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 he tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions (£20 p a ) & circulation: 0786 799 6074    [P&P Bulletin Publications PO BOX 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd]
No 1093 June 12 2001                                                                                                                        25p   weekly

Troubled ruling-class uses its media control to re-appoint Blair's national-coalition type government but this stunt is now on desperately thin ice and not at all popular. The coming markets collapse will leave a resentful Britain almost ungovernable, just like much of the rest of the world's economic crisis areas already. A huge ideological battle about the development of society is the only way forward, and the fake-'left' refusal to polemicise about revolutionary philosophy leaves them labelled "useless parliamentary opportunist" just like all the regular petty-bourgeois politicians. Sectarian careerists like the Socialist Alliance and SLP will continue to fail until a genuine polemical struggle resumes to build a party of honest revolutionary-theoretical endeavour instead of guru-led self-protective cliques. Sucking up to theory-less 'left' celebrities as SA and SLP do is worse than Blairism. And their negativity or silence on world revolutionary anti-imperialist frontline developments (Nepal, China, etc) is just cowardly, playing into fascist-chauvinism's hands, as fake-'left' feebleness has done in Oldham, Italy, and elsewhere. Without updating the history of revolutionary socialist theory, a socialist world will never be built. The anti-communist opportunism of the SA and SLP is doomed. 

Cynical disillusionment was the outstanding pattern of the general election, altered only where some hope in a nationalist alternative to the crookedness of routine capitalist government could attach itself to some prominent issue or other, whether usefully or negatively.

New Labour got re-elected on less than 25% of the votes cast, which means that this next government has the support of only 20% of the country once the large percentage which refuses to register to vote at all is taken into account, with 80% of the country in no way supporting Blairism.

Such is the corrupt 'democracy' of the wealth-dominated and influence-dominated misnamed 'free market' system. It is a sour and demoralised situation reeking of a capitalism in terminal moral, social, and political crisis.

The imminent crash into worldwide economic slump, mass unemployment, and trade war will complete the picture of a revolutionary crisis facing the out-of-date, bankrupt, and divisively-unjust racket of international exploitation by big-money monopoly imperialism.

At this stage of the world capitalist crisis, the results show Britain is now without a confident ruling class party, and unlikely to get one back in the visible perspective, which is an appropriate historical comment on the steady collapse of the British imperialist position in the world.

But it also shows that 'reformist' promises are treated with almost as much contempt. Clearly, people associate all "jam tomorrow" pledges with the very same system (bogus capitalist 'democracy') which they are now so overwhelmingly sceptical about and beginning to feel such anger and frustrations over.

With some confused nationalist exceptions, every sector of routine bourgeois-parliamentary posturing (from New Labour and Lib-Dems to the fake-'left' Alliance and SLP) either got considerably fewer total votes than last time or performed abysmally anyway.

Only when there was a seriously challenging ideological edge to any programme did voters respond, sometimes logically and sometimes in a reactionary way.

The 'left' reformist promises of the Alliance and the SLP made little headway precisely because they both avoid revolutionary philosophical polemics like the plague. The whole SA strategy is just to be 'nice' and 'inclusive' towards everything not obviously reactionary, - from maverick Labour 'lefts' like Abbott and Corbyn, to everything in the anti-communist 'left' swamp which presents no intellectual threat to the self-appointed gurus of the Alliance (e.g. Scargill's SLP philistinism).

But joining all-party pledges to try to prevent the closure of the Oranges and Lemons Nursery in Hackney is plainly 'nice' while prominently reporting it as of great political significance is equally plainly the naffest way imaginable to try to access the political mood of Britain (and the world) as the capitalist crisis closes in.

People sense that things are going terribly, terribly wrong in society, and the people are right. And just tinkering around the edges of all the obvious logical reforms (millions of them) that could be made to how things are run at present is simply not going to remotely reach the really deeper, global but inarticulate concerns of workers everywhere.

Universally, workers are beginning to be in revolt. What they desperately want is leadership that will give them revolutionary consciousness.

Quite deliberately, the SA and the SLP refuse to encourage it, and actively try to discourage it on occasions (such as warning against "crisisism"; or banning discussion of revolutionary history because "it will lead to splits" (SA), or "cause internecine warfare" (SLP) ; or expelling agitation for building a party of revolutionary theory in the working class, as happened to the EPSR).

The Review describes support for the SA or the SLP in these circumstances as merely adding to the disarming brainwashing by all the rest of bourgeois parliamentary politics which pretends that the only problem facing mankind is getting the balance right in different public-spending priorities and whether to get more investment via taxation or privatisation, etc. The EPSR is totally opposed to continuing this fraudulent 'democratic' confidence trick.

The real issue challenging society is the impossibility of the parliamentary capitalist system ever again being able to even remotely satisfy all a country's different demands or produce any worthwhile national harmony. The very way of life of hire-and-fire capitalist exploitation is historically running into a revolutionary brick wall. The modern working class is simply no longer suited to just being used as hired 'hands'. 

