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 9N(.] [Post Office Regd.]   
No 1080 Mar 13 2001                                                                                                                                  25p

All the variants of defeatist retreat from scientific communist methods of struggle by 'left' frauds in Britain (super-reformist electoralism; perfect-party democratism; single-issue activism; bogus 'socialist' nationalism; etc) will be condemned by the taint of opportunism once capitalism's non-crisis boom-interlude, the basis for all wretched anti-communist opportunism, turns into raging, incurable, international, warmongering, slump-ridden, inter-imperialist trade war, - now imminent. Trying to hide from the effects of a century of worldwide anti-communist brainwashing is a waste of time. The whole workers-state record, achievements and mistakes, will have to be embraced. OP polemic on the EPSR only digs this academic, monastic, defeatist agnosticism deeper into a hole. A correct analysis of world developments remains the only possible starting point for a new communist movement of Marxist theory and successful revolutionary agitation. Deepening Balkans warmongering chaos proves the EPSR's point, as does the predicted impasse for Japan's economy, now choking to death on 'surplus' capital which only destruction can now 'cure'. World War III edges closer.

The ludicrous whitewash of Blairite sleaze methods attempted by the 'official report' into the Hinduja scandals; the continuing economic-collapse threat to Japan; and the worsening chaos of warmongering intrigue in the Balkans, - all examples of relentlessly deepening imperialist-system crisis since last week's EPSR among scores of such examples, - serve as a reminder of the basic problems still blocking the re-emergence of a serious communist movement.

The confusion inflicted on workers by 57 varieties of fake-'lefts’ in Britain starts by all of them avoiding consistent agitation for a fundamentally revolutionary understanding of this hopelessly corrupt, unalterably slump-ridden, and incurably explosive world situation.

This entire anti-communist swamp will claim allegiance to "socialist revolution as the only solution" expressed somewhere in their documents, but the daily living reality of these sects is to do anything rather than stress this essential plank of a Marxist scientific approach to society's growing difficulties.

They are all cowed by the immense complications of trying to analyse the modern world and its tortuous recent history, especially the astonishing self-liquidation by the Soviet workers state just at a time when the insoluble contradictions of a 'free world' run by monopoly-imperialist domination were swelling up in all their menacing nastiness, (sudden, devastating regional economic crashes; the lethal build-up of inter-imperialist trade war; the unending sick search for arms-race superiority; the universal steady degeneration of capitalist cultural rottenness; etc, etc.)

The in-shock Revisionist tradition still cannot liberate itself from the Stalinist stupidity of seeing war-avoidance compromise as the prime requirement of civilisation, still puddled by irrelevant 'peaceful coexistence' delusions even when contemplating the hottest sectors of the international class war and anti-imperialist nationalist-war front line such as Palestine.

The 'alternative' Trot tradition of retreat from Marxist-Leninist science (SWP, SP ('Militant' etc,) - continues Red-baiting as usual on behalf of imperialism (Mugabe, Milosevic, and Saddam as the most recent bogeymen to be demonised), while organising yet another phoney 'alternative' to its real-life subservience to TUC/Labourism, - this time called the 'Socialist Alliance' which exists just to give a boost to the fraud of electoral 'reformism' which has been dangerously exposed for its rotten emptiness by Blairism's toe-rag loyalty to US imperialism and to monopoly-capitalist racketeering of all kinds.

All 57 varieties of fake-'lefts' keep their heads down, all being 'busy' pursuing their latest reformist diversions such as "Ditch the European Union but save the pound" chauvinism; or "Tame imperialism and save the world by extending human rights in all directions, by prioritising democracy, and by protecting the environment", etc, etc. Not a single sect pursues the Marxist-Leninist task of reporting and explaining what is really happening on the planet, and analysing everything solely from the scientific angle that the only possible historical outcome from capitalism's mess now is worldwide free-market warmongering bust-up, curable by international proletarian dictatorship alone.

But the 'left' swamp simply refuses to start any explanation of anything to the working class with the understanding that only revolution offers any way forward for mankind from now on. And they do not offer such an analysis because they simply do not believe it. They still all claim to be 'Marxists', of course, but they have all abandoned the essence of Marxist science completely.

All 57 varieties are anti-Marxists, who either hide behind the fact that "no one can predict exactly what will happen", and just tail-end selected disputes where they have members or an internationally related section, exaggerating the spontaneous achievements as much as they can in the " 'Ere we go, 'Ere we go, 'Ere we go," tradition, believing that the imperialist walls will crumble given enough rank-and-file enthusiasm; or else they concentrate on their own navel-gazing, self-righteously pontificating abstractly about how any serious future communist party must run its internal democracy, or what it should have in its constitution or its programme, and even how its standing orders should be interpreted, etc, – all in a pathetic attempt to gain public acceptance that this 'new communism' has absolutely no connections with the 'old Stalinism of the Evil Empire and Gulag', etc, and all before even the faintest glimmer of a serious new world communist movement has started to emerge again.

Worse than being simply a waste of time (the CIA's control of international brain-washing via the main TV and press corporations and news agencies will relentlessly demonise whoever or whatever they choose to, once something is targeted, regardless of any facts, excuses, or protestations of innocence; the crushing of Allende, the crushing of the Sandinistas, the crushing of the New Jewel Revolution on Grenada, etc, etc, etc, etc, the present vilification of Mugabe, etc, etc, - all provide indisputable proof that this is so, and of how it can be done), - this cringing defeatism is itself just another form of anti-communism.

