The concerted efforts of the dominant fraction of the U.S. ruling class to force a readjustment of imperialist policy in Iraq has run into fierce resistance from hardline stalwarts in the Bush administration. Since the failure to change the ruling team in the 2004 elections, the administration has been under pressure to modify its failed policies. This pressure was exerted through external policy reviews, media campaigns, and political scandals. The administration has always responded half-heartedly, with just enough concessions to give the appearance that change was coming. Examples include the sacrifice of Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative deputy secretary of defense who was widely credited with being the architect of Iraq war policy, and the adoption of policy aimed at gradual troop withdrawals in January 2006.

However, as the situation in Iraq steadily worsened, 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.

This consensus led last March to creation of a bipartisan commission, the Iraq Study Group, led by James A. Baker, III, and former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamiliton. Baker has been a close adviser and friend to the elder George Bush, served as secretary of state under Bush senior during the first U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991. Baker managed the current President Bush’s legal effort to successfully steal the 2000 election Florida, and is sometimes referred to as the Bush family “janitor,” who can always be counted upon to clean up Bush family messes. Hamilton also co-chaired the 9/11 Commission. Comprised overwhelmingly of prominent officials1 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 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 loss of touch with reality. So strong was this pressure, that by early September the President actually stopped using the “stay the course” slogan. Nevertheless, Bush still stubbornly certainly seemed to cling to this view. He still continued to denounce the Democrats as the party of “cut and run” and the content of his own message continued to stress 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 potential influence of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, 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 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’s 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 from the discredited Rumsfeld. The chiefs have undertaken a reassessment of the military situation in Iraq, searching for their own policy alternatives even before Gates was 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 which has been disastrous in Iraq.

Freed from an obligation to toe the line set forth previously by the lame duck Rumsfeld, General Abizaid, director of U.S. Central Command, 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 and shouldn’t have been fired.

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. Indeed the Bush administration has essentially rejected the study group’s recommendations and seems hell bent on escalating the war in Iraq. The hardliners in the administration have embraced Sen. McCain’s proposal for a “surge” in troop strength, with the deployment of perhaps 30,000 additional troops to quash resistance in Sunni areas, despite the fact that military leaders at the Joint Chiefs and in the field in Iraq are opposed to increasing troop levels. The military opposition to the “surge” stems from worries that this will only make the situation look more like an out and out occupation, increase the number of American targets on the ground and hence the number of casualties, and in the long run weaken the military’s ability to intervene elsewhere. It is indeed ironic that when the military wanted additional troops in 2003, the Bush administration refused and fired their leading general, and now when they don’t want more troops, the administration seems posed to ram them down their throats. Bush has responded by announcing a shake up in the military command. Military leaders opposing the escalation in the Central Command and in the field in Iraq have been reassigned elsewhere, and are being replaced with officers who accept the administration’s plan.

In all likelihood, despite expecting some stubborn resistance from certain neo-cons in the administration, the dominant fraction anticipated the implementation in large measure of the Iraq Study Group proposals, including particularly 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 and convening an international conference in the Middle East on the future of Iraq that would include participation of these two countries. In this regard, Baker has stressed publicly the importance of talking to your “enemies.” This 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. While Bush appointed Gates as his new secretary of defense under pressure from the external forces within the bourgeoisie, Gates appears to be the only figure in the president’s war council currently capable of recognizing the gravity of the situation. Adjustment of the situation in the Middle East is crucial to the interests of the American imperialism, necessary in order to lay the basis for the American imperialism to more effectively orient itself towards challenges in the Far East and Latin America.

The Bush administration’s resistance to a significant midcourse correction poses grave dangers for the ruling class. It risks jeopardizing the reassertion of political discipline within the bourgeoisie, undercutting the rekindling of the democratic mystification, and intolerably aggravating the crisis of American imperialism. This will seriously aggravate the political crisis afflicting the ruling class and create even more political pressure on the administration. – J. Grevin, 12/1/07.

In his address to the nation on January 10th, Pres. George Bush completely rejected the central recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, ignored the political meaning of the Republican electoral defeat in November, and escalated the war in Iraq by sending more troops and threatening hostilities against Iran and Syria. Ironically, Bush’s controversial troop “surge” is so small an escalation that it hardly has any chance of impacting on the military situation, except to increase the number of American targets in Iraq.

The consequences of what Republican Senator Chuck Nagel (Nebraska) called the “worst foreign policy blunder since Vietnam” will indeed be very serious for the American ruling class. In order to implement its reckless escalation, the administration had to remove its leading generals and diplomats in the field who opposed the troop build up and find compliant officers and officials who could be counted on to do what they were bid.

Through the study commission and its manipulation of the electoral circus, the dominant fraction of the American bourgeoisie had endeavored to coerce the Bush administration to alter its disastrous conduct of imperialist policy and at the same time give it the political cover to save face in doing so. Through its irrational refusal to comply, the Bush administration has triggered a political crisis within the ruling class that is unprecedented since the Vietnam war and Watergate. Increased divisions within the bourgeoise will result. Many Republicans have already joined the chorus against the escalation. This will provide impetus to a strengthening of the anti-war movement, which up to now has not been so much a mass political or social movement as it has been a series of occasional mass demonstrations orchestrated by a small circle of professional leftist activists. Now with growing disagreements within the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie, just as during the Vietnam war after the Tet Offensive, there will be increasing financial and media support for the anti-war movement to step up pressure on the administration and to rescue the democratic mystification from oblivion.

Instead of heeding the Iraq Study Group’s admonition to recognized political realities in the Middle East and engage Syria and Iran in diplomatic dialog, Bush has become increasingly bellicose towards these two countries and seemed to threaten military action. All the progress that the ruling class thought it made in overcoming the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” will be obliterated. This will severely aggravate the crisis of American imperialism, as it will be increasingly difficult to get the working class and the rest of the population to accept the need for future military interventions around the world – something that is a long term strategic necessity for U.S. imperialism.

We will witness a struggle of hawks against hawks within the ruling class, as the Bush administration becomes increasingly marginalized and the dominant elements seek to salvage the situation, so they can prepare for the next imperialist war.

The working class cannot be suckered by the rhetoric of the anti-Bush chorus within the bourgeoisie. What is unfolding is a bitter squabble within the capitalist class on how best to dominate the world. For the workers movement, it is the struggle to destroy capitalism that counts, not the struggle over the ruling team that will implement imperialist policy.

-- Internationalism, Jan. 12, 2007

The November election was an extremely important event for the American ruling class. For six years, since the disastrous election of 2000, the U.S. Bourgeoisie experienced serious difficulties in controlling the outcome of the electoral circus and putting in place a ruling team and political division of labor that best corresponds to its long term strategic interests and goals. As a consequence the credibility of the electoral mystification, the democratic propaganda myth that elections enable “the people” to participate in the governance of society, had taken some terrific hits and had been seriously undermined.

Difficulties in Controlling the Electoral Circus

In good measure these difficulties were a manifestation of the tendency of “each for himself,” which is a central characteristic of the general social decomposition of capitalist society, within the electoral circus. In particular this was epitomized by the breakdown in the willingness of the various candidates and parties to subordinate their political ambitions to the requirements of the national interest.

Instead, especially in close elections, despite what was in the best global interests of the national capital, candidates and parties succumbed to the desire to win at any cost. This was demonstrated by the debacle of the 2000 presidential campaign in which the candidate who lost the popular vote emerged as president.

The rise of rightwing Christian fundamentalism, which played a pivotal role in recent elections, as a political force in the U.S. Is also a reflection of decomposition.

Confused by the increasing social instability and hopelessness and lacking a revolutionary alternative for the future, many people are driven towards religion as a simplistic solution to the chaos of capitalist society. The fact that the fundamentalists are controlled by their religious leaders and are consumed by crackpot social agenda items, such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage, seemed to make them impervious to classic forms of political manipulation by the media. Thus in 2004, despite sharing widespread concerns about the economy and war, fundamentalists cast their votes based on emotional hot button issues like gay marriage.

The difficulties in reaching a consensus on the best ruling team until quite late in September in 2004 was in part yet another example of the impact of decomposition on conjunctural political events.

It has taken six years and an intolerable crisis of its imperialist leadership for the dominant fraction of the ruling class to regain control of its electoral circus.

The Role of the Media

The overwhelming Democratic victory in the House, and the razor-thin margin in the Senate can be attributed to the tremendous and determined effort not to repeat the errors of the 2000 and 2004 elections.

This time in 2006, the dominant fraction of the ruling class committed itself early to Democratic victory as essential to implementation of its long range interests.

The emergence of a consensus on the need to readjust the ruling team and imperialist policy could be seen last March with the creation of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission created on the initiative of Republican congressmen and comprised of prominent officials from the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George Bush senior, and Bill Clinton. The purpose of the commission was to devise a fresh approach to the disastrous situation in Iraq and to pressure the administration into accepting that approach. In order to achieve such a midcourse correction, it was crucial to manipulate the elections to demonstrate popular disenchantment with the administration’s policy and to put pressure on Bush to alter policy.

Effective mobilization of the mass media became a high priority to assure the desired electoral outcome. Except for the rightwing talk show commentators and Murdoch’s Fox network, the media messages were clear and unrelenting in attacking the administration. The critical views of the Iraq Study Group appeared regularly in the media. Both Democratic and Republican commission members characterized the administration’s rhetoric of “cut and run” vs. “stay the course,” as a simplistic, false dichotomy. Broadcasters on CNN and MSNBC, in particular, kept a steady barrage of criticism. CNN even ran a series of broadcasts titled, “Broken Government,” in the week running up to the election, which ripped the administration.

The New York Times and Washington Post led the attack by publishing leaked documents that revealed that the administration had suppressed a consensus national intelligence estimate drafted by 16 espionage agencies that reported that the disastrous consequences of the mismanaged war in Iraq exacerbated, rather than alleviated, the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist threat against the U.S. In flagrant contradiction of the Bush administration’s falsely optimistic propaganda pronouncements.

These reports were picked up and highlighted by the rest of the mass media immediately. In contrast to its past reaction to such media leaks with threats of investigations for criminal leaking of classified documents, the administration was forced to de-classify and make public large portions of the intelligence reports.

Even more importantly the use of the media was instrumental in neutralizing the Christian fundamentalist problem that had been so serious in 2004. The ruling class unleashed a media campaign around the Foley scandal. This scandal included more than just the actions of Foley himself, an ultraconservative Republican congressman, champion of so-called “family values,” and arch opponent of gay rights and gay marriage, who was revealed to have made sexual overtures to teenage boys working as pages in the House of Representatives. More devastatingly, the media campaign stressed also the complicity of high ranking Republican leaders in the House, including Speaker Hastert, who covered up this scandal for nearly three years. Exploitation of this scandal on a daily basis effectively neutralized the Christian right in the election.

Reviving the Electoral Mystification

The reinvigoration of the electoral mystification that had been so badly tarnished since the beginning of the new century was an important accomplishment for the bourgeoisie. In 2004, we wrote that the bourgeoisie desired a Kerry victory in part to revive the electoral mystification, to demonstrate “the power of the people” to correct the political fiasco of the stolen election of 2000. They wanted people dancing in the streets in celebration of how the system works and “the will of the people” is manifest. Well, that is very nearly what they have achieved in 2006. The election has been portrayed in the media, and in comments by prominent politicians from both parties, as an expression of the political will of the American people for an end to the war in Iraq, for a change in political direction. Following the election, even on election night itself, it was interesting to hear not only journalists, but Republican political strategists and pundits as well use such terms as “the swing of the political pendulum,” “a change in the political cycle,” “the need for the Republicans to reclaim their principles,” in describing the meaning of the election. In this sense, the bourgeoisie signaled preparation for realigning the political division of labor to put the Republicans in opposition and the Democrats in power, and the Republicans acknowledge acceptance of this role.

Undoubtedly the Democrats will undertake immediately some popular domestic measures, such as an increase in the minimum wage and new legislation correcting the excessively regressive medical prescription plan imposed by Bush, and abandonment of the attack on social security. These measures will be designed to lay the basis for the Democrats to take the White House in 2008, in order to continue the healing process and prepare for future military actions in defense of U.S.

Hegemony. Of course the resistance of Bush administration hardliners to any significant alteration in Iraq policy, still risks undermining the gains made in reviving the credibility of the electoral mystification.

Indeed already there is some concern expressed among bourgeois media pundits that the administration’s plans to escalate the war in Iraq after voters had so clearly expressed their disapproval of the war will lead to political demoralization and a loss of faith in elections as a means to influence government policy.

The degree to which the Bush administration refuses to accept the meaning of the midterm election results, as a reflection of the political will of the dominant fraction of the ruling class, is the degree to which it risks facing even more serious political pressure to change imperialist course. Jerry Grevin, 13/1/07.

In the early morning hours of Nov. 25th five New York City undercover police officers pumped fifty bullets at nearly point blank range into a car occupied by three unarmed black men. Sean Bell, the driver was killed and two passengers were seriously wounded. So outrageous was this assault that even New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York State Governor George Pataki quickly issued public statements decrying the obvious use of “excessive force” by the cops. Rev. Al Sharpton and a legion of civil rights leaders held angry press conferences, organized the usual protest marches and silent vigils, posed for pictures with grieving family members and denounced the racism of the New York City police department. There’s no doubt that racism is rampant within the police department.

However, this time it was not simply a case of white cops victimizing black victims. The squad of undercover cops who went berserk that night were about as ethnically diverse a group of cops one is ever likely to encounter, including two minority cops, one black and one Hispanic. In fact it was the black cop, who had been undercover as a customer in the same strip club where the victims had been drinking for most of the evening, who followed them to their car, first pulled his gun, and jumped on the hood of the car, provoking Bell to try to drive away from what he thought was an armed assault. Supposedly the cop, who himself had consumed two alcoholic drinks during his undercover operation at the bar, did this because he thought one of the passengers was in possession of a gun. While it was a white cop who fired 31 times, both the black and Hispanic cops also opened fired on the unarmed victims. Only the sergeant who was in charge of the squad did not first; apparently lacking confidence in the accuracy of his colleagues, once the shooting started, the sergeant ducked for cover.

For years leftists, civil rights leaders, and black nationalists have portrayed the problem of police brutality simply as a question of racism. The solutions offered by these leftist bourgeois activists are always the same: fire the police commissioner, hire more minority cops, appoint a black police commissioner, and elect more black politicians. As this incident demonstrates, having more minorities on the police force only increases the chances that a black person will be brutalized by a police officer who has the same color skin. There are plenty of black mayors and black police commissioners across the U.S. these days and police brutality continues unabated.

In capitalist society, the police are a special body of armed men, a critical element of the state apparatus that serves to maintain law and order – capitalism’s law and order – and to repress threats to that order. Sure, sometimes that includes some social useful things like solving crimes that reflect anti-social behavior, returning lost children to their parents, and directing traffic. But ever since the rise of the first police departments in the U.S. in the early 1800’s it has included the use of force and intimidation to suppress social and political discontent. The exercise of coercive force is crucial to intimidating the population to toe the line. Police brutality is a class weapon, not a race weapon. It has always been used to victimize and terrorize the poor and the working class, whether it was the Irish, Italian, Jewish immigrants in the industrial slums of major cities in the 19th and 20th centuries, long before the massive migration of black workers from the rural south to northern cities in the 20th century. Police brutality was used against workers, white and black, in the course of the class struggle throughout American history. It’s true that many police officers are recruited from working class families, and on an individual basis, it is sometimes possible to get through to an individual police officer to break with the institutionalized brutality and violence that engulfs their professional life. But as an institution the capitalist police, is the enemy of the working class. We will never rid society of police brutality except by destroying capitalism first. – JG, 13/1/07.

The victorious Ethiopian government has declared that its soldiers will leave Somalia in a matter of weeks. The emboldened Somali “transitional government” is cheerfully talking of economic recovery and peace for this ravaged country that has not had a central government for decades. The idea of a UN mandated African peacekeeping military force is being floated by the US and others. So everything seems dandy. One more local conflict resolved, one more war waged and won against the “threat” posed to civilization by Islamic fundamentalism. It would seem that finally the Bush administration, that is to say the US –the power behind Ethiopia’s and its Somali friends’ success- seems to have got one right!

Yet one should be careful to bet on it. Despite the abrupt military collapse of the forces of the “Council of Islamic Courts” that controlled much of Somalia until last December the war is far from over. It is believed that there are over 20,000 militiamen in the country responding to one or another warlord that have been killing one another for decades. The hard-core Islamist themselves have threatened to wage a guerrilla war against the government and its American/Ethiopian supporters and are attempting to reorganize in the Southern part of the country. In fact there are signs that this conflict is escalating to the point of being a new war front for American imperialism. The US force in Somalia –between 1400 and 1800 according to the media- seems to have mostly kept a low profile up to now, limiting its role in the battlefield to providing support to Ethiopian forces on the ground. However the US has not been shy in showing its military muscle using its gunship deployed in the region to launch devastating air-strikes against retreating Islamic forces in the Southern part of the country.

The Bush administration is saying that it does not intend to commit additional troops to this battlefield, but this conflict still runs the risk of escalating and is nevertheless already a new war front full of political implications for American imperialism’s long term strategy of defending its world hegemony.

In the context of the Bush administration’s planned escalation of the war in Iraq and the increasing military threats against Iran and Syria this new offensive in the Horn of Africa by US imperialism is one more push down the road of chaos and devastation that threatens to engulf the whole world over. Only the international working class movement can provide an alternative to this mind-boggling madness. –Eduardo Smith, 13/1/07.

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/300/anarchism-and-workers-control [6]

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to think that the American dominant class is paralyzed in the face of this contradiction. On the contrary, in the context of its strategic objective of defending its world hegemony, the US bourgeoisie has repeatedly responded to the challenges of its competitors not only politically, but also militarily, increasingly relying on its terrifying MILITARY MIGHT as its main tool. This could be seen in the first Gulf war, the Balkans wars, Afghanistan and presently in the war in Iraq. This headlong rush into war also implies for the bourgeoisie the need to manage more and more its economy as a war economy at the same time that it confronts an historically undefeated working class that is unwilling to accept sacrifices in the name of the defense of the national interest.

Since the present Republican administration came to power in 2001, its preoccupation to defend by military means the US imperialist interests around the world has been so clearly at the center of its political agenda, that the extension of war will be seen as the main legacy of its 8 years at the head of the American State. According to Bush’s own rhetoric, he is a war-president, the representative of a country that is literally in a permanent state of war. Yet we need to underline that using military means to defend US imperialism is by no means the prerogative of the right-wing Republicans, in fact at the imperialist level there has been continuity between Republican and Democratic administration policies ever since the dominant class became conscious of the new situation open up by the collapse of Stalinism.

Just as the old system of imperialist blocks collapsed Bush, the father, while proclaiming the beginning of a “new world order,” put in place and lead the first round of devastation against Iraq -the so-called “Desert Storm”- in 1991. Three years later, the Democrat Clinton came to power with a pledge to reverse the damage to the US imperialist interest that had been caused by the hesitations of the Bush administration vis-à-vis the break up of Yugoslavia and the advances of Western European powers, mainly France and Germany in their imperialist influence towards Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Thus, during its two terms in power, Clinton kept up a permanent state of siege against Iraq, bombarding it at will throughout the years of his administration. While in the Balkans region, under the cover of the ideology of “humanitarianism”, the Clinton administration led the US military might into the imperialist war unleashed by the break up of Stalinist Yugoslavia.

In this sense, the current Bush administration's imperialist strategy laid out during the first months after coming to power—a more forceful and unilateral foreign policy, heavily dependent on the American military might—was not an aberration. On the contrary it was a valid response to the need to defend the imperialist interests of American capitalism. Bush’s colorful cowboy, shoot-first, ask questions-afterwards image attempted to portray American Imperialism as being more than up to the challenges of world imperialist supremacy. And in September 2001, under the cover of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the dominant class, with very few exceptions, signed on to this strategy that would take the US in turn first to the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 and in March of 2003 to that of Iraq. And back then Democrats and Republicans alike, again with very few exceptions, went hand and hand into that war and celebrated together the “victories” of the American military machine.

Of course in hindsight the US bourgeoisie declared victory prematurely and today there is not much to brag about in those conflicts. After quickly overthrowing the badly outgunned Taliban regime and installing a client government, the US has accomplished little more in Afghanistan. Reconstruction has never really taken off and guerrilla war, drug trafficking and instability are rampant in many parts of the country. While in Iraq, the Bush administration is bogged down in a war that is rapidly becoming longer than other major military conflict in which the US has been involved – such as WWI, WWII and Korea.

Four years after it was launched under the cover of a mass of lies and grandiose promises, this war has become highly unpopular with the American population, tremendously expensive and with no winnable solution in sight. Internationally, the Iraq quagmire has been extremely costly to American imperialism. Its political credibility, so essential for its imperialist hegemony, has been greatly diminished, accelerating its historical crisis. Its real strategic objective in this war –the encirclement of Europe and thus the containment of its imperialist expansionist ambitions towards the Middle East – has been a total disaster. The war in Iraq War has not weakened the main imperialist powers of Europe. On the contrary, their political imperialist credibility and world influence has grown, just as the US's world standing has reached historical lows.

Domestically, the fiasco in Iraq, and, on top of that, the debacle of the so-called “war on terror,” has created growing tensions and mounting divisions within the bourgeoisie. The Bush administration itself is more and more isolated within the bourgeoisie and from its dominant fraction in particular. Already the Iraq quagmire has cost the jobs and influence of so-called “neo-cons,” the main architects directly responsible for the Bush administration's imperialist policies. Among those that have fled the sinking ship or were forced out are the number 2 in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, the ideologue credited for the so called “Bush doctrine.” In addition, the once much-admired (in bourgeois circles), abrasive and controversial ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Even Vice-President Dick Cheney has been involved in a flurry of political scandals that have ended with the conviction of Scooter Libby, friend and protégé of Wolfowitz and former top Cheney assistant. However, despite the dislike and lost credibility of Bush’s policies, the American political apparatus has great weaknesses in rectifying the situation. Unlike its European counterparts, with their parliamentary systems and votes of no confidence, the US can’t change a government outside its regularly scheduled electoral calendar, with the exception of some very destabilizing measures, like impeachment or assassination. Therefore, the most likely scenario for the immediate future is the continuation of the Bush clique in power at the head of the state apparatus until the 2008 election, albeit a very much watered-down version of the one that dominated in the first years of the administration.

What future political Strategy for the bourgeoisie?

With less than two years left in power for the Bush administration, the question is how will the dominant class try to manage the situation. Save dramatic events, such as an unlikely impeachment, the most likely course seems to be the one already put in place in the last couple years. This entails, on the one hand, pressuring the Bush clique to readjust its imperialist policy in Iraq and around the globe, even going as far as sabotaging its decision; and on the other hand, preparingtoa change the ruling team in the 2008 presidential elections, which could bring the Democratic Party to the White House or, at the very least, a reborn Republican party based on a total repudiation of Bush policies.

Since the failed attempt to change the Bush administration in 2004, we have seen it under constant pressure that in many instances has taken the form of juicy political scandals (see article on scandals in this issue), the ultimate goal of which is to push the administration to modify its disastrous handling of the Iraq war, and beyond that to revise its general imperialist policy in particular towards the Middle East and the Far East –particularly in relation to China and North Korea. As a result of this pressure, the core of neo-conservative hawks around Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were in large part responsible for setting the tone of the Bush administration's imperialist policy, have increasingly lost their dominant position within the administration to a more pragmatic “faction,” seemingly more in tune with the needs of American capitalism as voiced by many within the dominant faction of the bourgeoisie. This “faction” composed by career foreign service officers, part of the permanent foreign policy apparatus that has served past administrations, both Democratic and Republican, centered primarily in the State Department and is formally linked to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has already achieved some so-called course corrections that were unthinkable just a few months ago. These have resulted in a de-nuclearization pact with North Korea, a new push in the Middle East aimed to revive the Israel-Palestinian “peace process,” and tentative moves towards negotiating with Iran and Syria about the future of Iraq. Even Latin America, which has been largely ignored by the Bush administration and where anti-gringo rhetoric has been mounting for years behind Venezuelan President Chavez and his populist/leftist buddies in other countries, seems to have suddenly appeared on the radar screens of American imperialist policy priorities. Furthermore, indicative of how discredited the old neo-conservative, unilateralist, take-no-prisoners rhetoric has become, there is a clear attempt to sound more multilateralist and open to diplomatic negotiations with the enemy. In other words, the Bush administration is responding to the pressure, reluctantly and without saying so, putting forward some of changes in imperialist policy recommended in particular by the Iraq Study Group, adjustments that it had just a few months ago largely rebuffed.

It is too soon still to say how far the Bush administration will go in the ongoing readjustment of its policies, because although the so-called neo-cons are in retreat, they have not disappeared from the scene. So far, against the Iraq Study Group recommendations, they have gone ahead with an expansion of the war in Iraq and starting to send over an additional 40,000 troops against the platonic opposition of the Democratic controlled Congress. In addition, just a few weeks ago they managed to wage a successful proxy war in Somalia (which of course, like Iraq, is now bogged down in continuing instability). The neo-cons also seem to be trying to open yet another war front in the Middle East, this time against Iran which has been already for sometime in the spotlight mainly because of its growing regional imperialist influence and refusal to give up on its nuclear ambitions.

In a speech in January, Bush accused both Iran and Syria of granting safe passage in and out of Iraq to "terrorists and insurgents" and accused Iran, in particular, of "providing material support for attacks on American troops." In response, Bush announced the deployment of a second aircraft carrier strike group to the Gulf and pledged to "destroy the network providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” In early February, as the beating of war drums for military action against Iran built up, former Carter administration National Security Advisor Brzezinski sounded the alarm bells against the neo-cons in testimony before a Senate committee. After denouncing the Bush administration’s blunder in Iraq, he warned of possible Machiavellian maneuvers that could lead to war with Iran:

“ A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan".

The fact that such a denunciation came from a foreign policy expert from within the inner circles of the dominant faction of the bourgeoisie itself bears witness to both the discredit and dislike of the Bush administration, and to the mounting confrontations within the dominant class. Leaving aside the Brezezinski’s intentions to sabotage the neo-cons’ policies in the Middle East, this declaration totally confirms the ICC’s analysis of the September 11 events, the invasion of Iraq and the more general question of the Machiavellian nature of the bourgeoisie.

In the last weeks there has been a tamping down of the anti-Iran war rhetoric both in the Bush administration and the neo-conservative press. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attests that the US has no intention of going to war with Iran. This has been echoed by top military commanders who acknowledge that the US military, already waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, is spread too thin to be able to open another war front. This is a far cry from Mr. Bush earlier “all options are open” declarations and the calls from some neo-cons to launch tactical nuclear attack against Iranian nuclear research facilities. Of course this is not the end of the story, the difficulties of American imperialism in the Middle East and Afghanistan have had the unintended side effect of increased regional influence of Iranian imperialism. This puts Iran in a collision course with the US and its main allies in the region –particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia – and sooner or later the US will have to deal with this situation.

It seems that the bourgeoisie is more or less resigned to having Bush and company in power for the next 18 months and to the reality, as Bush himself predicted sometime ago, that the problem of withdrawing American troops from Iraq would be left for the next president to resolve. This is why almost two years before the next presidential election, the presidential campaign is in full swing. No wonder! This will be a very important event for the bourgeoisie. At stake is the need to repair the international credibility of American imperialism which has been badly damaged by a particularly inept administration, which in turn has become a case study on how decomposition has affected the bourgeoisie of the most powerful capitalist nation of the world. Its level of corruption and political favoritism, its gusto for manipulation and use of the state apparatus for its own benefit, and its narrow-minded president, heavily influenced by Christian fundamentalism’s ideological disdain for science and scientific facts seem unparalleled in the recent history of teams in charge of managing the American State. But then one can say that this is a decadent administration that fits well a decadent system of a historically bankrupt dominant class.

Internationalism, March 2007.

As this issue of Internationalism goes to press, details are still emerging regarding the senseless mass slaughter of 33 people-including the apparent shooter who committed suicide-on the campus of Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, VA. Based on what we can gleam from media accounts so far, this event appears to be but the latest in a long series of horrific school shootings that have rocked the planet over the last decade and a half. These killings serve as prime evidence of the complete bankruptcy of the capitalist social order, a system that puts the accumulation of profit and the interests of the imperial state before the satisfaction of human needs and the nourishment of human potential.

In fact, what these shootings really demonstrate is the decomposition of the very foundations of the capitalist social order itself, with its inability to offer the younger generation any real perspective for the future. More and more young people grow increasingly depressed and isolated as they are marginalized by unemployment, the ruthless competition of academic life-which foreshadows the future awaiting many of them in an increasingly precarious job market, the poor state of mental health care and the overall decline of social solidarity, as life under capitalism becomes an increasingly Hobbesian struggle for individual survival.

The shooter in this particular case, Cho Seung-Hui, appears to have been a very isolated and depressed individual who had extreme difficulty forming any social bonds with others of his generation. The capitalist media will inevitably seize on this and interpret his actions as the result of an individual mental health crisis resulting from his anti-social nature and his cultural isolation as a Korean immigrant. While these factors probably played a role in pushing this particular individual to take these desperate and senseless actions, the media will try its best to pass the shootings off as the actions of a lone "nut case" that no amount of foresight and intervention could prevent. Their goal is to make us all accept that events like this, as unfortunate and terrible as they may be, will happen from time to time and there is nothing we can really do about them. While some left-wing bourgeois politicians will raise the issue of gun control and argue for more restrictive legislation to prevent such tragedies[1] and those on the right will seek to hold a supposedly permissive and violent popular culture responsible, the main thrust of the media campaign will be to convince us that these murderous events-just like terrorism-are something we are going to have to learn to live with.

