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 
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No 1216 January 20th 2004                                                                                                                    25p

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The formation of 'Respect' is just more reformist nonsense from the fake-'left', continuing a long philistine tradition of class-compromise Labourism and trade unionism, built on "activism" and "pragmatism" (i.e. opportunism, and sentimental, impressionistic spontaneity), and hating class-struggle Leninism's science on the need to build a party of revolutionary theory, and how to do it, more than anything else. Right on cue, its appearance merely marks the further collapse of Labour's ability to hold back the working class much longer after a century of criminal pretence as "anti-imperialists" — while in fact crucially propping up the most vicious episodes of Western monopoly-capitalist colonial warmongering tyranny in history, — like now with the "war on terrorism" lunatic joke of the era.

The need to quit fawning on "liberal" and "well-meaning" public figures who decide to throw in their lot with certain anti-imperialist or anti-monopoly causes was well established among class-conscious workers more than 150 years ago.

The bogus 'left' of the labour movement is back sucking-up again to "anti-war" worthies (plus every other "anti" which is fashionable) because real communist confidence is at rock bottom internationally after the twin catastrophes of Stalinism and Trotskyism.

Leaderless, the revolutionary anti-imperialist spirit is searching worldwide for any understanding to latch on to.

It will never find a scrap of serious, intended encouragement at 'Respect' whose commitment to "reformist pressure" is not only already fully spelled out, but whose worthies are guaranteed to be far more hostile to revolutionary agitation than to the "free world" delusions of "Western democracy" and "NATO peacekeeping" which is precisely where civilisation's real problems begin and end.

It is, for example, almost as shallowly stupid and misleading to demand "Stop the War" as it is to declare a "War on Terrorism" in the first place.

Neither gets remotely close to the heart of the matter of what is wrong with the "new world order" society which is resulting in ever more warmongering, and ever more "anti-war" protesting.

Monbiot and Galloway, for example, like Benn and Scargill before them, can make blistering detailed exposures of the genuinely gut-wrenching horrors and hypocrisies of Western imperialism on all issues.

But NEVER will these accepted public figures even acknowledge that monopoly-capitalism's unending exploitational and warmongering tyrannies might just form part of a historical pattern which is relentlessly building up towards a global REVOLUTIONARY denouement, where all-out class war finally has to step in so as to rescue civilisation itself, — let alone ever put such a perspective down on a 'Respect' agenda for serious consideration.

This is a mirror image of the same blindness afflicting the reactionary bourgeois. The pretence is a "war on terrorism", but the reality is a Western-dominated monopoly-capitalist global economic system which THEY KNOW is heading for yet another periodic "overproduction" crisis of tradewar and shooting-war proportions, just like the joke "free world" degenerated into in 1914 and 1939.

In advance, just as in the previous two inter-imperialist world wars, the Big Powers are beginning to throw their weight around against all sorts of smaller nations, both as warmongering preliminaries just to show their rival powers how militarily mighty and ruthlessly determined they are, — and also to let the little nations know that they had all better watch their step and cause no "rogue regime" trouble of any kind or face a zapping.

Such "new-world order' pre-crisis military aggression is almost EXACTLY what the imperialist system has always promised before (when preparing for a period of warmongering slump catastrophe); and Bush on this occasion has even brazenly spelled out the US superpower's pre-emptive counter-revolutionary intentions IN ADVANCE, just to cow everybody with "shock and awe".

So this petty-bourgeois 'Respect' exists to objectively play into the imperialist bourgeoisie's hands, whatever subjective illusions any of the worthies may have about themselves.

The capitalist racket is not going to reveal that this entire "war on terrorism" global upheaval is solely to make sure that uncontrollable economic crisis does not result in world socialist revolution.

And the mirror-image "reformist" racket (which has never changed one whit of the capitalist class's domination of the economic, political, social, and cultural essence of modern society) is not going to reveal that it will in fact prove eventually far easier to actually get rid of the capitalist system completely (by revolution) rather than force it to stop being regularly crisis-ridden and warmongering (which is impossible to achieve by the very economic and political nature of international monopoly-imperialist domination and competition).

The sole future for civilisation, — the revolutionary future when the working class is forced to take over power worldwide on behalf of the overwhelming mass-majority of mankind, — is thus, out of class instinct, conveniently kept hidden by all sections of the bourgeoisie.

Echoing the Punch & Judy show in Parliament, mass opinion is kept mesmerised by the "anti-war" agitation against the "pro-war" establishment where the antics of Blair, Howard and Kennedy no longer divert people.

But what does "anti-war" offer??? What has it ever offered in more than 400 wars that the western imperialist system has inflicted on the Third World since the supposed triumph of "democracy" in 1947 (wars via a variety of coups, police actions, subversions, invasions, blockades, assassinations, bombings, etc, etc, etc).

"Anti-war" just offers a self-righteous moralising posture.

Even Suez and Vietnam were not victories for "anti-war" at all, but precisely spell out what is the real story about imperialist war; — which is that imperialist DEFEAT can alone be the only ever purposeful, worthwhile, and hoped-for quest. The war stopped in Vietnam because the communist revolutionary forces got the better of US imperialism. It stopped in Suez because the Soviet Union threatened to intervene (meaning DEFEAT for the Zionists, Britain, and France) and so the USA ordered a pull-out.

All of which leads back once again to the only real question worth asking: What is the perspective for putting an end to barbarous warmongering itself as any longer tolerable as a means of conflict in a modern world of potential plenty for all????

And once again, the only serious and proven theory is that imperialism itself, as a world system, must be DEFEATED.

Remarkably, of all the many divisive, bitter, and complex issues revolving around the war, it is the potential DEFEAT for US imperialism (i.e. humiliating failure to achieve its objectives in either Afghanistan, Iraq, or Palestine) which looms largest.

Even better, the potentially sensational background to the greatest economic "over-production" crisis ever to threaten the capitalist system's survival, revolves around the likely collapse of the dollar as world currency which has been consciously and deliberately polluted for decades by Washington in order to:- 
(a) keep the glitz of the world trade boom going "forever" in order to undermine the appeal of stable Socialist-Camp planned development; and  
(b) to arrogantly tell the rest of the "free world" that any eventual markets and trade collapse because of a dollar crash would have to be paid for by the rest of the world holding worthless currency and reserves, not by the USA which would simply dishonour its huge (and unpayable) payments debts and balance of trade deficits.

This unique and threatening diktat is one of the many aspects likening this period of US imperialist crisis to the fall of the Roman Empire, hated by all but falling not to a single rival but to a historical revolutionary shift in society (out of slavery empires into feudal nation-states).

The only way that the US superpower's dissolute corruption, now imposing universal war, might be most easily seen as facing doom in theory, might be through a new historical revolutionary shift in society, already overdue, from capitalist individualism to planned world collective socialism.

But 'Respect' and the like, are more often than not AGAINST the new Third World anti-imperialist masses, confused by their immediate past cultural origins in Islamic fundamentalism, suicidal terrorism, and the like, — just as these types never understood the priceless role of the Socialist Camp proletarian dictatorships in shifting history forward by leaps and bounds.

Many of these worthies were involved in the destruction of mass international communist confidence in their Trot or Stalinist earlier posturing.

But having helped create the anti-Marxist ideological debacle by either religiously worshipping Moscow and never questioning anything; or by taking Stalin's Revisionist "peaceful road to socialism" idiocy and "peaceful coexistence" delusion the whole way to eventual CPGB self-liquidation; or by endless academic ultra-Trot posturing about how this new revolution, and that new revolution, and the other new revolution were all only not taking place because of the "counter-revolution having won power in the Soviet Union", — by which insane logic the Trots to could even justify 57 varieties of their one constant passion which was to see ACTUAL counter-revolution prevail in East Europe, something finally achieved via the CIA and Vatican's Solidarnosc stooges in 1990, quickly rampant everywhere due to the ultimate ideological suicide by Stalinist Revisionist imbecility, — these anti-communist worthies all then walked away from the counter-revolutionary mess and have not gone back to their confused mistakes ever since.

But discontent and mass suffering in East Europe from the self-liquidation by the proletarian dictatorship continue to grow relentlessly, and a return to planned economies, with all capitalist corruption and anarchy firmly suppressed, is the only logical future at some stage.

However, 'Respect' worthiness (embracing remnants of Stalinism, Revisionism, and Trotskyism) will NOT be going back to try to sort out exactly what went wrong to befuddle, mislead, and eventually completely undermine the world's first workers states and simultaneously the mass international communist revolutionary movement, once the bulwark of many sincere and mighty anti-imperialist triumphs.

Its ingrained academic cynicism and conceit will safely stick to celebrity opportunism henceforth, and will philistinely refuse to touch with a bargepole any attempted return to re-establishing CORRECT revolutionary theory to wipe out the disastrous 80-year legacies of Stalinism and Trotskyism which drove Leninism from the scene.

But worldwide, the tide is flowing strongly against these philistine 'Respect' worthies.

The entire Third World is heading towards revolt against the ludicrous collapse effects of capitalism's uncontrollable crisis anarchy, and against the bullying brutality of the American imperialism which threatens war or embargo to everyone who steps out of line.

Renewed communist revolutionary inspiration has resurfaced in some anti-Western struggles (Colombia, Nepal, Philippines, etc) while pseudo-communist talk has taken other crisis situations to the brink of major decision-making about how to fight on further against imperialism (Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, plus more regimes in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the former Socialist Camp).

In the continued absence of any world revolutionary socialist understanding, all sorts of local cultural extremism is bound to feature in the anti-Western-imperialist struggle but will be no real obstacle to the universal triumph of a Marxist-Leninist scientific revival. EPSR

US war disasters continue on all fronts; and now the Generals start complaining. The global economic collapse of the anarchic exploitation system of imperialist greed may coincide with a total Iraq debacle.

Washington's damage limitation exercise to try to establish an "independent" stooge Iraqi authority in Baghdad by midsummer so that the Bush regime can pretend, for re-election purposes, to evade all further responsibility for the potential chaotic disaster there, is looking more doomed by the day. 

This bogus "Iraqisation" stunt will only recall the equally catastrophic "Vietnamisation" stunt pulled in Indo-China which failed to avert total US humiliation there. 

The massive weekend bombing of Iraqi collaborators outside the American occupation HQ plus the growing Shia muscle-flexing against the US stooge-regime plans, will sicken this "Iraqisation" possibly to death. 

And there are no guarantees that the ongoing US military occupation behind the stooges will be suffering any less casualties, which are politically crippling Washington. It could even get worse, as even a Pentagon think-tank is warning:

The Bush administration's doctrinaire view of the war on terror, which lumped together regimes like Saddam Hussein's and al-Qaida as a single undifferentiated threat, led the US on a dangerous "detour" into an unnecessary war, according to an unusually strong critique from the US army war college.

"The global war on terrorism as presently defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate US military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security" says the study by Jeffrey Record, a visiting scholar at the Strategic Studies Institute.

The report, endorsed by other scholars at the institute, appeared yesterday at a delicate moment for the White House, which was fending off damaging comments from a former cabinet member on its decision to go to war.

Although he says that Washington may be able to defeat al-Qaida, he concludes that its war on terror has designated so many fronts and enemies that it is fundamentally unwinnable.

Entering into an open-ended guerrilla conflict in Iraq has drained its military and financial resources and cost the country dear in international diplomacy, the report says, while emphatically failing to advance the war on terror.

"Operation Iraqi Freedom may have expanded the terrorist threat by establishing a large new American target set in an Arab heartland," it says.

In a memoir of his two years at the treasury, Mr O'Neill accuses President Bush of being a semi-detached president ,while rightwing members of his administration spun their plots to go to war on Iraq.

But if White House officials succeed in writing off Mr O'Neill's exposé as a pathetic attempt at revenge by a gaffe prone official who was eventually sacked, Dr Record will not be so easy to dismiss.

He is the author of six books, he served as a military adviser during the Vietnam war and to Republican senators, and leis report was endorsed in the Washington Post by the director of the war college.

Although the essay carries a standard disclaimer that its views do not represent those of the Pentagon, the study was endorsed by several other academics at the institute.

"This piece of work, like many others, certainly should be considered in the debate being taken place on national security policy" the institute's director, retired army colonel Douglas Lovelace, said.

He said it had "a fairly strong foundation of support among the academic faculty".

And the American military's brutal response to losing just goes on getting worse, as another pro-imperialist press admission reveals:

The international news agency Reuters has made a formal complaint to the Pentagon following the "wrongful" arrest and apparent "brutalisation" of three of its staff this month by US troops in Iraq.

The complaint followed an incident in the town of Falluja when American soldiers fired at two Iraqi cameramen and a driver from the agency while they were filming the scene of a helicopter crash.

The US military initially claimed that the Reuters journalists were "enemy personnel" who had opened fire on US troops and refused to release them for 72 hours.

Although Reuters has not commented publicly, it is understood that the journalists were "brutalised and intimidated" by US soldiers, who put bags over their heads, told them they would be sent to Guantanamo Bay, and whispered: "Let's have sex."

At one point during the interrogation, according to the family of one of the staff members, a US soldier shoved a shoe into the mouth one of the Iraqis.

The US troops, from the 82nd Airborne Division, based in Falluja, also made the blindfolded journalists stand for hours with their arms raised and their palms pressed against the cell wall.

"They were brutalised, terrified and humiliated for three days," one source said. "It was pretty grim stuff. There was mental and physical abuse."

He added: "It makes you wonder what happens to ordinary Iraqis."

The US military has so far refused to apologise and has bluntly told Reuters to "drop" its complaint.

The journalists were all wearing bulletproof jackets clearly marked "press".

Last night tire nephew of veteran Reuters driver and latterly cameraman Mr Ureibi said that US troops had forced his uncle to strip naked and had ordered him to put his, shoe in his mouth.

"He protested that he was a journalist but they stuck a shoe in his mouth anyway. They also hurt his leg. One of the soldiers told him: 'If you don't shut up we'll fuck you.'

Last August a US soldier shot dead another Reuters cameraman, Mazen Dana, after mistaking his camera for a rocket launcher while he filmed outside a Baghdad prison.

An internal US investigation later cleared him of wrongdoing. During the war last April another of the agency's cameramen, Ukrainian Tarps Protswuk, was killed after a US tank fired a shell directly into his room in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, from where he had been filming. 

Last night Simon Walker, a spokesman at Reuters head office in London, confirmed that the agency had made a formal complaint to the Pentagon last Friday.

More and more signs of a deepening systemic crisis to which there is no solution. Build Leninism. EPSR

New Lalkar own-goals on SLP inconsistency over Ireland and on the catastrophe of the Stalinist farcical "peaceful road to socialism".

A recent attack on Lalkar (EPSR 1211) because it failed to hit Scargill SLP reformists with its revolutionary conclusions about imperialist warmongering facing defeat in Iraq, would seem to have drawn some response from the Brarites.

If a polemic is developing at last, it will be very welcome, and hugely beneficial to general revolutionary understanding, whoever marshals the most convincing arguments.

But so bizarre is Lalkar's comeback that mind-readers are already needed.

EPSR 1211 had praised Lalkar for finally reaching a shared conclusion about the war's potentially revolutionary crisis, and for quoting Lenin on the need for workers of every imperialist country to fight for the defeat of "their own" ruling class first.

But 1211 went on to ask why Lalkar did not expose the SLP's refusal to countenance revolutionary conclusions about the West's war-onslaught on the Middle East, or quote the rest of Lenin's article demanding the DENUNCIATION in public of all social-patriotism and social-pacifism (i.e. Scargillism) in the workers movement.

It finally challenged Lalkar's praise of Harry Pollitt as a "great, historic British communist example of revolutionary anti-war struggle", recalling the universally known fact that Pollitt was the ARCHITECT of the CPGB's degeneration into social-pacifist reformism, personally pioneering the postwar Revisionist nonsense of the "peaceful parliamentary road to socialism", the lethally catastrophic Stalinist delusion which effectively eventually destroyed the CPGB.

Lalkar's "reply" of nearly 5,000 words eulogising Pollitt's political record 
(a) weirdly as usual makes no mention of the EPSR's attack; 
(b) gives no other explanation of why, suddenly, this huge article praising Pollitt is appearing; and 
(c) most bizarrely of all completely omits any reference at all to Pollitt's post-1945 record, — the crucial question at issue when any serious struggle against the forces of imperialist warmongering was finally abandoned utterly in order to boost Stalin's ridiculous "theory" that the fictional notion of "anti-fascist imperialism" (i.e. US world domination) within the imperialist system could prevent inter-imperialist World War III from inevitably threatening civilisation in due course (in the way that inter-imperialist World Wars I and II had inevitably arrived to threaten it) because 
(a) the growth of the Socialist Camp would make it impossible for Western imperialism to hugely expand economically ever again (an utterly imbecile "theory" when first enunciated, and since then demonstrated to be completely infantile and deranged); and 
(b) because these non-existent "anti-fascist" imperialists (who were just as rapaciously warmongering colonisers as Germany, Italy, and Japan, and only became reluctant Soviet "allies" against Germany in order to "win" the war at far less cost than would otherwise have been the case) — could be persuaded into sincere "peaceful coexistence" with the anti-imperialist Socialist Camp, (an even more lunatic "theory" which persisted in spite of the immediate next 15 years seeing US, British, and French imperialism, — both individually and collectively, — inflicting just as much barbarous blitzkrieg tyranny on Algeria, Malaya, Korea, Vietnam, etc, etc, as the fictionally "different" colonial tyranny of "fascist" Germany, Japan and Italy could ever have even dreamed of (e.g. mass dioxin defoliant poisoning of the whole of Indo-China; the saturation B52 bombing (more explosives than dropped in WWII by ALL the combatants put together); the burning alive of whole communities by napalm; the "scorched earth" systematic wiping out of villages in Malaya; the routine mass "collective punishment" massacres in Algeria; etc, etc, etc)).

Needless to say, the Lalkar "reply" also refuses all comment on the SLP's ignorant and reactionary wretchedness on all these questions, despite that being the whole point of the EPSR's attack.

But this hypocritical deceitfulness of Lalkar has struck even fouler new lows in a piece on Ireland.

Correctly, Lalkar echoes the longstanding EPSR line that the Good Friday Agreement was a great anti-imperialist revolutionary triumph, and that the latest Assembly elections have seen further significant justification for Sinn Féin's triumphant "peace process" line.

But where was Lalkar five years ago when the EPSR was being expelled from the SLP, personally by Scargill, precisely for insisting on arguing that articles in the SLP press (depicting the GFA as a defeat and a sell-out) were monstrously incorrect and a scandal??????

The EPSR was expelled from the SLP specifically for issue 979 which immediately followed a verbal threat from Scargill that political polemics inside the SLP on such matters as Ireland should cease:

"I am writing to inform you that it is my intention to pursue a complaint against you before the Complaints Committee of the NEC.

The basis of the complaint is that you have refused or failed to comply with a National Executive Committee instruction, 12 December, 1998: 'that the publishers and contributors of the EPSR (Economic and Philosophic Science Review) cease publication of that journal, or alternatively give an undertaking that it will not comment on affairs of the SLP.
 
Issue 979 of the EPSR, December, 15, 1998, was in complete conflict.

Yours,

Arthur Scargill
General Secretary"

This was "internecine warfare" Scargill decreed, hypocritically. It turned out later that he fully backed the Trot defeatist line on Ireland that the EPSR was complaining about, but was letting his Trot lieutenants (Heron & Sikorski) make the running on it in the absence of an SLP agreed position on the subject. 

The EPSR commented on this expulsion/censorship threat in the following manner in 979 as far as the Ireland polemics were concerned (many other aspects of a huge anti-communist witch-hunt against the EPSR by the Trots were dealt with too):

'A party that wants to earn the trust of all working people as the future party of leadership, to be followed all the way to the very bold confident step of abolishing capitalism and building a workers state in Britain, the only way a socialist society can be constructed — must be able to demonstrate that it can handle EVERY question of life and the community and philosophy BETTER THAN all the spokesmen and women of a thousand brands of bourgeois ideology (including fake-'left' petty bourgeois ideology like Trotskyism) all combined.

A workers party will never prove that by just running away from discussing difficult questions just because Trot counter-revolutionaries and other single-issue 'reformist' fanatics are out stirring up censorship lynch-mobs.

It will never prove it by allowing endless reactionary disruption by anti-communist factionalists who want to totally mislead the WHOLE-CLASS struggle (to jointly overthrow capitalism) into the sterile and racist divisiveness of separate schools for black children and separate schools for white children, separate sections in the party for black workers, etc, etc. 

Debate is necessary, but once a debate has been comprehensively won by a majority of the party, then the party has to decide what is the CORRECT line, and then move on.

It will never prove itself the total answer to ALL bourgeois ideology unless it constantly encourages the continuous developments required in the party's original (and inevitably time-dated) tactics & programmatic starting points. 

The immediate political composition of capitalist society and the broadest workers movement are changing all the time. Workers need constantly to be able to analyse everything that is going on around them, including in the labour movement around fake-'left' or anarchist trends.

It will never convincingly demonstrate its seriousness until it is prepared to accept its own mistakes, or mistakes committed in its name (over Ireland, e.g., or the extent of the economic crisis, etc), and correct then publicly.

Trotskyite articles on Ireland, e.g. have appeared in Socialist News which simply ignore, slightingly, one of the most colossal triumphs of anti-imperialist national liberation struggle of all time.

Negative references to the joke imperialist 'New World Order' supposedly imposing a settlement on Ireland in favour of the Union-Jack waving colonial fascists and one which IRA/Sinn Féin did not want but were powerless to prevent (SN 12) are just hopelessly WRONG and have the effect of the supposedly anti-imperialist SLP actually HARMING the anti imperialist struggle thereby spreading this biased anti-Irish propaganda to demoralise the heroic fight by Sinn Féin/IRA and demoralise its supporters in Britain.

And even though one strongly pro-Sinn Féin article was printed, nothing has been done in a tiny party like the SLP to keep this debate alive and ongoing so that the party is up-to-date on this issue and cementing better relations with Sinn Féin all the time, one of the-most outstanding anti-imperialist parties on earth at the present time, and one with some of the greatest potential for becoming a ruling party (in all-Ireland) with more socialist content and intentions than any current ruling party in the West.

Now all of this may still be some distance away, but the May/June 1998 SN stance was entirely in the wrong direction. It lazily adopted the widespread Trot-defeatist cynicism which has insisted (Weekly Worker and elsewhere) that the imperialist order was imposing a settlement on IRA/Sinn Féin which the Republicans hated but-were capitulating to, — abandoning the armed struggle and allowing Adams & Co to pursue opportunist bourgeois political careers.

For the gist of this defeatist nonsense to have appeared in Socialist News is a tragedy, especially if it remains uncorrected. And if it is to lead the working class in Britain, the SLP must become a party which can reach conclusions and take a stand in the further interests of the international defeat of the imperialist system, of which Blair's is the stooge representative government in Britain.

The Trots are wrong. Only the EPS Review has come remotely near the truth, and has printed it loudly and clearly throughout. The national-liberation struggle has not remotely been abandoned, and the IRA is nowhere near capitulating.

It has offered a peace ceasefire so that a completely new Ireland can be put in place, — the Good Friday agreement for crossborder bodies to begin adopting most of the government of all-Ireland.

When that de-facto obliteration of the old colonial 'Northern Ireland' tyranny is complete, including a completely new police force, etc, not run by anti-Irish colonial fascists, — the national liberation movement will begin to stand down its armed struggle, simultaneously with all non-Irish arms being taken out of the struggle, meaning the British Army, the sectarian RUC, and the criminal gangs of 'loyalist' fascist gunmen.

But the IRA has made it clear this week that there will be no decommissioning until the British imperialist Unionists who wish to remain Ireland-dwellers (Trimble & Co) have started to actually implement and accept the new all-Ireland structure for that much-wronged land.

It is British imperialism which has been defeated, — (by an undefeatable armed national-liberation struggle), — — NOT the IRA/Sinn Féin.

So far, the EPS Review has been astonishingly accurate in its Marxist analysis going back 20 years, even being far more farsighted (and at book length) in 1982 and 1985 in seeing imperialism's DEFEAT (long-term political defeat) in the outcome of the hunger strikes and the Anglo-Irish Treaty, when Sinn Féin itself initially could only see both events as a setback for the national liberation struggle (only much, later changing its mind, to some extent). 

Now, to repeat once again (and it will be repeated a million times in the future), none of this is related in order to prove who were the clever dicks and who were the duffers around the British labour movement or the SLP.

The point is to argue that without a deliberate struggle for Marxist theory, any workers party will be immeasurably poorer.

The same happened over the world capitalist economic crisis — which the December 1997 Congress was told, "may not come to Britain" solely because Trotspeak wished to undermine "cranky Marxism" and is also philosophically confused by imperialism's collapse because it puts Trot treachery to the Soviet workers state in such a bad light. (If the entire consumer glitz and high wage-earning 'democracy' of the 'free world' collapses in fascist-slump degradation, what then becomes of all the Revisionist and Trot imbecilities about the workers states being "on the wrong path"? Basically, they were on the correct planned development path of slow-but-steady growth and product-innovation (hampered by the need to meet colossal armed defence bills) and bureaucratic-but-equitable distribution and justice. By comparison with the ex-Soviet region's present plight, worsening all the time, it WAS almost a socialist paradise, as renewed communist revolutionary struggle will demonstrate, shortly forthcoming.)

Defeated Trot anti-communists around the SLP have staged a monstrous campaign of personal vilification and slander, including strike threats and other blackmail attempts, to try to rescue their factional positions within the party. This factionalising had long been on the skids anyway inside the SLP because of its disruptiveness and its hopelessly wrong politics (see main article), — but it decided to lash out with this farcical witchhunt hysteria after losing out at the November Congress elections.

Their real hatred is the EPSR's uncompromising fight for full-blooded Marxist-Leninist communist philosophy for the past 20 years which has completely trounced Revisionist and Trotskyite nonsense on every major issue in the world (see main article and previous 978 issues).

At their London SLP Region strike meeting, Heron blurted it all out, going incandescent about 'cranky Marxism' and adding "this trend was swept away by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and all those countries" in the most vicious McCarthyite manner, wanting the same thing to happen to the EPS Review.

The Trots hate the EPSR's crisis analysis (denounced by Heron as 'cranky Marxism', and 'pointlessly wanting to recreate a super-Bolshevik party' — last week's EPSR) because it has been relentlessly stalking their anti-communist and anti-workers-state treachery.

But far from weakening the EPSR, this hysterical campaign of personal vilification and attempted censorship (trying to get the EPSR closed down is closer to fascist bookburning than to the Marxist tradition of written polemics against philosophical positions thought to be incorrect or disagreeable) will quickly discover that the Review's 20-year fight for Marxist-Leninist science has produced a theoretically-competent communist cadre-strength which will continue to slaughter Trotskyite nonsense both inside and outside the SLP.

They tried physical violence outside the Manchester Congress hall, and aggressive threats at the London Region meeting, and now they have had a shameful mini-success in joining the SLP's name to anti-Marxist censorship temporarily.

But as this Review issue explains, the attempt to stop discussion of every aspect of capitalist society and bourgeois ideology facing the working class is both sterile and futile,

The galloping fascist hysteria which now feels free to express political pique at losing office by hurling slanderous vilification at opponents — (anti-Semite; gas-chamber-Nazi; gaybasher; misogynist; racist; and even paedophile, has been just the milder abuse from Heron supporters) may have been got away with temporarily, in the ideological confusion not yet clarified by stronger and more widespread Marxist-Leninist revolutionary understanding. 

But the new spirit of communism within the working class will eventually know how to deal with this crap and it will not be by swallowing it."

Lalkar at last standing up for at least some of the truth might be construed as partly reflecting that process. 

But while finally risking this small defiance of Scargill in order to admit some of the truth about the GFA and Sinn Féin, these Lalkarites go on to wallow in some of the most spectacular opportunist hypocrisy one could ever imagine.

Bristling with self-righteous posturing, Lalkar interestingly launches a huge broadside against fake-'lefts' (who helped British imperialist reaction by writing off the GFA as a "sell-out"), saying:

'Far from being a spent-force failure, Sinn Féin's 2003 Assembly Election triumph had frightened the life out of the unionist and British establishments alike, for in spite of the relentless propaganda against it, the party has continued to grow as an electoral force. 

This is a real achievement when one considers the refusal of the British government to implement any of the reforms promised under the GFA; reforms that were the basis of republican support for the Agreement and whose lack of delivery is adding fuel to the fire of anti-Agreement forces who always held that Good Friday sold out the interests of the Irish people in return for the proverbial mess of pottage.

The social-chauvinists of the SWP meanwhile, although they talk a great deal about the need for Ireland to be free in theory, never cease to denounce the real leadership of the real Irish struggle for their lack of socialist credentials. 

Any student of Lenin will tell you, however, that in the era of imperialism it is our bounden duty to give support to any and every movement that objectively fights against imperialism, whether the fighters themselves be guided by socialist, bourgeois or even feudal ideology. 

The main contradiction in the world today is that between the oppressor and the oppressed nations, between imperialism and those it plunders, and every struggle must be evaluated in this context, i.e. whether it tends to strengthen or weaken imperialism. 

Only such inveterate idiots and counter-revolutionaries as the Trotskyists could support the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet bloc countries in the name of socialism, whilst denouncing every anti-imperialist leadership from the DPRK, Nepal and Colombia to Palestine, Iraq and Ireland for being the wrong kind of socialist or not socialist at all."

But it is precisely the blustering anti-theory philistine Scargill who just loved to smirk privately that he "would never have signed the Good Friday Agreement" and that he "would have settled for nothing less than complete Ireland reunification there and then", etc, etc, boastfully implying what a great socialist revolutionary he was compared to everyone else, etc, etc.

As the EPSR never tires of pointing out, Sinn Féin and the IRA fought the national liberation war to a successful conclusion with never more than 1,000 active Volunteers at any one time, backed by maybe half the Irish working class in the north (the SDLP capitulators controlling the other half).

But the NUM at one time backed Scargill's leadership with a hugely organised and disciplined frontline force of nearly 200,000 miners, and backed by virtually the ENTIRE working class of Britain, not just one half of one half of it in one tiny part of partitioned Ulster.

With these tiny forces Sinn Féin built an astonishing, triumphant anti-imperialist REVOLUTION.

But Scargill's struggle against domestic British imperialist reaction has produced what, ultimately???

As the EPSR has always explained, the fake-'left' in Britain sneers dismissively at Sinn Féin's achievements out of envy because of being too stupid or too backward or too lacking in any true anti-imperialist REVOLUTIONARY spirit to achieve anything like as much themselves.

But where is Lalkar's mention of past SLP "counter-revolutionary idiocy" for jeering the GFA as "not being socialist enough"????

Build Leninism. Ditch museum-Stalinist nonsense once and for all. EPSR

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

DUP has never looked more exposed and frail

Last month, the DUP became the largest unionist party in the north, returning 30 members of the Stormont Assembly to the Ulster Unionists' 27. Ian Paisley, as the DUP leader, has the right to be First Minister. 

During the election campaign, Paisley had referred to the DUP as "MY party and anyone in MY party that talks to Sinn Féin is out of MY party," he stormed. (The emphasis on "MY" being Paisley's own).

"Like the Free Presbyterian church, the DUP is a Paisley monolith and as such it shares with his church one major irony," wrote Moloney and Pollak.

"Paisley offered the DUP to loyalists as an ostensibly 'democratic' alternative to the Official Unionist Party in the same way as his church offered Protestants a 'democratic' alternative to Presbyterianism. In practice, though, both the Free Presbyterian Church and the DUP have turned out to be the antitheses of democracy institutions whose common characteristic is worship of and obedience to one man."

And that man, like his party, presents a heady mixture of reactionary politics, religious intolerance and racist attitudes.

Paisley's news-sheet, the Protestant Telegraph, routinely compared Ulster to former Rhodesia, both having problems with "primitive natives".

During a Stormont debate in 1966, Terence O'Neill, whose modest reformist polices had provoked Paisley's wrath and the wrath of the mob, compared Paisleyism to fascism:

"To those of us who remember the Thirties, the pattern is horribly familiar. The contempt for the established authority, the crude and unthinking intolerance, the emphasis upon monster processions and rallies, the appeal to a perverted form of patriotism: each and every one of these things has its parallel in the rise of the Nazis to power."

O'Neill has not been the only unionist to label Paisley a fascist. More recently, Robert McCartney accused the DUP leader of being a fascist whose "outrageous conduct and irresponsible language" had divided unionism. Paisley was "more interested in an independent Ulster than in the union with Britain", McCartney had said.

There is no doubt that the DUP and its leadership share many parallels with the fascism of 1930s' Europe and the intolerant religious fundamentalism of more recent years. But how much more of a threat to the Good Friday Agreement and the current peace process does the DUP really pose?

The image of David Trimble hand in hand with Ian Paisley prancing in Portadown after the Orange Order forced a march down the Garvaghy Road remains a permanent reminder that unionism in whatever form has played a retrogressive role in Irish politics. Trimble, like Paisley, has in the past also courted unionist paramilitarism and a short time ago the UUP, like the DUP, was also refusing to talk directly to Sinn Féin.

The DUP may have snatched the mantle of office from unionism's traditional power brokers but as Trimble has already pointed out, faced with the same choices, the DUP will either make the same decisions or refuse to make any decisions at all. Unfortunately for the DUP, "never, never, never" is no longer a sustainable position. At the apex of its political power, the DUP, like its leader, has never looked more exposed and frail.

In the late 1950s Paisley, leading a rally of unionist supporters on the Shankill Road, gave out the names and addresses of Catholics living in the area. Addressing the "people of the Shankill", Paisley had demanded, "what's wrong with you?

"Number 425 Shankill Road. Do you know who lives there? Pope's men, that's who! Forte's ice cream shop. Who lives there? Italian Papists on the Shankill Road! How about 56 Aden Street? For 97 years a Protestant lived in that house and now there's a Papist in it. Crimea Street, number 38! Twenty-five years that house has been up. Twenty-four years a Protestant lived there but there's a Papist there now."

Having whipped up sufficient sectarian and race hatred to ensure the rally concluded by attacking the homes and businesses of the Catholics he had targeted, Paisley left the mob to do its work alone. "Did you read the paper this morning?" a triumphant-Paisley had asked a unionist colleague the following day. The colleague asked if Paisley had been responsible for the attacks. "Not me," came the reply. "I was in the car on the way home."

Paisley incites the mob but never stays long enough to witness the lynching. On 10 July 1995 Paisley was still employing the same tactic at Drumcree. Addressing an Orange mob gathered at the hill on the outskirts of the Catholic Garvaghy Road, Paisley declared that the future of Ulster might be decided that night.

Within hours of Paisley's departure, a running battle had developed across the fields as Orangemen and their supporters attempted to breach the cordon and reach the Garvaghy Road. A Catholic school and houses on the edge of the Garvaghy estate were attacked. In the four days of violence that ensued there were over a hundred reported incidents of sectarian intimidation and around 140 people injured.

But if mob violence has been the hallmark of Paisley's political rhetoric, unionist paramilitary violence has also been its bedrock. An astute politician, there have been few times when Paisley has been prepared to publicly endorse unionist paramilitary violence but scratch the surface of the DUP and it's never far beneath.

In 1974, Paisley was pictured marching with masked unionist paramilitaries during the Ulster Workers Council Strike. In 1975, William McCrea officiated at the funeral of a UVF member involved in the Miami Showband murders. During the 1978 election. Peter Robinson relied upon unionist paramilitaries in the UDA to run his campaign.

In February 1981, a crowd of 500 masked unionists led by Paisley paraded on an Antrim hillside waving firearm certificates. "This is a token of the many thousands who are at the ready to defend our heritage," Paisley told the media invited to cover the event.

Later that same year, Paisley announced the formation of a paramilitary "Third Force" and staged a number of rallies across the north, complete with masked and armed paramilitaries.

In 1986, Peter Robinson and a loyalist gang invaded the border village of Clontibret and attacked the Garda station. Robinson was arrested and charged but released after he agreed to pay a fine rather than stay in jail earning the loyalist jibe of "Peter the Punt". The night after his release, Robinson appeared on a platform flanked by masked and uniformed unionist paramilitaries.

In 1986, Paisley, Robinson and Wilson were at the centre of the formation of the paramilitary Ulster Resistance. At a rally, Paisley and Robinson were photographed sporting the maroon berets of Resistance. At an Ulster Resistance rally in Portadown, Robinson and Paisley were photographed with Alan Wright and Noel Lyttle.

A short time later, Wright and Lyttle were arrested in Paris after they attempted to sell missile parts to the Apartheid regime in South Africa in return for an illegal shipment of weaponry.

At a Resistance rally in Bangor Paisley said: "There maybe many like myself who would like to see the (Anglo Irish) agreement brought down by democratic means but wouldn't we be fools if we weren't prepared." A few months later, Ulster Resistance imported a huge shipment of illegal arms into the north.

In 1991, Sammy Wilson, speaking at a meeting of Belfast City council, gloated over the unionist paramilitary murder of two Sinn Féin councillors, Bernard 0'Hagan and Eddie Fullerton.

"Would this council be prepared to congratulate all those who have done a good job on two sides of this border?" said the DUP councillor. A month later, Paisley's daughter Rhonda, a DUP Belfast city councillor at the time, described unionist paramilitary attacks in the 26 Counties as "perfectly understandable". By the end of 1991, Wilson was calling for "a policy of extermination" against republicans and referring to Sinn Féin's electorate as "sub-human animals".