These apologists are running away from the obvious reality that any new onslaught on the 'free-world' bourgeois way of running things is unquestionably going to have to answer for everything that has been done in the name of all the workers states or socialist revolutions that have existed or been attempted so far in history, - and not just because total international CIA brain-washing control will insist that all communists are answerable for everything that has ever been done in the name of communism, but logically because every aspect of his next huge leap in he history of civilisation does need to be thoroughly understood and accepted eventually. The consequences of the 70-year total Cold-War siege, repeated invasion, and non-stop subversion of the world's first workers state (the USSR) by imperialism need fully analysing in the context of taking place in by far the most backward and brutal country in Europe, and under the burden of its truly great criminal tragedy, its Stalinist descent into Revisionist theoretical stupidity, stifling from very early on many of the rational society opportunities that a continued Marxist-Leninist basis for civilisation's continued revolutionary development would have offered, - and yet despite all of that producing many brilliant epoch-making achievements in economic, political, social, and cultural reorganisation.

The near-religious dogmatic loyalty which undermined the Third International needs demolishing by understanding its siege-mentality origins in the 20th century's second most remarkable historical phenomenon (after the workers states themselves), - the unprecedented worldwide brainwashing operation against the Soviet revolution and communism pursued through every ideological channel known to the bourgeois world through endless monstrous fictions, disinformation, and non-stop anti-communist provocation-stunts in every corner of the globe, ceaselessly militarily baiting or sabotaging the Workers states, and repeatedly threatening to take the planet to the brink of World War III and a nuclear holocaust.

The idiotic blind faith in Moscow and the disastrous lack of critical development inside the Third International must be thoroughly exposed, alongside the paranoid lunacy of some of the Kremlin leadership's worst mistakes and shameful arbitrariness, but the crucial importance to history of the world's first workers states remains undimmed, creating literally epoch making patterns for all subsequent anti-imperialist class-war struggle and understanding, and demonstrating again and again the vital truth of Lenin's observation:

"Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested".

One of the more bizarre sects from the fake-'left' swamp of constitutional self-righteousness ("We promise you perfect communist democracy which will never make mistakes of any kind but will build a perfect socialist world at the very first time of asking"); Open Polemic, has published another long whinge against the EPSR for allegedly misrepresenting OP, misunderstanding Bolshevism, preventing internal EPSR discussion, censoring the OP's views, and generally behaving like 'little Lenins' in presuming to "demonstrate a correct analysis of the current stage of imperialist crisis, and polemically defending it against all comers", a task which the OP pretends must be left to the future "party of revolutionary theory" (not built yet) while at the same time publishing its own longwinded 'theoretical demolition' of the EPSR's assessment of the necessary Marxist-Leninist dimensions of such an analysis.

EPSR 1065 has already replied to a preliminary draft of this new OP attack, and OP has now briefly commented on this reply as well.

Leaving aside all the endless rigmaroles about misquoting and misrepresentations, the OP's fundamental position remains that until there is agreement about "what kind of party the new party of revolutionary theory should be" and "what strategy is needed for establishing that party', then the EPSR's attempts to "demonstrate a correct analysis of the current stage of imperialist crisis" (an agreed task for the new party when it is built) are nothing more than "leader-centralist factional anarchism" and part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

"What the EPSR needs to understand"

OP goes on, 

"is that even the most correct line is quite useless if the conditions are such that it cannot be tested out in practice."

No doubt OP will quibble back about what it meant by "correct line", but on the surface, this statement is as barmy as it can get in these academic defeatist sects. Practice alone is obviously the only final proof of any attempted analysis of still-unfolding or still-obscure reality. But, for example, the real-world proof of what the EPSR argues about Kosovo, namely, that the warmongering power of imperialist trade-war forces were (and are) so involved in the 'Balkanisation' stirring up of national-chauvinist conflict in the region that it was just playing into the hands of monopoly-capitalist skulduggery for the fake-'left' in Britain (and elsewhere) to fall for the 'self-determination-rights' hypocrisy (for the Kosovo Albanians or anyone else) that the CIA was filling the world's media with, since no true, genuine self-determination aspirations would now be verifiable and least of all peacefully practicably-achievable in such an imperialist-crisis-created hellhole (which was now totally mafia-ridden and CIA-stooge-ridden, on the way to turning Albania into a potential new US-imperialist stooge mailed fist for the region, just as the Zionist colony had been implanted for imperialist control of the Middle East), - leaving World War III as the only likely guaranteed future for all the nationalities in the region rather than any worthwhile peaceful 'democratic' self-determination development, - was not going to become available through the carrying out of any 'party practice', and would only find its proof (or disproof) at the end of quite a long and complex sequence of subsequent world developments.

But does that then make it 'useless' to agitate for such a line to be argued for, within the obviously still atomised and confused workers movement in Britain? Was it not correct for communists to try, as best they could, to expose the fake-'left' naïvety in falling for the CIA's anti-Serb demonisation (it was the deliberately imperialist-encouraged break-up of the Yugoslav workers-state federation which inflicted ethnic-cleansing tyranny on all the nationalities, Serb included, who are still being ethnically-cleansed this minute out of their own most culturally-revered traditional heartland of a wealth of historic sites and magnificent monastic centres of Orthodox faith, learning, and nation-building, namely Kosovo) which flowed solely from Milosevic regime's stubborn traditional Serbian resistance (800 years of it, non-stop) to outside domination (Turkish empire, Austro-Hungarian empire, Nazi empire, and now US fascist empire) which Washington and Berlin were determined to provoke then crush at all costs??? Was it not correct for communists to try to expose the light-minded irresponsible academic posturing by fake 'revolutionary' groups in the West who insisted that the abstract commitment to 'self determination human rights' was absolutely of crucial overriding importance for the survival of civilisation at all costs, and that all concern about watching imperialism's longterm warmongering manoeuvres was utterly meaningless doctrinaire fantasy and paranoia???

Was it not equally correct to expose the 'Hands off Yugoslavia' social-pacifists as equally bankruptly playing into imperialism's hands, letting NATO fascist-colonialist aggression off the hook and a complete travesty of a Marxist understanding of the situation which would be to persuade workers to wish for the defeat of imperialism in this rotten adventure, regardless of the rottenness of the Milosevic regime???

And was it not correct to ridicule the Stalinist-Revisionist remnants who urged 'Defend Yugoslavia' in their continuing slavish unwillingness to accept the utter catastrophe that the degeneration from Marxist-Leninist science from Stalin onwards ultimately meant in every workers state???

Proving such a line that promoting the defence of the Milosevic regime would utterly mislead workers because it was already a hopelessly degenerate flawed failure which could only end in total humiliation and disaster, could not have been achieved by any practice that any party in Britain could accomplish. It could only be proved by watching it happen, watching a Marxist analysis of Serbia's inevitable failure under Milosevic's misleadership because of its hopelessly dogmatic and nationalist post-Revisionist character, prove to be correct. It was worth demonstrating to thousands of Third International remnants once again the doomed uselessness of this Revisionist degeneration in the difficult circumstances facing Serbia because they are still reluctant to be convinced about this. It is worth warning of the problems that Cuba, China, Vietnam, Korea, etc, could yet face, from any further retreat from Marxist-Leninist science into Revisionist stupidity, requiring communist supporters of those workers states to agitate for a return to revolutionary international anti-imperialist perspectives rather than just parrot endless solidarity loyalty to such regimes.

The Kosovo issue is a particularly relevant one to challenge OP's "taking a line is useless" nonsense because it was a burning question facing anti-imperialists everywhere which real life insisted that OP even take a stand on, breaching all its own ludicrous academic excuses for keeping out of attempted party building.

Or rather failed to take, because all that we still know about the heated discussion which split the OP editorial board was that it could not even reach a 'multanimous' decision to all denounce the NATO blitzkrieg on Serbia at least. One member famously resigned because of such signs of pro-imperialist wretchedness at the heart of the OP's academic posturing.

None of which sad nonsense proves, of course, that OP mayn't yet contain the best new leadership that any future new communist party could dream of having. All it proves is that OP are tying themselves in hopeless knots with their pretended diffidence in tackling the problems of the real world in favour of endless specious disputation about empty abstractions. The only way for any embryo revolutionary party to avoid embarrassing splits at the first challenge of having to address the real world is to keep on arguing about the real world and never stop. Only in this way can any embryonic cadre force start to develop the understanding and agreed widespread outlook which might one day help form the nucleus of the new revolutionary movement.

A correspondent to the OP has suggested that the EPSR try harder to polemicise with OP on Open Polemic's own terms. These rule out 

"discussing the general issues of the day" 

and other real-world issues, but contributions are promised publication if on

"the prospect of political and organisational unity of scientific communists being achieved around the ideology of scientific communism" 

(the weird tautology, answering itself by definition, is an indication of how far OP defeatism has disappeared up its own orifice). To qualify, contributors must be supporters of dialectical and historical materialism; democratic centralism; the party's leading role in the dictatorship of the proletariat; and a world socialist state coalesced from national working-class states. To which list of very excellent but highly contentious preconditions for building the new revolutionary party one can only comment: "How leader-centralist, factionally-anarchist, doctrinaire is it possible to be, even before the words 'multanimous practitioners only' have been written up above the door???"

But more to the point, EPSR 1065 precisely discussed the very core concern of OP about how "scientific communists can unite around scientific communism". It deployed a completely separate set of arguments from the anti-OP polemic in EPSR 1052 (which is what OP has now finally published, in its February 2001 issue (they come out twice a year on average) together with the aforementioned OP counterattack, here being replied to effectively for a second time). EPSR 1052 challenged OP's revolutionary party prospectus on the grounds of its discord with Bolshevik Party practice, with Marx and Engels’ First International practice, with Engels’ later commentaries on the subject, and very extensively with Lenin's clearly different plans for revolutionary party building taken from What is to be done and Where to begin at the start of Leninism's triumphant 25 year progress.

EPSR 1065 challenged OP's prospectus for its discord with the Review's own experiences in the last 21 years of trying to crystallise new 'scientific communist' understanding of a revolutionary party's modern-era obligations out of the attempted analysis of the direction of real-world developments week-by-week throughout those 21 years. And this current EPSR article raises yet further different argument on how 'scientific communists' should or shouldn't go about their business. It is, of course, for the OP to decide if it wishes to publish any of these further contributions from the EPSR, or reply to them in full. To jog OP's memory, and for convenience, the following extracts from EPSR 1065 are still considered valid for OP to publish and to answer if its 'Open Polemic' claims as a publication are not to be thrown into serious doubt:

The OPEB has just produced a reply to Review 1052 in which the EPSR yet again urged that only a concrete analysis of real-world developments could convince the international working-class to have renewed faith in a world communist revolutionary leadership, and that the endless abstract arguments about how to constitutionally organise a party, or what role should be played in party-building by interim tactics and minimum programmatic demands, etc, were all just further diversions from the redevelopment of communist consciousness, and a further retreat from Marxism-Leninism, prolonging the damage done by revisionism rather than trying to overcome it. Specifically, the Review once more challenged OP "to analyse the situation, say, in Ireland which the rest of the fake-'left' make such nonsense of, but which it is so crucial to understand and explain correctly from a communist perspective before the working class in Britain can begin to be broken from its links with British imperialism, (ideologically sharing, in part, its racist and colonialist prejudices)".

Despite a nearly 4,000-word reply, the issue is again evaded. The nearest OP gets to an answer runs as follows:

"Open Polemic devotes its time not in the advocacy of, but in opposition to, the factional anarchism of the leader centralist sects who are constantly busying themselves in plying their programmatic wares in front of a disinterested working class.

"The EPSR's challenge that OP should join this factional anarchism by analysing 'real world developments in the international class struggle as the only way of demonstrating any leadership qualities themselves for the rest of us to follow' is merely an invitation for the OPEB to liquidate itself and participate in wasting valuable preparation time. Any leadership qualities that the OPEB may have will continue to be demonstrated by the advocacy of party multanimity in opposition to the new 'revolutionary leadership' of factional anarchism in a disintegrated communist movement."

As best as the Review can understand it, this 'factional anarchism' of which it is accused, translates as being so bold as to put forward to the workers movement a concrete analysis of world developments which shows the need and opportunity for revolutionary international communist organisation to resume and prepare to bring down world imperialism as the economic crisis of the free-market system reaches its explosive inter-imperialist warmongering phase, measuring the historical movement and direction in the international balance of class forces strictly on the evidence of weekly events, analysed immediately in the light of the EPSR's understanding of Marxist-Leninist science.

Such attempted revolutionary-educational agitation is allegedly 'anarchic' because it is put before workers (to agree with or to disagree with and polemicise against) before it has won the support of a new party of the working class; and it is allegedly 'factional' because it emerges as EPSR editorial output rather than as the agreed outlook of every last supporting group of EPSR readers. These bizarre arguments have been dismissed by the Review before, and there is not much point in keeping on going over the same ground. 

It is agreement about what is wrong with the world and about what needs doing to put it right which unites workers into a party of socialist revolution, and the great communist movements of history have all famously started with just a tiny handful of comrades agitating for their ideas and steadily winning support for them, building a party in the process. There is only one test for the validity of any analysis of the world put forward, and that is whether it is correct or not. As a party of revolutionary leadership develops, confidence grows in its past ability to get things right and in its future ability to do so. The Lenin group had a dozen adherents in 1900 but a party, educated, in revolutionary understanding of the world, by 1917 big enough to carry out the Bolshevik Revolution. Other parties and groups which disputed the Leninist leadership throughout, continually got things wrong and ended up as counter-revolutionaries.

The answer to the EPSR's challenge to the entire fake-'left' (from the SLP to the OP) as representing nothing but anti-communist defeatism and philistinism, is to prove the Review wrong in its consistent 21-year weekly analysis, say, of how in reality the international balance of class forces was steadily moving against the outdated British imperialist colonial toe-hold on Ireland and towards the triumph of revolutionary national-liberation struggle, resolved in the Good Friday Agreement which will systematically dismantle the failed and discredited 'Northern Ireland' bigoted tyranny as used to exist. Or dispute the Review's longstanding investigation of the relentless build-up of 'surplus' capital throughout the free market which must result in a universal Crash sooner or later, spreading the paralysis which has undermined the Japanese economy for 10 years to the rest of the world, accompanied by all-out trade war leading onto inter-imperialist armed conflict such as alone terminated the two previous great imperialist economic crises in the last 86 years. Or disprove the EPSR's detailed tracking of Stalinist revisionist liquidation from its culmination in Gorbachev philistinism back to Stalin's own retreat from revolutionary perspectives into total coexistence complacency and bureaucratic-mindedness, most ludicrously expressed in his 1952 Economic Problems of Socialism nonsense about imperialism being no longer capable of resumed economic expansion, etc.

On every major domestic and world issue for 21 years, opponents of the EPSR’s attempted revival of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science have had the opportunity to polemically shoot down the EPSR’s conclusions about the world. The entire fake-'left' refuses the challenge, retreating further and further into anti-communism. Here again, the OP refuses to make any criticism of the Review's actual analysis of domestic and international developments, on which alone the worthwhileness (or otherwise) of the EPSR's Marxist understanding can be tested. Instead, all we get is the weird notion that the Review is 'factionally anarchist' for even attempting to understand what is going on in the world or to agitate for communist revolutionary consciousness as a result of such an analysis.

Sadly, the rest of the OPEB 4,000 words are mostly accusations that Review 1052 misrepresented what the OP polemic was trying to say. But since that critique reproduced the entire OP statement as part of the demolition, and can be re-read again and again, there seems little point in hacking through these rival interpretations a second time. One attempted OP clarification/justification of its refusal to polemicise about real world developments now, - (which would make it possible to see whose grasp and application of Marxist-Leninist science is more accurate) - leaves things as before, about as clear as mud, and in total internal self-contradiction. It reads:

"As there is no party in the present situation, the party must firstly be formally established on the basis of a common outlook, fundamental principles, and a common theoretical programme before it can, as a party, discuss everything and engage with the class. Engaging with the class involves the party having every debate out in front of the class, with nothing hidden. As for 'conceited arrogance', that continues to reside in the sectarianism of those leaders who, in the face of the continuing disintegration of the communist movement, insist on going directly to the class with their competitive, particular programmes."

This makes even less sense second time round. Without published discussions on 'everything', open to criticism from whoever wants to inject a better understanding, the only 'common outlook, fundamental principles, and common theoretical programme' that can possibly be developed is that of a very tiny closed-in sect. But even more ludicrously, this OP monastic cell still refuses to develop any 'common outlook', etc, or at least refuses to say what it is. It is precisely OPEB's 'outlook, principles, and theoretical programme' for assessing the direction and significance (or otherwise) of the conflict between the forces of national-liberation and the forces of dying British imperialism in Ireland, for example, that the EPSR is asking for so that the potential of the OP comrades can be assessed for building a Marxist-Leninist scientific communist party.

Subsequent jibes that the Review does not really wants its views discussed in 'open' polemics, least of all by its own followers, must sadly be concluded as terminal silliness. The EPSR is begging anyone and everyone to (e.g.) come out of the woodwork and polemicise against its denunciation of 'left' swamp solidarity with 'Kosovo Albanian self-determination' as the most crass and degenerate capitulation to as plain an imperialist warmongering stunt as the Cold War had ever seen against the workers states (or in this case the sad revisionist-nationalist-corrupted remnants in the wretched Milosevic's degenerate Yugoslav regime), - for example, - such is the importance of establishing imperialist crisis manoeuvres as the major enemy of civilisation and the main driving force behind all developments now on earth. It is the OPEB which did not really want polemics on the vexed question of 'self-determination against imperialism' having been "unable to resolve those differences as an editorial board". So the 'common outlook, fundamental principles, and common theoretical programme' about the real world still remains at zero on the OPEB, presumably.

The Lenin quotes in Review 1052 still stand as a more than adequate answer to the continued OP insistence that its determination to restrict its discussion of foundation 'outlook, principles, theoretical programme', etc, only to its own circle of 'advanced workers' is not anti-Leninist. Declaring that without a party, "what the EPSR needs to understand is that even the most correct line is quite useless if the conditions are such that it cannot be tested in practice" - is just an evasion. In time, world developments themselves show whether or not the working class has been offered a line (on responding to imperialist-crisis driving forces) which could have helped agitate an advance in revolutionary consciousness. Has there been the slightest chance for any realistic Kosovo Albanian self-determination? (dominated as that territory and its politics now are by total NATO imperialist domination, which only the KLA drugs banditry is tolerant of, and which has overseen some genuine genocidal ethnic-cleansing, - that against the Kosovo Serb population, the strongest cultural tradition in the region, and the original inhabitants, with a continuous homeland there, now no more, thanks to NATO barbarism which the fake-'left' "Kosovo self-determination" stooges for imperialist warmongering helped to impose)??? The Kosovo Albanians are 'free' to remain the CIA's patsies, nothing else.

And the EPSR equally warned workers to not fall for the echoed Stalinism, backing the wretched loser and liquidator Milosevic whose regime of revisionist confusion could only continue to bring more and more chaos and defeats, - exactly as has now been proved in practice. 'Defeat for imperialist meddling, - by any means' was the only worthwhile slogan and explanation of that highly significant warmongering turmoil inflicted on the Balkans by deepening imperialist crisis, plus 'no support for Milosevicism or KLA banditry'.

The entire 'left' swamp falls into subjective-idealist philosophical nonsense of one kind or another because of an inability or unwillingness to just take an objective look at the world of class struggle and inter-imperialist conflict (in the light of Marxist-Leninist proven historical analysis), - an inability or unwillingness entirely due to class influences (the petty-bourgeois mentality of comfortable complacency tending easily towards class-collaborative anti-communism alongside 'popular' (i.e. bourgeois-ideologically-dominated and manufactured) sentiment. This odd little OP sect is notable because it has actually turned this retreat from objectivity into its most boasted quality. Its greatest virtue, it claims, is its refusal to discuss the objective world situation.

Such is the mind-bending influence of the bourgeois capitalist world's basic philosophical glue, subjective idealism; starting with some fetish or fixed-notion or other (like a communist movement cannot be a communist movement until it is proficient in the weird art of 'multanimous practice'),and then refusing to acknowledge anti-imperialist developments in the real world if they do not conform to this fixed notion in someone's head about how the world can alone be put right.) This subjective idealism, hopelessly misunderstanding what were Stalin's real crimes and mistakes, placed its artificial ideas on the Cuban Revolution, found it wanting, and for years the entire fake-'left' simply ignored this titanic real-world defeat for imperialism and heroic defiance of US hegemonic bullying, either refusing to discuss it, or ludicrously dismissing it as a 'Stalinist counter-revolution', etc. Only much later did some of the fake-'left' camp creep on board the brilliant Cuban revolutionary bandwagon because the real world had finally knocked some sense into their silly Trot heads.

But such episodic coat-tailing should fool no one. The philosophy of the fake-'left' swamp remains incurably subjective-idealist and thoroughly hostile to the real proletarian-revolutionary spirit of Marxist-Leninist science, which can easily see the enormous worthwhileness and significance of e.g. the nationalist revolutionary triumph by Sinn Féin and the IRA against imperialism, where the Trots, and the museum-Stalinist philistines like the SLP, can only see a 'US-imperialist imposed settlement'; or 'a sellout by Adams & Co for bourgeois office'; or even 'a deplorable deal for Green fascist-nationalist terror'; etc, etc. The dialectical need to hail Sinn Féin and the IRA's brilliant revolutionary political and guerrilla-war victory over British imperialist reaction while remaining critical of the liberation movement's nationalist ideological failings, - is beyond the swamp, - as was the need to proclaim worldwide the epoch-making triumph of the Cuban Revolution while remaining critical of Castro's subservience for a long time to much of Moscow's revisionist theoretical nonsense, and critical of Havana's continued inability or refusal to seriously address the crucial world role for Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory.

Countless more examples can be brought of the subjective-idealist nonsense of the fake-'left' swamp in the comfortable complacent petty-bourgeois-minded West, failing or refusing to acknowledge the colossal worth and importance of such real-world anti-imperialist developments as the Castro Revolution, -  most blatantly recently in the SWP’s monstrous damning-with-faint-praise of the FARC revolution in Colombia (see last week's Review).

The pattern is invariably the same of some aspect or other of relentless bourgeois 'democracy' propaganda having infiltrated these middle-class mentalities, allowing them to posture as the most 'left' of the 'lefts' while in reality taking the easy route of 'popular' (i.e. bourgeois-dominated) sentiment.'

The repetition in that article and this current one of points about the Kosovo crisis and how 'scientific communist' understanding can either be demonstrated to some extent on such issues, or have clearly been a million miles from any fake-'left' heads when addressing the subject, - is left as it is to try to illustrate a further point about the EPSR's approach to the problems of trying to build a movement for scientific communism. The EPSR fully understands that it remains potentially totally exposed from such far-reaching, frequently-repeated, predictive methods of analysis of real-world developments. But it has nothing whatever to do with boldness, foolhardiness, or 'Little Lenin conceitedness' trying to act big.

It is all that the EPSR has ever understood about Marxist-Leninist scientific communist methods for trying to build a conscious revolutionary workers movement.

The last EPSR quoted Engels explaining that to win credibility from workers, it was necessary for a socialist analysis to explain the inevitableness of capitalism for a certain period of history "and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall".  Not blueprints for socialist utopias where workers would flourish without capitalists was the communist task,

"but to examine the historico-economic succession of events from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic conditions thus created, the means of ending the conflict."

And in some of his earliest discussion about scientific communist methods of party-building agitation, Lenin insisted (1899 - 'A draft programme of our party') - on keeping Marx's famous prediction about the tendency of expanding capitalism also to achieve the growth of "the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation" against Revisionist inclinations to drop the "theory of impoverishment". Measured globally, with frequent repeated mass starvations statistically included from the world market's peripheral regions like Africa, parts of Asia, and occasional pockets in Latin America, - the potential for recurring 'impoverishment' phenomena under capitalism remains unchanged. In mainstream capitalist countries, it currently frequently remains never much more than just a potential because of the centuries-long highly-developed working-class struggle forcing the capitalist system to rein back its own incurable tendency to reinstate a predisposition towards restoring 'absolute impoverishment' trends if they could be got away with.

And in terms of the imminent repeat of a 1930s worldwide slump followed by inter-imperialist war, the long-term averaged-out 'impoverishment' of the human-conditions (from 50 million dead, a whole continent devastated, and hundreds of millions of lives disrupted beyond repair, the outcome of World War II) - as a result of the normal all-round effects of the capitalist-imperialist system reaching a stage of extreme decadence, cannot be doubted.

On top of that, even more millions have been killed, and even more millions of lives disrupted for ever, by imperialist-system-imposed wars, interventions, coups, blockades, and sabotage (nearly 400 major conflicts) since 1945.

The Marxist philosophical view of late capitalism is that in the end, it only adds up to "the growth of the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation" (although it also never stops technologically and economically 'expanding' at the same time, to correct the key Revisionist stupidity at the core of Stalinist bureaucracy's most catastrophic ideological damage to the earliest attempted development of workers states in human history (see EPSR 2001 Perspectives document)).

Nothing could be more telling than the latest OP sneer at the EPSR for "constantly busying themselves in plying their programmatic wares in front of a disinterested working class".

So what, then, - stick inside the monastic cell like OP? Or go doorstepping for support within the bourgeois electoral racket like 'Socialist Alliance' or the SLP by promising better welfare-state reforms than New Labour are promising - "because that is what workers want to hear about, not world revolution"???

Scientific communism is in never-ending conflict with the spontaneous trade-union (petty bourgeois) mentality of every working class under capitalism. Disinterested? Not really. Just hard to get at in serious discussion, and even harder to convince. So what must scientific communists do? Just keep on having the arguments with whoever will listen and with whoever it is worthwhile giving an argument to, and hearing one back. If the scientific communism provides a true picture of the world, it is bound to be listened to in the end.

Adapting the Marxist-Leninist approach reported above, the EPSR will continue to present its scientific line that the longer that globalisation mechanisms (IMF, etc) continue to expand the imperialist world trade boom (effectively going on nonstop since 1945), the worse will eventually be the 'overproduction' catastrophe plunging the whole international market system into a long deep slump of devastating 'surplus capital' destruction, with warmongering irreconcilable inter-imperialist contradiction at its heart.

And the notion that 'over-bold' predictions or too many wrong prognoses could make the EPSR a laughing stock just doesn't enter into things. This is a long fought-for attempted scientific communist view of the world. The EPSR comrades live by it. It is constantly matched against massive quotations from every corner of Marxist-Leninist classical scientific methods and discoveries. EPSR mistakes are frequent but utterly irrelevant because they are always acknowledged and publicly corrected when found. The real point is that the EPSR is either massively right about where the world is heading, and what to do about it, and how to do it; or it is ludicrously mistaken about the whole question of history and civilisation.

So far, the EPSR has always easily prevailed against such polemics as have been directed towards it. Its weekly published attempted updating of a scientific communist understanding of the world has so far kept going from strength to strength for 21 years. Maybe it will be proved more or less completely right. Time will tell. More polemics, for or against, from all directions, can only help clarify things.

Evidence of the impending imperialist-system warmongering crisis threat to civilisation is, in Marxist tradition, invariably taken from capitalist press admissions against its own domineering world role. Naturally they are aimed to prove that the EPSR has been right all along, generally speaking. The struggle for scientific communist understanding continues. Where is peaceful democratic self-determination in the Balkans now?

The heart of the problem is a resurgence in nationalism across the region among minority extremists that some fear could spark a new regional conflagration. In Tanusevci ethnic Albanian guerrillas, who fought with the KLA in Kosovo against the Serbs are now fighting the Macedonian security forces. Their aim apparently: to create a 'Greater Kosovo'  linking ethnic Albanian communities that live just outside its borders in Serbia, Macedonia and Montinegro, threatening wider ethnic violence between Macedonia's majority Slav population and one third Albanian minority.

For a decade analysts have warned of the risk of war in Macedonia - a conflict, they say, that could suck in countries such as Bulgaria and Greece. Last week - as if on cue - Bulgaria sent military aid to Macedonia's armed forces while Greece sent a mission to report on the crisis on the border.

In Mostar the events have been no less alarming.  Last weekend, a congress of the nationalist Bosnian Croat party - the HDZ - voted to set up a Croat mini-state. In reply, the international community's administrator in Bosnia - Wolfgang Petritsch - 'fired' the HDZ's leader, Afire Jelavic, disbarring him from politics for threatening the fragile Dayton peace deal that ended the Bosnian war.

And it is not just events in Tanusevci and Mostar that are alarming Western governments. A dangerous coincidence of events is increasing tension across the region. In Serbia, the US government has imposed a deadline of 31 March for the arrest of former Yugoslav dictator Milosevic, if its new rulers want US aid. A few days later the citizens of Montenegro which, with Serbia, constitutes the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - go to the polls in an election expected to set the scene for a referendum on independence within three months. In Kosovo itself, where province-wide elections are due later in the year, pressure for independence is growing, amid a slew of murders of ethnic minorities.

And the former leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army are also accused of backing the fighters of the new National Liberation Army that appeared for the first time last month in Tanusevci, and its sister organisation the UCPMB which is fighting to establish autonomy for Albanian villages in the Presevo Valley of south Serbia.

'The one thing these crises have in common is borders, says Chris Bird, a spokesman for the Office of the High Representative which oversee Bosnia's administration. 'People are trying to redraw borders across the region. Our view is that if the international community allows that to happen it will mean dead people.'

In the Balkans, it was ever thus: rival ethnic groups competing with their neighbours for imagined national spaces.

'What defines this rather dangerous phase,' adds a Foreign Office analyst, 'is that we are dealing with losers who are struggling for their survival. We are not looking at a repeat of the circumstances when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate at the beginning of the 1990s. The people we are dealing with now are the fanatics who became wealthy out of nationalist politics, crime and war. They feel that their power is being eroded and they will fight to survive.'

Another dangerous factor, he believes is the complacency that emerged after the removal of Milosevic last October. 'There was a misplaced idea that when Milosevic was ousted things would immediately get better in the Balkans. Instead, his departure has revealed a series of unresolved problems which the international community has yet to get to grips with.'

Biggest among those problems will be what happens in Montenegro. Encouraged by the Americans to believe it would be permitted to split from Serbia, the departure of Milosevic saw the same officials tell Montenegro to forget those aspirations, and renegotiate its ties with Serbia for a looser Yugoslav federation.

It is an idea that angers many in Montenegro who argue that all of the other republics of the old Yugoslavia of General Tito - Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and Macedonia - have won their independence: Why, they argue, should Montenegro be the exception?

But while European Union and US policy is that Montenegro should remain in some federal relationship with the new Serbia of Vojislav Kostunica, privately officials believe there is little they can do to stop it seceding.

Their concern, however, is less about the future of Montenegro itself but over the psychological impact that a voting for independence would have elsewhere: not least in neighbouring Kosovo itself, which the international community has decreed should stay within Serbia and not enjoy independence.

'There has been a failure of imagination in the international community over the whole question of the Balkans,' says Mark Thompson, Balkans director for the Brussels-based think-tank, the International Crisis Group. 'There is nothing that physically links the problems in Kosovo and in Bosnia but what unifies both is s this sense of unfinished business.'

While Thompson applauds the actions of Petritsch and the international community in moving against Jelavic, he is worried that, in a wider sense, the glacially slow Dayton peace process may be running into trouble.

'The risk in Bosnia is as much about the spread of defeatism in the international community. There is a mood emerging in some capitals: "We've done our best, but these people do not want a solution."

Petritsch disagrees with this gloomy prognosis but does not deny that dangerous times lie ahead - in particular amid the growing rhetoric on both sides in Montenegro which he is worried could contaminate the region with a resurgence of nationalism.

"What we were seeing here with the Bosnian Croats was a return to the old notions of territorial exclusivity. It has never worked in this region and never will. We must not walk into the trap that is being set by the nationalists. It is a blueprint for disaster."

It is a disaster that can only increase as Western aid runs out, propping up all these artificial regimes, and the rival imperialist influences increasingly openly set about their real colonising warmongering interests in the region, all to do with securing more advantageous geo-political positions in East Europe (the gateway to the world's Central Asian oil wealth) as world War III approaches.

All the fake-'left' still sit tight really believing that the West will yet pull one more Keynesian economic miracle out of the hat. But for 10 years, Japan has been demonstrating for all who have cared to follow it, that stunt rabbits are eventually no more use once 'surplus capital' has choked the system completely (see Capital, vol 3, Chapter 30; and Communist Manifesto, Section I). Only destruction of 'surplus capacity', - on a worldwide scale, - remains for the capitalist system:

Japan's public finances are in danger of collapsing under the weight of the world's biggest national debt, the finance minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, said yesterday in a dire warning about the world's second biggest economy.

"The nation's finances are now abnormal, in a condition that is quite close to collapse," he told the Japanese parliament in an unusually frank appraisal of Japan's fiscal health.

The doom-laden comments came amid a cluster of gloomy economic data that helped to push the Japanese currency to a 19-month low of more than 720 yen to the dollar.

The comments are a virtual admission that the government's attempt to spend its way out of a 10-year economic slump have failed.

Japan has introduced more than a dozen pump priming packages totalling more than 111 trillion yen (£653bn) since the economic bubble burst at the end of the 1980s, but in the past five years it has rarely managed to eke out an annual growth rate of even 1%.

The country's addiction to public works has produced a rocketing public debt, which including central and local governments - is forecast to hit 666 trillion yen (£3.9 trillion), or 128% of national output, by the end of this fiscal year.

Coming from the octogenarian Mr Miyazawa, one of the biggest spending finance ministers in history, and who is usually criticised for the delphic nature of his statements, the warning was a shock to many analysts.

"A national minister saying the country's finances will collapse is akin to a company president saying his company will fail," a Sanwa Bank currency dealer, Mitsuru Sahara, said.

Yesterday, a steep fall in machinery orders intensified concerns that Japan's economy, which is bigger than the rest of Asia combined, is deteriorating faster than expected because of weakening export markets in the US and the prolonged stagnation of domestic demand. The orders, which are seen as an indicator of capital investment, fell 11.8% in January, almost twice as far as analysts had expected.

Separate data on consumption added to the growing fears of deflation that have been expressed by the Bank of Japan. According to the home affairs ministry,  average household spending declined by 0.5% in January.

The world's second-largest economy, once a symbol of implacable efficiency, appears to be paralysed. Its leaders, ageing masterminds of a model that once frightened global competitors, seem incapable of solving its policy dilemmas. Its investors have seen the value of their homes and their shares steadily decline for a decade, leaving many sitting on bank deposits that pay almost no interest.

The prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, a classic machine politician of the dominant Liberal Democratic party (LDP), is reported to be on the verge of resignation this weekend after plumbing the depths of postwar unpopularity. The Nikkei benchmark stock index is languishing at levels not seen since the mid-1980s. The all-powerful Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan (the central bank) seem locked in ideological and bureaucratic strife.

The economy remains in the grip of deflation, which has the paradoxical effect of deepening existing corporate debt and exerting dangerous pressure on a banking system that some economists fear is courting disaster. "The markets are seeing signals for a weakening yen because that is their last acceptable option," says an Asian foreign-exchange dealer. "Some people are looking at 130 to the dollar within months."

The Bank of Japan itself is at the centre of controversy. Last August, its governor, Masaru Hayami, raised interest rates for the first time in a decade, to a less than ruinous 0.25%. If this was intended as a bold step to cut the Gordian knot of reform and restructuring, it was a step too far for many of the interest groups who bankroll the LDP.

As the economy stumbled late last year GDP figures for the last quarter to be issued tomorrow may confirm it is back in technical recession pressure mounted on Hayami to reverse policy. Late in February, the bank cut rates back to 0.15%: If the figures are piffling in their actual effect on business, the U-turn signified a serious loss of face and influence for the central bank.

Nominal interest rates may soon revert to zero, leaving savers drawing little comfort from the academic knowledge that deflation makes the real rate higher.

Yet even the realities of deflation, which some may consider virtuous in the world's most expensive country, are hard to quantify. An economic adviser to the government, Taichi Sakaiya, told a gathering of bankers that although deflation was estimated at 1%, he would not be surprised if the real figure was 10%.

"So who's at the controls?" asks a western investment banker. "The answer seems to be nobody." News reports in Tokyo suggest the government is readying yet another spending package, doomed only to prop up the balance sheets of the construction and retail companies that pour funds into the LDP.

Japan's problems are interlocked in a way that does not allow for a solution in keeping with its customary values of harmony and consensus. Investors are penalised by poor interest rates to keep alive indebted companies. The companies are kept on a financial drip-feed because many of their shares are owned by the banks that extended them credit. In many cases, the debtor companies are significant shareholders in the banks themselves.

These shareholdings, known as keiretsu, strengthened the post-war corporate system, but could now contain the elements of its destruction. New accounting rules this year will oblige banks to book their shareholdings at real market value, not the nostalgic figures that persist in their accounts.

As, a result, whole blocks of shares in corporate Japan, firms such as Toyota, NEC and Sharp, are coming up for sale. But as each sale further depresses the market, the risk of a downward spiral intensifies. Amid the gloom, some foreign investors are seizing opportunities.

Competition in financial services is also slowly opening the Japanese market.

But Japan's plight of the big numbers could throw even the most hard-headed commercial decisions into doubt. A sharp fall in the value of the yen would help Japanese firms repatriating overseas profits, but would displease foreign investors holding Japanese assets.  From Seoul to Bangkok, nervous Asian exporters fear that their own recovery will be undermined by a cheaper yen, perhaps setting off another round of currency depreciation.

The Zapatista publicity stunt, riding unarmed into Mexico City, might indicate that dreams of reformist peace deals as a final solution to problems of indigenous Indian poverty and exploitation are still prevalent. If so, they will fail.

The Bogota "women only on the street at night" stunt is even more alarming, - reactionary single-issue feminism being used to divert international proletarian class attention from US imperialism's impending civil war against the FARC communist guerrillas, and to sow divisions in the working class that the real misery in people's lives is caused not by capitalism but by male bad behaviour.

More scientific communist power to the FARC elbow.  Build Leninism.  EPSR