And this rejection of soulless clock-on alienation is coming to a crescendo just at the moment when the boom-slump anarchy of the trade-war 'free market' system is stoking up the most catastrophic economic collapse of all time, resulting in devastating mass unemployment and chronic insecurity worldwide.

The 21st century is going to be one of non-stop revolutionary explosions everywhere. The fake-'lefts' pretend to be 'Marxist' when it suits them, but don't remotely take the Marxist scientific approach seriously.

The EPSR has always consistently argued in massive detail that international imperialist crisis is the scene-setter for all world political developments, and that nothing makes sense, including developments inside the workers states, if analysed outside that broad background of unending inter-imperialist conflict, dominating the planet.

The general framework is a steady degeneration towards inter-imperialist World War III, clearly dictating revolution as still the sole real vehicle of progress for civilisation.

In particular, for example, the EPSR has concentrated on Japan’s astonishing economic paralysis for the past 10 years as demonstrating how the inevitable anarchic greed of privately-owned chauvinistically-oriented cut-throat competition for ever-greater monopoly-capital accumulation does finally reach a point of vast 'surpluses' of investment capital which can no longer all continue to make a profit, exactly as Marxist science has long explained.

Japan's total paralysis continues, exactly as the EPSR has explained must happen, and as confirmed yet, again by today's own capitalist press admissions: 

Analysts have begun to fear the worst. "There is a debate in Japan whether we're going to be experiencing a hard or soft landing. This report suggests, if anything, that we might be hitting the runway with no landing gear," said WestLB Panmure economist Andrew Shipley.

Japan's economy, once a byword for strong growth, shrank by 0.2% in the first quarter of 2001 and is likely to continue to contract in the second quarter as its hitech sector is dragged down by the United States slowdown. Technically, a second quarter of falling output would mean Japan is in recession, following three previous periods of decline in 1992,1993 and 1999. In reality, it has never recovered after the speculative excesses of the late 1980s ended in the inevitable pricking of the bubble.

The size of the task facing Nichiro Koizumi, the latest politician promising to end Japan’s 10-year recession, became depressingly clear yesterday as tentative signs of recovery in the world's second-biggest economy prove to be just another false dawn. A policy of tough love -  deep structural reform  - has not just been accepted but welcomed as a way of breaking the downward spiral.

Whether Mr Koizumi's approach is the right one remains to be seen. In the short term there is the risk that forcing troubled companies into bankruptcy will drive the country deeper into deflation. Graham Turner of GFC Economics says land prices, a key factor driving consumer confidence and spending, are falling more rapidly than at any time since the asset market implosion at the end of the 1980s. Corporate profits fell by more then 15% in the first quarter, prices in the shops are dropping at an annual rate of about 1%. In these circumstances, telling the banks to pull the plug on companies in difficulty may make matters worse rather than better.

The figures released yesterday show that Japan's structural problem has been overlaid in recent months by a cyclical downturn caused by events in the rest of the world. Exports, particularly to the United States, are down while capital investment has fallen back after a period of over-optimism among hi-tech companies last year. The five biggest Japanese chip manufacturers geared up production, but found themselves with too much capacity as demand has dropped back sharply. The strength of the yen, which weakened after yesterday's dismal figures, has been an added drag on growth.

Corporate capital investment fell by 1% compared with the previous quarter, the result of stagnation in the services, transport, telecoms and other non-manufacturing industries. Exports dropped by 3.6%, the first decline since the first quarter of 1999, while imports fell by 2.2%.

Pressure is expected to mount for a dose of old-style, government-led stimulus amid warnings that the slump will continue. But Mr Koizumi, who unexpectedly won the premiership in April with promises of reducing the government debt and introducing painful fiscal reforms, resisted pressure to boost demand with a supplementary budget. "We have only just implemented the budget. A pick-up in the economy will be difficult unless we proceed with structural reform. We have to think about things from a long-term perspective."

Expansionary fiscal policy helped mitigate some of the effects of the downturn in the 1990s, with trillions of yen pumped into public works. However, the price of Keynesian pump-priming has been an explosion in the public sector that will eventually have to be reined in. Most analysts believe that further easing of fiscal policy will now have negligible effect.

'Difficult' target

Cutting interest rates and making credit cheaper is another traditional stimulus to demand, but the effectiveness of monetary policy is blunted when prices are falling. The Bank of Japan has cut nominal interest rates to zero, but the real rate of interest for most borrowers is about 4%, high for a country in recession.

Mr Koizumi's decision to rely on structural reforms is a recognition that the tried end tested policy responses are not working, and he is prepared to back his judgment in crucial elections to the upper house of parliament in July. His earlier promises to rein in government debt, slash banks' bad loans - estimated at between 30 trillion and 110 trillion yen (£185bn-£680bn) - and drastically cut public works projects won him plaudits from the public and money men. Conservatives within his Liberal Democratic Party, however, are likely to exploit yesterday's news as proof that it is far too soon to wean the economy off state support.

Economists warned of worse to come as a result of continued falls in personal consumption and public-sector demand. The seriousness of the problem can be gauged by the radical nature of some of the solutions now being proposed. The American economist Paul Krugman suggested injecting inflation into the economy so that interest rates could fall in real and not just nominal terms. Another proposal is for the government to nationalise the banking system and offer en interest-rate moratorium.

Doubts are already being voiced about whether Mr Koizumi can tread the increasingly fine line between implementing structural reforms and reassuring a public increasingly worried about job losses and wage freezes. On past form, the misgivings are justified.

But super-efficient Japan is only leading where the rest of the world imperialist economy must now follow, - into increasing paralysis and ever-closer towards total collapse. The USA economy is already approaching total stagnation from an expansion point of view. But market panics and big-power chauvinist aggression and recriminations will guarantee that such 'paralysed equilibrium' will be but a fleeting pause before the Great Crash.

The massive brutal destruction of all this worldwide 'surplus' capacity or 'overproduction', etc is then the only way out, - via trade wars, slumps, mass unemployment, but ultimately via international shooting wars to see which accumulated monopoly-imperialist power is to come out on top.

The forms this coming violent international turmoil will take are unclear, but World War III is as good a designation as any, reflecting both the destructiveness, and the consequences in inevitable socialist revolutions that will result from such barbaric capitalist insanity, just as happened after the first two inter-imperialist world Wars.

This is what a new working-class party needs to be preparing workers for. But this is exactly what the SA and the SLP refuse to pay any attention to whatsoever.

Of course the immediate issues on any doorstep are about schools, and hospitals, and public transport, and all other social services, and education and jobs, etc, etc, etc. And of course it makes sense while capitalism lasts to take advantage of its parliamentary 'democracy' platforms to denounce bourgeois penny-pinching and inhuman priorities in favour of a socialist solution to all society's problems. 

But to refuse to place all such discussions about how society could be better organised in their sole proper context of how revolutionary crisis is going to devastating the present order of things whether anyone wants it to happen or not, --- is merely continuing to help the bourgeois-capitalist establishment to carry on pulling the wool over the eyes of the working class with endless more lying promises about how pretend 'reforms' to this, that, and the other will 'totally transform the way of life in Britain' etc, etc, etc, - all total codswallop, but a rotten deception game in which the SA and SLP are now full participants with their equally unreal pretences that even more radical 'reforms' can change capitalism "just like that".

It is not going to happen. It is total nonsense. Consistent with keeping the monopoly-capitalist ownership game itself going, and its international imperialist exploitation role, the traditional bourgeois parties already play the 'reform' racket as hard as it can be played without stirring up too many revolutionary emotions. If something can be easily 'reformed' and make a government popular, why would not the careerist-opportunist Blairites have already themselves done as much as possible? And why would not their TUC backers ("join your trade union to get justice and a better life for all workers") have supported them all the way??? What has the past century of 'reformism' all been about other than the Western imperialist powers using their neo-colonial superprofits from their monopoly-capitalist multi-national world domination to buy off their domestic working classes with shallow 'reforms' of one kind or another????

But the essence of socialist understanding has always been that it is the very class set-up of the capitalist mode of production (private enterprise plus hired hands) which makes a totally different way of life via a wholly publicly-owned and planned economy vitally necessary, something which cannot possibly be achieved by any mere tinkering 'reforms', not matter how many or how radical they are.

Whether consciously or not, the SA and the SLP are simply adding to the confusing 'reformist' chains which imprison the working class, no matter how many times they swear that their real interest is going on to complete 'socialism'. All they are doing in practice is helping the bourgeoisie to keep going the 'parliamentary democracy' con trick.

This is particularly irresponsible and reactionary to provide a fake-'left' cover for the-capitalist electoral racket at a time when the working class is clearly showing a greater readiness to see through the whole fraud than ever before, - with a record low turn-out at a time of maximum disgust and hostility for all the corrupt freeloading, crooked careerism, and spin-doctored bullshit with which the capitalist system's bent government is currently being dispensed.

EPSR supporters will continue to keep a critical distance from all such parliamentary opportunist antics until some genuine ideological-polemical struggle resumes at a far more serious level than the present political equivalent of the old who-does-what trade-union disputes, with all the fake-'lefts' obscenely circling round each other in 'unity' to electorally deceive the whole working class and to try to poach any new recruits off each other, meanwhile positively refusing to try to work out any agreed revolutionary socialist history of the triumphs and failures of the 20th century in order to achieve the most scientifically-accurate possible revolutionary perspectives for action in the 21st century.

This philistine refusal to even consider trying to rebuild a Leninist party of revolutionary theory (without which the working class will never build a socialist world) is also easily explained.

