Dear comrades,
Thank you for your letter of July 22, 2003 containing a critique of two leaflets I produced for anti-war rallies in Toronto in the spring of last year. I regret that until now I have been unable to reply to the comments and criticisms raised in your letter.
To begin with, I want to agree with you that it is important for revolutionaries (both those in formal organizations and those operating as independents) to discuss in a comradely fashion, points of difference about the world situation and theoretical interpretations. Such a free exchange of views is important for the de to development of political ideas and for the clarification of our viewpoints. All too often, such debate degenerates into sectarian sniping and point-scoring, rather than actual discussion. In this spirit of discussion, I want to reply to the issues you address in your letter.
The anti-war mobilizations in Toronto in the winter and spring of 2003 were no different from mobilizations in New York and elsewhere. In terms of the banners carried and leaflets distributed, the spirit of events was overwhelmingly of a liberal nature. Indeed, in the first significant mobilizations, even United Nations banners were displayed The incidence of UN banners decreased as the conflict became imminent, but they were replaced by religious pacifism.
The 'far left,' in Toronto, represented mostly by the mainstream Trotskyist groups, largely promoted these pacifist ideas; although, if one wanted to look closely, mentions of capitalism could be found. The largest leftist group, the International Socialists (linked internationally to the British Socialist Workers Party, whose slogans and orientation they parroted), were in many cases the marshals of the parade and the promoters of the worst illusions about the nature of the war. At the first demonstration after the beginning of the war, a spokesperson for the IS, masquerading as a spokesperson for the anti-war coalition called for a boycott of American goods and services, and urged the crowd to buy Canadian goods because Canada was not supporting the war!
While many leftists echoed the liberal line "war is not the answer," others definitively opted to support one side in the conflict. The International Communist League (the Spartacists) and the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) organized around support for Iraq - the irony of the Spartacists naming their supporters in these mobilizations "The Revolutionary Internationalist Contingent" seemed to be lost on them.
However, within these demonstrations, there were small forces of internationalist opposition to the war. Together with other communists and some class struggle anarchists in Toronto, I helped to distribute materials of a revolutionary opposition to the war. In addition to the two Red & Black Notes statements, material by the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, the International Communist Current, and Internationalist Perspective was also distributed. These comrades also organized meetings in Toronto and Montreal under the heading of "No War But the Class," which featured speakers from Red & Black Notes, the IBRP, and the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists. It should also be noted that the Toronto group also produced its own leaflet in January of 2003 entitled "No to Capitalist War! No to Capitalist Peace." This leaflet, along with the ones produced by Red & Black Notes can be found at the Red & Black Notes web site along with a reply by the International Bolshevik Tendency and a rejoinder to them. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that while these efforts were important, they represented a very small voice in a dark time.
Before dealing with the criticisms of the leaflets, I want to deal with a couple of questions you raise. As you correctly assume, I reject both the "democratic" and the "fascist" sides in the Second World War, just as it was necessary to reject support for either side in the current conflict in Iraq. Capital is a global system, and the cause of the working class is not advanced by support for either the lesser imperialist powers against the larger ones, or the "democratic" capitalists against the "dictators." This policy is in stark contrast to the Trotskyists who, for all their anti-imperialist rhetoric, see nothing wrong with supporting bourgeois governments in their conflicts with larger powers. The IBT for its part took no side in the conflict between Iraq and Kuwait, yet hurried to defend Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003. Its rationale being, it is about "defeating imperialism" (in reality, supporting a small imperialist power against a larger one). In my reply to the IBT I asked, but received no reply, what would have been the logical extension of this policy for Iraqi militants: support Saddam Hussein? (militarily not politically of course). And would they advocate the shooting of deserters ("like pigeons"?) as scabbing on the defense of an "oppressed nation?"
It is necessary here to make a small correction in your article You quote the leaflet "A Plague on Both Your Houses" as stating "for some it's about defending imperialism," whereas the actual line was "for some it's about defeating imperialism," referring to the Trotskyist argument that the job of revolutionaries was to defeat the imperialism (and here they meant Iraq). My use of the phrase was intended to be ironic; nevertheless, the error does not affect your point.
Despite the general agreement in the framework of revolutionaries toward the attitude in the conflict, we clearly have some differences about the base cause of the war and minor tactical points within it. In the two leaflets I produced, it is argued that the root cause of the conflict was the crisis in the American economy, a position you likened to that of the IBRP who argue that this factor and US control of the oil markets are the key ideas. In contrast, you assert that the key factor was the collapse of the other global superpower and the US' need to assert its hegemony as against its European and pacific-rim rivals.
To begin with, I do not disagree that there is an element of "superpower" politics at play in the conflict, just as you do not deny the importance of economic factors. However, it seems that the US' actions, despite the national economy's weakness, are dictated from a position of strength. In your letter, you argue that the US' decision is based on the lesser imperialist powers challenging the US leadership, and the US needing to "engage in direct displays of its military power, as an attempt to keep its erstwhile allies in line." You further argue that my argument underestimates "the gravity of imperialist rivalries." However, in the following paragraphs you admit that "while there is an emerging conflict between the US and the EU, this is premature and the EU is a "sad fiction when it comes to exhibiting a united foreign policy." If this rebellion of the lesser powers was the impetus for the US to act, where was it coming from and who was leading it? I agree that France and Germany were the loudest voices in opposition, but as I noted in "A Plague on Both Your Houses" it was because they saw the US designs in strengthening its economy at their expense. While you argue that I have overstated the short-term economic impetus to war, it seems that you may have overstated the political.
Your letter also sees the "economic" explanation my view the holdouts would eventually fall into line for fear of losing out. While this expectation was largely unfounded, it has been negatively confirmed as the US has acted to punish those who did not send troops by withholding the lucrative contracts. Canada in particular, which has traditionally played the soft-cop peacekeeper under UN auspices, has been left whining about being denied contracts. If Germany and France had too much to lose by not going along, given the US' initial success, has discipline been strengthened or weakened?
As to the tactics which should be offered, I think you may have misconstrued their function. In the closing paragraphs of "No War But the Class War" leaflet, I suggested a number of possible scenarios which could take place. If my leaflet has led you to believe that I was putting forward a program for the working class to take up in resistance to the war, then I regret this impression. Obviously a few leaflets on the Internet or distributed in a crowd of tens of thousands will not be the "spark" which brings the revolution. These comments should not be likened to the call to arms made by many leftist organizations. I do not suggest that the revolution is around the corner, and to a large extent the actions did not go beyond the terrain of bourgeois politics.
However, it is important to remember that such actions could have had an important impact. Even the case of the UK firefighters strike, which did not ultimately transcend the union form, created a panic with the UK's ruling circles as it threatened to interfere with their war plans. While revolution is not always the end product, the class struggle can always be seen. As your statement of March 2003 correctly notes:
"The working class is not a mere passive victim of war. It was the mass strikes and mutinies of 1917-18 which brought the first world war to an end.Today the working class struggle can only be a defensive one. But it contains the seeds of an offensive revolutionary struggle, of a class war against the whole capitalist system."
Despite our differences on these questions, I look forward to further exchanges and discussion.
N, Red & Black Notes, 2-15-2004
As we go to press, the bourgeois media has already been ablaze for months with intense coverage of the Democratic primary race. The media campaign that always accompanies American presidential elections got off to an early start this time around, as pundits weighed in on the race months before the official start of primary season in January with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. As early as November of last year, the quirky former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, who positioned himself as a harsh critic of Bush's Iraq policy, was declared the democratic front-runner, with the media all but anointing him the Democratic candidate in 2004. Quite clearly, the American bourgeoisie deliberately used the media campaign surrounding the primary race to attempt to accomplish several distinct propaganda goals at once: distract the American public from the continuing chaos, death and destruction resulting from the war in Iraq, revitalize the Democratic party as a viable party of government, and once again drum-up illusions that the electoral process is the appropriate avenue through which to seek political and social change and have one's just grievances addressed.
This last goal corresponds to the general strategy of the American bourgeoisie to revitalize the image of bourgeois democracy following the debacle of 2000. In that election the Democratic Party candidate, Vice President Al Gore, won the popular vote but lost the presidency to Republican George W. Bush due to the Byzantine rules of the anachronistic Electoral College. It became evident in 2000 that as capitalism's decomposition advances, the bourgeoisie is tending to lose some ability to control and manipulate its electoral mechanism, and the bourgeoisie does not want to risk a repeat of that mess. Understandably, the election of 2000 left many voters with a bad taste in their mouth, fuelling the political alienation of many in a nation where most eligible voters already stay home on Election Day. The following three years of Bush's presidency have done little to heal the wounds. While Bush was able to reap some initial public relations benefits from the tragedy of 9/11, after which his approval ratings soared, his administration was unable to translate this propaganda coup into long-term political capital. Continuing concerns over spiralling American casualties in Iraq, the deteriorating economy, unemployment that won't go way, overseas job losses, soaring budget deficits in the face of huge tax cuts, and the administration's low credibility regarding pre-war justifications for the attack on Saddam Hussein have all begun to take their toll.
It is in this context, the bourgeois media initially hailed Governor Dean as an idealistic political outsider with a strong principled stand against the Iraq war. Dean's unorthodox organizational base, raising campaign funds almost exclusively over the Internet, was hailed by journalists and academics alike as evidence of an emerging 'post-modern social movement' based on a new 'electronic public sphere' of progressive activists. All of this was designed to lure disaffected young people back into the political fold and revive the democratic electoral mystification after the hard hit it took in the last election. Nevertheless, it is evident that the American bourgeoisie never had any real intention to make an ardent opponent of the war in Iraq like Dean the Democratic Party candidate for president. As quickly as the media built him up in November and December they took him apart in January and February. The media build-up and subsequent destruction of Howard Dean is an excellent demonstration of how bourgeois 'democracy' really works. With his utility as a presidential candidate exhausted, the media shamelessly replayed Dean's infamous 'scream,' from his speech after the Iowa caucuses to discredit him as unstable and therefore unfit to be president.
With Dean gone, the media next turned its attention to propping up Senator Kerry as an acceptable alternative, as a Democrat who could actually defeat George W. Bush in the General Election come November. 'Electability' now became the central theme, as the bourgeois media campaign to strengthen the electoral mystification now switched to rehabilitating the Democrats as a viable party of government. With the Bush administration in trouble on both the domestic and especially the foreign policy fronts, the American bourgeoisie is leaving all its options open for the moment. In case circumstances require a change at the top, it needs a Democratic candidate who not only can repair the electoral myth, but can also successfully lead the country to war in defense of its imperialist interests in the future, hopefully using a more convincing ideological justification than the kind Bush offered in Iraq. Kerry is being groomed as just that type of candidate. He is being painted as man who would be a reluctant warrior who would use military force only if absolutely necessary or for humanitarian purposes.
It is too early to say whether the bourgeoisie has decided that Bush should be replaced, but it is clear that this will be one of the longest running electoral circus in history. Usually the campaign doesn't start in earnest until after Labor Day, after the Democratic and Republican conventions during the summer, but the Bush campaign has already begun airing campaign commercials, and the conventions are still months away.
While the bourgeoisie tries its best to rehabilitate the image of its democratic facade, workers must refuse to fall for the trap. No matter which candidate comes out on top in November, the meaning for the working class will be the same: more austerity, more war, more death and more barbarism. In order to put an end to all this, the working class must search for its own identity and its own political response to capitalism's historic impasse, a response grounded firmly on its own class terrain. In order to achieve this, it must refuse to participate in the bourgeois electoral circus and recognize that the change begins, not in the voting booth, but on the shop-floor, in the necessary struggle to defend its living and working conditions from capitalism's attacks, and the class consciousness of the need to destroy the entire capitalism system that this struggle must generate.
Henk, 3/20/04.
Recently the American bourgeoisie finally gave up on one of the biggest lies it used to justify its war against Iraq. In January David A. Kay, the Bush administration's chief advisor on the search for weapons of mass destruction, publicly acknowledged that he did not believe that Iraq had possessed large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in the period prior to last year's American military invasion. So, it seems that the butcher of Baghdad was, after all, the one who was telling the truth - he no longer had so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "few months away," as the American government claimed, from producing a nuclear bomb - a key prop for the administration's case for the urgency of a pre-emptive war.
What brought on this sudden change of heart? Has the bourgeoisie suddenly become honest and willing to correct the historical record? One has to be really naive or a member of the bourgeois press corps to think so. The reality is that this lie, among the other cynical lies that the Bush administration used to justify the war against Iraq, had become over time totally untenable. Almost a year after the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime and millions of dollars and countless man-hours expended on the hunt for WMDs, this bogey-man seems to have disappeared into thin air. In Great Britain - America's main partner in its pre-emptive war on Iraq - this false explanation of the war has been totally discredited for a long time. The Blair government's schoolboy like assemblage of data on the weapons capabilities of Iraq from questionable Internet sources has been amply documented before and after the war. Thus in these circumstances Mr. Kay's admission that "sorry there were not WMD after all" is not surprising and was surely decided upon by the government in order to get rid of an uncomfortable issue, especially in the context of an election year.
However even now what the bourgeoisie is saying is only half true. For one thing, the Bush administration cannot openly admit that it misrepresented, misled, exaggerated or, to say it clearly, lied, about the WMD issue in order to rally the population and particularly the working class to support for the war effort. On the contrary, now we are being asked to believe that the representatives of the dominant class were duped, the innocent victims of "intelligence failure" of American spy agencies. This is the new myth being created, and in the end it seems that the initial little scandal around Mr. Kay's declaration is destined to die out in the comfortable backrooms of the investigation commissions that American democracy is so fond of. Thus the unmasking of the cynical lie about the dangerous threat to America posed by a mad man, quasi-armed with atomic weapons, has ended with Mr. Bush's decision to appoint a major bipartisan inquiry into the "intelligence failure" that was unable to see that Hussein was not so dangerous after all. The trick has worked so well that the issue has almost disappeared from the main bourgeois press, which reflects on the one hand, the unity of all the factions of the bourgeoisie on the war against Iraq and on the other the concern of the dominant class about the potential impact of the exposure of the fabrications that justified this military adventure.
From the point of view of the working class one thing should be clear - there should be no surprise that the bourgeoisie lies consciously and cynically when it asks for the blood and flesh of "its" workers to defend its imperialist interests. This is what revolutionaries have been saying about all the justifications that the ruling class used to draw the support of the working class for its war against Iraq. For instance a year ago, in Internationalism 125, we wrote: "The Bush administration has given over the last months many "praiseworthy" explanations for this new military adventure. It has said, attempting still to exploit the patriotic feelings awaken in the American population after the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the cities of New York and Washington, that this war is a war against terrorism. It has said that this war is a pre-emptive action to disarm Iraq of 'weapons of mass destruction' that could have been used in the future against American interest. It has said that this war has the goal of changing Iraq's regime and the overthrowing of a bloody dictator that threatened its neighbors and oppressed its own people. It has said -and this is the preferred theme lately- that this is a war aimed to liberate the Iraqi population, a war meant to bring prosperity, peace and the democratic panacea to the Iraqis and the Middle East region at large. These explanations are cynical lies."
That Iraq had become a military midget after its defeat during the first Gulf war and the sanctions that followed was a fact only hidden by the American bourgeoisie and a propaganda machine interested in justifying its military presence in the Middle East during the 90's and its open military offensive initiative in Afghanistan and the war against Iraq that followed.
In any case, the use of terrorism, the alleged possession of "weapons of mass destruction," the oppression of its "own population" were not attributes solely of Hussein's regime, but rather are the shared characteristics of all capitalist states in the world no matter how democratic or dictatorial their political regime. The US is no exception to this rule. Historically its dominant class has not hesitated either to use terrorism or "weapons of mass destruction" when it suited its political interests. Let's not forget that the US possesses a military arsenal capable of destroying the world several times over. Once again there is nothing out of the ordinary about the dishonesty of the bourgeoisie. The dominant class can't just tell the exploited class -the one that has always, in one way or another, borne the brunt of the military adventures of its exploiters - that a military action is needed in order to advance or defend the political, economic or military strategic needs of the State. In order to convince people that killing, and being killed, is a worthy cause, the dominant class has to ideologically mystify the population and in particular the working class. The imperialist world wars and the equally imperialist various local wars in which the Western and the Stalinist blocs confronted each other for decades had always been justified with one or another ideological theme. The "anti-terrorist" and democratic banner that the US is today waving to justify its world-wide war campaign is nothing but a fa?ade behind which stand the desperate efforts of a frightened imperial power determined to defend its hegemony over the world. These are the lessons that workers need to draw of the reveal dishonesty of the bourgeoisie.
Eduardo Smith, 3/20/04.
We have just received a report that Frank Girard, who edited and published - virtually single-handedly - the Discussion Bulletin for twenty years from 1983 to 2003 died last month at the age of 77. Frank had been a member of the Socialist Labor Party (the De Leonist organization in the U.S.) from the 1940s until his expulsion in the early 1980s, even running for political office on the SLP ticket. He began the Discussion Bulletin as an open forum for the exchange of political views by De Leonists, anarchists, libertarians, left communists, etc. - what he called "non-market socialists." Not only were the pages of Discussion Bulletin open to a wide range of political views, but the publication appeared like clockwork on a bimonthly basis, something of a rarity in this political milieu.
The ICC had many polemical exchanges with Frank, particularly on the political legacy of De Leonism, especially its blind spot when it came to the mystifications of bourgeois democracy. Despite its opposition to reformism, and despite the lessons of history, De Leonism, and Frank, persisted in a na?ve belief that capitalism could be overthrown at the ballot box. We also frequently criticized Frank for not publishing more exchanges on contemporary issues facing the working class, especially imperialist war. He once told us in a letter that he didn't republish any of the leaflets or articles against the various American imperialist ventures in the 1990s because all the groups had the same position, even though there were many different analyses for the causes of the war, and proposals for how the working class could oppose war. He finally seemed to take this criticism to heart at the time of the most recent US invasion of Iraq by publishing a collection of leaflets by various groups.
Whatever criticisms we made of Frank, and he of us, it was always clear that they were made as part of a fraternal debate between comrades who were committed to the destruction of capitalism and the liberation of the working class. When Frank Girard made the decision to cease publication we urged him not to. We argued that the Discussion Bulletin played an invaluable role of mutually introducing to each other the elements of a very disparate, far flung political milieu. After the publication of the last issue of Discussion Bulletin last July, we sent Frank a letter saluting his efforts on behalf of the proletariat, wishing him well in his retirement, and giving him a subscription for life to the press of the ICC. We had no idea at the time that his life would sadly end so soon. We extend our condolences and solidarity to the family and friends of Frank Girard.
Internationalism, 3/20/04.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/17/189/us-presidential-elections-2004
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/17/253/us-elections
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism