Author: Adrian Greeman

Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 569 Wednesday October 24 1990                                                                                                              10p 

Inter-imperialist crisis dominating events more decisively & catastrophically than ever

Gorbachevism's wretched revisionist stupidities are still good for some cheap anti-communist propaganda for the Western media on a slow news day but they are already being understood as almost irrelevant to the really historic national and class conflicts taking place on the world stage.

The class-collaborating Moscow bureaucracy's defeatist illusions that such a mirage as 'reformist capitalism' actually exists, and that its completely nonexistent 'benefits and achievements' are the real 'strength of world civilisation' which the USSR can become 'organically linked with', (all according to Gorbachev' new liquidationist plan, to be analysed in more detail in subsequent Bulletins), - certainly create more philosophical confusion internationally, but very little else.

The Soviet Union has further weakened the role it used to play (Stalinist arbitrary revisionism permitting) of inhibiting to a certain extent imperialism's counter-revolutionary colonial warmongering around the world.

But the Gulf crisis is not the first anti-imperialist struggle to which Moscow has only contributed yet another retreat from Leninist international revolutionary perspectives.

Completely regardless however, imperialism is busy-getting on with its own relentless self-destruction.

As the Bulletin's analysis of world developments has repeatedly insisted (see ILWP Books vol 11, written as long ago as 1986/88. on the unmistakable signs of the approaching inter-imperialist World War III as the decisive shaper of international events), - the incurable trade-war contradictions between rival monopoly-capitalist groupings is the key to the revolutionary upheavals which will spring irresistibly out of the fascist-slump class wars and chauvinist belligerence to come.

The insolubly crisis-ridden character of the capitalist system has never changed, and can never be altered, - no matter what class-collaborating hoops Gorbachev himself jumps through, or forces the Soviet workers state and planned economy through, as the dramatic Gulf turmoil has instantly demonstrated just at the very peak of Moscow's 'new world order' garbage (see also story p3).

Revisionism cannot alter this reality, nor could Gorbachev do very much in practice to add to the domineering influence of the international bourgeoisie trying to reinforce the capitalist-colonial mould, even if he wanted to.

Inter-imperialist mayhem is going to continue imposing a trade war/civil war/revolutionary war shape to events whether anyone wants it that way or not.

Moscow support was never the decisive influence on world revolutionary development, and has long ceased to be much of an active factor at all.

Inter-imperialist warmongering chaos will create all the necessary ingredients for the successful future resolution of the worldwide capitalist crisis by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The imperialist camp is certainly well supplied with adequately-armed fascist thug regimes. And the retreat of the Soviet workers state (and the rest of the socialist camp) from even pretending to stand up to them any more, and offering protection to anti-imperialist movements challenging the CIA's international fascist-thug network, - is a saddening revisionist capitulation, and dangerous too.

But there is no way that anti-imperialist struggle can be liquidated. Just the opposite. It is surging forward on all fronts in every part of the globe.

And not only is capitalist crisis the dominant characteristic of the epoch; but the most crucial development of all, - namely, paralysing inter-imperialist confrontation, - is already beginning to show its decisive effect.

It still must be said that US imperialism may yet get into the Gulf war (which it initially thought would be a good thing for shoring up the American bourgeoisie's tottering world domination, ruthlessly challenged now by vastly superior German and Japanese industrial and financial competition.)

But the evidence continues piling up that all is now far from well with this warmongering plan (which half of Washington seems now to be doubting the value of, apart from the growing opposition to it from bourgeois sectors elsewhere in America, and in the rest of the world.)

Inter-imperialist war is inevitable eventually for world domination. And imposing a military diktat on the crucial Gulf oil region could be an important move in such perspectives.

But the chronic financial and trade-war weakness of US imperialism now, plus the world-revolutionary dangers of a third inter-imperialist war this century, are all combining to produce the classic ingredients for epoch-shattering anti-imperialist struggle, - namely, war moves by imperialism which become bogged down and paralysed half-way for one reason or another.

It is worth putting on record the latest amazing capitalist press revelations of how the imperialist circles are splitting open like a can of rotten worms; - anti-Bush groups exposing how Washington was still encouraging its former aggressive stooge Saddam Hussein just hours before he repossessed Iraq's Kuwait province; Zionist and other far-right elements exposing (from different angles) the total hypocrisy of White House action over Kuwait (ignoring far worse belligerence by other Western stooges still in favour); and 'liberal' commentary revealing the sordid reality of unwilling 'Arab coalition' feeling behind the even more sordid feudal nonsense of the Kuwait royal family racket:

WASHINGTON was deeply involved in President Saddam Hussein's aggressive and ultimately violent pursuit of higher oil prices in the months leading to the invasion of Kuwait, evidence uncovered by The Observer reveals.

One of America's top Middle East experts — a former ambassador still used by the Bush Administration for foreign policy missions — held a discreet meeting with an Iraqi Minister in New York in January.

It was suggested to the Minister, a close Saddam associate, that Iraq should seek higher oil prices to get it out of its economic fix. The country was broke after its war with Iran.

As a result of this meeting, a Washington think tank then proposed that Iraq push for an oil price of $25 a barrel, and that it should take the initiative in forcing the increase on its fellow Opec members. Saddam did precisely that, and backed his demands by troop movements on the Kuwaiti border and open threats to the Gulf States.

While Saddam was bullying his neighbours to disgorge $30 billion 'or I will know how to get it', and was starting army manoeuvres on Kuwait's borders, the US was abjectly attempting to appease Saddam over his human rights abuses. Finally, when clear warning was given by executives at Shell and BP that Saddam was going to invade Kuwait to take the Rumaila oilfields and offshore islands, his envoy, Sadoun Hammadi, said with confidence: 'The US will not do anything.'

Just before the invasion, the US ambassador to Iraq had told Saddam: 'We don't have an opinion on inter-Arab disputes such as your border dispute with Kuwait, and we have directed our official spokesman to reiterate this stand.'

The evidence suggests that US complicity with Saddam went far beyond miscalculation of his intentions. Leaked tapes of a meeting between the US ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, and Saddam just before the invasion, coupled with evidence of US State Department officials to the Senate, have built up a picture of active US support of the Iraqi President.

In view of Saddam's expressed claims, the US refusal to make any security commitments to Kuwait was not a neutral act. It looked like a green light to Saddam, if not to invade Kuwait, at least to take the Rumaila oilfields and islands.

FURTHER evidence of policy confusion and mixed signals from the Bush Administration to President Saddam Hussein before the invasion of Kuwait emerged yesterday as worried Democrats demanded greater Congressional control over US military action in the Gulf.

In a new disclosure, unidentified Administration officials were quoted by one newspaper as saying that President Bush personally intervened with the Iraqi leader on July 28, four days before the invasion was launched. In what was described as a "presidential message" sent via the US embassy in Baghdad, Mr Bush reportedly said that the US wanted to improve relations with Iraq.

Mr Bush said that the use of force to resolve Iraq's grievances against Kuwait was unacceptable and that the US would "support other friends in the region" — an apparent reference to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other moderate Arab states. But Mr Bush reportedly issued no specific warnings about the consequences of military action against Kuwait even though Iraqi troops were already massing on the border.

The Administration has not conceded the existence of the message, first reported by the Washington Post. The White House would not comment on the report yesterday. If confirmed, the message would have been sent soon after the July 25 meeting between the US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, and President Saddam.

According to leaked transcripts of the meeting, published by The Guardian, Ms Glaspie told President Saddam that "we don't have an opinion on inter-Arab disputes such as your border dispute with Kuwait". She emphasised the American desire to improve relations and made only a passing reference to the border build-up.

The Glaspie transcripts led many in Washington to charge that the Administration effectively gave Iraq a "green light" for the invasion, a suggestion the Secretary of State, James Baker, has described as ludicrous. Yesterday's disclosure, if accurate, will fuel this debate.

The disclosure suggests that the Administration, after receiving Ms Glaspie's account of her July 25 meeting, effectively approved the line she had taken and, in Mr Bush's message, failed to adopt a tougher stance which, with hindsight, many Congressmen and commentators believe could have prevented the invasion.

Last week, Senator Claiborne Pell of the Foreign Relations Committee reminded Mr Baker that the Senate had repeatedly attempted to impose sanctions on Iraq before the invasion, to signal US abhorrence of Iraq's human rights record. Suggesting a belief that, even now, the Administration was still in a state of confusion over the Gulf crisis, Mr Pell demanded that Mr Baker "conduct a search and review of US policy and actions preceding [Iraq's] aggression".

Emphasising Congressional concern over Administration policy, the Senate Majority leader, George Mitchell, warned yesterday that Mr Bush "has no legal authority — none whatsoever— to commit the US to war". Under the Constitution, Mr Mitchell said, "only Congress can make that grave decision" and, if necessary, he and the Speaker, Tom Foley, were prepared to reconvene the 101st Congress after it adjourns for next month's elections, to ensure full consultation. 

The growing concern here about the Administration's past and current conduct of policy in the Gulf stemmed from the perception of continuing divisions between what Richard Straus of the Middle East Policy Survey yesterday called the "accommodationists" and those favouring a harder line. One former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, said yesterday that "the signals are wildly conflicting but I think we are headed for war". 

But if the US is going to fight for Kuwait's sovereignty as if it were America's own — and that is President Bush's commitment — someone surely should have made that clear to Saddam Hussein before he invaded. America's policies toward Iraq before and after August 2 can be defended independently. They just can't be defended together. The implication of each is that the other was or is disastrously wrong.

Assuming (for the sake of argument) that the current policy is right, the previous policy was a double failure: first, in misinterpreting Hussein's intentions; second, in failing to make America's own intentions clear in advance. The misinterpretation of Hussein was also twofold. Not only did the US overlook several specific signs that Iraq was going to invade Kuwait it also utterly misjudged Hussein's general designs.

Subsequent facile comparisons to Hitler notwithstanding, Hussein was seen as a potential moderate and ally in the Middle East by the Bush administration until the moment of the invasion. It overlooked his nuclear programme, his chemical weapons, his mass murder of his own people, his coddling of terrorists. It opposed congressional efforts to limit American subsidies. All this was in service of a foolish realpolitik, a softheaded hardheadedness, a failed attempt to play geo-chess like Henry Kissinger.

US Ambassador April Glaspie's notorious transcribed audience with Hussein a week before the invasion, has been widely misinterpreted. It's even worse than you think. Having heard Hussein's threat to invade, Glaspie explicitly sympathised with his complaint that Kuwait was driving down oil prices, chirped that "many Americans" also want higher prices, and went on: "I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your border disagreement with Kuwait."

In other words, the famous "no opinion" remark was merely a qualification of her general endorsement of Iraqi war aims.

In truth, the Bush administration could not have given Hussein a serious warning about the consequences of invading Kuwait, because the administration itself didn't know how strongly it would react.

With no underlying values to guide your policy, you lose the practical advantages of consistency and predictability. You also risk going too far on the momentum of shallow enthusiasm — something Bush's serial Iraq policies may have done in both directions.

If blame ranges from Bush himself to the hapless Glaspie, why not Baker? A Baker resignation would establish that there is accountability somewhere for monumental failures of government. It would end the ugly scapegoating of subordinates. And it would protect President Bush, just as Carrington's resignation shielded Thatcher. But taking responsibility isn't Jim Baker's style.

He has distanced himself from Glaspie. He also has mounted a damage-control campaign, both contemptible and hilarious, through his favourite medium of self-aggrandising leaks to the press.

A Newsweek cover story (September 17) revealing the "inside story of secret diplomacy between the superpowers" over Kuwait, begins: '"Secretary of State James Baker brought troubling news."

It was August 1 and Baker was telling Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that Iraq was about to invade. Newsweek does not ask why, if Baker knew the invasion was coming, he didn't try to stop it.

A front-page Wall Street Journal article (October 1) reports that as long ago as last April, Baker and two top aides decided at a secret meeting that "Saddam Hussein should be put on notice...that his menacing behaviour would not be tolerated."

Baker approved tough sanctions, but — tragically — "the federal bureaucracy and members of Congress preoccupied with defending special interests" slowed it down. Baker himself was "so preoccupied with momentous events elsewhere in the world that he failed to follow up..." Damn!
A column in the Economist (October 13) asks: "Is there someone, anyone, in Washington who thinks that the same ghastly mistake [as Vietnam] is going to be made all over again?" The amazing answer: "If there is, his name is probably James Addison Baker III."

Of course there are many people in Washington who are not afraid to publicly predict disaster in the Gulf. None of them is named James Addison Baker III. If Washington's greatest self-positioner is now stashing away a little deniability for future use, that is the best sign yet that Bush's policy may be in trouble.

And if Baker really does disagree with a policy that may yet kill thousands of Americans and others, he ought to resign now for that reason. To pursue a policy you think is wrong, while busily distancing yourself not just from past failures but from future ones as well, is precisely the opposite of ministerial responsibility.

/There are no suggestions of UN condemnations or inquiries when joyriders are accidentally shot in Ulster or when the SAS exercises its shoot-to-kill policy in Gibraltar. While the attention of the world has been obsessed with events at the UN and on the Temple Mount over the last 10 days, all manner of atrocities, killings and warfare have been nodded through, without remark: the caste dispute in India claimed 47 train passengers by fire; six people were killed and 27 injured in a gun attack in Durban; the Guardian's Mark Huband personally witnessed the late President Samuel Doe's killing fields in Monrovia, and perhaps most relevantly the Syrian occupiers in Lebanon mercilessly removed General Michel Aoun's Christian militias — provoking immediate sectarian violence between Christians and Hezbollah, the Islamic fundamentalist group.	
Moreover, when the West's freedom to pump cheap Middle Eastern oil is threatened the moral scruples, which historically have been the strongest undercurrent in American foreign policy since the age of Woodrow Wilson, are immediately brushed aside. The motley array of forces in the Gulf is not to protect Kuwait's greedy feudal rulers or Saudi Arabia's medieval monarchy. Not a drop of American blood would be shed for such a cause. It is to preserve the US's inalienable right to cheap petroleum prices, two-car or two-truck families and cheap flights heading for the Florida and Hawaiian beaches. In such circumstances the US, behaving as global policeman, will climb into bed with anyone. It will even, if necessary, threaten to abandon old friends like Israel which for years, through the Cold War, preserved Western security interests in the face of colossal Soviet arms supplies to Iraq, Syria, Libya and Jordan among others, and long-standing Russian ambitions for control of a warm water port.

WHAT, then, is the nature of the forces which the US has marshalled against the new Hitler, Saddam Hussein? The most important Arab element is the Egyptians, generally considered strategically acceptable because of their adherence to the Camp David accords. But when it comes to domestic oppression, the Egyptians do not rank that far behind Saddam.

A new Amnesty International report, issued just yesterday, makes it clear that President Mubarak's security forces act in much the same way as Iraq's battle-hardened troops in Kuwait. "Arbitrary detention and torture," it observes, "have been going on intermittently since the state of emergency was reimposed nine years ago and may well continue as long as the security forces can detain and torture with impunity." There is no suggestion, however, that the UN should hold an inquiry into Cairo's methods or that Egyptian forces are unfit to fight alongside America's voluntary, air-conditioned and well-fed armies. Even as Amnesty was delivering its verdict, the West, in the shape of the IMF, was delivering large dollops of cash to relieve Cairo of its $50 billions of debt.

The pay-offs offered by American diplomats to yesterday's enemies for their co-operation, in the war against Saddam are remarkable. Iran, which still regards the US as the Great Satan, is currently being offered a $300 million World Bank loan to remain neutral, even though it is within its power to win the freedom of Western hostages in Beirut, including Terry Waite. Jordan, however, which has borne the brunt of the Middle East refugee problem and seen its economy decimated, is being refused assistance by the rulers of Saudi Arabia because of personal bitterness over King Hussein's fence-sitting. Like Israel's Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, the Jordanian ruler is being condemned for running his domestic and external affairs as he wishes, rather than as the White House and Downing Street would prefer.

Then there is Syria. Suffice to say that if Saddam is Hitler (a ludicrous comparison) then Assad is Mussolini. Iraq marched on Kuwait, which has been in its traditional sphere of influence, and President Assad has chosen the current interregnum in the Gulf to march on Lebanon and consolidate his power over the current puppet ruler. Syria joins Arab League delegates in pressing investigations of Israel but runs the most battened-down and grim dictatorship in the Middle East, where whole cities of dissent have been wiped out, and where perestroika shows no sign of emerging. The deaths on the Mount, for all their symbolism, were dwarfed by those to which Syria contributed in Lebanon this weekend. 

"Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest thing in the nicest way," Isaac Goldberg, the Bostonian master of Latin American literature, once wrote. The germ of the mayhem on the Temple Mount was not cultivated by the justice of the Palestinian cause, as the UN and others would have it, but by the perfidy of politicians wearing diplomats' clothes. President Mitterrand, by becoming the first Western leader to accept (in some vague measure) Saddam's vague concept of linkage between his Kuwaiti incursion and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was the first on the bandwagon.

President Bush, less committed to Israel than many of his predecessors, was injudicious enough to suggest that longer term rearrangements of the Middle Eastern map might follow Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait. All this was enough for our own Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, to weigh into the debate in the toughest terms suggesting that Israel's subjugation of Palestinian rights was "misguided".

HAVING recently returned from the Occupied Territories and Israel, I can say that to visit Palestinians there is to gain a different and at least equally compelling perspective to that often presented with regard to both Israel and the Gulf conflict.

Arabs living within Israel would not recognise that country as the benign and liberal democracy which its apologists present. Their reality is of a fascist tyranny devoid of respect for human rights and in which they as Arabs are treated as racial inferiors.

The claim of Israel to be a democracy is to them a sham.

Arabist parties are not permitted. Polling districts where ballot boxes are publicly emptied are so small that individuals are fearful of identification. Discrimination is also pervasive. Permits for housebuilding among a rapidly growing population are unavailable unless large areas of Arab land are surrendered to the State for Jewish settlement or use.

Over the last three years, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been taken into detention without the benefit of legal representation for periods of up to six months — extendable to a year. When appeals are made to the Military Government, decisions are made on the basis of secret files available neither to the accused nor his lawyer. Taxes are levied on Palestinians without any account as to what they are spent on. Universities are shut down with contempt for educational need. Palestinians are short of water. Land is expropriated without effective compensation or appeal. At a whim, water and electricity can be cut off. Twenty-four hour curfews can be suddenly imposed. Harassment is normal and expected to the extent that the purpose of the occupation is seen less as the defence of Israel and increasingly as part of a longterm plan to pressurise the Palestinians to the East of the Jordan river.

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that refugee camps are decorated with cross Palestinian and Iraqi flags and combined portraits of Arafat and Saddam Hussein. No one else has offered to relieve generations of injustice, suffering and humiliation. At last it appears that a fellow Arab has the power to deliver. For such people, an Arab dictator, however brutal, crucified on the cross of Western self interest will be as potent dead as alive. 

/To Arabs suffering under the Israeli yoke the Gulf crisis is about cheap and plentiful oil to the "haves'' of the West — and the unmerited protection of Israel. Other occupations go unreversed. Double standards prevail. To remove Saddam Hussein without securing justice for the Palestinians would produce an enduring and seismic Arab reaction against those responsible. Thus are the Palestinian and Gulf crises linked.

Of the 750,000 Kuwaiti citizens perhaps 400,000 have already left. There is bureaucratic confusion: the enforced replacement of Kuwaiti with Iraqi identity cards, originally scheduled for the end of this month, has apparently been deferred, but in the drive for Iraqisation, it is, she says, clear Iraqi policy to drive all of the Kuwaitis out — all that is except males between the arms-bearing ages of 17 and 45 who are specifically prohibited from leaving — and to replace them with native born Iraqis.
The occupiers are marking abandoned houses with a cross prior to their occupation by Iraqis; the families of soldiers are expected to be followed by permanent settlers.

The newcomers shop in the same half-empty supermarkets and co-operatives as the natives, but they have much more money than the Kuwaitis, who are only allowed to cash limited amounts of their debased currency. There is no work for them, no schools, and little medicine. "At this rate, food will run out before long and everyone will either have to leave or starve," said Fatima. 

For a society so long accustomed to oil riches, the temptation to quit is obviously great, all the more so in that the government in exile guarantees a minimum stipend of $400 per head of family, $200 for his wife, $100 for each child and $500 for rent. "I hate it, but we really are five star refugees," said a university professor, one of the few to find a job elsewhere, whose new employers put him up at the Intercontinental Hotel, in Al-Ain in the United Arab Emirates.

Above all perhaps, it is to persuade the diminishing ranks of the insiders to stay put, that the ruler Sheikh Jaber Al Mahad and his Crown Prince Saad Abdullah presided over a "popular conference" in Jeddah this week — and acquiesced in what may come to be seen as an historic compact between ruler and ruled.

Their audience was not only their own people, both the insiders and the exiles, for they know and every Kuwaiti knows that, however, impatient they may be for liberation, only the international community, and its American-led forces assembling in the Gulf, can achieve it for them. When US senators murmured about "our boys" shedding their blood in the desert for "feudal rulers"; when, at the UN, President Mitterrand began talking about the "democratic will" of the Kuwaiti people, the sheikhs understood that they had better try to earn their status as "the legitimate authority" truly deserving to be restored to all their former glory, and in this era of human rights they had better try to show a civilised, a democratic face to the world. But mainly it is their own people whose fealty, or a reaffirmation of it, they sought.

/But the dissolution of the National Assembly in 1986 dealt the democratic cause a serious setback and in Jeddah, under the spur of this longstanding grievance, commoners, who are mostly modern, highly, educated men, confronted their sheikhly rulers and found much fault with their behaviour before, during and after the calamity.

Some went back a long way. Why, asked the Shi'ite professor, did we back Saddam's war of aggression against an Iran which never had serious territorial desires on Kuwait, but, as a country in revolution, naturally sought to exploit social and political discontents largely of our own rulers' making? Why, asked an economist, did our oil policy-makers pursue policies of over-production in flagrant violation of Opec quotas, which amounted to gross provocation of our dangerous and increasingly desperate neighbour.

Even if there was only a 5 per cent chance of full-scale invasion, said a political scientist, why did our rulers do absolutely nothing to prepare for it? "We couldn't have expected them to stand and fight, Saddam would have wiped them out, but why at least did not our army perform its trip-wire role? We spent billions preparing it to hold out for 36 hours against the only possible — the Iraqi — threat. Its commanders fled and it disintegrated in three hours." "Had we had a parliament," concluded veteran opposition leader Ahmad Khatib, "none of this would have happened."

And after the calamity the ruling family took to behaving more high-handedly than before. So its critics say, and nothing exercises them more than what they see as its arbitrary, unchecked use of the country's greatest single asset, the $100 billion at the disposal of the Kuwaiti Investment Authority.

"They have been behaving more like sheikhs than ever" said one, "and monopolising everything as if they are more interested in preserving their own rule rather than the existence of Kuwait itself". The rulers are also taxed with inertia, incompetence and insensitivity, especially towards those insiders they should be doing all in their power to sustain. "Instead of organising what help they can, all they do is broadcast unfounded assurances that the liberation is at hand, the Americans are about to go in. But every time that fails to happen the more bitter and abandoned the insiders feel," said another critic.

No one, not even the most radical Kuwaitis, doubted the need for a symbol of national unity at a time like this, and no one wished to deny the Emir that role. But when the Crown Prince declared that in a liberated Kuwait the Sabahs would "consolidate" freedoms under the 1962 constitution, everyone heaved a sigh of relief: their pledge of allegiance could now be sincere and unreserved.

The 1962 constitution provides that the Sabahs will rule Kuwait as a "hereditary sheikhdom'' in perpetuity. The quid pro quo is that the system of government shall be "democratic", with the people as "the source of all power".

But liberation is yet to be, and in the meantime the commoners are pressing for concrete gains here and now. They are pressing for supervisory committees, a sort of shadow cabinet, to advise the sheikhs who are manifestly out of their depth in the stormy and uncharted seas of exile. They think they will get them.

There is of course an underlying fear that the longer liberation is delayed, the less likely it is that it will ever come to pass, that the international community's will will be eroded, that "linkage" with Palestine will distract it, that great upheavals will reduce the Kuwait case to a very secondary affair.	

It is that fear, above all, which has brought sheikhs and commoners so sincerely together. But it is a fear which, if it ever materialised, would eventually drive them asunder, and it is almost certainly among the insiders, the ones who stayed behind to face the doorstep executions, that dissidence would first take root.

IN the White House, the most feared weapon in Iraq's arsenal may not be the chemical bombs, nor even the new fuel-air explosives whose devastation can be compared to a small tactical nuclear weapon.

It is a diplomatic maneouvre which is known to Washington's hawks as the Nightmare Scenario.

Simply, it would mean Saddam Hussein doing what the UN resolutions require, and pulling back from Kuwait with his armies and his chemical stockpiles and nuclear bomb research programmes intact. A tactical retreat paving the way for a strategic victory, this could leave him armed and poised to overawe the Gulf and menace the whole Middle East for years to come.

US officials are concerned that such an Iraqi withdrawal need not be a personal humiliation for Saddam Hussein.

Dressed up with a magnanimous speech which calls on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories and demands that the UN forcefully champion the rights of the Palestinians, it could be presented as an act of Arab statesmanship. 

At the least, an Iraqi withdrawal would put intense pressure on the US to remove or scale down its forces in the Gulf. And then the next time that Saddam Hussein telephoned the governments of Kuwait, or Qatar or Saudi Arabia to suggest that his economy really needed a stiff oil price increase, he would be a hard man to turn down.

"An Iraqi withdrawal that is not accompanied by the destruction of Saddam Hussein's war machine will leave the Western world in grave danger," warns the veteran hawk Richard Perle, assistant secretary of defence in the Reagan Administration. "If Iraqi military power survives the present crisis, Iraq will dominate the Gulf. Saddam Hussein will press his thumb on the Western world's jugular whenever the. spirit moves him."

The governments of the allies now standing guard alongside the US forces in the Gulf will require intense consultation before their troops can be ordered to go over to an offensive. Mrs Thatcher may be easy to persuade. President Mitterrand and the Arabs may prove less complaisant.

"The Egyptian forces in Saudi Arabia will not participate in any offensive," their commander, Major General Mohamed Ali Bilal, declared last week. He was echoed by the Syrian commander.

The arrival in the Gulf this week of the Third Armoured Cavalry Regiment and the First Cavalry Division, a total of 15,000 men with some 500 M-1 tanks, finally gives the US the realistic option of launching an attack to liberate Kuwait. But if Saddam's potential to overawe the rest of the Arab world is to be constrained, the allies will have to be squared. 

But short of an unlikely Iraqi agreement to open its arsenals and research laboratories to international inspection and control, the only scenario which would free Kuwait and neutralise Iraq as the Prussia of the Gulf involves military action. 

None of this squabbling chaos and vicious humbug is worth crossing the road for, let alone fighting a desert war for. Even Western public opinion, so brainwashed with anti-communism, is beginning to doubt the warmongering. A real thrashing defeat for Western imperialism somewhere is what is really required. Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin. Joe Harper

Vital connection between the 'left' swamp's confusion over imperialism's Gulf crisis and its confusion over Stalinism

Trotskyite hostility to proletarian dictatorship in practice (as opposed to the opportunist lip-service Trotsky paid to Leninism in jumping on the October Bolshevik revolutionary bandwagon) is beginning to haunt the swamp.

The 'steps towards the political revolution' which they all cheered in 1980 around Solidarnosc (and around similar reaction at other times) are now revealing their full counter-revolutionary significance.

Bulletin 567 examined how some of the ultra-left posturers in the swamp (like the 'Leninist' CPGB faction) have jeered at rival revisionist groups for embracing developments in East Europe which have all turned out to be counter-revolutionary, - while revealing (indirectly) that the 'Leninists' own attitude to the workers states was one of utter contempt from the start for their 'total failure'. From them, the 'Leninists' never expected even a Trotskyite 'political revolution' to emerge, - it being "better to forget East European 'socialism' completely, and even better if it had never even been developed in the first place".

Now the Sparts have shown their sensitivity (to the appalling anti-communist catastrophes now unfolding in East Europe for which they, like the rest of the swamp, feel a mite responsible, for cheering on anti-communism in the guise of 'anti-Stalinism'), - with a renewed attempt to pretend that the Sparts never supported Solidarnosc to begin with. They 'never would have dreamed' of backing anything but 'authentic Marxism-Leninism' as the way forward for the Polish workers state (ludicrously presented as the same thing as Trotskyism-Luxemburgism, which of course it isn't).

No.507 of the fortnightly Spart Vanguard declares:

Today fake-Trotskyists like the English Workers Power group try to cover up their years of support to Solidarnosc by cynically raising hollow slogans like "No Return to Capitalism!" while fondly recalling "the fighting strength of the early days of Solidarnosc the trade union." 

They're not the only ones to look back to the "early days." One of the most rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Communist outfits in Poland today is "Solidarnosc '80," centered in Szczecin and led by one Marian Jurczyk, who garnered a quarter of the vote as a "radical" (right-wing) opposition to Walesa at the 1981 Solidarnosc congress. At the time, Jurczyk declared that three-quarters of the Stalinist leadership were really Jews who had changed their names and that "a couple of gallows would come in handy" to deal with these "traitors to Polish society." As reflected in its name, Solidarnosc '8O deems itself the "true" spirit of Solidarnosc. And indeed it is - they are clerical nationalist, pro-capitalist reactionaries to the core.

In 1980-81, as the bourgeois press was singing praise for Walesa and Solidarnosc and the pro-imperialist labor bureaucracies were funneling in dollars and D-marks to Ronald Reagan's favorite "trade union." a lot of fake-Trotskyists emerged as neo-hard-core social democrats to lead the cheering. They ignored the photos of priests hearing confession in Gdansk's Lenin shipyard and dismissed Walesa's kowtowing to Reagan and the Pope. We followed Trotsky's admonition in the Transitional Program and simply said what is: that support to Solidarnosc was anti-working-class and counterposed to the Trotskyist perspective of proletarian political revolution. We stood on the historic interests of the international proletariat even when it meant that our Marxist program stood counterposed to the consciousness of the overwhelming bulk of the Polish working class.

The bottom line for Solidarnosc leftist cheerleaders was that "ten million Polish workers can't be wrong." Now many of those ten million are coming to the conclusion that maybe they were wrong. As the Polish workers begin to struggle against the ravages of capitalist restoration inflicted on them by Solidarnosc, its erstwhile left supporters twist and turn in disarray. As we wrote in "Letter to Polish Workers":

"Those who have paved the way for capitalist restoration cannot lead the struggles to beat it back....

"Only the Trotskyists have a program to combat capitalist counter-revolution and imperialist war, by returning to the authentic communism of Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin—the fight to defend and extend the gains of the October Revolution through Socialist revolutions throughout the capitalist world. Forward in a Trotskyist party in Poland, section of the Fourth International".

These are outrageous barefaced lies. The Sparts were in full sympathy with Solidarnosc for the first crucial 15 months of its existence, from August 1980 until October 1981. The following extract from ILWP Books vol 3 (the ILWP was still known as the Workers Party at that time) gives all the details:

"The language used against the Sparts has thus been marked by enormous RESTRAINT.

Consider their record. They began by welcoming the counter-revolutionary Solidarity movement in Poland ('Polish Workers Move' 5/9/80).

As late as May 1981, 9 months after the Workers Party had first (and repeatedly) fully exposed the counter-revolutionary essence of Solidarity, the Sparts were still urging workers to join in Reagan's worldwide anti-communist claque to "bitterly protest a Russian military intervention" in Poland.

Only in October 1981, after 5 months' licking their wounds after the Workers Party's denunciation of them, did the Sparts put up the pretence of a begrudging support for the USSR to rout Solidarity's "counter-revolution" (at last admitted, 15 months late).

But NOT ONE WORD do they say about this dramatic switch in their line, no mention of the fact that they have been forced to completely change their position.

And most of all no mention of the correct criticism made of their dangerous error by the Bulletin.

Lenin correctly said that the decisive test of the revolutionary party was how honestly it could face up to its own mistakes and learn from them.

In May 1981, the Sparts declared (SB 32): 

"Genuine proletarian internationalists must bitterly protest a Russian military intervention which would represent a defeat for the cause of socialism."

But less than 20 weeks later (SB 36), they declare:

"Solidarity's counter-revolution must be stopped. If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessarily brutal stupid way intervene militarily to stop it, we will support this."

But TOTAL SILENCE to their readers and supporters that the line has been changed.

The least the Sparts are is a bunch of DISHONEST FRAUDS.

But their political position is in fact FAR FAR WORSE.

For 15 months until October 1981, anti-communist Polish reaction, aided by at least $1,000 million from the CIA and the Vatican (see Bulletin 151 on the Vatican's missing funds scandal), was being screeched on by an unprecedented propaganda campaign from Western political circles (all departments), press, and television, to maintain the dual power that Solidarity had established, - with the Sparts either joining in the sneering at the Polish workers state or at best remaining neutral.

Suddenly they discover that this movement, whose suppression the Sparts were going to "bitterly protest", is in fact a raging counter-revolution. 

But NOT THE SLIGHTEST ATTEMPT TO ANALYSE how supposed 'Marxist revolutionaries' could have been on the brink of such a fatal mistake of joining in the international bourgeois clamour (CIA orchestrated) to undermine the defence of the Polish workers state and assist the triumph of a counter-revolution which could have been turned into an excuse by US imperialism for launching their final annihilation atomic holocaust against the Soviet Union and the entire socialist camp.

WORSE STILL, the Sparts totally ignore the correct revolutionary Marxist voices raised in the West against this counter-revolutionary conspiracy, thereby showing an utter contempt for the real interests of the working class and a completely doomed REACTIONARY preoccupation with their own subjective interests.

But much worse than that, the Sparts smugly JUSTIFY their own reactionary analysis, implying that real life was at fault in not conforming to the Sparts' bankrupt prejudices, and not vice versa. For at the bottom of their amazingly thick-skinned statement completely changing their international line without a word of explanation, the Sparts guiltily sneak in a little self-consoling paragraph excusing their earlier wrong position by saying:

"As Trotskyists we orientated towards the potential for development of a left opposition from among those Solidarity and Communist Party militants who wanted a genuine 'socialist renewal'"

an opposition which "would have" put forward a programme etc.

The only thing wrong with this explanation for supporting counter-revolution for 15 months is that there are no such 'militants', there is no such 'programme'. The whole thing is a complete figment of the Sparts' imagination.

In other words, the Sparts are saying that a fictional "third force" fantasy, existing solely in their poor deluded petty bourgeois heads, should be ample justification in workers eyes for the Sparts having misled the working class for 15 months into not demanding the crushing of counter-revolution in Poland (as urgently in the interests of the international socialist revolution and the fight against imperialism.)

Even worse than that, the Sparts quickly show that their hasty conversion to the anti-Solidarity camp is a complete OPPORTUNIST FRAUD anyway, done merely because the stink around the anti-communist 'free trade union' was getting too bad for these wiliest of 'revolutionary' charlatans to dare risk any longer.

For not long after their announcement that the Sparts will no longer join Reagan in opposing the crushing of counter-revolution in Poland, these incurable petty bourgeois go back to their "third force" idiocy, urging a "period of underground regroupement" for Solidarity 'militants'.

Lenin's exhaustive theoretical struggle against the enormous petty bourgeois counter-revolutionary reaction against the dictatorship of the proletariat under the Bolsheviks - stressing again and again that there were only TWO forms of class power, proletarian dictatorship or bourgeois dictatorship, - was in vain as far as these philistines are concerned.

To underline their comfortable, arrogant Western contempt for the Polish workers state and the enormously difficult problems of constructing socialism in a still hostile imperialist world environment, the Sparts add that they won't 

"advise the Warsaw bureaucrats who have ruined the Polish economy, how to get out of the hole they're in", 

a remark of breathtaking conceit and stupidity (Workers Vanguard 296).

The Sparts are the unwitting bemused dupes of that insidious scepticism by which bourgeois ideology holds back workers in the West from ever being really confident of the successful development of the Soviet Union and the workers states, giving easy rise to "third force" wishful thinking which takes a thousand different forms of mental paralysis, daydreaming about a 'perfect revolution' somewhere, sometime, at the expense of REALLY fighting on the ACTUAL front line in the international class struggle.

There is only ONE actual front line. There cannot be more than one. The best interests of world imperialism must find their central, most powerful expression at ONE point.

Equally, material factors must concentrate at one point the most decisive strength of the revolutionary socialist side in the international balance of class forces.

Unlike the Sparts' "third force", the Cold War is not a figment of the imagination. It IS the reality of the modern world, the reality of the international class struggle, the ONE actual FRONT line - with many, many subsidiary struggles going on behind it and all around it, intertwined with it in an endless complexity of ways. For many months, Poland has been one of the main battlefields in this historic confrontation between the capitalist era of mankind and the socialist era.

Only WITHIN this clear grasp of the actual framework of the international class struggle between the forces of workers dictatorship and the forces of bourgeois dictatorship), - firmly committed to REAL struggle on behalf of the workers states and their allies in this life-or-death fight for the future of civilisation - can the battle be joined for a BETTER REVOLUTIONARY THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING on the workers side to vastly improve the Marxist-Leninist armoury of the international working class.

The Sparts and the entire petty bourgeois 'revolutionary' left REFUSE to accept this reality. Their struggles are based on the illusion of the "THIRD FORCE" which will sweep away the capitalist camp and the 'bureaucratic Stalinist' camp.

The Sparts, and others, IN WORDS pretend to defend the workers states and their growing numbers of political allies.

But this is DELIBERATE DECEPTION.

In PRACTICE, as demonstrated above, the Sparts contemptuously jeer at the real world of slow, difficult socialist construction against endless counter-revolutionary obstruction; their true motivation is dreams of the THIRD FORCE, the world of petty bourgeois illusion, - and make feeble embarrassed attempts to hide it.

It is self-evident that living comfortably within the capitalist system, posing as 'Marxist revolutionaries' while in practice supporting Solidarity and opposing the putting down of the 'free trade union' counter-revolutionary stunt, and refusing to support the Workers Party's correct Leninist defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Poland, - the Sparts exist in permanent compromise with capitalism IN PRACTICAL REALITY, whatever they "claim" they are doing or delude themselves they are doing.

Thus the phrase complained of is far from "boastfully aggressive grandiloquence to cover up armchair socialist powerlessness" but an accurate analysis of the reality of the Sparts' position at the barricades, - perched firmly on the fence of 'third force' neutrality IN PRACTICE.

The Sparts do cynically write off the great revolutionary achievements in East Europe. And their humbug of pretending to be the best defenders of the USSR while in practice crawling behind the most crapulous bourgeois anti-Soviet propaganda (on the economy, etc) is truly jesuitical.

As can be seen from Spart VC 507 these Trots are still peddling this 'third force' gibberish, completely oblivious themselves in reality to the catastrophes it has helped cause in East Europe (for which they criticise others in the swamp).

There is no such class force as a Trotskyite 'political revolution', never has been, and never will be. It is simply criminally academic to continue harping on this subjective-idealist rigmarole when the overwhelming historical evidence is piling up all around (as the Sparts themselves admit when slagging off others in the swamp) that what has emerged in reality out of the incessant dragging down of the East European workers states by hostile Western propaganda and sabotage (in which the anti-Leninist Western labour and trade union movements enthusiastically took part, - again as the anti-Leninist Sparts themselves admit), - is counter-revolutionary chaos.

It was always inevitable that the only chance these East European workers states (badly flawed with Stalinist revisionism) had of any healthy renewal would be if the only actual world revolutionary movement (Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, Angola, Nicaragua, South Africa, Grenada, etc, - all exclusively and unavoidably pro-socialist-camp) could have been more successful and more widespread so as to reinvigorate and encourage the constantly flagging bureaucracy in Moscow back towards Leninist internationalist perspectives.

And the entire Trot/swamp morass (Sparts included) has in practice done nothing but permanently split and demoralise any pro-Soviet sentiments among Western workers, - the Sparts most criminally of all since they make such noisy and showy protestations of remaining in basic solidarity with the socialist camp.

In reality, it has always been the opposite, of course, as the above excerpts show. The time to have stood up against the anti-communist hysteria in the West against the Polish workers state was when the Vatican and CIA-financed Solidarnosc first raised its ugly Pilsudskiite head over the Gdansk shipyard wall in August 1980, - not 15 months later when all the ideological propaganda damage had already been inflicted on workers in the West, - courtesy in particular of the Trotskyite 'left' swamp.

Against swamp ecstatic championing of Solidarnosc the wretched lying Sparts had not one single word to say for nearly a year and a half...Then they merely changed their line just to cover themselves as the stench of Walesa & Co's pro-imperialist reactionariness was noticed by even these armchair-socialist dilettantes, but without hardly taking up the cudgels at all against the swamp's disgracefully treacherous role in promoting Solidarnosc, the stooges of Western imperialism and anti-Sovietism.

Nor is all this re-raised now in pursuance of some pedantic point-scoring against a minor Trotskyite group. All these questions are directly related to the disastrous misleadership of the working class being offered by the swamp in failing to see imperialist crisis as the central touchstone of modern world developments, - always wrongly starting instead with the revisionist weaknesses of the socialist camp (see also Bulletin 567 for a discussion of different aspects of this matter).

