Information Bulletin 2/2006/15,
£5.00 plus 50p P&P, NCP Lit PO Box 73, London SW11 2PQ.
The second part of the report of the conference of communist and workers parties held in Lisbon in 2006. Part one is still available from the NCP at the same price.
by Ray Jones
YOU CAN ALWAYS finds things of interest in the Information Bulletin, there’s always something to learn.
Michael Perth from the Communist Party of Australia gives an insight in to Australia’s imperialist role. Not only its support of the United States’ imperialist adventures around the world but also Australia’s own role in the South Pacific.You might not know but the police commissioners in both the Soloman Islands and Fiji and many government administrators in these places are Australians. The Australian military and police are occupying Timor Leste, the world’s newest state, and Australia refuses to put them under UN control.
Badouin Deckers of the Workers’ Party of Belgium makes some good points about the relationship between China and the US. He claims that the Western powers and Japan hoped to gain control over China’s economy and to impose bourgeois parliamentarism — the 2002 report of the US Congress commission on economic relations says so explicitly.
But the 2005 report admitted the failure of the policy and says that in the long run the relationship will be negative for the US economy and security.
Deckers also quotes the independent research group Global Security saying that much of the US’s massive spending against “terrorism” is really aimed at China.
On Iraq Deckers also uses US sources against them. While the US has been busy blaming the resistance for the civilian deaths he points out that the Intelligence Agency of the US Defence Department has admitted in August 2006 that 70 per cent of the bomb attacks in July were against US-led forces and 20 per cent Iraqi puppet forces. The remaining 10 per cent against civilians have been denied by the Iraqi resistance.
There is much more good material in this Bulletin but there also does seem to be a worrying trend in a minority of contributions. The use of “Marxist” instead of “Marxist-Leninist” sometimes strikes a sour note for those of us who have come through the battle against revisionism in the old Communist Party of Great Britain.
We have learnt that the fight against revisionism does not end but must be a continuous process.
