The intensification of the US offensive aimed at maintaining its world leadership has led it to unleash a new war in Afghanistan, and to deploy troops there, on the pretext of a world struggle against terrorism. As we will show in the article that follows, this military escalation and its conclusion today in a crushing American victory, far from bringing any kind of stability to the world is, on the contrary, the precursor of new wars and new massacres. Since the article was written, the situation has worsened in the Middle East, which is the object of this brief introduction.
The victorious US offensive failed to provoke the slightest hostile reaction from the Arab countries, and has seriously weakened Yasser Arafat, who now stands accused of a benign tolerance towards Palestinian terrorism. In its wake, Israel has put the PLO leader's back to the wall and unleashed a new storm of violence in the occupied territories. Tsahal has answered the blind terror exercised against the Israeli population with an equally blind violence whose principal victim is the civilian population, children included. Ever since the Oslo accords, the US has criticised - condemned even - successive Israeli governments' policy of deliberately sabotaging the peace process. For the US, it was necessary at all costs to limit the exacerbation of tension between Israel and the Palestinians, since this was liable to crystallise a growing hostility towards Israel throughout the Arab world. Such a situation would inevitably have backfired on the US, given that they could not abandon the Israelis who are their main military ally in the region. But above all, it would have provided an opportunity for certain European countries to play their own hand by supporting this or that diplomatic solution in favour of this or that national fraction of the bourgeoisie - no matter which solution, provided it opposed that of the US. Today the situation is different: the USA has just gained an enormous ascendancy over the rest of the world, and intends to push this advantage as far as possible. By accepting entirely the Israeli offensive in the occupied territories, the US is demonstrating with brutal clarity the inability of anybody - and in particular of the European countries - to provide the slightest support for an alternative to American policy in the Middle East. That said, the present situation will be no more stable than the "Oslo peace": on the contrary, it can only lead to an increase in tension, especially through the development of a profound feeling of hatred towards Israel and the United States.
The United States has today succeeded in completely sidelining the European powers (France, Britain, Germany) on the world arena. It allowed its main rivals no role whatever in the Afghan conflict, allowing them no more than the privilege of running the side-shows inherited from the defeat of the Taliban. The Europeans had intended to position themselves in Afghanistan, as they had done in Kosovo, by means of a UN contingent. It is clear now that this contingent will only operate under American control, and will be nothing but an auxiliary to the new power that they have set up in Kabul.
Obviously, all the second and third-rate powers whose ambitions are thwarted by the success of the world's greatest power will not remain inactive. On the contrary, they will do everything they can to put spanners in the works of US policy, in particular by exploiting all the local tensions stoked up by the American presence. In fact, this reassertion of the American world order has done nothing to appease the existing tensions in the world, as we can see already from the renewal of hostilities between the two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan. Since the terrorist attack by an Islamic group on the parliament building in Delhi on 13th December, tensions between the two countries have risen to a pitch rarely reached before (India, for example, is evacuating civilians from the border with Pakistan to make room for minefields).
Moreover, while the smoke of battle may have obscured momentarily from view the dramatic aggravation of the economic crisis, it has done nothing to diminish its reality. Today, the recession is official in Japan, it is under way in the US and Germany, while growth has fallen dramatically in Europe at the very moment that the Euro's arrival is being fêted. The world situation is well illustrated by the sudden collapse of the Argentine economy, which has just gone bankrupt after four years of recession, with all that that means for the proletariat: unemployment, poverty, and the reappearance for the first time since the end of Spanish rule, of the spectre of famine. The situation in Argentina - a country which forty years ago took pride in belonging to the exclusive club of "developed countries" - reveals the future that capitalism holds for us.
Argentina and Afghanistan reveal clearly the threat that we are facing: economic collapse bringing unemployment, poverty and hunger in its wake (see the article in this issue), and an explosion of military slaughter, destruction and barbarity.
8th January, 2002
The United States has responded to the barbaric bloodbath of the Twin Towers with an "anti-terrorist crusade" that is creating and will create new and worse bloodbaths. The main victims are the workers, peasants, and people of Afghanistan who, since the 7th of October, have suffered a terrible rain of bombs and the unleashing of furious struggles by the local armies.
Along with the present and future slaughter of so many people, housing, industry, fields, hospitals and means of communication are being destroyed; starvation, disease and looting have struck the population. Thousands and thousands of refugees who have tried to cross the frontiers with neighbouring countries have been brutally treated by all: the military, the gangsters controlling roadblocks and the frontier guards.
This is a new hecatomb that has been inflicted on thousands and thousands of human beings. Afghanistan has suffered 23 years of war. It has suffered war under every form of capitalism: first there was the capitalism of the so-called "socialism" of the old USSR; followed by "Islamic" capitalism in its various forms - the Mujahadeen, the Taliban - and now the "most capitalist" capitalism of all, that of the world's greatest power. This infinite barbarity of the system has torn away its deceitful mask of dignity, culture, rights, progress and exposed its true face: that of a dying organism that causes ever increasing wars, destruction and hunger?.
"Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping in filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics -as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity - so its appears in all its hideous nakedness" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: the crisis in the German Social Democracy. Merlin Press Publication, page 6. This was written against the First World War in 1915.)
Each nation for itself and chaos everywhere
The United States has made it clear that the "anti-terrorist" campaign will not be limited to Afghanistan. The Secretary of Defence has announced "10 years of war", whilst President Bush in his fireside radio chat on Saturday 24th November, declared that "We will face difficult times ahead. The fight we have begun will not be quickly or easily finished. Our enemies hide and plot in many nations. They are devious and ruthless. Yet we are confident in the justice of our cause. We will fight for as long as it takes, and we will prevail", making it clear that "the United States' army will have to be active in different areas of the world".
Why these plans for war? Are they really a defence against terrorism? In the Editorial of the last issue of the International Review we denounced this "anti-terrorist" cover. Terrorism - all the diverse forms of terrorism are alien to the proletariat1- is part of the current activity of all states and forms an increasingly important weapon of war.
Is it simply an operation to conquer the oil fields of Central Asia, as some groups of the proletarian political movement think? We cannot develop here the analysis that is contained in the "Report on Imperialist Conflicts" to our 14th Congress published in International Review n°107 where we say that: "If during the early stage of imperialism, then at the beginning of decadence, war was seen as a means to re-divide the markets, it has now become above all a way of imposing yourself as a great power, to defend your rank against the rest, to impose your authority and save the nation. Wars no longer have an economic rationality, they cost more than they can gain."
The real aim of this chain of military operations by the USA, begun in Afghanistan, is politico-strategic.2 It is a response to the growing challenge to its world leadership that has increased since the Kosovo war, and whose leading protagonists are the European powers - Germany, France - followed by all kinds of regional, local powers and even warlords such as Bin Laden.
In our previous Editorial we put forward the general premises of our analysis: the present military crisis is an expression, not only of the decadence of capitalism, which extends from the beginning of the 20th century, but as we have shown also of the terminal phase of decomposition, which clearly manifested itself in 1989 with the collapse of the old Soviet bloc. The most characteristic feature of this final phase of capitalism's decadence is the enormous disorder that is seen as much in the relations between states as in the form taken by the imperialist confrontations between them. Each nation state tries to take advantage of the situation, without accepting even a minimum of discipline. This is what we characterise as each nation for itself, which is leading to, and at the same time worsening, the general state of imperialist chaos throughout the world. A situation that we foresaw more than ten years ago at the time of the collapse of the old Soviet bloc: "The world appears as a vast free-for-all, where the tendency of "every man for himself" will operate to the full, and where the alliances between states will be far from having the stability that characterised the imperialist blocs, but will be dominated by the immediate needs of the moment. A world of bloody chaos" (International Review n°64 "Militarism and Decomposition", page 12).
Since its beginnings capitalism has contained an insoluble contradiction between the character of its production, that tends to be social and world-wide, and its mode of appropriation and organisation that is necessarily private and national. This contradiction is set in capitalism's genes, generating confrontation and destruction. This tendency was less visible in the ascendant period of capitalism since it was dominated by the dynamic towards the formation of the world market, which objectively unified the planet by subjecting territory and trade throughout the world to capitalist relations of production.3
With the decadence of capitalism, the wars between all the states, the battle of each national imperialism to escape from the growing contradictions of the capitalist regime at the cost of its rivals, have acquired a murderous virulence. The result was two world wars between two rival imperialist blocs, a paroxysm of hatred and "each against all". However, during the "Cold War" that followed (1945-1989) this universal antagonism was contained by the iron discipline imposed by the blocs, founded upon the bloc leaders' military supremacy, strategic and political blackmail and economic subordination. The disappearance of the blocs after 1989 let loose the expression of the national imperialist interests in all their chaotic and destructive fury: "the fragmentation of the old bloc structures and disciplines unleashed national rivalries on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an increasingly chaotic struggle of each against all from the world's greatest powers to the meanest local warlords. This has taken the form of a growing number of local and regional wars?The wars characteristic of the present phase of capitalist decomposition are no less imperialist wars than the wars of previous phases of decadence, but they have become more widespread, more uncontrollable, and more difficult to bring to even a temporary close" ("Resolution on the International Situation from the 14th congress of the ICC" in International Review n°106, page 8). The phase of the decomposition of capitalism has clearly shown that "The reality of decadent capitalism, despite the fact that imperialist antagonisms have given the impression that it is divided into two monolithic units, is the tendency towards the dislocation and disintegration of its components. The tendency of decadent capitalism is towards schism, chaos, from which arises the essential necessity of socialism in order to make the world one unity" (Internationalisme, Gauche Communiste de France, "Report on the International Situation", January 1945).
The biggest loser in this situation is the United States. Its national interests are identified with the maintaining of a world order built for its benefit. The United States is forced to play the world sheriff, faced as it is with the imperialist designs of its main rivals (Germany, France, Britain etc), challenged by numerous states with their own regional ambitions and even by its most loyal allies (the case of Israel is a good example, with its increasingly open sabotage of the "Pax Americana" since 1995); it has to make repeated displays of strength, banging its fist on the table, as we saw with the Gulf War or Kosovo and now in Afghanistan.
However, the present "anti-terrorist campaign" has much more ambitious aims. In the Gulf, the USA limited itself to an overwhelming demonstration of power in order to bring its old allies to heel. In Kosovo it again exhibited its immense military power, although its "allies" pulled a fast one with their "peace plans" with which each one gained its own zone of influence and frustrated the US's plans. Today the US has inflicted a crushing humiliation on its "allies", keeping them hanging about on the sidelines of its military operations, and establishing itself in stable military positions in the crucial area of Central Asia.
The US' first demanded its "allies'" "collaboration", which has meant them standing on the sidelines cheering on the advancing Rambos. France's attempt to send a contingent of soldiers under the guise of "humanitarian aid" has been blocked by the USA in Termez on the Uzbek frontier. Germany's offer of 3,900 soldiers has been "officially" scorned. Great Britain, which from the beginning appeared as an active partner in the operation, has suffered a humiliating rebuke. Blair's efforts to present himself as "commander in chief" have been answered by the immobilisation for over a week of the 6,000 British troops awaiting deployment. This marginalisation has been a bitter blow to these countries' standing on the international stage. But the second event is more important. For the first time in history, the United States has established itself in Central Asia, and it plans to stay there, not only in Afghanistan but also in the two neighbouring ex-soviet republics (Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). This is an open threat to China, Russia, India and Iran. However, its scope is far more profound: it is a step towards an authentic encirclement of the European powers - a new edition of the old policy of "containment" that the US used against Russia. From the high mountains of Central Asia it will exercise strategic control over the Middle East and its oil supplies, which are crucial for the European nations' economies and military action.
Covered by the "anti-terrorist coalition" and having marginalised its European "allies" America can now pursue its military villainy in other countries. Iraq is in its sights. There is talk of intervention in Yemen and Somalia. These new bloody acts will not have as their objective the "tracking down of terrorists" but rather the strategic encircling of its European "allies".
As we said in the Editorial to the last issue of the International Review we do not know if the authors of the crime of the Twin Towers were Bin Laden and his friends, but we do know that the United states has been the main beneficiary, as the selfsame Bush pointed out directly in his fireside chat of 24th November: "the evil the terrorists intended has resulted in good they never expected. And this holiday season, Americans have much to be thankful for" (see www.whitehouse.gov [1]).
When analysing the Kosovo war, our 13th Congress, held in April 1999, underlined that: "The present war, with the new destabilisation of the European and world situation that it represents, is another illustration of the inescapable dilemma confronting the USA today. The tendency to "every man for himself" and the more and more explicit assertion of their imperialist pretensions by the ex-allies of the USA increasingly forces the later to display and use its enormous military superiority. At the same time, this policy can only lead to a still greater aggravation of the chaos that reigns already in the world situation" (International Review n°97: "Resolution on the International Situation", page 3).
The virulence of this contradiction has not diminished, but worsened over the last 10 years. The American godfather's overwhelming displays of military power have clipped its rivals' wings and pulled them into line. But the effects have been short lived. After the Gulf War Germany dared to break Yugoslavia into pieces in order to gain access to the Mediterranean via the Adriatic. America's aims in the Balkans were frustrated as soon as the bombing in Kosovo stopped. The politicians in Washington have tried every possible method to contain this situation but have failed, not because they are incompetent, but because the evolving conditions of decomposing capitalism have worked against them. Pounding the table may intimidate the other gangsters for a while, but they are soon up to their old tricks again. First of all, there are the diplomatic intrigues, the sordid manoeuvres, followed by the game of destabilising this or that country, this or that zone. Later on, there are agreements with the local warlords, finally there are the operations of "humanitarian intervention". All of this is reproduced on a regional scale by the states of the second or third division, generating between them all a bloody jumble of criss-crossing influences. This vicious cycle does nothing but create ruined societies, starvation and mountains of bodies. The great powers, who present themselves as firemen, are in reality arsonists who treacherously and under cover of darkness sprinkle petrol everywhere.
The situation has turned the United States into the principal fire-bomber. Real firemen may light fire-breaks to bring a blaze under control. America's fire-breaks only fan the flames it is trying to extinguish. The contradictions of its position in this period of the historical decomposition of capitalism leaves America no choice but to light them. This is a contradiction that reveals the profound gravity of the world situation. The United States, the first guarantor and beneficiary of the "World Order", at the same time undermines its efforts to defend itself through its devastating military operations.
In the First and Second World Wars, it was the powers that had gained least from the great imperialist share-out of the 19th century (especially Germany) which upset the existing state of affairs, thus putting "world peace" in danger. During the period of violent competition between the USSR and the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s, the weaker Russian bloc always played the destabilising role whilst the Americans could allow themselves the luxury of appearing as being "under attack" or as the "guarantor of the world order". The US then adopted a more offensive policy - though appearing to remain on the defensive - notably via an arms race which its soviet rival was unable to take up due to its own economic and political weakness, and which eventually led to the latter's collapse. However, today, as an expression of the descent of capitalism into barbarity we have the absurd situation where the United States, the principle beneficiary of the world order and its overwhelmingly dominant power, is the one who undermines it most of all.
The present "anti-terrorist" campaign will inevitably follow the same route, the only difference being that the doses of destruction and chaos that are being prepared will be qualitatively and quantitatively more serious that those resulting from previous operations.
There will be no "peace and reconstruction" in Afghanistan, only the foundations for new military convulsions. The Northern Alliance is an agglomeration of warlords and tribal fractions that have momentarily solidified against a common enemy. But the division of power, their internecine feuds and the fires that will be fuelled by the foreign godfathers (Russia, Iran, India) will lead to the kinds of violent confrontations that we have already seen after the taking of Kunduz where the "allied" troops of Dostum and Daud have already clashed. The relegation of the factions based on the Pashtun majority, or at the least the vantage points seized by the other factions at their expense, heralds the ferocity of the confrontations to come. The USA, which has no interest in occupying the whole of Afghanistan4, has deployed its troops in Kandahar to back the Pashtuns and to counter the weight of the Northern Alliance.
America needed Pakistan's support to intervene in Afghanistan, and in exchange Pakistan has been promised American support for those tribes able to counter-balance the Northern Alliance, Pakistan's traditional enemy and a barrier to its influence in Afghanistan. Pakistan needs this "zone of influence" to give it "strategic depth" in its bitter confrontation with India over Kashmir. The increased political influence of the Northern Alliance in the post-Taliban settlement is therefore a breach in Pakistan's defences against India.
India, China, Russia and Iran are furious about the installation of the Americans in Central Asia. While they have no choice but to line up behind the "anti-terrorist" front, all their efforts will be aimed at sabotaging the operations of Big Brother by any means, since they threaten their vital interests. They can do nothing else but respond with the meagre means at their disposal: intrigues, destabilising operations in crucial areas, supporting the most unruly factions.
In the Arab and Islamic countries, the American operation can only incite still further the hatred of broad sections of the population, accentuating the threats of destabilisation and pushing all the bourgeoisies of the area to increase their distance from the United States, as we have already seen in Saudi Arabia with its open shows of bad will.
In the same way, the Afghan operation has dealt a serious blow to the prestige of the "Arab cause", and is therefore a catastrophe for Arafat who has been greatly weakened. This helps Israel to push its Palestinian enemy onto the ropes with the consequence of aggravating the open war that it has been dragging out for years.
Japan has taken advantage of events to despatch a naval flotilla to foreign seas for the first time since the end of World War II,. This is for the moment no more than a symbolic gesture, but one which shows how Japanese imperialism intends to assert its own power, creating a new front of tension that adds even more fire to the world situation.
Germany, France and Great Britain, those most harmed by this present war, have to respond because the American manoeuvre poses a serious threat inasmuch as it is the beginning of a strategy of "continental encirclement" that could suffocate them. They have to counter-attack, perhaps in Africa, perhaps in the Balkans, and they have to accelerate urgently their military spending and plans for the creation of rapid deployment brigades within the framework of the famous "European Army".
In the end, not only will the United States be unable to stabilise the world situation in its favour; it is on the contrary contributing to its destabilisation.
Since 1945 the central countries of capitalism (the United States, Western Europe) have enjoyed a long period of stability and peace within their borders. World capitalism as a whole has progressively sunk into a dynamic of wars, destruction, starvation? but the central countries have appeared as oases of peace. Now that situation is beginning to change. The Balkans Wars of the 1990s were the first warning. A devastating war brought instability to the gates of the great industrial concentrations. In this logic, the events in New York have a serious and profound significance far beyond their immediate impact. An act of war has directly struck the world's main power causing a massacre equivalent to a night of aerial bombardment.
We are not saying that war has begun or that it is about to happen in the world's great urban centres. We are a long way from such a situation for one good reason at least: the proletariat of these countries, despite all its difficulties, is not ready to fall into the moral degradation, physical suffering, real terror and the exhausting daily sacrifice that it would have to endure in a state of war. However, we cannot let this conceal the gravity of what has happened. A few months previously, analysing the underlying dynamic of the historical situation and drawing the lessons of the tendencies contained within it, our 14th Congress, in its Resolution on the International Situation stated that "the working class today thus faces the possibility that it could be engulfed by an irrational chain reaction of local and regional wars?This apocalypse is not so far from what we are experiencing today, the face of barbarism is taking material shape before our eyes. The only question remaining is whether socialism, the proletarian revolution, still remains a living alternative" (International Review n°106).
The attack on the Twin Towers has opened a period where instability, the bloody claw of terrorist actions unleashed directly as acts of war, threaten in a much more direct way the main industrialised states, which are less and less the "refuges of order and stability" that they appeared to be until now.5 It is an element of the situation that the proletariat must take account of since terrorism represents a new danger, not only physically (workers were the main victims of the attack in the Twin Towers) but above all politically since the state in the great "democratic" centres has taken advantage of the insecurity and terror generated by such actions in order to call on the population to close ranks around the "defence of national security" and offers itself as the "only guarantee" against chaos and barbarity.
The use of terrorism as a weapon in the struggle between states is not new. What is "new" is the widespread nature of the phenomenon in the last few years. The main states, and in their wake the smaller ones, have multiplied their relations with all kinds of Mafia and/or terrorists in order both to control all kinds of illegal but lucrative business, and as a way of putting pressure on rival states. The use of the IRA by the USA as a means of pressuring Great Britain or of the ETA by France to put pressure on Spain are significant examples. At the same time, all states have developed "special departments" in their armies and secret services: which prepare highly specialised troops for "guerrilla" actions, sabotage, terrorism etc.
The use of the terrorist weapon has accompanied a growing tendency in the war between states to violate the minimal laws that until now have been respected in the confrontations between them. As we say in the "Theses on the Decomposition of Capitalism" "The world situation is characterised by the increase of terrorism, the taking of hostages as a means of war between states in detriment to the 'laws' that capitalism has had in the past for 'regulating' the conflicts between fractions of the ruling class".6
The western governments' reaction to the 11th September has been the rapid reinforcement of their arsenal of state repression which unequivocally demonstrates that they have understood the danger. The United States has set the tone: introduction of identity cards, suspension of habeas corpus, secret military tribunals, "debating" whether to employ "moderate" torture in order to "avoid even worse events" and so on. With this policy it is developing weapons whose ultimate destiny will be to be used against the proletariat and revolutionaries, but what it reveals now is the growing threat of instability, chaos, underhand blows by rivals, that is unfolding in the central countries.
The cordon sanitaire against chaos, raised like a new Berlin Wall to protect the "great democracies", will become increasingly vulnerable. Bush has characterised the "anti-terrorist campaign" as "a long war, in many places on the planet, that will have visible phases and secret ones, that demands many means, some of which will be known and others not", and this demonstrates the level of convulsions and instability that is going to affect the central countries.
To gain a measure of the significance of these threats it is useful to refer to other historical periods. When Imperial Rome, in the first century AD, entered into decadence, the first stage was characterised by violent convulsions in its centre - Rome. This was the period of the "mad emperors" such as Nero, Caligula etc. The "reforms" of the emperors of the 2nd century - the period of great public works which gave rise to the most imposing monuments - pushed the convulsions to the periphery which declined into stagnation and fell increasingly prey to barbarian invasion. The 3rd century saw the return, like a boomerang, of chaos towards the centre, increasingly affecting Rome and Byzantium. The sacking of Rome was the culmination of this process. What until then had been impregnable fortress, fell like a house of cards to the barbarian hordes.
This same process is already been heralded as an unfolding tendency in present-day capitalism. Wars, starvation, ruins, which in the last decades have murdered millions of human beings in the under-developed countries, could end up becoming established with all their destructive force in the heart of capitalism, if the proletariat is not able to react in time by developing its struggle towards the world revolution. As Rosa Luxemburg declared nearly 90 years ago: "The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of culture, sporadically during a modern war, and forever, if the period of world wars that has just begun is allowed to take its damnable course to the last ultimate consequence. Thus we stand today, as Friedrich Engels prophesied more than a generation a ago, before the awful proposition: Either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of Socialism, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism, against its methods, against war" (The Junius Pamphlet, page 16).
Military escalation is accelerating. The period of fundamentally local wars, outside of the main industrial centres, is coming to an end. We are not talking about a situation of generalised war, of world war, but of a period defined by large-scale wars with world-wide implications and, above all, by their more direct repercussions on the lives of the central countries.
This evolution of the historical situation must make the proletariat reflect. As we said in the Resolution of our 14th Congress, the face of barbarism is becoming more precise, its contours more clearly defined, The barbarity of the outrage of the Twin Towers has as its counterpart the military campaign that the American bourgeoisie has imposed on the whole of society. Bellicose language has spread to American politicians of all tendencies. MacCain, Bush's former rival of in the Republican Party says "Let God take pity on the terrorists because we won't", the Secretary of Defence well known for his bellicose threats and his arrogant disregard for human life said of Kunduz "I want the Taliban dead or prisoners". A soldier fired by one of generalissimo Bush's speeches declared "after hearing the President I want to go and kill the enemy".
"War is methodical, organised, gigantic murder. But in normal human beings this systematic murder is possible only when a state of intoxication has previously been created. This has always been the tried and proven method of those who make war. Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses; the later must prepare and accompany the former" (Rosa Luxemburg, op. cit. page 20). The American bourgeoisie has been putting pressure on the proletariat and the American population through systematic campaigns of patriotic ardour, with carefully cultivated hysteria about the threat of Anthrax, with incredible rumours about "Arab" outrages etc in order to awaken the basest instincts and to catalyse the worst brutality. Its European brothers have been doing the same thing more discreetly, but with greater cynicism and sophistication.
We are not in the same situation that Rosa Luxemburg fought against in 1914, nor in that of 1939, when the mass of the proletariat was drawn into war. Today, the tendency of world society is towards the development of the class struggle of the proletariat and not towards generalised world war. The conditions for patriotic intoxication, for bestial hatred towards peoples designated as the enemy, for daily slavery under the military jackboot in the factory, in the office, in the street, for an acceptance of methodical and systematic murder for the "just cause" championed by the state, are not to be found today in the proletariat of the United States or any other of the central countries.
Does that mean to say that we can rest easy in our beds? Absolutely not! As we demonstrated in our report on the historic course adopted by our last Congress (see International Review n°107) in the present period, the terminal phase of capitalist decomposition, time is not on the side of the proletariat and the longer the working class' ability to gain the level of consciousness, collective strength and unity necessary for overthrowing the capitalist monster is delayed, the greater is the risk of the destruction of the foundations for communism and that the proletariat's capacity for unity, solidarity and confidence will undergo a relentless weakening.
The accumulation of events that has taken place over the last two months has revealed a sudden acceleration of the situation. They have concentrated three very important elements of the world situation:
- The acceleration of imperialist war.
- A violent and spectacular aggravation in the economic crisis with the avalanche of lay-offs, which are already much higher than in 1991-93.
- A cascade of repressive measures, in the name of "anti-terrorism", on the part of the "democratic" states.
Assimilating these events and drawing out the perspectives that they contain is not easy. While we have not been surprised, we have to confess that their virulence and rapidity has surpassed our expectations, and that we are far from seeing clearly all their implications. It is thus natural that a certain perplexity, combined with feelings of fear and disorientation, will dominate the proletariat for a certain time. This has happened before. For example, faced with the acceleration of the economic crisis with its procession of attacks, the proletariat has not immediately entered into struggle, due to an initial sense of bewilderment and surprise. Only later, when it has begun to digest events, has it begun to develop its struggles. This is what happened faced with the crises of 1974-75, 1980-82 and 1991-93.
However, the fact that the three elements (crisis, war and growing repressive apparatus) are present at the same time in so concentrated a form and in such enormous proportions, means that if the proletariat can develop its combativity and struggles in response to the central axis - the worsening of the crisis - this could be the premise for a very profound and global development of consciousness within the ranks of the proletariat.
The present wars, as they appear today, do not make it easy to develop a consciousness about their nature since the tangle of religious and ethnic fanaticism, characteristic of decomposition, as well as the proliferation of terrorist acts, are like trees that hide the forest of their real causes and the main culprits: capitalism and the great powers. Equally, the bourgeoisie is well prepared. It was not without reason that in our previous Congress we said "?in view of the degradation of the world situation the bourgeoisie is afraid that the class will discover those episodes which demonstrate that it is the class which holds the future of humanity in its hands: the revolutionary wave of 1917-23; the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in Russia, the ending of World War 1 through the revolutionary movement in Germany" ("Resolution on the International Situation" from the 13th Congress of the ICC, International Review n°97).
The Left that is in power in the majority of European countries, pushes towards war but at the same time toasts pacifism and looks for all kinds of justifications for its military excesses only too conscious of the fact that: "When and where has there been a war since so-called public opinion has played a role in government calculations, in which each and very belligerent party did not, with heavy heart, draw the sword from its sheath for the single and sole purpose of defending its Fatherland and its own righteous cause from the shameful attacks of the enemy? This legend is as inextricably a part of the game of war as powder and lead" (Rosa Luxemburg The Junius Pamphlet, page 31).
These obstacles can, however, be overcome by the proletariat since it has, in a global and historic sense, though not massively at present, the weapon of consciousness. "The bourgeois revolutions, such as those of the eighteenth century, storm quickly from success to success. They outdo each other in dramatic effects: men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds and each day's spirit is ecstatic. But they are short-lived; they soon reach their apogee, and society has to undergo a long period of regret until it has learnt to assimilate soberly the achievements of its period of storm and stress. Proletarian revolutions, however, such as those of the nineteenth century, constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again; with merciless thoroughness they mock the inadequate, weak and wretched aspects of their first attempts; they seem to throw their opponent to the ground only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again before them, more colossal than ever; they sink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals, until the situation is created in which any retreat is impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!" (Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", in Surveys from Exile, Vol 2 of The Pelican Marx Library, page 150)."For the ultimate triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto Marx relied solely and exclusively upon the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action and discussion. The events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than successes, could not but demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy hitherto of their universal panaceas and make their minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for the emancipation of the workers" (Engels: "Preface to the fourth 1890 German edition of the Communist Manifesto", Marx and Engels Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, London page 33).
Rosa Luxemburg said of the international proletariat "Gigantic as its problems are its mistakes. No firmly fixed plan, no orthodox ritual that holds good for all times, shows him the path that he must travel. Historical experience is his only teacher; his Via Dolorosa to freedom is not only covered with unspeakable suffering, but with countless mistakes. The goal of his journey, his final liberation, depends entirely upon the proletariat, on whether it understands to learn from its own mistakes. Self-criticism, cruel, unsparing criticism that goes to the very root of the evil is life and breath for the proletarian movement. The catastrophe into which the world has thrust the socialist proletariat is an unexampled misfortune for humanity. But Socialism is lost only if the international proletariat is unable to measure the depths of the catastrophe and refuses to understand the lessons that it teaches" (op cit. page 7).
The bourgeois revolutions were much more conscious acts than the social process that brought slavery to an end and led to the feudal regimes. However, they were still dominated by the overwhelming weight of objective factors. The proletarian revolution, on the other hand, is the first in history where the determinant factor is its class-consciousness. This crucial feature of the proletarian revolution, that has been energetically underlined by Marxists as we have seen, is even more powerful and more vital confronted with the present historical situation of the decomposition of capitalism.
Adalen 28-11-2001
Notes
1 See International Review issues 14 and 15 for our position on "Terror, Terrorism and Class Violence"
2 See our article "Strategy or oil profits" in this issue.
3 It is thus absurd to talk about "globalisation" today. The world market was formed at least a century ago, and capitalism's objective capacity to unify the living conditions of the great majority of humanity has long since been exhausted. Concerning the real meaning of so-called "globalisation" see our article "Behind the 'globalisation' of the economy the aggravation of the crisis of capitalism" in International Review n°86.
4 It has learned from the trap that the Russians fell in to during the 1979-89 war.
5 As we have already said in the Editorial to International Review n°107 we do not know who is responsible for the outrage of the 11th September. However, that such a monstrosity has taken place reveals the advance of chaos and instability and their direct effects in the central countries
6 Published in 1990 in International Review n°62 and republished in International Review n°107.
From the very first moments, American bourgeois propaganda has likened the horrific terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941. This comparison is laden with considerable psychological, historical and political impact, since it was Pearl Harbor that marked American imperialism's direct entry into the Second World War. According to the current ideological campaign presented by the American bourgeoisie, especially its mass media, the parallels are simple, direct, and self-evident:
1) In both instances, the US was victimized by a treacherous surprise attack, taken completely off guard. In the first instance there was the treachery of Japanese imperialism, which cynically pretended to negotiate with Washington to avoid war but plotted and unleashed an attack without warning. In the current instance, the US was victimized by fanatical Islamic fundamentalists, who took advantage of the openness and freedom of American society to commit an atrocity of unprecedented proportions, and whose evilness places them outside the bounds of civilized society.
2) In both instances the casualties inflicted by the surprise attack were staggering, arousing popular outrage. At Pearl Harbor the death toll was 2403, mostly American military personnel. At the Twin Towers the death toll was far worse, nearly 6,000 innocent civilians.
3) In both instances, the attacks backfired on the perpetrators. Rather than terrifying or plunging the American nation into defeatism and quiet submission, Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers instead aroused the deepest patriotic fervor in the population, including the proletariat, and thereby permitted the mobilization of the population behind the state for protracted imperialist war.
4) In the end, it is the goodness of the American democratic way of life, and its military strength, that prevails over evil.
Like all bourgeois ideological myths, whatever the elements of truth that offer superficial credibility, this tale of two tragedies, sixty years apart, is laced with half-truths, lies, and self-serving distortion. But this is no surprise. The politics of the bourgeoisie as a class are based on lies, deception, manipulation, and manoeuvre. This is particularly true when it comes to the difficult task of mobilizing society for all out war in modern times. The basic elements of the bourgeoisie's ideological campaign are completely at odds with both historical and present day realities. There is considerable evidence that the bourgeoisie was not taken by surprise in either case, that the bourgeoisie cynically welcomed the massive death toll in both cases for purposes of political expediency in regard to the implementation of its imperialist war aims, and other long range political objectives.
Since both Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center attacks have been utilized by the bourgeoisie to rally the US population for war, it is necessary to examine briefly the political tasks encountered by the bourgeoisie in preparing for imperialist war in the epoch of capitalist decadence. In decadence, war has taken on significantly different characteristics as compared to wars during the period when capitalism was an ascending, historically progressive system. In the ascendant period, wars could take on a progressive role, in terms of making possible the further development of the productive forces. In this sense the Civil War in the US, which served to destroy the anachronistic slave system in the southern states, and unleashed the full scale industrialization of the US, or the various national wars in Europe that resulted in the creation of modern, unified nation states, which in turn provided the optimal framework for the development of the national capital in each country, could be seen as historically progressive. In general, these wars could be restricted largely to the military personnel involved in the conflict, and did not entail the wholesale destruction of the means of production, the infrastructures, or populations of the respective combatant powers.
Imperialist war in the epoch of capitalist decadence is characterised by sharply different features. Whereas national wars in ascendance could lay the basis for qualitative strides in the development of the productive forces, in decadence the capitalist system itself has already reached the zenith of its historic development, and this progressive aspect is no longer possible. Capitalism has accomplished the extension of the world market, and all the extra-capitalist markets, which facilitated the expansion of global capitalism, have been integrated into the capitalist system. For the various national capitals the only avenue for expansion now is at the expense of a rival - to seize territory or markets controlled by its adversaries. The heightening of imperialist rivalries leads to the development of imperialist alliances, setting the stage for generalised imperialist war. Far from being confined to combat between professional militaries, war in decadence requires a total mobilisation of society, which in turn gives rise to a new form of state - state capitalism - which functions to exert total control over all aspects of society, in order to rein in the class contradictions that threat to explode society, and at the same time coordinate the mobilization of society for modern all-out war.
No matter how much it has successfully prepared the population for war on the ideological level, the bourgeoisie in decadence cloaks its imperialist wars in the myth of victimization and self-defense against aggression and tyranny. The reality of modern warfare, with its massive destruction and death, with all the facets of barbarism that it unleashes on humanity, is so dire, so horrific, that even an ideologically defeated proletariat, does not march off to the slaughter lightly. The bourgeoisie relies heavily on manipulating reality to create that illusion that it is a victim of aggression, with no choice but to fight back in self defense. The necessity to defend the fatherland or the motherland, as the case may be, against aggression and external tyranny, not the real imperialist motives that drive capitalism towards war, are offered up as justification for the conflict. No one can really succeed in mobilizing a population around the slogan of "let's oppress the world under our imperialist thumb at any costs." The state control over the mass media in decadent capitalism facilitates the mass brainwashing of the population with all kinds of propaganda and lies.
The American bourgeoisie has been particularly adept at this victimization ploy throughout its history, even before the onset of capitalist decadence in the early part of the 20th century. Thus for example, "Remember the Alamo," was the slogan of the Mexican War of 1845-48. This war cry immortalized the "massacre" of 136 American rebels in San Antonio, Texas in 1836, then a part of Mexico, by the Mexican forces led by Gen. Santa Ana. Of course, the fact that the "blood thirsty" Mexicans had repeatedly offered terms of surrender, and permitted women and children to evacuate the Alamo fortress before the final battle, did not prevent the American ruling class from imbuing the Alamo defenders with an aura of martyrdom, and the incident served the bourgeoisie well in mobilizing support for a war that culminated in the American annexation of much of what today constitutes the US southwest.
Similarly, the suspicious explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 served as the pretext for the Spanish-American war in 1898, and gave rise to the slogan "Remember the Maine." More recently in 1964, an alleged attack on two US gunboats in waters off the Vietnamese coast was used as the basis for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, adopted by the American Congress in the summer of 1964, which, while not a formal declaration of war, provided the legal framework for American intervention in Vietnam. Notwithstanding the fact that the Johnson administration knew within hours that the reported "attack" on the Maddox and the Turner Joy never happened, but was the result of error by nervous young radar officers, they still pushed the combat authorization legislation through Congress to provide legal cover for a war that would drag on until the fall of Saigon to Stalinist forces in 1975.
It is true that the bourgeoisie used the attack at Pearl Harbor to rally a hesitant population to the war effort, just as the bourgeoisie today is using the 11 September atrocity to mobilize support for still another war effort. But the question remains as to whether in either instance the US was taken by "surprise," and to what degree the machiavellianism of the US bourgeoisie was involved either in provoking or allowing the attacks to occur in order to take political advantage of the ensuing popular outrage.
All too often when the ICC denounces the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, our critics accuse of us of lapsing into a conspiratorial view of history. However their incomprehension in this regard is not just a misunderstanding of our analysis, but- even worse - falls prey to the ideological claptrap of bourgeois apologists in the media and academia whose job it is to denigrate those who try to ascertain the patterns and processes within bourgeois political, economic and social life as irrational conspiracy theorists. However, it is not even controversial to assert that "lies, terror, coercion, double-dealing, corruption, plots and political assassination" have been the stock in trade of exploitative ruling classes throughout history, whether in the ancient world, feudalism or modern capitalism. "The difference was that patricians and aristocrats 'practiced machi-avellianism without knowing it,' whereas the bourgeoisie is machiavellian and knows it. It turns machiavellianism into an 'eternal truth,' because that's how it lives: it takes exploitation to be eternal" ("Why the bourgeoisie is Machiavellian" International Review n°31, 1982 p. 10). In this sense lying and manipulation, a mechanism employed by all preceding exploiting ruling classes, have become central characteristics of the political mode of functioning for the modern bourgeoisie, which, utilizing the tremendous tools of social control available to it under the conditions of state capitalism, takes machi-avellianism to a qualitatively higher stage.
The emergence of state capitalism in the epoch of capitalist decadence, a state form which concentrates power in the hands of the executive branch, particularly the permanent bureaucracy, and gives the state an increasingly totalitarian control over all aspects of social and economic life, has provided the bourgeoisie with even greater mechanisms to implement its machiavellian schemes. "At the level of organizing to survive, to defend itself - here, the bourgeoisie has shown an immense capacity to develop techniques for economic and social control way beyond the dreams of the rulers of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has become 'intelligent' confronted with the historic crisis of its socio-economic systems" ("Notes on the Consciousness of the decadent bourgeoisie" International Review n°31, 4th quarter 1982, p. 14). The development of a mass media completely integrated under state control, whether through formal juridical means or more flexible informal methods, is a central element in the machiavellian scheming of the bourgeoisie. "Propaganda - the lie - is an essential weapon of the bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie is quite capable of provoking events to feed this propaganda, if need be" ("Why the bourgeoisie is Machiavellian" p. 11). American history is jammed with myriad examples, ranging from the relatively mundane everyday obfuscation to much more historically significant manipulations. An example of the former type might include the 1955 incident in which presidential press secretary James Hagerty engineered a fake event to cover up the incapacitation of President Eisenhower, who had been hospitalized in Denver, Colorado following a heart attack. Hagerty arranged for the entire Cabinet to travel 2000 miles from Washington to Denver to create the illusion that the president was well enough to preside over a cabinet meeting, even though no such meeting occurred. An example of the latter might include in 1990 manipulation of Saddam Hussein when the American ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam that the US, wouldn't intervene in the border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, tricking Saddam into believing he had been give a green light from US imperialism to invade Kuwait. Instead the invasion was used by the US as the pretext for the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, as a means to reassert its status as the only remaining superpower in the wake of the Stalinist collapse, and the ensuing disintegration of the western bloc.
This is not to say all events in contemporary society are necessarily predetermined by the secret decision making of a small circle of capitalist leaders. Clearly, factional disputes do occur within the leading circles of capitalist states, and the results of such disputes are not forgone conclusions. Nor is the outcome of confrontations with the proletariat in the heat of the class struggle always under the thumb of bourgeoisie. And even with planning and manipulation, accidents of history can also occur. However, the critical point to understand is that even though as an exploiting class, the bourgeoisie is incapable of a complete, unified consciousness, accurately understanding the functioning of its system and the historical dead-end that it offers humanity, it is conscious of the deepening social and economic crisis of its system. "At the heights of the state machine it is possible for those in command to have some kind of general picture of the situation and what options are realistically open to them to confront it" ("Notes on the consciousness?" p. 14). Even with an incomplete consciousness, the bourgeoisie is more than capable of formulating strategy and tactics, and using the totalitarian control mechanisms of state capitalism to implement them. It is the responsibility of revolutionary Marxists to expose this machiavellian manoeuvering and lying. To turn a blind eye to this aspect of the ruling class offensive to control society is irresponsible and plays into the hands of our class enemies.
Pearl Harbor offers an excellent example of bourgeois machiavellianism at work. We have the benefit of more than half of century of historical research, and a number of military and opposition party-controlled investigations to draw on. According to the official version of reality, 7 December 1941 was "a day that will live in infamy", as President Roosevelt characterized it. It was used as a means to mobilize public opinion for war. It is still portrayed this way in the capitalist media, schoolbooks and popular culture, despite considerable historical evidence that demonstrates that the Japanese attack was consciously provoked by American policy; the attack did not come as a surprise to the American government and a conscious policy decision was made at the highest levels to permit the attack to occur and to sustain significant losses of life and naval hardware, as a pretext to secure America's entry into the Second World War. A number of books and considerable material on the Internet have been published on this history1. Here we will review some of the highlights to illustrate the operational aspects of machiavellianism.
The Pearl Harbor events unfolded as the US was moving closer and closer to intervention in World War II on the side of the Allies. The Roosevelt administration was anxious to enter the war against Germany, but despite the fact that the American working class was firmly trapped in the grips of a trade union apparatus (in which the Stalinist party played a significant role), imposed under state authority to control the class struggle in all key industries, and was imbued with the ideology of anti-fascism, the American bourgeoisie still faced strong opposition to war within the population, including not only the working class, but even large parts of the bourgeoisie itself. Public opinion polls showed 60% opposed to entering the war before Pearl Harbor, and the "America First" campaign and other isolationist groups had considerable support within the bourgeoisie. Despite demagogic political pledges to keep America out of a European war, the Roosevelt administration searched furtively for an excuse to join the fighting. The US violated its own self-declared neutrality to an increasing degree, by offering aid to the Allies, and shipping vast amounts of war material under the Lend Lease program. The administration hoped to provoke Germany into launching an attack against American forces in the North Atlantic that could serve as a pretext for American entry into the war. When German imperialism failed to fall for the bait, attention switched to Japan. The decision to impose an oil embargo against Japan and the transfer of the Pacific fleet from the West Coast of the US to a more exposed position in Hawaii served to provide motive and opportunity for Japan fire the first shots against the US, and thereby provide the pretext for direct American intervention in the imperialist war. In March 1941, a secret Navy Department report predicted that if Japan decided to attack the US, it would come at Pearl Harbor in an early morning raid launched from aircraft carriers. In June 1941 presidential advisor Harold Ickes drafted a memo to the president when Germany first attacked Russia, suggesting, "There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way". In October Ickes wrote, "For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan". Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary in late November the following account of discussions with the President: "the question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves. In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the ones do this so there should remain no doubt in anyone's mind as to who were the aggressors".
The report of the Army Pearl Harbor Board (October 20, 1944,) detailed this conscious, Machiavellian decision to sacrifice lives and equipment in Pearl Harbor, concluding that during "the fateful period between November 27 and December 6, 1941? numerous pieces of information came to our State, War and Navy Departments in all of their top ranks indicating precisely the intentions of the Japanese including the probable exact hour and date of the attack" (Army Board Report, Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 39, pp. 221-30). For example:
- US intelligence sources learned on November 24th that "Japanese offensive military operations" had been set.
- On November 26, "specific evidence of the Japanese intentions to wage offensive war against Great Britain and the United States" were obtained by US intelligence.
- "A concentration of units of the Japanese fleet at an unknown port ready for offensive action" was also reported on November 26.
- On December 1, "definite information came from three independent sources that Japan was going to attack Great Britain and the United States, but would maintain peace with Russia".
- On December 3, "the culmination of this complete revelation of the Japanese intentions as to war and the attack came? with information that Japanese were destroying their codes and code machines. This was construed? as meaning immediate war".
This intelligence information was given to the highest ranking officials in the War and State Departments, and shared with the White House, where Roosevelt personally received twice-daily briefings on intercepted Japanese messages. Despite the desperate urgings of intelligence officers to send a "war warning" to military commanders in Hawaii to prepare for imminent attack, the civilian and military brass decided against doing so, and instead sent what the board termed "an innocuous" message.
This evidence of prior knowledge of the Japanese attack has been confirmed in numerous sources, including journalists' reports and memoirs of participants. For example, a United Press dispatch published in the New York Times on December 8, included the following under the subhead "Attack Was Expected: It now is possible to reveal that the United States forces here had known for a week that the attack was coming and they were not caught unprepared" (New York Times, December 8, 1941, p.13). In a 1944 interview, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, revealed that "December 7 (?) was far from the shock it proved to be to the country in general. We had expected something of the sort for a long time" (New York Times Magazine, October 8, 1944, p.41). On June 20 1944, British Cabinet Minister Sir Oliver Lyttelton told the American Chamber of Commerce, "Japan was provoked into attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history ever to say that America was forced into the war. Everyone knows where American sympathies were. It is incorrect to say that America was ever truly neutral even before America came into the war on a fighting basis" (Prang, Pearl Harbor: Verdict of History, pp 39-40). Winston Churchill confirmed the duplicity of the American government rulers in the Pearl Harbor attack in this passage from The Grand Alliance: "A prodigious Congressional Inquiry published its findings in 1946 in which every detail was exposed of the events leading up to the war between the United States and Japan and of the failure to send positive 'Alert' orders through the military departments to their fleets and garrisons in exposed situations. Every detail, including the decoding of secret Japanese telegrams and their actual texts, has been exposed to the world in forty volumes. The strength of the United States was sufficient to enable them to sustain this hard ordeal required by the spirit of the American Constitution. I do not intend in these pages to attempt to pronounce judgment upon this tremendous episode in American history. We know that all the great Americans round the President and in his confidence felt, as acutely as I did, the awful danger that Japan would attack British or Dutch possessions in the Far East, and it would carefully avoid the United States, and that in consequence Congress would not sanction an American declaration of war (...) The President and his trusted friends had long realized the grave risks of United States neutrality in the war against Hitler and what he stood for, and had writhed under the restraints of a Congress whose House of Representatives had a few months before passed by only a single vote the necessary renewal of compulsory military service, without which their Army would have been almost disbanded in the midst of the world convulsion. Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and, as a link between them all, Harry Hopkins, had but one mind... A Japanese attack upon the United States was a vast simplification of their problems and their duty. How can we wonder that they regarded the actual form of the attack, or even its scale, as incomparably less important than the fact that the whole American nation would be united for its own safety in a righteous cause as never before?" (Winston Churchill, "The Grand Alliance," p. 603).
Roosevelt may not have anticipated the extent of the damage and casualties that the Japanese would inflict at Pearl Harbor, but he was clearly prepared to sacrifice American ships and lives, in order to arouse the population to rage, and to war.
It is of course more difficult to assess the level of machiavellianism of the US bourgeoisie in regard to the Trade Center attack, which occurred less than three months prior to the writing of this article. We do not have the benefit of investigations after-the-fact by review boards that might reveal secret evidence on whether elements of the ruling class had some complicity in the attacks, or had advance knowledge but permitted the attacks to occur. But as ruling class history demonstrates, particularly the events at Pearl Harbor, such a possibility is far from unthinkable, and if we examine recent events, based solely on what has been reported in the media - a media incidentally that is completely enrolled in, and supportive of, the government's current political and imperialist offensive - we certainly find circumstantial support for such an hypothesis.
First, if we ask the question, who profits from the crime, there can be no doubt that the primary beneficiary of the attack on the World Trade Center has been the American ruling class. Surely this alone is enough to at least arouse suspicion. The US bourgeoisie moved swiftly and unrelentingly to take advantage of 11 September to advance crucial elements of its domestic and international agenda, including mobilizing the population behind the state for war, strengthening the repressive apparatus of the state, and re-asserting American superpower status in the face of the general tendency for each country to play its own card in the international arena:
- Immediately after the attacks, the American political apparatus and mass media were rushed into service to mobilize the population for war, in a concerted effort to use the tragedy to overcome definitively the effects of the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome," which has hampered American imperialism's ability to wage war for three decades. This so-called "mass psychological disorder" has been characterized by a resistance, particularly the working class, to mobilization behind the state for long term imperialist war, was largely responsible for the US's heavy reliance on proxy wars in its conflict with Russian imperialism in the 1970s and '80s, or on short-term, limited duration military interventions, relying heavily on air strikes and missile attacks rather than ground forces, like the Persian Gulf and Kosovo. Of course this resistance was not the result of some psychological disorder, but rather a reflection of the ruling class's inability to achieve an ideological, political defeat of the proletariat, to line up the current generations of the working class behind the state for imperialist war as had been done in the preparation for World War II. The current war psychosis campaign was exemplified by, and mapped out in, an editorial in a special edition of Time magazine published immediately after the attack. The thematic headline for the issue, "Day of Infamy," invoked the Pearl Harbor comparison right from the beginning, An editorial column by Lance Morrow, titled "The Case for Rage and Retribution," outlined the details of the ensuing ideological campaign. Though written in a mass media publication as part of the propaganda effort, Morrow's essay gives clear evidence of the bourgeoisie's conscious understanding of the heightened propaganda value of the Trade Center attack, compared to previous attacks, to manipulate the population for war because of large numbers of casualties and the dramatic visual images:
"A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage.
What's needed is a unified, unifying Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury - a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or two?
This was terrorism brought to near perfection as a dramatic form. Never has the evil business had such production values. Normally, the audience sees only the smoking aftermath - the blown-up embassy, the ruined barracks, the ship with a blackened hole at the waterline. This time the first plane striking the first tower acted as a shill. It alerted the media, brought cameras to the scene so that might be set up to record the vivid surreal bloom of the second strike?.
Evil possesses an instinct for theater, which is why, in an era of gaudy and gifted media, evil may vastly magnify its damage by he power of horrific images" (Time magazine, special issue, September, 2001).
- At the same time, the American bourgeois political apparatus quickly rolled out plans for strengthening the repressive apparatus of the state, and took immediate action to implement them. New "security" legislation restoring the legality of many practices that had been discredited in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the Watergate affair, as well as a whole new arsenal of repressive measures, was drafted, debated, adopted and signed by the president in record time. We can be excused if we suspect that the legislation had been drafted earlier and was being held for the right moment to be introduced. Over 1,000 "suspects," with Arabic surnames or Muslim garb being the primary reason for suspicion, were taken into custody, many held without charges indefinitely. Funds of organizations suspected of being sympathetic to bin Laden were frozen, without any court procedure. Restrictions were placed on immigration, particularly from Islamic countries (more a response to the bourgeoisie's long standing concerns about the tide of illegal immigration into the US as people seek to flee the horrifying conditions of growing decomposition and barbarism in underdeveloped nations, than anything related to the terrorist attacks).
- The terrorist crisis became overnight both the excuse for the worsening economic recession and the justification for horrendous budget cuts in social programs, as all available funds were shifted to war and national security. The rapidity with which these measures were presented reflects the likelihood that they were not drafted at the spur of the moment, but had been prepared, discussed and planned on a contingency basis for some time.
- On the international level, the real purpose of the war is not so much to destroy terrorism, as it is to reassert and reaffirm, American imperialism's dominance as the only remaining superpower in an international arena increasingly characterized by challenges to US hegemony. The collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 quickly led to the unraveling of the western bloc, as the glue that had held it together - the confrontation with Russian imperialism and its bloc - had disappeared. Despite its apparent triumph in the cold war, American imperialism found itself confronted with a world situation in which its former great power allies, and numerous lesser powers as well, began to challenge its leadership and pursue their own imperialist ambitions. To force its erstwhile allies back into line, and acknowledge its dominance, the US has undertaken three large scale military operations in the last decade: against Iraq, against Serbia, and now Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda network. In each case, the US military display has forced American "allies," like France, Britain and Germany, to join the US-led "alliances" or face total irrelevancy in the global imperialist chess game.
Second, contrary to the officially sanctioned version of "reality" that claims an unsuspecting US was completely blind-sided by the terrorist attacks at the Trade Center and the Pentagon, based solely on reports in the bourgeois media, it is possible already to begin to piece together circumstantial evidence that does not prove but certainly opens up the possibility of machiavellian maneuvers within the American bourgeoisie to permit these attacks:
- The forces that seem to have carried out the Trade Center attack may not have currently been under American imperialism's control, but they certainly were known to the American security apparatus and indeed originated as agents of the CIA. To counter Russian imperialism's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA recruited, trained, armed, and supplied thousands of Islamic fundamentalists to wage a holy war, a jihad, against the Russians. The concept of jihad had largely been dormant in Islamic theology, until American imperialism resurrected it for its own purposes two decades ago. Islamic militants were recruited from throughout the Muslim world, including Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. This is where Osama Bin Laden first came into the picture, as an operative of American imperialism. Following the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, and the collapse of the government in Kabul in 1992, American imperialism walked away from Afghanistan, shifting its focus to the Middle East and the Balkans. When they fought the Russians, these Islamic fundamentalists were hailed as freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan. When they use the same ruthlessness against American imperialism today, President Bush says they are uncivilized fanatics who have to be destroyed. In much the same way as Timothy McVeigh, the American right-wing fanatic responsible for 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, who was raised on the cold war ideology and imbued with hatred of the Russians, and recruited to the US military, the young men recruited to the CIA's jihad knew only hatred and warfare their entire adult lives. Both felt betrayed by American imperialism after the cold war had ended, and turned their violence against their former masters.
- Since 1996, the FBI had been investigating the possibility that terrorists were using American aviation schools to learn how to fly jumbo jets, so the entire modus operandi of the terrorists had been anticipated by authorities ("FBI failed to find suspects named before hijackings," Guardian, September 25, 2001).
- The apartment in Germany, where the Trade Center attacks had been planned and coordinated had been under German police surveillance for nearly three years.
- The FBI and other American intelligence agencies had received warnings of, and intercepted messages about, a planned spectacular terrorist attack, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the White House Rose Garden ceremony with Clinton, Rabin and Arafat. Both Israeli and French intelligence agencies had sent warnings to the Americans. So, American authorities certainly had advance notice about when the attack would come. Perhaps it was not clear that the target would be the World Trade Center, but the Center had already been targeted by Islamic terrorists for attack in 1993, as a symbol of American capitalism.
- In August, the FBI had arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, who had aroused suspicions when he sought pilot training at a flight school in Minnesota and mentioned that he was not interesting in learning how to take off or land. In early September, French authorities had sent a warning about Moussaoui's suspected terrorist links. In November, the FBI suddenly reversed itself and denied Moussaoui's involvement in the plot. But in any case, suspicions about pilots not interested in taking off or landing, hinting at the possibility of a suicide hijacking, were revived.
- Mohamed Atta, the supposed ringleader of 11 September, who allegedly piloted the first plane to hit the Twin Towers was well known to authorities, but seemed to have led a charmed life, and was allowed to remain at large in the US. Despite the fact that Atta was listed for years on the State Department's terrorist watch-list because of his suspected involvement in a 1986 bus bombing in Israel, he was permitted repeatedly to enter, leave and return to the US. From January to May 2000 he was under surveillance by US agents following his suspicious purchase of large amounts of chemicals, which might be used to make explosives. In January 2001 he was held by Immigration and Nationalization agents at Miami International Airport for 57 minutes because he had previously overstayed a visa, and because he did not have a proper visa to enter the US to study at a flight school in Florida. Despite being on the State Department watch-list, despite the FBI's concern that terrorists might be attending flight schools in the US, he was permitted to enter the US, to enroll in flight school. In April 2001 Atta was stopped by police for driving without a license. When he failed to show up in court in May, a bench warrant was issued for his arrest, but it was never executed. He was arrested for drunk driving on two other occasions. Atta never made any attempt to operate under an alias during his entire time in the US, traveling, living and studying at the flight school under his real name. Was the FBI grossly incompetent, or hampered by a lack of Arabic agents and translators as the FBI claims, or is there a more machiavellian explanation for the authorities constantly and consistently permitting him to remain at large - was he being "protected" or set up as a fall guy? ("Terrorists Among Us," Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sept 16, 2001)
- August 23, 2001, the CIA sent a list of 100 suspected members of Osama bin Laden's network, who were reportedly in or on their way to the US, including Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi who were on board the plane that hit the Pentagon.
- Long before the supposedly unexpected attacks of 11 September, the US had been secretly laying the groundwork for war in Afghanistan for nearly three years. Following the attacks on US embassies in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya in 1998, President Clinton had authorized the CIA to prepare for possible action against the out-of-control Bin Laden. At this level secret contacts and negotiations began with the governments of the former USSR republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to arrange for military bases, supply operations, and intelligence gathering. Not only did this prepare the way for military intervention in Afghanistan, but it also opened up significant American inroads into the Russian sphere of influence in Central Asia. In this sense, despite its claims of being taken by surprise, the US was poised to immediately pounce on the opportunity offered by the Twin Towers attack to push forward with a number of strategic and tactical measures that had been in the planning stages for a long time.
- The cornerstone of the ideological campaign immediately launched around the Twin Towers disasters has been the devastating destruction and death toll. For weeks government officials and the media have drummed into our heads that nearly 6,000 lives were lost at the Trade Center - twice the death toll at Pearl Harbor. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff repeated these numbers in an interview on a national television broadcast in early November.2 Yet there is every indication that these statistics, with their emotional propaganda value, are greatly inflated by the government. Independent tallies compiled by news agencies put the total at under 3,000, roughly equivalent to the loss of life at Pearl Harbor. For example, the New York Times puts the total at 2,943, Associated Press at 2,625, and USA Today at 2,680. The American Red Cross, which is distributing financial grants to families of the victims has only processed applications from 2,563 families. Government officials refused to comply with a request from the Red Cross for a copy of its still secret official list of Trade Center victims ("Numbers vary in tallies of the victims" New York Times , October 25, 2001, B1). Meanwhile, politicians and broadcast media continue to use the more propagandistically valuable, larger inflated number of 5,000-6,000 dead and missing, which is by now imbedded in popular consciousness.
- The US government has never publicly revealed its "evidence" of bin Laden's responsibility for the Trade Center. And then as the war progressed, the Bush administration announced that, if captured alive, bin Laden would be tried in a secret military tribunal, in order not to make public the sources of evidence against him. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld clearly signaled his preference that bin Laden be killed rather than captured in order to skip a trial. It is only natural to wonder why the US is in so concerned to keep its alleged "evidence" a secret.
None of this constitutes positive proof that either the Administration, or perhaps the CIA, had prior knowledge of the Twin Towers attacks and permitted them to happen, but one doesn't have to be a conspiracy buff to have his suspicions raised.
Contrary to the media's insistence, the current situation cannot be equated to Pearl Harbor on the historic level. Pearl Harbor came at the end of nearly twenty years of political defeats that had vanquished the world proletariat politically, ideologically and even physically, and opened up an historic course towards imperialist war. These defeats were of momentous historic weight on the proletariat: the failure of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary wave; the degeneration of the revolutionary regime in Russia, and the triumph of state capitalism under Stalin; the degeneration of the Communist International into a foreign policy arm of the Russian state, including a wholesale retreat from the revolutionary class positions promulgated at the height of the revolutionary wave; the integration of the Communist parties into their respective state apparatuses; the political and physical defeat of the working class at the hands of fascism in Italy, Germany, and Spain; and the triumph of the ideology of anti-fascism in the so-called "democratic" countries.
The cumulative impact of these defeats was to profoundly limit the historic possibilities for the workers movement. Revolution, which had been on the agenda in the period following 1917, was now on the historic backburner. The balance of forces had shifted definitively towards the capitalist class, which now had the upper hand in moving towards imposing its "solution" to the historic crisis of global capitalism: world war. However, the fact that the rapport de forces between the classes had shifted in its favor didn't mean that the bourgeoisie necessarily had a free hand to impose its political will. But even the course towards war didn't mean that the American bourgeoisie could automatically unleash imperialist war at given moment. The bourgeoisie still faced resistance to war within the American proletariat in 1939-41, in part reflecting the vacillating position of the Stalinist party which enjoyed considerable influence, especially in the CIO unions, due to Moscow's wavering line during the period of the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. The dominant faction of the US bourgeoisie also had to deal with recalcitrant elements within its own class, some who were sympathetic to the Axis powers, or others who maintained an isolationist perspective. As we have seen an "unprovoked" attack by Japan provided the pretext for rallying all the wavering elements behind the state and the coming war effort. In this sense, Pearl Harbor was the final nail in the political, ideological coffin.
The situation is very different today. True, the Twin Towers disaster comes after more than a decade of political disorientation and confusion sown by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Europe and the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie about the death of communism. But these confusions have not had the same political weight as the defeats of the 1920s/30s on the consciousness of the proletariat on the historic level. Nor did they mean a change in the historic course towards class confrontations. Despite disorientation, the working class was struggling to regain its terrain, and there were abundant signs of the process of subterranean maturation of consciousness, and the emergence of searching elements and a growing milieu around existing proletarian revolutionary groups. There is no attempt here to minimize the political disorientation within the working class ever since 1989, a situation that has been aggravated by decomposition, creating a situation where the slide into barbarism did not necessarily require World War to be achieved. While the American bourgeoisie is enjoying considerable success with its ideological offensive, even if for the moment workers are caught up in the war psychosis to an alarming degree, the global balance of class forces is not determined by the situation in a single country, even one as important as the US. On the international level, the proletariat is still undefeated and the perspective is still one of class confrontation. Even in the US, this international working class capacity to continue the struggle was echoed by the two-week strike by 23,000 public sector workers in Minnesota in October. Despite being attacked for being "unpatriotic" or striking at a moment of national crisis, these workers nonetheless stood their ground and struck for improved wages and benefits. While Pearl Harbor was the final punctuation mark in the fulfillment of the process of bringing to fruition the course towards imperialist war in 1941, the Trade Center is a setback for the proletariat, especially the proletariat in the US, but within the context of a general historic situation that still favors the proletariat.
JG
Notes
1 See www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/pearl/html [7] for a documented chronology and links to key historical documents online.
2 See for example, the interview of Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on NBC News Meet the Press on November 4, 2001.
Amid the roar of imperialist savagery in Afghanistan, tiny groups of internationalists have proclaimed their rejection of all the contending imperialisms, denounced any illusion in pacifying capitalism or support for any agencies with this objective, and called for the development of class struggle that alone can overthrow the world wide capitalist system, the mainspring of imperialist war.
These groups trace their origins from the heritage of the Italian and German left, the only internationalist currents to survive the decay of the Third International by holding high the proletariat's internationalist positions through the storm of World War II. They are part of what the ICC terms the proletarian political milieu.1
As a contribution to the strengthening of this milieu, we are examining the strengths and weaknesses of its present response to the war, as we do whenever such events test the very being of revolutionary organisations.
We will not deal here with the common approach of the different groups: the ICC's territorial press has already recognised and demonstrated the working class nature of their response.2 Nor can we hope to be comprehensive in the short space available here. We will instead discuss some significant elements of the explanation of imperialist barbarism by one of these groups - the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP).3
It is not enough for revolutionary organisations to know that the US state and the other big imperialist powers are not as hostile to terrorism as they have been claiming these past 4 months, nor enough to know that they are not motivated by the interests of civilisation and humanity in launching a war that causes death and misery on a mass scale. They have also to explain what is the real reason for this barbarism, what are the interests of the imperialist powers, and of the US in particular, and whether there can be an end to this nightmare for the working class.
The IBRP offers the following explanation for the war in Afghanistan: the US wants to keep the dollar as world currency and thus retain its control over the oil industry:
"...the US needs the dollar to remain the currency of international trade if it is to retain its position as the world superpower. Above all then, the US is desperate to ensure that the global oil trade continues to be conducted primarily in dollars. That means having the determining say in the routing of oil and gas pipelines over and above US commercial involvement in its extraction at source. This is when straightforward commercial decisions are tempered by the over-arching interest of US capitalism as a whole, when the American state becomes politically and militarily involved for the sake of wider objectives, objectives which often come up against the interests of other states and increasingly against those of its European 'allies'. In other words this is the heart of imperialist competition in the 21st century" ("Imperialism, Oil and US National Interests", page 8, Revolutionary Perspectives n°23, the quarterly journal of the Communist Workers Organisation which is the British affiliate of the IBRP).
"For some time now European oil companies, ENI of Italy amongst them, have been engaged in numerous projects to get oil from the Caspian and Caucasus directly to refineries in Europe and it is obvious that from January 1st [when the Euro becomes legal tender in the countries of the European Union] the project for an alternative oil market could begin to take shape but the United States, faced with perhaps the most vicious crisis it has experienced this side of World War Two, is not going to let go of its own economic and financial power" (ibid., page 10).
The war then is supposedly intended to remove the potential barrier constituted by the Taliban regime and its Al Qaida supporters to routing an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to carry part of the output of the oilfields in Kazakhstan, as part of a wider strategy of the US to control the distribution of oil. The US wants the secure and diversified routing from the worlds oil supplies. Behind this imperative, according to the IBRP, is the fate of the dollar, and behind the fate of the dollar is the superpower status of the United States. The Europeans on the other hand are also interested in improving the status of their fledging currency the Euro in the oil market and thus increasingly oppose the US with their own imperialist interests for this reason.
The underlying objective of the US in the Afghanistan war is, as the IBRP say, to preserve its position as 'world superpower', by which we understand its overwhelming military, economic and political superiority over all the other countries on the planet. Its opponents want to limit or eventually usurp this position. In other words, contrary to the fairy stories presented to us by the bourgeois media that it is about the struggle between good and evil, between democracy and terror, the IBRP as revolutionaries, reveal the imperialist interests of the protagonists. Behind imperialist conflict are the conflicting interests of rival capitalist powers, accentuated by the economic crisis.
Furthermore the IBRP, are moving away from their attempt to explain the present war (and the growing accentuation of imperialist conflict) as the result of the desire for immediate economic gain. Ten years ago the IBRP said, about the upcoming Gulf War, that: "?the crisis in the Gulf is really about oil and who controls it. Without cheap oil profits will fall. Western capitalism's profits are threatened and its for this reason and no other that the US is preparing a bloodbath in the Middle East" (CWO leaflet quoted in International Review n°64).
The US victory in the Gulf War, however, saw no significant improvement in oil profits, nor did it significantly change the price of oil. The IBRP seems to have realised this, and also that ex-Yugoslavia did not provide any profitable markets for the imperialist powers who were fighting each other there, as they first thought, and it now seems to have developed a broader explanation of the situation. Such an approach can only be welcomed because the credibility of the Marxist left depends on its ability to understand imperialism on the basis of a global and historical analysis, in which immediate economic factors are not the cause of war.4
But despite taking this step forward, the IBRP nevertheless sees imperialist objectives hinging on the fate of currencies, in other words on a specific economic factor. And they give the question of oil and oil pipelines a decisive weight in the role of the dollar and its new rival the Euro. Oil, for the IBRP, is very much at 'the heart of imperialist competition in the 21st Century'.
But is the preservation of the status of the United States as world hegemon really so directly and decisively dependent on the role of the dollar, as the IBRP says?
And does the position of the dollar as world currency really depend so directly on the US control of oil? Let us examine these questions in more detail, taking the last one first.
While an important say in the commercial control of oil production - most of the major world oil companies for example are American owned - certainly helps the United States to maintain its economic power, and is thus a factor in the dominance of the dollar, it is not the fundamental explanation of the means by which the dollar gained and retains its role as world currency.
The dollar achieved its pre-eminence before oil became the principle fuel on the planet. In fact no currency's strength is especially founded on the control of raw materials.
Japan for example controls practically no raw materials, but the yen, despite the recent stagnation of the Japanese economy, remains a strong currency. Conversely the former USSR had huge quantities of oil under its command but this did not prevent its economic collapse, let alone enable the rouble to become a world currency5. It was not control of the coal or cotton supply that launched the pound sterling as the principal currency of the 19th century.
It is rather the preponderance of a country's economy in terms of world production and trade, and its relative political and military weight that explains why particular currencies have become the standard monetary reference for world capitalism.
The pound sterling achieved its ascendancy because Britain was the first modern capitalist country. The greater productivity of its industries enabled its products to displace those of the rest of the world in terms of price and quantity, because elsewhere capitalist production was only beginning to take hold. The whole world sold raw materials to Britain. And Britain - as the famous expression had it - was "the workshop of the world". Britain's military, particularly naval, strength, and its accumulation of colonial possessions reinforced the supremacy of the pound and the position of London as the world's financial centre.
The development of capitalism in other countries began to undermine the supremacy of British capitalism, and its competitors began to overtake it in terms of productivity. And the new conditions of capitalism revealed by the First World War sounded the death knell for sterling. The Second World War sealed its fate. In a world where rival capitalist nations have already carved up the world market and seek to expand by its re-division in their favour, the question of military competition - imperialism - tends to favour countries of a continental scale like the United States rather than the European countries whose relatively small size was more appropriate to an early phase of capitalist growth. The exhaustion of all the European powers after the First World War, including the victors like Britain, enormously increased the relative weight of US production and its share of world trade, and therefore increased international demand for dollars. And after the devastation of Europe in the Second World War, the United States, stimulated by a phenomenal growth in arms production, achieved a crushing economic supremacy on the world arena. By 1950 the USA accounted for half of total world production! The Marshall Plan of 1947 supplied the European economies with the dollars they desperately needed to reconstruct by buying American goods. Dollar supremacy was institutionalised at the world level by the Bretton Woods agreement, and the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund under the aegis of the US.
By 1968, the reconstruction period had come to an end, and the European and Japanese economies had improved their economic position relative to the US. But even the relative weakening of the US economy, although it led to the effective devaluation of the dollar, did not mean the immediate end of its prime position. Far from it. The US had many means to use the new conditions to its advantage. The decoupling of the dollar from gold by Washington in 1971, allowed the US to maintain the power of the dollar and the competitive position of American production, by exchange rate manipulation which also helped cheapen its growing foreign debt (a method that Britain had used in the 30s to preserve sterling's role even after the eclipse of its economy by that of the US). At the beginning of the 80s the raising of interest rates, and the deregulation of the movement of capital, with the consequent mushrooming of financial speculation, helped offload the effects of the crisis onto other countries. Behind these measures the military supremacy of the United States, which became unassailable after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ensures that King Dollar retains his throne.
The role of oil in the dollar's prime position is therefore relatively insignificant. Even if it is true that in the 'first oil crisis' of 1971-2, the US, through its influence over OPEC oil pricing, managed to transfer enormous funds to its own pockets from those of the European and Japanese capitalist powers via Saudi Arabia, such manipulations are hardly the main instruments of dollar supremacy.
What counts in the hegemony of the dollar is America's economic, political and military domination of the world market on which oil and other raw materials are bought and sold, and this domination is mainly decided by factors of a more general and historical nature, rather than the control of oil.
The IBRP however believe that the acceleration of the USA's military adventures in central Asia is part of a long term preventative measure to occupy the centres of oil production and the oil routes to prevent the European powers from controlling them with a view to making the Euro the dominant currency in world oil production and trade. The supposed objective is to stop the Euro, the fledgling currency of the European Union, taking the dollar's crown, and thus overtaking the US as a rival imperialist bloc.
But, if our explanation is correct, the European powers would have to do a lot more than increase their influence on the oil industry in order to displace the dollar with the Euro. Even if the European Union was a really unified political and economic entity its overall GDP per capita is about 2/3rds that of the United States. Although the EU now has a common currency, it is still fragmented into several competing national capitalist units that undermine its economic strength relative to that of the United States. The European Central Bank lacks the US Federal Reserve's unity of purpose on monetary and fiscal policy, which is why, until now at least, it has tended to follow in the wake of the latter's policies. The economy of Germany, the strongest political pole in the Euro zone, still only ranks third behind the USA and Japan, and for reasons other than a lack of control of oil and pipelines.
At the political and military level the divide is even wider. The EU contains several imperialist powers, which compete both among themselves and in relation to the US. Europe's greatest economic power remains a military pigmy compared to Britain and France, its main rivals (and it is worth pointing out that one of Europe's major military powers and larger economies - Great Britain - is not even in the Euro zone). Germany is increasing its military strength, its troops have intervened outside its borders (in Kosovo) for the first time since World War II. Nonetheless, its ability to project its military power extends no further than its immediate neighbours in Eastern Europe.
As the currency experts of the bourgeoisie point out, this military weakness and the conflicting interests within the EU pose a serious threat to the Euro: "Glyn Davies, author of 'A History of Money From Ancient Times to the Present Day', said the greatest long-term threat to monetary union in Europe would be wars or 'disputes regarding attitudes to countries that are at war'.
'It's the political aspect which will matter,' he said. 'If you have a strong political union, then it can withstand many attacks. But if there are political differences, it can weaken the monetary union considerably'" (International Herald Tribune, 29.12.01).
For this and other reasons, the Euro will find it difficult to win over the confidence of the world economy in the dollar.
From all these standpoints, the drive to protect the dollar's domination of the world economy cannot be considered a credible reason for the vast military campaign being waged in Afghanistan. As we said at our last international congress, "The USA wants to control this region because of the oil - not for purely economic reasons but above all because it wants to ensure that Europe would not be able to use this source of oil in case of war. We only have to recall that during the second world war, in 1942, Germany carried out an offensive on Baku in order to gain control of its oil supplies, which were so vital for the war effort. Today the situation is a bit different with regard to Azerbaijan and Turkey, for whom the question of oil is more one of immediate economic gain. But the real stakes of the situation are not at this level" ("Report on imperialist tensions, in International Review n°107)6.
The second question posed by the IBRP is: does the superpower status of the US depend on the dollar's pre-eminent role? Not, we would say, in the decisive way that the IBRP suggest. As we have argued military superiority is as much a cause of the dollar's status as an effect. Obviously the economic and monetary pre-eminence of the US in the world economy is a crucial factor in its military supremacy. But military and strategic might does not flow automatically, mechanically and immediately or proportionally from economic power. There are innumerable examples to prove it. Japan and Germany are the strongest world economic powers after the United States, but are still military dwarfs compared to Britain and France who, while weaker economically, have nuclear weapons. The USSR was extremely weak economically but contested America's power at the military level for 45 years. And despite the US' relative economic weakening since 1969, its military and strategic strength relative to its nearest rivals has vastly increased.
Like every other country, the US cannot rely on the performance of its currency to automatically guarantee its imperialist position. On the contrary the US must continue to devote enormous, costly resources to its military and strategic interests in order to try to outflank its main imperialist rivals, and to reduce their pretensions to contest its leadership. The US's anti-terrorist campaign since September 11th, has scored remarkable successes in this imperialist struggle. It has forced the other major powers to support its military and strategic objectives, without allowing any of them more than a few crumbs of prestige from their support for the rapid military success of American forces in Afghanistan over the Taliban regime. At the same time it has expanded its strategic weight in central Asia. The display of its military superiority has been so devastating that its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia, has evoked only the mildest criticism from its previously vociferous opponents in European capitals. The US can now more easily set about expanding its 'anti-terrorist' crusades in other countries.
Yet it would be difficult to measure whether the American offensive of the last three months has made oil supplies any more secure for the US than before, or significantly increased the dollar's crushing superiority over the Euro. The real US victory is at the military/strategic level, as it was after the Gulf War. The economic benefits will be as elusive as they were from this previous conflict.
Control of oil for economic advantage was not the decisive question that caused the US to spend billions of dollars a month on the war in Afghanistan, and to risk the stability of Pakistan, where the proposed pipeline would continue after it left Afghanistan.
The CWO, already showed in an article in 1997 "Behind the Taliban Stands US imperialism" that there was nothing intrinsic to the Taliban regime that threatened US oil interests. On the contrary the US saw the regime as a factor of stability compared with the Taliban's predecessors. Even after harbouring Osama Bin Laden, the regime presented no insuperable obstacles to an accommodation with the US and its interests.7
The era when capitalist powers went to war for immediate or direct economic gain, was an embryonic phase in the evolution of imperialism, one that barely outlasted the 19th century. Once the major capitalist powers had divided up the world between them as colonies or spheres of influence, the possibility of direct economic benefit from war became more and more uncertain. When war became a question of military conflict with other imperialist powers wider strategic questions came to the fore, entailing industrial preparation and expense on a massive scale. War became less a question of economic gain than a question of the survival of each state at the expense of its rivals. The ruination of most of the contending capitalist powers in the two world wars this century testifies that imperialism, rather than being the "highest stage" of capitalism as Lenin thought, is an expression of its decadent period, when capitalism is increasingly forced, by the national limits of its own system, to vaporise men and machines on the battlefield rather than valorise them in the production process8.
Instead of war serving the needs of the economy, the economy has come to serve the needs of war, and raw materials haven't escaped this general rule. If the imperialist powers want to control raw materials, especially crucial ones like oil, it is not because the bourgeoisie believes, like the IBRP, that this will ensure the health of its profits or currency, but because of its military importance.
"The biggest peace-time military construction program in American History was endorsed by the House Armed Services Committee. A report to the House Foreign Affairs Committee called the strategic importance of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East 'almost equal to that of the North Atlantic treaty area itself'. Bases in the Arab states and Israel are necessary to protect sea and air routes. Protection of this region is vital, the report said, 'because in this area lie tremendous oil resources which the free world requires now for its greatly expanded rearmament effort'" (International Herald Tribune, 1951).
US imperialism has been quite candid: the control of oil is important, first and foremost, for military reasons, so that it can guarantee its flow to its own armies in times of war and cut its supply off to the hostile armies of rival countries.
Although the IBRP recognises that capitalism is in its historical period of decline, this theoretical framework is missing from its understanding of imperialist war today. Capitalism's fundamental need is still the accumulation of capital, but the relations of production that once ensured its fantastic development now prevent it from finding sufficient fields for expansion. Increasingly production is geared towards the destruction, rather than the reproduction of wealth. The understanding that war, while becoming more and more necessary for the bourgeoisie, has ceased to be profitable for the capitalist system as a whole, is therefore not a denial of Marxist materialism but an expression of its ability to understand the different phases through which an economic system passes, and in particular the passage from its ascendant to its decadent phase. In the latter phase, the economic imperative continues to push the bourgeoisie, all the more in the periods of open crisis, not toward war for immediate, or particular financial gain, but toward a global and ultimately suicidal fight for military supremacy among its rival national units.
Only by drawing out the implications of capitalist decadence for present day imperialist conflict can we show to the working class the enormous dangers represented by the war in Afghanistan, and by those wars which will inevitably follow it. The IBRP on the other hand tends to give the proletariat a false, reassuring picture of a system that is, as in its youthful phase, still able to subordinate its military objectives to the needs of economic expansion.
Moreover, with its misconception of a European imperialism, united around the Euro, the IBRP gives the impression of a relatively stable evolution of world capitalism toward two new imperialist blocs. On the contrary, the contradictory and antagonistic interests of the European powers towards each other as well as to the USA points to quite a different period of capitalism's decay. It indicates a terminal phase of decomposition, where, even if Germany is trying to assert itself as an alternative pole to the US, imperialist chaos has the upper hand; where military conflict threatens to generalise in a catastrophic way.
It is quite true that the war in Afghanistan is about the maintenance and reinforcement by America of its position as the world's only superpower. But this status is not determined by specific economic factors, like the control of oil, as the IBRP puts forward. It is rather dependent on geo-strategic questions, on the ability of the US to achieve a military supremacy in key areas of the world, and to prevent its rivals from seriously contesting its positions. Areas of the world like Afghanistan which proved their strategic worth to the imperialist powers long before oil became known as 'black gold'. It was not for oil that the 19th century British Raj twice sent armies into Afghanistan, and eventually succeeded in setting up a puppet ruler there. The importance of Afghanistan is not because it is a potential vehicle of an oil pipeline, but because it is at the geographical hub of the main imperialist powers of the Middle and Far East, and of South Asia, control of which will greatly increase US power not only in this region but in relation to the major European imperialisms.
The United States achieved its dominant imperialist position essentially by emerging victorious from two world wars. Fundamentally the key to its ability to keep this position also lies at the military level.
Como
1See the ICC books The Italian Communist Left and The Dutch and German Communist Left
2See for example "Revolutionaries denounce imperialist war" in World Revolution 249, November 2001.
3 See www.ibrp.org [10]
4In Internationalist Communist Review n°10, the IBRP even recognises the importance of military strategic questions over the economic: "It then remains for the political leadership and the army to establish the political direction of each state according to a single imperative: an estimation of how to achieve military victory because this now overrides economic victory". "End of the cold war: new step towards a new imperialist line-up".
5Indeed, the rouble's role as dominant currency in the ex-COMECON countries of the Eastern bloc was wholly dependent on the USSR's military occupation of their territory.
6We should also point out that the IBRP is simply wrong on the factual level, in claiming that "The area around the Caspian Sea is the site of the world's largest known reserves of untapped oil". The proven oil reserves of the entire ex-USSR amount to some 63bn barrels; those of the five main Middle Eastern producers amount to more than ten times that figure, while Saudi Arabia alone accounts for more than 25% of the world's proven reserves. In addition, Saudi oil is by far more profitable (in the purely economic terms of which the IBRP is fond), costing only $1 a barrel to extract, and with none of the gigantic cost of building pipelines across the mountains of Afghanistan and the Caucasus.
7A recent book Ben Laden, la vérité interdite by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, (Editions Denoël, 2001) covers the unofficial diplomacy between the American government and the Taliban regime, up and till September 11th, and tends to point to the opposite conclusion to the IBRP's on the relationship between the oil interests of the US and the development of military hostilities with Afghanistan. Until the 17th July 2001 the US was trying to use diplomacy to resolve its outstanding problems with the Taliban regime, such as the extradition of Osama Bin Laden for the attack on the USS Cole and American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. And the Taliban were by no means hostile to negotiating over such questions. Indeed after Bush's inauguration as US president the Taliban had proposed a reconciliation that they hoped would lead to their diplomatic recognition. But after July 2001 the US effectively broke off relations, sending a brutally provocative message to the Taliban regime: threatening military action to get Bin Laden, and announcing that they were in discussions with the ex-king Sahir Shah to retake power in Kabul! This suggests that the war aims of the US were already decided before September 11th and that all that was needed to launch hostilities was the pretext of the terrorist outrages on that date . It also suggests that it was not the Taliban that prevented a diplomatic process that might lead to a more stable Afghanistan for US oil interests, but the US government, which had another agenda. Instead of the IBRP formula: a war in Afghanistan to stabilise the country for an oil pipeline, the evidence points to a war that has destabilised the whole region for the greater goal of American military and geo-strategic superiority.
8Capital is accumulated or 'valorised' by the extraction of surplus labour from the working class.
Links
[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/56/middle-east-and-caucasus
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/terrorism
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[7] http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6315/pearl/html
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/1976/machiavellianism
[10] http://www.ibrp.org
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/russia-caucasus-central-asia
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/afghanistan