Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
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No 1069 Dec 5 2000                                                                                                                        25p
Manchester seminar. Sat Feb 5. Rcpts pse.

Peckham destroys every 'left'-reformist posture that has ever pretended that 'practical progress' can be made short of a socialist revolution, and destroys the newer fake-'lefts' who swear they will 'really change things', but without ever saying how, or ever mentioning the 'R' word. Single-issue race-awareness do-gooders are equally exposed as nothing but a further obstacle to working-class revolutionary understanding, pretending that moral pressure can change capitalism's fundamental divisiveness and alienation-resentment, (which will always breed race-prejudice and false targets for hatred for as long as capitalism lasts, in reality). Hypocritical New Labour sneers at 'walk-on-by' selfishness which Blairism's fat-cat culture has done more to promote than anything, will degenerate into the foulest scapegoating, creating more misery and resentment than ever.

The lethal bullying of the little Nigerian boy in Peckham has brought out the rottenness of capitalist society in a variety of ways which have devastatingly exposed the utter criminal uselessness of 'left Labour' reformism,(and all its equally bankrupt do-gooding single-issue spin-offs in the race-relations industry, and every other moralising formula), preaching political correctness to a corrupt conflict-ridden system which can do no other than spread ever-increasing amounts of social poison, frustration, and alienation.

Floods of 'concerned' reformers have poured into Peckham representing every conceivable hobby-horse for 'transforming' working-class estate life there, advocating every change except the one thing which alone could really start to make a serious difference to the existence and life-perspectives of the inhabitants (of that and every other working-class community in Britain, the overwhelming majority of the country), — namely, getting rid of the capitalist system itself.

But the 'left reformist' silence about discussing socialist revolution as the sole realistic issue which could make sense of the tragic mess in Peckham which has captured the headlines (but only repeating comparable family tragedies which are happening all the time everywhere, and have been doing so for ages, and which will go on occurring at the same relentless rate, or even faster, in the months and years to come), — is not because no one knows, or cannot work out, that socialist revolution is the only answer. This has been an incontrovertible scientific truth ever since Marx & Engels first began analysing the exploitation and alienation wretchedness of capitalist society, and explaining what was the only force within the system which actually had the serious power to change things, and in what circumstances this could alone occur, — namely the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat during a revolutionary crisis.

And not a single element in this huge 'reformist' army of caring do-gooders does not boast at some time or other that "oh yes, we know our Marxism; we all had our youthful revolutionary education, thank you", — especially the CPB, the SLP, and the Trot parties of the 'Socialist Alliance' who will all be around Peckham making the most strident 'left reformist' promises of all.

But not one single representative of these fake-'left' circles of specialist dilettantes will bluntly spell it out in election leaflets, big-meeting speeches, bourgeois media interviews, or own-press articles, that socialist revolution is the only really meaningful issue to start discussing in Peckham (and everywhere else).

'Left' reformist pressure is the universal doorstep fraud, and hypocrisy. "A vote for the Socialist Alliance (or SSP, SPEW, CPB, SLP, etc, etc) is a vote to say that we want a complete socialist system, against class-privilege, and that we mean to get it", etc, etc, — and that is the spiel's most 'radical' expression. It is an outrageous hoax in two directions.

It is an appalling deception to pretend that capitalist-class power in Britain will be given up by the bourgeoisie, and that the 'socialist' age of civilisation will be ushered in, just because a shallow list of 'left' reformist promises has got the nod on a few working-class doorsteps. 

Even if the fantasy is gone along with that the manipulative power of all state and commercial media propaganda was somehow unable to prevent the phenomenon spreading of anti-Labour 'lefts' winning council seats in Lewisham, Coventry, and even an Edinburgh parliament seat in Scotland, all the way to capturing office, here and there, — it would only take things back to the disillusionment of Liverpool in the 1980s where,(only via the entryist deceit of pretending to be regular 'Labour'), the Militant/SPEW Trots actually won city power, only to demonstrate that the real overall rottenness of capitalist Britain had not been changed a bit by 'lefter' reforms in Liverpool being boasted of, than other 'left' Labour councils were claiming such as Sheffield.

Obviously, 'municipal government' powers are limited anyway, but the further restraints imposed by Thatcherism prove nothing whatever about what 'could have been achieved' or 'might have been achieved' by 'voting socialist' but for 'Thatcher preventing it', etc. It only proves, — but proves it 100% conclusively, — that if economic, social, and state power remain in bourgeois class hands throughout thousands of established institutions which run Britain, — then no crucial or fundamental change in the system ruling the country can possibly ever come about through 'voting for socialism'. 

It is a colossal fraud to say anything different on the doorstep. Even when the pretence of 'a programme of socialism that has been voted for' was remarkably taken all the way in Chile in 1970 by the Allende Socialist Unity government, and actual inroads into the capitalist class's economic, social, political, and state power had begun to be prepared, — it was still the working class who got dreadfully conned, — mobilising in their tens of thousands to back the 'socialist government', only to be massacred or put into concentration camps by one of the very same 'reliable army generals', Pinochet, that Allende himself had invited to join the cabinet in the delusion that 'the democratic authority of parliament will not be dishonoured', etc.

Just consider what is happening right now in 'the world's greatest democracy'. Beyond the jeers at the grotesque inefficiency in trying to tally the presidential election fairly in the supposedly 'most efficient capitalist society on earth', and beyond the well-judged cynicism that it is only bad news for the overwhelming mass of exploited people on the planet whichever rival gang of monopoly-imperialist corruption, profiteering, and potential international fascist aggression captures supreme political office, — there is still a revealing story of just how ruthlessly and cynically crooked is this opportunist grab for power, over and above the unpleasant greed which clearly cares nothing for 'the real spirit of democracy', and should be universally understood as being capable of any crime or tyranny when the chips are down:

The US justice department announced yesterday that it had launched an inquiry into claims that thousands of black Floridians were stripped of their right to vote by a state government run by Governor Jeb Bush, the Republican presidential candidate's brother.

The inquiry, led by the department's civil rights division, has been under way since Thursday and is focusing on allegations by black community leaders that in the run-up to the election minorities were targeted by police intimidation and administrative measures which had the effect of disproportionately disenfranchising black voters.

The Gore campaign has so far avoided starting a legal battle over racial disenfranchisement, focusing instead on an appeal for a hand recount of votes in Democratic counties in the hope of bringing a rapid yield of sufficient votes to tilt the outcome.

However, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) yesterday announced that it would bring its case to court on the strength of 300 pages of testimony and 486 plaintiffs. 

Black leaders say voters were intimidated by police action near polling stations in several locations. In one electoral precinct, highway patrolmen set up a disruptive checkpoint on a road leading from black suburbs to a polling station. Elsewhere, police questioned black voters on the way to the polls about their criminal records, the NAACP claims.

However, far more black Floridians lost their voting rights as a consequence of measures taken by the Florida state government, and in particular by Governor Bush's political lieutenant and secretary of state, Katherine Harris.

In June, Ms Harris sent out a list of more than 700,000 convicts and ex-convicts deemed ineligible to vote under a 19th century law which disqualifies felons for life. Interviews by the Guardian have confirmed that the names of many black voters were wrongly added to the list, which included ex-convicts whose rights had been restored.

The wrongly disenfranchised include a black man disqualified from voting because he walked out of a community service job collecting rubbish in 1959. The man, Wallace McDonald, 64, was told he had been excluded from the electoral rolls on the grounds that he was an escaped felon.

Florida leads the nation in its number of disenfranchised adults, and the zeal with which felons have been stripped of their votes has disproportionately affected black voters. Human Rights Watch estimates that 31% of black voting-age men in Florida have been disenfranchised.

Thousands more black residents lost their votes on November 7 because their names had been purged from voter rolls on the basis of technicalities, such as changes of address. 

Several told the Guardian that they had voted regularly in federal elections, but had arrived at polling stations last month to find their names had been erased. They had the right to challenge their removal from the roll, and to enter an "affidavit ballot" confirming that they were registered in that precinct. But they were denied that opportunity in several polling stations because staff were overwhelmed by the number of disenfranchised voters.

It is only a short step to wholesale election-rigging, or worse, and it is not difficult to see how political assassinations (John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, etc, etc) and their endless attendant conspiracy theories, fit in with this routine graft and the law-unto-itself power of big business and the mafia, when the regular 'democratic' culture of American bourgeois imperialism is considered, — once again as acknowledged by the capitalist press itself:

Republican party has waged an all-out war to stifle and halt the final ballot recounts. 

But right to the bitter end the battle has been fought in the counting rooms and on the streets of the contested counties in Southern Florida by a hit-squad of senior politicians parachuted into the sunshine state, and by baying crowds being bussed around what is now a scorched-earth terrain of political acrimony. 

The mob is principally accused of shutting down the count in Miami which would undoubtedly have won Gore the election.

Republican party insists that this rent-a-crowd is made up of irate local supporters of George Bush, spurred into spontaneous action.

But the real guiding hand behind the storming of the counting houses in Florida is a carefully orchestrated campaign by the leadership of the Republican party in Washington, and specifically the office of the party's ultra-right wing chief whip Tom Delay.

The party leadership is working in alliance with the same Cuban-Americans in Miami who organized prolonged civil disobedience over the return of Elian Gonzalez, rescued from the sea a year ago yesterday and returned to his father. The incident detonated a bitter battle between the boy's Miami relatives and the Clinton administration.

For not only was the mob that tried to storm the Miami count swelled by the same demonstrators who had faced-off with police outside the house where Elian was held in Miami, but they were corralled to picket the count by the Cuban-American radio station, Radio Mambi, whose hallmark was the Save Elian campaign.

One face among the crowd was that of Rita Oliva, familiar to close observers of the Elian saga as one of the demonstrators who locked arms and stormed a police cordon at the home where the boy was staying

Miami had tallied 1,800 out of the 10,750 disputed or 'undervotes' set aside for counting. A total of 388 new votes had been declared, with Gore showing a net gain of 156 and, apparently, plenty more on the way among the 9,000 votes left.

But for three hours, between 9 am and 12 on Wednesday morning, the count was under siege by the mob of Republican demonstrators packing the corridors outside the counting room, scuffling with police and transforming the election that refuses to end into what Gore's running mate Joe Lieberman called 'the rule of the mob'.

Under pressure of a near riot, the count was abruptly abandoned. One Democrat board member, David Leahy, said yesterday: 'Although we could hear the noise, I was not intimidated'. But one of his colleagues said privately earlier in the week that the protest was a factor in the decision to halt the count.

By yesterday, the Republican rent-a-crowd was bussed up to Fort Lauderdale, where it was joined by a formidable phalanx of senior Republican politicians including governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, Marc Racicot of Montana and Frank Keating of Oklahoma — all weighing in behind a successful move to force the count into recess. 

But the allegations flying yesterday about mob intimidation pertained first and foremost to the cancellation of the count by the Miami board — made up of a democrat and two democrat-leaning independents.

The officials are the only ones in the entire saga to break with party affiliation — ending a pattern of political loyalty which has applied across the board to party-appointed judges, election managers and county canvassing boards alike. 

The attempt to storm the Miami board and the subsequent demonstrations in Fort Lauderdale have thrown up several faces in common. One is that of Tom Pyle, a senior aide to one of the most feared Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, chief whip Tom Delay.

Delay, a former pest exterminator and, like George Bush, a Texan, is known for his ultra-right wing views on every policy issue.

