In the last few months the ruling class has unleashed an incredible barrage of democratic campaigns to confuse and disorient the working class. The democratic mystification is used skillfully by the bourgeoisie in diverting political discontent within the working class into harmless traps that keep workers tied to the state and dilute the working class within a broader "civic movement" (interclassist people’s movements). Notable democratic campaigns in recent months include not only the union reform campaigns and the ongoing presidential campaign mentioned above, but also those centered on anti-police brutality and corruption movements, the ideological campaign around investing in the stock market, the Elian Gonzalez affair, and the anti-globalization movement.

The anti-police brutality campaigns respond to growing discontent, especially among minority workers, provoked by the strengthening of the state’s repressive apparatus. The movement serves the bourgeoisie by tying the movement to the state and bourgeois legality. The central slogan of these movements, "No Justice, No Peace," contains within it the false notion that somehow justice false notion that somehow justice is possible under capitalism, that somehow police who shoot and kill unarmed, innocent civilians will be punished in the courts. The demands of this movement that call for consultation between police officials and black community "leaders", i.e., local businessmen, clergy, etc., for the hiring of more minority officers, etc. express the bourgeois nature of this movement.

The ideological campaign around stock market investment is not confined simply to the U.S., but occurs in Europe and elsewhere as well. In Germany, the unions are now demanding that workers receive part of their wages in stocks, for example. The phenomenon of workers dabbling on the market via the Internet is all too common, and is accompanied with an ideological campaign pressing the false proposition that there is no class struggle, workers "own" the companies too and have a vested interest in capitalist prosperity – the essence of democratic capitalism.

The Elian Gonzalez campaign has been used successfully to promote a false democratic framework(i.e., the Cuban exile community’s desire to keep the child in a "free America"), and the Clinton administration’s invocation of the natural rights of parents and cherished democratic "rule of law." For five months this law." For five months this affair has the subject of intensive media coverage, reflecting the ruling class’s recognition that it is better to stir passions and public debate about a total sideshow, rather than .focus on the central contradictions in capitalist society.

Anti-globalization and the Development of a False Anti-capitalism

After the union reform campaign, the most pernicious of the recent democratic media blitzes has been the anti-globalization movement, and the accompanying fanfare about the rise of a new "anti-capitalism," which has provoked serious confusions within the libertarian and De Leonist milieu. Groups like the De Leonist New Unionist seem mesmerized by the confrontations in the street in Seattle last November, incapable of offering any political analysis of the movement whatsoever. News and Letters sees Seattle as the birth of a new revolutionary movement.

An article in Discussion Bulletin by Lauren Goldner acknowledges the anti-globalization movement’s reactionary protectionism on the one hand, but on the other sees it as offering the greatest potential since 1968, bringing together militant lesbians, tree huggers and industrial workers in a new movement. Such an outlook precisely serves the bourgeoisie’s intereststhe bourgeoisie’s interests by denigrating the autonomy of proletarian struggle and by diluting the working class’ grievances within a list of perceived social ills, i.e., gay rights, feminism, ecology, animal rights, and workers rights, as if all were equivalent in weight.

Three council communist groups endorsed an anarchist call to create an "anti-capitalist" wing within the anti-globalization movement, apparently in the belief that it would be possible to have a proletariat wing of a capitalist movement. The media’s coverage of the new anti-capitalist movement, as exemplified by interviews with John Zerzan, the theoretical guru to the masked anarchists in Seattle who smashed Starbucks windows during the anti-WTO protests, represents a cynical attempt by the bourgeoisie to define anti-capitalism as purposeless violence and rioting, which is designed a)to cut it off from working class support and b)to mislead younger generations of workers away from the terrain of proletarian struggle into a political dead-end.

A significant aspect of the bourgeoisie’s current offensive is designed to accentuate the isolation of current minoritarian reflection and struggle within the working class by blocking the younger generations of workers from the historic experience and class terrain of the prolet and class terrain of the proletariat. It can be seen in the derision of history, the dismissal of marxism as a "philosophy of dead white men,", in the notion of the "end of history," and the denigration of the meaning of historical historical experience making inroads amongst working class youth.

The bourgeoisie’s efforts to postpone as long as possible the outbreak of class confrontations is in part linked to an attempt to break the younger generations from the experience of the older generation of workers. It is now over thirty-years since the generation of ’68 experienced the first upsurge in class struggle following the end of the reconstruction period, and near twenty years since the onset of the significant struggles of the third wave in which workers challenged union control of their struggles and openly posed the question of extension.

Stalling the class struggle as the generation of 1968 ages and the encouragement of early retirements are all part of the bourgeoisie’s attempt to set up a situation in which it will confront a working class cut off from the experience of ’68 and the third wave. This all the more heightens the necessity for the revolutionary minorities within the class to direct its efforts towards the new generations of workers to assure that the lessons of past struggles can serve as guideposts in the confrontations to come.

JG

Prior to the 1930s, only the AFL, organized in craft unions, represented a significant organization, though it represented only a small minority of the working class and pursued conservative policies. Industrial unions, organizing workers in mass production industries, such as auto, steel, rubber, electrical, aviation, etc., were created only in the 1930s, by the CIO, under state sponsorship, as part of the New Deal run-up to World War II, for which they were needed to assure a reliable, disciplined workforce.

While the Stalinists played a key role in the CIO and actually controlled unions representing 4 million workers by the end of the War, the onset of the cold war with Russia created serious problems for the American bourgeoisie. As the bloc leader in Western imperialism’s confrontation with Russia, it was intolerable for the U.S. to have unions loyal to the rival imperialist power control significant sectors of the American proletariat, and by 1948, the CP was driven out of the labor movement. Thus, for nearly fifty years there has not really been a left presence in the unions; nor have the leftists been able to play a significant role. All of this has complicated the process of radicalizing the American unions.

The first element in the process was revamping the national union leadership, with the replacement of the moribund, Cold War Kirkland-Donahue leadership four years ago with the energetic, younger and more demagogic John Sweeney, who brought a commitment to organizing campaigns, and militant-sounding, confrontational rhetoric, threatening to revive the strike weapon, that had been all but abandoned by Kirkland-Donahue.

The next phase was the displacement of corrupt mob-controlled union leaders and other union leaderships compromised by blatant collaboration and cronyism with the bosses during the ‘80s and early ‘90s. The commitment to revive "union democracy" from the Sweeney led bureaucracy at the top, was supplemented by a concurrent revival of base unionist activity by leftists. In New York, this was exemplified by the efforts of the Association for Union Democracy, working in concert with Trotskyists from the ISO and dissident union bureaucrats, to launch reform caucuses throughout the public sector in NYC. Indeed the rise of left movements within unions across the country is reaching epidemic proportions.

The struggle in transit in New York City in November-December revealed clearly the strengths and weakness of the proletariat in the present conjuncture. On the one hand there was a tremendous combativeness among transit workers, the beginnings of a conscious reflection among a minority of the workers, a conscious willingness to violate the Taylor law, which forbids public sector strikes in New York State, and a growing distrust of the unions.

On the other hand, this process evolved within an overall balance of forces that favored the bourgeoisie. The working class throughout the world, and particularly here in the U.S. still suffers from the disorientation that ensued following the collapse of stalinism and the bourgeoisie’s propaganda campaign about the end of communism, the end of class struggle and the triumph of capitalist democracy.

The reflux in consciousness within the proletariat is real and has important consequences for the class struggle. All the positive elements present in the transit struggle were more than offset by the general characteristics of the period, which meant that the transit workers carried on their struggle under extremely unfavorable prevailing conditions which did not favor either an open confrontation with the unions or the extension of the struggle.

The struggle did not develop in a totally isolated fashion. Workers in other industries, particularly within the public sector, were widely sympathetic to the transit workers. However, the fact that bourgeoisie was able to inflict the incredibly repressive court injunction without repercussion, without workers in other sectors rushing to the support of the transit workers, demonstrates the serious limits for the active expression of solidarity by other workers at the present conjuncture.

The bourgeoisie demonstrated that it had the upper hand through its clever use of the division of labor between the right and left in the union, to derail workers’ combativeness, stymie the strike movement, and leave workers confused and in disarray. The fact that in order to assist this division of labor within the union to be successful the bourgeoisie was forced to grant the transit workers a wage increase larger than the prevailing level in recent years, has been used to foster the illusion that a militant left base unionist movement "pays," and has served as an impetus to base unionist insurgencies in other municipal unions.

The provocative actions of the Giuliani administration in New York City in no way contradict the overall policy of the left in power to seek avoidance of open class struggle, but rather reflects the different approach taken by the right in power on the local level in New York at the City and State governmental levels. Such provocative actions have not been characteristic of the Clinton government on the national level.

With all its difficulties, the transit struggle was clearly part of the arduous process of a return to class struggle, in which the paramount task at the present moment is the rediscovery of class identity by the working class, a recognition its nature as a class for itself, and development of the self-confidence as a class that will enable workers to begin to reclaim the acquisitions of past experience. Revolutionaries must intervene in this process to expose the bourgeoisie's efforts to stymie the struggle and bolster the base unionists.

JG

The U.S. government continues to boast about its "unprecedented, longest running economic expansion in history." And it is true that the anticipated bursting of the "bubble economy," which we had anticipated was just around the corner has not occurred, and this despite the fact that the elements for open rececession seemed to be in place in 1998 following the collapse of the Asian tigers. State capitalism has demonstrated the resiliency to postpone its economic day of reckoning. On the one hand, much of this economic wonder is based on deception – the manipulation of economic data to paint an artificially rosey picture – and on policies designed to foist off the worst aspects of the global economic crisis on the peripheral countries of world capitalism. On the other hand, the degree to which there is economic growth in the U.S., or, more accurately, the absence of open recession, it hardly makes a difference from an historic perspective. The global economic crisis of world capitalism, a crisis of chronic overproduction, continues to deepen inexorably, regardless of the vicissitudes of the trade vicissitudes of the traditional business cycle that the bourgeoisie focuses on in its propaganda.

As early as the mid-80’s, the ICC pointed to the existence of hidden recession, and "vampire recovery," which despite the lack of an open recession, defined by the bourgeoisie as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth rates, continues to weaken the global economy at the historic level. In this sense, the appearance of economic prosperity in the short run, only aggravates the inherent contradictions of capitalism in the throes of an historic crisis for the long run. In any case, even using the bourgeoisie’s own statistics, we can see that despite the "recovery," the economic picture is hardly rosey. The recovery, such as it is, is confined only to a few sectors, and is based primarily on an explosive expansion of credit and a tremendous increase in the trade deficit, which is running at a record setting $29 billion per month (an annualized rate of $348 billion). This is important to note because, though state capitalism still has the capacity to maneuver, its maneuvers tend to accumulate more powder in the keg, which will make the explosion that much worse in the longer term.

Masking the Real Level of the Crisis

We have previously demonstrated on numerous occasions how the bourgeoisie has deftly managed to redefine how its much vaunted economic statistical measures are calculated and altered economic benchmarks, so as to paint a falsely optimistic economic picture. These manipulations include:

• recalculating the unemployment rate to include only those workers without a job who actually applied for work within the previous month and to discount discouraged workers who have no job and have given up looking for employment;
• to include members of the armed forces as part of the workforce to dilute the unemployment rate,
• to count as "employed" anyone working 10-hours per week (defined as a job) and hence to ignore the level of "underemployment" in the economy;
• to overstate the level of employment in the economy by counting every parttime job of 10 hours or more as a job – thus workers scrambling to make a living with three parttime jobs , count as three separate jobs;
• changing the benchmark for inflation. In 1971, Pres. Nixon imposed wage and price controls because an inflation rate of 4.4% wasse an inflation rate of 4.4% was considered intolerable. Today 4% inflation is considered "natural inflation." If the problem won’t go away, just declare it is no longer a problem.
• changing the benchmark for unemployment.In the early 1970’s, an unemployment rate of greater than 6% was considered crisis level and automatically triggered extended unemployment benefits; in 1978, the Humphrey-Hawkins bill set 4% unemployment as the national target of acceptable unemployment. Today 6% is defined as natural unemployment in the economy, and an unemployment level of 4.5% is considered a "labor shortage." Again, if you can’t solve the problem, it is easier for the bourgeoisie to turn reality on its head.
• recalculating the formula for determining the official unemployment rate in 1994 and again in 1997. Allegedly this was done to make the measure more "accurate," but of course it was due to these statistical shell games that the bourgeoisie has been able to claim the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years. Even though the footnote to the unemployment statistics in the World Almanac notes that the changes in rate calculation are so great that unemployment figures from 1994 to the present are not directpresent are not directly comparable to earlier periods, the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself grinds out press releases making direct comparisons anyhow.

We can get a more accurate picture of real unemployment in America today by taking a deeper look at the bourgeoisie's own statistics. For example, the official unemployment level is 6,200,000. The bourgeoisie keeps this number artificially low by not counting people who haven't looked for a job in the past month. According to the government, "persons not in the work force who want a job" number 4,568,000. In addition there are 3,665,000 who are forced to work parttime because they can't find fulltime employment. If we add these categories together, true unemployment in America stands at 14,433,000 or slightly more than 11%.

True Unemployment in the U.S.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review, January, 2000

Falling Wages and benefits means a decline in Workers’ standard of living

Despite the bourgeoisie’s hype about unprecedented boom, wages for male workers in 1999 were actually 1.8% lower than in 1989 after adjustment for inflation. A study by the bourgeois Fiscal Policy inflation. A study by the bourgeois Fiscal Policy Institute on the situation in New York state, found that workers’ real incomes declined by 8% since the late 1980s. For the poorest 40% of New York families, real income fell between 13 and 15%. In New York City, average real income declined by nearly 20%. At the same time, the typical working class family in New York has had to put in 256 more hours of work per year (equivalent to more than six additional full-time weeks) than it did in 1989 for the dubious privilege of earning 20% less.

An examination of the deterioriation of key fringe benefits paid to workers over the past 20 years gives an even more accurate picture of the falling real wages (the previously mentioned statistics only account for inflation) and show a serious decline in the standard of living during the period of the "unprecedented boom" over the past eight years. For example, in 1980, 99% of workers employed by medium and large companies in the U.S. received paid holidays. By 1997 that percentage had dropped to 89%. In 1980, 100% received paid vacations, by 1997 that figure had dropped to 95%. (Imagine having a fulltime job with no vacations!)

In 1980, 62% received paid sick leave; by 1997 56%. The deterioration is much more drastic in terms of insurance and retirement coverage.surance and retirement coverage. In 1980, 97% of those employed in medium and large companies participated in medical care plans at work; by 1997 only 76%. In 1980, only 26% were required to pay an employee contribution to medical plans for self coverage, and 46% for family coverage. By 1997, 69% were required to pay for self coverage and 80% for family coverage. The average monthly amount that workers had to contribute for self coverage increased by 350% since 1984, from $11.93 per month to $39.14, and from $35.93 for family coverage to $130.07 per month in 1997.

In 1982, medical coverage after retirement was available for 64%, but 1997 this figure had decline to only 33%. In 1980, 84% of the workers at medium and large companies were assured defined retirement pension benefits, by 1997 only 50%. The Clinton administration’s so-called "reform" of social security has increased the age of eligibility for old age pensions from 65 to 66. If one considers that the average life expectancy of American males is 73.4 years, then this amounts to better than 12% reduction in social security benefits. It is indeed a strange economic boom in which the condition of the working class continues to decline steadily.

Stock Market Reflects Economy’s Ill Health

Likewise, the gyrations on the stock markets belies the propaganda of capitalist prosperity. The stock markets have zigged and zagged for a good year and a half, but since the beginning of the years everything is down. With the NASDAQ index losing nearly 30% of its value in between March 13 and April 14, as highly touted technology stocks plummeted precipitously, even bourgeois commentators have tired of using the dismissive "correction" cliché to hide the seriousness of the situation. In the first place the soaring stock markets were never a reflection of economic health, and the difficulties of the market in the period of state capitalism no longer carry the same economic impact as they did in the previous period. We have had an horrific global economic crisis for more than three decades without the harbinger of a panic on Wall Street.

Under the sway of the global economic crisis of overproduction in the past thirty years, we have seen the spectacular elimination of entire sectors of the economy, the spreading of industrial desertification, the amputation from the world economy of whole regions of the planet, and the collapse, one after the other, of the economic "models," variously termed "dragons" and "tigers," of capitaluot;tigers," of capitalist growth. In addition, the collapse of stalinism in eastern europe has not translated into a utopia of solvent, new markets capable of absorbing capitalism’s overproduction. The spectacular diversion of capital from the spheres of production into the stock market is a consequence of the crisis of overproduction. As the ever shrinking market proves incapable of facilitating the realization of surplus value, capital is pushed towards all kinds of speculative schemes, creating a virtual casino economy. In the context of this orgy of speculation, the stock market has more and more resembled a huge pyramid scheme, where fortunes are made, at least on paper – literally out of thin air – and lost equally easily in the blink of an eye. Investor’s earnings bear no relation to the economic performance or value of the company, i.e., its performance, but rather are gained from the inflated stock prices paid by new investors who buy their stocks.

The price/earnings ratio for internet companies often runs at astronomical levels ranging between 100 and 200! The precipitous drop in internet stocks demonstrates yet again that while the bourgeoisie can cheat the law of value for a while, it cannot do so forever. The speculation on the stock market in high value stocks that had no relation to ththat had no relation to the profitability of the companies involved was just one way of cheating the law of value. Many of these wonder companies are will soon go under, demonstrating the fictitious nature of the "new economy" so highly promoted in bourgeois propaganda. The degree to which workers have been drawn into these get-rich quick schemes or are counting on pension funds linked to the stock market performance, the current stock market volatility will contribute to increasing pressure on workers’ standards of living.

From the working class’s perspective, the economic situation continues to worsen, whether there is boom or recession in the short term, because of the continued worsening of capitalism’s global economic crisis.

They want us to buy into the electoral swindle – the phony myth that the people decide their own political fate. Of course all this is just a capitalist propaganda ploy -- the last thing that capitalism could tolerate is for everyday working people to make any of the decisions about how society is run. The campaign hoopla is all part of how the ruling class manipulates society for its own political and economic ends, how it obscures the real power relationships in society, how it assures the desired outcome, and makes sure that the correct ruling team is in power. Despite the horse race metaphor that the media is so fond of, the election campaign more resembles a World Wrestling Federation wrestling match – where all the action is scripted in advance.

For much of the past decade in the vast majority of the western industrial powers, the bourgeoisie has relied upon a strategy of the left in power. This strategy was first dpower. This strategy was first developed by the bourgeoisie in the U.S. in 1992, with the realignment of the Democratic Party towards the center-right and the election of Bill Clinton, and was then emulated in Britain with a similar revamping of the Laborites under Tony Blair (the Bill Clinton of Great Britain), and subsequently adopted throughout the major European capitalist nations. This strategic division of labor, which places the left in power, and the right in opposition, has been successful for the bourgeoisie on both the imperialist and domestic levels, in that it has permitted the bourgeoisies of the respective countries to unleash military interventions overseas under the guise of humanitarianism without engendering serious opposition, which would have been unimagineable for the right, and has allowed it to continue to implement austerity measures without provoking serious resistance. As the Resolution on the International Situation adopted by the ICC’s International Bureau last spring puts it,

"Bringing the left of the bourgeoisie into government has proved to be the ideal means of making the most of the proletarian disarray. No longer speaking the language of struggle as it did in opposition in the eighties, the left parties in government are well-equipped to give a snt are well-equipped to give a softer edge to the attacks on working class living standards. They are better able to obscure the militarist barbarism with a humanitarian rhetoric. And they are more suited to correcting the failures of neo-liberal economic policies." (Point 10)

At home the left has successfully managed the deepening of the economic crisis, and while it unleashes attacks which are just as vicious and far-reaching as the right’s, it does so in a manner and style clouded in democratic and reformist rhetoric. The left’s austerity attacks are disguised as "reforms," not as cutbacks. Everywhere this strategy is successful. In Germany the left government is positioned to remain in power for at least the next three years, until the expiration of its elected term. At the level of the class struggle, the balance of forces favors the bourgeoisie, as the combativeness which exists in some sectors of the working class is completely heterogenous and confronts serious obstacles in developing.

The German trade unions function in open solidarity with the regime; the oppositional role is played by the right. In France, there are strikes and protests in various sectors, but these struggles are very atomized. Though a simulre very atomized. Though a simultaneity of struggles exists, this phenomenon poses no particular problem for the French bourgeoisie, and the unions and the leftists are not required to play a strong oppositional role. In Britain, the story is much the same. There are signs of class combativeness but a serious difficulty for struggles to develop and the left government has the situation in hand. In Italy, the same situation prevails. Despite being the most heavily politicized in Europe, the Italian working class has launched no major struggles since the left government came to power.

Here in the U.S., there have been rising levels of combativeness, including particularly the Detroit teachers struggle last autumn, the transit struggle in New York in November-December, and more recently the Boeing strike on the West Coast, but these struggles experienced difficulty in developing and remained largely isolated. Despite an oppositional posturing on international trade issues by some unions, as illustrated by their participation in the anti-WTO and anti-World Bank protests in the past few months, the unions remain staunch allies of the Clinton administration, and were early supporters of the Gore candidacy. Thus, the Clinton-Gore team has successfully pursued a right-wing economic and social agenda, including the reinforal agenda, including the reinforcement of the state’s repressive apparatus (adding 100,000 cops to the nation’s police forces, increasing the death penalty, making the severest inroads on civil liberties) and dismantling the welfare state put in place by the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal program 65 years ago, without hardly a murmur of resistance.

As in other countries, the bourgeoisie can be expected to continue to play the left in power card at the political level in the period to come. Unlike 1992, imperialist policy disputes will have little impact on the 2000 election campaign. In 1992, the dominant factions of the bourgeoisie were dissatisfied with President Bush’s failures to take offensive action in the Balkans and to consolidate American imperialism’s successes in the 1991 Gulf War. Today the dominant factions of the bourgeoisie are in agreement on imperialist policy. This in no way implies that serious divergences within the ruling class on imperialist policy regarding the Far East have ceased to exist. The disagreements that have marked the internal disputes within the ruling class over China are very real and continue to exist, as certain elements on the right, but also including some in the Democratic party, contend that China is too potentially unstable and unreliable toially unstable and unreliable to serve as America’s central partner in Asia, preferring instead to play a Japanese card in the region.

These disagreements were the underlying factor involved in the scandals and campaigns against Clinton, including the impeachment attempt in 1999. However, the faction opposing Clinton’s China policy was badly routed in their abortive attempt to drive Clinton from office and are in no position to impact the presidential election – most were excluded from any role in the Republic Party convention, for example. However, this does not mean that disagreements on China policy have disappeared, or that this issue will not be revisited in the future. Meanwhile, John McCain, the only major candidate in the presidential primaries to represent the anti-China faction, was badly defeated and driven from the race. In the Democratic primary contests, the Bradley candidacy was more designed to counter a lagging interest in and rekindled enthusiasm for the electoral circus (fewer than 50% of Americans bother to vote) than it was to pose a serious challenge to a Gore candidacy. Indeed bourgeois commentators observed that Bradley didn’t seem to want to win!

Both the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, and Vice President Al Gore adhVice President Al Gore adhere to the foreign policy currently in place, and are truly mirror images of each other on domestic policy. Bush’s "compassionate conservatism" emulates Gore’s attempts to firmly occupy the center ground, and even if Bush were to win the White House through some political mistake, there would be political continuity with the Clinton presidency. However, Gore’s left credentials, exemplified by his reputation as an environmentalist and his strong support from the unions, most strongly corresponds with the successful left in power strategy.

Bush's move towards the center following his wrap up of the nomination in the primaries, alienates the base of the Christian right wing of the party and seems designed to undermine the Bush's chances to win in the election. The electoral circus will surely heighten the drama with strident discourse on such secondary non-issues for the bourgeoisie as abortion and gun control, which are designed to stir up passionate debate on issues that pose no challenge to capitalism but provide a safety valve for political steam, and an orchestrated close race, designed to beat the drums for the "every vote counts" electoral mystification. In a now familiar pattern, a probable Pat Buchanan candidacy on the Reform Party ticket, will siphReform Party ticket, will siphon off religious right support from Bush and help assure the continuance of the left in power.

In the end, whether Gore wins, or whether Bush pulls off an accidental upset, the working class will continue to bear the brunt of the economic crisis. No matter who wins, despite the propaganda campaign about "unprecedented economic boom" the global economic crisis will continue unabated. At home, the working class’s real wages will continue to decline, job security will continue to be eroded, social and company benefits will be scaled back. Abroad, American imperialism will continue to exercise its military might in a never-ending effort to assert its super power hegemony in a world in which international discipline has broken down with the collapse of the two-bloc Cold War confrontation.

The election offers nothing for the working class but the opportunity to be suckered into believing that we do not live in a capitalist class dictatorship. For the working class the only way to assert its interests is not at the ballot box, but the class struggle, a struggle that will one day lead to a revolutionary confrontation with capitalism, and pose the possibility of creating a genuine human community in which capitalist exploitationin which capitalist exploitation is banished from human experience. – JG 9/6/00

De Leon’s opposition to reformism, a central element in his ideological perspective, superficially resembles the position defended today by the ICC and the rest of the Communist Left. However, De Leon’s views, originally formulated as early as the 1890s, were based on a total confusion on the operation of capitalist economy and were actually incorrect for the period in which he lived. Here it is important to differentiate clearly between reformism and reforms. As we pointed out in Internationalism, #21, "Reformism has always meant the theory and practice of a peaceful transition to socialism, whose hallmarks have been a commitment to parliamentarism, legalism, and pacificism. This theory and practice of reformism…has always been antithetical to the interests of the working class and has represented the invasion of bourgeois ideology into the ranks of the proletariat." On the other hand the struggle for reforms – for durable improvements in the conditions of the working class, i.e., the end of child labor, the eight hour day, etc – "in the ascendant phase of capitalism when it was pse of capitalism when it was possible for the working class to win durable reforms from the bourgeoisie…occurred on the class terrain of the proletariat and was a manifestation of the fundamental antagonism between capital and the wage-working class." Thus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the struggle for reforms was correctly supported by Marxist revolutionaries. De Leon on the other hand did not support that struggle. Instead he denounced the struggle for reforms as synonymous with the counter-revolutionary practice of reformism.

There are two factors underlying De Leon’s confusion on this question: 1) a failure to understand adequately that all economic modes of production go through phases of ascendance and decadence in their historic development, and in particular the significance of this fact for capitalism; 2) an adherence to a variant of "the iron law of wages,"(1) which essentially held that under capitalism workers’ wages always fell and that the struggle for wage increases and for reforms was pointless. .

When Did Capitalism Enter Its Epoch of Decay?

The understanding that all modes of production throughout history pass through phases history pass through phases of ascendance and decadence in the course of their historic development, defended by the Communist Left, has its basis in the work of Karl Marx. Even the Socialist Labor Party’s Arnold Petersen was forced to acknowledge in his 1947 introduction to a reprint of De Leon’s "Reform or Revolution," that "social systems are born, grow and mature and eventually decay," and that before a social system reaches its period of decay, reforms are possible. But once decadence sets in, the era of reforms is over, and only a revolutionary transformation of society is on the agenda.

For revolutionaries it is essential to theoretically understand when capitalism reaches the limits of its historic development, ceases to be progressive in the historic sense, and instead becomes a fetter on the further development of the productive forces, and thereby puts proletarian revolution on the agenda. Such an understanding has profound implications for the intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle. Marx and Engels at first underestimated the expansive potential of capitalism, and thought that proletarian revolution was on the agenda in 1848. History was to demonstrate otherwise, and Marx and Engel’s later writings and revolutionary activities were based on a clearactivities were based on a clear recognition of this fact.

For De Leon the onset of capitalist decay must have come very early. As early as the 1890s, De Leon argued that "at the present stage of civilization there is possible no reform worth speaking of…" and that "every reform granted by capitalism is a congealed measure of reaction." But on what basis did De Leon believe that capitalism had reached the limits of its historic development and changed so fundamentally and irrevocably? Certainly such a qualitative change in the fundamental character of the capitalist system and the conditions of class struggle would have announced itself and offered itself for theoretical elaboration by revolutionaries. It is difficult to imagine that such an historic development would have occurred secretly and unnoticed. The fact is that De Leonism offers no answer to this question, no theoretical explanation for its conclusions. In the 1890s, De Leon was wrong when he opposed reforms, right when he opposed reformism, and wrong for confusing the two. Reforms were still possible at the turn of the century. Capitalism was in its last phase of expansion, still expanding into Africa. The capitalist system had not yet completed its historic mission – the creation of a world market. The struggle for a shorter wo The struggle for a shorter working day, for an end to child labor were not struggles that were "congealed reaction."

On the contrary, they were class struggles for durable gains for the working class, that provided a preparation for future revolutionary struggles, and also served as a goad to capitalism to continue its further development. In the ascendant phase of capitalism, the struggle for reforms was not separate from the revolutionary struggle. Ironically, despite his avowed opposition to reformism, because of his confusions on the nature of bourgeois democracy, and the political tasks of the proletariat, De Leon argued from parliamentarism, legalism and pacifism in the political arena, which made his practice identical to the reformism he so thoroughly despised. We will address these political shortcomings in a future article in this series.

While De Leonism was oblivious to the theoretical tasks of understanding when the qualitative change in the nature of capitalism had arrived, the rest of the revolutionary Marxist movement was clear that the outbreak of World War I, a fullscale inter-imperialist war, plunging humanity into an unprecedented global butchery, was the historic watershed, marking the end of capitalism’s period of historic expansion, and the beginning of the era of war or revolution. The understanding that a new situation existed, that posed directly the question of proletarian revolution as the means to rescue humanity from a descent into barbarism led to splits in all the socialist parties in the major countries of world capitalism, between the right which collaborated with the respective bourgeoisies in mobilizing the working class for the bloodbath, and the left which advocated a proletarian solution to the social impasse.

It was the change in historic period that led to the workers’ revolution in Russia as the first act in the world revolution, to the founding of the Third International to regroup the left revolutionaries and to help spread the world revolution, and to the founding of the Communist Parties. There was debate within the movement as to what were the fundamental causes of the onset of capitalist decadence, polarizing eventually on two theoretical explanations, and indeed this theoretical explanation is still debated within the Communist Left today. (2) But however hotly this issued is debated, there is underlying agreement that the nature of capitalism changed in the run up to World War I. Though De Leonism often found itself siding with the left in the Second International, it was cSecond International, it was content to wait for the end of World War I so it could resume its old political practices without regard to the changed historic conditions.

De Leon’s Confusions on the Theory of Wages

De Leon’s belief in a variant of "the iron law of wages" meant that he essentially saw no purpose to the class struggle on the immediate level. As one of his adherents once put it, De Leon believed that "regardless of how strong and militant the working class is, its collective action under capitalism cannot prevent its conditions from becoming worse. (Goodstein, New Socialist). In "Socialist Reconstruction of Society," De Leon developed his contention that the workers’ share of the products produced in society is declining. This was certainly accurate but did not necessarily mean that the standard of living of the working class was declining. According to De Leon, from 1870 to 1900, the standard of living of the workers had "gone from bad to worse." What De Leon confounded was the difference between the relative and the absolute impoverization of the working class. Absolute impoverization means a fall in the workers’ standard of living, while relative impoverization occurs even while the worketion occurs even while the workers’ standard of living may actually rise.

For Marx, here was no law that real wages must always sink. Quite the contrary. While the lower limit of wages was fixed by the physiological minimum necessary to reproduce the workers’ labor power, the upper limit was ultimately set by factors such as the rate and mass of profit, the rate of accumulation and the conditions for the realization of surplus value prevailing in a given period of capitalist development. Between this lower and upper limit (the latter receding as capitalism went from its phase of ascendance to its phase of decadence), the actual level of wages at any given moment is determined, in large part, by the degree of class combativeness and the level of class struggle. In developing this point, Marx wrote:

"although we can fix the minimum of wages, we cannot fix their maximum. We can only say that, the limits of the working day being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to the physical minimum of wages; and that wages being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to such a prolongation of the working day as is compatible with the physical forces of the laborers…The fixation on its actual degree is only settled by the cont is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labor, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the worker constantly presses in the opposite direction. The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective power of the combatants"(Wages, Price and Profit).

Contrary to De Leon’s view that real wages must always sink, regardless of the class struggle, Marx held that the class struggle was a vital determinant in settling the actual level of wages.

That Marx distinguished between absolute and relative impoverization is illustrated by the following passage:

"By virtue of the increased productivity of labor, the same amount of the average daily necessaries might sink from 3 to 2 shillings, or only 4 hours out of the working day instead of 6 be wanted to produce an equivalent for the value of the daily necessaries. The working man would now be able to buy with 2 shillings as many necessaries as he did with 3 shillings. Indeed the value of labor would have sunk, but that diminished value would command the same amount of commld command the same amount of commodities as before…although the laborer’s absolute standard of life would have remained the same, his relative wages and therewith his relative social position as compared to that of the capitalist would have been lowered" (Wages, Price and Profit).

That Marx recognized that while the workers’ share of the social product may sink in relation to that of the capitalists, the standard of living of the workers can remain the same, or even rise, is illustrated by the following passage:

"Real wages may stay the same, they may even rise, and yet relative wages may fall. Le us suppose, for example, that all means of subsistence had gone down in price by 2/3 while wages per day have only fallen by 1/3, that is to say, for example, from 3 marks to 2 marks. Although the worker can command a greater amount of commodities with these 2 marks than he previously could with 3 marks, his wages will have gone down in relation to the profit of the capitalist…The share of capital relative to labor has risen. The division of social wealth between capital and labor has become still more unequal…and Real wages express the price of labor in relation to the price of other commodities; relative wages, on the other hand, express the share of direct labor in the new value it has created in relation to the share which falls to accumulated labor, to capital" (Wage, Labor and Capital).

Thus, De Leon’s view that the real wages of workers, in contrast to their relative wages, must continually sink regardless of the class struggle in capitalist society, was refuted by Marx decades before De Leon even joined the socialist movement. De Leon persisted in this misunderstanding despite the fact that he translated into English the very works in which Marx argued his analyses.

De Leon’s view that the workers’ standard of living during the ascendant phase of capitalism had continually "gone from bad to worse" was refuted by the reality of workers’ struggles. In the ascendant phase of capitalism, there was a tendency towards absolute impoverization of the working class during the period of primitive accumulation. But in the period of capitalist expansion in the 19th century, there was a tendency towards a rise in real wages, simultaneous with a decline in relative wages, and thus relative impoverization. It was during this period that it was pduring this period that it was possible to wrest durable reforms from the bourgeoisie in the course of the class struggle.Thus, for example in Volume I of Capital, Marx pointed out that real wages fell in Britain between 1799-1815, the final stage of the primitive accumulation of capital. But if we look at Britain and France during the period of the most rapid capitalist expansion, it is clear that far from continually sinking, as De Leon mistakenly believed, real wages actually rose:

Real Wages in France and Britain 1830-1910

(1900=base 100)

These figures taken from Fritz Sternberg’s Der Imperialismus, 1926

The Link Between the Daily Defensive Struggle and the Revolutionary Struggle

It is in the decadent phase of capitalism that "the general tendency of capitalistic production…to sink the average standard of wages" (Marx, Wages, Price and Profit) prevails precisely because the accumulation process itself has come up against the insurmountable barrier of a saturated world market, and the cyclical crises of capitalist ascendance have been replaced by a permanent crisis.

Even if De Leon hadn’t totally misunderstood Marx on the questilly misunderstood Marx on the question of wages, the political conclusions he reached on the futility of the day to day struggle of the proletariat would have been wrong. Even if durable reforms had not been possible during capitalist ascendance and real wages continually fell as De Leon mistakenly believed, the daily struggle of the workers to defend themselves against the attacks of capital would have been no less necessary at that time than it is today, when durable reforms are in fact impossible to attain(3). This defensive struggle of the working class was contemptuously spurned by De Leon who could not understand the link between the daily struggle of the proletariat and the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism. In the Warning of the Gracchi (1902) De Leon expressed this contempt with these words:

"The characteristic weakness of the proletariat renders it prone to lures…short of the abolition of wage slavery, all ‘improvements’ either accrue to capitalism are or the merest moonshine."

Marx, on the contrary insisted that the defensive struggle was one of the most important conditions for the proletariat to be able to wage a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist state, when after the capitalist state, when after pointing to the objective tendencies which would, if unopposed , continually lower the standard of living, he wrote:

"Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches beyond salvation…

"By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement" (Wages, Price and Profit).

The necessary link between the economic and political struggles of the working class, between the immediate, defensive struggles and the historic struggle for communism is basic to revolutionary Marxism, but was rejected by De Leon. Particularly in decadence, the polarization of the class struggle, the tendency for economic struggles to become transformed into political struggles, and thus the generalization of the daily struggle, is at the heart of the revolutionary strugglheart of the revolutionary struggle. De Leonism’s failure to grasp Marxism’s theory of the laws of motion of the capitalist economy, and its political implications for the class struggle, have condemned it to dire consequences on the political terrain, as we shall see in future articles in this series. – JG

Notes

1) The iron law of wages was a term coined by Ferdinand LaSalle and decisively refuted by Marx.

2) A full discussion of capitalist decadence is beyond the scope of the current article. Readers are referred to the ICC’s pamphlet, "The Decadence of Capitalism" and a series of articles defending the theory of decadence in the International Review 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60.

3) Of course today the working class’s defensive struggles must take different forms than in the epoch of ascendant capitalism, because of the integration of the trade unions into the state apparatus and the impossibility of permanent mass organs of working class struggle because of the emergence of state capitalism. See the ICC pamphlet "Unions Against the Working Class" for a full discussion of the union question.

In Discussion Bulletin #103, the group called New Democracy, contrary to its usual habit of ignoring political criticism, has done us the honor of responding to our denunciation of their bourgeois character and counter-revolutionary politics. In its reply ND, behind a renewed attack on Marxism, has tried hard to defend its supposed revolutionary intentions, but perhaps unknowingly what it really has done is to corroborate our charge that they are a bourgeois organization. By ND’s own account its two founding members are ex-militants of a now defunct maoist leftist organization, the Progressive Labor Party, who split from this organization to form another "Party" and later on ND. These individuals, whatever their intentions, instead of breaking with their political past in counter-revolutionary Stalinism, have simply moved from the defense of leftist bourgeois ideology to the forefront of the bourgeois attacks on Marxism, with the addition of a sort of democratic bourgeois rubbish developed by their guru David Stratman, the main ideologue of ND.

New Democracy distortions of Marxism

For former maoists, the ND crowd are quite unsophisticated in their distortion of Marxism. In their writings one can find all kind of nonsense, like the one which af nonsense, like the one which affirms that "for Marx whatever increases economic production is good; whatever fetters it is bad" or the one that says that "Marxism turned into a method of increasing productivity," and similar other trash. However, ND actually contributes very little that is original to the slanders that the bourgeois ideologues have often heaped against Marxism. Thus ND’s main line of attack is to make Marxism responsible for the bloody state capitalist regimes of the former Soviet Union and its satellites of Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and so on. For ND, as for the rest of the bourgeoisie, the regimes of these countries were/are "Marxist dictatorships" because the dominant class there and all over the world says so.

And, if revolutionaries, armed with the tools of Marxism, show that in those countries there has never existed anything but capitalist production relationships, while their dominant class regimes pretend to cover their brutal exploitation of the working class with the most trivial "marxist" phraseology, then according to ND revolutionaries "miss the point entirely." But ND is not satisfied with simply repeating its bourgeois mentors –that would show their true capitalist colors too obviously. While the latter denounce Marxism to oe latter denounce Marxism to obliterate any idea of working class revolution, ND swears that it does so to put "revolution in the agenda." In their own words: "we don’t criticize Marxism to attack the idea of revolution; we criticize it to put the idea of revolution back in the public agenda in a way that can inspire millions of people to build the revolutionary movement and make it succeed where the old movements failed."

This may sound like a commendable intention, but… the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As Marx used to say

"as in private life one distinguishes between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, still more in historical struggles must one distinguish the phrases and fancies of the parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conceptions of themselves from their reality" (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, emphasis ours).

And the reality of ND, its real function, its raison-d’etre, as shown by its whole activity is to contribute to the mystification of the working class through the spreading of lies against Marxism. It is on this basis that we have denothis basis that we have denounced ND as a bourgeois group, regardless of how their members may earn a living; whether they are workers or petty bourgeois, or police agents, or whatever, is not an important issue. The central issue is what is the nature of the political positions and activity of the organization.

Marxism and New Democracy’s "revolutionary" ideas

According to ND, the "fundamental problem" with Marx is his view "of people and class struggle." Marx, the say, "thought working class people and capitalists are both motivated by the same thing –self interest. Marx understands the conflict between these classes as a conflict between the self interest of people who exploit others versus the self interest of people who are exploited." Next, ND begs to disagree with this "fundamental problem" and declares its ‘alternative": "working people object to exploitation not out of self interest but because they think it is wrong for anybody to be exploited." Thus for ND "class struggle is a struggle over what values should shape society, not a tug of war over competing self-interest." This is why the upcoming revolution will be the result of evolution will be the result of the victory of a an already existing "working class culture based on the values of solidarity, equality and democracy …against the capitalist values of inequality, competition and top down control." ND’s arguments are so contorted that one finds it difficult to choose where to begin to respond.

For a start let’s clarify marxism’s view "of people and class struggle," which, if it means anything, is marxism’s materialist conception of history. The whole view of world history up to the beginning of XIX century was based on the conception that the ultimate causes of the historical changes of society were to be found in the changing ideas —what ND calls "values"— of human beings, and, that of all the changes, political changes are the most important, and are dominant in world history. It was only after the French revolution that bourgeois historians began to recognize that the since at least the Middle Ages the developing force in European history was the struggle of the developing bourgeoisie against the feudal aristocracy for social and political domination. Marx, for his part, proved that the whole of previous history is a history of class struggles, a struggle for the social and political domination of social classes cr domination of social classes created by the material conditions in which society at a given point produces and exchange its means of subsistence

In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx gives an integral formulation of this conception in the very well known passage, which despite its length, we will quote in its entirety as it succinctly presents the essence of the Marxist view:

"In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundations on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

The mode of production in material life determines the social, political and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the materiof their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression of the same thing — with the property relations within which they had been at work before.

From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with precision of natural science and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out…In broad outlines, we can designate Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois forms of production as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.

The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of one arising from the social conditions ofng from the social conditions of life of individual; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material condition for the solution of that antagonism…"

This materialist conception of Marx, together with his discovery of surplus value –the demonstration of how within present society under the existing capitalist mode of production, the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist takes place — was and is of supreme importance for the working class communist movement. It allowed the working class for the first time to understand the reason for the historical division of society into classes, into exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled, oppressors and oppressed, and put in firm theoretical ground its movement for its own emancipation, which contains the uprooting of the economic conditions in which the existence of classes and class rule is based.

For Marx, the working class revolution was based on the fact capitalist relations of production would become too narrow, a "fetter" for the progressive development of society, and reaching that point would sink humanity in an ever-growing barbarism — a projection that the history of most of last century so brilliantly confirmed. Certainly this revolution, or the class struggle which leads to it, have nothing to do with "what values should shape society and who should rule it" (ND). In making its revolution the working class, as Marx said when analyzing the uprising of Parisian workers during the days of the "Commune", "have not ideals to realize…" in the sense of the ready-made utopias –or ND’s "values based on love and equality and solidarity" — set to be introduced by decree. Foreshadowing ND over a hundred years ago Marx would write:

"In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility." (The Civil War in France).

We cannot conclude without saying a few words about ND’s "critique" of the "Communist Manifest," which they pompously pronounced previously, but also maintain in their recent text inmaintain in their recent text in Discussion Bulletin. In its response to our denunciation of its politics in Discussion Bulletin, ND states that the Communist Manifesto’s "dominant theme" is "whatever increases economic production is good; whatever fetters it is bad" and, full of sentimental indignation, protests about Marx speaking of "capitalists as a positive force in its early years.".

The first affirmation is nothing but a stupid slander of Marx and Engels, and as regards the second, we claim its absolute validity. In describing the historical development of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels recognized the revolutionary role played by the bourgeoisie –as the bearer of large scale industry and the world market — in contrast to feudal aristocracy which struggled to keep their social position and the obsolete relations of production of feudalism. This is an historical fact –that ND likes it or not matters little — just as it is that that today bourgeois rule has become together with the relations of production that it represents not only a hindrance for the development of society, but a menace for its very existence. Furthemore that the bourgeoisie has become "unfit to rule" has absolutely no to rule" has absolutely nothing to do with changes in the ideology of the bourgeoisie or in ND words "with any change in capitalist values." In fact over two hundred years after the bourgeois French Revolution, bourgeois ideologues continue to hold fast to its historical ideological motto: "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" —spiced today with the catch word "democracy."

That this motto coincides almost word for word with the ND "model of social change and revolution" based on the "values of equality, solidarity and democracy," should surprise no one; it proves, if it were still necessary, the bourgeois character of this group and how misplaced are its militants when they say: "we don’t trace our thinking to any particular individuals from the past." Despite their claims of being new thinkers, so reactionary are the politics of ND, that their analysis of ideas or values as the motor force of history dates back to the 18th century, and their revolutionary watchwords are a throwback to the French Revolution at the end of that century.

Eduardo Smith.

As we pointed out in Part I of this series, Daniel De Leon unquestionably played a pivotal role in introducing Marxism to American revolutionaries, and exerted considerable influence early in this century not only over members of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), but also the left of the Socialist Party (SP) and the early Communist Party, as well. Unfortunately this influence wasn’t always beneficial. In Part II, we focused on De Leon’s mistaken adherence to Lassallean economic conceptions (see Internationalism 114), which rendered De Leon incapable of comprehending the relationship between the immediate struggle and the historic goals of proletarian struggle. This failure had profound implications for De Leon and his followers in terms of their political intervention in the class struggle.

De Leon contended that strikes could be successful only in the early stages of capitalism. In his view the development of machinery and the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed had undercut the ability of workers to wage successful strikes. Following the failure of the Buffalo Switchmen’s strike in 1892, De Leon wrote, "Once more it has been shown that no strike couldshown that no strike could succeed in industries that reached a high degree of capitalistic concentration" (People, August 28, 1892). This view, consistent with De Leon’s Lassalleanism, was completely at odds with the Marxist understanding of the workings of capitalist economy and the class struggle. As Marx insisted,

"The historical or social element, entering into the value of labor, may be expanded or contracted, or altogether extinguished so that nothing remains but the physical limit…the value of labor itself is not a fixed but a variable magnitude, even supposing the values of all other commodities to remain constant…The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labor" (Value, Price and Profit).

The failure to see that workers could struggle to improve their living standard – to increase wages and wrest durable reforms during the period of capitalist ascendancy had catastrophic consequences for De Leonism’s intervention in the class struggle, leading directly to a rejection of revolutionary work within the mass organizations of the proletariat during that period. For De Leon unions made sense only if they advocated the destruction of capitalism, and ignored tn of capitalism, and ignored the immediate struggle. In the early 1890s, De Leon had had illusions about the possibility of revolutionary socialists gaining control of the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor, but after several years of "boring from within," De Leon became completely disenchanted with the mass unions. In 1894, De Leon enunciated his hallmark positions on revolutionary trade unionism and revolution at the ballot box, in an article about the failed Pullman strike:

"The union of the workers that expects to be successful must recognize 1) the impossibility of obtaining a decent living while capitalism exists, the certainty of worse and worse conditions, the necessity of the abolition of the wage and capitalist system, and their substitution by the Socialist or Cooperative Commonwealth, whereby the instruments of production shall be made the property of the whole people…and 2) the necessity of conquering the public powers at the ballot box by the vote of the working class, cast independently."

Frustrated by the failure to capture control of the unions, De Leon denounced them as useless and dead, and called upon socialists to withdraw and adopt a dual unionist policy. In 1895 the SLP established the Soc1895 the SLP established the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (ST&LA), which an SLP resolution written by De Leon hailed "as a giant stride toward throwing off the yoke of wage slavery." In 1900 the SLP formally dropped support for immediate demands in workers struggles, and in 1902 in "The Warning of the Gracchi," De Leon wrote,

"The characteristic weakness of the proletariat renders it prone to lures…The essence of this revolution – the overthrow of wage slavery, cannot be too forcefully held up. Nor can the point be too forcefully kept in evidence that short of the abolition of wage slavery, all ‘improvements’ either accrue to capitalism or are the merest moonshine."

This rejection of the possibility of fighting for immediate demands, of winning gains or durable reforms, was absolutely dead wrong in the period of capitalist ascendance, in which De Leon lived, a period when capitalism was still an historically progressive mode of production, still expanding, and favoring a development of the productive forces, and therefore making durable reforms a real possibility. But it would be wrong even if advocated today in the period of capitalist decadence, when the system is no longer hie, when the system is no longer historically progressive, but rather has become a fetter on the further development of the productive forces and therefore incapable of granting reforms, because it grossly fails to recognize the link between the immediate struggle of the proletariat and the historic struggle to overthrow capitalism (see Internationalism 114 for a fuller explanation of capitalist ascendance and decadence). Even if reforms are impossible under decadent capitalism, the immediate struggle of the proletariat to defend its interests against capitalist attacks poses the possibility of transforming struggles that begin even as simple economic disputes into a political confrontation with state capitalism, which holds the seeds of the revolutionary struggle.

De Leon’s confusion on revolutionary work within the mass organizations of the proletariat was at odds with the repeated interventions in the American socialist movement by Engels, who urged participation in the existing unions, which,

"whatever their shortcomings and little absurdities, whatever their platform and their constitution…are…the only national bond that holds them (American workers) together, that makes their strength felt to themselves not less than to their enemies: less than to their enemies: (Marx & Engels, Letters to Americans, 1848-1895, The Labor Movement in the United States, p. 289).

Engels also called upon socialists to form

"a core of people who understand the movement and its aims"

within the unions, and warned that if socialists

"stand aloof, they will dwindle down into a dogmatic sect and be brushed aside as people who do not understand their own principles" (Letter for Frederick Sorge, Nov. 29, 1886).

Proving Engels prescience, the SLP withdrew from the mass unions, retreated into its ST&LA front group, which shrank from 15,000 workers to 1,500 in the decade of its existence, and cut itself off from the masses of the working class.

De Leon’s foolhardy withdrawal from the mass organs of the proletariat triggered considerable opposition from within party ranks, which led to a wave of splits and expulsions, after which the SLP was reduced to a small isolated group, losing half its membership, including long time and leading members of the organizatiog members of the organization. In 1900, one significant group split to regroup with Eugene Debs and others to form the Socialist Party, which quickly developed into a mass socialist party during the first two decades of the 20th century. The splits and expulsions had reached such epidemic proportions that in 1902, Lucien Sanial and Hugo Vogt, high ranking party leaders who had sponsored De Leon for membership in the SLP in 1890, issued an appeal for an end to "the inquisition in the SLP," and then shortly left the party themselves. Rudolf Katz, an SLPer who left the party at the time of De Leon’s death in 1914, reported that so many comrades had left the organization in such a short period of time

"that De Leon remarked that he had to look at himself in the mirror at least once a day to find out whether he had not gone with the others" (quoted in Reeve, The Life and Times of Daniel De Leon).

Mesmerized by bourgeois democracy, a serious political confusion that will be addressed in the ion that will be addressed in the next installment of this series, De Leon sorely misunderstood how class consciousness develops in the course of class struggle. For him consciousness was measured by means of the political thermometer of elections, and developed pedagogically, one worker at a time, as a voter at the ballot box, not as a collective phenomenon among workers at the point of production in the class struggle.

True, De Leon said he found

"the attitude of workingmen engaged in a bona fide strike…an inspiring one. It is an earnest that slavery will not prevail. The slave alone who will not rise against his master, who will meekly bend his back to the lash…that slave alone is hopeless. But the slave, who…persists despite failures and poverty, in rebelling, there is always hope for" (What Means This Strike?).

But his view of class struggle is erroneous. It sees struggling workers as noble savages, blindly rebelling. However, workers are not the slaves of the ancient world, who could only engage in blind rebellion, a noble act against injustice. In slave society, the slaves did not hold the future of the world in their hands. They were not the key to a society without exploitaey to a society without exploitation and oppression. De Leon may have found the attitude of struggling workers "inspiring" but he did not understand that this struggle was the key to the transformation of society. In the same text, "What Means This Strike?" he developed his views with these words,

"Look at the recent miners’ strike; the men were shot down and the strike was lost; this happened in the very midst of a political campaign and these miners, who could at any election capture the government, or at least, by polling a big vote against capitalism announce their advance towards freedom, are seen to turn right around and vote back into power the very class that just trampled them."

What a mass of confusion. First there is the bourgeois conception of the workers gaining control of the capitalist state, a position abandoned by Marx on the basis of the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871. And then, instead of pointing out the necessity for workers to organize and defend themselves, to arm themselves against the state and the pinkertons, to recognize the necessity for class war, De Leon called upon the workers to forsake the class struggle for the terrain of parliamentarism. What De Leon did not understand is t De Leon did not understand is that consciousness is a collective phenomenon. It cannot be measured by what an individual, atomized "citizen" does in a polling booth; it must be judged by what workers do together as a collectivity in confrontation with the bosses and their state. There is a concrete reason why every union bureaucrat knows that if he really wants a sellout contract rammed through, he has to hold a mail ballot ratification vote, where the workers alone in their living rooms will cast their ballots, rather than risk a mass meeting of the workers, where they can influence each other and react collectively to the issues before them.

In the period in which De Leon and the SLP were involved in the IWW, De Leon opposed what he disparagingly called the "bummery" who wanted to engage in direct action against the employers and the state. After the 1908 split between the anarchists and the SLPers in the IWW, the De Leonist controlled splinter-IWW organized one important strike, among silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1912, which gives a glimpse of De Leon’s conception of class struggle. This silk strike of 1912 is not to be confused with the famous struggle of 1913, led by the "bummery" IWW, which made working class history. No, the 1912 strike was doomed by the De rike was doomed by the De Leonist leadership which insisted upon legality and decorum in the course of the struggle. According to a contemporary newspaper report, "’Peaceful means’ is the slogan," meaning that workers could use only peaceful, legalistic forms of struggle under the SLP leadership.

"All forms of disorder and even peaceful picketing are barred. The strike-leaders notified the strikers that if any of them took the law into their hands the union would not help them out of trouble with the police" (St Paul Daily News, March 31, 1912, cited in Foner, History of the Labor Movement in he United States, Vol. 4).

It is precisely in those struggles that De Leon could appreciate only as the noble, blind rebellion of hapless slaves, that class consciousness develops. It is precisely these struggles, especially in decadent capitalism, that can lead quickly to a direct confrontation with the capitalist state, and hold the seeds of decisive class confrontations. Revolutionaries must intervene in these struggles to help generalize the lessons of past struggles, pointing out the need to organize independently of and against the unions, and the necessity for the violent overthrow of the capitalist state. Revolutionaries must not follow the example of De Leon, intervening in these struggles to tell the workers to abandon the class struggle for the ballot box in capitalist elections. In the next installment we will address De Leonism’s total confusion on the question of bourgeois democracy.

– JG

If there were no conjunctural factors pressuring the bourgeoisie to abandon the left in power strategy, neither was there any necessity to resort to an alternation in power to revitalize the democratic mystification. The left has been in power for only eight years, and the Republicans have controlled congress and a majority of state governorships, so there was no monopolizing of political powerolizing of political power for an overly long period of time to put in question the democratic mystification. After all, the right had held power for 12 years under Reagan/Bush, and was removed from office not to revitalize democracy, but rather because of imperialist preoccupations, following Bush’s indecisiveness to intervene in the Balkans and consequent squandering of American imperialist capital built up by the Gulf War in 1991..

Consequently, a Gore victory seemed most sensible for the bourgeoisie. As we noted in Internationalism 114, at the same time, to protect themselves against an "accident" the bourgeoisie installed the younger Bush as the candidate of the Republicans on the right. Despite all the campaign rhetoric, and despite their different party affiliations, both Gore and and Bush adhere to the same, identical faction of the bourgeoisie, with no significant divergences on imperialist policy, and essentially identical positions on all significant domestic policy questions. Whoever won, the bourgeoisie was assured that basically the same orientation on domestic and international policy would be pursued.

The campaign was manipulated to generate interest and enthusiasm in the election, to present it as "close" in order to bolsterlose" in order to bolster participation by largely apathetic electorate, to rejuvenate the electoral mystification. The propaganda stressed over and over that the campaign was too close to call, that every vote would count, etc. etc. The polls portrayed Gore as trailing even until the very eve of the election, prodding working class and liberal voters to come out to the poll to prevent the triumph of the right.

So, what happened?

In large measure the strategy prevailed. Despite being portrayed as trailing in all but one of the national polls by three to five points, Gore won the popular vote, achieving 49% of the vote, a greater percentage than the vastly more popular Clinton received in 1992 or 1996. In fac, Gore received more actual votes than Reagan did in his landslide victories over Carter and Mondale, respectively in 1980 and 1984. The political accident that threw the electoral circus into turmoil was due to two factors 1) the loose cannon actions of the Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, and 2) the fact that for the first time since 1888, indeed for the first time in epoch of capitalist decadence, the results in the popular vote were contradicted by the results in the anachronistic Electoral College, which appeared to give the election victory to the candidate who came in second place.

The Nader Factor

Unlike the Perot campaigns of ’92 and ’96, which were designed to siphon off votes from the Republicans, and facilitate the victory of the left in those elections, the Nader candidacy was not designed to impact the current election. The script called for the Green Party to develop a political presence so that it might 1) prepare play a crucial role in the future as a means to control radicalized workers and petty bourgeois elements, as the crisis deepens and work class discontent becomes more pronounced, In this sense the Nader campaign was designed as a electoral reference point for the Seattle-type anti-globalism movement, as well as traditional environmentalists and "progressives." The immediate goal was to post 5% in the popular vote, which would qualify the Greens for federal campaign funds in the future. However, Nader made a deal with the established environmental groups and the Democratic Party that he would not seek to impact the result of the election, and promised not campaign in states where it might effect the outcome. For whatever reason – some of his critics in the left of the Democratic party and the environmental movement charge egomanial movement charge egomania – Nader reneged on this agreement and concentrated his campaign in key battleground states that were crucial to a Gore victory but were also most receptive to Nader’s "progressive message" attacking big business, . Realizing that Nader was poised to threaten the Gore victory, about two weeks before the election the environmentalists and the left of the Democratic party began an all-out campaign against Nader for reneging on the deal, urging him to withdraw from the election, and calling upon his supporters not to "waste" their votes and help elect Bush. The New York Times joined this campaign, denouncing Nader for "electoral mischief," and tv journalists joined the chorus as well. This campaign was in sharp contrast to the situation with Perot, who never received such criticism and was never asked to withdraw in ’92 and ’96 – precisely because his campaign was designed to effect the election results in the Clinton races..

Even though the bourgeoisie was successful in scaring off more than fifty percent of the people who were supposedly intending to vote for Nader, and achieved a Gore victory in the popular vote, the Green party candidate managed to screw up the electoral college vote on the state level in at least three states: New Hn at least three states: New Hampshire, Oregon and the all important Florida, with its 25 electoral votes. For example, in Florida, where Bush had a 1700 vote popular vote margin on election day (before the first recount which brought him down to 330), Nader got 96,000 votes. While undoubtedly a good number of the voters who cast ballots for Nader were people who were so alienated from the mainstream parties that probably wouldn’t have participated in the election had Nader not been a candidate, if only 3 percent of the 96,000 had voted for Gore, Bush would have been easily defeated on election day.

The anachronistic electoral college

The unforeseen accident that produced a situation in which the electoral vote did not match the popular vote was caused by Nader’s reneging on the deal, and aggravated by the electoral college, an anachronistic, anti-democratic -- even by bourgeois standards – historical relic created in 1787 as a check against "popular passions." In today’s conditions this institution is weighted disproportionately in favor of rural, small population states, and it was these states that Bush won heavily.

The bourgeoisie’s strategy provided protection against arovided protection against an accidental defeat at the polls, but not for a contradictory and indecisive result at the polls. For the American bourgeoisie, no matter how much they pay homage to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers and the constitution they created over 200 years ago, an election in which the guy who lost the election is declared the winner is a tremendous political embarrassment and liability. All the rhetoric about the "will of the people" and "the people decide" rings empty. Despite the fact that the dominant faction of the bourgeoisie could certainly live with either Gore or Bush as president with no problem, each of the candidates, and their entourages, genuinely want to be president, and this has led to never ending political soap opera since election day. All the bickering, posturing and rancor by the two candidates camps is in complete contrast to the normal unifying, mutual support and coming together that normally marks the conclusion an American electoral circuses.

The goal of the current recount, and the legal challenges by the Gore staff is designed not simply to satisfy Gore’s personal ambitions, which are real, but also to produce an election result in Florida so that the final Electoral College results will coincide with the popular vote, though the final outcom vote, though the final outcome is still in doubt. The ruling class is trying to put the best "spin" possible on the current situation, stressing how this election proves that every vote counts, and that the melodrama we are witnessing is a simply a stupendous civics lesson for the American public. But in reality both sides expose the pettiness and corruption of the highly touted American electoral political system, in which each side is shamelessly trying to cheat and manipulate the vote counts in their won favor. Senior "statesmen" in both parties, including former presidents Carter and Ford, are already pushing for a resolution that will somehow salvage the authority and legitimacy of the presidency and American democracy following the settlement of the current stalemate. And indeed the current squabbling in no way threatens the stability of American society – whatever jitters there are on Wall Street have been there for over a year and are not caused by the inconclusive election, the working class is not engaged in open struggle, and the imperialist strategy of American imperialism is not in question. In this sense the so-called "sharp political division" in the American electorate couldn’t come at a better time for the bourgeoisie, even if it is unplanned. While not having the left in power might create certain prob power might create certain problems for the ruling class in terms of justifying overseas military interventions or in potentially provoking oppositional actions by the unions and the Jesse Jackson/Ted Kennedy wing of the Democrats, the situation will not be insurmountable. Once the election is decided the bourgeoisie will try to foster a reconciliation, and a strongly divided Congress and White House will somehow find the statesmanlike wherewithal to rise above partisan divisiveness to continue to attack the standard of living of the working class, and begin to repair the tarnished image of the democratic mystification. --

JG11/18/00

Now that the dust has settled from November's electoral mess, it's business as usual for the American ruling class. The incoming Bush administration will largely continue the same basic policies as the Clinton administration, particularly in regard to American imperialist interests. Already the bourgeoisie is pushing with great success an ideological campaign to cast the recent electoral embarrassment in the most positive light.

The causes of the electoral mess

The inconclusive result in the November election was clearly an unplanned accident for the bourgeoisie. Nothing in the current situation either on the level of the economic crisis, inter-imperialist tensions, or the class struggle, required the bourgeoisie to abandon the strategy of the left in power that had worked so effectively for the past eight years. As pointed out in Internationalism 115, "this strategy permitted the ruling class to use the Clinton administration to maintain a continuous implementation of austerity and the dismantling of the New Deal welfare state, and to intervene frequently and effectively on the military level around the world under the ideological cover of 'humanitarianism,' and to maintain the disorientation of the working class. At the same time the ruling class was able to revamp and strengthen the union apparatus in order to confront future working class struggles." Thus, the best interests of the bourgeoisie would have been served by a Gore victory as a continuation of the left in power strategy. The inability for the ruling class of the world's greatest imperialist power to control the electoral outcome was a great embarrassment, one which European powers did not hesitate to ridicule. This failure was largely attributable to the confluence of two factors: the actions of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, who reneged on a deal with the Democrats not to pursue his campaign in states that might affect the outcome of the election, and the anachronistic Electoral College, which is weighted heavily in favor of sparsely populated rural states, that voted for Bush. The fact that Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes, but was not the winner of the election severely undercut the democratic myth that the "people decide," that the government is a reflection of the "will of the people."

Following the election night impasse, this accident was exacerbated by a tendency for the political situation to spin out of control, as political ambition, and not the best interests of the ruling class became dominant. With 9,000 senior and middle level appointments at stake, the political and legal wrangling was quite unsightly for the bourgeoisie, incidentally exposing for the moment the hypocritical qualities of bourgeois electoral democracy. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration openly lamented this losing sight of the national interest in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which he complained about "the career politicians, congressional aides, party activists and the staffs of partisan think tanks and Washington-based interest groups that have gone ballistic." Reich moaned, "None of them expected an outcome so hair-splittingly close. There was no script for anything like this," and complained that this led to a "naked quest for power in the absence of clear rules" for settling the election (New York Times Dec. 4, 2000).

A popular e-mail parody of the election began circulating throughout internet asking what the media would say if in an African nation, there was a controversial election in which the winning candidate was the son of a previous president, who had previously served as director of the state security forces (CIA), and where the victory was determined by a disputed counting of the ballots in a province governed by a brother of the presidential candidate. Even the Supreme Court, which normally benefits from a mythic ideological portrayal as an exalted, "non-political" branch of government guaranteeing the rule of law in American society, permitted itself to be drawn into the highly charged partisan maneuvering. The Court ruled 5-4 along narrow political lines to stop the recount in Florida and award the election to Bush, a decision tainted by the vested interest of two of the conservative judges in the outcome of the election: Scalia, whose son was a Bush campaign official, and Thomas, whose wife was working as a personnel recruiter for the Bush transition team.

Capitalism unleashes a damage control campaign

As embarrassing as this political loss of control was for the bourgeoisie, the American ruling class was not powerless to protect itself. First, as we pointed out in Internationalism 115, the dominant faction of the ruling class had preventatively protected against serious damage in the event of such an accident by making sure that both major party candidates, Al Gore and George W. Bush, represented the outlook of the same ruling class faction, and that no matter who won essentially the same policies would be implemented. Thus, both Gore, and Bush, a champion of "compassionate conservativism," advocated identical positions on imperialist issues, and very similar positions on domestic policies. In this sense, while there was definitely a loss of political control for the bourgeoisie, it occurred within very proscribed limits and posed no particular threat to political stability. This was not a clash of two rival political factions for control of the capitalist state, but rather a bickering between two members of the same faction.

This enabled the bourgeois media, despite the ridicule emanating from Europe, whose leaders bragged that such a mess could never happen in their parliamentary democracies, to unleash an ideological campaign that emphasized the strength and maturity of American democracy. The ridicule that portrayed the U.S. as little better than a banana republic was refuted by the argument that the electoral stalemate did not lead to violence, that the rule of law would prevail, and ultimately that the system worked. This campaign to salvage the democratic myth, of course, was bolstered by Gore's concession speech after the Supreme Court ruling, which was hailed, even by conservative commentators, as one of the greatest speeches in American political history.

Bush cabinet affirms continuity with Clinton years

The emerging Bush cabinet demonstrates the effectiveness of the bourgeoisie's policy of minimizing the dangers of an electoral accident. Bush's political inexperience and alleged "lightweight" intellectual capacities, are fully compensated for from the very beginning by the role of the new vice president, Dick Cheney, who served under the elder Bush as Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War in 1991, and coordinated the transition team and played a key role in cabinet member selection. So prominent a role has Cheney played that the Economist, and even some American journalists, have quipped that the US is switching to a more European style government, with a largely ceremonial president, and the vice president serving essentially as prime minister (Economist Dec. 23, 2000, and Tom Brokaw, NBC News Jan. 20, 2001).

Bush's cabinet selection clearly demonstrates that his administration does not personify the Republican Party's right, but occupies essentially the same ground as the Clinton-Gore administration. Cabinet members for the most important posts, those dealing with imperialist and economic policy, come from the Republican Party mainstream, what the Economist (Jan. 6, 2001) called the traditional Republican "east coast establishment," not the right of Ronald Reagan. The imperialist policy team members have all served in previous administrations: Secretary of State Colin Powell who previously served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. military and National Security Advisor in the elder Bush's administration; and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who previously held the same post in the Ford administration. Treasury secretary designee Paul O'Neill also served in the Ford regime, as Budget director, and more recently as CEO of Alcoa Aluminum Corporation. As further evidence that his administration is not representative of the Republican right, Bush has gone out of his way to outdo Clinton in making his cabinet the most ethnically diverse in American history. This demonstrates clearly that Bush is not representing the far right of the party, but rather the center of the Republicans. Bush has thrown a bone to the far right by making several controversial appointments to less important posts, especially John Ashcroft as Attorney General, who will serve as a lightning rod for liberal and left opposition, especially on abortion - a social issue that the bourgeoisie purposefully and skillfully exploits to stir up emotions and divert attention from fundamental class questions. In fact, some news commentators have pointed out that the liberal Democrats want Ashcroft in office so they will have someone to attack.

The one error made in cabinet appointments made by the Bush transition team was the initial nomination of Linda Chavez as Secretary of Labor. She was forced to withdraw not, as the media would have us believe, because she had lied to the Republican vetting team and FBI investigators about employing an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper in the early '90s, which was surely just the pretext, but rather because she was too far right for the post. The Labor Department has a key role to play for the government in regard to the class struggle, through its regulation and control of the unions and laws regulating wages and employment. The bourgeoisie still needs to continue its efforts to revitalize the unions, and because of Chavez's opposition to unions, and minimum wage laws, her leadership at Labor would have jeopardized the continued strengthening of the unions, undercut the cozy relationship between the unions and the government of the Clinton years, and risked provoking premature confrontations with them. A more centrist nominee, like Elaine Chao, who was named within 48 hours of Chavez's withdrawal, will assure a more peaceful relationship with the capitalist unions in the immediate future.

The election is over, and after embarrassing itself and momentarily losing control of the political situation, the American bourgeoisie has already recovered, and is repairing whatever damage may have been done. Even if the election outcome appears to contradict the principle that the majority wins, the American population is being serenaded with a lullaby about the rule of law and the legitimacy of the new president. As soon as possible the Bush administration will get down to business, continuing to make the working class bear the brunt of the economic crisis and embarking on military missions to defend America's threatened hegemony in the world arena.

JG.

During the 1990's the bourgeois media portrayed the US economy as an oasis of unlimited prosperity. Today this talk of a never-ending, booming economy is heard no more. The days of the "longest running economic recovery in US history" - as they used to call it - seem now to be gone. The debate now among bourgeois economists is not about the likelihood of a recession, but rather about how bad it will be, whether there will be a hard landing or a soft one. There are even some so-called pessimistic economists who say that there is already a recession, particularly in the manufacturing sector, the central industry of the economy.

An economy gone sour

Certainly there is not much to brag about in the present US economic situation. The official figures themselves can't hide an increasing deterioration of the economic indicators that the dominant class uses to measure the health of its system. For instance there is a virtual collapse of economic growth, from about 7% annual rate in the last half of 1999 to a 1.8% annual rate in the last six months of 2000. In the fourth quarter of last year, the rate slowed to a meager 1.4 percent, the lowest since the second quarter of 1995. So far for 2001, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan estimates that economic growth has declined to near zero. For its part, Wall Street, the 1990's miracle machine that produced riches out of thin air is lately looking quite humble. The same "analysts" that peddled the virtues of the stock market before are now referring to last year's plunge in technology and Internet stocks as "a bubble that burst." It is quite symbolic that the big losers of this explosion are the infamous "dot-coms," the Internet companies that were supposed to epitomize the bright future of the "new economy," that according to the fashionable mumbo jumbo of the bourgeoisie characterizes today's capitalism. For the last year these companies, many of which were an aberration, never turning out profit, have been going belly up one after the other, making the myth of a healthy American economy collapse like a house of cards.

The reality is that - as we have often insisted in the pages of Internationalism - the US "booming economy" has been from start to finish a sick organism, bred by an explosion of private debt, growing commercial deficits and a tremendous wave of speculation on the stock market, which helped sustain growth and created a façade of general prosperity.

As bad as the situation of the US economy is, the dominant class is still not calling it a recession. According to its definition, a recession will only start after two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. The truth of the matter is that official recession, or not, the working class is already suffering - like always, bearing the brunt of the economic troubles of the bourgeoisie. On the job front it is a blood bath. January's layoffs -142,208- are the highest in 8 years, rising 6.4 percent over December's 133,713 job cuts. And these jobs lost are not MacDonald's or busboy jobs, but positions in sectors where, on average, workers can make a living salary. For instance in January the auto sector layoffs reached 34,959, while the telecoms, E-commerce and computer companies accounted for 44,851, about 32% of the total.

At the command of the state, the economic witch doctors of the bourgeoisie are hurriedly trying to breathe some life into the ailing economy. The Federal Reserve is busy playing its monetary games, dropping another ½ percent of its benchmark short-term interest rate at the end of January, on top of the half percent already cut at a few weeks before. The engineering of a reduction of a full percentage point in less than a month by the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan, who one bourgeois commentator put it, "never before…. moved this fast to rescue the economy from a slide," bears testimony to the worrisome situation. For his part, the new president, George W. Bush, is pushing for a tax cut, which will supposedly be central in jump-starting the moribund economy.

However, the bourgeoisie doesn't seem to be very optimistic about the immediate impact of either its monetary or fiscal policy in preventing the downward economic slide. The bourgeois analysts themselves are recognizing that the lowering of interest rates are at best encouraging people to play the stock market again, while the big banks, overburdened already by bad debts, are for the moment unwilling to open wide a flow of money that very likely will never be paid back. The irony of the situation is that in order to bring back some semblance of prosperity, the bourgeoisie has had to resort to a mechanism that the Federal Reserve had already found unsustainable and was trying to curtail when it started raising interest rates at the end of the 90's. Thus, faced with the present convulsions and the perspective that things will get worse rather than better, the bourgeoisie again resorts to a policy that will foster renewed speculation. Nor is there much enthusiasm for tax cuts among the bourgeoisie either. Some are arguing that it needs to be retroactive to have any impact in the slowing economy. Probably the real reason of this lack of enthusiasm is the fact that they know that, given the present economic troubles, the projected budget surpluses for years to come - the basis for the proposed tax cuts - may now never materialize at all. Of course the working class doesn't have much to be enthusiastic about in this tax cuts - the average 8 dollars more in their weekly paycheck they would get is nothing to cheer up about.

Thirty years of economic crisis

Nonetheless, despite the fact that the dominant class is more or less openly acknowledging that something has gone wrong with its economy and that things will only get worse, it is still promoting its mystifying way of looking at the world, only telling half truths. It wants us to believe that its present troubles are nothing but a normal phase in capitalism's economic cycle, after which a new period of prosperity will follow, and everything will continue as before. Nothing could be farther from reality. What present bourgeois economists call recessions are not the classical economic crises suffered by capitalism during the 19th century. Then, each cyclical decline of the economy was followed, through the expansion of the world market, by a new expansion of production reaching higher levels than the previous period. Today this way out is not possible. The world market been saturated since the beginning of the 20th century, opening up the historical crisis of capitalism. The youthful periodical crises of the bourgeois system of production have been transformed into a chronic economic crisis of a historically decadent system, which has nothing to offered humanity by cycles of crisis, wars, and reconstruction.

Since the end of the 1960's, following the "economic boom" of the period of reconstruction after the devastation brought about by the barbarism of WW II, capitalism as a whole has been confronted by an ever deepening worldwide open economic crisis, to which the bourgeoisie can only offer artificial solutions. Particularly the lack of solvent markets, in which it would be possible to realize the surplus value produced, has led the bourgeoisie to the creation of fictitious markets through the permanent abuse of credit. Thus for the last three decades, each "recovery," following a so called "recession' has been made possible only by an increasing growth in public and private debt. The result is that each one of the phases of convulsions has meant a more violent fall into the abyss, while each moment of recovery softens the fall. Nevertheless, both are situated in a dynamic of progressive collapse.

In this context the present troubles of the US economy are nothing but a moment in the general economic crisis that the whole system of capitalism has been confronted with for the last three decades. The years of "unprecedented" recovery after the world recession of the early 90's, which we often heard about, was mainly reduced to the US, bearing witness to the depth of the world crisis of capitalism. The second largest economy of the world, Japan, has not been able to come out of recession, while the countries of Western Europe - the other centers of capitalism - at best have shown only very anemic rates of growth over the past decade.

At the end of the 90's the US bourgeoisie was able to avoid the cataclysm of the system threatened by the collapse of the economies of South East Asia in 1997-98 thanks only to a historically unprecedented speculative bubble. Investments in the stock market were turned into the only profitable investment. Families and businesses in the US were pulled into the aberrant mechanism of taking out debt in order to speculate on the stock market and using the stocks acquired as pledges in order to frantically buy goods and services. The "wealth effect," or, more accurately, the dilution of wealth produced by this speculative bubble, has been in fact the real motor behind the famous "unprecedented" longest recovery of the US economy.

As we said above, the bourgeoisie itself had already recognized even before the present troubles of the economy became apparent, that it could not go on forever sustaining growth through the speculative mechanism and was trying to prick the speculative bubble and "cool" down the economy. This attempt to engineer a soft landing of the economy, judging by the sudden change in monetary polices by the Federal Reserve at the beginning of this year, has not been totally successful.

Paralysis of growth, massive layoffs, credit crunch, rising inflation are all indicators of the beginning of a new convulsion of the US economy which will without doubt have a tremendous effect on a world capitalism already very much weakened by thirty years of open economic crisis.

During the 90's, while the bourgeoisie was celebrating the wonders of the "booming economy," workers experienced salary freezes, worsening working conditions, the dismantling of the welfare state - in short, an all out austerity attack, sugar-coated with the promise that they eventually would get their piece of the pie. Yet the only thing that workers saw rising was their debts and the hours that they have to work to keep up with the deterioration of the purchasing power of their salary being eaten up by chronic inflation. Now they are told that the good times are off for a while. Now they will be asked to continue tightening their belts and bear the austerity made necessary by the bad phase of "business cycle." More than ever the working class needs to give its own solution to the crisis of capitalism: fight on its own terrain against the attacks of the system, overthrow capitalism and all its bourgeoisie institutions.

Eduardo Smith.

The 11-day stand-off between American and Chinese imperialism in April was the first international crisis weathered by the new Bush administration, and it gave a glimpse of what lies ahead for American imperialism. The crisis with China should not be seen as a surprise or anomaly. Just as the election of George Bush has set off alarms bells in European capitals (see Internationalism 116), so too the tensions with the Chinese bourgeoisie have been exacerbated, as both the Chinese and American regimes are feeling each other out now that a new foreign policy team is in place in the US. For the Chinese, the central foreign policy concerns at this juncture include continuation of the strategic partnership in Asia between the US and China brokered during the Clinton years, attempts to influence the US not to sell sophisticated weaponry to Taiwan, continued integration of China into the World Trade Organization, and maintenance of most favored nation trade status with the US. Once the accidental collision of the American spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter, it was inevitable that the Chinese would seek to test the mettle of the new Bush administration foreign policy team.

As readers are aware, a routine American reconnaissance flight was buzzed by Chinese fighter jets over international waters off the Chinese coast. One of the Chinese jets accidentally collided with the propeller driven spy plane, sending the Chinese pilot to his death. The crippled American plane, crammed with sophisticated surveillance technology and manned by a crew of 24, made an emergency landing in Chinese territory on Hainan island. The resulting squabble was over release of the American crew members and return of the plane, which is still in Chinese hands, as the Chinese demanded a formal apology from the US and an end to surveillance flights.

The reconnaissance flights serve several functions for American imperialism. Loaded with sophisticated intelligence gathering technology, the spy planes compliment American spy satellites already monitoring military movements around the world, and in China. The flights also serve a more prosaic imperialist function - that of reminding the Chinese, with their pretensions of dominant status in Asia, that the US, the world’s only remaining superpower, can do whatever it wants to anywhere in the world, including in China’s own backyard. American imperialism itself would never tolerate reconnaissance flights by another power so close to its national territory, regardless of whether they were technically flown over international waters. But the Chinese are routinely forced to acknowledge their powerlessness against American assertiveness, emphasizing that the US is top dog in the so-called strategic partnership. In this sense, the rift that has surfaced should not be viewed as totally new, as a break with the prevailing situation in the Clinton years. The provocative flights were not begun by Bush, but are a continuation of Clinton policy. The vehement Chinese objections, and interception and harassment of the flights by Chinese fighters, began during the Clinton years. The accident, while unplanned, fanned the flames of the uneasy relationship between China and the US.

The Collapse of the Imperialist Blocs and the Pressure on US Hegemony

American assertiveness is particularly important because of the chaotic situation on the international level since the collapse of the two international military blocs which were formed at the end of World War II, and the disappearance of the resulting bloc discipline that kept secondary and tertiary powers in line. The demands of the larger bloc-level confrontation forced the lesser powers to subordinate their own imperialist appetites to the larger strategic goals of the bloc, and especially of the bloc leader. Though neither the European or Asian powers can hold a candle to American military power today, America’s former allies and antagonists alike are increasingly playing their own imperialist cards, trying to exert their own imperialist appetites around the world, or on a regional basis. From the US perspective, a key element in its strategy is to prevent any potential rivals to assert themselves, even on a regional level, in a way that might endanger American hegemony.

The US first made its initial overtures to the Chinese government during the Nixon Administration, at the height of the cold war. Nixon having been for so long an anti-Communist poster boy was probably the ideal American president to push for rapprochement with the Chinese. A left/liberal member of the Democratic Party would have been lambasted as an “appeaser” or dupe for such a move. But American imperialism recognized that not only was China a major player in the Far East, but its shift toward alliance with the US would exert tremendous pressure on Russian imperialism, which could not face confrontation with the US bloc on both western and eastern fronts. Following the collapse of the two-bloc system, and the emergence of an “every man for himself” tendency on the imperialist level, the US-Chinese relationship was up for grabs. While the opening of Chinese markets to American industry, providing cheap labor and a wider market for American goods, was a welcomed development in the 1990s for the US, the Chinese ruling clique’s belief in their “manifest destiny” to be the dominant regional power in the Far East was counter to American policy which aimed at “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role…”(Defense Planning Guidance document, 1992).

During the later part of the 1990s there were serious divergences within the American bourgeoisie on the strategic orientation for the Far East. The drama played out in the Clinton scandals and impeachment process were just a reflection of this behind-the-scenes effort by the right to block the Clinton administration from playing the China card and adopting a policy of a strategic partnership with China in the far east. Opponents of the alliance with China argued that China was too politically and socially unstable to be a reliable ally, and instead preferred a strategy that emphasized Japan as the key US ally in the region,. However the dominant faction of the bourgeoisie at the time was united behind the pro-China policy, and the right went down to political defeat on this question.

The Continuity of US Imperialist Policy

This continuing unity within the dominant faction of the bourgeoisie, including the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties, was demonstrated by full support to the measured response of the Bush administration. While many on the right were seething at the mild mannered response by the Bush administration in April, most bit their tongues and declined to voice their criticism, except for Weekly Standard editor William Kristol who denounced the Bush administration policy as a national disgrace, and insisted on the imposition of economic sanctions, and sending US warships into waters off the Chinese coast, and other warlike measures - all of which was intended to force Bush to de facto rescind the strategic partnership relationship.

Nonetheless, the response by American imperialism demonstrated a complete continuity with the Clinton policy orientation. Despite the fact that during the presidential campaign, Bush appeared to back away from the phrase “strategic partnership” in regard to China and spoke of that country as “a rival,” the American response during the crisis was very mild and measured. The hawks in the administration, like Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were confined to a backbench, and not permitted to speak in public. Despite the militant posturing by the Chinese military, refusing to release either the 24 US crew members or the plane, and steadfastly demanding a US apology and an end to the reconnaissance flights, it was clear that the US concern was to come out of the crisis without inflicting long term damage to the US-China relationship. Secretary of State Colin Powell orchestrated a low expectation diplomatic offensive, eventually managing to draft a statement that expressed great regrets and said the US was very sorry for violating Chinese airspace by making the emergency landing without actually making an apology, giving both sides opportunity to declare victory.

The continuity in policy was acknowledged by the New York Times which reported, “the new president sounded at moments like Mr. Clinton, talking about the risks to the broad, if ambiguous, relationship between the world’s most powerful nation and its most populous one.” President Bush, in his statement following release of the crew, reiterated the Clinton policy in these words, “Both the United States and China must make a determined choice to have productive relations - to have a productive relationship that will contribute to a more secure, more prosperous and more peaceful world."

This will not be the last tense confrontation between American and Chinese imperialism. American strategy designed to maintain US hegemony and prevent the rise of rival powers, both on a global and regional level, will inevitably put strains on the tense US China partnership. Factions within the bourgeoisies in each country, in the military in China, and on the right in the US, will continue to seize on these unavoidable conflicts to undermine the strategic relationship. But the dominant factions in both countries will not lightly abandon the current imperialist orientation.

EF & JG, 15/05/01

For years the media painted a rosy picture of the state of the American economy. Today all the hype about never-ending prosperity seems a distant memory. The myth of the “new economy” and the “end of the business cycle” has unraveled. The media is full of stories bemoaning the deteriorating economic situation. Officially the country isn’t yet in recession, although there are few economists that hold fast to this view. Elsewhere around the world, the situation is not much better with increasing signs that world capitalism is heading towards a new global, open recession. The situation is actually a lot worse than they would want us to believe.

A worldwide crisis

Capitalism has been in open economic crisis for over 30 years, going through a series of more and more devastating open recessions followed by short-lived recoveries. The devastating effects of this ever-worsening crisis on humanity as a whole are immeasurable. Under its blows what was called the third world collapsed during the 1970a and early 1980s. Then came the collapse of the so-called socialist countries -actually nothing more than a particular form of state capitalist systems - at the end of 1980s and the beginning of 1990s. Contrary to the bourgeoisie propaganda that relentlessly extolled the wonders of capitalism, the last decade has seen the world economy to sink even more into the abyss. The most powerful economies in the world, in the heart of capitalism, have been finding it increasingly difficult to push the worse effects of the crisis onto the peripheral countries of the system. In fact, the so-called recovery following the recession of 91-92 was the weakest since the beginning of the open economic crisis at the end of the 1960s. With the exception of the US, the other powerful capitalist countries have not been able to point to much to back up their claims of prosperity. Western Europe has had at best anemic rates of growth, while Japan has not been able to revive its economy for the last ten years.

Currently, with Japan’s continuing economic decline, and the US plunge into a new recession, world capitalism is heading towards new convulsions, and we are already seeing their first manifestations: the Asian economies, still suffering after the 97-98 financial crisis, are reeling under the impact of the troubles in the US and Japan, Europe is slowing down, while in Latin America, the three most important economies -Argentina, Brazil and Mexico - are facing increasing difficulties. Of these countries, Argentina is already officially in recession, while Brazil seems headed towards a new round of hyperinflation. Since January 1, the Brazilian currency, the real, has fallen 10 percent. Mexico, with 89 percent of its exports headed for the US, is uniquely placed to be affected by American economic troubles.

The end of the illusions in the US

We have frequently published articles in Internationalism unmasking the myth of a healthy American economy during the decade of the 1990s. We have shown that what the bourgeoisie portrayed as the “longest running recovery in history” after the 1991-92 recession, was based on a sickly growth that in the long run was bound to lead the economy into new convulsions. To start with, the American bourgeoisie was able to overcome the worst effects of 1991-92 recession thanks to an aggressive monetary expansionist policy leading the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates 33 times between 1991 and 1992. This cheap money was the secret of the economic growth fueled by the so-called thecnological revolutions, which together with a massive wave of lay-offs and permanent insecurity of employment, gave the US an important competitive advantage over its commercial rivals.

This growth began to lose its momentum after 1995 with successive financial crises that culminated in the “Asian flu” of 1997-98 and stagnated between 1996 -98. At that time the American bourgeoisie was able to avoid a new fall into open recession by resorting to an historically unprecedented speculative bubble. Playing in the casino of the stock market was turned into the “only profitable investment.” What is worse this investment was not directed towards classical industrial enterprises, but towards the infamous dot-coms, most of which never turned a profit. Families and businesses in America were pulled into the aberrant mechanism of taking out debt in order to speculate on the stock market and using the acquired stocks as collateral to fuel domestic consumption. This form of investment ruined businesses and led to a 300% rise in the level of debt between 1997 -99. Following a period of positive savings levels for 53 years, since 1996 savings levels have been negative. At the same time, the American balance of payments suffered a spectacular degradation, going from a deficit of -2,5% of GDP in 1998 to -4,7% by the end of 2000.

The speculative financial bubble finally burst last year, sending the economy into a tailspin, the first consequences of which we are seeing today. Economic growth has gone from a 7% annual rate in the last half of 1999 to a 1.8% annual rate in last six months of 2000. For the current year, according to the economic indicators that the bourgeoisie uses to measure the performance of its economy, the economic decline continues: GDP is running near zero, industrial production has declined for six months in a row, company bankruptcies are setting records, profits are falling… For its part the stock market continues feeling the pain of the burst speculative bubble. Billions of dollars of paper wealth had been wiped from the economy. And yet, for most analysts the stock market still remains overvalued, presaging that the worst is still to come. The illusion of easy riches that drove millions into the frenzied speculation on Wall Street has for many turned into a nightmare. Many have lost their life savings, others are overburdened with debts contracted in the hope of striking it rich in the so-called ‘new economy.” Some former stock-option millionaires are finding their once lucrative stock options worthless after plunges in their stock prices.

As usual the working class is bearing the brunt of capitalism’s economic troubles. Lay offs are at the order of the day in every sector of the economy. In the “new economy” sector itself the job cuts that began last year at the now-disintegrating dot-com firms have widened considerably to include some of the most prominent technology firms, including chip giant Intel Corp. and networker Cisco Systems. Since December the tech industry has shed more than 38,000 jobs, according to government statistics, and thousands more layoffs are expected. The slowdown in the tech industry is symbolic of the collapse of the economy because it has contributed more than one-third of the US economic growth in the last three years. Kodak has just announced a further cut of 3,500 jobs on top of the 23, 000 that that it has eliminated since 1997. Texas Instruments is laying off 2,500, 6 percent of its work force. The Timken Company will cut 1,500 jobs. Experts say all this bad news hasn’t really shown up yet in government statistics, partly because companies have yet to carry out all their planned cutbacks.

The American dominant class is doing its best to manage this new descent into the abyss. The Federal Reserve has started a new aggressive expansionary monetary policy cutting interest rates already three times this year, while tax cuts are being considered by the central government. However after years of the abuse of the drug of credit, the margin of maneuver of the bourgeoisie has been greatly diminished. There is not much enthusiasm being shown by the bourgeois economists themselves about the chances for an immediate economic revival. By their own account, things will get worse rather than better.

From the working class perspective there is only one response to the worsening economic crisis: fight on its own terrain for the defense of its class interests and for the final overthrow of capitalism.

ES, 15/05/01.

Previous instalments in this series have addressed De Leonism’s contradictory legacy to the working class, including both its positive contributions to the workers movement in the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, and its enormous confusions on economic analysis, the class struggle, and the development of class consciousness. This article focuses on De Leonism’s curious confusions on the nature of bourgeois democracy and proletarian revolution.

De Leonism on Bourgeois Democracy: The Ballot as ‘Weapon of Civilization’

Perhaps the most quixotic feature of the De Leonist political legacy is its cluster of bizarre positions on such basic class principles as the nature of parliamentarism, the possibility of overturning capitalist domination through a peaceful, non-violent revolution, the proletariat’s historic tasks in relation to the capitalist state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. De Leonism departs so completely and fundamentally from the acquisitions of Marxism on these issues, it seems almost inexplicable. It is indeed ironic that at the same time that De Leon rejected the possibility of reforms within capitalism (even in the period of capitalist ascendance when durable reforms were actually possible, see Part II of this series in Internationalism # 114), he believed the proletariat could peaceably take over control of the bourgeois state through the use of the ballot, use the bourgeois state for its own purposes, and simply legislate capitalism out of existence. As he put it in “What Means This Strike” in 1898, “The aim of all intelligent class conscious workingmen must be to bring the government under the control of their own class by joining and electing the American wing of the International Socialist Party - the Socialist Labor Party of America.” He warned that “a labor organization must be perfectly clear upon the fact that it cannot reach safety until it has wrenched the government from the clutches of the capitalist class; and that it cannot do that unless it votes, not for Men but for Principles, and unless it votes into power its own class platform and program…”

A strong proponent of American exceptionalism, De Leon argued that peaceful revolution was possible in America, but not in Europe, because the American bourgeoisie were cowardly swindlers who lacked a “feudal” tradition that stressed “valour,” whereas the European bourgeoisie still had heavy feudal influences that emphasized “deeds of valor.” De Leon spoke optimistically of the “ideal so dearly pursued by the Socialist - the peaceful solution of the social question” (Socialist Reconstruction, emphasis in the original). De Leon affirmed that “the political movement bows to the methods of civilized discussion: it gives a chance to the peaceful solution of the great question at issue” (emphasis in the original). And he wrote in glowing terms of the bourgeois ballot: “The ballot is a weapon of civilization; the ballot is a weapon that no revolutionary movement of our times may ignore except at its own peril; the Socialist ballot is the emblem of the right”( Socialist Reconstruction, emphasis in original).

Now on one level it is understandable that De Leon might have confusions on bourgeois democracy at the turn of the century. A considerable amount of the clarity developed by Marx and Engels on the nature of the state, on the nature of bourgeois democracy, and the tasks of the proletariat in regard to the state had been completely buried during the period of the Second International. The idea that socialism could be gained peaceably at the ballot box through piecemeal reforms was propagated by the right in the Second International. And while De Leon generally oriented himself in alliance with the Left in the Second International, it is clear that he held certain positions in common with the Right, as on democracy. It wasn’t until around 1910 that efforts were made to again address the Marxist orientation on the state, notably by Pannenkoek. In 1917, three years after De Leon’s death, Lenin systematically reclaimed the theoretical thread, restating Marx and Engels’ insights on the state in State and Revolution. If De Leon’s confusions were at least understandable in the period in which he lived, what is completely ludicrous is for his adherents to maintain in a cult-like fashion the same mistakes a hundred years later, despite all the historical examples that refute the confusions they are wedded to.

For example even today his adherents still echo the naive belief in bourgeois democracy and revolution at the ballot box, still believe that the revolution will come when the socialists win a majority in Congress and adopt a resolution to abolish the government and turn power over to the Socialist Industrial Unions. The Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and the New Unionist Party (NUP) continue to run candidates in capitalist elections. What’s more they even go so far as to twist Marx and Engels to justify their confusions. For example, NUP leader Jeff Miller has insisted that De Leonism’s position on bourgeois democracy is derived from Marx and Engels’ assertion in the Communist Manifesto that “the first task of the proletarian struggle ‘is to win the battle of democracy,’ that bourgeois democracy is not literally a dictatorship, and that participation in capitalist elections is necessary for the legitimization of socialism

Marxism and Bourgeois Democracy

De Leon’s belief that American capitalist democracy was less repressive than its European counterparts notwithstanding, the history of the class struggle has amply proven that whatever particular juridical form the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie takes in any country on earth, it will never hesitate to vent its terror on the working class, unless checked by the possibility of organized defensive violence by the workers. Whatever the basis for De Leon’s profound fascination with feudal valour, the class struggle is not a gentlemen’s duel, but a struggle between two totally antithetical social classes in which the control of society and the future of humanity is at stake. To tell the American working class that their capitalist adversaries would relinquish their domination of society and shrink from violence completely contradicts the experience of the class struggle in America. In the railroad strike of 1877, at Haymarket, at Homestead, and Ludlow, the American ruling class demonstrated beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt that it is ruthless, treacherous, and vicious in its willingness to unleash the most unspeakable violence against workers and their families. Maybe they didn’t do the dirty work themselves, maybe they used hired goons, pinktertons, cops, and soldiers to do their dirty work, but there is no doubt that even in De Leon’s own lifetime the American capitalist class revealed itself as a pernicious and deadly adversary

While it is true that in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels originally believed that the proletariat could take hold of the bourgeois state and wield it for its own purposes, the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871 convinced Marx and Engels of the error of this view. In his analysis of the lessons of the Paris Commune, written for the First International, Marx recognized that this momentous experience in the workers movement demonstrated that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes,” but rather had to destroy it. The incredible claim that revolution at the ballot box is derived from the Communist Manifesto is just a wilful misinterpretation of what Marx said and meant in this historic text. The NUP’s Miller quotes Marx as saying the workers must “win the battle of democracy,” as if he meant getting elected to office. However, Marx made it clear in the Manifesto that by winning the battle of democracy he meant that the proletariat had to seize power by violent revolution. The full sentence that Miller quoted from, reads “We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” Seven pages earlier we find what Marx was referring to when said “we have seen above.” In this passage he explained how the working class would raise itself to the position of ruling class. “In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.” As we wrote in Internationalism No. 88, “how De Leonism manages to convert these remarks into a view of a peaceful transition to socialism through victory at the ballot box in bourgeois democracy is a mystery.”

The necessity for violent revolution was restated by Engels in Anti-Duhring: “That force, however, plays another role in history, a revolutionary role; that in the words of Marx it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with the new, that it is the instrument by the aid of which social development forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized, political form - of this there is not a word in Herr Duhring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of the economic system of exploitation…”

The De Leonist view, expressed by Miller, that bourgeois democracy is not a class dictatorship over the working class, constitutes yet another departure from the basic theoretical acquisitions of Marxism. As early as the Manifesto, Marx made clear that the bourgeoisie wages a class dictatorship over the workers. And in 1891, Engels wrote, “And people think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of the belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another; and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy…” (Introduction - Civil War in France).

The imbecile claim that workers enjoy the same political rights as capitalists is enough to leave one speechless. Rather than utilizing the Marxist method to see beyond the superficial, to read between the lines in order to understand material social processes, De Leonism accepts at face value capitalism’s own propaganda, and fails to take into account the manipulative process by which the ruling class determines the nominees for high office, and how the media is utilized to assure desired electoral outcomes. Furthermore, as we noted in a previous article, “the idea that the proletarian revolution must seek legitimization from the political/juridical process of the enemy class fails to understand that a revolution overturns and crushes those processes; to the revolutionary proletariat there is nothing legitimate about capitalism’s rule” (Internationalism No.104).

De Leonism seems simply incapable of grasping the nature of the Marxist method, of understanding the material conditions under which the proletariat wages its struggle against the bourgeoisie, and develops forms of struggle that correspond to these conditions. For example, as we have argued in previous instalments in this series (see Internationalism No. 115), in the ascendant phase of capitalism, when the system was still an historically progressive mode of production, capable of promoting the further development of productive forces, it was indeed possible for the proletariat to wrest durable reforms from the bourgeoisie in the course of struggle. These conditions made it possible for the workers movement to participate in capitalist elections, as part of the struggle to gain reforms in an epoch when material conditions did not yet favor the posing of proletarian revolution, and in certain circumstances to enter into temporary alliances with certain factions of the bourgeoisie. The changed conditions under which the proletariat struggles against its class enemy in the period of capitalist decadence, beginning around the time of the First World War, in which durable reforms are no longer possible, meant that old forms of struggle (e.g., participation in bourgeois elections) were no longer appropriate. The De Leonists know only that Marx said workers could participate in elections in the 19th century, so therefore they must always do this, even at the beginning of the 21st century, when the conditions under which the class struggles have changed so fundamentally from the late 19th century.

De Leonism’s Rejection of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

De Leonism’s adulation of bourgeois democracy and the belief in peaceful revolution has been accompanied historically by a rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Marx’s use of the term being dismissed as a “mistake.” Yet the writings of Marx and Engels are replete not only with references to the dictatorship of the proletariat as the form of working class rule in the period of transition between capitalism and communism in such key works as The Civil War in France and The Critique of the Gotha Programme , but with an insistence that the conception of the dictatorship is one of Marx’s key, unique contributions to the theoretical arsenal of the working class. The importance that Marx placed on the conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat is demonstrated in this excerpt from correspondence with Weydemeyer, dated Mar 5, 1852: “And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

In rejecting the dictatorship of the proletariat, the De Leonists deny the necessity of a period of transition between capitalism and communism, and, like the anarchists, believe that the state will disappear overnight. In the case of De Leonism the disappearance of the state will apparently be achieved by a resolution to disband the state and turn society over to the Socialist Industrial Unions.

In his 1891 introduction to republication of the Civil War in France Engels noted that Marx’s text on the Paris Commune, was “a most important work of scientific communism, in which the main Marxist tenets in relation to the class struggle, the State, revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat were further elaborated on the basis of the experience of the Paris Commune…In this work Marx corroborated and further developed his idea on the necessity for the proletariat to break up the bourgeois state machine, set forth in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx drew the conclusion that the proletariat should break it up and supersede it by a state of the Paris Commune type. Marx’s conclusion on a new, Paris Commune type of state as the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat constitutes the essence of his new contribution to revolutionary theory.” (The Civil War in France).

We quote here so heavily from Marx and Engels, not because their texts are biblical scripture, infallible for all time. Quite the contrary, Marx and Engels’ analysis and writings are subject to the crucible of the class struggle. Marx and Engels themselves engaged in this process of measuring theoretical propositions against the concrete experience of the class struggle, as they did in assessing the question of whether workers should capture and use the bourgeois state, or smash it. In theoretical reassessment of the experiences of the class struggle, it is possible to reach the conclusion that on this or that point Marx and Engels were wrong in their analysis. But the approach of the Marxist method would be to identify those positions that were mistaken and had to be discarded, and provide argumentation to prove that they were wrong. However, this is not the method of De Leonism, which, in cult-like fashion maintains the blunders of its founder, and then refuses to acknowledge the contradiction between their dogma and the theoretical legacy of the Marxist movement, and worse, falsifies history to insist that their positions are consistent with Marxism. This type of political dishonesty stands as a total contradiction to the spirit of the Marxist method.

These basic theoretical propositions are not controversial in the revolutionary workers movement, and haven’t been for decades:

• bourgeoisie democracy is a form of class dictatorship over the working class

• workers can no longer advance their interests in parliament

• proletarian revolution requires the violent overthrow of the capitalist state

• proletarian revolution cannot use the capitalist state for its own purposes, but must destroy it

• the workers revolution must establish its own class dictatorship, the dictatorship of the proletariat, to rule society in the period of transition between capitalism and communism the workers councils are the historically discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat

Yet all these fundamental Marxist positions are completely alien to the De Leonist current, condemning this political milieu to an unsavory mish mash of semi-anarchist and naïve political perspectives, and rendering them incapable of understanding the historic tasks of the revolutionary workers movement.

JG, 15/05/01

The bourgeois media can't hide the fact that around the world capitalism's economy continues to deteriorate. From the powerful economies of North America, Japan and Western Europe to the peripheral countries of the system, all the economic indicators used by the dominant class to measure the performance of its economy are showing signs of new levels of degradation of the world capitalist economy.

A World wide crisis

The media, in an effort to downplay the gravity of the situation, does not talk yet of world recession. Instead it prefers to use the euphemism of economic "slowdown," supporting this "thesis" by citing the still positive growth rates of the major capitalist economies. For the bourgeoisie, a recession only starts after two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. But even by this criterion Japan -- the second biggest economy in the world after the US-- has been in recession for the last ten years! However this way of measuring the health of the system is self-deceiving. What the bourgeoisie calls recessions, or the downturn of the "business cycle," are only particular aggravating moments in an overall dynamic of an ever more catastrophic permanent economic crisis. In fact world capitalism is anything but healthy. Since the beginning of the 20th century this system has become a hindrance in the development of humanity, dragging in its decadence the whole of society into an increasing spiral of barbarism and social degradation. Two imperialist world wars and uncountable "localized" conflicts; the obliteration of invaluable material wealth produced by the work of past generations; dozens of millions of lives (160 millions by some accounts!) sacrificed in the bloody confrontations between imperialist gangsters; an ever growing spread of misery throughout the planet; an ever growing poisoning of the environment -- this is the real face of capitalism, one that is far removed from the rosy picture preached by its interested defenders. In fact the very continuation of capitalism's relations of production is a menace to the survival of the human species.

When the Stalinist state capitalist regimes collapsed at the beginning of the nineties, the bourgeoisie announced the dawning of a new era of "peace and prosperity" of world capitalism. Then came the Gulf war with its dazzling array of sophisticated technologies at the service of massive destruction, and the collapse of the economic "models"of Japan and the so-called tigers and dragons. In fact, today, the pompous celebration of the victory of capitalism over "communism," almost looks like a bad joke. The irony of history is that it was the former US president, Mr. Bush senior, who promised "peace and prosperity," while today it is Mr. Bush, the son, who is presiding over the most expensive military build up since the Regan administration -- the "son of star war program-- and a new aggravation of the economic crisis, after the end of the happy days of the "booming economy" of the nineties.

A new recession

In the pages of Internationalism we have often exposed the reality of the economic crisis behind the phony bourgeoisie propaganda about a supposed "healthy booming economy." In fact, during the nineties, while the bourgeoisie was singing songs of praise for the "longest economic recovery" in US history, world capitalism continued to sink deeper into the insurmountable crisis that opened up at the end of the sixties. In the US, despite the talk of "prosperity", the working class has been showered with incessant attacks on its working and living conditions, belying the self-complacent propaganda of the dominant class. Salary freezes, layoffs, job insecurity, the raising of the retirement age, the dismantling of social benefits of the "welfare state," this was how workers experienced the "new economy" of the nineties. In fact even the Democratic Clinton administration organized an all out austerity program, dressed up in left wing clothes to better make workers accept it. The reality was that the "new economy," based on the Internet and new communications technology was a big bluff. As we have shown before, the US economic growth in the nineties had nothing to do with a normal rise in production based on the economic expansion of a healthy system. In fact the US economy, as the rest of the world capitalist economy, continued to plug along during that decade only by piling up even more money on the mountain of debt accumulated during the two previous decades --a debt which can't possibly ever be repaid. The US growth was specifically fueled from the mid-nineties on by boosting private consumption and an unbelievable stock market speculation which saw the debt of private individuals and companies reach dazzling levels.

Today, even the same bourgeois economists who just a few years back hailed US economic performance, now acknowledge that the US economic bubble has finally burst. The stock market has lost billions of dollars of paper money, most of the Internet companies have gone belly up, the number of companies going bankrupt is on the rise, profits are in decline, and economic growth has stalled. In other words, the economic crisis, that never really went away, is once again experiencing a new tremor in its downward evolution.

Despite its mystifying propaganda about a temporary "slowdown," the ruling class knows the gravity of the situation. This is why the bourgeois politicians are all pushing for all those "anti-recession" economic policies. However, given the bourgeoisie's historical inability to surmount the crisis of its system, the only thing it can do is administer the same remedies to its sick economy that it has been using for the last thirty years. The aggressive expansionist fiscal and monetary policies being pursued by the Bush administration and by the Federal Reserve-the federal tax-cuts and the cuts on interest rates-- are just a rerun of these same measures that the dominant class has used for decades to "manage" the worsening of the crisis. As proven by the history of the last 30 years of economic manipulations, these measures are not a solution to the crisis, but at best simple patches that will in the long run make it even worse.

Attacks against the working class

While the bourgeois economists are busy debating whether or not the world economy is already in recession, the working class is as usual already paying for the worsening of the economic situation. Layoffs are being announced in every branch of industry. In the US "new economy" companies like Intel, Dell, Delphi, Nortel, Cisco, Lucent, Xerox, and Compaq are laying off by the tens of thousands, but so are traditional industries such as General Motors and Coca-Cola. In Europe, layoffs and shop and factory closures have abruptly taken off. Job reductions are hitting major companies and state employees.

In these industrialized countries, the national bourgeoisie is aware of the danger of reaction from a concentrated working class with a strong historical experience of struggle, and so takes a maximum of political precautions to carry out its attacks. In countries where the working class is younger, less experienced, or more dispersed the attacks are far more brutal. Among many other examples, it is clear that the working class will suffer particularly in Argentina and Turkey where the bourgeoisie has already announced the beginning of an "official" recession.

These massive attacks in every country and every branch of industry are dealing a serious blow to the lie of the "healthy economy," and above all to the idea that layoffs in a particular company are exceptional because elsewhere, everything is going fine. The whole international working class is affected, every branch of industry is undergoing redundancies, wage cuts, job insecurity, speedups and longer working hours; a general deterioration in living conditions.

Humanity is faced with a historic logjam. On the one hand, capitalism has nothing to offer but crisis, war and destruction, poverty, and increasing barbarism. On the other, the international working class, the only social force able to offer a perspective of an end to capitalism and the creation of a new society, remains unable to assert this perspective openly. In this situation, capitalist society is decomposing, rotting on its feet. Apart from the wars, the urban violence, the generalized insecurity, the most dramatic consequences threaten humanity's future and its very survival as a result of the destruction of the environment and the proliferation of all kinds of disasters. Only the working class can offer a future for humanity by overthrowing capitalism.

ES, 23/7/01

1. By now everyone throughout the world is well aware of the tragic events that have taken thousands of lives and caused tremendous destruction to the City of New York, the so-called 'capital of the world," and the Pentagon, headquarters of the American military in Washington and symbol of the might of US capitalism. The senseless death of thousands of people (many of them workers), the material destruction, the total disregard for human life, the madness of the people who executed these acts, since they died themselves -- are all expressions of the dead-end of a social system which is each day sinking humanity more and more into a bottomless spiral of barbarism, as it sinks further into decomposition. Never before has the US population experienced a man-made catastrophe of this magnitude on its own territory; war and destruction have always been the fate of "others" --especially in the cases when American imperialism has been the power behind the devastation and obliteration of countries and their populations. Thus, in the wake of these events, there is among the American working class and the population at large a veritable feeling of terror, impotence and desperation, compounded with a feeling of solidarity for the direct victims of these barbaric events. However, what is more and more dominant in the social ambiance today is the cynical manipulation by the dominant class of the situation created by this tragedy to stir up hatred and patriotism, to incite the most base nationalistic feelings in order to unite people behind the State, and thus make the population accept the militarization of society and the sacrifices required by the American imperialist adventures around the world.

2. There is not doubt that the dominant class is having an immediate success on turning this tragedy to its own advantage. The most sickening xenophobia and revengeful bloodthirsty attitudes are been expressed in all sectors of the population. National unity, the identification of the population with the State has not been this great in a generation. There is a great danger of acceleration and escalation of all expressions of social barbarism. In this context the working class -the only social force that can put an end to the present madness of world capitalism-is faced today with enormous responsibilities. It cannot allow itself to be drawn permanently into this ambiance of social of patriotism. It needs to understand the present situation from its own working class perspective.

3. Revolutionaries have always condemned terrorism as foreign to the methods of the working class struggle against capitalism. They have always denounced terrorism - when it is not the product of manipulation of people in high spheres of the state apparatus itself- at best as an act of desperation by strata of society without future, that have nothing positive to offer to society at large, and the working class in particular. In the final analysis terrorist acts do much to reinforce the State, especially its control over society and its repressive apparatus, which the terrorist acts were "supposed" to be attacking in the first place. Terrorist actions against the state have always been used by the dominant class to reinforce its domination over society. On the one hand, the state inevitably acts to expand repression under the pretext of fighting terrorism, thus giving cover to the militarization of society characteristic of decadent capitalism. And, at the ideological level, the state uses the anger, anguish and terror caused by terrorist action as a means to rally the population ideologically around the defense of the national state, relying heavily on its mass media for this purpose. These old lessons are being confirmed by the recent events. If there is one beneficiary from the carnage that has just taken place, it is the American state. First, we are experiencing an increase in militarization of society and repression as we have not seen in our generation without hardly any questioning at all. Secondly basing itself on the feeling of patriotism and national unity stirred around this events, under the banner of "defending civilization" against terrorism the American bourgeoisie is preparing to go to war -in reality not to fight terrorism but to defend its more sordid imperialist interests-and asking from the working class, without shame, the sacrifices necessary for this adventure. Thirdly, in a time of deepening economic crisis and with its accompanying perspective for potential social unrest and class struggle, which had recently caused concern to be expressed by high ranking business leaders about the president's "leadership style," the ruling class has found the perfect excuse to make workers accept their worsening life and working conditions in the name of national unity. The worsening economic recession and the suffering it will bring will now be blamed on the terrorist scourge, not the capitalist system itself.

4. In its drive towards war, the dominant class cynically wants to portray itself as the representative of civilization against barbarism, as a peaceful nation, driven by the best principles of "democracy", "liberty" and many other wonders of capitalism. On the other hand they want the population, and particularly the working class which is the one who will bear the brunt of the sacrifices imposed by the war, to see the "enemy" as barbarians, driven by "evil," "fanaticism" and madness. The working class has nothing to gain by choosing one side against the other. Capitalism is ill-placed to portray itself as the personification of civilization - not after plunging humanity into a century of mass death and destruction which included two world wars, numerous proxy wars which sacrificed the lives of more than 100 million people, an accelerating social decomposition of society and a total denigration of the environment. And in reality it is capitalism itself that breeds and manipulates terrorism. In essence there is not difference between the destruction and killings caused by the terrorist acts of the Islamic fundamentalist groups and states, or the IRA in Ireland, on the one side, and the destruction and obliteration caused by the imperialist adventures of the civilized democracies of the world. They are both a clear statement of the dead end of world capitalism. In this sense the real significance of the tragedy in New York and Washington, touching locations at the center of the world capitalist system, which had up to know been spared the worst effects of capitalism decomposition, is that we are witnessing a qualitative new level in the downward spiral of capitalist society. From now on there won't be any "safe heavens." The centers of capitalism itself will begin to experience the same chaos and madness that has already being suffered for decades by the places in the periphery of the system. 5. The blood-thirsty hypocrisy of the "anti-terrorist" democracies, who are at this very minute preparing for war against poverty stricken Afghanistan for supposedly providing a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and his followers, is revealed by the fact that it was U.S. imperialism and its CIA that trained and financed Bin Laden and the Taliban in their proxy struggle against Russian imperialism in Afghanistan in the late 1970s-80s. Inevitably the real victims of this war against terrorism won't be the terrorists, but the thousands of innocent peasants and poverty stricken people whose deaths will be dismissed with the cliché "collateral damage." These deaths at the hands of western imperialism will only serve as a basis for more terrorism against the metropole countries, further accelerating the descent of humanity into barbarism under the auspices of world capitalism. The workers of the world have no state or country to defend. Against the war cries of our exploiters, against their sordid attempt to distort the genuine drive towards human solidarity into the most despicable nationalist chauvinism, our only interest is to revive the class war against exploitation, and finally to put an end to this so-called "capitalist civilization" that is pushing humanity towards barbarism and the destruction of humanity.

Internationalism

September 16, 2001

U.S. Section of the International Communist Current Post Office Box 288, New York, NY 10018-0288

Previous installments in this series have focused on both the positive aspects of Daniel De Leon's political legacy, and the central political and economic incomprehensions of the De Leonist political tendency. This final article will discuss De Leonism's tragic response to the Russian Revolution and the dire political consequences of this tendency's theoretical shortcomings.

De Leonism and the Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution was the most momentous event in the entire history of working class struggle against capitalism domination, more important even than the Paris Commune in 1871. It occurred at the confluence of tremendous social, economic and political forces at the beginning of the 20th century: the onset of the decadent phase of capitalist development, the global imperialist slaughter of World War I, and the revolutionary proletarian response to the historic choice of war or revolution posed by the global capitalist crisis. Capitalism's entry into its decadent phase meant that the system had completed its historic task of creating a world market, and had ceased to be historically progressive, no longer capable of continuing to foster the dramatic development of the productive forces. Instead it had become what Marx had called a fetter on the further development of the productive forces, and posed the necessity of proletarian revolution to push aside the rotten carcass of decaying capitalism and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat that could preside over the transformation of society to communism. With the completion of the world market, the only way that any nation could expand was at the expense of a rival, increasing imperialist rivalries and leading to the perspective of imperialist war as the means for survival and expansion for the different national capitals. The first world imperialist war was an unprecedented butchery, consuming more than 20 million lives, most of them civilians, sacrificed in the struggle to re-carve the world market.

In this context, the onset of capitalist decadence opened up serious theoretical tasks for the revolutionary workers movement, to understand the significance of the changed conditions of struggle for the working class, and to adjust the strategy and tactics of the workers movement to these dramatically altered circumstances. De Leonism's response to the changed epoch, as we shall see, was woefully inadequate, and completely cut off from the international revolutionary struggle.

Daniel De Leon died in May 1914, less than three months before the outbreak of the imperialist world war and the collapse of the Second International. Thus, his followers in the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) had to respond without direct guidance from their theoretical benefactor to the disgraceful betrayal of the principles of proletarian internationalism by the major social democratic parties. In general, these parties rallied to the support of their respective bourgeoisies and integrated themselves into their state's efforts to mobilize the working class for the imperialist carnage. The SLP responded with a principled defense of proletarian internationalism, but did not mount an energetic intervention within the proletariat on this question.

When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, the De Leonists were initially supportive, as were proletarian activists throughout the world. But their sympathy with Bolshevism was colored by an exaggerated sense of their own self-importance in regard to events in Russia. For example, Boris Reinstein, a former SLP member, who had returned to Russia on his own, had been named head of the Bureau of International Revolutionary Propaganda in Moscow. Despite the fact that Reinstein had previously been in disfavor within the SLP because of his willingness to seek unity with the left of Debs' Socialist Party (SP), his position of responsibility in Moscow was viewed as a tribute to the SLP. In addition, in 1918, reports by John Reed upon his return from Russia about Lenin's purported high regard for De Leon also tended to swell the SLP's pride. According to the SLP's Weekly People, Lenin was "a great admirer of Daniel De Leon, considering him the greatest of modern Socialists-the only one who has added anything to Socialist thought since Marx." Whether Reed's reports were accurately reported or whether Reed purposely exaggerated Lenin's "admiration" of De Leon as a tactic to woo the SLP to support the Russian Revolution and eventually join the Third International, is debatable. Lenin was clearly aware of De Leon and the SLP, and on several occasions warned against its sectarianism, while at the same time he envisioned a possible regroupment of the SLP, or at least elements of the SLP, with the left of the SP to form the Communist Party. It is definitely possible that Lenin considered that De Leon's conception of Socialist Industrial Unions vaguely anticipated the soviets, or workers councils, developed by the proletariat in Russia, as the historically discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is absolutely no way that Lenin could have abided De Leonism's rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat, refusal to recognize the need for a period of transition between capitalism and communism, insistence that the Socialist Industrial Unions concept was superior to the workers councils developed by the proletariat in the actual struggle, and blind faith in bourgeois democracy and revolution at the ballot box.

The SLP quickly soured on the Russian Revolution because it failed to establish a government of Socialist Industrial Unions, and sought to create a centralized revolutionary movement dedicated to the violent overthrow of capitalism in the formation of the Third International in 1919. The SLP conceded that the Third International was launched "for the purpose of promoting working class revolution, and with no thought that it was to serve merely Russian national interests." (SLP Declaration on the Dissolution of the "Third International"). But they believed that Lenin quickly abandoned this Marxian view, "for the 'Third International' was no more a Marxist International than was Bakunin's ill-famed 'International Alliance of Social Democracy.'" The 21 Points, adopted by the Second Congress of the International as the basis for affiliation with the Third International were denounced as "anti-Marxist and idiotic" by the SLP. For the SLP these revolutionary positions were so irrational, so contradictory to their naïve faith in bourgeois democracy and a peaceful overturn of capitalism, that a large portion of the membership doubted the authenticity of the 21 Points, and the decision was made to send observers to the Third Congress to clarify the situation, and correct the International's "mistaken" views on the conditions of struggle for the working class in advanced democracies like the US. The SLP's opposition did not focus on such significant problems as the union question or the national question, but rather on such issues as centralization, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the necessity to prepare for underground activity in the event of capitalist repression, and the need for political intervention in the military. As the following passage from the SLP's 1943 Declaration on the Dissolution of the "Third International" summarizing the SLP's attitude towards the Third International demonstrates, the SLP considered that the "idiocy" of the 21 Points was so transparent, that no counter arguments were necessary: "From Point No. 1 we cite: "The entire propaganda and agitation must bear a genuinely Communistic character and agree with the program and decisions of the Third International. All the press organs of the party must be managed by responsible Communists who have proved their devotion to the cause of the proletariat." "The dictatorship of the proletariat must not be talked about as if it were an ordinary formula learned by heart, but it must be propagated for in such a way as to make its necessity apparent to every plain worker, soldier and peasant through the facts of daily life, which must be systematically watched by our press and fully utilized from day to day."

"Point No. 3 provided: "In nearly every country of Europe and America the class struggle is entering upon the phase of civil war. Under such circumstances the Communists can have no confidence in bourgeois legality. "It is their duty to create everywhere a parallel illegal organization machine which at the decisive moment will be helpful to the party in fulfilling its duty to the revolution. "In all countries where the Communists, because of a state of siege and because of exceptional laws directed against them, are unable to carry on their whole work legally, it is absolutely necessary to combine legal with illegal activities."

"Point No. 4 imposed this insane obligation: "The duty of spreading Communist ideas includes the special obligation to carry on a vigorous and systematic propaganda in the army. Where this agitation is forbidden by laws of exception it is to be carried on illegally. Renunciation of such activities would be the same as treason to revolutionary duty and would be incompatible with membership in the Third International."

"Comments on what has been cited are superfluous."

The SLP's outright rejection of these basic revolutionary principles illustrate how isolated they were from the international struggle. It's almost impossible for revolutionaries today to imagine an objection to the principle that the organizational press had to communicate the programmatic positions of the international movement. While it is true that much of revolutionary Marxism's legacy on the question of democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat had been obscured by the opportunism of the Second International, the De Leonists showed themselves totally unaware of Lenin's State and Revolution, a landmark text which painstakingly reconstructed the views of Marxism on these questions. To read that revolutionists like the De Leonists were scandalized by the admonition not to be sucked in by bourgeois legality, and to be prepared to respond to legal repression, is almost unbelievable. The De Leonist ability to bury its head in the sand like an ostrich, denying the experience of the American proletariat which suffered bloody repression at the hands of the army, the police, the pinkertons, of the Palmer Raids, is unsurpassed in the history of the working class. And to write that the communist responsibility to carry on propagandistic work in the army is an "insane obligation" is itself an expression of political insanity.

American Exceptionalism and De Leonism's Self Proclaimed Superiority to European Socialism

For the SLP only an International based on De Leonist doctrine was acceptable: "the recognition, endorsement, and active support of … revolutionary, industrial unionism should be made a condition for admission in the new International (from the declaration of the SLP National Executive Committee May 1919). The SLP demonstrated both its strong commitment to American exceptionalism and its difficulty to see the international nature of the class struggle by its insistence that ..."the struggle against capitalism must of necessity differ in each country according to the prevailing conditions - social, political, and economic - the choice of these methods must therefore be left to each country. In the United States, for instance, where the Constitution of the land provides a method for its own amendment, the working class will not and should not voluntarily deprive itself of the political weapon, to utilize the working class ballot to proclaim and to propagate the working class RIGHT and to shield the gathering forces of the working class MIGHT on the industrial field." (ibid). The SLP's observers at the Third Congress of the International were absolutely scandalized when their naïve notion of revolution by constitutional amendment and rejection of workers councils in favor Socialist Industrial Unions were scoffed at by the delegates to the Congress. The SLP chose therefore to remain aloof from the international revolutionary movement, never participating in the struggle of the left against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the International.

