Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V. I. Lenin 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074      www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk     [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]   
No 1147 August 06 2002                                                                                                                                25p

German 'no' to Iraq war as US-run world economy plunges deeper into insoluble crisis shows imperialist knives are out already, which makes global CLASS-WAR perspectives more vital than ever. Rival neo-colonial influences in the Middle East and worldwide underline the economic-crisis tensions pushing US warmongering forward. Lenin on the "United States of Europe" reactionary fraud is more relevant today than ever. Fake-'lefts' are not just mis-analysing every situation at the moment. They are not even on the same planet as reality, and cannot even grasp the Marxist concept of learning from history, let alone get any of the answers right. The spontaneous revolutionary wave storming round the world needs harnessing to scientific REVOLUTION, not "condemning" as "terrorism".

Relative to the colossal, epoch-making, PHILOSOPHICAL transformation in the international proletariat for which leadership is urgently demanded (by the rapidly-maturing warmongering-revolutionary crisis of the global imperialist system), - the continuing total paralysis of the entire fake-'left' in Britain shows that even the very ROLE of Marxist-Leninist scientific THINKING remains a closed book to these reformist posturers, let alone getting the right answers to the huge uncertainties surrounding current world problems.

At this turning point in history, monopoly-capitalist corruption, incompetence, and warmongering tyranny, controlling the planet, cannot be taken on and smashed by the working masses, as must happen, without the rapid and vast expansion of Marxist revolutionary perspectives.

The entire fake-'left', from the Alliance to the SLP (including all the constituent squabbling factions of each), - do not even perceive this as an issue, or understand it.

They refuse to see that a consciousness of worldwide REVOLUTIONARY struggle, - total-war hostility, - against US imperialist domination, is not just the fulfilment of the whole purpose of 150 years of Marxist theory, but it is also now the most extremely pressing PRACTICAL need of an international proletariat approaching total ferment.

Workers everywhere need to hear it said as loudly and frequently as possible that REVOLUTION to overthrow this US-UN-IMF-EU imperialist warmongering tyranny is not merely the ONLY way forward but will represent the greatest triumph ever of all civilisation's achievements, by an enormous distance, - the triumph of the human spirit, the triumph of skills and organisation and ingenuity, and the triumph of the materialist philosophical understanding of the world and of what is in its best interests.

Most of the petty-bourgeois fake-'left' are appalled at this whole concept and perspective. 

They are the enemies of revolution, and serious anti-imperialists will need to start believing this soon.

The most that any will say, begrudgingly when pressed, is that "maybe" the world is heading for a revolutionary showdown with US imperialism.

But this is utterly hopeless. This is WORSE than zero leadership. It not only does not give any lead or perspective to anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles. It is pure agnosticism, a petty-bourgeois, opportunist 'philosophical' perch which is the TOTAL ENEMY of all Marxist science, and which the Marxists particularly despised for philosophically pretending to workers that leadership was being given while in reality, it was nothing but an opportunist hedging-of-bets.

A continuation of the Communist Manifesto is the furthest thing from what these fake-'lefts' represent. The whole point of MARXIST science is to defeat the bourgeoisie's ideological grip on the world PRECISELY by telling the international working class that the 800 years flourishing of civilisation under capitalism can ONLY end in total economic chaos and warmongering destruction because of the very class exploitation base on which ALL "private finance initiative" economy can ALONE be founded, - and that REVOLUTION by workers is the SOLE POSSIBLE way forward, - again by the very nature of class-war rule.

Sitting on the fence over these crucial questions for civilisation's future, - "maybe" imperialist crisis will end in revolution, - is NOT what the Communist Manifesto is all about.

It is true that Marxism is not a philosophical dogma, but a guide to action, forever flexible, as Marx himself said.

But WHAT action????? In one sentence: - grasping that class war has been the making of history so far, and that the working-class must OVERTHROW the capitalist class for civilisation to make further progress.

Minus that, there is not only "no dogma", but no Marxism either.

But from the SLP to the Alliance, the whole fake-'left' continues to posture as 'Marxist' yet refuses to commit itself about the OVERTHROW of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

It is a total obscene PRETENCE to feign that guesting on other trade unionists' picket lines, or supporting 'left-Labour' candidates, or even running in local and national elections as pure "socialist" candidates with lists of "urgent" reforms longer than your arm, - even remotely addresses the question of the OVERTHROW of the ruling class.

It does nothing of the sort. Quite DELIBERATELY, all of this "activism" goes on PRECISELY so that all so-called "socialists" can avoid having to deal with this question of is the ruling class going to be OVERTHROWN or not.

In the end, even the question of "violence" is a complete red herring, as Marxism long ago explained.

A combination of what condition of corruption, incompetence, confusion, and division the ruling class is in, - plus how determined, organised, and well-prepared in Marxist understanding the working-class is, will govern how much reactionary violence is inflicted by dying capitalism.

But that REVOLUTION is necessary, - and revolution is a self-explanatory VIOLENT end to capitalist misrule, - is the ABC of Marxism.

And for the petty bourgeois fake-'left' to hide behind this question of "violence" so as to obscure the central scientific necessity for the OVERTHROW of the ruling-class, is nothing but the slimiest and most treacherous betrayal of the socialist revolution itself that middle-class opportunism could possibly come up with.

Who in their right mind would NOT want there to be as little violence as possible in the overthrow of the ruling-class?

Obviously, only moments of irrational vengeance or insecurity would want to relish the idea of "paying back" the imperialist bourgeoisie for the cruelty and damage it has inflicted on mankind.

But to bolster their opportunism, these fake-'lefts' love to wallow in total confusion about "violence", and use it ruthlessly to effectively bury the idea itself of the OVERTHROW of the ruling class. And they moralise "against violence" in this cod-Christ-like fashion cruelly regardless of the quite stupendous volumes of murderous genocide, brutal violence and torture, starvation, and constant total humiliation that the US-led global imperialist SYSTEM is EVERY DAY inflicting NOW on the world's poorest exploited billions.

The dishonest and destructive essence of this anti-Marxist opportunism is nowhere better seen than in Lalkar's shifty embarrassment at the SLP's rightwing trade unionist "condemnation" of the Middle East's Sept 11 terrorist guerrilla revenge on US imperialism's unending bullying tyranny over the region.

In total agnostic stupidity which must dismay its few intelligent followers, Lalkar tries to pretend that its monstrous help to the SLP to provide a continuing fake-'left' cover for rightwing trade unionist class-collaboration with imperialism against Third World revolt, - is of little significance or importance.

But the class-war battle for the world's opinion largely revolves around this symbolic matter of whether the Third World guerrilla war/terrorist attempts to fight back against imperialist military tyranny are to be "condemned" or not.

The entire Third World cheers on every such blow struck by FARC, Hamas, Nepal Maoists, al-Qaeda, or whoever. The entire forces of bourgeois-liberal ideology on earth, - desperate to destroy all idea of REVOLUTION as a way forward for civilisation - tries desperately to keep up the pretence that UN 'democracy', and Human Rights, and the 'rule of law', etc, etc, etc, will still eventually, one day, deliver justice, and equality, and 'freedom' for all, etc, etc, etc, - in which case it is therefore only "reasonably obvious" that such "blind, gratuitous, reactionary violence, playing into the hands of the US imperialists", etc, etc, "should be condemned", etc, - playing up the issues that "backward Islamic nuttiness" inspires the suicide bombers; that the victims were "innocent New York workers"; and lying that "Marxism is against terror anyway", etc, etc.

It is certainly true that the terror weapon would seldom be first choice tactics for Marxist REVOLUTIONARIES, but what idiotic posturing are these fake-'lefts' indulging in who have no wish to stoke up a REVOLUTIONARY struggle anyway????

The issue is guerrilla WAR. Effectively, the entire Third World is under military DOMINATION from well-guarded US imperialist firepower sources, KILLING the Third World people with abandon whenever and wherever the fancy takes it.

Collective punishment of Palestinian homes, Afghan villages, Sudanese medical facilities, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc - all are targets and it will never stop until US imperialism (and its Zionist and UK and other stooges) is defeated.

It is total WAR on millions of innocents from imperialism's side, only interested in one thing - remaining the WORLD DOMINANT power at all costs.

So how can this well-guarded US-Zionist imperialist WAR machine be fought back against if not via total WAR against everything American or Zionist, as far as spontaneously-erupting Third World guerrilla-war terrorism is concerned??`7?

Lenin specifically dismissed fake-'left' attempts to use 'moral' or 'tactical' posturing arguments (for condemning terrorist spontaneity) as a "degradation of Marxism".

More shame on the 'Marxist revolutionaries' Lenin added, if tactically ill-judged spontaneous terror was becoming dominant to the organised socialist revolution's cost.

The only solution that was even thinkable, Lenin goes on, is for the Marxists to organise a more effective revolutionary uprising themselves, - in other words to capture the LEADERSHIP of the violent response to ruling-class tyranny.

In particular, Lenin insisted that very specific historical analysis of ALL the conditions of any action against imperialism was needed, not trite labels stereotyping anarchists or terrorists for immediate dismissal, etc.:

Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.

The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any revolutionary organisation.

The usual appraisal of the struggle we are describing is that it is anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution. Examples in support of this appraisal can easily be found in the events reported every day in the newspapers.

But are such examples convincing?

The fact that "guerrilla" warfare became widespread precisely after December, and its connection with the accentuation not only of the economic crisis but also of the political crisis is beyond dispute. The old Russian terrorism was an affair of the intellectual conspirator; today as a general rule guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply by the unemployed worker. Blanquism and anarchism easily occur to the minds of people who have a weakness for stereotype; but under the circumstances of an uprising, which are so apparent in the Lettish Territory, the inappropriateness of such trite labels is only too obvious.

The example of the Letts clearly demonstrates how incorrect, unscientific and unhistorical is the practice so very common among us of analysing guerrilla warfare without reference to the circumstances of an uprising. These circumstances must be borne in mind, we must reflect on the peculiar features of an intermediate period between big acts of insurrection, we must realise what forms of struggle inevitably arise under such circumstances, and not try to shirk the issue by a collection of words learned by rote, such as are used equally by the Cadets and the Novoye Vremya-ites: anarchism, robbery, hooliganism!

It is said that guerrilla acts disorganise our work.

It is not guerrilla actions which disorganise the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control.	 Being incapable of understanding what historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of neutralising its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is engendered by powerful economic and political causes. It is not in our power to eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against guerrilla warfare are complaints against our Party weakness in the matter of an uprising.

What we have said about disorganisation also applies to demoralisation. Condemnation and curses are absolutely incapable of putting a stop to a phenomenon which has been engendered by profound economic and political causes: It may be objected that if we are incapable of putting a stop to an abnormal and demoralising phenomenon, this is no reason why the Party should adopt abnormal and demoralising methods of struggle. But such an objection would be a purely bourgeois-liberal and not a Marxist objection, because a Marxist cannot regard civil war, or guerrilla warfare, which is one of its forms, as abnormal and demoralising in general. A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e. into an armed struggle between two sections of the people. In such periods a Marxist is obliged to take the stand of civil war. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism.

We fully admit criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say. But we absolutely demand in the name of the principles of Marxism that an analysis of the conditions of civil war should not be evaded by hackneyed and stereotyped talk about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and that senseless methods of guerrilla activity adopted by some organisation or other of the Polish Socialist Party at some moment or other should not be used as a bogey when discussing the question of the participation of the Social-Democratic Party as such in guerrilla warfare in general.

The argument that guerrilla warfare disorganises the movement must be regarded critically. Every new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices, inevitably "disorganises" organisations which are unprepared for this new form of struggle. Our old propagandist circles were disorganised by recourse to methods of agitation. Our committees were subsequently disorganised by recourse to demonstrations. Every military action in any war to a certain extent disorganises the ranks of the fighters. But this does not mean that one must not fight. It means that one must learn to fight. That is all.

