itherto 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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No1086 Apr 24 2001                                                                                                                                           25p

Clear counter-revolutionary agenda behind much 'solidarity' phoniness and much green-anarchist spontaneity for the 'alternative revolution'. Some of the anarchic grabbing of top publicity positions for the anti-WT0 direct-action campaign (which supposedly shuns all leadership) shows a revealing desire to be in charge, eagerly accepts the guru role, and betrays a surprisingly-disciplined and well-thought-out denunciation of Leninism. The anti-capitalist movement will stir useful passions, but is being systematically conned by petty-bourgeois ideology. Class-collaboration guff threatens to totally undermine Zapatismo. It will need a movement such as the FARC to consciously spark a world struggle to rebuild parties of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory. Blair's backing for the USA’s potential new Vietnam disaster in Colombia is the real political agenda to be fought against the illusions of 'left reformist-pressure' and for the revolutionary solution as the planet's only way out of the world imperialist crisis.

As a return to a new epoch of communist revolutions relentlessly gathers pace with the insoluble global economic and political crisis of the imperialist system, bourgeois ideological propaganda is working flat out to persuade all rebellions that reformist negotiations can supply solutions to everyone's problems and a route to progress for all.

These treacherous 'democracy' illusions are being peddled particularly flamboyantly in Mexico and Colombia to try to undermine the armed revolts by the Zapatistas, the ELN, and the FARC, which has already liberated a Switzerland-sized chunk of territory from the corrupt Colombian ruling-class and its permanent on-the-spot US advisers from the CIA and the Pentagon, masquerading under the banner of America's DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) to keep up the pretence that Washington's counter-revolutionary intervention, so reminiscent of the USA's initial involvement in Vietnam, is to "stop the Colombian peasants harvesting coca leaves which is forcing the whole Western world to become hooked on cocaine", - allegedly.

This contemptible CIA fairy-story has now been eagerly taken up, of course, by the B1air regime, and Mo Mowlam is just completing her third tour of Colombia in the last 10 months as New Labour's stooge seal-of-approval for these monstrous American fascist preparations to blitzkrieg rural Colombia to halt the peasant-supported revolution (in the way that the whole of Indo-China was napalmed, blown to pieces by B52s saturation bombing, and then defoliated just for good measure, by illegal Agent Orange chemical warfare which is still deforming new-born babies in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia thirty years later from the residues in the soil).

It is plainly total nonsense that Western society's drug-taking degeneracy is the fault of dirt-poor peasants harvesting cocaplant leaves in Colombia, or equally-poor peasants in Asia harvesting the opium poppy. If it was not this junk the West was getting high on, it would be on LSD or Ecstasy or other products of the West's own laboratories. The imperialist countries' drug bingeing is an incurable feature of capitalism's unalterably-decadent cultural decline which would continue to sink down unstoppably even if the whole of Colombia was to be nuked off the face of the earth. An alternative trade-chain of cocaine supplies would quickly be found, and if all the coca plants in the world were eradicated, then alternatives would quickly fill the new market niche in the West.

It is not even the case that the peasantry (who support the Colombian revolution) themselves have any say or control in the drugs trade at all. Their hard work harvesting for a pittance is totally exploited by big business in the Colombian ruling class and internationally, - the very same monopoly-bourgeois circles whose economic-domination-interests the American military intervention is really in Colombia to protect. The 'anti-drugs war' and the Plan Colombia pretence of 'peaceful reforms' are the most disgusting hypocrisy and murderous treachery imaginable. The lies and genocidal tyranny of the Vietnam War were bad, making the Hitler-Goebbels crimes of German imperialism look almost honest by comparison. The deceit of US imperialism's fascist preparations in Colombia smell every bit as bad.

But listen to the naïvety of the uneasy British press 'reports' of what is brewing in Colombia:

As well as advising the Colombian army, Britain has made £100,000 available to the UN drug control programme to monitor the effects of chemical defoliant sprayed on coca plants. Fields of plantain, cassava and maize have been inadvertently destroyed by herbicides.

The US is spending $1.3bn (£900m) to support Plan Colombia, a strategy which the Colombian president, Andres Pastrana believes will devastate the drugs trade and promote peace. President Bill Clinton approved the expenditure last year, despite concern about the Colombian army's human rights record and warnings that the aid - which, among other things, will pay for 60 combat helicopters - will add to the violence.

Britain too believes that the Colombian army needs help, chiefly advice on preventing collusion between soldiers and rightwing paramilitaries.

Ms Mowlam revealed the extent of British involvement in Colombia last week. General Sir Roger Wheeler, former chief of the general staff of the British army, General Sir Michael Rose, former UN commander in Bosnia, and the former head of security in Northern Ireland, John Steele, have been sent out since last November.

"They talked to the [Colombian] police and army about what they can do to make them more effective," Ms Mowlam said. "You couldn't tackle drugs without offering assistance with the peace talks and in [reducing] violence. You have to strengthen the military and police, but also teach them human rights. You are not going to get progress unless you have a military that can take on the [rebels] and the paramilitaries."

Ms Mowlam has "some problems" with US crop-spraying. Dousing smallholders’ fields in chemicals could alienate farmers, she warned. Herbicides should be used to destroy only large coca-growing operations; campesinos - peasant farmers - should be encouraged to grow different crops.

New Labour, which has not the faintest idea of what it is doing in laughably failing to 'govern' in Britain as far as the foot-and-mouth farming epidemic is concerned, the hopelessly chaotic railway services, and the even worse muddles over education and the health service, - now pretends to be able to show the entire vast Colombian peasantry how to economically organise more efficiently. The propaganda hoax is breathtaking. And what remarkable 'peasant economy experts' Mowlam took out with her!! Three counter revolutionaries!!!

