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
Subscriptions - £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications. PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]
No969 Tuesday Oct 6 1998                                                                                                                                    10p

More funny-money easy-credit 'loans' - to provide a 'fire brigade' to put out the flames of the world capitalist system going up in smoke, - will only add to the problem the markets started with in the first place, - the polluting effect of so-called 'surplus capital'. Imperialism is heading for self-destruction.

The complete failure of the Group of Seven major imperialist powers to come up with anything at all after their meeting in Washington over the weekend to meet the world crisis of the capitalist system, - is no surprise.

A few days earlier, a timid exploratory ½% cut in US interest rates, which the international business communities had allegedly been demanding, - only produced a new plunge on stock markets everywhere.

The joke going round at the weekend was how long would it be before the Western leaders would have it as official policy just to say nothing at all because saying anything would be bound to be deemed inadequate, such is the insolubility of the crisis.

It has come to pass far more rapidly than people were joking. Not only did the 'free world' leaders have nothing to say, apart from useless bromides and meaningless general statements of how serious the situation now is, etc, etc, but the capitalist press itself has started suggesting openly that little more will now be said about the crisis.

There ARE no policies. NOTHING can be done.

Which is exactly right. The postwar capitalist boom is bust. History's greatest-ever anti-communist stunt has begun to fall apart. The billions of dollars printed and poured out all round the world to prevent the exploited masses from going communist are now going to poison the system incurably.

Emergency loan funds are spoken of to try to bale out the next great free-market area to be submerged by crash and slump, with Brazil as the feared favourite to go under next, the lynchpin of the entire Latin American continent, and a key prop to US imperialism itself.

But no one wants to put up the money for fear of losing it, including the US Congress itself.

And in any case, what would it achieve? It is precisely the 'surplus' of credit-created capital which has caused the free market to choke in crisis in the first place. More easy politically-motivated funds are only going to increase the size of the postwar anti-communist bubble when it eventually bursts completely.

And it is fears about the American economy itself which are the most terrifying prospect of all for the bourgeois-'democracy' system, and the cracks in its edifice are already appearing. The collapse of the dollar itself will be one of the final catastrophes which will plunge the whole world into revolutionary upheaval as all the lies about 'capitalist stability' and about 'the evils of planned socialist economies' (see subsequent story) come home to roost.

The capitalist press itself is the best authority for this uncontrollable chaos:

For the first time in eight years, private investors are pulling money out of Wall Street. Until the summer the US boom had been fuelled by inflows of around $50bn a month from mutual funds, the US equivalent of unit trusts. But figures last week showed that the tide has now turned, and private investors are cashing in more mutual fund holdings than they are buying. If shares continue to fall, the effect could gather momentum, with American households cutting back on spending as they see their personal wealth begin to evaporate.

Strategist Nick Knight of Nomura said: 'This is more than a financial markets funk. ' This is a real world problem.'

Meanwhile, financial regulators from leading economies, who have been in intense consultations since the near-collapse of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management 10 days ago, are becoming increasingly concerned that there has been a sharp fall in liquidity - the ability to deal easily - in certain foreign exchange and government bond futures markets.

'Liquidity is very thin in some markets and that is worrying because it can feed on itself.' said one source. "The real worry is if people become worried about certain banks and refuse to deal with them. Then life becomes 'near impossible'.

Major banks have been interrogated about the size of their outstanding contracts with hedge funds.

There were persistent rumours in the US last week that at least one further hedge fund may be in trouble. 'But nothing has come out so far,' said a regulatory source.

GLOBAL financial markets face fresh upheavals this week amid a growing speculation that Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, will finally be forced to allow its currency to fall.

Brazil has been trying desperately to prop up its currency by jacking up interest rates to 50 per cent to staunch the outflow of foreign funds. Brazil is crucial to the US: Latin America provides a market for 16 per cent of its exports. And US banks are major lenders to Brazil.

Brazil's currency crisis has been a major factor in depressing shares on Wall Street. In London, the FTSE100 index of leading shares is now 25 per cent below the record it touched in July. Last week the index fell by more than 6 per cent. On Friday, when the index fell by 157.8 points in a single trading session, £27 billion was wiped off the value of shares - equivalent to almost £500 for every individual in the country.

Several investment strategists believe share prices could fall even further. "The markets may be 20 or 25 per cent down already, but it is quite possible that we will see the same again,' said Paul Walton of investment bank Schroders.

The collapse of the Russian rouble played a key role in the demise of Long-Term Capital Management, whose investment strategy - betting on a gradual convergence of interest rates across most of Europe as countries moved towards Emu - was blown apart as nervous investors rushed to buy the rock-solid safe German Mark.

And the near-collapse of Long-Term Capital Management highlighted once again just how enormous is the power which hedge funds can exert in the foreign exchange market: armed with $5 billion, it took bets covering at least $100bn of foreign exchange and interest rate deals.

Highlighted, too was the exposure of banks to Long-Term Capital and its ilk: if one link in the long and tortuous chain of transactions linking banks to hedge funds to banks were to break, then what further links might fail as a consequence? And increasingly, attention is now turning to Latin America: after Asia and Russia, where next to catch the currency contagion? The betting - and this is big betting, with $385m having flowed out of the country on Friday alone-is that Brazil is now in the firing line.

The stakes are high. Brazil is the world's ninth largest economy: it accounts for 45 per cent of the total gross domestic product of Latin America; US companies have more than, $35bn invested there.

That sense of crisis has spilled over, too, into equities markets - in shares in companies. And that in turn could provide the next turn of the screw, as US households see the value of investments shrink and start to spend less.

Brazil has been fighting for its financial survival, raising interest rates to 50 per cent. After the collapse of Russia, Brazil has been haemorrhaging foreign capital. (Last Friday's outflow of funds was modest compared with the volumes seen recently: as much as $1bn a day has been flowing out of Brazil as panicking foreign investors, tarring all developing countries as too risky, have desperately been taking their money out to put it in safer havens.)

The weekend of the 12 and 13 September marked a turning point for the leaders of the world's seven biggest economies. After two days of frantic phone calls and meetings, the G7 ministers agreed to sound the wake-up call. In a statement sent out on the Monday, they said simply that the balance of risks in the world economy had shifted.

A week after the G7 statement, Blair flew to New York, armed with an idea that he and Brown had hatched in a series of meetings in London. With the groundwork laid by officials, Blair discussed the idea in a brief meeting with President Clinton.

But scarcely had Blair presented his proposals, but the crisis dramatically deepened. Just two days after his speech, the panic which started in Asia, struck in the very heart of Wall Street.

Long-Term Capital Management -not the very largest of hedge funds but certainly one of the best regarded with two Nobel prizewinners on its board of management-could not meet its obligations. It had made a series of disastrous; gambles on world-wide interest rate movements. Under the nervous eye of the Federal Reserve, arms were twisted. A group of international banks was marshalled to provide the funds to bale it out. They did so not because they cared for the investors in the fund (although, as it subsequently transpired, Merrill Lynch chairman David Komansky, who was on the committee which put together the rescue, had a decent slug of his own money in the fund). Long-Term Capital, like virtually all hedge funds caters only for the super-rich who can well afford to lose a million or two and is deliberately domiciled in an unregulated tax haven where it faces no tiresome constraints in the sort of the financial exotica in which it can invest.

No, the reason for rescuing Long-Term Capital was to avoid the unknown consequences of allowing it to default on derivatives contracts with banks.

The working class is easily capable of giving the correct revolutionary response to the world imperialist crisis. It is only weak, rotten, or non-existent leadership which is letting it down. Let party education of workers ram every scrap of anti-communist propaganda back down the throats of the defeatist stooges of bourgeois ideology. Workers everywhere are ready for the class-war understanding that the party's Marxist science must provide. And the real significance of the workers states' achievements will be equally easily obvious given a lead. Self-imposed philistinism is the socialist movement's worst enemy. But the crisis will undermine even that.

The capitalist system is hurtling down into its most humiliating and self-destructive crisis ever, but socialist leadership for the working class remains paralysed.

Embarrassment at using Marxist scientific theory to explain the revolutionary implications of imperialism's spiralling collapse is one problem. Continuing widespread ignorance and prejudice against the richly significant achievements this century of the workers states led by communist parties, is another.

Pretence that "the working class is all right without all these intellectual arguments which only bore workers and get nothing done" is just crass philistinism and patronising in the extreme.

Only the mentality of individual petty-bourgeois conceit can give rise to such arrogance, covering up fear and insecurity, which justifies its anti-theory position with just a thinly-veiled stance which is really saying: "I can understand these things, but ordinary workers can't be bothered".

A more demoralising and seductive form of defeatism can hardly be imagined. Instead of straightforward belief in all of bourgeois anti-communist propaganda, it feigns to be agnostic about it but claims that it is what workers believe and that nothing can be done about that.

A shameful recent article in the SLP's Socialist News adopted this defeatist style, arguing that the idea of socialism was just a "dead-end concept" to workers, that it was "an old worn-out phrase by-passed by history" as far as common understanding was concerned, and that we were now living in the epoch of "the world historic defeat for socialism" as a simple "Real fact that everyone accepts", and where "heroic revolutionary struggles" were all a thing of the past, etc, etc.

All of this, it was argued, made a complete "redefinition" of socialism necessary. Which, of course, is exactly the argument of Blair & Co which the ruling class WANTS workers to believe.

And it is, of course, the most utter, self-defeating, shamefully lightminded NONSENSE.

It is bourgeois ideology and capitalism which is in crisis, not socialism; and it is Marxist-Leninist science which is vindicated, not anti-communist defeatism.

People too embarrassed to argue for socialism and a Marxist understanding on the doorstep are just stooges for anti-theory philistinism (the essential ideology of the petty bourgeoisie) in practice, whatever they kid themselves they are up to.

And defending the socialist revolution's great achievements and its understanding in the 20th century does not necessarily require in the slightest any lectures on Soviet history or any actual mention of Marx and Lenin's theories, as the anti-communists deliberately misleadingly imply.

Workers just need to hear a socialist party confirming what they basically already understand, - that it is the exclusive class-OWNERSHIP of the country and the economy by the ruling class which is creating the crisis and all the unfairness and injustice, and that only by taking over the country can the working class even begin to think about changing things.

This in no way invalidates single-issue struggles which although essentially reformist (and therefore ultimately futile) can nevertheless become real campaigning vehicles precisely for raising the understanding of the movement that only by finally getting rid of the ruling class can serious PERMANENT change begin.

And only when workers raise anti-communist propaganda issues as an argument against socialism (as they are relentlessly bombarded to do by the non-stop avalanche of bourgeois hysteria against the workers states' achievements and failings, past and present, which pours into workers heads via every medium from school prayers and pop culture to the tabloid sports pages, etc) is it necessary to know how to answer all the anti-Soviet rubbish.

And that does not remotely mean justifying everything done by the Moscow bureaucracy, or the Chinese bureaucracy, - not at all.

But what it does mean is that all BOURGEOIS propaganda stunts against the workers states (by imperialist provocation or sabotage, by ousted religions, by reactionary nationalists, by overthrown mafia or landowners, etc) should be rejected UNCONDITIONALLY first of all, on the grounds that imperialist counter-revolution ALONE should be charged with ALL the problems on earth which it alone can have created and which, of logical necessity, revolution can only have come onto the scene to try to remedy.

How revolutions should better tackle the problems they run into, past and present, is a matter which only UNCONDITIONALLY committed backers of the workers states are appropriate to argue about, not counter-revolutionaries, no matter how 'left' they claim to be, from Trotsky onwards.

The essential future for all mankind is the planned, publicly-owned world economy, and only within such a framework will it become possible in several generations time to contemplate the full freedom to flourish of every individual on earth (according to their ability and their desire) becoming the condition for the full freedom of everyone else.

The only possible organisational form for that long period of transitional progress has to be the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the only possible alternative. To pretend that the monopoly-capitalist ruling-class system offers to every individual on earth the full freedom to flourish is just derisible, counter-revolutionary nonsense. To disrupt the dictatorship of the proletariat with unlimited demands for 'full freedom' now is just deliberate sabotage.

The agitation to be "realistic" about the present condition of the class struggle is invariably influenced by capitulation to the current propaganda status-quo, by a capitulation to appearances.

It is precisely a scientific understanding of the ACTUAL historical movement in the international balance of class forces which alone can give workers the necessary independence from endlessly being the mere plaything of bourgeois propaganda.

And it is the most contemptible class arrogance to imply that a general Marxist understanding of the broad historical pattern of class struggle is beyond the grasp of workers.

The situation now is very simple. The monopoly-bourgeois ruling class of the world (Western imperialism) has since 1945 deliberately stoked up the longest, greatest boom in the whole of capitalist history in order to prevent any more of the world's masses from following the socialist revolution path of common ownership of the entire economy, pioneered by the world's first workers state, the Soviet Union, followed by China, East Europe, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc, etc.

But 20th century history has already proved that all booms eventually go bust because of inter-imperialist conflict, arising out of it being impossible for all the competing monopolies to ALL capture world-market leadership.

And after they have all kept on expanding and cost-cutting for long enough, trying to become the most profitable (or risk being taken over or closed down because not profitable enough), there are eventually 'too many' cars (for example) on the market for the 'rationalised' and 'downsized' workers of the world (i.e. wage-cut or redundant consumers) to soak up at the prices needed by the monopoly corporations to keep making a profit.

Once that 'glut' has spread to enough products, major bankruptcies begin in the dominant finance-capital sector of the free-market economy which funds all new enterprise by credit-creation. At the same time, cut-throat competition to survive the crisis breaks out among all the monopoly-imperialist groupings. Trade war erupts, and more closures.

With the collapse in banking and individual currencies, the boom spiral upwards turns just as uncontrollably into the slump spiral downwards. Universal destitution, fascist chauvinism, and warmongering inter-imperialist conflict return for the third time this century.

The profiteering greed and exploitation bases of the capitalist system can NEVER be altered. They are its essence. The boom-bust anarchy of the free market can, therefore, NEVER be 'reformed'. All 'reformism' is a complete pipe-dream.

The only SOLUTION to the eventual warmongering crisis-ridden anarchy of the imperialist system, always brutally dominating the Third World in order to exploit it, - is the socialist revolution which will take the ownership and control of the world economy out of the hands of the ruling-class bourgeoisie, and plan it under public ownership in a workers state.

Now all of that can be explained in one simple leaflet, and re-worded and elucidated in a thousand different ways, and in thousands of special applications to workers immediately in struggle.

What is LACKING is the belief among would-be socialist leaders that it is TRUE.

Hence, an SLP leader told last December's party congress that "this crisis in the Far East would not come to Britain".

This reflects an attitude totally cowed by bourgeois ideology which has convinced all anti-communists since 1945 that the capitalist "free world" had finally found a mechanism for forever solving capitalism's difficulties whenever they occurred.

Utter, total, anti-Marxist NONSENSE. Yet these are the petty-bourgeois intellectuals who posture so mightily about being so 'Marxist'. What sick dissembling crap.

Some people try to argue that it is important to be for socialist change even when there isn't a global imperialist crisis hanging over the capitalist system. Yes, but this is about as 'worthy' and useful as being generally in favour of good health but not being much bothered about whether heart-disease science and surgery are keeping up-to-date.

The mechanics of capitalism's failure are utterly CRUCIAL to understanding exactly HOW it is going to be got rid of.

Proletarian revolution for Marx was not just a 'nice idea', a sort of boisterous and over-exuberant wish-list by Marx but not entirely necessary for getting to socialism with.

Just the opposite. For Marxist science, proletarian revolution is the only possible FORCE in nature which CAN even hope to have the strength and ability to seize control and ownership of the economy out of the hands of the bourgeois ruling class.

Socialist revolution is not an option. It is the ONLY possibility.

Therefore, the mechanics of exactly how the imperialist crisis collapses worldwide, - in what conflicts, and under what precise international balance of class and national forces, - matters tremendously.

The type of analysis of world developments that the EPSR has struggled to put forward, therefore, is CRUCIAL to the development of a successful party of socialism. It needs expanding upon and improving upon without limit, in all directions.

Imperialist CRISIS is the key question, - the vital DYNAMIC which sets the scene for the economic and political developments which alone make socialist revolution possible.

The crisis is not just interesting because it makes capitalism look bad or creates embarrassing difficulties for bourgeois ideology to explain. It is the factor of systemic CRISIS which can be said will finally make it certain that the socialist revolution will be accomplished.

The intolerable problems of capitalist crisis finally oblige workers to help develop and support the revolutionary consciousness for conducting successfully the class-war transition to socialism.

It is the return to worldwide imperialist crisis now which emphasises the problematical difficulties facing revisionism's limited 'socialist' outlook now reviving in Moscow, and re-emphasises the core problem of Stalin's mistakes in playing down the essential future REVOLUTIONARY content to the final taming of imperialism, arising out of renewed CRISIS for capitalism based on its renewed boom expansion (as opposed to the general stagnation or contraction of capitalism envisaged, for example, in Stalin's 1952 work 'The economic problems of socialism', and indirectly reflected in such wider revisionist nonsense as the British road to socialism perspective of peaceful parliamentary transition, and the later catastrophic 'Eurocommunist' idiocies embraced by the Communist Parties in Italy, France, and elsewhere.)

Imperialist CRISIS will be the great educator of the international working class, and the great re-educator of past revisionist confusion.

In so many ways, it can be seen how the CRISIS phenomenon can alone give some understanding of how the APPEARANCE now of a completely triumphant imperialist 'New World Order', supposedly putting down anti-imperialist struggle after anti-imperialist struggle, and supposedly inflicting on the working class in the industrialised West the conviction that "socialism is a dead-end concept, an old worn-out phrase by-passed by history" under the blight of a "world-historic defeat for socialism", etc, - can be about to turn into its complete opposite.

Having tortuously strung-out world opinion so far and for so long along the lines that "capitalism has now solved all its problems; it is now guaranteed crisis-free; it can never go back to crash, slump and war as in the 1930s; there is no problem in civilisation on earth that capitalism can not now solve:", etc, etc, - there will now be a HUGE price to pay for such shattered illusions and aspirations; there will now be a HUGE comeuppance.

The scalded reaction of world opinion to the growing realisation that the capitalist system is in fact just a recipe for ultimate economic chaos and destruction, for grotesque injustice and corruption, and for disastrous social and environmental damage, - will be all the more indignant in face of the TERRIFYING DISLOCATION and potentially MURDEROUSLY KILLING UPHEAVALS that the CRISIS will impose ON EVERYONE.

To put it mildly, the CRISIS nature of capitalism's coming difficulties has the potential for causing the most unpleasant lethal episodes in all recorded history. This CRISIS character of imperialism's final degenerate mess will have the potential to bring the masses of the world to a pitch of determined anger such as even the greatest revolutionary achievements have not yet seen.

And Socialist News says "no more heroic revolutionary struggles"?? It would be hard to make up deliberately a more out-of-touch, misleading, demoralising load of defeatist nonsense to publish to the working class.

Another plea in defence of anti-communist reaction on the 'left' is for there to be "no more sects claiming to publish the truth. Let all opinions be equally valid" etc, etc. This is (a) complete hypocrisy; and (b) a recipe for complete disaster.

This is basically a retreat from theory as the only real guide to revolutionary inspiration and action, into manipulation and manoeuvre as the sly alternative for gaining positions of leadership.

The offer to "let everyone join the party" is strictly conditional on already being in a dominating role and confident of being able to retain it. If any threat to that dominance should appear, then some determined character-assassination, undermining, and elbowing-out is quickly employed, with censorship instantly replacing all the 'openness' previously promised. The behaviour of every fake-'left' group of middle-class 'revolutionaries' always follows the same pattern.

The posture that "no one has a monopoly of the truth" is just the classic gimmick of philistine sectarianism since the struggle for socialism began, - guarding against being exposed in argument by means of this diversionary agnostic claptrap, while at the same time ramming home the platitudes of their own confused sect as ruthlessly as possible.

This outrageous humbug is double destructive, - on the one hand denying all possibility of crucial objective truth based on experience and practice in the only way open to human society's developments; while on the other hand remaining convinced of the sect's own wisdom solely on the basis of subjective conceit and aggressive idealism (the self-serving philosophy of the capitalist bourgeoisie).

It is to the objective truth, tested in practice, that the world will eventually have to turn on all questions about the Soviet Union and the world's first experience of workers states, coming in the 20th century.

In the most hostile and difficult circumstances imaginable, - twice totally destroyed by war-invasion in its first 20 years; relentlessly economically blockaded for decades; threatened by encircling nuclear rockets which imposed a crippling cost in needed defence; and coming from illiterate Asiatic backwardness to start with; - the Soviet Union nevertheless built up its planned workers state without a capitalist class at all and not in the least reliant on international capital projects, to a point where it was the most admired, respected, and relied-upon country on earth, - a generous friend to the entire Third World of anti-imperialism, freely giving scholarships in abundance, massive armed help, industrial infrastructure, scientific establishments, specialist training, raw material supplies, transport of all kinds, etc, etc, etc.

Planned socialism works.

People who then try to argue: "Yes, but it all collapsed; it all became a world historic defeat for socialism; it could not have been that good because no one was prepared to fight for it or defend it", etc, etc, but who also then refuse to listen to the easy exposure of this anti-communist propaganda nonsense, - are not 'sympathetic to the Soviet Union' at all, as they claim, but are raving ANTI-COMMUNISTS of the vilest kind.

The Soviet bureaucracy made many appalling mistakes, and one of its worst failures was in not valuing highly enough just what had been achieved, or letting the Soviet people understand its value, - compared to life under capitalism.

The philistine imbecile Gorbachev (now scraping along on Pizza Hut adverts plus handouts from the most vicious of imperialist 'think tanks') had not a single idea in his stupid head about the deep worth to human beings of the social community in which the people of the USSR grew up, - where the guaranteed excellent high standards of comprehensive secondary education for all; the guaranteed higher education for all; the guarantee of lifetime careers in work for all with guaranteed universal respect for its worthwhileness; etc, etc, helped to create an abundantly healthy population which excelled in mass sporting and cultural activities up to the highest levels in the world, - in classical music, for example, producing the greatest geniuses of the century without argument, and coming close to it in the cinema and in literature.

The entire country was tuned into these things, where work was honoured, where international anti-imperialist struggle was honoured, and where violent criminal hatred and rejection of society (which is now the widespread phenomenon throughout the 'free' world, - especially in its most 'dynamic' and 'affluent' society, the USA) - was almost unknown.

The shallowness to still wonder about the glitz and glamour of the West was summed up in the glad-handing, star-struck, dimwittedness of Gorbachev himself, but it was a widespread phenomenon, due precisely to the revisionist limitations of Soviet political education which deliberately played down the explosively REVOLUTIONARY contradictions of life in the 'free' world, - only now becoming universally apparent as country after country erupts into crash and slump uproar.

When the Gorbachev bureaucracy proclaimed that the reintroduction of some market-forces mechanisms would enable the Soviet Union to expand and develop its lifestyle even more dramatically and rapidly, the mass of the people were not instantly hostile and suspicious, having had no education for decades that the 'free' world remained a system of catastrophic social contradiction and REVOLUTIONARY crisis. The Gorbachev bureaucracy thought that the West was only about the modernisations available to the more advantaged societies.

The people of the ex-USSR now know better. "Let's get back to the Soviet Union" is now the overwhelmingly most popular sentiment, universally throughout the ex-USSR; and in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus, it has even overcome local nationalist sentiment to become the majority political movement, even under the totally rigged conditions of the bourgeois 'democracy' frauds which now reign, and even behind clapped-out revisionist leaderships which still have not learned the lessons of the disastrous retreat from the dictatorship of the proletariat and from the REVOLUTIONARY analysis of imperialism as a system of uncontrollable CRISIS.

People who simply rub their hands at the Soviet tragedy and say: "Oh well, it doesn't matter now, it has all collapsed in disaster and is a world historic defeat for socialism", and deny the need for any further analysis are (a) not socialists of any description; (b) certainly Philistines; and (c) unmistakably lifelong vehement HATERS of communism, the Soviet Union, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And far from "everything now being lost; the whole of history has now changed", the crisis of capitalism is currently re-educating the international working class away from its revisionist lethargy more rapidly and on a wider scale than ever before, and the peoples of the ex-USSR will re-learn a REVOLUTIONARY understanding of the world in the process.

The fear that scientific discussion of the capitalist crisis and its revolutionary implications will lay the socialist movement open to being labelled a "sect" is just another sad form of defeatism, on a par with abandoning the demand for socialism because "a man at the door said it would never catch on; change your name" during the last election. This is just capitulation to Blairism and to revisionist CP liquidationism.

The fact that 100 years of bogus 'reformism' has given socialism a bad name is an argument for exposing and seeing off reformism, not for abandoning the understanding of socialism.

The only Marxist 'jargon' comes from fraudulent 'lefts' and middle-class bogus 'revolutionaries' who likewise need driving out of the workers movement for the defeatism and demoralisation which they deliberately spread.

Marxism-Leninism, like any science, is either right or it's wrong. Workers who refuse to try to find out are just incorrigible Philistines. The mass of the working class is patronisingly insulted by their incorrigible backwardness.

Illiterate workers and peasants in Tsarist Russia sustained and supported the Bolshevik Party leadership in far more difficult circumstances than any modern proletariat will ever have to combat. And what was once achieved in one country, and then in China and several more countries, will next be achieved brilliantly by the working class in the majority of the world's countries. Build Leninism.

The supposed imperialist 'New World Order' control is imaginary rubbish. It failed in Korea and Vietnam, it has failed to silence Cuba, it failed to shake the proletarian dictatorship in China, and it failed to save Apartheid colonialism in South Africa.

The Palestinian nation refuses to lie down, British imperialism has finally been forced to dismantle its sectarian Irish colony, and Libya, Iraq, and many more states refuse to dance to the US imperialist tune. Haiti and Somalia just proved uncontrollable, and the US imperialist forces have now left again.

But whatever balance sheet is drawn up about the above, the whole equation now is devastatingly transformed AGAINST the favour of US imperialism by the fact that its entire world-economic system is in UNCONTROLLABLE CRISIS. The American ruling class will soon be fighting for its own life, never mind dictating the lives of everyone else on earth. Build the SLP. Roy Bull

DOWN WITH NEW-LABOUR WARMONGERS. Anti-Serb hysteria is just a stunt. No such concern for minority rights where major imperialist bullying is concerned, such as NATO-Turkey's 15-year massacre of the Kurds, or Zionism's genocidal colonisation of Palestine.

The deeper imperialist crisis runs, the more frenzied become imperialism's efforts to shift the blame for the ensuing social chaos onto somebody else. Witness, for example, the torrent of racist hate propaganda yet again being unleashed against the Serbs.

With Moscow's retreat from proletarian dictatorship reflected in Belgrade's own unconfident opportunist muddle, imperialism lost no time in going back to its old divide and rule balkanizing ways. German imperialism led the pack by "recognizing" (egging on) the bourgeois secession of Croatia and Slovenia from Yugoslavia's socialist homeland. Open season then followed for every other variety of imperialist meddling, on which the sole limitations were those imposed by the unanticipated level of Serb resistance.

Despite the revisionist muddle from Milosevic and the rest, the historical momentum of Partisan traditions of anti-imperialist intransigence have so far proved tough enough to render only partial the re-imposition of imperialist influence in the region. Sanctions, air-strikes and Goebbels propaganda have all failed thus far to cow the Serbs into submission.

To what degree hard won workers' state traditions continue to inform this resistance may be doubted. But for the West, the fact that the leadership of this thorn in imperialism's side continues to describe itself as socialist can only pour more salt in the wound. Not only are self-avowed communists once more making the running in Russia but also (wails the Observer, September 27th), elections in "Bosnia" have now "delivered the two most important posts in the Serb half of the country to men who answer to Belgrade".

Little wonder then that New Labour, the blood still fresh on its hands from the London backed blitzing of Afghan and Pakistani villages and Khartoum's vital medicine factory, should now be yelping for more NATO bloodletting in order to "teach the Serbs a lesson". In a novel interpretation of international law, the authority of the United Nations is appealed to in justification of armed intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign country.

Respect for "Israel"'s invented sovereign status is held to have relieved the UN of any obligation to defend the dispossessed Palestinian inhabitants of that occupied portion of their homeland from permanent murderous Zionist persecution. And Turkey's endless campaign of terror against "its own" Kurds in the south east of its territory is likewise regarded as an internal matter, not warranting the presence of a single token blue helmet even.(But then, the case of Turkey at once reveals what a con this whole internal v. external distinction is in the practical application of "international law". When has such "law" ever made itself felt against Turkey's EXTERNAL threat, represented by countless armed incursions over the border into Iraqi Kurdistan?)

What is really driving the current wave of "genocide" propaganda is the spectacular failure of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) secessionists to put a dent in Belgrade's influence, making Western meddling look stupid and outmanoeuvred again.

Clearly, the forced disintegration of the socialist Yugoslav federation has been characterized throughout by all the horrors of ethnic and confessional strife, no longer held in check by a common socialist discipline and purpose. But throughout, Western news-management has followed a well worn path, routinely ignoring or playing down Croat or "Bosnian Muslim" atrocities, whilst presenting every real or imagined war excess of the Serbs as proof that "they are the source of all evil doing, without whose malign influence a new peace could be set in place by the democratic mediation of Robin Cook and Bill Clinton" etc. etc.

Such fairy tales go up in smoke when the REAL history of the region is studied, in which Serb nationalism figured pre-eminently as a bulwark against both Ottoman empire and Nazi imperialism, whilst the infamous collaboration of Croat ("Ustashe") and "Bosnian Muslim" stooges with German imperialism shocked even the Nazis with its murderous zeal-

All this must remain a closed book for the New Labourites, whose historical memory stretches back to Mandelson's last soundbite. Others have longer memories. Dripping with blood from head to foot, imperialism now points the finger again, this time at the Serbs, and demands vengeance for their alleged bad behaviour.

Cook pretends that this is nothing to do with realpolitik, and is simply required by the outrage all decent people feel at the sight of an atrocity against civilians. Yet if this were truly so, why was he not moved to make a similar pronouncement a month ago, when news filtered through of the abduction, murder and incineration of ten SERB civilians by the KLA? The report, graphic in its description of charred skulls retrieved from a lime kiln, was attested by the Guardian of September 5th (no friend of Milosevic) as originating from an "independent" Belgrade radio station (i.e. independent of the Belgrade government line).

This uncharacteristic shyness on the part of Cook, Albright and the rest could be connected to another discovery made at the scene of the crime (a freshly abandoned KLA camp):"several hundred yellow humanitarian aid packages with an American flag on the label", along with a massive arsenal of very expensive weaponry.

From the first, the KLA have found helpful friends in the West. According to the Guardian (29th August), the Swiss based "paymaster general" of the KLA, one Joshar Salihu, helped hire "former army officers from three Western countries to give them a crash course in the arts of war".

Another KLA man, Xhabir Zharku, codenamed "Blind", brags: "Arms were no problem. I bought six Kalashnikovs in Switzerland and sent them down to Kosovo in the back of a car". Curiously, it turns out that "Blind" was until January of this year a resident of Stamford, Connecticut.

Some "free market" assistance was less direct, but no less significant. It was the chaotic collapse of Berisha's robber capitalist regime and its crazy "pyramid-scheme" economy, - (the "free market" chaos following hard on the heels of Tirana's tragic retreat from proletarian dictatorship),- which poured cheap Kalashnikovs onto the open market and into the hands of the West's favoured "freedom fighters".

In truth, of course, imperialism does not care tuppence for Albanian culture or national aspirations, and is just cynically cheering on whatever looks like rattling Serb intransigence. "Blind" (the onetime Connecticut yankee) tells his interviewer: "A former Pentagon man advised us that we needed the corridor" (across into Albania). Pressed on this, he shrugs: "Oh, it was just a friendly chat, like this".

It's a fair guess that the friend from the Pentagon has withdrawn to a safe distance, leaving the ethnic Albanian inhabitants of Kosovo province, until a few years ago citizens in the peaceful Yugoslav socialist federation, to pick up the pieces as best they can. Further "help" from the West in the form of fire from the sky is unlikely to help mend their fortunes.

Despite all the nudges, winks, guns, "aid" packages, "friendly chats" and kidglove press coverage, the supposedly mass popular secessionist movement has now collapsed in disarray, with press-ganged Kosovars deserting in droves whilst their KLA officers turn their guns against those ethnic Albanian politicians who have no stomach for further war, in a futile campaign of internecine assassination.

Predictably, the West's former quiet satisfaction at the KLA's initial bloody "success" has now switched over into "moral" outrage at the resilience of Serb resistance.

But the artificial whipping up of war fever against the Serbs runs fast into deep trouble. A few arbitrary airstrikes run the risk of just stiffening Serb resolve against imperialist meddling. Yet the alternative (swamping the entire region with ground troops) looks less appetizing to London, Washington and Berlin than ever. German imperialism's last major sortie in that region (WWII) left it with indelible memories of fierce Serb resistance. And Washington's memories of cocking up ground troop invasions are fresher still (e.g. Somalia).

None of which consideration rules out ANY piece of warmongering nastiness being inflicted, upon the Balkans or anywhere else. Warmongering is the ESSENCE of the imperialist system, driven closer and closer to the surface of ALL international relations as the crisis of surplus capital shoves all the key players back into trade war blocs surrounded by ever higher-protectionist walls.

But getting everyone to agree on a concerted plan of aggression in order to, for example, get the tiny Serb nation once and for all under the imperialist thumb, ends up looking as impossible a task as agreeing concerted action to deal with the REAL threat to further world capitalist rule: its own rampaging crisis.

In short, the hoped-for warmongering DISTRACTION from the crisis gets to be as difficult to organize as the elusive SOLUTION of that crisis. In the end, it is just as hard to get all the rival imperialist factions to agree a common warmongering line against the Serbs (or Iraq, or Iran, or Libya, or Cuba etc.) as it is to get everyone to agree to stump up the cash for some joke "New Bretton Woods solution" to accelerating economic meltdown. With each new attempt at lashing together a "multilateral coalition" to zap the latest "pariah state" to be singled out for attention by the Pentagon, the hostile rivalry between the "allies" gets closer to the surface. What is intended as a DISTRACTION from imperialist crisis just ends up spawning chaotic new opportunities for crisis rivalries to wind themselves up to a higher pitch.

And if imperialism finds it so difficult to suppress such relatively puny revolts now (and revolts mostly armed with such a sad dilution of anti-imperialist scientific grasp), how can it expect to cope when its own crisis brings into revolutionary contention the millions of angry dispossessed of a countries like Brazil (feared to be the next major meltdown victim)? Living so long on the cutting edge of imperialist crisis can only in the end encourage the growth of anti-imperialist perspectives light years ahead of Belgrade's stumbling leadership.

Warmongering imperialism is rotten ripe for overthrow, and where better to start than with this foul New Labour government, with its endless toadying to Washington's aggressive war plans.

Down with NATO warmongering.

Down with the New Labour government.

Build the Socialist Labour Party.

Study Marxism Leninism. GBS

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

America's fascist-imperialist crimes against Cuba are not an exception but the rule of Western rottenness on all human rights questions.

The United States of America has the worst record of disrespect for human rights. And yet they shamelessly present themselves to the world like the ancient mourners of Egypt, hypocritically tearing up their tunics and throwing ashes on their heads.

Will it continue being a great nation to some extent? In terms of its official spheres, we can only see a mean, miserable and ridiculous policy.

A large amount of hypocrisy is needed to proclaim as policy free trade and the freedom of movement but at the same time to pass laws such as the Helms-Burton Act and others of a fascist extraterritorial nature.

A large amount of cynicism is needed by those who proclaim themselves the judges of human rights on a worldwide scale, especially when they have subjected their soldiers and Marines to radioactivity during the first nuclear tests in the Nevada desert and at sea.

Every year we find in Hiroshima and Nagasaki some of the men and women who were taken as simple guinea pigs and who now suffer atrocious ailments.

Only a few days ago, the Time magazine published a secret document, in which it's made clear how the U.S. army had bombed a village in Laos with nerve gas where some U.S. deserters had taken refuge.

On whose authority do these people examine and decide who respects or who doesn't respect human rights in this world.
It's not for having practically annihilated the indigenous people of their country (the Indians). Nor is it on account of the other victims of its expansionist policy south of the Rio Bravo.

And what about the human rights of its African-American citizens and of the minorities living in this country. What about the outrages committed by the U.S. police with its openly racist attitudes as was recently demonstrated in the report on neo-Nazi xenophobic acts.

How many human rights and international laws were violated when the Paraguayan citizen was tried, sentenced and executed without allowing his country's authorities to represent him and not even letting them talk to him.

And what is to be said about other similar cases with Mexican citizens, who are massacred, beaten and killed when they have tried to cross or have crossed the famous border.

But what is truly regrettable in this slanderous campaign mounted against Cuba, is the crocodile tears shed by some personalities.

Deep inside, there are many who are delighted that a country like Cuba exists. A country which is capable of saying to the United States what has to be said to it and which opposes with all its force its abusive, reactionary and extraterritorial policy.

Among the conference papers we have been receiving, there is the condemnation that the U.S. campaign on human rights is limited to the political and social domains.

Without lessening the importance of these rights, we could ask why there is no mention of the right to food, to housing, to health care, to education, social security, social participation, freedom and possibility of expressing oneself.

Another of the clearly hypocritical attitudes is that which demands that Cuba make gestures, changes, opens itself up more and all with increasing speed. It's hypocritical to ask all this of a blockaded, besieged and assaulted country.

It's obvious that it's not a matter of speed in the changes and opening up to the world. It's a matter bf direction. If they see that the changes and opening are leading to capitalism, they remain silent. But as soon as they notice, and furthermore we reaffirm this, that we are developing a policy to strengthen our socialist ideals, then the lamentations and pieces of advice are heard.

All these questions have led us to organize this conference on such an important and sensitive issue as that of human rights. It must be said, however, that it wasn't imagined when we started the organizing work more than one year ago that the U.S. would suffer such a setback in Geneva where it previously had managed through lobbying, blackmailing and pressures of every kind, to accuse Cuba of flagrant violations of human rights.

The blockade, the Helms-Burton Act and all the aggressive measures against Cuba as a massive and flagrant violation of human rights.

These are in essence the questions which we will analyze with the delegates at our Human Rights and Peace Conference, to be held November 23-25 this year.