Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions - £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]
No 1071 Jan 9 2001                                                                                                                                               25p

Market imperialism is on its last legs. An international slump will soon be undeniable. But economic bankruptcy will be the least of the problems that capitalism is about to impose on society. The bourgeois ruling class will want to govern on via trade war, then war. Revolutionary science is the only answer.

The entire financial edifice of the whole imperialist world is now teetering on the brink of collapse. Confidence in stock market values is undulating wildly as corporate profit forecasts nosedive, inviting universal predictions of another 1929 Wall Street Crash in the offing, – or worse. 

The attempted calming measure of a half percent cut in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve has only increased the nervousness by a) being so unexpected, implying panic; and b) by having no effect whatsoever, other than a negative one. 

Sensational rumours have now taken over, putting everyone in a sweat, – such as that the USA's biggest commercial bank, the Bank of America, is facing catastrophe because vast loans it made to boomtime corporations are now unrepayable because the slump has set in.

As the Review has been relentlessly recording, going back 21 years, the anarchic free-market system has never ceased being on a longterm suicidal course of creating an ever-larger 'surplus' of investment capital worldwide via endless expansion of bank credit, everywhere; US government debts; and IMF loans, to prop up any anti-communist regime that would take them, regardless of their competitive commercial viability in the cutthroat system of monopoly-dominated 'free trade'.

And even every time that the international racket of profiteering exploitation has creaked at the seams from localised anarchic 'surpluses' of greed-seeking capital, such as around the south-east Asian 'tiger' economies three years ago, as usual yet more loans were poured in, more money printed, more credit created, – and the profiteering circus rumbled on once more, keeping communist revolution at bay, but just building up ever greater catastrophic trouble for the future.

The artificial boom, – and now collapse, – of the Internet stocks, has not caused the crisis but merely graphically symbolises the underlying anarchic pattern of all capitalist investment, which is the problem. Instead of rationally-agreed plans for economic development everywhere, the world-dominant bourgeois class insists that its historical achievements of leaving everything to private-enterprise risk-taking in a supposedly completely 'open' market, is still the best way to do business and to run all economies.

But for the last 150 years increasingly, this anarchic system has produced as many major catastrophes for civilisation as it has produced economic benefits, – leading to ever-worsening international wars and revolutionary upheavals whenever the credit-creating anarchy results in 'surpluses' of investment capital causing 'over production' crises, necessitating trade-wars, and making bankruptcies, mass redundancies, and then slumps consequently inevitable. Only through warmongering aggression can the embarrassed bourgeois ruling class then keep its periodically wasteful and harmful capitalist system in power and 'popular', seeking to resolve the slump-unemployment at the expense of war on trading rivals or by new colonial blitzkriegs on Third World victims, – all of which helps destroy or use up 'surplus' capacity everywhere, and helps get a renewed period of profitable expansion going in the world again.

Since the 1850s, wars and revolutions have repeatedly erupted all over the planet, now numbered in thousands, and coming thicker and faster all the time, with never less than 20 major armed conflicts taking place around the globe at any one time, and currently more than that. And two world wars in that time often saw as much death and destruction in one month than all the previous recorded wars in history put together.

And this escalation is increasing, not decreasing, with the imperialist bourgeoisie inflicting more destructive firepower on Indochina in the Vietnam war than inflicted on the whole world during World War II.

It makes no sense to start analysing this current bourgeois international economic crisis from any other angle. This sick world ruling class is about to do the same thing to civilisation again. Its 'surplus' capital build-ups have reached unprecedented collapse proportions. The destructiveness, ingenuity, and sheer volume of the devastation-firepower available worldwide now easily dwarfs everything that has gone before. The almost casual, unchallenged military and economic crushing of Iraq and Serbia in the last 10 years shows that imperialist brutality is more ruthlessly determined on world-domination than ever, against any opposition to its diktat whatever. 

The communist rebellion in Colombia will probably be next for crushing, after the revolt in Sierra Leone. Capitalism rules, but its own sickness is what will bring it down. Despite the poured-in loans, parts of south-east Asia economic-tiger territory have not 'recovered' at all. The biggest, Philippines and Indonesia, are now in constant civil-war slump turmoil. Communist revolution is the only possible way forward. Its development there, and in scores more places soon, will sweep aside the anti-communist fake-'left' in the West which exists only to hold back revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And while the fake-'left' cynics will never stop saying "we have heard it all before" to rule out a revolutionary response to the deepening capitalist crisis, the anarchic financial system's seemingly endless capacity to wriggle off the hook (by credit-creating yet more polluting 'surplus' capital) is relentlessly and identifiably dwindling. The deadliest features, such as the impossible US government debts, and the growing bankruptcies and trade-war indications, continue worsening. And panic is beginning, – as the capitalist press itself, always a useful record, is admitting. EPSR.

Last week's decision by Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan to cut interest rates by half of one per cent should have emphasised the seriousness of the situation. But the fact that he took the highly unusual decision to change rates between scheduled meetings of the Fed's Open Market Committee now seems to have done more harm than good.

The markets' reaction was unnerving and illogical. The following day the Nasdaq finished up 14 per cent, its largest-ever daily rise, while the Dow jumped 3 per cent. The markets didn't seem to want to understand that such action signalled that the US economy could be hurting far more than originally thought.

The optimism flies in the face of empirical evidence, and investors may come to regret their initially euphoric reaction to Greenspan's largesse. On the same day that the Fed chairman acted, there was plenty of fresh evidence that should have made the markets cautious. December US car sales were shown to have slumped, and new data suggested that companies were set to slow their spending on IT projects.

Later, as the markets started to contemplate a more sober analysis of Greenspan's action, a move which saw them lose much of their earlier gains, they were left posing an uncomfortable question. Had Greenspan panicked? Until now it has been heresy to consider such a thing. The Fed chairman has had a reputation for never surprising the markets. He made a virtue of being boring.

But what has Greenspan seen? What is he scared of? To have acted so swiftly and so dramatically is not his style. The nuclear scenario is that somewhere out there lurks another. Long Term Capital Management disaster or some other banking meltdown. Until the truth is known, such uncomfortable questions will persist.

Last Friday it was clear just how nervous Greenspan's actions had made the markets. Rumours circulated that Bank of America Corp had taken a huge hit in derivatives trading. The bank denied it, but the market was spooked nevertheless. Similar scare stories will inevitably emerge in the coming weeks, all helping to nurture a negative climate.

And as the psychology of the markets changes, the danger is that the glittering patina which has attached itself to equities for so many years will fade. The simple, ugly fact for investors is that US equities, by any historical yardstick, are still fundamentally overvalued, despite recent falls. Even if you strip out the still highly valued tech stocks, you find that the average US company is valued at a worryingly high 24 times earnings.

Irrational exuberance is alive and well but there is fear now, too, and that makes for a volatile mix.

The change in America's economic mood has been astonishingly rapid. Only a few short months ago economic activity was booming. Profits were high. The stock market was soaring. Inflation was low. New jobs were everywhere. The rich got unbelievably richer.

But now, as the economy begins to slow, "it's beginning to look like Paradise Lost" as yesterday's front page story in the Christian Science Monitor newspaper put it.

The macroeconomic warning signs include the falling stock market, but they go beyond it. GDP growth is down to 2.2% in the last quarter compared with almost 6% a year previously. Lay-offs are beginning to dwarf new jobs. And these changes take place against a background of a high trade deficit, of Americans' traditionally low rate of savings and of the sharpest rise in income inequality since the 1920s.

The headlines, though, tell of an increasingly sick economy. In the hi-tech "new economy" sector, companies are learning the hard lessons for the first time. A succession of dot.com businesses have closed and even the technology giants are lowering their forecasts.

In the so-called "old economy", car companies like Ford and Daimler-Chrysler are putting their plants into idling mode, hoping for an upturn in demand. The manufacturing sector as a whole lost 54,000 jobs in December and companies have already exceeded that figure in January. Retailers did badly over Christmas, and last week the Montgomery Ward department stores went into liquidation after 120 years as a high street business. 

Economists are still struggling to interpret all the signs. All are agreed there is a slowdown. But opinions differ as to whether recession is on the way, while only a handful of observers predict anything approaching a market crash.

"An honest but unhelpful answer is that nobody knows. A more detailed but equally, unhelpful answer is that it's possible to make a case either way, But on the whole I'd vote for panic," says Paul Krugman; economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his weekly New York Times column.

A key part of Plan Colombia is the chemical warfare to be waged on the coca plantations in the south. The intention is, State Department officials admit, to remove the women and children and blitz the place.

Leaving aside the ecological damage this Armageddon will cause, it might be worth pointing out that in the 25 years since the US began to use chemicals to eradicate coca, Colombia's area under cultivation has gone from 25,000 to 140,000 hectares.

If US drugs policy were a company, it would have gone bankrupt years ago. But it marches to its own drum, whose peculiar rhythm can be detected in the sayings of General Barry R McCaffrey, the White House drug tsar. A year ago, McCaffrey was being briefed by a series of experts from Colombian NGOs and human rights movements in Bogota on precisely why Plan Colombia was a very bad idea. The general did not disagree. He explained, though, why the plan would go ahead.

"When I was a young soldier," he told the astonished gathering, "I was taught that it was better to entertain a doubt than to make a mistake. But as the years go by I realise that's wrong. It's far better to make a mistake than to entertain a doubt." That's the spirit, general.

Discussion

The inescapable reality of class-war under capitalism is the key to incurable race and national conflict as well. Which means that all-the-way class-war is also the only hope of ever curing chauvinist and sectarian small-mindedness in human society. All of bourgeois politics, from pro-market to fake-'left' reformism, effectively never stops 'playing the race card'. All imperialist history shows that reformist dreams of successful longterm 'anti-fascism' and 'anti-racism' are a total delusion. Token middle-class promotions, even to a 100% black Cabinet, will never stop inner-city slump-induced racist fears of crime and violence. Only getting rid of capitalism will do that. Blair's blame of 'yob culture' is a New Labour declaration of class war against the lowest in the social rat-race. Hague spills the beans that all capitalist crisis conditions are worsening. Fake-'lefts' miss the point yet again. Bourgeois angst and splits will educate the working class. Expose imperialist migration fraud. Political asylum needs a revolutionary perspective.