But the FARC need to beware even more the 'negotiated reforms' propaganda influence being peddled around the Zapatista movement in Mexico by the 'left' itself, - the fake-'left'. Its effectiveness on one variety of Western camp-followers, represented by Naomi Klein of the 'green anti-monopoly' movement, is obvious. The apparent effect on the Zapatistas themselves is more disturbing if the reported remarks of Comandanta Esther, addressing the parliament in Mexico City last month, are anything to go by at the climax of the astonishing Zapatista 'peace march' on the capital to 'call the President's bluff'.

She effectively declared the national-liberation class war over: 

"Our warriors have done their job. The orders (of the new Mexican president Vicente Fox) have been a sign of peace. We too will give orders of peace to our people", 

the capitalist press quoted her as saying.

Drooling sympathisers reported her as saying pointedly to the Mexican Congress that she and the other Comandantes with her in the negotiations were the movement's representatives "rather than (Subcomandante) Marcos who is subordinate to them".

"Esther took advantage of the podium to order Marcos not to occupy any military positions vacated by the federal army, and to ensure that all members of the civil population have their rights respected, regardless of political allegiance," 

her supporters reported on.

The capitalist press was keen to report her declaring:

 "I'm a Zapatista, but that's not important. What is important is that I am indigenous, and I am a woman, and I am speaking in this symbolic place".

In the same coverage, it was recorded:

"In an interview given to the writer Gabriel Garcia Marques, Marcos said the Zapatistas were 'condemned to failure if we continue with an armed structure'."

Esther fans went on: 

The Zapatista women's movement has probably made more gains in the last seven years than have women in mainstream society, although it should be recognised that they are coming from a more extreme position of powerlessness, and that their progress owes little or nothing to their male counterparts".

This feminist reformist drivel version of events concludes that if Fox met the Zapatistas' three negotiating conditions (Indigenous Rights Bill; partial demilitarisation of the conflict zone; release of all political prisoners),

"the way will then be clear for further talks and an eventual end to the conflict in the Southeast".

Leaving aside the obvious trap of the movement becoming hopelessly bogged down in endless wrangling details via such an interminable reformist perspective (with which no one will be happy, especially given that the original background to the Zapatista movement was for a completely new-deal society for the whole of the Mexican population, and not just the indigenous minority), - the real disaster of all this is the pretence that the economic and political crisis of the imperialist system internationally, class-war on a worldwide scale, - can be solved by reformist negotiations with the monopoly-capitalist bourgeoisie who control the world (or with their local representatives).

But the economic and political difficulties that ruling classes and regimes everywhere are in, cannot possibly be understood if seen as a 'negotiating' problem, especially when approached in a class-collaborative spirit within which 'everyone can live happily ever after'. That is a world of make-believe, and not the real world at all.

In reality, the gigantic financial forces of monopoly-capitalist imperialism on earth are plunging for a headlong crash in which they will attempt to slaughter each other in international trade war then shooting war, and in which every ruling class on earth will only be able to keep in the saddle at all, by imposing the most ruthless repressive tyranny on their own discontented populace and devastated country.

This capitalist-system crisis has been maturing for ages, and many parts of the world have already experienced whole populations in the Third World (Nicaragua, Grenada, Philippines, Indonesia, etc), or sectors of the population, being driven to revolution, (like the Zapatistas or the FARC) because of the total frustrations with doomed capitalist-class rule, and with early-crisis signs living-on in the old way.

In the longer historical framework, this crisis of frustration can only deepen. Given that the capitalist system itself is on the blink internationally, heading for its greatest slump-devastation, fascist-tyranny, and war-turmoil ever, only by the weirdest fluke circumstances will any individual ruling class escape this general capitalist pattern of violent degeneration, leading inevitably to more and more revolutionary determination everywhere to change the whole social order, getting rid of capitalism completely, and its endlessly recurring rottenness.

The opportunities, inspirations, and tactics of this anti-imperialist world revolution will vary endlessly from country to country. In different circumstances, bouts of public political negotiations to drive the capitalist class back might well be usefully interspersed with constant armed revolutionary pressure. Although not a socialist revolution, the Irish national-liberation struggle has been brilliantly led by Sinn Féin and the IRA to rout British imperialism's colonial toe-hold on Ireland in this way.

But crucially, so far, - and with imperialist colonialism only having to retreat a limited distance to initially concede the required minimum of genuine national-liberation opportunities under the complex all-Ireland Good Friday Agreement formula, Sinn Féin and the IRA have nevertheless found it vitally necessary to back up their negotiated political advances with the constant threat of returning to guerrilla war if London tries to renege on the agreement.

The Zapatistas’ aims and tactics are matters for the Mexican revolution, but the 'reformist solution' implications of all the above quotes and reports are undoubtedly a prime concern and of great significance for the whole of the international anti-imperialist struggle. Whatever this Mexican movement hopes for or gets from this campaign, these 'reformism can solve it' implications threaten a treacherous disaster for the international anti-imperialists.

Clearly the massively impressive FARC revolution in Colombia is in a different league entirely from the Zapatista nationalist revolts in Mexico, acknowledging freely its kinship with historic communist guerrilla wars for taking the power to build socialism.

But the world anti-imperialist movement has been thrust into a disastrous ideological mess by the appalling confusion sown by Moscow Revisionism and Third International muddled inability to ever clearly analyse the theoretical damage caused by Stalinism, or remotely suggest a coherent way forward.

The longtime pathetic silence on these matters by the likes of Beijing, Hanoi, and Havana, - and their continuing incoherence on these vital questions of the nature and scale of the imperialist economic crisis,	dominating world affairs, and how its degenerate influence on the life of the planet will be overcome, -  places the onus on front-line anti-imperialist movements like the FARC to give the whole world class struggle a theoretical lead as well as setting its brilliant, priceless practical example of how to fight capitalist ruling-class tyranny and its American imperialist back-up. 

