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 638 Tuesday March 3 1992                                                                                                                       10p 

Revolutionary theory more needed than ever as imperialism collapses

The Marxist science on imperialist economic crisis, dealing precisely with the common delusion: "They are bound to find a way out", has never been so vital.

The polemic below reproduces Lenin's conclusions about the revisionist Kautsky's fake 'Marxist' attempts to argue in 1915 that imperialism had been changed by the appalling WWI and would henceforth embrace disarmament and a supra-imperialist mechanism for peacefully resolving future conflicts, especially as monopoly-capitalist conglomerates were becoming increasingly international in composition, and less nationally chauvinistic.

The same cowardly and disarming arguments as Kautsky's are being heard now, and with the same aim of avoiding the reality that armed proletarian dictatorship is going to be the only thing that will stop inter-imperialist World War III, (just as it was in 1917 (WWl),and just as its threat (China, Southeast Asia, southern Europe, etc) forced imperialism to limit WWII after the Soviet intervention.)

In this period of astonishing Western turmoil and despair (coming so soon after the idiocies about the 'triumph of capitalism' and the 'end of history'), it is crucial to study Marxism Leninism more determinedly than ever, and to struggle to keep a party of revolutionary theory going at all costs.

A reply to US revisionist boasts about 'popular' approval for their retreat from Leninism

It is not the temporary influence on mass struggle which tests the truth of polemics or party policies, but how well such analyses match up in time to actual world developments.

The fact that the anarchists, or the Militant, or the SWP, or the SNP in Scotland, - appear to "test their ideas in the real world of working class struggle by engaging in mass work" (to quote a recent ILWP critic) and enjoy some momentary popularity, - is no guarantee at all of their historical assessments being correct.

If observed "struggles around the elementary needs of working and oppressed peoples" were the qualification for putting forward an alternative world view, then the Labour Party and the TUC would deserve to keep the workers movement in Britain sewn up for as long in the future as they have already kept it in the past.

But reformism and centrism are wrong, no matter how completely they can claim to have "tested their ideas in the real world of working class struggle" for more than 150 years (with some "success".)

They are wrong because a correct scientific theory of social development is able to explain how history itself will eventually prove reformism and centrist opportunism wrong.

The fact that only a tiny handful of people on earth may at any one time be saying why, scientifically, reformism and centrism are wrong does not invalidate revolutionary theory, - (even if some of those arguing for a Leninist view can be derided for individual subjective weaknesses, real or imagined, - such as having "petty-bourgeois ego needs of generals without armies to lead", etc.)

As for sneering at "ultra-left sects in a hothouse-world making a career out of polemicising with one another", - the ILWP Perspectives make this point:

Lenin warns against "learned fools and old women" who had "arrogantly and contemptuously turned up their noses at the abundance of 'factions' in the Russian socialist movement and at the bitter struggle they waged among themselves":

'Bolshevism grew up, took shape, and became steeled in long years of struggle against petty-bourgeois revolutionism which borrows something from anarchism and which falls short, in anything essential, of the conditions and requirements of a consistently proletarian struggle.... easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organisation, discipline, and steadfastness. The petty bourgeois 'driven to frenzy' by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which like anarchism is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, its liability to become swiftly transformed into submission, apathy, fantasy, and even a 'frenzied' infatuation with one or another bourgeois 'fad', - is common knowledge...Anarchism was not infrequently a sort of punishment for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement. The two monstrosities were mutually complementary.'

The current 'left' swamp in Britain richly illustrates Lenin's words with their organisational chaos, their treachery to the states of proletarian dictatorship, their vacillation when national liberation struggles feel obliged to resist violently, their opportunism towards reformist bureaucrats, and their defeatist lack of confidence in proletarian overthrow of imperialism (all detailed below).

No apologies are being made for "finding bombast and vituperation so congenial a political style". One man's bombast is another man's brilliant polemic. Surely the only point is: Is the vituperation making correct or false criticisms?

Bulletin 632 has already dealt with this point in this debate:(p5, cols 3-4).

The ILWP has no wish to apologise for using rough language, - only to apologise in advance to sensitive souls who might be put off from answering theoretical polemics because of the ego-bruising that is inseparable from an attack on subjective idealism.

The ILWP certainly "tests its ideological struggle by mass work" in the best way possible, - by publishing its analysis of world developments and what line revolutionaries should adopt in response, and being prepared to defend or correct this analysis, publicly, in the light of subsequent events, taking on allcomers.

Petty-bourgeois revolutionism (the 'left' swamp) significantly refuses to do this. To this day, for example, the Sparts refuse to answer how they came to spend eleven uncomfortable months in 1980-81 stumbling from an appeal for worldwide military action in support of Solidarnosc, to ostentatiously dismissing it as a CIA company 
union but without one word of explanation to the working class as to why the Sparts had so disastrously misjudged the situation and given workers internationally such catastrophic counter-revolutionary advice for so long, - long enough to help the CIA and Pentagon to stage a counter-revolutionary intervention into Poland there and then (had that been Washington's intention).

The ILWP has misanalysed a few things in its time - but never so calamitously - and never without a prolonged period of public self-analysis subsequently to discover exactly why the mistake was made, and what idealist illusions need correcting in the ILWP fundamental world outlook to ensure no similar mistakes are made again.

The new criticism of the ILWP makes repeated play of the fact that "the masses do not follow the leadership of the ILWP", in order to crack jokes about it being "sheer instinctive wisdom on their part", pursuing the already-discussed notion that "the masses ultimately must accept responsibility for history".

Bulletin 630 insisted that the failures (or success) of leadership are the crucial factor in the record of communist revolutionary struggle, not the failures of the masses.

The US critics joke that either they are correct about the masses being responsible for the leaderships they get, or else the ILWP is right about it being a question of leadership failures in which case the ILWP must be a self-confessed leadership failure because it has not won a mass following.

But these critics supply the 'answer' to their bogus conundrum themselves when trying to describe how the Bolsheviks succeeded in winning the masses of Tsarist Russia:

"In part it had to do with the specific experience of the working class and peasantry, and without that experience, a hundred Lenins could not have led a successful revolution."

Marxist science explains that would-be revolutionary leaderships slowly convince more and more followers to build the party because its world view, programme, strategy, and tactics are usually proved by developments to have been the correct approach. The theory has to be worked out before workers can make experience of it in practice in struggling to supply mass movement with comprehensive revolutionary leadership. In the course of real political struggles to demonstrate what policies and leadership-philosophy the revolution will need in order to seize and hold onto power, the theoretical understanding is further refined and developed.	

How far or fast any would-be leadership party progresses obviously depends on a combination of the subjective input (how much successful experience in theory and practice the individual revolutionaries collectively can offer) and the maturity of objective factors (how far developed is the masses' understanding of imperialist crisis).

Contrary to the American critics' abuse, the ILWP has claimed no special position for itself. The party emerged out of the complacent theoretical sterility of the Third International, and the fraudulence of Trotskyism's pretence of unconditional solidarity with the Soviet workers state and proletarian dictatorship, to argue the case for critical support of the socialist camp and national-liberation struggle plus a return to open Leninist polemics between revolutionary organisations everywhere.

The ILWP could only develop the need for this understanding out of its own experiences initially; but immediately, it contacted every other organisation remotely close to such an outlook with a view to friendly merger discussions.

To cut a long story short not one single organisation came remotely close to understanding the history of the world revolutionary struggle the way that the ILWP sees it. There was either relentlessly continuing camp-following by such as the NCP, or else unmitigated "everything is rotten" Trotskyite sectarian opportunism on the other side.

The crunch for the ILWP's development came immediately, within months of its launch, - the question of Solidarnosc.

To this day as far as we have been able to ascertain, the ILWP alone adopted the position (relevant to all socialist states) of unconditional support for the workers state of proletarian dictatorship against every single 'freedom' lobby or 'human rights' attack from the world of bourgeois idealism, coupled with an insistence on open polemical struggle with the complacent revisionist illusions of the Polish United Worker Party and similar governments, and with the whole bureaucratic class-collaborating essence of latter-day Third International politics.

And the ILWP still publicly argues that the revisionist illusions in Havana and Peking, etc, are deadly dangerous to the survival of those workers states and should be openly polemicised against at the same time as unconditional support is given to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat workers state in Cuba, China, etc, in every conflict with bourgeois-democratic ideology and Western 'free market' interference.

Moreover, the ILWP sees no possibility of compromise on these questions with other 'revolutionary' groups without destroying the very essence of Marxist Leninist understanding towards the international class struggle.

If this stand means that the party spends far more time polemicising as opposed to becoming a "mass movement" immediately by opportunist adaptations, then so be it.

But the US criticism is silly if it thinks that the ILWP theoretical positions can be disposed of just because there is no guaranteed rapid transformation into a mass party yet in sight. Incidentally, what "mass work" are these US comrades so self-satisfied with? No news of any great revolutionary breakthrough in the USA has yet reached this country, just the same way as there is no obvious mass-transformation in sight for any of the scores of "revolutionary" groups in Britain.

And this reality leaves us only with polemics among small groups (where, that is, even a willingness for this can be found, which would at least be a start towards clarification). The US critics, however, choose only to sneer at the ILWP's efforts to provoke public discussions.

The record of small groups embarking on careerist gimmicks in order to 'break out' of the narrow-circle tradition of revolutionary agitation is a disastrous one.

The most pathetic tragedy of all such opportunism is what happens to the 'revolutionary' cadres themselves. The entrist ambitions of 'Militant' which aimed to capture the Labour Party from within and at the same time train a steeled Marxist vanguard, ended up with the monstrous philistinism and spivvery of Derek Hatton & Co, who are to revolutionary theory what the British parliamentary Labour Party are to freedom and democracy for the working class.

Now, not surprisingly, these Trotskyite opportunists are splitting all over the place. The dream of the entrist route to building a significant revolutionary party is no more.

The WRP Trots made a fetish of vowing never to neglect the task of building a party of revolutionary theory even in the midst of the Healy-Redgraveites' most extravagantly theatrical activist gimmicks.

But the opportunist stunts around the leadership cult became so fanatical that fund-raising and newspaper sales became an exercise in zombiefication, - and all the reading of Lenin's vol.38 philosophical notebooks was turned into an occult prayer-meeting. There was a breakout of sorts from very small numbers, - but only to turn the WRP into one endless mass-rally of the living dead. James Jones and the Maharishi achieved similar dramatic effects on large numbers of followers but with just as little benefit to real revolutionary struggle.

This opportunist fear of remaining a tiny minority opinion for too long can only corrupt people, always ending up where all revisionism ends up, in total philistinism.

At one extreme, the British SWP will embrace any philosophical crap from feminism to militant homosexualism in order to avoid remaining unpopular. At the other, CPSU 'permanent peaceful coexistence' revisionism compromised itself out of existence in order to suck up to world bourgeois 'public opinion'. The result either way is the triumph of subjective idealism over Marxist philosophy.

The necessary materialist progress is quite simple, - as, for instance, explained in Lenin's 'What is to be done'. The fight for revolutionary theory has to overcome the spontaneous petty-bourgeois trade unionist consciousness of workers under capitalism.

It can only involve repeatedly telling workers and intellectuals that the current 'left' politics on offer are muddle-headed idealism. The case for a Marxist-Leninist party has to be put to workers individually and collectively in as accessible forms as possible, and as relevantly as possible to the experiences they are making about the world which might change their understanding of it. Hence the notion of the revolutionary newspaper published as frequently and cheaply as possible and distributed as widely as possible.

Starting from scratch, the great need is for training a revolutionary cadre party, - isolated individuals who ahead of their time are capable of responding to a new understanding of world history.

If the party keeps on misanalysing the international imperialist crisis and class struggle, and can only confuse people rather than educate them about understanding the world we live in, - every economic, political, social, and cultural phenomenon in it, - then it can make no progress. The 'left' swamp will all collapse in time.

If the party keeps on getting things right, it must eventually grow, - however slowly, and however long it takes. But there can be no rushing or force-feeding of it. It can only be a constant fight for the most ruthless objective understanding. And because of the impossibility of predicting exactly how the imperialist crisis will finally be resolved in world socialist revolution, it is impossible to answer 'yes' or 'no' to any challenge that the ILWP 'ought to' have X or Y number of members 'by this time'.

The only thing the struggle for Marxism can do is all that it has ever been able to do, - provide a correct materialist analysis of world developments, of the appropriate response by the international revolutionary movement, and of the constant necessary philosophical development of the revolutionary party, - and, of course, always to be standing up ready to be counted.

The ILWP is ready but no one else is.

The problem is simple - deep disagreements about what is happening in the world. Our record of these insoluble differences is readily available in 638 issues of the Bulletin and 17 volumes of the ILWP Books.

And now having disposed of the pointless subjective abuse of the ILWP by the US critics for being too small, these real disagreements about what is happening in the world, and what is the real history of the international revolutionary socialist struggle so far, - can proceed.

Leaving aside for the moment the derisive textual analysis of Bulletin 630 for its alleged illogicalities, non-sequiturs, and impenetrability, the unbridgeable theoretical differences remain as glaring as ever.

The US reply still insists that a third world war is not inevitable because the imperialists will calculate that modern weaponry will cause them too much damage, asserting this as the 'materialist' analysis and denying any idealism in their understanding.

But the long list of wars avoided since 1945 out of imperialist self-interest guarantees nothing about how the conflict for world economic supremacy between the USA, Germany, Japan, and West Europe will be resolved (as well as being misleading about how much war there has been since 1945 under continuing imperialist world domination, - more than in any other period of human history, - and obviously and inevitably so, the notion of 'international peace' since 1945 is one of the most outrageous bits of all the revisionist nonsense).

And it plainly remains philosophical idealism to say that imperialism will not go to war again over world economic domination because they will hurt themselves too much.

It remains materialist to say that they will go to war eventually because of the in-built contradictions of the monopoly-capitalist system and the essential historic motivation of the bourgeois entrepreneurial spirit which made the modern world the way it is by its acquisitive colonising aggressiveness.

It remains misleading to describe this as imperialism's 'war lust', - as though it were a personal idiosyncrasy of monopoly capitalists (which, it is implied, might change with maturity). War is forced on the imperialist bourgeoisie for their very survival as a ruling class, - one section against another.

It is fatuous for the US reply to give a long list of wars which have been avoided since WWII to try to justify their mystical faith that 'maybe' there does not have to be a WWIII. It is the equivalent of Kautsky trying to console the international working class during WWI with various diversions (about "ultra-imperialism eventually emerging to enable the Great Powers to avoid future wars "which are so damaging"; or about "disarmament" becoming irresistibly attractive after the destruction inflicted by WWI; or about aspects of imperialist war which might be thought to have a "progressive" or nationalist by-product) - all delusions serving only to undermine the proletariat's revolutionary intention to overthrow the bourgeoisie totally, internationally, - once and for all. 

Some of Lenin's vituperation against Kautsky is exactly applicable to this latest US revisionism:

From the necessity of imperialism the Left wing deduces the necessity of revolutionary action. The "theory of ultra-imperialism", however, serves Kautsky as a means to justify the opportunists, to present the situation in such a light as to create the impression that they have not gone over to the bourgeoisie but simply "do not believe" that socialism can arrive immediately, and expect that a new "era" of disarmament and lasting peace "may be" ushered in. This "theory" boils down, and can only boil down, to the following: Kautsky is exploiting the hope for a new peaceful era of capitalism so as to justify the adhesion of the opportunists and the official Social-Democratic parties to the bourgeoisie, and their rejection of revolutionary, i.e., proletarian, tactics in the present stormy era, this despite the solemn declarations of the Basle resolution!

At the same time Kautsky does not say that this new phase follows, and necessarily so, from certain definite circumstances and conditions. On the contrary, he states quite outspokenly that he cannot yet even decide whether or not this new phase is "achievable". Indeed, consider the "trends" towards the new era, which have been indicated by Kautsky. Astonishingly enough, the author has included among the economic facts "the trend towards disarmament"! This means that, behind innocent philistine talk and pipe-dreaming, Kautsky is trying to hide from indisputable facts that do not at all fit in with the theory of the mitigation of contradictions. Kautsky's "ultra-imperialism"—this term, incidentally, does not at all express what the author wants to say—implies a tremendous mitigation of the contradictions of capitalism. We are told that Protectionism is subsiding in Britain and America. But where is there the least trend towards a new era? Extreme Protectionism is now subsiding in America, but Protectionism remains, just as the privileges, the preferential tariffs favouring Britain, have remained in that country's colonies. Let us recall what the passage from the previous and "peaceful" period of capitalism to the present and imperialist period has been based on: free competition has yielded to monopolist capitalist combines, and the world has been partitioned. Both these facts (and factors) are obviously of world-wide significance: Free Trade and peaceful competition were possible and necessary as long as capital was in a position to enlarge its colonies without hindrance, and seize unoccupied land in Africa, etc., and as long as the concentration of capital was still weak and no monopolist concerns existed, i.e., concerns of a magnitude permitting domination in an entire branch of industry. The appearance and growth of such monopolist concerns (has this process been stopped in Britain or America? Not even Kautsky will dare deny that the war has accelerated and intensified it) have rendered the free competition of former times impossible; they have cut the ground from under its feet, while the partition of the world compels the capitalists to go over from peaceful expansion to an armed struggle for the repartitioning of colonies and spheres of influence. It is ridiculous to think that the subsiding of Protectionism in two countries can change anything in this respect.

"The growing international interweaving between the cliques of finance capital" is the only really general and indubitable tendency, not during the last few years and in two countries, but throughout the whole capitalist world. But why should this trend engender a striving towards disarmament, not armaments, as hitherto? Take any one of the world-famous cannon (and arms) manufacturers, Armstrong, for instance. The British Economist (May 1, 1915) published figures showing that this firm's profits rose from £606,000 (about 6,000,000 rubles) in 1905 6 to £856,000 in 1913, and to £940,000 (9,000,000 rubles) in 1914. Here, the intertwining of finance capital is most pronounced, and is on the increase; German capitalists have "holdings" in British firms; British firms build submarines for Austria, and so on. Interlinked on a world-wide scale, capital is thriving on armaments and wars. To think that the fact of capital in the individual states combining and interlinking on an international scale must of necessity produce an economic trend towards disarmament means, in effect, allowing well-meaning philistine expectations of an easing of class contradictions take the place of the actual intensification of those contradictions.

V

It is in a wholly philistine spirit that Kautsky speaks of the "lessons" of the war, presenting those lessons in the light of a moral abhorrence at the misery it causes. Here, for instance, is how he argues in the pamphlet entitled The National State etc.:

"It stands beyond doubt and needs no proof that there are strata of the population that are greatly interested in universal peace and disarmament. The petty bourgeoisie and the small peasants, and even many capitalists and intellectuals, are not tied to imperialism by any interests that outweigh the damage suffered by these strata as a result of war and armaments" (p. 21).

This was written in February 1915! The facts show that all the propertied classes, down to the petty bourgeoisie and the "intelligentsia", have joined the imperialists en masse, and yet Kautsky, like Chekhov's man in a muffler^121 shrugs off the facts with an air of extraordinary smugness and with the aid of saccharine phrases. He judges of the interests of the petty bourgeoisie, not by their conduct, but by the words of certain petty bourgeois, although at every step such words are refuted by the deeds. It is exactly like judging of the "interests" of the bourgeoisie in general, not by their deeds, but by the benevolent speeches made by bourgeois clergymen who avow that the present-day system is imbued with the ideals of Christianity. Kautsky applies Marxism in a way that voids it of all content, so that what remains is the catchword of "interests", in a kind of supernatural, otherworldly meaning, for it implies, not real economics, but pious wishes for the common weal.

Marxism appraises "interests" according to the class antagonisms and the class struggle which find expression in millions of facts of daily life. The petty bourgeoisie prattle and dream of the abatement of antagonisms, whose aggravation, they "argue", leads to "harmful consequences". Imperialism means the subjugation of all strata of the propertied classes to finance capital, and the partition of the world among five or six "Great" Powers, most of which are now involved in the war. The partition of the world among the Great Powers means that all their propertied classes are interested in possessing colonies and spheres of influence, in oppressing other nations, and in securing the more or less lucrative posts and privileges that stem from belonging to a "Great" Power and an oppressor nation.*

Life cannot go on in the old way, in the comparatively tranquil, cultured and peaceful conditions of a capitalism that is smoothly developing and gradually spreading to new countries. A new epoch has arrived. Finance capital ousts, and will completely oust, a particular country from the ranks of Great Powers, will deprive it of its colonies and spheres of influence (as Germany, which has gone to war with Britain, threatens to do), and it will deprive the petty bourgeoisie of their dominant-nation privileges and additional incomes. This has been proved by the war. It is the outcome of that aggravation of antagonisms which has long been admitted by all, including Kautsky, in his pamphlet The Road to Power.

Now that the armed conflict for Great-Power privileges has become a fact, Kautsky wants to persuade the capitalists and the petty bourgeoisie to believe that war is horrible, while disarmament is beneficial, in exactly the same way and with exactly the same results as the Christian churchman, speaking from the pulpit, would persuade the capitalist to believe that love of one's fellow-men is a Divine commandment, as well as the spiritual yearning and the moral law of civilisation. What Kautsky calls an economic trend towards "ultra-imperialism" is just a petty-bourgeois exhortation to the financiers that they should refrain from doing evil.

The export of capital? But more capital is exported to independent countries such as the United States of America, than to the colonies. The seizure of colonies? But they have all been seized, and nearly all of them are striving for liberation. "India may cease to be a British possession, but as an integral empire it will never fall under the sway of another foreign power" (p. 49 in the pamphlet quoted). "Any attempt on the part of any industrial capitalist state to acquire for itself a colonial empire sufficient to make it independent of other countries in regard to raw materials must cause all other capitalist states to unite against it and involve it in endless and exhausting wars, without bringing it nearer to its goal. Such a policy would be the surest road towards the bankruptcy of the entire economic life of that state" (pp. 72-73).

Is not this a philistine attempt to persuade financiers to renounce imperialism? Any attempt to frighten capitalists with the prospect of bankruptcy is like advising against speculating in shares on the Stock Exchange because many fortunes have been lost in this way. Capital gains from the bankruptcy of a rival capitalist or of a rival nation, because in this way capital becomes more concentrated. Hence the keener and "closer" economic competition becomes, i.e., the economic driving of a competitor towards bankruptcy, the more the capitalists strive to add military pressure in order to drive the competitor in that direction. The fewer the countries to which capital can still be exported as advantageously as to colonies or to such dependent states as Turkey—since in such cases the financier reaps a triple profit as against capital exports to a free, independent and civilised country like the United States of America—the fiercer is the struggle for the subjugation and partition of Turkey, China, etc. That is what economic theory reveals about the period of finance capital and imperialism. That is what the facts reveal. But Kautsky turns everything into a trite petty-bourgeois "moral": it is not worth while getting worked up and certainly not worth while going to war over the partition of Turkey, or the seizure of India, since they cannot be held for long anyway, and, moreover, it would be better to develop capitalism peacefully.... It would be better still, of course, to develop capitalism and expand the home market by increasing wages; this is quite "conceivable" and it is a very fitting topic for a churchman to preach on to the financiers.... The good Kautsky has almost succeeded in persuading the German financiers that it is not worth while waging war against Britain for the colonies, because these colonies will soon secure their liberation in any case!

Britain's exports to and imports from Egypt between 1872 and 1912 have not kept pace with the overall growth of British exports and imports, whence the "Marxist" Kautsky draws the following moral: "We have no reason to suppose that British trade with Egypt would have been less developed as a result of the mere operation of economic factors, without military occupation" (p. 72). "Capital's urge to expand... can be best promoted, not by the violent methods of imperialism, but by peaceful democracy" (p. 70).

What a remarkably serious, scientific and "Marxist" analysis! Kautsky has splendidly "rectified" unreasonable history; he has "proved" that there was no need for the British to have taken Egypt from the French, that it was absolutely not worth the German financiers' while to have started the war, organised the Turkish campaign, and taken other measures to drive the British out of Egypt! All this is merely a misunderstanding—it has not yet dawned upon the British that it would be "best" to give up forcible methods in Egypt, and adopt "peaceful democracy" (so as to increase exports of capital à la Kautsky!).

"Of course it was an illusion on the part of the bourgeois Free-Traders to think that Free Trade would entirely eliminate the economic antagonisms generated by capitalism. Neither Free Trade nor democracy can eliminate these. We, in all respects, are interested in having these antagonisms eliminated by a struggle waged in such forms as will impose the least amount of suffering and sacrifice on the masses" (p. 73).

The Lord help us, the Lord have mercy on us! "What is a philistine?" Lassalle used to ask, and answered by quoting the words of the well-known poet: "A philistine is a gut void of everything but fear and hope that God will have mercy on him."^122

Kautsky has degraded Marxism to unparalleled prostitution and has turned into a real churchman. The latter tries to persuade the capitalists to adopt peaceful democracy—and calls this dialectics: if at first, he argues, there was Free Trade, and then arrived the monopolies and imperialism, why should there not be "ultra-imperialism", and then Free Trade again? The churchman consoles the oppressed masses by depicting the blessings this ultra-imperialism will bring, although he has not even the courage to say whether it can be "achieved"! Feuerbach was right when, in reply to those who defended religion on the ground that it consoles the people, he indicated the reactionary significance of consolation: whoever consoles the slave instead of arousing him to rise up against slavery is aiding the slaveowner.

All oppressing classes stand in need of two social functions to safeguard their rule: the function of the hangman and the function of the priest. The hangman is required to quell the protests and the indignation of the oppressed; the priest is required to console the oppressed, to depict to them the prospects of their sufferings and sacrifices being mitigated (this is particularly easy to do without guaranteeing that these prospects will be "achieved"), while preserving class rule, and thereby to reconcile them to class rule, win them away from revolutionary action, undermine their revolutionary spirit and destroy their revolutionary determination. Kautsky has turned Marxism into a most hideous and stupid counter-revolutionary theory, into the lowest kind of clericalism.

In 1909, he acknowledged, in his The Road to Power, the fact of the unrefuted and irrefutable intensification of antagonisms within capitalism, the approach of a period of wars and revolutions, of a new "revolutionary period". There can be no "premature" revolution, he said, and branded as "a direct betrayal of our cause" any refusal to count on the possibility of victory in an uprising, even though before the fighting began, the prospect of defeat could not be denied.

With the advent of war, the antagonisms have become still more bitter. The sufferings of the masses have assumed tremendous proportions. The end of the war is not in sight and the hostilities are spreading more and more. Kautsky is writing pamphlet after pamphlet and, meekly submitting to the dictates of the censorship, refrains from quoting the facts on the land-grabbing, the horrors of war, the scandalous profiteering of the war contractors, the high cost of living and the actual slavery of the workers mobilised in the munitions industries; instead, he keeps on consoling the proletariat. He does so by quoting the instance of wars in which the bourgeoisie was revolutionary and progressive, in regard to which "Marx himself" desired victory for one bourgeoisie or the other; he consoles it by quoting rows and columns of figures to prove that capitalism is "possible" without colonies, without the plundering of others, without wars and armaments, and to prove that "peaceful democracy" is preferable. Not daring to deny that the sufferings of the masses are becoming more acute and that a revolutionary situation is arising before our very eyes (one must not talk about this, since it is not permitted by the censor!), Kautsky, in his servility to the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, depicts the "prospect" (he does not guarantee that it can be "achieved") of forms of struggle in a new phase, which will entail "less sacrifice and suffering".... Franz Mehring and Rosa Luxemburg were quite right when, for this very reason, they called Kautsky a street-walker (Mädchen für alle).

In August 1905 a revolutionary situation existed in Russia. The tsar had promised convocation of the Bulygin Duma^123 in order to "console" the masses who were in a state of unrest. If the abandoning of armaments by the financiers and their agreeing to a "lasting peace" can be called "ultra-imperialism", then the Bulygin regime of consultative parliamentary representation may be described as "ultra-autocracy". Let us assume for a moment that tomorrow a hundred of the world's biggest financiers, "interwoven" as they are in hundreds of colossal enterprises, will promise the peoples that they will stand for disarmament after the war (we make this assumption only for a moment in order to draw political conclusions from Kautsky's foolish little theory). Even if that happened, it would be downright treachery to the proletariat to dissuade it from taking revolutionary action, without which all promises and all fine prospects are only a mirage.

The war has not only brought the capitalist class huge profits and splendid prospects of fresh plunder (Turkey, China, etc.), new contracts worth thousands of millions and new loans at increased rates of interest; it has also brought the capitalist class still greater political advantages in that it has split and corrupted the proletariat. Kautsky is encouraging this corruption; he sanctifies this international split among the militant proletarians in the name of unity with the opportunists of their "own" nations, with the Sudekums! And yet there are people who fail to understand that the unity slogan of the old parties means the "unity" of the proletariat of a given nation with the bourgeoisie of that nation, and a split among the proletariat of the various nations....

June 1915 The collapse of the second international

Kautsky's definition is not only wrong and un-Marxist. It serves as a basis for a whole system of views which signify a rupture with Marxist theory and Marxist practice all along the line. I shall refer to this later. The argument about words which Kautsky raises as to whether the latest stage of capitalism should be called imperialism or the stage of finance capital is not worth serious attention. Call it what you will, it makes no difference. The essence of the matter is that Kautsky detaches the politics of imperialism from its economics, speaks of annexations as being a policy "preferred" by finance capital, and opposes to it another bourgeois policy which, he alleges, is possible on this very same basis of finance capital. It follows, then, that monopolies in the economy are compatible with non-monopolistic, non-violent, non-annexationist methods in politics. It follows then, that the territorial division of the world, which was completed during this very epoch of finance capital, and which constitutes the basis of the present peculiar forms of rivalry between the biggest capitalist states, is compatible with a non-imperialist policy. The result is a slurring-over and a blunting of the most profound contradictions of the latest stage of capitalism, instead of an exposure of their depth; the result is bourgeois reformism instead of Marxism.

Kautsky's reply to Cunow is as follows: imperialism is not present-day capitalism; it is only one of the forms of the policy of present-day capitalism. This policy we can and should fight, fight imperialism, annexations, etc.

The reply seems quite plausible, but in effect it is a more subtle and more disguised (and therefore more dangerous) advocacy of conciliation with imperialism, because a "fight" against the policy of the trusts and banks that does not affect the economic basis of the trusts and banks is mere bourgeois reformism and pacifism, the benevolent and innocent expression of pious wishes. Evasion of existing contradictions, forgetting the most important of them, instead of revealing their full depth—such is Kautsky's theory, which has nothing in common with Marxism.

"From the purely economic point of view," writes Kautsky, "it is not impossible that capitalism will yet go through a new phase, that of the extension of the policy of the cartels to foreign policy, the phase of ultra-imperialism," * i.e., of a super-imperialism, of a union of the imperialisms of the whole world and not struggles among them, a phase when wars shall cease under capitalism, a phase of "the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital". **

"From the purely economic point of view", is "ultra-imperialism" possible, or is it ultra-nonsense?

If the purely economic point of view is meant to be a "pure" abstraction, then all that can be said reduces itself to the following proposition: development is proceeding towards monopolies, hence, towards a single world monopoly, towards a single world trust. This is indisputable, but it is also as completely meaningless as is the statement that "development is proceeding" towards the manufacture of foodstuffs in laboratories. In this sense the "theory" of ultra-imperialism is no less absurd than a "theory of ultra-agriculture" would be.

If, however, we are discussing the "purely economic" conditions of the epoch of finance capital as a historically concrete epoch which began at the turn of the twentieth century, then the best reply that one can make to the lifeless abstractions of "ultra-imperialism" (which serve exclusively a most reactionary aim: that of diverting attention from the depth of existing antagonisms) is to contrast them with the concrete economic realities of the present-day world economy. Kautsky's utterly meaningless talk about ultra-imperialism encourages, among other things, that profoundly mistaken idea which only brings grist to the mill of the apologists of imperialism, i.e., that the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and contradictions inherent in the world economy, whereas in reality it increases them.

Compare this reality—the vast diversity of economic and political conditions, the extreme disparity in the rate of development of the various countries, etc., and the violent struggles among the imperialist states—with Kautsky's silly little fable about "peaceful" ultra-imperialism. Is this not the reactionary attempt of a frightened philistine to hide from stern reality? Are not the international cartels which Kautsky imagines are the embryos of "ultra-imperialism" (in the same way as one "can" describe the manufacture of tablets in a laboratory as ultra-agriculture in embryo) an example of the division and the redivision of the world, the transition from peaceful division to non-peaceful division and vice versa? Is not American and other finance capital, which divided the whole world peacefully with Germany's participation in, for example, the international rail syndicate, or in the international mercantile shipping trust, now engaged in redividing the world on the basis of a new relation of forces that is being changed by methods anything but peaceful?

Finance capital and the trusts do not diminish but increase the differences in the rate of growth of the various parts of the world economy. Once the relation of forces is changed, what other solution of the contradictions can be found under capitalism than that of force?

Capitalism is growing with the greatest rapidity in the colonies and in overseas countries. Among the latter, new imperialist powers are emerging (e.g., Japan). The struggle among the world imperialisms is becoming more acute. The tribute levied by finance capital on the most profitable colonial and overseas enterprises is increasing. In the division of this "booty", an exceptionally large part goes to countries which do not always stand at the top of the list in the rapidity of the development of their productive forces.

Germany, therefore, had an overwhelming superiority over Britain in this respect.* The question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?
Imperialism - the highest stage of capitalism   1916

………..the only objective, i.e, real, social significance of Kautsky's "theory" is this: it is a most reactionary method of consoling the masses with hopes of permanent peace being possible under capitalism, by distracting their attention from the sharp antagonisms and acute problems of the present times, and directing it towards illusory prospects of an imaginary "ultra-imperialism" of the future. Deception of the masses—that is all there is in Kautsky's "Marxist" theory.

Indeed, it is enough to compare well-known and indisputable facts to become convinced of the utter falsity of the prospects which Kautsky tries to conjure up before the German workers (and the workers of all lands). Let us consider India, Indo-China and China, It is known that these three colonial and semi-colonial countries, with a population of six to seven hundred million, are subjected to the exploitation of the finance capital of several imperialist powers: Great Britain, France, Japan, the U.S.A., etc. Let us assume that these imperialist countries form alliances against one another in order to protect or enlarge their possessions, their interests and their spheres of influence in these Asiatic states; these alliances will be "inter-imperialist", or "ultra-imperialist" alliances. Let us assume that all the imperialist countries conclude an alliance for the "peaceful" division of these parts of Asia; this alliance would be an alliance of "internationally united finance capital". There are actual examples of alliances of this kind in the history of the twentieth century—the attitude of the powers to China, for instance. We ask, is it "conceivable", assuming that the capitalist system remains intact—and this is precisely the assumption that Kautsky does make—that such alliances would be more than temporary, that they would eliminate friction, conflicts and struggle in every possible form?

The question has only to be presented clearly for any other than a negative answer to he impossible. This is because the only conceivable basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, interests, colonies, etc., is a calculation of the strength of those participating, their general economic, financial, military strength, etc. And the strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism. Half a century ago Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, if her capitalist strength is compared with that of the Britain of that time; Japan compared with Russia in the same way. Is it "conceivable" that in ten or twenty years' time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? It is out of the question.

Therefore, in the realities of the capitalist system, and not in the banal philistine fantasies of English parsons, or of the German "Marxist", Kautsky, "inter-imperialist" or "ultra-imperialist" alliances, no matter what form they may assume, whether of one imperialist coalition against another, or of a general alliance embracing all the imperialist powers, are inevitably nothing more than a "truce" in periods between wars. Peaceful alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics. But in order to pacify the workers and reconcile them with the social-chauvinists who have deserted to the side of the bourgeoisie, over-wise Kautsky separates one link of a single chain from another, separates the present peaceful (and ultra-imperialist, nay, ultra-ultra-imperialist) alliance of all the powers for the "pacification" of China (remember the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion^14) from the non-peaceful conflict of tomorrow, which will prepare the ground for another "peaceful" general alliance for the partition, say, of Turkey, on the day after tomorrow, etc,, etc. Instead of showing the living connection between periods of imperialist peace and periods of imperialist war, Kautsky presents the workers with a lifeless abstraction in order to reconcile them to their lifeless leaders.

An American writer, Hill, in his A History of the Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe refers in his preface to the following periods in the recent history of diplomacy: (1) the era of revolution; (2) the constitutional movement; (3) the present era of "commercial imperialism" *. Another writer divides the history of Great Britain's "world policy" since 1870 into four periods: (1) the first Asiatic period (that of the struggle against Russia's advance in Central Asia towards India); (2) the African period (approximately 1885-1902): that of the struggle against France for the partition of Africa (the "Fashoda incident" of 1898 which brought her within a hair's breadth of war with France); (3) the second Asiatic period (alliance with Japan against Russia); and (4) the "European" period, chiefly anti-German.** "The political patrol clashes take place on the financial field," wrote the banker, Riesser, in 1905, in showing how French finance capital operating in Italy was preparing the way for a political alliance of these countries, and how a conflict was developing between Germany and Great Britain over Persia, between all the European capitalists over Chinese loans, etc. Behold, the living reality of peaceful "ultra-imperialist" alliances in their inseverable connection with ordinary imperialist conflicts!

Kautsky's obscuring of the deepest contradictions of imperialism, which inevitably boils down to painting imperialism in bright colours, leaves its traces in this writer's criticism of the political features of imperialism. Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of antagonisms in this field. Particularly intensified become the yoke of national oppression and the striving for annexations, i.e., the violation of national independence (for annexation is nothing but the violation of the right of nations to self-determination). Hilferding rightly notes the connection between imperialism and the intensification of national oppression. "In the newly opened-up countries," he writes, "the capital imported into them intensifies antagonisms and excites against the intruders the constantly growing resistance of the peoples who are awakening to national consciousness; this resistance can easily develop into dangerous measures against foreign capital. The old social relations become completely revolutionised, the age-long agrarian isolation of ‘nations without history' is destroyed and they are drawn into the capitalist whirlpool. Capitalism itself gradually provides the subjugated with the means and resources for their emancipation and they set out to achieve the goal which once seemed highest to the European nations: the creation of a united national state as a means to economic and cultural freedom. This movement for national independence threatens European capital in its most valuable and most promising fields of exploitation, and European capital can maintain its domination only by continually increasing its military forces."*

To this must be added that it is not only in newly opened-up countries, but also in the old, that imperialism Is leading to annexation, to increased national oppression, and, consequently, also to increasing resistance. While objecting to the intensification of political reaction by imperialism, Kautsky leaves in the shade a question that has become particularly urgent, viz., the impossibility of unity with the opportunists in the epoch of imperialism. While objecting to annexations, he presents his objections in a form that is most acceptable and least offensive to the opportunists. He addresses himself to a German audience, yet he obscures the most topical and important point, for instance, the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany. In order to appraise this "mental aberration" of Kautsky's I shall take the following example. Let us suppose that a 'Japanese condemns the annexation of the Philippines by the Americans. The question is: will many believe that he does so because he has a horror of annexations as such, and not because he himself has a desire to annex the Philippines? And shall we not be constrained to admit that the "fight" the Japanese is waging against annexations can be regarded as being sincere and politically honest only if he fights against the annexation of Korea by Japan, and urges freedom for Korea to secede from Japan?

Kautsky's theoretical analysis of imperialism, as well as his economic and political critique of imperialism, are permeated through and through with a spirit, absolutely irreconcilable with Marxism, of obscuring and glossing over the fundamental contradictions of imperialism and with a striving to preserve at all costs the crumbling unity with opportunism in the European working-class movement.
Imperialism - the highest stage of capitalism   1916

The US revisionist reply keeps in with modern European opportunism by pandering to the nationalist element in Eurocommunism. It consoles any anti-Leninists who would not like to hear it asserted that inter-imperialist WWIII is inevitable, by making sarcastic jibes that trade-war is not yet the same thing as world war, and that it was news in the USA that the Netherlands or Canada, for example, was striving for world supremacy.

But even for Holland and Canada, the ILWP's assertion remains true "No imperialist bourgeoisie will voluntarily quit the fight for world supremacy".

Many world-ranking monopolies are based in Holland and Canada - Shell, Philips, Unilever, Thomson Organisation, other publishing empires, brewing empires, aircraft, etc. All of these bourgeois monopolies will be in the thick of the inter-imperialist coalitions and confrontations which will finally try to resolve the question of world supremacy through war for the third time this century - just as Dutch and Canadian monopoly interests were deeply involved in World Wars I and II.

To dismiss these questions with a sneering joke about "Holland striving for world supremacy is news to us" is grotesque philistinism, - so backward as to be hardly worth replying to (as far as helping these US revisionists is concerned), although it still helps ILWP development to plough through this muck.

Equally silly is the pedantic word play which uses the Bulletin assertion that "any retreats (from the fight for world supremacy) for military reasons will be just that - capitulation to superior armed bullying power" to try to prove the US revisionist points, thus: 

"Now if it is conceded that an imperialist will capitulate to superior armed power, then why is it not reasonable that it will avoid military confrontation in the first place if it determines that it will only be forced to surrender later".

This trivial sophistry answers itself, exactly as the Bulletin has explained things: - it is plainly inevitable that at some stage, one imperialist camp or superpower will be convinced it has the beating of another rival camp or superpower, and vice versa. Who capitulates then?

And in any case, the very conundrum posed by the US revisionists already establishes the essence of the ILWP's entire longstanding world view - that the supposed Cold War East v West armageddon was always likely to be superseded by real immediately-necessary war for survival between rival imperialist trading blocs.

A planet where it is conceded that imperialists back down to each other because of great-power political and military pressure is already a planet on its way towards World War III unmistakably and inevitably. 

Unbelievably, almost exactly mimicking Kautsky's revisionist idiocies of 77 years ago, the US reply claims to have discovered a major "restraining effect on an imperialist-initiated global-war", - namely that "a new and highly significant factor has emerged: the rise of transnational capital with ever-decreasing loyalty to its 'home', i.e.: monopoly capital's increasing cosmopolitanism."

Lenin specifically dealt with this ignorant nonsense:

Monopoly associations of entrepreneurs, trusts instead of enterprises, "freely" competing with each other at home and in relations between the countries—became typical. Finance capital took over as the typical "lord" of the world; it is particularly mobile and flexible, particularly interknit at home and internationally, and particularly impersonal and divorced from production proper; it lends itself to concentration with particular ease, and has been concentrated to an unusual degree already, so that literally a few hundred multimillionaires and millionaires control the destiny of the world. 

Abstract theoretical reasoning may lead to the conclusion at which Kautsky has arrived—in a somewhat different fashion but also by abandoning Marxism—namely, that the time is not too far off when these magnates of capital will unite on a world scale in a single world trust, substituting an internationally united finance capital for the competition and struggle between sums of finance capital nationally isolated. This conclusion is, however, just as abstract, simplified and incorrect as the similar conclusion drawn by our Struvists and Economists of the nineties.

If the international integration of national (rather nationally isolated) imperialisms is to be called ultra-imperialism, which "could" remove the conflicts, such as wars, political upheavals, etc., (which the petty bourgeois finds especially unpalatable, disquieting, and alarming,) why not, in that case, make an escape from the present highly conflicting and cataclysmic epoch of imperialism, which is the here and now, by means of innocent dreams of an "ultra-imperialism" which is relatively peaceful, relatively lacking in conflict and relatively uncataclysmic? Why not try to escape the acute problems that have been and are being posed by the epoch of imperialism that has dawned for Europe by dreaming up the possibility of it soon passing away and being followed by a relatively "peaceful" epoch of "ultra-imperialism" that will not require any "abrupt" tactics? Kautsky says precisely that "such a [ultra-imperialist] new phase of capitalism is at any rate imaginable", but that "there are not yet enough prerequisites to decide whether or not it is feasible" (Die Neue Zeit,7 April 30, 1915, p. 144).

There is not a whit of Marxism in this urge to ignore the imperialism which is here and to escape into the realm of an "ultra-imperialism" which may or may not arrive. In this formulation, 'Marxism' is recognised in that "new phase of capitalism" which its inventor himself does not warrant can be realised, while in the present stage (which is already here) the petty-bourgeois and profoundly reactionary desire to blunt the contradictions is substituted for Marxism.

Can it be denied, however, that a new phase of capitalism is "imaginable" in the abstract after imperialism, namely, ultra-imperialism? No, it cannot. Such a phase can be imagined. But in practice this means becoming an opportunist, turning away from the acute problems of the day to dream of the unacute problems of the future. In theory this means refusing to be guided by actual developments, forsaking them arbitrarily for such dreams. There is no doubt that the trend of development is towards a single world trust absorbing all enterprises without exception and all states without exception. But this development proceeds in such circumstances, at such a pace, through such contradictions, conflicts and upheavals—not only economic but political, national, etc.— that inevitably imperialism will burst and capitalism will be transformed into its opposite long before one world trust materialises, before the "ultra-imperialist", world-wide amalgamation of national finance capitals takes place.

In a piece of sheer name-calling to try to get back at the Bulletin for describing the US revisionism as "reactionary fatalism" when it blames the working class for the "ultimate responsibility" for the failures of opportunist leadership in the history of the anti-imperialist movement, the US reply declares:

"Is it not obvious that it is the theory of the inevitability of world war that is reactionary fatalism".

First, that makes the entire body of Leninist science nothing but a work of 'reactionary fatalism'. Second, it reveals the real hatred of proletarian-dictatorship revolution by these middle-class frauds, - regarding the historical necessity for the working-class overthrow of bourgeois power worldwide (because of imperialism's incurable warmongering contradictions) as a 'reactionary' development.

Clearly no one relishes the warmongering suffering that the collapse of imperialism will bring. But only philistines from Kautsky, Trotsky, and Plekhanov onwards refuse to follow the Marxist-Leninist inspirational call to wage civil war on the bourgeois warmongers and their apologists, - and instead invent every specious reason possible to try to limit the contradictions or human understanding of them, and to
conciliate or console as widely as possible.

As every line of Marxist-Leninist science shouts out, - revolutionaries do the opposite to the philistines. Revolutionaries objectively analyse the incurable warmongering contradictions of the very 'free market' system itself, and champion the cause of the dictatorship of the proletariat which alone can provide a historical force able to destroy the bourgeois-imperialist class hold on the planet, - driven to insurrection by the need to make war on the warmongers.

It is a useless tautology to keep on repeating ad nauseam, as this US reply does, that Third International misleadership could not have been got away with if the majority of the revolutionary workers movement had rejected the mistaken policies.

The only issue is what alternative policies for the Third International might have intervened to prevent the accumulating revisionist disasters. The only organisable point of intervention is new leadership. Marxism-Leninism is a theory of revolutionary leadership.

If the US comrades seriously welcome a collective effort to learn more about the ultimate near-total collapse of Leninism in the Third International, and the subsequent near-total collapse of the socialist camp then surely the problem of Stalinism's illusory understanding of Lenin's temporary 'peaceful coexistence' diplomatic tactic, turning it into a permanent class-collaborating idiot perspective which found its final absurd expression in Gorbachev's liquidationism, - is the place to start (see ILWP Books vol.4).

Stalinist defeatism, to answer a serious challenge in the US reply, came out of a failure of proletarian revolutionary consciousness - unable or unwilling to have the confidence or clarity to see Lenin's world socialist revolutionary perspectives triumphing through the proletariat's ultimate victory over the imperialist bourgeoisie worldwide.

Instead, the Stalin-era Third International leadership saw only setback after setback, - in China, Britain, Germany, Spain, etc, - and completely revised Leninist understanding in order to accommodate these setbacks.

Hence, for example, the Popular Front was born, - pure defeatism which ordered the revolutionary proletariat to tail-end the despicable and treacherous 'democratic' petty-bourgeoisie out of fear of yet more defeats at the hands of fascist counter-revolution.

But what was needed was not a revision of Leninism into class-collaborating opportunism, but a polemical struggle to sharpen the Third International's grasp of revolutionary theory, and to find out much more about the programmatic, strategic and tactical mistakes made in the 1920s and 1950s in China, Britain, Germany, Spain, - and inside the USSR in internal policies too.

Silly US sneers aside, it is a 'philosophical' problem because the rationalisation for incorrect Third International policies, - and their potential correction, - ultimately must rely on a confusion or clarification of objective necessity, - as in the US revisionist failure (see above) to grasp that the insoluble warmongering contradiction at the heart of the competitive capitalist economic system is a far more basic material reality than the relative military calculations of one bunch of imperialists versus another.

Stalinist defeatism fooled itself that the material example of peaceful economic rivalry between the imperialist camp and the workers states would permanently claim civilisation's allegiance as opposed to an East/West armageddon, - and would win the future for socialism as well.

But this was just more idealism, - putting forward a neat nice idea as the guidance for the planet's future as opposed to the unchanging basic material reality of international class war as the very essence of the 'free market' imperialist system which was always heading for unstoppable inter-imperialist conflict again, - and not necessarily East/West armageddon at all.

World domination by US imperialist anti-communism was just a temporary form of inter-imperialist rivalry, an 'ideologically acceptable' way of allowing the US monopoly bourgeoisie to dictate to everybody.

That Pax Americana (one of the bloodiest periods in all world history with more than 30 million dead in over 250 wars, coups, and 'police' actions by imperialism) was ended by irresistibly superior German and Japanese economic competition. The final collapse of the class-collaborating revisionist mentality of the Third International was merely a by-product of that relaxation of the Cold War's bogus 'imminent' threat to the Moscow bureaucracy.

No longer needing to protect itself with superpower state military might in order to survive, the philistine bureaucracy naïvely tried to repackage itself as a 'progressive democracy', and to join the rest of mankind as parasitic stooges of US imperialist dominance, - at last going the whole hog with its revisionist retreat from Marxism-Leninism and becoming outright liquidationists.

The ILWP has already elaborated its understanding of these processes into 17 volumes of ILWP Books and 638 editions of the Bulletin. This US revisionism is stuck fast with the barmy notion that blaming the people for putting up with leadership failures explains most of what there is to know about the history of the modem revolutionary movement and its mistakes.

What unbelievable nonsense.

Build Leninism. Spread the ILWP Bulletin.

Jack Bradshaw