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 1073 Jan 23 2001                                                                                                      25p

A widespread deep-rooted network of corrupt crooks is about to take over the government of the United States. No change there, then. The all-round humbug of the 'internet baby' soap-opera diverts attention briefly, but the massive economic-crisis problem facing the Bush mafia is and the rest of the West does not go away, only worsens. Minus their added bullshit, the Tiananmen Papers merely confirm the correctness, but the wretchedly muddled belatedness, of the CPC's socialist stand, plus the Goebbels-style propaganda hysteria of the Western press. Trot and Stalinist anti-theory philistines, continuing to flog their 'Alliance' and SLP dead horses of 'no crisis' electoralism, will fail to brainwash many.

US imperialism under Bush will be exactly the same as US imperialism under Clinton, - exactly the same as modern American monopoly capitalism has ever been, needing to dominate world politics and economics or lose its fabulously privileged position on the planet. The American bourgeoisie correctly fears that if its non-stop, relentless, warmongering, subversive, aggressive bullying to control international developments should falter, then the imperialist system's whole ruling-class position would be put in jeopardy. So the essence of the USA's permanent foreign policy, - counter-revolutionary, military interventionist anti-communism, and the perpetual nuclear armsrace, - will remain unchanged.

American domineering supremacy is the vital modern mould of monopoly-capitalism's international 'free market'. It can now no longer function any other way. The accumulated wealth of US imperialism's long reign is now so vast that the conglomeration of technological, military, and political capital needed for bossing the planet is beyond the grasp of any other bourgeoisie. An effective amalgam of rival ruling classes to get together a challenge to American hegemony is ruled out because of their own insoluble national differences within such a longstanding unchangeable culture of international market competitiveness and empire-building conflicts. And in any case such a challenge to US imperialist domination would mean such a destructive bitter struggle that the world would never be the same again anyway.

Thus the precise reactionary character and gloss of the new Bush regime (compared to the precise reactionary character of the outgoing Clinton regime, or any regime in modern US history before that) makes only for episodic differences and a changed general shallow cultural flavour, - not an alteration in any of the essentials of the USA’s imperialist stance over the world. The Bush vicious record in graft, pollution, and civil rights as Governor of Texas is just a routine detail that would not have been greatly out of place during any American presidency in the light of the overall murderously exploitative savagery of US imperialism's whole reign since it began; and his supposed stupidity and philistinism is merely par for the course.

What the world has to look forward to in the Bush era is the unalterable relentless deepening of the free-world economic crisis caused by intolerable capital surpluses, or 'overproduction'. The accumulation of monopoly capital through exploiting the whole world is now so vastly top-heavy that the international markets are simply going to collapse under the burden of mountainous capital 'surpluses' which can no longer all make a profit, and which must therefore hurl themselves into a cut-throat competitive frenzy for sheer survival, -  but with most of them (or even all of them, in certain circumstances, discussed below) having to go out of the game. It will be blood and war all the way.

Two avenues of further development open up, - world revolution, and revolution by the US working class itself.

The Western media, under their constantly disciplined directional 'advice' from the American CIA (through the newspaper and TV groups business-monopoly ownerships), have deliberately diverted attention, during recent days, away from the prospect of an international markets collapse, (sparked off yet again by Greenspan's US bank-rate-reduction panic (see EPSR 1071)), in order to 'remind' the world, via the newly-raked-up Tiananmen Papers nonsense, of 'how dreadful' would be the alternative to capitalist anarchy running the planet, namely disciplined communist revolution.

But the capitalist press itself (and its hold over the public) would perish if it starved itself of all news, and so the real world keeps on intruding, albeit devoid of all the really crucial explanation and analysis.

The Philippines 'popular revolution' to oust Estrada (in reality a Western-approved middle-class coup before something even worse happened) could hardly be ignored; and while the interesting aspects of mass public revolt against a corrupt and incompetent ruling class have been able to be covered up behind Estrada's 'safe' replacement, Gloria Arroyo, - the truly fascinating perspective still remains for all to see, - i.e. the obvious nonsense of the supposed 'recovery' of the Asian 'tiger economies' from their terrifying mini-collapse of three years ago. The three giant-population countries, - Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines, - all remain in varying degrees and styles (relative to the positions they started out from) of absolute turmoil.

It is only now, after he has been forced out and safely replaced by Arroyo, that the 'free' world media is happy to agree that Estrada was indeed an incompetent crook and deserved to be pushed out. Up to a week ago, he was "nevertheless the constitutionally-elected president" (nudge, nudge, unlike China's communist bosses), and was internationally accorded all due deference and respect, especially by US imperialism, which tells everyone else what to do on all such issues. Just like all previous corrupt goons and tyrants running the Third World on behalf of Western monopoly-capitalist interests, pictures will abound of Estrada happily posing with various 'free world leaders' in sublime anti-communist harmony. 

But the cracks in this utterly fraudulent 'free world' edifice only grow relentlessly wider and deeper. In addition to ludicrous government corruption in Manila, which will only continue and get even worse under Arroyo or any one else representing bourgeois interests, insurrectionary turmoil had already been scarring other parts of the Philippines for years with civil war and guerrilla war. And Indonesia, four times the population, is in even greater perpetual civil-war uproar since the overthrow 2 years ago of its long-reigning corrupt dictator Suharto, for 33 years one of the jewels in US imperialism's world-domination crown. Serious communist revolution has not re-started yet, as far as is obvious from the more accessible brief Western reports - (the Communist Party was physically wiped out under CIA guidance as one of Suharto's first moves in 1965 when the general seized power, brutally slaying one million communist supporters)- and a joke 'new broom' has been stitched up in the Philippines before red revolt had started flourishing there. 