There are huge fake-'left' class forces eagerly waiting everywhere to latch onto any and every slightest suggestion that the imperialist system's problems can be solved internationally by 'left reformist pressure', or by class-collaborative negotiations, in other words.

Such influences will be swarming all over the FARC and similar revolutionary movements, especially when it comes to claiming to represent international solidarity with the anti-imperialist revolutionary frontline. These 'Friends of Cuba' type movements can make mild propaganda embarrassment for 'respectable' political circles against any imperialist government's 'more outrageous' economic tyranny or militaristic subversion of Third World anti-imperialist regimes, but they never solve anything, are frequently ignored completely, and their objective effect in the long run is to play a reactionary role in history by implying that while an occasional Third World revolution deserves some sympathy, their active agitational politics, of constant left reformist pressure is all that is really needed to put things right in the mainstream Western political world.

In particular, these large-scale movements of 'left reformist pressure', sharing the petty-bourgeois mentality of 'sympathetic support' for some far distant revolution or other, objectively ensure that there is little political space in the West for the only serious solidarity with revolutions abroad to flourish, the advocacy that revolution will be the only way to guarantee real progress in the home country too, in the long run.

The Marxist-Leninist understanding of 'revolutionary solidarity' is that what the masses elsewhere need bringing to their attention about a particular revolution is simply the fact that the power was taken BY REVOLUTION, necessary everywhere, - rather than admirable details, however splendid, of the revolution's new universal health service, for example, and how the beastly imperialist trade blockade was making certain pharmaceuticals or other life-saving supplies impossible to obtain, etc, etc, - as important as such campaigns might also be for raising anti-imperialist political consciousness. The fact that planned public ownership and a socialist philosophy of equal treatment can produce far better social services than the market in the right circumstances, - is NOT a secret, not to any majority area of international public perception, even in the USA. Many Western countries have flourished for decades with many publicly-owned social services.

What is a secret is that communist revolution is NECESSARY everywhere to guarantee civilisation's progress, - EVERYWHERE, - and is also inevitable everywhere.

But it is precisely these crucial life-giving secrets for mankind that every middle-class solidarity movement that has ever existed in the West is most determined not only never to mention but to make sure that no one else ever mentions either (that might be taking part in a public meeting or helping in some other solidarity activity). This huge 'left reformist pressure' movement does exactly the same thing around any solidarity action with trade union disputes, invariably insisting for example "We are here to raise money for the railwaymen/Cuban hospitals/the miners/(etc) - not to discuss cranky revolutionary theories", etc, etc.

The long Revisionist nightmare which paralysed civilisation's revolutionary socialist progress for so long and eventually put it into reverse, had its main class support in this 'left reformist pressure' movement.

Some revolutionary struggle at some point, - the FARC or others, must, on behalf of the international anti-imperialist forces everywhere, start to deliberately repair the theoretical chaos caused by the Stalinist retreat from international revolution as the anti-imperialist cutting edge of world progress to socialism, echoed universally by the 'left reformist pressure' mentality.

Such a return to Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding of how historical development against world capitalist domination can alone progress, will have to be theoretically fought for against the continuing Revisionist/'left reformist pressure' muddle on world struggle still emanating from Beijing, Havana, etc.

Their wish to defend their right to build a workers state, resist imperialist pressure, and to refuse to fall for Western provocations designed to restart war hostilities against socialism, (wherever possible to refuse without capitulating completely), remains sound policy. A Colombian workers state would be bound to pursue the same line.

But going beyond that to put pressure on still-developing anti-imperialist revolutions elsewhere to 'avoid provoking imperialist intervention if possible', etc, etc, as Moscow's Revisionist tradition has done, (from backing the doomed Popular Front petty bourgeois 'democracy' in Spain in the 1930s, onwards), is only a recipe for the eventual theoretical chaos which destroyed the world communist movement, if it becomes a permanent general line, as it did, rather than just a one-off temporary tactic (which might have been right or wrong depending on how the combination of world circumstances and local circumstances was being analysed (e.g. in Spain at that time, something which is still being argued about)).

That general Moscow tendency to advise revolutionaries everywhere to only proceed with maximum slowness, caution, and delay, was based on Stalin's theoretical idiocy that the planned workers states economies, - heavily subsidising the socialist camp's weaker members as well as the whole worldwide national-liberation movement, as they were doing, - could nevertheless still out-perform the gigantic Western imperialist economies on the world marketplace for consumerist glitz, fashion, pop-music, Hollywood slick, lifestyle bollocks, etc, etc, etc, and that socialism would eventually prove itself that way, (just provided that imperialism could be "prevented from going to war", etc, etc).

What an insane notion; and what total stupidity to have wanted to pursue the West down that degenerate cultural blind-alley anyway, environmentally destructive to boot, as well as hopelessly exploitative of humanity.

But the pressure everywhere was to hold back on revolutionary initiatives, - to such an extent, for example, that the Communist Party in Cuba had to be adopted by Castro instead of vice versa, and in Nicaragua actually opposed the Sandinista revolution to start with. It completely missed the boat with the Sinn Féin and IRA national-liberation revolution, too, in British Colonial Ireland. In Indonesia over a million strong, it waited and waited and waited....and was then massacred into oblivion, still in 'left reformist pressure' mode.

Fully detailed accounts have yet to be compiled of hesitancy or restraint, such as Moscow transmitted, emanating from Beijing and Havana, for example, - to be done in solidarity with the Chinese and Cuban workers states, but critical of this ongoing theoretical retreat from Marxist-Leninist science.

But the glaring Revisionist hollowness in all their propaganda on the world scene, - deliberately never saying anything about the world's sole future in revolutionary overthrow of imperialism, - is a general analysis requiring no further proof, and revolutionary struggles everywhere should make no secret of it.

A world view, - plus all the lessons of building a party of revolutionary theory contained in 100 volumes of works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, - are what movements like the FARC generally need to do more of to add to their usually excellent local detailed anti-regime propaganda.

The 'left reformist pressure' middle class movement, feigning 'revolutionary' enthusiasm for every bandwagon going, is mounting a huge ideological offensive, courtesy of the bourgeois media, now that the capitalist crisis is becoming so serious. Green anarchists such as Naomi Klein, now almost a self-appointed spokesman for the Zapatistas, gets regular capitalist press space for her poisonous cynicism against communist leadership.

Note the modish, Pseuds Corner posturing of Klein's latest colour-supplement contrived effect:

Unlike those early visitors to Chiapas, these travellers say they are there not because they are "in solidarity" with the Zapatistas, but because they are Zapatistas. Some even claim to be Subcomandante Marcos himself - they say we are all Marcos.

Perhaps only a man who never takes off his mask, who hides his real name, could lead this caravan of renegades, rebels, loners and anarchists on this two-week trek. These are people who have learned to steer clear of charismatic leaders with one-size-fits-all ideologies. These aren't party loyalists; these are members of groups that pride themselves on their autonomy and lack of hierarchy: Marcos - with his black wool mask, two eyes and pipe - seems to be an anti-leader tailor-made for this suspicious, critical lot. Not only does he refuse to show his face, undercutting (and simultaneously augmenting) his own celebrity, but Marcos's story is of a man who came to his leadership, not through swaggering certainty, but by coming to terms with political uncertainty, by learning to follow.

Having failed as a Marxist missionary, Marcos immersed himself in Mayan culture. The more he learned, the less he knew. Out of this process, a new kind of army emerged, the EZLN, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which was not controlled by an elite of guerrilla commanders but by the communities themselves, through clandestine councils and open assemblies.

Further subjugating himself, Marcos says that he is not a leader to those who seek him out, but that his black mask is a mirror, reflecting each of their own struggle; that a Zapatista is anyone anywhere fighting injustice, that "We are you". He once said, "Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains."

So with it! And so-o-o 'revolutionary', - "but the real rank-and-file thing, not that dreadful Stalinist leader-centralism", etc. Sure, and that is why hard-nosed anti-communist capitalist corporations are giving Klein such mass coverage at the moment, to make sure that the next revolution from below is 'the real thing' at last?????? Hardly likely.

Klein's 'literary' self-indulgence is not just cheap poetic gobshite but betrays an utterly relentless, well–worked-out character-assassination of Lenin's role in history (without mentioning him, of course) revealing some highly professional psycho-warfare training from somewhere or other, plus a formidable class hatred of communism.

It gets worse. Every right note is struck, colourfully boosting the gunfighter machismo, but all in order to play it down in reality, and reveal an effortlessly magnanimous victory in which everyone is a winner, there are no losers, nothing is grabbed selfishly or for glory, - in short, gunfighter machismo every where. In this happy haze of Haight-Ashbury drug-assisted Flower Power revisited, - who could even think of mentioning anything so crude and crass as the Bolshevik Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat????

In the seven years since, the Zapatistas have come to represent two forces at once: first, rebels struggling against grinding poverty and humiliation in the mountains of Chiapas and, on top of this, theorists of a new movement, another way to think about power, resistance and globalisation. This theory - Zapatismo not only turns classic guerrilla tactics inside out, but much of left-wing politics on its head.

The Zapatista uprising was a new way to protect land and culture: rather than locking out the world, the Zapatistas flung open the doors and invited the world inside. Chiapas was transformed, despite its poverty, despite being under constant military siege, into a global gathering place for activists, intellectuals, and indigenous groups.

What is clear in all this jostling for position is that something radical has changed in the balance of power in Mexico. The Zapatistas are calling the shots now - which is significant, because they have lost the habit of firing shots. What started as a small, armed insurrection has in the past seven years turned into what now looks more like a peaceful, and mass movement. It has helped topple the corrupt 71 year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and has placed indigenous rights at the centre of the Mexican political agenda.

Which is why Marcos gets angry when he is looked on as just another guy with a gun: "What other guerrilla force has convened a national democratic movement, civic and peaceful, so that armed struggle becomes useless?" he asks. "What other guerrilla force asks its bases of support about what it should do before doing it? What other guerrilla force has struggled to achieve a democratic space and not take power? What other guerrilla force has relied more on words than on bullets?"

Well, all communist guerrilla forces, since you ask, have educated their movements in vast tracts of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary science which changed the whole course of world history in the 20th century. No volumes of Zapatismo revolutionary science have yet hit the world's bookshelves. It might be because there has not yet actually been any new revolution in Mexico. The same old US-imperialist-stooge establishment rules on as usual. So far, this 'new way' to oust monopoly-capitalist domination of 'land and culture' seems to consist of just imagining it has happened rather than actually driving out the armed forces and exploitation rule-of-law of the Mexican imperialist-stooge state power. This is certainly one way of "turning leftwing politics on its head", but there is no chance of this reformist farce ending in anything but bitter frustration and disaster in due course.

At the moment, K1ein's self-appointed spokesmanship for the international rallies against 'world trade' as well, looks certain to end in the same sulphurous disappointment. The aggressive demonstrations in Seattle, Prague, Quebec, and London on May Day do not even pretend to have a clue about what should follow any success for all this "direct action against world monopoly capitalism". The relentless emphasis on the form of the revolt (rather than on any longterm purposeful political content for actually permanently changing the world meaningfully), - "for collective decision-making and decentralised organising", etc, etc, - shows that this green anarchism is a real product of this epoch of capitalist cultural nihilism and despair, but that it is also doomed only to increase the swamp of bourgeois ideological confusion in which society is drowning.

Like the ludicrous diversions of 'modern art' which the bourgeois establishment choose to make a fetish of, -  all utterly meaningless arbitrary form, without a scrap of artistic insight into the human condition anywhere in sight, - this Kleinist celebration of form goes on relentlessly:

In a study commissioned by the US military from the Rand Corporation, the EZLN is studied as  "a new mode of conflict -  'netwar' -  in which the protagonists depend on using network forms of organisation, doctrine, strategy and technology". This is dangerous, according to Rand, because what starts as "a war of the flea" can quickly turn into "a war of the swarm".

But what finally does it all add up to?? The most pathetic attempt to rescue the clapped-out illusions of Christianity, reformism, the cooperative movement, and class collaboration, that any pretentious spin-doctoring could ever have tried to con people with. There are even verbal echoes of Blairism in it:

Zapatistas aren't interested in overthrowing the state or naming their leader, Marcus, as president. If anything, they want less state power over their lives. And, besides, Marcus says that as soon as peace has been negotiated he will take off his mask and disappear.  

What does it mean to be a revolutionary who is not trying to stage a revolution? This is one of the key Zapatista paradoxes. In one of his many communiqués, Marcus writes that "it is not necessary to conquer the world. It is sufficient to make it new". He adds: "Us. Today" What sets the Zapatistas apart from your average Marxist guerrilla insurgents is that their goal is not to win control, but to seize and build autonomous spaces where "democracy, liberty and justice" can thrive. 

Marcus believes that what he has learned in Chiapas about non-hierarchical decision-making, decentralized organising and deep-community democracy holds answers for the non-indigenous world as well - if only it were willing to listen. This is a kind of organising that doesn't compartmentalise the community into workers, warriors, farmers and students, but instead seeks to organise communities as a whole, across sectors and across generations, creating 'social movements'. For the Zapatistas, these autonomous zones aren't about isolationism or dropping out, 60s-style. Quite the opposite: Marcus is convinced that these free spaces, born of reclaimed-land, communal agriculture, resistance to privatisation, will eventually create counter-powers to the state simply by existing as alternatives.

It also occurs to me that Marcus isn't Martin Luther King; he is King's very modern progeny, born of a bittersweet marriage of vision and necessity. This masked man who calls himself Marcus is the descendant of King, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Emiliano Zapata and all the other heroes who preached from pulpits only to be shot down one by one, leaving bodies of followers wandering around blind and disoriented because they lost their heads.

In their place, the world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution. "This is our dream," writes Marcus, "the Zapatista paradox - one that takes away sleep. The only dream that is dreamed awake, sleepless. The history that is born and nurtured from below."

And with what success?? None at all, so far. This 'left reformist pressure'(with some direct-action knobs on) remains entirely at the mercy of the armed imperialist-stooge Mexican state-power of bourgeois dictatorship, - in Kleinism's own admission:

When the insurrection began, the Mexican military was convinced it would be able to squash the Zapatistas' jungle uprising like a bug. It sent in heavy artillery, conducted air raids, mobilised thousands of soldiers. Only, instead of standing on a squashed bug, the government found itself surrounded by a swarm of international activists, buzzing around Chiapas.

The ring mound the rebels has not protected the Zapatistas entirely. In December 1997, there was the brutal Acteal massacre in which 45 Zapatista supporters were killed, most of them women and children. And the situation in Chiapas is still desperate, with thousands displaced from their homes.

The World Trade Organisation is being 'challenged' at Seattle, Prague, Quebec, London, etc, in exactly the same deluded way. "Scale down your monopoly-imperialist power, and give us all some space to dream in". It is going to take quite a bit more than this to end world imperialist domination.

The FARC are doing better, - as the capitalist press itself admits:

Luckily for the students the village school was closed the day that crop-dusters, escorted by combat helicopters, doused the tin-roofed classrooms with herbicides. Their target was the swath of illegal coca plantations on the low hills around the village, but clouds of defoliant engulfed the school, the Roman Catholic church, and the fields of plantain, cassava and maize.

Miriam Rodriguez, a teacher at the school, said: "The effects have been catastrophic. They sprayed the coca, but they also killed all our food crops". The schoolchildren complained of rashes, headaches and vomiting after the weedkiller fell. Nearby are half-dead fruit trees, withered maize plants and row upon row of skeletal coca plants.

Guided by spy planes and US satellites, crop-dusters criss-crossed the skies of Caqueta state in the south and the Middle Magdalena region in the north last week. Flying as low as 15 metres (50ft) they were protected by helicopter gunships. Guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forced of Colombia (Farc) often shoot at the slow-moving crop-dusters.

The pilots, some of them US contract workers, fly up to five missions a day, spraying on average 3.8 litres of glyphosate herbicide on every hectare.  But local farmers and officials say crop-dusting has destroyed thousands of hectares of food corps and pasture, devastated the local economy, and sown deep resentment among the rural poor.

'Why should I lie? I had coca. But they've left me with nothing -  no work, and no food,' said Otoniel Urrea, staring down at his devastated smallholding in a barren gully stripped of vegetation.

Officials say crops are only sprayed after they have been identified as illegal drug plantations, but in high winds the herbicide can drift off target. Farmers often intersperse coca and opium poppies with food crops, making mistakes even harder to avoid. The effects of spraying are not seen straight away, but several days after fumigation, every plant in then affected zone starts to wither and die.

Farmers say that poisoned ground can take months to recover. Mr Urrea says coca was his only source of cash. The nearest city is Mocoa,12 hours away down a rutted single-lane road, and transport costs make most legal crops unprofitable to grow.

Officials describe the Guamuez valley as a vast network of industrial coca plantations financed and managed by drug dealers. Locals disagree.

"It's not one person with a huge plantation, it's a chain of little crops," said Alfonso Martinet, a former mayor in the town of La Hormiga. 

"The government has never had a serious social policy in the Putumayo - and they still don't. Two months after they fumigated we still haven't seen any aid" he said, warning that some peasants, despairing of government aid, were already replanting their illegal crops with a new strain of high-yield Peruvian coca.  Pastrana is expected to ask the US for up to $500m a year in extra financial assistance, and trade preferences to help bail out the struggling Colombian economy.

With unemployment nudging 20%, he believes that the anti-narcotics campaign and peace talks with Farc both depend on social investment. He has warned that without greater investment in drug-producing regions, poor Colombians will continue to work in the drugs trade or sign up with the armed factions which have perpetuated Colombia's 37-year civil war.

Most of the first tranche of US aid went towards helicopters, equipment find training for the elite anti-narcotics army battalions leading the fumigation drive.

Troops from the new battalions patrol the roads leading into the Guamuez valley, but towns in the region are dominated by paramilitary groups. In La Hormiga, militiamen with hand-grenades in their waist-bands keep watch in the town square.

Late last year the paramilitaries launched a campaign of massacres and assassinations to drive out the Farc guerrillas, who had dominated the region for decades. Their success helps explain the lack of guerrilla resistance to the fumigation campaign in Putumayo.

In rebel-dominated Caqueta state, however, fumigation sorties have come under heavy ground fire, and last week an armed rescue unit - including US civilian contract workers - braved guerrilla bullets to save the crew of a downed police helicopter.  But the brunt of the anti-narcotics campaign has been borne by small farmers and Indians, said German Martinet, a local ombudsman in the town of Puerto Asis.

"If this is just about destroying coca crops and burning labs, no matter the price, then it's a victory," he said. "But if you don't tackle the social causes, the peasants will continue growing illegal crops. We shouldn't just be eradicating coca -  we should be eradicating poverty."

But those who have studied coca production in Colombia argue that the aid package flies in the face of history and economics.

'It's prohibition in all but name,' says Jesus Idrobo, a taxonomist at the Botanical Gardens in Bogota, and an expert on the coca leaf. 'The campesinos depend on the coca for their livelihood. As long as they can make more money from a production [than from other crops] you will never eradicate it.'  According to Idrobo one hectare of coca produces about two kilos of coca leaves every three months, or six kilos a year. To add value to their crop, the campesinos press and refine the leaves into a crude block which they sell on to the cartels. For every kilo of coca that they manufacture the campesinos can expect to receive $32,000 from the drug gangs.

'That's enough to live well for several years,' explains Idrobo. What other crop can provide a similar rate of return?' Several years ago, Idrobo says, the US approached the botanical gardens with a request to release a fungus Fussarium oxysporum - that devours coca leaves.  However, the plan was ruled out on the grounds that the fungus might also take over legal plantations, destroying leaves that ordinary Colombians spend on for a daily source of nutrition.

'Do you realise that the coca leaf contains a higher percentage of vitamins and minerals than any of the 52 other food plants grown in Colombia?' says Idrobo. 'Coca chewing goes back 2,000 years to before the conquest. For the Indians it is a way of life.'

For the 17,000 guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) the day starts at 4am. It may be 36 years since they embarked on their attempt to bring revolution to the country, but there is no relaxation of the routine that has turned them into one of the biggest and best-armed guerrilla forces in history.

After exercises and morning parade, they stop for breakfast and the news. So sophisticated are some of their camps that they have their own televisions powered by generator.

"The news is discussed over breakfast at 6.30am," says Lucero Palmera, 26, who has been with Farc for nine years. "It might be a discussion about what is happening in Cuba or about Clinton's wife or about Israel. There is always a political focus to it. If there is no television, we listen to the news on the radio."

The guerrillas will be listening very closely to the news in the coming days and weeks as the world focuses on Plan Colombia, the agreement by which the United States will send more than £1bn-worth of military aid to the Colombian government, officially to crush drug trafficking but essentially to destroy the Marxist Farc.

The plan has raised fears of a big increase in the fighting and killing which plague Colombian society

After breakfast, the camp is tidied up and, if necessary, defensive trenches are dug: a frequent task since they move position every five days, often marching all day to a new hide-out.

"There are no siestas in the afternoon," M$ Palmera says with a laugh - rather, there is study: "It could be anything. Philosophy, mathematics, history. This is a permanent daily school.'

The Farc office in the centre of San Vicente, the unofficial capital of 'Farclandia' as the demilitarised zone is known, is run by Nora, a nom de guerre, as all the names of those in Farc are: a practice intended in part to protect their families, who are targeted by far-right paramilitary groups.

Nora has the task of dealing with problems brought to her by the townspeople of San Vicente, greeting visitors to the peace process - a busload of mainly black law students from California arrived while we were in town - and handling the press.

She has been in combat many times, she says, but has never taken part in a kidnapping. The money seized during kidnaps or paid in ransom for kidnap victims goes towards running Farc. Sometimes Colombian journalists are kidnapped to be taken to see the site of a massacre carried out by the paramilitaries, who wipe out villages considered sympathetic to Farc.

From its origins as a peasant guerrilla movement under Manuel "Tiro Fijo" (sure-shot) Marulanda in July 1964, Farc has evolved into this army which is neither well enough supported to take over the country nor small enough to be defeated militarily.

When Farc previously re-entered conventional politics as a political party, Union Patriotica, in the 80s,  it learned a painful lesson: 13 of its 18 elected mayors were assassinated and more than 3,000 members were killed, depriving the party of much of its intellectual leadership.

Only a few of those responsible for the killing, mainly carried out it is believed by the military, have been charged.

As night falls on San Vicente, the senior guerrillas drift back to their camps hidden in the countryside: At 4am a new day will begin, and with it discussions of the news reports containing, as they will this week, predictions that if the military aid package goes through, Colombia may become the Vietnam of the 21st century.

Vietnam was a colossal triumph for civilisation’s most heroic history of revolutionary achievement, thanks to the incredible sacrifices of the Indo-China communists and the revolutionary leadership they consciously put their trust in. It was also a humiliating disaster for US imperialism from which it has never recovered. History was tragedy that first time round. Farcical aspects are already well to the fore if Colombia does become a definitive 'second time round'.

First, the military officer in charge of the CIA counter-revolutionary intervention stunt in Colombia, supposedly leading and organising the massive new international Plan Colombia campaign "to eradicate drugs production" but really to smash the FARC, Colonel Hiatt, had to be dismissed by Washington because his wife, there as the consort of the US military attaché, was found guilty in court in the USA of being at the centre of one of the biggest illegal drug-smuggling rackets between Colombia and the USA yet uncovered.

Now follows the ludicrous humiliation of the light aircraft being shot down as a 'drug-runners target' which was in fact carrying American bible-thumping Born-Again christian pastors, another arm of US imperialism's ideological New World Order offensive to make the planet 'safe from communism' for all time.

And what is worse, the all-American holy men were shot down (by a Peruvian fighter-jet on Colombia's borders) after having been identified and geographically pinpointed by the CIA's own spotter plane patrolling the area looking for 'drug runners', allegedly.

Worse still, this monstrous imperialist-fascist brutal lash-up then machine-gunned the helpless downed pastors' light aircraft after it had crash-landed, inflicting further damage, misery, and humiliation.

More power to the FARC's elbow. Spread the revolutionary message worldwide. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

The darker-corners of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie ruling the 'free world'

Amnesty International's latest report points out that torture continues to be used throughout the world, as an instrument of political repression.

In many parts of the world, those who challenge the prevailing order are still likely targets of torture and ill-treatment. In the year 2000, torture is not only confined to military dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. Once again we discover how torture is inflicted in so-called 'democratic' states too, although the mainstream media decided to highlight only those cases in developing countries, with bad human rights records.

The persistence of torture at this moment in history is an indictment of the collective failure of governments to honour the pledge their predecessors made more than 50 years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

Torture is still affecting the most marginalised and discriminated against peoples in society. The Amnesty International report states that "the victims of torture are criminal suspects as well as political prisoners, the disadvantaged as well as the dissident, people targeted because of their identity as well as their beliefs. They are women as well as men, children as well as adults."

Common methods of torture and ill-treatment reported since 1997 include electric shocks (more than 40 countries), rape and sexual abuse in custody (more than 50 countries), suspension of the body (more than 40 countries), beating on the soles of the feet (more than 30 countries), suffocation (more than 30 countries), mock execution or threat of death (more than 50 countries) and prolonged solitary confinement (more than 50 countries). Other methods included submersion in water, stubbing out of cigarettes on the body, being tied to the back of a car and dragged behind it, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation.

In more than 80 countries, people reportedly died as a result of torture or ill-treatment by state officials. Most of the torturers were police officers. Beatings of criminal suspects may be so routine that even the victims themselves do not recognise them as torture.

In the absence of proper training and investigative resources, police may resort to torture or ill-treatment as "short-cut methods" to extract confessions and gain convictions, the report says. Those who wish to see tougher action against rising crime and support 'zero tolerance'  measures sometimes advocate such violence.

Police officers are by far the most common state agents of torture. Some governments use torture as part of their strategy for holding on to power. When society's defences are down, any opportunistic pretext such as the need to combat 'terrorism', the fight against crime, or hostility to groups such as asylum-seekers may be used as a licence to torture.

KNOWING THE CASES

In Western Europe, a pattern of foreign nationals dying during deportation has emerged, apparently as a result of excessive use of force by police and dangerous methods of restraint. This has been alleged in relation to such cases in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and the UK. Asylum-seekers have also been ill-treated in detention.

Allegations of racist ill-treatment are rarely investigated effectively. Violent raids on Romani households or communities by masked police officers have been reported in Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary. Police officers in these countries and in Romania are often reported to resort to ill-treatment of Roma to intimidate their communities or to extract confessions. Many Roma victims do not complain about their ill-treatment for fear of reprisals.

In Britain, the police have been found negligent in their response to racist attacks. An inquiry into the police investigation of the racist killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 found that the investigation had been fundamentally flawed "by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers". In 1999 the Police Complaints Authority found three officers guilty of neglect of duty for failing to carry out a thorough and impartial investigation into the case of Ricky Reel, an Asian student drowned in London in October 1997. 

Similarly, in the USA, the Rodney King case set in motion an intense debate into police brutality. Rodney King and his two passengers were ordered out of their vehicle by police, following a car chase on 3 March 1991. King was struck twice with an electro-shock taser gun. The video tape showed that he was then subjected to 56 baton blows and kicked and punched by three uniformed officers while 21 other officers stood by. Rodney King sustained multiple injuries, including a broken cheekbone, broken ankle and skull fractures. In April 1992 four police officers charged in the case were acquitted in a state court. The controversial jury decision sparked off serious rioting in Los Angeles in which more than 50 people died. However, in April 1993, two of the officers were convicted of federal civil rights charges in the case and sentenced to 30 months imprisonment. 

