The leading representatives of the US dominant class have followed up their victorious war against Iraq and the military occupation of that country with a flurry of political and diplomatic activity. Mr. Bush, Colin Powell and D. Rumsfeld, among others, have been busy visiting the capitals of Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, trumpeting the US dream of a world under Americaís unquestioned imperial dominance. Meanwhile, contrasting with the US bouorgeoisieís fine speeches about the gains in the war against terrorism, the bright future of Iraq, and the prospects of a peaceful Middle East, the sinister reality of capitalism is in full display in this region and on worldwide scale
There is no doubt that through the display of its overwhelming military muscle and political will in its quasi-solo war against Iraq the US has created a favorable momentum in the defense of its world imperialist hegemony. For the moment Americaís most vociferous critics have quieted down, waiting for a better opportunity to challenge their suffocating imperialist rival. This was clear in the last meeting of the G-8 group at the beginning of June, where in on apparent show of unity the leaders of major industrialized countries including Germany, France and Russia óthe noisiest opponents of the US war against Iraq ó declared that their present common objective was a ìfully sovereign, stable and democratic Iraq.î France has tried to accommodate itself to the new situation in the Middle East by appealing to the US to share the spoils of war, recalling that while the US might have been able to win the war alone, it cannot secure the peace without help. Nonetheless this plea by French President Chirac has fallen on deaf ears. The reality is that the American bourgeoisie has no intention to loosen its recently acquired grip over Iraq; with the exception of Great Britain, no major imperialist power is being allowed to meddle in its ìreconstructionî. The new international military force that the US is putting together to help police post-war Iraq ñ which include such ìpowersî as Albania, Portugal, Rumania aandPoland ñ is nothing but a political cover to legitimize American military occupation and political control of this country.
On another front, after the ìnear death experience for NATOî during the debacle over Iraq, the US is trying to breathe some life back into this cold-war relic. In early June, NATOís current 19 members made headlines by deciding to include 7 more countries, and by agreeing on the shape of a new NATO ìresponse force,î a US idea aimed at counteracting the European Unionís similar sounding military outfit already in the making. Thus although the US knows that NATOís fate had been decided long ago when the reason for its existence disappeared with the collapse of the Stalinist military bloc, it does not want to accelerate its demise. On the contrary it will continue to use this pretence of ìmilitary allianceî to, on the one hand, supplement its military activity as it did in Kosovo and post-war Afghanistan, and on the other, to sow trouble in the attempts of its European rivals to escape American imperialist tutelage.
Beyond Europe, in the Middle East region, exploiting its success in the Iraq war, the US is pushing hard to reshape to its own advantage the balance of forces between the local bourgeoisies. Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine, and Israel are all under various degrees of pressure to play the imperialist game according to the rules of its bullyish new ìneighbor.î In particular Iran, which seems next on Washingtonís list of ìundesirable regimes,î is getting a lot of US attention lately. There is no doubt that the Bush administration wants to complement its political control of Iraq and Afghanistan with the conquest of Iran, a move that would put under its hand a large belt of land stretching almost from the Mediterranean sea (Syria would still be in the way) to the borders of China and Pakistan. In fact a case for Iranís ìregime changeî is already being built and excuses are mounting to justify the toppling of the ayatollahs. Pretexts are not lacking, from Iranís lack of ìdemocracy,î mistreatment of women, terrorism sponsoring and nuclear weapons ambitions. Already the US-inspired student democracy protests are causing trouble for the regime. However, once again, as was the case with the propaganda leading up to the war against with Iraq, these issues are nothing but a smoke screen to mask the real imperialist motivations of the US bourgeoisie. Lets not forget that the present Iranian theocratic regime rose up after the toppling of the US sponsored autocratic regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Regarding the question of backing terrorism, the US has no reason to envy the Iranian dominant class. With the cynicism typical of a decadent class the American bourgeoisie is today rehabilitating the so-called ìPeopleís Mujahideenî, an armed Iranian terrorist group based in Iraq that was just a few months ago the instrument of Saddam Hussein in its imperialist squabble with the Iranian State.
On May 1st the Bush administration announced the beginning of a new period in its conquest of Iraq. With the war now over, the emphasis was now going to be put on ìnation building,î on the reconstruction of the economy and on the creation of a fix-all-ills democratic political system. Peace and prosperity were supposed to be for the first time in the future of the beleaguered population of this country thanks to its humanitarian liberation by the US war machine. What cynicism! As if the economic disaster of this country, the misery, the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the battle fields and by illnesses caused by unsanitary conditions and lack of medicine were not in large part the responsibility of the US dominant class. Even though Saddam Hussein and his clique combined political dictatorship with a ruthless economic exploitation, the two US led wars against this country in just over a decade and the economic sanctions that followed the first one, have not been a blessing for the working class and impoverished masses of Iraq. Today the material situation of the Iraqi masses is by all accounts worse than before their ìliberation.î Unemployment is rampant, sanitary conditions worse than during the Saddam regime, and widespread famine is only being avoided by the US restoration of Saddamís old food handout system. The discontent about this situation is growing as exemplified by the demonstrations in mid-June by the demobilized soldiers of Iraqís army asking for payments of pensions and owed salaries. Moreover the nearly two hundred thousand strong American and ìalliedî occupying forces and the US ìcivilian administratorsî have not been able yet to create a semblance of a functioning society in Iraq. Lately the American military is having a lot more to worry than the rampant looting that followed the first days of the collapse of Husseinís regime. In the last few weeks increasing guerrilla military activity by remnants of the overthrown system have kept the numbers of American soldiers killed growing every day. At this level the situation of Iraq resembles very much that of post-war Afghanistan, in which stability has not been forthcoming. In Afghanistan on June 7 a suicide bomber killed 7 German soldiers and injured 29 others, while a resurgent Taliban is waging a guerrilla war against the American and ìinternational peacekeepersî in the Pushtun region and east of Afghanistan with incursions from its bases in Pakistan.
In the Middle East itself the continuing carnage between Israel and the Palestinians make a mockery of the US promises of peace and prosperity in the region in the post Saddam Hussein era. The ìroad map to peaceî announced with such fanfare during the Aqaba summit between Bush, Sharon and the Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has been followed by a new descent into bloodshed. In mid-June Israel attempted to assassinate Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, a top Hamas political leader, then a Palestinian bomber slaughtered a bus-full of people in Jerusalem, which in turned provoked a new round of killings by Israel. And the common slaughter goes on as usual. The reality is that neither the American bourgeoisie nor the Israelis have a solution to the Palestinian question. The State terror of Israel is once and again unable to stop the terrorist attacks of the Palestinian cliques. The carrot offered by the Americans in the form of some sort of Palestinian State very likely will also fail.
The US launched its war against Iraq with the excuse of eliminating Husseinís weapons of mass destruction. That this was a lie is proven by the fact that almost two months after the war ended those weapons are no where to be found. However neither was this war fought for humanitarian reason or to get rid of terrorism. This was an imperialist war aimed to bolster the US world hegemony and to weaken its European imperialist competitors ñGermany and France in particular. And like all wars in the 20th and 21st century, it will generate more war and political instability. This is the logic of decadent capitalism. Only the international working class through its proletarian revolution can offer a different future to humanity.
In our last issue, we reported how the American bourgeoisie is making full use of the pretext of the "war on terrorism" to ram through unprecedented attacks on the working class' living and working conditions (see "War is a Pretext for Austerity," Internationalism #125). Utilizing the federal structure of its state apparatus, the American ruling class seeks to obscure its policy of generalized austerity at the level of the national capital itself by portraying the measures as the result of particular local and state officials' policy choices.
We are seeing this logic play itself out spectacularly in America's largest locality: New York City, the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Recently, city and state officials in New York have been compelled to enact a whole series of unprecedented austerity measures. Public sector lay-offs and givebacks on the shop-floor have been accompanied by a 33% hike in the subway fare, toll hikes on bridges and tunnels, a rise in the already high sales tax, property and income tax increases, a sharp rent hike for rent stabilized tenants, fire station closures, tuition increases at city universities, and, in an attempt to raise revenue, an aggressive police enforcement of a number of obscure city ordinances. For most workers, whatever increase in take home pay that results from the Bush administration's policy of federal tax cuts, which is likely to be meager at best, is quickly eaten up by the local austerity measures.
The American bourgeoisie is employing a sophisticated strategy to divert the working class away from responding to these austerity measures on its own class terrain and calling upon it to mobilize behind bourgeois democracy, bourgeois legalism and the unions.
In New York, the media has portrayed the measures as self-contained policy choices of the particular official or agency with the responsibility for implementing them, and never as part and parcel of an overall concerted austerity campaign at the national level. For example, the recent subway fare hikes were the subject of intense media coverage as the "Straphangers Campaign," a leftist inspired "consumer interest" lobby, along with a number of local and state politicians, launched a legal challenge to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's (MTA) decision to raise the fare by 33%.
According to the Straphangers’ legal complaint, the public hearings the MTA sponsored on the fare increase were held under "false pretenses," such that the "democratic process" was subverted by lack of "informed debate, because the authorities presented the public with a set of fake financial records showing a budget deficit. In mid-May, the court had decided in favor of the plaintiffs, and subway fares would be rolled-back after all! However, with the media still celebrating this supposed "victory for the public interest," the MTA appealed the decision, was granted a stay and now "the public," i.e. the working class, will be paying the increased fare, at least until the conclusion of the legal process at some undetermined future date
Similar campaigns have been launched around the bridge and tunnel toll hikes; the pending closure of firehouses in a number of the city's poorer neighborhoods; as well as the strict police enforcement of city ordinances evidenced by a media blitz surrounding the ticketing of a man for "unauthorized use of a milk crate" for using the latter as stool on a public street and a pregnant woman cited for illegally resting in the stairway of a subway platform. The latter episode has even witnessed the local police union take out a radio commercial urging citizens to petition city hall in an effort to alleviate the pressure on beat cops to write as many citations as possible!
Moreover, a number of consumer groups, in particular the Metropolitan Council on Housing (METCOUNCIL) together once again with a number of city council members and state assemblymen launched a campaign opposing sharp rent hikes for rent-subsidized housing, calling on renters to attend all meetings of the Rent Guidelines Board. In the end, despite the campaign, the RGB voted to raise rents 8.5% for a two-year lease and 5.5% for a one-year lease, figures that were very close to the landlords' actual proposal of 12% and 9% increases respectively. Clearly, this was a process with a pre-determined outcome, as many observers believe Mayor Bloomberg had previously hinted to landlords that the burden of their property tax increases could be shifted to their mostly working-class tenants. In a city where rents are already high, where the average rent-stabilized family makes $32,000 a year and pays 1/3 of its pre-tax income on rent, and where 1/4 of tenants pay 50% of this income (cited in Tenant/Inquilino, April 2003), this rent hike constitutes a serious blow, a blow against which the democratic and legalistic route of the bourgeois state proved no defense for the working-class.
In still another example, recent city lay-offs have been the target of yet another lawsuit, this time by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), claiming that the lay-offs have unfairly targeted minority workers, because most of the teachers aides being laid off are blacks and Latinos. The union legal campaign does not challenge the logic of austerity and lay-offs; it only asks that people be thrown out of work in a more racially sensitive manner. The union campaign not only serves to trap workers behind the dead-end of race-based litigation and but actually seeks to divide workers against themselves on the basis of race and ethnicity -- one more example of the "divide and conquer" strategy the American bourgeoisie has always played, and which the unions have historically been on the front line in implementing.
The lesson of the recent media campaigns in New York City, emphasizing legalistic campaigns based on our "democratic rights as citizens," is that in struggling to resist the austerity measures being taken against it, the working class must not fall for the dead-end of bourgeois legalism and democracy. Filing lawsuits in court, petitioning city hall or testifying at administrative hearings will not halt the current austerity drive that capitalism is compelled to launch against the proletariat. On the contrary, workers must resist the call of the bourgeoisie to bury its struggle in the inter-classist stew of democracy and legality. It must struggle on its own class terrain in defense of its living and working conditions. In this, it must come to see that all factions and levels of the bourgeoisie have the same policy: faced with the insolubility of capitalism's permanent crisis, faced with the senility of its entire system, it has no choice but to attack the working-class. The working-class must take its fate into its own hands, develop its own organs to coordinate its struggle outside of the state's legal and democratic arena, including its union apparatus.
Frank Girard, publisher and editor of the Discussion Bulletin, the independent but decidedly De Leonist-leaning journal devoted to political debate and discussion among "non-market socialists," libertarians, and anarchists, has announced his intention to cease publication with the July-August issue. It is appropriate at this moment to reflect back on the contributions of Discussion Bulletin over the past two decades, assessing its strengths and weaknesses.
Girard for many years had been an activist in the Socialist Labor Party and Internationalism frequently polemicized with Discussion Bulletin on the De Leonist legacy, especially its tendency to embrace bourgeois democratic ideas (revolution at the ballot box; rejection of the necessity of a violent revolution; rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Russian Revolution, the Third International), and also its ossified position on the union question. While the debate sometimes got heated, it was clear that Girard was committed to open debate, often publishing our polemics with his rejoinders in DB's pages. In the early days we had the impression that DB was a group project, despite Girard's insistence that it was essentially a one-man operation. In large measure our disbelief resulted from DB's record of regular publication, appearing every two months like clockwork. In a milieu too often characterized by dilletantishness, a failure to understand the need for regular publication, and a tendency towards sporadic publication schedules by often short-lived groups, this was a remarkable achievement, a reflection of Girard's seriousness and dedication to proletarian discussion. It is difficult to avoid talking about DB and Girard as being somthing other than synonymous.
DB was unique in that it specialized in publishing disparate points of view. It became a place where different groups and individual militants searching for political clarification could discover each other's existence. On many occasions, for example, when DB published one of the ICC's polemics, we would receive queries from militants interested in learning more about our politics. Similarly, we learned about the existence of certain organizations that might never have known about through reading their contributions in DB. In a country which is as geographically far-flung as the US, with a dispersed and disorganized political landscape, this function was a tremendous political contribution.
There were of course a number of serious shortcomings. For one, despite his openness to political discussion, Girard personally never was able to surpass the democratist confusions of De Leonism, and basically stayed mired in the perspectives of the Second International, cutting his political evolution from a Marxist understanding of the most important proletarian event of the 20th century: the Russian Revolution. Too often Girard's polemics against the ICC fell into the De Leonist practice of equating anyone who saw the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution as a Stalinist. On a number of occasions Girard repeated slanderous accusations that the ICC defended substitutionism and sought to establish regimes like those in Cuba and China. It is to Girard's shame that he could never acknowledge the utter falsity of these outrageous charges, which were more akin to the red-baiting of the bourgeois than fraternal debate.
Another shortcoming was the failure to have any formal criteria for publication in DB. While we appreciate the effort to create an open forum, the magazine sometimes published contributions by openly bourgeois elements, such as an environmental activist who once called upon readers to write their Congressmen! More importantly DB too often was mired in fulminations about De Leon's outmoded sentiments, and failed to address burning conjunctural questions facing the workers movement. In particular, there was a failure to publish contributions about American imperialist policies, and military adventurism. Also it would have been interesting to read Girard's own critique of the SLP; after all there must have been a reason for his departure from an organization in which he had spent three decades of his political life.
Perhaps the greatest weakness was Girard's failure to build a group. Regular publications that address significant theoretical questions are important acquisitions for the working class, and their disappearance is a real loss. We appreciate that Girard would like spend his retirement years "on other projects", but we disagree that a publication like DB is anachronistic in the age of internet discussion boards. There is a qualitative difference between the "off the top of one's head" jottings that appear on a discussion board and a well-thought out essay or article that was either written for, or reprinted in, DB. In any case, Internationalism salutes the seriousness and efforts of Frank Girard to maintain publication of DB for these 20 years, and wishes him good health in the years to come. We of course invite him to continue to debate with us. - J. Grevin
For more than a month the prestigious New York Times, and the media in general, have been shaken by the Jayson Blair scandal, which has put into question the veracity of the mass media that the ruling class relies upon to manipulate and mold mass consciousness in contemporary society. Blair was exposed for plagiarizing and even fabricating more than 73 national news stories over the past year. To repair the damage to its credibility, the Times devoted four full pages of its May 11th edition to detailing Blair’s transgressions. This “coming clean” by the self-styled American newspaper of record was supposed to reassure the public that the New York Times was more than capable of cleaning its own house. The whole thing was very reminiscent of the New York police department’s self-investigations of police brutality complaints. Journalists around the country rushed to the defense of the Times, praising the newspaper for confronting the scandal head-on. As one apologist put it, “the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post are dedicated to reporting the truth.”
For revolutionaries the current affair is not particularly shocking. Blair’s misdeeds pale in significance in light of the daily onslaught of propagandistic half truths and outright falsifications perpetuated by the mass media in defense of the state apparatus to which it is attached and which it defends unequivocally. But for the ruling class the scandal is embarrassing because it potentially undermines confidence in the so-called “free press” which is ideologically touted as a foundation stone of democratic society. There is a myth about the media as the fourth estate which asserts that an informed citizenry, capable of participating in the decisions that affect their lives, is the essence of democracy. In reality, all three elements that make up this myth (informed citizenry, participation in decisions, and democracy) are totally groundless.
The whole idea of an “informed citizenry” is completely fictitious in capitalist society. “Informed” about what, by whom, and for what purpose? A cornerstone of American journalism is the idea of “objectivity” in reporting the news, an idea that developed only in the beginning of the 20th century. The view that journalists can transmit the central elements of what happens in the real world through a formulaic transmission of information that includes the who, what, why, when, where and how of significant events in society free of bias is the linchpin of American journalism’s self-image and by extension, America’s “democratic” self conception. However, the notion that news coverage is not reality, but a story about reality, and it is marked and shaped by a variety of social institutions, codes of behavior, and practices, that make “objectivity” a chimera is generally accepted even by bourgeois academics in media theory. It is not the facts that determine the story that is written, but rather the story that editors have assigned to a reporter that determine the facts that are selected for inclusion.
Modern journalism as it exists in the US is a creation of decadent capitalism, in which the media has become fully integrated into the state capitalist apparatus as a tool to control popular opinion in the interests of the ruling class. During World War I, government information offices were created to manipulate public opinion as part of the war effort, and it was after the war that the first journalism schools were created in the US and the new generations of journalists were inculcated with the notion of objectivity, which facilitated the integration of the media into the state apparatus. Whatever Jayson Blair’s evil deeds, it was the media as a whole which fed the public all the administration’s lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda and Asama bin Laden as a pretext for war.
For marxists, truth is inseparable from class perspective. From the perspective of the ruling class, capitalism is a progressive system, in which the laws of the market determine an equitable distribution of wealth, and workers receive a fair wage for a fair day’s work. This capitalist version of reality, based on the exploiting class’ inability to see itself as the personification of an historically anachronistic mode of production and social relations, is supported by all manner of official and non-official data and evidence to demonstrate its truthfulness. From the perspective of the working class a completely different reality is abundantly apparent: capitalism is a ruthless system of exploitation of labor that offers humanity a stark choice between barbarism or revolution.
Exactly how do workers, or any individuals in society for that matter participate in the decisions that affect their lives? Any decision we make is totally limited by the circumstances in which we live even on the most personal basis. Sure, we can go to a theater and see any movie we want, but who decides on what films are made and distributed? Sure the capitalist state allows citizens to vote for president, but who decides who runs for president? We can only choose between the limited options the system allows. According to bourgeois propaganda, citizens participate in these decisions of state policy indirectly because their elected representatives make the decisions in the legislature or the executive branch. And in any case, in what way does “choosing” the president have any bearing on the policies that the government pursues?
There are many examples of the farcical nature of this alleged participation in decision making. For example in 1964, Lyndon Johnson won election by portraying the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater as a war monger and promising “no wider war,” but as soon as he was elected, Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam.In 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, public opinion polls showed a majority of American citizens opposed to war, yet that didn’t stop the elected representatives from launching war. Likewise, a majority of Americans were opposed to war in Iraq, at least without UN sanction, but that had no impact on the decision making in Washington. For a more local example, see the account of the fraudulent financial reports used by the New York Transit Authority to ram through the recent 33 percent fare increase (p. in this issue). While this case is still kicking around in the courts, there is absolutely no one talking about any criminal liability for the board for its fraudulent financial record keeping and willful misleading of the public. Why? Because they didn’t do anything that isn’t part and parcel of the everyday functioning of capitalist government.
This brings us to the third and most pernicious element in this fraudulent myth – the very idea of “democracy” itself. The reason that the bourgeoisie constantly inundates us with propaganda extolling its “democracy” and “freedom” is precisely because the opposite is true. We don’t live in a“democracy” where, by definition the people rule, but in a class dictatorship, where the capitalist class imposes its domination on society, especially on the working class, which produces all the wealth in society, and provides all the services that allow society to function but is totally excluded from the decision making process. The reality of this class dictatorship is covered over by all the trappings of bourgeois democracy: the free press, the electoral circus, clap-trap about inalienable rights, etc.
First of all, there has never been a true “democracy” in all of human social history, which has been characterized always by class rule. The much vaunted Greek democracy was in fact a slave society where democracy was reserved for male citizens only. The democracy established by the American revolution was initially a property owners democracy, with rights denied to workers, women, and slaves. Sure, in the ascendant period of capitalist development the ruling class used its democratic state as a mechanism for determining what policies its class dictatorship would implement, and it was therefore possible during that bygone era for workers to use the parliamentary system to play one faction of the bourgeoisie off against another and wrest certain structural reforms or improvements in the standard of living from the bourgeoisie. But with the passage the capitalist system into its decadent phase at the beginning of the 20th century, that characteristic of the capitalist dictatorship changed, and bourgeois democracy became 100 percent mystification. Real decision making power now resides firmly in the executive branch, and is exercised behind closed doors in the global interests of the national capitalist state, not in the legislature. In decadent capitalism, bourgeois democracy is a massive social swindle.
While the media would like to use Jayson Blair as a scape goat for media shortcomings, it is in fact the nature of journalism in capitalist society that it serves the interests of the ruling class, as a transmission belt for the capitalist propaganda and a central mechanism in manipulating and derailing class consciousness.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/north-america
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture