|
In the second I showed that the theory of the ‘imperialism
of free trade’ also failed to account for important features
of the post-World War II global order, and did so partly because
the specificities of the state disappeared (Weekly Worker August
5). I looked at some alternative approaches to the problem and concluded
that they had their own limits. In this article I will re-approach
the question and show how the conclusions that can be reached have
implications for our political line in wars like the US-UK invasion
and occupation of Iraq.
Epochal limits and the decline of capitalism
I argued in the first article that the deep significance of the
question of imperialism was its link to the issue of the epochal
limits of capitalism. The reason is that the underlying supposition
of Marxism as a scientific socialism is that there are such limits.
If there are not, the claimed scientific critique of capitalism
is in reality moral-utopian, the theoretical apparatus of Marxism
should be discarded, and the political activity of Marxists is pointless
or destructive. This was the conclusion reached by the ‘analytical
Marxists’ and the ex-‘official communist’ Democratic
Left. We therefore need to begin with this question.
Marx and Engels proposed, as early as the Communist manifesto, two
fundamental limits to capitalism: (1) capitalism raises up its own
gravedigger, the proletariat; and (2) the forces of production grow
beyond controllability by the laws of capital and turn into forces
of destruction. Thus crisis produces starvation amidst and caused
by plenty. We will return to these later. However, since these were
originally proposed in 1848 as diagnoses of the state of the capitalist
order at that date, it is unlikely that they can provide direct
benchmarks for the extent to which capitalism is approaching its
epochal limits.
The underlying reason for supposing that there are epochal limits
to capitalism is that there turned out to be epochal limits to the
slave mode of exploitation of classical antiquity, and to European
and Japanese feudalism. Marx’s most general statement of the
point is in the celebrated 1859 preface to A contribution to the
critique of political economy:
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive
forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations
of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal
terms - with the property relations within the framework of which
they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive
forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era
of social revolution.”
This statement (and much else of Marx’s and Engels’ occasional
writing on the problem of transitions between modes of production)
is strikingly unilluminating on the concrete forms of the “age
of revolution”.
Some Marxists cast the problem away on the basis that the task of
the proletariat is radically different from that of other classes,
because it is the first ‘revolution of the majority’ -
a view which also has support in Marx and Engels. But this collapses
the underlying ground for supposing that capitalism will come to
an end: the fact that prior social orders have come to an end. The
Bolsheviks filled the gap with generalising on the French revolution
(“the national and democratic bourgeois revolution”),
which had a poisonous effect on their debates in the 1920s and has
had continued adverse effects on Marxism since.
There is a lot of academic Marxist writing on the problem of the
transitions from slavery to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism,
of very varying usefulness. There is also substantial non-Marxist
historical work on the topic, since, whether you are a Marxist or
not, it is clear that something changed between classical antiquity
and the European early Middle Ages and also that something changed
between the European late Middle Ages and the 1800s.
The currently predominant academic Marxist view is that pre-capitalist
economic and social formations are all non-dynamic, and only capitalism
tends to develop the forces of production (Ellen Meiksins Wood’s
The origin of capitalism [2003] is an example). The economic ground
for this idea is that peasants can withdraw from the wider social
division of labour into household autarky, and hence that peasant-based
economies tend to stasis. It cannot explain the archaeological and
legal-historical evidence.
Some non-Marxist social historians have come up with the idea that
social formations apart from the European Middle Ages are not dynamic,
but that the European Middle Ages sees a dynamic social formation
which tends to collapse into capitalism (John A Hall Powers and
liberties [1985]; Patricia Crone Pre-industrial societies [1989]).
The defect of this view is that the same dynamic tendency is visible
quite strongly in early modern Japan and more weakly in pre-revolutionary
China.
Declining class regimes and states
An alternative approach - more consistent both with the evidence
and with the claims of classical Marxism - is this. There are indeed
social class incentive structures which tend to promote growth of
the forces of production, at least in the slave mode of exploitation
in classical antiquity, in feudalism in both Europe and Japan, and
in medieval Chinese society, and probably in other pre-capitalist
class societies about which we have less evidence. The problem,
however, is that the development of the forces of production comes
into conflict with the particular rights of the existing class elite.
There are two results. First, there is a rise of class groups subordinate
to the existing class elite (since a growing surplus will support
a wider surplus-eating elite) which begin to contend for enfranchisement
in the power system. Second, the internal dynamics of the old class
elite increasingly produce an inability of this elite to organise
directly various necessary social functions.
Both trends result, not immediately in social revolution, but in
strengthening of the coercive-bureaucratic apparatus of the state
and its taking over tasks which have previously been organised directly
by the old ruling class. The dynamic towards statisation is a continuing
tendency in a declining class order. However, the state is originally
created as a coercive apparatus by the old ruling class and retains
ties to it. It thus positively resists the overthrow of this class,
and attempts to artificially preserve and recreate it. This phenomenon
is quite clearly visible in the Roman empire and in the rise of
‘absolutism’ in later medieval and early modern Europe
and the Tokugawa Shogunate in early modern Japan.
States of this sort can outlive for very long periods the economic
grounds of the classes which gave them their form. Thus the later
Roman empire survived as the Byzantine empire into the 15th century.
Much of the evidence used by academic Marxists for the ‘stasis’
of pre-capitalist societies - especially the Chinese case - may
really be evidence for this role of old states holding back social
dynamics. In the terminal phase, the state is so heavily engaged
in holding up the old social order that the legitimacy of the state
order collapses, leading to internal or external overthrow: this
is what happened in the western Roman empire in the 5th century,
in England in 1638-41, and in France in the late 1780s.
If we use this hypothesis to approach the question of the decline
of capitalism, the critical evidence will be the extent to which
(a) direct capitalist class management of social affairs is displaced
by state management and (b) the interpenetration of capital and
the state takes the form, not merely of dependence of the state
on capital (which is normal), but of dependence of capital on the
state.
On this basis it is clear that capitalism has been ‘in decline’
in Britain since about the mid-19th century. The critical evidence
is the invention of the limited liability company. This is both
a state subsidy to capital, and a system of state regulation of
the direct managers of capital in the interests of rentier capital.
At the same period we see the displacement of direct class control
of various state functions by an increasingly professional-bureaucratic
state.
The situation in Europe is obscured by the capitalists’ need
for the strong state from the outset (Bonapartism) as an instrument
of self-defence against Britain, but the emergence of an embryo
welfare state in Germany in the late 19th century is an indicator
that the threat of the workers’ movement was forcing an increasing
dependence of capital on the state. In the US the early 20th century
sees similar phenomena, most clearly after the ‘new deal’
era of the 1930s and the post-World War II preservation of the strong
wartime state. The dependence of capital on the state has continued
to deepen: thus Thatcherite efforts (and similar elsewhere) to “roll
back the frontiers of the state” have not set free new autonomous
capitals, but created a large range of state-subsidised capitals,
often monopolists.
The terminal phase is a lot harder to predict. It involves a gradual,
and often until the last moment imperceptible, decay of political
legitimacy. Revolutionary crises are usually surprises. There are
certainly some signs pointing in this direction in the large majority
of the central imperialist states: cynicism about politicians and
growth of abstention from voting; rise of far-right and to a lesser
extent far-left votes; and, strikingly, the diversion of state funds
into subsidising private suppliers through cost-plus contracts to
a point at which the US attempted to invade Iraq “on the cheap”
and has found its military nonetheless overstretched for other tasks.
However, it remains possible that the present capitalist state system
could be replaced by a new American-led formal world empire. It
is also possible, and indeed at present the most probable outcome,
that the decay of the modern capitalist state system will end in
a large-scale regression of the forces of production (decay into
generalised warlordism and collapse) or in human extinction. The
reasons for saying that this is the most probable outcome concern,
on the one hand, the destructive dynamics of the attempts of the
US state to save itself and, on the other, the dynamic towards irrationality
inherent in a declining wave of capitalism and the continued political
weakness of the organised workers’ movement.
States and the world market
Capitalism is from its beginning an international economic, social
and political phenomenon. This is the fundamental lesson of the
work of Wallerstein and Gunder Frank and of the debate and studies
which have followed. Capitalist market structures naturally entail
the production of winners and losers and the multiplication of initially
slight inequalities. This was, in fact, a large part of the point
of Capital volume one - as a polemic against Proudhon and other
supporters of a purified capitalism. This in turn entails winners
and losers on a world scale with increasing differences between
rich and poor. Alan Freeman has rigorously demonstrated this point
(see ‘Crisis and the poverty of nations’ Historical Materialism
29, 1999).
