Author: Adrian Greeman

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
I.L.W.P. BULLETIN
Weekly newspaper of the International Leninist Workers Party (P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL)((GPO Regd.)   
No 0567 October 10th 1990                                                                                                                              10p 

Paralysed crisis threatening imperialism is the key to Gulf turmoil & USSR stupidity

Bush's budget farce of having to prepare to close down American government completely because of irreconcilable contradictions within US imperialism's terminal condition, - is the crucial thread in dramatic world developments.

Unless the incipient collapse of Washington's international domination is placed at the centre of events, as the Bulletin alone has consistently explained, then there can only be confusion, in understanding and activity, in the enormous upheavals now unfolding.

The 'left' swamp of hostility to the proletarian dictatorship philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, - from the Labour Party to the Trots, - will criminally mislead the working class in the revolutionary chaos ahead because of this incurable philistine inability to analyse things correctly.

Every one of the 57 varieties has, - because insolubly infected with petty-bourgeois anti-communism, - fallen for the 'free world' propaganda blitzkrieg in making the 'collapse of communism' the starting out point in trying to explain the latest startling turns.

Every one is hopelessly wrong, pushing the whole swamp into anti-Leninist positions over the renewed imperialist warmongering,(see detailed examination below).

It is vitally important to grasp the depth of imperialism's crisis at the heart of current matters. The lack of this perception is making the anti-Gulf-war movement a sorry effort, and spreading appalling misunderstanding about the whole historic struggle for socialism.

The paralysis in the USA over the budget is an extension of the crisis the American bourgeoisie has already been thrust into by irresistible Japanese and German competition.

Imperialist confidence and decisiveness is undermined in all directions as soon as it senses it faces defeat from rival imperialist forces or in the international class struggle.

The American ruling class has never really recovered from the humiliation it received in Vietnam.

The Reagan years were full of arms-race bluster, and of anti-Third-World and anti-communist bullying or attempted subversion of the socialist camp.

Tripoli was bombed, - very clumsily and ineffectively, - and tiny Grenada was successfully invaded, - just.

But despite all the Reagan bluster, little else was undertaken or achieved in 're-establishing American world dominance'.

And in the midst of all the swaggering and sanctimonious bullshit, the USA finally woke up to find itself hopelessly in debt on foreign trade and in domestic budget spending which together had 'financed' the massive empty Reagan showmanship.

This deficit-spending credit boom began to collapse, bankrupting the American state and society internally, and undermining the world trading role of the dollar internationally with inconceivably catastrophic consequences if the cut-throat financial and industrial competition from Japan and Germany could not be halted.

The Reagan regime, of all things, was forced into a complete reversal of its bilious Cold War arms-race extravagance ("bombing of the evil empire commences in five minutes'" - in Reagan's notorious overheard 'joke' aside) and to reach limitation agreements with the USSR in several directions so that America could concentrate all its might on the really deadly threat, from Germany and Japan in the international capitalist market-place (and subsequently, inevitably, in the political sphere too if the trade-war was lost).

Certain costly lines of military expansion were curtailed, - and mutual reductions of expenditure in certain areas were agreed with Moscow where a 'stalemate' could be pretended to the revisionist defeatists in the Kremlin bureaucracy, - such as in Afghanistan, for example.

Meanwhile, the CIA switched emphasis completely over to economic warfare in the international marketplace, but particularly against German and Japanese competition and against potential raw-material trouble spots from Third World 'upstarts' such as fundamentalism, or Arab nationalism in the Middle East.

Washington tried to keep up its expensive interest in Star Wars and in other costly advanced-technology weaponry as one area in which it hoped it would still be able to outmanoeuvre, outsmart, or outweigh Japan and Germany in any final all-out political/economic confrontation.

But most anxiety began to be concentrated on how to prevent financial bankruptcy in the 'free markets' where German and Japanese industry and international banking were rapidly forcing US imperialism into the position of also-rans, which could only end in America's collapse.

Nothing has improved. If anything, things have got worse. The American bourgeoisie continues to do very badly in the trade war, and the tensions and contradictions this has thrown up in the class and social set-up inside the USA have now produced this appalling rift in the government circles themselves, leading to this current unprecedented budget paralysis.

It may be patched up this time. But the message is on the wall. US imperialist world domination is finished, - economically undermined by the very workings of the 'free-market' system itself, - the same bludgeon that Washington itself so effectively used over decades to demoralise the philistine defeatists in Moscow (and which is still being used by bourgeois propaganda in general to continue bamboozling the Gorbachevites).

Colossal spending cuts are going to have to be imposed over every aspect of US imperialist economic activity, both internal and international.

This in turn means enormous disruption to the existing domestic class alignment, severely worsening the prospects of several sectors, and thereby undermining the whole political 'balance' of America, and the entire international balance of class forces too. 

This can then only cause even further splits and disruption within particular classes and elites as bitter recriminations and 'no surrender' stands set in. The scene is then set for even wider political upheavals of an even larger scale such as fascist chauvinism on the right, such as might be represented by the David Duke racist phenomenon in Louisiana; and proletarian revolt on the left such as revived black power movements, and rising ghetto anarchy in general.

Bush may calm things down again for the moment. But there can be no mistaking the significance of the astonishing potential breakdown in American government, - precisely reflecting the truly insoluble catastrophe represented by the Savings and Loan debt fiasco which has placed debt burdens on the American budget which are virtually unrepayable, - and the threatened major bank insolvency which runs alongside this collapse of the whole Reagan credit-boom speculation.

This is seen at its most grotesque in the collapse of speculative property values right across America (and beyond), in the collapse of the 'leveraged' (i.e. debt-financed) takeover mania, and other greedy scandals of feverish 'private enterprise'.

It is at the same time as this 'market economy' debacle is unfolding, and as a result of Reagan's scuttle away from his brashest Cold War arms-race extravagance, - that Gorbachevism has been taking already-existing revisionist defeatism (Stalinism) to its logical conclusion, - the complete liquidation of the anti-imperialist struggle.

The philistine-opportunist limitations of Stalinism had sought from the very beginning in the 1920s to 'play safe' over revolutionary situations as often as possible to avoid 'unnecessary mistakes', and to avoid 'provoking imperialism unnecessarily', etc.

By the 1940s, this had turned Lenin's intelligent diplomatic tactic of 'peaceful coexistence' (to keep all the counter-revolutionary bourgeois-imperialist forces from uniting all at once against the Soviet Union) into deranged delusions of possible fulltime class-collaboration with imperialism, which Gorbachevism has now taken to their nightmare obscenity of liquidating not just the anti-imperialist struggle but the whole idea of a planned socialist world into the bargain too.

This retreat from its international socialist revolutionary responsibilities had been an aspect of Stalinist revisionism from the start (see ILWP Books vols 3,4,5,6,7,11, and 13). By the time systematic bureaucratic degeneration (the inevitable result of Stalin's cover-up of his muddling of Leninist internationalism) had reached as low as Gorbachevism, then the slightest gesture towards class collaborationism with the USSR by imperialism was bound to be lapped up by the Kremlin opportunists.

The 'collapse' of communism has been created entirely by Gorbachevite philistine misleadership, coming as the last hopeless example of cowardly revisionist weakness and muddleheadedness, capitulating to relentless bourgeois ideological pressure.

As soon as Reaganite bluster said it would no longer pursue its bloodcurdling threats against the 'evil empire', the anti-Leninist bureaucrat Gorbachev's cowardly revisionism could not wait to begin dismantling the 'dangerous' and 'difficult' international revolutionary class struggle completely (from which earlier stages of Stalinist degeneration had already retreated quite a long way).

It stands things completely on their head, and abandons all class analysis of imperialism, to declare (as the 'left' swamp does) that the American bourgeoisie has followed its recent course of action in response to 'communist collapse'.

Exactly the opposite. The degenerate anti-Leninist bureaucracy in Moscow intensified its international class-collaborating opportunism (the essence of Stalinism's subjective arbitrariness) towards uninhibited bourgeois idealism the moment such a philosophy could be 'justified' by the 'disarmament summit talks' forced on Reagan by the need for US imperialism to concentrate on all-out inter-imperialist trade war at the expense of gratuitous blood-curdling (and costly) Cold War stunts.

The only irresistible material force at work in all this, dictating all these immense upheavals, was the uncontrollably ripening inter-imperialist economic crisis of credit-boom-period rival mountains of 'surplus' capital which cannot all possibly continue to survive profitably. It is now unstoppable trade-war to-the-death to wipe each other out, or be wiped out. 

There were no great irresistible historic forces at work in East Europe forcing changes there. It was only in the shallow impressionistic 'analyses' of the bourgeois press, - copied by the 'left' swamp, - that all the fanciful talk of 'peaceful revolutions', (initially transformed into imaginary 'workers revolutions' by the more hysterical anti-communist 'left' swamp so eager to welcome the collapse of the proletarian-dictatorship workers states), - was invented, - inspired by the usual flood of news-feeds by the CIA spin doctors.

It was painfully obvious throughout this sordid revisionist farce in East Europe that the liquidationist leadership had simply decided to no longer fight the non-stop counter-revolutionary subversion by the Western-financed petty-bourgeois and reactionary elements, - in paralysed sympathy with Moscow's decision to stand down the Red Army from all future struggle against counter-revolution in East Europe while Gorbachevism pursued international class-collaborationism full blast.

This suicidal capitulation to the power of bourgeois 'democracy' (in reality capitulation to eventual domination by the capitalist class) was accompanied by a couple of minor surges of middle-class dissident hysteria, grossly magnified by the Western media and the CIA spin doctors, such as the East German holidaymakers going West via Hungary, or Lithuanian catholics staging bogus hunger strikes, or Czech students sitting down in Wenceslas Square, etc, - but there was not a single rebellious stunt which the East European workers state authorities could not have continued easily to control just as they had always competently dealt with far more threatening reactionary stunts from time to time over more than 40 years.

Class forces were of course involved in these disruptive protests, but the decisive influence on how things turned out was the liquidationist turn by the ruling bureaucracies which finally took Stalinist revisionism to its logical class-collaborating conclusion of total abandonment of the anti-imperialist struggle to which it had already come so close theoretically in 1945 pushed back from complete liquidationism over further world revolutionary socialist advance only by the West's reactionary Cold War turn.

If the irresistible spread of revolutionary advance through Asia (Korea, China, Vietnam, etc) as a result of inter-imperialist World War II had not obliged the 'victorious' US imperialist arrogant wealth to impose a ferocious international Cold War and anti-communist crusade, then who knows what more class-collaborating concessions the Moscow bureaucracy might have been ready for in 1945, even further than the considerable-enough retreats from revolutionary consciousness and struggle which were made by the West European CP 'peaceful road' idiocies, the undermining of the Greek CP's civil war, the acceptance of Zionist imperialist colonialism in Palestine, etc, etc.

Thus, the 'left' swamp's hysterical anti-communist wishful thinking about 'political revolutions' against the dictatorship of the proletariat in East Europe was merely an extension of its notorious 1980 ecstasy over Lech Walesa and his 'genuine rank-and-file socialist revolution', whom no one now disputes has always been a near-fascist stooge for imperialist counter-revolution.

The entire 'left' swamp has been caught out again in failing to grasp what is really happening in the international balance of class forces, just as it was all caught out then over Solidarnosc, - without exception, despite the Sparts, the RCG, and the 'Leninist' all pretending subsequently to have 'come down correctly against Solidarnosc counter-revolution'.

The truth is that what none of them did for fully six months or even longer was to come even remotely anywhere near declaring total unconditional support for the Polish workers state (as poor a condition as it was in,) - the only possible Leninist line.

Marxist-Leninist science is all about the international balance of class forces and understanding what kind of, how, when, and where, revolutionary developments could next make the best impact on weakening world counter-revolutionary imperialist strength overall.

For all the need to maintain non-stop Leninist polemics against the revisionist stupidities of the socialist camp leadership, it was nevertheless vital for the overall international anti-imperialist struggle (raging then in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Afghanistan, Grenada, Palestine, etc) at that time to inflict the most ruthless defeat possible on the Vatican and CIA's lavish counter-revolutionary stunt around Lech Walesa's bogus 'independent trade union' which was nothing but pure anti-communist anti-Marxist political reaction riddled with the worst-kind of near-fascist Polish nationalism, catholic obscurantism, and capitalist opportunism, - as is all now obvious.

Only the ILWP said so loudly, clearly, promptly, and at great length within days of Walesa appearing over the Gdansk shipyard wall.

The Sparts cheered on this counter-revolution for nine months along with the rest of the swamp, only belatedly tumbling to it that Solidarnosc was in reality a 'CIA company union' after all the colossal international propaganda counter-revolutionary damage had already been done, - with the aid of the 'lefts'.

The RCG just kept silent for six months, letting its swamp friends get on with the 'political revolution' Trotskyite hysteria, - but most importantly uttering not one word of support for the Polish workers state (and very few subsequently either).

The 'Leninist' was later on the scene, and from this, - and from its then niche in the heart of Stalinist revisionism (about which it made such an obscene opportunist rationalising fuss about the 'importance' of remaining organisationally loyal to, - euphemistically referring to it as the 'official and only possible world communist movement', etc, - a reactionary pedantry which even the 'Leninists' were finally forced to abandon because the counter-revolutionary stench got too much even for them), - avoided the more obvious pro-Solidarnosc hysteria pitfalls.