When I see Social-Democrats proudly and smugly declaring "we are not anarchists, thieves, robbers, we are superior to all this, we reject guerrilla warfare", - I ask myself: Do these people realise what they are saying? Armed clashes and conflicts between the Black-Hundred government and the population are taking place all over the country. This is an absolutely inevitable phenomenon at the present stage of development of the revolution. The population is spontaneously and in an unorganised way-and for that very reason often in unfortunate and undesirable forms-reacting to this phenomenon also by armed conflicts and attacks. I can understand us refraining from Party leadership of this spontaneous struggle in a particular place or at a particular time because of the weakness and unpreparedness of our organisation. I realise that this question must be settled by the local practical workers, and that the remoulding of weak and unprepared organisations is no easy matter. But when I see a Social-Democratic theoretician or publicist not displaying regret over this unpreparedness, but rather a proud smugness and a self-exalted tendency to repeat phrases learned by rote in early youth about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, I am hurt by this degradation of the most revolutionary doctrine in the world.

It is said that guerrilla warfare brings the class-conscious proletarians into close association, with degraded, drunken riff-raff. That is true. But it only means that the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism. And without this latter condition, all, positively all, methods of struggle in bourgeois society bring the proletariat into close association with the various non-proletarian strata above and below it and, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become frayed, corrupted and prostituted. Strikes, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become corrupted into "alliances",  agreements between the workers and the masters against the consumers, Parliament becomes corrupted into a brothel, where a gang of bourgeois politicians barter wholesale and retail "national freedom", "liberalism", "democracy", republicanism, anti-clericalism, socialism and all other wares in demand. A newspaper becomes corrupted into a public pimp, into a means of corrupting the masses, of pandering to the low instincts of the mob, and so on and so forth. Social-Democracy knows of no universal methods of struggle, such as would shut off the proletariat by a Chinese wall from the strata standing slightly above or slightly below it.

That being so - and it is undoubtedly so - the Social-Democrats must absolutely make it their duty to create organisations best adapted to lead the masses in these big engagements and, as far as possible, in these small encounters as well. In a period when the class struggle has become accentuated to the point of civil war, Social-Democrats must make it their duty not only to participate but also to play the leading role in this civil war. The Social-Democrats must train and prepare their organisations to be really able to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of inflicting damage on the enemy's forces.

This is a difficult task, there is no denying. It cannot be accomplished at once. Just as the whole people are being retrained and are learning to light in the course of the civil war, so our organisations must be trained, must be reconstructed in conformity with the lessons of experience to be equal to this task.

We have not the slightest intention of foisting on practical workers any artificial form of struggle, or even of deciding from our armchair what part any particular form of guerrilla warfare should play in the general course of the civil war in Russia. We are far from the thought of regarding a concrete assessment of particular guerrilla actions as indicative of a trend in Social-Democracy. But we do regard it as our duty to help as far as possible to arrive at a correct theoretical assessment of the new forms of struggle engendered by practical life. We do regard it as our duty relentlessly to combat stereotypes and prejudices which hamper the class-conscious workers in correctly presenting a new and difficult problem and in correctly approaching its' solution.

• The Bolshevik Social-Democrats are often accused of a frivolous passion for guerrilla actions. It would therefore not be amiss to recall that in the draft resolution on guerrilla actions (Partiiniye Izvestia, No. 2, and Lenin's report on the Congress), the section of the Bolsheviks who defend guerrilla actions suggested the following conditions for their recognition: "expropriations" of private property were not to be permitted under any circumstances; "expropriations" of government property were not to be recommended but only allowed, provided that they were controlled by the Party and their proceeds used for the needs of an uprising. Guerrilla acts in the form of terrorism were to be recommended against brutal government officials and active members of the Black Hundreds, but on condition that 1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into account; 2) the conditions of the working-class movement in the given locality be reckoned with,  and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat should not be frittered away. 

Proletary, No 5, Guerrilla warfare September 30, 1906

At this stage in 1906, the postscript was still favouring selective assassination of officials by Bolsheviks, which gives the lie to the moronic disinformation that Marxism is "in principle" against terrorism as a tactic. Not at all. Marxism has only ever evaluated such matters merely from the standpoint of fighting expediency, as dictated by immediate tactical considerations, etc.

The fake-'left' tradition in Britain of the middle-class 'revolutionaries', always distancing themselves from IRA terrorism, is instructive here.

On the surface, the Sept 11 Islamic suicides look a million miles distant from any interest that posturing, stereotype "working-class Marxist-socialist revolutionaries" might have in the anti-imperialist outcome; - but then that is exactly what was said a million times by fake-'lefts' to keep their distance from the IRA/Sinn Féin anti-imperialist struggle.

"Green nationalist terror, as bad as Orange-loyalist terror, and worse than British rule"; or "reactionary Catholic isolationism, extending the priest-dominated backwardness of Dublin rule"; or "a treacherous sectarian abandonment of a joint Catholic-Protestant working-class fight for a socialist Ireland"; etc, etc, etc, - anything to be able to "condemn” the "murder of innocent British workers" whenever the Irish guerrilla-war terrorist response to total British colonial police-military dictatorship of the 6-county joke statelet of 'Northern Ireland', bombed or shot its way to victory.

But as in 1916 when Lenin's detailed historical analysis of ALL the conditions surrounding the international struggle against imperialist warmongering led him to ridicule those Second International fake-'lefts' who dismissed the Easter Rising as a disruptive, middle-class putsch which could only make the workers' revolutionary tasks more difficult, the EPSR's analysis of the modern Sinn Féin/IRA national-liberation war saw only humiliating defeat and setback for British imperialism again.

Neither the tactics nor the aims of nationalist struggle necessarily ever coincide with how a Marxist revolution would choose to fight; but the longterm total ideological paralysis of the entire fake-'left' (still persisting) guaranteed that no alternative anti-imperialist revolution was going to defeat British colonial domination of the occupied Zone, as it was obvious to the EPSR from the start that the Sinn Féin/IRA revolutionary guerrilla war was going to do.

Being right about the Provisionals' struggle was not, and is not, a matter of scoring Brownie points against the fake-'left' but of fighting for a historical method of anti-imperialist analysis which can prove its worth and establish a historical record of correct understanding.

This was how Marxist-Leninist science gained universal credibility in the first place, and how Stalinist Revisionist theoretical degeneracy (and its even sadder Trotskyite shadow) then lost it again by getting everything wrong.

Past fake-'left' inability or refusal to recognise the Provos' anti-imperialist triumph continues its sectarian poisoning of British workers understanding to this day.

ALL the Revisionists and Trots still sneer privately that the Good Friday Agreement was a 'defeat' for the national liberation struggle which "they"' would "never have settled for", etc, etc, still pretending that the British fake-'left' would have fought all the way for an all-out 'socialist' revolutionary victory.!!!

Why they won't do it in Britain, in that case, is never explained.

The imperialist-era corruption of the British worker with reactionary class-collaborationism has, potentially, been usefully & greatly undermined by British imperialism no longer being able to boast about its utterly fictional "defence of the rule of law against terrorism" in Ireland, or win sympathy for "our heroic boys in danger, and defending themselves bravely" in Ireland, - the source of anti-Irish hatred and racism in Britain for centuries.

But an acknowledged DEFEAT for British imperialism's ill-managed and badly-judged and unjust war in Ireland against an acknowledged, truly inspired, and justified revolutionary guerrilla army would contribute immeasurably more to the healthy class-war spirit and rationality of the British worker.

All of that, however, continues to be unrealised because of the fake-'left', - still misleading its thin following of 'militant' workers into not even any conception of imperialist defeat, anywhere at any time; nor any grasp of British imperialist defeat obviously; and least of all into any understanding of a British imperialist defeat in Ireland at the hands of the despised "thick Irish bogtrotters" (who in reality proved themselves to be some of class-war history's most outstanding guerrilla-war successes of all time).

On top of that, the feeble fake-'left' agnosticism of "does it matter so much if something was got wrong in the past", cuts the working-class off from so many other insights, potentially flowing from a correct understanding of British imperialist defeat in Ireland.

The Sinn Féin/IRA triumph, against all the odds, cemented more firmly than ever that post-1945 was the epoch of national-liberation defeat of direct colonial domination, even where the imperialist power was in a massively favourable position to keep on and on, trying to crush independence, or to frustrate or delay it endlessly.

The Good Friday Agreement is one of the most long-drawn-out and most impenetrable and ungraspable imperialist retreats of all, which actually had built into it a weird deal whereby the protagonists would play-act their way, at a snail's-pace, safely out of one mentality ("No Surrender") and safely into the real perspective - for Ireland's reunification at some not-too-distant future but without any more bloodshed, and without too much crowing in any direction about who had won and who had lost in Ireland's last (hopefully) national-liberation war.

National-liberation struggles against South African apartheid, against Smith's Rhodesian UDI, against Zionist colonisation of Palestine, for an independent Kurdistan, for Basque and Chechen separatism, etc, etc, could all become better understood (positively or negatively) as a result of studying the circumstances leading to the British imperialist retreat from Ireland.

And an understanding of that British imperialist defeat is increasingly emerging in admissions in the British capitalist press, - AS USUAL well before the petty-bourgeois timidity of the fake-'left' press has been able to conquer its Little Englander emotions to start admitting it too.

One of the weirdest aspects of the wretched scuttle from Ireland has just been faced up to, even more weirdly, in a Guardian column by Roy Hattersley, the epitome of Labourite class-collaborating opportunism. Leaving aside his anti-Sinn Féin abuse, Hattersley's piece astonishingly admits that Trimble has the "dirty" role of merely pretending to keep on "exposing" supposed "Republican villainy", and pretending to keep on threatening to walk out, but only all in order to keep on pacifying and taming the wild men of Loyalism by keeping the peace dividends of the Agreement going long enough for an increasing majority of all sides to see that it is in everyone's	 interests ultimately to keep the power-sharing deal going, - the strange snails-pace capitulatory reality of the GFA as analysed by the EPSR from the start. 

Interestingly, it was because of refusing to stop challenging the "failed peace process" Trot gobshite (that Socialist News kept printing from Heron and Sikorski) that the EPSR got expelled from the SLP. And it now takes someone from the more dishonest wing of Labour-movement 'reformist' nonsense to be the first petty bourgeois opportunist politician to be willing to confirm the important anti-imperialist understanding that the EPSR refused to shut up about:

Quentin Davies, the Tories' spokesman on Northern Ireland, described the government's position as "quite extraordinarily vacuous" and the secretary of state as suffering from a "credibility problem":  Clearly Mr Davies has no wish to preserve the traditional bipartisan approach to the threat of renewed sectarian violence. 

What remains in doubt is whether he has the slightest understanding of the subject which he shadows. The only possible outcome of the course which he advocates by implication - and some of his extreme unionist allies openly advocate would be the effective end of the peace process. 

To lay down in advance precise and immutable rules which, if broken, would automatically result in exclusions from the Northern Ireland executive could have only one result.

Sinn Féin would be exiled to the constitutional wilderness. Turning the clock back in that way would delight the mad dogs on the crazy extremes. Some of the more rabid unionists would also rejoice that the constitutional changes - power sharing in Belfast and cross-border cooperation - had been halted and might be reversed. For they realise that the logic of the Good Friday agreement is an eventually united Ireland. 

But the people of the province would be once more oppressed by the death and destruction which, although not yet over, has at least been abated.

Of course, David Thimble has to huff and puff about the need to deny the allies of terror a seat in the legitimate devolved government - a posture which he must adopt with fine disregard for the fact that many of the sectarian murders and beatings are the work of men who call themselves loyalists. To accept reality is, for him, to guarantee his removal from the leadership of the unionist party. 

But he knows that the partial peace is preferable to all-out war. And he realises too that the Sinn Féin leadership does not have the power to discipline the little groups of urban terrorists who have broken away from the regular IRA. By accusing the government of weakness, and threatening to walk out, he is playing his part in keeping the fissiparous Stormont parties together. 

He is subtle enough to realise that his position has to be a paradox. No such excuse can be offered on behalf of Quentin Davies. It is, I admit, difficult to be either reasonable or realistic about the future of Northern Ireland. The dramatis personae of the continuing tragedy are all so unattractive that the temptation to denounce them is almost irresistible. I heartily dislike Gerry Adams. But I do not believe that he is stupid. He knows that he has nothing to gain by encouraging violence. If he keeps the peace, the border that he hates will gradually disappear and Sinn Féin, converted into a wholly legitimate political party, will be the major beneficiary. 

When I asked him, last month, why he refused formally to renounce violence and denounce all those who practised it, he told me: "There is no advantage in disbanding one IRA and creating another." That sentiment may be cynical, but it is certainly sensible. 

The fact of the government's position in Northern Ireland is that the secretary of state must struggle on from day to day. Westminster ministers cannot afford to lay down absolute rules or inviolable principles. Every day that the assembly and the executive are kept in business is a day nearer to a lasting and objectively acceptable solution. It was necessary for the government to harden its attitude towards the definition of a ceasefire in order to keep Trimble's unionists as part of the agonisingly slow progress towards an Ireland which is safe and civilised. 

And, one day, it may be necessary to say something supportive about Sinn Féin's struggles for peace in order to keep them marching in the same direction. Anyone who thinks that the double talk is dirty work needs to explain why allowing the return to a society in which children are blown up in their beds is any cleaner.

Yet the hard necessities of at least maintaining the hope of a desirable solution seem to have escaped Quentin Davies. So we had to endure all the claptrap about the government's weakness in the face of violence. What a thoroughly good thing that he and his party count for absolutely nothing.

What Hattersley still totally dislikes, naturally, is the underlying but unstated of course reality of a British imperialist defeat by an armed revolutionary guerrilla war struggle, the part of the deal that everyone is sworn never to mention.

But the steady slow conditioning of British public opinion to accept this reality finally, keeps creeping forward. Now Special Branch RUC despair has filled the Sunday Times:

It was only in recent years - when I had evidence of what influence McGuinness and men like him have over British ministers - that I realised both Margaret's pain and the sacrifices I and my colleagues had made were in vain. The truth was that Gilmour would never have joined the IRA if I had not asked him to, and he had been an agent whose intelligence was of the utmost reliability.

But the defence tactics worked with the judge. Lowry threw out all the prosecutions and described Gilmour's evidence as "entirely unworthy of belief".

The Derry IRA had been paralysed during the trial, but now it was back in business.

I nursed my shock through many dangerous years with Special Branch. This only turned to bitterness much later when I heard from two reliable witnesses the same explanation for the trial's disastrous climax.

Both said that, in retirement, Lowry had told friends - including one of Northern Ireland's most senior politicians - that he had thrown out Gilmour's evidence under political pressure.

Lowry is now dead and the politician is retired and living outside Northern Ireland. But I believe it. There can be no other rational explanation. 

This was all about the 1983 failure to put another 60 Republicans behind bars for life because the evidence of a 'supergrass' British agent in the IRA's ranks could no longer be considered as providing "safe" convictions, - an aspect, certainly, of London's ongoing negotiations for a way out of its unwinnable Ireland nightmare, but that search continuing solely because British imperialism's time was up in Ireland, due to the epoch.

And at the same time as the RUC's counter-revolutionary specialists publicly cry their despair, the dismantling of the disgraced and intolerable 'Northern Ireland' colonial-dictatorship tyranny crawls ahead too.

The Stevens inquiry is about to spill more beans on the Nazi-SS assassination tactics that British 'democracy' got up to in Ireland:

The loyalist gang that assassinated solicitor Patrick Finucane also planned to shoot two more lawyers listed in British army intelligence files as being "sympathetic" to the IRA, the Canadian judge launching a new Finucane inquiry is to be told.

The Northern Irish lawyers targeted were Patrick McGrory and his one-time pupil, Oliver Kelly.

The former Canadian supreme court judge, Peter Cory, arrives in London next week to launch a wide-ranging review of cases of collusion in Northern Ireland.

The hitherto unknown assassination plans against the two lawyers were discovered by the Stevens inquiry, led by the current Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Stevens, whose team are to brief Mr Cory.

Mr McGrory, doyen of Belfast's criminal solicitors, who died of a heart attack in 1994, aged 71, was on the council of the Law Society of Northern Ireland and had been appointed by the lord chief justice to the disciplinary tribunal which judges fellow lawyers.

Like Finucane, Mr McGrory and Mr Kelly often represented clients on IRA charges - some high-profile - and some RUC officers also believed they were IRA sympathisers.

Mr Kelly said: "This is what the cops were feeding out to loyalists: if you defended someone in court you were acting against the state. They felt that you should throw in the towel; you shouldn't defend someone to the best of your ability. They were telling the loyalists to wipe us out to take us out of the road."

Like military intelligence, the RUC special branch also knew of the plots to murder Mr Kelly and Mr McGrory, the Stevens inquiry has established. But like Finucane, neither lawyer was warned their lives were in peril.

Sources close to the Stevens inquiry suspect this was no accident. One detective has described it as "collusion by omission".

Mr McGrory acted for the families of the three IRA terrorists who were shot dead by the SAS on Gibraltar while unarmed.

Although neither Mr Kelly nor Mr McGrory were shot, in the case of Mr McGrory - as with Finucane - details of the lawyer's movements were collected by the British army's intelligence agent, Brian Nelson. The draft Stevens report says the failure to provide a warning was "another Finucane tragedy in the making".

Mr McGrory's son Barra, also a lawyer, said: "The inescapable conclusion is that military intelligence wanted the targeting to occur. Uninterrupted. They didn't want anything to stand in its way."

