The uproar over the Hutton inquiry has given rise to a new round of false arguments between the so-called pro- and anti-war camps.

According to the pro-war camp, the inquiry has proved that Blair and co. are men of integrity and that they took Britain to war after making a sober and honest assessment of the available intelligence about the threat that Saddam posed to the world.

The 'anti-war' camp argues that the Hutton inquiry was a smokescreen and that there should be another enquiry into whether the government took us to war on false pretences.

Both arguments hide the truth: that imperialist war is a natural product of the dying social system. And the class that manages this system, the bourgeoisie, has always lied to justify its wars.

You can be sure that no official inquiry would ever come to that conclusion!

The ideological reasons used to justify the assault on Iraq are more hollow than usual. Even before the war, important elements of the British and US bourgeoisie were warning that the Weapons of Mass Destruction argument was too flimsy a pretext for defying 'world opinion' and launching an 'illegal' war. Today, even while Blair continues to profess his faith that the WMD will turn up, his allies in Washington are getting ready to dump this line and put the blame on faulty intelligence about Iraq's real military capabilities.

'Anti-war' warmongers

In the logic of people like Clare Short and Robin Cook, war would have been justified if Saddam really did have WMD. Let's not forget that these 'anti-war' heroes were the same people who supported the war in Afghanistan because it was supposedly a justified response to terrorism, or before that the bombing of Serbia because it was part of a 'humanitarian intervention' to save the Kosovans from the evil Milosevic. But these justifications were no closer to the truth than the suggestion that Saddam could attack London in 45 minutes. All three of these wars were products of capitalism's innate drive to war - in these particular cases, the necessity for US imperialism to launch indirect, pre-emptive strikes against the ambitions of its main imperialist rivals on the world stage (rivals like France, Germany, Russia...).

Cook, Short and their ilk are no less war-mongers than Blair and Bush.

No doubt there are those in the 'anti-war' camp who have more radical views than these former government ministers. After all the Stop the War Coalition is more or less run by the Trotskyists of the SWP. But Trotskyist opposition to imperialist war is no more substantial than Cook's or Short's. Didn't the Trotskyists call for support for Serbia against NATO (or for the NATO-backed Kosovan guerrillas against Serbia), for the Taliban in Afghanistan as a lesser evil than US imperialism? Don't they still call on workers to support the 'Resistance' in Iraq today? Didn't they spend the decades of the 'Cold War' supporting so-called 'national liberation' movements that usually served the interests of the Russian bloc against the American bloc? And before that didn't they support the Second World War because 'democracy' had to be defended against fascism?

In short, every bourgeois political group, party or tendency supports the doctrine of the 'just' war. Bourgeois unity about the Second World War is proof of that. Never have so many different political currents agreed that this, at least, was a war that had to be fought, a just war. As Churchill put it on the day the war started: "This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war for domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain...It is a war ... to establish ... the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man".

This too was a gigantic lie. Churchill's war to defend all that is sacred to man left the Jews of Europe to their fate, vaporised hundreds of thousand of civilians in Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and cynically left the job of crushing the rebellious workers of Italy to the Nazi occupation forces. This was indeed a war for imperialist aggrandisement, as seen in the tremendous gains made by US and Russian imperialism in the post-war carve up.

The ruling class can give all sorts of pretexts when it comes to the mobilisation for war. But whatever ideological poison they use to suck the working class into imperialist massacres, this does not change the reality of war in decadent capitalist society. War is not a particular choice, not the policy of certain belligerent parties, not the option of desperate governments, not the product of exceptional circumstances. No, imperialist conflict is inherent in the very nature of a capitalist system which has covered every corner of the planet and reached the limits of its capacity for further positive development. Every national capital is forced into conflict with its rivals, from economic competition to full military confrontation. They will try and use any means to mobilise the population, but the working class needs to be able to distinguish what its own class interests are, and how to defend them. It also needs to identify the 'anti-war' campaigns that use the same arguments as the open warmongers, and therefore serve the same capitalist interests.

WR, 30/1/04.

In the last few weeks there has been an acceleration of disasters. Most terrible of all was the earthquake in Iran, but we have also seen an air crash in Egypt that left nearly 150 dead, industrial 'accidents' in China, Algeria and Indonesia, and new alarms about contagious diseases - legionnaires disease in France, 'bird flu' in south east Asia: the list just goes on and on.

For marxism, there is nothing natural or fatal about these catastrophes. They are expressions of the fact that the capitalist system is rotting on its feet. Despite having developed all the scientific and technological means to prevent or at least limit such calamities, capitalism in decomposition not only fails to do this, but tends to aggravate and even initiate them. Iran: natural disaster or social disaster?

At the end of December, a terrible human tragedy unfolded in Iran. In a few seconds an earthquake destroyed the town of Bam and its surrounding villages. The death toll has climbed to 40,000, with 35,000 injured and tens of thousands left homeless. As always, it is the poorest sections of the population who lose the most in all this. In Iran alone in the last 30 years, earthquakes have claimed more than 150,000 lives.

Of course, you can't blame capitalism for the earthquake itself. But we can point out that this was by no means the most violent quake in recent years and that even so it has caused a vast social catastrophe. And we can certainly point out that four days earlier, in California, an earthquake of exactly the same strength on the Richter scale killed only three people and destroyed a tiny fraction of the built environment.

There has been a great deal of progress in seismology on a world scale, and Iran is not without scientific competence and experience at this level. But the corruption and backwardness of Iran's political establishment is notorious. As an Iranian architect underlined, "what is lacking is an unfailing political will, a strict and systematic public control of the application of norms, and means and methods worthy of dealing with the problem" (L'Humanite, 3/1/04). More particularly, the social situation in Iran's cities has created a disaster waiting to happen. In recent years the population has grown from 30 million mainly rural inhabitants to 70 million, the majority living in towns and cities: many cities are swollen to the point of bursting. "In this situation, the most deprived elements in society are obliged to build their own housing using the most rudimentary means, while the voracious greed and corruption of commercial and state agencies, from the smallest to the largest, has led to criminal levels of negligence" (ibid). To the criminal neglect of safety norms, we can add the fact that the town of Bam has been largely made of mud brick, and when buildings made in this manner collapse, they cave in completely from top to bottom, leaving little hope for anyone trapped inside.

As in Turkey a few years ago, the Iranian state demonstrated that it had not drawn any lessons from previous earthquakes in the region. Since the last disaster, building continued in an anarchic and unregulated way. The contempt for the population shown by the public and religious authorities was exposed by the following facts: the earthquake took place at 4.30 in the morning and the first batches of aid didn't arrive until around five in the evening. While numerous inhabitants of the main Iranian cities, notably in Tehran, mobilised themselves to collect clothes, food and tents for the survivors, the authorities were incapable of getting this material to the affected zones. Even worse, the response of the Iranian bourgeoisie to this elementary display of human solidarity was to use the tragedy for its squalid electoral interests. In the first hours after the earthquake, with legislative elections due in February, we saw representatives of the two main political clans, the reformers around Mohamed Khatami and the conservatives around Ali Khameni, rushing to the earthquake zone in helicopters - while the aid agencies lacked any such means for bringing supplies or evacuating the wounded. These charlatans rivalled each other to arrive on the scene first and promise that the town of Bam and its citadel would be rebuilt. But it's precisely these politicians who are responsible for the carnage. Even recently constructed buildings, especially hospitals and schools, also collapsed because they had been put up without any reference to anti-earthquake specifications. Capitalism is responsible for these endless catastrophes

At the same moment that the town of Bam was being devastated by the earthquake, a gas explosion in south west China killed 191 people, half of them children; hundreds were wounded and over 3000 poisoned to varying degrees. There was nothing predestined about this accident either. It was the result of a frenzied drive for capitalist profit at the expense of the most basic rules of safety at the workplace. In 2003 alone, "13,283 people were killed in shipyards, factories or mines in China, which is a rise of 9.6% over 2002" (Le Monde, 27.12.03). In order to hide its responsibility for such crimes, the ruling class organises media campaigns to point the finger at such and such a company or person. We saw this with the Boeing crashes at Cotonou, in which over 100 died, and at Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt, which left 148 dead, most of them French travellers. In both cases, the campaigns accused the Lebanese and Egyptian companies which ran these planes; and while it's true that these companies failed to apply all the necessary safety rules, this is ultimately the result of cost-cutting aimed at offering the most competitive price for charter fares. And contrary to what was said by the French transport minister, this is in no way a unique characteristic of 'exotic' airlines or of companies that specialise in air-travel price 'dumping'. We only have to recall the Air France Concorde crash at Roissy in July 2000 which claimed 113 victims, or the collision between a Tupolev and a cargo plane over Lake Constance in Switzerland (71 dead), where the investigation pointed to failings in Swiss air traffic control; or again, there was the crash of the A-320 Airbus over Mont Sainte Odile in Alsace ten years ago (87 dead). Victims' families have had considerable difficulty in obtaining compensation, even though it had already been well known that this plane suffered from technical defects. Such accidents, which can only multiply, are the consequence of the ruthless trade war between the air companies, desperately seeking to guard their bit of the market. This compels them to reduce expenses when it comes to safety and the maintenance of the infrastructures needed for air transport to function properly. But air transport is itself no exception in this respect. We only have to look at the long list of train, tube and shipping accidents (particularly the disastrous break-up of oil tankers such as the Erika or the Prestige) in recent years, both in the 'third world' and in Europe.

The rise of new epidemics is further proof of the bankruptcy of capitalism. The SARS epidemic has still not been properly brought under control in Asia, and is now being chased by 'bird flu', while in Pas-de-Calais in France an outbreak of legionnaire's disease has infected 76 people, ten fatally. We are told that the refrigerating towers of the Noroxo factory are to blame. In fact, as a specialist reveals, the annual number of such cases in France has gone up from less than 50 to more than a thousand, and each time the cause is the negligence of this or that factory in maintaining the refrigeration infrastructure. These recurring examples of negligence have brought about a situation in which the hospitals, whose job is to make the population get better, have become sources of epidemics and infections. 800,000 people a year are affected by nosocomial infections (ie, picked up from within the hospital itself) and of these 4000 die in the wards. Capitalism's survival is a threat to humanity

In the face of such tragedies, revolutionaries have to denounce the vile cynicism of the ruling class and reaffirm their class solidarity with the victims of these catastrophes, particularly towards the proletarians in Iran hit by the Bam earthquake. What the bourgeoisie presents as yet another natural catastrophe, as a fatality or as proof that there can be no 'zero risk', marxism analyses much more pertinently: "As capitalism develops then begins to rot on its feet, it prostitutes techniques which could have a liberating use for its needs of exploitation, domination and imperialist pillage, to the point where it transmits its own rottenness into the techniques and turns them against the species�Neither is capitalism innocent of the so-called 'natural' disasters. Without denying that there are forces of nature which escape human action, marxism shows that many catastrophes have been indirectly provoked or aggravated by social causes�Not only does bourgeois civilisation directly provoke catastrophes through its thirst for profit and the predominant influence of profiteering on the administrative machine�but it has also shown itself to be incapable of organising effective protection, since prevention is not a profitable activity" (Bordiga, The Earth's Crust and the Human Species, preface)

Once again, it's not nature, or bad luck, or some divine will which is responsible for these tragedies. The capitalist system always provides partial explanations to prevent the proletariat from understanding that it is the very logic of capital which lies behind such horrors. The growing parade of catastrophes we are seeing today is further proof of the utter putrefaction of this social system, and those who suffer most from it have no choice but to destroy it before it destroys the whole of humanity.

Donald, 29/1/04.

The World Social Forum has recently been held in Mumbai (Bombay), India. This grand festival of 'anti-globalisation' gathered together 80,000 people of numerous political colours and social backgrounds under the slogan 'another world is possible'. In a forthcoming issue of WR, we hope to publish a report on this event written by comrades in India who intervened at some of its many meetings and debates. In the meantime, we are publishing an article written by our French section, Revolution Internationale, on the European Social Forum held in Paris last November. As the article shows, this was yet another rally 'against capitalism' supported from start to finish by the bourgeoisie.

After Porto Alegre in January 2001, Florence in November 2002 and Larzac last summer, the great alternative world show has once again filled the rooms from the 12th to the 15th November in the towns of Paris, Ivry, Bobigny and Saint-Denis on the occasion of the second edition of the European Social Forum. Some hundreds of 'debates' were programmed with 50,000 people coming from the four corners of Europe. A demonstration on November 15, the grande finale of the Forum, brought out about 80,000 people. One could say that the 'alternative world' movement has the wind in its sails. And that doesn't displease the bourgeoisie, quite the contrary. Because it's the bourgeoisie which is its silent partner.

From its beginnings, with the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre, the dominant class has appeared as the main silent partner of the 'alternative world' movement. Thus, the paper, Le Monde Diplomatique and the association ATTAC, the emblem of this movement, was granted 80,000 Euros in January 2002 by the French minister of foreign affairs to financially support the organisation of the 2nd World Social Forum in Brazil. Similarly, some months ago at Larzac, the Regional Council of Midi-Pyrenees forked out a generous contribution of 50,000 Euros. For the European Social Forum of November last in Paris, the least that one can say is that the French bourgeoisie has not been tight-fisted.

Matignon has contributed 500,000 Euros to the 'alternative world' meeting. The general councils of Seine-Saint-Denis, Val de Marne and l'Essone have spent more than 600,000 Euros. Finally, the town hall of Paris has put one million Euros on the table and that of Saint-Denis 570,000. All this without taking into account the enormous logistics freely provided: town hall annexe, theatre, libraries, gymnasium and even local headquarters! "The financial and logistical effort which the Paris Council, the town hall arrondissement and the services of the town put at their disposal for the organisation of this event, the subsidies for fitting out the site of la Villette, the opening of spaces for meetings and lodgings...all this illustrates, I think, a will to be in tune with what's at stake in this assembly" (Bertrand Delanoe).

The involvement of the bourgeoisie in the 'alternative world' movement is so flagrant that it was the town halls in the cities where these events were taking place, via the Parti Communiste Francais or the Parti Socialiste for Paris, who had the great honour of giving the opening speech of the ESF on 12 November. The tone was set! There's nothing surprising about the important presence in the ESF of these bourgeois forces for controlling the working class - the unions and the parties of the left and extreme-left of capital. Effectively, numerous unions, such as the CGT, FO, CFDT, CFTC, the G10 Solidaires part of the SUD, the FSU and many others, from the German IG Metall to the Brazilian TUC, all experienced in the sabotage of class struggle and the techniques for mystifying the working class, not only animated a great number of debates, but some amongst them were co-organising the Forum. That says it all!

The same for the bourgeois parties, hypocritically forbidden from participating, but who in fact were present under the cover of associations, foundations or press organisations under their control. Thus the PS could benefit from the participation of its Young Socialist Movement, from the National Leo Lagrange Federation or the Jean Jaures Foundation. As to the PCF, it was present in the debate notably through its paper L'Humanite and its Karl Marx Foundation. The Trotskyist LCR also had the freedom of the city in the Forum via its weekly publication Rouge (for the duration becoming the daily of the ESF and distributed free) and its JCR - 'Revolutionary Communist Youth'.

Here is the real face of the animators and organisers of 'alternative worldism'. Here's what lies behind the so-called 'renewal' of the alternative political scene: all the old bourgeois merchants of the unions and social democracy, taking in Trotskyism and other components of leftism along the way.

'Alternative Worldism': a mystification to mask the crisis of capitalism

But why should the bourgeoisie give so much money and deploy so much energy in order to animate a movement which harps on about another world (even several) being possible and necessary since this one is not working? Has the bourgeoisie gone daft? Of course not! If it has created the 'alternative world' movement out of nothing, financed it and granted it so much publicity at an international level, it is because behind its mask of 'opposition' to the existing world order is hidden a powerful weapon of mystification against the working class.

The bankruptcy of capitalism is shown by the growing development of barbaric warfare in the four corners of the globe. It is also patently obvious when you look at the aggravation of the insoluble economic crisis, which results in violent attacks on workers' living conditions. The recent attacks around retirement and pensions throughout Europe bear witness to this. All these attacks inevitably raise questions about the future that capitalism has in store for us. For the dominant class, it is imperative to cut short this type of reflection. It is precisely this need which 'alternative worldism' serves. From this point of view, the set-up of the ESF speaks for itself. Four different towns, a headache to get around, 'debating' rooms dispersed from one end of town to the other like a maze. In short, everything planned so that there's the least meeting up and discussion possible outside of the official 'debates'. 'Debates' which, it must be said in passing, were completely stage-managed. In fact, speakers were exclusively experts (philosophers, journalists, trade union officials...) sharing out the role of 'orators' and 'moderators' in order to relegate the public to the role of simple spectators.

'Another world is possible'... 'yes, but which one?' That's the common and agreed critique made of 'alternative worldism' by the newspapers and television. And for good reason. Because it allows the Popes of the movement, like Bernard Cassen for ATTAC and Jose Bove for the Peasant Confederation, to come and explain why alternative worldism is not based on any precise perspective. 'We are reflecting on it' these gentlemen respond, and here is the aim of these ESF-type meetings; a massive 'brain-storming' in order to define the contours of this 'other world' or still more evasive, 'these possible worlds'. In fact, if 'alternative worldism' nestles in the most complete artistic blur it is precisely because it carries no alternative to capitalism but rather a real impasse for the working class.

"Against liberal globalisation, it is necessary to act HERE and NOW for a new social and economic logic!" declared a leaflet of the Republican and Citizens Movement. Here's the archetypal 'alternative worldist' chatter that has been spewed out during the ESF. If the world goes ill, good people, it's the fault of the 'neo-liberalism' of the unscrupulous and wicked multinationals stuffed with profits. In brief, a leftist rant in all its splendour which consists of raising a hue and cry against the villainous bosses 'who organise the system for their profit', made in order to whitewash the capitalist system and sow the illusion that it is useless to overthrow it since it is enough to exchange its 'liberal logic' for one that's more 'humane'.

Faced with all the crises and wars that have ravaged the human race for the past 100 years and more, all this is just ridiculous or, more accurately, it is shameless lying of the bourgeoisie.

"The process of capitalist production is determined by profit. For each capitalist, production has no sense unless it allows him to pocket a 'net gain' every year... But the fundamental law of capitalist production, contrary to any other economic form based on exploitation, is not simply the pursuit of a tangible profit but of an ever-growing profit" (Rosa Luxemburg, Anti-Critique).

"The growth of capital appears as the beginning and the end, the end in itself and the sense of all production... production for profit becomes the law over all the earth and under it, consumption, the insecurity of consumption and moments of non-consumption for the great majority of humanity, becomes the rule" (Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy).

This is the iron law, the immutable logic on which capitalism is based, and it is this which 'alternative worldism' tries to conjure away in order to establish its reformist ideology, ie, the illusion of capitalism with a human face.

The bourgeoisie has sufficient experience to know that it's the old pots that make the best stews. And the 'alternative worldist' stew that it is serving up to the proletariat, despite the pretence that it is something new, is nothing less that the re-heating of the good old pot of reformism.

Making out that another management of capitalism, a more humane management, is possible, is a monumental fraud perpetrated by this so-called 'full of hope' movement. A movement which aims at only one thing: preventing the working class from reaching the conclusion that capitalism is in a situation of irreversible, historical bankruptcy; that it is a system incapable of engendering anything other than misery and barbarity, and that this has been the case since its entrance into its period of decadence at the beginning of the 20th century.

The contribution of the anarchists to the trap of alternative worldism

All the same, a problem is posed for the ruling class: what to do with all those who don't feel suitably satisfied by a very clearly reformist ESF? What to do with all those who remain dubious about this vast masquerade of Stalinist inspiration where all the 'debates' are sorted out in advance? Fortunately 'alternative worldism' has thought of everything, including how to organise its own 'counter-forum', in the image of the Libertarian Social Forum that took place at Saint-Ouen at the same time.

"The libertarians propose some immediate demands which break with capitalism". They demand not "a reform of the capitalist economy but its abolition", contrary to the ESF that "doesn't call into question the market economy" (LSF website).

It's thus with a vocabulary borrowed from revolutionaries that the LSF, animated by the official organisations of anarchism (CNT, Libertarian Alternative, Anarchist Federation, OCL...) present and promote themselves. But very clearly, it's only a question here of a showcase whose objective is to attract more perplexed elements looking for a sharper perspective, in order to bring them back into the reformist bosom of 'alternative worldism'. The proof of this lies in the themes debated and the propositions of the LSF 'in order to try to construct alternatives' such as 'the access of all to culture', 'equal education for all' or 'a better sharing out of wealth', identical themes word for word to those programmed by the ESF and still revealing a full blown reformism.

On top of this, of course, comes the libertarian panacea of self-management, which has been revived by 'alternative worldism' as a whole with the famous notion of 'participative democracy'. A dangerous ideology inciting the workers to organise their own exploitation in the factories, or leading local populations to directly manage their own misery without ever being able to resolve it, as at Porto Alegre.

It was not by chance that the libertarians joined up with the alternative worldist procession of November 15, that they animated via Libertarian Alternative a debate within the ESF on the 'question of self-management', or that the Forum at Saint-Ouen was conceived in exactly the same framework as that of the ESF. In fact, on the internet site of the ESF, under the heading "Around the ESF" can be found all the information concerning the "anarchist counter-forum". Official anarchism is thus entirely a component part of 'alternative worldism'. A link in the chain taking a key role, that of a beater flushing out those most critical of the barbarity of the capitalist world, and driving them into the reformist trap of 'alternative worldism'.

The proletarian revolution is the only solution to capitalist bankruptcy

'Another world is possible... but above all not communism'. Here is the aim of the 'alternative world' movement: to impede the working class in its difficult effort to develop its class consciousness. In the 'alternative world' ideology, there is no question of a working class but of citizens fighting for their democratic rights or any number of inter-classist categories, homosexuals, women, those fighting for a 'world without pesticides' or for the protection of laboratory animals. No question of a proletarian revolution, but of amendments to bourgeois democracy (that's to say the most advanced form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie against those it exploits).

Faced with the 'alternative worldist' offensive against the proletariat, which is aiming to blur its identity and class consciousness, revolutionaries cannot stand with folded arms. They have the responsibility of reaffirming that only a communist society constitutes a future for humanity, and only the working class is the bearer of this new world. "Inasmuch as the abolition of exploitation is identical, in the main, with the abolition of wages, only the class which submits to this specific form of exploitation, that's to say the proletariat, is up to carrying out such a revolutionary project... The communist project of the proletariat... is perfectly realistic, not only because capitalism has created the premises for such a society, but also because it is the only project which can bring humanity out of the swamp into which it is sinking" (International Review no. 73).

This was the whole sense of the intervention of the ICC against the trap of the ESF: sales of the press (in six languages) and the distribution of a leaflet at ESF sites and the November 15 demonstration; speaking in the ESF debates. All this illustrates the fiercely held will of the ICC to defend marxist positions and to demonstrate how 'alternative worldism' (from ATTAC to the anarchists of the LSF) is a trap directed against the proletariat.

It is only by developing its struggles on its own terrain against the capitalist system that the working class will be able to clearly lay out the perspective that another world is possible: communism.

Azel, 26/11/03.

In the movement of the working class against the attacks of capitalism, the specific role of revolutionaries is not just to insist on the need for workers to take control of their struggles and spread them as widely as possible; it is also to show that the day-to-day struggles of our class are the preparation for an ultimate confrontation with this system, aimed at dismantling it and replacing it with a radically new society.

We are not talking here about the ‘alternative worlds’ proposed by the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement; as we show in our article on the European Social Forum, these are not really an alternative at all, but a slightly modified version of present-day capitalism. We are talking about communism.

Ah, but ‘communism is dead’ we are told: it died when the Berlin Wall fell and the Stalinist regimes of the east collapsed. At best, the argument goes, the idea of communism is ‘utopian’, impossible, contrary to human nature, a daydream of mad fanatics. And indeed, for the vast majority of workers - even those engaged in bitter struggles against the system - communism is also no more than a nice idea, good in theory but unworkable in practice.

And we reply: the claim that communism died in 1989 is a lie - the deceitful propaganda of the ruling class. Because the Stalinist regimes had nothing to do with communism and were capitalist from top to bottom. The demise of these regimes was not the death of communism, but the end of a particular form of capitalist domination.

With the republication of this series written in the 1970s(1), we intend not only to show what communism really means, but also to show that far from being a failed dream, communism is both possible and absolutely necessary, the only real solution to the insoluble contradictions of capitalism in decay.

The historic limits of capitalism

However, communist conceptions were not fundamentally developed until such time as a new class - the proletariat - made its first appearance in society. For the first time in history, a class existed which carried within itself the real possibility of transforming the old dream into reality. As early as the seventeenth century in England and the eighteenth in France, political currents grew up within the bourgeois revolutions taking place at that time and proclaimed the communist project in more or less explicit terms. Thus, even while the proletariat was not a fully formed class in society, it nonetheless created organisations like the ‘True Levellers’ in England and the Equals in France to defend its historic interests. But it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, with the growth and concentration of the working class accompanying the development of large-scale industry, that the communist movement was able to make precise its own objectives and the means to attain them. This entailed a break with past utopian conceptions, best-expressed in the work of Fourier, Saint-Simon and Owen, and the distancing of the movement from the sectarian, conspiratorial activity of Blanqui and his cohorts. Religious references which had permeated the movement previously, and which even influenced as lucid a communist as Weitling, were swept aside in 1847 with the appearance of the first rigorous, scientific formulation of communism. The Communist Manifesto provided the theoretical basis for all the later developments in understanding of the proletarian movement. In this document, communism is not presented as the invention of a few visionaries that merely awaits application, but is seen as the only society which can succeed capitalism and overcome its mortal contradictions. The essential argument contained in the Manifesto is that capitalism, like all societies before it, cannot go on forever. If it did at one point represent a progressive step in the development of humanity, notably by unifying the world through the creation of a world market, capitalism today is wracked with insurmountable contradictions. These plunge the system into ever more violent convulsions which will end in it being swept away. By causing an immense development in the productive forces of society, and most important among them the working class itself, capitalism has brought into being the conditions necessary for its own transcendence and the creation of a society based on abundance. The working class is the subject of the social transformation of capitalism, and situated as it is on the lowest rung of the social ladder, it cannot emancipate itself without emancipating the whole of humanity.

Decadence of capitalism and perspective of communism

Although the Communist Manifesto was mistaken in its conception that capitalism had already reached the limits of its own development and the communist revolution was, therefore, imminent - a mistake which its authors Marx and Engels recognised some years later - nonetheless its essential understanding of the unfolding of capitalist development has subsequently been amply confirmed. This is particularly true with regard to the idea that capitalism cannot escape from its own economic crises, which become successively more violent.

Today, once again, the economic crisis imposes on society an aberration typical of capitalism. Hundreds of thousands of individuals are plunged into the most terrible misery, not because production is insufficient to meet their needs, but because production is too great. However, today’s crisis is of a different type than the crises analysed in the Manifesto. The crises of the last century appeared in a period of full capitalist expansion; the system could ‘solve’ its crises at that time by eliminating the least profitable sectors of the economy in conjunction with its conquest of new markets. The crises of the nineteenth century constituted the heartbeat of a vigorous social organism. But since the first world war capitalism has entered into its phase of historical decline; of permanent crisis. From that time on, no real solution to the crisis has been possible within capitalism. The system can only continue to exist on the basis of an infernal cycle in which increasingly acute crises are followed by war, reconstruction and further crisis. As the Communist International announced in 1919, the era of imperialist wars and revolutions had arrived and communism was on the historical agenda. Since then, the successive convulsions suffered by humanity have confirmed, each time more forcibly, the urgent need for humanity to go beyond the capitalist mode of production which now severely hampers any further human development.

After the first world war, the crisis of 1929 provided another spectacular illustration of the bankruptcy of capitalism. In its wake, the holocaust of the second world war demonstrated that the scope of capitalist barbarism could exceed even the unbelievable horror of the first world butchery. Since capitalism has entered into its phase of decadence, humanity has paid the monstrous price of over 100 million deaths to keep this system functioning; and that is not counting the terrible human losses caused by unnecessary famine, malnutrition and general misery which capitalism forces millions of human beings to endure.

Today’s crisis is not the first indication of capitalism’s bankruptcy, nor the first proof of the need to replace it with communism. In many domains the crisis merely reflects in a clearer light contradictions which have torn the system apart in the past. But to the extent that a startling discrepancy exists between the enormous possibilities this system possesses to satisfy human needs, and the catastrophic usage to which capitalist production is actually put, the necessity for another type of society makes itself felt today in a way which is even more imperative than it was in the past.

The new society which will succeed capitalism must be able to overcome the contradictions which plague society today. This is the only way that such a society can function as a definite objective necessity and not as a utopian construction of the human mind. Its characteristics must be in complete opposition to the negative laws underpinning the development of capitalist society.

The root cause for the evils which ruin capitalism resides in the fact that the aim of capitalist production is not to satisfy human needs but to accumulate capital. Capitalist production does not produce use values but exchange values. Private appropriation of the means of production thus comes into conflict with their increasingly social character. In other words, capitalism decomposes because it produces for a market which is itself more and more restricted since it is based on an exploitation of wage labour. The surplus value produced by the exploitation of the working class can no longer be realised, i.e. be exchanged for goods which can enter into an enlarged cycle of capitalist reproduction.

The basis of communist society

The economic character of communism must, therefore, be the following:

1. The only incentive governing production will be the satisfaction of human needs.
2. The goods which society produces will cease to be commodities; exchange-value will disappear and only use value will remain.
3. The present restricted framework hampering the process of production will become more and more socialised. Private ownership of the means of production, whether possessed on an individual basis as in laissez-faire capitalism or by the state as in decadent capitalism, will give way to the socialisation of the means of production. This will mean the end of all private property; the end of the existence of social classes and thus the end of all exploitation.

One objection is often raised against this conception of society. It questions why such a society has not already come into existence since it would contain all the characteristics most appropriate to human development and would most closely constitute an ideal form of society. In other words, why should this form of society be a possibility today when it hasn’t been possible to create a society like this in the past? In their reply to questions like these the anarchists usually answer, as all the utopians answered before them, that in fact communism has always been possible. Since objective material conditions don’t stand in the way of communism, all that is needed is sufficient human will. What the anarchists can’t explain is why human will hasn’t been strong enough in the past to create communism and why the will to create communism, which did exist within minority groupings, didn’t extend itself throughout society in the past.

Marxism, however, gives a serious answer to these questions. It explains why one of the essential conditions for the evolution of humanity is the development of the productive forces, or in other words the productivity of human labour. Each level of development of the productive forces of a particular society corresponds to a given type of productive relationship. The relations of production are the relations established between men and women in their activity of producing goods destined to satisfy their needs. In primitive societies the productivity of labour was so low that it scarcely satisfied the barest physical needs of the members of the community. Exploitation and economic inequality were impossible in such a situation: if certain individuals had appropriated to themselves or consumed goods in greater quantities than other members of this society, then the poorer off would not have been able to survive at all. Exploitation, generally in the form of slavery established as the result of the territorial conquest of one tribe by another, could not appear until the average level of human production had gone beyond the basic minimum needed for physical survival. But between the satisfaction of this basic minimum and the full satisfaction, not only of the material but also the intellectual needs of humanity, there exists an entire range of development in the productivity of labour. By means of such development, mankind steadily became the master of nature. In historical terms, it was this period which separated the dissolution of primitive communist society from the era when fully developed communism would be possible. Just as mankind wasn’t naturally ‘good’ in those ages when men and women weren’t exploited under the conditions of primitive communism, so it hasn’t been naturally ‘bad’ in the epochs of exploitation which have followed. The exploitation of man by man and the existence of economic privilege became possible when average human production exceeded the physical minimum needed for human life to reproduce itself. Both became necessary because the level of human production could not fully satisfy all the needs of all the members of society.

As long as that was the case, communism was impossible, whatever objections the anarchists may raise to the contrary. But it is exactly this situation which capitalism has itself radically modified, owing to the enormous increase in the productivity of labour which it has brought into being. Capitalism methodically exploited every scientific discovery, generalised associated labour, and put to use the natural and human riches of the entire world. But obviously the increase in the productivity of labour set in motion by capitalism was paid for by an intensification of exploitation on a scale unknown in human history. However, such a profound increase in human productivity does represent the material basis for a communist society. By making itself the master of nature, capitalism created the conditions by which humanity may become master of itself.

Humanity’s future at stake

The capitalist crisis today is an excellent demonstration of the necessity for communism. For the first time in the history of humanity, a society plunges the greater part of its members into the most acute misery, not because it cannot produce enough, but because it produces too much in relation to the laws which govern how it regulates production.

Before the rise of capitalism humanity knew crises, but never crises of overproduction. Today this congenital evil of the capitalist system reveals itself with unequalled violence: unemployment increases relentlessly, underemployment spreads throughout the productive process, more and more murderous and extensive wars break out. All of these things prove that the real utopians are those people who imagine it is possible today to achieve a greater satisfaction of human needs through the reform of capitalism, and not its complete overthrow. The whole gamut of economic, political and military events which have shaken the world over the last decades bear testimony to the fact that humanity, if it remains bound by the laws of capitalism, will find itself moving down the road towards a third world holocaust. The magnitude of that war would make the other two appear almost inconsequential.

While the unbelievable destructive power of past inter-imperialist conflicts has demonstrated that mankind can master nature, and therefore that communism is possible, it has also shown that mankind’s mastery over nature can also be used to destroy humanity itself. Thus, communism becomes a necessity today, not only to ensure the further progress of the human species, but more simply to ensure that humanity survives at all.

In the next article in this series we will examine various objections raised against the viability of communism, mainly those that argue that humanity is ‘naturally’ incapable of realising such a society.  FM

Notes

(1) See World Revolution 25, 26, 28; the series is also available on our website.

In the concluding part of this series by an ICC sympathiser, we examine the failure of the Trotskyist movement to uphold an internationalist position and draw some conclusions about the response of proletarian political groups to the Second World War.

The Trotskyists

The Fourth International was founded on the basis that capitalism was in its ‘death throes’, but unlike the Italian Communist Left which defended the same position, Trotsky concluded from this that revolution was on the immediate agenda (1). As the historic course opened towards generalised imperialist war, this led him to defend increasingly dangerous opportunist positions, including:

-               support for bourgeois democracy as a ‘lesser evil’ against fascism;

-               unconditional defence of the Soviet Union;

-               support for ‘national liberation’.

Even before the Second World War these positions led the Trotskyists to take sides in inter-imperialist wars: for example, with the democratic imperialisms against fascism in Spain; Stalinist Russia against Poland and Finland, and China against Japan.

These positions were enshrined in the Transitional Pro­gramme; a series of demands supposed to be impossible for capitalism to grant, therefore demonstrating the system’s bankruptcy and pushing the working class to struggle for its destruction. At the beginning of the Second World War, Trotsky set out the main lines of a ‘Proletarian Military Policy’ (PMP), which was essentially an application of the transitional programme to a period of universal war and militarism, centred on the demand for compulsory milit­ary training under the control of the trade unions (2).

Trotsky himself remained faithful to internationalism, affirming in his manifesto on the war that: “…the Fourth International builds its policy not on the military fortunes of the capitalist states but on the transformation of the imperialist war into a war of the workers against the capitalists…” (3). But the policies he outlined put the Trotskyist movement on an extremely steep, slippery slope towards abandoning an internationalist position, and supporting the participation of the workers in an imperialist war in the name of defending democracy against fascism. Trotsky argued:  

“We cannot escape from the militarisation, but inside the machine we can observe the class line. The American workers do not want to be conquered by Hitler, and to those who say ‘Let us have a peace program,’ the worker will reply, ‘But Hitler does not want a peace program.’ Therefore we say: We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers’ government…”

The role of the Trotskyists was to actively participate in this war for democracy as “the best soldiers and the best officers and at the same time [sic] the best class militants” (4). In his zeal to distance himself from pacifists and liberals, Trotsky even went as far as advocating American military intervention in Europe as the best way to defend democracy in America (5). After Trotsky’s murder by the Stalinists in August 1940, it was left to the members of the Fourth International, led by its largest section the American Socialist Workers’ Party, to turn his proposals into a practical intervention.

In Britain in 1939 the two main Trotskyist groups were the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), which was the official section of the Fourth International; and the Workers’ International League (WIL), formed from a split in 1937.  Both groups denounced the British bourgeoisie’s war preparations and raised internationalist slogans: ‘Turn the imperialist war into a civil war’, ‘The enemy is in your own country’.

However, other aspects of the Trotskyist programme undermined this opposition:

-               Both groups spread illusions in the Labour Party and the trade unions as mass bodies belonging to the working class. Far from warning workers against the dangers of these capitalist organs, which were essential to the bourgeoisie for mobilising workers behind a war to defend democracy, they called for the election of a Labour government with a full ‘socialist’ (i.e. state capitalist) programme, supposedly to ‘expose it in front of the masses.’

-               Both groups clung to the un-Marxist idea that Russia was still a ‘workers’ state’ because ‘collectivised property relations’ and a ‘planned economy’ existed there, which must therefore be defended. Even after the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Red Army’s invasion of Finland and Poland, they denied that the Stalinist regime had any imperialist designs, and even saw a ‘progressive side’ to Stalin’s occupation of eastern Poland because he had taken measures like expropriating private landlords (6).

Both the RSL and the WIL raised transitional demands before the war, but it was the WIL which enthusiastically took up the Proletarian Military Policy - thus solving the problem for the Trotskyists of raising such demands inside the capitalist war machine during wartime - while the RSL began to break up and became increasingly inactive. Differences opened up after the German invasion of France in 1940. The WIL explained the victory of fascism as due to the French bourgeoisie’s reluctance to fight for fear of arming the workers. To prevent an invasion of Britain the WIL raised the slogan, ‘arm the workers’, and criticised the British capitalist class for “...refusing to take the one course which would doom any invasion, however formidable, to inevitable futility and defeat: the arming, mobilising and organising of the entire working class for resistance, factory by factory, street by street, house by house.”

The WIL posed the problem as one of transforming the imperialist war, not into a civil war, but “a genuine revolutionary war against Hitlerism” (7), thus crossing the line from internationalism to national defence. The slogan ‘arm the workers’ put forward at the height of an invasion scare could only lead the workers to defend their ‘own’ capitalist state.  

Nor was this just a matter of abstract propaganda; it led in practice to support for the increased exploitation of the working class in order to produce guns and material for the imperialist war. The WIL was activist and gained some influence among industrial workers as the war went on and strikes grew. While it opposed the Stalinist-controlled Joint Production Committees, which tied workers to ferocious levels of exploitation in the cause of anti-fascism, the WIL argued that production could be increased as long as it was under ‘workers’ control’. It gave uncritical support to the Trotskyist-led shop stewards’ committee in the Nottingham Royal Ordnance Factory, which was briefly granted control by the management over production and pay, and where output of guns duly rose. An additional justification was that the guns were intended to aid the Russian war effort. In reality of course the workers had no control whatsoever over how the British bourgeoisie directed its war material; and even if the guns did get to Russia they were weapons in the struggle of the democratic gangsters – with their ally, the butcher Stalin - against their fascist rivals.

The WIL’s active support for the war effort was no aberration but the logical consequence of its enthusiastic adoption of the Proletarian Military Policy developed by the American SWP, which publicly declared that it had no intention of sabotaging the war or obstructing America’s military forces in any way. Put on trial for conspiracy in 1941, the SWP’s leaders, far from denouncing the war or calling for the overthrow of the capitalist state, publicly declared their support for a war against Hitler as long as it was under the leadership of a ‘workers’ and farmers’ government’(8).

This open defence of social patriotic views provoked a reaction from some in the Trotskyist movement, particularly Grandizo Munis of the exiled Spanish section, the Revolutionary Communists of Austria (RKD), and the Greek Trotskyist Agis Stinas (9). At first a minority in the WIL also opposed the new line, criticising it as a concession to defencism, but they soon gave in and the policy was confirmed. The centre and left factions of the RSL opposed it, while the right – closely allied to the WIL - supported it.  The RSL criticised the WIL for pandering to chauvinism in the working class, and identified the PMP as a symptom of the degeneration of the Fourth International towards the bourgeoisie (10). But when the RSL and the WIL merged in March 1944 it was on the basis of the latter’s positions, and the new organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party, overwhelmingly adopted the PMP with the full backing of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International.

Trotskyist historians have since tried to play down the significance of this betrayal, claiming that the PMP was merely a tactic, applicable only in certain circumstances, and later dropped. Any errors committed by the WIL or other groups were similarly tactical or the result of polemical excess. In fact, as we have seen, the PMP was devised by Trotsky himself as the specific means of applying the Trotskyist transitional programme in wartime. It became the official position of the Fourth International and was promoted as such by its central organs. Far from being in any way repudiated, the policy and its wartime application were confirmed at the FI’s first post-war congress in 1948. At this point, those revolutionaries who had remained faithful to internationalism, like Munis, Stinas and the RKD (and later Natalia Trotsky), were forced to break definitively with the Trotskyist movement.

Nor was the PMP the only means by which the Trotskyists betrayed internationalism.  As we have seen, the slogan of ‘unconditional defence of the Soviet Union’ also led them to give practical support for the war.  Only those revolutionaries who were able to recognise that proletarian internationalism was their primary duty in an imperialist war, and who rejected any support for the counter-revolutionary Russian state, were able to avoid the betrayal of internationalism.

Conclusions

The response of political groups in Britain to the Second World War highlights the crucial importance for revolutionaries of opposing any support whatsoever for bourgeois democracy. Any concession to the idea that workers should fight to defend democracy against fascism led straight into the arms of the democratic capitalist gangsters, who did not hesitate to use the horrors of Nazism as an alibi for their own sordid imperialist interests.  This is precisely the trap that the Trotskyists plunged headlong into with their call to ‘arm the workers’ for ’a revolutionary war against Hitler’.

For the anarchists of the Freedom group, the trap was sprung earlier, in Spain, where their uncritical support for the capitalist ‘Popular Front’ government led them to take sides under the reactionary banner of anti-fascism, thus passing over to the enemy camp. The heavy influence of anarchism also led the weak council communist current to take sides in this war, and only the split of the anarchist faction – together with the admittedly weak influence of the communist left - allowed the APCF to climb out of this trap and defend a basic internationalist position in the Second World War.

In between these two currents, the grouping around Spain and the World and War Commentary avoided the trap of anti-fascism to a certain extent, but did not break with other aspects of anarchism. As with the Friends of Durruti group in Spain, rather than demonstrating the vitality of the anarchist movement, it expressed the resistance by proletarian elements to anarchism’s betrayals, while its failure to break clearly from anarchist positions weakened its ability to make an organised intervention with clear political perspectives for the class struggle.

In splendid isolation from events, while avoiding an open betrayal, the SPGB still managed to add its own dose of mystification about the war and democratic rights, and showed its unhealthy respect for the niceties of bourgeois legality by giving up any anti-war activity in the face of the threat of suppression by the democratic state.

The profound defeats suffered by the proletariat after 1921 meant that it entered the Second World War with a much more unfavourable balance of forces than the first.  Does this mean that the defence of internationalism was of symbolic value only? The class struggle did not stop during wartime and there were important strikes in Britain towards the end, in which it was important for a revolutionary voice to be heard – against the reactionary slogans of the Trotskyists and the vague educational efforts of the anarchists. The strike waves in Italy and Germany and elsewhere testify to the combativity of the proletariat even in the most difficult conditions, and it was the duty of revolutionaries in all these struggles to provide a clear communist intervention.s

In the period of counter-revolution – of which the world war was the ultimate expression - the watchword, as the Italian Left understood, was ‘No betrayal!’. The surviving minorities of revolutionaries in Britain – very, very weak and confused – nevertheless represented the political continuity between the ‘old’ workers’ movement and the proletarian party of the future. Internationalism was the unbroken thread, an essential position in the communist programme of humanity. Even in the extremely hazardous conditions of occupied Europe, under threat from the Gestapo, local police and Stalinist assassins, elements of the surviving communist left undertook anti-war activity, issuing leaflets calling on soldiers to fraternise, etc. This is an example of internationalism in action that revolutionaries must take as their inspiration: the watchword of the workers’ movement, ‘workers’ of the world unite!’, is still our first duty today.   MH

In Greece in December 15 men were convicted of the nearly 1000 crimes attributed to the November 17 terrorist group during the 27 years of its activity. There had been 23 murders, dozens of bombings and rocket attacks on a range of targets - typically foreign banks and other businesses, military figures, Turkish and German diplomats, tax officers - as well as raids on police stations to restock on weapons.

Yet, while 'justice' was finally supposed to have been done with the guilty behind bars, there was widespread suspicion throughout Greece of how neatly the November 17 case had been wrapped up. It seemed to have been done just in time to avoid affecting this year's Athens Olympics. There were also questions as to why the Greek state had previously done so little to catch the terrorists who in the end either gave themselves up or confessed: these were alongside questions on the origins of the gang and the 'interests' that initially funded them. Also, three weeks after the end of the N17 trial, the judges were chosen for the trial on February 9th of five members of the ELA - a lesser terrorist group that had carried out hundreds of bombings since 1975 - who had been conveniently arrested as part of the N17 investigation.

There had been suspicions about N17 right from its first killing in 1975, when three unmasked men shot the CIA Athens station chief at point blank range in front of witnesses. Because of the precision and efficiency of the attack little credibility was given to the claims of the previously unknown group. A year later the murder of an army officer was followed by a communiqué in Liberation that had reached the French paper via Jean-Paul Sartre. For a group that was only supposed to amount to two extended families they always seemed to have friends in high places.

Subsequent attacks and the communiqués that accompanied them showed that N17 had a typically nationalist agenda expressed in familiar left-wing terms. As its leader, Alexandros Giotopoulos, said during the trial, "modern Greece is a colony of the USA". N17's targets were American, British, German, French and Turkish, and those Greek bodies that were deemed to have betrayed, sold out or acted as agents of foreign powers. They bombed because of the running down of the health service; against any rapprochement with Turkey; in protest against a judiciary that was not taking action against corrupt industrialists; against privatisations; against German delays in paying reparations for World War II crimes. There were rocket attacks in protest against aspects of the Greek government's foreign policy (any concessions to Turkey or the US), attacks on British and German targets in protest against their role in the war in ex-Yugoslavia.

The left-wing of capitalism in Greece (and elsewhere) criticised N17's "militarism". But while it didn't accept the terrorist methods it had no quibbles with its ideology. N17 was against US imperialism, against Turkish 'expansionism' (that was 'backed by the US'), against the Greek media, against the EU. When PASOK (Greek social democrats) came to power in 1981 it was welcomed by N17 in one of its communiqués because of PASOK's "basic lines, anti-monopolistic, anti-imperialist and democratic". Accordingly, for two years N17 undertook no attacks and issued no communiqués. They renewed their activity when they considered that PASOK was making concessions to the US.

At his trial, Giotopoulous said he had been framed by "British and American secret services". This fitted in with N17's previous protestations, as, for example, when in 1995 they mounted a rocket attack on a TV studio with more than a hundred people in it and complained that they were being misrepresented by a CIA/FBI/Greek media conspiracy. They had no quarrel with Greek capitalism, just the foreign pressures that acted on it. In a 1988 communiqu�� they complained that "there is not a Greek Army but only a NATOite army".

Far from causing any difficulties to the Greek ruling class they seem to have been able to tolerate N17's actions for a long period. In 1994 the Greek minister for Public Order said in an interview that he thought that groups like N17 were controlled by elements from foreign secret services. This seems to contradict the reality of a group whose politics fitted perfectly well into the left-wing of the bourgeoisie's political spectrum, and whose defence of Greece against all foreign encroachments made the Greek state the only body with any interest in sustaining the existence of N17 for so long. There is no other satisfactory explanation for N17's survival. But what of the reasons for its sudden demise?

The 2004 Olympics would have seemed to be a perfect theatre for N17 activity - yet they've been brought to heel. Claims of US intervention behind the scenes need not be far off the mark. Athens has previously shown itself to be antagonistic to US policy in the area: in Greek support for Serbia in the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia; in the opposition of parts of the Greek ruling class to US initiatives over Cyprus; in Greek opposition to the war against Iraq. But the situation is changing. In particular, the leadership of PASOK is being handed over to George Papandreou who spent much of his early life in the US, speaks better English than Greek, has been the leading figure behind improved relations with Turkey, is enthusiastic about the EU and has ditched the nationalist anti-Americanism of his father, who founded PASOK. Whatever manoeuvres the US has actually undertaken it must be pleased with the way things are going. The US backed the 'colonels' regime that ran Greece from 1967-74, and ever since a certain verbal distancing from American policy has been required from Greek governments. The end of N17, the coming trial of the ELA and the advent of George Papandreou show that, even if PASOK lose elections brought forward to March, Greek capitalism is re-orientating itself to take more account of the weight of US imperialism in the region.

Car, 27/1/04.

Following the Bam tragedy, the Iranian state launched an international appeal for aid, and in the name of human solidarity the great powers of this world sent in rescue and aid teams. From the accounts of several members of non-government organisations, there was a veritable competition between the aid teams to see who would impose their presence first. Their lack of coordination added further confusion to the chaotic state of the local aid agencies. The television teams from France, Britain and Russia produced some frankly indecent publicity about their own teams of rescuers and sniffer dogs. This tragedy was even the occasion for grand gestures between the US and Iran. Whatever the media might say, the sending of American rescuers was simply a 'humanitarian' mask for imperialist ambitions; the speeches about the purely humanitarian nature of the rescue effort were purely lies. The earthquake provided a good opportunity for the US authorities to make an approach to Iran; the latter has a huge influence on the Shiite community in Iraq, which is currently causing considerable difficulties to the American occupying force. As for the Iranians, they are hoping that the US will rein in the armed Mohajedin opposition it has been supporting against the Tehran regime.

And on top of this cynical use of the earthquake as an opportunity for diplomatic manoeuvres, the grand media show about humanitarian aid has been of short duration. Three weeks after the catastrophe, the various aid teams have departed as quickly as they arrived. The victims, of course, have nowhere to go back to. They are faced with the struggle to survive among the ruins and while the government will be carrying on with its sordid international intrigues, they will only have themselves to rely on.

WR, 30/01/04.