demands for the immediate integrated nationalisation of everything, carefully called 'public ownership' to supposedly indicate its revolutionary 'socialist' content.

This weird 'socialist leadership via resurrected personality-cult' staggers on, but now even shorn of Harpal Brar’s compatible museum-Stalinism? A quite startling allowance of 'internecine strife' emerges in Socialist News 25:

"It was with deep dismay that I read our paper (Issue 24) promoting the Stalin Society alongside advertisements for our Party and paper. We should not seek to identify this Party with any factional or historically loaded group or interest.

"The role of Stalin within the Soviet Union and the wider communist movement has not been without substantial criticism, indeed antagonism. For the Party to identify itself with one historical faction would load it with an amount of baggage that has been almost universally discarded."

Powerful stuff. Is Brar now just baggage, about to be discarded? And what historical baggage does Murdo Ritchie (the author) carry with him (or her)??? And, shocking thought, what about Scargill's dreadful 'left Labourism' historical baggage??? Is that up for dumping too???? Or could it be that honest, serious, healthy conflict of ideas (internecine strife) is about to be sanctified rather than expelled????? The last paragraph sounds almost EPSR like:

"The only route forward for the SLP will be by undertaking a drastic re-evaluation of the history and movements we come from, attempting to grasp the strengths and weaknesses of all, and, from that, build the best type of socialist party for the future. "

But do they really mean it? Let's see if the final sentence is really applied (against the ridiculous cult-of-the-individual bureaucracy that Scargill surrounds himself with; or his reactionary 'left Labourism'; or his anti-theory philistinism and all-round political inadequacy as in this oil crisis non-statement of anything). It reads:

"Any attempt at turning this Party into a continuation of another Party or tradition will only meet the same failures that they have already undergone."

Correct again. And only 100% Leninism avoids this fate. Cue to circulate the EPSR more widely.

But propaganda alone, of course, cannot possibly defeat defeatism in all its devious or rotten manifestations, from Scargill’s conservative philistinism to the Trots' treacherous anti-communism. Only the world imperialist crisis itself can move things sufficiently on to let Leninist revolutionary consciousness at last get a chance again.

And the prognostications are outstandingly encouraging. The imperialist system has never been in such a pre-collapse mess. Even if the chronic and uncorrectable 'imbalance' between the Euro and the Dollar can be fixed for a while longer to avoid fears of crashing profits (everywhere) setting off the much-feared Wall Street crash, - the entire pattern of post-1945 imperialism of relentless Western credit-creation (to let the US 'engine' of the world economy prolong the international trade boom seemingly indefinitely by running up ever higher balance-of-payments deficits in order to keep buying everyone's consumer products worldwide) has got to find its expression in unpayable and uncontrollable debt everywhere sooner or later.

On one side, American personal, corporate, government, and foreign debt all keep rising relentlessly. Almost every sector of the capitalist press is now reeling with alarm at the possibilities of a collapse. And Japan, mimicking what US imperialism gets away with, draws almost total capitalist-commentary dismay for its own implacable credit-creation anarchy:

Is bigger really better? That is the trillion-dollar question hanging over the launch in Japan today of the world's largest bank amid renewed fears about the health of the country's bloated financial sector.

The formation of Mizuho Financial Group is supposed to be a symbol of the changes that Japan has undergone in the two years since its banking crisis threatened to bring down the entire global financial system.

With assets of ¥134.4 trillion (£853bn), the group dwarfs it closest rival, Deutsche Bank.

The launch comes against a backdrop of declining bank stocks, falling asset prices and growing concerns among politicians and investors that the problems of bad loans and poor profitability faced by Japanese banks are merely being swept under the carpet.

Mizuho is a holding company formed by Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, Fuji Bank and the Industrial Bank of Japan as the first step towards a full reorganisation of their operations by 2002.

It is the biggest in a wave of megamergers engineered by the government to shore up the Japanese financial system after a decade of lax lending led to the collapse of three major banks and the near bankruptcy of several others.

The government strong-armed the banks to accept the alliances in return for trillions of yen in public cash to stabilise their precarious finances. It justified the cost to taxpayers by arguing that the move would force the banks to clear up their bad loans and improve their profitability

But this is proving easier said than done. Despite huge write-offs over the past eight years by its three member banks, the Mizuho group begins life with ¥4.7 trillion in bad debts, the biggest burden among the four Japanese major banking alliances. It must also repay the ¥2.8 trillion it received from the government for recapitalisation.

Like other banks it is suffering on the other side of the balance sheet, where its assets continue to decline as a result of falling land prices and a slump in the stock market since the start of the year.

According to analysts, the outlook is not much brighter. A recent rise in interest rates is expected to push many firms into bankruptcy, which will mean more uncollectable loans.

"There is a great deal of concern about bad loans," said Paul Migliorato, a broker at Credit Suisse First Boston. "And it's not likely to get better any time soon."

As well as this tough business environment, the painful but necessary reform needed at Mizuho and other banking groups is not likely to have been helped by a change of political climate.

With the end of the crisis, the sense of urgency in the government has dissipated. Since April, a new administration led by conservative prime minister Yoshiro Mori has taken a cautious stance  towards financial sector reform that has alarmed many in parliament. It has supported weak construction companies, such as Hazama and Kumagai Gumi, that hold so many of the problem loans.

"Two years have passed since we started trying to clear up the financial system, but nothing has really changed. If anything the situation has deteriorated;' said Yasuhiro Shiozaki, one of the legislators who drew up the banking reform plans two years ago. "We are just postponing the difficult decisions."

Investors have been rattled by similar concerns. Banking shares have lost more than 18% since August, compared to a 3% average decline by all stocks on the Tokyo stock exchange.

The same 'over-production' of capital, only a million times worse, - is exactly what is stalking the US economy now with fears of a similar collapse of confidence, a markets crash (of shares, etc, particularly Wall Street), and then comparable long lasting and untreatable paralysis (going for nearly 10 years now in Japan, and getting worse, more & more threatening to community and state survival all the time.)

On the other side, the even worse horrors of Third World revolt everywhere. Venezuela's Chávez is not remotely a Castro, or even a repeat of Nicaragua's Ortega, or of Mexico's Zapatistas, or Colombia's FARC. But all their influences, and especially the USA's imperialist economic profligacy, are winding Chávez up towards ever-greater confrontation with American conduct of globalisation:

Opec blamed the tax systems of rich countries for high oil prices yesterday as they rallied to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's call to politicise the oil producers' cartel as a campaigning advocate for the developing world.

The strongly worded Caracas declaration echoed his anti-imperialist viewpoint by urging developed countries to recognise that the biggest environmental tragedy facing the globe is human poverty.

In a key speech combining revolutionary rhetoric with folksy references to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Hindu philosopher Krishna Murta, he rallied leaders of the other 10 Opec countries - including the presidents of Nigeria, Indonesia, Algeria and Iran - to demand justice from industrialised countries.

"We cannot allow that once again we be indicted as guilty for the imbalance of the world," he said in defence of high oil prices. 'We are victims of the imbalances of the world economy. We are not at fault.'

It was excessive fuel taxation that was endangering world economic growth, he said.

"Opec is not blackmailing anyone. Opec is not a cause of poverty in the world. It is the horrific, diabolical world economic system that is to blame... The debt burden is a greater hindrance to development than the high oil price.'

Mr Chavez compared the price of oil to the price of barrels of Coca-Cola, ice cream, shampoo and Tabasco. "A barrel of good wine is worth, you know how much? $1,370,  450% [more than oil]. This is almost laughable, but let's tell the truth to the whole world.'

He has been Opec's loudest voice since he took office in February last year, when oil was $13 a barrel and the cartel was mired in bickering over quotas. He received an unexpected cash windfall when the cost of a barrel more than tripled after reaching a low of $8. It has sparked a recovery in the Venezuelan economy and has enabled the former coup leader to project himself as a combative new voice on the international stage.

In the same way as the forceful Mr Chavez has taken control of Venezuelan institutions, so industry analysts credit him with bringing discipline to the traditionally fractious cartel.

This year he toured all Opec countries to invite them to the summit. He took delight in irritating the west by being the first president to visit Saddam Hussein since the Gulf war.

The timing of the summit has coincided with protests in Europe about pump prices, adding to Opec's re-invigorated sense of importance. "The eyes of the world are upon us," Mr Chavez said. "Everyone is attentive to what we do, what we discuss, what we decide."

The summit is only the second in Opec's 40-year history because the organisation has been complicated by wars between members - Iran and Iraq in the 1980s and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The only visible crack in the united front in Caracas was when the seating plan was hastily changed to move Saudi Arabia's crown prince from next to Iraq's vice-president.

According to oil experts, the Opec countries were revelling in their moment of importance because a future drop in the oil price was inevitable. "Market reality will reassert itself," one said. "Then I don't know what will happen but it will be pretty messy. Chavez will get egg on his face."

Whereas Saudi Arabia, the most influential and least hawkish Opec country, preached moderation, other countries rallied to Mr Chavez’s anti-imperialist cry.

"In many countries the tax on oil has become an important means for financing their various projects instead of looking for other sources of income," said Qatar's foreign minister, Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassem Bin Jabor al-Thani.

Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, denounced what he called the new "world attitude", adding that Opec countries were "waiting for international financial institutions to give all countries an equal opportunity."

During the closing session of the group's first summit in 25 years, Opec launched a "Caracas declaration" that put aside longstanding animosities in the name of unity and pledged to supply petrol at "fair and stable" prices.

The summit was a personal triumph for the charismatic Mr Chavez, who is the man analysts say is most responsible for resurrecting Opec from a moribund and fractured organisation two years ago when the price of oil crashed. With barely concealed glee that the high price of oil has conspired to give Opec new relevance, he hosted the summit with the grandeur of a man staking his claim to be self-appointed leader of the developing world.

The total global capacity for fighting imperialism is now unquestionably greater than ever before in history, and the deeper the crisis, the more the downtrodden masses will gain confidence to tell all neo-colonial exploiters to go to hell, exactly as the heroic Palestinian nation is now telling the Zionist-imperialists (usurpers of Palestine to turn it into the colonial-occupation territory called 'Israel'). The willingness and aptitude for revolt will grow remorselessly. Neo-colonial exploitation and domination everywhere is doomed. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

Two thirds of vegetables consumed in Cuba this year come from urban agriculture

The preservation of resources as valuable as soil, water and the planet's natural biodiversity were relegated to lower significance with the dawn of the so-called Green Revolution, because of the push to obtain high crop yields to satisfy not only growing food needs, but so that transnationals could profit rapidly with competitive products on the world market, sacrificing the health of the Earth and its inhabitants in the process.

Those systems of intensive and toxic agriculture ark the cause of the increasing degradation of soils, now dependent on artificial fertilizers to renew their nutrient. The natural biological equilibrium of plants and animals was broken. Numerous blights and illnesses emerged, which, to control and keep them in line, were contained once again by a recipe of chemical remedies.

At the same time, falling crop prices - not caused by a lack of demand but due to a scarcity of financial resources in poor countries - discouraged farmers from utilizing those expensive systems.

Subsidies and support for conventional farmers are not priorities of the majority of government systems, and this has unleashed a crisis in that economic sector, said German Professor Hermann Vaibel, representative of the German Foundation for International Development, one of the sponsoring organizations of the international workshop called Growing Cities Growing Food that took place recently in Havana.

"One of the best instruments to battle soil degradation is to utilize sustainable agricultural methods like those applied in urban agriculture," Vaibel confirmed. This opinion is shared by Stan Webster, Namibian agriculture minister, a participant in the event.

Some 107,000 Cubans work on urban farms and in usufruct areas, leasing the land. Two-thirds of the vegetables consumed this year in Cuba come from urban farms and intensive organic farming, which use planting beds made from various resources and filled with organic materials.

The urban agriculture program, asserted Conrado Martínez Corona, Havana's mayor, is growing each year and includes not only the cultivation of vegetables, but also other crops like fruit, ornamental plants, rice, medicinal plants, spices, plantain, various animal feeds, hydroponics, and other non-polluting endeavors, while reusing organic wastes to fertilize the soil.

Each municipality of Havana has a center for processing organic matter thus eliminating the need to transport it over long distances.

Collaboration with agencies and NGOs constitutes a significant contribution to the development of urban agriculture, said Martínez Corona, because 37 such projects are being carried out, and more than 10 are in the works.

He said that even the current level of urban agriculture in not enough to meet the needs of Havana's citizens and warned that there are still limitations in obtaining organic matter and in the rational use of water.

On the threshold of the so-called "century of cities," Havana's mayor emphasized, Cuba knows that any country with a well-intentioned government will be poor if urban agriculture is not part of its political agenda.

Through different paths we've arrived at the same conclusion, in the face of demographic and climatic phenomena, to recycle reusable wastes generated by densely populated cities, emphasized experts from the European Union's Technical Center for Rural and Agricultural Cooperation and the Swedish Agency for Cooperation and Development, which also backed the forum.

The city of Havana - now celebrating its 480th anniversary - possesses 20 percent of the country's population, even though it represents only one-150th of the country's land mass.

Perhaps because of lack of knowledge, a good part of Cuba's citizens assume that the nation's growing urban agriculture program is a desperate alternative for a country suffering a blockade and emerging from the special period.

Even though those conditions accelerated its development, what's certain is that, inevitably, our country should focus on that alternative, because today's world is confronting a large-scale crisis in conventional agriculture, and sustainable agriculture complements the food needs of urban areas.

CULTIVATING the Earth was a fundamental factor in the evolution of humanity.

But after abusing its fertility so much, filling it up with buildings, poisoning it with agricultural chemicals and raising great polluting industries, humanity is now abandoning it to live in cities, in search of better living conditions.

One hundred years ago, one in every eight people lived in urban areas. On the threshold of the new millennium, half of the planet's inhabitants now dwell in cities.

More than 20 of the world's megalopolises have surpassed the 10 million mark. Fifty years ago only New York City had reached such a magnitude. Currently, 75 percent of the population in developed countries is urban. 

The surprising changes in world population that occurred during this century force us to question many of our concepts about how we are going to feed the residents of urban centers, explained Professor Irene Tinker from the University of California at Berkeley, in an article published in Urban Era magazine.

Dr. Webster pointed out that in Africa a somewhat spontaneous movement is emerging, even though it is not always understood and supported by government authorities.

Dr.Vaibel, from the University of Hannover, pointed out that, as a continent, Asia is the world leader in urban agriculture, due to the urgent and growing need for food in its large urban centers.

More than 90 percent of the vegetables consumed in China's 18 largest cities come from agriculture in surrounding areas, said Dr. Adolfo Rodriguez Nodals, president of Cuba's National Commission on Urban Agriculture.