The dominant fraction of the U.S. ruling class has utilized the November election as a means to adjust the implementation of imperialist policy, to force a recalcitrant Bush administration to make a much needed midcourse correction in Iraq. By last winter a consensus had emerged within the dominant fraction that the situation in Iraq was an absolute mess, a quagmire that jeopardized the long range, global interests of American imperialism. The U.S. military was clearly stretched so thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that it was incapable of responding to threats in other parts of the world. This was an intolerable situation because the exercise of military might abroad is an absolute necessity for American imperialism in a period in which its hegemony is under increasing challenge. To make matters worse, the Bush administration’s bungling of the war in Iraq had completely squandered the ideological gains the U.S. ruling class had made in manipulating popular acceptance of its overseas imperialist adventures in the aftermath of 9/11.
The emergence of this consensus led last March to creation of a bipartisan commission, the Iraq Study Group, led by James A. Baker, III, close adviser and friend to the elder George Bush. Baker had served as treasury secretary in the Reagan administration and as secretary of state under Bush senior during the first U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991. Former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, was named co-chair of the study group. Comprised overwhelmingly of prominent officials from the Reagan, Bush senior, and Clinton administrations, the commission in essence represented the continuity of the permanent state capitalist apparatus, which saw the need to force the ruling team to alter course.
The initial work of this commission was conducted secretly and in confidence, but in the course of the electoral campaign, its members, both Democrats and Republicans increasingly spoke out in public, critiquing specifically the administration’s often repeated “stay the course” refrain. They derided the administration’s polarizing political rhetoric, pitting “stay the course” vs. “cut and run,” as incapable of advancing national imperialist interests. The administration’s tendency to put in doubt the patriotism of its bourgeois critics was clearly unacceptable. Indeed the media conveyed the message, emanating from the commission, that this simplistic policy dichotomy reflected an untenable position that implied a loss of touch with reality. So strong was this pressure, which by early September the President actually stopped using the “stay the course” slogan. Of course, Bush still stubbornly certainly seemed to cling to this view, as he still continued to denounce the Democrats as the party of “cut and run”, and the content of his own message still stressed the need to fight on in Iraq until victory was achieved. However the Study Group had effectively laid the basis for a change in policy even before the election.
In Internationalism 140 we predicted that the impending Democratic victory: “would increase pressure for extra-electoral adjustments in the administration, including perhaps the forced resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld”.
Confirmation of this prediction came almost immediately with the announcement of the forced resignation of defense secretary Rumsfeld and the designation of a successor by 1pm the day after the election. If bourgeois media reports can be believed, as early as the weekend before the election, Bush had already asked Rumsfeld to step down and decided to replace him with Robert Gates, a veteran national security agent, who served as CIA director under the elder George Bush. Demonstrating even more graphically the role of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group as the mechanism for reasserting control by the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie over a badly misled and misdirected ruling political team, it must be noted that Gates was in fact a member of the Iraq Study Group (he stepped down only after his nomination as defense secretary). Gates generally subscribes to Baker’s cautious approach to imperialist policy and criticisms of the current administration’s approach. The “extra-electoral adjustments in the administration” involve not simply a change in personalities but the imposition of a policy change. The transference of key decision-making roles to people who can be relied upon to implement the bipartisan perspectives of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie on imperialist policy are essential in this regard.
The reinvigoration of the democratic mystification accomplished by the November election is important for the bourgeoisie because a belief that the system works is a precondition for popular acquiescence in what is to come. Despite the popular revulsion against the war, particularly in the working class, the election is of course not a victory for peace, but rather a victory for the bourgeoisie’s effort to prepare for the next war, by repairing the damage done to the U.S. military, intelligence and foreign policy apparatus by the Bush administration’s mistakes.
The real debate within the bourgeoisie over Iraq does not pit hawks against doves, but hawks against hawks on how best to extricate themselves from the quagmire and prepare for the next overseas military adventure. As the “dovish” New York Times wrote in its editorial two days after the election, “Mr. Gates’ most urgent task, assuming he is confirmed, must be to reopen those necessary channels of communication with military, intelligence and foreign service professionals on the ground. After hearing what they have to say, he needs to recommend a realistic new strategy to Mr. Bush in place of the one that is now demonstrably failing…He will have to rebuild a badly overstretched Army, refocus military transformation by trading in unneeded cold war weapons for new technologies more relevant to current needs, and nurture a more constructive relationship with Congressional oversight committees”.
Since the election, the general chiefs of staff moved quickly to assert their independence of the discredited Rumsfeld. The chiefs have undertaken a reassessment of the military situation in Iraq, searching for their own policy alternatives even before Gates is confirmed and before the Iraq Study Group issues its recommendations in mid-December. The Army has already released a new training manual that reverses one of Rumsfeld’s more controversial policies regarding minimal troop levels for occupation and reconstruction operations following military invasions, a policy that has been disastrous in Iraq.
Freed from an obligation to toe the line set forth previously by the lame duck Rumsfeld, General Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, testified before Senate and House committees in mid-November and openly criticized and contradicted Rumsfeld’s and Bush’s past decisions and policies in Iraq. For instance, regarding the long-simmering dispute between the armed services and Rumsfeld over necessary troop levels in Iraq, Abizaid testified that General Eric Shinseki - who was fired by Rumsfeld in 2003 for criticizing Rumsfeld’s doctrine of sparse occupation force deployments and insisting that up to 300,000 troops might be necessary - had been correct in his assessment of the situation.
Abizaid also contradicted the administration’s long-standing propaganda line by insisting that the greatest threat in Iraq came not from Al Qaeda but from sectarian militias that were on the brink of civil war. Abizaid opposed both a phased troop withdrawal, as advocated by some Democrats, and a deployment of thousands more troops, as advocated by Republican Senator John McCain. Instead he called for a policy change that would shift deployment of significant numbers of American troops from patrol and combat assignments to training Iraqi security forces.
Despite popular disenchantment with the war and widespread support for withdrawal, there will in fact be no quick military withdrawal from Iraq. In all likelihood, despite some stubborn resistance from certain neo-cons still remaining in the administration, there will be the implementation in large measure of whatever the bipartisan proposal that comes from Iraq Study Group in December. This will likely involve stepped up pressure on the Iraqi bourgeoisie to reach compromises within itself, some kind of timetable for phased withdrawal, and a reversal of the Bush administration’s refusal to talk to Syria and Iran. Baker has already said publicly that it is important to talk to your “enemies” and believes that the involvement of regional powers is essential in stabilizing Iraq and preventing the spread of chaos throughout the Middle East. Indeed it increasingly appears that the Baker commission may lean towards some sort of accommodation with Iran as a key element in the new orientation. The Study Group has leaked rumors about possibly convening a regional conference in the Middle East on the future of Iraq (similar to the Dayton negotiations on Kosovo). The Bush administration has already started moving in this direction by opening regional discussions with friendly nations like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt. While the administration may drag its feet on Iranian and Syrian involvement, it is inevitable that that orientation will eventually prevail. It is the only option available that would allow the U.S. to extricate itself from the Iraq quagmire, maintain a presence in the region, and counter European overtures toward Iran and Syria.
Adjustment of the situation in the Middle East will lay the basis for the American imperialism to more effectively orient itself towards challenges in the Far East and Latin America.
The reassertion of political discipline within the bourgeoisie, the rekindling of the democratic mystification, the realignment of the ruling political team, and the adjustment of its imperialist policies are important achievements for the American ruling class. However, these accomplishments cannot mitigate the impact of the deepening global economic crisis, the growing challenges to American imperialist hegemony, and increasing chaos on the international level. As we have written many times, in the world today, the U.S. confronts a crisis of American imperialism, not a crisis of George Bush. While perhaps this crisis has been aggravated by the miscues of the Bush administration in implementing U.S. policy, it is a crisis of the system, not one attributable to an individual. It is a central characteristic of the current period that whatever actions the U.S. takes to defend its challenged imperialist hegemony, in the end they accomplish the opposite of their intended goal – only aggravating, not correcting, the challenges to U.S. imperialism. For the moment the bourgeoisie can relish the current post-election political euphoria, but it cannot last for long. J. Grevin, 2/12/06.‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is a film about the impending disaster facing planet Earth because of global warming and the dreadful consequences for humanity if nothing is done to reverse the current course. Global warming results from the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, like coal and gasoline/petrol. Global average temperatures are predicted to rise by anything from 1.4 °C to 5.8 °C over the period 1990 to 2100.
The film tells us that of the 21 hottest years ever recorded, 20 have come in the last 25 years and the hottest of all was 2005. We see photographs of various mountains and mountain ranges from all around the world and see how the extensive snows and glaciers that previously covered their peaks have drastically diminished. In the Himalayas, for example, this means reduced irrigation for those who inhabit the lower plains with a serious threat to their livelihoods. We then see pictures of the polar ice caps and are told how the ice functions in reflecting the sun’s heat, but as the ice caps reduce in size and more ocean becomes visible, it absorbs heat and this accelerates the melting process (the ice cover on the Artic Ocean is melting away at 9% per year).
And as the ice caps melt, the more the oceans are rising and more places become submerged by water. Some populations on Indian Ocean islands are already having to evacuate. And we were told that in the not too distant future, assuming nothing is done, cities like San Francisco and Shanghai, regions like Florida and southern India and countries like Holland and Bangladesh, because they lie close to sea level, could be under water.
The film also refers to how the warmer atmosphere has been the key factor in extreme weather, of which there are numerous examples in recent years. (There have been many more unnatural rainfalls and freak floods across China, India and Central Europe). One of the worse examples was the floods in Mumbai in 2005 which saw 37 inches of rain in 24 hours, killing 1000 people.
There have been extremes of hot and cold, like the extremely hot summer across Europe in 2003 that killed thousands of elderly people. In 2005 fires burned out of control in Portugal and Spain due to the exceptionally dry conditions. There has been an exceptionally cold winter across Russia.
Then there have been many highly destructive hurricanes and tornados in the Caribbean region, and typhoons in the Far East (Hurricane Mitch wreaked destruction on Guatemala City in 1998). 12 months ago Hurricane Katrina devastated Florida but instead of burning itself out as it moved off shore, it entered the Caribbean and sucked in the rising heat, re-charging its power before it set of in the direction of New Orleans.
The film also shows global warming’s effects in central Africa. Lake Chad, that sits between two war-torn places, Niger and Darfur, has shrivelled up to about a fifth of its previous size, which can only further worsen the wretched living conditions of those who depended on its waters.
The animal kingdom is suffering too with more species disappearing as their habitats come under attack or disappear. We were also told of the damaging affect of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide on the oceans and their creatures living there (carbon dioxide dissolves in the sea to form carbonic acid). We were shown pictures of the devastating effects this is having on the coral reefs.
The warmer temperatures are also leading to an increase in tropical diseases, as disease carriers like mosquitoes are surviving more easily in the warmer conditions. And certain parasitic insects that winter frosts would have previously wiped out are destroying forested areas.
And to make the scenario even more frightening still, the film explains that global warming could affect the movement of the oceans, and the important circulation of heat and cold carried by the ocean currents to and fro across the globe. For example, a massive release of water from the melting of the Artic ice-cap could seriously interfere with Gulf Stream that brings the heat from the equatorial belt to the northern hemisphere. This could eventually lead to parts of Europe and America freezing over.
And we are told that despite the fact that some people claim there is dispute among scientists about the scientific evidence, this is untrue. There is broadly a 100% acceptance among scientists about these statistics and these predictions.
Al Gore spent two terms as US Vice-President and, after narrowly failing to win the presidency, has transformed himself into an eco-warrior. The format of the film has him lecturing students somewhere in the US with a large screen on which he projects his photographs, graphics and computer animations to illustrate his prognosis. However, the film has a parallel theme. This is the story of Al Gore, the Man. We see him growing up, are told of how a serious car accident nearly killed his young son and made him see how precious life is. We are told of how he was instrumental in raising environmental issues inside the Clinton Administration, and are encouraged to believe that if he had won the presidency over that nasty warmonger, George W, we would all be able to rest more comfortably in our beds.
He tells us the US is the number one polluter and has refused to implement the Kyoto agreement on reducing /trading carbon emissions (though some north eastern states and California have now unilaterally agreed to implement Kyoto).
The Bushes are hand in glove with the oil industry and the Bush Administration even had an official in charge of environmental issues who doctored reports until he was forced to resign (Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ refers to these distortions of the facts by the Bush Administration and the oil industry).
Considering he was at the heart of the US government in the latter half of the 1990s, when the issue was neglected just as much by the US government as it is now[1] [3], it’s not surprising that Al Gore doesn’t make a big issue of the need for state intervention to deal with the problem. In fact, we see a lot of him travelling around the lecture theatres of the world spreading the news, and quite pathetically he declares that the only way he knows of getting this message across is by going
“from city to city, from person to person, from family to family” as if the salvation of the planet is can only be solved at the individual level. Logically, the film ends with a farcical shopping list of things to do to make our lives more eco-friendly.
Like the rest of the Environmental lobby, like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, all this film does is use the horrors of global warming in order to increase our feeling of impotence in the face of impending disaster and to make us believe there is an alternative under capitalism. The real message from the Green Lobby is that we can spread the propaganda and pressure the governments and parliaments into taking a rational course of action, in other words, “trust in bourgeois democracy”.
Contrary to the view of Jonathan Porritt that capitalism can solve the crisis of global warming, the reality is quite the opposite.
The Kyoto Agreement set emission targets for each country but they have been largely been ignored. Meanwhile “The G8 communiqué on climate change at the end of the Gleneagles Summit… was a significant and long-awaited expression of political agreement… of the consequent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions… (but) the conclusions were based on the false assumptions that the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from human activity in affluent countries around the world can largely be achieved through the more efficient use of fossil fuels and increased research, development and investment in technology, particularly in renewable energy. In practice, this cannot be sufficient either on scale or in the timescale required.. The only action now open to government is to slow the pace of damaging change. Yet the scale of preventative action it is actually taking is pathetically inadequate”(‘Your planet and how to save it’ in The Independent 19/9/05).
Capitalism may have various global institutions within which the competitor nation states participate, but it is an illusion to believe they express a capacity for cooperation and rational decision-making at the international level. In fact, their decisions only replicate the power relations between the participants. The fundamental relations of capitalism are those of competition and the market and with the permanent economic crisis and imperialist wars, there can be no accommodation reached for offsetting environmental destruction. In the ravenous search for profits, the irrational flood of goods and services and people around the globe, and the competition between nation states in the search to squeeze out profits, means the degradation of the environment will only continue. Capitalism only produces for maximum profit and the ferocious competition between companies and nation states demands that each one expands to the maximum or goes under, gobbling up whatever natural resources feed the hunt for profit. The solution of the environmental crisis lies in the abolition of production for profit and the introduction of production for need, but this cannot happen without the global overthrow of the capitalist system.
Capitalism is clearly the problem, not the solution. The scientific and technical tools are there to enable us to develop a precise understanding of the present predicament of global warming and its causes. Marxism provides us with the framework for understanding where the problem lies at the social level. But the practical implications of the marxist method can only be realised by them taking root inside the working class. Workers can have no illusions in capitalism being able to find a way out from its current course. It’s only by becoming conscious of capitalism’s total bankruptcy and of its own capacity to free humanity from this nightmare that there can be hope for the future.
Duffy, 2/12/06.
[1] [4] According to the Independent, cited in Courrier International 15,6,06, the Clinton administration “authorised the dumping of dioxin into the oceans and presided over the biggest process of deforestation in the history of the USA”.
Presentation to the ICC Public Forums, Winter 2006
Communism is not a ‘nice idea’; it’s a material necessity. Not a nice idea? Actually, for most of the past century we have been told that it’s a very bad idea, because it means a totalitarian state, poverty wages, superpower politics, labour camps, etc. But despite the vast lie that communism=Stalinism, the idea still persisted that Stalinism wasn’t really communism at all, certainly not the communism envisaged by Marx. But there’s another line of defence: what happened in Russia proves it’s no more than a ‘nice idea’, unworkable in practice because of human nature or the complexities of the modern world. In fact, the very attempt to put it into practice is bound to end in something horrible. So better put up with what we’ve got…
Our point of departure – that of Marxism – is that communism isn’t a ‘nice idea’ because it’s not some scheme invented by well-meaning reformers, but corresponds to a necessity and a possibility provided by the dynamic of history. It’s a necessity because the present organisation of human society – capitalism – has reached a point where it is the system that can’t work for humanity. It has developed man’s powers of production to an unprecedented degree, but in such a manner that these very powers are turning against mankind and threatening to overwhelm him. This is evident when we look at the way technology and science are being used not to free mankind from useless toil and satisfy the basic material needs of the human species, but to create vast arsenals of extermination, to despoil the natural environment, and to serve the needs of a tiny exploiting minority. The very continuation of capitalism, in fact, has become a danger to humanity’s survival, whether through war, ecological collapse, or a combination of both. So getting rid of the present system is not just a nice idea, it’s a historic necessity that is imposed on mankind. It’s possible because the system has set in motion forces that can overcome it: the productive capacity to create abundance and thus end exploitation, and a social class which has a material interest in making a revolution against capitalism, in abolishing capitalist social relations. But note that necessity does not equal inevitability: communism is possible, but so too is the other alternative: the collapse into total barbarism.
When we answer the question ‘what is communism’, it is often necessary to begin with negatives. Certainly by saying ‘it’s not the USSR, China or Cuba’. But more generally by showing what features of the present system have to be got rid of. We could, for example, say:
a) Communism is a society without classes. It’s a basic axiom of the dominant ideology that society always has one bunch of people at the top and the rest at the bottom, with a few in the middle. In other words, that class divisions have always existed and will always exist. In fact, class society is quite a recent invention historically speaking. For tens of thousands of years human beings lived in a ‘primitive’ form of communism, also imposed by necessity. Class divisions emerged over a long period but finally gave rise to the first ‘civilisations’. So communism does set itself a pretty ambitious task is saying it’s going to get rid of thousands of years of class exploitation, which took various forms before capitalism arrived on the scene (despotism, slavery, serfdom…). But at the same time the existence of primitive communism disproves the argument that there’s something ‘natural’ about class divisions. They arose at a certain stage of history because of the old egalitarian social relations became a barrier to the development of the productive forces; but the present social relations have themselves become a barrier to further progress; what is now needed is to get rid of class divisions and private property and create a true community, where all wealth is controlled by the community for its own needs, not for the needs of a privileged minority;
b) Because it’s a society without classes, it’s a society without a state. The state has not been there for all time but arose as society split into contending classes, with the function of preserving social cohesion in the interests of the dominant class. Get rid of class divisions and you get rid of the state. This is already an answer to all those who argue that the more the state controls the economy, the closer we get to socialism or communism;
c) Communism is a society without money. In other words: unlike in capitalism where everything is produced for sale and to make a profit, in communism the motive of production is to meet human needs. Money will become unnecessary because production and consumption are no longer mediated by exchange. Again, this is possible because it has finally become feasible to produce enough for everybody’s needs, so goods can be freely distributed, even if, as with the problem of the state, this can’t be solved overnight. And it’s a necessity because producing for profit is the source of all the contradictions of the capitalist economy – the tendency towards the fall in the rate of profit and the crisis of overproduction. These contradictions once spurred capitalism to become a world wide system, and in this sense laid the foundations for communism, but at a certain point they became the source of growing catastrophes which demand a fundamental reorganisation of the whole system of production;
d) Communism is also a society without national frontiers. Capitalism developed the nation state as its ‘highest’ form of unity, but again, the very form of the nation state has become a fundamental obstacle, a danger for humanity, because capitalist competition has essentially become economic and military warfare between armed powers for the control of the globe. But despite this ‘war of each against all’, the system still functions as whole and it is impossible to escape its laws inside one region or country. The revolution has to be worldwide, and the new social organisation has to use all the earth’s resources in common. This is evident, for example, when it comes to dealing with the ecological crisis.
These are all negative definitions. Which doesn’t mean that communism is just negation. Marxists have always avoided ‘recipes’ but from the young Marx onwards there have been attempts to describe in positive terms what communism, especially in its more advanced phases, will be like: labour as a source of pleasure not torture; the fusion of work, science and art; man’s harmony with nature ‘without and within’ and thus the overcoming of the conflict between consciousness and instinct….
For us, these attempts by Marxists to describe the distant communist future are not ‘utopian’ because they are based on real human capacities: as Trotsky put it, the average human being will one day be as creative as Goethe or Shakespeare, but Goethe and Shakespeare are also only human, products of real human life. But they are also not utopian because communism is, as Marx put it, is “the real movement that abolishes the present state of affairs”. In one sense, this movement is the movement of all the exploited and oppressed classes in history, but more specifically, it is the movement of the proletariat, the working class. From the beginning Marx based his understanding of communism on the recognition that there was a class in society whose struggle had an implicitly communist dynamic - a class which could only emancipate itself by emancipating the whole of society from thousands of years of exploitation.
The proletarian struggle contains a dynamic towards communism because this is a class that can only defend itself in an associated manner, through the widest possible solidarity – and the society of the future is a society founded on solidarity. It contains a dynamic towards communism because communism is the first society in history where mankind will have a conscious mastery of its own productive powers – and the class struggle of the proletariat cannot advance without becoming increasingly conscious of its methods and its goals. From the beginning therefore, these fundamental needs of the class movement, the need for solidarity and the need to become conscious of its goals, gave rise to organised forms – trade unions, mutual aid societies, cooperatives on the one hand; and political organisations or parties on the other. Constantly subject to the pressure of the dominant class and its ideology, these forms often disappeared or were captured by the enemy class, but the class struggle constantly gave rise to new forms more suited to its own evolution.
Thus, as capitalism reached the end of its ascendant course, as it entered its epoch of decline, the proletarian movement was no longer simply confronted with the need to define and defend itself within the existing order, but to turn defence into attack and mount a challenge to the very foundations of that order. Marx had deduced that the class struggle would lead to revolution from the first defensive skirmishes of proletarians hardly evolved from their artisan roots. But even in his lifetime the capacity of the working class to storm the heavens was demonstrated in practice by the Paris Commune, the first “workingman’s government”, the first indication of the capacity of the working class to overturn the existing state power and set up its own form of power. The capacity of the proletariat to organise itself as a force antagonistic to capital was further demonstrated by the mass strikes in Russia in 1905, and on an even higher level by the revolutionary wave that arose in response to the First World War, the highest point of all being the seizure of power by the soviets or workers’ councils in Russia. The workers’ councils, as Lenin observed, were the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. A form which allowed the whole working class to regroup, to control its struggles through mass assemblies and revocable delegates, to fuse the economic and the political dimension of the struggle, to arm itself and destroy the bourgeois state. A form, finally, which allowed the consciousness of the working class to progress by leaps and bounds, influenced decisively by the intervention of the most advanced fraction of the class, the communist party.
The revolutionary wave that followed the war was defeated. In Russia, where the working class for the first time took power at the level of an entire country, the revolution was strangled by isolation and the very instruments that had served it at one stage turned against it at another. But from this tragic experience, vital lessons were learned, in particular: the necessity for the workers’ councils to maintain their autonomy from all other political institutions that may arise after the destruction of the old apparatus of power; the impossibility of the communist party taking on tasks that belong to the class as a whole, above all the exercising of political power; the understanding that the nationalisation of the economy does not mean a break with capitalist social relations.
Despite the historic defeat suffered by the working class at that time, despite all the horrors that followed in its wake - Stalinist and Nazi terror, a second imperialist world war – we do not therefore conclude that the communist revolution is an impossible dream, but remain determined to preserve and develop these lessons so that they can feed into the revolution of the future. WR, 23/11/06.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2006/december/inconvenient-truth#_ftn1
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2006/december/inconvenient-truth#_ftnref1
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism