For more than 30 years scientists have warned of the dangers of global warming from the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The recent Stern report on the impact of climate change shows an economist, supported by the British government, putting a price on it. Tony Blair, convinced by the overwhelming evidence, thought that the consequences of ‘business as usual’ would be literally “disastrous”.
We are already living with the consequences of global warming and are now officially being told of the prospects of more floods (with the displacement of up to 100 million people), more droughts, more famines, more extreme weather conditions, in particular with more devastating storms, rising sea levels (with hundreds of millions of people displaced), changes in food production conditions, declining crop yields, more heat waves (with their impact on the vulnerable and on agricultural production) and, among many other things, the loss of up to 40% of species in the ecosystem.
Stern warns that doing nothing “could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century”. He therefore proposes that for carbon emissions to be stabilised in the next 20 years, and then drop between 1% and 3% after that, which would be a ‘manageable’ level. It would cost 1% of world GDP, but would avoid the cost of 20% GDP that would be needed if action was postponed. (A leaked United Nations report suggests that 5% would be more realistic than 1%).
The measures proposed by Stern and the government are familiar. There should be a campaign against further deforestation. Industry has to widen the search for more efficient low carbon technologies, cleaner energy sources, non-fossil fuels. Carbon trading can be developed to ration emissions, or at least make them more costly. There’s the prospect of taxes on air and car transport. There’s a need to reduce consumer demand for heavily polluting goods and services. Gordon Brown has taken on Al Gore as an adviser. And, er, that’s about it.
It’s obvious that the propaganda which makes us all individually responsible will also be cranked up a notch. We are constantly being told that we have to change our behaviour. We’re supposed to turn down the thermostat, turn off the lights, not leave the TV on standby, recycle everything, plant a tree, buy local, leave the car at home and ride a bike.
There are many criticisms of the measures that are proposed. Leftists blame the US for not taking global warming seriously, and for holding out for the prospect of a miraculous new technology. They criticise countries like Australia or the US for not even signing up to Kyoto. George Monbiot thinks that governments will take action if they’re lobbied forcefully enough. The SWP blames neo-liberalism and wants the re-nationalisation of the transport industries and state reorganisation of the energy industries. Many critics say that no plan can work because countries like China and India won’t sacrifice economic growth for the sake of the environment.
This last point has the beginning of an insight. But it doesn’t involve just those two economies but every national economy in the world.
CBI head Richard Lambert had the cheek to say “Provided we act with sufficient speed, we will not have to make a choice between averting climate change and promoting growth and investment.” Gordon Brown said his priorities are “growth, full employment and environmental care.” Yet these gentlemen would be the first to admit that competition is at the very heart of the drive to growth in capitalism.
Capitalism’s functioning, the way it survives and its central goal lie in accumulation. “Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie…” as Marx put it in Capital (vol. 1, chap. XXIV). And the drive for profits, the drive of each national capital to defend its interests, does not mean that each country patiently awaits the verdict of the market but uses every means, including the military option of war, to push itself forward in the capitalist world. It’s competition, not co-operation, that marks out the capitalist mode of production.
Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace pointed out that 1% of GDP is “the same amount of money we spend on global advertising” as if there was some easy substitution to be made. He admits that emissions have actually gone up under Labour, but then suggests, “there are so many things the government could do”. Where everything that an individual capitalist enterprise does is determined by the need to keep costs down and get revenues up, the actions of the capitalist state are determined by the needs of the capitalist ruling class. And, for all its talk about the disasters that loom from the worsening environmental system, no government is going to put serious restraints on the process of accumulating capital. Yes, expense on advertising is wasteful, and so are the even greater resources devoted to military production, but they have both become fundamental to the world of capitalist competition.
You don’t need a science degree to see that capitalism, throughout its history, has been polluting the natural environment without any concern for the consequences. Stern mentions world wars and economic slump in the same breath as the ecological catastrophe that faces us all. The cause is the same: a bankrupt capitalist system that, having fulfilled its historic mission of creating a world economy, now threatens the very continuation of life on earth. Different computer projections have predicted average global temperatures to rise by anything from 1.4 °C to 5.8 °C by 2100. What they’ve not taken into account is the question of society, the relations between social classes.
The continuation of capitalist rule holds out only the prospect of profound cataclysm, through war, through environmental degradation, or a deadly combination of both. Against this only the struggle of the working class holds out any hope, as it’s the only force in society that can overthrow capitalism and has the potential for establishing a society based on human needs, with solidarity rather than ruthless rivalry at its heart. 3/11/6
Jack Straw knew he was being provocative when he revealed that he asked Muslim women to remove their veil when visiting his surgeries. He said that wearing a veil was “a visible statement of separation and difference” and that many Muslim scholars didn’t think it was obligatory. Writing in his weekly column for the Lancashire Telegraph he said he was concerned “that wearing the full veil was bound to make better, positive relations between the two communities more difficult”. Although his comments only concerned a small number of Muslim women, they were immediately seized upon and turned into the next episode of the ‘clash of civilisations’. His remarks come in the wake of comments from the Pope that were taken as denigrating Muslims, the high profile police operation in Forest Gate, and the terror alerts during the summer over suicide bombers on planes.
The debate that has been generated has included scholarly verdicts on how the Qur’an should be interpreted, but has mostly been an exchange of accusations and insults. Straw has been denounced for pandering to racism, stirring up prejudice and for trying to further his political career with a hardline image. He’s been supported by Blair, Brown, Salman Rushdie and the BNP, and denounced by Ken Livingstone (“utterly wrong and insensitive”) George Galloway (“It is a male politician telling women to wear less”) and the SWP.
Deepening divisions
In the campaign round the ‘war on terror’, there has been a barrage of bourgeois propaganda aimed primarily against Muslims. The references to a ‘clash of civilisations’ are supposed to conjure up visions of a conflict between the liberal, secular, democratic traditions of the West with the despotic, fundamentalist and undemocratic traditions of the East, exemplified by the Islamic states in the Middle East. Indeed, for Bush and Blair, one of the reasons given for the war in Iraq, and the broader offensive in the region, was a fight for ‘freedom’ and the rights of women.
In Britain there have been arguments for a greater tolerance of differences, of giving women the ‘right to choose’ whether they wear a veil, of upholding ‘multiculturalism’, while the Straw line says that Muslims should make greater efforts to ‘integrate’ into British culture and society, accepting the ‘British values’ of tolerance, freedom of speech and democracy. The arguments for ‘assimilation’ have been backed up by falsified provocative stories in the papers and numerous well-documented physical attacks against Muslims, both male and female.
In the whole false ‘debate’ everyone is allowed to give their opinion on what direction British society should go. Blair sees the veil as a “mark of separation”, another Labour MP sees it as “frightening and intimidating”, against these there are the accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘bigotry’. The ‘debate’ presents a view of society not divided into conflicting social classes, but along religious, ethnic or gender lines. Straw’s comments also give a false view of the word ‘community’ with its implicit unity of purpose and action. There is no ‘Muslim community’ or wider ‘British community’, there is only capitalist society which is divided into classes, irrespective of racial or religious background. The hysteria of the debate does provide further evidence for Islamic ‘fundamentalists’ to prove that the west is ‘decadent’ and ‘corrupt’, and that the only answer is a holy war for an Islamic caliphate.
The net result of the ‘debate’ has been to heighten tensions and to deepen existing divisions within society. Muslims are portrayed as a ‘fifth column’ within Britain, not wanting to integrate, and more and more concentrated in ghettos, where some schools have more than 90% Asian i.e. Muslim, intakes. The only element of truth in this is that there is a greater fragmentation and atomisation within society, and one tendency of the ruling class is to cause further divisions, for example with Blair’s encouragement of faith schools. But, at the same time that society is becoming more fragmented, there is the campaign for ‘integration’ and ‘embracing Britishness’, behind which is the defence of the British state as an entity which supposedly sits ‘above’ society and acts to balance out the different interests which exist and to which we should all defer. In reality the state wants us to unite behind the ‘war on terrorism’. The ‘fight against fundamentalism’ is just another justification for strengthening of the state’s repressive apparatus.
The ‘debate’ over the veil is also another way of hiding the present and forthcoming attacks against the wages and living standards of the working class that the state is about to undertake. These attacks will fall hard on the backs of the working class and the only response to these is to strengthen the class struggle. Instead of being divided by race or religion the working class has to respond as a class with common interests. The search for solidarity in workers’ struggles is the basis for building a real unity. The struggles of today are laying the basis for a truly human community of the future. Graham 25/10/06
Since becoming Conservative Party leader last December, David Cameron has changed the party’s logo, launched a new mission statement, rejected immediate tax cuts and pledged to defend the NHS. Comparisons have been made with Blair’s ‘re-branding’ of New Labour in the 1990s. With a rise in support for them and Labour in increasing difficulties the Conservatives are beginning to look electable again. However, these developments are no more the fruit of Cameron’s leadership than they were of Blair’s in the mid 1990s: they reflect the needs of British capitalism.
The management of the democratic process has been a central concern of the ruling class since the 19th century when the vote began to be extended to the working class. In Britain, the First World War saw the growth of state control and the consequent concentration of power in the hands of the executive. While the legislature continued to have an important role to play it did not exercise the same power as it had in the past and ceased to offer any scope for the working class to advance its interests. The betrayal by the unions and Labour with their support for the war and their integration into the state helped to consolidate this change. The British ruling class became adept at managing the process to defend its interests. In particular, it used the parties of the left and the right, with their alternation in power, to get the best result for British capitalism at elections. The left, with its origins in the working class movement, had a particularly important role to play in containing the class struggle.
At the end of the Second World War Labour’s landslide victory and the creation of the welfare state helped to fuel illusions in the working class that the war had not been in vain and so ensure there weren’t widespread struggles as there had been after the First World War. By the late 1970s the Labour government elected in 1974 was facing a rising tide of class struggle while British capitalism was mired in economic difficulties. The election of the Tory party under Thatcher in 1979 meant that Labour did not have to make the attacks deemed necessary to defend British capitalism and could pose as the worker’s champion in order to contain their anger and stifle any real challenge, thus allowing the Tories to get on with the work in hand. Throughout the 1980s Labour played its role well. It opposed all of the Thatcher cuts and privatisations as well as legislation against the so-called excesses of the unions. In foreign policy its support for unilateral nuclear disarmament gave it a radical edge while even its internal difficulties, with the battles between left and right, gave the impression that its members could make a real difference.
The replacement of the Tories by New Labour in 1997 was not linked to the class struggle but to difficulties within the Tory party. After the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 the waves of class struggle that had continued during the 1980s came to an end and it was no longer so important for Labour to be in opposition to contain it. At the same time the Tories showed themselves unable to defend the more independent imperialist strategy required by the ruling class. This is what lay behind the removal of Thatcher and the subsequent problems with the ‘Euro-sceptics’. Labour’s return to electability, begun under Kinnock, notably with the battles against the Militant Tendency, was continued by John Smith and completed by Blair through set piece battles with the left and the occupation of ground previously held by the Tories, in particular on the management of the economy. The party became famed for its discipline and ability to control the news agenda.
Today much has changed, as we showed in WR 298 (“Labour Disarray: A capitalist party arranges its succession”). Blair is under pressure to go, in particular because the imperialist strategy he has followed since the bombing of the twin towers in 2001 is no longer supported by the dominant part of the ruling class. The slow development of the class struggle that has been taking place over the last couple of years also poses the longer-term possibility that Labour may need to return to opposition once again. This may also be affected by the increasing necessity to impose more direct cuts as it becomes harder to continue the management of the crisis in the way that Gordon Brown has done up to now. Whatever happens the ruling class needs to get its options ready.
Throughout the last decade and more the Tory party has looked completely unelectable. It has even seemed unable to fulfil much of its responsibility as an opposition, with the Liberal Democrats being called on to make good the shortfall. Under William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith the party remained largely consumed by in-fighting and nostalgia for the past while its policies seemed to drift to the right, to xenophobia and little-Englandism. Its vote slumped and in parts of the country it was wiped off the map. In many ways this was not important as Labour was secure in power and was very effectively defending the bourgeoisie’s interests with both the economy, where it increased the exploitation of the working class and in imperialist strategy, where it adequately maintained the independent line.
The election of Michael Howard to the Tory leadership following the general election defeat of 2001, meant that a more serious and experienced politician was in charge. However, his very experience proved to be a weakness since he was linked to the past, with Thatcher’s attacks on the working class and the period of in-fighting in the party.
Since his election Cameron has made a virtue of being fresh on the scene. While paying lip service to Thatcher’s achievements he has deliberately distanced himself from several traditional policies, bluntly telling the party conference that the old policies were not coming back. He has laid claim to several Labour policies, even repeating their phrase about being “tough on the causes of crime” and echoing one of Blair’s best known slogans: “Tony Blair once explained his priority in three words: education, education, education. I can do it in three letters. N.H.S.” The party’s website is currently running a campaign against Brown’s NHS cuts under a picture of Brown wielding an enormous pair of scissors. Cameron has sought to claim the green agenda, from putting a small wind-turbine on top of his house to proposing that the state takes the lead, including imposing taxes on polluters.
Significantly, Cameron has also sought to address some of the issues that concern the ruling class. First and foremost he has argued that he will take a more independent line from America, arguing in a speech given in the US on the anniversary of 9/11 “We should be solid but not slavish in our friendship with America”. He called for “a policy that moves beyond neo-conservatism” and declared “we will serve neither our own, nor America’s, nor the world’s interests if we are seen as America’s unconditional associate in every endeavour”. Secondly, he supported the criticism that has been made of Blair’s style of government: “For too long, the big political decisions in this country have been made in the wrong place. Not round the cabinet table, where they should be. But on the sofa in Tony Blair’s office. No notes are taken. No one knows who’s accountable. No one takes the blame when things go wrong. That arrogant style of government must come to an end. I will restore the proper processes of government. That means building a strong team, and leading them. I want to be prime minister of this country. Not a president.”
Cameron has taken on much of Blair’s mantle in order to move into the centre. But today Blair is widely mistrusted, being seen not just as ‘all spin and no substance’ but also, and more seriously, as a liar, and if Cameron mirrors Blair too closely he risks being touched by this mistrust too. His media background can be seen in the polish of his performances and the concern for image. The risk is that he will be seen as little more than image. Furthermore the Tory party still contains some of the divisions that have convulsed it for many years. Since the most recent party conference Cameron’s rating has gone down, but still compares well to Gordon Brown. The next general election can be as late as 2010. Much can happen between now and then and the bourgeoisie is taking steps to make sure its political apparatus is prepared for every contingency. North 26/10/06
Throughout the world, the living conditions of the working class are under attack, whether by private bosses or the state, whether in the developed countries or the poorest. Attacks on wages, the aggravation of unemployment, lowering of benefits, growing constraints on conditions of work, deepening poverty - such is the price the proletariat pays for the crisis of capitalism. But these attacks are not raining down on a beaten proletariat, ready to passively accept all the sacrifices that are demanded of it.
On the contrary, we are seeing stronger and stronger reactions from the workers to counter these attacks. Despite the enormous black-out operated by the media in the developed countries, this is particularly the case in Latin America at the moment.
Against the violence of the attacks, workers’ militancy is developing
In Honduras in September, major strikes broke out in the transport sector of the capital of the country, Tegucigalpa, which was completely stopped for two days after taxi and bus drivers went on strike to protest against the imposition by the government of an increase in the price of fuel by 19.7%. In Nicaragua, after the violent protests that took place at the beginning of the year in Managua, following an increase in transport prices, we saw the massive strikes of health workers in April, and strikers in the transport sector blocked the capital.
In Chile, in the context of police raids, arrests and brutal repression led by the social democratic government of Michelle Bachelet, a strike broke out at the end of September in the education sector. This was a strike against lamentable teaching conditions and it united teachers, students and school children, the latter having been involved in a very radical struggle since August. One of the themes of the movement was to refuse partial strikes and to engage in the widest possible struggles. This summer, the workers of the copper mine of Escondida went on strike for the first time since the mine opened in 1991, for three weeks in order to claim a 13% wage increase and a bonus. They only obtained a wage increase of 5% and a bonus of less than half their demand. Further, their contracts would last for 40 months instead of 2 years, which is a setback because wages would not be renegotiable for 40 months.
In Bolivia, workers at the tin mines who struggled for several weeks for wage claims and against the prospect of rising job losses, were subjected to ferocious repression by the left government of Evo Morales, the great friend of Fidel Castro.
In Brazil, after the strikes in May in the Volkswagen factory against 5000 job losses, bank workers went on strike in September over wages (see separate article).
In Mexico, several thousand steelworkers stopped work for 5 months between spring and summer in the factories of Sicartsa and Atenco on the Pacific coast. The strikes were repressed by violent police action. And there were also strikes by teachers in the town of Oaxaca, in one of the three poorest states in Mexico, strikes which gave birth to a movement of solidarity among the whole population of the town, from mid-June to today.
Electoral and populist attacks: the case of Mexico
However, numerous traps developed by the bourgeoisie at the ideological level have impeded these movements of the working class of Latin America. These struggles have unfolded in a general atmosphere of electoral and populist propaganda by the left, whose media-friendly champions are Lula and above all Chavez. The recent election of Morales in Bolivia, of Bachelet in Chile, have been saluted by all the press, and by the left and leftists in particular, as a great advance for democracy. In reality this propaganda is designed to pervert and derail the struggle of the working class. It’s the same with the holding of presidential elections in Brazil and the barrage around the re-election of Lula as president.
In Mexico, the massive strike of 70,000 teachers, that began in mid-June in Oaxaca, was diverted into an essentially populist and democratic campaign, despite the militant will of the workers, and despite the fact that the whole population supported and joined this strike. The SNTE (national union of teachers) and the parties of the left managed to displace the focus of the initial strike movement for wages and the conditions of the teachers and children onto support for an individual: the central demand of the forces occupying the town centre since August is the resignation of the State Governor Ulises Ruiz, who had diverted money for the schools (particularly to pay for the children’s food) into his electoral campaign. At the same time the occupation was taken in hand by a Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO), which Trotskyists and other leftists have been presenting as a kind of workers’ Commune or Soviet, a fraudulent claim answered by our comrades in Mexico: “ For another Trotskyist group - Germinal (in Spain) - the APPO is ‘possibly the embryo of a workers’ state, the most developed organism of a soviet nature seen for many decades on the whole planet’ (document of the 13-09-06). This affirmation is not only exaggerated but false. It is not an error made ‘in ignorance’, but a bad-intentioned deformation so that the workers think they are seeing a soviet where there is really an inter-classist front. A soviet or a workers’ council is an organisation that develops in a pre-revolutionary or directly revolutionary period. All workers participate in them. Its assemblies are the life and soul of the insurrection. Their delegates are elected and revocable. In the APPO the well-known ‘leaders’ are close to the existing structures of power, such as Rogelio Pensamiento, known for his relations with the PRI; the ex-deputy of PRD, Flavio Sosa; or the SNTE unionist, Wheel Pacheco, who himself received ‘economic support’ for a long time from the same government of Ulises Ruiz. But in addition, if we look at the composition of the ‘soviet’ we can see that, as the first act of the APPO stated, it is made up of 79 social organisations, 5 unions and 10 representatives of schools and parents. Such an amalgam allows the expression of everything except the independence and autonomy of the proletariat” (‘Is there a revolutionary situation in Mexico? [3]’, ICC Online).
At the end of October, the central state’s repressive forces began a massive offensive aimed at bringing the occupation to an end, no doubt provoking furious anger among the local population. At the time of writing, violent clashes are still taking place, particularly around the occupied university. But the movement had already lost its class dynamic before that happened, and has essentially become part of a more general campaign by the left, the Zapatistas, and other bourgeois forces against the ruling party. Following the most recent presidential elections, there have also been massive demonstrations in the centre of Mexico, demanding a recount after the candidate of ‘the poor’, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, was defeated.
Violence and repression take on their most spectacular form in the countries of the periphery, notably in Latin America. But it is equally present in the most developed countries, where if it’s not in the shape of truncheons and tear gas, then it’s the blackmail of unemployment and job losses.
As for the mystifications aimed at sabotaging the struggles, at destroying the solidarity and consciousness of the class, they know no frontiers. Everywhere, the unions, the parties of the left and leftist organisations are the principal purveyors. And the ideological themes come together as brothers: they can be summed up as the defence of bourgeois democracy and the defence of the national capital. Everywhere, the electoral mystification is used in massive doses: it is necessary to ‘vote well’, and if you can’t elect ‘the best for the workers’, then it’s necessary to prevent the victory of the ‘worst’ (the parties of the traditional right) by voting for the ‘least bad’ (the established parties of the left).
Similarly, all these bourgeois organisations argue that the workers should mobilise not against capitalism as a whole, whatever its forms, but against ‘neo-liberalism’ and ‘globalisation’. In this sense, the lies used against the workers’ struggle in Latin America are not so different from those used against workers in the central countries. You only have to add some local ingredients, such as ‘indigenism’ (the defence of the rights of Indians) or the populism of Chavez and Morales. The radical ‘anti-imperialist’ discourse of these people, who are the new heroes of a good part of the extreme left in the developed countries, has one basic function: to obscure the fact that exploitation remains the same, whether organised by ‘foreigners’ or ‘compatriots’, or by the national state itself. The chauvinism that these people try to inject into the consciousness of the workers has always been the worst enemy of the proletariat.
Mulan 4/11/6 (adapted from Revolution Internationale)
In Brazil, “after the massive job losses (75% of personnel) at the Varig aeronautical company last spring, it’s the turn of the employees of the Volkswagen factories in the industrial belt of Sao Paulo (ABC). (…) It’s the ABC metalworkers’ union that, in collaboration with the bosses of Volkswagen, fixed the quota of 3600 job cuts staged up to 2008. In the assemblies, the atmosphere was extremely intimidating, with the unions using blackmail about more job cuts if the workers didn’t accept the proposals for voluntary redundancies. In the assembly where the agreement was concluded, the unions were booed, labelled as ‘sell-outs’ and accused of having swindled the workers. (…) But that’s not all: the workers who are going to keep their jobs are going to see their wages cut from 1-2% due to increased social security costs, that too with the assent of the unions”. (Extract from a joint declaration by the Brazilian group Workers’ Opposition - OPOP – and the ICC).
In Brazil again, bank employees, whose numbers have dropped in twenty years from one million to 400,000, went on strike for a week for wage demands, despite the union exhorting them not to strike because of the electoral campaign.
Every September in Brazil the campaign for wage claims for bank employees takes place. Regularly, this campaign involves strikes that have only resulted in a very modest slowdown of the attacks on wages. In less than 5 years wages in the state banks have lost a considerable amount of buying power. This year, due to the elections, the unions decided to postpone the campaign for wage claims so as to not coincide with the electoral campaign. But the bank employees decided otherwise. They stopped the manoeuvre of the cartel of unions including the CUT. The general assemblies, though called and held by the unions, decided to strike against the advice of the same unions and their national representation, in the towns or states of: Bahia, Porto Alegre, Florianoplis and Pernambuco. Some general assemblies elected delegates in order to set up a national co-ordination. The great majority of elected delegates did not represent any union and many didn’t belong to the union at all. In Salvador, the delegation elected was made up of our comrades from OPOP. Faced with the extension of the struggle at the national level and the danger of being openly repudiated by the workers, the unions declared a strike while manoeuvring to keep the workers of the banks of Sao Paulo from entering the struggle. When they finally convoked a general assembly to decree the strike in this town, the workers concerned weren’t content to passively accept the union’s orders. On Wednesday October 4 they insisted on having their say and violently confronted the union goons that surrounded and protected the praesidium, composed of the unions’ mafia bosses who had tried to preserve a monopoly on speaking.
Finally the unions succeeded in bringing the movement to an end by means of a gross manoeuvre. They made Sao Paulo and Brasilia go back to work – which demoralised the others towns in the struggle – by convoking general assemblies in which they ensured a massive participation by non-strikers. At the same time the striking workers were more or less kept in the dark about what was going on elsewhere.
(Translated from Revolution Internationale)
Following the recent conflict between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon we have heard many voices raised against American imperialism as the main cause of war and destabilisation. The leftists are often the first to argue this. The Trotskyists in particular never miss an opportunity to stigmatise American imperialism and its Israeli ally.
But the world’s biggest power doesn’t have the monopoly of imperialism. Quite the contrary, imperialism is the condition sine qua non for the survival of each nation. The period of the decadence of capitalism, which began almost a century ago, marked the entry of the system into the era of generalised imperialism which no nation could avoid. This permanent confrontation contains war as a perspective and militarism as a mode of life for all states, whether large, small, strong, weak, aggressor or victim.
To give a very general definition of it, imperialism is the policy of a country that tries to conserve or to spread its political, economic and military domination over other countries and territories. As such it refers to numerous moments in human history (from the old Assyrian, Roman, Ottoman empires or the conquests of Alexander the Great up to today). Only in capitalism does the term take on a very particular sense. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, “…the urge of capitalism to expand suddenly forms a vital element, the most outstanding feature of modern development; indeed expansion has accompanied the entire history of capitalism and in its present, final, imperialist phase, it has adopted such an unbridled character that it puts the whole civilisation of mankind in question” (Anti-Critique). It is thus vital to understand what imperialism is in a capitalist system which has become decadent, which today engenders conflict everywhere, subjecting the planet to blood and fire, which in the “present, final, imperialist phase… puts the whole civilisation of mankind in question”.
Since the world market was constituted at the beginning of the 20th century and has been shared out into commercial zones and areas of influence between the advanced capitalist states, the intensification of competition between these nations has led to the aggravation of military tensions. It has also led to the unprecedented development of armaments and the growing submission of all economic and social life to military imperatives and the permanent preparation for war.
Rosa Luxemburg shattered the basis of the mystification which made a state, or a particular group of states, those with a certain military power, as solely responsible for warlike barbarity. If all states don’t have the same means, all have the same policy. If effectively the ambitions for world domination could only be realised by the most powerful states, the smallest powers still shared the same imperialist appetites. As in the Mafia, only the Godfather can dominate the entire town, while the neighbourhood pimps can dominate only a single street, but nothing distinguishes them at the level of the aspirations and methods of gangsters. Thus the smallest states devote as much energy as the others to becoming a greater nation at the expense of their neighbours.
That’s why it is impossible to make a distinction between oppressor and oppressed states. In fact, in the relations of force imposed between imperialist sharks, all are equally in competition in the world arena. The bourgeois myth of the aggressor state or bloc serves to justify the ‘defensive’ war. The identification of the most aggressive imperialism is used as propaganda to dragoon populations into war.
Militarism and imperialism are the most open manifestations of the entry of capitalism into its decadence. This whole issue provoked a debate among revolutionaries at the beginning of the 20th century.
Faced with the phenomenon of imperialism, different theories were developed in the workers’ movement to explain it, notable by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Their analyses were forged on the eve of and during the First World War against the vision of Kautsky who made imperialism one option among other policies possible for capitalist states and asked “... Cannot the present imperialist policy be supplanted by a new, ultra-imperialist policy, which will introduce the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capitals?” (cited by Lenin in his Imperialism, Highest Stage of Capitalism) .
In contrast, the marxist approaches shared the view that imperialism was not only a product of the laws of capitalism but an inherent necessity of its period of decline. The theory of Lenin revealed a particular importance because it allowed him, during WWI, to defend a strictly internationalist position which then became the official position of the Communist International. However, Lenin first of all confronted the question of imperialism in a descriptive fashion without elaborating a clear explanation of the origins of imperialist expansion. For him it was essentially a movement of the developed countries whose main characteristic was the exploitation in the colonies by the “superabundant” capital of the metropoles, with the aim of achieving “superprofits” by exploiting cheap labour and abundant raw materials. In this view, the most advanced capitalist countries became parasites on the colonies: the hunt to obtain “superprofits”, indispensable to their survival, explained the worldwide conflict aimed at conserving or conquering colonies. This view had the consequence of dividing the world into oppressor countries on one hand and oppressed countries in the colonies on the other. “… Lenin’s emphasis on colonial possessions as a distinguishing and even indispensable feature of imperialism has not stood the test of time. Despite his expectation that the loss of the colonies, precipitated by national revolts in these regions, would shake the imperialist system to its foundations, imperialism has adapted quite easily to ‘decolonisation’. Decolonisation [after 1945] simply expressed the decline of the older imperialist powers, and the triumph of imperialist giants who were not burdened with many colonies in the period around World War I. Thus the USA and Russia were able to develop a cynical ‘anti-colonial’ line to further their own imperialist ends, to batten onto national movements in the colonies and transform them immediately into inter-imperialist proxy wars” (International Review 19).
Starting from the analysis of the whole of the historic period and of the evolution of capitalism as a global system, Rosa Luxemburg achieved a more complete and more profound understanding of the phenomenon of imperialism. She showed the historic basis of imperialism in the very contradictions of the capitalist system. Whereas Lenin limited himself to establishing the phenomenon of the exploitation of the colonies, Rosa Luxemburg analysed the colonial conquests as a phenomenon that constantly accompanied capitalist development, feeding the insatiable necessity of capitalist expansion through the penetration of new markets, the introduction of capitalist relations in the geographic zones where capitalism didn’t yet exist: “Accumulation is impossible in an exclusively capitalist environment. Therefore, we find that capital has been driven since its very inception to expand into non-capitalist strata and nations, the ruin of artisans and peasantry, the proletarianisation of the intermediate strata, colonial policy (the policy of ‘opening up’ markets) and the export of capital. The existence and the development of capitalism since its beginning has only been possible through a constant expansion of production into new countries.” (Anti-Critique)[1] [8]
Thus imperialism is considerably accentuated in the last quarter of the 19th century: “Capitalism in its avid, feverish hunt for raw materials and buyers who are neither capitalists nor wage labourers, robbed, decimated and murdered the colonial populations. This was the epoch of the penetration and extension of Britain into Egypt and South Africa, France into Morocco, Tunis and Tonkin, Italy into East Africa and the frontiers of Abyssinia, Tsarist Russia into central Asia and Manchuria, Germany into Africa and Asia, the USA into the Philippines and Cuba, and Japan into the Asian continent”(‘The problem of war’ by Jehan, 1935, quoted in International Review19)
But this evolution also comes up against capitalism’s fundamental contradictions: the more capitalist production spreads its grip over the globe, the narrower the limits of the market created by the frenetic search for profits becomes, in relation to the need for capitalist expansion. Beyond the competition for the colonies, Rosa Luxemburg identified in the saturation of the world market and the depletion of non-capitalist outlets a turning point in the life of capitalism: the historic weakness and impasse of this system which “can no longer fulfil its function as a historic vehicle for the development of the productive forces” (Anti-Critique). In the final analysis, this is also the cause of wars that would henceforth characterise the mode of life of decadent capitalism.
Once the capitalist market had reached the limits of the globe, the scarcity of solvent outlets and of the new markets opened up the permanent crisis of the capitalist system, whereas the necessity for expansion remained a vital question for each state. Henceforth, the expansion of one state could only take place to the detriment of other states in a struggle for carving up the world market through armed conflict.
“In the epoch of ascendant capitalism wars (national, colonial, imperialist conquest) expressed the upward march, flourishing, enlargement and expansion of the capitalist economic system. Capitalist production resorted to war as a continuation of its economic policies by other means. Each war paid its way by opening the way for further expansion, ensuring the development of an expanded capitalist production…war was the indispensable means for capitalism to open up the potential for its future development, at a time when this potential still existed and could only be opened up through violence” (Report to the 1945 Conference of the Gauche Communiste de France).
In the decadent period, however, “war became the only means, not for the solution of the international crisis, but through which each national imperialism sought to escape from its difficulties at the expense of rival imperialist states” (ibid).
This new historic situation compelled every country in the world to develop forms of state capitalism. Each national capital is condemned to imperialist competition and finds in the state the single structure sufficiently strong enough to mobilise the whole of society with the aim of confronting its economic rivals on the military level. “The permanent crisis makes it inevitable that the various imperialisms will settle scores through armed struggle. War and the threat of war are the latent or open expressions of a situation of permanent war in society. Modern war is a war of materiel. It demands a monstrous mobilisation of all the technical and economic resources of a country. Production for war becomes the axis of industrial production and the main economic activity of society” (ibid). That’s why technical progress is entirely conditioned by the military: aviation was first developed militarily during the First World War, the atom utilised as a bomb in 1945, information technology and the internet conceived as military tools by NATO. The weight of the military sector in all countries absorbs all the living forces of the national economy with a view to developing armaments to be used against other nations. At the dawn of decadence, war was conceived as a means of sharing out markets.
But with time, imperialist war more and more loses its economic rationality. From the beginning of decadence, the strategic dimension takes precedence over strictly economic questions. It is a question of conquering geostrategic positions against all other imperialisms in the fight for hegemony and the defence of military rank and status. In this period of the decline of capitalism, war more and more represents an economic and social disaster. This absence of economic rationality of war doesn’t mean that each national capital abstains from plundering the productive forces of the adversary or the vanquished. But this ‘plunder’, contrary to what Lenin thought, no longer constitutes the principal aim of war. Whereas some still think, officially trying to be faithful to Lenin, that war could be motivated by economic appetites (oil being the most popular prize on this question), reality answers that. The economic balance sheet of the war in Iraq led by the USA since 2003 doesn’t at all come down on the side of ‘profitability’. The revenues from Iraqi oil, even those hoped for in the next hundred years, count for little faced with the vast sums expended by the United States in order to undertake this war. And at the moment they do not even look like slowing down.
Capitalism’s entry into its phase of decomposition intensifies the heat of the contradictions contained in its period of decadence. For every country, each particular conflict carries costs which greatly outstrip the benefits that they could draw from them. Wars result only in massive destruction, leaving the countries in which they take place anaemic and in complete ruin, never to be reconstructed. But none of these calculations of profit and loss can put aside the necessity for states, all states, to defend their imperialist presence in the world, to sabotage the ambitions of their rivals, or to increase their military budgets. On the contrary, they are all caught in an irrational grip from the point of view of economics and capitalist profitability. To fail to recognise the irrationality of the bourgeoisie reveals an underestimation of the threat of the destruction, pure and simple, that weighs on the future of humanity.
(From Revolution Internationale no. 335, May 2003)
[1] [9] Rosa Luxemburg, Anti-Critique. In The Accumulation of Capital, she shows that the totality of surplus value extracted from the exploitation of the working class cannot be realised inside capitalist social relations. This is because the workers, whose wages are inferior to the value created by their labour, cannot buy all the commodities that they produce. The capitalist class cannot consume all the surplus value since a part of it must serve for the enlarged reproduction of capital and must be exchanged. Thus capitalism, considered from a global point of view, is constantly obliged to search for buyers for its goods outside of capitalist social relations.
In France recently, there has been a huge amount of media publicity about the ‘anniversary’ of last year’s riots in the banlieues(1) There’s been a lot of speculation about whether it’s all going to kick off again, and TV coverage of tough police raids in various tower blocks – often showing that the police have come to the wrong door and ended up terrorising innocent mums and kids.
Why so much noise about the ‘banlieues’ when there has been virtual radio silence about the struggle of the young generation against the CPE last spring? Where is the real danger for the bourgeoisie?
The riots are an alibi for strengthening the police apparatus…
All the politicians have been promising all sorts of solutions to the problem of the ‘difficult neighbourhoods’. A year after the riots, you don’t need to be a genius to work out what’s been done to ‘get to the roots’ of the violence: nothing. Poverty and unemployment still reign in the suburbs. The new teachers they were going to get? Funds have if anything dropped and young people are more than ever left to their own devises. 8500 teaching jobs are to be cut in the 2007 budget. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie has made an effort where it really counts. In Clichy-sous-Bois, the starting point of last year’s riots, a whole new police commissariat has been set up!
It’s not hard to see that thousands of young people, whether at work, unemployed, or at school are ready to hit the streets again, to give vent to their rage, even if burning buses or your neighbour’s car can only really express impotence and despair. At the same time, this kind of violence provides the state with a pretext to strengthen its own repressive arsenal in order to protect the ‘decent people’ who it is quite happy to leave to rot for the rest of the time. The government, with Sarkozy to the fore, has put repression at the heart of its policies, reinforcing the BAC intervention brigades and the battalions of the CRS in reserve. In the 2007 budget, all expenditure is being cut, except for funds for the police and the courts which will go up by 5%! The blind rioting of last year tends to create an atmosphere of fear and distrust in the working class. This gives the bourgeoisie the perfect alibi to strengthen a repressive apparatus whose main role is not to protect anyone but to keep control over the entire working class. Let’s remember that during the fight against the CPE it was the CRS which was used to terrorise the students who had barricaded themselves in the Sorbonne.
…and an opportunity to pull young people into the trap of elections
The Minister of the Interior Sarkozy has become the bete noire of the suburbs. The top graffiti on the walls is T.S.S: Toit sauf Sarkozy – anyone but Sarkozy. It’s a whole election programme! We have to use the ballot box to get rid of Sarkozy – that’s the clamour from the entire left. And any number of ‘cultural’ figures, preferably ones more credible to immigrant youth, people like Joe Starr or Djamel Debouzze, are being used to get the message across: “Vote and get rid of Sarkozy, make your voice heard through the ballot box!”. “Eight out of ten rappers call on young people to register and vote” says J Claude Tchikaya, a member of the Devoirs de Memoire group. One of the more political rappers, Axiom First, even tells us that “the vote is a weapon!”. And it has to be said that this kind of thing is having an impact: there has been an increase in people registering on the electoral lists: “The rise in registrations on the electoral lists has gone up by between 7 and 32% in comparison to 2004. In two thirds of cases, this involves people between 18 and 35” (the Banlieues Respect collective). The most striking increases have been in the banlieues: 25% in Nanterre, 26% in Bobigny.
Anyone but Sarkozy? But who are the other choices for transforming the suburbs and changing life? The parties of the left, the Socialists and Communists in particular, are the first to criticise Sarkozy’s security policy and the government’s inertia about the problems of the banlieues. Did they do any better when they were in power? Did they find work for young people and the not-so young, invest in social benefits, housing and education in order to ‘get to the roots’ of urban violence? Like hell they did!
Segolene Royal, the Socialists’ ‘good’ counter-part to the evil Sarkozy, has been trying to show that her party is different. “The failure of the current security policy is flagrant…we need a much firmer policy” (Bondy June 2006). Concretely, “we must find a massive response to a massive problem of delinquency”. That means “obligatory courses in parenthood…paid for by family allocations in an educational logic….systems of military training for the over 16s instead of prison”. In Sarkozy’s dreams! Segolene and the left will give us even more police and policing!
In the suburbs, and among all young people and not-so young people, everyone who is asking questions about the future this society has in store for us, it has to be clear that we can expect nothing either from the right or the left. When it comes to managing the crisis or administering repression, the left has nothing to learn from the right. From the creation of the CRS by Jules Moch, a Socialist minister after the war, to colonial massacres in Madagascar or Algeria, to the repression of workers’ struggles, as in 1984 when the ‘Communist’ transport minister Fiterman sent the police to beat up striking railway workers at Saint-Lazare station, the examples are legion.
The left has always defended the interests of the state, of capitalist exploitation, against the workers, whether young or old, immigrant or ‘native’. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
The struggle is our only weapon
The new generations who live in the deprived suburbs are caught in a vice between poverty and police repression. It is intolerable and unacceptable. But to face up to this situation, it is essential to avoid the traps laid by the bourgeoisie, the false choice between desperate violence and electoral illusions.
The only way forward is to struggle on the terrain of the working class. The way shown by the students in the anti-CPE movement in the spring. Taking charge of the struggle through general assemblies, unifying demands, solidarity between the workers. The students called for an amnesty for the rioters and many ‘banlieusards’ rallied to their struggle, which offered a real alternative, a real perspective. The more the bourgeoisie highlights the ‘horrors’ of the banlieues, the more we must call to mind the lessons of the struggle against the CPE, of the class struggle – the true oxygen against doubt and despair. Ross 22.10.06 (From Revolution Internationale publication of the ICC in France)
(1) Literally ‘suburbs’, but with very different connotations to the English word.
During the night of 25/26 October in Nanterre, Montreuil and Grigny on the outskirts of Paris, as well as in Venssieux in the Lyon suburbs, several buses were attacked and burned, causing panic among passengers and drivers.
What is striking about these violent actions is their highly organised character. They make you think of real commando operations, more or less simultaneous and very well orchestrated. In Montreuil, the attackers were hooded and half of them armed; they coldly forced the occupants to get off the bus and blew it up a few metres away from them. These methods look much more like gangsters robbing a bank than a cry of despair from the young urban dispossessed.
There’s nothing surprising about such events. For weeks now, the bourgeoisie has been fanning the fires. Not a day has gone by without newspapers, radio or TV going on and on about the events of October 2005. The message was loud and clear: the anniversary of last year’s riots could once again plunge the suburbs into violence. If the bourgeoisie didn’t organise these criminal operations itself, it has certainly done everything possible to provoke them. Why? Quite simply, to sow fear in the workers’ ranks and prevent them from thinking. Keeping quiet about the exemplary and victorious struggle of the students against the CPE is not enough to block the process of profound reflection going on in the working class today. To prevent the lessons of this struggle being drawn, to stop the development of solidarity, the ruling class is trying to create a permanent atmosphere of insecurity and suspicion. To persuade every worker that they should look to the state for protection. What’s more, when these attacks took place, the police immediately stepped up its presence in the transport system.
The working class should be in no doubt: it is the target of these repressive measures. The patrolling of working class neighbourhoods, buses and metros is a preparation for the strikes and demonstrations of tomorrow. Workers should not be taken in by these intrigues. TR 27/10/6 (From RI)
On the weekend of 3-5 November Beijing hosted a China-Africa forum that top-level delegations from 48 (out of 53) African countries planned to attend. The way that the Chinese media sold the jamboree, along with loyal African cheerleaders, gave the impression that China is a great force for progress in Africa - such a contrast to the colonialists and imperialists of the US, Europe and Japan.
The Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister said (Xinhuanet 12/1/6) that his government wanted “to conduct mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation with African countries” and “will vigorously encourage Chinese enterprises to participate in improving infrastructure in African countries”, but insisted that “China’s economic aid for African countries is free of political conditions and is based on African countries’ priorities”.
Zambia’s founding president Kenneth Kaunda (Peoples Daily 27/10/6) declared “African leaders and their people will not be cheated by lies that China’s presence in Africa is neo-colonialism”.
When African trade union leaders visited China in October they said “China’s assistance to Africa is ‘sincere’ and ‘selfless’” and “has brought ‘concrete benefits’ to African countries and people” (People’s Daily Online 14/10/6.)
Chinese imperialism defends its interests
China is sensitive over accusations of ‘neo-colonialism’, especially if they’re made by imperialist rivals, because its attitude towards Africa is supposed to be different from theirs.
China, for example, boasts of the extent of its trade with and investment in Africa. “The two-way trade volume has rocketed from 4 billion dollars in 1995 to some 40 billion dollars in 2005. Chinese direct investment in Africa has amounted to 1.18 billion dollars, with more than 800 Chinese enterprises on the continent.” (Xinhua 9/9/6). So, what is this investment, and can it really be described in any way as ‘selfless’?
The official Chinese view is that “the rich deposit of resources in Africa matches China’s need for raw materials for sustained economic growth” (ibid 12/1/6). That is to say, it’s the demands of the Chinese economy that feed its ‘investment’ in Africa. Chinese industry needs a lot of raw materials such as copper, iron ore, cobalt, and platinum. It is the biggest user of copper in the world and has invested over $150 million in mining in Zambia, as well getting copper from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Oil is essential to all aspects of modern industry and China’s energy needs compel it to search everywhere. “Africa is home to 8% of the world’s oil reserves, which has prompted Beijing to spend billions of dollars to secure drilling rights in Nigeria, Sudan and Angola and to negotiate exploration contracts with Chad, Gabon, Mauritania, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia and the Republic of the Congo. The continent now accounts for 25% of China’s oil imports” (Asia Times Online 6/10/6).
China’s oil operations in Sudan are so extensive it takes 70% of the country’s oil exports. One of the reasons for the more than $10 billion dollars worth of investment in Sudan is the defence of Chinese oil interests. It has a military force in place in Sudan to guard 1506 kilometres of pipeline, a refinery and a port all built by Chinese labour. 10,000 Chinese workers were brought in to work on the project, it was widely rumoured that prisoners were used, many of whom “may have perished from disease in the inhospitable swamps and baked savannahs” (Human Rights Watch November 2003).
China also has an enormous need for timber and is taking great amounts of wood from forests in Mozambique, Liberia, Gabon, Cameroon, DRCongo and Equatorial Guinea – many of these being countries where the environmental impact of often illegal logging is ignored.
One interesting example of the Chinese approach is that it is not only attracted to Zimbabwe for supplies of gold, silver, and platinum, but has been “farming about 1,000 square kilometres of the land that has been seized from white farmers since 2000” (Asia Times Online 6/10/6.)
The claims about the benefits of trade are particularly dubious. Every national capital has to find a market for the products it manufactures; that’s ABC in commodity production. Europe and the US will only accept limited quantities of Chinese exports, so Africa is one of the few remaining markets for China to try and exploit. Chinese textiles, for example, undercut the African competition. It should go without saying that the $40 billion trade figure for 2005 (maybe $50bn in 2006) is heavily weighted toward Chinese sales.
One trade that has been thriving for a long time is the arms trade. China is the most significant supplier of arms to Sudan, having delivered tanks, ammunition, fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, howitzers, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft guns, and anti-tank and antipersonnel landmines. And the Sudanese government arms the Janjaweed militia in Darfur (see ‘Imperialist intervention is never humanitarian’ in WR 298). For decades China has been a major arms supplier throughout Africa, including to both sides in the Eritrea/Ethiopia border conflict of 1998-2000.
Human Rights Watch (November 2003) “concluded that while China’s motivation for this arms trade appeared to be primarily economic, China made available easy financing for some of these arms purchases”. The economic aspect of the arms trade is misunderstood here. National capitals defend their interests in many ways and the military aspects of imperialism are fundamental. Arms sales are often subsidised by a power if it corresponds to its imperialist interests. Not only that: China “will continue to help train African military personnel and support defence and army building of African countries” (‘China’s African Policy’ at www.chinaview.cn [12] 12/1/6). In a continent of multiple conflicts China helps to fan the flames. It has several thousand troops in Liberia and DRCongo (among nearly 10,000 throughout the continent) and, apart from Sudan and Zimbabwe, has significant military links with Nigeria and Ethiopia. This helps explain why Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi was reported by Xinhua (16/10/6) as saying “China is not looting Africa” and that “the influence of China is not a source of concern or danger”, despite arming Eritrea against his own country.
One commentator has pointed to different appreciations of Chinese activity in Africa. “Although China’s Africa policy has won the hearts and minds of the continent’s rulers, the people themselves appear to lag behind. They are waiting to see whether the Chinese model of engagement with the continent is going to be any different than those of the exploitative colonial powers of the past.
So far - with China using the continent as a source of raw materials and a dumping ground for its own manufactured goods - the formula seems much the same.” (Asia Times Online 6/10/6)
Other commentators have shown how economic necessity has driven Chinese policy in the continent, as well as being able to take advantage of the lack of US influence in some parts, as in Sudan where US companies are banned from investment. A Deutsche Bank expert suggests “It’s a vacuum. Why not fill that with loans and development help in exchange for getting put higher on the pole when it comes to consuming African oil” (BusinessWeek 14/9/6). This makes Chinese intervention in Africa look like a particular policy, one from a number that could be chosen. In reality, as the article on imperialism in this issue clearly shows, imperialism is not a policy of this or that country but the situation that pushes every national capital to fight ruthlessly in defence of its interests.
Car 3/11/6
Bogged down by the war in Iraq, the manifest failure of the war on international terrorism with the growth in deadly attacks, not only in the Middle East but throughout the world: this is not just a setback but a truly stinging reverse for the USA.
How is it possible that the world’s greatest army, equipped with the most modern technological means, the most effective electronic systems, the most sophisticated armaments capable of locating and reaching their targets at distances of thousands of kilometres, should find itself trapped in such a mire? For the ruling class the answer is evident, it can only be the manifest incompetence of Bush junior, “the worst President in America’s history. He’s ignorant, he’s arrogant, he’s stupid” (in the words of American writer, Norman Mailer). This explanation is easy and works all the better since George Bush doesn’t have to work very hard to make it credible. However, this explanation is miles away from the real problem (which is its chief merit for the bourgeoisie). It is not this or that individual at the summit of the state who makes capitalism go in this or that direction, but, on the contrary, the state of the system which determines the political orientations. The greatest world power must, is compelled, to hold on to its position. The United States could not have any policy other than that put forward by Paul Wolfowitz (now a leading member of the Republican administration) at the beginning of the 1990s: “America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union”. This ‘doctrine’ was made public in March 1992 when the American bourgeoisie still had illusions in the success of its strategy, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and the reunification of Germany. With this aim, several years ago, they declared that to mobilise the nation and impose America’s democratic values on the entire world and prevent imperialist rivalry “we need a new Pearl Harbour”. Remember the Japanese attack on the American naval base in 1941, which resulted in 4,500 American dead and wounded, and allowed the United States to enter the war on the Allied side by tipping public opinion which until then had been reticent about this war. The highest American political authorities were aware the attack was being planned and did nothing about it. Since then they have simply applied their policy: the attacks on 11 September were their “new Pearl Harbour” and in the name of a new crusade against terrorism they have been able to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq.
The result of this policy, the only one that the world’s greatest imperialist power can carry out, is damning: 3,000 soldiers killed since the beginning of the war in Iraq three years ago (of whom more than 2,800 are American), 655,000 Iraqis perished between March 2003 and July 2006, since when the deadly terrorist attacks and confrontations between Shiites and Sunnis have started to intensify. There are 160,000 soldiers of occupation on Iraqi soil under the supreme command of the United States, who are incapable of ‘carrying out their mission of maintaining order’ in a country on the edge of civil war. Not only are the Shiite and Sunni militia violently confronting one another, as they have since a few months ago, but also the local rival Shiite gangs are tearing each other apart and spreading terror, particularly in the conflict between Moqtada al-Sadr’s gang (the self-styled Mehdi army) and the Al-Badr brigades (linked to the dominant faction in government) mainly responsible for the slaughter at Amara, Nasiriya, Basra where they tried to impose their rule. In the South of the country the Sunni activists who proudly proclaim their links to the Taliban and Al-Qaida have self-proclaimed an ‘Islamic republic’ while, in the Baghdad region, the population is exposed to car, bus and even bicycle bombs, as well as gangs of looters. The shortest sortie by isolated American troops sees them exposed to ambushes.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also swallow up colossal sums that dig ever deeper into the budget deficit, precipitating the United States into astronomical debt. The situation in Afghanistan is no less catastrophic. The interminable hunt for Al Qaida and the presence of an army of occupation gives credit to the Taliban (toppled from power in 2002 but rearmed by Iran and more discretely by China) whose ambushes and terrorist attacks are multiplying. The ‘evil terrorists’, Bin Laden or the Taliban regime, were both alike creatures of the US to counter the USSR, at the time of the imperialist blocs, after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The first was a former spy recruited by the CIA in 1979 who, after having served as a financial intermediary in the arms trade from Saudi Arabia and the USA to the Afghan guerrillas, ‘naturally’ became the intermediary for the Americans to finance the Afghan resistance from the beginning of the Russian invasion. As for the Taliban, they were armed and financed by the USA and their accession to power was accomplished with Uncle Sam’s full blessing.
It is obvious that this great crusade against terrorism, far from eradicating it, has only opened the way for more and more terrorist actions and suicide bombings whose only purpose is to affect as many victims as possible. Today the White House is powerless in the face of the Iranian state cocking a snook at it in the most humiliating way. Besides, this gives space to fourth or fifth rank powers, like North Korea which undertook a nuclear test on 8 October, making it potentially the eighth country with atomic weapons. This huge challenge imperils the equilibrium of South East Asia and encourages others with aspirations to possess nuclear weapons[1] [15]. Japan’s rapid militarisation and rearmament and its orientation towards the production of nuclear weapons will find a pretext in the need to face up to its immediate neighbours.
We must also consider the terrible conflict raging in the Middle East and particularly in the Gaza Strip. Following the Hamas electoral victory in January, direct international aid has been suspended and the Israeli government has blocked the transfer of funds from tax and customs duties to the Palestinian Authority. 165,000 of its employees have not been paid for 7 months but their anger, as well as that of the whole population, with 70% living on the threshold of poverty, with 44% unemployment, has easily been recuperated into the confrontations in the streets between the Hamas and Fatah militias, which have occurred with renewed regularity since 1 October. The attempts at a government of national unity have all been aborted. At the same time, after its retreat from South Lebanon, Tsahal (the Israeli armed forces) has gone back into the frontier with Egypt as far as the Gaza Strip and restarted its missile bombardment of Rafah under the pretext of hunting for Hamas activists.
The population lives in a climate of permanent terror and insecurity. Since 25 June 300 deaths have been recorded in the territory.
So the American policy fiasco is obvious. This is why the Bush administration is being so widely called into question, even by Republicans. 60% of the American population think that the war in Iraq was a ‘bad choice’, a large part of them no longer believe that Saddam held nuclear potential nor had links to Al Qaida, and think this was a pretext to justify an intervention in Iraq. Half a dozen recent books (among them one by Bob Woodward, the prominent journalist who uncovered the Watergate scandal under Nixon) implacably denounce this state “lie” and call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. This does not mean that the militarist US policy can be abandoned but the government is constrained to take account of and display its own contradictions in order to adapt it.
Bush’s latest supposed ‘gaffe’, admitting the parallel with the Vietnam war goes with these ‘flights’… orchestrated by the James Baker interviews. This former Chief of staff from the Reagan era, then Secretary of State for Bush senior, advocates opening a dialogue with Syria and Iran and above all a partial withdrawal from Iraq. This attempt at a limited response underlines the extent of the American bourgeoisie’s weakening, since the pure and simple retreat from Iraq would be the most stinging in its history, and one it could not permit. The parallel with Vietnam is a really deceptive underestimation, for at the time the retreat from Vietnam allowed the United States a beneficial strategic reorientation of alliances and to draw China into its own camp against the USSR, when today the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq would be a pure capitulation without any compensation and entail the complete discredit of American power. These glaring contradictions are the manifestation of the weakening of American leadership and the advance of ‘every man for himself’. A change in the majority in the next Congress will not provide any other ‘choice’ but a headlong flight into the more and more murderous military adventures that express capitalism’s impasse.
In the United States, the weight of the chauvinism displayed in the wake of 11 September has largely disappeared with the experience of the double fiasco of the war on terrorism and the mire of the Iraq war. The army recruitment campaigns can hardly find fodder ready to risk their skins in Iraq and the soldiers are demoralised. In spite of the risks, there are thousands of desertions on the ground. We note that over a thousand deserters have sought refuge in Canada.
This situation gives us a glimpse of a whole other perspective. The more and more intolerable weight of war and barbarity in society is an indispensable dimension for proletarians to develop their consciousness of the irremediable bankruptcy of the capitalist system. The only response the working class can make against imperialist war, the only solidarity that it can give to its class brothers exposed to the worst massacres, is to mobilise on its own class terrain to bring an end to this system. W, 21/10/06 (Translated from Revolution Internationale, publication of the ICC in France)
[1] [16] As we go to press we are reading reports that 6 Arab states (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and UAE) have announced that they want to use nuclear technology. Although all say they want this for peaceful energy production, it is impossible to believe this, particularly as Iran tries to join the nuclear club and the US has proved powerless to stop North Korea’s nuclear tests.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/200611/1951/there-revolutionary-situation-mexico
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-and-central-america
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1848/mexico
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/brazil
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/299/what-is-imperialism#_ftn1
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/299/what-is-imperialism#_ftnref1
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/france
[12] http://www.chinaview.cn
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/africa
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/china
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/299/us-quagmire#_ftn1
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/299/us-quagmire#_ftnref1
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq