Everyone has seen the catastrophic images. Bloated corpses floating in fetid flood waters in New Orleans. An elderly man sitting in a lawn chair, hunched over, dead, killed by heat and lack of food and water as other survivors languish around him. Mothers trapped with their young children with nothing to eat or drink for three days. Chaos at the very refugee centers that the authorities told the victims to go to for safety. This unprecedented tragedy has not unfolded in some poverty stricken corner of the third world, but in the heartland of the greatest imperialist and capitalist power on earth.

When the tsunami hit Asia last December, the bourgeoisies of the rich countries blamed the poor countries’ political incompetence for refusing to heed the warning signs. This time there is no such excuse. The contrast today is not between rich and poor countries, but between rich and poor people. When the order came to evacuate New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf coast, in typical capitalist fashion, it was every person, every family for themselves. Those who owned cars and could afford gasoline, the price of which soared with capitalist price-gouging, headed north and west for safety, seeking refuge in hotels, motels and the homes of friends and families. But in the case of the poor, the elderly, the infirm, most were stuck in the path of the storm, unable to flee. In New Orleans the local authorities opened the Superdome arena and the convention center as shelters from the storm, but provided no services, no food, no water, no supervision, as thousands of people, the overwhelming majority of them black people, jammed into these facilities, and were left abandoned. For the rich who remained in New Orleans, the situation was far different. Stranded tourists and VIPS who remained at five star hotels adjacent to the Superdome lounged in luxury and were protected by armed police officers who kept the “rabble” from the Superdome at bay.

Rather than organize distribution of food and water supplies stockpiled in the city’s stores and warehouses, police stood by as poor people began “looting” and redistributing vital supplies. Lumpenized elements undoubtedly took advantage of the situation and began stealing electronics, money and weapons, but clearly this phenomenon began as an attempt to survive under the most dehumanizing conditions. At the same time, however, shot-gun wielding police officers provided security for employees sent by a luxury hotel to a nearby pharmacy to scavenge for water, food and medical supplies for the comfort of wealthy hotel guests. A police officer explained that this was not looting, but the “commandeering” of supplies by the police, which is authorized in an emergency. The differentiation between “looting” and “commandeering” is the difference between being poor and rich in America today.

The system is to blame

The failure of capitalism to respond to this crisis with any semblance of human solidarity demonstrates that the capitalist class is no longer fit to rule, that its mode of production is mired in a process of social decomposition – literally rotting on its feet – that it offers humanity a future of death and destruction. The chaos that has consumed country after country in Africa and Asia in recent years is just a taste of the future that capitalism has in store even for the industrialized countries, and New Orleans today offers a glimpse of that bleak future.

As always, the bourgeoisie has been quick to offer up all manner of alibis to excuse its crimes and failures. The current crop of excuses whine that they are doing everything they can; that  this is a natural disaster, not a man-made disaster;  that no one could have anticipated the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history; that no one anticipated that the levees holding back the waters would be breached. Critics of the administration, both in the U.S. and abroad, blame the incompetence of the Bush regime for turning a natural disaster in a social calamity. None of this bourgeois claptrap is on target. All of it seeks to divert attention from the truth that it is the capitalist system itself that is responsible.

“We’re doing everything we can” is rapidly becoming the most repeated cliché in the bourgeois propaganda stockpile. They are doing “everything they can” to end the war in Iraq, to improve the economy, to improve education, to end crime, to make the space shuttle safe, to stop drugs, etc, etc.. There is nothing else or nothing more they could possibly do. You’d think the government never made policy choices, never had the possibility to try any alternatives. What nonsense. They are pursuing policies they consciously choose – with clearly disastrous consequences for society.

As for the natural vs. man-made argument, sure, Hurricane Katrina was a force of nature, but the scale of the natural and social disaster was not inevitable.  It was in every aspect manufactured and made possible by capitalism and its state. The growing destructiveness of natural disasters throughout the world today is arguably a consequence of reckless economic and environmental policies pursued by capitalism in the relentless pursuit of profit, whether it’s the failure to employ available technology to monitor the possibility of tsunamis and to warn threatened populations in a timely manner, or whether it is the denuding of hillside forestlands in third world countries which exacerbate the devastation of monsoon-related flooding, or whether it is the irresponsible pollution of the atmosphere with the unleashing of greenhouse gases which worsens global warming and possibly contributes to aberrations in the world’s weather. In this case, there is considerable evidence that global warming has led to increases in the water temperature and the development of a greater number of tropical depressions, storms and hurricanes in recent years.  When Katrina hit Florida it was only a Category One hurricane, but as it hovered over the 91 degree waters of the Gulf of Mexico for a week it built itself up to a Category Five storm with 175 mile an hour winds before it hit the Gulf coast. 

The leftists have already begun citing Bush’s ties to the energy industry and opposition to the Kyoto Protocols as being responsible for the Katrina disaster, but this critique accepts the premises of the debate within the world capitalist class – as if implementation of the Kyoto agreement could actually reverse the effects of global warming and the bourgeoisies of the countries that favored the Kyoto Protocols are really interested in revamping capitalist production methods. Worst still, it forgets that it was the Clinton administration, which, even though it postured as pro-environmentalist, that first rejected the Kyoto agreement. The refusal to deal with global warming is the position of the American bourgeoisie, not simply the Bush administration.

In addition, New Orleans, with a population of nearly 600,000 and nearby suburbs with even more people, is a city that is built in large part below sea level, making it vulnerable to flood waters from the Mississippi River, from Lake Pontchartrain, and from the Gulf of Mexico. Since 1927, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers developed and maintained a system of levees to prevent the annual flooding of the Mississippi River, which permitted industry and farming to thrive beside the river, and allowed the city of New Orleans to grow, but which stopped the flood waters from bringing the sediment and soil that naturally replenished the wetlands and marshes of the Mississippi delta below the city towards the Gulf of Mexico. This meant that these wetlands, which provided natural protection to New Orleans as a buffer against sea surges became dangerously eroded and the city more vulnerable to flooding from the sea. This was not “natural”; this was manmade.

Nor was it a force of nature that depleted the Louisiana national guard, a large percentage of which has been mobilized for war in Iraq, leaving only 250 National Guard troops available to assist the police and fire departments in rescue efforts during the first three days after the levees broke. An even greater percentage of Mississippi guardsmen has also been deployed in Iraq.

The argument that this disaster was unanticipated is equally nonsense. For nearly 100 years, scientists, engineers and politicians have debated how to cope with New Orleans’ vulnerability to hurricanes and flooding. In the mid-1990s, several rival plans were developed by different groups of scientists and engineers, which finally led to a 1998 proposal (during the Clinton administration) called Coast 2050. This plan called for strengthening and reengineering the existing levees, constructing a system of floodgates, and the digging of new channels that bring sediment-bearing water to restore the depleted wetland buffer zones in the delta, and had a price tag of $14 billion dollars to be invested over a ten year period. It failed to win approval in Washington, on Clinton’s watch, not Bush’s.  Last year, the Army Corps requested $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans, but the government approved only $42 million.  Yet at the same time, Congress approved $231 million for the construction of a bridge to a small, uninhabited island in Alaska.

Another refutation of the “no one anticipated” alibi is that on the eve of the hurricane’s landfall,  Michael D. Brown, the director of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Administration)  bragged during television interviews that he had ordered the creation of an emergency contingency plan for a worst case scenario in New Orleans after the  tsunami in South Asia, and that FEMA was confident they could handle any eventuality. Reports out of New Orleans indicate that this FEMA plan included a decision to turn away trucks carrying donated bottled-water, refusing delivery of 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel transported by the Coast Guard, and the severing of emergency communication lines used by the local police authorities in suburban New Orleans. Brown even had the nerve to excuse inaction on rescuing the 25,000 people at the Convention Center, by saying that federal authorities hadn’t become aware of those people until late in the week, even though news media had been reporting on the situation on television for three or four days.

And while Mayor Ray Nagin, a Democrat, has been vituperative in his denunciation of federal inaction, it was his local administration that made absolutely no effort to provide for the safe evacuation of the poor and elderly, took no responsibility for the distribution of food and water, provided no supplies or security for the evacuation centers, and abandoned the city to chaos and violence.

Only the working class offers an alternative

Millions of workers have been moved by the deplorable suffering in the Gulf coast and outraged by the callousness of the official response. Especially within the working class, there is a tremendous sense of genuine human solidarity for the victims of this calamity. While the bourgeoisie parcels out its compassion based on the race and economic status of the victims, for most American workers no such distinction exists. Even if racism is often a card that the bourgeoisie utilizes to divide white and black workers against themselves, and various black nationalist leaders are trying to serve capitalism in this way by insisting that the crisis in New Orleans is a black vs. white problem, the suffering of poor workers and the underclass in New Orleans today is abhorrent to the working class.  The Bush administration is undoubtedly a poor ruling team for the capitalist class, prone to ineptitude, empty gestures and slow motion response in the current crisis, and this will add to its increasing unpopularity. But the Bush administration is not an aberration, but rather a reflection of the stark reality that the US is a declining superpower presiding over a "world order" that is sinking into chaos. War, famine and ecological disaster is the future that world capitalism is taking us towards. If there is any hope for the future of humanity, it is that the working class of the world will develop the consciousness and understanding of the real nature of class society and take in hand its historic responsibility to push aside this anachronistic, destructive capitalist system and replace it with a revolutionary society controlled by the working class, in which genuine human solidarity and the fulfillment of human need, is the guiding principle.