But what the 'Leninist' would not do is declare enthusiastic and unconditional support for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat around the Polish workers state, - which was in truth in that instance 'the only one possible' and therefore a serious political factor, - (unlike the barmy notion that Leninist polemics can only make sense under one particular roof.)

There was only one actual Polish workers state. And that was the one which had to be defended, - unconditionally, regardless of the colossal amount of inter-communist Leninist polemics which had to be directed towards it.

The ILWP fought for this Leninist line. The entire 'left' swamp watched world reaction pile up monstrous material and propaganda damage against the Polish workers state, either gleefully joining in, or else keeping cynically reserved.

Anti-Leninist philistinism has now made even further inroads, - both into the 'left' swamp and into Eastern Europe. But this deepening anti-communist climate is not making any of the revisionists very happy, either with themselves or with each other.

And the Gulf crisis has again glaringly exposed the swamp's hopeless petty-bourgeois political cowardice, - all incapable of urging the West's defeat at the hands of the vilified Saddam Iraqi regime, - the only Leninist line, - just as they were incapable of declaring unconditional support for the vilified Polish workers state in 1980-81.

True to form as one of the queerest of the 'left' groups, the RCG, fence-sits the problem by noisily calling instead for 

"Self-determination for Kurdistan, Victory to the Palestinian Revolution. Imperialist troops out of the Gulf",

which certainly wins the prize for fake-'left' bizarre evasion. The implication of this is that the massive US-imperialist-organised conspiracy against Iraq is opposing the 'equally-imperialist' forces of Saddam's regime. This is nonsense. The Iraqi regime was originally (and not long ago) a form of anti-imperialist national-liberation struggle. Its recent and current hostility to the way American imperialism dominates all affairs in the Middle East is an echo of that origin, regardless of the truly odious past opportunism of the reactionary Saddam clique. It would be a brilliant revolutionary development in the worldwide balance of class forces if the big US imperialist conspiracy was to be militarily thrashed by aggressive-opportunist Iraqi nationalism, regardless of the regime's unstable and unsavoury character.

The RCG sets itself up for this confused emphasis (which pointlessly declares that:

"The Iraqi-Kuwaiti clash is a contest between two reactionary ruling classes for control over the wealth and oil of the region" 

which leaves out the Western imperialist stake completely), by ascribing the US aggression to Washington's response to the 'collapse of communism', which of course totally overlooks the real driving force which is US imperialism facing collapse.

The RCG declares: 

"The collapse of the socialist bloc and the effective end of the USSR's role as an international power has significantly added to the brazen and arrogant militarism and aggression being displayed by the imperialist powers. For the moment there is no countervailing force or influence to stem the tide of imperialist aggression....The collapse of the socialist bloc has whetted imperialist appetites for plunder, and increased the danger of war."

What naïve confusion, and what pathetic defeatist gibberish.

Capitalist crisis is driving the world to inter-imperialist world war III, - nothing else. The murderous cut-throat trade-war competition between rival monopoly-imperialist 'surplus' capital mountains needs no encouragement from Moscow revisionism to 'seek new plunder', - nor ever has.

As for there allegedly being "no countervailing force", then what is the huge armageddon build-up in the Middle East all about?

This is just Western petty-bourgeois racist arrogance by these weird RCG poseurs in totally ignoring the power of Arab nationalism. For a group of middle-class moralisers with unhealthy guilt feelings, who invent charges of 'racism' against opponents in order to disrupt arguments for Leninism, - this is an appropriately humiliating revelation of philistine backwardness.

But instead of coming off the fence and admitting that they cannot stomach a perspective of the Western forces being defeated by the Arab nationalist forces of the 'terrorist butcher' Saddam Hussein, the RCG will duck the issue again by accusing the ILWP of 'anti-Kurdistan racism' or some such nonsense.

Considerable elements of Kurdish and Palestinian nationalism are in fact enthusiastically supporting Iraq's stand precisely because it represents for the moment, whatever its many defects, the main immediate (and serious) challenge to US imperialist domination of the region, in which a humiliating defeat for the West would be welcomed by anyone with the slightest real revolutionary consciousness.

It is far from certain, of course, that a triumphant opportunist Saddam regime would be any less contemptuous of Kurdish or Palestinian legitimate self-determination rights than it has been in practice in the past (despite much anti-Zionist hot air, for example). But local systems of capitalist-colonial tyranny can never be defeated until the worldwide imperialist framework of great-power colonial tyranny has been defeated first. Revolutionaries, including Kurds and Palestinians, understand this. Posturing academic fatheads like the RCG haven't a clue.

No surprise that these 'left' charlatans are now openly peddling scandalous PAC slanders that the ANC is the 'common denominator' in all recent murder sprees (by black nationalist stooges of bourgeois anti-communism) in South Africa.

All of this is traceable back to a fundamental anti-communist defeatism and petty-bourgeois renegacy at all really difficult moments of declaring unconditional support for the dictatorship of the proletariat, common to the whole of the 'left' swamp.

At the first sign of any serious new mess that weak revisionist leadership had plunged the workers states into, hounded by hysterical anti-communist propaganda pouring out of every pore of Western society, - the petty-bourgeois 'revolutionaries' in the West have always shirked the fight initially.

Refusing to call for the West's defeat by the 'odious terrorist barbarian' Saddam Hussein (as some of the fake-"left" have joined in the racist vilification), is in continuity with refusing to call for the crushing of the Solidarnosc counter-revolution, (the only Leninist line), - or refusing to defend the downing of KAL 007, or generally refusing to laud the crucial revolutionary defence role of the KGB and the Stasi, etc; or refusing to welcome the defeat for counter-revolution in Peking last summer and expose the nonsense about the non-existent 'Tienanmen massacre' (see ILWP Books vol 16).

The 'Leninist' are back at their old posturing vomit of in words, 'unconditional solidarity with the dictatorship of the proletariat', but in practice a complete defeatist cynicism which writes off the workers states as complete failures and too hopeless to defend in reality.

Sneering (correctly) at the Morning Star fiction that Soviet 'peace pressure' had forced a reduction in Cold War imperialist warmongering, the 'Leninist' substitutes its own 'idiocy' by pretending: 

"NATO's change of attitude is nothing to do with its pacification at Soviet hands. It is merely a recognition of the fact that war against the Warsaw Pact is made redundant with the latter's collapse.. "Such a 'success' in the supposed attainment of world peace is a result of the collapse of the USSR as a prime force in world politics...The collapse of bureaucratic socialism will merely bring about internecine imperialist tensions."

As arguments above demonstrated, this astonishing armchair-socialist political ignorance puts things the wrong way round entirely. It is the financial bankruptcy and worldwide inter-imperialist economic crisis, rampaging now in Washington's budget paralysis, which forced Reagan to seek arms limitations in harmony with Soviet revisionist 'peaceful coexistence' distortions in order to step up the warmongering conflict with imperialist rivals.

The real struggle for Leninist understanding in Britain around the ILWP had already published an entire book by the end of 1988 about the approach of inter-imperialist World War III. The 'Leninist', the RCG, and other middle-class swamp posturers have begun dimly to grasp this perspective in recent months, but the incurable anti-communism of the 'Leninist' cannot avoid presenting this too as yet another wretched by-product of failure in East Europe.

This sick defeatism is a class phenomenon of the petty-bourgeoisie and manages to stand the whole of reality on its head.

Throughout the whole Solidarnosc posture which fraudulently concealed its real pro-capitalist aims, the entire 'left' swamp was sufficiently taken in by the bourgeoisie's screaming worldwide anti-communist propaganda offensive to always start out any analysis from the point of view of the whole mess being the fault of the Polish workers state.

This too places reality completely on its head, and it is crucial to get this right for any hope of developing a movement of revolutionary consciousness among workers.

The whole problem begins, not with revisionist weaknesses in the workers states, but with imperialist counter-revolutionary subversion.

By never grasping that simple reality, the whole of Trotskyism was reduced to a lifetime of sterile cynicism. The 'Leninist' is now well into this sectarian defeatism despite all its earlier anti-Trot pretensions.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater was always a hopelessly defeatist approach to the problems of bureaucratism, and completely un-Leninist (see ILWP Books vols 3,4,5,6,&7).

But the 'Leninist' rump of the revisionist CPGB now pontificates that those resisting Gorbachev's capitalist-restorationist proposals:

are not defending socialism in defending the collapsed bureaucratic plan. The halcyon days to which they wish to return are dead and gone. What we see with the Ligachev camp is the death throes of an inert and ossified caste. This is not only being expressed through the medium of pseudo-Leninist jargon. A substantial base of opposition in the congress came from the 'united workers front' which combines this bureaucratic hostility to market relations…

Another section of these 'Marxist-Leninists' is the upper echelons military bureaucracy, who have even been accused by sections of the 'radical' intelligentsia of hatching plots for a military coup. To do what? Like their co-thinker Ligachev, they have no coherent alternative policy. Any such attempt would quickly degenerate into low farce[...]

[...]It is impossible to give any backing to forces whose commitment to socialism goes no further than empty rhetoric as part of a self-serving reactionary strategy, whether of the Gorbachev or Ligachev varieties. No answers in the interest of the working class are coming from any section of the old ruling caste. It has proven itself bankrupt beyond redemption.

Almost delightedly, the CPGB 'Leninist' defeatists add that "the restoration of market relations would sweep away the basis for this", and then approvingly quote the capitalist-press Independent, sneering dismissively at 

'government and party functionaries who fear they will lose their privileges guaranteed them by the centralised command system.

This routine bourgeois humbug against 'bureaucratic government' misses the real crime of Stalinism which was not bureaucracy but abandoning the crucial understanding of world socialist revolutionary perspectives. It is a million miles from Lenin's own blasts against bureaucracy which were in order to strengthen the Soviet workers state, not demolish it.

The 'Leninist' and the entire Trotskyite swamp have never grasped this.

Such defeatist capitulation to routine post-1917 Western biliousness against the Soviet workers state whose working survival (no matter how greatly in need of constructive Leninist criticism) for 75 years has so completely haunted every waking hour of imperialist anti-communist reaction, - must have been really sickened when military intervention did restore a 'bureaucratic plan' recently, - in Peking. It in not hard to see the CPGB 'Leninist' rump ending up with the openly pro-capitalist 'Marxism Today' CPGB rump and together pillorying, say, the Cuban secret police for bureaucratically protecting Cuba's 'bureaucratic plan' from counter-revolutionary subversion.

The true farce is the total anti-Leninist philistine confusion inflicted on the workers movement by CPGB revisionism and the 'Left' swamp over the last 65 years, to which the 'Leninist' is just adding a 58th variety of anti-communist defeatism. All that the swamp's abstract "no bureaucracy" posturing has meant in practice is "no workers state" at all. In reality, these armchair socialists would prefer it if there had never been these attempts to build socialism in East Europe since 1917 at all, - as the 'Leninist' defeatist bile only bothers thinly to disguise these days.
	
Comically, these cynics have penned their own epitaph in jeering at others in the swamp for their anti-communism in naïvely pretending that 'counter-revolution' in East Europe was going to be the 'political revolution' towards 'real' socialism. No so, replies the CPGB 'Leninist', thinking it is being so 'left' and so smart. The collapse of the 'self-serving reactionary centralised command system' is the collapse of 'bureaucratic socialism' totally. 'And good riddance' the 'Leninist' obviously feels, if not quite pronouncing it.

Their anti-swamp sneer is one self-demolishing cynicism too far:

'The petty bourgeois left in Britain has historically projected a model of western bourgeois democracy onto the workers states, and found them wanting. Like their big brothers in the ranks of imperialism itself, these elements went into paroxysms of delight over the counter-revolutions in the socialist countries; now, as the disintegrative and disruptive effects of these reactionary changes become explicit they are starting to get qualms.

Their support of counter-revolution in Eastern Europe has not been a 'hiccup' in an otherwise sound methodology. It has been rotten methodology producing rotten politics. Individuals may be salvageable; as organisations they have crossed the Rubicon.

Indeed the swamp has. All of it.

Also exposed by events are the illusions of the big bourgeoisie in pretending that with the 'collapse of communism' and the 'end of history', there could be no serious threats left to a virtually 'eternal' and 'benevolent' world leadership by Western imperialism.

But as the ILWP has demonstrated in these last Bulletins from the very beginning of the Middle East flare-up, what is happening is really the deepening of the crisis of imperialism, and in particular the crisis of tottering international domination by the American monopoly-bourgeoisie.

The sickness of the credit-boosted deficit-riddled US economy has inflicted another paralysing blow to American credibility with this latest budget fiasco:

The new deal hardly deserves to be called a budget. Its claim to cut $40 billion from this year's deficit is a pious wish. Having promised to reduce the unpopular cuts in the Medicare budget for the elderly, and to spare the wintry New England states from higher fuel taxes, the budget does not specify where the cuts will fall. That is to be left to the congressional committees.

And the vaunted $40 billion in cuts hardly begins to attack the deficit, which this year is nudging $300 billion in real terms. The cost of bailing out the bankrupt savings and loans industry, America's building societies, has been kept off budget. So has most of the cost of the Gulf operation.

The budget assumes a 3.8 per cent growth in GNP this year, when the economy is at best stalled and may be heading into a recession, and also assumes that interest rates will fall to 5.8 per cent.

This year's federal budget will be some $1,300 billion. Under the package agreed by the House in the early hours of yesterday, total spending will go up by about $100 billion from last year. The deficit will in fact go up by $35 billion, and some fancy accountancy will be required to stop it triggering the draconian cuts of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings laws.

"People who maintain that all these are real cuts, that this is an austerity budget, are just lying to the American people," James Miller, a former White House budget director under President Reagan, said yesterday, in a statement which suggests the deal will have difficulty attracting conservative support.
The budget crisis has become a symbol of the inability of the US constitutional system to tackle big and sensitive issues with a government divided between a 10-year Republican tenure of the White House, and a 36-year Democratic grip on the House of Representatives.

"We are no longer a working institution," complained Nancy Johnson, a Republican congresswoman, yesterday.

The uneasy coalition which President Reagan built of traditional moderate Republicans and fervent ideological conservatives has begun to fall apart in this Congress, as the Republican Party whip, Newt Gingrich, led the fight against the deal his own President had agreed.

By the end of this week, the US national debt will be $3,195 billion, more than the combined GDP of Germany and Japan. The burden of paying interest on that debt is expected to be $260 billion this year, and by 1992, it will be $293 billion, more than the Pentagon budget. It will be costing more to service the debt than to defend the country.

In New York they closed the Statue of Liberty, and in Washington tourists were turned away from the White House as Congress and President sought to blame each other for a budget crisis which leaves the US government drifting and leaderless while war threatens and recession looms over the economy.

For once, there is a serious issue of political ideology at stake. There have been repeated attempts by the leaders on both sides of the House at a compromise that would grant Mr Bush the cuts in capital gains taxes he demands, and pay for them by flattening out the income tax bubble, which currently means that people earning over $200,000 a year pay tax at a lower rate.

But the conservative Republicans are against flattening the tax bubble, and the liberal wing of the Democrats are against giving the rich the gift of lower capital gains taxes.	

Mr Bush yesterday sought to reduce the creeping disaster overtaking the US government's finances to a clash of wills between the Republican President, and the Democrat-controlled Congress.

The polls yesterday suggested that the public was blaming the entire political establishment in Washington, President and Congress alike. A Time magazine poll suggested that a clear majority of voters would have supported the budget agreement which the Congress, rejected last week, while private polls taken by the party committees suggested that President Bush had lost 10 per cent of his approval rating almost overnight.

"The President has created a kind of paper crisis," Tom Foley, the Speaker of the House and Democrat leader, said yesterday. "The last thing we need is setting the fiscal house on fire just as we are trying to rebuild it."

The international implications of the crisis and the weakening of the presidency have begun to strike home. Political commentator Kevin Phillips, a former White House aide, said yesterday: "You cannot be the leader of a new world order while your economy is coming unravelled back home."

ASTONISHINGLY, a majority of both Democrat and Republican Congressmen voted against the compromise that their leaders had put together with the White House after months of negotiation. Nor has there been much sign over the weekend that the Congressmen are prepared to get their constitutional act together.

On Saturday night, this tragedy of the political system became a black farce as they argued for 58 minutes over whether or not they should break for dinner.

Throughout the 1980s, when Congress proved obstructive, Ronald Reagan went over their heads and appealed directly to the American people.

President Bush tried to do that last week, in a TV address to the nation in which he appealed to the viewers to write or phone their Congressmen and urge them to vote for the budget package.

Not only did the public fail to heed the President's call; the overwhelming majority of those who did call their Congressman were telling him to vote against it.

The result is a grievous, and possibly decisive weakening of the President's stature in this most political of cities. Bush has already been forced to climb down from his election promise of "No New Taxes", and has got nothing in return. He summoned his Republican Congressmen, and they ignored him. Bush appealed to the people, and they turned their backs.

"When they smell blood in the water in this town, they go", commented Robert Strauss, former Democrat National Committee chairman.

This week, to keep the government going and to pay the wages of the troops in the Gulf and the bureaucrats in Washington, some sort of paper will be pasted over the cracks. It may even be hailed as a statesmanlike agreement. Do not be fooled. With a Middle Eastern war and an economic recession both looming, this political system is acting like a banana republic.

A COLLAPSE in the international Gatt negotiations, and the outbreak of global agricultural trade war, inched closer yesterday, following a threatened revolt by EC farm ministers against proposed cuts in EC agricultural subsidies.

A 30 per cent cut in farm subsidies has been proposed by the Commission in an effort to meet demands from the US and other Gatt governments for the dismantling of the Community's Common Agricultural Policy.

The farm ministers refused to endorse the proposal and postponed their meeting until next week in an attempt to prevent their colleagues — the EC foreign trade ministers — agreeing a package which many believe will lead to violent protests on Europe's farms.

The EC farm commissioner, Ray MacSharry, who last week was criticised by some fellow commissioners for not being tough enough on the farmers, was yesterday told he had gone too far in bowing to pressure from the Bush Administration.

The German farm minister, Ignaz Kiechle, was even blunter in rejecting the threat of collapse in the Gatt talks. "If I am offered the choice between the collapse of the Gatt talks and the ruination of 70 per cent of my farmers I will choose the former," he said. This means that when the final decision on whether to endorse the Commission plan is taken by EC trade ministers on Wednesday they too may feel obliged to tone down the Mac-Sharry proposals.

If this happens the European Community will have the embarrassing task of back-tracking from proposals already denounced by the US, Australia, Canada and many other countries as quite inadequate in their target reduction of subsidies.

The French minister also warned that his government, under growing pressure from protesting fanners, was also likely to reject the plan.

Altogether nine out of the 12 EC farm ministers said it went too far. Only Britain's agricultural minister, John Gummer, with some support from the Dutch and Danish ministers, said that agricultural support, and export subsidies in particular, would have to be cut if disaster was to be avoided in the Gatt negotiations.

The only chance of a compromise last night appeared to be an undertaking by the European Community governments that they would find the money to compensate farmers' income for the threatened drop in support prices.

But these governments show little enthusiasm for increasing agricultural spending to support the incomes of any but the smallest and poorest farmers.

The prospects of a Gatt agreement are being further complicated by the budget crisis in Washington. This has prevented the administration from formally tabling its own proposals for a more than 70 per cent cut in farm subsidies over the next 10 years.

Among other expressions, this loss of credibility in any 'masterful US manipulation of developments' is seen in the increasing doubts about the sense in backing the Kuwaiti feudal circus in the first place, - especially at the cost of a horrific Gulf war which could devastate the region:

OVER A month ago Japan's Prime Minister, Toshiki Kaifu, promised to send 100 volunteer doctors and nurses to the Gulf to treat non-military casualties. Seventeen flew from Japan in the middle of September. 'And that's it,' mumbled a desperately embarrassed Foreign Ministry official the other night, 'we haven't confirmed any more volunteers.'

His superior, Nobutoshi Akao, put it more diplomatically at a press briefing. 'The response is still, well...disappointing.'

Viewed from Tokyo, the real 'Gulf crisis' seems increasingly to be that between Japan and the outside world, particularly the United States.

But more importantly, what appears in the West to be Japan's indecisiveness, insularity and pussyfooting over Iraq and Kuwait actually reflects a quite coherent resistance to becoming embroiled in a military conflict over which Japan was never consulted — in a region with which it has no cultural or historical ties — and which runs counter to 45 years of peace, ordained and enshrined in the US-drafted Constitution that supposedly took away Japan's right to wage war or maintain troops.	

'If you think that the United States has or had a Vietnam syndrome, imagine how much stronger that syndrome has been for Japan since 1945,' Taizo Watanabe, the Foreign Ministry's chief spokesman, said recently.' 'Simply rubber-stamping foreign demands is not the same as taking initiatives and is certainly not responsible,' he said.

For any Japanese citizen with an 'America complex' it is a short but dangerous step from resentment to outright hostility towards Washington. A retired senior Foreign Ministry official said recently: 'Many Japanese economists are saying that the real reason for the conflict is that American, British and French oil companies want to make more money to pay for expensive oil exploration.'

Then there was the young journalist who argued: 'Iraq and Kuwait were your colonies; you, Britain, created them. What does it have to do with us?'

And why should the United States, he asked, think it can treat Japan 'like its slave'? Suddenly articles in the sensational Japanese press, such as 'Cheating America' in the Shukan Post last month, which dealt exclusively and sympathetically with Jordanian protests against US deployment in Saudi Arabia, begin to seem alarming.

A US commander once described US forces based in Japan as the 'cork in the bottle'. Now that America has pulled the cork, and Kaifu has proposed a new law which would allow the SDF to join 'peacekeeping forces' sent abroad, one must wonder where this antipathy and resentment towards the United States may eventually lead.

Some 2,000 marched from the Kuwait embassy to Trafalgar Square, passing the Knights-bridge shops they had once patronised, chanting "Saddam, Saddam, you will bum, Kuwait, Kuwaiti, will return," but they were joined by few of the half-million ethnic Arabs, including 100,000 Iraqis, who are thought to live in Britain.

Britain's fragmented Arab community has not been united in support of the Kuwaitis, and there is little sympathy for the immensely wealthy al-Sabah family. 

There is growing disenchantment, even among Kuwaitis, with the way the al-Sabah ruling family, who hold all leading posts in the Kuwaiti government, has handled the crisis.

"The pre-invasion mentality has not changed. It is even going from bad to worse," said Ahmed al-Khatib, a prominent member of the Kuwait opposition. 

"By showing that everything belonged to the al-Sabah household, they are undermining the sympathy we have been enjoying since the invasion," he said.

Kuwait's overseas investments, which run to more than $100 billion, in addition to the vast personal wealth of the al-Sabah family, is managed by the London-based Kuwait Investment Office, now under the direct control of the al-Sabah family. Some 50 of the 1,200 members of the family are in London, including the younger brother of the Emir; Sheikh Khaled al-Ahmed al-Sabah, but none addressed the demonstration. Instead, three of the four speakers were foreigners who had lived in Kuwait.

Opposition leaders who were members of the national assembly suspended during the Iran-Iraq war, have rejected offers from Saddam Hussein to take part in a puppet government, but are pressing the al-Sabah family to allow genuine democratic power sharing when Kuwait is liberated.

The failure of the Kuwait government to rally support among the exiled community in Britain is significant, as London has replaced Beirut as a centre for political debate, with eight daily and 20 monthly newspapers published here. 

There are also growing fears about whether the US military could win a Gulf war anyway, reflecting the economic and political chaos in Washington. The Rambo mood seems to be evaporating as the heat and sand of the desert begin to shatter the confidence and mechanical reliability of the bloated bourgeois American, forces.

Even more debilitating are the increasing longer-term doubts everywhere about what capitalist boom is all for anyway, as economic tensions and cut-throat trade-war competitiveness seem only to lead everywhere to a flourishing of corruption and fascist chauvinism, a certain recipe for making inter-imperialist World War III inevitable by the end of the decade:

Even if he loses, Duke has established a credibility which promises to make him the George Wallace of the Yuppie generation. The polls give him 25 to 30 per cent, but the pollsters say "he flies below radar''. As in his election to the State legislature last year, many voters will not declare their support outside the privacy of the polling booth. At his foot-stomping, cheering campaign meetings, many in the crowd refuse to give their names, but their is no doubting the strength of his appeal.

He has done this in the face of a ferocious campaign of TV ads which feature a 1978 film clip of Duke standing with his arm raised in a Nazi- salute and chanting 'White Victory" before the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan, and a hostile press bombardment which runs his picture beside Adolf Hitler. He has turned this Senate race into what his foes call a "referendum on hate".

For Duke, it is "the election campaign where we are showing that the biggest problem facing America today is the rise of the welfare underclass".	

"And you can spell that N-I-G-G-E-R," grins the good ol' boy drinking Budweisers at the back of the Yellow Rose saloon.

"The rising welfare underclass is the greatest source of our violent crime, tax waste, and decline of public education," says Duke. "Many welfare mothers are having illegitimate children faster than our taxes can be raised to pay for them all." The word "black" does not have to cross his lips.

He tells his enthralled crowd a tale of the first baby born In New Orleans this year being the eighth child of a welfare mother: "All eight born in the hospital at taxpayers' expense. In Louisiana it costs about $4,000 a year to educate a child in public school. Eight, times four is about $30,000 a year. In 10 years, that mother is costing $300,000 in education alone. And you haven't talked about welfare payments, food stamps, housing; you haven't talked about police, about court costs and corrections. Every child, born to the welfare system costs over $100,000, and that's if the child doesn't get into serious criminal activity."

ON THE face of it, Duke should be an easy man to discredit. Quite apart from the racism, he has had an odd career. He has written pseudonymous books, including a sex manual called Finders Keepers which includes some interesting advice on exercising the vaginal muscles, sexual teasing and other ways to "really turn a man on".

His vanity is remarkable. He admits to having had cosmetic surgery, and one radio journalist laughingly recalls him slipping out mid-interview to shower and blow-dry his tinted hair. Blond, blue-eyed and slimly athletic, he has remade himself into the model of what he once called "the beau ideal of Aryan manhood".

His Klan record is only the beginning. He founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People, and edited its journal which featured articles on partitioning the US on racial lines, with all Jews being moved to Manhattan and Long Island, which would become "West Israel". Until last year, he sold neo-Nazi literature from his home.

Beth Rickey, one of the leading anti-Duke members of the Republican state committee, followed Duke to a populist party convention in Chicago and saw him meet American Nazi Party leaders.

"I got into a closed meeting where he met the party faithful. It was just after he won the state election. The room was full of skinheads, Klansmen, Nazis. He strode the front and said 'We did it - this is a victory for you people.' The room erupted,'' she told the Guardian.

"In a taped interview last November, Duke rambled on about whites having higher IQs, said he believed "nationality comes from genes", and argued that the US should never have entered world war two. In a debate last month, he said the blood donor supply should be racially segregated.

In an interview this week with The Guardian, Duke said that "Martin Luther King was Communist-influenced. He was working not just for equal rights but for a new social order." And he went on to define Civil Rights as "a weapon the government uses to suppress people."

Duke is running against the 1960s, rather like Mrs Thatcher, whom he deeply admires. He is against the welfare system and he condemns the results of the 1960s Civil Rights legislation, saying that the affirmative action programmes to help blacks overcome the legacy of discrimination has led to "racism against whites".

This goes down well with his audience. Southern rednecks complain that their daughters can't get hired as a secretary because "the blacks get preference". But Duke is not only getting the poor white support which sustained George Wallace. His constituency of Metairie boasts the highest number of college degrees of any district in the state. He appeals to the small businessman and entrepreneur who sees city contracts going to minority firms under affirmative action programmes. 

Kathleen Ryan, who wears bright-blue "Duke" earrings to match her eye-shadow, works on Duke's telephone bank in Lafayette, and she sees another new constituency developing after this week's Budget deal in Washington.

"We are getting call after call from the old people who say they can't afford these new Medicare payments and they are counting on David Duke to speak out and stop it."

This puts Duke's opponent, the 18-year incumbent-Democrat Senator Bennett Johnston, into a tricky position. He has to support the Budget compromise hammered out in Washington, even while it leaves him vulnerable to Duke's populist attack on the new gasoline taxes and the Medicaid cuts.

"I can win better than any other Republican, because I can win the fiscal conservative Republican vote and bring in the blue collar Democrats," Duke maintains. "I am not just a Southern phenomenon." 

His sights are set way beyond Louisiana, on a national scene where he believes voters who are tired of their incumbent politicians and resentful at America's mood of decline are ready for his new populism. Even if he is stopped this time, with a war chest of $2 million and a mailing list of 90,000 faithful supporters, the campaign of this telegenic and blow-dried George Wallace is ready for the long march through the politics of hate.

The Lombard League's potency is the result of the surge in the northern economy, its ability to capitalise on growing race hatred, and its ability to exploit tensions within the riven Communist and Christian Democrat parties. Vittorio Moioli, a communist who has written a book on the league, finds the organisation "one of the many expressions of social atomisation in this country, which has exploded in Lombardy because it is the richest area.

"The increase in standards of living, income and consumption has not been accompanied by a parallel increase in what we might call cultural wellbeing.

"It would be wrong to reduce the league to mere racism — this is ethnicism into which is written a model of a closed society. It is a very dangerous scenario — it is the new, modern, market authoritarianism."

The league will come of age in the coming months above all because of its stand against immigration, at the close of a summer of racist attacks across Italy.

When 300 Arabs were billeted in a forlorn army encampment on the edge of Milan, local residents took their objections to the league, which eagerly adopted their cause.

The league has been accused by the Italian Football Federation of fermenting racism on the terraces. The league, of course, rejects the oft-applied adjective "fascist."

"The real racists," says Mr Bossi, "are those who pretend that there is no difference between blacks and whites, those who make the laws."

This weekend, Mr Bossi began using newly confident political language, proposing that the Socialist Party in government might like to avoid a referendum by dealing with the league, and agreeing new controls on immigration which would require immigrants to prove at their point of departure that they have jobs to go to.

There is intolerance of what the league calls "big capital" controlled by Italy's industrial barons. "Big capital," says Mr Tajariol, "has its political arrangements and its political friends. It will be impossible for us to ally with these people. Our support will be the middle class and the working class."

The league is building political columns to organise these strata — Antonio Magri, a former communist voter, union organiser and then socialist councillor, is responsible for the new "Autonomous Lombard Unions" among industrial workers.

"I know factories, and I know workers. They're afraid for their standard of living," he said. "We will seek priority for jobs for Lombard workers, arguing that employers will be better off if they employ their own people.

"Workers watch funds that were going for houses in Lombardy spent on housing for immigrants and funds for services spent on immigrants' free, social assistance."

Surprisingly, Italy, with 1.5 million illegal immigrants, is the EC country with the fewest racist attacks.

In Germany, where neo-nazis have won local government posts, the extreme right netted almost 2.7 million votes in the European Parliamentary elections in 1989.

There was a clear indication that few Austrians had shaken off their past when 53 per cent of them voted for Kurt Waldheim in the country's presidential elections — this despite a huge media debate about his alleged war crimes.

According to the report, there are approximately 20,000 rightwing extremists in Austria. In Carinthia's recent federal elections, the racist ultra-right FPO party received 29 per cent of the vote and 10 per cent at local government level.

France has experienced a wave of cold-blooded murders of North Africans in which the background motives have clearly been racist. After an incident last spring in which three youngsters of North African origin were murdered, 76 per cent of people interviewed in a survey thought the victims' upbringing "could to some degree justify reactions of a racist nature". Against that background, it comes as no shock to learn that 18 per cent of French voters would like to see the Front National leader, Jean-Marie le Pen, as minister for immigration.

1989-90 — A CATALOGUE OF HATE:

• In a survey, 75 per cent of West Germans said there were too many foreigners in their country.

• Belgian police looked on passively as a group of skinheads daubed swastikas on North African youths.

• Three Frenchmen murdered a North African "just for kicks".

• Near Avignon, France, 34 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery were desecrated.

• 70,000 racist attacks were recorded in Greater London. 

The violence broke out at the centre of the country's largest ghetto, where 30,000 day labourers are crowded into hostels where they can be ignored by respectable and prosperous Japan Inc.

Walking past burned-out cars on the main road leading into the district, the smell of urine is the first noticeable difference. Wild dogs scavenge among overturned bins amid shards of broken glass; pieces of concrete have been broken up for missiles; bicycles are piled up in makeshift barricades; people sleep in doorways.

Riots last broke out here 17 years ago. The latest outbreak of hopeless violence suggests that the lot of the local labourers and down-and-outs has still not improved. Video cameras set up to improve police surveillance of the main streets represent a rare official initiative in the last decade.

Now surveillance takes the form of 2,500 riot police rotating in strict formation at 30-minute intervals holding a perimeter round the police station and using shields to ward off a permanent hail of stones.

Police claim that the crowd has been infiltrated by motorcycle gangs and radical students. On the other side of the station perimeter there is paranoia about plainclothes infiltrators from the police. The mutual preoccupation with infiltration is testament to the divided community.

The only people who could be said without a doubt to have infiltrated the area yesterday were the two startled passengers of the expensive Toyota sports car.

A red Toyota two-seater sports car drove into the periphery of a crowd milling around in the darkness. The driver realised much too late that the road was blocked. At the front of the crowd, protesters were hurling rocks at a long line of riot police protecting Osaka's main loop line.

The Toyota's arrival caused surprise followed by suspicion and rage. The men closest to it hammered on the roof and the bonnet and tried to smash the windows. The driver started to reverse, taking the crowd with him, just fast enough to avoid being completely and fatally surrounded, and escaped into a side street

It was an uncharacteristically conclusive incident in a four-day stand-off which has reduced an entire residential district of Osaka to a no-go area and turned the local police station into an armed camp.

The riot began when a crowd gathered outside Nishinari station to protest against collusion between police and the yakuza gangs which hold sway over the local work-force.

The Osaka municipal authorities now find themselves at the centre of a national scandal. Television viewers are treated to nightly scenes of street fighting in a country where the subject of law and order tends to be treated with smug self-satisfaction. In a part — albeit a small part — of Japan's second city, it is no longer safe to walk in the streets.

The Zionist massacre of unarmed Palestinians this week is the constant living testimony to the murderous warmongering savagery at the heart of the capitalist colonialist exploitation system:

Even the doctors, who have seen many bad days before, were shocked and angry. "I have been here throughout the intifada, and in the 1967 war," said Dr Wahid Dajani, "and this is the worst I have ever seen. This was a real massacre. Today was simply a battlefield."

Doctors said that most of the injuries had been caused by high velocity bullets, with little evidence of the use of plastic or rubber rounds. Many of the 140 or so wounded were shot in the thighs or buttocks, others overcome by teargas.

In the midst of the mayhem, a clear and angry political message was never far away. "These bullets were paid for by American taxes," said a Makassed surgeon in a blood-drenched gown. "I would like to see the US marines here, like they are in Saudi Arabia because of Kuwait. If there is oil at stake they will do anything, but Palestinian blood is cheap.

"The Israelis are bringing a million Jews from Russia to eat up our land like locusts. I think that the real response to this will be mustard gas from Iraq. That is the language that they understand here."

But British imperialism, the pathetic junior partner to dollar hypocrisy in financing all the non-stop colonial warmongering in the Middle East, is further demonstrating what a fundamentally bankrupt force this Western monopoly-capitalist domination of the Middle East now in reality represents, regardless of these regular exhibitions of Zionist fascist-thug brutality. It has joined the ERM with its tail between its legs in the vain hope of avoiding the economic holocaust certain to swamp the weaker inter-imperialist competitors shortly as a result of the American monopoly-bourgeois state's virtual insolvency along with that of its currency, -the international trading medium of 'free-market' anarchy.

Thatcherism could still outmanoeuvre the embarrassing Labour Party parody of a Nuremberg rally, complete with racist bombast declaring the Iraq Arab nation unfit to have serious weapons in its defence armoury.

But the explosion of the inflationary boom can only bring more severe turmoil and fascist excrescences to the class struggle in Britain. Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin.

Jack Bradshaw

Nicaragua needs a second great Sandinista revolution

What serious perspective can revolutionaries hold out for the Nicaraguan people to a background of raging imperialist reaction and savage warmongering - like the Gulf crisis?

Surely it is a pure fantasy to believe that the US-supported UNO government can be anything other than the incipient door-opener to attempted all-out fascist counter-revolution. Even now the Chamorro government is setting up more and more 'farms' for the incoming Contras which will prove to be, not the lions lying down with the lamb, but the armed camps of imperialism's mercenary cut-throats. Not fighting them before they are established and ready to put armed fascism fully in charge will prove to be the truly lethal mistake - whatever the pious dreams of wishful thinking people who hope, against all world history, that reactionary classes can have the interests of humanity to heart (Gorbachevism, Christianity and all class collaborators).

What good has it ever done not to fight the counter-revolution? 

The Sandinista revolution's great social progress has been bloodily subverted by US imperialism behind its stinking 'democratic' hypocrisy but much worse is to come in the torrent of disasters for the world coming in the next great imperialist slump and war, after WW1 and WW2. The Gulf colonial warmongering against the Arab people shows just some of what imperialism has in store - even before the real inter-imperialist warmongering takes shape between the major capitalist world powers of Japan, Germany and the US.

What kind of progress can be made by attempting to achieve social justice on the quiet, without counter-revolutionary US imperialism noticing and coming down on this 'upstart' like a ton of bricks? The reformist approach has certainly been tried and has always been disastrous, with the world's poor masses paying in blood for the stupid illusions of their 'social-democratic' leaders, like Allende in Chile in 1973, the Palestinians under Arafat under Zionist occupation ever since 1948, and corrupt parliamentary Western 'Labour' parties that 'manage' imperialism when they are allowed to be in government, with or without fake Western 'Communist Party' support.
 
The Sandinistas' greatest error is their retreat away from the heroic revolutionary understanding that took them into the mountains to start the revolution in the first place. There never was going to be any value in pretending to imperialism that the Sandinistas ever were anything but the end of imperialist tyranny in Nicaragua. All kinds of wretched stooge regimes and rightwing governments not to imperialism's liking have been attacked and overthrown by the US, let alone reforming governments, - and astute peaceful coexistence diplomacy combined with non-stop revolutionary armed preparedness for battle would always be the serious perspective rather than going meekly to the slaughter. Look at the Vietnamese revolutionary experience - is imperialist subversion or armed threats about to overthrow communism there? Not a chance. US imperialism was whipped on the battlefield and still can't forget it now. Cuba rings out its defiance around the world and it is good revolutionary perspectives that unite its people in communist inspiration ready for the fight. Telling the workers and peasants that no challenge to imperialism and its democratic fraud of 'free elections' (in the face of $millions of armed fascist intimidation) can be sustained is only ever going to demoralise everybody for the fight and convince them to entertain illusions themselves that letting UNO run things won't be too bad. Leadership with a Leninist perspective is what is required. The dictatorship of the proletariat in the teeth of imperialist aggression just before the West's coming worst ever depression and trade war collapse, which will send the entire Third World into social turmoil and civil war crisis) is the only civilised answer.

Look at Brazil's sickening crisis and what 'free market' domination leads to — death squads to slaughter children in the slums. Look at what Gorbachev's stupid embrace of the 'free market' system has brought: cowardly sucking up to imperialism's Gulf warmongering (which will prove a fiasco when the Arabs turn to socialist revolution, if not before) and totally backward nationalist enmities breaking out all-over the USSR.

There is no choice but to fight imperialism - so battle hardest of all for the greatest scientific understanding, Leninism. This is the victorious road of 1917, China, Cuba, Vietnam, the African revolution etc.

The dictatorship of the proletariat will win.