In both Finucane's and Mr McGrory's case no reference to Mr Nelson's activities was recorded on the official "contact forms" - the weekly debriefing of Mr Nelson by his army handlers in the secret Force Research Unit or FRU.

The Stevens inquiry draft says that an "explicit targeting document" on Mr McGrory supplied by Mr Nelson should have rung "all the alarm bells, for this could clearly be solicitor number two".

And more will emerge when Stevens tackles the FRU boss Brigadier Kerr on his return from posting to Beijing as the British military attaché.

And the Canadian judge Cory has also been sent in to slowly unravel yet more and more of the unpleasant truth about British imperialism's deserved disgrace in the occupied Zone of Ireland, plus the even greater unpleasantness of how such tyranny got deservedly defeated in the epoch of unstoppable national liberation struggle.

For all sorts of rotten reasons, the fake-'left' is as constipatedly negative about 'terrorism' in Palestine and Sept 11 as it was over Ireland, whereas Marxist-Leninist living revolutionism would welcome the 'spontaneous' combustion of all of them as massive breath of fresh revolutionary air to sweep aside the fetid anti-revolutionary paralysis of Revisionism and the empty 'revolutionary' posturing of the anti-Soviet Trot opportunists.

Lalkar-SLP is doubly embarrassed by Palestine because the Hamas bombs on "innocent civilians" are so like the Sept 11 suicide missions "which are to be condemned", and because a crucial part of the Zionist colony's existence is due to the Stalinist Revisionist acceptance of it in 1948.

This is now begrudgingly passed off as a Moscow "mistake". A what??????????????? Some "mistake"!!!!!

The truth is, of course, that agreeing to the Zionist colonisation of Palestine was nothing whatever to do with "thinking that the Western imperialist-financed Jewish colonists would turn to socialism" or with "feeling under pressure from world sympathy with the Jews", etc, etc, etc.

This insane reactionary stunt was agreed to as all part of the imbecile Stalinist 'theory' that imperialism was now finished as an expanding force in economic history any longer, and that the whole world would now tend towards "peacefully" adopting socialism in place of capitalism; and that wars, destruction, ruin, and revolution could all be superseded by socialists firmly insisting on "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism.

Fortunately for the world, the Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese and the rest of IndoChina, the Cubans, and others, refused to be completely dominated by this class collaborating idiocy spewing out of the Soviet bureaucracy, and made their revolutions anyway.

Most of the rest of the Third International obsequiously capitulated, and are now either totally dead and buried, - or else limp on as living Revisionist corpses, still insanely spouting the "peaceful" reformist 'left-pressure' road to socialism and world harmony, still refusing to pronounce "REVOLUTION" from the rooftops as the only possible way forward for mankind everywhere; and still really incapable of seeing the monumental reality of this raging imperialist crisis for what it is, - the signal that ALL HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS have gone as far as they now can under capitalism, and that a revolutionary world-wide explosion is the only serious perspective facing socialists now.

The Alliance fake-'lefts' meanwhile are cultivating Kautsky and pretending that there would be no great significance even if capitalism's "continuous pattern of the present ups and downs" really did turn into another 1929. "What would be the significance of that" they ask innocently. "The imperialists would find a solution". It is difficult to argue with such anti-Marxist ignorance that refuses to see any of the colossal historical consequences of 1929, still haunting bourgeois ideology to this day; which cannot see capitalist economic collapse and catastrophe as a relevant part of Marxist science at all; and which is holding an Alliance 'Communist University' at present which in 21 planned separate sessions fails to even put the current imperialist crisis and its enormous implications on the official agenda at all. But for working-class survival and sanity, the arguments do have to continue relentlessly, explaining the imperialist system's imminent collapse into warmongering chaos and economic destruction - wherever possible in the capitalist bourgeoisie's own words of admission:

Latin America, is looking distinctly frayed.

Ten years ago, the view from Washington was that Latin America was a success story. Democracy had returned to countries that for years had suffered dictatorships - most of them, as it happened, overtly or covertly supported by the US. Only Cuba was left as a lonely memory of a different world and Castro, surely, could not last much longer.

Even more important, the new governments had been persuaded to abandon the economic protectionism that had been the region's predominant economic orthodoxy in favour of freemarket liberalism. Prosperity, the new orthodoxy said, would surely follow.

For some it did. But for the majority, the story of the 90s was one of a steadily widening income gap between the few who prospered under regimes of privatisation and free markets, and the rest. Now, even that thin prosperity is a fading memory.

Castro is still there and has a new ally in Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, who survived a coup attempt earlier this year, to Washington's ill-concealed disappointment. He remains in power, delivering a message of defiance of the US and populist promises of creation and welfare. 

At least he remains popular. In Paraguay, President Luis Gonzalez Macchi declared a state of emergency this month after protests against free-market policies left two people dead.  He was forced to scrap a privatisation drive which was a condition for a standby loan from the IMF. 

In Bolivia, too, miners recently took to the streets to protest against free market policies. In Guatemala, where serious malnutrition has been reported, a peace settlement reached after more than 30 years of civil war is coming apart.

And in Argentina, the country that most faithfully followed the free-market and prescriptions of the IMF, national income has shrunk by nearly two-thirds in a year.

More than half the people of this once comfortable country are below the poverty line and protests have become a way of life. So absolute is the loss of confidence in government that even former President Raul Alfonsin, who bears no responsibility for the crisis, can hardly venture out for fear of public reaction. It seems only a matter of time before a new demagogue emerges.

Argentina's collapse has taken place with scarcely a murmur from the rest of the world and, even now, the remedies offered by the IMF and the World Bank prescribe yet more politically unsustainable pain.

Colombia, the country with which the US is most directly involved, has a new preside elect, Alvaro Uribe, whose authoritarian instincts were summed up in his campaign slogan, "Firm hand, big heart". Last week, he visited Britain, promoting his ideas for dealing with Colombia's 40-year civil war and drugs crisis.  A ceasefire negotiated under the previous president, Andres Pastrana, unravelled in the final weeks of his mandate.

Uribe wants to arm a civilian militia a million strong, a move that will drag into the war a rural population that desperately wants to stay out of it. He plans, too, to weaken the powers of the judicial body that can prosecute those in the army responsible for human rights abuses.

He has been in Washington arguing for more military aid and a lifting of restrictions on how it is used. What began as a major US intervention in the name of the war on drugs has morphed seamlessly into a military intervention into Colombia's intractable politics.

It is a dismal panorama and requires attention, particularly from the regional superpower. The team that Bush put in place to attend to Latin America bore a startling resemblance to the one his father relied on when the seeds of today were planted. Their policy involved support for rightwing regimes, overt and covert military intervention and turning a blind eye to systematic human rights abuses - all in the name of fighting for democracy and the free markets.

These arrived and, across the continent, there is rage and hunger. As far as the people on the streets are concerned, the experiment has failed.

AMERICA could be edging back towards recession, according to unexpectedly weak data that yesterday fuelled concerns about a double dip in US economic growth.

Official figures revealed that the world's largest economy is slowing far more sharply than Wall Street had expected, and that last year's recession was longer and deeper than first thought.

Wide-ranging revisions to historical growth data in the US revealed that the 2001 recession began earlier than previously believed, and lasted for longer. The new figures showed that the US economy began weakening significantly in the second half of 2000, suggesting that economists may have seriously underestimated the financial impact of the dotcom bust.

The Commerce Department also issued a series of back revisions to growth data in 1999, which indicated that the peak of the US boom may have been exaggerated. Analysts said the figures raised serious questions about the long term economic potential of the US, and gave warning that forecasters may have been too optimistic about America's sustainable rate of growth.

Shares initially slid after the publication of the disappointing data, and US political leaders rushed to talk up the prospects for their economy.

However, economists were unsettled by the back revisions to data, which suggested US economic fundamentals were less healthy than had been previously thought.

The Commerce Department revised down its estimate of annualised growth in the first quarter.

Uruguay's mounting financial crisis spilled over into street rioting in the capital, Montevideo yesterday as the public vented its anger at the banks' remaining shut for the fourth successive day.

Thousands joined a general strike earlier in the day, in protest at the closed banks and the country's three years of recession.

Rioting in some parts of the capital followed.

"We are dealing with a group of citizens trying to destabilise our community," the interior minister, Guillermo Stirling, said. "Groups of looters attacked 13, 14 or 15 shops simultaneously in a well planned strategy."

The unrest echoed the mass public protests in Uruguay's crisis-ridden neighbour Argentina in December, which forced out Fernando de la Rua's government and led to a succession of five presidents in two weeks.

Uruguay's reputation as a safe haven for investment - it is known as the "Switzerland of Latin America" - left it vulnerable when the Argentine government imposed banking controls to avert a full-scale financial collapse.

Wealthy Argentines began withdrawing savings from Uruguayan accounts after their deposits at home were frozen, with the result that bank reserves have fallen by as much as 40% since the beginning of the year.

With the increasing threat of a cash crunch, Uruguay's currency, the peso, has lost about half of its value since it was floated in June and is now trading at around 28 to the dollar.

As protesters went on to the streets of Montevideo, government officials were in Washington, hoping to secure a bailout by the International Monetary Fund to avert the collapse
of the banking system.

The US treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, arrives in Latin America next week on a confidence boosting visit - one he was originally forced to postpone as US markets fell.

The political unrest in Uruguay will add to the growing sense that Latin America is on the brink of a wider financial crisis.

The continent's biggest economy, Brazil, has suffered a sharp fall in its currency in recent weeks as the markets mulled over the possibility that October's presidential election may install a leftwinger who may refuse to honour the conditions attached to the its $255bn (E160bn) foreign debt.

Brazil's currency is now collapsing, and Washington has been humiliatingly forced to climb down from previous Bush regime threats to leave Latin American economic basket-cases to stew in their own juice.

But more US imperialist intervention can only pollute the currency and 'surplus capital' situation even worse,- bringing down the dollar itself eventually.

Even British industry is now going bankrupt, it is at last officially admitted, which means that Brown's public-spending bonanza is done for, yet with Blair being publicly booed at the Games closure ceremony even before Labour's economic catastrophe becomes fully clear.

And in two further priceless admissions last week, the bourgeois Guardian's capitalist apologetics agreed that Marxist science rules (on the ultimate total insanity of the imperialist system). Firstly it was acknowledged that "severe crashes purge 'excess' investment" (cf the Communist Manifesto); and secondly that a collapse of oil profits because of "excess investment" is the likeliest world-shattering issue over oil, not the imaginary "US imperialist global manipulation to secure its oil supplies", which clearly does go on, and clearly needs global US military domination to back it, but which equally clearly has nothing DIRECTLY to do with the REVOLUTIONARY crisis the imperialist system is taking the world into because the US monopoly bourgeois interests feel it necessary to put the boot firmly on the neck of all anti-imperialist revolt everywhere, - arising from the fact that ALL HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS, worldwide, can NO LONGER TOLERATE LIVING UNDER IMPERIALIST DOMINATION ANY LONGER.

But the fake-'left', is likely to dismiss all this as mere 'catastrophism', and will still refuse to make REVOLUTION the only worthwhile core of ALL socialist propaganda.

The SWP heart of the Alliance has already slagged off the FARC.

These latest significant developments will no doubt be "condemned" as "cruel to innocents" by some fake-'lefts'.

For the EPSR, this spontaneous revolutionary combustion is far from yet being a return to the international Marxist-Leninist world-revolution consciousness that is needed, but it once again proves that imperialist crisis will drive the world back to that Marxist science sooner or later:

COLOMBIAN rebels have told thousands of small-town officials to resign or die in a nationwide campaign to destroy the state from the ground upwards.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces, or Farc, have warned mayors in the country's 1,048 municipalities they will be declared a 'military target' if they refuse to step down. In many regions the Marxist rebels have extended the death threats to all local functionaries. The offensive, based on tactics of Vietcong guerrillas during the Vietnam War, has closed scores of town halls.

The collapsing of state authority in the countryside is a challenge to President-elect Alvaro Uribe Velez, who takes office on Wednesday. Uribe won a landslide victory in May's elections by promising to double military spending and crack down on Farc, but the rebel strategy highlights the fragility of the state and the challenges the US-backed military faces.

Since the threats began in June, the 18,000-strong guerrilla group has murdered one mayor, abducted three and forced 220 to resign. Last Thursday, Farc released the three-year old daughter of another mayor, who resigned after guerrillas abducted the child two weeks ago.

In Hobo, an Andean village in southern Huila state, Mayor James Lozada was given 72 hours to step down. 'He said it was nothing personal, but these people don't make empty threats,' said Lozada.

Colombia's rural mayors have long been targeted by both the rebels and rightwing paramilitary groups. Over the past three years, the warring factions have killed an average of one mayor a month. Public services are grinding to a halt in towns throughout the country.

Without a mayor to sign contracts and allot funding, Hobo's health centre is running out of drugs, and the old people's home is on the verge of closing. Patients who need an ambulance must first find a driver and pay for petrol.

The government has offered mayors bodyguards and bullet-proof vests, and last month outgoing President Andres Pastrana pledged $100 million to protect endangered officials.

But some mayors feel the security forces are simply unable to protect them. 'Nobody can guarantee my safety. Farc can follow you anywhere. And they'll skin, you wherever they find you,' said Marlio Peralta, who recently resigned as mayor of Santa Maria.

From Asia to Latin America, all local revolutionary crises are really only aspects of the monster US imperialist crisis, the resolution of which will decide all the other outcomes.

As the EPSR has consistently explained, for US imperialism to successfully colonial police one troublesome region like Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and the rest of the Middle East, means that US imperialism must eventually try to successfully colonial police the WHOLE PLANET simultaneously.

But the real issue is that US imperialism can no longer even colonial-police downtown Los Angeles with permanent security.

For Los Angeles, currently substitute the whole of Latin America.

But the point remains the same. In this capitalist SYSTEM crisis, the US imperialist bourgeoisie will not even be secure in its own back yard.

Elsewhere, REVOLUTION is to be looked for as the irresistible force to be reckoned with. In the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, it is not the "peaceful coexistence" imbecile-era notion of the "two-state solution" that needs analysing, but the relentlessly spontaneously-combusting Palestinian REVOLUTION. Like the whole world, it needs Marxist-Leninist perspectives.

But that is the last thing it will get from the fake-'left' Revisionist and Trotskyite remnants everywhere.

Build Leninism. EPSR

But while the slogan of a republican United States of Europe - if accompanied by the revolutionary overthrow of the three most reactionary monarchies in Europe, headed by the Russian - is quite invulnerable as a political slogan, there still remains the highly important question of its economic content and significance. From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism - i.e., the export of capital and the division of the world by the "advanced" and "civilised" colonial powers - a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary.

Britain, France and Germany have invested capital abroad to the value of no less than 70,000 million rubles. The business of securing "legitimate" profits from this tidy sum - these exceed 3,000 million rubles annually - is carried out by the national committees of the millionaires, known as governments, which are equipped with armies and navies and which provide the sons and brothers of the 	millionaires with jobs in the colonies and semi-colonies as viceroys, consuls, ambassadors, officials of all kinds, clergymen, and other leeches.

That is how the plunder of about a thousand million of the earth's population by a handful of Great Powers is organised in the epoch of the highest development of capitalism. No other organisation is possible under capitalism. Renounce colonies, "spheres of influence", and the export of capital? To think that it is possible means coming down to the level of some snivelling parson who every Sunday preaches to the rich on the lofty principles of Christianity and advises them to give the poor, well, if not millions, at least several hundred rubles yearly.

A United States of Europe under capitalism is tantamount to an agreement on the partition of colonies. Under capitalism, however, no other basis and no other principle of division are possible except force. A multi-millionaire cannot share the "national income" of a capitalist country with anyone otherwise than "in proportion to the capital invested" (with a bonus thrown in, so that the biggest capital may receive more than its share). Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, and anarchy in production. To advocate a "just" division of income on such a basis is sheer Proudhonism, stupid philistinism. No division can be effected otherwise than in "proportion to strength", and strength changes with the course of economic development. Following 1871, the rate of Germany's accession of strength was three or four times as rapid as that of Britain and France, and of Japan about ten times as rapid as Russia's. There is and there can be no other way of testing the real might of a capitalist state than by war. War does not contradict the fundamentals of private property - on the contrary, it is a direct and inevitable outcome of those fundamentals. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics.

Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists ... but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America, who have been badly done out of their share by the present partition of colonies, and the increase of whose might during the last fifty years has been immeasurably more rapid than that of backward and monarchist Europe, now turning senile. Compared with the United States of America, Europe as a whole denotes economic stagnation. On the present economic basis, i.e., under capitalism, a United States of Europe would signify an organisation of reaction to retard America's more rapid development. The times when the cause of democracy and socialism was associated only with Europe alone have gone, for ever.

A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism - until the time when the complete victory of communism brings about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic. As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others.

Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world - the capitalist world - attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states. The political form of a Society wherein the proletariat is victorious in overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be a democratic republic, which will more and more concentrate the forces of the proletariat of a given nation or nations, in the struggle against states that have not yet gone over to socialism. The abolition of classes is impossible without a dictatorship of the oppressed class, of the. proletariat. A free union of nations in socialism is impossible without a more or less prolonged and stubborn struggle of the socialist republics against the backward states.

It is for these reasons and after repeated discussions at the conference of R.S.D.L.P. groups abroad, and following that conference, that the Central Organ's editors have come to the conclusion that the slogan for a United States of Europe is an erroneous one.

SLOGAN FOR A UNITED STATES OF EUROPE Sotsial-Demokrat No. 44, August 23, 1915