Internationalism Sept. 4, 2005

This leaflet was distributed by the ICC at the mass demonstration in Washington, DC against the war in Iraq. The leaflet offers a revolutionary Marxist perspective on the reasons for the war, in contrast both to the official government explanation and the confusions and obfuscations offered by the leftists, who function as the extreme leftwing of the bourgeoisie.

Internationalism.

The working class knows that the war is not worth the money or lives being spent on it. In addition to the 1,900 American lives lost, thousands upon thousands of Iraqis have been killed, maimed and left homeless. All the official explanations for the war in Iraq have been exposed as lies – there are no weapons of mass destruction, there was no link between the 9/11 terrorists and Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to any other nation. The Bush administration has lost all credibility, all political authority.

There are plenty of explanations and slogans offered by anti-war activists about the causes of the war. At today’s demonstration you will hear speaker after speaker berate you with variations on the following:

• It’s a war for oil. It’s the result of corporate greed. No blood for oil!
• It’s a policy error. It’s a mistake.
• It’s a Republican war.
• It’s an irrational policy of a reactionary faction of the ruling class.
• It’s the fault of the stupidity and ineptitude of George W. Bush, who can never acknowledge a mistake.

Whatever kernels of truth exist in each of these explanations, they all obscure the reality that the war in Iraq is the inevitable consequence of a globally decomposing capitalist system and the increasing difficulty of US imperialism to maintain its hegemony in an increasingly chaotic world.

In 1989, when Russian imperialism collapsed and the cold war came to an end, the politicians and the capitalist media promised us a new world order, a future of peace, prosperity, and democracy. Billions of dollars previously spent on the arms race would be transferred to social programs and the world would be a better place. Fifteen years later the new world order has become a new world chaos. There is no peace, no prosperity, and the forces of state repression and dictatorship are on the rise. The Cold War, with its disciplined blocs, led respectively by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. superpowers, where secondary and tertiary powers subordinated their interests to those of the bloc, looks increasingly like the “good old days” for the world capitalist class. The collapse of Russian imperialism was a pyrrhic victory for American imperialism, more a reflection of the decomposition of the global capitalist system than a triumph for American power. With the collapse of the blocs, the glue that kept the lesser powers in line disappeared, and every country more and more began pursuing its own imperialist interests, “every man (or nation) for itself,” producing a situation of increasing chaos on the international terrain.

In 1992, U.S. imperialism officially adopted the strategic goal of preventing the rise of any rival bloc or rival power in Europe and Asia so that it would remain the only superpower in the world and this goal has guided U.S. foreign policy ever since, whether Republicans or Democrats have occupied the White House. It is this strategy which explains U.S. imperialism’s increasing number of military excursions throughout the world – to send a warning  and block any potential rival, including America’s onetime allies, to remind them that the U.S. is the only superpower in the world. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was not a greedy attempt to boost oil profits for U.S. corporations – far more has been and will be spent on the war and occupation of Iraq than will ever be compensated for by Iraqi oil production. It’s not a policy error, or the result of Republican or Bush administration stupidity, but a conscious decision supported by all factions of the ruling class, except for the extreme rightwing isolationists. The invasion of Iraq was the lynchpin in the American geopolitical strategy to keep European imperialisms from making inroads in the Middle East. Coupled with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and new American alliances with former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, it meant growing U.S. control of one of the most strategically important areas in the world.

For the ruling class the real problem with the war in Iraq is that the greatest military machine in the history of the world is now bogged down in a quagmire, and is increasingly unable to unleash necessary military operations in other imperialist theatres. This would have happened no matter who was president, because it is a central characteristic of capitalist decomposition that every action that American imperialism takes to improve its situation only winds up exacerbating the problems even more. However, the Bush administration’s clumsiness and ineptitude both on the level of the propaganda and ideological explanation for the war (the Democrats prefer justifying military interventions on the basis of human rights) and the squandering of the considerable “patriotic” sentiment that followed the 9/11 attacks, and its tactical handling of the invasion on the ground has made things even more of a mess. The deteriorating military situation and growing unpopularity of the war raises serious problems for the ruling class because it makes it increasingly difficult for the U.S. to have available fresh, deployable troops or to drum up support for further military ventures which are a vital necessity to defend U.S. imperialist interests.

Since this war and all the wars that capitalism has in store for us in the years ahead are inexorably linked to capitalism’s drive to survive, to maintain a world of exploitation and profit, the way to end war is not to change policies, or to change presidents, but for the working class to change the world, to understand its historic responsibilities and potential, to develop the consciousness and unity necessary to destroy capitalism and consign it to the historic rubbish pile, and replace it with a society based on the fulfillment of human need and the construction of a genuine human community – a workers’ revolution.

Internationalism, September 24, 2005

The events of the past four years have amply confirmed the analysis that the ICC advanced in 2001 about the nature and political impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11th.  

The Bourgeoisie Knew About the Attacks in Advance

As readers will recall, four years ago in these pages, we compared the terrible events of 9/11 to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and pointed out that “there is considerable evidence that the bourgeoisie was not taken by surprise by the attacks in either case and that the bourgeoisie cynically welcomed the massive death toll in both cases for purposes of political expediency in order to implement its imperialist war aims, and other long range political objectives” (Internationalism 120). We argued that, while the bourgeoisie might not have known the exact targets of the attacks that came on 9/11 or that the results would be so catastrophic, they had ample knowledge that such attacks were coming and permitted them to ocurr in order to mobilize the population for war, to overcome the vestiges of what the bourgeoisie calls the “Vietnam syndrome” – the unwillingness of the population, particularly the working class, to rally behind the state for full scale imperialist war.

At the time our critics accused of us of falling prey to conspiracy theory and paranoia. However, our analysis has been confirmed by the data revealed in countless books, journalistic articles, and investigation commissions, etc. in the last few years.The latest revelation is that the CIA knew that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, was in the US, was being trained as a pilot, and was preparing a terrorist attack, but  decided not to inform the FBI. Furthermore, this information was subsequently given to investigators for the highly acclaimed 9/11 Commission, but was suppressed by the Commission and was never made public until quite recently. However critical the Commission’s report was of the  “intelligence community,” this particular item was too damaging to be allowed to see the light of day. And as recently as mid-September, the New York Times reported that despite the government’s protestations that no one could have ever imagined that terrorists would hijack planes and turn them into missiles, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had been informed in 1998 that al Qaeda planned to hijack American jetliners and crash them into American landmark buildings and structures.

Our alleged conspiracy theories and paranoia notwithstanding, there is no longer any factual dispute that the American capitalist state was aware in advance that attacks were coming, knew who the specific leaders were, and was aware that they were in the US. For the bourgeoisie and their media, the debate is about how such terrible errors, poor judgments, lack of communications, incompetence, etc. could occur. For us, as revolutionary Marxists, the question has been to understand the political purposes behind the government’s policy to permit the attacks to occur. We have seen clearly that these attacks were used to attempt to mobilize the population for war, to make possible an unprecedented strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state, and to provide pretext for the launching of imperialist war in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are more dictated by the needs of maintaining American hegemony than combating terrorism.

The Historic Course Remains towards Decisive Class Confrontations

As we anticipated in 2001, the patriotic fever whipped up by ruling class in the aftermath of 9/11 quickly subsided and doomed the bourgeoisie’s expectations that it had finally overcome its dreaded “Vietnam syndrome” that had hampered its imperialist designs since the 1960s. For a moment the bourgeoisie did indeed seem to have cause to celebrate in 2001. All the flag waving and  propaganda campaigns gave them momentary hope that they would be able to mobilize the working class for sustained imperialist war. However, this has proven an illusory accomplishment, as opposition to the war in Iraq continues to grow.

As we pointed out in the National Situation Report (Internationalism 135), “the war in Iraq has revealed that any illusions the bourgeoisie had surmounted what they referred to as the “Vietnam Syndrome” – a term they used to refer to the unwillingness of the working class, and the population at large to permit itself to be mobilized for war and to accept the death and mutilation of working class youth in the service of the imperialist appetites of American capital – were completely groundless. As we have noted previously, on the historical level, the proletariat, internationally and in the US, remains undefeated, and the bourgeoisie cannot mobilize the population to accept on a prolonged basis the sacrifice, economic, political, and physical (in terms of lives), that long scale imperialist war requires. Furthermore, the ideological justification for imperialist war in this period manufactured after the 9/11 attacks and clumsily manipulated by the Bush administration, has been totally discredited, and consequently presents the bourgeoisie with grave problems in its efforts to mobilize the population to accept future wars. Despite Bush’s claims that his re-election constitutes a popular ratification of his Iraq policies, it is abundantly clear that Bush’s electoral triumph is a pyrrhic victory. All the bourgeoisie’s own data demonstrates that the majority of the population thinks that the war in Iraq is not worth  the cost to fight it, in terms of the lives lost or the money expended. The various explanations for the war in Iraq – the purported link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, or the imminent threat posed by alleged weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Iraq – were all revealed as lies.”

The problem for the bourgeoisie is not that the Bush administration has waged war in Iraq – the bourgeoisie was  and is united on the necessity for this invasion, not because of the greed for oil or to fight terrorism, but to serve the far more significant geo-political strategic goal of preventing the rise of any rivals in Europe or Asia and reasserting US hegemony. The real problem for the bourgeoisie is that the administration’s bungling of the war has frittered away the ideological gains of 9/11 and has made it more difficult to launch future military interventions that will be necessary for US imperialism.  

This problem is compounded by the fact that the bourgeoisie, both here in the US and throughout the world, is now confronted by two generations of undefeated workers – the generation of ’68 and their children, who have now grown to young adulthood. While the official bourgeois “anti-war movement” lies largely dormant between its annual huge mobilizations and hence is not really a “movement” but an event organizer, we have begun to see signs of members of the working class taking actions against the war effort – including protests by mothers and spouses of soldiers, and spontaneously organized protests by working class parents demanding that military recruiters not be permitted to recruit cannon fodder in high schools across the nation.

Four years after 9/11, the fact that the bourgeoisie knew in advance about terrorist attacks and permitted them to occur is an established fact and despite the patriotic campaigns of of the post-9/11 period it is still abundantly clear the proletariat is not defeated and continues to resist being mobilized behind the war ideology of the capitalist class.

JG

Last spring, in our report on the National Situation (see Internationalism No. 134 [6]), we described the serious political problems confronting the American ruling class in the wake of their botched attempt to elect John Kerry president and to realign American policy in Iraq. This failure to effectively control the outcome of the election was a reflection of a number of factors flowing from the phenomenon of the social decomposition of the capitalist system, including the difficulty of the main factions of the bourgeoisie to align behind Kerry until quite late in the electoral circus and the impact of Christian fundamentalist right, which appears impervious  to conventional political propaganda and manipulation. Instead of a much needed revitalization of the democratic myth, which would have accompanied a Kerry victory as a correction to the “stolen” election of 2000, the outcome of the  2004 was not political euphoria but widespread political demoralization and shock.

However, we also pointed out that “the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie are well aware of their problems and are not entirely powerless in the face of their inability to achieve the appropriate political division of labor at the polls. There are clearly efforts underway to rectify the damage done by the electoral outcome. Considerable political pressure has been exerted on the administration to modify its more extreme positions, especially on Iraq policy, and to actually move towards the very policies advocated by Kerry in the election campaign. At the same time there is a concerted effort to restore a certain discipline to the state capitalist apparatus, a good portion of which worked behind the scenes to defeat Bush’s re-election.” We were able to cite examples of this political rectification that included the shake-ups in the cabinet and the CIA, sharp criticism of Rumsfeld’s handling of the war in Iraq from prominent Republicans such as McCain, Nagel, Schwarzkopf,  Scowcroft, and even Gingrich; the removal of Paul Wolfowitz, the primary neo-conservative architect of the administration’s war policy; and Rumsfeld’s reluctant decision to appoint    retired General Gary E. Luck to  conduct an independent review of Iraq policy as a prelude to an impending policy shift.

Since the spring, however, the Bush administration has backed away from this process of political rectification and has reaffirmed its “stay the course” orientation and reverted to its gross exaggerations of the success of its policies in Iraq. Bush’s refusal to follow through on a change of course poses tremendous political difficulties for the ruling class, major factions of which see the need for some sort of strategy of progressive disengagement to rescue US imperialism from a deepening quagmire in Iraq and allow it to be capable of initiating further military operations in defense of its imperialist interests in the period ahead. The dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie reject any notion of immediate withdrawal, but there is a growing undercurrent pushing for a disengagement strategy. One academic has proposed a plan featuring a progressive scaling down of American groundforces in Iraq in favor of a longer term commitment of a smaller numbers of mobile troops, stationed in Iraq or aboard ships in the Gulf area and capable of providing strategic air support to Iraqi troops. This would have the benefit for American imperialism of drastically reducing the mounting American death toll and still permit a long term American military presence in the region.

The dismay of significant sectors of the ruling class about the Bush administration political regression is reflected in rising criticism even from Republicans and an escalation of anti-Bush media campaigns over the summer and collapsing administration popularity. The president’s approval ratings have dropped below 40%, to levels similar to those of Nixon shortly before he was forced to resign in 1974 and Clinton when rightwing Republicans attempted to impeach him in 2000. The Bush administration’s inability to cope with the protest by Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a young soldier killed in Iraq, who was practically elevated to sainthood by the media as she stood vigil outside the president’s Texas ranch during his August vacation and demanded that the troops be brought home now. The only thing that took Sheehan out of the limelight was Hurricane Katrina, which was an even greater political disaster for the president, as even many Republicans and supporters of the war in Iraq were flabbergasted by the administration’s ineptitude. The incredible media campaign exposing the failures of the Bush administration can only be explained in the context of the efforts by elements of the bourgeoisie to ratchet up the pressure on the administration to modify Iraq policy. In this sense these campaigns are similar to the campaign surrounding the Monica Lewinsky scandal and effort to impeach Pres. Clinton, which, as we reported at the time, was more a reflection of an intra-bourgeois dispute over whether to play the China card or the Japan card in the Far East than some kind of puritanical, moral outrage about Clinton’s sexual activities and lies.

These media campaigns signal a serious effort to force the president to return to the more responsive  behavior of last winter. Unlike traditional parliamentary democracies, there is no such thing as a vote of no confidence in the US system that would permit the calling of an early election and the fine-tuning of the ruling team for the bourgeoisie. It is only 10 months since Bush supposedly won a mandate at the polls, but he is increasingly a liability for the ruling class, which is stuck with him for the next three years. On the historic level, the American bourgeoisie has very limited options regarding regime change – assassination (as in the case of Kennedy) or impeachment (leading to forced resignation, as in the case of Nixon), both of which are incredibly traumatic to the body politic and result in the vice president succeeding to the presidency. In the case of Nixon, it should be remembered that Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in the midst of a corruption scandal and replaced by Gerald R. Ford, as a prelude to the Nixon impeachment/resignation, in order to assure an acceptable replacement. The prospect of a Dick Cheney presidency seems unlikely to mollify administration critics within the bourgeoisie. Whether the Bush administration will succumb to growing political pressure and change course, or whether more extreme options will be needed, remains to be seen. However, if we suddenly see a concerted campaign in the media and on Capital Hill directed against Cheney’s conflict of interest deals with Halliburton or some serious doubts about his health and his continued ability to fulfill his governmental obligations, we might be excused if we suspected that a replay of the Agnew/Nixon scenario was unfolding before our eyes.

When the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, the bourgeoisie predicted the dawning of a new world order of peace, prosperity and democracy, and promised that the end of the cold war would mean shrinking military budgets and more funds devoted to social programs. In comparison to the growing chaos that has become the reality of the present period, the relative stability of the cold war era looks increasingly like the good old days for humanity. As the only remaining superpower, US imperialism is intent on maintaining its global hegemony and preventing the rise of any potential rival power or rival bloc. To this end, it has repeatedly been forced to exercise military power to send a warning and a reminder to its erstwhile allies and potential rivals. Each of these military ventures, however, only exacerbates the difficulties of American imperialism, and increases the pressure for it to take military action yet again. This chaotic spiral into war and devastation can only be answered by the class  struggle.Jerry Grevin

The exchange of views below continues a discussion with Red and Black Notes on the vitally important question of class consciousness and the role of the revolutionary organization. As readers will recall, in Internationalism 134 [7] we published a letter to R&BN commenting on a joint public forum they held with the Internationalist Workers Group, the Canadian affiliate of the IBRP, last winter. We publish below R&BN’s response to our letter, followed by some further comments that we offer in an effort to deepen the discussion on consciousness and revolutionary organization.

The meeting to which Internationalism’s letter refers took place in Toronto on February 26, 2005. It was the second such discussion between Red & Black Notes and the Internationalist Workers’ Group. Last year, two meetings were held in Montreal and Toronto on the role of the trade unions. Public meetings and discussions between revolutionaries are to be encouraged as they provide a valuable place for the exchange and debate of ideas. In addition to the speakers, the meeting in Toronto drew participants from Autonomy and Solidarity, the International Communist Current, the Socialist Project, the North-Eastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists, the International Bolshevik Tendency and the New Democratic Party, as well as several unaffiliated individuals.

Space considerations prevent answering all of the points Internationalism raises; however, some clarification is necessary here, particularly on the relationship between organization and class. Red & Black Notes has never used the term councilist as a form of self-identification, even though that label has often been applied by it, and it has printed materials by groups considered to be councilist.

As I mentioned in my speech, my primary political education was as a Trotskyist, and as a member of the International Bolshevik Tendency from 1988 to 1995. I began publishing Red & Black Notes in 1997 as an attempt to reconsider some of my previous politics, and also to make contact with others with similar politics. Reading Red & Black Notes from its inception to the current issue, readers will note a definite evolution.

When I left the IBT, my belief was that Trotskyism made sense, but that it somehow didn’t work in the “real world.” In the course of re-examining my political theory, I came to reject that interpretation, and also the Trotskyists’ obsession with, in their words, “the crisis of leadership of the proletariat. As a result, where the Trotskyists put a plus on the leadership question, I put a minus. A comrade from the Communist Workers Organisation referred to Red & Black Notes at this point as a kind of “libertarian Trotskyism.” In a sense this was true, since I had not entirely broken with the methodology of Leninism.

So what is ‘councilism?’ The term councilist has always sounded like a pejorative to my ears. I don’t know anyone who uses the term except its opponents (unlike say, left communist, or council communist which many embrace). I have never seen those organizations which are labeled as councilist, such as Echanges et Mouvement or Daad en Gedachte use this term. Organizations which use the expression, such as the International Communist Current, often argue it is a product of the degeneration of the Dutch-German communist left tradition. The degeneration is seen in the view of these organizations analysis of the Soviet Union, and also on the need for organization.

As I tried to explain in my presentation, I tend to view organization as intimately linked to the question of class consciousness. How an organization views the development of class consciousness usually indicates the kind of organization its members see as necessary. For the Leninists, workers can never achieve more than trade union consciousness on their own, and therefore an organization is necessary to lead them. I reject such a view as it contradicts the essence of Marxism - the revolutionary capability of the working class. For the organization such as Echanges et Mouvement, class consciousness develops out of the experiences of the working class, but they believe the only task for the organization is to circulate information and develop program.

While the circulation of information and the promotion of workers ideas are very important, an organization of revolutionaries can do more... While workers will make their own history, they are not entirely free to make it as they choose, but neither do they make it from scratch. It’s a romanticization to suggest that the every member of the class remembers the heroic traditions of class struggle, but neither do they disappear with every new generation. It is not always necessary to reinvent the wheel.

As Gilles Dauvé noted in his critique of the ultra-left (reprinted in the new edition of Spontaneity and Organization), the task is neither to seek to be leaders of the class, but neither to shy away from it. It is the experience of the class which creates class consciousness, and ultimately the class which will create the mass organizations necessary to overthrow capitalism. But the revolutionary grouping can assist in that process, by being the memory, by developing theory and aiding in the clarification of the struggle.

Fischer.

As readers of Red and Black Notes and Internationalism may have noticed, a discussion has developed on the role of the revolutionary organization and its relationship to the class.  This is a central and difficult, controversial issue that has been hotly and long debated within the workers’ movement.   It is vital that the discussion continues for the benefit of clarification.  This is why we would like to carry the discussion further and approach some points on councilism that Fischer, the editor of Red and Black Notes, raised, as well as other points.

The defeat of the revolutionary wave that started in Russia in 1918 and spread throughout Europe in the following years, provided a lethal weapon for the bourgeoisie worldwide, which it used to poison the consciousness of the working class.  The establishment of state capitalism via Stalinism was equated to communism and even among some of the revolutionaries who had supported the Bolshevik  party, a position formed that viewed the party, the revolutionary organization itself as inevitably leading to the suffocation of the revolution by becoming more and more integrated into a stratified political formation.  In this view, it is the nature of ‘party organization’ itself that is in conflict with the unitary form of organization of the class, the councils.  In this view, the councils have a revolutionary nature, while the party has an essentially conservative nature, which inevitably leads to the defeat of the revolution.  In its most extreme, yet logical conclusion, this view sees the Bolshevik party as responsible for the defeat of the revolution.  Hence, the theorization, by some groups, that the Bolshevik party had never been a communist organization, its origin and nature being rather bourgeois.  In fact, some even theorized that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. In yet other variations, we see sometimes a total and sometimes a hesitant rejection of organization.  It is this rejection of the party as a necessary organizational and political organ of the class that ‘councilists’ reject.  While ‘council communism’ is claimed as part of the workers’ movement, in that it has not rejected the necessity of the party, ‘councilism’ refers specifically to the denunciation and rejection of the idea of ‘party’.

 Notwithstanding the nuances and variations, the origin of the confusion regarding the role of the party is the same:  it is the confusion about the relationship of the party to the class.  The rejection, hesitant or outright, of the party springs from this confusion, and it is because of this confusion that assigning a role for the party becomes impossible.

We agree with Fischer’s rejection of the Stalinist distortion of Lenin’s conception of the party and consciousness, which the Stalinists proclaim to be Leninist, when in fact Lenin himself recognized that he had bent the stick too far in the debate with the economists on the importance of the revolutionary organization and the ability or inability of the proletariat to go beyond trade union consciousness on its own.  Fischer  wrote in Red and Black Notes #21:

“For the Leninists, workers can never achieve more than trade union consciousness on their own, and therefore an organization is necessary to lead them.  I reject such view as it contradicts the essence of Marxism – the revolutionary capability of the working class.  For the organizations such as Echanges et Mouvement, class consciousness develops out of the experiences of the working class, but they believe the only task for the organization is to circulate information and develop program.  While [this is] very important, an organization of revolutionaries can do more.”

We agree with the rejection of this Stalinist view, which assigns a passive role to the working class, and even denigrates it, while it glorifies the idea of an all-knowing elite.  For us, the working class is the revolutionary subject.  For us, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the task of the workers’ councils, not of the party. However, this is not the same as assigning to the party the role of ‘spectator’, or some kind of ‘paternal guardian’ that watches over its children, the workers, to make sure they make no mistakes.  In this sense, we agree with Fischer that the role of a revolutionary organization is more than informing and developing a program.

In addition, we agree with Fischer’s earlier idea that the “…organization is intimately linked to the question of class consciousness.”  But we need to clarify in what ways the organization is intimately linked to the class and its consciousness.  This clarification will allow us to assign an organic, truthful role to the organization.  From what Fischer says, he seems clear as to the ‘intimate relationship’ between the class and its consciousness, and between the class and its mass organizations, the councils.  But he still has problems understanding the relationship between the class and the party.  While Fischer is clear that the councils and class consciousness are both a product, a secretion of the class, the party does not enjoy the same kind of intimate relationship with the class.  Somehow, the party feels alien, separated from the experience, the consciousness, the creation of the class.  For example, while Fischer makes an attempt to assign a greater role to the party than the one Echanges et Mouvement assigns to it, the party is still emasculated, relegated to ‘the memory’ of the class, the developer of theory, the helper in the clarification of the struggle.  Since the party is not viewed as part of the class, its secretion, it is still given a relatively passive role.  This is a concession to ‘councilism’ as described above.

At the same time, though, Fischer agrees with Gilles Dauve’s vision, which he quotes from Spontaneity and Organization, that “…the task [of the party] is neither to seek to be leaders of the class, but neither to shy away from it.”  The problem with this formulation is that it is not at all clear.  Instead, it reveals a contradictory vision of, on the one hand, a sideline role for the party, and, on the other, of ‘leaders of the class’.   This formulation says and clarifies nothing.  Is a revolutionary a leader?  Or does he stand on the sideline?  The shyness about being ‘leaders’ stems from the scars of Stalinism and from the ideological confusion arising from associating Stalinism with communism, and the Bolschevik party with the ‘general staff’ of the class.

Our conception is that we do not shy away from ‘being leaders’.  Instead, we seek to be so.  But what do we mean by ‘leaders’?  What are ‘leaders of the class’?  For us, ‘leaders’ does not mean the ‘intelligentsia’ ruling over the class; neither does it mean being the ‘general staff’ of the class, giving orders.  ‘Leaders’ are the most conscious revolutionaries who are internationally regrouped in a centralized organization, the party, to aid the class clarify the goals and methods of the struggle. While their tasks are not identical to those of the councils, they are dedicated to the class’ revolutionary transformation of the world, and to the process leading to the class’ self-emancipation.  This is why their interests and aims do not diverge from those of the class.

The  first task for the class is that of advancing its combat.  The class does so by unifying and extending its struggle.  It has historically created the means to do so through organizing bodies, the sovereign general assemblies and committees of elected and revocable delegates, the soviets, or workers’ councils.  In addition to this bodies which help the class unify and extend the struggle, the class also has secreted the means to attain the clarification of the goals and methods of the struggle: the party.   But the party does not do so ‘from the outside’, or from ‘the sidelines’.  It is not some sort of reference library that lectures or teaches from the outside.  Neither is it afraid of intervening.  On the contrary, the party is totally involved with the development of the class struggle and class consciousness, and it does intervene to point out the general course of march.  There is no separation between the practice, the daily struggle of the class, and theoretical deepening, even though these two aspects of the life of the movement do not always coincide in time.  It sometimes happens that the class is ahead of the party in the understanding of the methods of the struggle, as in the case of the April Theses in 1917 when Lenin appealed to the class as a whole when the party did not understand that proletarian revolution was on the agenda, and sometimes it is not, and so on.  In no way, though, does this absence of coincidence prove the party unnecessary or its existence a superimposition over the class.  For the party to ‘aid in the clarification of the struggle’, as Fischer correctly formulates, it has to have an active role, a leadership role, both at times of lull in the struggle and otherwise.  This is why the class itself has given rise, historically, to ‘the party’.

The very last point in our Basic Positions of the ICC, printed in the back of every ICC publication, is devoted to our activity:

“Political and theoretical clarification of the goals and methods of the proletarian struggle, of its historic and its immediate conditions.

Organized intervention, united and centralized on an international scale, in order to contribute to the process which leads to the revolutionary action of the proletariat.

The regroupment of revolutionaries with the aim of constituting a real world communist party, which is indispensable to the working class for the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a communist society.”

This is what the class has secreted its political, revolutionary organization for.  It is its own creation, an integral part of it, the product of its rise in class consciousness.  It does not exist, as the Stalinists and Trotskysts claim, because the class cannot achieve more than just trade union consciousness, and therefore it needs an ‘injector of consciousness’ from the outside.  Rather, the revolutionary organization has always been the class’ own creation.

Ana