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:  0771 263 9934      www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]       
No 1195 July 29 2003                                                                                                                                              25p
EPSR trounces Lalkar

The increasing NAZI viciousness and despair of the Western imperialist onslaught on the Middle East, - gunning down innocent bystanders without a care; brutal terror searches of any and every household at random; mass detentions without trial in concentration camps; all the daily reality of "life" in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, underlines the disaster for the global anti-imperialist struggle of fighting without a Marxist-Leninist perspective.

The world communist movement died because it had ceased to give the mass of people on Earth any believable explanation of how the ongoing tyranny of Western monopoly capitalist domination of the planet was going to be tackled and ended.

The Revisionist gibberish after 1945 of "peace movements will stop wars"; "peaceful roads to socialism"; and "imperialism will shrink and the socialist world economy will capture the commanding position"; etc, etc, has blatantly collapsed in ruins.

But even now, diehard Stalinists, Trots, and other Revisionists, - concealing their opportunist retreats (into "left-pressure", anti-theory philistinism such as the Socialist Alliance, the SLP, and all the various remnants of Communist Parties with different names and 4th International posturers) behind their "big revolutionary hero" daydreaming, - still won't face up to reality.

Specifically, this entire opportunist swamp, cringing behind its hasty "condemnation" of anything Western propaganda denotes as "terrorism" in order to curry favour with anti-theory philistines like Scargill, or to keep in with the joke "Socialist Alliance", or just to avoid being too outspoken on now very difficult and dangerous public issues, - simply shuts its mind to the essential challenge posed by Marxist-Leninist science.

This exclusively M-L class-WAR understanding of ALL historical development included the following basics:

* Universal suffrage is just a permanent instrument of bourgeois rule;

* The imperialist countries' might will grow ever vaster, and NOTHING will stop them going to war again (and again, and again, and again, etc);

* Only violent revolution will ever take power away from this world imperialist ruling class to stop them dominating the planet with their exploitation and their warmongering supremacy, finally always butchering all opposition and rivalry if that is what they see as necessary;

* The essential tactic for the international working-class in the unending imperialist warmongering is for the workers in each country to call for the DEFEAT of their OWN ruling class in ALL the various unending conflicts and "defence of national interests" garbage;

* That demand for "DEFEAT" in any conflict calls for NOT ONE SCRAP of "victory" for the enemy side, necessarily; in a Tsarist imperialist defeat, for example, it is Russian soil which will produce the eventual "victors", not the invading German imperialist forces;

* Defeat or not, the ultimate aim of taking state power away from the warmongering imperialist ruling-class can ONLY become possible through the strategy of "turning the imperialist war into civil war", no other way;

* In this way, the whole PROGRAMME of violent revolution leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat, the absolute essence of Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding of how history ALONE can function, - is likeliest seen as fulfilling mankind's age-old dream of building socialist justice for all (economic, political, cultural, and social) in a workers state, exactly as was achieved by the Bolshevik Revolution and the building of the USSR;

* To get there, only a dedicated PARTY OF REVOLUTIONARY THEORY, developing in constant polemical conflict, internal and external will be able to build the CONSCIOUS revolutionary leadership throughout the workers movement on every issue that will carry out the task;

* In the likely conditions of the depths of economic crisis plus the degradation of war destruction in which the revolutionary party will begin to come into its own, all manner of violent hatred of imperialist rule will be being expressed randomly and spontaneously all round the world, - all of it being venomously condemned as 'terrorism" by the imperialists, and much of it being made an example of with maximum brutality by the "civilised authorities" for ease of scapegoating ALL opponents with full force in due course.

Whatever negative effects for the revolutionary struggle are envisaged as flowing from such "terrorist outrages", Lenin insisted that it would be suicidally stupid for the revolutionaries to see anything else in these issues than further signs of a civil-war break-up of the old order in which the revolution should be on the side of EVERY defeat, setback, and humiliation for the ruling class, no matter where it came from or how, while yet keeping itself aloof from negative methods (if so they are judged) and from reactionary anti-establishment attitudes possibly behind such methods, - using the situation ONLY to tell the revolutionaries themselves that they are not yet doing their agitational and enlightening jobs nearly well enough, and seeing the preponderance or popularity of such hate explosions as a condemnation of the revolutionary party for its own weak influence.

Above all, the revolutionary party should avoid humiliating itself in irremediable class-collaborative shame by joining the ruling-class in "condemning" the "terrorist outrages".

* In any United Front activities with non-revolutionary forces in order to isolate or defeat a more pressing immediate enemy, it is absolutely VITAL for the revolutionary party to simultaneously exploit the "unity" as a way of demonstrating the inadequacy or mistakes of the non-revolutionary forces on their own.

It is also essential for the revolutionary party NEVER to drop, hide, or muddle its own clear revolutionary perspective longterm while temporary United-Front activities are in progress.

The world communist movement by the end of the Stalin epoch had effectively abandoned, betrayed, or muddled every single aspect of these CRUCIAL Marxist-Leninist basics.

It adds insult to injury to the working class that political elements which built the obscene cult of Stalin in the first place, covering up his ever-increasing inadequacy in Marxist-Leninist theoretical understanding and revolutionary perspective; and then abandoned defence of the Soviet workers state in the chaotic aftermath of the posthumous disgrace of Stalin's personal domination, - should now be continuing their damage to the working-class by helping the shallow SLP to not only shrug off Stalinist Revisionism, denying it happened, but cover up for the worst Trotskyite, counter-revolutionary anti-communism inside the SLP, and worst of all to continue to peddle the same blatant retreat from Marxism-Leninism in their policies for TODAY, in both Lalkar and the SLP.

The latest Lalkar collects the usual huge amount of secondhand reportage about Iraq, shorn of any philosophical perspectives about what this tells us about where the whole world in general is now heading, - (deeper and deeper into worse and worse imperialist warmongering crisis where "stop the war" marches will, on their own, be an ever-increasingly inadequate response), and concludes with no call at all for "defeat" to be the slogan for a proper working class response to degenerate imperialist warmongering, and no perspective whatever for a political future of any kind following the "scandalous and catastrophic failure" which they predict for the US-UK imperialist adventure.

Outlining the revolutionary perspective for the working class would be the naturally logical thing for Marxist-Leninist science to raise at that point of sketching imperialist warmongering's "scandalous and catastrophic failure".

So why don't these "Stalinist revolutionaries" do it??????

Is it because Stalinism became useless crap by the end of its life?????

Or is it because Scargill has warned them as SLP members to avoid all talk of revolution?????

Or maybe they are the same thing.

There is an even bigger problem with Lalkar's even longer reportage on the Zionist warmongering crisis.

The silence from Lalkar on the EPSR's questions over "no-defeat" demands or revolutionary perspective to meet imperialist warmongering disaster in Iraq, - are loud enough.

The silence from Lalkar on Stalinism's responsibility for the grossest imperialist warmongering degeneracy of all, - the genocidal Zionist armed colonisation of Palestine from 1947 onwards, and Lalkar's covering-up of it, - is positively ear-splitting.

The article ends heroically:

"The Zionist state is bound to end up as a by-word for beastliness and as a historical abortion."

Too true, but what on Earth does Lalkar think it is playing at to still, nevertheless, recommend a "two state solution", - the very last word in Stalinist peaceful-coexistence class-collaborating barminess which never could be, and never ought to be, either.

This is taking living in the last years of Stalin's fantasy world, daft enough in itself, to even loonier extremes.

Zionism's ever-worsening warmongering crisis is the LIVING PROOF that the Stalinist daydream of permanent peaceful coexistence between an imperialist half-domination of the world and a workers state half-domination of the world, was a demented and tragic joke from the start, but here are the museum-Stalinist Revisionists, still peddling this damaging nonsense right up to the last minute before the world's revolutionary reality at last reasserts itself openly once again, and poses the question of whether imperialist tyranny is going to continue to rule the world, - in which case there will be no serious Palestinian "state" worth talking about, just a continuation of a slave-like captivity within Bantustan barbed-wire reservations (or even worse) under non-stop armed Zionist surveillance, exploitation, and endless harassment; or whether revolutionary anti-imperialism is going to rule the world, in which case the monstrous attempted armed-colonisation of the land of Palestine for the genocide of its native nation, will be sent packing into the annals of history's worse nightmares.

What genuine socialist understanding or belief does Lalkar have at all, to conjecture a world which the international working class would supposedly be content with where the Zionist colonial outrage, - "a byword for beastliness and a historical abortion" (to put it mildly in Lalkar's own words) - was still inflicting its NAZI terror on the Palestinian nation???

Moreover, why would any determined revolutionary socialist leadership for the world (Lalkarism, supposedly) be so weird as to offer to the Zionist NAZIS "the Road Map as the last chance for a two state solution, the time for which is running out fast. If the Zionists are stupid enough to throw away this last chance, the Palestinians might be forced to re-evaluate the two-state solution".

Could this bizarre proposal for this NAZI police-state colony to hurry up and save itself, be explained by Lalkar's congenital incapacity to at last think seriously about Stalinist Revisionism's monstrous, cowardly, treacherous imbecility in agreeing to Western imperialism's plan for an armed Zionist colony in the first place on the modern homeland of the Palestinian nation???????

Generosity towards a national geographic land claim so famously fixed in literature 2,000 years ago??????

So do the far-more-recently ousted 'Red Indian' native-American nations get the USA back some time?? Or the even-more-recently expropriated Aboriginal nations of Australia get all their richly-cultural-heritaged land back??? Will the Danes get Yorkshire back?? Can the Welsh reclaim the Home Counties???? Etc, etc, etc.

It is all special pleading historical religious nonsense by a most ruthlessly cynical and sinister monopoly-imperialist-network-plan from the end of 19th century climax of Western colonial rape and pillage of a foully conned and fleeced world. Why would any "revolutionary socialist plan" of any description want anything at all to do with such a rotten, scabby, NAZI master-race deception?? Because the demented hero worship of Stalinist "theoretical" nonsense demands it.

Back in the real world, the Zionist imperialist juggernaut blitzkriegs on, unstoppable, giving the international working-class the clearest possible warning of the ruthless murderous tyranny that lies in store for the whole planet as the monopoly-capitalist warmongering crisis gets more and more into its stride.

It is Marxist-Leninist science to analyse how it is the Zionist imperialists' own arrogant ruling class despair (as their lucrative power-giving economic system plunges ever deeper into INSOLUBLE "overproduction" difficulties), - which will TEACH the international working class its revolutionary business, - exactly as the EPSR has consistently for 24 years explained was going to happen, making a revolutionary perspective for mankind the only philosophical sanity.

It is the only world we live in, - the world of ever-recurring imperialist crises, - that MAKES it also a world of REVOLUTIONARY progress only, - as far as any REAL changes are concerned for the planet's vast proletarian masses.

Hear these realities admitted to in capitalism's own press admissions:

A thousand Israeli soldiers grappled for hours with dedicated Jewish settlers for control of a barren, rocky hilltop in the heart of what may become a Palestinian state.

The Israeli prime minister told Mr Powell that it showed he was prepared to make "painful concessions" in pursuit of peace. Officials called it coincidence that troops were sent in as the secretary of state arrived to press the Israelis to honour commitments made to President Bush at last month's summit in Aqaba, Jordan.

But nearly two months later the settlers are back and this time the army is protecting them - and Mr Sharon - from embarrassing questions.

"Everything at the moment is in a very delicate state," said Michal Ben Avraham, one of the settlers who told the army to stop this reporter from entering Yitzhar.

"At the moment, there is a complete Jewish presence. The army, as well as the settlers, are living in tents. Sometimes an officer comes up and says: 'Take this tent away.'  We take it away and then put it up again."

	Before Mr Sharon's meeting with Mr Bush at the White House Israel has claimed that it is fulfilling the promises made at Aqaba.

"Israel is continuing to dismantle unauthorised outposts according to a defence ministry plan," the prime minister's office said. But the picture from the hilltops looks very different.

Dror Etkes, who monitors Jewish settlement activity for the Israeli campaign group Peace Now, says that new outposts have gone up as fast as the government has torn down existing ones.

"There's no serious dismantling and the remaining outposts are becoming bigger and more established" he said. "The ones that have gone are minor, while quality construction continues. The settlers are more established than they were when Aqaba took place."

The council of settler rabbis urged Jews not to resist the dismantling of the outposts but to build new ones. One particularly controversial settlement, Havat Gilad, was technically torn down but the army permitted it to be rebuilt about 100 metres (330ft) away.

"Before, Havat Gilad was just tents," Mr Etkes said. "Now there's four containers and a new extension to the road. It's much larger than the original outpost. It's the same at other outposts where settlers have been building permanent houses in the past weeks:'

After Mitzpeh Yitzhar was torn down a new outpost was established nearby called Ariel Hill "in honour of the prime minister, who has established many outposts".

The settlers at Yitzhar, like the Palestinians, believe the dismantling of their outpost was merely a show for Mr Powell.

"The army was very interested in the outpost for the past two years. It set up listening devices to listen in to the hostile [Palestinian] village below," Mrs Ben-Avraham said.

"Ariel Sharon - Mr Security, Mr War, Mr Strategy - knows better than us how important this post is. It's very hard for us to believe he is playing with our future."

One of Mr Sharon's critics on the right, Benjamin Netanyahu, has tried to portray the removal of the settlers as a form of ethnic cleansing even though he approved the removal of an earlier outpost near Yitzhar when he was prime minister six years ago.

But critics of the settlements say that the government has been duplicitous by giving settler leaders a list of targeted outposts and inviting them to seek legal injunctions against dismantling them.

"The evacuation of outposts is nothing but a great fraud," said Yossi Sarid, a parliamentarian and former leader of the leftwing Meretz party. "Sharon is interested in convincing President Bush that it is very hard for him to keep his commitment and uproot outposts.

"He no doubt also asked settler leaders to oppose the evacuation on the ground so that the whole world would know how hard Sharon's life is, what a great sacrifice he is making."

Mr Sarid accuses the Israeli army of siding with the settlers.

"In [one] place several outlaw settlers agreed to be, evacuated on the condition that the road beneath would remain 'sterile'. And the army, the settlers' servant, agreed, of course. I heard the word 'sterile' and I got goose bumps. The meaning is a road 'free of Arabs'."

And to this aggressive arrogance, covering up their despairing fears that the imperialist system's economic crisis-collapse might lose them EVERYTHING, - all that the Lalkar Stalinist Revisionists can say to them (latest issue) is:

"It is time that Sharon, his party, and his government, were subjected by the leaders of public opinion in Europe and America to similar opprobrium, and in the same forthright and trenchant manner, to which Einstein and his fellow intellectuals subjected Begin back in December 1948."

And it'll do about as much good as that peaceful coexistence gibberish achieved then, inspired by Stalin's global class collaboration delusions, - precisely NOTHING about the Deir Yassin massacre of a Palestinian village which it was "protesting" about, an exemplary slaughter which made the young Zionist terrorist thug Menachem Begin's name as he lorded this "triumph" to the world's media and then went fundraising around New York, thus attracting Einstein's predictably liberal-useless "opprobrium".

But now as then, Stalinist opportunism cannot resist abandoning every scrap of revolutionary understanding in order to roll on its back when tickled by big-name agreement to peacefully coexist with "communism", - Einstein's useless "progressive protest" lauded then; Scargill's useless "progressive party" sucked-up to now.

Returning to the Leninist real world once again, one fascinating possibility looms ever larger, briefly discussed by the EPSR many times before, and one which helps the investigation and understanding of imperialist warmongering's essential nature and origins in this process of speculating about it.

The international working-class in the West is still desperately politically ill-informed and unsuspecting about just how bad and how widespread this inter-imperialist warmongering crisis is shaping to become.

The ultimate theoretical preparation has got to be that a World War III, as much worse again than WWII was worse than WWI, is on the cards, given the scale and extent of the economic devastation worldwide that is likely to be caused by one of the more commonly expected features of the coming crash, - namely a world currency collapse (i.e. a dollar collapse) which global capitalism has never truly experienced before.

And it is the ruthless, butcher everything, and bully-everyone mentality of NAZI aggressiveness that the American Empire (the world's mightiest ever) seems to be developing, which is constantly raising the question of "who's next??"

And it is the essential inter-capitalist-economic-rivalry character of imperialist warmongering crisis (which has plunged the NATO colonial exploitative gangsters at each others throats over (strangely) the unilateral US determination to blitzkrieg a string of Third World "rogue states" whether the other imperialists agree to it or not), - which demonstrates the possibility in these topsy-turvy times that it is US imperialism itself which might end up in conflict with its own Zionist imperialist protégés at some point, giving the region an astonishing imperialist-war opportunity to turn the tables on its monopoly capitalist Western exploiters via REVOLUTION.

The older imperialist powers aren't at war with each other again YET, but although it is still early days in the international economic collapse fall-out so far, nonetheless it is the POTENTIAL war destruction harm TO EACH OTHER, from crisis-suppressing warmongering blitzkrieg, that is already alarming some European powers into open condemnation of their formerly close US imperialist "ally", blasting-off unilaterally on Third World bullying which they themselves would normally be not just be automatically in favour or, or turning a blind eye to, but as often as not eagerly participating in themselves.

And from the hysterical tension of highly costly or highly lucrative Third-World-warmongering triumphs or disasters putting the age-old anti-communist imperialist "allies" at loggerheads with each other, it is no step at all to imagine how Washington could rapidly unleash fearful anger on its normally obedient Zionist imperialist sidekicks should things start to go wrong or get out of hand in the extremely-fraught war-front situation that the imperialist crisis is now slithering uncontrollably into.

The international working-class in the West equally needs to start thinking urgently about how its political perspectives will HAVE to change once the inter-imperialist conflict, currently limited to tradewar threats and jeering at each others global-diplomacy strategy, does break out into real political and military threats against each other.

The REACTIONARY nature of Revisionism (all varieties) in its theoretical retreat from constant workers education on such revolutionary tactical essentials as grasping the concept of "defeat for one's own ruling class" in each and every rotten imperialist venture it drags the country into, - is nowhere better exemplified in the case of the imperialism-corrupted British working class than on the issue of Ireland.

Still the Stalinists and Trots can be heard sneering at any notion that British imperialism has been DEFEATED in the Occupied Zone of Ireland; and they came together inside the SLP to allow the crap to be peddled that it was a Sinn Féin/IRA "defeat", imposed by an enforced settlement from the US imperialist "superpower", which was codified in the Good Friday Agreement, - subsequently allowing the EPSR to be expelled from the SLP because it refused to stop exposing this counter-revolutionary nonsense in Socialist News articles by Trot SLP leaders.

This opportunist backwardness raises many interesting questions in the re-education of Revisionism corrupted British workers, but first let some more recent admissions by the capitalist press itself, authored by no less than arch-colonist Jeffrey Donaldson, be heard on this imperialist retreat:

My resignation of the whip of the Ulster Unionist Party has been a profoundly difficult decision to take. My entire political life has been spent working to build up a successful, inclusive Unionist party and I have never belonged to any other Unionist party. 

For none of us who have resigned the whip Rev Martin Smyth, David Burnside, and myself, with support from the former party leader, Lord Molyneaux - has it been some spur of the moment decision. We have been left with no choice by our party leadership: we cannot, and will not, prop up any more appeasement of the Provisional IRA.

The immediate cause of our difference with David Trimble is the UUP's attitude to the British and Irish Governments' Joint Declaration. This, in keeping with most other things that have happened since David signed the Good Friday agreement, is one long list of concessions to Sinn Féin/IRA. For that's the way "politics" in Northern Ireland has worked since 1998. The Ulster Unionist leadership have done everything asked of them by that agreement. Much of it, including the release of murderers on to our streets, has been extremely painful.

But then on top of that, in response to constant pressure from Republicans and the Irish Government, demands have been extorted from Unionism far in excess of what was agreed five years ago. Now the Joint Declaration takes us into even more dangerous territory, with the Irish Government given a key role in the workings of the Northern Ireland Assembly, a fundamental breach of a Unionist principle.

On top of this, the future of the locally recruited Royal Irish Regiment is thrown in doubt and many fear its demise just like the RUC before it. Add to this the proposed amnesty for IRA terrorists "on the run" from justice and you have an idea of just how one-sided this process has become.

This failure of tactical nous by the UUP has been matched by a complete failure of the Republican movement to do the one thing asked of it, and disarm. Yet with the collapse of the assembly and the cancellation of elections, it has been democrats like myself who have had to pay for this arrogant refusal of unrepentant terrorists finally to become politicians.

Such is the unwillingness of Sinn Féin to make this process work on any terms other than its own, that it hasn't even made a gesture to help David Trimble out. It is essential that we remove Sinn Féin's veto on political progress. Politics in the Province have been suspended since the IRA spy ring at Stormont brought the issue of Sinn Féin's unwillingness to become a normal political party to a head.

For the "peace process" to work, there has to be an agreement that commands Unionist support as well as nationalist. Our goal is to realign Unionists into a force capable of defending the Union, and repairing the damage already done.

But it is not just traditional anti-Irish prejudice in Britain which allows the 800 years of popular corruption from imperialist domination of Ireland to destroy people's ability to understand the Irish question. Revisionism has played a grotesquely distorting role too. 

A starting difficulty in the 1960s launch of this finally triumphant offensive (the umpteenth in history) by the Irish national liberation struggle was its surprising base in the very Catholic, bourgeois-nationalist wing of the Provisional Sinn Féin and IRA, rather than in the Official wing with its strong Communist Party connections, where both wings had been involved in previous armed guerrilla-war struggle. 

But it WAS the Provos who, willy-nilly, saw during the late 1960s Civil Rights explosion that the British imperialist colonial toehold on the last occupied Zone of Ireland (six of Ulster's nine counties, artificially created as "Northern Ireland" by dog-in-the-manger British imperialist retreat from TOTAL occupation of Ireland following the 1921 National-Liberation War) was more vulnerable than any colonisation of Ireland had ever been before because the "secure back door" needs for the British Empire homeland were no longer a serious strategic consideration in the nuclear-rocket age of overall, severe, British imperialist decline; because the battleship-building industrial value of Belfast was similarly more of an economic burden than military use now; because the now-out-of-date but still tragically viciously deluded British triumphalist population of the OZ, - the Ulster Unionist colonists, - would be bound to become an increasingly difficult problem to cope with by retreating British imperialism over time (as indeed has happened with a vengeance); and because large parts of the London imperialist establishment were already indicating that they would quite like to extricate Britain from its Irish colonial involvement COMPLETELY if it could be done without any appearance of capitulation to Irish self-determination struggle, and if it could be got past Ulster Unionist reaction by one means or another. 

The ignorant anti-revolutionary Trots and Stalinist Revisionists in and around the Irish Question scene all idiotically plumped for exclusively Civil Rights agitation thereafter. Only the Provos surprisingly grasped that unless seriously harried, - sclerotic and demoralised British imperialist arrogance and complacency would take forever to find a way round these remaining difficulties for getting out; but that pressing Britain hard with an intensified national liberation war and a revolutionary political offensive could lead to a dramatic sensational triumph. 

And so it proved, exactly as the EPSR's Marxist-Leninist grasp of the movement of international class and national forces in this epoch of imperialist crisis, confidently explained would happen from its first publication 24 years ago.

The basic revolutionary question was: Who is actually waging the independence WAR against British occupation, - and having remarkable success with it, showing colossal heroism, fortitude, and imagination, with the Provos as the obvious answer.

And inevitably, in those national oppression conditions, the Irish working-class (the mass of poorest proletarians) throughout the OZ (and further afield in the Irish Republic itself) began to be uplifted into revolutionary hostility against imperialism quite regardless of Sinn Féin's petty-bourgeois nationalist limitations, in support of the inventive revolutionary political initiatives of Sinn Féin, and in astonished admiration (universally shared) of the IRA's remarkable courage and guerrilla war prowess, both in the OZ but particularly in Britain, despite the vilest and most brutal police-state repression imaginable, including torture, hunger-strikes-to-death, repeated home destruction terror raids, and a hideous shoot-to-kill state assassination policy and programme, all backed up by open-ended detention-without-trial in the Long Kesh concentration camp.

Yet every Trot and Stalinist variety in Britain came together in failing to call for a British DEFEAT in Ireland, with many of them going along openly with the imperialist bourgeois "condemnation" of "terrorism", - both then, and STILL, in many cases.

The Ireland question also illuminated the Marxist scientific understanding that "defeat" for one's own imperialist state does not necessarily at all imply any interest in wanting "victory" for the targets of the police-state tyranny by the imperialist colonial warmongering, - even in the hugely sympathetic case of the Irish national liberation struggle to which cause anyone with the slightest scrap of progressive humanity has been irresistibly drawn for centuries.

Nor is it just an academic hair-splitting point to stress that - in spite of the huge excitement (shared by Marx and Lenin among others) at the many highlights of splendid defiance, magnificently lauded in 800 years of world renowned Irish rebel culture, - the independence struggle is still by no means the end of the story, and probably particularly rapidly in modern times, the socialist revolution is still going to have its problems with this purely nationalist (inevitably bourgeois nationalist) "solution" in Ireland.

So there is still no purpose in creating confusion by popularly calling for "victory to the IRA" (apart from, of course, after the exceptional cultural circumstances of enjoying a few pints and a few rebel songs).

"Defeat for imperialism" really is much more accurate, scientific, and sufficient, fully reflecting the colossal importance for the British and international working class's OWN socialist emancipation (well observed by Marx in Britain's case that with Ireland unfree, the English working-class was obviously going to be still subservient to its own imperialist ruling class) that a DEFEAT for British imperialism would mean, "echoing round the world" as Lenin described the first modern era explosion of the Easter Rising 1916, which to Lenin's disgust was dismissed by the Scargillite Revisionist opportunists of his day as "to be condemned as terrorism by middle-class religious putschists, and not TU-approved", just like Sept 11 in fact, "condemned" by the cowardly Scargillite Stalinists, with their fellow Lalkar Stalinist Revisionists looking-on, keeping silent.

The full idiocy of museum Stalinism comes across in its refusal to polemicise on a universal basis, limiting itself to fixed Aunt Sallies, plus the occasional getting-trounced public-meeting clash, where the silly ancient sneers of "Trotskyists" and "imperialist USSR-bashers" come across as particularly silly given the EPSR's relentless campaigning to re-establish Soviet proletarian dictatorship as the highest achievement by a long way in world civilisation's history so far, - defending it vociferously right up to the end in 1987-1991 against the stupidities of Gorbachevism and in conflict with such as the Cuban Communist Party and the South African Communist Party who refused to see the writing on the wall when the long slide of Stalinist Revisionist "peaceful coexistence, peaceful road" garbage culminated in Gorbachev's total class-compromise theoretical bankruptcy.

From never having had a rigorous Leninist commitment to internal and external polemics on a universal basis, all the Stalinist remnant parties (just like all the Trotskyite remnants) merely harbour all kinds of unresolved eclectic theoretical rubbish, all the time half-heartedly conflicting and giving the working class no leadership at all, which is why the workers movement is now utterly bankrupt in terms of a serious Marxist-Leninist Communist Party.

The all-over-the-place, unresolved, stupidity means that "like minds" gather together around the Socialist Alliance, the SLP, or Lalkar, with as many different half-hearted views about exactly what went wrong with the world communist movement, when, and where, as there are confused, posturing, and opportunist voices present.

Predictably, they all fall apart after a time without that CONSTANT, never-ending, FIGHT towards theoretical understanding and agreement,- the essence of Leninism.

The steady degeneration of the world communist movement, more and more noticeable from its middle decades onwards, was notoriously TOTALLY marked, internationally and in every separate country, by a tightlipped silence over any internal polemicising that did take place, and by a smug, po-faced, blanket refusal to entertain any serious Marxist polemics with anyone outside the movement unless it was vicars and 'left'-leaning Labour MPs.

And so now the final farcical outcome is that the Stalinists have completely missed the great historical come-uppance of the sick Trotskyite individualist mentality, (swearing blind for decades that there was nothing to defend in the Soviet workers state, that there was no socialism there, and that all there was consisted of state capitalism, etc, etc, etc.)

The second great watershed in modern history after 1917 (and its follow-ons around the world after 1945), - namely, the aftermath period (following the 1991 deliberate dismantling of the proletarian-dictatorship state in the USSR) when the mighty Soviet economy and fabulous state-social achievements and cultural brilliance did TRULY start to collapse for the first time, - a period of enormous mass personal tragedy all across East Europe when living standards fell in half, an unprecedented historical event from purely political causes (where not caused by war, plague, famine, etc), - has paradoxically destroyed 70 years of anti-communist and anti-Soviet petty-bourgeois propaganda of endless varieties, ALL saying that there was nothing worth defending in the workers states.

This COLOSSAL historical event and COLOSSAL OPPORTUNITY for a political propaganda fightback by communists, has been totally missed by most varieties of museum Stalinist brain-deadness.

Just as well the EPSR exists as a firm, weekly publishing basis of sanity in the workers movement.

It has no intention of losing the plot, and will continue the fight to uphold the REAL workers-state record of achievement in modern history (as opposed to the Stalin-cult theoretical defectiveness it struggled on under), - as always, in Marxist tradition, using the capitalist press's own admissions as the best propaganda evidence for eventually winning the fight for workers communist understanding in Britain.

Naturally, only the ultimate re-establishment of proletarian dictatorship in East Europe would provide the final clinching argument in favour of a planned publicly owned economy and relentless REVOLUTIONARY hostility and vigilance against surrounding imperialist meddling (if it is still surviving), - a still complex, and possibly still relatively distant prospect, depending on how the global imperialist warmongering crisis develops next.

But this, from the Times, no less, is an interesting perspective (just disregard the obligatory sneers):

Kati Witt, the pirouetting ice-skating star of the defunct East German state, caused a stir the other day by appearing in public in a tightly stretched T-shirt that announced: "I Love the German Democratic Republic." The uproar was prompted not by offended sensibilities - but by a sense of approval; a taboo had been broken.

Many east Germans want to be East Germans again: they want to be swaddled by a kind of soft communism. Should we be worried? I think so. Not because the Berlin Wall is about to be rebuilt but because reunification has so manifestly failed to convince millions of east Germans that capitalism and liberal democracy are superior to the ramshackle socialism of the Cold War.

The Kati Witt phenomenon - she is about to front a prime-time TV series on the highlights of East German life - is part of a wave of Ostalgie, a yearning for the East. As such it is harmless enough, even comic. The latest Ostalgic excursion is to appear in British cinemas from Thursday - Goodbye Lenin, the funniest film to come out of Germany for a century or so.

The point of the film, and the surrounding Ostalgic fuss, is that communism produced an imperfect world, full of defeat, yet it was not evil or run by monsters. It was intimately bound up with the biographies of people who believed in something better. The latest Stasi files to be released into the public domain are shocking not because people snitched on their friends for money - where would the publishing industry be without that kind of help? - but because so many did so for free. They were convinced that their Germany was the superior one; it did not dump on the weak, throw people out of work, it was modest and, usually, decent. That sentimental attachment to a dead state lingers on and I'm not sure it is as ludicrous as it sounds.

We have failed the East Germans. We promised them prosperity, a flourishing new culture that would lift them out of provincial mediocrity. Instead they have become the Mezzogiorno of the north, a hopeless bog where subsidies sink swiftly, leaving mere bubbles on the surface. The united Germany became the laggard of Europe not just because of a chronic inability to reform but also because of the fundamental mistakes made in the east during the 1990s.

If you drive the few miles from Mecklenburg in the east to Hamburg, you leave a state where the average income per head is 16,890 euros a year and enter a city state with an average income of 43,550 euros: the gap between rich west and poor east in some ways more stark than 13 years ago. The east is beginning to resemble a 19th-century colonial settlement a few scattered, relatively prosperous, oases surrounded by depopulated wasteland.

Airports are built on the basis of half-baked projections about tourism. In villages the houses facing the road are brightly painted; behind, there is a broken-down community, unfinished buildings, dumped cars and unsaleable farmland. A million people have moved out of eastern Germany since unification. At night teenagers, bored and drunk, play chicken on the long straight country roads with hot-rodded cars. 

On the morning of Berlin's overmarketed Love Parade, I was marooned at a small station in Brandenburg. Waiting for the train to the German capital was a boy in a wheelchair - the victim of a dare that involved jumping off a local bridge and three half-naked youths smoking marijuana. One almost fell in front of the train, another vomited. It was 10 o'clock in the morning in the heart of what used to be Prussia.

The ideologically coherent argument is that this generation has been messed up not by capitalism but because of the soul-destroying legacy of communism. But these teenagers were five years old when the wall tumbled. Communist rule in East Germany did not have much to do with Marxism but it offered a sheltered and slower life. Now these lost tribes feel exposed, under pressure to succeed in a society they no longer understand. So they reach back to a mythical pre-1989 world, not because they crave communism and the Stasi and the ban on foreign travel, but because it was a gentler age.

East Germans learnt patience: they had to wait 15 years for cars that could barely move faster than lawnmowers. They valued the extended family: it was almost impossible to live independently before middle age. East Germans developed a fetishistic interest in Western goods but most understood that consumer choice was nowhere near as important as ethical choice, the daily tests of loyalty and self-respect. These were values learnt under communism and it has made thoughtful individuals out of east Germans, sceptical of ideologies, of populism and posturing. Perhaps we should stop mocking them and listen more carefully to the people that history left behind.

The author is Berlin correspondent of The Times

The EPSR's favourite headline of all time is "Build the Berlin Wall higher" which it published at a time when there was first Stalinist talk about capitulating to the relentless global tide of bourgeois propaganda, (a typical, muddle-headed Stalinist compromise, worthily following-on the Stalinist class collaborating stupidity in the first place of agreeing to allow the "non-aggressive imperialist states" to implant a constantly-destructive propaganda and sabotage outpost in West Berlin, withdrawing the Red Army to let them in.

What is "non-aggressive imperialism"????

How do 400 wars, coups, and proxy sabotage by NATO imperialism since 1945, - including Vietnam, Korea, Grenada, Panama, Malaya, Algeria, Bay of Pigs, Sandinista overthrow, Allende overthrow, Suez, Gulf Wars, Zionist genocidal colonisation, etc, etc, etc, etc, amount to "non-aggressive imperialism"?

Stalin ended as a muddle-headed catastrophe for the international anti-imperialist struggle).

Its next favourite headline is "Let the KGB run everything until imperialism is finished with".

The joke about Stalin in heaven ("0K, I'll come back. But next time, no more Mr Nice Guy") bizarrely proved to be tragically the truth. 

Build Leninism. EPSR supporters.

E P S R BOX

Leaving the world to be run by the greed of the capitalist monopolies can never stop resulting in periodic crises where trade-war destruction MUST rule, and to which the only antidote is Revolution and a strong workers state, - as these essentials of Marxist-Leninist SCIENCE explain.

Only the crisis events of collapsing imperialist rule interpreted in this Marxist-Leninist light will educate a mass workers party of leadership to do the necessary tasks.

The Revisionist retreat from the Soviet workers state because of crawling to shallow Western glitz and shame at their own past bureaucratic mistakes has only proved the soundness of Lenin's 'State & Revolution' science about a very long period of proletarian dictatorship being the only way for the world to see-off monopoly imperialist warmongering, now back with a vengeance.

***********

It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's teachings is the class struggle; but this is not true. And  from this untruth very often springs the opportunist distortion of Marxism, its falsification in such a way as to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the doctrine of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and generally speaking it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognise only the class struggle are not yet Marxists;  they may be found to be still within the boundaries of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the "Kautskyites" (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats who repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat. V.I.Lenin

*********

"The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit." (Capital. Vol III. P568.)

*******

" For many a decade past", wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crisis a great part, not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary...they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them."

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

Adams' reply to Blair.

"I believe that the IRA statement, unmatched by any from the IRA leadership in this or indeed any other phase of their struggle, points the way forward. Now the two governments and the leadership of the UUP have to make a choice."

“Sinn Féin's focus in the last five years has been to see the Good Friday Agreement fully and faithfully implemented.

The Agreement was born out of decades of division and conflict, and almost 30 years of war. It reflects a deep desire on the part of the vast majority of people on this island to build a just and lasting peace for everyone.

The substance of the Good Friday Agreement is about the rights and entitlements of citizens. It is about a new political dispensation on the island of Ireland and a new relationship between Ireland and Britain.

It is about change - fundamental and deeprooted change - including constitutional and institutional change - across all aspects of society.

Five years after the Agreement, there has been progress. The institutions, when they functioned, did so effectively and were very popular.

While for some people, including bereaved families and victims of sectarianism, the situation is worse the reality is that for most people things are much better today than they have ever been.

We have all come a long way in recent years. A problem, which was previously described as intractable, has proven not to be so.

But we still have a lot more to do.

Important aspects of the Agreement have not been delivered on, as Prime Minister Blair freely acknowledged last October.

The purpose of the Joint Declaration and of the negotiations which Sinn Féin and the two governments were locked in for months, was to ensure that those rights and entitlements not yet in place become a reality in the time ahead.

While committed to our republican objectives it is Sinn Féin's view that the Good Friday Agreement, despite the difficulties, continues to hold the promise of a new beginning for everyone.

I believe we have now reached a defining moment in that endeavour.

The Joint Declaration commits to progress across a range of issues and indeed significant progress in some areas; albeit on a conditional basis. It also contains other difficulties, some of which are wholly unacceptable to Sinn Féin. We have made this clear to the two governments.

The two governments, for example, intend to introduce sanctions aimed at Sinn Féin and the Sinn Féin electorate, which are outside the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. These sanctions would contravene the safeguards built into the Agreement and are unacceptable.

Let us be clear about the Joint Declaration. The commitments given by the two governments, and especially the British government, in the Good Friday Agreement and the Joint Declaration, if and when acted upon would see the commencement of a process. This could see the implementation in full of the Good Friday Agreement.

The Joint Declaration is not an act of completion. It is, at best, a commitment to a process towards completion.

Nor is there any certainty about the UUP's position or its intentions in respect of the stability of the political institutions, a timeframe for the transfer of powers on policing and criminal justice, or the establishment of the North/South interparliamentary forum and so forth.

There is no certainty from the unionist paramilitaries.

There is no certainty about the positions or the intentions of British securocrats.

But despite these very real and serious difficulties, it is Sinn Féin's view that on balance the Joint Declaration presents an important opportunity to move the process forward.

Consequently, the IRA leadership was persuaded to take yet another initiative to support and give space and momentum to the peace process. A draft text and other concepts were passed to the two governments and the Ulster Unionist Party. There followed a period of sustained leaking and misleading briefings to the media about this.

Then on 12 April, the two governments, in a public statement, said that it is important that all parties and groups join the governments in upholding and implementing the Good Friday Agreement in full. They also said that 'fulfilling the promise and potential of the Good Friday Agreement is a collective responsibility'.

So there was agreement that the basis for definitively ending conflict - conflict resolution - is a collective one.

On Sunday 13 April, Martin McGuinness and I gave the two governments the final copy of the IRA statement.

This detailed statement setting out the IRA leadership's view of the current phase of the Peace Process was accomplished in the most difficult circumstances. It contains a number of highly significant and positive elements unparalleled in any previous statement by the IRA leadership, - either in this or in any previous phase of their struggle. 

A copy was also shown to the Ulster Unionist Party leadership.

The two governments have publicly recognised the many positive aspects of the IRA statement, the obvious progress and, crucially, the British and Irish governments said that the statement shows a clear desire to make the peace process work.

Such an IRA statement and such a response to it would have been unimaginable ten or even five years ago.

The IRA statement sets out the status of the IRA cessation; - its future intentions and its attitude to the issue of arms. It also makes clear the IRA's resolve to a complete and final closure of the conflict, and its support for efforts to make conflict a thing of the past. This is unequivocal.

On 23 April the British Prime Minister publicly raised three questions about the IRA statement.

Mr Blair asked first, whether activities inconsistent with the Good Friday Agreement, such as targeting, procurement of weapons, punishment beatings and so forth, were at an end; second, whether the IRA's commitment was to put all arms beyond use; and thirdly, whether the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and commitments in the Joint Declaration would bring complete and final closure of the conflict.

I have stated in the course of the extensive private contacts that have taken place with the governments my belief that the IRA statement is clear on the issues raised, but for the public record, my answers are as follows.

Firstly, the IRA leadership has stated its determination to ensure that its activities will be consistent with its resolve to see the complete and final closure of the conflict.

I have already acknowledged in my address to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, and at other times, the difficulties caused for the pro-Agreement unionists and others by allegations of IRA activities in the recent past.

In particular, these have been cited as an excuse for the suspension of the political institutions and the current impasse in the Good Friday Agreement process.

Sinn Féin is, with others, an architect of the Good Friday Agreement. Martin McGuinness and I have raised allegations of IRA activity with the IRA leadership. 

Mr Blair has also raised these issues in one of his questions. 

In my view, the IRA statement deals definitively with these concerns about alleged IRA activity. 

And any such activities which in any way undermine the peace process and the Good Friday
Agreement should not be happening. 

The IRA statement is a statement of completely peaceful intent. Its logic is that there should be no activities inconsistent with this.

Secondly, the IRA has clearly stated its willingness to proceed with the implementation of a process to put arms beyond use at the earliest opportunity. Obviously this is not about putting some arms beyond use. It is about all arms.

And thirdly, if the two governments and all the parties fulfil their commitments this will provide the basis for the complete and final closure of the conflict. 

Sinn Féin's peace strategy has always been about bringing an end to physical force republicanism by creating an alternative way to achieve democratic and republican objectives. We have negotiated, and campaigned and argued to have the Good Friday Agreement implemented not only because that is our obligation, not only because it is the right thing, but also because it fits into a strategy of creating an alternative to war and a means of sustaining and anchoring the peace process.

The IRA statement contains another key element. Some time ago the Ulster Unionist Party leader publicly stated that he would not call a UUC meeting to discuss his party going back into the institutions until after the IRA had acted on the arms issue. For its part the IRA had set its engagement with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning in the context of functioning political institutions.

There was also deep scepticism within the republican constituency because there was no indication that the UUP would reciprocate even if the IRA moved on the arms issue.

This stand off had to be broken.

So, despite the suspension of the institutions the IRA leadership authorised a third act of putting arms beyond use to be verified under the agreed scheme by the IICD. This act was timed to facilitate the Ulster Unionist Party holding a UUC meeting. 

This followed a suggestion by me that I would point up this difficulty in a public statement. Mr Trimble was to respond to this with a public commitment that he would recommend to his party that they actively support the sustained working of the political institutions and other elements of the Good Friday Agreement.

The IRA leadership was then prepared to act in advance of the UUC meeting and in the context of suspended institutions.

My understanding is that all of this is still doable at this time if there is a positive response from the two governments and Mr Trimble.

Let me tell you that the Sinn Féin leadership have put in a huge amount of effort to save this process. But there is a limit to what we can do.

There is considerable unease within the republican activist base and the wider republican constituency over recent developments. The Sinn Féin leadership, while mindful of this, has not been deterred because our commitment is to making this process work. We are also conscious that other constituencies have their problems.

The IRA leadership has once again demonstrated in an unprecedented way its clear willingness to support the peace process.

I, along with the vast majority of people in Ireland, value the IRA cessation. It is the main anchor for the peace process. But let me be clear, the political process is the responsibility of political leaders. We created the Good Friday Agreement. It is our job, whatever about the approaches or actions of others, to make politics work, to make conflict resolution work.

This is a collective responsibility. We all have a choice to make. The Sinn Féin leadership's position is clear.

I believe that the IRA statement, unmatched by any from the IRA leadership in this or indeed any other phase of their struggle, points the way forward.

Now the two governments and the leadership of the UUP have to make a choice.

So what has to be done? There is no magic formula waiting to be discovered. The next steps in this process are not secret. Everyone knows what is required.

The Joint Declaration and all other statements should be published. It is as simple as that. The commitments contained in all the statements, including the IRA statement, should be implemented in full.

The Assembly Elections should proceed as planned.

Republicans have stretched ourselves repeatedly to keep the peace process on track. Sinn Féin is in this process to the end.

Nationalists and unionists, republicans and loyalists have to come to terms with and recognise each other's integrity. We need to forge a real partnership that manages the changes that are taking place and builds a better future, a democratic and inclusive future.

Our collective task, in fact our collective obligation, is to make that change peaceful and constructive for all.

We have to work together to move this process forward.

That is the challenge for all of us, for Sinn Féin for the two governments and, critically, for the leadership of the UUP.

That is the way to achieve a permanent peace.”

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

Sinn Féin National Chairperson Mitchel McLaughlin spoke to An Phoblacht about why republicans place so much importance on attending the National Hunger Strike Commemoration in Belfast.

"Sinn Féin is mobilising people, at a national level, to remember why they died and to reflect how far republicans have come in resolving conflict and in transforming the political landscape here in Ireland," said McLaughlin.

"Twenty-two years ago, the British Government refused to accept the five demands of republican prisoners. They refused to acknowledge the profound political nature of the conflict in Ireland or indeed their responsibility for creating and maintaining that conflict. In 1981, ten people died on Hunger Strike.

"They forced the British Government to acknowledge the political nature of the conflict. They forced the British Government to recognise the legitimate political aspirations of republicans. The courage, vision and determination of republicans today, as it was 22 years ago, has been the driving force for change on this island.

"We're currently at a very important moment in terms of the history of republicanism and remembering the Hunger Strike puts a clear focus on the progress that has been made. There are many important strands in current republican thinking and tactics which sprang directly from the Hunger Strike period.

"The electoral intervention of Bobby Sands and subsequent elections of Hunger Strikers and their supporters showed republicans that there was a whole new arena of struggle that could be explored. Out of that developed an electoral strategy

"The way in which those early community based structures that emerged during the Hunger Strike came together provided the basis for a mass movement, a movement that actually reflected a broad spectrum of political opinion and was the first example of an emerging nationalist consensus. The nationalist consensus has become a key strand in the current peace process.

"The Hunger Strike period showed republicans the advantages of engaging in broad-front politics. During this period a wide range of people, from all kinds of political backgrounds, were not only prepared to engage in a process with republicans but to accept republican leadership. This also marked an important milestone.

"This week, republicans are approaching the 22nd commemoration of the Hunger Strike against the backdrop of speculation and uncertainty about the forthcoming elections. To date, the British Government has changed the electoral rules eleven times in successive attempts to prevent Sinn Féin's electoral advances.

"But despite all their best efforts, it hasn't stopped Sinn Féin's electoral surge forward. The British Government is afraid of this election's outcome. They are so afraid that they are now threatening to abandon the election altogether. In a week in which people in England Scotland and Wales are going to the polls, we in the North of Ireland are witnessing the true attachment of the British Government to the democratic process" said McLaughlin.

Meanwhile, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams at an election rally on the Falls Road described the forthcoming election campaign as "the most important" election to date.

"Nothing should daunt us: Nothing should prevent us from moving forward," said Adams.

'Thirty years is a long time, it's a long time in anyone's life but it isn't a long time in struggle, it isn't a long time in history. Consider Sinn Féin in this city 30 years ago; in 1964 Sinn Féin was a banned organisation, today we're the largest party and Alex Maskey is coming to the end of his term of office as mayor, a groundbreaking successful term as the first republican mayor in the history of this city.

"Most republicans and nationalists are really cheesed off with David Trimble. They tell me that they can't put up with David Trimble. And I ask myself, put up with David Trimble? It's me who is putting up with David Trimble and the rest of our team. And if we can put up with him, it is reasonable to expect other republicans to do so as well.

"And this is important, because unionists have nowhere to go unless we make them welcome on this island. They'll twist and turn, they'll be bombastic and arrogant and use offensive language, but that's understandable. It's understandable because change, the type of change we want and the change envisaged by the GFA, threatens the very rationale of unionism.

"We should be understanding, not acquiescent, because we are Irish republicans. We want a Republic, a new Republic, a national Republic on this island, but the most important part of this word is "public", which means people. That's what a Republic is about. It's about people, people in charge, people in power, people being uplifted, people being sovereign and that includes unionists," said Adams.

"As for the British, they are currently upholding the Union. What else should we expect? What colonial power ever voluntarily gave up possession of its conquests? It has never happened in the history of humanity. Even a benign government will resist, even if there are people within that government who know in their heart of hearts that they should not be on this island.

	"And we should not be surprised by the British system of securocrats, MI5 and their network of spies. Their war is not over. They may present the IRA as the target but in truth their War is about defeating people like you, it's about defeating people. But over many, many years, there is one thing I have learnt about republican activists. And that is this, they cannot be defeated, they will not be defeated" said Adams.