Not ignoring how Gorbachevism, - the ultimate expression of Stalinist revisionism, - has apparently 'justified' the endless Trot cynicism (over Soviet economic achievements) by now trying to liquidate completely the planned workers state as a 'total failure', it nevertheless remains essential to grasp insoluble capitalist crisis as the key to all world developments, and to correctly understand the colossal significance of the immense achievements during the last 73 years of developing planned workers states without a capitalist class or a 'free' market (the inevitable and incurable basis of monopoly-capitalism), - in spite of all the appalling disappointments, mistakes, and crimes.

Nor can the revealing mechanics of the struggle for revolutionary theory be ignored either.

It remains utterly crucial, for there to be any possibility of building a new Bolshevik movement, not that a party should never make mistakes, but that the Marxist-Leninist scientific approach to dealing with mistakes should be fully mastered.

Whatever else the Sparts may think they can achieve by lying about their position 10 years ago on Solidarnosc, it is absolutely certain that they cannot possibly be building a sound party of sincerely struggled-for revolutionary theory on such a dishonest basis, - no chance at all.

And this leads on to another matter of how the swamp has chosen to deal with polemical challenges (put out by the ILWP, repeatedly, to every sector of the swamp.) With the exception of a few exchanges early on with just a few groups, the swamp has eventually settled down to simply trying to ignore the ILWP "because of its small size".

On any other issues within the swamp's subjective-idealist armoury of feminism, gay liberationism, black nationalism, etc, - such 'sizism' would no doubt be considered 'morally intolerable', etc. But politically, it really is fatuous. The entire 'left' is, relatively speaking, 'small' - and shrinking - because of the temporary effects of the 45-year-long post-war imperialist credit boom, - (now on the very brink of at last imploding, with unprecedented revolutionary consequences worldwide.)

The bigger the party to start with, the better the advantage in the class-war turmoil to come. But all Marxist-Leninist history has shown that only if the theoretical analysis is correct, - programme, strategy, and tactics, - will a successful revolutionary movement grow. The working class will start to follow a party of revolutionary theory which has shown in practice that it is capable of keeping on getting things right and giving correct leadership.

It would be nice to have a body of well-developed theoretical cadres available already, to quickly get that mass party growth under way. But there are no groups of Marxist-Leninist cadres available anywhere on earth at the moment who are remotely comparable with the theoretical ability achieved by Lenin and his 20 or 30 reliable Bolshevik cadres at the beginning of this century who were to achieve state power just a dozen or so years later.

Compared to the contemptible attitude towards the Marxist-Leninist theory of proletarian dictatorship by the Trotskyite 'left' swamp, the ILWP is already an enormous party of theoretical cadres, and not small at all. And it firmly intends to develop further solely through the continued struggle to increase revolutionary understanding, and not through opportunist lies, or opportunist adaptations to anti-Sovietism and anti-communism, masquerading as anti-Stalinism.

Although bitterly disappointed by the continuing revisionist degeneration in East Europe (and elsewhere in the remains of the Third International and the socialist camp), and occasionally reluctant and slow to realise how far and disastrously the counter-revolutionary rot has sometimes set in, the ILWP has alone (compared to the swamp) steered clear of Stalinist illusions, Trotskyite illusions, state-capitalist illusions, Maoist illusions, black nationalist illusions, Gorbachevite illusions, etc. It has never wavered from a Leninist unconditional solidarity with the dictatorship of the proletariat when most needed, - at the height of counter-revolutionary bourgeois hysteria (Peking 1989, KAL007 incident, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, NJM majority 1983, Solidarnosc, etc, and, in retrospect, German-Soviet non-aggression treaty 1939, Hungary 1956, Prague 1968, etc).

So far, the only way the ILWP could be faulted seriously is if the Marxist-Leninist theory of proletarian dictatorship itself can be proved wrong, - the real wish of petty-bourgeois class weakness at the heart of all revisionist backsliding.

But one look with half an eye at the world all around in 1990 makes it abundantly obvious (yet again) that unless the working masses do rise up internationally and seize the power in order to impose a planned world socialist economic order (wiping out bourgeois political and social class domination on the way), then the whole of civilisation will inevitably be plunged into its greatest crisis yet of belligerent chauvinistic trade-war chaos, and the fascist-racist tyranny of civil-war slump dividedness. Every corner of the globe is poised for jingoistic arms-race mayhem as a direct result of the free market at work, the degenerate centre-piece of every imperialist-colonialist holocaust hitherto in history. Under the capitalist system, and under the deliberate destabilisation its non-stop Cold War sabotage and ideological disruption has inflicted on countries which have tried to break away from the capitalist system, - class/nationalistic turmoil and bloodshed is rampant universally, - in South Africa, the Philippines, El Salvador, Cambodia, Liberia, Guatemala, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Peru, Burma, Palestine, Sudan, Nicaragua, India, Mozambique, Sahara-West, Chile, Timor, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Panama, the Gulf, Angola, Ireland, Brazil, Afghanistan, Armenia, Kurdistan, and dozens more, - with even greater numbers on the brink of being plunged into class and racial civil war as the crisis of the market system of exploitation and tribal envy becomes more bitter.

Uniquely and unmistakably in history, the dictatorship of the proletariat has alone been able to put an end to this divisive market-inspired nonsense, instigated invariably under the guise of religious belief and other philosophical and cultural dementedness, exclusive to bourgeois and other property-owning idealist illusions.

Nothing could be more telltale than the national, racial and communal strife resurrected along the length and breadth of the Moscow-influenced socialist camp the moment that Gorbachev's extension of Stalinist anti-Leninist revisionism (retreating from world revolution) began undermining proletarian-dictatorship discipline everywhere.

The greatest philistine idiocy swallowed by Gorbachevism, the Trot swamp, and big bourgeois idealism alike is that 'the evils of Stalinism' can only be remedied by dismantling the workers states. What incredible stupidity.

So-called 'free-market democracy' is the real fascist killer, - as East Europe found out between the wars, and is about to find out again, - a system of incurable bribery, corruption, extortion, and deceit, always inevitably ruled over ultimately by a monopoly-bourgeois dictatorship, whether openly declared as in most capitalist countries, or hypocritically veiled behind a parliamentary fraud, as in a few richer Western states.

The Marxist-Leninist science of proletarian dictatorship arose out of practical experience, from the Paris Commune onwards, of there being no other way for the working class to consolidate state power other than via the most relentless repression of all bourgeois counter-revolutionary influences - internationally organised and financed from the very beginning.

Cold War sabotage and subversion has been raging full blast non-stop from the very first moments of the 1917 October Revolution, and far from being relaxed once the Bolshevik Party was finally firmly in the saddle, was on the contrary then escalated to an every greater pitch of intensity on a worldwide basis, - infiltrating, undermining and spying on the world communist movement as never before.

It is scientific nonsense to try starting an analysis of 'what went wrong with socialism' from the defeatist revisionist retreats into which the Stalinist leadership was successfully driven by the endless bourgeois ideological and economic disruption. The problems start with the counter-revolution, - not with the weakening of the revolution.

From the very beginning, Trotskyite cynicism was part of that Western-induced weakening of the revolution, and never part of any 'cure'. The pretence of 'unconditional solidarity with the workers states' has always been a despicably hypocritical posture, as seen in the above examples and countless thousands more of the swamp's treachery to the socialist camp (see ILWP Books vols 3 to 17, and Bulletins 1 to 568).

Only Leninist renewal could have halted Stalinist degeneracy, but the clear stubborn reality of actual historical transformations is that it could never have made sense to have thrown the workers-state baby out with the Stalinist bathwater, which is all that the Trotskyite undermining of the Moscow bureaucracy could ever have achieved, as has been proved in practice, now, tragically.

A determined struggle to continue expanding the world revolutionary movement, as was achieved in China, Vietnam, and Cuba, for example, - was the only way to continue trying to combat Stalinist defeatism with Leninist perspectives, - not by cynically splitting and ceaselessly deriding the communist movement as Trotskyism did (see ILWP Books vols 3, 4, and 5 in particular).

Open polemics with Stalinism were correct. But inventing a 'Stalinist bureaucratic caste' and predicting its downfall (because of illegal blanket repression against criticism) could at best be merely a ludicrous self-fulfilling prophecy which petty-bourgeois Trot cynicism could only work for hand-in-glove with the real counter-revolutionary imperialist opponents of the Soviet workers state.

The utter bankruptcy of this Trot middle-class defeatism, piled on top of the Stalinist bureaucratic defeatism, became painfully evident even to the swamp during such paralysing contradictions of not knowing whether to laugh or cry over the brilliant 'Stalinist' revolutionary achievements in Cuba, China, and Vietnam, for example. 0pportunist splits inundated the swamp over such issues, - and still do. The more devious petty-bourgeois 'revolutionaries' in the West still hedge their bets over how to grudgingly 'support' Cuba's heroic anti-imperialist stand, vacillating between 'friendly concern' over 'human rights abuses', and dismal forebodings about 'command socialism economics', etc. What is worse, this appalling anti-Leninist humbug has wormed its way deep into the 'Cuba solidarity' movements in the West, - ready to help spread anti-Leninist backwardness just as was done via the Nicaragua solidarity movement.

The Cuban leadership has suffered, and still suffers, from many revisionist weaknesses. And the ILWP has consistently publicly polemicised against them. But only the most depraved petty-bourgeois swamp dilettante (i.e. every last Trot and centrist) could doubt that unconditional defence of the Cuban workers state was the only possible stance to take in every tension and conflict between the encircled Castro movement and the imperialist bourgeoisie.

But the overwhelming majority of the swamp just carries on blithely undermining Cuba for all it can, running down Cuba's brilliant social and economic achievements, and instantly jumping onto every 'human rights' bandwagon stunt promoted by the CIA's worldwide bourgeois 'public opinion' network.

Just to confirm Trotskyism's degenerate armchair-socialist opportunism, the swamp is already at work knifing the ANC in the back even prior to its taking power in South Africa (with Western petty-bourgeois fears of another proletarian dictatorship being established), - as evidenced in, for example, the criminal slander published by the RCG accusing the ANC of responsibility for the recent flood of black township killings (see Bulletin 587 (??-ed) for a more detailed examination).

As for the Sparts' lies, denying their role in bringing down the Polish workers state (only for it to inevitably be followed by extreme counter-revolution), - these are all crocodile tears anyway. No middle-class Trot sentiments could give a damn about the fate of the workers states in reality. Their bourgeois Western philistinism is too deeply ingrained to seriously consider the very longterm question crucial to a correct understanding of history, - namely what social formation could in practice possibly replace the universal political and economic domination by the capitalist bourgeoisie. To which there is only one answer, - the dictatorship of the proletariat, - a workers state armed to the teeth and combative to the highest degree, - as Cuba has been forced to learn to be (despite its Stalinist delusions) by the reality of endless imperialist counter-revolution.

Trot derision of Soviet economic difficulties has not at all been 'finally proved correct'. All it has helped achieve, alongside the rest of universal bourgeois-idealist scorn for the 'command economy', has been the ultimate demoralisation of the Moscow revisionist bureaucracy itself (adding economic defeatism to the world revolutionary defeatism already established by the whole complexity of leadership weaknesses which succeeded Lenin). In reality, all the Trots are inside the CPGB 'Leninist' ivory tower, believing it would have been better for there never to have been this 'deformed bureaucratic socialism' (which it crucified these petty-bourgeois 'revolutionary1 dilettantes to have to defend, unconditionally, at particularly nasty moments of proletarian dictatorship confrontation with subjective-idealist delusions about 'freedom' and 'parliamentary democracy', etc.

Stalinism's fearful criminal arbitrariness itself undermined the 'command socialist economy'; and abandoning central planning and political leadership for the 'market mechanism' in order to recover(!) from Stalinist bureaucratic defeatism, is like having bubonic plague injections to cure smallpox.

The revolutionary socialist camp's achievements overall since 1917, in surviving non-stop imperialist counter-revolutionary onslaught as well as it has, are the greatest social feats yet in mankind's history; and the epoch-making political and military triumphs (the Bolshevik revolution and civil war victory against imperialist intervention; the defeat of German nazi imperialism; the monumental revolution in China; the watershed defeat of US imperialism by the revolution in Vietnam and the rest of Indo-China; the revolution surviving the Korean War; the shattering blow to the West of Cuban revolution; etc, etc, etc,) - could not have been dreamed of without the formidable planned economic advances gained, - without a capitalist class or a 'free market', - by one workers state after another.

The continuing vicious sabotage of Angola, Mozambique,  Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, etc, by the Western imperialists and their stooges, proves only one thing about planned economies, — how the capitalist class fears the revolutionary example they could set, - as socialist Cuba sensationally did for the whole of Latin America, - making the USA's criminally fascist quarantine of Cuba a vital necessity to this day for the "free market's" survival in that continent, and further afield as well.

The phenomenal new feature of imperialism's 20th century warmongering history is the sensational intervention of the socialist Soviet Union, dramatically altering the entire international balance of class forces for the whole of this period since 1917, and China's later intervention even more so. Gorbachevism is simply political and economic gibberish which may sabotage the Soviet workers state completely, but which can no more rewrite the class-war history of the 20th century (of which proletarian dictatorship is the essence) than all previous revisionist attempts to do so. The key measure is not Gorbachevism's ability to demoralise and disorient the bureaucratised revisionist workers states, as appallingly damaging as that is, - but the scale of unstoppable revolutionary turmoil spreading everywhere right round the capitalist world now, in step with the anti-imperialist and inter-imperialist contradictions relentlessly disrupting the US monopoly-bourgeois world order.

The increased danger to the international revolutionary movement from the deluded class-collaborationism in Moscow, - (which can only increase inequalities and exploitation in the Soviet Union but never achieve the imperialist bourgeois consumerist 'miracle' Gorbachev's revisionist illusions aspire to), - is more than offset by the uncontrollable anti-imperialist revolt surging through the real world, the Third World.

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