What is certain on the doorsteps of the Preston by-election campaign (or anywhere else where the fake-'lefts' will be boasting about the 'significance' of their getting 5% of the vote or more) is that all-out class war as the sole essential guarantee on offer from an international imperialist system plunging ever-deeper into incurable worldwide crisis, — was not raised as the standard canvassing technique. 

It is a safe bet that no such perspectives got even the remotest mention throughout the entire Preston by-election campaign. Promising a more secure future for Preston's municipal housing, or street-lighting provision, or for the pros or cons concerning debated road improvements, etc, etc, is perfectly good nonsense for the opportunist mountebanks of 'left Labourism' to be discussing, — people deeply-rooted in the acceptance of capitalism as the way of life, and naïvely convinced that "the opportunity to back a working-class candidate" (which is how the SA 'lefts' summarise this by-election 'triumph') would be everything that Preston workers could wish for. 

But it has nothing whatever to do with the crisis of the imperialist system and the fight for socialism. It is a total diversion from that real-world reality.

The single-issue creed of "we must at least do something practical", pouring into Peckham as well, is just as poisonous. Specific reforms and changes to 'make things better' have never been absent from bourgeois politics since parliament began. Local government consists of very little else but such endless social tinkering, 'making improvements'. 

But Damilola's death is not about improved library hours, or opening a new youth club, or funding more holiday play-schemes, or even campaigning for greater race-awareness.

This growing gratuitous violence reflects new generations becoming totally hostile to the entire prospective appeal of capitalist society itself, and its whole authority. It represents a real crisis in the whole way in which competitive market consumerism within private-enterprise/class-property rule tries to motivate, organise, and control the vast mass of ordinary people on earth, but increasingly failing to retain (or deserve) the slightest respect. 

The "lets do something practical" do-gooders serve one purpose only, — to complete the total diversion (away from concentrating on capitalist society's essential bankruptcy) which the fake-'lefts' first create with their phoney 'revolutionary' posturing pretending that a vote for 'Socialist Alliance' would mean a vote for 'real socialism' at last.

All these opportunist dilettantes always promise that they will 'really, really, really change things', — by winning votes or by 'practical action', etc. But without exception, they all achieve one thing only, — to distract the working class's attention from the very impossibility within capitalism any longer for the very system of hire-and-fire, get-rich-quick, competitive-consumerism 'rat-race' to inspire people to do anything but become meaner 'rats', if they bother to respond at all.

Once people start to grasp this more fully and more consciously, the revolutionary essence of the contradiction between the working class and monopoly-capitalist exploitation will become ever-plainer, and a genuine revolutionary movement will at last be able massively to work towards a serious real-socialist transformation.

People are endlessly held back from this revolutionary understanding by a non-stop procession of ever-new 'socialism'-promising fake-'left' groups and single-issue 'practical-reform' activists, dashing around earnestly ambulance-chasing to 'put things right' whenever or wherever trouble breaks out. 

This is not a question of sincerity, which doesn't come into it. It is a problem of basic understanding of 200 years of international class-war struggle against the capitalist-imperialist system which have only ever shown revolutionary crisis as the sole opportunity to terminate bourgeois exploitation/domination of society; and reformist promises, however 'left', as the sure guarantee of continued capitalist-system rule.

How obviously these 'left'-reform promises serve only to obstruct the development of revolutionary understanding but do nothing to seriously change life at the bottom of the capitalist rat-race, is made clear by the scalded responses of the 'New Labour' leadership who have supposedly already transformed life for the working class by the mass of legislation since coming back into office 3½ years ago. 

Blairism has obviously failed to make capitalism smell remotely sweeter (despite 95% of the current 'Socialist Alliance' dilettantes telling workers that it would be 'worth' voting Labour so as to 'get rid of Toryism'). This farcically assured continuation of exactly the same capitalism as before (or worse, if anything, because Blair is even more enamoured of monopoly-capitalist swagger than Hague is) was 100% accurately predictable given just the slightest acquaintance with Marxist historical materialism.

Eight periods of Labour government-by-reformist-promise prior to Blairism, stretching all the way back to 1924, had not changed the basic alienating relationship between the capitalist economy and the exploited working class one little bit. People still hate and resent being bossed-around, profiteered-from, and generally screwed rotten, just as much as they have ever done since the monopoly-capitalist class started ruling centuries ago.

The near-hysterical posturing around Peckham by Blair, Blunkett, Straw and Harman, plus their local Labour Party representatives, merely showed how close things are to a total breakdown (with the Establishment secretly knowing that a complete collapse could expose Blair's bogus 'New Labour reformism' (or any government) to not just utter ridicule but to violent hatred as well), as well as how dangerously thin public gullibility has had to be stretched to present Blairism as something 'new' and 'exciting' to start with (to get round the problem of Thatcherism, the quintessential successful capitalism, being booed off the stage) when it was only the same old discredited Labour treachery once more, promising to change things, but in reality merely propping up the capitalist system again (while the Tories, the major capitalist ruling-class party, took a breather to work out new propaganda gimmicks, and fresh ways to rob people blind), — just as every previous Labour government in history has done.

The nervous hysteria has gone very badly. The former 'Socialist Alliance' hero Blunkett, one-time leader of the 'socialist republic of South Yorkshire', (incidentally rumoured to be one of the most conceited, short-tempered, tyrannical bullies of any Cabinet Minister in charge of a major department (education & employment)), has denounced the bullying culture in Peckham, feared to be the cause of Damilola's death, as a spin-off from the selfish commercial-TV culture of 'who wants to be a millionaire'.

But this disgusting toe-rag government for big-business privatisation has given away vast public wealth to create more unworthy millionaires faster than any government in history. Blair absolutely revels in the company of millionaires and billionaires, appointing hordes of them to every kind of public office and quango possible, having them finance every back-office for his party-leader role, and bringing them directly into his Cabinet via the exclusivist racket of putting them, unelected, into the House of Lords (fabulous free club, fabulous expenses). 

New Labour has overseen bigger fat-cat salaries, golden hellos, golden handshakes after cocking things up, etc, etc, than any previous period. If anything has deepened the climate of hostility and resentment at ill-gotten gains and unjustified chasm between the lavish lifestyle of posturing (and often unpleasant) wealthy excess and how ordinary people have to live, it is Blunkett's own government. How couldn't the notion of getting something for nothing, or of getting the means to mimic a lavish lifestyle by hook or by crook, — corrupt impressionable young minds in the Peckham ghetto?

Straw's sneers at a 'walk-on-by' society being unwilling to go to Damilola's aid are even more outrageous. Who keeps capitalism going which regularly drives a large percentage to crime and violence who end up at the bottom of the rat—race pile? Jack Straw & Co. Who defends and builds up the class-biased philosophy of policing in Britain which protects big property at all costs but has no time to protect working-class property; which hounds the poorest or most disadvantaged sectors of society for every offence or crime imaginable but regularly lets top-quality offenders or fraud criminals off with a caution or two; which has an appalling record of treating with disdain or suspicion, or actually arresting, people who have 'had a go' to try to prevent crime or offer witness-evidence about it (e.g. the young black friend of Stephen Lawrence when he was stabbed to death on South London's streets); and which therefore wins very little sympathy from the working class as a whole in this 'walk-on-by' question?? Jack Straw & Co.

The panicky posturing of New Labour around Peckham reveals its own ludicrous contradiction. One strand of hysteria could not wait to promise extravagantly that absolutely everything would be done that needed to be done so that 'never again' should such an 'intolerable threat to people's security', such 'pointless destructiveness', such a 'stain on a decent and hard-working community', such a 'minority lawlessness of anti-social violence', etc, etc, 'bring shame and despair to the streets, of Peckham', etc, etc, etc, etc. 

But simultaneously, another New Labour strand of hysteria was babbling just as fast about how no one could find fault with 'how much had already been achieved by Labour local and national government to make completely new prospects and opportunities available to working-class communities such as Peckham'; or with 'how much had been initiated to transform housing, schooling, job-seeking, community spirit, leisure activities, street security', etc, etc, etc, etc. 

Well, one or the other, but not both. Either 'everything necessary for a good life for all' has already been initiated. Or everything necessary is now going to be worked out and initiated immediately. But by it not being possible for both hysterical Labour responses to be truthful, it gives the game away that neither is truthful, — and obviously so.

The notions that violent street crime out of depraved vindictiveness, or bored resentment, or paranoid disadvantage, or perceived injury or insult, etc, etc, etc,
is either something new under capitalism, — or else is something which has now been firmly got a grip of and is about to be eradicated, — are both such obviously astonishing nonsense that New Labour's selling of both contradictory idiocies simultaneously indicates a tottering political judgement and standing that is as close to total bankruptcy as it is possible to be without collapse completely. 

Capitalism has been spawning destructive, resentful, vindictive, violent, criminal responses in those who have reason to hate the system's unfairness and injustices —  ever since capitalism began, — and spawning them just as relentlessly today (and tomorrow) as at any other time in its history.

Anyone feigning not to understand this is either a complete moron or a complete mountebank. Anyone pretending to be able to 'reform' this situation out of existence without mentioning how the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist ruling class is to be accomplished, — no matter how 'left' the reformist promises, — should be given a very wide berth. Witting or unwitting, they are just agents of the foulest crime and dirtiest treachery that the capitalist system ever foisted onto the backs of the working class, — the pretence that 'democracy' could give the working class anything it wanted, including 'socialism'. No chance. As the cynic profoundly said, — if voting ever seriously threatened to change things fundamentally, it would soon be postponed, abandoned, or abolished.

In the light of all this, it can be seen, how provocatively offensive, — and how sinisterly demagogic, — it is for the 'radical' wing of 'Socialist Alliances' to be boasting how "The SA challenge will ensure that hundreds of thousands have the opportunity to back a working class candidate". 

This is nauseating workerism of the most foully insincere and philistine kind. This is demagogy pure and simple. It is just possible that good communist comrades have formed the Lancashire Socialist Alliance after quitting as Preston Labour councillors, (having already represented 3½ years of monstrous Blairite pro-imperialism as being 'the working-class interest'). 

But just possibly they are no better than the opportunist slimeball Ken Livingstone who also was semi-adopted by the Socialist Alliance after finding his careerism programme being overlooked, overshadowed, and otherwise cramped in some way by Blair's own demagogic brilliance. Who knows? 

Fingers crossed that real communist understanding is now growing and being spread fast in Preston to put a real chance of socialism onto the agenda for the very first
time. But if this sinister demagogic influence of the SA gets a grip (with its ludicrously spurious pretence that because an opportunist 'alliance' has been electorally manufactured between the worst sects of anti-communist fake-'lefts' ever to betray the real workers-state interests of the international proletariat, thus 'socialism' has been re-born), — then this Preston anti-Blair break will prove as sterile as Scargill's 'left reformist' SLP demagogy, — (all of which is still, incidentally, being invited into the 'Socialist Alliance' in spite of endless denunciations of Scargill as a neo-Stalinist 'labour dictator'.) 

Only correct revolutionary theory can ever unite the working class effectively for socialism. This SA refusal to even discuss seriously the huge complexities of socialist programme and perspectives in the aftermath of the revisionist self-liquidation of the Soviet workers state and socialist camp, and now the raging worldwide crisis of the imperialist system, putting revolution back on the agenda (see countless past Reviews on this anti-theory philistinism), — is now filled out with the most obscene empty-socialist demagogy. What is going on???

The reformist race-relations industry is shown up just as badly by the Peckham situation as is the fake-'left'. No activist wants to be heard saying what causes racism (by causing the poverty, failure, resentment, and alienation which is an ever-present in capitalist society and which has always guaranteed the constant renewal of racist backwardness and fascist aggression as false 'solutions' to the feelings of wretchedness and hatred at the bottom of the social pile), — namely capitalism itself.

Despite 300 and more years of evidence of social divisiveness and violence in scores of varieties (including racism) always accompanying the statistical 'failure' to ever get to the top for 80% of the people who have ever lived under capitalism, — black careerists like Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng still are pretending that capitalism is 'improving' under Labour. These are despicable lies. The class-divided and resentment-filled capitalist system just goes round and round in the endless same circles, breeding failure, frustration, and violence (and racism) at the disadvantaged end of the social scale, just as it has always done.

The capitalist press itself admits as much; discussing various problems suggested as 'causing' the lethal Peckham bullying:

The other, as the local MP Harriet Harman admitted yesterday, is "intractable. Nobody knows what to do about it." What she means is the callous behaviour of ever younger children, and the non-existence of their family lives.

The lack of any accepted pattern of family life produces kids that not even careful rehousing can rescue. The hopeless, uncared for, non-achieving underclass, seething with failure and resentment about adults and authority, excluded from school and society.

Nothing illustrates the cheek-by-jowl contrasts of London inner-city life more than the grim estates where these children live and their proximity to the Victorian and Georgian houses in Camberwell, less than a mile away. Ms Harman lives there, half a mile from the school that Damilola attended.

She insists, as she leads me up dank, stained staircases, that "this area has a huge amount going for it. We're tackling the low achievement in schools which made people say 'I can't find a secondary school where I think my child will do well'." (Ms Harman was memorably among them.)

It is complete lies, of course, and Harman & Co in New Labour still seek out selective, specialist, or private schools for their own kids. The lengthy Nick Davies investigation into state schools has now been turned into a book by the Guardian, (pro-Labour), with this introduction:

I started with a vague feeling of unspecified benevolence towards the secretary of state for education, David Blunkett. I came out with a feeling close to contempt, having peered into a department which, I eventually concluded, was habitually lying and cheating and was presiding over a shambles — something which it was enabled to do mainly by the scale of that self-same dishonesty.

I came away with a picture of ministers beset by problems and lost for solutions — lost, either because they simply didn't understand the issues well enough to know what to do, or because they did know and couldn't bear the political consequences. Rather than admit they were stuck, they were reaching for pseudo-solutions, policies which gave them something to talk about, gave the appearance of action, gave the pundits something to chew on while the real problems sat unsolved in the background, because (as the ministers often very well knew) the alleged solutions were entirely bogus.

We looked at Fresh Start, Mr Blunkett's brave new cure for the weakest schools — and found a mass of evidence which had discredited the idea in the United States years before Mr Blunkett ever pulled it out of his briefcase and started pretending it should be taken seriously. We looked at "special measures", the routine procedure for dealing with a school that fails its Ofsted report — and (after months of negotiations) we dug out statistics which completely contradicted the ministers' grandiose claims of success. 

We looked at the official claims for the virtues of our "mentoring" scheme — and then unearthed the department's own devastating findings of its miserable weakness. These initiatives are high-octane guff. And they reflect the great underlying problem, that the entire strategy of Mr Blunkett's department is based on an analysis of school failure which has the intellectual weight of a joke in a Christmas cracker. Everything else flows from that analysis, and the simple reality is that it's phony.

And then there are the outright lies. In one of the early stories, we gave credit to Mr Blunkett for securing a £19bn increase in funding for education — a few months later, we discovered that we had been conned. Well, the whole country had been conned. What was worse, the conman got away with it. On the single occasion when he was challenged about it — in the House of Commons, by the Liberal Democrat education spokesman, Phil Willis — Hansard records the secretary of state's reaction. He laughed. And that was that (although he never again repeated the £19bn lie).

This is a lesson not just about the cynicism of politicians but also about our own gullibility — particularly our gullibility as journalists. We allow Whitehall to manage us: Mr Blunkett makes a big announcement about extra funds for Fresh Start schools; we report it, as though there were some kind of sense in it; and then we go off into micro-criticism of its detail, whether this is quite enough extra cash, whether there is really such a thing as a superhead, without explaining that the whole project is a proven failure. We are pushed into a sideshow.

Within a week of Mr Blunkett first telling his £19bn-whopper, he was caught out by the Treasury select committee, who exposed the most successful of his several sleights of hand. They did the same for the then health secretary, Frank Dobson, whose claims about new cash for his department were similarly fictitious.

The point is that the press missed the story. The Treasury select committee's report sank like a stone, the journalists chased off to the next press conference, and the various ministers carried on fibbing for 18 months before they were caught out. (Frank Dobson's budget was exposed as a hoax by BBC Panorama, by coincidence, in the week after we took apart Mr Blunkett's.)

I spent the first three or four months of this research being as stupid as it is possible for a journalist to be without getting sacked. I started, in the approved fashion, by reading files of old newspaper stories; I read the book by the former education minister, George Walden; I went to see senior people at the Department for Education and Ofsted. And I emerged with the clear view that school failure was primarily caused by bad teachers and, in particular, by bad teachers who had been led astray by "trendy teaching methods" from the 1960s.

Then two things happened. First, I read a book called Failing School Failing City by Martin Johnson, a veteran teacher and now president of the NASUWT union. Then I started going into schools. And I realised that my working theory was complete garbage, that the truth was simpler, nastier and very plain to see, as the first two stories, set in Sheffield, attempted to make clear: you cannot make sense of why some schools fail and some succeed without taking account of the corrosive impact of child poverty, which has soared in this country in the past 20 years. Combine that with the effects of the Conservative education reforms of the late 1980s and you have a design for educational failure.

You can look at any area of our schooling system — the effect of private schools on their state counterparts, the scale and distribution of funding, teacher stress and teacher pay, syllabus and teaching technique, truancy and exclusion, the outbreak of teacher cheating in exams — and you cannot explain what is happening unless you take primary account of child poverty and Kenneth Baker's reforms. There are other factors in there as well, but those two are essential. The reality is that unless Mr Blunkett acknowledges this and until he finds the political courage to scrap almost all of the market-driven reforms of the late 1980s, none of the dinky little schemes which he has launched will save our schools from crisis.

In a nutshell, the capitalist-system competitive rat-race, — and the obvious fact that for as long as capitalism lasts, vast numbers at the lower end of the social scale will feel that they have 'failed' in this rat-race, or have been 'unlucky', and will be full of resentment.

It is a poverty of a sense of well-being that the 'failures' suffer most, — as emerges clearly from the near-missionary work carried out by one do-gooding race-relations charity, "doing something practical" in Peckham:

Another boy slouches sullenly at the door: "Hello," says Mhemooda Malek, one of a staff of 40, greeting him. "Feeling a little less bad today?" Making all the children feel welcome, no matter how excluded, punished and aggrieved they feel, is the ethos of Kids' Company.

The shining example of people who are struggling to change things in Peckham is Camilla Batmanghelidjh, an extraordinary powerhouse of a woman in her thirties, who travels from West Hampstead daily to run the project.

Every day up to 200 young people are given instruction, amusement and three meals. Some have been excluded from schools, others have excluded themselves, some have lived on the streets. They come from workless homes where benefit money goes on drink and drugs, dads go to jail, and parenting is non-existent.

She says: "At the beginning I had no idea of the total breakdown of attachment. The children seemed disconnected from other people. The way they survive is to shut down their feelings in order not to experience their own pain. But the repercussion is that they lose the capacity to empathise, they imagine other people to be equally feelingless, and in that zombie state of mind you can do harm without anxiety or remorse."

This is the social evil that Ms Batmanghelidjh believes can cause crime such as the murder of Damilola. "This moral and emotional rot is what the Government has to break. It is all very well to build new houses, but we need programmes where the children's needs are addressed holistically. We need to fund people to spend time with children and give them the affection they are deprived of, the feeling that someone is pleased to see them."

"That is our No 1 philosophy: nurturing conditions of attachment. It's not rebellion they feel, it's a sheer lack of care, leading to this suicidal disengagement from the feelings of other people."

Ms Harman is bringing the Home Secretary to Peckham today and will show him what is being done to regenerate the estates. "Look, those houses already have broken windows," Ms Batmanghelidjh points out. "Moving people around does not mend their problems, or alter their behaviour, it just moves it.”

These children are bringing themselves up and the only thing to do is to deal directly with them, not expect the parents to change, those parents are incapable of making that commitment.

"But we had 48 children here for Christmas lunch last year — and they want to close us down because the neighbours find us noisy. I don't know how we can afford it this year, but we've got to do it, and I will raise the money."

It is heartwarming stuff, but a staff of 40 to belatedly try to bring some caring into the lives of 48 damaged youngsters already feeling like losers (and being treated like it, generally speaking, either excluded from school, or just not going and nobody caring) thanks to some obviously very lavish charitable donations, — is self-evidently no kind of realistic solution for the capitalist inner cities as a whole, and almost certainly not even remotely any kind of 'solution' for even these 48 damaged youth in Peckham, who merely have temporarily somewhere to go in the daytime or somewhere friendly to at least enjoy Christmas lunch. 

These are staff ratios to die for, but clearly in the capitalist billionaire culture of the 'free world', state schooling will get no such funding, and the general philosophy will never raise higher ambitions than just managing to keep control, and discipline, and minimal education standards if at all possible, wearing down overworked teaching staffs to the point of not infrequent stressful breakdowns now, and forever trying useless 'fresh start' gimmick after useless 'fresh start' gimmick just to cover up the evidence of a growing social crisis of confrontation and despair.

No amount of gimmicks, or even extra 'extra funding', will resolve a fundamental built-in contradiction between the capitalist state (the education service) and a working class which really only exists to be exploited for its labour power (when needed, that is, but left unemployed when not).

Trying to impose control, discipline, and minimal education standards in these circumstances is in itself nothing but a form of bullying. 

Everyone is getting bullied by the capitalist rat-race. It is blatantly obvious that the schoolyard bullies are the worst victims of the system, not its perpetrators at all, — (as tragically felt as is the suffering of all victims of hooligan violence). Once again, the capitalist press makes the admission. It is the capitalist system itself which is failing:

THE school where Damilola Taylor spent his last hours was so unruly that pupils had to be excluded for fighting in class as an emergency measure to improve behaviour.

The Ofsted team which inspected the school in 1998 failed it after finding that almost a third of teaching was unsatisfactory and behaviour poor. "There are frequent incidents of shoving and pushing in the playgrounds and around school," it said.

There had been more than 150 exclusions, mainly for fighting in class. "Generally, there is no culture of learning ... some lessons ended in hopeless noise and inattention," the inspectors said. 

Although Mr Parsons was praised for his commitment to restoring order and raising standards, he was too new to turn around a school where a third of pupils changed each year and where recruiting good teachers was a struggle. 

Local people were more concerned about the activities of a minority of pupils at the nearby Warwick Park Comprehensive School. Although not failing, the school was judged by inspectors last year to have serious weaknesses.

Warwick Park's Ofsted report said pupils' behaviour was generally unsatisfactory. Many showed little respect for others as they indulged in aggressive horseplay.

The 234 exclusions the year before the inspection was about ten times the national average.

Dwain Brown, 13, was expelled from the school last year for persistent fighting. The final straw for the school came when he tried to smash a chair on to a fellow pupil. The chair instead injured a girl's back.

"There are a lot of gangs at the school. They fight all the time, they take people into flats and beat them up. They form circles and hold on to the teachers so the teacher can't get through and do anything. 

"The big gang is mixed, but a lot of the others are the same kind of race, sticking together. They go into design and technology class, and put chisels, hammers and screwdrivers into their coats. Nobody stops them. The police and ambulances come to the school nearly every day. Last year one boy got hit in the head with a hammer and his head split open. Another got whacked in the face with some scaffolding."

Karen Davies, 32, who sends her children to school in Elephant and Castle because "she is too scared to use the local ones," said that she witnessed a fight between 60 local girls yards from the estate, most aged about 14. "I've never seen so many weapons in my life. It was terrifying."

The local police officer said: "They are about to cut the number of beat officers here back from three, to two. Compared to one and a half years ago, they have reduced the emergency response unit for the Peckham area from 300 officers to 230.

"We have a couple of gangs on that estate who are being constantly charged, constantly sentenced, then given a slap on the wrist and sent out again. They view us as powerless. They are right."

Marilyn Bailey, 32, was bought up in Liberty City, the worst ghetto in Miami, Florida. She married an Englishman, Robert, in 1988, and has lived near the estate since 1989. 

"Gradually the American ghetto culture becomes more and more influential here," she said. "All the young kids now dress the same, listen to the same violent, negative rap music, and speak the same."

Mrs Bailey, a music teacher who educates her 12-year-old son Jonathan at home, has worked for the £260 million Peckham Regeneration project since its inception five years ago. The plan is to demolish the North Peckham Estate, plus four others next to it, and replace them with 2,000 new council homes. Just over 1,000 have already been built.

She said: "You can take these kids out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the kids." Her husband added: "Building new housing is one thing. But they are not building any facilities for the young people. And when they do, they just smash them up. 

"That's what happened to the new swimming pool. And look at the library. It's covered in graffiti." 

In stark contradiction to official police claims yesterday that crime in and around the North Peckham Estate is falling, The Times heard numerous first-hand accounts of rival teenage gangs armed with knives and baseball bats and dealers selling drugs in broad daylight. One local police officer said: "It is worse in this area than it has been for a long time."

Last month the area's senior officer publicly called for the demolition of the High Street to get rid of drugs dealers. It was the reaction of a frustrated officer.

A few months ago eight people waiting outside a Peckham nightclub were sprayed with bullets from a sub-machine-gun. The attack outside the Chicago's club is under investigation by Operation Trident, the Scotland Yard team fighting gun crime in the black community.

Peckham is part of an inner London borough which saw an average of 20 violent crimes and six muggings every day last year.

Five minutes' walk from the estate where Damilola Taylor died, the High Street and the surrounding area is "heaving" with dealers, according to Superintendent Charles Griggs. 

Calling a few weeks ago for regeneration of the area, Mr Griggs noted that after working there for 15 years he had witnessed just one change: dealers now sell crack cocaine instead of cannabis.

Mr Griggs urged the demolition of the shops and flats and. the rise of new businesses. Regeneration, his officers say, has already done wonders for part of the area but Southwark is struggling with the third highest level of violent crime in London.

In 1999-2000 Southwark recorded 7,479 violent crimes, exceeded only by neighbouring Lambeth and Westminster out of 41 police divisions. Southwark is also high in the drugs league. In 1999-2000 the borough had the second highest number of arrests for drug possession in London, at 1,523.

The gangs are often young and black and they have increasingly turned their attacks on children with mobile telephones. But the North Peckham Estate is not the centre of the problem, despite the death of the Nigerian boy. For commanders like Mr Griggs the problem is whether to continue foot patrols in estates to reassure the local communities or to get more officers into the most dangerous areas.

Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, said the murder was a wake-up call and proved that we all needed to take responsibility for challenging crime.

"This tragedy is one that must teach and affect us all, and one from which we have to draw very important lessons if we are to create the responsible society — one which actively challenges criminal and anti-social behaviour

"I'm not talking here about 'having a go' or getting involved in a potentially dangerous situation. But people do have a responsibility to report crimes and to help the police."

Mr Straw made his remarks in advance of measures to tackle "yob culture" which will be announced in the Queen's Speech next week.

The entire New Labour response is just an obscene joke, of course; and the Tories, Lib Dems, and the whole bourgeois parliament and establishment will be just as bad. Capitalism is going rotten, and these New Labour opportunist careerists, enjoying the good life, have only one concern in life and that is to conceal that fact, and hide from the people at all costs, that the revolutionary overthrow of the collapsing capitalist system is the only future.

Helping electoral politicians (and their fake-'left' cover in the 'Socialist Alliance', CPB, SLP, etc) to evade this conclusion are the politically-correct reformists of the petty-bourgeois race-relations industry, — objectively in the historical longterm playing one role only which is to bring in ever-new 'race awareness' diversions and the like, just further obstructing the working class from this essential revolutionary understanding that it is the capitalist system itself which needs to be got rid of.

Their latest sad gimmick is to black up some white celebrity faces, and to white up some black ones, and then to ask the public to think about its shocked prejudices. Simple really. You can get £100,000 a year for heading organisations which think up such childish nonsense.

Its naïveté is on a par with a previous 'shock' campaign to trick the unsuspecting into surprise that black faces can be occupying very responsible and high positions in society. 

But all that was exposed, of course, was not racist prejudice, doubting that black faces can be brilliant achievers, but the class prejudice of the race-relations industry which pretends that any old black person can become a top headmistress, or a dentist, or whatever. 

It is just not true. At least 8O% of the black population, just like the white population, start life in working-class Peckham, or Moss Side, or Chapeltown, or the Gorbals. They will grow up suffering disadvantage, alienation, and relentless exploitation. That is all that the working-class exists for under capitalism. And that is the sole reason why there are race-relations problems to start with.

If these single-issue do-gooders really want to do something practical, then open a Leninist library in Peckham, and start urgent courses in the science of socialist revolution.

But these petty bourgeois will just end up joining New Labour and seeking scapegoats for 'what is going wrong', blaming all losers for it being 'their own fault' that they have never seized the 'wonderful opportunities made available to them', etc, etc, etc, — blaming white racism, black-on-black racism, black-Asian racism, etc, etc, — all utterly pointlessly. 

Degrees of racist backwardness and prejudice are obviously everywhere, and are to be shunned, but that won't cure or change a thing. It is single-issue reformist nonsense. Go and live in Peckham and find out. 

Revolution is the answer, not race awareness. Build Leninism.  EPSR 

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

United Nations summit admits its uselessness

The UN should learn from its deficiencies, those that allowed genocides in East Timor, Rwanda and the bombings and blockades against Iraq and Serbia. 

UN statistics show that the majority of people in Africa live on less than $1 a day, while 40% of government revenues are allocated to servicing debt, accrued in most cases by corrupt governments supported by the Western powers. This works to the detriment of health, education and other essential services. 

South African President Thabo Mbeki African leaders accused the world's rich nations of neglecting and exploiting their continent for decades, condemning millions of people to a lifetime of misery and suffering. 

"The poor of the world stand at the gates of the comfortable mansions occupied by each and every king and queen, president, prime minister and minister privileged to attend this unique meeting," Mbeki said. "The question these billions ask is, 'What are you doing.... to end the deliberate and savage violence against us that, every day, sentences many of us to a degrading and unnecessary death?'"

Zambian President, Frederick Chiluba, said existing plans for debt relief for the world's poorest nations were inadequate, and Ghana's President Jerry Rawlings, said Africans were suffering under Western corruption. Rawlings said Africa had had some "notably corrupt" leaders of its own, "but we are also entitled to demand that the developed world does not thrust corruption upon us".

Rawlings attacked Western governments for turning a blind eye to the corrupt practices of their own companies in Africa. "For every dollar of corrupt money that is kept in Western banks, one African child dies, two African children starve and three African children suffer from disease and ignorance resulting from lack of health care and education," he said.

Botswana's President, Festus Mogae, told the summit his country was the worst affected by HIV/AIDS in the world, and he urged leaders to pool their efforts to fight the disease.

PEACEKEEPING ?

The 15 Security Council members held a summit within a summit to agree on broad peacekeeping principles, with special emphasis on Africa. They also promised to "consider" recommendations in a recent UN-commissioned report calling for a new structure ready to organise operations quickly.

But the resolution to be adopted by 15 presidents and prime ministers, whose countries have seats on the council, is short on specifics, including how an overhauled UN peacekeeping operation would be financed. The United States owes the world body £1.18 billion, most of it for past and current peacekeeping
operations.

At issue is an understaffed and underfinanced UN peacekeeping department, which in the last year has had difficulties recruiting, directing and supplying basic equipment for troops and police in Sierra Leone, East Timor, the Congo and Eritrea and Ethiopia.

REFUGEES FLEEING GUINEA

Sierra  Leone, hosting the world's biggest UN peacekeeping operation, which is seeking to contain the country's long-running, brutal civil war, is now facing a refugee crisis. Authorities in Guinea are continuing with a round up of thousands of refugees from Liberia and Sierra Leone. The West African country currently harbours around half-a-million refugees who have fled the Liberian and Sierra Leone conflicts.

The crackdown began on Saturday 9 September, after a speech by Guinea's President, Lansana Conte, in which he blamed the refugees for helping armed dissidents who had been responsible for border attacks. The president's speech signalled a crackdown on foreigners in the capital Conakry, with Guinean civilians joining enthusiastically in hunting down the refugees.

There were accusations that the security forces had beaten people, broken down doors, extorted money and stolen the refugees' belongings. Those rounded up have been taken to police cells or are being held in public buildings or open spaces around the city. 

It is impossible to travel by road, as this would mean passing right through the area of the recent fighting. The Guinean authorities have refused to allow boats from Freetown to dock, a move designed to prevent any more Sierra Leone refugees coming into the country.

A report of the US Committee for Refugees released on 6 September says that at least 1.5 million people in Africa fled their homes during the first eight months of the year 2000 because of war, violence, or political repression. This is equivalent to nearly 50,000 new refugees and displaced people per week. The newly-uprooted people join millions of other Africans who remain refugees or are internally displaced, a cumulative total of some 14.2 million Africans.

TIMOR FACES STARVATION

Meanwhile, in Asia, the people of East Timor are facing yet another humanitarian crisis, only a year after pro-Indonesian militias and the Indonesian army went on a rampage of destruction and killings, forcing more than a third of the population into misery as refugees in West Timor.

Nowadays, 130,000 East Timorese held in West-Timorese refugee camps are facing death by starvation, following the United Nations' decision to withdraw following the killing of three UNHCR staff by pro-Indonesia militia members on Wednesday 6 September. With stocks of rice and medicine exhausted in many of the more than 200 camps in West Timor — 80% of them controlled by militiamen — refugees are facing deteriorating conditions.

UN officials knew of the presence of pro-Jakarta militia in the camps, as they knew of the wish of the majority of East Timorese refugees to return to their country immediately. Nearly 170,000 refugees have returned to East Timor since UNHCR began a repatriation programme on 8 October 1999. However, the programme has had to be halted due to the continuous harassment and intimidation of aid workers and refugees by the militia.

Since the UNHCR went to Timor in September 1999, 103 security incidents have been reported, culminating in the killing of three of its officials and dozens of refugees following the UNHCR's withdrawal.

The murders have triggered intense international pressure in Jakarta to rein in militias that operate with total impunity around the refugee camps. The Indonesian government has done little to stop the militia, apart from arresting 15 people over the latest bloodshed. For Indonesian president, Abdurrahman Wahid, at the UN Millennium summit, "everything is under control. The situation is now going very well". 

The opinion of those in the refugee camps is very different.  •