Al Gore once embarrassed himself by claiming to be the father of the Internet, but he has been much more successful in anointing himself the king of environmentalism. Global warming has become Gore's signature issue, earning him an Oscar for his self-aggrandizing documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," and a Nobel Peace prize nomination, and transforming him into a possible presidential nominee in 2008. Indeed, some bourgeois pundits are touting a Gore-Obama slate as an unbeatable "dream" ticket that would enable the bourgeoisie to put the Democrats back in the White House and allow them to begin to repair the damage wrought by eight years of catastrophic squandering of American political capital and authority by the inept Bush administration. While Gore has become environmentalism's iconic figurehead, he is not alone. Wrapping oneself in green is suddenly quite fashionable. For the ruling class in general, green is in. Corporations are tripping over themselves in their rush to portray themselves as environmentally conscious.
The current campaigns about global warming, for the bourgeoisie, are fundamentally manifestations of demagoguery and opportunism which aim to gain popular acceptance for austerity and repair American imperialism's moral authority and image on an international level.
There is absolutely no doubt that there has been a horrific degradation of the environment at the hands of a world capitalist system driven by the relentless quest for profits and economic expansion at all costs. Despite the chorus of doubt spewed by propagandists in the service of right-wing think tanks and energy industry lobbyists, the accumulation of Green House Gases (GHG) in the atmosphere triggered by the profligate burning of fossil fuels that powers industrial production, transport, and heating under capitalism and the consequent aggravation of the trend towards global warming is a sobering reality.
The right-wing of the ruling class has consistently tried to sow confusion by pointing to the phenomenon of naturally occurring global warming. And it is true that in the course of the earth's geological history, over millions of years, there have been alternating periods of atmospheric warming and cooling. These climate changes usually occurred over periods of thousands, perhaps even millions of years, with a relatively gradual impact. The causes are believed to include the occurrence of sun spots and other solar activities, changes in the ocean currents -- some of these caused by the impact of warming caused by other factors which changed the salinity of the ocean water and then in turn caused additional climate changes.
The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. There is much discussion in the scientific literature about the existence of a "Little Ice Age" that lasted from the mid 1500s to around 1850, with significant impact on Europe and North America, including widespread crop failures, famines, and cultural and economic changes necessitated by colder temperatures. In the 17th century glaciers in the Alps advanced and crushed villages. Canals in Holland froze over. The Thames first froze over in 1607 and the last time in 1814. In 1780, New York Harbor froze over and people were able to walk on the ice from Manhattan to Staten Island. Iceland was completely isolated by sea ice stretching hundreds of miles in every direction. The Little Ice Age is attributed by some to a decrease in solar activity and sun spots.
Since 1850, there has been a gradual warming of the earth's atmosphere and a retreat of the glaciers, widely attributed to these natural processes, which are very gradual. Right-wing propagandists, especially in the U.S., have belittled research that demonstrates the threat posed by GHG and endeavored to put the responsibility for global warming on these natural processes alone. However, since the late 1880s, with the rise of capitalism's mass production industries and the accompanying greatly increased burning of fossil fuels, there has been a rapid increase in greenhouse gas accumulations in the atmosphere and an acceleration of global warming, especially in the last fifty years.
A general consensus has emerged on the dangers of GHG in scientific circles and there is no longer any serious controversy over the role of GHG in worsening global warming... The problem with the environmentalist movement is its penchant for attributing the problem to human activity and modern technology in and of itself. The tendency is for environmentalists to see over-consumption - too much automobile travel, too much "luxurious" living by the masses, which causes too much industrial production, as the cause of the environmental crisis. This opens the door to all manner of anti-technology ideologies that justify belt tightening, sacrifice, and slashes in the standard of living for the working class.
Without a proletarian Marxist perspective, the environmentalist movement fails to understand that it is the capitalist mode of production that is responsible for the degradation of the environment. It is not industrialization per se that is responsible for global warming, but "capitalism's overriding quest to maximize profits and its consequent disregard for human and ecological needs, except insofar as they coincide with the goal of wealth accumulation" (International Review 129, p.2), Because it is a mode of production whose motor force is the drive for profits, not the fulfillment of social need, capitalism is short-sighted, concerned about the short term results and profit margins. The profit motive overrides any attention to the long term social impact of economic activity.
It is the profit motive that leads the petroleum, electricity and coal industries and their political acolytes to sabotage research and development of more environmentally benign alternative fuel sources to power industrial production. It is the profit motive that leads to wasteful production. In order to assure profits, capitalism has resorted to the phenomenon of built-in obsolescence - the purposeful production of inferior quality goods that wear out prematurely and need to be replaced sooner than would normally be necessary. This keeps industrial production artificially higher than it needs to be. It is the profit motive that gives rise to a massive advertising apparatus to manipulate the population and create consumer demand for socially useless and unnecessary products. In this way capitalism artificially creates the need to burn more fossil fuels than necessary. And it is the competitiveness characteristic of capitalism that makes cooperation on the international level necessary to deal effectively and decisively with global warming an absolute impossibility.
Typically 90 percent of the sun's energy that penetrates the earth's atmosphere is reflected back into space. The increasing concentration of GHG, however, traps increasing amounts of this energy, preventing it from being reflected back into space and thereby contributing to a warming of the earth's atmosphere. The coincidence of naturally occurring global warming and the warming caused by accumulating GHG accelerates global warming and creates dangerous conditions that require attention to assure the future of society. Nothing can be done about naturally occurring global warming, but certainly something can be done about GHG produced by capitalism's disgraceful abuse of the environment.
The Kyoto Treaty of 1997 has become coin of the realm for the environmentalist movement, a virtual rallying cry to save the global ecology. The Bush administration is universally condemned for refusing to endorse and abide by the treaty. But this is much ado about nothing. The Kyoto Treaty, a creation of capitalist governments which are inherently incapable of attacking the root cause of global warming - the capitalist mode of production- is more a mystification than a genuine attempt to deal with a serious problem confronting society. Kyoto is an ideological swindle to create the illusion that capitalism is capable of dealing with the problem. The intrinsic competition between capitalists, especially between each nation state, which is the essential characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, makes genuine cooperation at the international level essentially impossible. This is further exacerbated by the general tendency towards overproduction which intensifies global competition and further undermines possibilities for cooperation.
The cornerstone of Kyoto is the requirement that industrialized countries reduce their GHG emissions by 5 percent below their 1990 levels by 2010, as if there was something "good" or desirable about the 1990 levels, which already represented more than a century of GHG accumulations. To make these requirements even more of a joke, so-called "flexible mechanisms" allowed industrialized nations to meet their GHG emissions limits by purchasing emission reductions either from emission trading groups (organizations dealing with projects that would reduce emission-productions) or from projects in non-industrialized nations that were exempt from emissions limits. For some industrialized nations, Kyoto actually permitted increases in GHG emissions.
In addition, Kyoto explicitly exempted China and India from limitations, which contributed to the acceleration of the transfer of industrial production from developed countries. Western capitalists now had a double incentive to close factories in the metropole countries. They could take advantage of both the lower wages and the GHG exemptions.
The net result has been essentially no improvement in global atmospheric carbon levels and the fact that China is expected to surpass the U.S. and become the world's leading producer of GHG within the next year or two. Only two nations are on course to meet their targeted emissions limits: Britain and Sweden. The United States and Australia, the only major industrial nations to have never ratified the Kyoto Treaty have increased GHG emissions since 1997 - by 16 percent for the U.S. and 25 percent for Australia. Even nations supposedly adhering to the treaty have increased their emissions - Canada by 27 percent, Spain by 49 percent, Norway by 10 percent, New Zealand by 21 percent, Greece by 27 percent, Ireland by 23 percent, Japan by 6.5 and Portugal by 41 percent. China has increased its GHG emissions by 47 percent and India by 55 percent (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: Changes in GHG Emissions from 1990 to 2004).
Gore acknowledges that Kyoto was never actually intended to decrease carbon emissions, but to establish the principle that international limits could be negotiated and implemented. So, we are to be comforted by the ability of the world bourgeoisie to reach meaningless agreements on the environment.
Despite all the media glorification celebrating Gore as the preeminent champion of the environment, Gore, like the rest of the capitalist class, is an environmental hypocrite. In light of his acknowledgment that Kyoto was never meant to impact seriously on GHG emissions, Gore's denunciation of the Bush administration's attitude on Kyoto and global warming rings hollow. Furthermore, while Gore voiced support for Kyoto in 1997, the Clinton/Gore administration did nothing to push for ratification of the treaty. A bi-partisan "sense of the Senate resolution" opposing the treaty because it exempted China and India from emissions limits and "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States," passed by 95-0. Clinton/Gore administration never submitted the treaty for ratification, and the U.S. has not abided by the guidelines. Thus, no matter how much Gore vilifies Bush for not embracing Kyoto and no matter how clumsy Bush is in how he talks about the environment, the rejection of Kyoto has been a consensus policy position of the American bourgeoisie that began on the Clinton/Gore watch. Bush's policy is a continuity of the position set by Clinton/Gore in 1997.
On a more personal level, despite chastising the American public for wasteful abuse of energy and natural resources and calling upon Americans to change the way they live, Gore himself is far from an exemplary energy consumer. Gore has not denied accusations that his Nashville family residence consumes more energy each month than the average American family consumes in a year, and he's profited from a leased zinc mining operation located on his property in Tennessee which has one of the worst pollution records in the U.S.
Prominent American bourgeois personalities increasingly rely on the purchase of so-called "carbon offsets" to allow them to sanitize their environmental credentials, to compensate for their carbon emissions and reduce their carbon "footprint" to zero. These offsets are sort of an environmental shell game whereby wealthy people essentially purchase permission to pollute while pretending that they are canceling out the pollution they cause. Prices for carbon offsets are calculated on the basis of the number of pounds of carbon emissions created by a particular activity - an airplane flight, driving a car, heating a home. The companies or organizations selling the offsets then spend a portion of the offset price on investments in solar or wind energy or reforestation projects to supposedly offset the carbon emissions. Critics charge that the offsets are a sham, doing nothing to reduce pollution, and giving the false illusion that such individual, voluntarist actions can clean up the environment.
This is not meant to deny that there is a difference in the Bush administration's stance on global warming, compared to the greener members of the ruling class. For example, there is ample documentation of the Bush administration's efforts to censor government scientific reports to minimize the dangers of global warming. In 2002/2003, when the Bush administration first begrudgingly began to admit that global warming existed and was caused by human activity, in accordance with the interests of the energy industries with which they were so heavily affiliated, they initially suggested that the best policy would be to adapt to global warming, rather than to prevent it. They suggested for example the increased use of air conditioning and switching to different crops that wouldn't be negatively affected by climate changes.
The same kind of nonsense could be seen in recent attempts to look for the silver lining in the dark cloud of global warming. For example, various pundits have suggested that the melting of the polar ice cap would lead to the opening of sea routes across the Arctic Ocean, or the acquisition of millions of square miles of cultivatable land in northern Canada and Russia, and the possibility of building new cities in those previously uninhabitable territories -- as if that could compensate for the hundreds of millions of people who would be forced to flee from flooded coastal regions, the millions of square miles of land that would be submerged, the hundreds of cities that would be destroyed, etc.
The U.S. bourgeoisie is increasingly happy to turn to environmentalism as an ideological weapon to control the working class, promote acceptance of a declining standard of living, unify the population behind the state, and repair the international authority of American imperialism. In the hands of the bourgeoisie, environmentalism is used as a means of diverting attention from the class struggle against capitalism. It provides the capitalist propaganda machinery with the opportunity to reinforce the false view that the threat to humanity's future is NOT the continued domination of a historically anachronistic system based on exploitation and rampant imperialist appetites, but rather the view that the problem is a society drunk on irresponsible over consumption. Environmentalism advances an inter-classist perspective on the world's problems which seeks to disarm the class struggle against capitalism - which alone has the capacity to address the basic causes of global warming.
By blaming over-consumption of the masses for global warming, the bourgeois environmentalist movement lays the ideological groundwork for austerity. Instead of raising the standard of living of the world working class, so that all may benefit from the increased productive capacities, environmentalism makes cutbacks in the standard of living a social good, a humanitarian goal. We should travel less, consume less, and use less for the betterment of the environment and the future of human society. As Gore says in the conclusion of "Inconvenient Truth," "Are you ready to change the way you live." Can you imagine the ecstasy of a ruling class facing a working class that wants a decline in its standard of living for the good of humanity?
In his 1992 bestselling book, "Earth in the Balance," Gore outlined the importance of environmentalism as a unifying ideology for the ruling class. Warning that "we now face a global civil war" between those who would countenance the continued despoliation of the environment and those who would resist the destruction of the ecology, Gore wrote, "the time has come to make the struggle the central organizing principle of world civilization" (p. 294).
While individuals in general and the working class in particular are exhorted to change the way they live on a moralistic basis, to do the right thing for the environment simply because it is just the right thing to do, in "Earth in the Balance," Gore acknowledged that the only way to use "free market economic forces" and enlist the participation of capitalist corporations in the effort to save the environment is to guarantee profits, extremely high profits, for developing and switching to new technologies. While it isn't talked about much openly in the media, including "Inconvenient Truth," in 1992 Gore described the obvious policy options for American state capitalism for re-orienting economic activity in a green direction, including:
Government investment in environmentally benign technologies will inevitably be financed by cutting the standard of living of the working class, through higher taxes and cuts in the social wage.
Currently the U.S. is branded by most of the world as an environmental villain because of its refusal to endorse the Kyoto protocols and the awkward, clumsy posturing of the Bush administration. Coupled with the catastrophic conduct of foreign policy by the Bush administration, particularly in Iraq, this has led to a crisis of American imperialism. By reorienting its Iraq policy (probably after the 2008 election) and simultaneously becoming a champion of the environment, American imperialism could begin to repair its image, and international political and moral authority. In his 1992 book, Gore was very conscious of the role that environmentalism could play in advancing American imperialist interests. He called for the U.S. to take the lead in a new global Marshall Plan, patterned after the efforts that cemented American dominance in Western Europe after World War II. Emulating Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), Gore advocated an American Strategic Environmental Initiative. His theorization of environmentalism as a unifying ideology for contemporary civilization reflects an attempted ideological manipulation that parallels the role of anti-fascism in the 1930s and ‘40s, anti-communism during the Cold War, and anti-Islamicism in the period since 9/11.
The ecological crisis is real and endangers the future of humanity. It is yet another example how decadent capitalism, which is literally in a state of decomposition, threatens the destruction of civilization and a descent in barbarism, even if world war is avoided. The problem cannot be solved by or within capitalism, which is the cause of the problem in the first place and is incapable by definition of cooperation on the global level that is necessary to address the crisis. Capitalism can only take advantage of rising public concern over global warming as a means to derail the working class from the path of class struggle, as a smokescreen to gain popular support for the increasing austerity necessitated by its deepening economic crisis and produce extortionate profits, and to mobilize the population around a unifying, inter-classist ideology.
Freed from the disastrous profit motive, the working class can pursue what is directly necessary to fulfill the social needs of humanity. To assure that technology serves the social needs of society and not the blind, insatiable drive for profit that fuels capitalist economic activity, the working class must understand the nature of its revolutionary responsibilities. Every problem that confronts humanity today increasingly demonstrates the necessity for the working class to rise to the historic challenge of destroying capitalist domination and creating a new society in which the workers of the world can decide what should be done to satisfy the needs of humanity and guarantee the future of society. Capitalism has disqualified itself on an historic level.
Jerry Grevin, July 2007.
The failure of the so-called "immigration reform" legislation in the Senate this summer is an absolute disaster for the dominant fraction of the American ruling class and yet another example of its increasing difficulty to control its own political apparatus. Deteriorating social and political conditions, particularly in underdeveloped countries, forces millions of poor workers to risk all and flee towards the capitalist metropolises. The desperate search for survival and some modicum of a better life for themselves and their children has flooded the U.S. with millions of immigrants to the extent that 40 percent of the population of New York City was born in a foreign country. Immigrants and their American born children account for 60 percent of the New York's population. Official estimates put the number at 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the U.S., but the actual number is surely even higher.
The unresolved status of so many people creates a multitude of social, economic, and political problems for the bourgeoisie, which very much needs to be resolved. These problems involve the availability and delivery of medical, social, educational and other public services, as well as a variety of legal questions pertaining to their American born children and their property. These are not only problems for the immigrants, but for the state as well. The fact that their parents are illegal and hesitant to utilize services creates educational and health problems, which the state needs to deal with. The illegal status of such a large number of people, who are afraid to speak to the police and other law enforcement agencies, makes them susceptible to criminal victimization. The existence of antiquated laws which make employing illegal immigrants a legal violation for employers creates serious problems for industries that rely on the exploitation of low paid immigrants, including the retail, restaurant, hotel, janitorial services, and meat packing industries.
The demands of the far right to criminalize illegal immigration (currently it is a civil violation, with deportation, not jail sentences, as the most serious consequence) and to round up and deport 12 million immigrants was rightly considered by the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie as irrational, impractical, and harmful to the American economy, which needs the low paid workers, and rejected outright. The fact that the Bush administration and Sen. Edward Kennedy, from the left of the Democratic Party, could unite on compromise legislation to address the immigration crisis, shows how important the bourgeoisie considers this problem. The same political elements who are locked in seemingly irreconcilable divergences over imperialist and military policy, particularly in Iraq, were quite able to find common ground in addressing immigration.
The bill was in no way a boon to immigrants. The proposed immigration reform is in no way a humanitarian gesture, but rather an attempt by the state to exert control over the flood of immigrants pouring into the country. The legislation called for the militarization of the border, the legalization of illegal immigrants already in the country, and measures to control the future flow of immigrants. It included provisions for tightening the border, and restricting the inflow of new immigrants. While it provided a means for illegal immigrants currently in the country to legalize their status, it was in no way an "amnesty," including time delays and huge fines.
Nevertheless, the Bush administration was unable to mobilize its own party, and the legislation fell victim to a vicious, chauvinistic propaganda attack by the right-wing of the Republican party and know-nothing talk radio broadcasters, that fed off a long standing xenophobia towards immigrants that has always belied America's self-serving mythology about being a melting pot that welcomed immigrants to these shores. Historically there has long been an ugly bourgeois ideological hatred of newcomers, whether it was the Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs, etc. who were portrayed as strange and different and threatening to native born workers. This ability to divide the working class against itself has often served the interests of the capitalist class in its efforts to derail the class struggle.
However, today the inability of the bourgeoisie to control its own political apparatus when it so urgently needed to deal with the immigration problem is a serious weakness for the ruling class. There is no chance for the problem to be addressed again until after the new president takes power in the winter of 2009.
From the perspective of the working class, the whole immigration crisis is entirely artificial. The working class is an international class that owes no allegiance to any state or nation. All workers are ultimately immigrants. The struggle we face is not one that pits immigrant against native born or naturalized workers, but in which the working class confronts the capitalist class.
Internationalism, July 2007
As we have pointed out in other articles on the US national situation - see in particular Inter 142 [3] - American capitalism is currently besieged by a twin malady: an historic crisis of its imperialist power and an economic crisis that is becoming more and more unmanageable. The answer of the dominant class to this situation has been a head long flight into imperialist war around the globe and the continuation of the worn out monetary and fiscal tricks that have kept the economy out of a total collapse up to the present. These policies have meant for the working class a continuous deterioration of its working conditions and standard of living and a growing sense of social insecurity. Due to the retreat of the struggle of the working class amid the confusion after the collapse of "communist" Eastern bloc and the supposed "victory" of democratic capitalism, the bourgeoisie has been able to implement these policies without a serious challenge from the working class, the only force in society that has a real option to offer to the dead-end of moribund capitalism. However in the last few years there is growing evidence that we have entered a period in which the class struggle will once more be at the center stage of the social situation and the bourgeoisie's policies of austerity and war will not go on without a challenge. In order to be able to help the future struggles to bear the fruit of all their potentialities we need to make more precise our understanding of the present stage of the working class struggle.
It is impossible to understand the present state of the working class struggle in the US without situating it in the broader context of the international struggle of the working class. Thus it is important to recall briefly the main characteristics of the current phase of these struggles. We have seen since 2003 the generalized tendency of the international working class to emerge from the reflux of consciousness and combativeness, and the general disorientation that took place after the turmoil caused by the fall of the two bloc system at the end of the eighties. This turning point of the class toward the path of confrontation against its historical enemy had one of its more remarkable moments in the great mobilization of the students in France in the spring of 2006. The struggles in Germany that took place at the same time as the mobilization in France, and since then the working class mobilizations in many other countries in the center and periphery of capitalism around the world, have confirmed that we are in a new phase of the international class struggle.
As we have pointed out throughout the press of the ICC the central characteristics of this phase of the class struggle are:
The working class in the US has been totally part of this resurgence. As in other countries workers in the US have been pushed by the relentless attacks on their working and living conditions by a capitalist system mired in a permanent economic crisis, to defend themselves and leave behind the period of disorientation characteristic of the decade of the 90's. As we have pointed out in our press the high point of this trend was the three-day strike by New York City transit workers over the holiday season in December 2005. However this was not an isolated incident but rather the clearest manifestation of a tendency of the class to come back to the path of the struggle as seen in the grocery workers struggle in California in 2004 and the struggles at Boeing, North West Airlines and Philadelphia transit in 2005. This same tendency to return to the path of the struggle continued in 2006, as expressed in particular by the two-week teachers wildcat strike in Detroit in September and the walkout by more than 12,000 workers at 16 Goodyear Tire & Rubber plants in the US and Canada on October of the same year.
All these struggles have faced the same issues: the threat of draconian attacks on existing wages and benefits -direct cuts on wages, health care benefits and pensions-that would affect not only the existing work force, but future generations of workers. The combativeness of the workers involved in these battles, where the chance of winning was often lacking, has been enormous, showing the huge reservoir of energy existing in a class that has two generations of undefeated workers. Transit workers in New York City and Philadelphia and the Detroit teachers went on strike under threat of legal and financial penalties for violating laws that barred public employees from striking. Everywhere workers were willing to make huge personal sacrifices. However beyond the combativeness, what is more remarkable is the nascent development of consciousness contained in these struggles, particularly at the level of class identity and solidarity. Workers often entered the struggle knowing well that they were not only defending themselves, but the future generations of workers and the class as a whole. This was the message often repeated by workers during the New York City transit strike where the main issue of the struggle was a management proposal for a new pension tier system for future employees which included higher contributions for all new hires. This expressed an unwillingness to "sell out the unborn" and to defend the future of the new generation of workers, which was a striking expression of the developing solidarity and growing consciousness in the class.
On the downside, despite the enormous combativeness and the growing class consciousness shown by the workers involved in them, there have been enormous weaknesses on these movements. In every case the dominant class managed to keep the struggle under the control of the unions, which managed to isolate the workers in struggle from their class brothers facing the same barrage of attacks on salaries and social benefits. Even during strikes like the one of the Transit Workers in NYC where there was tremendous sympathy from the local working class and spontaneous expressions of solidarity were often witnessed, the union bureaucracy managed to keep other workers from getting involved in the struggle and limited "solidarity to posturing declarations by the unions. This control by the union apparatus in the present struggles, given the retreat in class consciousness that occurred during the decade of the 90's, is not surprising and workers will have to regain the lessons of their past struggles in order to confront these institutions of the bourgeois State. It will be in this confrontation that workers can find again their own methods of organization and struggle -mass assemblies, workers' control committees, mass strike -- that are still missing from the nascent movement in the US.
However, despite the weaknesses of the present movement the bourgeoisie has not failed to see its potentialities. After each struggle, it has campaigned to send the message that the more important lesson of these strikes is that the "struggle does not pay". And in most cases workers have come back to work with a pile of give-backs eroding salaries, benefits and working conditions that the unions have rammed down their throats after long and draining strikes. However for the working class as a whole the importance of a strike is not measured by winning or losing its immediate demands, but by the contribution at the level of organization and consciousness that it provides for the movement as a whole in its confrontation with the class enemy, and this is the main reason why the bourgeoisie puts so much effort into discouraging other workers from entering the struggle. In NYC, where the bourgeoisie has tried so hard to drive home the message that the "struggle does not pay" by punishing the striking transit workers, the city unions and the mayor have avoided the risk of any other municipal workers' struggle by settling contract negotiations ahead of schedule and without the kind of draconian attacks that provoked the transit strike. On a national scale the present rush of bourgeois proposals aimed at resolving the health care crisis is also very much influenced by the present struggles -each of which has involved attacks on health benefits. This campaign -all 12 pre-presidential candidates have a "plan" to resolve it --is very much directed at eliminating the health care issue from the terrain of the struggle, making of it one more issue for the bourgeoisie to decide through the electoral circus.
Amid a world falling apart, increasingly ravaged by the barbarism of war, worsening economic crisis, political instability, the spread of lethal diseases and the growing degradation of the environment, the historical responsibility of the world working class is immense. The future of humanity and without exaggeration the very survival of the human species and life on the planet are at stake. Either the working class will raise its struggle to the level necessary to put an end to this moribund system or capitalism will take to its tomb the very bases for building a world-wide human community, free of the exploitation of man by man, social classes and national states, and in which the human species can live in a more harmonic relationship with its environment.
The present reawakening of the international working class struggle contains the potentiality of that new world and revolutionaries have enormous responsibilities to help their class make possible this perspective.
Eduardo S, July 8th 2007.
On June 16, 2007 Hamas’ routing of Fatah-led security forces in Gaza made the headlines. The event was described as a ‘coup’, a violent and bloody take-over that made all the ‘democratic’ and ‘peace loving’ factions of the local and international ruling class shake in indignation. They all lifted their eyebrows, pointed their finger, and cried, “Criminals, criminals!” By portraying Hamas as the ‘bad guy’, the untrustworthy and violent Palestinian faction by virtue of its affiliation with radical Islam and ‘terrorism’, the Israeli, Abbas’ faction in Palestine, Fatah, and the US bourgeoisies have cast themselves in the light of the ‘good guys’, the ones that supposedly are ‘really’ looking for ways to establish ‘peace’ in the area.
Without taking away from Hamas the honor of being a cut-throat power-seeking bunch of gangsters, their ambition and brutality merely rivals that of our ‘pro-West’ ‘peace-lovers’. If we were to believe their sincerity, we would have to conclude that it was certainly a sense of righteousness, and not brash hypocrisy, that made Ehud Olmert, Israel’s Prime Minister, find the nerve to say, “ The residents of the West Bank will feel that choosing the path of no terror or violence, the way of peace and dialogue will bring a better , more comfortable, more peaceful life.” But he is not the only one who feels self-rigthous. The soon-to-be peace ambassador to the Middle East is no less a person than Tony Blair, that other accomplice of Mr. Bush in the imperialist butchery going on in Iraq.
Of course, the working class has learned that when the ruling class talks about ‘peace’, they only mean “the peace of the tombs”, as a closer look at what’s happening right now in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank sadly and tragically confirms. Or can the working class expect these leaders to be able to accomplish what they promise? If the ruling class cannot make peace in the Middle East --or anywhere else on the planet--, what prevents them from doing so? Is there any other force in society that can lead humanity out of the infernal chaos of irrational barbarism we have spiraled into?
No, there will not be any peace in the Middle East. Any respite from open fight has been and will continue to be a moment for the imperialist gangsters of any stripes and size to ‘sharpen their knives’ in view of even more brutal and bloodier confrontations which every state and more and more even the various factions within it wage in order to either gain or maintain a position of dominance. This has been the tendency in the period following the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and it has aggravated to the point where there are genuine examples of loss of control by the faction who seemingly had the upper hand or was working toward that goal. This, in fact, is what has just happened in Gaza. We do not live in a world divided into ‘reasonable’, ‘equitable’, ‘law-abiding’ nations on the one hand, and ‘backward fanatics’ and ‘terrorists’ on the other. We live under a capitalist regime that has no more room to expand without doing so at another nation’s (or would-be nation) expense.
The US and Israel have made deals with Abbas and the Palestinian faction he supports ---Fatah-- since Fatah’s opposing faction --Hamas—won the elections in 2006. This is because it would be an embarrassment for the US to have to make deals with a political organization that has links with the ‘terrorists’ the US vows to liberate the planet of. Of course, this stance would not be different if the opposition to the US/Israel domination in the area had a different ideology or affiliation. The point is that the US or Israel cannot tolerate contenders in the area. On the ideological level, the US/Israel opposition to Hamas aims to show that there are advantages in cooperating with Israel, which promises to be so ‘humanitarian’ when such cooperation takes place, as the talk about unfreezing the 100 million dollars it had frozen at the time of Hamas’ victory, part of a blockade against Hamas, is supposed to confirm. However, the right-wing factions in Olmert’s government have not supported his policy of openness toward Fatah, and have pressured Olmert to renew the policy of settling Israelis in Gaza and destroying Palestinian homes in Jerusalem. The impossibility to reach any agreement was clearly seen when Israel authorized Egypt to deliver weapons to Fatah so that they could be used against Hamas and in its renewal of air raids on the Gaza strip and operations in the West Bank.
In fact, the US and Israel had set out to destroy Hamas, notwithstanding the US’ claims that it wants to ‘spread democracy’ throughout the ‘undemocratic world’. Well, Hamas raised to power precisely through democratic elections, but because of all the reasons described above, it could not be tolerated. The US itself handed weapons to Fatah to accomplish the destruction of Hamas.
To add insult to injury, Abbas declared he wanted to hold elections in Gaza, a real provocation for Hamas, who, of course, has not been just sitting around waiting to see what would happen. It was quite inevitable that Hamas would try and get Fatah’s security forces out of its air. In fact, such are the tension and chaos that if Hamas hadn’t struck, Fatah would have. This, however, was not what the US wanted. As in many other instances when the US has wanted to push its ‘democratic’ agenda in areas where historically bourgeois democracy has not developed, the result has been further chaos, and, as in the case in Gaza, loss of control, whereby the US’ original design came back to haunt it.
Now, Fatah gunmen are taking revenge. Hamas will certainly follow suit, as the whole area will spin into an orgy of violence and madness. Organizations that have supported either Palestinian faction and have now turned mostly to armed robbery, extortion, and car theft rings, will join in the mayhem and further the spread of instability. The entire situation is in fact so fragile and critical that it is very likely that Hamas will open its arms to Al-Qaida, who has been trying to get its own foothold in the area. This is the perspective for the area, not a ‘re-opening’ of the ‘peace process’.
But it was in the midst of this uncontrollable chaos, and as a direct result of the blockade imposed on Hamas, that in March 170,000 civil servants in Gaza and the West Bank went on strike, seeing that they hadn’t been paid their salaries for months. The Israeli civil servants followed suit. It is true that Hamas and Fatah, blaming each other for the situation, exploited it to try and recruit angered Palestinians, including children 10-15 year old, mesmerized by the idea of a warrior’s death, who continue to take revenge on Israeli civilians, while Israel continued its raids into the West Bank and Gaza. It is certain that the Palestinian and Israeli working class have not waged their struggle in unison and with the consciousness of belonging to the same international working class, however, it is in their struggle that we can glimpse the only perspective for humanity. It is the struggle of the working class against exploitation that has the potential of going beyond the nationalist, ethnic, religious differences and divisions that mire the population in an endless spiral of irrational mayhem. It is because by showing what is universal in the human condition of the proletariat – its exploitation – the working class struggle unveils the root cause of the contradictions that are ripping society apart, while at the same time it also points to the way out.
What will save the population in the Middle East and lay the basis for a total resolution of the area’s decades-long conflict will not be any ‘re-start’ of any ‘peace process’, but the unified, international struggle of the working class leading to the taking of political power and the destruction of the moribund capitalist state. Ana, 7/1/07
This article has already been published on this site here:
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/content/2115/internationalism-no-142-april-june-2007
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/58/palestine
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/306/struggles-in-SA
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-africa