Political persecution is, of course, not an oddity within the European Union. Amnesty International's 2000 report, highlights the case of ETA suspect Nekane Txarpartegi, who was arrested in Tolosa (Gipuzkoa). in March 1999 by Civil Guards. She was reportedly held incommunicado for five days. Before being taken for interrogation in Madrid, she was driven to a wood near Etxegarate. During the journey she was beaten. She was forced to get out of the car and kneel as a gun was pointed at her head, in a simulation of execution. Insulating tape was placed round her hands and legs, her hands were cuffed, her legs tied with a cord and her head covered with a plastic bag. She was then beaten again. She claimed that throughout the days of interrogation by Civil Guards at Tres Cantos, Madrid, she was held under restraint and beaten mainly by "protected" hands on her head and shoulder, sexually abused, threatened with rape, and kicked each time she fell to the ground. Txarpartegi later received treatment at the Hospital Gregorio Maranon. A medical report from the prison of Soto del Real (Madrid) referred to a number of injuries that matched her torture accusations. * 

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

	State sponsored murder

The UN Special Rapporteur tasked with protecting the rights of lawyers has called for an independent public inquiry in the killings of Pat Finucane end Rosemary Nelson as the only way of establishing the truth about the deaths of the two prominent human rights lawyers.

The call came as Param Cumaraswamy, the senior UN official in charge of the cases, made his annual report to the UN's Human Rights Commission at a hearing in Geneva last week.

The Rapporteur reiterated his call for a public inquiry into the killing of Pat Finucane, who was shot dead in front of his family in February 1989 at his North Belfast home. Rosemary Nelson died in a booby trap car bombing in Lurgan in March 1999. This was the first call for an independent public inquiry into her death by the UN.

In his report the UN official criticised the British Prime Minister for failing to reply to a letter sent by the Rapporteur in September 2000. In the letter, Cumaraswamy expressed his concerns about the killing of Pat Finucane and backed calls for an independent public inquiry. Six months later and the UN investigator is still waiting for a reply.

The UN rapporteur also exposed the RUC Chief Constable's role in blocking access to information. Ronnie Flanagan denied a request for access by the UN Rapporteur to two earlier reports compiled by John Stevens into allegations of collusion.

In March 2000, during a meeting with the British policeman charged with the day to day running of the current Stevens' probe, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Hugh Orde, the UN official had requested the two reports. Three months later Orde informed the Rapporteur that his request was to be denied because the RUC Chief "did not think it would be appropriate".

Meanwhile, responding to criticism during the UN hearing, Tony Blair has claimed he never received a letter from the UN's Special Rapporteur or in the carefully chosen words of a Downing Street spokesperson, "there is no record of us having received that letter".

Curiously, this is not the only letter to have conveniently gone astray. Last year a letter criticising the British Army's decision to retain two soldiers convicted of the murder of a North Belfast teenager, Peter McBride, from the victim's family, also went missing. The family later hand delivered a six-foot letter to Downing Street.

Yet despite attempts by the British government and RUC to thwart disclosure of the full facts behind the deaths of two prominent human rights lawyers, evidence continues to emerge to support the case that collusion between British Crown forces and loyalist death squads was neither casual nor renegade but proactive and sanctioned at the highest levels.

It is now clear that the mechanisms of collusion, initially portrayed as dependent upon regrettable but inevitable "leaks" of confidential information from British Crown forces to loyalist gunmen, were, and probably remain, far more invasive and structured.

Collusion is now generally understood as a form of state sponsored murder. And the state's furtive response towards investigating the Finucane and Nelson killings increasingly confirms rather than dispels this understanding.

"The public should not be fooled by what is going on here," ran a statement from the Finucane family, responding this week to news that the trial against RUC Special Branch informer and UDA quartermaster William Stobie is about to collapse. "The purpose of the Stevens police investigation is to thwart a public judicial inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane.

"We can expect some further prosecutions," said the family. "This has all been carefully choreographed to ensure that the police investigation and any prosecution arising from it will postpone a public judicial inquiry indefinitely."

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

The judgment handed down last Friday by the North's top judge, Carswell, now calls into question many of the convictions based mostly on confession evidence obtained by the RUC through the ill treatment of detainees in holding centres such as Castlereagh and Gough Barracks in Armagh over the years.

THE ACQUITTAL of former prisoner Gerard Magee on Friday 6 April opens the way for former prisoners convicted in non-jury Diplock courts to have their convictions similarly overturned.

The judgment, although forced on the North's judiciary by the European Court of Human Rights, nonetheless means that the conveyor bell of British justice in the Six Counties has been exposed for its violations of the human rights of detainees.

Gerard Magee from Antrim was arrested on December 1988 and charged with conspiracy to kill British soldiers and possession of explosives. He was convicted of these charges in December 1990 by Judge Murray.

The only evidence against Magee was a signed confession made in Castlereagh RUC barracks in Belfast. Magee argued that he made the confession under duress and says he was physically abused by his RUC interrogators. He was also denied access to his solicitor during the first crucial 48 hours of interrogations, during which he made tire confession , used to convict him.

Judge Murray rejected Magee's claims and accused him of fabricating the [events].

but in June 1993 the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal, saying it was satisfied that the original conviction was "neither unsafe or unsatisfactory".

Meanwhile, Magee instituted proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that his treatment in Castlereagh was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

On 6 June 2000 the ECHR, in a written decision, ruled in Magee's favour stating, "there had been a violation of Article 6 (1) of the Convention, in conjunction with Article 6 (3)(c) as regards the denial of access to a solicitor.

Given that Magee had already brought his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, this body, in light of the European ruling, returned his case to the Court of Appeal, which in turn acquitted him.

In his judgment, Carswell acknowledged that "if other cases come before us concerning admissions made in Castlereagh by persons whose access to legal advice was deferred; we shall take the ECHR's decision into account".

Speaking about the ruling, Magee said: "Many people were abused by the RUC. I hope this will lead to many opportunities for people to seek legal redress."

Patricia Coyle of solicitors Madden and Finucane said: "This is an important judgement for others who have been convicted in Diplock Courts, either wholly or substantially on alleged confession evidence extracted under the regimes of Castlereagh and Gough Barracks without access to legal advice."