But what does the West do next??? The biggest cover-up conceals that there exists no solution anywhere to the global capitalist economic catastrophe of having credit-created so much 'surplus' capital (in order to keep communist revolution at bay everywhere) that the IMF and Washington have killed the goose that lays their golden eggs. In a world already awash with unrepayable debt, and choking on it, the only thing that the West can keep doing every time that profits stagnate, bankruptcies mount, and whole markets threaten to collapse, - is pour in more 'good' loan money after bad, swelling the already intolerable capital 'surpluses' even more.

Despite the temporary news blackout on the coming Big Crash, this gigantic 'overproduction' problem, and its devious covering-up by never being fully analysed or described as such, nevertheless still relentlessly finds its way into the capitalist press.

Japan presents the 	classic case of accumulated monopoly capital 'surpluses' which now choke the system and prevent all capital from functioning smoothly any more, threatening the banks themselves with collapse (Japan had 8 of the world's 10 biggest banks at one stage, the driving force behind Japan's world trade conquest) and the currency too. A tucked-away corner of this week's Times keeps this mega-story quietly ticking over:

Why are economists worried about the Japanese economy? Japan, the world's second-largest economy, has been in the grip of financial slump for much of the past decade. Hopes last year that the economy had at last turned the corner now seem premature.

The country's continued under-performance has become a central issue after the unexpected deterioration in the US. With America slowing, growth in another region will have to accelerate if the global economy is to avoid a downturn. All the signs are that it will not be Japan that picks up the baton of global growth from the US.

What are Japan's main problems? A series of economic shocks in the early 1990s, including the bursting of the stock market and property bubbles, triggered a sharp slowdown in growth. This led to falling retail prices, or deflation. Falling prices undermined already fragile consumer confidence and dissuaded consumers from spending money. Japan is locked into a vicious circle in which falling growth sends prices lower, which knocks consumer confidence, which undermines growth.

Japan's difficulties have been compounded by the so-called "liquidity trap" - the truism that central banks cannot push interest rates below zero. Japanese interest rates (currently just one quarter of one percentage point) have been hovering at or just above zero for a number of years. Yet the economy is refusing to respond.

What can be done if interest rate medicine is not working? If monetary policy does not work, fiscal policy - or tax and spending - is the next port of call. The Japanese Government has launched several enormous spending packages in recent years to try to rescue the economy, all to little avail.

Japan's Government has been financing its spending by issuing debt, but there is a limit to how far this can go. Already market analysts believe that the level of Japanese debt is too high, and it is doubtful whether the Government can afford many more rescue attempts.

Are there any other solutions?  Some economists have urged Japan to pursue inflation actively by allowing its central bank to print money. But this is a radical step, and one that the Government has yet to pursue, for fear that inflation will spiral out of control. 

Switching unrepayable loans from overreaching banking imperialism to overreaching bourgeois state structures is an obvious old ploy to try to boost confidence and to calm panic, but it cannot have the slightest impact on the underlying capitalist-market problem itself, - that too much capital is now chasing too few profits in an ever-increasing imbalance which will go on getting worse, and stagnating all growth, and stagnating all production itself in due course, - until deliberate destruction of capital 'surpluses' begins.

This starts with cut-throat competition within individual markets, driving big players towards bankruptcy such as is now unfolding in the international car market, for example, threatening to wipe out the whole British car-production industry, for instance, having already bankrupted most independent British car-production firms long ago; and from there it easily goes on to inter-imperialist trade war as typical complaints come up that country X is unfairly subsidising its car manufacturers, or country Y is illegally placing hidden tariffs on imports from rival trading nations, etc, etc.

When that level of open chauvinistic hostility also gets nowhere near solving the underlying problems for the international capitalist market system, then deliberate punitive political sanctions begin to get hurled around; devastating and humiliating major bankruptcies are blamed on other countries; accusations are made that rival nations are "exporting their unemployment to us", etc; working-class unrest starts to grow rapidly at the declining economy and falling living standards; and in no time at all, the talk is all again of a new inter-imperialist war looming.

Two inter-imperialist world wars, - and their consequences in successful communist revolutions, - governed the whole character of the 20th century. Their like will dominate the events of world history even more in the 21st century. The regional mini-collapse three years ago of the young Asia 'tiger' economies was a foretaste of the eventual consequences of the general uncontrollable crisis-circumstance which has the whole imperialist economic system by the throat. The IMF-aided 'recovery' of the 'tiger' economies has been patchy to say the least and a revolutionary catastrophe (from the point of view of bourgeois stability and overall US imperialist control) in the case of the most populous states, Indonesia and the Philippines. But in Japan, where the underlying problem of inevitable long and deep capitalist slump (following the most unprecedentedly long and soaring capitalist boom created in all history) represents the system's difficulties at their most profound quintessence, then there has been no 'recovery' at all, as the capitalist press itself gloomily spells out.

Japan has avoided all revolutionary turmoil so far, it is true. But how long can that last??? Its economy has ticked over because its export industries are still flooding the world. But for how much longer can the USA afford to go on running the mightiest, most alarming trade deficits in all history (done precisely to bale out ailing 'free world' economies elsewhere, to keep the wolf of communist revolution from the door)???? And especially how long can this sleight-of-hand, hiding economic capitalist catastrophe, be kept going by the USA now that its own joke 'Goldilocks' economy can no longer be kept 'not too hot, nor too cold, but just right'??? Profit forecasts continue to tumble everywhere. Bankruptcies threaten all over. The Wall Street stock exchange, governing business sentiment worldwide, remains teetering on the brink of the greatest, most devastating crash ever. The most clever and rational system of society yet is in deep denial, just lying to itself about how monstrous and insoluble are its international political economic problems. Replacing Clinton global-village idiocy with Bush global-village idiocy is a change without a difference.