Race prejudice can be shown to be inevitably exacerbated repeatedly just by the routine everyday workings of the imperialist system, the world of the multi-national monopoly corporations. Cut-throat competition, setting one country's workforce against another's, or one company's against another's, inevitably embitters national or regional antagonisms. When trade war leads on to shooting war, the cycle of periodic national-chauvinist hatred is complete.

Local ethnic or regional rivalry is just as economically-based in its fundamental origins, and its constant renewals, even though the unavoidable competitive spirit of life in a permanent 'rat race' often obscures this, and can make nationalism, regionalism, and racism appear as a purely undying 'cultural' phenomenon, endemic to all societies and with no real cause except fear and ignorance.

The 'playing the race card' squabble between the Tories and New Labour, following recent scares over 'racist' crime, is all a farce. Who is worse playing the race card (between Hague's mock 'concern' for law and order, and Blair's phony 'anti-racist' political correctness) is not just the wrong question to ask but actually plays right into the hands of the divisiveness in capitalist society which threatens everyone.

Racism is endemic to the capitalist system. It can never be cured, – under capitalism. The opportunist, careerist, and international rivalry which is the very fabric of all 'free market' existence all over the world, at every level of the social order, – is incurably rooted-in and sustaining-of class divisions, which are synonymous with a monopolistic free-enterprise system.

One entrepreneur's lucky triumph, whether deserved or not, automatically implies the 'failure' of thousands more people who will never now be able to fill that entrepreneur's niche. And the pattern, of monopolist 'lucky' entrepreneurs growing ever richer while everyone else continues to worry about their job-security, or paying the mortgage, or how to get their kids into a decent school, etc, etc, - is clearly destined to continue for as long as capitalism lasts.

It is unalterably natural for the class envy engendered by this grotesque system of unequal rewards in society, to take on additional 'comforting-abuse' features wherever it can. Don't just call the boss a bastard when you get the sack. Feel better by adding 'fat bastard', or 'bald bastard', or 'boss-eyed bastard'.

In wider-ranging collective difficulties where a factory has to close because orders have been lost to abroad, or when massive redundancies result from when one section of the community is prepared to work for less money or worsened conditions, – how will this despair, envy, and hatred ever be stopped from expressing itself as 'German bastards', or 'immigrant bastards', or 'female bastards', or 'unskilled bastards', etc, etc.

The reformist notion that 'spreading niceness', or 'moral leadership', or 'enlightened self-interest', etc, etc, will all finally convince everyone to simply abandon all national, class, and racist envy because "the world will be a better place for all of us as a result" is not just a naïve pipe-dream but also, of course, a most pernicious deceit-assault on the whole working class. Such a mass conversion to righteousness can never come about in real life but can only exist in religious fantasy, and it has one purpose only, – to make the working class feel bad about itself, and to feel guilty for the rottenness in society that is the result, in reality, of the capitalist system's own crisis, – or entirely the fault of the very existence of the bourgeoisie, in other words, – owning society as they do, and creating classes in the first place.

Racist backwardness will, of course, never be anything other than utterly reprehensible in anyone's language, and must remain so. But just saying this, all the time that capitalism continues to divide the whole people of the world, is just spitting into the wind. 

And 'anti-racist' reformist activities and agitation are as much in danger of confusing and alienating workers by providing a 'left' cover for the fake 'moralism' of regimes like New Labour who are hell-bent not just on keeping the capitalist system but are fanatically in favour of making it more relentlessly competitive and divisive than ever, instilling cut-throat rivalry as early into lives as possible with every new initiative for schools to embark on a never-ending quest for new advantages in the rat-race for educational excellence, etc.

The 'shock' or 'dismay' that Blairism then puts on show at the presumed racist killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor in Peckham is a total fraud, of course. Giving a new political shot in the arm to the capitalist system, as Blairism has done, can only automatically give all racist divisiveness everywhere a new boost too. 

To play 'left reformist' games against New Labour, – as all the 'Socialist Alliance' Trots and SLP revisionist anti-communists do, – is just to play as equally phoney an 'anti-racist' card as Blair. Ever-more-fervent 'anti-racist' exhortations in circumstances where there is a deliberate refusal to discuss, now, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society altogether in conditions of forthcoming worldwide economic crisis and warmongering trade competition (as catastrophic slump deepens),– – is so much hot air, effectively merely providing a 'left' cover for Blairism.

It goes without saying that by being just as devoted as Blairism to the capitalist system, the Hague Tories are just as big an 'anti-racist' fraud as New Labour, – or just as devoted to the continuation of inevitably race-divided societies, in other words. But in their routine farce-'democracy' contest of 'anti-racist' insincerity, the Tories are willy-nilly helping to publicise the tell-tale realities of ever-deteriorating conditions which could see new surges of racist nastiness engulfing Britain.

Blaming Hague for 'playing the race card' sows almost as many stupid reformist illusions as does criticism of Blair for not playing his 'anti-racist' card 'sincerely enough', etc. Either way, it is plain anti-Marxism to suggest that the stunts of bourgeois political ideology are responsible for how much racist divisiveness any society is being poisoned by at any one time. Surely the race card will always be there to be played in any capitalist society? And surely, if it is there and the conditions are ripe, then some bourgeois politician or other will play that racist card, inevitably.

And equally surely, is not the only final decisive answer to any playing of the race-card in any society, the understanding, willingness, and ability within the working class to play the communist revolution card???

Investing too much faith in the notion that "anti-fascist agitation can prevent any bourgeois society from playing the race-card" is surely just one more historical howler from the school of Stalinist-revisionist nonsense. It was the world imperialist system as a whole which needed World War II to rescue the shattered capitalist free market from its 1930s slump-stagnation. It was the bourgeois-imperialist system as a whole which needed to play the race card (in order to get the planet safely into World War II) because of continuing potential revolutionary communist hostility everywhere to the capitalist world just drifting back into international war again so soon after the horrors of World War I, – the "war to end all wars", etc. 

And successfully play the race card is what the bourgeois-imperialist system as a whole duly did, – using Germany as the obvious pace-maker, but fully aided and abetted throughout fascist rearmament by the rest of the West. The 'master-race' warmongering counter-revolutionary revanchism was appeased all the way by Britain, America, and France, – all the way through Spain, through the Austrian Anschluss, through Munich-approved Sudetenland grab, through the seizure of the rest of Czechoslovakia, and so on and so on until the past forces of revolutionary communism, still represented to a degree by the then Soviet workers state, finally pushed Germany and the West into the direct conflict which all had been universally anticipating for years anyway. Total holocaust everywhere resulted, thus destroying the huge volumes of 'surplus' industrial capacity (which had caused the world slump in the first place), and the millions of 'surplus' unemployed workers everywhere along with it.

In what way was the national-chauvinist race card, dividing society into bloody warmongering conflict in order to sow devastation, not played in Britain and France just as much as in Germany? There has never been any historical success for anti-fascism. Anti-fascism was a failure. World War II did take place. And more than 50 million people were wiped out. And half the world's economy was destroyed, exactly as required by the international imperialist economic system.

Anti-fascism was a reformist failure, – an inevitable reformist failure.

All over the free-market world now, the race card, – or its equivalent, – is being played again and again and again to achieve just those conditions of national-chauvinist fear and hatred needed by capitalism's desperate economic-crisis circumstances to divert the enraged masses from communist revolution into self-destructive warmongering and communal strife, exactly producing the devastation necessary for wiping out the capital 'surpluses' imposing the slump conditions in the first place on the planet.

But there is still a huge distance to go, with trillions and trillions of 'surplus' dollar-capital still to be destroyed everywhere before a fair run of resumed longterm international profitable expansion can be guaranteed again. 

It is ludicrous to think that the communal ethnic/religious bloodshed currently wrecking the Indonesian economy everywhere, for example, will be sufficient for eliminating the mounting conditions of worldwide 'surplus capacity'.

The national-chauvinist race card will need to be played all over the free-market world. And it is guaranteed that it will be successfully played, – all the way to renewed international warmongering.

Implacable Leninist revolutionary hostility to the capitalist system and to every aspect of bourgeois ideology and bourgeois society is the only possible answer. Limiting the 'socialist' movement just to anti-racist and 'no to war' protesting is simply ludicrous self-deception and a farcical betrayal of the working class. Pretending to see some difference between New Labour or other fake-'left' reformist pressure for more and more 'anti-racist' legislation and political correctness, – and the more crudely-concealed acceptance of capitalist-system racism by Hague & Co, – is equally treacherous nonsense.

In their desperate fear of not winning back political office and in the hope of a 'subtle' playing of the race card, the Hague Tories are obliged to point out that the existing Blairite 'anti-racist' society is wearing no clothes at all. 

Regardless of the aim being to scare white voters and black middle-class voters into revived anti-mass-immigration postures, – Hague & Co nevertheless are volubly pointing out that cosmetic 'anti-racism' of the Macpherson-report kind is simply destroying Met Police morale but without putting anything in its place, and that more 'racist' crime is going on than ever before because of the hollow posturing of politically-correct stands against 'institutionalised white racism'.

In a country like Britain, it is undoubtedly the case that the vast majority of racist prejudice is inflicted by whites on non-whites. And of course it can never be challenged enough, – even precisely in those terms.

But it is ridiculously misleading to pretend that identifying the worst or the most racism as being the fault of white racism, makes any progress at all towards solving the problem. It strikes a completely harmful tone of moral self-righteousness, that is all. This is not only utterly useless for solving the problem. It completely conceals the real problem.

Only superficially does racism have any colour, – majority whites against minority blacks or asians; majority asians against minority whites or blacks; majority blacks against minority asians or whites, – all of which can actually be found in localised bad circumstances in Britain itself, as well as in the world at large, and all of which would always inevitably erupt under any circumstances all over the world once international economic slump conditions get a good grip.

Racism is essentially an inevitable spin-off from class-war mentality which not only can never disappear but can only gain relentlessly in intensity, measured on a worldwide scale, all the time that monopoly-imperialist private ownership remains the basic international economic structure on the planet.

Racism will continue to flourish, occasionally flaring up into worse epidemics than at other times depending on economic conditions, etc, – and all the time susceptible to being turned into a significant openly political football, – for as long as capitalism lasts.

Paradoxically, only going all the way with class-war mentality provides deliverance. Only a completely communist philosophy can be objectively world-community-enthusiastic enough to grasp how ultimately damaging to everyone on earth is injury of any kind to any people on earth, negating the only true concept of freedom for everyone in a material world. If some people are not 'free' somewhere, (from whatever is the problem), then in a world of never-ending material repercussions, no one is eventually 'free' anywhere.

Genuine 100% worldwide economic cooperation is the obvious only sensible way to run the planet, just as it is the obviously only sensible way that human communities have ever found for working at all harmoniously together (taking a genuinely healthy and enlightened family unit as the obvious starting point). 

The best efforts of communist philosophy so far (the socialist camp of workers states, when it existed) is the best stab at this until now, but a far more fully combative and wholesome communist philosophy needs to take the world on from those ultimately revisionist failings of the Stalin era.

And the struggle to get to a new world communist movement is, of course, at the same time the only genuinely anti-racist movement possible as well. Only revolutionaries are genuinely active anti-racists. Only thoroughgoing revolutionary philosophy meaningfully exposes the sources of race-prejudice to the core and explains to mankind the only way for civilisation to proceed towards genuine world harmony. Supposed 'anti-racist' support for the free-market system is a contradiction in terms.

That being the case, it is precisely politically-correct 'anti-racist' reformism which is the next biggest problem here, after capitalism itself. This Blairite liberalism populates a fantasy world which consists of nothing but the sickest hypocrisy. The cruellest deceit in the whole history of capitalist-born race-prejudice is the phrase "any black person can now become a police chief, a top eye surgeon, or even prime minister", etc, etc. 

The reality is that 80% of the black and asian population will always be working class, just like 80% of the white population. And while any individual, from any background, can in theory become anything they like, – the fact that 80% of the population will always be working class, – guaranteed nothing in life except what some hirer of labour-power is prepared to pay them, and constantly subject to being fired again at any whim or 'economic downturn', etc, – makes it certain that class-war resentments in all directions will never die for as long as capitalism lasts. 20 black people out of every 100 will continue to make it as police chiefs, eye surgeons, judges, and prime ministers. But 80 black people out of every 100 will continue to always suffer the humiliation of not making it in society, of being continuously subject to hire and fire, and to all the obvious resentments (class resentments spilling over into racist resentments) in both directions which such a contradictory 'freedom' system (privately-owned monopoly imperialism) must inevitably always lead to, latent in 'good' times, and explosively bad in times of economic difficulty.

Where such class conflict inevitably remains at the heart of the 'devil-take-the-hindmost' drive behind the fiercely competitive 'free enterprise' system, — it is idealist day-dreaming to imagine that cultural improvement and moral lectures can eventually prevent inevitable frustrations and a sense of injustice from finding angry expression in whatever is to hand, much personal abuse included (and obviously racist abuse within that). If it is conflict about surviving and flourishing for one's own family and interests (in pursuit of which people everywhere have commonly been known to be prepared to beg, borrow or even steal, – or even kill in the worst perverted cases), then such endemic conflict in a cut-throat competitive system can be seen as permanently easily prey to such mild conflict expressions as a few personal (including racist) oaths.

The moralising make-believe of political correctness preaching 'anti-racism' is thus ultimately as much of a race-card as that being played by Hague Tories, – posturing its PC credentials to win votes by declaring all racism to be 'an intolerable scandal' but raising the issue solely in order to condemn everyone who is not a paid-up Blairite, effectively, for a phenomenon which in fact exists solely because of the system which precisely all paid-up Blairites most fanatically of all support, namely capitalism.

On the streets of Peckham after Damilola Taylor's death, knowing the capitalist-system alienation which has seen literally hundreds of black youth excluded from local schools in recent years because of uncontrollable hostility to society, – the Blairites were "playing the race card worse than Hague" (in reality a meaningless comparison, solely disarming of people) – to temporarily adopt the shallow value-judgements being applied by the media to deliberately confuse people on these issues. What could be more cynically disturbing and disruptive than to declare that it was "now just a small minority of wilfully bad people" who were supposedly "ignoring all the improved conditions the Labour Government has created", etc, etc, who were allegedly intent on lawlessness, – following this up with yet more new legislation outlawing "yob culture" on the streets of Britain.

On top of New Labour's servile embrace of all the very worst aspects of fat-cat monopoly-imperialist social dominance in Britain, guaranteed to inflame feelings of resentment and injustice a hundredfold about this basically irrational, incompetent, and unfair system, – this was effectively an open declaration of class war by Blairism, – and against the very most disadvantaged sectors of society of all, and most of them black.

Although obviously only in despair about not getting back into office, the race-card played by Hague Tories, – (frightening middle-class whites about a serious decline in Met Police morale), – does however warn people (who might still be doubting it) that the social and political climate in Britain is rapidly growing seriously worse. As out-of-touch and reactionary as they are, the Tories remain a major significant bourgeois political party. Their calculated squawk of fear about worsening prospects of crime and racial/social strife, – done for alarmist vote purposes, –  does nonetheless reveal how bleak the crisis ahead must look to the ruling class in view of what is already being admitted in public about failing police morale, etc. 

These are startling acknowledgements that social strife can already be seen as getting out of hand at some near stage in the future.

Thus from both New Tory and New Labour, the word is that the capitalist system is degenerating rapidly, and that only major class-conflicts lie ahead.

All the more deplorable, therefore, that fake-'leftism' should be more dementedly than ever running away from an all-out revolutionary analysis of world perspectives and into the most paralysing reformist complacency imaginable, – on race and chauvinism questions as on everything else.

Most of the fake-'lefts' have taken things no further than a knee-jerk reaction against Hague for 'playing the race card', but have looked no deeper. Most have bullishly been adding the assertion that the Tories will continue to face 'deserved electoral suicide' because of this 'politics of gutter extremism', exactly echoing the very worst of the Blair groupies from Polly Toynbee to Bill Morris, and as though this obscene 'left' labourism could somehow substitute for a serious class war Marxist analysis of the real crisis facing the whole of the capitalist system, particularly all reformism. 

And they may well be wrong even about that inconsequential electoral guesswork too. Hague wound up his campaigning in his Sunday Telegraph article denouncing the 'liberal elite' around New Labour for not accepting "that it is the members of the ethnic communities themselves who are suffering the most from the post-Macpherson collapse in police morale and the rise in street crime". It is the same hypocrisy as the equally pro-capitalist Blair's, but its more populist half-truths may not necessarily fall completely on deaf ears. Even in black middle-class circles where such as the Lawrences and the Taylors seem content to be patronised as loyal Blairites, – other voices are heard (no doubt equally opportunist) echoing Hague's slightly more frank and accurate appraisals of the class-war dangers to everyone if underlying economic and social conditions deteriorate further.

Bizarrely, some fake-'lefts' have attempted a more rational assessment of Hague's devious gamble (of challenging Macpherson's 'anti-racist' shallowness as not really doing much for ethnic communities' suffering from capitalism's current crime and alienation blight), – but have merely dismissed it as 'Tory opportunism'. It is all of that, of course, and more besides. But is not the real point that by showing up the hollowness of official 'anti-racism', Hague Tories (for whatever reason) are helping to make it possible to draw huge attention to Blairite reformism's utter bankruptcy, – from a class-war point of view, and not just from the doubtful advantage for Conservative electoral purposes.

There would be nothing unusual, of course, about such a paradoxical-appearing phenomenon. Just the opposite. It is precisely crisis-ridden degenerating bourgeois society itself which, – scarred and divided by desperate conflict, does most of the initial educating of the working class that the capitalist system is suddenly going very badly wrong, on top of all its normal nastiness, injustice, and incompetence. 

It is the worst self-defeating idiocy for the supposed 'socialist' movement (the 57 varieties of Trot and Revisionist fake-'lefts') to continue ignoring the revolutionary-crisis aspects of capitalism for as long as possible in order to carry on playing into the bourgeoisie's hands by concentrating mostly on just mere electoral prospects (for themselves in the bogus 'Socialist Alliance' and for others, refusing even to point out consistently (or even at all in most cases) that parliamentary 'democracy' is the monopoly-imperialist system's most vicious deception and most dangerous treachery of all).

The 'liberal elite' journalists themselves are already admitting that something is going seriously wrong with the shallow Blair government's routine, and complacent reformist perspectives. No less than the chairman of the Scott Trust noted in the Guardian that New Labour's playing of the 'anti-racist' card against Hague possibly represented something far nastier and more damaging than Hague's own opportunism:

"Perhaps we should applaud the truth exposed by William Hague's inept dabbling in the tragedies of two black boys in South London...

"By calling him 'disgusting' and 'disgraceful', Jack Straw did as much to play the card as he did. It was a different suit, but had a worse effect.... It was designed to have a political result, namely the portrayal of Hague as a crazed extremist who will stop at nothing....The hairtrigger alertness of both Prime Minister and Home Secretary, and the hyperbole of their righteous language, was their own playing of the race card.....making a wild, intemperate noise about race, thereby reminding ethnic and liberal minorities which side they should be on as the election comes closer.

"Hague's speech was not racist, either in text or sub-text. For Straw to call it, on that account, disgusting matches the level of rhetorical subtlety Hague himself achieved when he said the Macpherson report stigmatised all policemen as racists. Macpherson did no such thing.

But neither did Hague say anything to justify Bill Morris likening his speech to Enoch Powell talking in 1968 about the rivers of blood that would flow through English cities because of immigration. Morris's charge was grotesquely irresponsible. It was a lot more likely than Hague's words to stir up antagonisms.... On the whole it is the left, by recklessly interpreting Hague as racist, who have raised the temperature more than he did.....

"When Hague cites the whinges of individual policemen as proof of a wholesale collapse of morale, he seems to justify their complaints rather than urging them, for the sake of society, to help reform their own social order.....

"With his paragraphs of impeccable political correctness on racial murder and black mistrust of the police, he resembles neither Enoch Powell nor Margaret Thatcher....He makes a valid charge about the shortage of policemen, from which the people on housing estates, including ethnic minorities, suffer disproportionately much. But he's not alert to the inflammation already set off by his remarks.....

"But it wouldn't have happened if the left, for their part, hadn't fallen into instinctive exaggeration. The most important quality any politician can bring to public discourse on racial issues is scrupulous care with words. That applies both to comment on reality and to the depiction of other people's good or bad faith in dealing with reality. Because, mercifully, racism has become the least acceptable of all modern prejudices, spraying such a charge around needs to be done with a little more care for society than the government propaganda machine, eager to seize its moment, has showed.

"An attraction of this to ministers was, in a coarse way, political. Leaping to attack Hague as a racist, they could distract attention from their own failures as liberals. They may not have done much for civil liberties, but they're clean on this one. A feeling of virtue grips them. So, they must hope, will the constituency that deplores their reactionary record. But hyperbole, in this tinder-box, exacts a high price".

On the same day as Hugo Young's piece, another Guardian comment added the following:

"Yob" may be "boy" spelt backwards, but the ministers most responsible for the welfare of all the young are too smug, stupid, or maybe just too scared to face up to the deepest implications of destructive aggression among schoolboys and young men. Far easier to take refuge in the soft option rhetoric of law and order than to address, or even ask, the really tough questions thrown up by knifings in back alleys or boozing in the streets: questions about where the irresponsibility, amorality and sometimes chilling cruelty of young males actually comes from, what the factors are that help foster it, and how these aspects of our society can most effectively be challenged and changed. And behind these lies the hardest question of all: what do we want our young men to be for?

New Labour's failure to look this issue in the eye lies behind its inability to come to anything like terms with all the other dimensions of "the great boy problem" that currently so preoccupies society.

Look more closely at the yob culture and what we see are young men not behaving simply badly, but in precisely the sorts of ways they hope will win them manhood's spurs. Just like the politicians they strut and they pose, frantically competing to be the most bellicose—who's got the most bottle, who will be the first to chuck a chair at the police? Look at boys in general, including those who are not yobs, and the same psychological dynamics dominate.

The Times was even more outspoken:

The solicitor for Damilola Taylor's family, Neil O'May, said Damilola's parents were "very unhappy" at William Hague's attempt to make political capital from their son's death: "The use of their son's death as a political football has caused a great deal of distress. They hope that their son's death will not be used by others in this way again." Alongside was a photograph of the Home Secretary, peering sternly at us between two policemen, with the caption: "Jack Straw revisits Peckham's Oliver Goldsmith School today where Damilola Taylor was a pupil."

Whatever Damilola Taylor's death was originally about — a mobile phone, a few quid, perhaps race — it is now about the next election. 'Tellingly," the Daily Mail informed us yesterday, "it was revealed that the Taylors' solicitor, Neil O'May, is a 'passionate' Labour activist in Highgate, North London, and belongs to the left-wing firm Bindman and Partners." Ah, a real Hampstead liberal, member of the hated legal elite. This is the sound of politicians — and their media cheerleaders — in full pursuit of a general election. Tally ho.

The election won't mean much to most of those on the estate where Damilola was killed. The turnout in Camberwell and Peckham in 1997 was 55.6 per cent, the 13th lowest in the country. And this is among those registered to vote; in an area such as Camberwell and Peckham, with the fourth highest  population density in the country (103.7 persons per hectare) and the fifth highest unemployment (11.7 per cent),  many people will not officially exist at all; some of these are doubtless part of the thriving "black economy" upon which Gordon Brown launched a "war" earlier this year and which   is said to cost the economy £8 billion a year. Think how many extra police officers you could buy for that.

Not that extra police would necessarily have prevented the death of Damilola—or help now to discover who killed him. With the eyes of No 10, the Opposition and the media focused on Peckham, one can be certain the police are doing everything within their power. They are not getting anywhere because those who know who is responsible have no faith in the State and are refusing to co-operate with the police, either out of fear or apathy. The State has had to field a footballer, Rio Ferdinand, to appeal for information.

It must have seemed perfectly apt to select a celebrity, the "death of Damilola" being primarily a media event now. Mr Hague protests that the body of his speech about crime was ignored as the media focused on his comments about the Macpherson report. But advance briefings of the speech, by his allies, concentrated on precisely this angle: "William Hague will today blame a 'liberal elite' for stripping police of the power to fight crime — and contributing to the murder of Damilola Taylor", as The Sun reported.

By strange coincidence, by the time Mr Hague made the speech, police had made 11 arrests in Peckham. Armed with video cameras (they later gave footage to the media), officers seized 11 boys in dawn raids because they "congregate together in and around the area". This was a fishing expedition for information. You arrest 11 people only if you have no idea what else to do.

They didn't offer footage of the boys being released and by then the media had temporarily moved to Littlehampton, where a mixed-race 13-year-old boy had been stabbed in a case which apparently bore "chilling" similarities to Peckham. Except this was Littlehampton: turnout in the 1997 election, 69.6 per cent; population density 16.2; unemployment 2.3 per cent. When TV crews turned up in Littlehampton, residents queued for interview; they co-operated with the police, and within days two women had been charged with attempted murder.

In Peckham, the media were met with hostility and Mr Straw's first visit with protests that the area had been sterilised and dozens of police drafted in for his benefit. Residents were rightly sceptical about how long it would be before the caravan moved on. "What do you expect Jack to do?" asked an ally, defending the need for the second public visit to Damilola's school. "He has to fight back." But for whom? Mr Straw is fighting for the Government, on Mr Hague's ground. This "debate" about race will not help Peckham. Just as the impending anti-crime legislation — curfews and fixed penalty notices — is aimed at assuaging the fears of people in areas such as Littlehampton who object to teenage rowdiness on street corners, and who will co-operate with police to stop it.

Labour is almost as guilty as Mr Hague and the media of skewing the debate away from the real issues which contributed to Damilola's death — poverty, unemployment and a hopeless education. When houses in English valleys are flooded, it is not long before TV cameras move in; yet those who live in permanently damp and dilapidated housing are routinely ignored.                 

In an editorial yesterday, The Sun heralded the appointment of Colin Powell, "a black American raised in the Bronx", as proof that the United States has "delivered more equality than the old world nations such as Britain and France... The average American family does not expect handouts or pensions OR ANYTHING from its Government..." 

The average resident of the North Peckham estate probably doesn't expect much from the State either, except perhaps occasional (expensive) imprisonment. Of course we can follow the US down this route, until half of society is content and the other half is completely alienated. But then we should prepare to bear the social and financial burden of such alienation — and to admit that we don't care about the North Peckham estate or Damilola Taylor.

A communist response to this stark picture of capitalist crisis should be 'prepare the revolutionary party'. The fake-'left' response is an academic infliction of 'moral improvement' on workers, telling them to 'welcome all asylum-seekers into Britain', falling for yet another age-old imperialist stunt for diverting from revolution. Generations deserted potential revolutions in East Europe, with capitalist encouragement, in order to join in the already-established colonisation-expropriation of the American native peoples by 'surplus' population from the west. Modern migration is a similar capitalism-facilitated pressure valve, trading in bodies instead of drugs, and condoned by world imperialist control as a useful racist provocation everywhere, for use later on should revolution become a problem. 

All migrants need protecting and embracing. All migration needs exposing as an imperialist-system anti-revolutionary racket, for the present. The international working class should start urging workers everywhere that revolution is the best answer to 'hopeless' conditions, not migration, which sooner or later can only mean going from the frying pan into the fire. Enforced political asylum-seekers need helping to build those revolutions.  EPSR supporters.

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

Sinn Féin steps up denunciation of New Labour's degenerate incapacity to stand up to Orange bullying

MARTIN MCGUINNESS launched a scathing attack on British Secretary of State, Peter Mandelson, during a visit to Australia.

McGuinness, speaking prior to a meeting with the Australian Foreign Minister in Canberra, said that Mandelson has shown himself to be a "peace wrecker rather than a peace maker".

"Peter Mandelson has inherited a unique and highly developed opportunity to resolve the historic conflict in Ireland. By his mishandling of this opportunity he has retarded the search for a lasting peace in Ireland and endangered the Good Friday Agreement."

McGuinness said that the IRA's confidence-building initiative of 6 May this year was predicated on the previous day's commitments, by the British and Dublin governments, including commitments to the implementation of Patten and to demilitarisation.

"The IRA initiative was situated in this context and was wholly dependent on these commitments being honoured. The British government reneged. I believe that this was primarily the responsibility of Peter Mandelson. And not only has he not honoured commitments given to nationalists and republicans, he has pursued with enthusiasm a pro-unionist agenda ever since, opposing demilitarisation, undermining the Patten recommendations and taking the power to fly the Union flag over the departments of nationalist and republican ministers.

"In short," he said, "Peter Mandelson is a disaster".

This disaster was acknowledged by the IRA in its statement issued on Tuesday, 5 December. Reiterating its commitment to the resolution of the arms issue, which it termed as a "necessary step", the army said that this would "not happen on terms dictated by the British Government or the unionists". Outlining its fulfilment of commitments made, including the second inspection of arms dumps by the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, Óglaigh na hÉireann said that the British Government have failed to deliver on their promises. 

"The British Government's approach to demilitarisation and their refusal to address the Good Friday Agreement's requirements for a new beginning to policing and other matters represents a failure by them to honour their commitments," said the statement. 

Sinn Féin Assembly member for North Belfast, Gerry Kelly, welcomed the IRA statement as "a positive development in which the IRA asserts its commitments". Of the Army's criticism of British intransigence on Patten and demilitarisation, Kelly said that what republicans require is "substantial, in-your-face demilitarisation.”

"The IRA has honoured all its obligations. It has demonstrated courage and vision. The onus of responsibility for real political progress now rests with the British Government."

Kelly said that republicans and nationalists need to be careful and considered in their approach to the policing issue, amid increasing signs that some politicians and community leaders are now willing to toe the British line.

"Speaking to some Sinn Féin and SDLP supporters of late, I pick up a growing wariness that some parties might jump soon on the basis that the British Government has convinced them that there is no other choice or that further radical change is impossible.

"Sinn Féin stayed out of the 1996 Forum, when the SDLP jumped on, only to jump off later. The 'Heads of Agreement' document was presented by the British Government to the political parties in January 1998, which substantially diluted the Framework Document of 1997. Sinn Féin refused to accept it; there were those tempted to go with it even though we were at a crucial point in the negotiations.

"Sinn Féin, the SDLP, the Catholic Church and the Irish government have, from their separate directions, come to the same conclusions as Clifford Shearing." Shearing, who himself sat on the Patten Commission, came out last month in denouncing the Police Bill passed by the British Government as a subversion of the Patten Report.

"Let none of us jump to Mandelson's drum," Kelly said. "It is far better to keep the British Government at the drawing board until they get it right than to go for something fundamentally flawed that would perpetuate the disaster of the RUC, possibly under another name." •