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
No
1118 Jan 8 2002
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www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk
PERSPECTIVES
2002.(Draft)
Driven
by insoluble 'over-production' crisis, the monopoly-imperialist system is
gearing up for perpetual inter-imperialist war. Only the relentless destruction
of 'surplus' capital is seen as avoiding Japan's fate (of 10 years economic
paralysis) afflicting the West. At the same time, all potential
anti-imperialist revolt in the Third World can be destroyed. To stifle revolt
at home, racial divisions will be continuously provoked. By being brainwashed
into 'condemning' the anarcho-terror attempts to fight back against western
domination, the entire fake 'left' has repeated the Second International's 1914
disaster of voting for war credits. US imperialist tyranny is as 'fascist' as
anything seen when German and Japanese imperialism were setting the pace for
warmongering to end capitalism's last world slump. The grotesque theoretical
mistakes by Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Revisionism in the 30s, 40s, and 50s,
continue to cripple the revival of serious anti-imperialist struggle.
More clearly than
ever, the long post-1945 imperialist boom (which saw off Revisionist-Stalinist
muddle-headedness and Trotskyite 'left' opportunism equally effectively) is now
heading unstoppably towards international slump and inter-imperialist world
war, as Marxist-Leninist science has always made obvious must happen.
As economic and
political domination by multi-national monopoly finance capital, and its NATO
armies, runs into ever-greater
contradictions of all kinds, so will explosive anti-imperialist phenomena of various
qualities proliferate, such as the international anarchist street protests
against globalisation, the al-Quaeda terrorism, the Palestinian suicide bomber
Intifada, the FARC and Nepalese guerrilla war movements, the Argentine mass
political revolt, the race-riots in north of England towns, etc, etc, etc.
And even before any
world-crisis effects have started having a major impact on any of the big
metropolitan imperialist powers (Japan excepted), the traditional anti-slump
diversion of warmongering chauvinist aggression has already become the
necessary tone for holding office in the main Western powers.
A quite spectacular
note of cold-blooded colonial-fascist domineering has been struck to justify
the brutal blitzkrieg on Afghanistan which has casually wiped out thousands of
innocent villagers, etc, under the demented high-altitude bombing of targets
"where we had good reason to think al-Quaeda or Taleban leaders might
be" in the words of the Pentagon and NATO war-criminals.
The same murderous
ruthlessness has arrogantly accompanied the total slaughter of hundreds of
prisoners-of-war at Mazar-i-Sharif and elsewhere, the bodies photographed with
their hands still tied behind their backs.
Only the destruction
from major inter-imperialist war can 'cure' the international economic
paralysis (slump) caused by the unavoidable 'surplus' of monopoly capital and
its 'over-production' crisis. In their 'condemnation' of anarcho-terror
spontaneous responses to imperialism's stifling world domination, the fake-'lefts'
repeat the social-chauvinist treacherousness of Second International leaders
voting for war credits in 1914.
Simultaneously with
this xenophobic contempt for cheap Third World life, the Western powers are
also all preparing to play the racist card at home.
The 'asylum-seeker'
mixture of human despair, economic opportunism, and capitalist racketeering,
plus the inevitable ghettoisation of all imperialism's former 'immigration'
stunts (to defuse revolutionary crises abroad or to import cheap labour), makes
playing upon racial consciousness (as yet unavoidable given some extremely low
educational and cultural levels prevailing under capitalism) a simple task for
a frightened bourgeois world.
FAKE
'LEFT' HELPS PRESS 'ANTI-RACIST' STUNT CONCEAL CAPITALISM'S
RESPONSIBILITY. NEED FOR SOCIALIST
REVOLUTION.
To keep the working
class divided so that it does not get together to raise a revolt against the
degeneracy of the capitalist free-market system, it is the capitalist press,
television and radio which will have the crucial role in initially playing on
peoples existing prejudices.
The riots have
already kicked off in 2001 because of the worsening economic perspectives and
feelings of frustration and insecurity which the slump damage so far has caused
or threatened.
With ethnically
segregated residential areas already (due to the persistent cultural
shallowness of the capitalist system and its encouragement of clannishness for
reasons of social and economic survival or getting-by), ‑
it is inevitable that worsening conditions for jobs, housing, schooling,
health service, etc, etc, will spread capitalism's rotten basic rivalry in all
things (jobs, housing, well-being, living standards, education, etc) into blame
and envy, about the slump too.
As with scarce
council resources already,- with
endless complaints that services for one community are better than for another
or are being improved at the expense of another, ‑ ‑ so will
resentment escalate astronomically when jobs have to be lost, or closures made,
and different ethnic groups all think that they are getting the unfair
treatment.
Once living
standards start falling, and people can no longer provide for their families as
they used to be able to, then the latent prejudices which saw riots around the North
in 2001 will begin to be whipped up into hardline fascist politics.
It is capitalist
society AS A WHOLE which will be leading the way, no one part of it.
It is pointless just
blaming the fascist parties, for example. They are the SYMPTOMS of growing
divisions and conflicts in society, not the cause.
It is pointless
blaming the capitalist media as such: They don't run capitalism. But the media, of course, keep everyone
brainwashed so that the capitalist system remains protected.
And that is just what
the press are doing now, pretending that they could never be seen as a key part
of the causes of racism by putting on this huge show of vilifying Bowyer and
Woodgate, thereby also conveniently adding simultaneously to the general
brainwashed confusion about where race-riots come from by implying that
overpaid thoughtless thugs are the cause, and that giving Bowyer and Woodgate a
good public kicking will help wipe out the phenomenon.
A thousand punch-ups
outside pubs and clubs every week all round Britain. Hundreds get injured,
dozens get killed. But the fracas that gets people agitated is the one
involving the 'celebrities', ‑ as created and defined by the capitalist
press.
And what about the
thousands of other young men involved
each week in the wretchedness of street fights and injuries??
They are not 'news'
so the reasons for their negative behaviour seldom get investigated. The
pressure that should be put on capitalist society as a whole to answer up for
the paltry perspectives and ambitions it gives to most working-class youth, for
example, gets frittered away by the fake-'left' getting pathetic self-righteous
kicks out of fulminating against a couple of equally pathetic hooligan Aunt
Sallies, pointlessly put in the stocks
by the same capitalist system which gave them shallow and bogus 'notoriety' in
the first place.
Beyond the trivia of
the sick hoax witchhunt against Bowyer and Woodgate which licensed an avalanche
of confusion and sad behaviour in all directions, ‑ capitalist press, judiciary, Leeds FC, whipped-up
hysteria, and black nationalist response, ‑ really serious political issues about imperialist crisis go on
piling up for resolution.
Racist-fascist
diversions will continue to grow inexorably, increasingly clouding the
perspective for the one burning question which so far just isn't being
addressed at all, ‑ how much reaction, death, and destruction is
capitalist crisis going to be allowed to inflict before the immediate practical
need for world socialist revolution starts being seriously discussed.
UNDER CAPITALISM, ALL 'REFORM' DEMANDS ('LEFT' OR
BLACK NATIONALIST) ONLY ADD TO CYNICISM AND HYPOCRISY.
The conflicting and
unresolvable arguments about how to improve race relations in Britain are
themselves exactly a reflection of what caused the flight into ghettoisation,
separate-faith schools isolation, and northern city riots in the first place.
The 'problems' about
which no one can find a cure or agree, lie in the dissatisfaction with life
itself under the inevitable class-hierarchy tensions of the winners v losers
capitalist system.
On top of the
jeering resentment of the very rich by the relatively poor majority because of
the injustice, unfairness, and exploitation by which the extremes of wealth are
accumulated and then preserved, there must be added the unavoidable sense in
the non-white population that a lot of their difficulties some from
discrimination.
And the racial
prejudice is very real, too, and colossally hurtful, ‑ clearly the
overwhelmingly dominant issue as far as most non-whites are concerned.
But the black
nationalist response to the outrage of race-discrimination, ‑ trying to
fight it as a single issue with a 'reform' solution based on putting 'moral'
pressure on racists to get them to behave differently, or legal curbs to stop
them acting prejudiced, is not only doomed to frustration for as long as
capitalism lasts(which automatically endlessly breeds bitterness, envy, and
tribalism in all races), but will be used by racists to further justify their
resentment of 'difference'.
All 'reformist'
'solutions' to ALL Britain's social (and 'racial') problems will only have this
aggravating effect in the end precisely because there can be NO 'solutions'
under capitalism, the preservation of which is the sole real purpose for the
very existence of 'reformism' in the first place, ‑ the never-ending
pretence that the unstoppable monopoly-imperialist accumulation pattern of the
'free markets can be legislated towards ever-increasing 'fairness' and
'justice' via 'democratic government'.
The silliest
deception of all rests in the universal make-believe that the plain sad reality
that capitalist society has presented the world with in 2001, ‑
race-riots in cities, ghetto-isolation of ethnic minorities, withdrawal into single-faith
schools in despair of social justice any other way, retreat into
black-nationalist cultural postures out of self-protection instincts, etc, etc,
are all the result of 'mistakes in policy which can now be put right by
'capitalist democracy'.
But quite obviously,
envy, prejudice and fear, plus serious communal conflicts when things go
seriously wrong in the economy, are exactly what capitalist society is capable
of, and all that capitalism is capable of.
An even bleaker
picture is presented by the historical record of 'capitalist democracy', and by
its current 'world leadership' preoccupations.
The Western-backed
genocide of the Palestinian nation in order to complete the handing over of the
Palestinian homeland to the Western Zionist-imperialist leadership of world
Jewry to build a 'national home' for the faith-linked freemasonry of some of
the Western world's most powerful monopoly-capitalist banking and commercial
dynasties is one of the most monstrous, sustained acts of official racism in all
world history.
The West's
'liberals', 'democrats', and 'reformists' can swear hostility to 'racism' in
society for all they are worth, but the very existence of the Western way of
life is based on its world economic domination, which in turn is totally dependent
on the USA's international military-control system for propping up armed
stooges like the Zionists, and putting down any local Third World regimes which
might challenge the Washington 'New World Order'.
This planet-wide
network of ruthless blitzkrieg repression is unashamedly 100% racist, by the
very definitions of the First World dominating the Third World, and by the
utterly merciless brutality with which the master-races put down the Earth’s
unter-mensch.
Growing up for 7
generations or more with such a regular routine
race-superiority/race-inferiority background to all history, how can the people
of the Western imperialist countries not be steeped in prejudices, and
assumptions, and hypocrisy of all kinds, concerning what real 'justice' there is
on earth for the overwhelming majority (non-white) of mankind????
These fascist
tyrannies against the Palestinian and Iraqi nations are happening in the West's
name right now, as criminally murderous as any racist-atrocity injustices in
all history.
How can there be
anything other than complete disbelief, suspicion, and mistrust in all dealings
between the majority ethnic populations of the world and the minority White
master-race?????
But just as bad as
the petty-bourgeois white 'reformist' delusions that the capitalist world can
be changed to one which has perfect equality and justice, are the 'reformist'
delusions of the black-nationalist middle-class who basically just want to
climb on the bandwagon of Labour or other 'parliamentary' opportunism, and ape
their 'party democracy' careerist colleagues in pretending that just one more
inquiry, or just one more complete new legislative changer, etc, etc, will
"transform race‑relations in Britain", etc.
Under capitalism,
and especially facing a long period of deepening world economic crisis which
will see xenophobic warmongering-chauvinism become the main policy platform for
every Western power to divert the unemployed masses at home from revolution
(blaming 'abroad' for the slump economic difficulties and trade-war disasters),
the lives of most of the population will never be far from turmoil, dire
insecurity, or real suffering and a vengeful sense of grievance of one kind or
another.
Brought up and
educated in total brainwashed political and historical ignorance, how can all
Western populations possibly avoid being whipped up by racist diversions thrown
into the domestic bargain.???
The whole
'immigration' racket is a capitalist exploitation fraud to start with, and has
been for hundreds of years, shipping vast numbers of people back and forth
around the globe all for the sake of economic domination and exploitation.
Slave trade & anti-Third World genocide (America, Australia, etc) were the
tragic human suffering at the start of this bourgeois-imperialist racket;
race-riots in slump-terrified Western lands will mark its conclusion
The USA points the
way. It has experienced more dramatic 'civil-rights' and anti-slavery struggles
and victories, and has had more outstanding integration triumphs at the top of
public life, backed by as much 'political correctness' as can be imagined, as
any country on earth. But the racial tensions in parts of America, and the
expectations of future racial strife, are more violent and bleak than at any
time in US history, ‑ driven into
that volatile condition by the insanely unrealistic propaganda for the American
capitalist way of life which pretends that a fabulous life for all US citizens
is guaranteed now for all time by the American 'New World Order'.
That lying hypocritical
dream will not fall apart in the most appalling civil-war bloodshed (at some
time in the future) just because US global domination is based on
racist-fascist tyranny, as seen above, but much more because in the
international economic collapse, the imperialist bourgeoisie can only try to
pass off the burdens of slump and collapse onto the working class everywhere.
Tragically, class
prejudices are likely to be indistinguishable from racist prejudices for a
while for many of the victims of the world slump, and it will require a massive
rebuilding of an international Marxist-communist revolutionary movement to
rally all spontaneous outbursts and struggles into a class war to take power to
build a workers state, universally.
'Reformists' of all
kinds, ‑ New Labour, Black Nationalist, Lib/dems, BNP, and dozens more to
come, ‑ will be the main obstacle, ‑ still all trying to sell to
the working class the idiotic dream that the totally unstable, divisive,
unfair, and unjust capitalist exploitation system can somehow be 'reformed'
into a much happier society by this or that series of changes, major or minor.
It is garbage. If a
capitalist country's entire population was totally cloned like peas in a pod,
they would still be bamboozled into taking it out on each other when things
went wrong if they had been brought up in the brainwashed ignorance such as
rules Western 'democracy' today, living a totally false economic existence
based on worldwide racist exploitation and tyranny.
All American and
other Western history once again proves it. Since the 19th century, every new
wave of exploited immigrant labour has been systematically vilified with
officially condoned racism, always ready to divide and rule the working class
in case of slump and revolutionary necessity, ‑ anti-Irish, anti-Jewish, anti-Polak, anti-Spic, anti-Spade,
anti-Paki, anti-anything-that-goes.
Get rid of
capitalism, and all need for such backward, lunatic, racist filth disappear.
The 'race-reform'
lobby is not especially bad or stupid, but it is as misleading a fraud and
diversion to the working class as any other reformist delusions. It disarms the
working class from the crucial understanding that its historical destiny is to
make the greatest revolutionary advance in the entire record of civilisation,
to rid the world of class domination, by building the true democracy of workers
states under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
TO HALT 'FASCISM' AS SUCH IS A DIVERSION. ALL
WARMONGERING REPRESSIVE IMPERIALISM IN CRISIS IS 'FASCISM'. THE BOOT OF
REACTION GOES IN WITH OR WITHOUT SWASTIKA ARMBANDS. REVOLUTION IS THE ONLY
PROGRESS, NOT ANTI-FASCISM. GERMANY & SPAIN WERE STALINIST DISASTERS EN
ROUTE TO THE 'PEACEFUL PARLIAMENTARY ROAD' TO OBLIVION.
A looming
blind-alley disaster for the working class will be the political extension of
the misdirected posturing against thug celebrities which will try to make
"stopping the fascists" the main strategy for the socialist movement.
Every catastrophic
historical mistake that Revisionism and Trotskyism made between them will be
reimposed by such fatal shallowness.
Never in history has
the problem been fascism as such, and neither is it now,
The problem is
always the social and economic conditions of crisis being sown by the
capitalist system as a whole which the fascists take political advantage of,
just one of a variety of negative political and social symptoms which the
crisis creates.
Just
"stopping" one symptom by "halting fascism's march" is a)
utterly pointless; and b) almost
certainly futile anyway.
The essence of all
'fascist' repressive reaction in a crisis is to cow the working class to make
it bear (in unemployment and poverty, etc) the burdens of the economic crisis;
to divide the working class tribally to make them more easily pacified and less
capable of organising. a revolution; and to divert the working class and petty
bourgeoisie into 'patriotic' war-chauvinist channels by playing on the
'national interest' in xenophobic conflict with 'foreign' enemies of one kind
or another. In every international economic crisis in history, every single
capitalist state has always gone down this repressive reactionary route.
Only in very rare
special circumstances has a named specific fascist party had to be put into
office in order to achieve the basic task in every crisis-situation, namely,
the survival of the capitalist-bourgeois system despite the cataclysmic horrors
of slump, reaction, war, and destruction it has led a country into.
In other words,
'fascist' parties as such are a purely incidental phenomenon of capitalist
warmongering crisis, ‑ a symptom, not the cause.
For a workers
movement ever to declare "Halt the
slide into fascist reaction" to be either a sensible or an achievable aim
is to make a declaration of total reformist confusion, bankruptcy, and
futility.
Currently, this
anti-revolutionary anti-Marxist muddle-headedness finds its spontaneous
expressions in "Stop the BNP" and "Punish Bowyer and
Woodgate", etc, etc .
It is the wrong
political education for the working class entirely, hopelessly misleading it
that all that is going wrong with capitalism is ‘a temporary reactionary hiccup
which can quickly be sorted out with some energetic anti-fascist protest
marches and some stiffer punishments all round for racist hooliganism. Not so.
The international
imperialist-system crisis the world is approaching is total and deadly.
The quality,
cynicism and injustice of the almost casual fascist blitzkrieg death and
destruction US imperialism is currently inflicting on Afghanistan, for example,
is already in an infinitely more cold-blooded, vicious, and alarming league
than anything that German or Japanese imperialism hoped to get away with when
deliberately stirring up a warmongering atmosphere during the 1930s crisis. And
the scale and suddenness of economic breakdown already utterly dwarfs the sort
of dislocation experienced during the Great Depression; and the crisis has
hardly started yet. Argentina’s current civil-war uproar results from just a
tiny proportion of the potential devastation. Argentina gives a flavour of HOW
the turmoil will evolve.
Japan is still the
much more revealing guide to the terrifying dimensions of the mayhem to come.
The world's second-most-powerful-economy ever developed is comparable in
efficiency, output, inventiveness and productivity to the whole world economy
of the 1930s; and its floundering like a gigantic beached whale over the last
11 years, constantly threatening total bankruptcy and ruin in all directions,
is symbolic of the paralysed disaster menacing the whole world economy.
Unemployment,
poverty, and despair on an unimaginable scale awaits the whole planet, a simple
application of Marx's law on monopoly-accumulated unviable capital 'surpluses'
makes clear (the 'overproduction crisis'), of which the rioting in Argentina is
just a tiny foretaste.
World revolutionary
socialist understanding will shortly stage a rapid revival; but failed and
incurable Revisionist and Trotskyist muddle-headednes still stands in the way,
and fascist diversions will also make their move, all exploiting the same arena
of 'left"-reformist anti-revolutionary confusion.
The working class
must be warned not to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s.
"Stopping the
BNP" will be the WRONG issue, ‑ reformist nonsense. Crisis is driving the
whole of capitalism towards reactionary repression and war. It will get there
with or without the help of a 'viable' fascist party. Thus, if the BNP were
"stopped", the capitalist; state would simply find some other way or
some other fascist party to get the job done.
There is one issue
only from now on: The revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system as soon
as possible.
The monstrous
mistake of Revisionism in the 1930s was the inability or unwillingness to make
it clear (through all the complicated nuances of tactics and strategy) that
only the socialist revolution could possibly save the world from. warmongering
imperialist catastrophe as the climax to the insoluble economic crisis.
Strategic confusion
of left opportunism or right opportunism dominated Moscow's leadership of the
Third International.
Because of the lack
of clarity over the inescapable revolutionary perspective which alone was
facing the world, in Germany the mightiest communist party outside of the
Soviet Union was virtually wiped out without trace and without a fight in a
matter of weeks in a period of domestic and international capitalist debacle
where a serious revolutionary attempt, entirely creditable and entirely
worthwhile, could have been launched but for the universal theoretical
cowardice and feebleness which bogged the communist movement. down in
opportunist tactical and strategic rigmaroles.
And the wrong
criticism is still being made which pillories the "after Hitler our
turn" nonsense.
The crucial failure
lay not in mistimed tactical manoeuvres around Nazi Party activities, but in
making ludicrous assumptions about the 'worth' and 'stability' of parliamentary
'democracy', & not calling .for
revolt.
A similar
catastrophe was inflicted in Spain three years later where the same delusions
insisted that the same worthless 'parliamentary democracy' was what was worth
fighting for against the fascist rebellion.
It was nonsense.
Capitalist crisis was bent on a course of repressive reaction come what may,
either through 'parliamentary democracy' as in Germany (where Hitler was
legally voted into taking over governmental power by the MPs), or around the
parliament as in Spain.
Either way, the only
issue facing the working class was to overthrow the capitalist state. It was
the only way to stop the course to repressive reaction. It would have been the
only way to raise a sufficiently determined, clear-headed, and far-sighted
proletarian movement that might actually have stopped Franco.
Let the Republican
Government by all means fight Franco as well.
But as with the
Bolsheviks against the Kornilov rebellion in August 1917, let the insistence on
proletarian revolution remain in force, whether the weak existing government
managed enough of a fight to survive the fascist coup or not.
As with all such
potential 'parliamentary' allies against fascism; strike together against the
plotters, but march separately, insisting that only socialist revolution can
really put a stop to the capitalist course towards repressive reaction.
Even an
almost-certainly-doomed bid for power would clearly have been preferable in
Germany in the early 1930s. It would have further clarified the reactionariness
of the existing 'parliamentary democracy' system, as did the July Days doomed
demonstration in Russia , in 1917. And it might also have forced the Nazi Party
to reveal its pro-capitalist essence more, in solidarising with the capitalist
state, ‑ thus shedding more of its own bogus 'revolutionary' posturing
which was still beguiling some sections of backward workers.
But learning no
lessons, Revisionism's anti-revolutionary anti-Marxist degeneration
subsequently dragged the whole world communist movement towards the 'peaceful
road to socialism' delusion and towards ultimate oblivion in the post World War
II period.
Even more
shamefully, delusions in the stability of 'parliamentary (i.e. bourgeois)
democracy' in Indonesia in 1965 saw the worlds mightiest communist party
outside of the workers states virtually annihilated without a fight and without
trace once again, as in Germany in 1933, ‑ to the background by now of not just Moscow Revisionism's idiotic
belief in fairy stories about 'good' imperialism versus 'bad' (i.e. 'fascist'
imperialism) but the insanity of permanent 'peaceful coexistence' as well,
making anti-revolutionism almost obligatory.
To this day, the
entire fake 'left' in Britain, Trot and Revisionist alike, has not really moved
on from that shameful Communist Party position of just being useless 'left' reformist adherents to the utterly
reactionary Labour Party, the architects of the Cold War nuclear encirclement
of the workers states, and the chief stooge still of US imperialism's fascist
aggression masterplan to some day rid the world totally of any socialist or
anti-imperialist revolt at all, via total repressive reaction.
Tragically, the
opposition to Stalinism's Revisionist weakness was dominated from early on by
the even worse opportunist theoretical nonsense of the Trotskyites, which
rapidly degenerated everywhere into Labour-entryist anti-communism which found
its classic Cold War expression supporting the Solidarnosc fake-'left' stunt, financed and masterminded by the
CIA and the Vatican which put the neo-fascist nationalist Walesa on the map,
eventually guaranteeing capitalist restoration in Poland and undermining all of
the workers states in the process.
The only way that
total catastrophe for the world from warmongering crisis can now be avoided,
and rational progress for civilisation resumed, is by going back to the
dictatorship of the proletariat, and working within .the workers states for
steady improvement. The pro-Soviet world anti-imperialist movement offered the
only serious alternative there has ever been to international domination by
regularly recurring crises of warmongering monopoly-imperialist aggression.
Only a new wave of
Bolshevik Revolutions and powerful workers states, organised on anti-capitalist
consciousness as before, will halt this new era of out-of-control warmongering
fascist aggression by the monopoly-imperialist system in crisis.
SUCH IS THE 'LEFT' RETREAT FROM LENINIST
REVOLUTIONARY ANTI-IMPERIALIST SCIENCE THAT GENUINE RESISTANCE TO WESTERN
DOMINATION IS BEING SLANDERED AS 'FASCISM', A HISTORIC TERM ONLY DESCRIBING
IMPERIALISM ITSELF. TOO MUCH IS MADE OF THE 'DIFFERENCE' BETWEEN BOURGEOIS
DICTATORSHIP BY 'DEMOCRACY' TRICKS OR BY POLICESTATE TRICKS.
The complexities in the historical journey of
class war and revolutionary nationalism towards the overthrow of the
imperialist system, since the Revisionist self-destruction of the Soviet
workers state and the Socialist Camp, have plunged fake 'lefts' into
theoretical chaos.
Sept 11, Palestinian suicide-bombers, or
anarchist street fighting in Genoa have all been declared "the wrong
struggle" variously by every Trot and Stalinist sectarianism from the
Socialist Alliance to the SLP, Lalkar, and beyond, ‑ the
'swamp'.
But they are what is happening, ‑
caused by imperialist world repression and its insoluble 'surplus capital'
economic crisis which is increasingly pushing monopoly-bourgeois ideology
towards big-power warmongering fascist aggression against any resistance to
western (i.e. American) domination.
The fake 'lefts' in Britain who universally
condemned the Sept 11 attempt by the imperialist-dominated middle East to fight
back against the region's endless humiliation and persecution as a result of
Western world-rule, have increasingly more to answer for as the fascist
slaughter, which US imperialism has unleashed on the strength of gaining world
opinion's approval that "something must be done gathers pace.
Universal warmongering barbarism is the
imperialist system's long-term intention if the deepening economic crisis
threatens, the West's international domination.
Support for Islamic voodoo is out of the
question, but to condemn Sept 11 means, willy-nilly, to side with US
blitzkrieg.
As Lenin explained in "Guerrilla
War" (1906), it is ludicrous for the socialist revolution to
"condemn" episodic terrorist turmoil. Instead, it needs to spread its
own influence so as to give a believable direction and leadership to
anti-Ruling-Class hatred:
In their futility and frustration, confusion
and self-conceit has dragged 'left' sects beyond the disgraceful attempt to set
up Black Bloc anarchists for a beating as 'police provocateurs' to even nastier
bourgeois class-collaboration, cheering on the slaughter of al-Quaeda as
"no great loss", and even fingering Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorism
for "condemnation" too, effectively providing a 'left' cover for
further imperialist blitzkrieg massacres.
This theoretical chaos needs to read Lenin,
study history, and look objectively at exactly what is happening in the world
to produce Sept 11 after a decade of increasing imperialist
warmongering-fascist aggression.
It would be marvellous if there was a
Palestinian Viet Cong to give Marxist-Communist leadership to the struggle
against Zionist colonisation and. tyranny, but it was precisely the Revisionism
and Trotskyism which produced these armchair-revolutionary defeatists in
Britain which also buried Leninism without trace in Palestine too, ‑
'swamp'.
Hamas has a reactionary, religious ideology
and equally backward international sponsors and will undoubtedly fail to
inspire the whole Palestinian nation, Vietnam-style, to a successful
national-liberation socialist revolution.
But that the Hamas guerrilla war is leading
the fight against Zionist-imperialist tyranny is also indisputable, inspiring
the whole Intifada.
The socialist revolution needs its own independent
propaganda in Palestine and its own fighting units, but while marching
separately, they need to strike together with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah,
and anyone else willing to topple the Zionist colonisation.
Hamas suicide bombing, for all its flaws and
weaknesses both long-term and short-term from a Marxist perspective, is
nevertheless WHAT IS HAPPENING on the front line against Zionist-imperialist
tyranny. As Lenin explains, the socialist revolution is abandoning the fight
completely by simply rejecting what Hamas is doing. The only serious critique
that will deserve a hearing is one which gives alternative anti-Zionist
fighting leadership from the front. All other purely academic carping should be
treated with the contempt it deserves as little better than
pro-imperialist, class-collaborative
defeatism.
As obvious as all this is from a Leninist
point of view, unbelievably some theoretical confusion on the fake 'left' has
actually accepted the 'logic' of the generally confused and cowardly , "condemnation"
of Sept 11 and condemned Palestinian guerrilla-war terrorism as well. This
takes Revisionist degeneration into qualitatively new territory, and is already
a widely-observed anti-communist phenomenon. This is 'New World Order'
defeatism gone totally pro-imperialist. It is the historical equivalent of the
Revisionist leaders of the Second International initially voting for war
credits in their 'own' parliaments in 1914 "purely for the self-defence
purposes of our 'own' country", but rapidly being transformed into open
social chauvinists as World War I murderously and humiliatingly progressed, or
into shamefaced ones (i.e. social pacifists, idiotically bleating 'No to war'
as the Juggernauts of the imperialist economic-survival crisis clashed on).
All sorts of 'justification" is put
forward, now as then, as to why such class-collaboration is 'necessary', ‑ invariably along the racist-chauvinist lines
that the enemy fighting one's 'own' imperialist state is "even MORE
reactionary" than the home team, and so the "lesser of two
evils" has to be sided with.
Unbelievably, fake 'lefts like the CPGB and
others in the Socialist Alliance, are spouting this degenerate opportunism
right now, denouncing the pathetic Islamic naivety of such insubstantial lightweight
sects as al-Quaeda as " "dangerous reactionary anti-imperialism whose
religious feudalism would drag civilisation back historically", etc, even
as the only truly dominant, direction setting force on earth, Western
imperialism, was in the process of inflicting such atrocities as the two mass,
acres of prisoners at Mazar-i-Sherif (see EPSRs 1114 & 1115), and
continuing the merciless blitzkrieg brutality, bombing more than 3,000 innocent
civilian casualties to death so far. in Afghanistan.
It is derisible fantasy to pretend that Osama
Bin Laden, or sheikh Yassin, or even Saddam Hussein, can even remotely be
considered a "serious fascist threat to the world" as these weird
bedfellows Bush, Blair, and the CPGB like to make out.
None want to restore feudalism against
capitalist-imperialist world progress; none of them are in the slightest
position even to try.
And however 'barbaric', primitive', or
'reactionary' any of their actions or programmes can be labelled, it throws all
reading of history into impossible confusion to see any of them as the
"possible next fascist threat to civilisation".
Firstly, the description of the danger is
itself phrased hopelessly misleadingly, causing people to look for fascism in
entirely the wrong phenomena.
Secondly, even when correctly stated, there
is no way that any regime headed by Saddam, Osama, or Yassin could play the
slightest 'fascist' role in inter-imperialist warmongering, which is the arena
which alone has given 'fascism' its dramatic historical resonance.
It was a specific world-imperialist crisis
situation which created the fascist phenomenon (aggressive warmongering tyranny
fuelled by manic ideological extremism of a racist/religious/mystical flavour).
It was the crisis era which created the fascists, not the fascists who created
the crisis era.
There have been plenty of would-be lunatic
messiahs marching around the political scene for generations.
But there was only one fascist era ‑
the 1930s when difficult economic world-crisis conditions particularly
put the squeeze on some major, or would-be major, imperialist powers who felt
they were being denied the chance of colonial expansionist lifelines out of the
international slump conditions prevailing universally.
Germany, Japan, and Italy felt especially
aggrieved against the colonial-exploitation stranglehold that Britain, France,
and the USA in particular had already historically established.
Their 'fascist' ranting about a 'new world
order' to keep their own slump-threatened populations bemused by aggressive
preparations for expansionist warmongering, set the tone for a row of
smaller-power imitators, but was crucially pandered to, up to a certain extent,
by the established Big Three imperialist powers who all had a mature grasp of
warmongering chauvinism's great potential for keeping state-unity intact during
a severe economic crisis, but who also had a huge stake in trying to crease a
particular imperialist-warmongering conspiracy which might strike at the Soviet
workers state.
For a serious repeat of a 'fascist' threat as
history knew it, Saddam, Bin Laden, and Yassin would not only need to be the
partial inventions of imperialist foreign policy in the first place which then
went wrong (as they all in fact are, encouraged as foils for perceived 'greater
evils' at the time); but they would also need to be potential state-regimes
which could in time become a worldwide military threat.
For the British fake 'left' to shout 'fascist
danger' in unison with imperialism at Saddam, Bin Laden, and Yassin is a) just
lunatic fantasy; and b) class-collaborating treachery anyway because any
military defeats which ANYONE can inflict on world-dominant imperialism should
be ecstatically welcomed by all who have a serious interest in the overthrow of
the imperialist system, ‑ defeat in war being the only route well
-trodden in history so far for the revolutionary socialist overthrow of a
ruling class, (after its defeat and humiliation in a failed inter-imperialist
war).
When imperialist powers fought each other,
the science of Leninism saw only the opportunity for each working class to
topple its OWN ruling-class after defeat, setback, or humiliation. NEVER did
Leninist science see the social-chauvinist route (of regarding the domineering
warmongering aggression of the 'enemy' as "more fascist" than the
home governments destructive murderous opportunism and jingoistic
hysteria), ‑ as anything but a ludicrous mistake and a
catastrophic betrayal of the working class.
For the fake 'lefts, to abandon 100%
concentration on looking for the next imperialist defeat, setback, or
humiliation while they make utterly useless academic appraisals of how much
'fascist potential' they can see in the regimes targeted by their 'own'
imperialist governments for fascist blitzkrieg, ‑ ‑ is such
reactionary treachery to everything that serious anti-capitalism has ever been
about that all pretence to some kind of 'socialist, ideology by these sects is
destroyed completely.
Not a scrap of imperialist foreign policy has
ever been anything less than 100% 'fascist, in being willing to blitzkrieg and
repress local resistance to whatever extent necessary whenever it could be got
away with.
The colonising/domineering tyranny abroad by
imperialist powers (Britain, France, USA, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, etc, all
the same, exactly like Germany and Italy) for more than 100 years consisted of
massacres, torture, concentration camps, starvation, cultural destruction, and
total murderous genocide, etc, etc, etc, long before German imperialism gained its
international brutality notoriety in the 1930s.
And the butchering, poisoning, torturing,
defoliating slaughter in Vietnam by the USA in the 1960s took imperialist
tyranny abroad to unprecedented new depths.
The merciless savagery against innocents in Afghanistan
right now shows that nothing has changed, ever will change, or ever could
change. It is 'fascist' (for whatever use the word is).
For accuracy's sake and for strategy's sake,
a distinction only has to be drawn about the organisational nature of
imperialist domination at home.
The dictatorship of the capitalist
bourgeoisie is permanent until overthrown by socialist revolution, whether the
proletarian masses .are hoodwinked, swindled, and repressed by 'democratic
legal' means or by open dictatorship.
Anti‑imperialist tactics, ideology, and
means of struggle must adapt to whether the working class is being screwed by a
parliament, fronting a police-state; or by the police-state directly.
The great danger is in making too much of
this difference whereby the catastrophic historic phenomenon of 'reformism'
(plus the fake 'left') is able to prevail for ages, limiting the
anti-imperialist struggle effectively to just "defending this democratic
gain" or "winning that human-rights extension", etc, etc, but
all the time solely determined to limit the fight just to that single
issue.
Such delusions of "socialist
struggle" are not just utterly useless because capitalist states have for
more than a century realised that it is far better to rule the working class by
conning them with 'parliamentary democracy' than by direct police-state
methods, if economic prosperity allows such a 'democratic'
luxury.
Such delusions are also totally treacherous,
gagging and binding the working class hand and foot to be dominated by
bourgeois propaganda and 'representative' betrayals ad infinitum.
The socialist revolution never comes by such
means, nor could it ever come by such
'democracy' means.
Such understanding, however, does not rule
out the need for mass mobilisation to defend any 'democratic right' whenever
appropriate. Such struggles can educate and revolutionise wider sections of
workers and middle class who might not yet have seen through the fraud of
capitalism and its 'democracy' yet, but might learn this in some 'rights'
battle or other, (provided that the revolutionary purpose of all such
'reformist protest mobilisations has been well argued.
Proof of the pricelessness of Marxist science
over the imbecile blathering of SLP demagogy is already at hand anyway, over
Ireland. The analogy is not to imply anything positive at all about Bin
Ladenism but to show how lessons for the working class about the imperialist
world crisis must start from the conflict of class and national forces as it
unfolds in reality, and not as how it 'ought to' unfold.
Any disgrace for the Northern Ireland office
of dying British colonial-imperialism in Ireland and its police chief Flanagan
flowing from the Ombudsman 'report on the Omagh bomb fiasco, springs out of the
massive significance of the Good Friday Agreement defeat for imperialism which
the EPSR has alone ever fully explained.
This Ombudsman office has a huge budget and a
large powerful staff reflecting the dramatic historical nature of the GFA which
effectively dismantles one of the oldest, best-entrenched, most
viciously-minded, and most difficult-to-dislodge colonies of all, ‑
the 'separate state' effectively, of 'Northern Ireland'.
It was brought down by Sinn Fein and the IRA
via, eventually, the snails-pace nationalist compromise of the GFA, which
less-than-clear-cut 'socialist' victory had the likes of the SLP and Socialist
Alliance constantly sneering at the 'failed peace process' and 'Sinn Fein
capitulation to a US-imposed settlement', etc, etc.
From the start, what every variety of fake
'left' ideology misled itself with was in automatically sneering at the more
obviously backward Catholic nationalism of the Provisionals after they split
from the more apparently 'communist' Officials in the Sinn Fein/IRA movement. The
raw terror of the IRA frightened off these British labour movement
traditionalists too (all hopelessly corrupted by Trot and Revisionist
brainrot).
These opportunists who now form the 'swamp'
failed to observe the basic Marxist scientific requirement to actually look at
what is happening (see Lenin ,Guerrilla Warfare' PS).
What was clearly being built from the start
was an effective national-liberation struggle which was obviously going to LEAD
the anti-imperialist fight in circumstances where a 'pure socialist revolution'
as such (as advocated by all the conceited swamp as "the easiest way
forward" despite not only being incapable of doing the same in Britain,
but of not even daring to try), ‑ was historically. not yet on the cards for a
whole variety of obvious reasons.
More Marxist-Leninist understanding was
required to then see what a crucial anti-imperialist victory it would be to
eventually achieve the dismantling of the 'Northern Ireland' independent
statelet colony as it used to be, with its own sectarian army and police.
Not a single sect . in the 'left' ‑
swamp could even see it, ‑ let alone recognise it -- when it arrived,
deliberately concealed for additional obvious reasons within .the Good Friday
Agreement,, which the entire fake- 'left' voted "useless compromise, which
will solve nothing".
The cowardly SLP will, cautiously, continue
to opportunistically boast of its 'big party' relationship with Sinn Fein,
which, the non-Marxist Sinn Fein will naturally humour, as it does all
bourgeois-liberal British politics.
But the sick philistine hollowness at the
heart of such SLP-opportunist posturing remains doomed to contempt and hatred
from Revolutionary working-class understanding as it relentlessly grows.
AFTER
HELPING BOURGEOIS HYSTERIA SET UP THE FASCIST.BLITZKRIEG ON AFGHANISTAN, THE
FAKE 'LEFT' PLUMBS THE DEPTHS OF HYPOCRISY STUPIDITY BY THEN CHANTING 'NO TO
WAR' TO 'CONDEMN' SEPT 11 TS TO ACCEPT THE WHOLE BOURGEOIS-STATE 'MORALITY'
JOKE OF 'PUNISHMENT LAW', MAKING ANY WISH TO SEE THE WARMONGERS DEFEATED
POINTLESS. LENIN SHOWS WHY MIDDLE-EAST 'TERROR IS THE ESSENCE OF
ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE, AND ALL WHO 'CONDEMN' IT ARE PRO-IMPERIALIST
STOOGES. SHAMEFUL REVISIONIST CONTEMPT FOR PALESTINIAN DEGRADATION IT HELPED TO
CAUSE.
As events move on, this servile and
treacherous "condemnation" 'morality', siding with stinking
bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy, will unavoidably become more and more
obviously the measure of class-collaborating rottenness, petty-bourgeois
stupidity, and total untrustworthiness as far as the working class is
concerned.
Depending on how events develop, this filthy
betrayal of the impoverished and tortured Third World's obvious incapacity or
perspective-limitation to start fighting back against colonial-imperialist humiliation
and totally repressive domination in any other way, could rank alongside the
1914 voting of war credits by the Second International as the greatest
fake-'left' treachery in history.
Endless 'revolutionary'-sounding arguments
were aggressively put forward in 1914 by the Second International leaders of
the Revisionist retreat from Marxist-Leninist science then, just as now, ‑ but in practice all were just a cover for
class-collaborating chauvinism.
No different today. To condemn Sept 11 as
only a "barbaric atrocity" by "fascist anti-imperialists"
is to concede the field of argument completely to the bourgeois-reformist
imbecility which thinks that the poverty causes of terrorism should be
eradicated soon, but that the 'indiscriminate slaughter of innocents' cannot be
tolerated, and has to be stopped immediately.
To agree with bourgeois hypocrisy that
"something must be done about barbaric terrorist atrocities", which
helped put Bush and Blair in total charge of world opinion (superficially and
temporarily),but to then protest the blitzkrieg outcome with pacifist 'No, to
war' objections, is the cynical absolute in self-delusion by the fake-'left'.
The Second International similarly pretended
that each party voting for war credits within their 'own' parliament would only
provide for each country's "own" defence, but not for any
colonial-imperialist war aggrandisement, conquests, reparations, or other
booty.
But warmongering chauvinism quickly won the
propaganda battle in every country, as was bound to happen as soon as the
fake-'left' conceded any justification whatever in voting war credits.
The same now. As soon as the phoney
'morality' of reformist imbecility is conceded that "something must be
done about barbaric terrorist atrocities", then blitzkrieg repression ad
infinitum has been conceded.
As in the 1914-18 War and as in all
warmongering, the only way for halting the butchering chauvinism henceforth
(Iraq, Somalia, and the Palestinians are already being lined up for the next
blitzkrieg slaughters) is by taking advantage of ANY defeat or setback
whatsoever for the imperialists to wage war on the warmongers themselves. (See
EPSR 1109 for the quotations from Leninist science which explained its
epoch-making practical development of strategically setting up the October
Revolution).
But having effectively abandoned the field to
bourgeois propaganda's claimed right to "wage a war on terrorist
atrocities", then there is no way possible for the fake-'left' to now
encourage the world to look forward to imperialist defeats in these blood
thirsty brutalities and triumphalism. It would make no sense for these Trots
and Revisionists to do so.
And in practice in this case,
"condemnation" is indeed the language of reformist punishment, the
entire fraudulent basis of all bourgeois-imperialist "law"
everywhere.
You may not wish to emulate a poor old lady
stealing a pack of bacon from a supermarket, but as soon as you publicly
condemn her, it is tantamount to accepting all the hypocrisy of bourgeois
'justice' including the crap that her 'punishment' will henceforth make society
a better place, less crime, etc.
Publicly "condemn" Sept 11 and its
'punishment' will arrive inexorably. Pointless to say 'No to war' at that
stage. Equally unbelievable to then hope for an imperialist defeat at the hands
of what you have already publicly "condemned".
In other words, to have joined the hypocrisy
of bourgeois-imperialist propaganda to "condemn" Sept 11 is
effectively a social-chauvinist declaration of pro-imperialism (i.e.
pro-'reformism' which in practice can never get rid of the imperialist
bourgeoisie, and therefore amounts to a permanent acceptance of imperialism,
and is thereby 'pro‑imperialism'.)
Another bogus 'argument' by fake-'lefts' is
that "ineffective terrorist desperation" has "strengthened
imperialism".
Lenin wrote interestingly on whether
inadequate terror-assaults disorganised or demoralised the working-class or
not, ‑ and what to do about it,
in his Sept 1906 article "Guerrilla Warfare":
Marxism demands an
absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of
struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation
betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At
different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political,
national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle
come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection
with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their
turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular
means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the
concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development,
means completely to abandon the Marxist position.
The phenomenon in
which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by
individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations,
while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to
any revolutionary organisation.
The usual appraisal of
the struggle we are describing is that it is anarchism, Banquets, the old
terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise
the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and
injure the revolution. Examples in support of this appraisal can easily be
found in the events reported every day in the newspapers.
But are such examples
convincing?
The fact that
"guerrilla" warfare became widespread precisely after December, ‑ and its connection with the accentuation not
only of the economic crisis but also of the political crisis is beyond dispute.
The old Russian terrorism was an affair of the intellectual conspirator; today
as a general rule guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply
by the unemployed worker. Blanquism and anarchism easily occur to the minds of
people who have a weakness for stereotype; but under, the circumstances of an
uprising, which are so apparent in the Lettish Territory, the inappropriateness
of such trite labels is only too obvious. The example of the Letts clearly
demonstrates how incorrect, unscientific and unhistorical is the practice so
very common among us of analysing guerrilla warfare without reference to the
circumstances of an uprising. These circumstances must be borne in mind, we
must reflect on the peculiar features of an intermediate period between big
acts of insurrection, we must realise what forms of struggle inevitably arise
under such circumstances, and not try to shirk the issue by a collection of
words learned by rote, such as are used equally by the Cadets and the Novoye
Vremya‑ites: anarchism, robbery, hooliganism!
It is said that
guerrilla acts disorganise our work.
It is not guerrilla
actions which disorganise the movement, but the weakness of a party which is
incapable of taking such actions under its control. Being incapable of understanding what
historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of
neutralising its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is
engendered by powerful economic and political causes. It is not in our power to
eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against
guerrilla warfare are complaints against our Party weakness in the matter of an
uprising.
What we have said
about disorganisation also applies to demoralisation.
condemnation and curses are absolutely incapable of putting a stop to a
phenomenon which has been engendered by profound economic and political causes:
It may be objected that if we are incapable of putting a stop to an abnormal
and demoralising phenomenon, this is no reason why the Party should adopt abnormal
and demoralising methods of struggle. But such an objection would be a purely
bourgeois-liberal and not a Marxist objection, because a Marxist cannot regard
civil war, or guerrilla warfare, which is one of its forms, as abnormal and
demoralising in general. A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not
social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the
class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e., into an armed struggle
between two sections of the people. In such periods a Marxist is obliged to
take the stand of civil war. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be
absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism.
We fully admit
criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency
and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic
practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say. But
we absolutely demand in the name of the principles of Marxism that an analysis
of the conditions of civil war should not be evaded by hackneyed and
stereotyped talk about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and that senseless
methods of guerrilla activity adopted by some organisation or other of the
Polish Socialist Party at some moment or other should not be used as a bogey
when discussing the question of the participation of the Social-Democratic
Party as such in guerrilla warfare in general.
The argument that
guerrilla warfare disorganises the movement must be regarded critically. Every
new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices,
inevitably "disorganises" organisations which are unprepared for this
new form of struggle. Our old propagandist circles were disorganised by
recourse to methods of agitation, Our committees were subsequently disorganised
by recourse to demonstrations. Every military action in any war to a certain
extent disorganises the ranks of the fighters. But this does not mean that one
must not fight. It means that one must learn to fight. That is all.
When I see
Social-Democrats proudly and smugly declaring "we are not anarchists,
thieves, robbers, we are superior to all this, we reject guerrilla
warfare", ‑ I ask myself: Do these people realise what they are
saying? Armed clashes and conflicts between the Black-Hundred government and
the population are taking place all over the country. This is an absolutely
inevitable phenomenon at the present stage of development of the revolution.
The population is spontaneously and in an unorganised way ‑ and for that
very reason often in unfortunate and undesirable forms ‑ reacting
to this phenomenon also by armed conflicts and attacks. I can understand us
refraining from Party leadership of this spontaneous struggle in a particular
place or at a particular time because of the weakness and unpreparedness of our
organisation. I realise that this question must be settled by the local
practical workers, and that the remoulding of weak and unprepared organisations
is no easy matter. But when I see a Social-Democratic theoretician or publicist
not displaying regret over this unpreparedness, but rather a proud smugness and
a self-exalted tendency to repeat phrases learned by rote in early youth about
anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, I am hurt by this degradation of the most
revolutionary doctrine in the world.
It is said that
guerrilla warfare brings the class-conscious proletarians into close
association with degraded, drunken riff-raff. That is true. But it only means
that the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the
only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must
be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief
methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising
influence of socialism. And without this latter condition, all,
positively all, methods of struggle in bourgeois society bring the proletariat
into close association with the various non-proletarian strata above and below
it and, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become frayed, corrupted
and prostituted. Strikes, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become
corrupted into "alliances" - agreements between the workers and the
masters against the consumers. Parliament becomes corrupted into a
brothel, where a gang of bourgeois politicians barter wholesale and retail
"national freedom", "liberalism", "democracy",
republicanism, anti-clericalism, socialism and all other wares in demand. A
newspaper becomes corrupted into a public pimp, into a means of corrupting the
masses, of pandering to the low instincts of the mob, and so on and so forth.
Social-Democracy knows of no universal methods of struggle, such as would shut
off the proletariat by a Chinese wall from the strata standing slightly above
or slightly below it.
That being so ‑
and it is undoubtedly so ‑ the Social‑Democrats must absolutely
make it their duty to create organisations best adapted to lead the ,masses in
these big engagements and, as far as possible, in these small encounters as
well. In a period when the class struggle has become accentuated to the point
of civil war, Social-Democrats must make it their duty not only to participate
but also to play the leading role in this civil war. The
Social-Democrats must train and prepare their organisations to be really able
to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of
inflicting damage on the enemy's forces.
This is a difficult
task, there is no denying. It cannot be accomplished at once. Just as the whole
people are being retrained and are learning to fight in the course of the civil
war, so our organisations must be trained, must be reconstructed in conformity
with the lessons of experience to be equal to this task.
We have not the
slightest intention of foisting on practical workers any artificial form of
struggle, or even of deciding from our armchair what part any particular form
of guerrilla warfare should play in the general course of the civil war in
Russia. We are far from the thought of regarding a concrete assessment of
particular guerrilla actions as indicative of a trend in
Social-Democracy. But we do regard it as our duty to help as far as possible to
arrive at a correct theoretical assessment of the new forms of struggle
engendered by practical life. We do regard it as our duty relentlessly to
combat stereotypes and prejudices which hamper the class-conscious workers in
correctly presenting a new and difficult problem and in correctly approaching
its' solution.
*The Bolshevik Social-Democrats are often accused
of a frivolous passion for guerrilla actions. It would therefore not be amiss
to recall that in the draft resolution on guerrilla actions (Partiiniye
Izvestia, No. 2, and Lenin's report on the Congress) the section of the
Bolsheviks who defend guerrilla actions suggested the following conditions for
their recognition: "expropriations" of private property were not to
be permitted under any circumstances; "expropriations" of government
property were not to be recommended but only allowed, provided that they
were controlled by the Party and their proceeds used for the needs of
an uprising. Guerrilla acts in the form of terrorism were to be recommended
against brutal government officials and active members of the Black
Hundreds, but on condition that 1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into
account; 2) the conditions of the working-class movement in the given locality
be reckoned with, and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat
should not be frittered away.
As the EPSR has explained from Sept 11
onwards, people will struggle like this anyway, whether bourgeois-imperialist
hypocrisy, fascist-blitzkrieg retaliation, or petty-bourgeois 'left' denunciation
has 'condemned' the suicide guerrillas or not. Lenin clearly explains here that
the organised socialist revolution cannot stand back from such anti-imperialist
war but should try to provide proper leadership and perspective to all such
struggles.
The fake-'lefts' have shamefully tried to
wriggle out of this Marxist-Leninist scientific exposure of their reactionary
'moralising' by pretending that these unbelievably heroic guerrilla-war
sacrifices by the Palestinian suicide-bombers and their Sept 11 counterparts
are "reactionaries trying to bring back feudalism" or new
"fascism".
The Goebbels-like propaganda scabbiness of
this disinformation by the CPGB and others, plus the essential pro-imperialism
of their opportunist position on Third World terrorist fightbacks, is beginning
to mark out these Socialist Alliance careerists as one of the most despicable
sects in the whole rotten history of fake-'left' "Marxism".
And the other part of Lenin’s message is
equally relevant. If Sept 11 is indeed a "bad tactical move", then
even greater is the guilt of the whole history of Revisionism (which spawned
these new CPGB clones) for causing the international proletariat on merit to
abandon any support for the old Third International traditions, which have now
degenerated into complete counter-revolution in many countries.
If the clearly inadequate terrorist
conspiracies are doing it wrong, or doing it at all when they should not be,
then do more to clarify the appeal of Marxist-Leninist science, and win back
the world proletarian leadership, Lenin is saying.
Nowhere is this stinging rebuke more
appropriate than in Occupied Palestine where the fight against the Zionist
colonisation of the Arab nation's homeland was sold out from the start by
Stalinist Revisionism's United Nations agreement to let Zionist imperialism
begin "legally" imposing genocide on the Palestinian people by
stealing their land from 1947 onwards. Now the CPGB successors of that
Revisionist treachery have the insane gall to charge as "racists" all
who refuse to accept the colonisation of Palestine by the Zionists as a fait
accompli. And once having got the 'politically correct' slander going, the
related provocation is to sneer "racist" at the argument (see Lenin
above) that depending on historical, cultural, or regional backwardness or
unfavourable conditions, the blind rage of a terrorist outburst might well be
accepted as unsurprising considering the wretched conditions of total
degradation and humiliation that the hopelessly repressed refugee camps might
breed in the persecuted Palestinian people.
'That is racist patronising' to paraphrase
CPGB. 'Of course they could fight back with a Federal-Republican Constitution
dedicated to socialist democracy: Saying that terrorism is all that the repressive
conditions allow, or the best answer they can think of, is a racist slur on the
Palestinians'.
Self-righteous moralising humbug of this
extreme nastiness and barminess is undoubtedly stuck emotionally 100% in the
camp of imperialism prevailing
A large part of this cringing wail that
"the terrorists are making imperialism stronger" is just the
snivelling petty-bourgeois servility
in the face of what 'lefts' think or fear is
"super-imperialism" (Kautsky) invincibility.
Lenin's "Guerrilla Warfare" could
almost have been wholly written to expose Lalkar's silly snivelling retreat
from Marxism into pompous posturing in impotently 'denouncing' the Genoa Black
Bloc anarchists for fighting back against police brutality at the globalisation
summit.
Such Revisionist capitulationism is
completely missing the historical context, as Lenin explains above. In fact it
shows no awareness of dialectical historical development at all.
So, "now they will really give these
terrorist sources what for" will they???
But Zionist colonisation has been promising
and threatening exactly this same brutality, non-stop, every year for nearly 50
years.
And Zionist imperialism has virtually
unchallenged power to precisely continue inflicting genocide 'punishment' with
virtual impunity.
The result? The Intifada is wrecking the
'peace' of all the Zionist 'conquests' more devastatingly today than ever
before.
And the guerrilla-war skills and ruthless
determination are more awe-inspiring and more universally lionised by more young
Palestinians than ever before.
And all of this came about predictably too
(see EPSRs for 22 past years) because this most genocidal and brutal of all
colonisations has taken place in basically the historical epoch when such
direct colonisation was crumbling in every corner of the earth, the
irresistible forces of national-liberation and Third World awakening driving
out the no-longer-tenable humiliation of imperialist domination and
exploitation.
And no nation has suffered more greatly or
more brutally than Palestine, yet no major cultural tradition in human history
has more catching-up to do, or a greater sense of grievance at having been
wronged and scorned by the West, than the Arab Muslim civilisation which was at
one stage so advanced that for centuries it made Europe look backward.
The stealing from them of their Palestinian
homeland has made this 7-million strong most cultured and capable section of
the mighty Arab nation an obvious historical explosion just waiting to happen.
It is inevitable that single nationhood must
be restored to the entire land of Palestine, and all stolen properties returned
to their rightful owners.
Consistent with the outcome of war crime/
colonisation trials against the most rapacious Zionist-imperialist criminals,
any Jewish-immigrant workers who want to live on (and have no property stealing
crimes against them) will have to put up with living as a minority in a
majority-Arab country.
The undoubted and criminal RACISM in this
whole equation resides within the ignorant, arrogant, sentimental Western
'political correctness' (shared by Revisionism's rotten class-collaborationist
tradition) which unthinkingly and unhistorically insists that "of course
Israel is here to stay".
And out of this routine failure to apply an absolutely
objective historical examination to the Palestinian question as Lenin
recommended, routine non-Marxist fake-'left' posturing invents the ultimate
prejudice against terrorist methods and declares the Palestinian guerrilla-war
"condemnable" because they are deluded it is "doomed".
This standard petty-bourgeois undialectical
prejudice that the 'sole super-power' imperialist 'New World Order' is bound to
win any international political-military conflict whenever it wants to, only
continues Revisionism's anti-communist thinking that a shattering crisis for
the 'free-world system' such as produced the inter-imperialist catastrophes of
World Wars I and II, is no longer possible.
The ignorant prejudice also continues, shared
by bourgeois and Revisionist anti-Marxism alike, that 'fascism' is just violent
aggressiveness attached to any backward beliefs. Hence. the sneer from the
pro-imperialist 'lefts', ‑ who are opportunistically desperate to
dissociate themselves from Sept 11 but who are embarrassed at the worldwide
proletarian satisfaction at America's humiliation, ‑ are so keen to
dismiss the al-Quaeda guerrilla-war operation as 'fascism'.
But the only fascism around, of course, is
the historically established aggressive imperialist warmongering as the
chauvinist 'solution' to international capitalist economic crisis.
It is what US imperialist warmongering
aggression is actually DOING now which could earn the additional description of
'fascism' (for what it is worth), whipping up chauvinist belligerence as
hysterically as possible as the notion of a 'solution' to worldwide problems,
'pacifying' everything in sight as the only way forward.
The treacherous 'left' collapse into its
"condemn terrorism" stupor is the other side of its anti-communist
inability to accept that the whole imperialist international 'free-market
system' is soon to crash in a worldwide revolutionary crisis which will even
dwarf the turmoil of 1917 and its aftermath.
The Enron 'greatest bankruptcy in history' is
signal enough, but the far more conclusive evidence still revolves around
Japan's fate where the world's second most powerful imperialist economy ever
has remained paralysed for 11 years in a classic 'surplus capital' crisis, and
simply cannot get out of it despite the repeated massive use of every
reflationary trick in the Keynesian book.
And until World War III destroys enough
'surplus capital' (and 'surplus labours, etc, etc ) worldwide, no economies
will avoid the relentlessly oncoming slump any more successfully than Japan.
Hardly surprising, therefore, how noticeably
quick Japan was to offer active-service military units for the anti-Afghanistan
warmongering bonanza, again re-writing its 'peace' constitution in the process.
Germany, where economic stagnation has now lasted two years, was equally quick
to do likewise, and get in on the international warmongering 'solution' to
problems as rapidly as possible. The self-deluding myth of 'super-imperialist
invincibility' is just the rationalisation of the petty-bourgeois class-collaborative
instinct, but it shallowly looks to these undoubted 'facts' of imperialist
warmongering build-up to "prove" how this 'desperate terrorist
atrocity' has only 'made imperialism stronger'.
In workers movement history, the periodic
annihilation of all ability to think dialectically never ceases to astonish.
Firstly, when has a breaking-out of
generalised imperialist warmongering ever led to anything but revolutionary
disaster ultimately for the degenerate 'free-world' system??
Secondly, if cut-throat inter-imperialist
trade-war is already virtually strangling to death such major economies as
Japan, then how can the spread of inter-imperialist rivalry in warlike
posturing and threatening (as around the Gulf War earlier, then around the
Balkans emergencies, and now around the anti-Afghanistan blitzkrieg) not RAISE
expectations that the degenerate warmongering system is heading yet again in
the same catastrophic direction as marked the 'free-world's' two previous great
economic crises by World Wars I and II.???
Thirdly, what does an initial run of easy US
imperialist 'victories' (Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, Gulf War, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, etc) most resemble in modern history?? The 'triumphs' for
imperialist aggression as a promised world-slump 'solution' which preceded the
most disastrous inter-imperialist degeneracy so far in history, ‑ namely,
World War II. Prior to it, the world turned a satisfied 'peace in our time'
blind eye to the 'justified' triumphs for self-righteous 'civilising'
warmongering imperialist aggression against Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain,
Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, etc, etc. And then when World War II's
declaration was forced onto the bogus 'democratic' world by the shame of its
own degenerate connivance in all the warmongering imperialist aggression, there
was yet another run of seemingly unstoppable imperialist-war 'triumphs' across
Europe, the Near East, and the Far East. But all the time these 'victories'
were only dialectically building the imperialist system up for its most
devastating fall yet in the aftermath of World War II when a whole string of
new states ousted capitalism and imposed the dictatorship of the proletariat;
and then the whole colonial world rose up in arms to wipe out one great
'invincible' Western empire after another.
History is clear. The imperialist system goes
to war, and sooner or later, the imperialist system itself must also suffer
some defeats.
Most of the revolutionary overthrows of the
murderous and destructive capitalist system so far in history have come out of
imperialist defeats in the warmongering aggression it inflicts so
"unstoppably" onto. society.
And while heavyweight inter-imperialist war
some way down the line will undoubtedly produce comparable defeats at some
stage or other, revolutionary upheavals are not ruled out before that because a
combination of circumstances can at any time create a humiliating defeat or
setback for almost any imperialist power.
The greatest obstacle to understanding and
preparing for this essentially revolutionary direction of history is the
philistine influence of fake-'left' sects on the British workers movement, all
pretending to be 'revolutionary' this, and 'Marxist' that, and 'real socialist'
something else, but all in reality being nothing but the sterile clones of
failed old Labour 'leftism', utterly deluded by the fraud of 'reformist
pressure' eventually producing a 'socialist majority' in Parliament.
The snivelling impotent fake-'left' sentiment
will be that like on Genoa's streets or in Gaza or on the West Bank, 'violent
provocations' like Sept 11 will 'play into strengthening imperialism's hands',
etc.
Social pacifism come: out of the same roots
of "you can't fight against. impossible odds, so just stop the juggernaut
with moral shaming".
But far from impossible, Leninism explains
that the victims of the imperialist world order will never stop fighting in any
way they can. It is the task of Marxist science to give the anti-imperialist
struggle a convincing unifying world-revolutionary perspective.
The entire fake-'left' is held back from even
starting the task by its sectarian backwardness of being crippled by unresolved
theoretical skeletons in the cupboard.
A self-regarding petty-bourgeois small-minded
inability to face up to past mistakes of a Trotskyite anti-communist
anti-Soviet nature, or a museum-Stalinist Revisionist nature of "no
mistakes here" in best cultist-monolith tradition (although grotesque
errors clearly started creeping in from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, ending in
total catastrophe by 1990), ‑ ‑
‑ has paralysed all competence
for genuine, open, all-round objective polemics.
As is already happening, the development of
events themselves wi11 increasingly expose this reactionary theoretical
backwardness of the fake-'left'.
This isn't just a question of a difference of
opinion or feeling about violence, or just a tactical political mistake which
will soon be forgotten.
The whole philosophy of whether the world is
heading for a revolutionary future as the inevitable outcome of the insoluble
contradictions of imperialist crisis, or whether rational reforms are going to
find solutions to most of the world's problems largely peacefully, ‑ is
bound up in this issue.,
And that is not a harmless choice to be made
either. Choosing the essentially class-collaborative view of the future in
which everyone is going to act fairly reasonably it .is assumed, and nothing
too terrible is going to happen to the world, ‑ is essentially
threatening to totally disarm important sections of the population and make the
direction of the inter-imperialist trade-war economic crisis towards World War
III all the more certainly unstoppable before it starts, and in consequence all
the. more genocidally destructive and devastating once it is allowed to get
going.
Paradoxically, it is the
"condemnation" of the Sept 11 terrorist violence which most ensures
that the greatest brutalities and bloodshed will be inflicted on the world by
the imperialist crisis.
If the whole planet had risen up to
sympathise with the tragic victims of Sept 11 but to tell the world imperialist
system (of economic exploitation, political domination, and military
humiliation) that its foot on the neck of the Third World (to keep going the
injustice and unfairness of the rewards on earth) was the real CAUSE of why
young men from the Middle East were driven to such terrible fanaticism, ‑
then the sick authors of the barbaric blitzkrieg slaughter now raining down on
the worlds poorest people, ‑ and
with much more threatened to come, ‑ might have been restrained.
This is unrealisable fantasy, of course. But
posing such a hypothesis brings home what has been achieved by confused
petty-bourgeois idiocy in feeling obliged to go along with the
bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy of "condemning" the Sept 11 violence.
It has massively reinforced the operational
confidence of the monopoly-imperialist humbug (not an inevitable
development),smugly congratulating itself that its propaganda blitzkrieg has
fooled enough of world opinion into "condemning" Sept 11, implying
"something must be done", to now be able to get away with murder
(literally) in Afghanistan, and probably much further afield too, warming up
early for US imperialism's planned World War III violence.
It is pointless the fake-'lefts' now saying
that they condemned Sept 11 but that they instantly said also 'No to war'. Sept
11 was the time to tell US imperialism "serves you right. It is your
system which makes the world a violent unjust tyranny. The tragic victims of
Sept 11 are just a drop in the ocean of the vast numbers massacred, murdered,
starved to death, diseased to death, or otherwise brutalised and blighted EVERY
DAY all round the world by your system of domination and exploitation. And the
violence and the bloodshed will only get worse for as long as your system rules
on, ‑ worse in all
directions".
And what use is the left's
"condemnation" anyway, since far more and far worse terrorist
attempts by the Third World to fight back are bound to follow.
If it is argued that no, the NATO special
forces will wipe out al-Quaeda and that this will be an end to all such
terrorist 'outrages' for all time then this amounts to "condemning"
Sept 11 in the spirit of effectively helping imperialism's retaliatory
blitzkrieg.
And if it is argued as the Socialist Alliance
CPGB sect does for example, that the defeat of the "Taleban
counter-revolutionary fascists" is a good thing, and that Lenin supported
the need to "combat pan-Islamism",
‑ then such "condemnation" of Sept 11 effectively amounts
to enthusiastic support for the imperialist blitzkrieg and massacres.
It is pointless just blaming Blair for such a
de facto British imperialist role. In such matters, governments can be swayed
by public
opinion. The petty-bourgeois academic
"communist" idiocy, ‑ which turned the tormented Third World's
attempt to fight back on Sept 11 into a moralising posture about ends and
means, and irresponsibly falsified the historical record to pretend Leninist
backing for this imperialist aggression (the real fascism) against Third World
revolt, has provided just the self-absorbed confusion, blind to real world
hatred of imperialism, which Blairism has needed to go down this sick
warmongering holocaust road.
Imperialist warmongers now feel justified by
all the anti-Marxist "condemners" of terrorist guerrilla-war; and the
fascist massacre trick of "shot while escaping" is already rampant,
reading between the lines of the uneasy capitalist press cover-up of the
deliberate slaughter of prisoners-of-war at the Qala-i-Jhangi fort.
And Iraq is next, Bush warns. The fake-'left'
imbeciles joining the bourgeois "condemn .terrorism" hoax, will
presumably cheer again:
PUTTING
THE U.S' ANTI-TALEBAN BLITZKRIEG INTO ITS CRISIS CONTEXT OF DECADES OF
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY WARMONGERING PREPARATION BY IMPERIALISM, THE ONLY SERIOUS
'TERRORIST' THREAT TO MANKIND IS THE AMERICAN IMPERIALIST BOURGEOISIE,
PREPARING FOR WWIII. BUT 'LEFT' AVOIDS HAVING THIS PROVED TO IT VIA STALIN'S
TRICK OF REFUSING GENUINE OPEN POLEMICS, THE VERY LIFEBLOOD OF THE 50 VOLUMES
OF LENINIST SCIENCE. UNTIL THE MARXIST-LENINIST POLEMICAL TRADITION IS
RESTORED, THE ENTIRE 'LEFT' CAN ONLY KEEP ON SPLITTING, AND FAILING. USSR
DOOMED BY THE SAME THEORETICAL BANKRUPTCY.
Sept 11 and its aftermath have raised many
questions but principally the issue of anti-revolutionary degeneration of the
socialist movement, once again.
When not idiotically supporting bourgeois
hypocrisy's "condemnation" of this desperate Middle-East attempt to
strike back against PERMANENT imperialist domination and warmongering
humiliation (in occupied Palestine, and elsewhere), ‑ the fake 'left'
just naively catalogues "another round of US bullying aggression",
& calls 'No to war' uselessly.
But the science of Marxism-Leninism only
examines such phenomena in the context of imperialist-system CRISIS and not at
all as just arbitrary American acts, or convoluted oil-pipeline conspiracies.
It is also necessary to constantly relate the
world turmoil Sept 11 has produced to the ever-improving understanding of what
was achieved by the workers states and the socialist Camp, plus the
now-towering historical significance of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The hindsight which new developments help
create also makes plainer the long theoretical build-up over decades to
Moscow's ultimate Revisionist catastrophe of self-liquidating the Soviet
workers state.
The arbitrary murderous blitzkrieg on
Afghanistan reveals more fully the crisis-driven neo-fascist phase of the
imperialist trade-war cycle which may yet have a huge distance to run (aspects
of it having appeared as long as 10 years ago in the anti-Iraq blitzkrieg) but
which already has the stamp on it of massive World-War-III escalations to come.
The American monopoly-imperialist bourgeoisie
is giving notice, ahead of the next Great Crash dwarfing the events of 1929,
that history's next long depression period of collapsing markets, mass
unemployment, and poverty-driven revolt internationally, will be resolved in
the USA's favour by military-backed cut-throat competition from the start.
The message, intended for Japan, Germany,
Italy, and any powers taking notice, is that there will be no waiting for Pearl
Harbour next time.
The US propaganda about a 'war on terrorism'
could not be more misleading, especially coming as it does from the imperialist
superpower which for 55 years has been running the 'School of the Americas' out
of Fort Benning, Georgia, where every cut-throat tyranny which has ruled
Central and South American countries throughout that time in
counter-revolution's interests, has had its leading butchers trained in torture
techniques; illicit assassinations; 'deniable' mass-murder; 'legal' frame-ups;
'paramilitary-vigilante' death-squads; straightforward military dictatorships;
and fascist coups; (as capitalist press reports themselves have frequently
acknowledged, see EPSR 1113), ‑ every truly 'terrorist' activity known to
history.
While the Sept 11 guerrilla-war actions
against New York and Washington were the catalyst for this renewed surge of
American fascist-imperialist aggression(and Sep 11 can indeed be described as
terrorism in its proper historical sense of pre-rising individual revolutionary
violence against institutions or symbols of the repressive authority, ‑
in this case the US-led international imperialist economic system and its
political/military establishment), ‑ ‑ the wider, real, longer-term purpose of this ruthless blitzkrieg
on the world's poorest and most backward country is to launch the war on
capitalist crisis and its effects before the capitalist crisis launches any
more war on US monopoly-imperialist domination.
It is the lessons of history forgotten by the
international workers movement (thanks to a steady increase in theoretical
mistakes by the CPSU Third International leadership from the 1920s onwards,
mainly challenged only by Trotskyism's even worse Revisionist errors and
treacherous Opportunism) which matter most in this crucial understanding of
what happens next, ‑ not the
notorious ruling-class inability to avoid past pitfall patterns.
The bourgeoisie have. not forgotten the
lessons of how to fight slump and war.
The US ruling class are not fooled now. They
know what nonsense it is to "wage war on terrorism", but they also
know that ruthlessly putting the boot into all world developments henceforth
will be the best way to prepare for the inter-imperialist trade-war and
political conflicts to come, basically intimidating everything in sight and
preparing for military adventures of the greatest destructiveness possible, the
only 'cure' for worldwide 'surpluses' of investment capital in every industry
which are steadily choking world trade profits by recession.
Little of this Marxist understanding appears
in fake-'left' anti-war propaganda, from the Stalinists to the Trots, from the
SWP to the SLP. All either still want to protect their own incorrect historical
stance on the questions of war and revolution such as the "peaceful road
to socialism" or the "neither Washington nor Moscow" Third-Camp
academicism (turning into pro-Solidarnosc 'rank-and-file' counter-revolution at
every opportunity); or else just wash their hands of all attempts to understand
correctly the triumphs and failures of world revolutionary socialist history,
and stick to routine 'left'-reformist electoral futility and 'No to war'
endless social-pacifist protesting like the useless Socialist Alliance,
(basically just yet another attempt to dig-up again the long-dead corpse of
'left Labourism', the worst fraud ever perpetrated on the working class).
But as the EPSR has insisted since its launch
as a weekly paper 22 years ago, until the greatest ever polemical debate and
theoretical rethink has challenged the ultimately negative results of
Revisionism's and Trotskyism's long hold on the international workers movement,
then every attempt at any new serious 'revolutionary' party' building is doomed
to never get beyond the squabbling-sect stage.
The wretched farce of Scargill's SLP sums up
the problem, deliberately driving out the EPSR's growing influence within the
party's ranks with the openly cynical demand that the Review should cease
discussing certain subjects (specifically, in that detailed charge, the history
of Trotskyite delusions on the Irish Question (because some SLP leaders still
adhered to them)) or its editor (the then SLP vice-president) would be expelled
from the party.
This laughably trivial nonsense is of no
importance in itself, but its symbolism is enormous, exactly capturing the
quite ludicrous sectarianism (arrogantly contemptuous of, yet secretly fearful
of, all discussion) inherited from the long rotten history of Stalinist
cultism. Even more ridiculously and significantly, Scargill only managed to
keep any life going in the SLP at all thanks to the typical traditional
bureaucratic-opportunist 'loyalty' of the Lalkar museum-Stalinist faction of
the Indian Workers Association, which dutifully feigned support for Scargill in
every arbitrary outrage of party 'leadership'. Lalkar's museum-Stalinism
notoriously 'solves' all the vexed questions of 20th century workers-state and
Third International history by simply still continuing to believe that Stalin
never got anything wrong, and bluntly just refusing to consider the irrefutable
evidence from Stalin's theoretical works of the most crass mistakes in
international analysis, and the most grotesque Revisionism of Marxist-Leninist
scientific discoveries.
But now, most farcically of all, Lalkar
itself (with Scargill's tacit approval, it would seem) has been forced to make
the most withering open polemical attack on anti-communist delusions within the
SLP leadership which has actually voted Scargill down (apparently) in order to
publicly join the SLP to the West's bourgeois propaganda bandwagon (supported
by all the fake 'left') of "condemning" the Sept 11 Third World
attack on US imperialism.
Such are the sectarian imbecilities resulting
from the attempt to build a 'real socialist' party not only without any
worked-out revolutionary theory at all, but in undisguised contempt for all
genuine polemical open struggle on questions of revolutionary-movement theory.
And everywhere else around all 57 varieties
of Stalinist and Trotskyist sclerosis, the same bureaucratic manipulative
nonsense prevails, all terrified of taking up the open polemic against
all-comers.
Such is the rotten hold of Revisionist
traditions that even the sect called Open Polemic just point-blank refused to
discuss the broadest vexed questions of revolutionary history "because it
was premature until the working class itself can do so once a new party is
built".
This chicken-and-egg demented formalism is
not so much the "inevitable result of too much aimless talking-shop
discussion" as the final ludicrous thrust of precisely those Stalinist
bureaucratic traditions of 'loyalty' (which killed off not just all ability to
make discussing all new developments afresh and objectively the only possible
starting point for every new daily political analysis of the world, confirming
or rejecting what had already been 'understood' or predicted, ‑ ‑ but killed off even any capacity to
understand what was meant by "only ever starting with actual world
developments, always analysed in the light of ever-renewed and ever-reviewed
existing theory").
And while another fake-'left' group with
pretensions to 'open polemical' dedication, the John Chamberlain sect which
captured the CPGB title, ‑ is not so daft that it cannot see the need to
base its 'revolutionary programme' on a supposed analysis of contemporary world
developments, its continuing Revisionist-tradition disease of bureaucratic
manipulativeness and lying hypocrisy means that it will only 'openly,
polemicise with selected safe, small targets, or provocatively abuse
advantageous larger targets, but consciously tries all the time to ignore or
deny the existence of the constant and weighty polemical challenge which the
EPSR inevitably makes against this. CPGB 'objective debate' posturing.
The obvious opportunist temptation is only
ever to polemicise, if at all, within a larger amalgamation or with a larger
party which might provide some recruitment advantages. But this all hopelessly
misses the point of objective Leninist polemics which can only be to build a
genuinely competent, all-round cadre party which could carry on the revolutionary
communism fight, if necessary independently for a while in the worst
conceivable most isolated circumstances.
With one or two honourable exceptions, the
whole ex Third International virtually fell apart at the end of the Revisionist
epoch which deliberately set out to kill all notion of polemical struggle(on
all matters with all comers in order to develop an independent ability
everywhere to grapple with the overdeveloping truths of Marxist-Leninist
science.)
One of recent history's most tragic ironies
is that all the split-offs from narrow-minded Stalinist complacency inherited
exactly the same authoritarian philistinism as the sectarian' bureaucracy they were breaking with.
In every case, it was the complete failure to
establish any kind of correct perspective on the world's future developments
(different from Stalinism's warped vision) which skewered the endeavour.
The lack of a credible and defendable world
view will always embarrass any sectarian 'revolutionary socialist' posture into
stifling any real debate or polemic in due course:
The development of 57 varieties of even worse
bureaucratic Revisionist authoritarianism than Stalinism itself, marked the
essential petty-bourgeois opportunism of the intellectual or
trade-union-bureaucrat-cadres (and their working-class followers), splitting
for careerist reasons from the Soviet monolith in a decades-long intimidating
atmosphere of relentless anti-communist propaganda and vilification. And the
specifics of Stalinism's own failure to read world developments correctly
contributed to all its critics getting their perspectives hopelessly wrong too.
The Trotskyite Fourth International came
spectacularly to grief at the end of the 1930s after the 'Death Agony'
manifesto predicted total Stalinist capitulation to fascist warmongering, and
an easy 4th I[nternational]
revolutionary triumph over imperialism's death throes via programmatic
steadiness demanding little more than "a sliding scale of wages" and
"opening the books of big business to union inspection", etc, etc.
Seven years later, after the Soviet workers
states 1945 triumph over imperialism's fascist-aggression conspiracy (as great
a triumph as 1917 itself), and as total US dollar hegemony started reviving
monopoly-capitalism towards its most awe-inspiring world trade boom ever, ‑
no Trot faction realistically had a perspective left to stand on; and so
authoritarian stifling of all serious theoretical discussion was all that was
left for all wannabee true Trot sects, and the splits inevitably began
mushrooming faster than ever.
All subsequent sizable Trot sects imposed the
same authoritarian dogmatism, ‑ and all always broke into further
smithereens as soon as a major theoretical difficulty was thrown up by further
world developments.
The splits from Moscow's theoretical
paralysis in a more nationalist or reformist direction but which equally failed
to come up with a more convincing world perspective than Stalinism's
Revisionist nonsense, fared no better.
Maoism (for understandable reasons) totally
failed to get to the bottom of Stalin's theoretical mistakes because of Mao's
own involvement in their perpetuation; and the resulting non-polemical
bureaucratic authoritarianism then left the party prey to even wilder
voluntaristic excesses (and the start of serious splits, inevitably sparking
off even more dogmatism), from the lack of any polemical party mechanism to
cope with the theoretical questions thrown up by the clash with Moscow.
The inevitable subsequent further
entrenchment of unchallengeable theoretical authoritarianism by a less-and-less
confident(because less-and-less polemically-trained)leadership, unavoidably
plunged towards even worse Revisionism later on, a tragic decline which the
confused Chinese workers state has yet to see the end of.
Eurocommunism was an even more shamefaced,
tight-lipped retreat from Marxism-Leninism, almost abandoning the whole
revolutionary idea itself of a role for theory, swamped by the urgent pragmatic
business of 'realistic reforms'.
The eventual self-liquidation by Western
'communist' parties could not have provided a more fitting monument of shame to
the long-threatened total collapse of any meaningful revolutionary theory, or
of any understanding of its crucial role in party-building and the socialist revolution.
Anti-polemical bureaucratic authoritarianism,
the total enemy of serious theoretical understanding, had finally proved the
point in the most dramatic war possible, ‑ by killing off the party.
The retreat from serious, objective,
polemical theoretical struggle (and the start of ultimately terminal
Revisionist sickness, unless checked) begins with Moscow's perplexed confusion
at the failure of the world socialist revolution to spread further in the
1920s, a nervous paralysis made ten times worse by Trotsky's endless
opportunist boat-rocking (against which Lenin had properly introduced the 10th
Congress ban on organised factionalising, which tragically was later distorted
into a virtual ban on all polemical theoretical struggle of any kind, the lifeblood
of the revolution and of civilisation itself).
After much disputed zigging and zagging about
the ending of NEP, collectivisation, China, and Germany, etc, (requiring full
re-examination in due course), the kernel of Stalin’s ultimately destructive
world-perspective Revisionism appears in the Spanish Civil War policy of
deluded 'support' for petty-bourgeois parliamentary Republicanism when the CP
correctly joined the anti-Franco war of resistance. Connected to it was the
delusion that 'good' imperialism could be shamed into helping the 'legitimate
democracy' survive the outrageous subversion by 'bad' fascist imperialism.
Both were utterly false and misleading
perspectives; all imperialism was encouraging reactionary fascist aggression;
and the petty-bourgeois 'parliamentary democracy'
fraud could never rally sufficient anti-Franco resistance.
The CP line was a disaster. Only a workers
state could have been inspired to defeat Franco's coup-war, and might well have
triumphed. The Soviet workers state did against far vaster fascist forces three
years later. The CP should have called for joint anti-Franco resistance; no
support for the petty-bourgeois government; and a proletarian revolution as the
only serious way forward.
It was this idiot Revisionist theory of a
'good' imperialism which would help defeat a 'bad' imperialism (which was
further boosted by the anti-German 'allies' aspects of world War II (which had
entirely different chance causes)) which Stalin then embellished into the
"Permanent peaceful coexistence" and "peaceful roads to
socialism" imbecilities, embracing various anti-revolutionary put-downs,
Spain-style, on the way.
It culminated in the monstrous theoretical
nonsense of "Economic Problems of Socialism, 1952" which declared
that the days of the imperialist system's economic expansion were over, and
that the Marxist-Leninist science of capitalism always having growth potential,
was no longer valid. 'Capitalist markets' could no longer be made even
‘relatively stable'.
With this gibberish as the gospel Soviet
faith over the next two generations, no wonder the CPSU Revisionist hack
Gorbachev found himself by 1990 no longer believing in the Stalinist myths that
planned socialist equitable production and distribution would by then have left
capitalist living standards behind (impossible against the West’s super-profits
from the world-trade-exploitation's greatest boom in history).
Going with popular, opinion which no longer
believed it either, Gorbachev insanely decided that the flaw in Stalin's
perspectives was the sluggishness of steady planned non-exploitative Soviet
economic development instead of the fact that of course imperialist
world-domination still had endless TEMPORARY expansion-potential left in it, ‑ all the way up until the next great slump
and World War III.
Instead of tearing up the whole Stalinist
Revisionist understanding of 'tamed imperialism' which was still the CPSU
delusion, Gorbachev tore up the Soviet workers state and its planned economy,
and called for the 'magic' of the market to transform the people's lives (with
the fraud of 'parliamentary democracy' inevitably in tow).
Sept 11 and its alarming warmongering
aftermath raises the question 'Where is the world heading' as never before; and
the tortuous fake-'left' stumbling over the daft notion of joining bourgeois
imperialism to "condemn" the tragic terrorist despair of a Middle
East wish to fight back against humiliating domination, ‑ shows what a huge theoretical re-education
the socialist movement needs.
Stalin's wishful-thinking legacy about 'good'
imperialism still lives on, totally deluding everyone's natural instinctive
hope for a peaceful democratic solution to all the world's problems.
It is totally disarming dangerous gibberish,
backed up by the combined efforts of Socialist Alliance fake-'lefts' to dismiss
the blitzkrieg on Afghanistan as just more bombing, unconnected to any deeper
imperialist-crisis warmongering, and solvable by diplomatic and democratic
reformist pressure(SWP); or else as no concern at all because imperialism is
doing the world a favour by wiping out such reactionaries as the Taleban
Islamic fundamentalists, even distorting Lenin as being in favour (CPGB).
The massive reproduction of all the quotes
from Lenin in recent EPSRs , proving conclusively that there was no Bolshevik
objection in principle to terrorism, and nothing but the most careful approach
to pan-Islamic developments which genuinely were prepared to fight aspects of
imperialist reaction, ‑ are all,
of course, totally routinely ignored by such fake-'lefts' as the Socialist
Alliance, in line with the whole rotten Revisionist-epoch development in the
socialist movement of simply abandoning all serious polemical theoretical
struggle.
But such silly opportunism is doomed to get
absolutely nowhere against the impending titanic world imperialist crisis in
which the working masses will demand and need the most comprehensive revival
and further development of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory ever known.
The EPSR has never seen the point of this
challenge ‑ as insisting that all of the answers are here, right now.
The point is that without debate, without
consistent serious polemical struggle, a new real revolutionary party will
never be built to provide the answers workers have to develop.
EXTREME
'LEFT' REFORMISTS IN FACT ONLY PROP UP THE BOURGEOIS-IMPERIALIST SYSTEM.
REVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENTS ARE IN AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE CAT EGORY OF HISTORY.
ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE DAMAGED MOST BY TROT & STALINIST IGNORANCE OF
MARX-LENIN THEORY.
As night follows day, the notion that surely
civilisation's economic development can be rationally planned to proceed
steadily in the interests of everyone on earth rather than have this periodic
terrifying slump-catastrophe, will rapidly again become the chief aspiration of
all human longing, ‑ as socialism has been, already, for nearly 200
years.
What precise battles for socialist ideas will
have to be fought is not yet known, of course; but that there is no alternative
but world socialism to the slump and warmongering catastrophes of capitalism's
grotesquely unfair and uneven development is not doubted by anyone.
Exactly how to conquer the world for a
totally classless international society of planned cooperation is the stuff of
all future argument; but there can be no question that even spontaneous
developments (in Argentina and elsewhere) will sooner or later suggest the mass
of the people taking over the ownership, running, and planning of their own
country's whole economy rather than let the present insane mess continue.
Organised revolutionary communist proposals will already be fermenting there
for certain.
It will take the beginnings of such
revolutionary upheavals (in Argentina or in any one of a score of other countries where capitalism's
failure is already proving intolerable), ‑ plus US imperialism's
inevitable threatening response, -
before the connections between international imperialist slump and
international imperialist warmongering begin to be widely-made; but once events
themselves start to teach the world such lessons (rather than the tiny
propaganda output of the few circles of genuinely revolutionary Marxist
understanding, which could never achieve such an educational effect on their
own), ‑ then all further mind-conditioning that "bombing is
best" as a cure for the planet's ills by the likes of Bush, Blair, Polly
Toynbee, Clare Short, and Christopher Hitchens, will be self-branded as more
and more demented.
"War without end" was one of the
more perceptive slogans already appearing on the huge London demonstration
against imperialist blitzkrieg politics
And deepening splits in the ranks of
middle-class mind-conditioning ‑
all united in their horror-stricken "condemnation" of Sept 11,
‑ are observable in the capitalist press:
As usual, this well-meaning liberalism is
unable to provide any perspective for any kind of end to imperialist
warmongering rampaging, revolutionary or otherwise.
As usual, if there,, is any message at all,
it is that the world would be a better place if it did not go down this route
of American fascist domineering. Reformism, in other words, is the only answer
put forward.
And the essence of parliamentary cretinism,
Wedgwood Benn, was on hand at Trafalgar Square to actually declare: "We
have a passive parliament and a cringing Cabinet", but still the 'answer'
is reformism.
But of course it solves nothing. It was the
total fraud of bourgeois democracy elections to a parliament under capitalism
which gave Hitler the power in 1933. It was what put Bush in office last
November. And it is obviously the system responsible for what Benn now calls a
"passive parliament".
It is not a historical record of 'lesson
learning' either. Imperialist warmongering, colonial tyranny, and the
never-ending arms race are the entire unbroken story of the capitalist system;
and "clearer-headed" or "more decisive" parliamentary
voting is not about to change anything, no matter how many warnings are
delivered by periodic outbreaks of fascist aggression.
The lesson-learning has to be about the 'free
market' system itself, and its impossibility of ever achieving economic and
technological progress for the potentially-useful benefit of mankind without
creating, by those very same 'free market' means, the most grotesque inequality,
injustice, and uneven development on earth, (plus periodic slump catastrophes),
that must always unalterably end in total frustration, envy, hatred, revolt,
and consequential domineering-warmongering-tyranny ultimately, for as long as a
capitalist class is allowed to rule, (i.e. even exist, since once a capitalist
class exists it is bound to rule).
This is where the petty-bourgeois fake 'left'
plays its major role, posturing as 'revolutionary socialists' but utterly
confusing the picture of total, all-the-way hostility to the imperialist-state
world-domination and nothing else.
The "No to war, and No to terror"
line of the SWP and the Socialist Alliance completely disarms the working
class, playing them straight into the hands of Western propaganda pretending
that the destruction of Bin Laden, al-Quaeda, and the Taleban regime will make
the world a "safer and better place".
As even the capitalist press admits, the last
time that imperialism's current allies in the Northern Alliance took power in
Afghanistan, there was a widespread bloodbath of more degenerate savagery than
the imagination can master:
And even worse than that, the anti-war
sections of bourgeois press opinion are also currently drawing attention to the
astonishing fact that far more "terrorist outrages" have been
committed by the US imperialist system itself, in crushing its opponents by
fair means or foul, than have been perpetrated by anti-imperialist struggles:
So the fake-'left' posturing 'morality' of
agreeing with the West’s propaganda to "condemn Sept 11" not only
effectively justifies the US imperialist pretence that "terrorism must be
eradicated", but allows the West to literally get away with murder in its
hypocrisy.
There is nothing to "condemn".
Arbitrary savagery and brutal injustice are inseparable from the class-war and
national-war struggles for the survival or overthrow of the international
imperialist-rule system; and 'morality' will play no part at all in bringing
down the monopoly-capitalist class; only organised communist-revolutionary
strength and mass political understanding will.
Even "terrorism" could be a
legitimate weapon, as EPSR 1106 explained in detail, quoting in full from Lenin
on the subject.
'Only' two months late, at least the hoax
'Marxist' wing of one degenerate fake-'left' sect, the SLP, has limped into
line with the EPSR's Marxist-Leninist understanding of class-war history by
briefly repeating the same Lenin quotes, but with no acknowledgment, of course,
of how and why Lalkar has now seen the light, and, more
disastrously-pathetically still, with no reference to how Lalkar got it
completely wrong in its previous issue two months ago.
Last week's EPSR. derided Lalkar's
opportunist cowardice for at last denouncing fake 'lefts' who
"condemn" terrorism ‑ but for not having. the political guts to
explain that it was Scargill's SLP they were really targeting, which has just
belatedly formally joined the petty-bourgeois "condemnation" brigade.
This time, the charge is even more serious.
Scargill's Lalkar stooges lack the political courage to admit even their own
mistaken analysis, even when the progress of historical events themselves have
shown up the stupidity.
It was nearly three weeks after Sept 11 that
Scargill's arbitrary decision to "deplore the loss of life in the United
States" and to express "fear that the world could see more of this
type of attack" was revealed to those in the international working class
who might have been waiting for a lead from the SLP.
The EPSR tore this mealy-mouthed petty-bourgeois
idiocy to pieces for limping along half-heartedly behind middle-class
"condemnation" and fascist-imperialist revenge seeking belligerence.
Lalkar came out at roughly the same time, not
just failing to criticise this SLP nonsense, and calling Sept 11 a
"disaster", but indirectly supporting Scargill's reactionary
confusion in a separate attack denouncing anarchist anti-globalisation street
fighting as only damaging the working-class cause, and only playing into the
hands of imperialist counter-revolution.
"The tactics of deliberate violence are
detrimental" Lalkar scolded, and approvingly quoted an allied Danish
Stalinist sect branding the international anti-globalisation anarchist
protesters as "tools of the bourgeois establishment, paid or otherwise"
and as "the instrument of the reactionary forces".
With Sept 11 still the world's number 1
talking point, Lalkar then pointedly quoted Stalin on the Narodniks, the
dominant anti-Tsarist revolutionary movement before the Bolsheviks' rise began,
and renowned internationally as practitioners of terrorism against imperialism.
"The method of combating Tsardom chosen
by the Narodniks, namely, by the assassination of individuals, by individual
terrorism, was wrong and detrimental to the revolution."
Lenin never said this about the original
Russian revolutionary movement. On the contrary, he paid tribute to the
"heroes" and the "grandeur" of their struggle against huge
odds and fearful repression.
Lenin's massive output against the Narodniks
was to expose their utopian views about using the Russian peasant commune
system as a possible non-capitalist development, and their philosophical
idealism which failed to grasp the Marxist materialist basis of social,
economic, and political attitudes.
Lenin's more dismissive comments were
directed against the Liberal Narodniks of the 1890s, a sad reformist retreat
from the Revolutionary Narodniks of the 1870s.
Lenin's attacks on terrorist methods were
always on the question of terrorism as an inferior tactic once the Marxist
movement had won support for the idea of a mass working-class revolutionary
movement of open political understanding as opposed to the earlier anti-Tsarist
belief in a conspiracy movement of outstanding individuals.
In particular, Lenin attacked a verbal
infatuation with terrorist methods which many Leninist supporters still were
influenced by, and which the Socialist-Revolutionary claimants to mass
working-class revolutionary leadership also continued to put forward "in
the Narodnik tradition".
The problem for all today's fake-'left'
parties remains the same, SLP included. By "condemning" terrorist
methods. in the aftermath of Sept 11, these wretched petty-bourgeois
opportunist sects all effectively line up behind the savage imperialist blitzkrieg
on the Middle East to "destroy terrorism". All weaselling that
"a police action" would have been "an alternative" to the
imperialist blitzkrieg, or that "United Nations peacekeeping" should
have been used to stop "the deplorable massacre of innocents on Sept 11,
which the whole world must condemn", etc, etc, is the most monstrous
dissembling. The fascist-aggressive turn in contemporary US imperialist
world-domination under the so-called 'New World Order' has long been obvious to
everyone on earth. And this murderous, ruthless, genocidal terror-bombing of
Afghanistan was freely predicted by the whole of world opinion.
So what was crucially needed was for that
whole world opinion to avoid at all costs giving the slightest justification
for this demented imperialist blitzkrieg, which is still inflicting airforce
massacres all round Afghanistan utterly indiscriminately, despite the effective
abdication of the Taleban government, - giving cover simultaneously to equally
murderous warlord opportunists in the Northern Alliance. World opinion
predictably failed. But for so-called 'lefts' to join in the wittering
bourgeois hypocrisy about "appalling horror" and "unacceptable
barbarism", etc, about a worm-turning retaliation at last by Third World
hatred against the PERMANENT warmongering terror-domination by Western tyranny
against the slightest anti-imperialist revolt anywhere, ‑ ‑ was
more cowardly political treachery than the whole wretched history of
anti-communism has produced in a long time.
The fate of the reactionary religious
delusions of the Taleban and Bin Laden are not the issue. Serious revolutionary
anti-imperialism will not miss them. Providing imperialist
"anti-terror" humbug with a 'left' cover is the truly barbaric horror
which has been committed over this Sept 11 issue, ‑ a lame-brained
ignorant betrayal which will help add tens of thousands more "innocent
victims" to the endlessly growing world's total out of deepening
imperialist-system economic crisis in the longer run, now that this ludicrous Bush-Blair
'anti-terror' posture has been allowed to get away with such blatant fascist
tyranny and murder.
But still the fake 'lefts' continue peddling
the same old lying tune as an 'excuse', ‑ namely, that Sept 11 "had
to be condemned, ‑ otherwise it would have meant supporting Bin
Ladenism", etc, etc. EPSR 1109 has already quoted Leninist science in full
refuting that idiotic non sequitur in respect of the Bolshevik hope to take
advantage of Tsarist imperialism's defeat by German imperialism in World War I,
dismissing Trotsky's incomprehension of Marxism which slandered that Lenin's
slogan for Tsarist defeat amounted to "support for German imperialism as
the lesser evil".
There were no such stupid implications, Lenin
explained.
Equally stupid is the current Trot and
Revisionist anti-Marxist drivel that hoping to see US imperialism further
humiliated by the disastrous failure of its attempted "war on
terrorism" retaliatory barbarism against Afghanistan, ‑ similarly
amounts to "support for the Taleban".
No such nonsense.
A further example of Leninist dialectical
science on such matters was provided by the challenge to clear-thinking
priorities which the Kornilov rebellion against the Kerensky government
presented in August 1917 to the Bolshevik propaganda demanding Kerensky's
downfall.
Kornilov represented fascist
counter-revolution against the great anti-autocracy gains of the February
Revolution. It had to be fought against unconditionally.
But Kerensky's suzerainty over February s
gains had already plunged them back towards total loss,(temporarily,
effectively), by continuing Russia's full participation in inter-imperialist
WWI, and would doom them to certain permanent loss in the near future, if the
war was continued with for much longer, and if the bourgeois-state Provisional
Government was not overthrown by the socialist revolution and the dictatorship
of the proletariat.
The Bolshevik conclusion was to make opposing
the Kornilov Rebellion to bring down Kerensky the priority, but to explain
vigorously to the world why that in no way meant any support at all for the
continuation of the Kerensky regime.
It is equally clear today that agitating for
the defeat of the imperialist blitzkrieg implies not a shred of support for the
reactionary ideology of the Taleban. At the same time, however, any
"condemnation" of al-Quaeda terrorism clearly invalidates all 'No to
war' posturing social-pacifism, and plays Afghanistan and the international
working class totally into the hands of the bourgeois-imperialist propaganda
racket.
To shore up the contention that cheering for
imperialist military defeat is tantamount to supporting the Taleban, Trotsky is
approvingly quoted (Trot and Revisionist anti-communists are losing much of
their distinction) from 1935 on why the Ethiopian autocracy feudal emperor
Haile Selassie deserved to be supported in the fight to resist Italian colonial
conquest, and not merely by-passed in the course of opposing the fascist
invasion.
Similarly, the CPGB quotes Trotsky favourably
from 1927 implying that the Kuomintang regime in China was progressive enough
to be sided-with in trying to establish full independence from imperialist
domination.
Both examples miss the point that Lenin makes
about precisely NOT supporting or siding-with the Kerensky government despite
the priority need for all the forces of the February-Revolution-transformation
to all join in the resistance to the Kornilov counter-revolution. in August
1917.
And historical perspectives exactly confirm
this Marxist understanding.
By the 1920s and 1930s, the epoch-making
triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat in being able to start
transforming the massive backwardness of the Tsarist empire into a
technologically-advanced and totally politically-educated and socially-organised
workers state which the entire might of the imperialist world could not
subsequently dominate, ‑ demonstrated that communist revolution could be
a practical way forward already everywhere on earth, given enlightened Leninist
leadership of the proletariat, both locally and internationally.
What the world sadly got instead, of course,
was a sick choice between Stalinist or Trotskyist Revisionist ignorance and
opportunism, the degeneration of the necessary Marxist scientific understanding
of world development either way, and equal treachery to the dictatorship of the
proletariat too, in the very long run. (see EPSR 2001 Perspectives document).
Illusions in the Kuomintang was precisely one
of the revolutionary movement's problems in China, and the National
government's uselessness against Japanese domination later on doubly proved the
point.
And the CPGB canvassing to spread
retrospective illusions in the Ethiopian feudal emperor of the 1930s must set
some kind of new barmy record even for the off-the-wall Weekly Worker.
The problem of retreating from the gains of
Marxist-Leninist science was seen clearest in Spain. Creating 'support'
illusions in the bourgeois 'parliamentary Republic' was fatal. The
international bourgeois-imperialist system was turning to fascist aggression
wherever it had revolutionary problems, and the middle-class 'democracy' stood
no chance of survival.
Certainly all the forces of the new Republic
in Spain needed to join the fight against Franco's counter-revolution, but, as
with Kerensky in August 1917, without sowing 'support' illusions in a uselessly
weak government, but continuing to spread the campaign instead that only the
dictatorship of the proletariat building a workers state could save Spain from
the bourgeois-imperialist world system’s fascist onslaught.
And given the Bolshevik Leninist
understanding and organisation that first transformed backward Tsarist Russia
and then set the Soviet workers state off on its path that was eventually to
achieve such mightiness, Spain could have become an even more glittering
triumph of planned socialist organisation and anti-imperialist defiance.
What the world now desperately needs is a
return to Marxist-Leninist science, and the problem it faces is the remnants
everywhere of the same Stalinist versus Trotskyist backwardness which destroyed
the international revolutionary movement with Revisionist ignorance last time
round, forming the 57 varieties of sectarian opportunism around the Alliance,
the SSP, the SLP, 'left'-Labourites, and everywhere else.
This cretinous CPGB ignorance of history sums
the problem up, still approving the Revisionist tail-ending of feudal emperors
and bent Nationalists of the 1930s, and even more stupidly pretending that the
only choice today is either support for the Taleban, or opportunistically
joining in with the Western 'condemnation' of terrorism.
Neither. There are no forces anywhere
resisting this US imperialist turn to fascist blitzkrieg which are more
reactionary than this crisis-driven imperialist nightmare. But no illusions
whatever are needed in Bin Laden's religious backwardness to nevertheless see
that joining the bourgeois world’s 'condemnation' (of the desperate al-Quaeda
terrorist attempt to strike back at US imperialism's tyrannical domination of
the Middle East)is itself the most opportunist reactionary atrocity on view by
far.
Wholly shunned is any attempt to reconvince
the international working-class that a further development of Marxist
scientific understanding alone holds the key to civilisation’s future by
demonstrating a correct analysis of the current stage of imperialist crisis,
and polemically defending it against allcomers, ‑‑ rebuilding a party of revolutionary theory
as Leninism did, in other words.
Current world events are either ignored
completely, or dealt with by some wooden formula which then not only ignores
all polemical critique but even keeps its mind closed when history itself
proves things differently. For example, the SWP became the fattest of the fake
'lefts' via decades of the most reactionary anti-Soviet opportunism. Crucial
for these anti-communist 'revolutionaries' was the fiction that 'socialist'
solidarity with the USSR against imperialist provocation, subversion, and
sabotage was not an issue because the Soviet Union was only 'state-capitalist'
itself anyway. When the Gorbachev 'market forces' counter-revolutionary debacle
did finally re-introduce state-capitalism (quickly inevitably joined and
shafted by robber-baron capitalism),and when the overthrow of proletarian-dictatorship
central planning and discipline
[happened] state-capitalist 'market forces' soon devastated the former
mighty USSR, thus proving that what went before for 60 years could not have
been state capitalism, ‑‑
the SWP simply carried on insisting that its 'theory' which 'justified'
its anti-Soviet hatred was 'still correct'.
What undermined the Stalinist Revisionist
ideology of the USSR was its being proved wrong by events. The entire
57-variety swamp of fake 'leftism' still has not grasped this point and is
doomed to destruction
along exactly the same sterile path as Third International Revisionism.
Such widespread multi-hued anti-Marxism has
captured the international workers movement before, of course. It was rescued
from 57 varieties of Bernsteinism, Kautskyism, Luxemburgism, social pacifism,
social chauvinism, etc, etc, in 1917 by the combination of spontaneous
revolutionary struggle ripping the imperialist world apart whether anyone had
written a constitutional programme or a set of perfect standing orders for it
or not, plus the correct scientific analysis of the world by Lenin's deliberate
party of revolutionary theory ('What is to be done', etc) which was
consequently trusted by the masses to give guidance and leadership to the revolution.
A recent new feature of the anticommunist
fake 'left' has been to replace the old Trot cliché that 'Lenin was a great
revolutionary socialist but Stalin's brutal dictatorship imposed a
counter-revolution' (which has always
caused difficulty since no one could ever agree when, where, and how this
counter-revolution took place), ‑ with the more internally coherent line that
'Lenin's revolution was a monstrous anti-socialist dictatorship from the
start', etc.
The problem for the anti-communists with
this, of course, is the same one that routine anti-Stalinism found difficulty
with (apart from in a handful of very wealthily bourgeois Western imperialist
countries); namely, that although very patchy and seriously theoretically
flawed, the actual 70-year record of the Soviet Union in standing up to or
challenging imperialist world domination in so many ways, exposed all
instinctive class-based anti-Sovietism for the idealist anti-Marxist reaction
that it was.
Despite endless allegations of dubious motives,
crass interference, grotesque mistakes, etc, the plain reality is that for 70
years, the backward and war-devastated workers state founded by Leninism made
colossal disciplined sacrifices to help two-thirds of the world rise up against
colonial slavery and start their own independent economic and cultural
development, supplying doctors, engineers, educational establishments,
agronomists, dams, economic enterprises, backed by scores of special Third
World colleges and institutions set up in the USSR itself, setting a completely
new agenda for the world to replace the bombs, bullets, and scorched-earth
tyranny that the dying colonial empires (Britain, France, USA, Holland,
Portugal, Belgium, Spain, etc) had tried hanging onto power with post-1945 in Algeria,
Malaysia, Vietnam and Indo-China, Egypt, Kenya, Aden, Indonesia, Mozambique,
etc, etc, etc. In addition, a score or more countries, from China to Cuba, were
further generously helped to establish their own planned economies in defiant
independence of the non-stop worldwide imperialist attempts at armed subversion
and counter-revolution, at economic embargo-strangulation, and at ideological
propaganda-destruction.
These most outstanding and astonishing
achievements yet (in the history of international political development)only
started going irrevocably wrong when the Moscow bureaucracy began to lose the
plot theoretically about how the later stages of the international class war to
destroy the international imperialist bourgeoisie and its system of 'free
market' world economic domination, would unfold.
Widespread confusion started taking root in
the international workers movement from the 1930s Popular Front onwards that
capitalism might finally be toppled or tamed, universally, partly by the
worldwide pressure of anti-imperialist coalitions of cross-class 'democracy'.
This anti-revolutionary delusion was further cemented by the tragic World War
II confusion that there were 'good' imperialists (USA, Britain, France, etc)
who were prepared to become an 'ally' of the Soviet workers state in its fight
for survival against German imperialist onslaught, and there were 'bad'
imperialists (Germany, Japan, Italy, etc) who were out to destroy the USSR.
This imbecile falsification of Marxism, and history then spawned further
stupidities that 'good' imperialism might eventually accept the need to
peacefully coexist permanently with the socialist camp, and in time even
acknowledge socialism's superiority as an economic system.
This in turn gave birth. around the Third
International to the nonsense of the 'peaceful road to socialism'; and misled
the Moscow bureaucracy into foolish and needless boast; that Soviet consumer
products would soon outperform, in terms of quality and productivity, the
slickest and most cost-effective output of Western imperialism (which had the
whole world to exploit at often slave-labour rates and under direct colonial
tyranny), ‑ ‑ a pointless
and ridiculous claim when socialism's target was pointing in the entirely
opposite direction of trying to equalize living standards and investment levels
right across the .socialist camp from Cuba to North Korea and Vietnam. There
was no way that. factory shirts e.g. from Uzbekistan with its universal free
health service, secondary and higher education, widespread cultural facilities,
etc, could ever be turned out with so much labour-content so cheaply as shirts
churned out from Bangkok factories by child-labour literally sold into bondage
by an illiterate peasantry and sometimes literally chained to the looms and
sewing machines for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
But this daftest way possible of trying to
'compare' the building of socialism with the cut-throat competitiveness of the
monopoly-imperialist free market was pursued relentlessly by the Revisionist
Moscow bureaucracy to the point where Gorbachev eventually concluded that
free-market capitalism was the better way to run society altogether, and set
about deliberately dismantling the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But in reality, the Soviet workers state
carried on successfully technologically transforming itself for a further
period four times longer than the span of existence it had covered when Trotsky
first declared in 1936 that 'all further Soviet economic progress was now out
of the question because the demands of modern technological change had now run
into the absolute limits of bureaucratic-dictatorship command-economy
management's ability to respond flexibly enough to all the detailed delicate
new innovative requirements', etc.
If the USSR could multiply its productive
growth period of 1923 to 1936 by five times to reach 1988 successfully, having
mastered space exploration, nuclear rocket engineering, aircraft design and
mass production, computerised television communications, etc, etc, etc, along
the ways despite having been utterly war-destroyed again by another western
imperialist invasion-intervention from 1941 to 1945, and despite having propped
up half the Third World with free technological assistance thereafter, ‑ then Trotsky's sour-grapes
counter-revolutionary nonsense was clearly proved as such, and the above 1988
Gorbachevite version of the same irrational anti-Marxist mysticism made no
sense either. If bureaucratic state planning can do it at one time, it can do
it at another time just as easily.
What undermined the final generation of
Soviet bureaucratic leadership was not an inability to cope with "the new
scale and pace of scientific and technological progress" (Nauka i Zhizn,
1988 Science & Life, the 3.2 million monthly circulation magazine of the
All-Union Knowledge Society) but a degenerate Revisionism which made an even
more disastrous mess of failing to understand imperialism as an incurable
system of boom-and-bust crisis than Stalin had done. The background to this
rationalised idealism (about Soviet state planning suddenly becoming incapable,
allegedly, of coping with technological innovation any longer), ‑ lay in
the confusion sown by Stalin's 1952 work 'Economic Problems of Socialism".
This had mapped out how the conflict with imperialism would be overcome
peacefully through the socialist states eventually easily outperforming the
capitalist economies.
When this uncorrected anti-Marxist nonsense
had failed to prove true by the late 1980s (according to how the then
generation of Moscow Revisionist bureaucrats chose to measure things), this
ongoing anti-Marxist confusion decided to abort not Stalin's mistaken ideas
about this pointless and unrealistic 'competition' and about misunderstanding
the boom-bust nature of imperialist crisis, but his sound ideas about how the
Soviet economy should continue to organise its development.
When the Western economies failed to decline
to a crawl and be overtaken by the socialist camp, as Stalin's 'theory'
explained must happen, Gorbachev & Co decided it was because the Soviet
economy was failing to make proper use of market mechanisms..
Stalin's 'theory' carried such weight that it
was not even questioned, (in spite of much 'anti-Stalin' posturing after his
death), because it fitted so well into so many other non-Marxist
anti-revolutionary delusions the bureaucracy had lived by. It suited admirably
the established wishful-thinking that maybe ultimate all-out conflict between
the socialist camp and the
'good' Western imperialists (now
dominant ‑ USA, Britain, France)
could be avoided.
Moscow's delusion that workers states now had
a permanent safe stake in the world, accepted by the 'good' imperialists,
helped breed an attitude around much of the Third International (as was) that the
last thing that was needed was any 'revolutionary adventurism', meaning
'premature' bids for working-class power, which would tend to 'unnecessarily
rock the boat' of what was seen as a 'good enough' phase of 'stable
international peaceful coexistence' which it was imagined would somehow lead to
imperialism eventually giving up completely on any general dreams of
maintaining active, instant, universal counter-revolutionary responses to block
the path forever to any further socialist advances in the world.
In this deluded atmosphere, future socialist
advances were seen as almost falling into the lap of the international working
class in time, practically automatically. Stalin's casual neglecting to mention
the utterly crucial importance to mankind for the working class to be ready to
take revolutionary power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie upon the failure
of yet another capitalist war-disaster, both reflected and cemented this
totally anti-Marxist mentality already established.
Stalin gives this deliberately
non-revolutionary perspective further authority in commending the objectives of
the heavily internationally CP-backed peace movement. Although not denying that
to eliminate wars inevitability altogether, imperialism would have to be
"abolished" (but avoiding stating specifically how), ‑ Stalin
plainly advocates the following:
"The object of the present-day peace
movement is to rouse the masses of the people to fight for the preservation of
peace and for the prevention of another world war. Consequently, the aim of
this movement is not to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, ‑
it confines itself to the democratic aim of preserving peace. In this respect,
the present day peace movement differs from the movement of the time of. the
First World War for the conversion of the imperialist war into civil war, since
the latter movement went further and pursued socialist aim’s."
As Marx or Lenin might have commented, it is
impossible to prevent the capitalist system from going to war. It is not impossible
to overthrow the capitalist system. So, surely it would be easier to overthrow
capitalism rather than trying to prevent it going to war. But once again,
behind this Stalinist anti-revolutionary Revisionism lurks the assumption that
the imperialist countries are steadily collapsing economically anyway, and that
sooner or later, they will just fall into the hands of the working class like
ripe plums. All that is needed from the international workers movement is to
guard against letting the imperialists get away with starting another war.
And this was the essence of the "less
difficult" task facing the international communist movement than the
Bolsheviks had to face in 1917, as Stalin explained it to the 19th Congress of
the CPSU in 1952, again implying that bourgeois imperialist decline and decay
would make winning power off them relatively easier.
The following passage in 'Economic problems'
finally spells out the warped 'theory' behind this anti-revolutionary retreat
from Marxist science, which doomed the world movement to an impossible
perspective, and condemned it to inevitable ultimate total confusion:
"The result [of East European socialist
camp cooperation] is a fast pace of industrial development in these countries.
It may be confidently said that with this pace of industrial development, it
will soon come to pass that these countries will not only be in no need of
imports from capitalist countries, but will themselves feel the necessity of
finding an outside market for their surplus products.
"But it follows from this that the
sphere of exploitation of the world's resources by the major capitalist
countries (USA, Britain, France) will not expand but contract; that their
opportunities for sale in the world markets will deteriorate, and that their
industries will be operating more and more below capacity. That in fact is what
is meant by the deepening of the general crisis of the world capitalist system
in connection with the disintegration of the world market.
"This is felt by the capitalists themselves
for it would be difficult for them not to feel the loss of such markets as the
USSR and China. They are trying to offset these difficulties with the 'Marshall
Plan', the war in Korea, frantic rearmament, and industrial militarization. But
that is very much like a drowning man clutching at a straw.
"This state of affairs has confronted
the economists with two questions:
"a) Can it be affirmed that the thesis
expounded by Stalin [talking about himself in the third person] before the
Second World War regarding the relative stability of markets in the period of
the general crisis of capitalism is still valid?
"b) Can it be affirmed that the thesis
expounded by Lenin in the spring of 1916, namely that in spite of the decay of
capitalism, "on the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than
before", ‑ is still valid?
"I think that it cannot. In view of the
new conditions to which the Second World War has given rise, both these theses
must be regarded as having lost their validity".
This was the gospel in
1952. Despite the start of the open debunking of Stalin in 1956, and the
beginnings of China's doubts about how well Moscow understood the world, the
November 1960 statement of the 81 communist parties, including China, continued
promoting the universal perspective "to achieve the socialist revolution
by peaceful means" on the basis that "the pillars of the capitalist
system have become so decayed that the ruling imperialist bourgeoisie in many
countries can no longer resist, on its own, the forces of democracy and
progress which are gaining in scope and strength. The decay of capitalism is particularly marked in the USA, the
chief imperialist , country .... Never has the conflict between the productive
forces and relations of production in the capitalist countries been so acute
...." etc,
Build Leninism. EPSR