In fact, something of this very sense of inevitability was revealed in the video tape the shooter sent to the news media shortly before launching his killing spree. In the tape, which is mostly an incoherent mix of anarchist hatred of the rich and puritanical and misogynistic ravings, he laments the injuries that the privileged and depraved in society have inflicted upon him, but irrationally concludes that he has no choice, no option at all, but to strike back against random innocent individuals in the murderous way he did. The sense that there is no alternative but to resort to violence is the very argument the bourgeoisie uses to justify its own military barbarism. And in the U.S., this same argument is used constantly to explain why we must keep the troops in Iraq. According to this cynical view, no matter how much in error the initial decision to send troops may have been, we now have no choice but to stay the course.

It is no surprise that this mentality has penetrated throughout society and helped cultivate an increasingly pervasive sense among many disaffected young people that there is "no future" and thus "no alternative" for assuaging one's pain than to strike back against society with individualized violence. At least that way, one can gain some recognition and attention and make society take them seriously for once, even if it means going out in a hail of bullets or the blast of a bomb. We see this same sick logic play itself out in suicide bombings in the Middle East, as well as the senseless acts of destruction carried out by many young people in the supposedly politically aware anarchist milieu.

However, the fact of the matter is that an alternative does exist to this senseless spiral into hopelessness and violence-both state and individual-that is currently engulfing the capitalist social order. But this alternative will not be found by turning to the capitalist state to protect us with more legislation-they have already proven incapable of doing that-or to the religious hacks who try to comfort us with the absurd notion that such events are part of God's master plan.

Today, it is only in the struggle of the working class against capitalism that we can find a road to a different type of society, one that is based on the collective solidarity of all, rather than the private enrichment of a few. While we cannot say that all forms of mental illness will disappear under communism-this part of the human condition is still just too poorly understood today-we do know that the establishment of a truly communist society will require a level of social solidarity we do not have today. This solidarity, while not a panacea for all human problems, is something we communists think will go a long way to alleviating many of the psychological pressures that young people like Seung-Hui face in a decomposing capitalist society which itself has no future use to the human species and whose continued existence can only serve prolong human misery.

Internationalism

April 2007

[1] In fact, as soon as news of the shootings was released, the bourgeois media in Europe, Australia and Canada seized on the event to cynically berate the United States' "gun culture" and trump the superiority of their societies over that of the American hegemon. However, while it is true that due to historical reasons it is much easier for individuals to purchase a gun in the United States than elsewhere, this same type of irrational youth violence has occurred across the capitalist globe, from the 1989 shootings at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, which killed 15 people, to the 2002 school shooting in Erfurt, Germany which claimed 17 lives.

However, as we have frequently pointed out in the ICC press, these periods of economic expansion that capitalism likes to brag about, in no way reflect a healthy economy or represent a reversal of the global economic crisis that began in the late 1960s. The general tendency is for each economic downturn, or recession, to be deeper and for each recovery to be weaker than the previous one. So in fact the economic recovery of the past five years was more fiction than fact. For example, at the height of the current economic recovery, poverty in America was worse than it was in the bottom of the previous economic downturn. According to the Census Bureau in 2005, 12.6 percent of the population – 37 million people – were living in poverty. “That means that four years into an economic expansion, the percentage of Americans defined as poor was higher than at the bottom of the last recession in late 2001, when it was 11.7 percent” (NYT Apr 17, 2007). Of course the “official” poverty statistics seriously understate the problem. For example, an alternative method for calculating the poverty level suggested by the National Academy of Sciences would have put the poverty rate at 14.1 percent in 2005, or 41.3 million people. But these statistics are ridiculous and completely distort reality. According to the official government rate, the poverty line for a family of 2 parents and 2 children in 2005 $19,806, and for the Academy’s alternative it was $22,841. It’s impossible to imagine how any family of four could survive on such abysmal income.

In any case, recently even among bourgeois pundits enthusiasm about the economy has petered out. Five years after the last recession triggered by the bursting of the stock market bubble and the dot.com collapse in mid 2001, there are numerous signs of economic downturn, most notably in the collapse of the housing market.

The chickens are once again coming home to roost for the capitalist economy. To revive the economy after the 2001 recession, the bourgeoisie responded with its usual medicine: easy credit and federal tax manipulation. From mid 2001 to August 2004, the Federal Reserve lowered the prime interest rate repeatedly, so that it reached historical lows and drove down the interest rates charged by banks and mortgage companies for loans to purchase real estate. This cheap money created an artificial demand – not a solvent demand – that stimulated the housing market, and accelerated increases in real estate prices due to an undersupply of housing. This in turn triggered an artificial construction boom to create new housing stocks to satisfy the demand, thus creating the housing boom that was in large measure the motor of the economic recovery. Speculation fueled this boom, as “subprime lending” companies engaged in speculative lending practices like granting mortgage loans without down payments or credit checks on borrowers' income. But good times don’t last forever, and as soon as the Fed started tightening credit to supposedly head off inflation, the real estate boom began to run out of steam. New homeowners got a reality check and quickly realized they had accumulated debts that far exceeded their ability to pay. Mortgage loan defaults are soaring, home foreclosures are hitting record levels, and subprime mortgage lenders have cut back drastically on making loans or have gone out of business altogether. Even traditional banks have started feeling the impact of the real estate bust, and are tightening credit and imposing restrictions on their lending practices.

After an unbelievable upswing fueled by rampant speculation in which an average home’s value increased 54.4 percent between 2001 and 2005 across the nation—even reaching more than 100 percent in some locations, housing prices are dropping. Houses for sale are sitting longer on the market and inventories of unsold homes have hit historically high levels, further depressing sale prices. Some economists are predicting a “correction” in housing prices of up to 30 percent down from present levels. This will wipe out the nominal wealth of many home owners overnight. With an oversupply of houses on the national market, fewer units are being built. The number of new, privately owned housing units fell from a peak seasonally adjust level of 2.3 million units in January 2006, to just 1.5 million in October.

The decline in housing sales and construction affected not only people directly tied to the housing industry, such as construction workers, real estate agents and mortgage brokers, but also industries that supply material to the construction industry. Analysts estimate the housing slump reduced US GDP growth by approximately one percentage point in the second half of 2006. If the slump continues to worsen, the consequences for the national economy could become even more serious.

Towards a New Recession

But the housing bust is only the tip of the iceberg. In recent weeks more bad news on the state of the economy has surfaced. The monstrous national budget deficit, driven up in particular by the war and sustained by an increase in foreign government ownership of US debt, shows the potential to damage the whole world economy According to some analysts, the recent stock market crash in China and other Asian countries, followed by a jolt that sent Wall Street reeling, was caused in part by perceived weakness in the American economy by America’s larger international creditors. The carnage in the manufacturing sector is another element that completely belies any optimism about the economy. This sector has lost millions of jobs in a flurry of plant closings and “restructuring” programs. And now the service sector has begun to experience a dramatic slowdown as well.

Bourgeois economists themselves, despite Fed Chairman Bernanke’s reassurances are increasingly convinced that the US economic situation is worsening and the only thing in question is whether it will be a soft or hard landing within the year. Bourgeois economists define a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth rates in the GDP. But this definition hardly touches the reality of what is going on at the economic level. It is clear that the American economy is preparing for a new plunge into the abyss of the world wide economic crisis of capitalism. The phases of the
”economic cycle” that the bourgeoisie uses to describe the ups and downs of its economy are nothing more than moments in the life of a bankrupt economic system, kept afloat by a pervasive state intervention characteristic of state capitalism. All the propaganda in the world about the bright future of capitalism and having nothing to fear from economic cycles, cannot mask the essential historic truth that the global economic crisis that began in the late 1960s with the end of the post war reconstruction period continues to deepen inexorably. The current generation of the working class no longer dreams of living a better life than their parents. The environmental crisis is being used to lay the groundwork for ideological acceptance of a cut in the standard of living. The working class, and indeed the entire society, is mired in debt. Any semblance of “prosperity” or “expansion” or “growth” is based solely on speculative schemes, which ultimately wind up aggravating the economic crisis even more. Eventually these deteriorating economic conditions will drive the proletariat to defend its class interests.

ES, 04/15/07.

The targets of scandals often complain that those who have launched the scandalous allegations are politically motivated, that what they are accused of doing was longstanding common practice, and has been done by others before them without public outcry, and in this they are generally accurate. Corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and illegal behavior are central characteristics of the capitalist class’s mode of functioning. Many of the revelations that become the focal point of media attention in various scandals have actually been known about for a long time and only become worthy of media attention because of political circumstances external to the subject matter of the scandal itself.

For example, the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to Richard Nixon's fall from power in 1974 is perhaps the most sensational political scandal in post war American history. Political dirty tricks, the surreptitious tape recordings, lying and suppression of information that were at the heart of the scandal were not unique in American political history. Indeed when the break-in at Democratic party headquarters in 1972 by operatives secretly working for the White House and Nixon’s re-election committee occurred, neither the media, nor the Democratic party made such a big deal out of it, as it was to become over the next two years. The reason the scandal mushroomed was nothing intrinsic to the Watergate break-in itself, but was related to larger political themes. The first of these was the Nixon administration's use of the state apparatus against members of the ruling class, an abuse that was unacceptable within the capitalist class. This included not simply the break-in, which in fact was a minor event, involving relatively unimportant information that was taken, but the use and abuse of the power of various government agencies at the behest of the administration against critics of the administration’s policy on Vietnam, including for example the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service.

Equally important was the Nixon administration’s inability to liquidate the war in Vietnam and consummate the alliance with China, which the Nixon administration itself had played such a central role in cultivating. The rapprochement with China was central to long term US imperialist objectives, much more important than Vietnam, as it would put Russian imperialism under pressure on two fronts, from the West and the East, and allow the US to focus attention on the strategically important Middle East. A precondition for the Chinese bourgeoisie to come over to the American side was the liquidation of the Vietnam War, something which, despite all their so-called “secret plans,” the Nixon team was incapable of delivering. It was the confluence of these two political concerns of the ruling class that led to the Watergate scandal assuming historically gargantuan significance. Nixon resigned in August 1974; American withdrawal from Vietnam was achieved by April 1975. Legislative measures were implemented to protect against the worst abuses of executive power within the ruling class, which were more or less effective until the current Bush administration began its policies of restoring presidential power to pre-Watergate levels.

Ronald Reagan was clearly of limited intellectual capacities, probably at the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and his administration was surely corrupt and plagued by scandalous exposes in the press, but even the most significant of these, the Iran-Contra scandal, was relatively mild in its impact. This caused some media pundits to refer to Reagan’s regime as the “Teflon presidency” because nothing stuck to it. This telfon-icity of the Reagan administration had more to do with the political circumstances of the time, which required no significant pressure be brought to bear on the administration.

In the Clinton administration, as we noted in Internationalism’s pages at the time, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, ostensibly triggered by his handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, actually had more to do with divergences within the ruling class over imperialist policy in the Far East than whether Clinton lied about having oral sex with a White House intern. Rightwing Republicans strenuously disagreed with the Clinton administration’s intentions to play a China card, and instead preferred relying upon Japan as our key regional partner in Asia. The Lewinsky affair simply became the pretext for putting pressure on the administration.

Likewise, the scandals that have led to a whole series of media campaigns in the last few years reflect the increasing political isolation of the Bush administration within the ruling class because of its inept handling of the Iraq War and its squandering of American political and moral authority on the international level. The refusal of the administration to respond to pressure only increases the intensity of the attacks. Even if they haven’t or cannot achieve a total revamping of administration policy, they can exert enough pressure on the administration to change personnel or abandon certain disastrous policy options.

So for example, earlier scandal-driven media campaigns (WMD, Abu Ghraib) forced the administration to remove first Wolfowitz, and then Rumsfeld, from responsibility for handling war strategy.

And more recently, the administration’s rejection of the Iraq Study Group’s central recommendations to salvage the situation in Iraq in January prompted a corresponding intensification of scandals. These include the trial and conviction of Scooter Libby, the Walter Reed hospital scandal, and the US Attorneys’ dismissal scandal, which have forced the administration for the moment to seem to abandon any intention of military action against Iran.

On a general level, the Walter Reed scandal, which exposed the horrendous living conditions and medical treatment for soldiers wounded in Iraq, not only cost the careers of several generals and a hardline deputy secretary of the Army, but also totally undercut the administration’s efforts to attack their policy critics within the bourgeoisie as disloyal cowards, who would abandon American soldiers in harm's way. This neutralized the administration's propaganda blitz against its opponents, and put it totally on the defensive for its hypocrisy in its treatment of wounded servicemen, and created the climate in which military action against Iran seemed to disappear as an immediate policy option. Of course there had been complaints for over two years about the unacceptable treatment of wounded soldiers, but only in the context of political considerations did it become cause for sustained media attention.

The trial and conviction of Scooter Libby, assistant and key adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney further eroded Cheney’s political authority, who remains the main remaining foreign policy hardliner in the administration.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, is on the verge of being driven from office in a scandal that has as its pretext his role in the dismissal of eight US Attorney’s around the country, but is more likely associated with his hardline war-related policies. As White House legal counsel, Gonzales played a key role in formulating administration policy on warrantless searches and wiretaps and on disregarding the Geneva Conventions on the torture and treatment of detainees at Guantanamo interment facilities. In January, Robert Gates, the new secretary of defense, who had served until November on the Iraq Study Group panel, proposed shutting Guantanamo down because it was so discredited in the international community. He was supported by Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, but opposed by Gonzales and Cheney. Each day, there are more and more revelations that put Gonzales’ ability to survive the crisis in doubt.

These recent scandals are seized upon with vigor by the media because there is essentially political open season on the administration within the dominant fraction of the ruling class which is totally dissatisfied with the administration and needs to put pressure on it to curb its disastrous policies and minimize any further damage until a change in ruling teams is possible in 2008.

Jerry Grevin, 04/15/07.

In any case, the publication of the latest report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IIPC) forced the administration to change course. The tactic of denying the existence of plausible scientific evidence is no longer viable. It is now clear that the scientific community is near-unanimous: the ‘debate’ on whether global warming is caused by ‘human activity’ is now over. There is now overwhelming evidence that climate change is being driven by greenhouse gases produced by factories, power stations, transport, and other sectors of the economy. Global temperatures could rise by as much as 6 degrees by the end of the century, with almost incalculable results: melting of the polar ice-caps, vast floods, droughts, famines, and a frightening possibility of ‘feedback’ mechanisms which could lead to an unstoppable spiral of catastrophe. A follow up IPCC report in April demonstrated that we are already seeing the impact of global warming on weather patterns even on the immediate level, and warned that nearly 30 percent of earth’s species faced the threat of extinction due to the climate changes associated with global warming. (A number of scientists involved in drafting this report complained that diplomatic negotiation actually watered this report down because of pressure from Saudi Arabia and China.)

Suddenly Pres. Bush pronounced his acceptance that global warming exists, that it is caused by “man,” and that something has to be done about. The president, who for six years slashed environmental standards and protections at the behest of the oil industry, now champions the development of alternative fuels and an end to the American addiction to oil. Of course this didn’t stop the administration from arguing before the Supreme Court against a law suit that would compel the EPA to take action against greenhouse gas pollutants, which had it steadfastly refused to do for the past six years.

So now the scientists and even President Bush agree on who’s to blame: mankind. In one sense, of course, this is true. These changes are not brought about by changes in solar radiation or other cosmic phenomena, but by the actions of human beings. It is human beings who build factories and power stations, fly planes and burn down rain-forests.

But this is an observation, not an explanation. The teams of scientists who are trained to analyze and interpret the natural world have no corresponding theory for explaining why mankind’s economic activity operates the way it does, with so little regard for its effects on the natural environment. And as a result they are capable only of identifying the existence of the problem, not of locating its causes and mapping out a solution.

For example: a great deal of attention is paid to the technologies used to generate power and to produce and transport goods. It is recognized that these technologies are unacceptably profligate in the production of greenhouse gases and that new technologies must be found. Power should be produced by wind and tide instead of coal. Cars should be powered by electricity or hydrogen instead of oil. And while the more short-sighted representatives of the energy industry continue to give big hand-outs to the dwindling band of scientists prepared to argue against the conclusions of the IPCC, more and more spokesmen for business express the confident hope that the search for new technologies will generate new markets and so allow them to preserve and even increase their profit margins.

No doubt, any solution to the gigantic environmental problems facing humanity will involve fundamental changes at the level of technology. But the problems, at root, are not to be found in technology itself. They are to be found in the very structure of present day society, in the basic motivation of economic activity. Present day society is not just ‘industrial society.’ It is a capitalist society, a system where for the first time in human history all production is driven by the competitive hunt for profit. It is this motivation which forces the system to grow and grow and keep on growing regardless of the human and ecological consequences. It is structurally incapable of producing for human need, of adjusting production to what is humanly and ecologically viable. For capitalism that would signify the end of accumulation – suicide, in other words. And since, to grow faster than your rivals, you must cut production costs as much as possible, you need to invest in the type of technology that does the job as quickly and as cheaply as possible, regardless of the damaging consequences for the generations of the future.

By the same token, as a system irredeemably divided into competing national units, it is equally incapable of acting in a truly cooperative way at the global level. On the contrary: the more national capitals are faced by economic difficulties and diminishing resources, the more they will be obliged to retreat behind their national barricades and look for military solutions to their problems. Well-meaning commentators may lament the fact that, instead of pouring resources into saving the planet, the world’s leading powers (and, proportionally, all other states) are pouring them into developing the weapons of war. From a human point of view this is indeed absurd and tragic, but it makes sense from the point of view of the ‘nation’, of the capitalist state.

The problem of the environment is indeed a problem for mankind – for the very survival of the human species. But it cannot be solved by the very institutions whose function is to guard and maintain the present social system. The dire consequences of global warming lead some well meaning militants to grasp at the false hope that capitalist society can actually do something about salvaging the environment .But capitalism is totally incapable of doing “good” by its very nature. The highly touted Kyoto Treaty which world governments hold out as the solution would only bring greenhouse pollution back to levels equivalent to what they were in the early nineties – still a disastrous level of pollution. Now capitalism, which caused and aggravated the problem in the first place, will take advantage of public concern to reap extortionate profits in developing new technologies, which will still leave the world in disastrous conditions.

To truly solve the problem of global warming, to make sure that technology serves the social needs of humanity and not the profit drive of corporations, requires a revolutionary transformation of society. It is yet one more reason why the fate of humanity lies in the hands of the working class and its ability to rise to the challenge of it historic task to destroy capitalist society.

Internationalism, 04/15/07.

(Based on an article that originally appeared in World Revolution 301)

Al Gore once embarrassed himself by claiming to be the father of the Internet, but he has been much more successful in anointing himself the king of environmentalism. Global warming has become Gore's signature issue, earning him an Oscar for his self-aggrandizing documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," and a Nobel Peace prize nomination, and transforming him into a possible presidential nominee in 2008. Indeed, some bourgeois pundits are touting a Gore-Obama slate as an unbeatable "dream" ticket that would enable the bourgeoisie to put the Democrats back in the White House and allow them to begin to repair the damage wrought by eight years of catastrophic squandering of American political capital and authority by the inept Bush administration. While Gore has become environmentalism's iconic figurehead, he is not alone. Wrapping oneself in green is suddenly quite fashionable. For the ruling class in general, green is in. Corporations are tripping over themselves in their rush to portray themselves as environmentally conscious.

The current campaigns about global warming, for the bourgeoisie, are fundamentally manifestations of demagoguery and opportunism which aim to gain popular acceptance for austerity and repair American imperialism's moral authority and image on an international level.

The Reality of Global Warming

There is absolutely no doubt that there has been a horrific degradation of the environment at the hands of a world capitalist system driven by the relentless quest for profits and economic expansion at all costs. Despite the chorus of doubt spewed by propagandists in the service of right-wing think tanks and energy industry lobbyists, the accumulation of Green House Gases (GHG) in the atmosphere triggered by the profligate burning of fossil fuels that powers industrial production, transport, and heating under capitalism and the consequent aggravation of the trend towards global warming is a sobering reality.

The right-wing of the ruling class has consistently tried to sow confusion by pointing to the phenomenon of naturally occurring global warming. And it is true that in the course of the earth's geological history, over millions of years, there have been alternating periods of atmospheric warming and cooling. These climate changes usually occurred over periods of thousands, perhaps even millions of years, with a relatively gradual impact. The causes are believed to include the occurrence of sun spots and other solar activities, changes in the ocean currents -- some of these caused by the impact of warming caused by other factors which changed the salinity of the ocean water and then in turn caused additional climate changes.

The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. There is much discussion in the scientific literature about the existence of a "Little Ice Age" that lasted from the mid 1500s to around 1850, with significant impact on Europe and North America, including widespread crop failures, famines, and cultural and economic changes necessitated by colder temperatures. In the 17th century glaciers in the Alps advanced and crushed villages. Canals in Holland froze over. The Thames first froze over in 1607 and the last time in 1814. In 1780, New York Harbor froze over and people were able to walk on the ice from Manhattan to Staten Island. Iceland was completely isolated by sea ice stretching hundreds of miles in every direction. The Little Ice Age is attributed by some to a decrease in solar activity and sun spots.

Since 1850, there has been a gradual warming of the earth's atmosphere and a retreat of the glaciers, widely attributed to these natural processes, which are very gradual. Right-wing propagandists, especially in the U.S., have belittled research that demonstrates the threat posed by GHG and endeavored to put the responsibility for global warming on these natural processes alone. However, since the late 1880s, with the rise of capitalism's mass production industries and the accompanying greatly increased burning of fossil fuels, there has been a rapid increase in greenhouse gas accumulations in the atmosphere and an acceleration of global warming, especially in the last fifty years.

A general consensus has emerged on the dangers of GHG in scientific circles and there is no longer any serious controversy over the role of GHG in worsening global warming... The problem with the environmentalist movement is its penchant for attributing the problem to human activity and modern technology in and of itself. The tendency is for environmentalists to see over-consumption - too much automobile travel, too much "luxurious" living by the masses, which causes too much industrial production, as the cause of the environmental crisis. This opens the door to all manner of anti-technology ideologies that justify belt tightening, sacrifice, and slashes in the standard of living for the working class.

Without a proletarian Marxist perspective, the environmentalist movement fails to understand that it is the capitalist mode of production that is responsible for the degradation of the environment. It is not industrialization per se that is responsible for global warming, but "capitalism's overriding quest to maximize profits and its consequent disregard for human and ecological needs, except insofar as they coincide with the goal of wealth accumulation" (International Review 129, p.2), Because it is a mode of production whose motor force is the drive for profits, not the fulfillment of social need, capitalism is short-sighted, concerned about the short term results and profit margins. The profit motive overrides any attention to the long term social impact of economic activity.

It is the profit motive that leads the petroleum, electricity and coal industries and their political acolytes to sabotage research and development of more environmentally benign alternative fuel sources to power industrial production. It is the profit motive that leads to wasteful production. In order to assure profits, capitalism has resorted to the phenomenon of built-in obsolescence - the purposeful production of inferior quality goods that wear out prematurely and need to be replaced sooner than would normally be necessary. This keeps industrial production artificially higher than it needs to be. It is the profit motive that gives rise to a massive advertising apparatus to manipulate the population and create consumer demand for socially useless and unnecessary products. In this way capitalism artificially creates the need to burn more fossil fuels than necessary. And it is the competitiveness characteristic of capitalism that makes cooperation on the international level necessary to deal effectively and decisively with global warming an absolute impossibility.

Typically 90 percent of the sun's energy that penetrates the earth's atmosphere is reflected back into space. The increasing concentration of GHG, however, traps increasing amounts of this energy, preventing it from being reflected back into space and thereby contributing to a warming of the earth's atmosphere. The coincidence of naturally occurring global warming and the warming caused by accumulating GHG accelerates global warming and creates dangerous conditions that require attention to assure the future of society. Nothing can be done about naturally occurring global warming, but certainly something can be done about GHG produced by capitalism's disgraceful abuse of the environment.

The Myth of the Kyoto Protocols

The Kyoto Treaty of 1997 has become coin of the realm for the environmentalist movement, a virtual rallying cry to save the global ecology. The Bush administration is universally condemned for refusing to endorse and abide by the treaty. But this is much ado about nothing. The Kyoto Treaty, a creation of capitalist governments which are inherently incapable of attacking the root cause of global warming - the capitalist mode of production- is more a mystification than a genuine attempt to deal with a serious problem confronting society. Kyoto is an ideological swindle to create the illusion that capitalism is capable of dealing with the problem. The intrinsic competition between capitalists, especially between each nation state, which is the essential characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, makes genuine cooperation at the international level essentially impossible. This is further exacerbated by the general tendency towards overproduction which intensifies global competition and further undermines possibilities for cooperation.

The cornerstone of Kyoto is the requirement that industrialized countries reduce their GHG emissions by 5 percent below their 1990 levels by 2010, as if there was something "good" or desirable about the 1990 levels, which already represented more than a century of GHG accumulations. To make these requirements even more of a joke, so-called "flexible mechanisms" allowed industrialized nations to meet their GHG emissions limits by purchasing emission reductions either from emission trading groups (organizations dealing with projects that would reduce emission-productions) or from projects in non-industrialized nations that were exempt from emissions limits. For some industrialized nations, Kyoto actually permitted increases in GHG emissions.

In addition, Kyoto explicitly exempted China and India from limitations, which contributed to the acceleration of the transfer of industrial production from developed countries. Western capitalists now had a double incentive to close factories in the metropole countries. They could take advantage of both the lower wages and the GHG exemptions.

The net result has been essentially no improvement in global atmospheric carbon levels and the fact that China is expected to surpass the U.S. and become the world's leading producer of GHG within the next year or two. Only two nations are on course to meet their targeted emissions limits: Britain and Sweden. The United States and Australia, the only major industrial nations to have never ratified the Kyoto Treaty have increased GHG emissions since 1997 - by 16 percent for the U.S. and 25 percent for Australia. Even nations supposedly adhering to the treaty have increased their emissions - Canada by 27 percent, Spain by 49 percent, Norway by 10 percent, New Zealand by 21 percent, Greece by 27 percent, Ireland by 23 percent, Japan by 6.5 and Portugal by 41 percent. China has increased its GHG emissions by 47 percent and India by 55 percent (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: Changes in GHG Emissions from 1990 to 2004).

Gore acknowledges that Kyoto was never actually intended to decrease carbon emissions, but to establish the principle that international limits could be negotiated and implemented. So, we are to be comforted by the ability of the world bourgeoisie to reach meaningless agreements on the environment.

Environmental Hypocrisy of the Bourgeoisie

Despite all the media glorification celebrating Gore as the preeminent champion of the environment, Gore, like the rest of the capitalist class, is an environmental hypocrite. In light of his acknowledgment that Kyoto was never meant to impact seriously on GHG emissions, Gore's denunciation of the Bush administration's attitude on Kyoto and global warming rings hollow. Furthermore, while Gore voiced support for Kyoto in 1997, the Clinton/Gore administration did nothing to push for ratification of the treaty. A bi-partisan "sense of the Senate resolution" opposing the treaty because it exempted China and India from emissions limits and "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States," passed by 95-0. Clinton/Gore administration never submitted the treaty for ratification, and the U.S. has not abided by the guidelines. Thus, no matter how much Gore vilifies Bush for not embracing Kyoto and no matter how clumsy Bush is in how he talks about the environment, the rejection of Kyoto has been a consensus policy position of the American bourgeoisie that began on the Clinton/Gore watch. Bush's policy is a continuity of the position set by Clinton/Gore in 1997.

On a more personal level, despite chastising the American public for wasteful abuse of energy and natural resources and calling upon Americans to change the way they live, Gore himself is far from an exemplary energy consumer. Gore has not denied accusations that his Nashville family residence consumes more energy each month than the average American family consumes in a year, and he's profited from a leased zinc mining operation located on his property in Tennessee which has one of the worst pollution records in the U.S.

Prominent American bourgeois personalities increasingly rely on the purchase of so-called "carbon offsets" to allow them to sanitize their environmental credentials, to compensate for their carbon emissions and reduce their carbon "footprint" to zero. These offsets are sort of an environmental shell game whereby wealthy people essentially purchase permission to pollute while pretending that they are canceling out the pollution they cause. Prices for carbon offsets are calculated on the basis of the number of pounds of carbon emissions created by a particular activity - an airplane flight, driving a car, heating a home. The companies or organizations selling the offsets then spend a portion of the offset price on investments in solar or wind energy or reforestation projects to supposedly offset the carbon emissions. Critics charge that the offsets are a sham, doing nothing to reduce pollution, and giving the false illusion that such individual, voluntarist actions can clean up the environment.

This is not meant to deny that there is a difference in the Bush administration's stance on global warming, compared to the greener members of the ruling class. For example, there is ample documentation of the Bush administration's efforts to censor government scientific reports to minimize the dangers of global warming. In 2002/2003, when the Bush administration first begrudgingly began to admit that global warming existed and was caused by human activity, in accordance with the interests of the energy industries with which they were so heavily affiliated, they initially suggested that the best policy would be to adapt to global warming, rather than to prevent it. They suggested for example the increased use of air conditioning and switching to different crops that wouldn't be negatively affected by climate changes.

The same kind of nonsense could be seen in recent attempts to look for the silver lining in the dark cloud of global warming. For example, various pundits have suggested that the melting of the polar ice cap would lead to the opening of sea routes across the Arctic Ocean, or the acquisition of millions of square miles of cultivatable land in northern Canada and Russia, and the possibility of building new cities in those previously uninhabitable territories -- as if that could compensate for the hundreds of millions of people who would be forced to flee from flooded coastal regions, the millions of square miles of land that would be submerged, the hundreds of cities that would be destroyed, etc.

Environmentalism in the Service of Capitalism

The U.S. bourgeoisie is increasingly happy to turn to environmentalism as an ideological weapon to control the working class, promote acceptance of a declining standard of living, unify the population behind the state, and repair the international authority of American imperialism. In the hands of the bourgeoisie, environmentalism is used as a means of diverting attention from the class struggle against capitalism. It provides the capitalist propaganda machinery with the opportunity to reinforce the false view that the threat to humanity's future is NOT the continued domination of a historically anachronistic system based on exploitation and rampant imperialist appetites, but rather the view that the problem is a society drunk on irresponsible over consumption. Environmentalism advances an inter-classist perspective on the world's problems which seeks to disarm the class struggle against capitalism - which alone has the capacity to address the basic causes of global warming.

By blaming over-consumption of the masses for global warming, the bourgeois environmentalist movement lays the ideological groundwork for austerity. Instead of raising the standard of living of the world working class, so that all may benefit from the increased productive capacities, environmentalism makes cutbacks in the standard of living a social good, a humanitarian goal. We should travel less, consume less, and use less for the betterment of the environment and the future of human society. As Gore says in the conclusion of "Inconvenient Truth," "Are you ready to change the way you live." Can you imagine the ecstasy of a ruling class facing a working class that wants a decline in its standard of living for the good of humanity?

In his 1992 bestselling book, "Earth in the Balance," Gore outlined the importance of environmentalism as a unifying ideology for the ruling class. Warning that "we now face a global civil war" between those who would countenance the continued despoliation of the environment and those who would resist the destruction of the ecology, Gore wrote, "the time has come to make the struggle the central organizing principle of world civilization" (p. 294).

While individuals in general and the working class in particular are exhorted to change the way they live on a moralistic basis, to do the right thing for the environment simply because it is just the right thing to do, in "Earth in the Balance," Gore acknowledged that the only way to use "free market economic forces" and enlist the participation of capitalist corporations in the effort to save the environment is to guarantee profits, extremely high profits, for developing and switching to new technologies. While it isn't talked about much openly in the media, including "Inconvenient Truth," in 1992 Gore described the obvious policy options for American state capitalism for re-orienting economic activity in a green direction, including:

• imposition of higher taxes on old, non-environmentally friendly technologies to discourage use (who knows, the government might turn the purchase of carbon offsets into a new tax)
• government funding for research and development of new technologies
• Government purchasing programs for early pioneer technology and products to ensure profitability
• Guarantees of high profits
• Improved patent and copyright protections for developers (p.320)

Government investment in environmentally benign technologies will inevitably be financed by cutting the standard of living of the working class, through higher taxes and cuts in the social wage.

Currently the U.S. is branded by most of the world as an environmental villain because of its refusal to endorse the Kyoto protocols and the awkward, clumsy posturing of the Bush administration. Coupled with the catastrophic conduct of foreign policy by the Bush administration, particularly in Iraq, this has led to a crisis of American imperialism. By reorienting its Iraq policy (probably after the 2008 election) and simultaneously becoming a champion of the environment, American imperialism could begin to repair its image, and international political and moral authority. In his 1992 book, Gore was very conscious of the role that environmentalism could play in advancing American imperialist interests. He called for the U.S. to take the lead in a new global Marshall Plan, patterned after the efforts that cemented American dominance in Western Europe after World War II. Emulating Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), Gore advocated an American Strategic Environmental Initiative. His theorization of environmentalism as a unifying ideology for contemporary civilization reflects an attempted ideological manipulation that parallels the role of anti-fascism in the 1930s and ‘40s, anti-communism during the Cold War, and anti-Islamicism in the period since 9/11.

The Environment and the Working Class

The ecological crisis is real and endangers the future of humanity. It is yet another example how decadent capitalism, which is literally in a state of decomposition, threatens the destruction of civilization and a descent in barbarism, even if world war is avoided. The problem cannot be solved by or within capitalism, which is the cause of the problem in the first place and is incapable by definition of cooperation on the global level that is necessary to address the crisis. Capitalism can only take advantage of rising public concern over global warming as a means to derail the working class from the path of class struggle, as a smokescreen to gain popular support for the increasing austerity necessitated by its deepening economic crisis and produce extortionate profits, and to mobilize the population around a unifying, inter-classist ideology.

Freed from the disastrous profit motive, the working class can pursue what is directly necessary to fulfill the social needs of humanity. To assure that technology serves the social needs of society and not the blind, insatiable drive for profit that fuels capitalist economic activity, the working class must understand the nature of its revolutionary responsibilities. Every problem that confronts humanity today increasingly demonstrates the necessity for the working class to rise to the historic challenge of destroying capitalist domination and creating a new society in which the workers of the world can decide what should be done to satisfy the needs of humanity and guarantee the future of society. Capitalism has disqualified itself on an historic level.

Jerry Grevin, July 2007.

The failure of the so-called "immigration reform" legislation in the Senate this summer is an absolute disaster for the dominant fraction of the American ruling class and yet another example of its increasing difficulty to control its own political apparatus. Deteriorating social and political conditions, particularly in underdeveloped countries, forces millions of poor workers to risk all and flee towards the capitalist metropolises. The desperate search for survival and some modicum of a better life for themselves and their children has flooded the U.S. with millions of immigrants to the extent that 40 percent of the population of New York City was born in a foreign country. Immigrants and their American born children account for 60 percent of the New York's population. Official estimates put the number at 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the U.S., but the actual number is surely even higher.

The unresolved status of so many people creates a multitude of social, economic, and political problems for the bourgeoisie, which very much needs to be resolved. These problems involve the availability and delivery of medical, social, educational and other public services, as well as a variety of legal questions pertaining to their American born children and their property. These are not only problems for the immigrants, but for the state as well. The fact that their parents are illegal and hesitant to utilize services creates educational and health problems, which the state needs to deal with. The illegal status of such a large number of people, who are afraid to speak to the police and other law enforcement agencies, makes them susceptible to criminal victimization. The existence of antiquated laws which make employing illegal immigrants a legal violation for employers creates serious problems for industries that rely on the exploitation of low paid immigrants, including the retail, restaurant, hotel, janitorial services, and meat packing industries.

The demands of the far right to criminalize illegal immigration (currently it is a civil violation, with deportation, not jail sentences, as the most serious consequence) and to round up and deport 12 million immigrants was rightly considered by the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie as irrational, impractical, and harmful to the American economy, which needs the low paid workers, and rejected outright. The fact that the Bush administration and Sen. Edward Kennedy, from the left of the Democratic Party, could unite on compromise legislation to address the immigration crisis, shows how important the bourgeoisie considers this problem. The same political elements who are locked in seemingly irreconcilable divergences over imperialist and military policy, particularly in Iraq, were quite able to find common ground in addressing immigration.

The bill was in no way a boon to immigrants. The proposed immigration reform is in no way a humanitarian gesture, but rather an attempt by the state to exert control over the flood of immigrants pouring into the country. The legislation called for the militarization of the border, the legalization of illegal immigrants already in the country, and measures to control the future flow of immigrants. It included provisions for tightening the border, and restricting the inflow of new immigrants. While it provided a means for illegal immigrants currently in the country to legalize their status, it was in no way an "amnesty," including time delays and huge fines.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration was unable to mobilize its own party, and the legislation fell victim to a vicious, chauvinistic propaganda attack by the right-wing of the Republican party and know-nothing talk radio broadcasters, that fed off a long standing xenophobia towards immigrants that has always belied America's self-serving mythology about being a melting pot that welcomed immigrants to these shores. Historically there has long been an ugly bourgeois ideological hatred of newcomers, whether it was the Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc. who were portrayed as strange and different and threatening to native born workers. This ability to divide the working class against itself has often served the interests of the capitalist class in its efforts to derail the class struggle.

However, today the inability of the bourgeoisie to control its own political apparatus when it so urgently needed to deal with the immigration problem is a serious weakness for the ruling class. There is no chance for the problem to be addressed again until after the new president takes power in the winter of 2009.

From the perspective of the working class, the whole immigration crisis is entirely artificial. The working class is an international class that owes no allegiance to any state or nation. All workers are ultimately immigrants. The struggle we face is not one that pits immigrant against native born or naturalized workers, but in which the working class confronts the capitalist class.

Internationalism, July 2007

As we have pointed out in other articles on the US national situation - see in particular Inter 142 [9] - American capitalism is currently besieged by a twin malady: an historic crisis of its imperialist power and an economic crisis that is becoming more and more unmanageable. The answer of the dominant class to this situation has been a head long flight into imperialist war around the globe and the continuation of the worn out monetary and fiscal tricks that have kept the economy out of a total collapse up to the present. These policies have meant for the working class a continuous deterioration of its working conditions and standard of living and a growing sense of social insecurity. Due to the retreat of the struggle of the working class amid the confusion after the collapse of "communist" Eastern bloc and the supposed "victory" of democratic capitalism, the bourgeoisie has been able to implement these policies without a serious challenge from the working class, the only force in society that has a real option to offer to the dead-end of moribund capitalism. However in the last few years there is growing evidence that we have entered a period in which the class struggle will once more be at the center stage of the social situation and the bourgeoisie's policies of austerity and war will not go on without a challenge. In order to be able to help the future struggles to bear the fruit of all their potentialities we need to make more precise our understanding of the present stage of the working class struggle.

Where is the class struggle in the US?

It is impossible to understand the present state of the working class struggle in the US without situating it in the broader context of the international struggle of the working class. Thus it is important to recall briefly the main characteristics of the current phase of these struggles. We have seen since 2003 the generalized tendency of the international working class to emerge from the reflux of consciousness and combativeness, and the general disorientation that took place after the turmoil caused by the fall of the two bloc system at the end of the eighties. This turning point of the class toward the path of confrontation against its historical enemy had one of its more remarkable moments in the great mobilization of the students in France in the spring of 2006. The struggles in Germany that took place at the same time as the mobilization in France, and since then the working class mobilizations in many other countries in the center and periphery of capitalism around the world, have confirmed that we are in a new phase of the international class struggle.

As we have pointed out throughout the press of the ICC the central characteristics of this phase of the class struggle are:

• The emergence of a new generation of workers facing for the first time its class enemy.
• The posing of the question of class solidarity both within the class as a whole and between the generations of workers.
• The recovery of the historic methods and forms of struggle of the working class. -mass assemblies, the mass strike.
• A growing consciousness of the stakes contained in the present historical situation.

The working class in the US has been totally part of this resurgence. As in other countries workers in the US have been pushed by the relentless attacks on their working and living conditions by a capitalist system mired in a permanent economic crisis, to defend themselves and leave behind the period of disorientation characteristic of the decade of the 90's. As we have pointed out in our press the high point of this trend was the three-day strike by New York City transit workers over the holiday season in December 2005. However this was not an isolated incident but rather the clearest manifestation of a tendency of the class to come back to the path of the struggle as seen in the grocery workers struggle in California in 2004 and the struggles at Boeing, North West Airlines and Philadelphia transit in 2005. This same tendency to return to the path of the struggle continued in 2006, as expressed in particular by the two-week teachers wildcat strike in Detroit in September and the walkout by more than 12,000 workers at 16 Goodyear Tire & Rubber plants in the US and Canada on October of the same year.

All these struggles have faced the same issues: the threat of draconian attacks on existing wages and benefits -direct cuts on wages, health care benefits and pensions-that would affect not only the existing work force, but future generations of workers. The combativeness of the workers involved in these battles, where the chance of winning was often lacking, has been enormous, showing the huge reservoir of energy existing in a class that has two generations of undefeated workers. Transit workers in New York City and Philadelphia and the Detroit teachers went on strike under threat of legal and financial penalties for violating laws that barred public employees from striking. Everywhere workers were willing to make huge personal sacrifices. However beyond the combativeness, what is more remarkable is the nascent development of consciousness contained in these struggles, particularly at the level of class identity and solidarity. Workers often entered the struggle knowing well that they were not only defending themselves, but the future generations of workers and the class as a whole. This was the message often repeated by workers during the New York City transit strike where the main issue of the struggle was a management proposal for a new pension tier system for future employees which included higher contributions for all new hires. This expressed an unwillingness to "sell out the unborn" and to defend the future of the new generation of workers, which was a striking expression of the developing solidarity and growing consciousness in the class.

On the downside, despite the enormous combativeness and the growing class consciousness shown by the workers involved in them, there have been enormous weaknesses on these movements. In every case the dominant class managed to keep the struggle under the control of the unions, which managed to isolate the workers in struggle from their class brothers facing the same barrage of attacks on salaries and social benefits. Even during strikes like the one of the Transit Workers in NYC where there was tremendous sympathy from the local working class and spontaneous expressions of solidarity were often witnessed, the union bureaucracy managed to keep other workers from getting involved in the struggle and limited "solidarity to posturing declarations by the unions. This control by the union apparatus in the present struggles, given the retreat in class consciousness that occurred during the decade of the 90's, is not surprising and workers will have to regain the lessons of their past struggles in order to confront these institutions of the bourgeois State. It will be in this confrontation that workers can find again their own methods of organization and struggle -mass assemblies, workers' control committees, mass strike -- that are still missing from the nascent movement in the US.

However, despite the weaknesses of the present movement the bourgeoisie has not failed to see its potentialities. After each struggle, it has campaigned to send the message that the more important lesson of these strikes is that the "struggle does not pay". And in most cases workers have come back to work with a pile of give-backs eroding salaries, benefits and working conditions that the unions have rammed down their throats after long and draining strikes. However for the working class as a whole the importance of a strike is not measured by winning or losing its immediate demands, but by the contribution at the level of organization and consciousness that it provides for the movement as a whole in its confrontation with the class enemy, and this is the main reason why the bourgeoisie puts so much effort into discouraging other workers from entering the struggle. In NYC, where the bourgeoisie has tried so hard to drive home the message that the "struggle does not pay" by punishing the striking transit workers, the city unions and the mayor have avoided the risk of any other municipal workers' struggle by settling contract negotiations ahead of schedule and without the kind of draconian attacks that provoked the transit strike. On a national scale the present rush of bourgeois proposals aimed at resolving the health care crisis is also very much influenced by the present struggles -each of which has involved attacks on health benefits. This campaign -all 12 pre-presidential candidates have a "plan" to resolve it --is very much directed at eliminating the health care issue from the terrain of the struggle, making of it one more issue for the bourgeoisie to decide through the electoral circus.

Conclusions

Amid a world falling apart, increasingly ravaged by the barbarism of war, worsening economic crisis, political instability, the spread of lethal diseases and the growing degradation of the environment, the historical responsibility of the world working class is immense. The future of humanity and without exaggeration the very survival of the human species and life on the planet are at stake. Either the working class will raise its struggle to the level necessary to put an end to this moribund system or capitalism will take to its tomb the very bases for building a world-wide human community, free of the exploitation of man by man, social classes and national states, and in which the human species can live in a more harmonic relationship with its environment.

The present reawakening of the international working class struggle contains the potentiality of that new world and revolutionaries have enormous responsibilities to help their class make possible this perspective.

Eduardo S, July 8th 2007.

On June 16, 2007 Hamas’ routing of Fatah-led security forces in Gaza made the headlines. The event was described as a ‘coup’, a violent and bloody take-over that made all the ‘democratic’ and ‘peace loving’ factions of the local and international ruling class shake in indignation. They all lifted their eyebrows, pointed their finger, and cried, “Criminals, criminals!” By portraying Hamas as the ‘bad guy’, the untrustworthy and violent Palestinian faction by virtue of its affiliation with radical Islam and ‘terrorism’, the Israeli, Abbas’ faction in Palestine, Fatah, and the US bourgeoisies have cast themselves in the light of the ‘good guys’, the ones that supposedly are ‘really’ looking for ways to establish ‘peace’ in the area.

Without taking away from Hamas the honor of being a cut-throat power-seeking bunch of gangsters, their ambition and brutality merely rivals that of our ‘pro-West’ ‘peace-lovers’. If we were to believe their sincerity, we would have to conclude that it was certainly a sense of righteousness, and not brash hypocrisy, that made Ehud Olmert, Israel’s Prime Minister, find the nerve to say, “ The residents of the West Bank will feel that choosing the path of no terror or violence, the way of peace and dialogue will bring a better , more comfortable, more peaceful life.” But he is not the only one who feels self-rigthous. The soon-to-be peace ambassador to the Middle East is no less a person than Tony Blair, that other accomplice of Mr. Bush in the imperialist butchery going on in Iraq.

Of course, the working class has learned that when the ruling class talks about ‘peace’, they only mean “the peace of the tombs”, as a closer look at what’s happening right now in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank sadly and tragically confirms. Or can the working class expect these leaders to be able to accomplish what they promise? If the ruling class cannot make peace in the Middle East --or anywhere else on the planet--, what prevents them from doing so? Is there any other force in society that can lead humanity out of the infernal chaos of irrational barbarism we have spiraled into?

No, there will not be any peace in the Middle East. Any respite from open fight has been and will continue to be a moment for the imperialist gangsters of any stripes and size to ‘sharpen their knives’ in view of even more brutal and bloodier confrontations which every state and more and more even the various factions within it wage in order to either gain or maintain a position of dominance. This has been the tendency in the period following the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and it has aggravated to the point where there are genuine examples of loss of control by the faction who seemingly had the upper hand or was working toward that goal. This, in fact, is what has just happened in Gaza. We do not live in a world divided into ‘reasonable’, ‘equitable’, ‘law-abiding’ nations on the one hand, and ‘backward fanatics’ and ‘terrorists’ on the other. We live under a capitalist regime that has no more room to expand without doing so at another nation’s (or would-be nation) expense.

The US and Israel have made deals with Abbas and the Palestinian faction he supports ---Fatah-- since Fatah’s opposing faction --Hamas—won the elections in 2006. This is because it would be an embarrassment for the US to have to make deals with a political organization that has links with the ‘terrorists’ the US vows to liberate the planet of. Of course, this stance would not be different if the opposition to the US/Israel domination in the area had a different ideology or affiliation. The point is that the US or Israel cannot tolerate contenders in the area. On the ideological level, the US/Israel opposition to Hamas aims to show that there are advantages in cooperating with Israel, which promises to be so ‘humanitarian’ when such cooperation takes place, as the talk about unfreezing the 100 million dollars it had frozen at the time of Hamas’ victory, part of a blockade against Hamas, is supposed to confirm. However, the right-wing factions in Olmert’s government have not supported his policy of openness toward Fatah, and have pressured Olmert to renew the policy of settling Israelis in Gaza and destroying Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. The impossibility to reach any agreement was clearly seen when Israel authorized Egypt to deliver weapons to Fatah so that they could be used against Hamas and in its renewal of air raids on the Gaza strip and operations in the West Bank.

In fact, the US and Israel had set out to destroy Hamas, notwithstanding the US’ claims that it wants to ‘spread democracy’ throughout the ‘undemocratic world’. Well, Hamas raised to power precisely through democratic elections, but because of all the reasons described above, it could not be tolerated. The US itself handed weapons to Fatah to accomplish the destruction of Hamas.

To add insult to injury, Abbas declared he wanted to hold elections in Gaza, a real provocation for Hamas, who, of course, has not been just sitting around waiting to see what would happen. It was quite inevitable that Hamas would try and get Fatah’s security forces out of its air. In fact, such are the tension and chaos that if Hamas hadn’t struck, Fatah would have. This, however, was not what the US wanted. As in many other instances when the US has wanted to push its ‘democratic’ agenda in areas where historically bourgeois democracy has not developed, the result has been further chaos, and, as in the case in Gaza, loss of control, whereby the US’ original design came back to haunt it.

Now, Fatah gunmen are taking revenge. Hamas will certainly follow suit, as the whole area will spin into an orgy of violence and madness. Organizations that have supported either Palestinian faction and have now turned mostly to armed robbery, extortion, and car theft rings, will join in the mayhem and further the spread of instability. The entire situation is in fact so fragile and critical that it is very likely that Hamas will open its arms to Al-Qaida, who has been trying to get its own foothold in the area. This is the perspective for the area, not a ‘re-opening’ of the ‘peace process’.

But it was in the midst of this uncontrollable chaos, and as a direct result of the blockade imposed on Hamas, that in March 170,000 civil servants in Gaza and the West Bank went on strike, seeing that they hadn’t been paid their salaries for months. The Israeli civil servants followed suit. It is true that Hamas and Fatah, blaming each other for the situation, exploited it to try and recruit angered Palestinians, including children 10-15 year old, mesmerized by the idea of a warrior’s death, who continue to take revenge on Israeli civilians, while Israel continued its raids into the West Bank and Gaza. It is certain that the Palestinian and Israeli working class have not waged their struggle in unison and with the consciousness of belonging to the same international working class, however, it is in their struggle that we can glimpse the only perspective for humanity. It is the struggle of the working class against exploitation that has the potential of going beyond the nationalist, ethnic, religious differences and divisions that mire the population in an endless spiral of irrational mayhem. It is because by showing what is universal in the human condition of the proletariat – its exploitation – the working class struggle unveils the root cause of the contradictions that are ripping society apart, while at the same time it also points to the way out.

What will save the population in the Middle East and lay the basis for a total resolution of the area’s decades-long conflict will not be any ‘re-start’ of any ‘peace process’, but the unified, international struggle of the working class leading to the taking of political power and the destruction of the moribund capitalist state. Ana, 7/1/07

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/306/struggles-in-SA [12]

Workers Against the War (WAW) has posed an important question, "What can workers do about the war?" and offers a quick, ready answer. On their web site WAW says workers can stop the war in Iraq in a single day by refusing to move war materials: "If workers across the US decided to stop working until the war ended, it would only be a matter of days, if not hours, before the first soldiers were on the planes heading home." In itself this is debateable, since even at the height of the Russian revolution when workers were striking in many dockyards to stop arms being shipped to the white armies this did not stop the counter-revolutionary intervention. More to the point today, we need to ask concretely what it would mean for "workers across the US to decide to stop working"? In the abstract, it is true that a mass workers' movement could stop the war by paralyzing the economy, but for this to happen would mean that the American working class, or at least a substantial mass of the working class, was politically conscious of the meaning of the war, and had the organizational means (mass meetings, general assemblies, delegations, political organisation) to put its political consciousness into action. For the working class, as a class, specifically to aim to stop a capitalist war, is immediately to call into question the ruling class' right and ability to rule. We have seen this before: it happened between February and October 1917 and it was called "dual power".

Clearly, we are not in such a situation today. Whatever the disgust American workers feel for the war, the class as a whole is a long way from a political understanding that the war is the result of capitalism, that war can only be ended by doing away with capitalism, and that they, the workers, are the only ones who will be able to do away with it and put something else in its place. What is the alternative?

WAW proposes as a first step towards grinding the American war machine to a standstill, that workers should participate in a national sick-out, a "Sick of War Day" in which all workers opposed to the war should call in sick on Oct. 26, stay home from work, and use the time to prepare to participate in the national anti-war protests organized by United for Peace and Justice the following day, Saturday, Oct. 27. The goal of this proposal is to constitute a strong workers contingent in the anti-war movement. But is this really the best way forward - for the working class to dilute itself in an interclassist mass of pacifists, greens, religious groups, and leftists, and turn themselves into cannon fodder for the fraction of the US bourgeoisie which is using the population's disgust for war as its own weapon to win the upcoming presidential elections?

The workers' strength comes from collective, mass action. "Unity is strength": every worker knows that. But this strength in unity goes much further than merely a matter of numbers: when workers act together as a collective, the strength, the reflection of each one reinforces that of the others, the collective result is greater than the sum of the parts - and this is true for a truly mass revolutionary movement and for a demonstration in one town or even a small discussion circle. Anybody who has been involved in collective action knows the sense of exhilaration and increased strength and self-confidence that it brings.

The essence of the proposed "sick-out" is completely different: it is something individual. It is merely an individual substitute for the lack of mass action, it does nothing to bring workers together in such a way that they can develop their own collective strength; their sense of themselves as a class.

"What can workers do about the war?" is indeed a question that many workers are asking themselves, and to which revolutionaries have a responsibility to give answers that provide an orientation for our class. It's not really just a question of the war in Iraq. In fact, war has become a permanent characteristic of capitalist society since the beginning of the 20th century. In her "Speech to the Founding Congress of the KPD," Rosa Luxembourg said, "Matters have reached such a pitch that today mankind is faced with two alternatives: it may perish in barbarism, or it may find salvation in socialism." This assessment, made nearly ninety years ago, of the directions society may take has been dramatically confirmed by decades of ever more barbaric and horrific world wars and countless localized conflicts where the major imperialist powers confronted each other through proxies, civil wars, and imperialist clashes between secondary and even tertiary powers who confront each other in an increasingly chaotic international situation. The result is that utter destruction and desolation are a fact of life.

Today, the bourgeoisie's lies and ideological campaigns pressure us to accept the idea that war is inevitable because it's part of ‘human nature'. It paints a horrific picture of the ‘rogue state' of the day, the better to make us appreciate the brand of dictatorship it imposes on us locally. It fuels xenophobic feelings in the population, in the hope we get convinced of the necessity of war. Yet, despite clearly getting the ideological upper hand after the 9/11 attacks which the ruling class used to stir up war fever and chauvinism, the working class has shown clear signs that it is fed up and disgusted with the war in Iraq. These signs are evident in the number of active duty GI's speaking out against the war, the difficulty the bourgeoisie has to recruit for the war, and the growing opposition by working class parents to allowing military recruiters on high school grounds to manipulate and recruit their sons and daughters for the slaughter.

In this context it's important to assess the level of understanding of the situation by the class, its present strengths and weaknesses, and the balance of forces between the classes, so as to allow our class to push forward all the potential that is contained in the current situation, to assure the deepening and extension of class consciousness and clarification of what is at stake. In making this assessment we need to avoid any sense of triumphalism, or false optimism.

Although doubtlessly the workers are not defeated ideologically by the idea of the ‘necessity' for war, and their disgust for war is quite a step forward compared to what we saw at the start of the war in Iraq, we do not think it is accurate to suggest, as WAW seems to do, that the class is ready to ‘stop the war' and ‘create a system that serves our needs instead of the greed of a few.' In order to redefine itself as a class, understand the stakes and its own historic role, the class needs first and foremost to discuss collectively what is going on in the world, what the perspectives are, and what the class can do. The isolated ‘sick day' cannot accomplish any of this because it is an individual act that cannot substitute for the mass action and discussion, which the class needs.

So, what can workers do about war under the present conditions? Is there really nothing to be done? Yes, there is, but it needs to start from a clear appreciation of reality, not ‘taking our dreams for reality'.

In our view, the real question is, is there any chance of getting workers together to talk? To discuss about the war, what it means, to gain a broader view of the world and the workers' place in it, of their own political perspectives. This perhaps is something that can be organized, depending on local circumstances. It will not look spectacular, but if it is undertaken with perseverance and courage, it may bring more long-lasting results. Workers could hold meetings at work, or after work, and adopt resolutions or statements denouncing the war. Why not if that is possible? As long as it is the workers themselves that do it and not just a way of fueling the trades unions' pro-Democrat electoral bandwagon.

The unbearable weight of war is becoming a factor in the deepening of the class reflections on the future and how the class itself is positioned in its face, what its responsibilities are, who it is vis-à-vis capital, posing the real possibility for deepening the understanding in the working class that capitalism means war and offers humanity a bleak perspective of barbarism. This process of deep reflection can be aided through collective discussions, so that workers can finally see the link between capitalism and war, and organize for the ‘assault on the heavens.' Revolutionaries have the utmost responsibility to aid and facilitate the class' process of coming to consciousness and infuse in the class a sense of confidence.

Ana, 30 September 2007.

The summer has not been a good season for American capitalism. The instability of the financial markets, the credit crunch, the roller-coaster of the stock market, the housing bust, the record fall of the dollar's value, all show that the American economy continues sinking deeper into trouble. The speeches reassuring the population about the "good fundamentals of the economy" coming out from the White House are sounding more hollow than ever. In fact by mid-September the deterioration of the economic situation was so obvious that the Federal Reserve's wizards abandoned their wait and see attitude and came to the rescue with their traditional medicine in hopes of avoiding a catastrophic descent into the economic crisis. However, despite the Fed's sharp reduction of its interest rate bench mark, the deterioration of the economy has not shown signs of change. On the contrary the trend seems to indicate that the worst of the present developing recession is still to come.

The American housing collapse that started in 2006 has continued to deepen. The housing industry, this engine of the American economy so central to its economic growth after the last recession in 2001, is totally broken. Every day there is more bad news coming out from this industry. The construction of new houses has slowed to a trickle. Nonetheless by last September the stock of houses offered for sale nation-wide rose to a ten-month, the highest on record. New home prices have fallen in 20 of the biggest cities throughout the country, while sales of existing homes have stalled despite a nation-wide decline in their nominal value. In other words, despite a decline in prices of new and existing houses there is not much of a solvent demand to revive the embattled housing market.

Moreover as the housing bubble continues to lose air, the number of homes in foreclosures has soared to new record levels --by 36 percent between July and August. Nationally foreclosures have more than doubled in the past 12 months. The states where the housing boom was at strongest are now leading the bust: between July and August, foreclosure filings jumped by 48 percent in California and 77 percent in Florida. Nevada has the highest foreclosure rate in the country - one of every 165 households. Yet there is no end in sight. According to most economic predictions in the next few months foreclosures are bound to skyrocket, as the housing industry absorbs the shocks of the actions that created the exuberance of the housing boom --rampant speculative investments, shoddy lending practices that allowed people to borrow beyond their ability to repay, and adjustable rates that are now going to reset to higher levels. In fact the bourgeoisie is so worried about the social and economic consequences of a massive default of mortgage debt that is rushing to put forward some kind of plan that will alleviate the situation.

The housing bust has also generated much finger pointing within the bourgeoisie. There is much "soul searching" about who is responsible for the housing industry's unsustainable "exuberance" and awful bust. The favorite villains that are blamed to a greater or lesser degree by the right and the left wings of the bourgeoisie are:

• The financial institutions that created the artificial housing demand by their shoddy lending practices.
• The quick-profit -hungry speculators who helped drive real estate prices to the stratosphere.
• The irresponsible home owners who rushed to cash in their fictitious wealth created by the rising value of their properties.
• The gullible borrowers who got into mortgage debts beyond their means

All these allegations do nothing but hide the real stakes that are contained for society by this phenomenon of boom and collapse of the capitalist economy.

From a Marxist revolutionary perspective, the fact is that the housing boom and bust are in the last instance not that much different. Both are expressions of the crisis of capitalism. Since the end of the sixties capitalism has been mired by its own contradictions in an open economic crisis that has gotten ever more catastrophic. Every few years we witness a sudden collapse of the economy after a moment of respite, a "boom and bust" cycle like the one we just saw in the housing industry, or before it the ascent and collapse of the stock market and the internet economy. The dominant class likes to portray these ups and downs as normal moments of an otherwise healthy system - the so-called business cycle. Nothing is further from the truth. At best this is a self-delusional understanding of the system determined by the bourgeoisie's own survival instincts, if not a simple mystification to hide the bankruptcy of capitalism.

The reality is that for over thirty years in the US and throughout the world, faced with a crisis that can't be overcome, state capitalism has been trying to keep afloat an ever sicker economy using means that at the end of the day are themselves a factor in the aggravation of the crisis. In the absence of a sufficient solvent demand that can absorb the ever growing production and realize a decent profit, the bourgeoisie has, on the one hand, escaped head on into the terrain of speculation. More and more capital finds its place not in the real production of goods and services, but in the "casino" economy of the stock markets. On the other hand, to alleviate the saturation of the world market, the bourgeoisie has manipulated everywhere the mechanism of credit. This has left the whole world economy sitting on a mountain of public and private debt that can't be repaid.

This manipulation of the economy through state capitalist interventions has allowed the bourgeoisie to more or less successfully have its economy running throughout the world, but at the same time preparing ever more catastrophic economic situations.

This is the real history behind the housing boom and collapse in the US and some other European countries: The "exuberance" was created by an aggressive state capitalist intervention aimed to get out the economy from the morass brought on by the collapse of the stock market and the internet economic revolution. In the US it was fed in particular by a policy of cheap money to stimulate consumption that went at one point as far as setting interest rates below the rate of inflation. This cheap credit created in the real estate industry an artificial demand that pushed up prices and stimulated construction and production in other related industries. However, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. And the rest is the story of the housing bust of which millions of words have been written in the bourgeoisie press.

There is at present much debate among bourgeois economists about the state of the American economy and its immediate future. There is in fact not much to brag about. Beyond the housing bust the monstrous federal deficit driven up by the war effort and the feeble state of the manufacturing industry are also clear signs of an economy in big trouble. The mood is gloomy and the bets are overwhelmingly on the side of a coming recession. Mr. Bush has recently expressed his hopes for a "soft landing". It seems that the surest bet to make is that it won't be a soft landing for the working class. In fact since the worst of the presently developing recession is still to come, we will be seeing in the immediate future a proportionate increase on the attacks on working and living conditions as the bosses try to make workers bear the brunt of the crisis.

Workers must respond to these attacks on their own terrain, on the terrain on the class struggle. Eduardo Smith, 10/13/07.

There's plenty of evidence that capitalism kills...in the imperialist wars that are the hallmark of capitalist decadence for over 90 years, in the grinding poverty that shortens the life span of millions of people, in the diseases and inadequate medical care that afflict society,  and in the inhuman living conditions that people are forced to exist in. The month of August included several stark reminders that capitalism also kills at the workplace, that even in the simple act of showing at work everyday, in the daily exploitation of their labor power, workers risk their lives. For a mode of production characterized by a relentless drive for profit, the safety of workers is only a minor, peripheral concern that cannot be allowed to get in the way of making money. Within a period of three weeks, we saw the release of two reports on gross safety violations that led to the deaths of two subway workers in two different incidents in New York City last spring, and the heartbreaking mining disasters in Utah and across the world in China.

On August 2, authorities released reports that detailed the poor safety procedures and an "organizational culture" that flouted basic safety rules that led directly to the needless deaths of two track workers just days apart in April. On April 24,  Daniel Boggs, a 41 year old transit worker was struck on the express tracks at Columbus Circle (near 59th Street) in Manhattan, where he was working at 11:20pm. The express track had been scheduled to close to train traffic at 11:00 pm, so Boggs went to his work location on the tracks confident that it was safe to do so. But he didn't know that after a train became stalled at the nearby 66th Street station, train dispatchers decided to keep the express track open a little longer to enable other trains to bypass the stalled train. Incredibly, in the 21st century, in the era of a communications revolution, in an epoch of telephones, radio communication, and cell phones, there was no communication between the train dispatchers and the supervisors of the track workers to inform them that traffic would still be continuing on the express tracks, and that it was not safe to work on the tracks. There's been talk from time to time about acquiring two-way radios for work crews in the New York subway tunnels but the MTA always decides it's too expensive. Even more incredibly, the supervisor of the track workers was ignorant of a requirement that he had to inform the dispatchers that he was sending workers onto the tracks. Boggs went to his death thinking it was safe to go onto the tracks.

Four days later, on April 29, 55-year-old Marvin Franklin, another track worker with 20 years experience on the job was killed and another was seriously injured when they were struck on the tracks between the Hoyt -Schermerhorn and Jay Street stations in Brooklyn around 3pm. The two workers were carrying a ninety pound equipment dolly across live tracks to the out-of-service tracks where they were assigned to clear scrap metal debris. Transferring the dolly across live tracks was a safety rule violation, but a supervisor told the workers that he would watch for and signal on-coming trains with a flashlight (called "flagging"). The supervisor, Lloyd London, positioned himself in an appropriate location, but soon abandoned his post to help another worker, unbeknownst to the two workers on the live tracks, who still thought he was warning oncoming trains that they were on the tracks. Moments later, the two workers were struck by an approaching train. 

Following these tragic deaths, transit authority supervisors held safety meetings with workers throughout the 40,000 employee system. The transit system claims that worker safety is a priority. Over the years they've developed a safety rules and regulations books, adding new procedures and rules drafted after every accident and fatality to show how much they care. The book is swollen with rules that are so contorted in their language that you need a lawyer to figure out what they say. The whole thing is more to protect the system from legal liability in lawsuits than to provide guidelines on how to work safely.

To illustrate this point perfectly, at one meeting workers were warned that they'd better abide by all safety regulations because otherwise if something happened to them on the job, their families would be denied full death benefits. One angry worker, angry at this effort to blame the victims, retorted, "How come every time a fireman or a cop gets killed on the job they call him a hero. But when a transit worker gets killed, you try to say it's his fault and threaten to penalize his family." After the reports were released, supervisor London was made the fall guy and demoted to subway car cleaner, and that was that. The failing of the entire city administration and its public transportation authority were absolved of any responsibility. Nothing has been done to make sure that the safety of the workers is the top priority. After all the transit system has a railroad to run and schedules to keep.

A few days later in August national media attention was riveted on the Crandall Canyon mine in Huntington, Utah where six miners were trapped in a collapsed coal mine on Aug 6th. Repeated efforts to drill shafts for ventilation and to send down food to the miners ended in failure. Ten days later, on August 16, three rescue workers were killed and six others injured as crews worked around the clock to dig through the collapsed debris to reach the miners. Rescue operations ceased and the 6 trapped miners will be entombed forever in the sealed mine.

Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of Murray Energy Corporation, co-operator of the mine, held repeated press conferences and briefings during the doomed rescue operations that seemed more designed to build up his personal image and shift blame for the tragedy from the company to mother nature than to facilitate the rescue. Contrary to all scientific evidence, Murray claimed that the disaster was caused by a 3.9 magnitude earthquake. However, scientists at the University of Utah and elsewhere said that the opposite had occurred-the spike in seismographic readings was caused by the mine collapse, which was caused by a particularly risky technique, called "retreat mining," that the Murray Corporation was using to extract the last vestiges of coal in the largely depleted mine.  The previous owner of the mine, Andalex Resources, thought it was too dangerous to use the "retreat mining" technique to extract coal from so-called "coal barriers," the pillars of coal that are left to hold up the mine ceiling and the rest of the mountain above it. While commonly used in shallow mines, at Crandall Canyon with a depth of 1800 feet, with tremendous pressure from the millions of pounds of mountain above it, the technique is extremely dangerous.  When Murray took over control of the mine in 2006, they applied for and were granted permission from the Mine Safety and Health Administration, to employ the controversial technique, so it's not just that they're an evil corporation-their dangerous techniques were endorsed by the state apparatus itself. 

The coal mining industry is particularly dangerous, in the US and around the world. In the past three years, the industry has opened 50 new mines per year in the US, increasing the number of coal miners by 20%, yet safety inspections have declined to their lowest level in 10 years. In 2006, 47 American coal miners were killed, double the number in 2005.

To drive home the fact that the loss of human life is just a collateral cost of production for the industry, Murray callously announced that the trapped miners were hopelessly lost, that it was too dangerous to try to retrieve their bodies, that the area they were in would be permanently sealed and that coal mining operations would be resumed in other parts of the mine. There was simply too much money to be made to permanently shut down the unstable mine. The fact that the mine was too unsafe to even reclaim the bodies for appropriate burial was not going to stand in the way of profits. Under pressure from the public outcry triggered by this ruthless, profiteering, inhuman and unsafe decision, the Murray Corporation retreated, saying that the Crandall Canyon mine would be closed forever and permanently sealed in honor of the missing men, and that mining would resume several miles away in a new mine, with a different name-of course they'll be tunneling into the same mountain from a different angle and give this so-called "new" mine a different name..

While Robert Murray tried to portray himself as a champion of everyday coal miners, he and his company are no strangers to safety and other legal problems. The company was cited by the National Labor Relations Board for violating federal labor laws by penalizing workers in a labor dispute in 2001. In 2001 a worker in one of Murray's mines in Ohio bled to death after a conveyor belt cut off his arm. An investigator attributed the death to a lack of adequate first aid in the mine. In 2003, one of its subsidiaries and four executives were convicted of conspiracy, lying and violating safety laws regulating dust levels in a Kentucky coal. The Crandall Canyon mine, the scene of the recent cave in and deaths, was cited for 33 health and safety violations in 2007 alone. A company mine in Illinois accumulated more than 850 federal health and safety violations in 2007.

Mine safety problems are not just limited to the US of course. Half way around the world in China, at the same time as Crandall Canyon was in the news, 180 coal miners were lost in flooded coal mines in Shandong Province. This brought the death toll in China's coal mines to 2,163 for the first seven months of 2007.

In the United States, the most advanced, capitalist power in the world, with all manner of government regulations and oversight in place last year 5,703 workers died in  job-related fatalities, 1226 of them in the construction industry.[1] In other words nearly double the number of people died on the homefront in work-related accidents last year than the number of US soldiers who have died in four years of combat in Iraq.

Clearly, in a mode of production where the quest for profits drives the system, safety is an after-thought, an add on, an extra cost - unless of course if accidents disrupt production so much as to endanger profit margins. As long as capitalism exists, people will die needlessly and horrendously. In a system controlled by the working class, where production is designed to satisfy human need, then safety would be a high priority. Accidents and illnesses will never be eliminated, but there is no rational reason for them to be so prevalent. The deplorable safety conditions that prevail today are still more proof that capitalism has outlived its usefulness and has forfeited its right to continue. Capitalism needs to be destroyed and replaced by a society controlled by the working class. - J.Grevin, 10/13/07.

[1] US fatality and accident data based on Bureau of Labor Statistics Press Release/Report, Aug. 9, 2007

[2] Global fatality, accident and illness data based on UN News press release, Apr. 28, 2005

After a 48-hour strike in September, General Motors and the United Auto Workers sealed a deal that will undoubtedly serve as a pattern setter for the rest of the industry, that will cut costs and sacrifice worker and retiree medical benefits forever. The UAW once again revealed itself as a full fledged partner in implementing austerity and cutting the workers' standard of living, and serving the interests of the national capital by helping keep the struggling auto industry afloat on the backs of the workers. The same scenario quickly followed at Chrysler in early October, following a 6-hour strike.

The big breakthrough feature in the GM contract was the creation of a VEBA-a voluntary employee benefit association - or a health care trust that will take over the GM's medical benefits program and be administered by the union. The deal frees GM from an estimated debt of $55 billion over the next 80 years to cover the health care benefits for employees and retirees. The trust will be funded with a payment of 70 percent of the $55 billion (or $38.5 billion) in cash, stock and other assets. According to the New York Times, the balance of the $55 billion will supposedly come from "gains on investments." In other words the deal lets GM unload its costly medical benefit program, to be run by the union, and the whole future of the program will rest on the profitability of the company. If the company should falter, the medical plan would collapse. The union will clearly have a long term commitment to bolstering GM's profits at the expense of workers for years to come.

The union announced that it had won a guarantee that medical benefits wouldn't be cut for two years-exactly how long it will take for federal authorities to review the details and approve establishment of the VEBA, and then it will be the union that will preside over cuts in medical benefits in order to assure viability of the program's future. The union also made a big deal that  it won a GM guarantee that the company would maintain the workforce at the current 73,000 employee level, which was initially interpreted as meaning a job guarantee for all workers. But it soon came to light that the company was merely promising to maintain a workforce "equivalent" to the current 73,000 level. It does not guarantee that all current workers will continue in the job; the company can and will close down plants - the number and location of which has yet to be announced - and hire temporary workers who will be required to become UAW members. So, the union is guaranteed 73,000 dues paying members no matter how many current workers are laid off or forced to take early retirements. The four-year contract runs through 2011and provides that workers will get a $3,000 lump sum payment when the contract is approved and signed by union officials, and additional lump sum payments in the last 3 years, but there will be no increases in hourly wage rates whatsoever.

To add insult to injury, the contract also imposes a two-tier wage system, dooming younger workers and new hires who perform the same work as workers who have been on the job for a number of years. This gives the company even more incentive to drive older workers out of their jobs. This divides the workers against each other on generational grounds, pitting young against old, turning on its head the courageous stand taken in December 2005 by transit workers in New York City who fought against imposition of a new tier system.

Yet again the trade unions reveal themselves as a weapon for capitalism against the workers. - JG, 10/13/07.

The recent stock exchanges convulsions (see article on front page) pose the following question: whether the approaching open recession, which everyone agrees is likely, is part of the inevitable up and down pattern of the capitalist economy which is fundamentally sound, or whether it is a sign of a process of inner disintegration and breakdown, integral to capitalism, that will be punctuated by more and more violent convulsions.

To answer this question it is first necessary to deal with the idea that the development of speculation and the resulting credit crisis is in some way an aberration or a departure from the healthy functioning of the system, which could be corrected by state control or better regulation. In other words is the present crisis a result of financiers holding the economy hostage?

The role of credit in capitalism

The development of the banking system, the stock market and other credit mechanisms have been integral to the development of capitalism since the 18th century. They have been necessary for the amassing and centralising of money capital in order to permit the levels of investment required for vast industrial expansion that was outside the scope of the richest individual capitalist.  The idea of the industrial entrepreneur acquiring his capital by saving or by risking his own money is a pure fiction.  The bourgeoisie requires access to the sort of sums of capital that have already been concentrated in the credit markets. In the stock markets the ruling class is not betting with their own individual fortunes but with monetised social wealth.

Credit, and lots of it, has thus played an important part in immensely accelerating the growth of the productive forces in comparison with previous epochs and in the constitution of the world market.

On the other hand given the inherent tendencies of capitalist production, credit has also been a tremendous accelerator of overproduction, of overvaluing the capacity of the market to absorb products and has thus been a catalyst of speculative bubbles with the consequent crises and drying up of credit. Side by side with facilitating these social catastrophes the stock markets and the banking system have encouraged all the individual vices of greed and duplicity that are typical of an exploiting class living off the labour of others; vices that we see flourishing today in insider trading, fictitious payments, outrageous ‘bonuses' that amount to huge fortunes, ‘golden parachutes', accountancy fraud, and plain theft.

The speculation, the risky loans, the swindles, the subsequent crashes and the disappearance of huge quantities of surplus value are therefore an intrinsic feature of the anarchy of capitalist production.

Speculation is, in the last analysis, a consequence, not the cause of capitalist crises. And if today it seems that speculative activity in the financial sector dominates the whole economy, it is because over the past 40 years capitalist overproduction has increasingly lapsed into a continuing crisis, where world markets are saturated with goods, investment in production is less profitable and money capital's inevitable recourse is to gamble in what has become a ‘casino economy'.

Therefore there is no possibility of a capitalism without its financial excesses, which are an intrinsic part of capitalism's tendency to produce as if the market had no limits.

The recent slump in the housing market in the US and in other countries is an illustration of the real relationship between overproduction and the credit squeeze.

Housing industry illustrates the anachronism of capitalist production

The characteristics of the crisis in the housing market are reminiscent of descriptions of the capitalist crises that Karl Marx described in the Communist Manifesto in 1848:

"In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over production. ...there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce".

So today we don't see homelessness as a result of a shortage of homes but paradoxically because there are too many of them; there is a veritable glut of empty houses. The construction industry has been working flat out over the past five years. But at the same time the purchasing power of American workers has fallen, as American capitalism attempts to increase its profitability. A gap opened up between the new homes being thrown onto the market and the ability to pay by those who needed them. Hence the risky - ie sub-prime - loans to seduce new buyers who could hardly afford them, and square the circle. Eventually the market crashed. Now, as more and more homeowners are evicted as a result of foreclosure on the crippling interest rates on these loans, the housing market will be further flooded - in the US some 3 million people are expected to lose their roofs as a result of defaulting on sub-prime mortgages. This human misery is anticipated in other countries where the housing bubble has either burst, or is about to. The surge in the construction industry and in mortgage lending over the past decade, then, far from reducing homelessness has put decent housing effectively out of reach for the mass of the population, or put homeowners in a precarious state[1].

Evidently what concerns the leaders of the capitalist system - its hedge-fund managers, its treasury ministers, its central bankers, etc - in the current crisis are not the human tragedies created by the sub-prime debacle, the dashed aspirations to a better life (except insofar as they might lead to questioning the insanity of this mode of production) but their inability as consumers to pay the inflated prices of houses and usurious rates of interest on the loans.

The sub-prime fiasco epitomises therefore the crisis of capitalism, its chronic tendency in the drive for profit to overproduce in relation to the solvent demand, its inability, despite the phenomenal material, technological and labour resources at its command to satisfy the most basic human needs[2].

However absurdly wasteful and anachronistic the capitalist system appears in the light of the recent crisis, the bourgeoisie still tries to reassure itself and the rest of the population that at least it won't be as bad as 1929.

The present situation: the same problems as 1929

The 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression continues to haunt the bourgeoisie, as the media coverage of the recent crisis testifies. Editorials, in-depth articles, historical analogies, have tried to convince us that the present financial crisis won't lead to the same catastrophe, that 1929 was a unique event that turned into a disaster by wrong decision making.

The bourgeoisie's ‘experts' foster the illusion that the present financial crisis is rather a repeat of the relatively limited - in time and place - financial crashes of the 19th century. In reality today's situation has more in common with 1929 than this earlier period of capitalism's ascendancy, sharing many of the common characteristics of the catastrophic financial and economic crises of the decadence of capitalism, of the period opened up by the First World War; of the inner disintegration of the capitalist mode of production, of a period of wars and revolutions.

The economic crises of capitalist ascendancy, and the speculative activity that often accompanied them and preceded them, were the heartbeats of a healthy system and gave way to new capitalist expansion throughout the world, through the construction of railways over entire continents, massive technological breakthroughs, the conquest of colonial markets, the conversion of artisans and peasants into armies of proletarian labour, etc.

The 1929 New York stock market crash, which announced the first major crisis of capitalism's decay, put all the speculative crises of the 19th century in the shade. During the ‘roaring twenties' the value of shares in the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest in the world, had increased five fold. World capitalism had failed to recover from the catastrophe of the First World War, and in the now richest capitalist country the bourgeoisie sought an outlet in stock market speculation.

But on Black Thursday 24 October 1929, a precipitous decline took place. Panic selling continued on Black Tuesday of the following week. And the stock market kept on crashing until 1932, by which time stocks had lost 89% of their peak value in 1929. They returned to levels not seen since the 19th century. The 1929 peak in share value was not reached again until 1954!

Meanwhile the US banking system which had lent money to buy the stocks itself collapsed. This catastrophe heralded the great depression of the thirties, the deepest crisis capitalism has ever experienced. American GDP was effectively halved. 13 million workers became unemployed with no relief to speak of. A third of the population sank into abject poverty. The effects were echoed around the world. 

But there was no economic rebound as there had been after the crises of the 19th century. Production only began to resume when it had been harnessed to arms production in preparation for a new re-division of the world market in the imperialist bloodbath of World War II. In other words when the unemployed had been transformed into cannon fodder.

The thirties depression appeared to be the result of 1929, but in reality the Wall Street Crash only precipitated the crisis, a crisis of the chronic overproduction of capitalism in its decadent phase. Here lies the essential identity of the thirties with today's crisis, which began in the late 60s.

The bourgeoisie in the 1950s and 60s smugly claimed to have solved the problem of crises and consigned them to a historical curiosity through such palliatives as state intervention in the economy both at the national and international level, through deficit financing and progressive taxation. To its consternation the world wide crisis of overproduction reappeared in 1968.

Over the past 40 years this crisis has lurched from low point to another, from one open recession to one more damaging, from one false Eldorado to another. The form of the crisis since 1967 hasn't taken the abrupt nature as the crash of 1929. In 1929 the financial experts of the bourgeoisie took measures that only allowed the financial crisis to take its course. The measures were not errors but methods that had worked in previous crashes of the system, like in the panic of 1907, but weren't sufficient in the new period. The state initially refused to intervene. Interest rates were increased, the money supply was allowed to shrink, tightening the credit squeeze and further shattering confidence in the banking and credit system. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill imposed import barriers that accelerated the downturn in world trade and consequently worsened the depression.

In the last 40 years the bourgeoisie has understood the need to use state mechanisms to reduce interest rates and inject liquidity into the banking system in the face of financial crises. It has been able to phase in the crisis, but at the price of overloading the capitalist system with mountains of debt. A more gradual decline has been achieved than in the thirties, but nevertheless the palliatives are wearing out, and the financial system is increasingly fragile.

The phenomenal growth of debt in the world economy during the recent decade is exemplified in the extraordinary growth, within the credit markets of the now famous ‘hedge-funds'. The estimated assets of these funds have risen from $491bn in 2000 to $1,745bn in 2007[3].  Their complicated financial transactions, mostly secret and unregulated, use debt as a tradable security in the search for short term gain. The hedge-funds are judged to have spread bad debt throughout the financial system, accelerating and rapidly extending the present financial crisis.

The economic history of the last 40 years has been the history of the failure of one magical remedy after another. Keynesianism - deficit financing by the state to maintain full employment - evaporated in the galloping inflation of the 1970s and the recessions of 1975 and 1981. Reaganomics and Thatcherism - restoring profits by cutting the social wage, cutting taxes and allowing unprofitable industries to collapse with mass unemployment - expired in the stock market crash of 1987, the Savings and Loans scandal, and the recession of 1991.  The Asian Dragons, saddled with huge debts, ran out of puff in 1997. The dot com revolution, the ‘new' economy, turned out to have no visible means of support, and the boom in its shares bust in 1999. The housing booms and credit card debt explosion of the past five years, and the use of the gigantic US foreign debt to provide demand for the world economy and the ‘miracle' expansion of the Chinese economy - this too has now been put in question.

We can't predict exactly how the world economy will continue to decline but increasing convulsions and even greater austerity is inevitable.

Capitalism has prepared the conditions for socialism

Karl Marx, in the third volume of Capital, argued that the credit system developed by capitalism revealed in embryo a new mode of production within the old. By enlarging and socialising wealth, taking it out of the hands of individual members of the bourgeoisie, capitalism had paved the way for a society where production could be centralised and controlled by the producers themselves and bourgeois ownership could be done away with as a historical anachronism:

"The credit system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production"[4].

For a century now conditions have been ripe for the abolition of capitalist exploitation. In the absence of a radical proletarian response, the contradictions of this moribund system, the economic crisis in particular, have only become more acute. While today credit continues to play a role in the evolution of these contradictions, it's not that of conquering the world market, since capitalism has long established its social relations throughout the planet. The massive indebtedness of all states has allowed the system to avoid brutal collapse despite the virtual impossibility of further expansion of the world market. But there is a price. After functioning for decades as a means of attenuating the conflict between the development of the productive forces and the obsolete social relations of capitalism, the headlong flight into debt is beginning to "accelerate the violent outbreaks of this contradiction" and to shake the social edifice as never before.  Como

[1] Benjamin Bernanke, Chairman of the US Fed, referred to mortgage arrears as "delinquencies": in other words crimes or misdemeanours against Mammon. Accordingly the ‘criminals' have been punished... by still higher interest rates!

[2] We can't here go into the state of homelessness in the world as a whole. According to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1 billion people on the planet are considered to be without adequate housing, while 100 million have no home at all.

[3] www.mcclatchydc.com [15]

[4] Part 5, Chapter 27: ‘The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production'

Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly and an army of rightwing talk show hosts are busy flooding the air waves with propaganda messages blaming immigrant workers, legal and illegal, for the social problems that beset American society, particularly the working class. According to this rightwing propaganda line, the deterioration of our neighborhoods, increasing crime, unemployment, what they call "cultural and linguistic pollution," are all caused by immigrant workers. They want to put up an impenetrable fence along the US border with Mexico, they want border guards to shoot to kill, they want to deport 12 million illegal immigrants, and so on. In doing this, they prey on mistrust of and discomfort that some workers feel towards newcomers, foreigners, those perceived as outsiders, and whip up irrational fears of xenophobia and racism.

For the working class, this ideological claptrap is absolute poison. Anything that stresses, exaggerates, aggravates, and manipulates differences within the working class, real or imagined contributes to the disunity of the working class and is nothing but an expression of bourgeois ideology against which we must $fight. Sure, ethnic and racial hatreds exist in the working class and are real, and workers who fall for this can always point to empirical facts that justify their views, but they are not legitimate, they are not "rational" because they are contrary to the historic interests of the working class and serve to divide the working class against itself and render it less capable to confront its class enemy.

Capitalist decadence and decomposition are causing greater chaos and crisis in the world and contribute to massive population displacements as growing numbers of workers and other strata become refugees from war, starvation, unemployment, disease, and pestilence. But the problem is not mass migration; it is not that working people flee to some place better to live and support their families. Workers have done this throughout the history of capitalism. The problem is not that workers flee from the disastrous life that capitalism offers them. The problem is capitalism itself, which has become an historically anachronistic social system, that offers humanity a future of barbarism and suffering, and must be overthrown.

Workers have no country, no national loyalties, no national flag, or national culture to protect. The working class is a worldwide class that lives in many countries and where many languages may be spoken, but in which the same class struggle against capitalist exploitation exists. We seek a new world free of exploitation and oppression - a genuine human community, where there will be no nations, no immigration services, no immigration police. The working class will run the world so that social needs are met and scarcity is not a dominant factor, where cooperation, not competition, is the organizing principle in social life. Anyone who gets mad at immigrant workers, legal or illegal, is giving in to the ideology of our capitalist enemies who rejoice when they succeed in dividing us against each other and reduce us to fighting over the crumbs. The capitalists rejoice when we think that we are each others' enemies, that we are citizens of some "country" or "nation" and not a world class of workers who have the historic responsibility to destroy the capitalist's rotten system.

To the rightwing loudmouths who demonize our immigrant class brothers and sisters as scapegoats and fall guys, we have to tell them we're not the idiots they want us to be. We know that it is not immigrant workers who exploit us at work, who cut our health benefits and our pensions, who despoil the environment and unleash the dangers of global warming, who permit the deterioration of our cities and living conditions, who are responsible for imperialist war that destroys and kills, who perfect the means of oppression and repression under the guise of guaranteeing "freedom," who are completely incapable of offering hope for a better future for humanity. We know it is capitalism we must fight, not our class brothers. - Internationalism Oct. 2007