It is one thing to say that the U.S. and its allies failed to win a decisive victory in the cold war, it is another to say that they lost it.
The logic of his position (and that of the Militant) is that imperialism has already "lost the war." This is far from being the case. Militarily NATO is building alliances with Eastern European states, which were formerly part of the Soviet Alliance, the former liberation movements have accepted a capitalist path of development, and there has been a huge regression in the productive forces of Russia.
To ignore these facts is to present a false and misleading picture to the working class. It also leads to ultra-leftist politics and a failure to analyze the most elementary political issues.
The Communist Party's loss of power in 1991 was not accompanied by a leftward movement within the working class and thus, the layers within the bureaucracy which supported free-market capitalism were emboldened. The resulting destruction of the Russian economy was certainly no victory for the working class. Those workers who mistakenly supported Yeltsin because he opposed a Stalinist coup, are now paying the price for his capture of Presidential power.
The collapse of stock market values worldwide places question of socialism on the agenda once more. But achieving this goal will require a contemporary transitional political programme and a clear orientation towards winning those workers still dominated by reformist leaders and ideas.
John Laurence
by email
`Antiterrorist' hysteria
I thought readers of the Militant might be interested in a
column that Gus Hall, National Chair of the Communist Party
USA, recently wrote for that party's newspaper, The People's
Weekly World, in its September 12 issue. The full-page
opinion piece was headlined "World terrorism - new threat to
humanity." Calling terrorism "a new evil in the world," Hall
abstracts the question of individual terror from the world we
live in today and from the class struggle, where clearly
Washington is the number one terrorist government on the
planet. And he caves in totally to the big-business hysteria
around terrorism that is used to justify U.S. war moves
abroad and attacks on democratic rights in this country.
The two photographs that accompany the article speak volumes. One is of a two-year-old girl who was hurt from the April bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the other the damaged U.S. embassy in Kenya that was recently bombed. No photos of the pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan destroyed by U.S. missiles, or of Iraqi victims of deadly U.S. aggression.
He does come out against U.S. government terrorism, though in twelve paragraphs on the subject the only mention of the U.S. war against the Cuban revolution is to denounce "the 10- year [?] effort to assassinate Fidel Castro." Nowhere is the U.S. aggression against Iraq stated, but Hall talks about the "spraying of the deadly Agent Orange on our own soldiers in the Persian Gulf War."
The Communist Party's support for the U.S. warmakers now goes under the rubric of fighting against terrorism, as their support for the U.S. imperialists during World War II was declared to be fighting fascism. "Too many in our movement are knee-jerk anti-Americans," Hall complains. "Everything American, everything the United States government does, is automatically wrong or suspect.... Of course, there are things our government does that are right, that we support."
Bill Kalman,
Miami, Florida
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