There should be no confusion about the purpose of the 9/11 Commission. The last thing that the current circus orchestrated by the ruling class is designed to do is uncover the truth about the period leading up to 9/11 and the terrorist attacks that killed over 3,000 people at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. While the hearings perhaps have undermined the credibility of the Bush administration and revealed some embarrassing details, the major thrust of the hearings will be a proposal to bolster yet again the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state, strengthen the CIA and the FBI, facilitate domestic surveillance, relax restrictions on searches and seizures at home, and unleash a new round of CIA covert activities abroad. To the extent that the hearings have been critical of President Bush, it is more because of discomfort within large sections of the ruling class about the administration's handling of the situation in Iraq, than because of errors made about the 9/11 attacks. This was made abundantly clear by the remarks, for example, by Commission member and former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, when he prefaced his questioning of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice with a critique of the administration's Iraqi policy.
Public testimony in the 9/11 Commission's investigation of the alleged "intelligence failings" offer ample confirmation of the analysis of these events developed by the ICC in fall 2001, immediately after the attacks. While the bourgeois politicians fingerpoint and try to outdo each other in proposing a revamping of the intelligence apparatus and repressive legislation to strengthen the domestic spying and police powers of the state, the real lesson of the hearings is never mentioned: the American government knew that an attack was coming and consciously permitted it to happen for political and ideological purposes, much the same way that the Roosevelt administration permitted the Japanese attack that it knew was coming at Pearl Harbor in 1941, to give it the pretext to mobilize a reluctant population for entry into World War II.
The timeline emerging from the hearings confirms with more details than were available when we first developed our analysis of why the bourgeoisie permitted the 9/11 attacks to occur. The evidence clearly demonstrates that the bourgeoisie knew that al Qaeda was preparing attacks within the U.S. that al Qaeda was planning to use hijacked airplanes as missiles, that al Qaeda was operating in the U.S., that al Qaeda's agents were training in American flight schools, and that al Qaeda was preparing a major terrorist attack within the U.S. during the summer 2001. The evidence further suggests that the administration, nevertheless, permitted the attacks to occur in order to create a political climate that would permit it to foment war psychoses in the population and simultaneously allow it to beef up the repressive apparatus of the state with minimal opposition. Here is what the timeline shows:
Summer 1996, the "American intelligence community" (in a strange distortion of the word "community", the bourgeoisie uses this phrase as an umbrella term for its foreign and domestic spying agencies) prepared to protect the Atlanta Olympics from terrorist attacks that might utilize hijacked airplanes. Former FBI director Freeh reported similar concerns about terrorists using airplanes to attack in 2000 and 2001.
January 25, 2001, President Bush and National Security Advisor Rice were briefed on al Qaeda and informed that it was operating in the U.S.
On Feb. 7, 2001, Richard Clarke, the Clinton administration anti-terrorism expert that was retained in office by Rice, further briefed Rice on al Qaeda's operations in the U.S.
Throughout spring 2001, Clarke repeatedly requested that he be permitted to address a cabinet level meeting on the al Qaeda threat, but was rebuffed by Rice.
On July 5, 2001 Rice, having declined to convene a cabinet level meeting on al Qaeda, instead asked Clarke to hold lower level meetings to help domestic agencies to prepare for possible domestic attack. This effectively sent a signal downgrading the administration's concerns about an imminent attack.
July 10, 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix recommended checking whether al Qaeda operatives were training at American flight schools (they were!).
July 20-21, 2001, Egyptian intelligence sources informed the Bush administration that terrorists were plotting to attack the G-8 Economic Summit in Genoa by crashing a hijacked airplane filled with explosives into the conference building. Italian military personnel manned anti-aircraft weapons around the site to protect the assembled imperialist leaders. For security reasons, Bush did not sleep at the conference site, but stayed aboard an American naval vessel in the harbor.
Aug. 6, 2001, the CIA presented Bush with a Presidential Daily Briefing, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." warned that bin Laden was planning to attack in the US homeland, that al Qaeda cells had been surveilling federal buildings in New York City, that the FBI reported activity consistent with preparations for airplane hijackings by al Qaeda operatives. Implausibly, the Bush administration rationalizes its blas? attitude towards this CIA warning by arguing a) that it was primarily an "historical report" and b) that there really wasn't a threat since time, date, and place were not specifically mentioned.
Sept. 4, 2001, Clarke sent a memo to Rice urging immediate action to block a possible attack, warning of the possibility that hundreds of people could be killed.
The real reason for permitting the terrorist attacks to unfold can be inferred from Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the commission. For example, Rice complained that, "...for all the language of war spoken before 9/11, this country simply was not on war footing." How does one accomplish getting a nation on "war footing"? Following the example of the Roosevelt administration in 1941, Rice explained it quite clearly when she said, "Bold and comprehensive changes are sometimes only possible in the wake of catastrophic events - events which create a new consensus that allows us to transcend old ways of thinking and acting." References to the importance of "catastrophic events" as a means of transcending "old ways of thinking and acting" were repeated several times in Rice's testimony. For example, in answer to one question, she said, "And I think that the unfortunate - and I really do think it's extremely tragic - fact is that sometimes until there is a catastrophic event that forces people to think differently, that forces people to overcome old customs and old culture and old fears about domestic intelligence and the relationship, that you don't get that kind of change."
Still later, she worried that the American people might "forget" the political lessons of these catastrophic events. "I would not consider the problem solved," Rice told the commission. "My greatest concern is that, as September 11 recedes from memory, we will begin to unlearn the lessons we've learned." This of course opens up the possibility of allowing future attacks to keep alive patriotic fervor, and may be linked to the predictions that al Qaeda may strike again before the presidential election in November.
This notion that a catastrophic event could be used to manipulate mass consciousness had been bandied about by leading Republicans even before winning the 2000 election. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had been involved with the Project for a New American Century, a right-wing think-tank that argued as early as 2000 that the United States needed "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" to justify a military invasion of Iraq.
So, what the 9/11 Commission will never tell us, is that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were allowed to occur, not because the Bush administration is incompetent or that President Bush was asleep at the wheel, or that American intelligence agencies are poorly organized, but that it was consciously allowed to happen in order to use a "catastrophic event" to manipulate the American people - in the same cynical way that the Roosevelt administration permitted Pearl Harbor to happen in December 1941. The Bush administration may not have foreseen the magnitude of the attack, or the number of lives that would be lost - it is probable that even al Qaeda was surprised that the Twin Towers collapsed into dust - but they purposely allowed it to happen so that they could finally overcome the legacy of the so-called "Vietnam syndrome," and mobilize the population behind the state for imperialist war. That the Bush administration has apparently squandered the ideological capital it gained in September, 2001 with its botched occupation of Iraq is what is creating serious political problems for Bush's bid for reelection.
Jerry Grevin.
Over the past year Internationalism has been involved in a correspondence with the Toronto based group Red and Black Notes that publishes a journal of the same name. We have already published previous installments of this correspondence. The following letter is a reply to the Red and Black letter published in our last issue [3] (#129).
Dear Comrade,
We write in order to continue the dialogue we have been engaged in over the past year regarding the nature of imperialism and war in the current period. We apologize for the slight delay in responding to you.
First, we wish to salute the spirit of open and fraternal debate that your last letter to us-a reply to our previous commentary on the leaflets you distributed at the anti- war rallies in the winter of 2003-demonstrates. It is only this open process of exchange and confrontation between ideas and positions that can advance revolutionary theory and then provide the most effective basis for revolutionary intervention in the proletariat's struggle to destroy capitalist society and build a new human community. We are certainly encouraged that the debate between us has sustained itself for a year in a fraternal and open way. We look forward to exchanging correspondence with you again soon. However, what we would like to do in this letter is to expand the debate beyond the specific intervention in the anti-war rallies to a more general discussion of the nature of imperialism and war today, and in doing so, draw your attention to what we see as some continuing methodological weaknesses in your analysis of these questions.
However, we will begin by stressing some of the main points of agreement between our analysis and the approach you have taken towards these questions. First, we certainly concur with your insistence that capitalism is a global system and that there are no longer any such things as "non-capitalist" or "non-imperialist" nations. In this era of decadent capitalism, all states are equally capitalist and imperialist even if some are stronger than others or more openly acknowledge their own imperialist character-albeit in a distorted way-as is the case today with certain factions of the American bourgeoisie. In such a situation-as you correctly point out-there can be no question of "defeating imperialism" by allying the workers movement with "oppressed nations." Defeating capitalism requires a global revolution by the entire working class against all states. The task of revolutionaries is to intervene towards the working class to defend this perspective, something your leaflets reflected admirably despite the fact-as you put it-that the revolutionary perspective may be a "small voice in a dark time" in today's political climate. Moreover, your reply to the Trotskyist group's criticism of the internationalist position on war was dead-on in pointing out the obvious inanity of their politics, a politics that offers "military" but not "political" support to lesser imperialist powers in the hope of "breaking the weakest link in the chain." You correctly point out the bourgeois class nature of such a position that would logically lead them to-as you phrase it-"advocate the shooting of deserters (.) as scabbing on the defense of an oppressed nation." Your analysis of war and imperialism, as portrayed in your leaflets and in your last letter, is one we would find ourselves in general agreement with, an agreement you acknowledge yourself.
Nevertheless, despite this general agreement, we feel your reply to our criticisms of your initial leaflets did not fully grapple with the fundamental methodological question posed by the transition of the capitalist system from its period of historical ascendancy-in which it served the purpose of developing humanity's productive forces-to its period of decadence, in which capitalist relations of production come to serve as a brake on the development of the productive forces and, in which, capitalism has become a fully regressive mode of production. For us, this historic transition, which we see occurring in the early 20th century, fundamentally changed many things in the functioning of the capitalist system. While we cannot go into all of the features of this historic transition here, a subject covered in depth in our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism, we will try to sketch out-in a somewhat schematic way perhaps-the connection between the theory of decadence and our analysis of imperialism and war today.
For us, as decadence-marked by a permanent global crisis of overproduction-has advanced, imperialism and war have more and more tended to lose any direct economic function for capitalist states. While there may indeed be some instances of residual economic benefit for this or that company or state as the result of a particular imperialist confrontation, for us this is not the primary motive behind the capitalist system's current march to war. In decadence, strategic and tactical considerations tend to dominate the imperialist rivalries between states, as they all compete-albeit in a very general sense-to strengthen their positions on the global market by making inroads into the spheres of influence of other states. In a world where the entire globe is dominated by capitalist states, there is no place left to colonize and exploit that isn't already a rival state or in another state's sphere of influence. In a context such as this, war and imperialism tend to loose the vulgar economic motives that characterized some phases of capitalism's ascendancy, such as access to markets or raw materials. In decadence, capitalist states are driven towards imperialism and war by the competitive logic of the global market itself and as such they often engage in military actions that are on the immediate level very unprofitable, and in many cases even a drain on the national capital. In this sense, the period of capitalist decadence is marked by the increasing "irrationality of war," wherein war becomes an end in itself, i.e. gaining strategic position against one's rivals, rather than a means to some immediate economic end. In this sense, the present day capitalist system has taken on the all the trappings of a mafia war in which violence takes on a life of its own outside of a direct connection to substantive ends.
Nevertheless, we think the most important oversight of your response to our previous criticisms is to see the differences in our analysis of the war as a matter of "differing emphasis." While it is true that we can have differing interpretations about the weight of immediate economic factors in a given imperialist conflict, we must be clear that there is a profound difference of method in analyzing war and imperialism from the perspective of profit and immediate interests as opposed to taking a global and historical view of the evolution and development of imperialist tensions over the longue dure? of capitalist development. For us, the theory of decadence is the method that provides this perspective and which best explains the situation facing global capitalism and all its constituent states today. And which can best guide our own analysis of imperialist tensions and the class struggle.
We believe this perspective better explains the imperialist situation surrounding the current war in Iraq than does the attempt to search for the immediate economic interests of the American national capital. Ever since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc at the end of the 1990's, the main powers of the former Western Bloc: Great Britain, France, Germany etc. have been slowly but certainly trying to free themselves from the dominance of their old bloc master: The United States. As such, over the past decade and a half-sensing its weakening grip over its erstwhile allies-the United States has increasingly been obliged to engage in direct displays of military power, as a way of reminding its rivals of its superiority in this area: the Gulf War of 1991, Somalia 1993, the ex-Yugoslavia and Kosovo under Clinton, Afghanistan after 9/11, and now Iraq once again under the 2nd Bush administration. Nevertheless, these interventions have in general had little benefit for the US economy. In fact, as we now know about the war in Iraq they have tended to be an economic burden, with the American state forced to spend a spiraling amount of money on each intervention it makes, a sum that is increasing daily with the continued violence in Iraq. While some administration bigwigs and assorted other cronies may be getting rich from this war from contracts etc., the American economy itself is suffering tremendously. We think the idea of a post-war economic revival based on some sort of "oil boom" has been, at this point, largely discredited. Domestically, it is the working class that bears the brunt of the domestic cutbacks that result from the increasingly precarious nature of the global capitalist economy and of the American national capital in particular, as well as the drive to war that only exacerbates the crisis. So, from the perspective of the theory of decadence, the current war in Iraq is less an attempt to jump start a struggling economy and more a desperate geo-political move to shore up a shrinking imperialist power base, a move that has, in fact, done great harm to the national capital and raised the stakes of austerity for the working class even further.
In conclusion, we hope that you accept our intervention in the same spirit of openness that has characterized our correspondence thus far, and we look forward to any additional reply you may send. We would also like to respond to the part of your letter dealing with the tactics of the class struggle and we will be in touch with further correspondence on this question soon. In the meantime we look forward to your letters and emails.
Revolutionary Regards,
Internationalism
Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, honored by the Cannes Film Festival, more for its politics than its artistry, has been playing to packed theatres across the country this summer. Within the US the controversy surrounding this film reflects the seriousness of the divisions within the American bourgeoisie about the conduct of the war in Iraq. Walt Disney Co., the film's producer, originally decided not to permit the film to go into theatrical release for fear of offending the Bush administration because of its sharp political attack on the administration. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, a prominent liberal democrat, who served as legal counsel representing Moore in his efforts to get the film into release, said he was fighting for this film to be in theatres nationwide because he believes it is a film that every American should see, that it's message is vital to American democracy. The New York Post, the conservative tabloid, controlled by Murdoch's News Corp, denounced the film as crass propaganda.
It certainly is propaganda, as is the news regularly published and broadcast each day in the mass media, whether it's the NY Post or the prestigious New York Times. In the run up to the Iraq invasion, all these publications and broadcast networks were overwhelmingly pro-war in their coverage of administration policy. Today of course there are serious disagreements within the American ruling class, not about the necessity to invade Iraq, but primarily about effectiveness of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq, and whether the administration has made a mess of the invasion and therefore made things more difficult for American imperialism in its efforts to dominate the world and mobilize the American population for future military actions in the period ahead. It's a serious disagreement, but it is a tactical dispute on the implementation of an agreed upon overall imperialist policy orientation: to do what is necessary to maintain America's status as the world's only superpower and prevent the rise of any potential rival or rival bloc.
In the current uproar about Fahrenheit 9/11 what mass media commentators say depends upon what faction of the bourgeoisie the commentator and his/her media organization adheres to: whether they support the Bush administration's policies, or whether they think the administration has made a mess that needs to be fixed. However, one thing is clear. Fahrenheit 9/11 is neither anti-war, nor anti-imperialist. It is simply anti-Bush. Moore does an excellent job in bashing Bush. The film features a collection of powerful images about the horror of the war, and about the oafish ineptness of Bush and his administration, which relies heavily on embarrassing outtakes not originally meant for public viewing. For example, Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of American imperialism's strategy in Iraq, is reduced to being a clown in a scene in which he uses his own spit to groom his hair before appearing in a TV interview - even running his comb through his mouth. Moore takes advantage of Bush's acknowledged shortcomings as a public speaker to portray him as stupid and mean. In one scene, Bush can't remember the old aphorism about "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me..." and comes off looking ridiculous. On a more serious political level, another scene depicts Bush speaking before a fundraising audience of wealthy supporters and saying something like, "You are the haves and the have mores. Some call you the elite. I call you my base." Pretty damning stuff.
The movie includes compelling images, such as the interview with a formerly pro-war mother from Flint, Michigan, who now opposes the war after the death of her son, or the scene in which Moore asks members of Congress to volunteer to send their children to combat in Iraq and gets only glares of incredulity in response.
And while the movie blasts Bush's propaganda campaign to justify the war - which has already been amply discredited in the mass media - it is definitely not anti-war. Moore for example clearly supports American imperialism's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and in fact criticizes Bush for not being warlike enough in regard to Afghanistan. He ridicules the Bush administration for having had diplomatic ties to the Taliban regime before the invasion, and even having a Taliban representative tour Bush's home state of Texas. Moore attacks Bush for not invading Afghanistan quicker. He complains that the president waited two months to attack - giving bin Laden "a two-month headstart." Moore also criticizes the president for having so few troops in Afghanistan.
The debacle in Iraq is blamed on the personal failings and greed of George W. Bush. Moore offers up a rather crude vulgar economist argument that the Bush family's business relations with the Saudi royal family is guiding American foreign policy in the current administration. Moore stresses that the majority of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, as is bin Laden. While he stops just short of calling for war against the Saudi royal family, he practically denounces Bush for treason for spending the evening visiting with the Saudi ambassador to the US on the evening of September 13, 2001, and protecting Saudi interests in the US. He really plays an extremely nationalist tune in regard to the Saudis, bemoaning how much they have invested in the U.S.
This "analysis," which Moore has claimed is "very sound" in television interviews about the film is typical capitalist propaganda of blaming individuals and their policies for social evils rather than the capitalist system itself. Moore totally obscures the reality that it is American capitalism and its imperialist interests that are responsible for the war in Iraq. The real argument within the American ruling class today is not whether the US should have invaded Iraq, but about the most appropriate way to have prepared the invasion - what ideological justifications should have been used (weapons of mass destruction & links to al Qaeda vs. human rights violations), how hard the US should have worked to pressure for international endorsement of the invasion, and what military tactics and doctrines should have been used in the invasion and occupation (Rumsfeld's doctrine of lean, bare bones military force using smart weapons vs. the doctrine of "overwhelming force," used so successfully in the first Iraq war in 1991.
From a revolutionary proletarian perspective, the most dangerous aspect of Fahrenheit 9/11 is not only that it obscures the class nature of American imperialist policy, but that it is being used by capitalism to revive the electoral mystification, which took such a bad hit in the disaster of the disputed 2000 election. In the final analysis this film aims to get people out to the polls to vote against Bush, to restore confidence in the electoral system, that had been so badly shaken four years ago. The film hides the fact that imperialist war is the policy of all major factions of the bourgeoisie - after all it was the Democrat Clinton who had continued bombing raids against Iraq throughout the 1990s, and sent troops into Haiti, and Kosovo. It doesn't matter who wins the election in November, American imperialism will still wage war relentlessly around the globe. The only way to end war is to destroy capitalism. You can go see Fahrenheit 9/11 if you want to laugh at Bush and see some skillful bourgeois political propaganda, but don't for a minute think you're seeing some kind of anti-imperialist, anti-war, cinematic political statement with a cogent analysis of current events. This film is Democratic party campaign propaganda and an apology for capitalism, an attempt to bring alienated and discontented citizens back into the established capitalist political framework.
Internationalism, July 29, 2004
One year after the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the American occupation of the country is in deep trouble. The burst of intense violence in April in Central and Southern Iraq has sent any semblance of political stability and military gains achieved during the last year down the drain. The death toll among the American soldiers is mounting. In fact, more soldiers have died in the last weeks than during the official war period that led to Saddam's removal from power. The brand new American trained Iraqi security forces have routinely "dropped out of sight" during these last weeks of fighting, or, worse, joined the anti-American forces. The circle of violence against the Americans has grown from Sunni Muslims identified with the old regime and foreign terrorist groups to include a faction of Shiite Muslims -the majority religious group in Iraq that was often the worst victim of Saddam's repression- led by cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr. In fact, the US and its supporters are increasingly isolated. Today, anybody identified as being on the American side has become a target of the rising anti-American violence. Iraqis working for the US at any level, do so at the risk of losing theirs lives at any moment, while foreigners working for the so called "reconstruction" effort are facing a wave of kidnappings and killings. A year after the "conquest" of the country the American media can't show anymore flower-bearing children thanking the occupation army for their "freedom". On the contrary, the youth of Baghdad are more likely today to be on the side of the hysteric mob, celebrating the last killing of one more American soldier. In sum, it seems that the so-called "liberated" population of Iraq has turned against its "liberators".
As we write, this last flare up of the war in Iraq seems far from abating, as fighting continues in many parts of the country. In the first weekend of May, 13 soldiers died, while the Bush administration was celebrating the first anniversary of the end of major combat operations in the country. In Falluja, a Sunni city of 300,000, after weeks of virtual urban warfare, and an almost month old siege, hundreds of Iraqi civilians and combatants have been killed and many more have been injured. Many houses have been blown to pieces by the firepower of heavy weapons used by the US military to quell the resistance. Only at the last minute did the US call off an all-out assault to take control of the city. With both sides claiming victory, one thing is undeniable: the American imperialist enterprise in Iraq has become so muddled that the US is willing to grasp at any straw for salvation. In a somewhat bizarre move to avoid an escalation of violence that could have had tremendous consequences throughout Iraq and the entire region, the Americans are trying to make new allies of old enemies. The task of restoring order in Falluja has been handed to a new "Iraqi force" composed of former soldiers of the Hussein army, led by an ex-general of the infamous Republican Guard, one of the special military units closest to Saddam Hussein. In the context of this odd alliance, nothing can be more ludicrous than the comments of the US commander in charge of operations in Falluja celebrating the "formation of a military partnership", with "the most respected institution in Iraq", the army. This is to say the former backbone of Hussein's dictatorship, from whose oppression the US claimed to come to liberate the Iraqi people!
With the standoff in Falluja "resolved" the US army is now moving to crash the anti-American Shiite uprising led by the cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr. Heavy fighting has erupted in Baghdad and in the southern cities of Najaf, Kufa, Karbala and Basra. After a period of hesitation during which the US retreated from is declarations that Sadr must be arrested or killed, today the US seems to be posed to launch a military offensive to take back control of the cities of Najaf and Kufa from Sadr's followers. An all-out assault against the holy city of Najaf can only be a factor of further destabilization, not only in Iraq, but also throughout the whole region. While a last minute, face-saving, political compromise that avoids the all-out military solution can't be discounted; this alternative will not improve the US position in Iraq.
No matter how the Bush administration tries to spin its difficulties in Iraq it is obvious that the occupation has reached a crisis point. It takes a lot of naivet? or cynicism to declare, as General Meyers did, that the deadly violence of the last month is "a symptom of the success that we are having there." The reality is that the whole enterprise aimed at making Iraq a bastion of American dominance of the Middle East, and thus a center for the defense of its imperialist hegemony of the world, is in deep crisis. After astronomic amounts of money spent in the war effort, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, the whole imperialist policy of the Bush administration is beginning to look like a total failure.
At the tactical level, the US is being pushed to constantly change its policies in at attempt to handle a situation that is very much out of control. Plans decided months or weeks ago are being constantly scrapped in mid-course, while new improvised ones are coming to the table. Among these new policies are; first, the rehabilitation of the UN, which after being frozen out of Iraq during the months that preceded the war, is now being put in charge of pulling together a transitional government. Today, certain elements with the American bourgeoisie openly talk of bringing in the UN or NATO troops as a way of lessening American imperialism's military and political exposure in the region-a clear backsliding from the open "go it alone" stance that has animated US policy since 9/11 Second, an easing of the ban on former Baath party members in the new government in the making has been touted, which goes hand in hand, with the decision to allow former Iraqi soldiers to try to quell the uprising in Falluja. Meanwhile, the embarrassments for the US continue mounting. In February, we saw the total discredit of the weapons of mass destruction excuse for attacking Iraq. It turned out that by the account of the American person in charge of finding these weapons, there were none after all. Now there is a growing scandal around the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by US army personnel. The bourgeois representatives are trying to spin this latest show of brutality as an aberration, contrary to American democracy, principles, etc. The reality is that torture and abuse of rivals is not the prerogative of dictatorial military regimes. Bourgeois democracy has a long, bloody history of all kinds of sadistic cruelties against its enemies, and in particular, against the working class, when it has dared to challenge its domination over society.
At the strategic level, the US is today politically weaker than when it decided to go after Iraq on its own. The credibility won by its show of military and political determination in going to war defying the open opposition of other imperialist powers -France, Germany, Russia- has been lost by its inability to consolidate its initial victory in the war field. Humbled by the difficulties in Iraq, there is no more talk of Bush's grand strategy of pre-emptive action and unilateralism of which, the war against Iraq was supposed to be a test case. What is left is an imperialist power bogged down in a costly local conflict, for which it has no apparent imminent solution. This weakening of American imperialist credibility will only encourage major and minor imperialist powers to advance their own cards at the expense of their US rival. This is already the case with Iran -with the protection of Germany and France. In fact, faced with the inability to control the Shiites, the Americans have been forced to ask Iran to intervene towards its proxies in the Shiite region, the same country which Bush denounced as part of the "axis of evil" and which seemed to have been slated as the next target for American intervention only one year ago. In addition, we must consider North Korea's ongoing efforts to become nuclear armed, as well as Israel's recent actions, which take advantage of the growing American political isolation to make the Bush administration support the latest attempts of Sharon to settle the Palestinian question in Israel's favor, even though those policies are in total contradiction to what has been the US's stated policy in the region for decades. Even countries that decided that it was best for its national interests to show allegiance to the US by sending troops to Iraq, are now trying to get off the shipwreck. Spain has been the first one, with others soon to come.
The quagmire in Iraq is also bound to have a profound impact in the dominant class itself. There is a growing dissatisfaction with the Bush administration's handling of the US imperialist policy. The Democratic candidate's latest criticism of Bush is centered on the US's change of tactics in Iraq -it seems that Kerry thinks that the Bush administration has stolen his ideas. If this is all that Kerry has to offer, the US bourgeoisie would certainly not need a new president. Nevertheless, a certain faction within the American ruling class is becoming increasingly frustrated with the Bush administration's handling of the war effort as well as its general implementation of imperialist policy. We have thus seen an electoral circus off to an early start. Months before the election, quite unusual for American presidential elections, a vicious exchange of attacks from both sides has graced television sets and radio speakers. This internal discord in the American bourgeoisie quite probably reflects the growing confusion within the American bourgeoisie over the tactical implementation of its imperialist policy. The Bush administration's cavalier unilateralism having fallen flat on its face, there are clearly factions of the American bourgeoisie that would prefer to make a change. Yet, the inability of Kerry to articulate any real alternative is also proving troubling to many. Thus, the possibility exists that the current political scandals represent a real fight within the American ruling class rather than a mere attempt to manipulate the democratic circus, a real reflection of the growing crisis of American imperialist hegemony and its political leadership. While the upcoming election will be just as irrelevant for the working class as any other, the bourgeoisie-due to its internal divisions-may have difficulty orchestrating a particular result
At the working class level, the question of war has always been of primordial importance. First of all, the workers are the ones that in the last instance, bear the brunt of the imperialist adventures of the dominant class. It is the working class that pays for the bourgeoisie's war through its increased exploitation and with the life of its sons and daughters. It is only the working class that can stop, with its struggle, this maddening dynamic of capitalism barbarism, a dynamic that is spinning out of control today.
ES/Henk, 05/11/04.
The situation in Iraq this spring has become a total disaster for US imperialism. The highlights of this mess include:
It is important to be clear that this is a crisis, not of the Bush administration, but of American imperialism as a whole. The strategy to block the rise of any potential rivals, and even the use of unilateral military action to support the implementation of that strategic goal is an orientation shared by all major factions of the American ruling class. Despite recent criticisms of Bush's unilateralism from certain factions within the bourgeoisie, the fact is that US imperialism has always acted unilaterally on the international arena since the end of World War II. However, during the Cold War when the US acted unilaterally, making major imperialist policy decisions that effected the entire western bloc, whether it was war in Korea, or in Vietnam or the deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe without prior consultation with its "allies," it could count on the discipline of the bloc to force its partners to go along with its decisions. In the post-Cold War period, the disappearance of the imperialist confrontation with a rival bloc, which was the basis of that international discipline, has made it more difficult for the US to get other imperialisms to sacrifice their own interests and submit to American diktat. The first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 was designed precisely to get the European powers to support American imperialism, even against their own interests, and remind them that the US was still the dominant power. The ideology of human rights was used repeatedly by the Clinton administration during the 1990s to justify its military actions in the Balkans and Iraq. The current criticism of Bush's unilateralism is premised on the contention that his administration has used the wrong tactics and abandoned prematurely efforts to get the European powers to endorse the US invasion.
The invasion of Iraq in fact had the unified support of all major factions of the American ruling class and was conceived as the latest installment in the implementation of American imperialism's abovementioned general strategy for the post-cold war era. This strategy, adopted by the US in the early 1990s, has been continued and developed by both Republican and Democratic administrations for the last decade and a half. In this context, the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with Iraq per se, but was aimed at the European powers - Germany and France in particular - to put pressure on the European powers through strategic control of Middle Eastern oil supplies, and to block European diplomatic and economic inroads in the region, especially by French, German and Russian imperialisms. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was supposed to complement America's military occupation of Afghanistan in establishing a direct US military presence in a strategically vital part of the globe. American saber-rattling during the Iraq invasion demonstrated that next on the US military target list were Iran and Syria, which taken together with growing American influence in Pakistan and the Central Asian republics that were formerly part of the USSR would allow the US to begin a literal encirclement of Europe. The reason that France and Germany were the most vocal opponents of the US invasion was not because they were champions of peace, but because they understood the real intent of US policy.
There were however differences within the ruling class about the ideological justifications for, and timing of, the invasion. For example, even former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, the most outspoken critic of the Bush administration at the onset of the Iraq invasion, was actually in favor of invading Iraq, but argued that it would have been more effective to use "human rights" and not false claims about Iraqi links to 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction. Albright and other administration critics also disagreed with the precipitous rush to act unilaterally in Iraq and favored more patient - and more convincing - efforts to pressure and manipulate the European powers into endorsing the invasion. From this perspective, the European powers would have found it much more difficult to justify their refusal to support a military intervention based on ousting a tyrannical regime and restoring human rights in Iraq. The Bush administration is in deep political trouble today because it seriously botched both the ideological campaign to justify the war and the occupation of Iraq.
Botching the ideological campaign means that the political capital that accrued from the 9/11 attacks has been largely squandered at home and it will be much more difficult to convince the American population, especially the working class, to rally behind the next military adventure of American imperialism. This is a serious problem because in the inter-imperialist arena the period of capitalist decomposition is characterized by each country, even third rate regional powers, increasingly playing its own card, growing chaos in international relations, and hence even more challenges to American hegemony. This in turn will most assuredly mean that US imperialism will be compelled to launch new military campaigns in the future, but its own population will be distrustful of its war-justifying propaganda and less likely to accept the sacrifices and loss of life that war requires. It will also be more difficult to get the populations of other countries to acquiesce in American imperialist adventures.
Botching the occupation of Iraq has demonstrated that while it might be the sole superpower in the world today, the US military is spread too thin and has military weaknesses which make it vulnerable in the international arena. For example, the inability to accomplish publicly announced goals, like arresting or killing Sadr, or occupying Falluja, demonstrates concretely American imperialism's weakness and will embolden other countries to play their own cards in the period ahead.
In this sense, rather than improving its imperialist position on the international level, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has aggravated the US position. Instead of bringing stability to Iraq, the country is totally destabilized. Instead of bringing stability to the Middle East, the entire region is embroiled in turmoil. Instead of buttressing American authority, it has become undermined. The US cannot even control or influence the policies of its only reliable client/ally in the region - Israel, and has been forced to endorse a complete reversal of policy regarding the settlements on the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian state, that Ariel Sharon can't even successfully sell to his own political party in Israel. Instead of checking the tendency towards chaos on the international level as it was intended to do, the war has increased chaos, and made the world more dangerous, as the current situation in Saudi Arabia amply illustrates. Impact of the Imperialist Crisis on US Politics
While President Bush and his closest advisers stand alone in insisting that things are going well in Iraq and that all that needs to be done is to "stay the course," almost everybody in the bourgeoisie recognizes that the occupation is a mess. Even Paul Wolfowitz, the "neo-conservative" perhaps most identified with the failed invasion and occupation, has recently been compelled to acknowledge a series of miscalculations and underestimations by the Pentagon. The Bush administration's blunders in the past year have raised genuine concerns about the future direction of American policy within a ruling class that is still otherwise united on the basic strategic goal of maintaining the American superpower monopoly. In May, Walter Cronkite, the dean of American broadcast journalism, who stepped down as the anchorman of CBS nightly news two decades ago but still appears in documentaries and talk shows wrote a widely circulated op-ed piece criticizing Bush's errors.
It was Cronkite, who in 1968, after the onset of the Tet offensive, returned from a visit to Vietnam and announced in on-air editorial that he called for an end to the Vietnam War - an act that signaled the beginning of a split within the bourgeoisie and a qualitative change in American media coverage of that war. In a thinly veiled attempt to reprise his earlier role, Cronkite's recent essay criticized Bush's squandering of the post-9/11 goodwill, unilateralism, and sidestepping of the Geneva Convention. "It seems to me," he wrote, "that, in the appalling abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and the international outrage it has caused, we are reaping what we have so carelessly sown. In this and so many other ways, our unilateralism and the arrogance that accompanies it have cost us dearly." Cronkite advocates a return to a foreign policy that "embraces international cooperation," but at the same time demonstrates the unity of the bourgeoisie on the Iraq invasion. He insists, "It still is immediately important for this nation that its invasion of Iraq should result in a free and functioning Iraqi democracy?We need to restore America's image as a preserver and defender of the peace and prove to the world that the change is more than cosmetic. But one has to ask, as others have, whether we can convince the world of our sincerity without regime change at home." (AM-New York, May 21, 2004).
This was followed by a blistering denunciation by Al Gore at a speech in New York, in which he called for the resignations of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet. A week later, Tenet and his second in command, announced their resignations. In June, in a similar vein, 20 former ambassadors, state department officials, and military leaders, including the former commander of US operations in the Middle East, prepared a statement labeling Bush's execution of foreign policy as detrimental to American interests and calling for his replacement in the November elections. In essence these critics focus their venom not on strategic goals but on the implementation of those goals. It is the execution of the policy orientation, not the fundamental, underlying policy that it is at issue. The sometimes vociferous calls for a switch to a cut-and-run policy in Iraq are confined to a small segment on the left of the bourgeoisie and is not embraced by any serious factions of the ruling class. This explains why John Kerry's policy for Iraq calls for more military forces to be sent to that country, to better "pacify" the insurgents and assure the successful installation of a loyal puppet regime in Baghdad, and not an end to the war, or even a phased-in military withdrawal.
The underlying strategic unity, however, doesn't diminish the current disarray within the bourgeoisie on imperialist policy implementation, and on how to fix the current mess. Disagreements exist even within the Republican party and the Bush administration itself. For example, the right wing of the Republican party, as reflected in articles in the National Review, has expressed its disenchantment with the "neo-conservatives" and the concept of "nation building." The disputes between Secretary of State Powell and Rumsfeld, Cheney and the "neo-conservatives" at the Pentagon over the rush to unilateralist action have been well publicized in the American media. On the military level, Powell and senior career officers in the Pentagon subscribed to the "doctrine of overwhelming force" that had been so successful for the US in the first Gulf War in 1991 and were sharply critical of Rumsfeld's insistence on a smaller, leaner, fast-strike military operation and occupation in Iraq. A leading general who argued that an occupation force of 300,000 troops would be required in Iraq, instead of Rumsfeld's 115,000 troops, was forced to retire at the outset of the war. One can only imagine the level of "I told you so" ranting in leading military circles today.
The seriousness of the crisis faced by American imperialism and the political disarray it has caused within the bourgeoisie explains the extraordinarily early beginning of the presidential election circus this year. Normally, the primary elections continue through early June and the party conventions are held in July and August. The formal campaign doesn't traditionally begin until Labor Day in September. But this year, as early as March, both sides began running political campaign ads slamming the other side on television in the major "undecided" states. It is certainly true that in part this early campaign start has been motivated by a political need to revive the democratic mystification, which had suffered a severe blow in the debacle of 2000, in which Bush lost the popular vote by a quarter million but won in the electoral college. But clearly it is also true there is a widespread sentiment within the bourgeoisie that the implementation of American imperialist policy requires a much needed repair job.
Currently the Bush administration is in deep political trouble. The numerous political scandals in the news are the product of divisions within the bourgeoisie, designed to put pressure on the administration. One conservative commentator complained that the New York Times had devoted a front page on 43 of 47 days since the Abu Ghraib scandal surfaced. But the result of the elections is not sealed. No political consensus has emerged yet on the best political division of labor for the bourgeois parties. It is still possible that Bush could manage to remain in the White House. For example, a house cleaning at the Pentagon, with the departure of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and their replacement with a new team that would set things right could salvage the situation for Bush. Implications for the Working Class
For the working class the implications of the current situation are potentially very serious. The working class was never mobilized behind this war in the first place, and clearly there is a growing dissatisfaction with the war today. A year ago Bush had a 90% popularity rating and today it is 43%. However we cannot afford to exaggerate the political significance this development. The current opposition to the war in the working class is not simply a reflection of the fact that the working class, in the US and throughout the world, is not politically or ideologically defeated on the historic level, that the historic course remains one oriented towards class confrontation not global imperialist war. While this is partly the case, discontent with the war also reflects the serious divergences and disarray within the bourgeoisie. The situation is similar to what happened in Europe when war broke out in Iraq. The massive anti-war demonstrations that shook Europe at the time in part reflected the fact that important factions of the bourgeoisie, and even the state in France and Germany, were openly opposed to the invasion. This governmental opposition to the war helped foment and legitimize those protests. In the same vein, the relentless attacks on the Bush administration from within the bourgeoisie feed the current anti-war sentiment, and create a situation in which that discontent can be controlled and manipulated by the ruling class.
There is also a serious danger that the democratic myth can be reinforced through the elections and the present anti-Bush campaign. The anti-war sentiment can easily be channeled not into an understanding of the bankruptcy of capitalism and the need to destroy it, but into a mobilization to vote the scoundrel in the White House out of office. In this sense, revolutionaries must insist that a Kerry administration will not be an anti-war administration. Kerry will only offer a different ideological campaign to justify war (human rights) and will work more patiently perhaps to draw the various European powers into future American military actions as reluctant allies. No matter who wins the election in November there will be more war, not less - more war in Iraq, more war in Palestine, and throughout the world. No matter who wins the election, the crisis of American imperialism will only deepen, chaos will grow in the international arena, and the world will move closer and closer to a future of barbarism, which is the only thing that capitalism holds in store for humanity. The only antidote to this devastating future for the human race is the class struggle and proletarian revolution. This is what revolutionaries must patiently explain to the rest of the working class in this difficult time.
Internationalism, June 15, 2004.
The clamor over gay marriage has become a virtual obsession of the bourgeois media in the United States over the past several months. Television talk shows have been replete with impassioned debate between liberal reformers and conservative Christians arguing the pros and cons of granting same-sex couples the right to a legally sanctioned marriage. From the Marxist perspective, while the often bigoted and hate-inspired arguments of the conservative foes of gay marriage-which claim that homosexuality is a perverse lifestyle whose legal recognition will further erode the moral fiber of the nation-are easy to reject, the often inspired and passionate arguments of liberal reformers for granting the right to same sex marriage are not so simple to evaluate
Many radicals, and even some self-described Marxists, have been at the forefront of the movement advocating for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Sometimes, their arguments have been couched in a certain class language. For instance, some argue that by obtaining the right to legal marriage, same-sex couples could improve their standard of living and overall piece of mind as it would be easier to share a partner's health insurance benefits, obtain hospital visitation privileges, ensure child custody rights, and obtain legal title to common property in the event of death or injury. Ultimately, they argue, same-sex couples could obtain the right to a certain legally determined portioning out of property in the event that the relationship comes to an end (legal divorce). By granting same-sex couples the right to marry, so the argument goes, they can achieve these very important legal rights and economic benefits presently available only to heterosexual couples, and thus gays will take a tremendous step towards full equality, a better life and the human dignity that capitalist-patriarchy and heterosexism deny them.
So what should Marxists, those concerned with the total emancipation of the human species through proletarian revolution, make of these arguments? Well for one, we must respond on the terrain set out by Marx and Engels and recognize that if the social and economic circumstances in capitalist society are such that married couple enjoy certain legal benefits that non-married ones do not, this does not mean that the "right to marry" is, or can be, an appropriate proletarian class demand. On the contrary, as Engels pointed out in On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the family-predicated, as we know it on a legally sanctioned marriage-is inherently an institution of class society based on economic scarcity and the existence of antagonistic social classes. In its capitalist form, the "nuclear family"-and all the Christian moralizing that has accompanied it throughout history-provides a whole plethora of benefits for the bourgeoisie. From providing a mechanism for the class inheritance of the means of production to ensuring the steady supply of labor power, the "legal family"-in the sense of the institution recognized by bourgeois law-has always been intimately tied up with the exploitation of the proletariat and thus human suffering. In this sense then, as Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto, the communist society of the future will be a society beyond the family in which human relationships will be regulated by mutual love and respect and not the state sanction of law.
While Marx and Engels never dealt directly with the issue of homosexuality, Marx nevertheless provides us with the method to approach such questions as gay marriage today. In the early 1840s, as the debate over the political emancipation of German Jewry was heating up, Marx intervened with one of his earliest, yet most profound political criticisms of bourgeois society. In On the Jewish Question (1844), Marx rails against the faulty method of the Young Hegelian philosophers who addressed Jewish emancipation strictly in political terms, as the right to full protection of the law and unfettered participation in civil society. For Marx, while political emancipation was an important first step toward ultimate human emancipation, legal equality was nevertheless a self-limiting partial emancipation that-in its very success-tended to strengthen the ideological veneer of equality that always obscures the real degradation and dehumanization of bourgeois civil society. With its universal tendency to submit all human relationships to its iron law of commodification and monetarization, the real problem with bourgeois society would be left unaddressed by simple political reforms. For the Marx of 1844 then, true human emancipation could come only from a total reconstruction of society on a fundamentally new basis, one that puts human need before capitalist profit. Only this revolutionary transformation of society could allow one to live a truly fulfilling and emancipated existence.
Using the methodology developed by Marx to analyze the Jewish question in 1844, one can conclude that same-sex couples gain nothing from obtaining the right to legal marriage other than the same institutionalized oppression that married heterosexual couples receive in the dehumanizing social world of capitalist society, including "the right" to such things as domestic violence, brutal divorce, sexual frustration, economic insecurity and personal alienation. While it is indeed true that many couples are able to construct meaningful and satisfying lives together, it is doubtful that the legal status of their relationships has anything to do with this, a legal status that really only ends up legitimizing many of the more negative aspects of marriage and the family that often dominate these relationships in the context of capitalist dehumanization. In short the demand for the "right to marry" is a demand within capitalist social relations that does not challenge capitalism in any fundamental way. It is really a demand to be recognized by capital through its state.
However, isn't it possible, it might be argued, to use Marx's method in On the Jewish Question to justify the contemporary campaign for gay marriage as a necessary "first-step"? After all, didn't Marx argue there that Jewish emancipation, even if it was only a partial emancipation, was nevertheless to be welcomed as paving the way forward? That is indeed true, however, one must also keep in mind the context in which Marx was writing. In the 1840s, capitalism was in its epoch of ascendance as a mode of production, in which real tangible reforms were possible. And indeed in most countries that became dominated by capitalism in the 19th century, Jews did achieve considerable levels of equality and were more and more integrated into society as a whole. Many Jews even shed their religious identities along the way and entered the burgeoning workers' movement. Nevertheless, today, such historical reforms are impossible to obtain from a capitalist system that has entered its epoch of decadence in which it no longer serves the need of the human species to develop the productive forces and instead acts as a break on this very process.
So, while Marx's method remains valid today, we must be very careful not to confuse the tasks facing the proletariat in the 1840s with the situation it faces in a capitalist system that is literally rotting on its feet. On the contrary, what we are seeing today in the U.S. is the bourgeoisie shamelessly appropriating the debate on gay marriage to its own ends of ideologically confusing the working class and distracting it from its historic task to destroy capitalism, the only task of the proletariat today. It is in this context that we have seen President Bush call for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, while the Massachusetts Supreme Court argues that nothing short of full and equal marriage rights would be constitutional and the "liberal" Mayor of San Francisco openly flaunts his state's law to issue gay couples marriage licenses. This "debate" is proving very valuable to the bourgeoisie in confusing and distracting working-class people from true class issues by politicizing private life.
Nevertheless, while the current subordinated legal status of gay couples in the United States is perhaps due to certain historical and cultural specificities of American capitalism, in other countries the bourgeois state has seen no problem in granting gay couples the right to get married. In Canada, The Netherlands and certain other "progressive countries," gay marriage seems not to be a problem for the bourgeoisie. In fact, it has often been championed by certain bourgeois politicians as a way of cutting back on unnecessary social expenditures such as "double insurance," etc. Nevertheless, one must ask what do gay couples really get out of the state officially recognizing their partnerships? What has really changed in their lives? These legally married gay couples continue to suffer the same fate as heterosexual couples under capitalism. While many are able to construct meaningful personal partnerships, the same conditions of capitalist alienation and dehumanization continue to prevail in general. The fundamental basis of the capitalist system that produces such personal misery has been left untouched. For working class families, legally married gay couples would face the same threat to their living standards as heterosexual ones, as the growing crisis of the capitalist system forces the state to enact ever more brutal austerity measures. In this context, the legality of one's marriage proves no defense to the imperative of the capitalist system to attack the working class.
The seemingly endless "culture wars" that dominate American politics today on this and other issues are evidence of two features of the period of capitalism's decomposition. First, is the skillful use by factions of the bourgeoisie of such "cultural issues" to distract the working class from class demands: the struggle at the shop floor against the ruthless attacks on wages and benefits underway in many sectors of the economy, as well as keep them distracted from the continuing horrors of the war in Iraq where the body count of mostly working-class youth keeps adding up. Second, is the shear inability of decomposing capitalism to pose any real tangible solution to the oppression of minority groups, be they gays, women, ethnic and religious minorities, etc. With religious fundamentalism on the rise, often deliberately stoked by factions of the bourgeoisie for their own purposes, gay couples-no matter their legal status-will likely never be admitted as full members of the human community as long as capitalism continues to exist; if for no other reason than the simple fact that the human community itself does not yet exist.
Moreover, the ideological distraction offered up by the subordinated status of gays, and the quest to either emancipate them from it or keep in that state is just too valuable to a capitalist system in utter decomposition. From the Marxist perspective then, today emancipation for gays-as well as any other oppressed group-is synonomous with the emancipation of labor from capitalism itself and the construction of the truly human communist society. This necessarily entails a society in which one's personal life needs no legal sanction, wherein the law itself has been made obsolete and individuals are free to choose the intimate relationships that suit them the best.
Henk, 04/18/04.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/129_rnb.htm
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq