Dear comrades,
Thank you for your letter of July 22, 2003 containing a critique of two leaflets I produced for anti-war rallies in Toronto in the spring of last year. I regret that until now I have been unable to reply to the comments and criticisms raised in your letter.
To begin with, I want to agree with you that it is important for revolutionaries (both those in formal organizations and those operating as independents) to discuss in a comradely fashion, points of difference about the world situation and theoretical interpretations. Such a free exchange of views is important for the de to development of political ideas and for the clarification of our viewpoints. All too often, such debate degenerates into sectarian sniping and point-scoring, rather than actual discussion. In this spirit of discussion, I want to reply to the issues you address in your letter.
The anti-war mobilizations in Toronto in the winter and spring of 2003 were no different from mobilizations in New York and elsewhere. In terms of the banners carried and leaflets distributed, the spirit of events was overwhelmingly of a liberal nature. Indeed, in the first significant mobilizations, even United Nations banners were displayed The incidence of UN banners decreased as the conflict became imminent, but they were replaced by religious pacifism.
The 'far left,' in Toronto, represented mostly by the mainstream Trotskyist groups, largely promoted these pacifist ideas; although, if one wanted to look closely, mentions of capitalism could be found. The largest leftist group, the International Socialists (linked internationally to the British Socialist Workers Party, whose slogans and orientation they parroted), were in many cases the marshals of the parade and the promoters of the worst illusions about the nature of the war. At the first demonstration after the beginning of the war, a spokesperson for the IS, masquerading as a spokesperson for the anti-war coalition called for a boycott of American goods and services, and urged the crowd to buy Canadian goods because Canada was not supporting the war!
While many leftists echoed the liberal line "war is not the answer," others definitively opted to support one side in the conflict. The International Communist League (the Spartacists) and the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) organized around support for Iraq - the irony of the Spartacists naming their supporters in these mobilizations "The Revolutionary Internationalist Contingent" seemed to be lost on them.
However, within these demonstrations, there were small forces of internationalist opposition to the war. Together with other communists and some class struggle anarchists in Toronto, I helped to distribute materials of a revolutionary opposition to the war. In addition to the two Red & Black Notes statements, material by the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, the International Communist Current, and Internationalist Perspective was also distributed. These comrades also organized meetings in Toronto and Montreal under the heading of "No War But the Class," which featured speakers from Red & Black Notes, the IBRP, and the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists. It should also be noted that the Toronto group also produced its own leaflet in January of 2003 entitled "No to Capitalist War! No to Capitalist Peace." This leaflet, along with the ones produced by Red & Black Notes can be found at the Red & Black Notes web site along with a reply by the International Bolshevik Tendency and a rejoinder to them. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that while these efforts were important, they represented a very small voice in a dark time.
Before dealing with the criticisms of the leaflets, I want to deal with a couple of questions you raise. As you correctly assume, I reject both the "democratic" and the "fascist" sides in the Second World War, just as it was necessary to reject support for either side in the current conflict in Iraq. Capital is a global system, and the cause of the working class is not advanced by support for either the lesser imperialist powers against the larger ones, or the "democratic" capitalists against the "dictators." This policy is in stark contrast to the Trotskyists who, for all their anti-imperialist rhetoric, see nothing wrong with supporting bourgeois governments in their conflicts with larger powers. The IBT for its part took no side in the conflict between Iraq and Kuwait, yet hurried to defend Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003. Its rationale being, it is about "defeating imperialism" (in reality, supporting a small imperialist power against a larger one). In my reply to the IBT I asked, but received no reply, what would have been the logical extension of this policy for Iraqi militants: support Saddam Hussein? (militarily not politically of course). And would they advocate the shooting of deserters ("like pigeons"?) as scabbing on the defense of an "oppressed nation?"
It is necessary here to make a small correction in your article You quote the leaflet "A Plague on Both Your Houses" as stating "for some it's about defending imperialism," whereas the actual line was "for some it's about defeating imperialism," referring to the Trotskyist argument that the job of revolutionaries was to defeat the imperialism (and here they meant Iraq). My use of the phrase was intended to be ironic; nevertheless, the error does not affect your point.
Despite the general agreement in the framework of revolutionaries toward the attitude in the conflict, we clearly have some differences about the base cause of the war and minor tactical points within it. In the two leaflets I produced, it is argued that the root cause of the conflict was the crisis in the American economy, a position you likened to that of the IBRP who argue that this factor and US control of the oil markets are the key ideas. In contrast, you assert that the key factor was the collapse of the other global superpower and the US' need to assert its hegemony as against its European and pacific-rim rivals.
To begin with, I do not disagree that there is an element of "superpower" politics at play in the conflict, just as you do not deny the importance of economic factors. However, it seems that the US' actions, despite the national economy's weakness, are dictated from a position of strength. In your letter, you argue that the US' decision is based on the lesser imperialist powers challenging the US leadership, and the US needing to "engage in direct displays of its military power, as an attempt to keep its erstwhile allies in line." You further argue that my argument underestimates "the gravity of imperialist rivalries." However, in the following paragraphs you admit that "while there is an emerging conflict between the US and the EU, this is premature and the EU is a "sad fiction when it comes to exhibiting a united foreign policy." If this rebellion of the lesser powers was the impetus for the US to act, where was it coming from and who was leading it? I agree that France and Germany were the loudest voices in opposition, but as I noted in "A Plague on Both Your Houses" it was because they saw the US designs in strengthening its economy at their expense. While you argue that I have overstated the short-term economic impetus to war, it seems that you may have overstated the political.
Your letter also sees the "economic" explanation my view the holdouts would eventually fall into line for fear of losing out. While this expectation was largely unfounded, it has been negatively confirmed as the US has acted to punish those who did not send troops by withholding the lucrative contracts. Canada in particular, which has traditionally played the soft-cop peacekeeper under UN auspices, has been left whining about being denied contracts. If Germany and France had too much to lose by not going along, given the US' initial success, has discipline been strengthened or weakened?
As to the tactics which should be offered, I think you may have misconstrued their function. In the closing paragraphs of "No War But the Class War" leaflet, I suggested a number of possible scenarios which could take place. If my leaflet has led you to believe that I was putting forward a program for the working class to take up in resistance to the war, then I regret this impression. Obviously a few leaflets on the Internet or distributed in a crowd of tens of thousands will not be the "spark" which brings the revolution. These comments should not be likened to the call to arms made by many leftist organizations. I do not suggest that the revolution is around the corner, and to a large extent the actions did not go beyond the terrain of bourgeois politics.
However, it is important to remember that such actions could have had an important impact. Even the case of the UK firefighters strike, which did not ultimately transcend the union form, created a panic with the UK's ruling circles as it threatened to interfere with their war plans. While revolution is not always the end product, the class struggle can always be seen. As your statement of March 2003 correctly notes:
"The working class is not a mere passive victim of war. It was the mass strikes and mutinies of 1917-18 which brought the first world war to an end.Today the working class struggle can only be a defensive one. But it contains the seeds of an offensive revolutionary struggle, of a class war against the whole capitalist system."
Despite our differences on these questions, I look forward to further exchanges and discussion.
N, Red & Black Notes, 2-15-2004
As we go to press, the bourgeois media has already been ablaze for months with intense coverage of the Democratic primary race. The media campaign that always accompanies American presidential elections got off to an early start this time around, as pundits weighed in on the race months before the official start of primary season in January with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. As early as November of last year, the quirky former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, who positioned himself as a harsh critic of Bush's Iraq policy, was declared the democratic front-runner, with the media all but anointing him the Democratic candidate in 2004. Quite clearly, the American bourgeoisie deliberately used the media campaign surrounding the primary race to attempt to accomplish several distinct propaganda goals at once: distract the American public from the continuing chaos, death and destruction resulting from the war in Iraq, revitalize the Democratic party as a viable party of government, and once again drum-up illusions that the electoral process is the appropriate avenue through which to seek political and social change and have one's just grievances addressed.
This last goal corresponds to the general strategy of the American bourgeoisie to revitalize the image of bourgeois democracy following the debacle of 2000. In that election the Democratic Party candidate, Vice President Al Gore, won the popular vote but lost the presidency to Republican George W. Bush due to the Byzantine rules of the anachronistic Electoral College. It became evident in 2000 that as capitalism's decomposition advances, the bourgeoisie is tending to lose some ability to control and manipulate its electoral mechanism, and the bourgeoisie does not want to risk a repeat of that mess. Understandably, the election of 2000 left many voters with a bad taste in their mouth, fuelling the political alienation of many in a nation where most eligible voters already stay home on Election Day. The following three years of Bush's presidency have done little to heal the wounds. While Bush was able to reap some initial public relations benefits from the tragedy of 9/11, after which his approval ratings soared, his administration was unable to translate this propaganda coup into long-term political capital. Continuing concerns over spiralling American casualties in Iraq, the deteriorating economy, unemployment that won't go way, overseas job losses, soaring budget deficits in the face of huge tax cuts, and the administration's low credibility regarding pre-war justifications for the attack on Saddam Hussein have all begun to take their toll.
It is in this context, the bourgeois media initially hailed Governor Dean as an idealistic political outsider with a strong principled stand against the Iraq war. Dean's unorthodox organizational base, raising campaign funds almost exclusively over the Internet, was hailed by journalists and academics alike as evidence of an emerging 'post-modern social movement' based on a new 'electronic public sphere' of progressive activists. All of this was designed to lure disaffected young people back into the political fold and revive the democratic electoral mystification after the hard hit it took in the last election. Nevertheless, it is evident that the American bourgeoisie never had any real intention to make an ardent opponent of the war in Iraq like Dean the Democratic Party candidate for president. As quickly as the media built him up in November and December they took him apart in January and February. The media build-up and subsequent destruction of Howard Dean is an excellent demonstration of how bourgeois 'democracy' really works. With his utility as a presidential candidate exhausted, the media shamelessly replayed Dean's infamous 'scream,' from his speech after the Iowa caucuses to discredit him as unstable and therefore unfit to be president.
With Dean gone, the media next turned its attention to propping up Senator Kerry as an acceptable alternative, as a Democrat who could actually defeat George W. Bush in the General Election come November. 'Electability' now became the central theme, as the bourgeois media campaign to strengthen the electoral mystification now switched to rehabilitating the Democrats as a viable party of government. With the Bush administration in trouble on both the domestic and especially the foreign policy fronts, the American bourgeoisie is leaving all its options open for the moment. In case circumstances require a change at the top, it needs a Democratic candidate who not only can repair the electoral myth, but can also successfully lead the country to war in defense of its imperialist interests in the future, hopefully using a more convincing ideological justification than the kind Bush offered in Iraq. Kerry is being groomed as just that type of candidate. He is being painted as man who would be a reluctant warrior who would use military force only if absolutely necessary or for humanitarian purposes.
It is too early to say whether the bourgeoisie has decided that Bush should be replaced, but it is clear that this will be one of the longest running electoral circus in history. Usually the campaign doesn't start in earnest until after Labor Day, after the Democratic and Republican conventions during the summer, but the Bush campaign has already begun airing campaign commercials, and the conventions are still months away.
While the bourgeoisie tries its best to rehabilitate the image of its democratic facade, workers must refuse to fall for the trap. No matter which candidate comes out on top in November, the meaning for the working class will be the same: more austerity, more war, more death and more barbarism. In order to put an end to all this, the working class must search for its own identity and its own political response to capitalism's historic impasse, a response grounded firmly on its own class terrain. In order to achieve this, it must refuse to participate in the bourgeois electoral circus and recognize that the change begins, not in the voting booth, but on the shop-floor, in the necessary struggle to defend its living and working conditions from capitalism's attacks, and the class consciousness of the need to destroy the entire capitalism system that this struggle must generate.
Henk, 3/20/04.
Recently the American bourgeoisie finally gave up on one of the biggest lies it used to justify its war against Iraq. In January David A. Kay, the Bush administration's chief advisor on the search for weapons of mass destruction, publicly acknowledged that he did not believe that Iraq had possessed large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in the period prior to last year's American military invasion. So, it seems that the butcher of Baghdad was, after all, the one who was telling the truth - he no longer had so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "few months away," as the American government claimed, from producing a nuclear bomb - a key prop for the administration's case for the urgency of a pre-emptive war.
What brought on this sudden change of heart? Has the bourgeoisie suddenly become honest and willing to correct the historical record? One has to be really naive or a member of the bourgeois press corps to think so. The reality is that this lie, among the other cynical lies that the Bush administration used to justify the war against Iraq, had become over time totally untenable. Almost a year after the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime and millions of dollars and countless man-hours expended on the hunt for WMDs, this bogey-man seems to have disappeared into thin air. In Great Britain - America's main partner in its pre-emptive war on Iraq - this false explanation of the war has been totally discredited for a long time. The Blair government's schoolboy like assemblage of data on the weapons capabilities of Iraq from questionable Internet sources has been amply documented before and after the war. Thus in these circumstances Mr. Kay's admission that "sorry there were not WMD after all" is not surprising and was surely decided upon by the government in order to get rid of an uncomfortable issue, especially in the context of an election year.
However even now what the bourgeoisie is saying is only half true. For one thing, the Bush administration cannot openly admit that it misrepresented, misled, exaggerated or, to say it clearly, lied, about the WMD issue in order to rally the population and particularly the working class to support for the war effort. On the contrary, now we are being asked to believe that the representatives of the dominant class were duped, the innocent victims of "intelligence failure" of American spy agencies. This is the new myth being created, and in the end it seems that the initial little scandal around Mr. Kay's declaration is destined to die out in the comfortable backrooms of the investigation commissions that American democracy is so fond of. Thus the unmasking of the cynical lie about the dangerous threat to America posed by a mad man, quasi-armed with atomic weapons, has ended with Mr. Bush's decision to appoint a major bipartisan inquiry into the "intelligence failure" that was unable to see that Hussein was not so dangerous after all. The trick has worked so well that the issue has almost disappeared from the main bourgeois press, which reflects on the one hand, the unity of all the factions of the bourgeoisie on the war against Iraq and on the other the concern of the dominant class about the potential impact of the exposure of the fabrications that justified this military adventure.
From the point of view of the working class one thing should be clear - there should be no surprise that the bourgeoisie lies consciously and cynically when it asks for the blood and flesh of "its" workers to defend its imperialist interests. This is what revolutionaries have been saying about all the justifications that the ruling class used to draw the support of the working class for its war against Iraq. For instance a year ago, in Internationalism 125, we wrote: "The Bush administration has given over the last months many "praiseworthy" explanations for this new military adventure. It has said, attempting still to exploit the patriotic feelings awaken in the American population after the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the cities of New York and Washington, that this war is a war against terrorism. It has said that this war is a pre-emptive action to disarm Iraq of 'weapons of mass destruction' that could have been used in the future against American interest. It has said that this war has the goal of changing Iraq's regime and the overthrowing of a bloody dictator that threatened its neighbors and oppressed its own people. It has said -and this is the preferred theme lately- that this is a war aimed to liberate the Iraqi population, a war meant to bring prosperity, peace and the democratic panacea to the Iraqis and the Middle East region at large. These explanations are cynical lies."
That Iraq had become a military midget after its defeat during the first Gulf war and the sanctions that followed was a fact only hidden by the American bourgeoisie and a propaganda machine interested in justifying its military presence in the Middle East during the 90's and its open military offensive initiative in Afghanistan and the war against Iraq that followed.
In any case, the use of terrorism, the alleged possession of "weapons of mass destruction," the oppression of its "own population" were not attributes solely of Hussein's regime, but rather are the shared characteristics of all capitalist states in the world no matter how democratic or dictatorial their political regime. The US is no exception to this rule. Historically its dominant class has not hesitated either to use terrorism or "weapons of mass destruction" when it suited its political interests. Let's not forget that the US possesses a military arsenal capable of destroying the world several times over. Once again there is nothing out of the ordinary about the dishonesty of the bourgeoisie. The dominant class can't just tell the exploited class -the one that has always, in one way or another, borne the brunt of the military adventures of its exploiters - that a military action is needed in order to advance or defend the political, economic or military strategic needs of the State. In order to convince people that killing, and being killed, is a worthy cause, the dominant class has to ideologically mystify the population and in particular the working class. The imperialist world wars and the equally imperialist various local wars in which the Western and the Stalinist blocs confronted each other for decades had always been justified with one or another ideological theme. The "anti-terrorist" and democratic banner that the US is today waving to justify its world-wide war campaign is nothing but a fa?ade behind which stand the desperate efforts of a frightened imperial power determined to defend its hegemony over the world. These are the lessons that workers need to draw of the reveal dishonesty of the bourgeoisie.
Eduardo Smith, 3/20/04.
We have just received a report that Frank Girard, who edited and published - virtually single-handedly - the Discussion Bulletin for twenty years from 1983 to 2003 died last month at the age of 77. Frank had been a member of the Socialist Labor Party (the De Leonist organization in the U.S.) from the 1940s until his expulsion in the early 1980s, even running for political office on the SLP ticket. He began the Discussion Bulletin as an open forum for the exchange of political views by De Leonists, anarchists, libertarians, left communists, etc. - what he called "non-market socialists." Not only were the pages of Discussion Bulletin open to a wide range of political views, but the publication appeared like clockwork on a bimonthly basis, something of a rarity in this political milieu.
The ICC had many polemical exchanges with Frank, particularly on the political legacy of De Leonism, especially its blind spot when it came to the mystifications of bourgeois democracy. Despite its opposition to reformism, and despite the lessons of history, De Leonism, and Frank, persisted in a na?ve belief that capitalism could be overthrown at the ballot box. We also frequently criticized Frank for not publishing more exchanges on contemporary issues facing the working class, especially imperialist war. He once told us in a letter that he didn't republish any of the leaflets or articles against the various American imperialist ventures in the 1990s because all the groups had the same position, even though there were many different analyses for the causes of the war, and proposals for how the working class could oppose war. He finally seemed to take this criticism to heart at the time of the most recent US invasion of Iraq by publishing a collection of leaflets by various groups.
Whatever criticisms we made of Frank, and he of us, it was always clear that they were made as part of a fraternal debate between comrades who were committed to the destruction of capitalism and the liberation of the working class. When Frank Girard made the decision to cease publication we urged him not to. We argued that the Discussion Bulletin played an invaluable role of mutually introducing to each other the elements of a very disparate, far flung political milieu. After the publication of the last issue of Discussion Bulletin last July, we sent Frank a letter saluting his efforts on behalf of the proletariat, wishing him well in his retirement, and giving him a subscription for life to the press of the ICC. We had no idea at the time that his life would sadly end so soon. We extend our condolences and solidarity to the family and friends of Frank Girard.
Internationalism, 3/20/04.
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 [8] (#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.
For four days in July the Democratic Convention occupied the center ring in this year?s electoral circus. Political conventions for the ruling class in America are media events par excellence, as was demonstrated by the fact that media personnel outnumbered delegates 15,000 to 3,000. It was all part and parcel of the bourgeoisie?s efforts to revive the electoral mystification that was so badly tarnished in the debacle of 2000.
Media pundits made it clear that they agreed with Democratic candidate John Kerry that ?this is the most important election of our lifetime. The stakes are high,? as he put it in his acceptance speech. The incessant propaganda message is that this election offers voters a stark choice about the future of America, and humanity, and it would be irresponsible to sit this one out. However when you push aside all the hype and empty rhetoric, it?s quite clear that this election, like all capitalist elections, is an ideological swindle, a charade designed to make the working class falsely believe that democracy works and that government is controlled by the will of the people. Quite the contrary is true: no matter who wins the election in November, the policies of the American government will be substantially the same: the bourgeoisie will still send young workers to fight and die for the interests of American imperialism around the world, especially in Iraq, and the economic crisis will continue to erode the standard of living. Republican and Democratic Foreign Policy Is Essentially the Same
Despite the fury of the criticisms heaped against Bush, the differences between Kerry and Bush on foreign policy are largely secondary, confined to questions of style in the implementation of the same imperialist strategy. All major factions of the American ruling class share the same strategic imperialist goal ? assure that the US maintains its imperialist hegemony as the only remaining superpower by preventing the emergence of any rival power or rival bloc. Kerry?s criticism of Bush focuses on three main points: the botched ideological and propaganda campaign to justify the war; the failure to pressure the major European powers to acquiesce in the war; and the failure to plan an effective occupation of Iraq.
The Bush administration?s ideological and propaganda justifications for the war (WMD, Iraq?s alleged ties to al Qaeda and implied links to 9/11) have all been thoroughly discredited. This seriously undermines the ability of the US to mobilize the population for more wars and military interventions, which is a weakness for American imperialism since the continuing challenges to its dominance require ever more military interventions. It?s not that Kerry rejects Bush?s ideological justifications; his criticism is that Bush?s mistakes have squandered the gains made after 9/11 in whipping up patriotism and war fever. Despite the fact that all of Bush?s rationalizations for the invasion have proven to be outright lies, Kerry still supports the invasion and defends his vote in favor of authorizing the war. Under pressure from barbs from Pres. Bush, Kerry stated that even knowing what he knows today about the situation in Iraq, he would still have voted in favor of the war authorization, but if he were president he would have used the authorization differently, to take the time to secure international support for the war and reconstruction. Since all the arguments used by Bush were lies, presumably Kerry would have told the same lies more effectively or would have conjured up a different batch of more plausible lies.
The capitalist media portrays the foreign policy debate as a clash between Bush?s unilateralism and Kerry?s multilateralism, but this is a gross distortion. Ever since World War II, US imperialism has always acted unilaterally in the defense of its imperialist interests as a superpower. Even during the cold war, when the western bloc was intact, the US always acted on its own initiative and in its own interests, whether it was in intervening in Korea, or in chastising Britain and France for supporting Israel in the invasion of the Sinai in 1956, or the Cuban Missile Crisis , or in Vietnam, or in the decision taken by Carter in the late 1970s, and implemented by Reagan in the early 1980s, to deploy intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe. As the head of the bloc, the US was easily able to oblige its subordinates in the bloc to go along with its decisions (with the occasional exception of the French bourgeoisie which sometimes acted out its own delusions of independence in resisting American policies).
With the collapse of the bloc system at the end of the 1980s, the cement that held the western bloc together dissolved, the tendency for each nation to try to play its own imperialist card emerged, and the discipline that obliged each member of the bloc to accept American diktats evaporated. It became more difficult for American imperialism to force its will on the other states. The first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 was more designed to remind its former allies that the US was the only superpower in the world and that it was necessary to follow its leadership, than it was to contain Iraqi imperialist appetites. (After all the American ambassador had purposely misled Saddam Hussein into believing that the US had given Iraq the green light to invade Kuwait in their border dispute when he was told that the US ?would not take sides? in a dispute between Arab brothers.) Throughout the 1990s, even during the Clinton years, American imperialism acted increasingly alone in the international arena when it exercised military force, as it became more and more difficult to pressure the European powers to accept American diktats. So, the extreme unilateralism of the Bush administration in the Iraq invasion, is consistent with the evolution of American policy over the past 15 years and not an abrupt break in policy, even if it is a bit heavy handed and clumsily implemented..
Kerry?s promise that he will bring other nations back into the fold is simply a proposal to be more patient and more effective in the efforts to get them to accept American policy, not a promise to abandon unilateralism. In his acceptance speech, Kerry said, ?I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security.? So, like Bush, he wouldn?t let the United Nations Security Council block the US from waging a war, when the US government decides it is necessary to do so. In the final analysis no matter who is president, American imperialism will continue to act unilaterally. Kerry and the Democrats Are Just as Much a War Party as the GOP
Anyone who thinks this election is a clash between hawks and doves needs to have his/her head examined. Kerry may have been briefly involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement in the early 1970s after his two tours of duty in Vietnam, but he and the Democrats made it abundantly clear at the convention that they are just as blood thirsty and dedicated to waging imperialist war as their Republican counterparts. It was no accident that the Democrats paraded 12 retired generals and admirals on the stage at the convention, and produced a special film in which these military giants explained how the strategic and diplomatic errors of the Bush administration in implementing American strategic goals were weakening America in the world. Kerry and his generals made a bid to show that it is the Democrats who are better able to mobilize the population for war, challenging the right?s claim to a monopoly on patriotism. Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark said, ?This flag is ours! And nobody will take it from us.? Kerry said, ?For us, that flag is the most powerful symbol of who we are and what we believe in. Our strength. Our diversity. Our love of country. All that makes America both great and good.
?That flag doesn?t belong to any president. It doesn?t belong to any ideology and it doesn?t belong to any political party. It belongs to all the American people.? Kerry criticized Bush for squandering all the unity and patriotic fervor that gripped the population in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He promises to regain that unity in support of American imperialism by making patriotism palatable again for workers and all those disenchanted with the war in Iraq and putting forth believable arguments for war. Kerry also promises to ?build a stronger American military,? by increasing the armed forces by 40,000, doubling ?our special forces to conduct antiterrorist operations,? and developing new weapons and technology. Not exactly a peace candidate.
In the final analysis, the ?most important election of our lifetime? boils down to a choice between two candidates who offer differ styles in mobilizing the population for and unleashing imperialist war. This surely is the hallmark of freedom in capitalist democracy, a system that offers death, destruction, terror, and repression, no matter who wins the election.
J. Grevin, Aug. 16, 2004
In the last few days, the situation in Iraq has once again returned to the front pages of the bourgeois daily papers. The latest attempt of the US forces to crush the radical shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his ?Mahdi army? in their Najaf stronghold has spurred a new wave of violence across Iraq, from the slums of Baghdad to practically all Shiite cities of southern Iraq. Cities and towns are being bombed and hit by rockets, adding untold numbers of dead and injured to the growing list of victims in this latest example of capitalist barbarism. The much ballyhooed ?return of sovereignty to the Iraqi people? at the end of June notwithstanding, after over a over one year since ?major hostilities? were declared over, the war shows no signs of abating. The American casualties of war are reaching one thousand soldiers dead while thousands have been injured and condemned to a life of physical pain and psychological problems. And regardless of the many promises that preceded the US invasion of Iraq, there won?t be road to a prosperous, peaceful and ?democratic? Iraq.
A year after the overthrow of Sadam Hussein the rationalizations that the American bourgeoisie used to launch its war against Iraq have been exposed to be nothing but gross fabrications. Today even school children know that the Bush administration lied about the whole issue of ?weapons of mass destruction? in supposedly in the possession of the Iraqi regime. The very people that the American paid to find Iraq?s secret weapons and illicit armaments programs have concluded that there were no such things after all. The same goes for the supposed involvement of Sadam Hussein in the September 11 attacks to New York and Washington. The reality is that there has never been any evidence to substantiate the Bush administration?s claim of links between Sadam Hussein and the terrorists of al Qaeda.
Now the actions to crush the new Shiite uprising and the behavior of the brand new ?Iraqi government? are putting a couple more nails in the coffin of the much worn-out American political credibility.
The US invaded Iraq, the myth goes, among other things, in order to ?liberate? the oppressed Shiite population that Saddam Hussein had so ruthlessly victimized. The massacres that ended the 1991 Shiite uprising were used as one more proof of the immorality of Iraq?s regime. In this regard, it is worth remembering that after the first Gulf war, the US encouraged the Shiite population to revolt but left the butcher of Baghdad enough military force to easily suppress the rebellion. Nevertheless, despite being let down previously by American imperialism, when the US invaded Iraq last year, the Shiite population welcomed of the US ?liberators,? even if they did not join in the fighting. Now it is within this same Shiite population that the opposition and hatred for the Americans is among the strongest in Iraq. Last May, after battling Moqtada Al-Sadr?s militia for over a month, the US reached a face-saving political compromised that averted an all-out assault against the holy city of Najaf and other strongholds of its supporters. Now, at a time when the Bush administration is so much in need of being to point to some kind of success of its policy in Iraq, the US seems to have gone back to square one. Neither a military solution nor a new political compromise with Al-Sadr and his supporters can help the US out of the quagmire in Iraq. At the military level, despite the fact that unlike last April, it has the option of using the resurrected ?Iraqi army? as a first line of attack, thus putting an Iraqi face to its military operations, still an all-out military assault to crush Al-Sadr and his supporters will further alienate the Shiite population and discredit even more the puppet government of Iyad Allawi. On the other hand a political compromise with Al-Sadar and his militia has no better chance of success and can only erode more American political credibility. It is this dilemma that explains the constant change of course and hesitations of the US and its creature, the Iraqi ?provisional government,? in dealing with the new Shiite uprising. Meanwhile the carnage goes on sinking the whole population in a nightmarish situation far removed from the promise of peace and prosperity that the US used to justify the overthrow of Sadam Hussein.
Regarding its self-proclaimed mission of bringing ?democracy? to Iraq, US actions are also in blatant contrast to its promises. Faced with an obvious crisis in its military adventure in Iraq, the Bush administration has been trying recently to give same credence to its suppose intention, as Bush said, of ?helping the long suffering people of Iraq to build a decent and democratic society at the center of the Middle East.? Now the US version of this ?decent and democratic? Iraq is its new puppet government led by Iyad Allawi an ex-Bathist head of an exile organization, the so called Iraqi National Accord, made up largely of ex-Baathist military officers, backed by the CIA and Britain?s MI6, known for planting car bombs in downtown Baghdad in the 1990?s. Mr. Allawi has lost no time in showing his democratic colors reinstating the death penalty for more or less all acts of rebellion, instituting a curfew in Sadr city and banning the Arab television network Al-Jazeera.
Despite the Bush administration?s promise that the invasion of Iraq would lead to peace, democracy, and stability, not only in Iraq, but in all of the Middle East, the situation is completely the opposite. The war rages on, the stillborn ?democracy? implements repression that the Americans could never have dared to impose as an occupying power, ?prosperity? is not even a relevant word, the country faces greater instability, and the chaos is spreading throughout the Middle East.
Eduardo Smith.
The US war of independence, 1776-1783, helped unify the new bourgeois class in North America, defined the nation-state and, therefore, sped up the development of capitalism. The consolidation of capitalism as a system, along with the extension of the market, shaped the American bourgeoisie?s perception of the European colonial powers, then present in the American continent as dominant forces, as enemies to fight on the economic and military terrains. This aspect of the dynamic of capitalism led the US to develop the Monroe doctrine (1823), which it used to shape the diplomatic argument in support of the national independence movements in the Latin American countries. In fact, though, it would be a threat to the old colonial powers of Europe, insofar as the declaration of ?America for the Americans? presented by the Doctrine, served a mechanism for the American bourgeoisie to define the American continents as territory under its own domination, and thus designated Latin America as its own ?backyard?.
It is clear that the domination of the US on the continent is due to the economic difficulties in Latin America, which prevented the dynamic of accumulation of capital to occur at the same rate as in the North. We need to underline, though, that this backwardness is also attributed to political difficulties, which prevented the unification of the bourgeoisie and the perspective of the unification of the Latin American nation-states. The degree of dispersion was so high that well into the middle of the 19th century in a great part of the Latin American continent internal conflicts existed which destroyed the social fabric and did not allow capitalism to proceed in the destruction of the vestiges of old modes of production. About the understanding of how such conflicts cause a ?delay? in the development of history, Engels, following the same idea exposed by Marx in the ?Communist Review? #1, London, 1847, wrote in ?The Revolutionary Movements of 1847?: ?We have witnessed with satisfaction the defeat of Mexico by the United States. This represents an advancement, because when a country is up to its neck in imbroglio, perpetually weakened by civil wars and with no way out for its own development (?) when this country is forcefully pushed into historical development, we can?t help but regard this as a step forward. In the interests of its own development, it was appropriate that Mexico fell under the ?protection? of the United States.? The Politics of Strangulation: An expression of capitalist decadence
It was in this way that the development of capitalism in North America and the backwardness in the rest of the continent helped establish the ties of domination by Uncle Sam (1). By the end of the 19th century the US had widened its territorial extension through the military invasion of Mexico and the domination of Puerto Rico and Cuba with the Treaty of Paris (1898). Doubtlessly, this tendency was reinforced when the system entered its period of decadence, around the first decades of the 20th century. During this period, the US used the ?Roosevelt corollary?(1904) to justify its right to invade Latin American territories where American property was endangered. The US? threatening and belligerent attitude was confirmed by the expansion of its economic and military power over Panama and its canal. Although the US stayed out of the first imperialist butchery of 1914 until 1917, it continued to strengthen its dominance over all the Americas. Its power widened globally through its participation in the Second World War, and was consolidated through the formation of the Western Bloc and the beginning of the Cold War. During this period of imperialist struggles between the two blocs (US and USSR), the US did not cease to pay attention to and be aggressive toward its ?allies?, the minor Latin American imperialisms. The US took special care that the imperialist forces of the opposing bloc (the USSR) did not intrude in the continent (2). This situation gave birth to the Organization of American States, with programs such as the ?Alliance for Progress?, and the structuring of the ?Schools for the Americas? (founded in 1946 in Panama for the military training and the ?teaching? of torture to Latin American soldiers) along with military incursions, among others: Guatemala (1954), Dominican Republic (1965), Granada (1983. We should not forget the long list of coup d?etats directed by the US in the South American countries during the 70?s. The ?danger of the Soviet bloc? was used by the US as a pretext to justify its invasions of the Latin American countries. When the Soviet bloc fell the new ?world order? of peace and prosperity which the US promised did not materialize in Latin America or anywhere else in the world. Plan Colombia: Uncle Sam reasserts its power in Latin-America
Contrary to the propaganda spread by the bourgeoisie, the collapse of the Stalinist bloc has not brought the ?reign of peace?. Rather, the loss of the underlying reason for the adherence of imperialist countries in a bloc (the confrontation with the other bloc), formed the basis for the tendency toward continuous confrontations, and the loss of a lasting framework for cohesion. In this ?new order?, various imperialist forces have challenged the leadership of the US, to the point where they have established a presence in Latin America, violating the sanctity ofUncle Sam?s backyard. Since the fall of the Eastern bloc, anti-US feelings have proliferated within the every Latin American bourgeoisie, as in the case of Fujimori and his overtures to Japanese imperialism, the birth of the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN), which is supported by various European imperialist powers, and the attention given to Cuba by European capital. Lately, H. Chavez of Venezuela has become a problem for the US, not because his government puts in question the capitalist relations of production, but because it can be converted into a beachhead through which rival imperialist forces can intervene in Venezuela and the rest of Latin America.
Faced with the continuous threat by its imperialist rivals, the US hopes to regain its leadership by means of force, as demonstrated in Iraq, and even if Latin America does not pose the same level of confrontation in terms of political, military, or economic strategic issues as the Middle East, and therefore does not require actions of the same magnitude, the necessity to strengthen US power over the area is not diminished. This is why with the so-called Plan Colombia (Pl-Co) (3), the US hopes to regain its power over the South American continent as a whole.
Using the fight against drug trafficking and the Colombian guerrillas -over which the US is more and more losing control, and which open the door to the support or the intervention of European capital- as a pretext, the US has implemented a process of militarization by which it will soon ?remind? the local bourgeoisies of which political alliances they have to follow. The US military presence is a threat for anti-US sentiments. Although it cannot mobilize a great number of soldiers (it has only deployed 500, officially), and its attention is for now focused on the Middle East, the US utilizes Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and Panamanian soldiers in a military unit to keep control of the southern horn, opening out from Colombia..
This military project obviously shows how desperate North American capital is to regain lost terrain. Most importantly, this expresses the level of barbarism attained by capitalism. In fact, not only are the bombings of civilian populations activated (at levels that are at times greater than the ones reached in El Salvador during the confrontations of the 80?s against the guerrillas), but also, highly toxic chemicals are being used to destroy coca plantations (4), causing the displacement of great numbers of people who, in the process, become pauperized.
The implementation of Pl-Co has produced a slow but steady process which has not stopped in the face of the claims made by European imperialist powers. In October 2000, the spokesperson for the European Union (EU), Renaud Vignal, in an open criticism of the North American project said: ?Plan Colombia is not my plan?The position of the French government and the EU regarding Plan Colombia is that it?s not our business?. In the same way, at the 2nd Conference of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the European Union (ALCUE, 2002), the European powers made a ?subtle? critique of Pl-Co by calling for a ?negotiated solution?. This caused alarm in the US, and that?s why it has been fixed up a bit in certain areas which could raise doubts about its purpose or cause discontent among the Latin-American bourgeoisie. It was at the 3rd ALCUE (May 2004) that, although the US did not participate, its presence was felt through the announcement that the Mexican government, which traditionally has played the role of the US? ?best man? in Latin America, will establish ties with sectors of the Colombian guerrillas, in particular with the National Liberation Front to negotiate the disarmament. Ties will not be established with the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias de Colombia), which has been so close to the European Union that at the time of the government-FARC ?dialog? in 2002, the EU agreed to discuss financial support with the guerrillas. The US rapprochement with the NLF allows for the neutralization of forces over which the US had lost control, while at the same time preparing the terrain for a better development of its military adventure.
Latin America has been traditionally under the political control of the US, but if it is to be so in the future, it is necessary to strengthen the US military presence in order to stop ?the radical positions [which fuel] anti-American feelings?, as mentioned in the March 2004 report by J.Hill, Chief of the Southern Command.
Under these circumstances, the working class cannot take sides for any of the disputing imperialist forces. Neither can it get involved in the ?defense of the nation?. The only alternative the working class has in the face of the acceleration of war and barbarism in Latin America, as in the rest of the world, is the combat against the real cause of humanity?s sufferings: capitalism.
Tatlin, July 2004.
Notes:
1. This process of domination is the product of the predatory nature of capitalism and it does not have a solution. This is why the nationalist and ?independentist? ideas postulated by the ?Latin-America economic school?, promoted by the UNO through CEPAL in the 60?s and 70?s, and which are nostalgically used today by the left apparatus of capital, are false.
2. It?s important to remember that in preparation for WWII the US led -or at least complacently allowed, as the British government expressed it ? the oil expropriation of Mexico. Although this benefited North American companies mostly, and above all the Sinclair Pierce Group, it also negatively affected the British oil companies, and, by means of the ?good neighbor policy?, the Mexican oil production became tied up with the US war economy.
3. Plan Colombia (1998) was initially called ?Plan of development for Colombia?s south?.
4. Some reporters point out that ?fusarim oxyporum? is spread indiscriminately. This chemical, they say, caused ebola in Africa.
We are daily being bombarded with propaganda about how absolutely important the election is this year from the media, politicians, labor leaders, clergy, academia, civil rights leaders, rock stars, movie stars, and anti-war movement leaders ? from all the institutions that prop up the capitalist state. We are told that this is the most crucial election in our lifetime, that the future of humanity literally hangs in the balance. But it?s all a load of nonsense.
The differences between Bush and Kerry are minimal - confined to secondary issues of style, different approaches to implementing the same goals. They share the same commitment to maintaining US imperialist hegemony, the same strategic goal of preventing the emergence of any country that could challenge US domination as the world?s only superpower. They both support the war in Iraq. They both seek to whip up patriotic fever so they can plunge us into still more wars in the years ahead. They both pledge to strengthen the armed forces and thus accelerate the militarization of American society. They both support increasing state repression ? Bush through the US Patriot Act and Kerry through his pledge to implement immediately the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which include establishment of a domestic espionage network that will dwarf anything the FBI ever did. They both defend capitalism and the ruthless exploitation of the working class, in the US and around the world.
Sure, they appear to diverge sharply on secondary social questions like abortion, ecology, and stem cell research, but these are hot button issues that the capitalist class doesn?t really plan to ever resolve one way or the other. They cynically use these controversies to to whip up political emotions and distract attention from the fundamental problems of capitalism?s economic crisis and the class struggle. These divergences are more for show than anything else.
Today, elections have lost any meaning except as a mystification, as a means to confuse, trick and manipulate the working class into thinking it was ?free.? Bourgeois democracy is in fact the most sophisticated and pernicious form of class dictatorship the world has ever seen, the class dictatorship of capitalism. In the period of capitalism?s development when elections mattered, the bourgeoisie resisted the expansion of the franchise tooth and nail. Now that elections are useless except as an ideological mystification they keep expanding the franchise, making it easier and easier to register and vote ? because they want to suck more people into the charade.
For the working class, it is meaningless to participate in deciding which capitalist politician will be the titular head of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. For the working class, it is the class struggle, the uncompromising defense of working class interests, that is the only thing that makes sense. It is this struggle, which inevitably puts the working class into confrontation with the state, that holds the seeds of the revolutionary struggle that is capable of destroying the capitalist state and its horrid economic system, and making possible the creation of a genuinely human social community, led and controlled by the working class, organized in workers councils. In such a society the guiding principle will be the fulfillment of social need, not the exploitation of labor and drive for profits. Whoever wins in November the fundamental orientation of the American state will be the same ? imperialist war abroad and austerity at home.
Internationalism, August 17, 2004.
The following letter to the editor was sent to Red & Black Notes in response to an article by Loren Goldner analyzing the California grocery workers strike which was published in issue #19 of that publication. Internationalism.
While we wouldn't use the same words or formulations, there are certainly many things in Loren Goldner's 'Notes on Another Defeat for Workers in the US: The Los Angeles Supermarket Strike of 2003-2004,' which was published Red & Black Notes #19, that are on the right track. For example, we agree that the grocery workers' fight was an important strike for American workers in the struggle to resist capitalist attacks on their living standards in the form of cutbacks in their medical benefits and that it ended in a serious defeat. It's also accurate to say that the strikers were militant and enthusiastic, and that other workers were sympathetic and wanted to demonstrate their solidarity. Who could disagree with observations that the unions followed the same 'localist and legalist strategies of so many losing strikes of previous years,' that the union kept the strikers 'under control, and that 'no mass meetings were held to discuss strike strategy.' And it is clear that 'the decisive factor in the defeat was the absence of any challenge to the union strategy from the UFCW rank-and-file.'
However, the article falls terribly short in explaining why this terrible defeat occurred. Goldner doesn't seem to understand why the unions persist is such disastrous tactics year after year. He thinks perhaps that 'they underestimated the willingness and ability of the three chains to lose millions of dollars in order to break the power of the unions,' or that 'it is possible that the UFCW leadership in Southern California thought they could win, based on the early momentum, not realizing that the supermarkets had national backing and a national strategy.' Essentially, Goldner's explanation boils down to this: the union leaders underestimated, they didn't realize, they didn't understand. In other words, they made mistakes. A possible implication of such an analysis could be that different union leaders smart enough understand their adversaries and to use different strategies and tactics could have won the strike - though of course Goldner's article does not specifically advocate such a reformist, leftist view.
This kind of analysis is totally inadequate. It reflects a wrong understanding of the class nature of trade unions in this period of capitalism. First of all, this struggle was not an attempt to 'break the power of the unions,' as Goldner suggests. It was all about cutting the standard of living of the working class, pure and simple. It is usually the unions and their leftist choir groups that raise the 'union busting' slogan as a way to divert attention from the true nature of the bosses' attacks on the workers, often as a way to celebrate an allege 'victory' when the union's 'security' is maintained even as the workers suffer wage cuts and layoffs. If anything, in this strike, it was the power of the unions that was used effectively to defeat the strike and help American capitalism as a whole, and not just the three national corporations involved, to achieve a significant victory in scaling back the medical benefits for American workers.
The supermarket strike failed because the strike remained firmly under union control from start to finish and trade unions are no longer organizations of the working class. Unions once were defensive organizations of the working class in an earlier period capitalist development, but for nearly a century since the period of the First World War they been integrated into the state apparatus of capitalism. As we wrote in Internationalism 130, "unions are part of the capitalist state, the arm of the ruling class, charged with the specific function of controlling the working class, and rendering its anger, combativeness, and solidarity harmless for capitalism. The lesson that workers must remember is that the way to advance the struggle is to push aside the unions and take control of the struggle into their own hands." In the supermarket strike, the unions and the union leaders didn't make any mistakes; they did the job that they are supposed to do for capitalism - and they did it quite well.
Internationalism June 24, 2004.
Despite the fact that the Democratic convention was an orgy of flag waving patriotism and war mongering, the so-called anti-war movement did not march in the streets. This movement demonstrated clearly that it is an appendage of the Democratic party with the specific function of controlling and manipulating the growing discontent with the imperialist war in Iraq for purposes of the factional disputes within the bourgeoisie. All the anti-war spokespersons within the Democratic party abandoned their opposition to the war for the sake of party unity in defeating Bush. Howard Dean, whose whole campaign in the primaries was based on a denunciation of the war and a call for withdrawal from Iraq, voiced his support for Kerry. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the self-styled ?progressive? candidate, who had previously called for the creation of a Department of Peace in the cabinet, likewise squelched his anti-war perspective, as did Ted Kennedy and Al Sharpton. Tom Hayden, the former SDS leader, a member of the Chicago Seven who faced federal charges for his role in leading protests at the 1968 Chicago convention, called upon the anti-war movement not to protest or disrupt the Democratic convention, but to support efforts to elect Kerry and defeat Bush. Farenheit 9/11 filmmaker Michael Moore not only voiced his support for the Democrats but promised to take his cameras to Florida on election day to make sure that the Republicans didn?t steal this election, like they did in 2000.Despite their leftist credentials, the leaders of United for Peace and Justice, which took the lead in organizing the massive protests on the eve of the Iraq war, also lined up behind the Democratic party, ignoring the Democratic war mongering. Instead they concentrated their efforts on organizing an anti-Bush demonstration at the Republican convention in New York at the end of August.
Once it became clear that dominant fractions of the ruling class had come to recognize that a division of labor between the two major political parties that coincided with the best interests of the national capital rested on the election of John Kerry, the mass media quickly fell into line to help facilitate this result. The first inklings of this came in the positive coverage of Kerry’s speech at New York University in September, where he changed position and clearly denounced the war in Iraq as the wrong war at the wrong time, a distraction from the war against terrorism and the crusade to find and kill Osama bin Laden. But the first clear expression of the media’s new orientation came in the coverage of the first presidential debate, focused on foreign policy – supposedly Bush’s strong card, according to the media pundits. The media made it clear that Kerry was the big winner in that debate, that Bush was the big loser, and that Kerry and the Democrats had emerged from the debate with a renewed confidence and self-assurance.
Soon afterwards, the vice presidential debate pitted the experienced Dick Cheney against the newcomer John Edwards. Again the media coverage of the debate emphasized an important breakthrough for the Democrats. Cheney had launched a blistering attack in the debate against what he called Edwards’ “undistinguished” career in the Senate. Cheney charged that though he presides over the meetings of the Senate, he had never met Edwards until they walked on stage for the debate. The media was all over this charge and by the 7:00 am news shows the next day had gathered video tape of at least three occasions when the Cheney and Edwards had met. One showed the two men sitting side by side at Senate prayer breakfast. Whatever advantage Cheney had had during the debate quickly evaporated with the exposure of his blatant lie.
The media moved quickly after the third presidential debate when Bush had scoffed at Kerry’s charge that the President had publicly stated that he was not concerned about bin Laden. When Bush made that denial, Kerry simply grinned. Perhaps he knew that by the next morning the media would produce video to show that Bush had indeed made such a comment at a press conference, again exposing the Republicans as liars.
ABC News executives subsequently issued a memorandum to their staff which argued that while both candidates were distorting and stretching the truth in their campaign speeches and political commercials, Kerry’s distortions tended to involve only peripheral issues, but Bush’s dealt with issues at the heart of the campaign. The memo therefore instructed network journalists to highlight these gross distortions in their coverage.
Officials in the permanent bureaucracy seeking to influence the course of the election began leaking a series of damaging stories to expose Bush administration errors and wrongdoing, particularly in regard to Iraq. The media promptly picked up these stories and gave them wide exposure, including reports about the Bush administration’s efforts to create secret changes in the military justice system that circumvented the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Central players in this scandal were Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Attorney General Ashcroft, and White House aides. The plan was so secret that neither Secretary of State Colin Powell nor National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice were informed. An anonymous source within the CIA reported that there had been widespread opposition to the plan because it violated American democratic principles. Yet another damaging story concerned the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives that American troops had failed to secure and which had probably fallen into the “wrong” hands and are probably being used against American forces in Iraq. And just a week before the election, sources in the FBI leaked details of a planned criminal investigation of Halliburton’s preferential treatment in the granting of lucrative no-bid contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. (VP Cheney was the chief executive of Halliburton prior to the 2000 election.) The media also gave prominent and sympathetic play to the story of the 19 soldiers who refused a direct order to participate in a supply caravan to deliver fuel supplies in Iraq, because they complained it was a “suicide mission” because their trucks were not armored and they would not have an armed escort. Rather than portraying these soldiers as mutineers and cowards, stories described them sympathetically, as brave and honorable soldiers fed up with being poorly supplied and armed – exactly what the Kerry campaign had been charging for weeks.
One media commentator even noted a shift in coverage by the pro-Bush media controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. For example, the NY Post ran a picture of Bush and Kerry standing side by side after one of the presidential debates, which unflatteringly depicted Kerry towering over the president. One Bush-Cheney campaign official reportedly complained, “Couldn’t they choose a better angle?”(amNew York, Oct. 21, 2004)
Yet another example of the media falling into line could be seen in what happened with the threat by pro-Bush Sinclair Media company to air a 45-minute anti-Kerry documentary attacking Kerry’s Vietnam war record on the 60 local stations it owns across the country, many of them in the so-called battleground states. The chief executive had actually compared the refusal of the mainstream networks to broadcast the film as tantamount to supporting holocaust revisionists. However, under pressure from journalists from within their own organization, major stockholders, and government officials, Sinclair backed down, and excerpted several scenes from the controversial documentary along with scenes from anti-Bush films to include a shortened and more “balanced” report on the campaign.
The results of the presidential election reflect the increasing difficulties that the American ruling class is experiencing in its ability to manipulate the electoral circus. These difficulties, which first appeared in the debacle of the 2000 election, were manifest this year in two important respects.
First, it took the bourgeoisie a comparatively long time to coalesce around how best to realign the political division of labor between the Republicans and Democrats – perhaps too long a time. It wasn’t until mid-September, that one could discern a preference for the election of Kerry, as evidenced in the pronouncements by prominent members of the foreign policy establishment in the Republican party and by the shifts in the media coverage of the campaign. Despite his various shortcomings, including his contradictory statements on the war in Iraq, the predominant view was that Kerry was best suited to restore American credibility on the imperialist terrain and allow an opportunity to salvage the situation in Iraq for U.S. imperialism. The fact that there had been so much confusion and dissension within the bourgeoisie on this reflected a real difficulty to act in the national interest in the face of the conditions of the social decomposition of capitalism. The fact that the consensus came so late in the campaign weakened the bourgeoisie in its ability to manipulate the electoral outcome.
Second, the growth and cohesion of the Christian fundamentalist right wing in America, which like religious zealotry everywhere in this period is a response to the increasing chaos and loss of hope for the future that characterizes social decomposition, posed serious difficulties to the ruling class. This group, first cultivated as a base for the Republicans in the Reagan years, has grown large in many of the less populated, rural states (the so-called “red states” in media parlance), and is characterized by its anachronistic social conservatism and control by local clergymen. This segment of the electorate proved impervious to media manipulation on the essential political questions of the campaign such as the economy, the war, international policy, or cronyism, especially a media manipulation that began so late in the campaign. These fundamentalists voted based on issues like gay marriage and abortion, and contributed significantly to the bourgeoisie’s ability to re-adjust its political division of labor. As one CNN commentator noted with incredulity on election night, despite the fact that Ohio had lost 250,000 jobs, there was a disastrous war in Iraq, and Kerry had won three face-to-face debates, still the social conservatives in Ohio had thrown the election to Bush.
As decomposition continues to accelerate, the U.S. ruling class has joined other capitalist nations, like France, in its difficulties in controlling the electoral charade.
As we have pointed out previously in Internationalism, Kerry was not an anti-war candidate. He merely promised to be more sensitive as to how he takes the U.S. into war, to win in Iraq, to expand the American military, to increase the size of American Special Forces units, and modernize weapons systems. This was not the political program of a dove. Kerry’s program coincided with the view of a growing majority within the bourgeoisie that recognizes the seriousness of the mess in Iraq. The Bush administration’s refusal to face reality undercut its credibility and increasingly made Bush’s continuance in office untenable. From the bourgeoisie’s perspective, Kerry alone offered the possibility of being able to convince the population to accept further military excursions in the future.
If Kerry’s campaign appeared to falter during the summer after the Democratic Convention, it was because he did not clearly assert a critique of the Bush administration on the war, implausibly insisting he would have still supported the invasion of Iraq even if he known that all the reasons justifying the invasion were wrong. He was criticized for this inconsistency in the editorial pages of the New York Times for example. It was only after Kerry’s speech at New York University in September in which he changed position and embraced the view that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time that his support within the bourgeoisie began to solidify. Already at the convention in July, a dozen retired admirals and generals had endorsed him, including three former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In September, Republican Senator Richard Lugar, the chair of the Foreign Relations committee, openly criticized the Bush administration for incompetence in Iraq. Another Republican, Sen. Chuck Hagel, the second ranking Republican on the same committee, also lashed out at Bush’s handling of Iraq. And even, Republican Sen. John McCain, while still avowing support for Bush’s candidacy, also criticized the administration for not leveling with the nation on Iraq. When leading Republicans openly attack their own candidate on the central foreign policy issue of the day just five weeks before the presidential election, it gives a real glimpse of the thinking of the bourgeoisie. The Democrats of course quickly took out a full page campaign in major newspapers featuring photographs of these leading Republicans and excerpts from their anti-Bush statements.
The media quickly followed suit, its coverage shifting on balance to support of the Kerry candidacy, as could be seen in the coverage of the debates and their aftermath, which portrayed Kerry as the winner. At the same time, an ABC News policy memo surfaced, which argued that while both candidates were distorting and stretching the truth in their campaign speeches and political commercials, Kerry’s distortion tended to involve only peripheral issues, but Bush’s dealt with issues at the heart of the campaign. The memo instructed ABC journalists to highlight these gross distortions in their coverage. One media commentator even noted a shift in coverage by the pro-Bush media controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – Fox News and New York Post (see accompanying article on the media [17]).
The capitalist propaganda barrage that accompanies each electoral circus always promotes the democratic mystification, the capitalist political swindle that tries to convince the working class that its participation in choosing the particular politician who will formally preside over the capitalist class dictatorship for the next few years means that it is free. While it is fashionable this year for journalists, politicians, pundits, professors, and clergymen to proclaim that this is the most important election in a generation or in our lifetime, one must note that similar claims were made in many previous elections. From the perspective of the democratic mystification, there is no such thing as an “unimportant” election.
This year the media blitz was awesome. The war in Iraq, national security, terrorism, civil liberties, chronic unemployment, medical care, social security, abortion, gay marriage, the environment – were all invoked as hot button issues, the better to get people interested in voting.
But despite the hoopla, like all elections in the period of capitalist decadence, this election was not really about the clash of alternative policies advocated by different factions of the bourgeoisie, but about manipulation and mystification. Certainly there are differences within the bourgeoisie but these disputes are confined primarily to tactical questions on how best to implement a shared strategic outlook internationally and domestically. It was already pre-ordained that regardless of who the victor was, the U.S. would continue a policy of austerity at home (making the working class pay the brunt of the economic crisis) and military intervention abroad (making the working class risk the lives of its young men and women to protect US imperialist interests), regardless of the winner. The style in which these policies are implemented may differ slightly, but the end result – austerity and war – will be the same.
On the level of political strategy, the ruling class this year had two primary political imperatives:
1) It needed to revive and repair the credibility of the democratic mystification which suffered a heavy blow in the debacle of the 2000 election.
2) It needed to adjust the capitalist political division of labor between the major political parties, making sure that the team formally in power is best suited to carry out the strategic requirements necessary to defend effectively the needs of the ruling class in the period ahead. These needs include a) the implementation of the ruling class’s agreed upon imperialist strategy designed to block the rise of any rival superpower in Europe or Asia, and b) the continued implementation of austerity, attacking the standard of living of the proletariat, making it bear the brunt of capitalism’s global economic crisis.
The 2000 election outcome wasn’t resolved for 36 days – determined only by a controversial Supreme Court decision, reached along narrowly divided partisan political lines, which deeply eroded political confidence in the court and the Bush presidency. For the first time in the modern era, the candidate who lost the popular vote won the presidency by gaining a majority in the antiquated Electoral College, based on the chaotic mess in Florida, the state controlled by George Bush’s brother (Governor Jeb Bush). The whole thing was more reminiscent of what one would expect of a third world banana republic rather than the most powerful democracy in the world. The 2000 debacle was a reflection of the effects of social decomposition on the ruling class' electoral process, which has made it increasingly difficult for the bourgeoisie to control its own sham electoral circus. In fact, the political strategy of the bourgeoisie in 2000, which was to keep the Democrats in office actually worked. Gore received 500,000 more votes in the popular balloting. His loss by 500 votes in Florida was attributable to a variety of miscues, ranging from confusing ballots, disenfranchisement of voters who typically voted for Democratic candidates (African Americans), and outright fraud. Once the recount process began, the capitalist politicians lost all sense of self-control and propriety. Each side adopted an irrational attitude to win at any cost, with no-holds barred squabbling. This loss of ruling class discipline and decorum stood in sharp contrast to the more mature and responsible comportment of Richard Nixon in 1960, for example, when he decided not to initiate a court challenge against Kennedy’s election due to voting fraud in Chicago. Nixon understood better his role in the electoral circus and put the interests of the “nation” above his own partisan desires to win the White House.
This year the bourgeoisie needed to restore confidence in elections. To do so, it needed a decisive victory at the polls in order to avoid any repeat of the ugliness of four years ago. The media has been very successful in spreading propaganda about the importance of each citizen’s vote – the idea that every vote counts is crucial in getting as many people as possible to participate in the electoral sham. To keep the pressure on for people to go to the polls, the media incessantly portrayed the contest as too close to call, keeping the tension alive and serving the purpose of making sure that no one lost interest in the race.. The campaign was incredibly effective on certain levels. In the battleground state of Iowa, the media reported that every eligible voter has been registered to vote. In Ohio, another swing state, the campaign has been so successful that there are an estimated 120,000 more people registered to vote than are eligible – either some people registered more than once or the ghosts of citizens past were lining up to vote. In the end nearly 120 million people went to the polls, setting a record for participation (though this was still around only 65% of the eligible voting population).
Had Kerry carried the state of Ohio, he would have emerged as the winner of the presidential election, giving the U.S. for the second time in a row a president who had lost the popular vote (this time by an even bigger margin than Bush in 2000 – 3 million as compared to 500,000), which would have been disastrous for the democratic mystification. This is what prompted Kerry not to push for the counting of the disputed provisional and absentee ballots in Ohio, or demanding a recount, for which there was ample justification. The New York Times reported four days after the election that some of the new electronic voting machines had registered 3,200 votes for Bush in one Ohio district, even though there were only 800 voters who had actually cast ballots. In thus making this decision, from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, Kerry acted “responsibly” in the same way that Nixon had declined to dispute the Kennedy election in 1960, deciding against a course of action that would have potentially contributed to political instability.
However, despite the large turnout and the responsible behaviour of Kerry, the democratic mystification still suffered a serious setback for the bourgeoisie. Among large sectors of the population, the “anybody but Bush” campaign had become a real crusade, an opportunity to correct a serious political blunder in American political history. Unprecedented numbers of volunteers, from rock stars to everyday citizens, got caught up in this crusade and traveled to the so-called battleground states from other parts of the country to campaign for Kerry. In the large, urbanized, industrial states, the media campaign was largely successful. In New York City, Kerry received 75% of the votes, in Philadelphia, 80%, and in Washington, DC, 90%. Kerry carried the industrial states of the northeast, Midwest and far west. The failure of the bourgeoisie's media campaign to shift the political division of labor to the Democrats resulted in widespread frustration, even depression, at how such a democratic movement could have failed to dislodge an unpopular president, and risks triggering widespread disillusion in the electoral process. The Canadian government reported a 600 percent increase in American citizen requests for information about immigrating to Canada the day after the election. New Zealand and Australia also report a tremendous jump in such requests.
Because of the proletariat’s continuing difficulties in breaking free of the disorientation that has characterized the reflux in class consciousness since the collapse of the Russian bloc, the bourgeoisie has considerable flexibility in deciding whether to put its left team (Democrats) or right team (Republicans) in power. In times of intense class struggle, the bourgeoisie often prefers to keep the left in opposition, as a means of controlling and derailing working class discontent. But today this is not a necessity – the left is equally capable of implementing austerity, beefing up the repressive apparatus, and waging imperialist war without jeopardizing its ability to control the working class. The Clinton administration demonstrated that amply.
The central consideration for the bourgeoisie today in the U.S, as it has been for more than a decade now, is not how to contain the class struggle, but rather the defense of its imperialist interests in a drastically changed international arena in the post-cold war period. While there is a general agreement within the dominant factions of the American capitalist class on the strategic goal of maintaining U.S. imperialist hegemony and preventing the emergence of any new imperialist rival, there are significant controversies over the tactical implementation of that strategy. Most notably this dispute has focused on the war in Iraq for the past year. In the winter of 2003, the ruling class was united on invading Iraq as reminder of American supremacy aimed at potential rivals, as a reinforcement of direct American military presence in a strategically important zone of imperialist competition, and as a means to put pressure on Europe by establishing a growing American control of Mideast oil supplies. As the ICC predicted on numerous occasions, this strategy was doomed to failure because in the phase of capitalist decomposition the dominant characteristic is the tendency for each nation state to play its own card on the inter-imperialist terrain, which results inevitably in growing chaos on the international level. In this period, every venture that U.S. imperialism undertakes ultimately aggravates the very circumstances that it aimed to combat, increasing rather than decreasing the level of chaos in the world and the challenges to U.S. hegemony.
The divergences on Iraq within the American bourgeoisie emerged only after the abject failure of the Iraq invasion. There are today three positions within the American ruling class on Iraq: 1) the situation is going well, and the U.S. needs only to stay the course, a position defended by the Bush administration, and one that seems to contradict blatantly the reality on the ground; 2) the situation is a mess, and the US should withdraw immediately – an extreme position defended by a few elements on the left and others on the right; 3) the situation is a mess, and the US must find a way to minimize the damage of the Iraq quagmire in order to be able to respond effectively to new challenges to use hegemony, a position increasingly defended by the dominant factions of the ruling class.
The utter failure of the Bush administration’s propaganda justifications for the Iraq invasion raised concern for the ruling class not because they were lies (the bourgeoisie, left or right, is united on the necessity to lie), but because their exposure has made it increasingly difficult to prepare popular acceptance for future military adventures, particularly within the proletariat. Bush’s ineptness squandered the considerable political capital gained from the 9/11 attacks, which had given the bourgeoisie an opportunity to use patriotism to manipulate the population at large. But now patriotism has once again become increasingly identified with the political right, as Kerry noted in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party Convention when he promised to reclaim patriotism for the left as well.
As we pointed out in Internationalism n°131, the controversy over Bush’s unilateralism versus Kerry’s alleged multilateralism was “a gross distortion. Ever since World War II, US imperialism has always acted unilaterally in the defense of its imperialist interests as a superpower (…) As the head of the bloc, the US was easily able to oblige its subordinates in the bloc to go along with their decisions…”
Having failed to readjust the political division of labor through the electoral circus, the bourgeoisie will be forced to make the best of a difficult situation in the period ahead. Bush will face pressure to abandon his early rhetoric of “a mandate” in the election giving him a free hand to pursue more of the same. There will be tremendous pressure to develop a more realistic assessment of the situation in Iraq and to adjust policy in a way more consistent with what Kerry advocated. Already there is talk of a shake-up in the cabinet. It is contrary to the interests of American capitalist class to have the population so badly divided as this election demonstrated and something will have to be done about it.
J. Grevin, Nov. 5, 2004
George W. Bush’s foreign policy in regard to imperialist alliances has come to symbolize American imperialism’s historical break with its former allies in the so-called “old Europe”. The Democratic candidate, John Kerry, campaigned on a promise at this level to restore the past status quo, to mend fences with the “dear friends” of Europe that Bush’s reckless cowboy policies had supposedly so much alienated. However, even if Kerry had won, and his statements on this issue had been more than campaign gimmicks, any improved relations with Europe on the bases of a new face in the White house would have been destined for a very short honeymoon.
It became fashionable in the bizarre atmosphere of the presidential election campaign to blame Bush and his friends for whatever has gone wrong with America’s standing in the world. In particular the Democratic candidate, echoed by a great part of the media, has peddled the idea that the Bush administration is somehow responsible for the present rift between the US and the Western European powers headed by Germany and France. Nothing could be further from the truth. The confrontation between Europe and the US that has come so clearly to the open during the Bush administration in the last couple of years, in particular in relation to the question of Iraq, goes back to long before Bush came to power. In fact this rift, far from being a circumstantial event, produced by the style of a particularly foolish president, is rooted in the upheavals of the end of the 80’s and the beginning of the 90’s that completely changed the relation of forces between states that had existed up to then for over half a century. The historical collapse of the Stalinist imperialist bloc led by Russia at the end of 1989 was soon followed by the breaking apart of the Western imperialist bloc that the US headed since the end of WWII. The disappearance of the military alliances that have dominated every major event at the level of imperialist confrontations between nation states in the world arena for over 50 years did not mean the beginning of a “new world order” – in the words of Bush the father – of a revitalized capitalism and democracy. On the contrary, free of the discipline imposed by the existence of the military blocs and impelled by the deepening of the economic crisis, every state has since tried to play its own imperialist card causing a free-fall of world capitalism into a growing state of the barbarism of war and political chaos. The European nation states, some of the most powerful economies of the world, felt compelled to defend and extend their own imperialist interests just as much as anybody else. This has been so for France, but is particularly true for Germany, which as a loser in WW II had seen its world status diminished for over five decades.
The collapse of the Stalinist imperialist bloc also meant the demise of the USSR “superpower,” leaving Russia to play a totally lessened role in the world arena. However this was not the case for the leader of the other bloc. The disintegration of the Western bloc did not mean the direct weakening of the USA. On the contrary, the end of the bloc system left the US as the only remaining “superpower” and thus the world hegemonic imperialist nation. This fact has in great part determined the way in which the imperialist confrontations have taken place around the world in the last 14 years. On one side, any nation that wants to expand its influence has to do so at the cost of challenging directly or indirectly the American dominance over the world. On the other hand the US bourgeoisie can’t afford to fail to respond to its competitors with a permanent political, economic and military offensive to outplay its enemies. The first Gulf war under Bush the father, just as the present Iraq war under Bush the son and the wars in the Balkans under the Democratic Clinton administration are all part of this dynamic of imperialist confrontation between the US and the challengers of its hegemony, and first among them the imperialist powers of western Europe. In fact as we have said many times in relation to the Iraq war, the real objective of this US military adventure has never been the “destruction of weapons of mass destruction”, the “liberation of the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator”, “the war on terrorism”, or ….any other lie put forward by the dominant class. The enemy that George Bush and friends were addressing with the invasion of Iraq was located somewhere else: in Europe, where the real danger to American dominance is centered. In this sense there is nothing surprising in the fact that Germany and France have been the most vociferous opponents of the war, the French and the German bourgeoisie know very well what is at stake in this American military adventure.
The historical situation is leading not to less, but to an ever growing confrontation between the major imperialist powers and this will not change with or without a new face in the White House.
Eduardo Smith.
Links
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[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/17/189/us-presidential-elections-2004
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/17/253/us-elections
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/129_rnb.htm
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-and-central-america
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1848/mexico
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/20/parliamentary-sham
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/outside-communist-left
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/leftism
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/132_media.html