) ince the late 1970s a tre)mendous international offensive of imperialism has been taking place, in response to the emergence of the long wave of economic crisis which became obvious to all during the 1974-5 economic recession.
This offensive combined a savage attack on the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, an attempt to restructure the global economy to the detriment of the working class and the oppressed, and the militarisation offensive under Reagan and Bush which targeted third world liberation struggles and the post-capitalist states.
The imperialist offensive threw the international working class movement and liberation struggles onto the defensive. And it succeeded, during the 1980s and early 1990s, in imposing some harsh defeats. But none of these victories for imperialism succeeded in stabilising its economy. World imperialism has a tremendous interest in trying to pacify 'unstable' sectors of the world in order to get out of its own crisis. is an occasional supplement to Socialist Outlook which takes an in-depth look at key issues of socialist analysis and strategy. Each issue examines a subject of importance to socialisis in greater depita - alic a These processes can be illustrated in relation to the events in Central America and the Caribbean. The victory of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979; the general offensive of the Salvadorean FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) in January 1980 and the emergence of the Maurice Bishop New Jewel movement government in Grenada posed immense dangers for imperialist stability in the region.
All of these countries are very small, but the political dynamic in the region, which included a revolutionary guerrilla struggle being waged in Guatemala, threatened to destabilise Latin America and the Caribbean. The response of US imperialism was of course to unleash counter-revolutionary war: US advisors and military aid in El Salvador, the contra rebels in Nicaragua. These moves wrecked the Nicaraguan economy and fought the FMLN guerrillasto a standstill. There would be no éasy repetition of the Cuban experience. The leaderships of both these revolutions were posed with immense new greater length - than is possible in the paper itself The next issue - out in February -will be an examination by Livio Maitan, a long standing central leader of the Fourth International, of the implosion of the post-war political svstem in lady.
theory + practice • No Historic Compromise with Imperialism • page two