What keeps this whole anti-theory squabbling fake-'left' swamp together is, of course, their shared anti-communism, either active or passive. They are either frozen-in-time anti-communist Stalinist Revisionists or else anti-Soviet Trotskyite opportunists of the most treacherous counter-revolutionary, Solidarnosc-loving kind.

One of the most posturing frauds within the Alliance camp, the anti-communist Weekly Worker, has just re-demonstrated this petty-bourgeois opportunism with some astonishing reactionary jeering against the revolutionary struggle in Nepal:

The Nepalese left needs not only unity, but a programme of revolutionary democracy which brings the working class and its peasant allies into state power. If the political vacuum is left open there is a good chance that the CPN (Maoist) will fill it. A CPN (Maoist) regime in Nepal would not be a pretty sight, serving up yet another version of dictatorship over the proletariat 

In the 1999 general election over 40% of the Nepalese electorate gave their support to the CPN (UML), the Nepal Workers' and Peasant' Party, the Communist Party of Nepal (ML), the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist), the Communist Party of Nepal (United), and the United People's Front/SJM. All six parties in the bloc are descended from splits in the Communist Party of Nepal, as is the CPN (Maoist). Either way, the desire of peasants and workers in Nepal for change is palpable and a real force.

Since 1996 the CPN (Maoist) has set itself the target of encircling the towns with liberated villages, emulating their Shining Path mentors in Peru and People's War in India's Andhra Pradesh. In classical Maoist fashion CPN (Maoist) units have attacked police posts, banks (for funds), and government offices, abducted officials, and executed many political leaders with the traditional kukri. Over 70 guerrillas have reportedly died in exchanges with state forces.

There is a real base of mass support for the CPN (Maoist) in the villages, reeling as they are under poverty and chronic debt. There are now large 'liberated areas', especially in western Nepal, where CPN (Maoist) cadres help villagers plant and harvest crops, and local guerrilla commanders act as judges in people's courts; human rights activists have reportedly found the Maoist judicial system to be speedy and businesslike. Two newspapers, Janadesh and Mahima, are sympathetic to the insurgence and allow them to air their views, as does The Katmandu Post.

The six left-wing non-guerrilla-ist parties have been cooperating with each other for some time. In April they staged mass rallies and meetings around the country to mark the 53rd anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Nepal. Part of an ongoing campaign to force the resignation of the corrupt Nepal Congress prime minister. They also organised a series of traffic jam demonstrations in over a dozen towns and cities, facing police tear gas and baton charges for their pains. Many, including MPs, were injured and many were arrested. But while this bloc is discussing ever closer cooperation, even unity, their horizons are low and quasi-reformist. In their opposition to guerrillaist methods they 'forget' that the state must be destroyed - by the working class. If the working class were to take a lead and challenge the Nepalese state now with the demand for a democratic republic, while the regime is punch-drunk and on its knees, it would stand an excellent chance of sweeping aside the ruling clique and putting itself at the front of the urban and rural poor. But it appears that the left groups are stuck in a Stalinite rut, seeking alliances with liberals and the 'progressive' national bourgeoisie. That hardly fulfils the needs of the working class and peasantry of Nepal.  Nor can it act as a spark for the oppressed billions to the north and south.

So here is a practical anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle, halfway through the guerrilla-war liberation of Nepal from the ruling-class stooges of Western monopoly-capitalist interests, being urged to turn the clock back to a reformist campaign for a "democratic republic", the selfsame posturing 'niceness' which has only just managed to stifle less than 20% of the yawns of British voters, thoroughly and properly contemptuous of the whole 'democracy' fraud as lived through under 20th century imperialism, in about 80 constituencies, and which could not face challenging the BNP in Oldham because the SA was afraid it might not do justice to itself!!!

And what is the CPGB's real giveaway concern in all this fatuous 'revolutionary' posturing???? To hope to stitch up some 'democratic' stunt or other in Nepal in order to "act as a spark for the oppressed billions to the north", - in other words to help US imperialism's non-stop CIA subversion intrigues to try to get a counter-revolution going against the dictatorship of the proletariat in China.

For such treacherous petty-bourgeois fake-'lefts' as these, Marxist-Leninist science laboured in vain to expose the total fraud of 'democracy' under parliamentary capitalism, and to establish that a revolutionary guerrilla war with a purely class content can only end up either as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie once again, or else as the dictatorship of the proletariat. This dictatorship 'over the proletariat' snivel is either meaningless gobshite or else it has discovered a completely new form of historical class struggle in which anti-bourgeois-state class forces take on the bourgeois state dictatorship in order to set up the bourgeois state dictatorship again!!!!  Remarkable!!!!!
It would hardly be a surprise if this Nepalese native proletarian guerrilla-war revolution carried some theoretical baggage (coming from Nepal CP Third International Revisionist origins) which it would be fascinating and useful to internationally debate and which might well be dangerously flawed; but without more evidence than the CPGB or other sources have made available at this stage about CPN (Maoist) political confusion, to pour scorn on this proletarian guerrilla war as some kind of weird counter-revolution tells far more about what dirty game the Weekly Worker is playing in world socialist politics than it does, about the Nepalese CPN.

The philistine SLP is just as bankrupt on these issues, refusing to take any part in trying to establish for the working class an agreed historical understanding of the triumphs and disasters of the more than 80 years record of international revolutionary socialist struggle so far.

The Chinese workers state exists, one quarter of mankind, and a major headache for world-dominant US imperialism under whose shadow the whole of mankind must still suffer. And not a day passes without some disgusting anti-China propaganda in the national press and television brainwashing of the British working class (that Scargill & Co hope to influence). And here are rival 'socialists' to the SLP calling for the CIA's counter-revolution to succeed against the Chinese workers state, in effect.

So what does the huge glossy SLP election manifesto say to the working class about this crucial issue for understanding what is going on in the world??? Not one single word. The very existence of China does not even get mentioned.

So whose foul sly opportunism is the more reprehensible and dangerous, that of the Socialist Alliance or that of the Socialist Labour Party?????

Back in the real world, and away from these sick vestiges of equally-bankrupt Trotskyism and Stalinism, the superficially dispiriting post-election atmosphere (the feeling that catastrophe looms but that nothing is going to be done about it because of universal ignorance and paralysis) could stand closer analysis.

The campaign in Worcestershire by local independents (to save the Kidderminster hospital from downgrading) routed the safe Labour seat of Wyre Forest by an astonishing 17,630 majority, defeating a cocky junior government minister in the process.

Energetic voting and campaigning in the occupied Zone of Ireland went enthusiastically to both 'extremes' where there was some real historical movement to fight over, commendably to Sinn Féin in the case of nationalist Irish voters, who doubled their seats from 2 to 4, overtaking the 'constitutional' nationalist SDLP in the process in spite of generations of counter-revolutionary propaganda vilifying Sinn Féin and the IRA in every way possible, - but tragically to Paisley’s DUP in the case of the lumpen British colonialist voters, threatening more 'No Surrender' posturing to thwart implementation of the Good Friday Agreement for a snail's-pace withdrawal by British imperialism to allow the triumphant Irish national-liberation struggle to progress steadily towards Ireland's reunification.

But whereas the ideological muscle which nationalist feeling overcame voter apathy with in Sinn Féin’s case was positive, helping to further the cause of revolutionary national-liberation and something obviously worth fighting for and bound to rouse the working-class electorate in such imperialist crisis times, the nationalist stimulus in Oldham which brought the BNP an astonishing 16% of the vote was obviously negative; but at the same time it raises enormously interesting and useful question marks against the hopelessness of the SA and SLP electoral-opportunist philistines, firstly for not standing, and secondly for having nothing sensible to say about the immigration/asylum-seeker issues anyway.

Just parading their utterly abstract and academic ultra-'political correctness' line of "no immigration controls" and "welcome all asylum-seekers", etc, is worse than useless. If the literally hundreds of millions who would willingly exchange grinding Third World poverty and/or political disillusionment, despair, or repression for First World affluence could actually make it to Britain, then the practical stupidity and pointlessness of this ultra-'politically correct' posturing would become all too apparent.

But even as things stand, the 'nobility' of the gesture is the vainest and emptiest show imaginable since in reality all it is doing is giving a fake-'left' cover to existing bourgeois reformist practice, legitimising the very manipulativeness of the capitalist state which it claims to be setting out to expose as 'racism'.

Changing Britain's immigration laws is pure reformism and not 'revolutionary' at all, no matter how apparently extreme the "no immigration controls at all" academic posture might seem. And not once throughout this whole immigration controversy has the fake-'left' exposed the deliberate imperialist political encouraging of worldwide emigration for more than a century as a safety valve to take the more enterprising away from crisis-ridden countries where revolution would be the only other option. A socialist revolution in Britain would have the immediate clear internationalist duty, - as posturingly accepted by both the SA and the SLP, - to instantly start helping every other nation on earth to achieve their own socialist revolution. Tens of thousands don't like life in Kosovo, or Iraq, or Sudan, or Nigeria, or Bangladesh, etc, etc?????  Fine, great. So instantly equip them with training, revolutionary education, and material support for an organised return to their homelands to fight for a revolutionary improvement in conditions there. It would be all-round entirely reactionary, to just encourage the individuals who had the drive and ambition to leave their homelands for something better, to just swell the catering and cleaning casual labour force in Britain, or help British backwardness to continue to ignore its gap in training sufficient doctors and nurses of its own, or teachers, etc, etc.

So what is the 'revolutionary' point of encouraging reforms for "complete freedom of immigration" now, under capitalism??

There isn't any. It grants the capitalist state the right to play God over human lives when the only thing worth thinking about any capitalist state or any of its activities is that they are al1 out-of-date and irrelevant and that the only worthwhile future is to abolish all capitalist states immediately. It pretends even more stupidly that sound 'reforms' to a capitalist state's immigration laws can make a capitalist state quite a worthwhile and tolerable thing after all, pure reformist nonsense. And it says to the native working class that the only real problem is their racist intolerance of all the immigrant newcomers. "Welcome all asylum-seekers" working-class communities everywhere are instructed. "Any problem you think you might have with this rests entirely in your own backward racist prejudices".

This racistly stupid and lunatically academic 'politically correct' nonsense got its answer in Oldham, as the EPSR has consistently warned would begin to happen.

It is quite pointless telling culturally disadvantaged and economically-deprived proletarian communities that more immigrant admissions to the already-lengthening dole queues and housing queues and hospital queues and social services queues could not possibly adversely affect their own lives and that they must overcome their own natural prejudice with a leap in philosophical magnanimity to simply "welcome all asylum seekers".

It is not going to happen, and the BNP's intervention spreading ludicrously bogus 'comfort' about serving 'British nationals' first is a warning to the fake 'socialist' swamp to start shedding their own anti-communist and counter-revolutionary prejudices themselves, and quickly, so that a serious Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement can start to be built in the working class, making the only possible sensible anti-capitalist observations and proposals on the immigration question, making world revolution the only sane answer for all, and the only long-term possibility for consigning backward racist prejudices to the dustbin of history.

Utterly feeble fake-'left' posturing in Italy has just opened the door to a rampant semi-fascist Berlusconi government which is making mincemeat of all the ludicrous 'politically correct' reformism that Trotskyism and Revisionism have held back the working class with.

The weak-mindedness on the fake-'left' in Britain which rolls on its back at the first friendly gesture from some 'nice' but hostile-to-theory celebrity political 'left' or other, is pushing this 	country in the same direction. Build Leninism. 
EPSR supporters. 

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

According to European Foreign Commissioner the heavy military component of Plan Colombia will only deepen the internal Colombian conflict

Europe against Washington's war strategy ?
PENTAGON SEEKING TO OCCUPY COLOMBIA SINCE 1965

For those who have followed U.S. policy in the region closely, it's clear that the phantom of an eventual intervention by Washington in Colombia is not a new phenomenon.

History does not lie. Documents declassified in early 1999 reveal information about a Pentagon plan designed to invade Colombia in 1965 during the intense political crisis in that country due to advances by the guerrilla movement.

Later, for diverse motives, the sinister plan was put on ice, although the Pentagon opted for the indirect mechanism of sending in training units, helicopters and even advisers to direct the fighting against the rebels.
The current situation is very similar to what happened in the middle of 1965 when the extreme alternative was about to happen.

The European Union (EU), comprising 15 countries, has a very different perspective on the contents of the controversial Plan Colombia, an initiative that emerged from the 1999 request of Colombian president Andres Pastrana and was impelled by Washington, come hell or high water, to combat guerrilla.

The plan, estimated at $7.5 billion USD, of which the White House is to contribute $3 billion USD, has a heavy military component, which includes the training of special troops to fight in the selva until available weaponry is expanded.

Of that U.S. contribution, $900 million USD are designated to upgrading weapons, training three green beret battalions, and modernizing various military air bases in Colombia and Ecuador.

The sinister list, criticized by the Europeans, includes 18 Black Hawk helicopters and a further 35 Heuys, many of which are already in active use in Colombia.

In an attempt to disguise it as a regional effort, the U.S. authorities have tried to directly involve countries bordering on Colombia as well as Europe and Japan (to a lesser degree). On various occasions, these have come out against the plan, primarily due to the bellicose character of the campaign.

The endeavor has clearly not had the acceptance that the United States and some parts of Latin America had hoped for, given that governments like Brazil and Venezuela have expressed their disagreement with direct participation.

The reasons are several: the fear of creating a new Vietnam in the region, the exodus of millions of Colombian refugees fleeing the mass fumigations, and the relocation of coca, poppy and marijuana-cultivation in their territories.

EUROPE DEFINES ITS STRATEGY

According to Europe, the heavy military component of Plan Colombia will only deepen the internal Colombian conflict, characterized by more than 40 years of struggle by the insurgent movements: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), among others, and the violence generated by the paramilitary groups.

With the goal of establishing their own strategy, representatives of the EU and certain other countries, as well as international and regional organizations, participated in the 3rd Support Group meeting for the peace process in Brussels.

According to European Foreign Commissioner Christopher Patten, the meeting didn't signify support for the Plan Colombia of Pastrana and the United States, but was an attempt to establish a single program of a social nature to promote the peace process, and which would also focus on how to deal with the drug problem.

The meeting agreed to grant 330 million euros (about $304 million USD) for developmental projects within Colombia.

Patten stressed that they are focusing on a social and economic agenda which would contemplate, for example, what they have designated as peace laboratories consisting of programs directed toward the development of alternative crops.

"Europe cannot repeat the U.S. scheme, which is based on a war strategy and does not acknowledge the serious economic, social and human rights crisis at the time of distributing resources," Francisco Angulo, spokesperson for the Colombia Peace Group emphasized.

According to analysts, the EU agreement probably didn't provoke smiles in Washington, which is suspicious of a European presence in Latin America, a region it views historically as its backyard.

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

Setback in China, mistrust in Europe

The U.S. EP-3 spy plane incident has strained relations with China, revealing the magnitude of the tug of war between Beijing and Washington.  

On top of the Echelon espionage network, which has been poisoning relations between the United States and the European Parliament for a year, comes the Perkins Case

THE U.S. EP-3 spy plane detained and immobilized since April 1 on a runway at Lingshui military airport on the island of Hainan, China, is a diplomatic setback for President George W. Bush and his administration.
The EP-3, equipped with highly sophisticated receivers and powerful radars and worth $80 million USD, had made an emergency landing on April 1 after an incident with a Chinese F-8 interceptor. The 28 crew members were handed over to the U.S. authorities on April 12.

This initiative, considered a goodwill gesture on Beijing's part, meant that the issue did not escalate to more serious dimensions.

On April 28 Beijing authorized a U.S inspection of the EP-3.

The EP-3, Aries 2 spy plane, was undertaking a "routine surveillance flight," or rather contributing to a global land, sea and air spy operation. The EP-3 is an old plane, the same size as a Boeing 737 (35 meters long), but its surveillance system is unique. The Chinese know it well and call it "the fat pig."

So what was the United States doing in that part of the world? The South China Sea area, to the south of Taiwan between VietNam and the Philippines, is in fact constantly monitored by a host of U.S. devices that trawl the area, one of the most coveted on the globe.

The plane's surface was entirely covered with very powerful detectors and radars, its flight range is 12 hours (there are less than 12 of these models traveling international airspace) and as a general rule it is designed to intercept in that region primarily all electronic information on Chinese communications, then military signals, then to supervise maritime routes or identify planes by detecting maritime or aerial radioelectrical signals.

The Taipei Times on April 7 quoted U.S. expert Richard Fisher of the Jamestown Foundation as saying that the spy plane was gathering information on the Sovremmeny destroyer, bought by the Chinese from Moscow.

Responding to the Chinese decision to retain the spy plane in its territory, the Pentagon announced on May 2 that the Defense Department had ordered a case-by-case review of bilateral military ties. This modified previous information about a total cutoff of such exchanges.

It's worth recalling that at the beginning of this year, at a military base in Colorado during the Schriever 2001 war games, the Pentagon simulated a space war-supposedly declared by China in 2017. The scenario was that the Red State (China) threatens the Brown State (Taiwan), which requests help from the Blue State (United States).

The United States' arrogance and sense of impunity can be seen once again. .

As a matter of form, it is worth recalling that the Chinese ambassador in Washington asked what would have been the United States' reaction if Chinese spy planes "surveyed" U.S. coasts.

ANOTHER BIG BROTHER 

We must not forget that this event, as spectacular as it may be, is only one of the many faces of the U.S. Big Brother.

We must also bear in mind that the United States continues to weave its worldwide web using two other spy systems that are equally effective, Echelon and Carnivore, capable of capturing everything sent on the Internet, even an e-mail to your grandmother on the other side of the world. And we've yet to see what the 2005 spy satellites hold in store.

This news was officially revealed in February 2000 thanks to a report handed to the European Parliament by Scottish researcher Duncan Campbell, one of the leading experts in international electronic tapping systems. The Echelon system, a large electronic espionage network created in 1947 during the cold war, caused clear tension between Washington and some European capitals, excluding London, of course.

Europe would in fact discover that Echelon had been shamelessly misused. The enemy from the "Eastern bloc" had disappeared, but the allies then started to "listen" to the allies, mainly with an economic and commercial agenda, fundamentally for the benefit of the United States.

This issue has reappeared due to revelations, involuntary or not, suggesting that they have managed to reach the very heart of European management.

"Is this just anti-Yankee paranoia? No, the White House can monitor everything, or almost everything," were the words published in a well-known French weekly as early as December 1998, penned by journalist Vincent Janvert in one of the first newspaper inquiries into the National Security Agency (NSA). Secret Power, a book published in April 1988 written by Nicky Hager, a researcher from New Zealand, caught people's attention with its primary revelations on Echelon's dirty deeds.

THE PERKINS CASE

The latest known scandal began with what Desmond Perkins, head of coded cryptography at the European Commission said - behind closed doors in the European Parliament but leaked by French newspaper Liberation - and tried to deny two days later. According to Perkins' first declaration, U.S. spy organizations had free access to the European executive's coded system of confidential information through NSA, for two weeks at the beginning of 2001. Perkins admitted that they had very good relations with NSA, confirming that they were only "checking" the quality of the coding system supplied by Siemens. However it seems suspicious to have given the task to the big U.S. "listeners" and have also confirmed confidential codes to them. Despite laborious declarations from others in charge at the beginning of April there was such doubt that -  as Bosco Esteruelas, El Pais correspondent in Brussels, had written in March - Europe was considering opening a new inquiry. Esteruelas confirmed that the EU's security procedures for secret information would be revised.

According to the experts the best form of protection is through cryptography (ciphering or coding messages), and according to Duncan Campbell, in an interview with Liberation on January 22, 2001, the best way to end Echelon is with political action. 

The Echelon affair is a delicate subject among members of the European Union. Britain, the second pillar of this authentic Anglo-Saxon intelligence multi-national, is a member of the EU, and three members of this spy club are NATO members (United States, Britain and Canada). French legislator Arthur Paecht (right-wirig liberal), responsible for releasing an alarming report from the French Parliament, considers that the EU "fell into the trap" set up by the Washington-London team, adding that he was never given an explanation by either country. The report requests international discussions with the aim of protecting citizens and public and individual liberties.
ECHELON AT THE SERVICE OF U.S. COMPANIES

According to French journalist Jacques Isnard, one of the leading experts on military issues, in the United States this spying is done "through the commercial secretary of the National Economic Council's creation of a true war council to coordinate and centralize the action of intelligence services working for the benefit of big U.S. companies" (Le Monde, March 30 2001). For eight years this council, the Advocacy Center, has offered "help" to U.S. firms. Campbell suggests that this is how U.S firms have pocketed billions of dollars after having "won" big contracts (see explanation later on m this article) originally destined for European businesses.

The Campbell Report undermined U.S. impunity, as do the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation in Washington and publications like Ramparts, which waged war against the U.S. military-industrial complex, and even NSA veterans who "deserted" to work in the private sector. This sense of impunity is so strong that the former head of the CIA, James Woolsey, stressed the intellectual honesty of the Campbell report.

It is obvious that the United States is using Echelon to scan the world. The Americas are under the dominion of the NSA; Europe, Russia and Africa belong to Britain; Australia and New Zealand take care of Asia and the Pacific; and finally Canada also controls Europe and the Americas.

The European Parliament is understandably upset yet equally defenseless, as according to French representative Paecht there is no "European legislation for telephone tapping and private conversations. The existing texts are not effective enough." A year ago the Campbell Report provoked an avalanche of protests and comments from European politicians. A year later the shock waves continue but Europe still has no clear stance on the issue.

Where does European criticism of Echelon stop and where does complicity begin? Is it possible to protest in good or bad faith when we know that each country has its own tapping network?

With the NSA and its "big ears," industrial espionage seems to have become child's play. For example, in 1994 the French group Thompson-CSF negotiated a huge contract with Brazil to supply a radar system destined to monitor rainfall in the Amazonian rainforest NSA intercepted all the negotiations and told its "friends." The result was that France lost its $400,000 USD contract to a U.S competitor, Raytheon Corporation.

A year later France and Airbus, European Aeronautical Consortium, lost another contract, this time to Saudi Arabia.

Who were the happy winners? Boeing and McDonnellDouglas, but the U.S government denied all involvement.

The 1993 GATT negotiations (forerunner to WTO) favored the United States. The main country to suffer the conversation tapping was France. According to Isnard, Japanese firms such as NEC and other car companies or South Korean businesses also became victims of Echelon. As far as the Internet, the U.S. "invention" par excellence, the majority of the world's networks pass through the United States. The NSA and its Comint (Communications Intelligence) are like fish in water. Their software allows them to "read" messages, if necessary with the use of external decoding programs. A private U.S. pressure group, the highly active Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), has just taken the FBI and, the Justice Department to court and revealed the composition of the software used by the Carnivore spy system.

Even private phone calls

Thanks to an exceptional informatics system, from its headquarters, in Fort Meade, Maryland, Echelon can intercept, capture and then decode, select and file all kinds of communication in the world.

It doesn't matter what medium (telephone, ground line or not, fax, telex, e-mail), or what language (out of around 100). This organization can employ up to 38,000 people and has an annual budget of $4 billion USD. The United States intercepts military, diplomatic and strategic telecommunications, like in the times of the cold war, but also civil, commercial, industrial, financial, scientific and even private telephone conversations.

As a result, the National Security Agency (NSA), created in 1952, has two billion messages at its disposal every 24 hours. It "works" on these messages, with the help of a powerful artificial intelligence system, on the basis of key words, tones of voice and names. It is estimated that reports are filed on more than 10,000 conversations a day. The NSA has a network of around 120 spy or communications satellites (Intelsat) that send the captured information to some 50 land stations throughout the world (in some 20 countries), which immediately transfer it to the NSA headquarters.