Capitalism is from the outset an international formation; but it
inherits from feudalism the nation-state. There is thus an inherent
contradiction between the world market and the nation-state, which
drives towards a capitalist world state. The partial expression
of this contradiction is the successive world hegemonies of the
Netherlands, Britain and the US, each of which is closer to being
a world state than its predecessor. The contradiction is also expressed
in hierarchical state-to-state relations: colonialism and semi-colonialism.
However, each state is in the first place dependent on a particular
group of capitals, and begins as a quasi-nation-state (‘quasi’
because the Netherlands is sub-national, while the British state
is multinational). In the mid-19th century British capital began
to enter a period of decline, and this absolute decline entailed
relative decline compared to non-British capitals. British capitals
responded to this decline by deploying the British world hegemony
as an instrument of defence against rival capitals and against the
workers’ movement; rival capitals responded with their own
empires and imperial protection systems. These responses set up
the conditions for the arms race of around 1900 and the world crisis
of 1914-45. The upshot is a new world hegemony: that of the US.
In the terms of Marxist political economy, crisis flows from the
declining rate of profit in previous lead sectors and from disproportionalities,
and is overcome through the devalorisation of previously dominant
capitals. But when the decline of a global lead capital is translated
onto the world economic stage, this capital will use leverage over
‘its’ state to resist devalorisation. As a result, crisis
within the world hegemon is delayed, and the international disproportionality
overhang can only be overcome (British coal, rail, shipping, textiles,
etc - capitals globally devalorised) through the overthrow of the
existing world hegemonic state: which usually means, through war.
The result is a prolonged and international ‘down phase’
corresponding to the down phase of Kondratiev’s long cycle,
overtly affecting non-hegemonic states more sharply than the hegemonic
state, until such time as the existing hegemon can be overthrown
and replaced. This enables - as after World War II - a new ‘up’
phase.
It is the failure of World War I to overthrow the British empire
which led to the instability of 1918-39 and to World War II. It
is the reduction of Britain to dependency on the US, resulting from
Nazi victories, which enabled the long up phase of around 1950 to
around 1975. This in turn meant that the underlying conditions for
profitability existed which allowed the policy of ‘containment’
rather than an immediate new war with the USSR, major concessions
out of surplus to the European and US working classes, and concessions
to European and colonial capitals.
From around 1970 conditions analogous to those affecting British
capital from the mid-19th century have begun to affect the US. The
dominant US capitals, in turn, have begun to use their state to
protect them against rival capitals and against the workers’
movement. The result is neoliberalism and the turn from the policy
of ‘containing’ the USSR, etc to the policy of ‘rollback’.
US capital, however, starts from a much weaker position of capitalism
as a whole than the position of British capital in the mid-19th
century. Primarily, it is already more heavily dependent on the
state than British capital was in the 19th century; it has much
lower internal political legitimacy as a world empire than the British
state of that period; and it is also showing a terminal-phase symptom:
that is, that it wishes merely to receive subsidies from the state
without - as far as possible - paying it tax. Its response to date
has been primarily to take back the concessions which its political
representatives see as having been made directly or indirectly to
the working class ‘since 1917’ - but to do so indirectly
and at least cost to the US taxpayer.
Its self-defence thus has an internationally destructive character
which seeks to drive the import of money capital into the US, where
the European empires of the late 19th century were empires of the
export of capital and had a (partially, contradictorily) constructive
character. This destructive character is reflected in the effects
both of the ‘Washington consensus’ and IMF ‘structural
adjustment programmes’ on non-US economies, and of the direct
effects of US and US-backed military interventions from the time
of the Unita operation in Angola onwards - most recently in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
This is not primarily a matter of the subjective intention of US
capitalist or state actors. US state actors clearly do subjectively
prioritise the blocking of developments which might threaten US
interests at lowest cost (other than in subsidies to US capitalist
actors), and are willing to accept merely destructive outcomes.
But the real problem is that the objective situation of US capital
and the US state precludes the US state playing a constructive role,
even in the limited sense that British imperialism did in the later
19th century.
A capitalist way out?
Capitalism prepares the ground for socialism in two senses. The
first is that it creates the material-technical conditions which
could release everyone in the world from the long working day and
thereby enable the end of permanent specialisations of workers versus
managers, politicians, etc. In this sense and this sense alone Trotsky
was right to say that “The objective prerequisites for the
proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have
begun to get somewhat rotten.” (The “rottenness”
is expressed in the ‘great car economy’, the arms industry,
the decline of education, and so on.)
The second way in which capital prepares the conditions for socialism
is that it tends to expropriate the petty proprietors, converting
them into proletarians, and in its own way to socialise production,
thereby creating the fundamental condition for human cooperation.
In this sense the objective conditions for socialism have not ripened.
The contradiction between the nation-state and the world market,
leading to ‘rich’ (imperialist) countries and ‘poor
countries’ (colonies), creates in the colonies an artificial
preservation of the peasantry and artisan class, and in the imperialist
countries a large, new class of petty proprietors of intellectual
property - managers, foremen, bureaucrats, and ‘self-employed’
in luxury and unproductive ‘service sectors’ (finance,
advertising, etc) of the economy. It also creates political nationalism
in both the imperialist and colonial workers’ movements. To
a considerable extent these are results of deliberate acts by states,
which (rightly) see imperialism as providing the means to support
concessions which will pacify the proletariat, and a strong petty-proprietor
‘middle class’ as their necessary bulwark against the
proletariat.
At a purely economic level, therefore, there is substantial space
into which capitalism could in theory expand at the expense of petty
proprietorship. Some expansion in this direction has taken place.
Thus US trade policy aimed ultimately at the fall of the Chinese
and Vietnamese regimes has promoted the development of native capitals
in the ‘front-line states’, especially Taiwan, South Korea,
Thailand and Malaysia; and the flight of capital from US and European
high wages since the 1970s has produced further development of wage-employment
in a series of colonial countries, albeit very unevenly. The rise
of intellectual property is in part a form of protectionism, but
it is also in part an expropriation of the ‘intellectual commons’
at the expense of the managerial and professional classes in the
imperialist countries.
The condition for these possibilities to turn into a new long up
wave, however, is the overthrow of the world hegemony of the existing
US state and the devalorisation of the US dominant capitals - oil,
aerospace, motors, petrochemicals and so on. Such a development
would inevitably involve the reversal of the artificial privatisations
of the 1980s and 90s and the bringing of further economic activities
into the state or subsidised sectors: ie, a deepening of the dependence
of capital on the state.
I have already argued in the second article in this series that
such an overthrow is most unlikely to take the form of a return
to multi-polarity leading to a new 1914-45. The relative weight
in the international order of the US state is just too great. The
alternative road would be one envisioned in a cloudy way by Hardt’s
and Negri’s Empire, and in a liberal-utopian way (as the ‘international
rule of law’ or ‘reform of the UN’) by the ‘official
communist’ parties and other reformists. This would be the
overthrow of the US constitution in order to convert the US state
into a world empire. Like Augustus’s coup in ancient Rome,
which disenfranchised the senatorial elite in order to preserve
them but incorporate the provincial elites, a military figure would
have to disenfranchise the major US capitals in order to preserve
a bastardised capitalist order which could incorporate more effectively
the elites of the subordinated countries.
There are contradictions within the US state which point in this
direction: expressed in the deepening polarisation of US politics
between the religious right and the liberal left, and the growth
of militarism, hostility to ‘the corporations’, and the
cult of the strong man in US culture. This is still, however, a
low-probability outcome. Far more probable is a succession of larger
and more destructive US military and economic interventions spreading
destruction and warlordism across the globe, and on each occasion
further destabilising the world economy and politics, increasing
irrationalism and leading ultimately to a general collapse. This
is due to the class and political-ideological effects of ‘long
business cycles’.
Cycles and politics
Marx and Engels said, as I noted earlier, that there are two fundamental
limits to capitalism: (1) capitalism raises up its own gravedigger,
the proletariat; and (2) the forces of production grow beyond controllability
by the laws of capital and turn into forces of destruction. The
political problem is that in the short term these two are necessarily
out of synchronisation.
It is familiar Marxism and, indeed, bourgeois economics, that boom
conditions make the labour market tight. The result is that more
people are drawn into employment and the bargaining position of
the trade unions is strengthened. When there is a prolonged up phase,
like the 1950s and 60s, these conditions are accentuated. However,
in this phase of the economy capitalism appears to be doing fine.
The result is an ascendancy of forms of ‘business unionism’
and reformism. At the close of the up phase, as in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, the working class may challenge the initial attempts
of the capitalists to take back concessions from a position of immediate
strength, and this may indeed lead to serious political crisis.
But this is not the same thing as a deep-going challenge to the
legitimacy of the state power.
Slump conditions, in contrast, weaken the immediate bargaining position
of the trade unions and the self-confidence of the working class.
An increasing proportion of the population is thrown permanently
out of work and forced into forms of petty-proprietor life, whether
in forms of small business and the service class or in the smallest
form of small business, pauperism and crime. In acute cases there
may be real atomisation of the proletariat as a class, as in the
current situation (70% unemployment) in Iraq, and as in Russia in
the military demobilisation and dislocation of the economy of 1917-18.
Slump is the point at which the forces of production mysteriously
(except to Marxists) turn into forces of destruction and capitalism
appears as irrational.
The trouble is that without a Marxist understanding it is not capitalism
which appears as irrational, but the world. Prolonged downswings
in the economy therefore create a growth of religion, superstition,
and irrationalist and reactionary-utopian politics. These were a
strong feature of the politics of the first half of the 20th century,
and they are increasingly prominent today. Part of the difficulty
in interpreting the invasion of Iraq is that the current US administration
is on the verge of reactionary-utopian irrationalism in other aspects
of its policy, and in its political base. Part of the difficulty
in formulating a political line towards the occupation is the significance
of reactionary-utopian irrationalism, in the form of political islam,
in the opposition to it.
Afghans, Iraqis, etc have been cast into the abyss, and a miscalculation
on the part of the managers of global finance capital could yet
precipitate a general crash in the short term. But in general, the
international order is in decay, not yet in open crisis. Nonetheless,
the dominant underlying tendency of the capitalist order is towards
irrationalist politics which lash out destructively, and therefore
towards the abyss.
Fighting for the seizure of power by the working class is a long
shot, because of the difficulties caused by imperialism and the
continued weight of the petty proprietors and because of the negative
effects of imperialism and of the long recessionary phase on the
working class and its organisations. However, it is rationally justifiable
to bet our activity on this long shot because the dynamics of continued
capitalist rule lead towards truly disastrous consequences.
Lessons
There are two fundamental strategic lessons to be learnt from the
20th century evolution of imperialism. The first is that the “forward
march of labour” will inevitably be “halted” so long
as capitalism continues on a world scale. The reforms gained by
European, US, etc workers are not simply products of class struggle:
they are products of national class struggle combined with (a) underlying
boom conditions and (b) the use by the capitalist states of imperialist
strategies to contain the working class. Every later 19th century
carries with it a 1914-45; the reforms of 1945 to the 1970s carry
with them their gradual reversal, already begun, and the present
tendency towards general destruction. It is illusory, therefore,
to argue from the possibility of capitalism playing a ‘progressive’
role by expropriating the petty proprietors to a strategy of building
the workers’ movement and waiting for our time to come. On
this front the AWL’s position is at best ambiguous, and the
‘imperialism of free trade’ idea incarnates this ambiguity.
The second is the lesson of the failure of the Soviet experiment
and its post-1945 satellite experiments. Stalinism turns out to
be a road back to capitalism by a long and bloody detour. The same
is true of the ‘anti-imperialist front’. The dynamics
of state-to-state inequality, dependency and colonialism are given
by capitalism, not by the immediate decay of capitalism. The dynamism
of capital comes from its core, even when this core is in decline.
A strategy of escaping from capitalism to create a ‘socialist
camp’ on the basis of backward and colonial countries therefore
leads, not to encircling the capitalists, but to the capitalists
encircling and reconquering the ‘socialist camp’. It follows
that the struggle for proletarian internationalism - for the working
class to begin to act, practically, on an international scale -
is fundamental. On this front the AWL are unambiguously right.
Constructing proletarian internationalism
The decay of the US-led world order and the accompanying offensive
of capital reflects global dynamics and is global in its scope.
The organisations of the working class remain nationally limited
and mesmerised by illusory alliances with the ‘national’
states and with petty-proprietor nationalism. The truth is that
the proletariat can only become truly a class ‘for itself’,
a potential claimant to rule society, insofar as it begins to think
of itself, and to organise, as an international class. The problem
posed is how to construct the international unity of the working
class.
Constructing the international unity of the working class was the
purpose of the four Internationals, three of which failed, while
one was stillborn. The First International collapsed in factional
struggles, as the wave of class struggles which had supported it
died away. The Second collapsed in face of the outbreak of war in
1914, as its leading parties supported their own national capitalist
states.
The Third, Communist International sought to avoid this fate by
a rigorous centralism and programmatic commitments (the 21 conditions).
But it was in practice dominated by the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, became an arm of Kremlin diplomacy, and was wound up in the
interests of Stalin’s alliance with the US and Britain. The
Fourth was stillborn in part because it was premature - in substance
a (small) left external faction of the Comintern; in part because
its ideas were radically incapable of dealing politically with the
war. Efforts since 1945 to revive it have produced only talking
shops (present-day Fourth International) or grotesque microscopic
imitations of the Comintern with British, French, US or Argentinian
sects playing the role of the CPSU.
The common weakness of the Internationals after the First seems
to have been to create unity around programmatic declarations, involving
only the ‘tops’ of the national organisations, rather
than building unity around concrete practical tasks which could
unite the ranks of the organisations directly. The partial exceptions
were the role of May Day, and campaigns for the legal defence of
victims of capitalist repression.
The problem behind this weakness is that the leap from tasks in
the individual country to global tasks is just too great. There
is a genuine practical unity, broader than the underlying problem
of the world market, and some underlying cultural unity, affecting
day-to-day politics and the tasks of the working class in Europe
- or North America, Latin America, the Arab East and so on. The
struggle for global class unity thus needs to be mediated by the
struggle for continental or ‘global regional’ class unity.
The early Comintern, indeed, showed a dynamic towards the organisations
in Europe at least grouping themselves for common action. It was
one which the centre suppressed on the ground that it threatened
centralism.
Here, again, the CPGB and the AWL have common ground, though neither
they nor we seem to have discussed the question of other ‘continentalisms’
beyond the issue of Europe. The opposition of the majority of the
British left to the European Union claims to be ‘internationalist’.
At best it is the ‘internationalism’ of the ‘anti-imperialist
front’, which leads back to nationalism. In practice it is
merely nationalist.
States and defeatism
A recurring theme of these three articles has been the role of the
state. Imperialism consists of state-to-state hierarchies and dependency
relations. These are grounded on economics, but not reducible to
economics. There is a long-term tendency for capital as such to
become dependent on the coercive-bureaucratic state. This tendency
is the ground of classical imperialism, and of the post-war forms,
and of the present decay of the US-led world system.
The critical global-strategic problem of the working class is the
development of practical proletarian internationalism. But the fundamental
obstacle standing in our way is the imperialist state system. It
is the capitalist states which organise imperialism and its consequences,
the capitalist state which is the immediate enemy of proletarian
internationalism and the practical organiser of capital’s class
war on the proletariat, and the capitalist states which threaten
humanity with global war and barbarism.
The ground of proletarian revolutionary defeatism is this recognition
that our fundamental enemy is ‘our’ national state. The
AWL has reprinted segments of Hal Draper’s War and revolution:
Lenin and the myth of revolutionary defeatism (1996) to support
its arguments against defeatism. The basic error of Draper’s
book is that the bureaucratic-coercive state is dissolved into ‘the
policies of governments’. The state has dematerialised, flatly
contrary to Draper’s own analysis of Marx’s arguments
in Karl Marx’s theory of revolution (1977-78). Revolutionary
defeatism is not in general an argument for issuing calls for the
defeat of our own state or for the victory of its opponent. It is
an orienting position: we remain enemies of the state even when
it is at war: we fight by all practical means to bring the war to
an end.
We now return, finally, to the question of Iraq. We fight for the
immediate and unconditional withdrawal of British troops. We do
so in the first place because the British working class needs to
learn to act effectively as the enemy of the British state. On several
issues I have argued that the AWL is right. On this issue, however,
it is committing an absolutely fundamental error.
|