The entire spectrum of 'nice' bourgeois critical-realist politics has been pumping out full blast for a week about The Tiananmen Papers to try to revive middle-class fears about the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to distract attention from the anarchic, warmongering 'free world' economic chaos. But reading carefully, any worker with half a brain would see that the real horror of Tiananmen Square was the pathetic revisionist confusion of the CPC leadership in taking nearly two months to rout the counter-revolutionary stunt organised by the CIA and pro-American petty bourgeois elements inside and outside China wanting the free market to replace the planned workers state for the good of their wallets. The CPC can see now from the Soviet Union's subsequent catastrophe that listening to imperialism's "free market" blandishments, as Gorbachev did with his Stalinist revisionist inheritance, was a disaster. Its leadership should have seen more clearly then what a disgusting counter-revolutionary stunt were the petty bourgeois pro-American protests for 'more democracy' there, and smashed them much sooner. To this day, the CPC leadership still do not take Western imperialism's worldwide counter-revolutionary conspiracy seriously enough, because they continue to lack, or fail to exhibit, the faintest grasp of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary philosophy for a world socialist revolution as the only final answer to capitalist warmongering and bourgeois-imperialist tyranny on earth.

Note halfway through how the great 'democrat' posturer in the revisionist leadership, Zhao, arrogantly announces his refusal to accept the vote against him in the Standing Committee. Note also, near the end, how these capitalist press claims and admissions slither over the giant propaganda fraud hammered into the Western world for 12 years about a non-existent "massacre of thousands in Tiananmen Square", etc, - admitting the truth that none were killed there, and only 200 deaths all told (and a third of them soldiers and policemen and other officials butchered by the counter-revolutionaries), but failing to give any account of their own grotesque responsibility for continuing to allow these Goebbels-Hitler style warmongering lies to still be hawked openly all round the 'free world' to this day:

Li: "There are open calls for the Government to step down, appeals for nonsense like 'open investigations into and discussion of the questions of China's governance and power' and calls to institute broader elections and revise the Constitution, to lift restrictions on political parties and newspapers, and to get rid of the category of  'counter-revolutionary' crimes."

Deng: "This is no ordinary student movement. A tiny minority is exploiting the students; they want to confuse the people and throw the country into chaos. This is a well-planned plot whose real aim is to reject the Communist Party and the socialist system at the most fundamental level."

Zhao Ziyang, Party General Secretary and a leading reformer, argued that his conciliatory line of democracy and dialogue was the best way of ending the impasse.

Li Peng took a different line:

"Some colleges around the country are nearly in anarchy right now; wall posters that slander Party and Government leaders have appeared all over the place.

"And they call this democracy? This is freedom? How is this different from the Cultural Revolution? If we let it go this could pull our whole country into chaos."

On May 13 Zhao, increasingly weary and out-manoeuvred both by his opponents in the Politburo and by events on the streets, took his case directly to Deng. He received short shrift. 

Deng: "Dialogue is fine, but the point is to solve the problem. We can't be led around by the nose. This movement's dragged on for too long, almost a month now. We have to be decisive. How can we progress when things are in an utter mess?" 

Yang (the Party Elder whom Zhao had taken with him on his visit to Deng as an ally): "Gorbachev will be here in two days, and today I hear that the students are going to announce a hunger strike. They obviously want to turn up the heat and get a lot of international attention."

THE NEXT DAY, Wang Zhen (a former peasant soldier) also visited Deng at home and told him: "There are two voices inside the Party, Comrade Xiaoping. If we don't come down hard on these students right now, there'll be no peace for the Party, no peace for the country, and heads will roll."

ON MAY 16 Deng met the visiting Gorbachev to normalise Sino-Soviet relations. Later, the five man Politburo Standing Committee, plus two Elders Yang and Bo Yibo, who attended as Deng's representatives gathered in emergency session.

Yang: "We're supposed to have had two sessions of summit talks [with Gorbachev] today in the Great Hall of the People but we had to meet in the Diaoyutai [in the western suburbs] instead. That's the kind of anarchy we're in."

The Standing Committee convened again the following morning, this time at Deng's home. "Of course we want to build socialist democracy, but we can't possibly do it in a hurry, and still less do we want that Western-style stuff. If our one billion people jumped into multiparty elections, we'd get chaos like the 'all-out civil war' we saw during the Cultural Revolution." 

WHEN THE STANDING Committee resumed its meeting on the evening of May 17, Zhao reiterated his opposition to martial law: "Martial law could give us total control of the situation, yes, but think of the terror it will strike in the minds of Beijing's citizens and students. Where will that lead?"

"Give them no mercy!" the retired general Wang Zhen exploded. "These kids don't know how good they have got it. When we were their age we lived in a forest of rifles and a rain of bullets... If the students don't leave Tiananmen on their own, the People's Liberation Army should go in and carry them out."

Deadlocked the committee - now minus Zhao, who said he could not accept the outcome of the vote and would resign as General Secretary - gathered in Deng's house on May 18 to bow to the Elders' advice.

Deng: "We old comrades are meeting you today because we feel we have no choice. The Standing Committee should have come up with a plan long ago, but things kept dragging on, and even today there's no decision. Beijing has been chaotic for more than a month now and we've been extremely restrained. What other country in the world would watch more than a month of marches and demonstrations in its capital and do nothing about it?

"I've discussed it with comrades and we all feel Beijing just can't go on like this."

Li Peng used the occasion to maximum advantage, playing on Zhao's absence and the Elders' fears about the consequences of letting things drift. He emphasised that the unrest was the work of a small group of plotters, or "blackhands".

"All kinds of people are strutting around on stage these days. There were posters in the crowd yesterday attacking Comrade Xiaoping. A proclamation called Comrade Xiaoping an 'emperor without a crown' and a 'dictator'.

Wang Zhen: "These people are really asking for it! They should be grabbed as soon as they pop out again. Give them no mercy! The students are crazy if they think this handful of people can overthrow our Party and Government."

Bo Yibo: "The whole imperialist Western world wants to make socialist countries leave the socialist road and become satellites in the system of international monopoly capitalism."

On the evening of April 29, the students erected the Goddess of Democracy  - a huge plaster statue modelled on the American Statue of Liberty. On the morning of June 2, the Elders met the three remaining members of the Politburo Standing Committee. Again Li Peng took a hard line.

"The sacred and solemn Tiananmen Square has been reduced to a front-line command centre of the turmoil, the gathering place for hostile forces, foreign and domestic, and a counter-revolutionary base from which to launch furious attacks on the Party and Government."

Wang Zhen: "Those bloody bastards! Who do they think they are, trampling on sacred ground like Tiananmen for so long? They're really asking for it! We should send the troops right now to grab those counter-revolutionaries, Comrade Xiaoping!

"What's the People's Liberation Army for, anyway? What are martial law troops for? They're not supposed to just sit around and eat! They're supposed to grab counter-revolutionaries! We've got to do it or we'll never forgive ourselves. We've got to do it or the common people will rebel. Anybody who tries to overthrow the Communist Party deserves death and no burial!"

Deng argued that the Western world had thrown its weight behind "the so-called democrats or opposition in China - people who, in fact, are the scum of the Chinese nation.

"Some Western countries use things like 'human rights' to criticise us, but what they're really after is our sovereignty. Those Western countries that play power politics have no right at all to talk about human rights."

If the turmoil keeps going, it could continue until Party and state authority are worn away. Then there would be civil war. Once war got started, blood would flow like a river, and where would human rights be then?"

Premier Li Peng accused US diplomats of  'collecting intelligence aggressively'. 'Almost every day, and especially at night,' he told the elders,  'they would go and loiter at Tiananmen or at schools such as Beijing University and Beijing Normal.' Li, who still ranks number two in the Chinese leadership,  called overseas Chinese dissidents 'the scum of the nation' who were financed by the CIA.

"A major scheme of the organisers and plotters of turmoil" he warned, "has been to occupy Tiananmen Square."

Yang Shangkun indicated that "The thinking of all officers and soldiers has been thoroughly prepared. After nearly two week of political thought work, all officers and soldiers have deepened their understanding of the severity and complexity of this struggle."

Wang Zhen: "We should announce in advance to those people occupying the Square that we're coming in. They can listen or not as they chose, but then we move in.  

"If it causes deaths, that's their own fault.  We can't be soft or merciful toward anti-Party, anti-socialist elements."

The NEXT AFTERNOON (June 3) the three remaining members of the Standing Committee, together with Yang Shangkun and several high-ranking military officers, held an emergency meeting. 

Yang Shangkun: "You all get the picture now. I've also just been in touch with Comrade Xiaoping, and he has asked me to relay two points to everyone.

"The first is: solve the problem before dawn tomorrow. He means our martial law troops should completely finish their task of clearing the Square before sun-up. The second is: be reasonable with the students and make sure they see the logic in what we're doing. We must do everything we can to avoid bloodshed. Let me repeat: no bloodshed within Tiananmen Square - full stop."

AT 4AM THE lights were switched off on Tiananmen Square. When they came back on 30 minutes later, tanks, armoured cars and rows of soldiers wielding batons advanced from the north-west side, toppling the Goddess of Democracy and forcing the students to retreat. Dawn broke at 5.20am and by 5.40am the square had been cleared.

However, a later despatch claimed - as the Party has done ever since - that in the Square "martial law troops did not shoot a single person to death and no person was run over by a tank". 

"We've all seen the videotape of the young man blocking the tank. Our tank gave way time and again, but he just stayed there, right in the way, and even crawled up onto the tank, and still the soldiers held their fire.

"That says it all. If our soldiers had fired, the repercussions would have been very different. . . It's amazing they could stay cool and patient in a spot like that."

The fighting was most severe in the area known as Muxidi. "At Muxidi Bridge the troops were stopped once again. Then regular troops came rushing on to the bridge, chanting, 'If no one attacks me, I attack no one. But if people attack me, I must attack them."

The Tiananmen Papers contain similar figures for the final death to those the Government released to the public later in June - about 200 killed.

Though the troops were ordered to fire only in the last resort they seem not to have fired in the square itself, but many were killed on the approach roads.

"Infantrymen led the way, firing into the air," the army reported to the leaders. "Then the soldiers - with the first two rows in a kneeling position and those in back standing - pointed their weapons at the crowd."

"At 10.30pm, under a barrage of rocks, the troops opened fire."

The documents make it clear that the senior leaders were kept fully informed, contrary to speculation at the time. The state security ministry reported that  "some soldiers lost their self-control and fired wildly as people shouted 'fascists' and threw stones."

The documents put the death toll in the region of 200 - fewer than most estimates, though independent scholars no longer believe claims that "thousands died".

ON JUNE 16, Deng gave his uncompromising interpretation of the crisis to the new Politburo Standing Committee. 

"The recent events show how crucial it is that China sticks with the socialist road and the leadership of the Party. If we don't, then all we'll ever be is somebody else's satellite country. The world marketplace is pretty competitive; it's not easy to break in. Only socialism can save China and turn it into a developed country. On this point the riots have actually taught us something. They've been a huge wake-up call. China has no future outside the socialist road." 

The reactionary reality of this small-scale counter-revolutionary putsch is clear even from these carefully selected documents (assuming they are genuine), treacherously handed to the West by another pro-American stooge to try to whip up a military interventionist counter-revolutionary hysteria among the more reactionary Western imperialist circles. It could almost be wished that US imperialism under Bush might even try it, - a) to finally wake up the CPC to the actual counter-revolutionary reality of the warmongering 'free market' world we live in; and b) to give US imperialism another catastrophic defeat, to go with their Vietnam disaster. 

It is defeats in warmongering which have so far in history provided proletarian revolution with its best opportunities for overthrowing the imperialist order. That general pattern will not change. Third World communist revolutions are the only final answer to Western monopoly-imperialist domination and exploitation. The dictatorship of the proletariat in the imperialist states themselves will be the only final way in which the working class can at last escape from being the (often unwilling) stooges of Western colonial warmongering, and the perennial fall guys for the worst burdens, always, of the periodic economic slumps (which capitalist 'free market' anarchy can never avoid), - frequently ending up as cannon fodder in inter-imperialist wars, the worst slump burdens of all. 

And as for the artificially-maintained Western scenario of a basically 'nice' world which is only marred by the very occasional 'human rights abuses' (always perpetrated, of course, by some 'evil' communist regime, or other, or by some similar 'anti-Western tyrant', etc), - the capitalist press itself is invariably always putting the record straight with its occasional restrained admissions of usually past Western wrongdoing somewhere or other, just to 'set the record straight', and to continue the pretence of 'free-press objectivity', etc, etc. 

But just note the difference. No one could have missed the Tiananmen Papers furore running throughout the press all week, all over some truly insignificant anti-communist putsch-posturing by literally just a handful of counter-revolutionary petty bourgeois ringleaders who are completely out of tune with the general massive popularity of China's socialist revolution, and who were nevertheless put down with ludicrous kid gloves. But the following truly terrifying admissions from the same week's Times, effectively acknowledging fascist genocidal tyranny with maximum brutality as virtually the standard Western treatment of the exploited Third World when some 'uppitiness' somewhere or other needs 'disciplining', - caused not a ripple or an echo anywhere:

With the tenth anniversary of the Gulf War bombing campaign, and the second anniversary of the Yugoslav one looming I last week visited the greatest bomb-site in history. It is the forgotten Plain of Jars, surely the world's most unobtrusive battlefield. For nine years, from 1964 to 1973, the tiny nation of Laos was bombed more ferociously than anywhere before or since. The bombing failed: Laos was not "bombed back to the Stone Age", as promised by US generals. It was merely bombed into communism. Communist it remains to this day.

The beautiful plain, in reality a long valley flanked by high karst mountains, is still a morass of craters, each containing unknown horrors. Its settlements were more blasted than the Somme, more flattened than Dresden. The 500-year-old provincial capital of Xiang Khouang saw its temples reduced to dustclouds by B52s, described afterwards as "looking like Hiroshima". Nobody knows how many people died. The only memorial I saw was to the 320 villagers of Tham Piu, forced from their homes into a cave, where a direct hit from a T28 rocket incinerated them. When the regimes of South-East Asia are told to hand over their "war criminals", they ask in sincere naïvety: "Will Americans be there too?"

I am not much given to battlefield tourism. I have never been a soldier, and find the silent detritus of war impossible to relate to history's grand logic. We are told that central Laos has always been contested land, and that Hmong tribesmen used as mercenaries by the Americans were always foes of the Vietnamese. If half their menfolk died and two thirds became refugees to keep Laos "safe from communism", such are the cruelties of history. Laos was proof only that the weak get hurt when the strong go to war.

The Laos war was kept secret for six years, as the CIA and its special air force units supported local troops against the communist Pathet Lao and Vietcong. Though devoid of legal or moral justification, it was an efficient war. Commanders freed of bureaucracy and political scrutiny fought well. Strike aircraft were effective in close support of the Hmong ground troops. Laos was probably the last war in which airmen took greater risks than ground troops, notably the forward fire control Cessna pilots. Christopher Robbins's account of their war, The Ravens, is one of the best battlefield books I know.

Robbins's book is a textbook on what air superiority can achieve, and what it cannot. Its villain is the US Air Force, whose incompetence in South-East Asia was of Crimean dimensions. By the time Nixon and Kissinger sent the Air Force's "strategic" B52s to the Plain of Jars in 1970 - against the pleading of local commanders - the Vietnam War was lost. But punitive bombing exacted a terrible revenge on Laos, as on Cambodia to the south. Laos suffered a monsoon of destruction, with a peak of 500 sorties a day. The B52s used napalm, defoliants and weapons which, on any definition, were "chemical". They bombed the plain's neolithic jars, like bombing Stonehenge. At night they hosed anything that moved with cannon. Yet the enemy calmly went on building roads and moving troops and supplies. The bombs were ineffective.

America is still "in denial" over Laos, where its chief concern is to search for the bodies of missing American pilots. It cares less for the Laotian bodies still to come. There are estimated to be some nine million unexploded bombs and bomblets (or "bombies" the size of tennis balls) littering the country. They constitute a gigantic, unmapped minefield. The BLU and CBU canister weapons contained hundreds of delayed action bomblets, each with timers and 250 ball bearings. They were and are wholly unreliable, a quarter to a third not exploding as intended. Today's mutilated victims fill the hospitals and beg in the streets. A quarter of the casualties are small boys.

No remotely civilised state should use such weapons. Britain uses them. The RAF dropped them on Iraq in 1991 and on Yugoslavia in 1999. I have no doubt they are being dropped on Iraq this very day. They are no more accurate or sophisticated than those used in Laos 30 years ago, more than a quarter reportedly failing to explode in Yugoslavia.  

Indeed rules requiring pilots to fly above missile range make them even more dangerous. No modern air force would dare risk a Cessna for precision fire control, as in Laos. 

Missed targets are not "accidents".  They are the calculable risk of using specific weapons from specific heights on specific targets. A Cessna Raven would have prevented the disastrous bombing of the Kosovan refugee column or the Serbian commuter train.  Cluster bombs are disproportionately horrific weapons. Dud cluster bombs are random landmines. The British Government supposedly signed the 1997 Landmine Convention and its Mines Advisory Group is even active in the Plain of Jars. The International Development Secretary, Clare Short, likes to be photographed in "Diana-style" mine-clearing garb. Yet Ms Short sat in the Cabinet that approved the cluster bombing of Yugoslavia, including the daylight massacre in Nis marketplace. I recall her on Any Questions? as a vociferous champion of the bombing. The estimated 14,000 unexploded bombs with which her Government "seeded" the (mostly Kosovan) landscape are far more dangerous than landmines. Minefields are usually mapped and may blow off a leg. A bombie may lurk anywhere and its makers promise death over 1,000 square metres. How Ms Short finds bombies acceptable and mines not is a mystery.

Laos is a land of grim lessons for the bombing lobby. It showed the worth of close air support in the heat of battle. But this required pilots brave enough to engage the enemy with precision at close quarters. The politics of virtual war make this no longer an option. Pilots must fly high and safe. Smart missiles may nowadays compensate for the "lack of eyeball", but they require static targets, and the RAF is too poor to afford many Tomahawks. Three quarters of its Yugoslavia bombs were "dumb" - and their accuracy is now accepted as poor to dreadful. The military case for Nato's bombing strategy has been reduced in most debates to: "Well, we won in the end".

The contribution of bombing to the conflicts in Iraq and Yugoslavia has been heralded as a new era of risk-free, airborne coercion. So said The Economist last week. The historian John Keegan claimed in yesterday's Daily Telegraph that "air power, technology and international morality now march in step", making the global triumph of democracy unstoppable. This is surely mad.  Strategic bombing did not oust the Iraqis from Kuwait or the Serbs from Kosovo. This needed an actual or threatened ground assault. So-called 'strategic bombing' of non-military targets in Serbia and Iraq did nothing to topple their respective regimes. Slobodan Milosevic went only when voted from power and deserted by his army. Saddam Hussein is still there. Close air support has a role in any war. But the photogenic nature of strategic bombing makes it no more effective today than it was in Europe in 1945 or South-East Asia in 1970.

The bombing of Laos ranks among the most obscene acts of war. It was wanton destruction, power without restraint divorced from the purpose of battle, which is to take and hold territory. Laos, thank God, is recovering. But each week the echoes of that power still explode across its landscape, as they do across the plains of Iraq and Yugoslavia. Like medieval armies salting fields and poisoning wells, modern air forces leave behind them weapons which they know will sprout death for decades to come. I am told that not a single Cabinet minister protested against their use.

Helping the rest of the press to ignore Simon Jenkins' piece on Bombs that turn our leaders into butchers were all the crocodile tears that were able to be shed about the purchased 'internet twins'. After similar buckets of hypocrisy to that poured out the previous week over the 8-year-old Anna Climbie, left to die in agony by all capitalist Britain's 'caring' authorities, the remarkable thing here was the crass contradiction that the usual attempted individual scapegoating produced. Not the capitalist system to blame over Anna Climbie, (a routine case of child neglect under the stress and depression-creating 'free-market' ratrace which leaves the poorest half of humanity feeling permanently inadequate), but the overworked local child-welfare department and its local child-protection police-liaison office. Change the scene to the sordid 'internet twins' case, and a much easier scapegoat can be instantly found in the Kilshaws. And the two tiny babies? Handed over to the overworked local child-welfare department and its local child-protection police-liaison office, to universal applause. So that's all right then.  

Asking 'so who can look after children successfully under capitalism' or 'who can be trusted to deal with difficult cases' is posing the wrong question. The issue is: "Why is such a simple matter of rearing offspring turned so frequently into such a complicated nightmare at this fag-end of the bourgeois-capitalist epoch?". The only worthwhile coverage in all the phony hysteria, scapegoating the ridiculous Kilshaws, came in the capitalist press admissions that beyond the high-profile Internet adoptions-racketeering lies a far more damning condemnation of impoverished Third-World life, hideously further tormented by its juxtaposition to ridiculous First-World consumerist affluence and commodity philistinism:

The Observer has discovered that aspiring parents are using the internet to choose babies from some of the world's poorest countries and paying for them to be brought to America, enabling them to be the proud parents of a newborn baby within weeks.

'I know adults from Germany who have ordered Guatemalan children from American websites,' said Bala Gopal, Unicef's senior child protection adviser in Guatemala. 'They travel to America to pick them up and can be home within days.'

Before the internet, couples were generally restricted to working with the adoption agencies in their area, Gopal maintains. With the aid of the internet, however, parents are able to seek out and contact agencies that work with children from countries with little, if any, adoption legislation.

'The high international demand for children and the poverty experienced by most Guatemalan families has created a situation where the processing of adoptions occurs according to the laws of supply and demand,' he said. 'This effectively results in illegal obtaining of children, who are then transferred to corrupt lawyers who give them the papers they need to enter America for adoption.'

While the majority of inter-country adoptions are above board and provide a much needed, loving home for children orphaned or abandoned by poverty-stricken families, the internet-facilitated adoption of illegally-obtained children is a growing trade that is causing experts serious concern.

'There is a lawless and unregulated side to the reality of adoption,' said Cindy Freidmutter. executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Institute, a New York adoption policy group. 'The children are brought into the country legally but they are removed from their birth mothers using all sorts of tricks, from theft to force.'

Dr Dana Johnson, director of the respected International Adoption Clinic in California, believes the problem is growing. 'When people are desperate for children, the law is routinely ignored. This is happening now in any country where you can bribe officials, where corruption is pervasive and where money talks.'

The forthcoming ratification of the Hague Convention will make it harder to adopt children without the natural mother's express permission but experts believe the convention, drawn up in 1991 long before the internet played any role in facilitating adoptions, will not solve the problem.

'We must wait until the Second World Congress Against the Commercial and Sexual Exploitation of Children takes place in Oklahoma at the end of the year before the internet's role in these kinds of adoptions can be really dealt with' said Gopal. 'Until then, almost nothing can be done to stop these dirty adoptions taking place.'

JOSEFA Ceballos was told her baby was dead as soon as she woke up after the birth. She wasn't allowed to see his body, the nurse said, it had already been disposed of. Ceballos had better get used to the idea and, she added, get a move on and leave - the hospital needed her bed.

'I felt like my life had exploded' Ceballos said. 'I wanted to die: he was my first born. Those people tore my heart open.' As 14-year old Ceballos wept and prepared to return to her shanty town on the Guatemalan-Mexican border, an expectant, wealthy couple in California were putting the final touches to the bedroom of the baby they had been praying for, for more than 10 months.

Within two days, the excited pair hoped to be proud parents. If all went according to plan, a woman would call at their house to collect the last instalment of' the $20,000 they had agreed on and, in exchange, would hand over a healthy baby boy, along with a receipt and the child's visa.

But it did not all go according to plan. Ceballos was not the defenceless girl that the corrupt hospital staff had assumed and, thanks to the fury and determination of her brothers, her son was quickly tracked down and restored to his natural mother, to the distress and confusion of the Californian couple who had been assured the adoption was in the bag.

An Observer investigation has discovered that the worldwide internet trade in babies, highlighted by last week's extraordinary transaction between Alan and Judith Kilshaw and Tina Johnson, the Californian adoption facilitator, has an even darker side where mothers in the world's poorest countries are cheated and intimidated into relinquishing their children for the convenience of well-to-do couples throughout the world, who have used the internet to demand the fast-track adoption of a newborn child. Aspiring parents such as the Kilshaws frequently travel to America to take advantage of the country's legal but completely unregulated private adoption process which ensures incomparably quicker and smoother adoptions than in Britain.

What a stomach-churning condition the monopoly-imperialist-dominated 'free world' market has been reduced to, incurably so, and getting worse by the year as unequal development, and the grotesque inequalities of rewards, spiral to ludicrous extremes in the wasteful, anarchic capitalist free-for-all.

Fake-'left' electoralists and anti-theory activists who dismiss what they sneer at as 'crisisism', continue to argue that Western society is not yet remotely near to even abandoning Blairism, let alone being prepared to listen to a critical analysis of capitalism couched solely in a perspective of a revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

So on the ludicrous grounds that people still seem reasonably content to put up with their lot, and that capitalist mass culture will continue to dominate most people's attention to their satisfaction, fake-'left' sectarianism continues supporting bourgeois electoral opportunism, either in a museum-Stalinist time-warp looking to win over a majority of the existing 'labour movement' via the 'fourth largest and fastest-growing political party in Britain' (the SLP); or in a museum-Trotskyist time warp, pretending to be able to create 'socialist-unity' for the 57 varieties of anti-communism in Britain on the basis of no agreements whatsoever about anything in history or in the world (except a petty-bourgeois fear and hatred of the dictatorship of the proletariat, fatuously dismissed as 'Stalinist tyranny' despite totally transforming the whole record and perspective for civilisation during the 20th century, and just by re-activating 'left Labourism' on the electoral doorstep, promising what amazing progressive reforms they would make if only workers would vote for them, etc, etc, etc.

Both variants deal with the challenging questions to their tail-ending electoral opportunism (raised by Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory of world and working-class development) by simply ignoring them, and by paying purely academic acknowledgements to the role of theory.

Thus Scargill's latest contribution, reproduced in Lalkar which now boasts a new slogan on its masthead "Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement" (V.I.Lenin), is once again to completely abstain from all attempt at re-evaluating and understanding the international communist movement's theoretical catastrophe which left the likes of Gorbachev in charge of the CPSU, his inherited revisionist confusion not effectively challenged from any part of the vast official-communist family. Just blaming Gorbachev again, and his immediate predecessors, saying: 

"Following the death of Stalin in 1953, new forces seized control in the Soviet Union, and a so-called 'new realism' began to take the place of Socialist planning", 

is a) gibberish, and b) still explains absolutely nothing. This SLP invention of post-1953 'economic planning mistakes' (to get Stalin's ludicrous revisionist theories on world socialism perspectives off the hook), explains nothing about Moscow's much longer-standing deluded perspectives which envisaged the triumph of socialism in the world just by being able to demonstrate its economic superiority to capitalism, provided of course that the coexistence and peace movement initiatives, Moscow's overall international propaganda and political agitation line, - could prevent a superpower nuclear war by shaming Western imperialism to talk peace.

This unbelievable anti-Marxist and counter-revolutionary garbage was so influential that the British CP, for example, had already in the early 1950s, with Stalin's approval, embraced the 'peaceful road to socialism', which nonsense was, of course, self-liquidationist (as communists, i.e. as proletarian revolutionists accepting the Marxist theory of the world as a history of class struggle in which the crisis-impossibility of continuing with the old system finally forces the emerging new ruling class to violently overthrow the state power of the old decaying ruling class and its social & economic system). Endless fragmentation, and ultimately self-liquidation duly followed in Britain (and elsewhere), just as did Gorbachev's self-liquidation duly follow in Moscow from this Stalinist theoretical abandonment of the world socialist revolution.

Even more ludicrously, Scargill mentions the rotten role of all those 'communists' worldwide who either applauded Gorbachev, or failed to expose the Stalinist theoretical roots of his class-collaborationist revisionism, - but names only one source of this international ideological poison, 

"Gerry Healy and Vanessa Redgrave of the WRP, a Trotskyite duo whose thinking was as muddled as that of their mentor".

But what about 80-or-so Stalinist-trained Communist Parties who all said nothing and applauded Gorbachev. In the next breath, Scargill boasts about the SLP as "a political party recognised by Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, and the South African Communist Party". With all due respect to the magnificent revolutionary achievements of these comrades, what useful lead were these huge and powerful political movements giving to the international working class while the final Gorbachev-Stalinist catastrophe was incubating??? They were generally applauding Gorbachev all the way to the Socialist Camp's grave, SACP representatives in particular going out of their way to denounce the pro-Soviet EPSR as 'counter-revolutionaries' for publicising and agitating its grave doubts about Gorbachev's dangerous theoretical muddle-headedness from 1985 onwards.

And what of Scargill's own record in this period on Gorbachevism-Stalinism, and whole swaths of the labour movement like Scargill??? A point-scoring exercise is not needed. But the key to the whole catastrophe of Moscow revisionism lies precisely in the complacent, unchallenging, non-Marxist traditions which Stalinism built into the international CP and near-CP movement over generations by its hopeless corruption of Marxist-Leninist world socialist revolutionary theory, - a corruption stretching all the way back to the 1930s (most fully analysed recently in the EPSR's 2001 Perspectives).

It urgently needs looking into because this complacent SLP clowning instead of serious struggle for revolutionary theory, is just continuing exactly the same old useless sectarian cosiness and sycophancy which destroyed the world communist movement (the mightiest anti-imperialist force on the planet) in the first place.

The museum-Trotskyism of the 'Socialist Alliance' in the British labour movement is like a sick mirror-image of the museum-Stalinism it leeched off parasitically. The 57 varieties of anti-communist opportunism prefer academic obfuscation of theory to the cruder Stalinist cover-ups of SLP-Lalkar, but with the same aim in both anti-Marxist dogmas, - to avoid at all costs any suggestion of permanently guiding the communist movement solely by constant reference to the correctness or otherwise of all previous world analysis and theoretical perspectives, and to the successes or otherwise brought about by their practical application.

The EPSR was founded on a series of books in the early 1980s, exposing the bankruptcy of every Trotskyist and Stalinist sect, from the WRP to the various CP factions, on every major world development, past and present. The universal sectarian reply was to ignore the polemics. "Were big, they're small; it will go away".

What went away were the grand and mighty Trot factions like the WRP and Militant; the grand and mighty CP movements, on a local and world scale. What remains, -  clearer, better, and stronger than ever, - is the argument for serious theoretical debate and understanding. EPSR    

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

Whilst only republicans and the families of victims pointed the finger, the British could simply continue lying and dismiss collusion as the unfounded allegations of a few political miscreants. With the testimonies of 'Martin Ingram' and William Stobie, this is no longer possible

It seems that a number of factions are emerging within those ranks of British Intelligence, the. security services and the RUC that were responsible for the activities of the FRU and their loyalist helpers, and that serious tensions exist in the inter-relationships between them all. One faction, that to which 'Ingram' and Stobie have attached themselves, is those at the bottom of the military food chain - the men and women who took the orders rather than those who gave them - who have belatedly woken up to the fact that, unless the stringent efforts to collapse it succeed, the Stevens Inquiry could possibly come up with sufficient evidence to charge some members of the FRU and others associated with it with conspiracy to murder. These individuals are, not surprisingly, unwilling to face such charges and are thus ready to point out the trail which leads inexorably upwards and ends at the door of the British cabinet office.

Another is what could be termed the realist faction which in all probability understands that one way or another, and irrespective of any subversion of any number of inquiries, the accusations of collusion will ultimately have to be answered. Again, this realism is born less of any sense of honour than of an urgent need to protect individual, possibly Ministerial, rear ends. Here the careful management of selective revelation becomes paramount and promoting the 'rogue units/bad apples' argument, one which long ago lost any semblance of credibility, is central to that management.

This approach, some would argue, has also been informed by the desire to deflect attention away from the RUC and Patten and by the need to resolve what, for the British, is a very tricky contradiction indeed. One the one hand, the RUC, up to its neck in collusion, is awarded the George Cross and fêted as a body of brave and incorruptible police officers risking their lives for the entire community, but on the other its continual and systematic abuse of nationalist human rights has required a major inquiry which recommended substantial changes to its structure, ethos and accountability. Pretending that its crimes (and carefully passing details of certain of them into the public domain) were the responsibility of a few uncontrolled individuals, and that a minimum bit of tinkering will suffice to bring the force into line, is a neat way out of this particular difficulty.

Thirdly is the faction that just cannot move beyond the historical, colonial and truly pathological culture of secrecy and dishonesty at the NIO and MI5. It remains the case that, no matter what political efforts were made or what political progress was achieved as a result of those efforts during the last year, there is still a powerful element which will forever do its utmost to prevent the misdeeds of the British state from seeing the light of day and which is determined in its attempt to crush, discredit and destroy anyone who imperils this project.

Various of these factions have surreptitiously fought it out, often through the pages of the Sunday Times, with one side feeding compliant journalists collusion stories which are presented as 'investigations' and then the other threatening the same journalists with legal action for publishing them. But, as Laura Friel has observed on these pages before, adequately addressing the collusion issue is less about discovery than disclosure, and in that sense the Stevens Inquiry is itself, knowingly or otherwise, part of the cover-up. The question is not an abstract or theoretical one of whether crimes against Irish people were committed by the British state; that they were is surely now beyond any question whatsoever. It is simply about those at the top of the pile - who know precisely what happened in the cases of Pat Finucane, Rosemary Nelson, Francisco Notorantonio, all the others - telling the truth.

What has become very clear however - and not just to the republican community, which has been saying all of this for years - is just how deeply and for how long the British state involved itself, through its military establishment, in an elaborate matrix of intrigue, terror and assassination in the Six Counties, using a war it refused to formally acknowledge as justification.

But the greatest difference between the revelations of last year and the accusations which have gone before is that so much of the material has come from those directly involved in the events. Whilst only republicans and the families of victims pointed the finger, the British could simply continue lying and dismiss collusion as the unfounded allegations of a few political miscreants. With the testimonies of 'Martin Ingram' and William Stobie, this is no longer possible.

But 'Ingram' and Stobie are no heroes. They have not 'suffered from pangs of conscience' or been overcome by altruism. The only thing that keeps them awake at night is fear for their own safety. Rather, their uncharacteristic bouts of seeming honesty are for reasons of self-preservation, probably arising from the realisation that they may well be required to face the consequence of actions they carried out on the orders of others. And therein lies the crucial sub-plot of the collusion story, a sub-plot which, again, has been revealed as never before during the last 12 months.