De Leonism's greatest weakness has not been its collection of confused political positions, but its failure to grasp the Marxist revolutionary method. Revolutionary marxists don't necessarily have a priori answers to all questions confronting the workers movement at any given moment in history. What they do have is a method, the marxist method, which enables them to analyze and comprehend reality in order to change it. It's a method that allows revolutionaries to constantly measure the validity of their analyses against the reality of the class struggle, and to modify, update or revamp that analysis accordingly. The De Leonist movement never came close to mastering this method. Instead it reduced Marxism to a dogma, as laid down by its patron saint, Daniel De Leon, producing a narrow, inwardly turned sect, that cut itself off from the rest of the revolutionary Marxist movement. This isolation was not accidental but rather stemmed from the SLP's American exceptionalism, a mistaken view that held that the specificities of the American situation made the class struggle in the US totally unique, and refused to recognize that the experiences of the workers movement in other countries had any applicability to the class struggle in the US.

Despite its confusions and incomprehensions, the De Leonist movement never suffered from an inferiority complex in regard to European socialism. To the contrary, almost laughably, the De Leonists considered themselves to be far superior to the European Marxists in the Second International. As long-time SLP leader Eric Haas explained in an official party text in 1944, the SLP's superiority corresponded directly to the political and economic supremacy of American capitalism in relation to its European counterpart. According to this rather clumsy, vulgar materialism, "Europe…was far behind America in political and industrial development, and the European Socialist movement, not without some logic, reflected this backwardness…Even foremost European Marxian scholars seemed utterly incapable of understanding the significance of the higher point of vantage enjoyed by the SLP…" So even while the SLP was able to recognize that the Second International regrouped a left comprised of revolutionary Marxists, as well as opportunists and reformists, it had nothing but contempt for the European movement in general. For example, in 1904, a membership referendum narrowly defeated, by a slim margin of 25 votes, a resolution not to send a delegate to the Amsterdam Congress of the Second International. Passage of this resolution, supported by De Leon, would have been tantamount to a withdrawal from the International. It was defeated primarily because many SLPers feared that withdrawal would have been misinterpreted as a repudiation of the "sentiment of internationalism." Had it not been for this sentiment, De Leon said, "I would at previous occasions have moved to save the Party the money, the time and, I must say, the delegate the annoyance of sitting in one of these conventions. Even though De Leon and other SLP delegates intervened with the left against Bernstein and Kautsky in the various debates in the International, the Party's quixotic theoretical snobbery cut it off from being influenced by the left, in the Second International.

This disdain for the international movement and the self-induced estrangement from the international left was reflected in the SLP's inadequate response to the outbreak of the imperialist war in 1914. True, the party maintained a formal adherence to proletarian internationalism, denouncing the war as imperialist and refusing to support it. But its sectarian isolation from the mass movement of the proletariat meant that its intervention was largely ineffectual. Unlike the left of the Socialist Party, or the left within the IWW, who openly denounced the war, advocated strikes against military shipments, and supported the Russian Revolution in 1917, and were arrested and imprisoned for their anti-war agitation, the SLP propaganda was never enough of a threat to risk the rancor of the capitalist repressive apparatus.

Despite the betrayal of the social democratic parties in the central countries of Europe and the consequent collapse of the Second International, an SLP membership referendum rejected a motion to disaffiliate from the Second International, on the grounds that it might be possible to revive the International in the postwar period, and the SLP's "prestige would be enhanced by reason of our tried and tested internationalism "(Haas). So, while the proletariat was butchered in Europe, and the international left gave a concrete example of "tried and tested internationalism" as they struggled to rebuild an international effort to oppose the war and end the barbarism, the SLP was content to wait patiently for the war to end, dreaming wistfully of improvements in its prestige in the postwar period. It was so cut off from the international left that it seemed totally unaware of the Kienthal and Zimmerwald conferences aimed at regrouping anti-war socialists. Neither Kienthal or Zimmerwald are mentioned in Haas's The Socialist Labor Party and the Internationals. It wasn't until 1919, five years after the outbreak of the war and nearly two years after the Russian Revolution, that the SLP decided that the Second International was irredeemable and officially ended its affiliation. But as we have seen sectarian blindness left the De Leonists unable to see the need to regroup with the rest of the revolutionary Marxist left in the midst of an international revolutionary wave.

It is a basic tenet of the workers movement that "proletarian revolutions…. criticize themselves constantly; constantly interrupt themselves in their course; come back to what seems to have been accomplished, in order to start anew; scorn with cruel thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their first attempts…" This basic axiom of the workers movement has proven beyond the comprehension of the De Leonist tendency. Everything De Leon ever said or did is beyond reproach, every half-baked, mistaken idea is sacrosanct, regardless that the entire experience of the working class movement might contradict it. Despite its confusions, De Leonism never crossed the class line. In every imperialist war, perhaps saved by the very political sclerosis that prevents it from self-critiquing its own history, this tendency has always defended a proletarian internationalist position. De Leonism's American exceptionalism and sectarianism cut it off from the international workers movement, and thus left it incapable of drawing the lessons of the class struggle of the entire 20th century. De Leonism never pondered the meaning of capitalist decadence for the class struggle, the nature of the global crisis, the changed conditions for the class struggle, the rise of state capitalism, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the role of the revolutionary party in the development of class consciousness, or any of the other burning issues that were debated and discussed by the communist left throughout the 20th century. For the De Leonists it's as if the 20th century never happened. All the positions that De Leon advocated in 1898 and 1903 are as applicable today as they ever were. De Leon's confusions at the turn of the last century may have been honest errors, but to repeat those same errors a hundred years later at the dawn of the 21st century, and ignore the lessons of working class experience, reduces De Leonism to an anachronistic sect. This is especially tragic because there are genuine militants who are still drawn to De Leonism in part because of its opposition to reformism, its rejection of Stalinism and its peculiar American exceptionalism. But in reality De Leonism offers only the perspective of being mired in a swamp of confusion, and an inability to play any significant role in the difficult struggle of the world working class to confront and overthrow the system of capitalist exploitation and replace it with a society controlled by the working class itself, that will make the creation of a genuine human community in which social need, not the profit motive, will predominate.

Jerry Grevin, 23/7/01.

Against the War Psychosis of Capitalism: The Class War of the Working Class

One of the central characteristics of the political situation over the last thirty some odd years, since the onset of the open economic crisis, has been the fact the bourgeoisie has confronted an undefeated working class that could not be counted on to rally behind the state, and permit itself to be mobilized for the carnage of global imperialist war. In the period prior to the outbreak of World War II the situation was starkly different. The world working class had suffered defeats of historic proportions that had rendered it incapable of resisting capitalism's inevitable drive towards imperialist war in the 1930s. These defeats including the failure of the revolutionary wave that began in Russia in 1917, and the ideological defeats that permitted it to be mobilized behind the state, such anti-fascism.or the physical defeats such as outright repression of the workers movement in Germany. It was these defeats that created a situation in which the working class could be mobilized behind the capitalist state and thereby opened a course towards global imperialist war.

The workers who came of age with the return of the global economic crisis in the late ‘60s had not experienced the same political, ideological and physical defeats as the prior generation and, unlike their fathers, would not be tricked into accepting the level of sacrifice, death and destruction that capitalism sought to inflict. In the U.S. the failure to successfully mobilize the population around the Vietnam War was the first notable example of that capitalism now confronted a proletariat unbent by defeat.

Since the 1960s, the American capitalist media has lamented the existence of what it has called the Vietnam Syndrome, a supposedly mass psychological disorder, in which Americans could not be convinced to accept the sacrifice of a long, protracted war. This problem contributed heavily to the necessity of the U.S. ruling class to rely on proxy wars for the past 30 years to advance its imperialist interests around the globe, supplying and financing its various puppets in smaller wars against its imperialist rivals or their proxies, or, alterenatively, to orchestrate short term military operations carefully designed to risk only minimal casualties, such as in Somalia, Haiti or the Persian Gulf. However, this problem, this so-called Vietnam syndrome, this resistance to being mobilized behind the state to march off to imperialist slaughter, was not a problem of social psychology, but rather a political consequence of the fact that capitalism had to contend with an undefeated working class. No matter how politically confused or disoriented it might have been at any given moment, the American proletariat, like its brothers throughout the world, was not ready to send its sons and daughters to march off to the slaughter for its exploiters imperialist interests, as was the case during World War II.

The Bush administration immediately seized upon the Trade Center disaster as the opportunity to prepare the population to rally behind the flag, behind the state, and accept the idea of a protracted war-- one that could last 36 months, as Secretary of State Colin Powell put it. For the moment this political offensive seems to be working. With a relentless, propaganda barrage, constantly comparing the current disaster to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that killed less than half the total missing at the Trade Center, patriotic fervor is at unprecedented levels since World War II. The hideous flag waving, the singing of mindless patriotic songs, the distortion of the genuine sense of solidarity for the victims of the tragedy into the basest nationalist chauvinism are all part of this campaign. The media, including the tabloid newspapers and especially television,with its constant, repetitious replays of the planes crashing into the buildings, and glib, are all contributing mightily to this effort.

However the long term success of this political offensive is not sealed. The strategy runs into difficulty because there is no “enemy” country to attack or invade. For the moment the “heroes” continue to be the firefighters in New York City who risked their lives to rescue the missing, not the Special Forces units who will soon raid Afghanistan, or the crews who will fire the cruise missiles that will obliterate thousands of lives, in what the bourgeoisie will excuse as “collateral damage.” But more importantly, the outcome of the ruling class political offensive won't be determined simply by conditions in the U.S., but depends as well on the experience, activity and collective political force of the world working class. The outcome of this offensive will be linked to the question of the deteriorating living conditions, shrinking wages and the acceptance of continuing death and destruction that the ruling class will attempt to inflict on the working class in the name of sacrifice for the good of the nation, and the proletariat’s response to these attacks. Whether the working class will abandon its own self-defense and acquiesce in the capitalist attacks is not predetermined.

The potential success of the capitalist campaign and the implications it could have on a long term basis for the class struggle raise truly serious issues for the workers’ movement, and the future of humanity itself. The present situation clearly poses the alternative of barbarism or socialism with inescapable clarity. Now as never before, revolutionaries and class conscious workers must speak loudly and unitedly against the war psychosis propagated by the bloody gangsters who wield political power. We must intervene as widely and effectively as possible against the rising tide of nationalism, against the racist attacks against Muslims, against the American bourgeoisie’s attempt to mobilize the working class behind the state. No matter how much of a minority revolutionaries might find themselves in at this crucial juncture, they have the responsibility, to their class, and to history, and to the future, of pointing out the general of march to communism -- to point out that the only way to build a future where wanton mass death and destruction are not daily barbaric social realities is for the working class to return to the class struggle, to fight for its class interests and to challenge the continued domination of capitalism that is leading us into barbarism. It is class war, not imperialist war, that holds the promise of a future for the human race.

Jerry Grevin

A central element in the current ideological offensive of the ruling class is the aggressive effort to gain public acquiescence in the strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state, and the erosion of “civil liberties.”Of course this isn’t totally new.The Clinton administration had already presided over the greatest repressive offensive in a generation.The strengthening of the police forces around the country by the transfer of 100,000 laid off soldiers to local police agencies during the 1990s; the increase in the number of criminal offensives punishable by death; the closing of the doors to political exiles from oppressive regimes in South America and the Caribbean; repressive rulings by the Supreme Court that expanded police search and seizure powers, limited appeals by defendants; the explosion in the percentage imprisoned in the nation’s jails -- are all examples of this strengthening of the repressive apparatus overthe past decade.

In response to the attack at the Trade Center, the bourgeoisie is experience considerable success in gaining public acceptance for the imposition of road blocks, police check points, the shutdown of bridges and tunnels.One of the central elements in the current media campaign is the constant reminder that “things will never be the same,” that Americans will have to accept inroads on their traditional “civil liberties.”Already the government asks the lifting of legal restrictions on wiretaps and electronic surveillance, that had been enacted in the aftermath of the excesses of the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis.The use of immigration law to detain people being questioned about their possible knowledge of the terrorist plot is hailed in the media, despite the fact that only one or two of these people have actually been arrested – and those as “material witnesses,” not conspirators.

The government even proposes to detain and deport people caught in its drag net without having to present evidence.The idea of imposing a system of identity cards for citizens and non-citizens has been broached.Proposed under the cover of the popular uproar over the Trade Center disaster, these repressive tools will serve the ruling class well in its future confrontation with the working class and its revolutionary minorities, for it doesn’t a rocket scientist to appreciate the basic lesson of history that its not a handful of terrorists—no matter how bloody and horrifying their actions—that poses the real threat capitalism, but is the working class, the only revolutionary class in society today.

Now matter how horrifying the events of September 11th, the strengthening of the state’s repressive apparatus offers nothing positive for the working class.The state does not exist as an institution reflecting the interests and needs of all of society, but rather it represents the dictatorship of the dominant class in society.The state exists in order to control a society wracked by social contradiction and class antagonisms, and ultimately to repress the social forces that threaten it historically.Cynically, the bourgeoisie uses the current disaster, which was provoked in the first place by the decomposition of its own system -- its own social and political relations-- more and more into the ravages of open barbarism against the working class.

The existence of such barbarism is demonstrable proof that capitalism is no longer fit to rule humanity, but paradoxically it is used by capitalism to propagate the notion that its rule needs to be strengthened, that even more repression, more capitalist dictatorship, is necessary for the safety and welfare of society. This hideous campaign seeks to gain acceptance for the increasing intrusion of the state of our class enemies into our daily lives, supposedly for our protection, when in the final analysis what the state is doing is strengthening its ability to suppress proletarian opposition and resistance. For the working class, the historic task is the destruction of the capitalist state, and its replacement by working class rule.The working class has nothing to gain from the strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state, no matter what guise the bourgeoisie uses to serve it up.

Jerry Grevin

As the bourgeois media gave its gory accounts of the terrorist attacks in the attempt to rally the American working class behind its rulers’ war cry about the ‘necessity to unite behind the nation in its fight against terrorism’, it also subtly started to prepare the working class to accept sacrifices and belt-tightening of all sorts in the name of patriotism and the defense of the nation. For example early media reports following the NYC and Washington, DC carnage, conveyed the news that President Bush would have to put domestic policies on the back burner, and divert billions of dollars from Social Security and other social programs into the military effort. Numbed by the nationalist, patriotic propaganda blitz, this news was received without the least hint of opposition. The bourgeoisie wants to blame the accelerating economic difficulties on the terrorists, and to use patriotism to get the working class to accept the escalating crisis and its attacks on wages and the standard of living without a whimper. But this propaganda line just won’t wash.

True, the economy took a further nosedive after September 11th, as over 100,000 layoffs were announced in the airlines industry and at Boeing aircraft, and much economic activity ground to a halt for several days. But even before September 11, the economy was in dire straits. The economic situation was so grim that high ranking business leaders affiliated with the Republican party were clamoring for the president to ‘do something,” complaining that he was not showing a strong leadership style in the face of adverse economic developments.

What was the state of the economy before September 11th? Unemployment had risen to 4.9%. The number of layoffs announced up to September 11th totaled 1.1 million, a record pace. For three months in a row, private sector employment shrank in an increasing number of industrial sectors, and, in addition, workers with jobs were putting in fewer hours a week. Consumer confidence had taken a nose dive, as workers and other strata braced themselves to weather out the impending recession. A survey by the University of Michigan reported that nearly half of American households were using the Bush administration’s highly touted tax refund checks to pay day the burdensome debt that had accumulated before the bubble burst, rather than spend on new purchases to jump start the economy, as the government had hoped. There were a record number of bankruptcy filings in the second quarter –400,000 in all, a 25% increase. According to the American Bankruptcy Institute, ‘the figures for the first half of this year are alarming, if not shocking. (Washington Post Sept. 9). And the corporate sector was even in worse shape, the Standard and Poor 500 companies’ profits were down 39 percent in the second quarter, in what some bourgeois financial observers termed “one of the most severe profit recessions in 30 years.” Particularly hard hit was the high tech industry, which had been the darlings of the 1990s boom years, as corporations across the board cutback on spending on computer software by an annualized rate of 15%. This left many of the computer industry giants tinkering on the edge of disaster, as they choked “on billions of dollars in debt that they took on during the boom years to expand capacity and keep up with what then looked like never-ending demand” (Washington Post). The default rate on junk bonds will likely reach nearly 10%, similar to the rate in the 1991 downturn. Hopes that the seven interest rate cuts would stimulate economic revival had proved groundless.

The economic difficulties of the US economy reflect the global crisis of world crisis, characterized by an ever shrinking, saturated world market, one that is more and more involvent. For years the economic boom in the US, was largely a mirage, fueled by exploding debt levels and speculation on the stock markets, since there were no outlets for productive capital investments. Finally the economic bubble had burst, and the chickens were coming home to roost. The terrorists may present the bourgeoisie with a handy scapegoat for the recession, but in terms of economics, it’s nonsense.

The bourgeoisie is responding to this situation by resorting to the old ’anti-recession’ policies that have already proven a further poisonous ’remedy.’ On Thursday, September 13, the Fed bought $38.25 billion worth of government bonds from investment houses, when on a normal day it buys and sells no more than a few billion dollars worth of bonds. The Fed also cut interest rates to spur borrowing for investment. These ’remedies’ have proved in the past to be effective ways to create an artificial market and a speculative bubble which was inevitably bound to burst. Meanwhile $20 billion are being used for the military effort, just for starters, and the ’fight’ over whether or not to use the Social Security surplus is over, with Congress dipping deeper and deeper in it.

Revolutionary marxists have always insisted that the economic crisis is the best ally of the working class, because it’s the misery and threat to its own existence that can help the working class develop its struggles and consciousness of the necessity to destroy capitalism. But today the bourgeoisie will do its utmost to cloud any understanding by the working class of the real causes of its increased misery and the present danger to its own survival. In this sense, the attacks are a boon for the ruling class. The unions will gladly give the ruling class a hand. Already, in Minnesota, two unions representing 60% of that state’s government employees have agreed to postpone a threatened strike, saying the time is not right, after the terrorist attacks In New York City, teachers, who have worked for a year without a contract, can forget about any new agreement. The working class confronts increasing layoffs, greater economic uncertainty, and the growing threat their lives and the lives of their families, as the US unleashes its new aggressive militarism. But it is the working class alone which can put an end to humanity’s suffering at the hands of decomposing capitalism, by rejecting the capitalist flim-flam and returning to the class struggle to defend itself.

-- Ana

For more than a year now not a day has passed without a new act of barbarism in the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. The age-old ideologies of Palestinian nationalism and Israel Zionism, more than half a century after the inception of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war, continue to fuel havoc in this region. The spectacle is absolutely appalling. On one side, radical Palestinian militants blow themselves up together along innocent victims in suicidal terrorist attacks; suicidal armed confrontations against an adversary thousands of times better armed and organized; children, women and desperate young Palestinians aiming to kill at random, so long as the victim is a Jew. On the other hand, rubble, destruction and death caused by all-powerful Israeli state terror displayed with cynical impunity and total disregard for human life. On both sides populations living in fear, hating each other and ready to kill, poisoned to the core by the nationalist ideologies of their respective dominant classes.

This is today the situation in this region where a decade ago "a new era of peace" was announced with so much fanfare by the world bourgeoisie. Nothing more than a spiral of interminable violence, which threatens to escalate at any moment into a full-blown war.

The so-called "civilized" democracies of the US and Europe would like us to believe that they have nothing to do with the current events in the Middle East, that they have encouraged peace and that if it has not worked out is due to the radical terrorist Palestinian groups, or the policies of Arafat's PLO, or the Israel radical right wing politicians. Nothing is further from the truth. Although in the context of capitalism there is no solution to the Palestinian-Israel conflict, the imperialist maneuvering of the great imperialist powers for influence in the Middle East has always been a major factor in the exacerbation of political violence that characterized its history.

"Pax Americana" in the Middle East in the 1990's

The collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the end of the 80's and the beginning of the 90's brought with it the disappearance of the imperialist blocs that had divided the world since the end of WWII. This upheaval has had profound consequences in the Middle East. For decades the US and the USSR, as a means to secure influence in the region, had supported this or that bourgeois clique or state on their respective petty imperialist rivalries against their neighbors. The collapse of the imperialist bloc lead by the USSR and the diminished imperialist stature of Russia profoundly upset the interimperialist relationships between the countries of the region. Countries like Syria and bourgeois factions like the PLO suddenly found themselves without a godfather to resort to for money, weapons and political influence. Meanwhile, as Russian influence vanished, the American bourgeoisie established itself as the dominant imperialist power in the region.

The 1991 Gulf War, launched by the US as a means to demonstrate to its potential imperialist rival its willingness to defend its imperialist world hegemony, strengthened even more the grip of American imperialism in the Middle East. Through the ruthless killing of hundred of thousands of people, a new imperialist relation of forces among the local bourgeois cliques in the region emerged from Operation Desert Storm. Iraq, before the war a local imperialist power to be reckoned with, was reduced to the stature of a "nobody" in the region; the PLO, punished for backing the wrong horse during the war, descended one step further into political bankruptcy, particularly as some of its traditional sources of financial support from other Arab states dried up; Syria, on the side of the winners, was granted Lebanon as a reward for its services, plus a promise of negotiations on the status of the Golan Heights, currently under Israeli occupation; Saudi Arabia was rewarded with upgraded military "aid" -and a US military base in its soil-for its role as crucial center for the American military operations.

In the face of these changes in the Middle East political situation, and as a centerpiece of its strategy for reinforcing its position as imperialist master of the region, the US bourgeoisie pushed for a political compromise between Israel, its most trustworthy ally in the region, and Israel's traditional Arab foes. Through this compromise Israel's right of existence would be recognized by its historical enemies, while the Israel bourgeoisie would made its own concessions, among which the most important would be its acquiescence on the creation of Palestinian state in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West bank

Since this "Pax America" was announced through the showcase of the so-called "peace conferences" in 1991, and the Oslo agreements between Israel and the PLO in 1992, the American ruling class consistently stuck to this policy, despite the switch from Republican to Democratic control of the White House. Even the present Bush administration, which seems to have now abandoned the idea of creating a Palestinian state, had up until very recently stuck to this same strategy. However, the present sudden US government support for Israel's current policy of reneging on its compromise on the Palestinian question seems to be more than a spur-of-the-moment event. In fact this policy change is a well thought out response to both the difficulties that the US has faced during the last decade in its struggle to maintain its dominance all over the world, and to the need for adjustment in US policy in the Middle East in the wake of the September 11 events.

The revamping of American's imperialist strategy

Since the disappearance of the interimperialist relations that determined world politics in the Cold War era, the US has been faced with the reality that it not longer controls Western Europe. In fact its ex-allies in the old Western bloc have been the main challengers of its world dominance. Thus the US has been struggling for the last decade to defend and strengthen its hegemony in the areas outside Europe that are strategically vital, such as the Middle East, the Balkans, the Horn of Africa, and now Central Asia.

This struggle to defend its world supremacy, although not a total failure, has not prevented the US challengers from advancing their own imperialist cards, as shown for instance in the growing influence of Germany in the last decade in its historical hunting grounds of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Increasingly the US has found it necessary to rely on brutal force to defend its threatened hegemony, and to stand alone against the rest of the world. The perspective of 'every nation for itself' that has characterized the impact of capitalist decomposition on international relations, in which each nation plays its own card, now includes even the US, the world's only remaining superpower. This bellicose position, openly defended by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the World Economic Forum in New York this winter, only fueled criticism and opposition from the US's erstwhile allies in Europe. The unflinching support of US imperialism to the war campaign of its most reliable Middle Eastern ally, Israel, reflects the American commitment to war and bloodshed as the lynchpin of its foreign policy.

The 'Axis of Evil'

As Uncle Sam looks furtively for a new victim in its never-ending war against international terrorism, Pres. George Bush coined a new term in his State of the Union address in January when he spoke of the "Axis of Evil," comprised of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. This sobriquet, yet another attempt to cloak the current war effort in the same patriotic clothe as World War II, is of course absolutely ridiculous. The Axis powers were an imperialist bloc, an alliance for war against a rival bloc, the Allies. There is no alliance between these three demonized states; in fact, Iraq and Iran are adversaries.

This verbal trial balloon for future military attacks triggered an even greater flood of criticism against US policy from European powers have been making overtures to Iran and Iraq, for example, and are opposed to the new US offensive. Even from the American perspective, the new line is contradictory, at least in regard to Iran, for example, which actually cooperated with the US in the Afghanistan war, and had been earning praise in the US media for its actions. Once the war ended, it's true that Iran started to try Uncle Sam's patience with its efforts to maintain its traditional sphere of influence in western Afghanistan. But it was the Israeli capture of a vessel carrying 50 tons of illegal Iranian munitions, supposedly being shipped to the Palestinian Authority, which served both as the pretext for US support to Israel's campaign of annihilation against the Palestinians, and put Iran in the "evil" dog house.

The American commitment to military action was made clear in Bush's State of the Union speech, when he said, "My hope is that all nations will heed our call, and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and our own…But some countries will be weak in the face of terror. And make no mistake: if they do not act, America will." The future that capitalism offers humanity is one of militarism and terror, in which human life is expendable, and destruction a cold political calculation. The notion of an "axis of evil" may be questionable, the "excess of evil" oozing from decomposing world capitalism is all too apparent. It is only the struggle of the working class that can block this bleak future that capitalism promises.

ES

It is no surprise that the worst impact of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the ensuing ideological campaign would be found in the US, where the events were particularly traumatic for a working class that had not experienced war on its own national territory since the Civil War (1861-65), except for Pearl Harbor – which had occurred in Hawaii, some 2,000 miles from the American mainland. Prior to Pearl Harbor the last significant foreign attack on the US was the British burning of the White House and the Capitol during the War or 1812-15. The success of US imperialism's ideological campaign in the first weeks after the attacks is difficult to exaggerate. Whatever its confusions and disorientations since the revival of class struggle at the end of the 1960s, the proletariat in America has been defiant and distrusting of the state, willing to undertake militant struggle, to confront the police if necessary, and even, at an elementary level, to put the unions into question. The American proletariat, despite its historical and political weaknesses, has consistently echoed the struggles of the international proletariat over the past 33 years. The overnight transformation of this battalion of the world proletariat into a patriotic, flag-waving mass, susceptible to the worst racist attitudes and manipulation by the state was an unnerving phenomenon, and for weeks, made the defense of proletarian internationalist principles in the face of this barbaric ideological onslaught completely against the current.

No matter how sober we must be in our recognition of the success of the ideological campaign in the US, it is clear that the historic course towards decisive class confrontations has not be reversed. For one thing, the historic course is not determined on the basis of the momentary situation in a single country, even if it is the most powerful economic nation on earth. On the contrary, it is determined on a global level, particularly in the main capitalist countries that have the greatest concentration of the proletariat. On this level, it is clear that the situation in other countries in no way paralleled that in the US. Furthermore, even in the US, there is growing evidence that the setback in class consciousness is not permanent, but transitory. There is a clear tendency for workers to return to the proletarian terrain to defend their class interests, and not to be dissuaded from class struggle by the demands of patriotism and the war.

For example, in October, 23,000 public sector workers went on strike in Minnesota, despite criticism from the governor and the media that to strike during a period of such national crisis was unpatriotic, to which the workers responded, "how dare you use these events against us." So strong was sentiment for this strike, that not only did the national union involved directly endorse it , but other unions were obliged to express "solidarity." Other strikes in the post-Twin Towers period include a week long walkout by sanitation workers in Orange County, California; an illegal strike by teachers in Middletown, New Jersey (a suburb of New York) in which 200 teachers were jailed for defying a court injunction to return to work, a strike by teachers at parochial secondary schools in New York; a strike by 4000 machinists at Pratt and Whitney jet engine manufacturing plant in Connecticut; and a one day wildcat strike by several hundred private bus company bus drivers in New York City. The angry response of postal workers to the obvious class bias in the state's handling of the anthrax scare in the US, where Senate and Congressional offices were shutdown for over a month to permit fumigation to destroy the virus, while postal workers at contaminated postal sorting centers were required to continue working, putting their health at risk, was yet another sign that despite the prevailing patriotic climate, workers were capable of seeking their own terrain. These struggles in the US have all ended in varying degrees of defeat, and they occur in difficult circumstances, but more importantly they demonstrate in a very concrete manner that the acceleration of the crisis is pushing workers to reassert themselves as workers, to struggle to regain their confidence in themselves as a class, and to rediscover the power of their unity in struggle.

In other countries, especially in Europe, despite certain success in mobilizing sympathy for the US following September 11, and taking advantage of the situation to introduce measures to strengthen the police and the repressive apparatus, the ideological success of the bourgeoisie has been nowhere comparable to the US. There have been strikes in a number of European countries in the last few months. Meanwhile the global economy has plunged into open recession, which will only heighten the attacks on the working class's standard of living, and build pressure for the workers to return to the class struggle to defend itself.

RP, 30/3/02

After months of warning of a possible economic slowdown, the American bourgeoisie has suddenly acknowledged that its economy has in fact been in recession since last March, based not on the traditional capitalist economic criteria of two consecutive quarters of negative growth, but for the first time based on an admission that rising unemployment can be utilized as an indicator of economic decline. At this level, even though its manipulation of economic data had eliminated the statistical negative growth figures, the skyrocketing unemployment, which the working class understands full well is the paramount indicator of open recession and an attack on its living conditions, made it fundamentally impossible for the ruling class to maintain the fiction that a recession had not yet occurred. The rise of joblessness in the US has been staggering in the past year, with the number of officially unemployed workers in the US skyrocketing in 2001 by 2.6 million, up to 8,250,000, or 5.8 percent of the official workforce. As always the bourgeoisie's statistics underestimate the real picture of unemployment. For example, the bourgeoisie admits that its unemployment figure does not include 1.3 million workers who are "marginally attached to the labor force," by which they mean people who want to work but did not look for a job in the preceding 4 weeks before the latest government survey. Nor does it include the estimated 344,000 "discouraged workers" who have given up looking for jobs that don't exist.

The list of firms announcing massive layoffs grows daily. In January, Ford Motor Company, the world's second largest automaker, has announced plans to cut 35,000 jobs world wide, more than 10% of its workforce. This came after an earlier announcement last year by DaimlerChrysler that it would cut 26,000 jobs (20%) of the Chrysler workforce. Despite the bourgeoisie's propaganda efforts to blame the economic woes on the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Labor Department's figures indicate that only103,000 workers had been laid off as a direct or indirect consequence of the attacks, 42% in the airline industry and 29% in the hotel industry. The other 2.47 million laid off workers lost their jobs due to the workings of the capitalist business cycle. And it was only a few short years ago in the heydey of the Clinton prosperity that the capitalist pundits declared we had arrived at a utopian era of permanent prosperity, that the business cycle had been surpassed.

All of this occurs at a moment when the bourgeoisie has an increasingly restricted margin of maneuver. In 2001, in a desperate attempt to jump start the economy, even though it was still denying there was recession at the time, the Federal Reserve lowered the prime rate 11 times, four times since September 11, to the point in which the prime is less than half the rate of inflation. The US Treasury is literally printing and giving away money to the banks, and still the economy slides deeper into trouble. In this context the scandalous bankruptcy of Enron, the Houston, Texas-based American energy giant, the seventh largest corporation in the US, with close links to the Bush administration, is an ominous reminder that the bubble has burst for the phony prosperity of the last decade which was based on speculation and debt. The disintegration of the Enron employee pension plans that were locked into Enron stocks, which had shriveled from a value of $92 less than a year ago to 34 cents a share, is a warning of what lies in store for other pension plans as the crisis deepens.

Internationalism, 30/3/02

The ICC is not the only organization in the communist left milieu to find itself under parasitic attack in the current period. A similar attack has been launched by the Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) against the International Bureau of the Revolutionary Party (IBRP). All of this follows the collapse of the IBRP's American affiliate that had been inaugurated at a conference of IBRP North American sympathizers in Montreal in April 2000. The IBRP-sympathizing section was a regroupment of the Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) with another sympathizer (AS), then based in Wisconsin, now in Indiana. This US regroupment, which organized around the name Internationalist Notes (a newsletter published for several years by AS), quickly began to unravel.

By the summer of 2001 we were given a public glimpse of a bitter political and organizational internal dispute within Internationalist Notes that had apparently be brewing almost from very beginning on some very fundamental, basic questions pertaining to organizational functioning, centralization, and intervention in class struggle. By December there was a parting of the ways with LAWV, which had broken with the organizational orientations and practices of the IBRP, and for that matter, the communist left. Initially the IBRP offered to retain, cordial, fraternal relations with LAWV, and encouraged them to continue their political development. In a letter to LAWV in December the IBRP wrote, "Perhaps you may develop towards us in the course of time or perhaps you develop towards another tendency. The important thing is that you develop…We would though encourage you to investigate all the tendencies of the communist left own political basis." However, shortly afterwards, following outrageous charges of dictatorial practices by the IBRP, the IBRP denounced the LAWV for "resorting to slanders, which pre-empt all further discussion."

This collapsed regroupment is an unfortunate setback not just for the IBRP, but also for the entire communist left political milieu on the international level, especially here in the US. Whatever divergences separate the organizations of the communist left milieu, the political legacy and principles that we share far outweigh the differences. The class line separating the communist left milieu from the groups of bourgeois leftism is very real, and very critical. The ability to strengthen all the political organizations in the communist left milieu, both in terms of numerical growth and in political influence within the working class, is a reflection of the deepening of class consciousness within the proletariat. For nearly a quarter century Internationalism had been alone in defending the communist left perspective in the US. With the growth of the IBRP in the US there was an increased presence for this perspective.

The dispute that tore apart the American affiliate of the IBRP centered on a basic organizational question, long ago settled in the revolutionary workers' movement. There was apparently a heated disagreement on the need for a regular press, regular public meetings, a reasoned and purposeful political intervention in the class struggle, centralization on the organizational level. From what we are able to make of the debate, it appears that LAWV, a group that was in the process of breaking with leftism, was mired in localism, immediatism and activism. In the words of the IBRP, "What they (LAWV) object to is not a Bolshevik model of organization but any organization which goes beyond their little group. As it is, United States Workers' Voice (as LA now calls itself) remains a loose grouping of individuals which does not consistently hold a clear set of positions but consistently show themselves unable to work with anyone outside their immediate circle" (Statement Regarding the Relationship of Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) with the IBRP). The texts published by LAWV draw heavily on stalinist vocabulary and ideological formulations, such as "party building," "agit-prop," the need to be with the masses in motion, etc., and a complete confusion about so-called "reforms" won by mass, interclassist movements in the US in the '60s, and '70s.

It's not surprising that the LAWV had political confusions. They were coming to the communist left after a terrible experience in bourgeois leftism, actually stalinism, bringing with them tremendous negative political baggage, which was bound to effect their political evolution, and required firm political discussion. Their immediatist and localist weaknesses were clearly apparent in the period before their formal affiliation to the IBRP from their continuous grinding out of leaflets for distribution at leftist and union rallies and demonstrations, without any political assessment of the appropriateness of the intervention. Indeed this was one of the weaknesses criticized by AS in his debate texts published in the IBRP press. But again militants coming from leftism often suffer from these immediatist, activist and localist confusions. Their break with leftism is often marred by sentimental attachments to "mass struggles" and "agit-prop," an antipathy towards theoretical reflection, and a lack of patience in regard to intervention in the class struggle. They often distrust organizational centralization because they mistakenly identify it with the totalitarian domination by central committees in leftist organizations that they were subjected to in their prior political experience. The only chance for the LAWV to overcome this leftist political baggage was to put themselves in a positive orientation towards the communist left, to learn and assimilate the lessons of the past, and to subject their own past to a severe self-critique.

But during its brief and stormy affiliation with the IBRP the LAWV's actions clearly reflect that the influence of alien class ideologies predominated. The LAWV carried out political intrigue and maneuvering within the IBRP, holding secret and private political and organizational discussions in Los Angeles, without the participation, or even the knowledge, of AS, or the rest of the IBRP. They disregarded the rules and mode of functioning in revolutionary organizations, and of the comportment of comrades within a proletarian organization. The fruit of this bourgeois leftist mode of operation was the unilateral taking of organizational decisions, and eventual announcement of abrupt changes in basic class line positions without even a murmur of discussion within the organization. When criticized for these gross organizational violations, the LAWV responded with personalized attacks against AS, and with slanders against the IBRP. A group of individuals who carry on secret, clandestine political decision-making within the organization had the temerity to denounce the organization as being undemocratic!!!

We express our solidarity to AS, and to the IBRP, on this score. We, too, are very familiar with this type of behavior from the parasitic milieu that exists to attack and discredit communist organizations. Indeed this righteous charge of "undemocratic" and stalinist practices is incredibly reminiscent of the filth emanating from the so-called "fraction" recently causing problems within the ICC. There are obvious differences between the LAWV and the "fraction" formed by former members of the ICC, most notably that the LAWV were individuals in a process of breaking with leftism --actually stalinism -- and with only a minimal grasp of communist left principles, whereas our "fraction" was comprised of much more experienced militiants, some of whom had been entrusted with important responsibilities in the central organs of the ICC. Nevertheless, there are remarkable similarities in comportment; both are very much cut from the same cloth. There is the same influence of alien class ideologies, the same tendency to compensate for the inadequacy of their political arguments with peronsalizations in the debate, the same violation of basic rules covered with denunciations of stalinism and undemocratic practices against the organization, and the same attempt to insist that is they who are the continuators of the communist left tradition - the same parasitic behavior.

Once the LAWV had put itself into a negative dynamic in relation to the IBRP, it quickly fell into a sharp political regression. Thus, for example, the LAWV, which had affirmed its agreement with the platform of the IBRP since the mid-1990s, abruptly adopted the ridiculous notion that the Russian Revolution had degenerated into a state capitalist regime and the Bolsheviks had become counter-revolutionary by 1918. Indeed it was the appearance of this anarchist view in a publication that claimed affiliation with the IBRP, that help precipitate the IBRP's decision that a parting of the ways was necessary. While this is not the appropriate place to enter into a lengthy refutation of the LAWV position, we do wonder how the LAWV can explain the fact that these supposedly counter-revolutionary Bolsheviks of 1918 then undertook the formation of the Communist International in 1919, and exhorted the revolutionary proletariat of the world to break with the social democratic parties and prepare to spread the revolution throughout the world. For LAWV, the failure of the Russian Revolution is not due to the failure of the revolution to spread internationally, but because of the betrayal of the Bolsheviks and because conditions for socialism in Russia were not ripe. This pearl is actually a variant of the Stalinist theory of socialism in one country, since it implies that socialism in a single country is possible; the problem was that it was attempted in the wrong country, one that wasn't developed enough.

The political regression of the LAWV is continued in their new platform published in their new publication, the New Internationalist (LAWV bowed to pressure from the IBRP to abandon the Internationalist Notes name which has been used historically by ICP- Battaglia Communista). The platform is a poorly written, two-and-a-half page document, presented as a single, never-ending paragraph. Especially in the beginning, the LAWV text appears to follow very closely the Basic Positions that appear in all issues of the ICC's press (not as a platform but as merely a summary of the major points of the ICC platform), and borrows various formulations from the ICC.

The ICC is not flattered by this seductive imitation by a parasitic group. We are well aware that parasites often seek legitimacy by making overtures to established groups in the proletarian milieu, as part of an effort to play one organization off against the other. In any case, the LAWV redrafts and adds many formulations and points to what they have lifted from our Basic Positions document, which reflect their inconsistencies, confusions and political regression away from the communist left traditions. For example, instead of talking about the decadence of capitalism, the LAWV refers to a period of barbarism ushered in by World War in 1914. But later in the document there is a reference to "decadent capitalism" without any explanation what decadence is. The document is also unclear as to whether state capitalism exists only in the stalinist countries or as a universal tendency in all countries in decadent capitalism. The "dictatorship of the proletariat," a fundamental acquisition of the revolutionary workers movement going back to Marx and Engels, is totally unmentioned in the document. From the rightwing of the American bourgeoisie, the LAWV borrows the conception of "term limits:" "No delegate [to the workers councils] can serve consecutive terms."

Unfortunately, today in the US, not only do we have a weakened IBRP presence, and hence a weakened communist left presence in the US, but now we are confronted with the presence of a parasitic group of former leftists, with only a half-baked comprehension of communist left positions, heavily imbued with an amalgam of localist, immediatist, activist, and stalinist ideological conceptions from their past, and libertarian distrust of centralization and the Russian Revolution, affirming themselves as spokespersons of the communist left in America. At the same time they distort the positions of that political tradition and slander one of its most important organizations internationally, the IBRP. It won't be long, we suspect, before the ICC, too, is subjected to the slander and denouncement by such parasitic elements.

JG, 24/5/02.

In the context of the acceleration of political chaos and war around the world following the September 11th events, the Middle East is once again threatening to go up in flames. After being overshadowed for some time by conflicts in others parts of the world --Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Afghanistan -- this region is reclaiming its status as an imperialist powder keg. In a situation that changes daily, the bourgeois media is packed with a dazzling amount of information on and "analyses" of the region. For a start, the US bourgeoisie has made clear its intention to once again unleash a military intervention against Iraq. At the same time the chronic Israel/Palestine conflict has reached the level of an all out open war. There is not day passed without a new act of barbarism being committed by either the Israel State or its Palestinian rivals. The death toll on both sides has already reached the thousands, Palestine's economic infrastructure is in shambles, and Israel's is not much better. Both populations live in constant fear; the misery, the suffering, the desperation is reaching nightmarish levels.

As usual, the bourgeoisie, both left and right, all over the world exhort the working class to choose sides in this conflict, to either support Palestine's "freedom fighter" terrorists or Israel's Zionist defenders of the Jewish State. Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim feelings are being stirred up all over the world. Pro-Palestine or pro-Israel demonstrations are organized in many countries. In the face of this campaign to push workers to choose between the capitalist cliques who are fighting in the Middle East, the working class cannot permit itself to be drawn into this nationalist war fever. The only way that workers -particularly in the industrialized countries where the main battalions of the working class are concentrated- can support their Palestinian and Israeli class brothers is by developing their class struggle in their own terrain. The working class has no country, no nationality or religion to defend. Against the present drive to war by world capitalism workers need to oppose their own international struggles for the abolition of wage slavery and all national frontiers. The creation of a Palestinian state or the defense of a Jewish state is not the task of the working class movement.

The Western democracies would like us to believe that they have nothing to do with the Palestine/Israel war. They present themselves as peace loving nations in the midst of barbarians stirring up chaos in an increasing unstable world. In the US, the Bush administration portrays itself as a concerned and fair "peace broker," while in fact it has provided political cover to Israel's scaled-up war against its Palestinian rivals. The latest Israel's military offensive in the West Bank aimed at weakening the Palestinian's militia groups could not have taken place without the "green light" of the American government. Despite the leverage that the Israel's bourgeoisie has with the US, as its most trustworthy ally in the region, it can't afford to go against American global imperialist interest. There is not secret that Israel could not have survived as a nation state without the economic, military and political support of the US for the past half century. Thus the US present support of the policies of Israel has nothing to do with a Bush government being somehow teledirected by the Jews, as some conspiratorial theories with an anti-Semitic flavor maintain, but it is mainly determined by the American bourgeoisie immediate political objectives in the region.

The US, paradoxically, needs this war to give a new lease on life to the "pax Americana" in the region, so that it can get underway its war against Iraq in the best possible conditions. The apparently contradictory policy of the Bush administration comes from this situation. It is impossible for the US to go into another war against Saddam Hussein with the Palestinian/Israel conflict at the level reached in the last months. The acquiescence of the US Arabs allies in the region to the US policies depends in great part on the US ability to reign on Israel expansionist policies. The 1990's "peace process" launched by the US in the wake of the Gulf war was supposed to create a balance of power in which Israel would resolve its outstanding rivalries with its Arabs neighbors. The resolution of the Palestinian question was in this context high on the agenda. This is why Arafat's PLO was given the task to police the Palestinian territories with the promise of the eventual formation of a national state. However this "pax Americana" particularly in relation to the Palestinian question has in the end come to a total failure. The Israel/Palestinian conflict has reached levels in the last year-and-a-half not seen since the 80's, jeopardizing the policies of the US in the region. Arafat's PLO - when it is not itself participating in the military activities against Israel -had proven unable to reign in the Islamic extremist terrorist groups. In fact, a group like Hamas is more popular among the Palestinian population than the famously corrupt, gangsters turned policemen of the "Palestinian Authority." This is why the Bush administration has no choice, despite the danger that its policy would alienate its Arabs allies, but to give Israel the green light to crush militarily the terrorist groups.

It almost seems ironic that as far as the Palestinian bourgeois cliques are concerned, the main beneficiary of the Israel latest military campaign is Mr. Arafat, Mr. Sharon's declared "hated enemy." After being humiliated and virtually held prisoner by Israel during the last 4 months, Arafat has gained a new political lease on life. Of course it is very likely that this has been Israel intention all along.

As far as the European powers are concerned, they also have their share of responsibility in the present mayhem in the Middle East. They of course do not have the imperialist stature to challenge directly the US hegemony in the region as Russia did during the so-called cold war period. However this has not prevented them from trying hard during the last few years to set foot in this strategically important area of the world. Thus their vociferous condemnation of Israel's latest military campaign betrays their past efforts to sabotage the "pax Americana" in the region. Furthermore they know that behind Israel's offensive, there is the American bourgeoisie preparation of a new and more devastating war in the Middle East that will weaken even more their imperialist standing in the region.

Once again the Palestinian question has no solution within the framework of capitalism. Palestinian state or no Palestinian state, the misery, exploitation and oppression of the Palestinian masses will continue unchanged. Once again it's only the world working class that can provide a way out of the increasing spiral of barbarism that is sweeping the world.

ES, 24/5/02.

On April 11th, opposition forces, including factions within the army, overthrew the Chavez government in Venezuela. Forty-eight hours later, Chavez and his government were restored to power. In both instances, the bourgeoisie invoked the rhetoric of democracy. When Chavez was overthrown capitalist propaganda told workers in Venezuela, and the U.S. as well, that the opposition forces were overturning a tyrannical populist president. The military forces involved in this action took great pains to insist this was not a coup, but rather manifestation of the "support of the army for civil society." When Chavez returned to power, capitalist propaganda declared that the overthrow of a democratically elected leader by wealthy oligarchs could not be tolerated.

The situation in Venezuela continues to be highly unstable. Chavez's restoration has not resolved the deep internal divisions within the bourgeois class that precipitated the crisis. On the one hand, there are the pro-Chavists who maintain their allegiance to the guerrilla methods of the 60's and 70's, their links with Cuba, Libya, ad the Colombian FARCs, and openly project an anti-American posture, which is unacceptable to Washington, particularly in a region that long been America's backyard. On the other hand, there is the opposition comprised largely of businessmen, the unions, the church, and various political parties. The military is divided with some factions backing Chavez, others the opposition. Chavez's return to power only exacerbates these serious tensions within the ruling class.

The U.S. regards Chavez as incapable of restoring stability to the chaotic national situation in Venezuela. In addition, Chavez's unwillingness to support American policy in Colombia and on the contrary to support the FARCs poses serious problems for Washington. There is no question that Washington would support the overthrow of Chavez, but at a time when the U.S. is so deeply engaged in an international war against terrorism that is purportedly designed to "help nations blossom through the use of democratic governments," the Bush administration requires that a democratic charade be employed to dump the bothersome populist. So, while the restoration of Chavez will not mean political stability in Venezuela, and bloody in-fighting is to be expected, the U.S. will have to intervene in Venezuela's politics more subtly, but also more decidedly. A campaign around bourgeois democracy will be unleashed to numb the working class and prepared the ground for ousting Chavez and his clique. Parliament will be used as a showcase for the disposition of political disagreements in a civil manner in a modern democracy, while the murders, backstabbing and Machiavellian scheming will occur behind the scenes.

The social chaos that reigns in Venezuela is not unique in Latin America. The recent economic collapse in Argentina also exposed the difficulties of the local bourgeoisie to find a common political front, as five different presidents were elected within the space of two weeks. What is "unique" to Venezuela is that the Chavez government represents the left Latin American style. His populist verbiage was necessary to quell the threat of hunger riots from the extremely poor social strata, which in Venezuela constitutes 70 percent of the population, and has consistently supported Chavez. The populist rhetoric is also used by Chavez to pit the poor, declassed strata against the working class, and to quash working class discontent by getting them to accept the imposition of tremendous austerity measures supposedly to help the poorest raise their standard of living.

Meanwhile, going back to last year, the opposition has developed a concerted strategy to manipulate the working class' anger both to legitimize its own action aimed at taking control of the government, and to derail working class struggles onto bourgeois terrain. For example, the CTV (Confederacion de Trabajorderes de Venezuela), the major trade union confederation, called for a 24-hour general strike for April 9 based on protests among public sector workers and the mobilization of executives and professionals within the petroleum industry. This strike was supported by the FEDECAMARAS, the bosses' federation, and by the opposition political parties. The strike was then extended by 24 hours, and finally, on April 10, the bosses and the unions decided on an indefinite national strike to oust Chavez. The Venezuelan bourgeoisie is trying to channel the anger and discontent of the various social strata and classes into an effort to bring some social stability, but above all, to prevent the workers for developing their own struggles on their own terrain.

The pro-Chavists took advantage the provisional junta's dissolution of all public powers - parliament, governors, majors, etc - to mobilize national and international support by claiming that there had been a coup that nullified the constitutional power and disregarded the democratic "popular will." We have not seen the end the ideological campaigns around bourgeois democracy. The working class in Venezuela will face the difficult task of developing its own struggles in a climate of democratic euphoria, against the tremendous weight of interclassism coming from the sheer size of the poorest strata, and the emboldened petty bourgeoisie within the opposition, a strengthened union apparatus, and all within the general framework capitalist decomposition.

An, 24/5/02.

Recently Internationalism received a pamphlet from the Chicago Revolutionary Network (CHIREVNET), entitled "The Revolutionary Uprising of Sailors and Workers of Kronstadt, Russia, March 1921." First, we want to acknowledge the effort of the pamphlet's author to consider important events in the history of the workers' movement that have important lessons to be learned on how revolutionaries conceive of the essential problems of proletarian revolution today. The pamphlet cites our book-recently translated into English-The Dutch and German Communist Left: A Contribution to the History of the Revolutionary Movement as the source of its account of the events of the Kronstadt uprising, but it also criticizes the ICC for supposedly regarding the Bolsheviks' repression of the revolt as a "tragic necessity." In this regard, the pamphlet fundamentally misunderstands, miseads or misrepresents our analysis of the Kronstadt events. Over the years, the ICC has consistently and sharply criticized political groups that defend the incorrect view that the suppression by force of the Kronstadt rebellion was a "tragic necessity," as can been seen in the two part series we begin publishing below, or in International Review No.3, or No. 104

The CHIVREVNET pamphlet also reflects a number of essentially anarchist or councilist myths regarding Kronstadt and the lessons to be drawn therefrom. This is particularly, but not solely, true in its understanding of the role of the Bolshevik party in the crushing of the revolt, and the anti-party lessons it draws from the supposed "statist authoritarianism" of the Bolsheviks. To cite only one example, the author argues that:"(….) there is no revolutionary need for political parties since this implies: participating in the capitalist electoral charade-which we all know means more or less the same old capitalist, authoritarian dictatorship by the big capitalist ruling class-and, a desire for state power." This oversimplified anti-party political conclusion completely misunderstands the role of the revolutionary party and the relationship between party and class in the process of coming to consciousness, which has nothing to do with participation in the electoral mystification peddled by the bourgeoisie.

Furthermore, the pamphlet's methodological frame of reference-despite CHIVRENET'S frequent invocation of the Marxist dialectic elsewhere1-fails to grasp the true historical meaning of these events. For example, it does not seek to set the Kronstadt revolt in its historical context - and the author acknowledges this from the outset. Despite its supposed aim of developing a proletarian understanding of the meaning and significance of the Kronstadt revolt, the pamphlet fails to grasp these events through the lens of historical perspective, which is the sine qua non for developing a scientific, Marxist-in short, proletarian-understanding of social, political and historical events. Lacking this grounding, it is not surprising that CHIREVNET falls prey to anarchist moralizing regarding Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. Weakened by anarchism's ageless moralistic essentialism, the pamphlet fails to draw any real historical balance sheet of the Kronstadt revolt and its overall relation to the Russian Revolution itself, the most important event to date in the history of the proletariat's struggle against capitalism. Without this critical frame of reference, the pamphlet fails to understand how the repression of the Kronstadt revolt flowed not simply from certain theoretical errors of the Bolshevik Party or from Lenin's "substitutionism," though these were clearly important factors, but ultimately from the contextual realities imposed on the actors by the failure of the revolution to effectively spread to other countries and the international isolation of the proletarian bastion in Russia from the massive working class concentrations of Western Europe and North America. Without this understanding, the old anarchist moralist explanations for the degeneration of the Russian Revolution prove too tempting for CHIREVNET to pass up. According to this view, the origins of this latter process are to be found in the authoritarian predispositions of the Bolshevik leadership, essentially reducing the question to a matter of good vs. bad historical personalities-to the possession, or lack thereof, of the correct moral outlook …a theory that, in the end, reflects iidealist and petty-bourgeois rejection of historical materialism.

In responding to this pamphlet, we are publishing translations of two articles previously appearing in French in Revolution Internationale #310, March 2001, the territorial press of the ICC's section in France. These articles explain the ICC's position on the repression of the Kronstadt revolt particularly well, demonstrating the origins of these positions in the Marxist balance-sheet of the Russian Revolution drawn by our predecessors in the left fractions that detached themselves from a degenerating Third International, during the height of the Stalinist counter-revolution.

It is our hope that CHIVRENET will accept our response in a fraternal manner and will continue the process of debate and discussion, which is the fundamental and necessary precondition for political clarification within the workers movement. We encourage our readers to intervene in this debate with written contributions and by raising these issues in their discussions among themselves, with us and other groups of the milieu.

However, it is also important here to mention that the Los Angeles Workers' Voice (now calling itself USWV) has also published a lengthy article on the Kronstadt revolt. It is not necessary to recount here the rather circuitous political evolution of this group from supporters of Albanian Stalinism to their current parasitic attack on the groups of the proletarian milieu (see articles in this issue and Internationalism #122 ). It is enough to recognize that despite the apparent similarities of the analysis of Kronstadt offered by LAWV and CHIREVNET, the two groups currently evidence completely different political trajectories. Although the articles of both publications share similar serious libertarian and anarchist confusions, CHIREVNET's is clearly searching for political clarity in understanding the issues confronting the workers' struggle. By contrast the LAWV's current position on the Russian Revolution, in which it sees the Bolsheviks as counter-revolutionary from about 1918, and the Russian Revolution as degenerating almost as soon as the insurrection was completed in October 1917, is a clear and abrupt step backward from the historical positions of the Communist Left that they defended during their affiliation with the IBRP for over five years.

We suspect that the LAWV's jumping on the libertarian bandwagon on Kronstadt reflects a seductive attempt to gain credibility with the libertarian and anarchist-influenced groups as part of its current parasitic campaign of denigration of the organizations of the Communist Left (the ICC and the IBRP). The LAWV goes so far as to reproduce, without citing the source, the cover of CHIREVNET'S pamphlet on the cover of the latest issue of The New Internationalist. Further, in its article attacking the ICC in the same issue, the LAWV charges that the alleged ICC defense of the crushing of the Kronstadt revolt as a "tragic necessity" is supposed proof of our desire to "empower ourselves" and for a "party-state dictatorship over the proletariat." What may have been an honest misreading of our position by the CHIREVNET becomes a blatant lie and slander in the pages of the LAWV.

We look forward to the positive spirit of debate with groups that are honestly trying to come to grips with serious issues facing the working class and in drawing the lessons of past struggles, which can serve as an effective counter-weight to the divisive and destructive parasitism of elements like the LAWV.

CHIVRENET can be contacted at: Perry Sanders PO BOX 578042 Chicago, IL 60657-8042 [email protected] [24]

The Repression of Kronstadt in March 1921: A Tragic Mistake for the Workers' Movement

Over 80 years ago, in March 1921, less than four years after the seizure of power by the working class in the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolshevik Party put an end, by force, to the insurrection of the Kronstadt garrison on the small island of Kotlin in Gulf of Finland, about 30 kilometers from Petrograd.

Over the course of several years, Soviet Russia had been forced to lead a bloody fight in the civil war against the counter-revolutionary intrigues of the white armies who were supported by a number of foreign powers. Nevertheless, the revolt of the Kronstadt garrison was not a part of these counter-revolutionary endeavors: it was a revolt emanating from the same working-class partisans of the Soviet regime who had been at the forefront of the October Revolution. These workers advanced grievances with the aim of correcting the numerous abuses and intolerable deviations of the new power. The bloody repression of Kronstadt constituted a great tragedy for the worker's movement in its entirety.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a proletarian revolution, the first victorious episode in the development of the world proletarian revolution that was the international working class' response to the imperialist war of 1914-1918. The October insurrection was part of a process of the destruction of the bourgeois state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and, as passionately defended by the Bolsheviks, its profound meaning was that it marked the first decisive moment in the world proletarian revolution, of the class war of the world proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

Isolation Was The Real Cause of the Degeneration of the Russian Revolution The revolution initiated in Russia in 1917 did not succeed at the international level despite the many attempts of the working class to spread the struggle across the whole of Europe and elsewhere.

Russia itself had been torn apart by a long and bloody civil war that devastated the economy and fragmented much of the industrial proletariat, the real supporters of Soviet power.

The elimination of the factory committees, the progressive subordination of the soviets to the apparatus of the state, the demolition of the workers' militias, the growing militarization of social life-results of the tense period during the civil war- and the creation of various bureaucratic commissions, were all extremely significant demonstrations of the developing degeneration of the revolution in Russia. Even if certain of these factors date to the period preceding the civil war, it was the latter period that witnessed the full blossoming of the process of degeneration. More and more, the leadership of the "Party-State" developed arguments that claimed that the self-organization of the working class might be fine in principle, but that-in the present instant-all efforts must be subordinated to the military struggle against the counter-revolutionary forces. A doctrine of "efficiency" began to undermine the essential principles of proletarian democracy. Under the cover of this doctrine, the state began to institute a militarization of labor, which submitted the workers to the methods of surveillance and extreme exploitation. Having emasculated the factory committees, the path was opened for the state to introduce the "management of one" and the Taylorist system of exploitation at the point of production, the same system Lenin had denounced as the enslavement of man to machine. The havoc of the war economy, coupled with the international blockade, rendered the entire country on the brink of famine; and the workers were forced to satisfy themselves with rations that grew more and more meager each day, and were often distributed in a very irregular manner. Many sectors of industry ceased to function entirely, and thousands of workers were forced to resort to their own resources in order to survive. The natural reaction of many workers was to leave the city altogether in order to find some means of subsistence in the countryside.

As long as the civil war raged, the Soviet state maintained the support of the majority of the population, as it was identified with the struggle against the old possessing classes. The sufferings of the civil war had been endured with a relative willingness on the part of the workers, laborers, and small peasants. However, following the defeat of the white armies, many began to expect that their living conditions would become less severe and that the regime would loosen a bit its grip on economic and social life. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik leadership, at all times confronted with the devastation of production caused by the war, was rather reluctant to permit any loosening of the state's control over social life.

The Kronstadt Uprising At the end of 1920, peasant uprisings spread across Tambov province, the middle Volga, Ukraine, Western Siberia and several other regions. The rapid demobilization of the Red Army fanned the flames of the revolt as the "peasants in uniform" returned to their villages. The main grievances of these revolts were the ending of grain requisitions and the right of the peasants to determine the use of their own products. At the beginning of 1921, the spirit of revolt spread to the workers in the cities that had been at the forefront of the October insurrection: Petrograd, Moscow and Kronstadt.

Petrograd witnessed a series of important spontaneous strikes. In factory assemblies and street demonstrations, resolutions were adopted that demanded an increase in food and clothing rations, as the majority of workers were suffering from cold and hunger. In conjunction with these economic grievances, other more political demands appeared as well: the workers wanted an end to the restrictions on moving outside the city, the liberation of imprisoned workers, freedom of expression, etc. Without any doubt, some counter-revolutionary elements such as the Mensheviks and the Social revolutionaries (SRs) played a role in these events. Nevertheless, the strike movement in Petrograd was essentially a spontaneous proletarian response to intolerable conditions of life. The Bolshevik authorities, however, could not admit that the workers might strike against the post-insurrectional state, which was regarded by them as a "Workers' State", and charged the strikers as provocateurs, idlers and individualists.

These were among the social troubles in Russia, and above all in Petrograd, which would serve to detonate the sailors revolt at Kronstadt. Even before the strikes in Petrograd broke out, the Kronstadt sailors (which Trotsky described as being the "glory and honor of the revolution") had already opened up a struggle of resistance against bureaucratic tendencies and the reinforcement of military discipline within the Red Fleet. However, when news of the revolts of Petrograd arrived and with the declaration of martial law, the sailors immediately mobilized. On the 28th of February they sent a delegation to the Petrograd factories. The same day the crew of the cruiser "Petropavlovsk" held a meeting and voted a resolution that was to become the program of the Kronstadt insurgents. This resolution advanced both economic and political grievances, and demanded notably the ending of the draconian measures of "war communism" and the regeneration of the power of the soviets along with the freedom of speech, a free press and the right of expression to all political parties.

On the 1st of March, two delegates from the Bolshevik party met with the crew of the Petropavlovsk, denounced their resolution and immediately threatened repression if the sailors did not back down. This arrogant and provocative attitude of the Bolshevik authorities poured oil on the fire and galvanized the anger of the sailors. On the 2nd of March, the day of the reelection of the Kronstadt Soviet, 300 delegates voted for the Petropavlovsk resolution and adopted a motion for the "peaceful reconstitution of the soviet regime". The delegates formed a "Provisional Revolutionary Committee" (PRC) charged with the administration of the city and the organization of its defense against any armed intervention of the government. This was the birth of the Kronstadt commune, which began to published its own Izvestia, the first issue of which declared: "The Communist Party, master of this state, has proven itself incapable of bringing the country out of the chaos. The innumerable incidents which have recently transpired in Moscow and in Petrograd clearly show that the party has lost the trust of the working masses. The party neglects the needs of the working class because it believes that its grievances are the fruit of counter-revolutionary activities. In this belief, the party commits a profound mistake."

However, the revolt of the Kronstadt Commune remained totally isolated. The call of the insurgents for the extension of what they called the "Third Revolution" failed to gain an echo. In Petrograd, despite sending a delegation to the factories, despite the distribution of tracts and the Petropavlovsk resolution, the Red Fleet's call did not succeed in mobilizing the working class of the whole of Russia who could recognize their own situation in the program of the insurgents and who alone could fully sustain the revolt. The Petrograd workers ceased their strike movements and returned to work under conditions of martial law. The Russian working class had been broken, demoralized and scattered by the dislocations of the civil war.

The Crushing of the Kronstadt Commune The immediate response of the Bolshevik government to the rebellion was to denounce it as a part of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the power of the soviets. Certainly, all the vultures of the counter-revolution, from the white guards to the SR's, attempted to recuperate the rebellion to their own purposes and offered it their "support." Nevertheless, except for the humanitarian aid offered through the channel of the Russian Red Cross controlled by the émigrés, the PRC rejected all the advances made by the forces of reaction. It proclaimed that it was struggling not for the return of autocracy, or the Constituent Assembly, (wherein were assembled, beginning in 1918, the enemies of the revolution) but for a regeneration of the soviets liberated from bureaucratic domination: "It is the soviets and not the Constituent Assembly that are the ramparts of the workers" declared the Izvestias of Kronstadt. " In Kronstadt, power is in the hands of the sailors, the red soldiers and the revolutionary workers. It is not in the hands of the white guards commanded by General Kozlovsky, as deceptively affirmed by Radio Moscow."

One cannot deny that there were petty-bourgeois elements in the program and ideology of the insurgents, as well as among the personnel of the navy and the army. In fact, this was an opportunity for these elements, hostile to the Bolshevik Party because it had been at the forefront of the revolution of 1917, to demonstrate their contempt. However, the presence of these elements did not alter the fundamental nature of the movement itself.

The Bolshevik leadership reacted to the Kronstadt rebellion with an extreme firmness. Its intransigent attitude very rapidly eliminated any possibility of discussion or compromise. During the military assault on the fortress itself, the Red Army units sent to crush the rebellion were constantly on the verge of demoralization. Some of these units fraternized with the insurgents. In order to ensure the loyalty of the army, eminent Bolshevik leaders were dispatched to the scene from the 10th Party Congress, then in session in Moscow. At the same time, the rifles of the Cheka were pointed at the backs of the soldiers in order to doubly ensure that any demoralization would not be able to spread. When the fortress finally fell, some of the insurgents were massacred, summarily executed or quickly condemned to death by the Cheka. The others were sent to concentration camps. The repression was systematic and without mercy.

At the time of these events, an overwhelming fear of the danger that the White Guards would only exploit the Kronstadt revolt in order to level their account with the Bolsheviks obliged some of the voices most critical of Bolshevik power to support the crushing of the rebellion.

A Mistake for the Whole Workers' Movement If there is one aspect of the crushing of the Kronstadt revolt that anti-Leninists of all stripes continually do their best to mask, it is that the Bolshevik Party's mistake was shared, at the time, by the entirety of the workers' movement, including the fractions and currents of left communists who had been excluded from the International.

Thus, the Workers' Opposition, a fraction in opposition to the Bolshevik leadership, expressed its full support for the repression; and Alexandra Kollantai (who was at the forefront of this fraction) went so far as to indicate that the members of her fraction would be the first to volunteer to serve in the crushing of the rebellion.

The fractions of the German-Dutch left, even if its position was clearly differentiated from Kollantai's enthusiastic support of the repression, did not condemn nor critique the Bolshevik policy. Thus, the KAPD2, at the time, defended a thesis according to which the Kronstadt Revolt was a counter-revolutionary plot against Soviet Russia, and thus did not condemn the repression. Herman Gorter, a militant of the Dutch left, affirmed that the measures taken by the Bolsheviks were "necessary" in the face of the Kronstadt Revolt, as he believed the latter was a counter-revolutionary insurrection emanating from the peasantry.

From within the Bolshevik Party itself, Victor Serge, even if he affirmed his refusal to take-up arms against the sailors at Kronstadt, did not protest against the repression out of loyalty to the party.

Thus, it is clear that this tragic mistake was not committed by the Bolshevik Party, and even less by its leadership, alone. In reality, the Bolsheviks only carried out a tragically mistaken policy that was the natural consequence of the incomprehensions of the entirety of the workers movement at the time, a movement that did not see that the counter-revolution could emanate from within the post-insurrectional state itself. This is not because, as the anarchists argue, "the maggots were already present in the fruits" of 1917 (i.e. the existence of a class party always already contains within it the seeds of counter-revolution); but because, due to the international isolation of the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Party was absorbed by the state and the latter identified itself with this state against the working class. This mistake of the whole workers' movement of the day was expressed in the general confusion surrounding the idea that the institutional apparatus that emerged following the revolution of October 1917 was a "proletarian state."

1 See their pamphlet, Some Important Lessons of the International Working-Class In the Revolutionary Class Struggle for Socialism/Communism: The Emancipation of the Working-Class Is the Act of the Working Class Itself!

2 Kommunistiche Arbeiter Partei Deutschlands or Communist Worker's Party of Germany, excluded from the Communist International in 1920 due to its critical stance towards many of the International's positions, particularly against its policy of the "United Front."

Over the summer the Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) - actually they now call themselves the U.S.Workers Voice - began a smear campaign against the ICC. In their article, "ICC - What Do They Stand For?" in their publication "The New Internationalist", the LAWV unleashed a barrage of one liners charging that the ICC "specializes in pouring cold water on the workers' mass struggles;" that the ICC seeks to impose "their party dictatorship over the proletariat;" that the ICC seeks "to use the working class to empower themselves;" that our views and tactics are "embarrassingly absurd, and …mainly just give the Communist left trend a bad name" - unsupported by any evidence or argumentation and presented in a manner more characteristic of the worst tactics of bourgeois leftism than the revolutionary workers movement. They even go so far as to falsely charge that the ICC defends the position that the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921 in Russia was a "tragic necessity" when we have repeatedly defended precisely the opposite position, in published articles specifically denouncing that view (see our article on Kronstadt in this issue, or International Review No. 3 or International Review 104.

All these slanders, distortions, and lies about the ICC are thrown out there willy nilly to distract attention from the very serious criticisms the ICC made in "In defense of the revolutionary milieu: The LAWV's Parasitic Attacks Against the IBRP" in Internationalism 122. It is particularly striking that, if you look beyond the litany of false statements about the ICC, the LAWV article contains no denial or refutation of the essential points of our critique of the LAWV's comportment during the process by which they split from the IBRP and their sudden rejection of fundamental class line positions that they had defended for nearly half a decade. There is no denial of the facts of their secret discussions that excluded the other IBRP member in the US, and which they hid from their own organization, a gross violation of fraternal relations within a proletarian organization. In fact they appear to defend such a breach of revolutionary organizational behavior because of the alleged need to escape the "dictatorial" oversight of the central committee. Nor do they respond to our criticism of their sharp political regression on fundamental class line positions, without explanation - such as their rejection of the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution, their rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the failure to make clear their position on the decadence of capitalism, or on the nature of state capitalism.

There are three main currents in the left communist milieu in the world today, the IBRP, the ICC and the Bordigists. The LAWV has already denounced the two main currents, the IBRP and the ICC - as essentially Stalinist, substitutionist, non-proletarian, and a disgrace to the workers movement. It is of course a curious charge against two historic currents in the left communist movement coming from individuals who spent most of the past quarter century as adherents of a stalinist organization that extolled the virtues of Albanian Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha. Their bizarre political trajectory and behavior today are marked by that terrible experience in capitalism's leftist political apparatus. On the other hand they retain certain non-proletarian political behaviors they learned in leftism -maneuvering, slandering, personalizations (especially their attacks against AS in the IBRP), immediatist and activist misconceptions, the retention of stalinist verbiage and conceptions - like "agit prop", "party building" and the pandering to the daily struggle. At the same time, in their incomplete attempt to break with Stalinism, they have lapsed into grave libertarian errors, mistakenly identifying the grossest Stalinist distortions of revolutionary principles as inevitable manifestations of marxism - leading to their rejection of the need for a centralized revolutionary party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Russian Revolution (after 1918).

The LAWV was particularly scandalized by our pointing to their simultaneous manifestations of Stalnism and libertarianism, which they ridiculed as incoherent oxymoron of "stalinist libertarism." Of course, we did not use that term but they are correct that there is incoherence here, but the incoherence is theirs, not ours.

The LAWV's smear campaign against the political organizations of the communist left reflect an attempt to drive a wedge between the ICC and the IBRP, on the one hand, and the various new groups developing in the US, on the other, in order to isolate left communist forces from the rest of the milieu emerging in North America today. This goal is revealed in the LAWV'statement that "no serious Communist can unite with the ICC today," and that the ICC deems anyone who disagrees with it as "useless or even enemies of the working class." This last slander is particularly pernicious. The ICC doesn't hide its disagreements with other groups. We have enough respect for militants who seriously seek to defend the interests of the proletariat and advance the revolutionary struggle to engage in open and honest debate. We believe that the open confrontation of ideas and political perspectives is a vital aspect of the deepening and extension of class consciousness.The existence of differences between organizations and groups doesn't preclude the ability to work together for the common revolutionary goal. There is no secret that the ICC and the IBRP and its affiliates have long had serious political divergences, but we defend the IBRP as part of the revolutionary political milieu. In fact our original critique of the LAWV was written in solidarity with and in defense of the IBRP. Despite the LAWV's attempt to paint the ICC as narrow sectarians, at the time of the Kosovo War, and the outbreak of the Afghanistan war, we appealed to the LAWV and other IBRP sympathizers in North America to draft a joint leaflet against US imperialism's policies in the name of a united left communism. At the time of Kosovo this proposal for joint action was summarily rejected by the LAWV. During the Afghanistan war, they didn't even bother to respond.

The LAWV's attempt to distort our record on the class struggle is also part and parcel of this attempt to isolate left communism from the rest of the political organizations in the US. What the LAWV calls "pouring cold water on workers' mass struggles" is the ICC's effort to fulfill its responsibility as a revolutionary marxist organization to analyze each struggle, each confrontation, as it arises, to understand the dynamic in which it unfolds, and the balance of forces between the classes, as a basis for determining its understanding of the appropriate intervention to make in such a struggle. Such analysis may be mistaken in this or that instance, but it is important that revolutionaries bring communist consciousness and the analytical tools of marxism to the struggle. As Lenin put it, the mass struggle, needs a mass of consciousness. Marxists are not cheerleaders for the class struggle, indiscriminately hailing and celebrating every little strike or union confrontation because of immediatist or romanticist illusions about the class struggle. Workers face very difficult conditions of class struggle today, in the context of the rising pressures of the social decomposition of capitalism, the political disorientation that followed the collapse of stalinism and the bourgeoisie's ideological campaign about the alleged death of communism, and the efforts by the bourgeoisie to strengthen and refurbish its union apparatus. To fail to recognize and comprehend the conditions under which the working class struggles today and adopt an appropriate intervention is a failure to live up to revolutionary responsibilities.

In contrast to the ICC's analytical approach to class struggle, the LAWV uncritically rushes off to every union called rally or demonstration as if it were some manifestation of autonomous "workers' mass struggle." In the last issue the New Internationalist they claimed that they intervene in a principled manner in these demonstrations. The empty meaning of this "principled" intervention can be seen in a leaflet they published in the same issue of New Internationalist,which they distributed at a teachers demonstration in Los Angeles. Most of the leaflet is devoted to a recitation of the facts of the dispute, followed by some very ambiguous recipes for action which are neither principled nor clear. The LAWV's says, "to advance, and prevent more routs don't new political and industrial organizaions need to be built up?" There's no attempt to give any revolutionary marxist content to this rather ambiguous statement - actually a question, not a statement. One wonders what they really mean, what kind of new industrial organizations … the creation of militant caucuses within the existing unions, the formation of new "class struggle" unions, as some leftists advocate, or mass assemblies and strike committees outside the framework of the union apparatus, as revolutionaries might suggest? What kind of new political organization - maybe a labor party, like the Trotskyists advocate? Why don't they speak openly and honestly to the workers about what they mean? Or do they know what they mean?

As we pointed out in Internationalism 122, "we are now confronted with the presence of a parasitic group of former leftists, with only a half-baked comprehension of communist left positions, heavily imbued with an amalgam of localist, immediatist, activist, and stalinist ideological conceptions from their past, and libertarian distrust of centralization and the Russian Revolution." They now function to distort the positions of the communist left and slander its two most significant political organizations. We appeal to working class militants and political groups to be on guard against the opportunist overtures of this strange political formation. If you wish to understand and debate the political positions of the left communist movement, we encourage you to engage in discussion with the ICC and the IBRP. You don't have to agree with us - after all the goal of political discussion is the clarification of ideas, even if that means better understanding the differences in point of view. We urge that you be on guard against this erratic group of former Stalinists, who after a brief sojourn in the left communist milieu, suddenly claim to be the only coherent, principled left communists in the whole world, and seek to keep the existing left communist groups isolated from the rest of the emerging workers movement in North America and sabotage the process of open discussion and debate among those committed to the revolutionary destruction of capitalist exploitation

JG, 11/10/02.

In the wake of Stalinism's collapse, the end of the XX century was celebrated by the dominant class all around the world as the beginning of a new era of peace and prosperity in the life of capitalism. The disappearance of the division of the world in two major imperialist blocs was supposed to end the bloodshed and the potential thermonuclear obliteration of human beings and any other form of life in the planet. The chronic state of economic crisis and the poverty suffered by most of humanity was said to be finally on the way to being resolved thanks to economic globalization and other marvels of democratic capitalism.

History itself has already proven the worthlessness of these projections. Imperialist wars and chronic economic crisis are a permanent feature of decadent capitalism. They are scourges to which the dominant class has no solution. In the last years, rather than disappearing, imperialist conflicts end economic disasters are reaching dramatic levels all over the world.

At the level of the economy, all major industrialized countries are facing open recessions, while the so-called developing nations, capitalism's weakest sector, are moving from one economic catastrophe to the next, facing ever growing difficulties to keep their heads above water.

At the level of imperialist conflict, the challenge of the US hegemony and the battle of the American bourgeoisie to maintain its world dominance are more and more spreading war and political instability around the world.

In this context of growing barbarism one of the most important elements in the current international situation at the level of imperialism is, undeniably, the American bourgeoisie's growing awareness and adjustments of its imperialist strategy to the realities and needs of the present historical situation. The US flexes its military muscle

These adjustments to its strategy, to judge by the "debates" and dissensions that we have witnessed among the bourgeoisie in the last 10 years, has not been an easy process. For instance, Mr. Bush the elder lost his chance for reelection to a second term because of his administration's hesitations in the face of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkans wars. And, as we pointed out several years ago, the real root of the scandals that plagued the Clinton administration was the divisions on imperialist policy within the American bourgeoisie, in particular vis a vis the Chinese question. Nonetheless, whatever their divisions, the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie has already managed to put in practice a strategy of which the planned invasion of Iraq is one of its latest manifestations.

This strategic orientation aims to maintain the status quo in the world, i.e. American hegemony, and has, according to the bourgeoisie itself, the following elements:

A Commitment to Maintain a Uni-Polar World in Which the United States Has No Peer Competitor: Already at the end of the first Bush administration, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz made this goal clear when he wrote that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US must act to prevent the rise of peer competitors in Europe and Asia. And as Mr. Bush the son declared last July: "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge-thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." The same idea affirming that the US will never allow its military supremacy to be challenge the way it was during the cold war, was recently expressed again by Bush: "the president has not intention of allowing any foreign power to catch ch up with the huge lead the US has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago" as printed in "The National Security Strategy of the US." The esence of this policy is nothing else but the decleared intention of the American bourgeoisie to do all that it can to prevent the arising of a strong competitor around which a new imperilaist bloc could eventually be formed.

A Commitment to Stay On the Offensive: According to this, the old cold war era concept of deterrence is totally outdated. This is the context in which the so-called doctrine of the preemptive strike is being discussed, and which is behind the new drive to relocate troops around the globe, as well as the efforts to gain direct control of strategic regions of the world. As Mr. Bush put it, "the military must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. All nations that decide for aggressions and terror will pay a price."

A Commitment "To Do It Alone": According to this precept, the US will act unilaterally in responding to "threats". In other words, the illusions of stable alliances-NATO, etc.-are being recognized as undesirable constraints in carrying out American military adventures. As Mr. Rumsfeld explained: "the mission must determine the coalition; the coalition must not determine the mission. If it does, the mission will be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and we can't afford that."

A Commitment to "Nation-Building": In plain words this means a direct territorial control of strategic zones of the world. We have seen this strategic element being applied in Afghanistan and more recently in the planning being put forward for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. According to bourgeois propaganda calculations, the US will need to stay in Iraq after overthrowing Hussein for at least the next 20 years. This drive to gain a direct territorial control over strategic regions of the globe has been described by some bourgeois analysts as a new, but necessary-given the present state of chaos in the world-neocolonialist imperialist tactic that the US must carry out in order to fight the spread of chaos and decomposition. Clearly, the bourgeoisie has seemed to obtain a rather accurate consciousness of the dangers that decomposition poses to the system as a whole; and it is currently developing an imperialist strategy that accords with the recognition of this reality. Nevertheless, the assimilation of the present "nation building" tactic of the US, to the colonialism of a previous era in the history of capitalism, an ideological claim popular among many leftists and certain spokesmen of the bourgeoisie-above all in Europe, is quite far fetched. Colonialism was an expression of the outward expansion of capitalism in a period in which the world market was still being created. In that sense, despite the suffering that it brought to the indigenous populations of colonized regions, it represented a positive step forward in the development of the productive forces of humanity as a whole. On the contrary, the US's tactic of "nation building" today does not have anything positive to offer anyone. It will only, on the other hand, be one more factor in political destabilization of the world. American Imperialism offensive

A concrete manifestation of this strategy is the present effort of the American bourgeoisie to directly control Central Asia. With the collapse of the Stalinist bloc, this zone-which had been for most of the 20th century a privileged sphere of interest for Russian imperialism-has become the target of US attention. The American bourgeoisie has been for many years quite active in the countries that formed in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, not only through its oil companies and financial institutions, but also through actions intended to have a direct military presence in the region. In this sense, the Afghanistan campaign launched under the cover of the "fight against terrorism" in the wake of the September 11th events, has just capped a tendency that has long been underway.

The same can be said of the Middle East. Despite the "Pax-Americana" imposed by the US after the 1991 Gulf War, it has not succeeded in completely keeping this region under its control. Second and third rate powers have not given up their efforts to advance their own interests and to torpedo the American-imposed order in the region. There have been, for instance, many widely known initiatives by France, Germany, China, Russia, et. al., to advance their own interests in the region. Even local imperialist gangsters like Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran have grown bolder in the pursuit of their own interests, often clashing with the US's designs in the region. The Palestinian/Israeli "peace process" has blown into pieces. In this context, a second Desert Storm launched against Saddam Hussein's Iraq is the US's chosen way of regaining the political momentum in the region. What is even more important, is the US's goal of assuring, through an upgrading of its direct presence on the ground in Iraq, a much more thorough control of this crucial strategic zone. Evidently the US's "allies" are well aware of what is really at stake behind the American bourgeoisie's targeting of Iraq, and hence their strident opposition and efforts to derail the US war plans.

ES, 11/10/02.

One of the main ideological themes used by the dominant class during the 1990s, in order to maintain its ideological domination over society, was the supposed economic health and prosperity of its system. According to this fable, following the recession of 1990-91, the American economy enjoyed the longest period of recovery in history. For some years capitalist acolytes even declared that, thanks to the new communication technologies, their system had arrived at an era of permanent prosperity, and that the so-called "business cycle" had been definitively surpassed.

Then, in 1997-98, the explosion of the once exemplary economies of the East Asian "tigers" and "dragons" sent shock waves across the globe. Tales of capitalism's imminent collapse and an open world recession filled the media. Nevertheless, the main capitalist countries-with the exception of Japan-managed to stay out of recession for a couple more years giving some continued credence to the tale of a booming capitalism.

Today there is no more chatter about the wonders of the "new economy" energized by the "internet revolution." It seems so long ago that Bill Clinton bragged: "America's economy is the healthiest in a generation and the strongest in the world." By all accounts, world capitalism is experiencing once again a new fall into the abyss of its chronic economic crisis. All the major economies of the world are officially in open recession or just limping by.

At the center of this new downfall of world capitalism is the American economy-by far the biggest in the world. In the summer of 2001, after months of warnings about a possible economic slowdown, the bourgeoisie suddenly recognized that its economy had been in recession since March of that year. Skyrocketing unemployment and the wave of corporate bankruptcies made it impossible for the bourgeoisie to continue preaching the fiction of a healthy economy, even though by its own account, the economy had still not qualified for an official recession, which the economists define as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Then in the winter of 2001-02, the bourgeoisie suddenly had a change of heart, and magically the recession was officially over as a new myth was born: the US economy has just gone through its shortest and mildest recession in history!

However, no amount of optimism and economic manipulation can hide the severity of the recession that the US is currently experiencing. Even the normally deceiving economic indices that the bourgeoisie uses to evaluate the state of its system don't leave much room to brag about the health of the economy. There are so many black spots that some economists are talking of the dangers of a "double dip recession". For instance:

• Unemployment: The economists can talk all they want about the ongoing recovery, but for people that have lost their jobs and can't find a new one it feels like a recession. According to the Labor Department, there are almost 3 million people nationwide that have been out of work for at least 15 weeks, up more than 50 percent from a year ago. From this 3 million, half have not worked in at least 6 months. The difficulty in finding a new capitalist willing to exploit you once the previous one has decided to "let you go" is not a new phenomenon, but has been a general trend of the last 30 years of chronic economic crisis. When the jobless rate was around 6 percent in 1970 and during the 1980's, as it is supposed to be today, the average length of unemployment was 10 to 12 weeks. In August, according to the Labor Department the average length of unemployment was 16.2 weeks. The impact of this growth in long-term unemployment is causing financial havoc for the laid-off workers. Many who have not worked for months have begun spending retirement savings that were already diminished by the stock market's fall. Others are considering taking low-wage jobs at a fraction of their old pay. Moreover, as usual, the bourgeoisie severely underestimates the number of workers out of a job. Officially, the unemployment rate is floating around 6 percent of the labor force. But, by the "official" bourgeois definition, a worker is only consider unemployed if he/she is receiving unemployment benefits, or is actively looking for a job. Thus, by their own account, 2 million appear to have dropped out of the labor force in the last two years, no longer looking for work and thus not counted as unemployed.
• Fall In Industrial Production: Industry-the real heart of the capitalist economy-has been, according to the economists' statistics, the sector of the economy hardest hit by the recession. Much of the talk about "recovery" has been based on industry's sluggish, but steady rise since last January. Thus, when the Federal Reserve reported that industrial growth stumbled in August, some economists could not avoid talking about the dangers of falling back into recession.
• Fall In Consumer Spending: Just a month ago, a New York Times economic reporter claimed: "One big reason economists remain optimistic that neither the national economy nor manufacturing will backslide into recession is because consumers, whose spending accounts for two-thirds of economic activity, have been holding up amid the economic turbulence." However, although consumer spending is not at all a reliable measure of the state of the economy-individual spending can often be buttressed by consumer debt that will never be repaid- it is symbolic that even this economic indicator is headed downward. Officially, there is a slump in retail sales. In August, retailers announced one of the worse "back-to-school" sale seasons ever, raising worries about the upcoming holiday season. Meanwhile, the real estate market-after a growing wave of speculation that has seen housing prices skyrocket-is starting to cool off amid rising fears of an unavoidable bust of the real estate bubble.
• Stock Market Instability: Ever since the stock market speculation bubble burst over two years ago, things have not been going well for this sacred symbol of capitalism. Last July, the overall market hit a five-year low; and to this day, it has not recovered its previous value, prompting some economists to compare the present stock market slump to the days of the Great Depression.
• Corporate Bankruptcies: The list of bankruptcies is quite long: first were the once celebrated start-up "dot-coms"-many of which never had more than a "virtual" existence. Then came a number of filings in the technological and communications sector. Moreover, in the months following the Enron collapse, many of the titans of American capitalism have been toppled, while others are struggling to avoid bankruptcy. Over 1000 American companies have now restated their earnings since 1997, admitting in effect that they had previously published wrong or misleading profit statements. The existence of these phony accounts means that much of the profit growth of the late 1990s, the ostensible justification for Wall Street's celebrated heights, was equally phony. It would be a mistake to think that this malaise is due only to the greed and "corporate irresponsibility" of a few bad CEOs. In fact, what these so-called "corporate scandals" reveal is a widespread attempt to cheat capitalism's law of value, the very fundamentals of the bourgeoisie's own economic system.
• The Return of the Federal Budget Deficit: Driven largely by the recession and the so-called sluggish recovery, the Federal Budget deficit is projected to reach 1.5% of GDP this year. And as the price-tag of the permanent war in which the American bourgeoisie is currently embarking escalates, the myth of balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility-which the whole bourgeoisie was so fond of just over a year ago-will continue to go up in smoke.

However most of these "economic indices" say little of the impact of the crisis in the working class and other non-exploiters strata, which are really as always bearing the brunt of the economic difficulties of the bourgeoisie. By the bourgeoisie own account "the recession that began in March 2001 has reduced the earnings of millions of Americans -Census Bureau annual report on income and poverty NY Times 9/250-." Of course not every body is suffering the same because while the working class has seen its salaries decline "the gap between rich and poor (has) continued to grow -ibd-."

This document also says that the number of so-called poor Americans rose last year to 32.9 million, an increase of 1.3 millions, reaching 11.7 percent of the total population of the country.

Marxist revolutionaries have repeatedly insisted that so-called recessions are not just a bump in the road of an otherwise healthy economic system, the downturn of the so-called "business cycle." For us, recessions today are nothing more than a particular moment-one more step into the abyss-of the chronic economic crisis of overproduction that a decadent capitalist system, unable to create sufficiently solvent markets for its products, is condemned to suffer. Moreover, coming in the wake of all the propaganda of the 1990s about the "exuberant American economy", this recession is quite important. In particular, it lays bare the feeble basis upon which the prosperity of that decade was built: the stock market speculation; the explosion of personal debt in order to stimulate a consumer binge that allowed overproduction to be hidden to some extent; and the corporate debt that financed a spree of investments in communication technology that have proven to be, to a good degree, useless; being but the most obvious examples of the palliative measures that the bourgeoisie has been forced to adopt.

The stock market bubble: a symbol of the veritable "casino-economy" that characterizes, not the health of capitalism, but its total bankruptcy.

Despite all the talk of "recovery" the fact is that all of the bourgeoisie's attempts to invent various "medicines" with which to revive its economy have been largely ineffectual. Despite the Federal Reserve having lowered its prime interest rate to historic lows, there has not been a revival of the credit market. The effects of the "shot in the arm" given to the economy by the Bush administration's engineered tax cuts, have been, in the long-term, inconsequential. Further, the effects of the rise of military spending necessary to prosecute its "war without end," have yet to hit the economy with their full force.

ES, February 2003.

Introduction

This is the second installment in our two-part series on the historical lessons of the Kronstadt revolt, presented in response to a pamphlet published by the Chicago Revolutionary Network (CHIREVNET) that takes an anarchist perspective on Kronstadt and at the same time seriously misrepresents the ICC's analysis of the events. As we wrote in the introduction to the first part of this article, we have never claimed-contrary to the assertions of CHIREVNET's pamphlet-that the Bolshevik repression at Kronstadt was in any way a "tragic necessity." In sharp contrast, the ICC has always maintained that the repression was a "tragic mistake" that hastened the worldwide counter-revolution against the global revolutionary wave of 1917-1927, and was a major step into the abyss for the Bolshevik Party, a process which led to its eventual betrayal of the working-class and its integration into the state apparatus as the manager of the Russian national capital.

Nevertheless, as we explained in our last issue, even if we recognize the Bolsheviks' grievous error in their conception of revolution, a conception that was used to sanction violence within the working-class as a means of solving the inevitable differences that may arise in the period of transition from capitalism to communism, we do not join CHIREVNET in their anarchist contentions - that if the Bolsheviks committed this terrible repression, this fact-by itself-is evidence that Bolshevik party never stood in the vanguard of the revolution, that it was always a murderous state-capitalist clique destined to usurp the revolution to its own alleged purposes of grabbing state power. CHIREVNET's historical methodology is not a Marxist, not a materialist, one. Instead, it reflects the essentialist moralizing attitude of anarchism that cannot situate historical events in their context, and evaluates historical actors based on how well they live up to, or stray from, preconceived moral precepts divorced from history.

If CHIREVNET is serious about this methodology, we can only ask that it be consistent. As we will see in Part II of our article below, the Bolsheviks were not the only ones holding a flawed conception of the relationship between party and class, and a mistaken position on violence as a means to solve disputes within the class during the period of transition. If CHIREVNET thinks the Kronstadt repression is evidence of Lenin and the Bolsheviks' inherently counter-revolutionary nature, then it should equally denounce the Left Communists of the day, and certain anarchists as well, many of whom mistakenly supported the repression at Kronstadt. Moreover, if substitutionism alone is evidence of a counter-revolutionary nature, as CHIREVNET asserts, it would then also be obliged to denounce Marx and Engels themselves, for they were known to take certain "substitutionist" positions at times - a mistake we in the ICC have never been shy in criticizing.

Thus, we can see how the methodology CHIREVNET-and anarchism and councilism in general-tends to employ only leads to obfuscation of the central historical lessons of Kronstadt, as well as the proverbial, "throwing away of the baby along with the bath water." The ICC agrees with CHIREVNET that Lenin and the Bolsheviks demonstrated, in certain of the their theoretical and political conceptions, a number of profound non-proletarian confusions, distortions and weaknesses. These flaws were a definite factor leading to an, at times, even more flawed political practice in the course of the Russian Revolution. Chief among these errors was the idea that the party should act in the name of the class and should assume control of the state in the period of transition. But as we will show below, this was an error shared by almost the entirety of the workers' movement at the time. In fact, this is one of the real lessons of Kronstadt and the Russian Revolution itself, the lesson that such a conception can lead to an identification of the party with the state, and eventually to the idea that if revolts against the state take place, then these revolts must be counter-revolutionary and thus must be suppressed. This conception was a key factor in the mistaken repression of the Kronstadt revolt: a revolt that, despite its anarchist confusions, and manipulation by counter-revolutionary elements, expressed a real attempt by the working class to reinstitute the workers councils as the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In another example of CHIREVNET's oversimplified moralism, it glorifies the Kronstadt revolt unconditionally (employing all types of simplistic leftist phraseology and rhetoric, replete with copious use of the exclamation points even!) refusing to acknowledge or address its confusions and its manipulation by the counter-revolution.

Nevertheless, this picture of the Bolsheviks only gives part of the story. What about their unconditional defense of internationalism in 1914? Or Lenin's work in setting up the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915, the Bolshevik's call to "turn the imperialist war into a civil war," and Lenin's leadership in 1917 in calling for the insurrection against any compromise of the revolution with the bourgeois Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries? Were Lenin and the Bolsheviks counter-revolutionary in these events as well? Were all these exemplary examples of proletarian internationalism just a vicious ploy to seize state power years later? We await CHIREVNET's answer to these questions. The key to examining any period in history from the Marxist perspective is to situate the events in their totality and to draw the lessons this methodology allows. In this regard, it becomes clear that substitutionism and a failure to resist the use of violence within the working class, were failings of this entire historical period in the workers' movement, not the "original sin" of Lenin and the Bolsheviks alone. The task of revolutionaries today is to learn from these mistakes so as not to repeat them in the future, not to engage in a masochistic-moralist attack against the most visible figures, flawed as they were, of this period.

Our intent in publishing this article is to contribute to the process of debate and political clarification within the North American political milieu on what is a very important historical issue for the working-class and its revolutionary minorities. We were thus pleased to receive a response from CHIREVNET to the first part of our article in the form of a flyer. Nevertheless, the content of this flyer is basically a rehashing of the same moral condemnation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks that their original pamphlet espoused, and as such does little to advance the debate. It also criticizes our position as "centrist" and "erroneous," as a blatant exercise in excusing the Bolsheviks'-a part of the ruling class in CHIREVNET's opinion-hijacking of the authentic proletarian revolution of 1917. We certainly welcome the opportunity to continue this debate as part of the process of the working class coming to grips with its own history. However, we must also insist that the debate be carried out in accordance with certain proletarian principles of sincerity and an honest representation of one's opponent's views. In this regard, CHIREVNET's flyer is unfortunately notable for what it doesn't say. Despite our reproach to them for misrepresenting our views on Kronstadt,-an honest mistake we assumed-in writing that the ICC views the repression of Kronstadt as a "tragic necessity," when in fact we have repeatedly criticized groups that defend that position, CHIREVNET fails to clearly retract its previous misrepresentations and set the matter straight with its readers and contacts. Furthermore, CHIREVNET continues to distribute its original pamphlet-uncorrected we assume since we haven't been informed otherwise-where this mistake is printed.

We understand that sometimes in the heat of debate mistakes and errors may be made in representing an opponents' view. But when this happens, the responsible thing for any group or organization to do is to openly admit its error, retract its misrepresentation in a conspicuous way, i.e., in print, and adjust its polemic to account for what the other side really said. CHIREVNET has failed to issue a conspicuous retraction so far, despite the clear and voluminous evidence we gave it that it misrepresented our views. Thus, we must conclude this introduction by calling on CHIREVNET to conspicuously retract its original misstatement of our views in print, and to circulate this retraction to all its regular subscribers and contacts. This would be in continuity with the principles of debate that proletarian organizations have followed in the past.

Moreover, we must also take notice that in responding to Part I of this article, CHIREVNET, in addition to its flyer, also sent us a copy of the Los Angeles Workers Voice's (LAWV) (now calling themselves "United States Workers' Voice" (USWV) article on Kronstadt that cites CHIREVNET's original pamphlet on this question in order to denounce the ICC as "counter-revolutionary" for what is a completely mistaken representation of our views. This is not the place to recount LAWV's current parasitic attack on the groups of the Communist Left (readers can see the article in this issue, as well as Internationalism # 122 and 123). Nevertheless, we also call on CHIREVNET to stop distributing the LAWV article containing a blatant misstatement of our views, a misstatement that CHIREVNET itself is responsible for propagating, and which is now being used by LAWV/USWV, not in a spirit of debate and the open exchange of ideas between revolutionaries, but in a parasitic denunciation of the groups of the Communist Left.

CHIREVNET can be contacted at Perry Sanders, POB 578042, Chicago, IL 60657-8042 ([email protected] [24]). - Internationalism Against the Anarchist Theses: The Lessons Drawn From Kronstadt By the Communist Left.

The only current, while defending the October Revolution, at the same time rejected and condemned the repression of the Kronstadt revolt was the anarchist current. Nevertheless, it is necessary to distinguish among the various tendencies that comprised this current at the time. Certain anarchists, notably the immigrant anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were very close to the Bolshevik Party (and they gave it their full support in October 1917 contrary to other anarchists emanating from the intelligentsia or declassed elements whose anti-Bolshevism clearly expressed the reactionary conceptions of the petty-bourgeoisie).

It is without a doubt that numerous anarchists are correct in their criticisms of the Cheka (the party's political police) and the crushing of the Kronstadt Revolt. The anarchists' problem though, is that their conceptions offer no method for understanding the historical meaning of these events: as witnessed by the analysis of Voline: "Kronstadt is a luminous beacon that lights the way (?) At once the full liberty of discussion, of organization and action was definitively achieved by the laboring masses themselves, along the true route of independent popular production, the rest flows automatically from these acquisitions." (Voline, The Unknown Revolution).

Thus, according to Voline, it is sufficient for the Kronstadt Revolt to be victorious for the rest to "follow automatically." In reality, though, even if the revolt had spread to the rest of Russia, even if the Kronstadt insurgents had won their battle, this would have done nothing to solve the essential problem of this epoch: the international isolation of the soviet bastion to one country. (However, it is true that in the logic of the anarchists, as one can see demonstrated in their analysis of the "proletarian revolution" in Spain of 1936, the Marxist analysis according to which communism cannot be established except at the international level is always a secondary concern.) Such an underestimation of the difficulties and of the necessity of a rapid international extension of the revolutionary process is a real poison for the consciousness of the proletariat, which masks the first and most important lesson of the Kronstadt revolt, a comprehension of the fact that any revolution that remains isolated in one country is irredeemably doomed to failure. 1. The Proletarian Revolution Must be International Or It Is Nothing

The proletarian revolution can only succeed at a global level. It is impossible to abolish capitalism or "build socialism" in one country, but only by the extension of proletarian political power across the entire planet. Without this extension, the degeneration of the revolution is inevitable, regardless of whatever changes are effected in the economy. This was exactly Lenin's point when he declared in 1918 that the Russian proletariat waited with impatience for the extension of the revolution in Europe, because if the proletariat of Western Europe did not quickly come to the aid of Soviet Russia (which had begun to be asphyxiated by the economic blockade of the world bourgeoisie) the latter would be condemned.

For the anarchists, the Bolsheviks were determined to crush the workers and sailors of Kronstadt because they were, according to the terminology of Voline, "statist, authoritarian Marxists." In reality, what Voline and the whole anarchist current have never understood, is that the disappearance of workers' democracy, which bled the soviets of any real proletarian life, was the direct consequence of the tragic impasse in which the Russian revolution found itself trapped. It is from this incomprehension of the real movement and the general historical dynamic of the world proletariat that the anarchists rewrite and interpret history in their own fashion through their old anti-Marxist, anti-party and "anti-authoritarian" theoretical frame. In this manner, the anarchist ideology provides more ammunition for the anti-communist campaigns of the bourgeoisie, which have as their objective to perpetuate, before the proletariat, the lie that there exists a pretend "continuity-theoretical, practical and historical" between Lenin and Stalin, between the Revolution of October 1917 and the Stalinist counter-revolution. Because Marxism defends the formation of a proletarian political party, calls for the centralization of the proletariat's forces and recognizes the inevitability of a state in the period of transition to communism, it is condemned, according to the anarchists, to conclude in the execution of the masses. Such "eternal truths" have no utility for the understanding of the real historic process and for drawing out the lessons that must be stressed to the future revolutionary movement.

In this context, we must now ask; what were the real lessons of the tragedy of Kronstadt drawn by the Communist left? 2. Violence Can Never Be a Means to Solve Disputes Within the Working Class Itself.

Revolutionary violence is a weapon that the proletariat is forced to use in its fight against the capitalist class. However, in regards to disputes within the proletariat, violence can have no place, as it cannot but destroy the class' unity, its solidarity, its cohesion and engender demoralization and a loss of hope.

Under no pretext, can violence serve as an instrument within the working class because it is not a method for the acquisition of consciousness. The proletariat cannot acquire the latter except through its own experience of the class struggle and the constantly self-critical examination of this experience. This is why violence within the working class, whatever its immediate motivation, cannot but serve to interfere with the masses own self-activity; and, in the end, constitute the most profound hindrance to its acquisition of class consciousness, which is the indispensable condition for the triumph of communism. In this sense, even if certain fractions of the working class demonstrate errors or confusions, the "just line" cannot be imposed upon them by the force of arms by another fraction, even if it is the majority. The uprising at Kronstadt did, in fact, constitute a weakening of the proletarian bastion, at the level of its cohesion and unity. However, the repression of Kronstadt constituted a weakening even more profound and dangerous and hastened the degeneration of the revolution altogether. 3. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat Is Not That of A Party:

The tragedy of the Russian Revolution, and in particular the massacre of Kronstadt, was that the entirety of the workers' movement of the day lacked clarity regarding the role of the party in the exercise of proletarian power. In fact, within the workers' movement the idea that, as in the bourgeois revolution, it was the party that must exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat in the name of the working class, still held currency. However, contrary to other revolutions in human history, the proletarian revolution requires the constant active participation of the whole of the working class. This means that under no circumstances can it tolerate, under the threat of immediately opening up a course of degeneration, neither the "delegation" of power to a party, nor the substitution of a body of specialists or any fraction of the working class-as revolutionary as they may be-for the whole of the working class itself. It is equally due to this reason that when the state raises itself up against the working class, as it did in the case of Kronstadt, the role of the party-as an emanation from, and the vanguard of, the proletariat-is not to defend the state against the working class, but to lead the struggle on the side of the latter against the state. 4. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat Cannot Be Identified With the State:

At the time of the Russian Revolution, there existed a general confusion in the workers' movement, which identified the dictatorship of the proletariat with the state that appeared following the overthrow of the Tsarist regime. This state came to be represented by the All-Russian Congress of Delegates of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants' Soviets. Proletarian power, instead of being manifested through the specific organs of the working class (factory assemblies and workers' councils) was identified with the apparatus of the state (territorial soviets, emanating from all the non-exploiting social strata).

Yet, as clearly brought to the forefront by the Italian Communist Left at the end of the 1930's and the Gauche Communsite de France following that, in drawing the lessons of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the autonomy of the proletariat means that, under no circumstances, can the unitary and political organs of the working class subordinate themselves to state institutions, as that can only have the effect of diluting these proletarian organs and cause them to abdicate their communist program, which is their proper subject and their real concern. Holding these conceptions that plagued the workers' movement of the day (the idea of a "proletarian state") any resistance on the part of the workers against the state apparatus could only be considered as "counter-revolutionary." At no moment, can the proletariat relax its vigilance vis a vis the state apparatus, as the events of Kronstadt and the Russian experience as a whole have shown that the counter-revolution can very well manifest itself through the channel of the post-insurrectional state and not merely in the form of a bourgeois aggression from the "exterior".

As tragic and as devastating as the Bolshevik mistakes were, it is not the latter, but really the isolation of the Russian Revolution, that was the basis for its degeneration. If the revolution had been able to spread, in particular in the form of a victorious insurrection in Germany, it is highly probable that these errors could have been corrected in the course of the revolutionary process itself. This possibility is witnessed by the positions defended by Lenin in the debate of 1920-1921 in which he was opposed to Trotsky on the question of the unions (a debate that transpired at the 10th Party Congress at the same time as the Kronstadt events unfolded). Thus, just as Trotsky defended the idea that the unions must become an apparatus for the instruction of the working class by the "proletarian" state, Lenin-in disagreement with this analysis-argued that the workers must defend themselves against their "own state", particularly in his estimation that the soviet regime had become no longer a proletarian state but a "workers' and peasants' state" with "profound bureaucratic deformations."

Elsewhere, in 1922, in a report presented to the central committee of the party, it was in these terms that Lenin began to perceive that the counter-revolution had raised its head within Russia itself and that the party apparatus, bureaucratized as it had become, was headed in the wrong direction in regards to the real interests of the proletariat: "The machine is in the process of evading the hands of the conductor: in fact, one could say that there is someone at the controls, who manages this machine, but this manager follows another path from that which is required, it is driven by some invisible hand (…) Only god knows to whom this hand belongs, perhaps a speculator, perhaps a private capitalist, or perhaps both at the same time. The fact is that the machine does not go in the direction of the requirements of those whom are supposed to be in control and, sometimes, it goes-in fact-in the opposite direction." B and C From Revolution Internationale # 310, March 2001.

Internationalism, February 2003.

The November 2002 issue of Internationalist Notes (publication of the newly constituted Internationalist Workers Group regrouping the remaining sympathizers of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) in the US and Canada) rejects the ICC's expression of solidarity in the face of the Los Angeles Workers Voice's (LAWV) parasitic attacks against the IBRP(see Internationalism 122). Readers will recall that in that article we not only defend the IBRP against the ludicrous LAWV accusation that it was no longer a working class organization, but also supported the IBRP's criticism of LAWV's reprehensible behavior on the organizational level and its headlong retreat from the political legacy of the communist left. Calling our article an "unfortunate intervention," IN criticizes specifically our criticism of the LAWV for violating revolutionary principles of fraternalism and organizational functioning because "they held secret and private political and organizational discussions in Los Angeles." Dismissing our expression of solidarity, IN writes:

"As usual with the ICC there is always a clear lack of proportion in their accusations. Though the LA group is clearly localist, the ICC needs to add accusations on its effort to characterize them as parasites so as to give support to their own sectarian theory of parasitism. How else could the LA people meet other than privately as the closest IBRP supporter was many hundreds of miles away? This has permitted the LA group to respond to the ICC accusation in a way that can imply that the IBRP could have demanded some kind of mandatory observation at those meetings."

Of course, we're not so stupid or naïve that we don't recognize that geographically dispersed militants in revolutionary organizations normally meet without the physical presence of comrades from other geographical locales. However, we are well aware that geographically dispersed militants in revolutionary organizations communicate with each other through letters, documents, texts, minutes, etc. and have a responsibility to keep each other and the rest of the organization informed of discussions and decisions, which are taken within a shared framework. Our point was that these "private" meetings in LA were held secretly, that they violated earlier collective decisions and were deliberately hidden from the other comrades - just as the comrades who recently split from the ICC held secret meetings hidden from the organization, in gross violation of our statutes.

Just for the record, the "unfortunate intervention" we made in Internationalism 122 in regard to these "private" meetings was the following:

"The LAWV carried out political intrigue and maneuvering within the IBRP, holding secret and private political and organizational discussions in Los Angeles, without the participation, or even the knowledge, of AS, or the rest of the IBRP. They disregarded the rules and mode of functioning in revolutionary organizations, and of the comportment of comrades within a proletarian organization. The fruit of this bourgeois leftist mode of operation was the unilateral taking of organizational decisions, and eventual announcement of abrupt changes in basic class line positions without even a murmur of discussion within the organization. When criticized for these gross organizational violations, the LAWV responded with personalized attacks against AS, and with slanders against the IBRP. A group of individuals who carry on secret, clandestine political decision-making within the organization had the temerity to denounce the organization as being undemocratic!!!"

We are of course a bit baffled by IN's apparent complete turn around on LA's comportment, for our comments in that article were merely a paraphrase of what the IBRP and the militants of IN themselves had already published on this episode. The defense of "private" discussions in Los Angeles in the November Internationalist Notes constitutes a retreat from the clarity of the IBRP's own previous analysis and description of the situation in its external press and on its web site, upon which Internationalism drew heavily in writing our previous article.

For example, in the "Statement Regarding the Relationship of Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) with the IBRP", which was originally published on the IBRP web site, and which IN republishes as part of the November 2002 article, "The IBRP, Internationalist Notes and the US Workers Voice," the IBRP explained unprincipled secret behavior of the LAWV in these terms:

"Thus, although LAWV formally agreed to work in tandem with the Bureau the differences between us were growing rather than diminishing. Rather than tackle these differences politically as they emerged, LAWV preferred to pretend they did not exist and instead produced a smokescreen of diversions and virulent attacks on the IBRP comrade elsewhere in the USA, including demanding his expulsion from the Bureau."

"…they agreed to take on the work of publishing Internationalist Notes Volume 3. When it finally came out, however this was labeled 'US Workers Voice magazine' and all reference to the existence of other IBRP supporters in the US was omitted, including acknowledgement of the articles contributed. All this was no accident. To the criticisms that there should be a collective discussion of all US comrades on the contents of the publication, LA replied that from now on 'the majority' (i.e. themselves) would decide. This is their idea of resisting 'authoritarian' practice! Theoretically there was little to distinguish this effort as a publication o the communist left."

"Now post hoc (since it was never part of the discussion)…LA now find that the Bureau is 'non-working class', not to mention favoring Bolshevik methods of 'top-down elitism and commandism.'…LA are now resorting to slanders, which pre-empt all further discussion".

A similar point of view on the danger of the so-called private discussions in Los Angeles, also appeared in the article "The Debate Among IBRP Sympathizers in the US," by AS.This article presented very persuasively and correctly the argument that the regroupment in April 2000 of militants in Los Angeles and Wisconsin (now Indiana) as a sympathizing section of IBRP meant that the comrades were "obligated to openly discuss and inform each other and the Bureau of proposed decisions that affect our activity…" But instead of functioning according to the principles of a revolutionary organization, AS's article points out:

"The comrades of Los Angeles Workers' Voice made a decision privately amongst themselves when they changed the rate of publication in Internationalist Notes without open discussion. They also adopted the organizational name of "US Workers' Voice" without open discussion. They discarded the agreement that we made regarding the joint publication of IN. They refused to answer any questions regarding their actions preferring to make accusations and recriminations. We cannot claim to be a sympathizing section of the Bureau if we are not willing to work with the comrades of the Bureau and definitely not if we are not willing to work together as a group….a vote cannot just be taken in private without allowing a minority voice to be heard. The process of how revolutionaries make decisions involves much more than simply taking a vote. The first thing that revolutionaries do is to open a debate and try to reach a consensus through this debate. If all else fails then we make decisions by means of a majority vote."

So, it seems a bit disingenuous of IN to chastise the ICC for agreeing with and reaffirming the IBRP's own earlier criticism of the "private" meetings of the LAWV. In this apparently sectarian brush off of our expression of solidarity and our theory of parasitism, IN seriously underestimates the danger posed by LAWV (now calling itself USWV) to the workers movement. Previously, as the quotations reprinted from the IBRP above demonstrate, the IBRP and IN saw the LAWV as guilty of comportment totally at odds with the tradition and principles of the workers movement, of abandoning fundamental class positions, and publishing a journal which as the IBRP put it contains "little to distinguish this effort as a publication of the communist left," and slandering the IBRP as "non-working class." But as of November, IN now sees the main problem with LAWV is that it is localist. But in fact LA's localism is the least of their shortcomings, as the IBRP and IN themselves previously pointed out.

The small forces of left communism in North America now face a very serious problem. As we noted in Internationalism 122, "now we are confronted with the presence of a parasitic group of former leftists, with only a half-baked comprehension of communist left positions, heavily imbued with an amalgam of localist, immediatist, activist, and stalinist ideological conceptions from their past, and libertarian distrust of centralization and the Russian Revolution, affirming themselves as spokespersons of the communist left in America." The LAWV (USVW) actively distorts the positions and political traditions of left communism and now denounces the two most important organizations of the international left communist movement, the IBRP and the ICC, as non-working class and irrelevant.

After we expressed our solidarity with the IBRP, LAWV turned its venom on the ICC, distorting our views - for example literally lying about what we have written in our press on the Kronstadt rebellion. To their credit, IN notes this outrageous slander by their former Los Angeles comrades in their article, but makes an egregious error when it basically equates the ICC and the LAWV, essentially saying "a pox on both your houses." In this sense, IN announces that the political struggle against LAWV "is of no interest to the revolutionary movement and the international working class," as if the parasitic attacks and political distortions of the LAWV will disappear if they are ignored. It is critical that IN resist any sectarian biases against the ICC, and join with us in countering the confusions and distortions of revolutionary principles being peddled by the Los Angeles group. Even if they don't accept our theoretical understanding of political parasitism, surely IN must understand that against the LAWV attack against the very idea of a revolutionary Marxist organization, against the conception of the revolutionary party, against their rejection of the Russian Revolution, against their rejection of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, against their ridicule and denunciation of the organizations of the communist left, we share a common bond and common struggle. This is especially true since the IBRP and IN bear a particular responsibility for the fact that the LAWV gained a certain aura of legitimacy as partisans of the communist left because of their sojourn as members of an IBRP sympathizing section, despite their inability to deal with and break with their leftist past. It is impossible to "go forward" as IN wishes to do without taking up the responsibility to defend the communist left against a monster they helped to create, even if at the same time they are aware of political disagreements between the organizations of that milieu.

JG, 12/16/02.

Four weeks after unleashing its terrifying war machine over Iraq the US bourgeoisie is getting ready to claim victory. Overmatched and out-gunned by an enemy far superior in every military aspect Iraq’s armed forces have been practically destroyed. Sadam Hussein’s regime has collapsed; all major sate functionaries (included Hussein) have been killed or are in the run. The so-called “coalition” forces have taken military control of all the main strategic areas of the country. Ten of thousands -perhaps hundreds, no body knows exactly or has cared to count, of Iraqi soldiers and civilians have been slaughtered or maimed by the US killing machine. The devastation of basic infrastructure and the destruction of material wealth by the aerial bombardment of the war and the fighting in the ground, is being compound by the destruction caused by mobs acts of revenge against perceived symbols of the fallen Iraq’s regime, the settling of accounts between ethnic and religious groups and the mass looting undertaken by some sectors of the “liberated” Iraqi population.

The main phase of the war over, now the American bourgeoisie will have to deal with the political instability and economic ruins of a country ravaged in grand part by the accumulated effects of three major wars in the last two decades. Accordingly the bourgeois media is already phasing out its high pitch war propaganda campaign and switching over to a peacetime “war reconstruction” theme.

And while the American bourgeoisie parades in front of the noses of friends and enemies the prowess of its military muscle and prepares itself to celebrate its war victory by a new barrage of lies aimed to justify the conquest of Iraq, revolutionaries have the duty to reveal the real reasons for this war and thus to unmask the false explanations that the ruling class is using to make the working class identify itself with the imperialist interest of American state.

The Bush administration has given over the last months many “praiseworthy” explanations for this new military adventure. It has said, attempting still to exploit the patriotic feelings awaken in the American population after the terrorist attacks of September 11 to the cities of New York and Washington, that this war is a war against terrorism. It has said that this war is a pre-emptive action to disarm Iraq of “weapons of mass destruction” that could have been used in the future against American interest. It has said that this war has the goal of changing Iraq’s regime and the overthrowing of a bloody dictator that threatened its neighbors and oppressed its own people. It has said –and this is the prefer theme lately- that this is a war aimed to liberate the Iraqi population, a war meant to bring prosperity, peace and the democratic panacea to the Iraqis and the Middle East region at large.

These explanations are cynical lies. The use of the weapon of terrorism, the possession of “weapons of mass destruction”, the oppression of its “own population” was not the sole attribute of Hussein’s regime, but the share characteristic of all capitalist states in the world nor matter how democratic or dictatorial their political regime. The US is not exception to this rule, historically its dominant class has not hesitated either to use terrorism or “weapons of mass destruction” when its suited its political interests. Lets not forget that the US posses a military arsenal able to destroy the world several times over. However there is nothing out of the ordinary about the dishonesty of the bourgeoisie. The dominant class can’t just tell the exploited class –the one that has always bared one way or the other the brunt of the military adventure of its exploiters- that a military action is needed in order to advance or defend the political, economic or military strategic needs of the State. In order to convince that killing and being killed is a worthy cause, the dominant class has to ideologically mystify the population and in particular the working class. The imperialist WWI, and WWII and the none less imperialist various local wars in which the Western and the Stalinist blocs confronted each other for decades had always been justified with one or other ideological them. The “anti-terrorism” and democratic banner that the US is today waving to justify its world-wide war campaign is nothing but a façade behind which stand the desperate efforts of a frightening imperial power determined to defend its hegemony over the world.

The Crisis of American leadership:

The collapse of the Stalinist bloc and its leader the USSR at the end of 1989-90 left the US as the hegemonic imperialist superpower in the world. Thanks to its unsurpassed military apparatus, its powerful economy and its privileged geographic position the American bourgeoisie set for a moment at the top of the world gloating on its political leadership. However this dominant position was challenged immediately by major and minor imperialist powers, included the states that during the cold war period have been American’s closest allies. The end of the “cold war”, rather than putting an end to military confrontations and brining in “peace and prosperity”, opened up a period of increasing violent confrontations between national states that are plunging the whole world into a growing state of barbarism. This drive to war is not due to “bloody” dictators or particularly bellicose bourgeois fractions, but to the fact that in the epoch of capitalist decadence all sates are obliged to wage a life or death imperialist struggle in order to maintain their economic and political viability. This is the underlying dynamic at work behind the first Gulf war at the beginning of the 90’s, the wars in Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Africa, the menace of nuclear war between the Pakistan and India, the September 11 events, the war in Afghanistan, the ongoing massacres in the war between Israel and Palestine and today’s US conquest of Iraq.

US imperialism, at the center of this war dynamic, has for over a decade followed a coherent strategy designed to defend its hegemonic world power. This strategic orientation has at its core a political, economic and military policy aim to prevent the arising of a new superpower –in reality an imperialist bloc- that could pose a serious challenge to the American worldwide dominance. The massive American display of military power during “desert storm” in 91, just after the disappearance of the bloc system that dominated the world since after WWII, was already meant to send a message to the US would be challengers. The diverse political-military initiatives of the US bourgeoisie during the last decade, ranging from the revival of the “star wars” program, the relocation of troops around the world under the cover of “peace-keeping” and “antiterrorism” slogans and the direct territorial control of strategic zones of the world, are all elements of this strategy aim to defend American hegemony.

In the last year, after the events of September 11, the US bourgeoisie has ratchet up its campaign against its would be challengers. Under the cover of the war against terrorism it has through a more massive military intervention started an offensive directed to the encirclement of Europe and Russia by gaining direct control of Central Asia and the Middle East. This is the real explanation of the war in Afghanistan, the present conquest of Iraq and the declared intention of the Bush administration to deal with Iran. Thus the aims of this intervention are beyond the question of oil considered as a source of capitalist profit. In reality to the extent that the question of oil plays a role in these events this due to the strategic importance that the control of this raw material has in the over all imperialist chessboard game being play in the international arena between the US and its challengers.

The US new offensive has called forth a corresponding response by its rivals. France led the efforts to resist the American intervention in Iraq plunging the UN into crisis and obliging the US to go to war without the “legal” coverage of this organization and thus undermining its credibility. But even more important is the open Germany’s challenge to the US policy, which has brought unquestionable to the open the opposition between America and the only other power which could pose as the candidate to lead a new anti-US imperialist bloc.

The divisions between the great powers over Iraq has also exposed the fiction of the NATO alliance and at the same time has also reveled the great divergences that exist in Europe over inter-imperialist relations and the nonexistence of a European bloc for the moment.

The military victory of the US in Iraq, despite the fact that it has allowed once again to show-case the US enormous military superiority will not stop its rivals from continuing challenging its world hegemony. On the contrary this war will have the immediate effect of adding fuel to imperialist tensions and chaos all around the world.

--Eduardo S .

One step ahead in the strengthening of the revolutionary organization in the Americas

On November 30 and December 1 2002 an event of great importance took place for the working class, and particularly for its bastions in North, Central, and South America, as well as in the Caribbean area. The ICC held its first Pan-American Conference, which brought together the sections in the USA (Internationalism), Mexico (Revolucion Mundial), and Venezuela (Internacionalismo). This assessment is not an expression of arrogance. Instead, its importance is a historical fact.

The ICC statutes set down that each of its territorial sections must hold a conference every year. The aim of these conferences is to make a balance of the activities and give the perspectives for intervention for the following year, within the context of the agreements reached at the International Congresses, held every two years. In the last few years, the ICC central organs have encouraged the holding of regional meetings for those sections which intervene in a common geographical area. In this way the international and centralized character of the central organs is reaffirmed, the collective character of the organization is strengthened, and possible localist tendencies within each section are counterbalanced. In addition, the tendency toward ‘each for themselves’, characteristic of decomposition, are also counterbalanced.

The regional conferences are not a sum of each section’s representatives. Instead, their objective is to make common balances of activities, national situations, and intervention, as well as tracing perspectives in a collective manner, without neglecting the discussions around the most relevant aspects of each section involved. This is why the task of the first ICC Pan-American Conference was to make a collective balance of the activities of the American sections of the ICC, and a balance of the economic, political, geopolitical, and social situation in a region that traditionally has been the US bourgeoisie’s backyard. One of the myths that this conference tore down is that of the separation between the proletariat in the US and that in the rest of the continent, a separation drawn by the left, the leftists and their new version, the ‘anti-globalists.’ It portrays the US working class as ‘privileged’ or as ‘working class aristocracy,’ when in reality they are being affected by unemployment and a significant increase in the level of poverty.

The defense of the organization: axis of the Conference

The dominant aspect of the Pan-American Conference was the balance of our activities, especially as they relate to the functioning of the sections concerned, which had been particularly affected by an internal crisis, which led to the formation of a clan within the organization. This clan in turn constituted a supposed ‘internal fraction’ which today is a parasitic group. It is made up of ex-militants who had violated our organizational principles, (see the article Extraordinary Conference of the ICC: The struggle for the defense of organizational principles, International Review 110).

The Conference has deepened on the root causes that made the formation of this new clan possible within the organization. It based itself on the orientation texts generated by the central organs for the internal discussion. The discussion brought to light the fact that affinitarian-type relationships made it possible for the clan to have an influence on the American sections, and particularly on the Mexican section, where a number of its militants have been co-opted by the ‘internal fraction.’ The Conference has also highlighted the vestiges of leftism in organizational matters which facilitated the penetration of alien ideologies within the sections, as an expression of the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie. The Conference resolved that the aspects of the weight of affinitarism and leftism will have to be deepened by each one of the sections.

After extending the invitation to the four comrades co-opted by the ‘internal fraction’ in Mexico, the Conference has once more witnessed its disrespect for the organization. Instead of making use of this regional event to defend its positions and try and convince the militants of the correctness of their positions, these comrades opted for political ostracism. In this way, these comrades (like the ones in the Paris ‘fraction’, who rejected our invitation to the Extraordinary Conference of the beginning of this year) have placed themselves outside of the organization, by consistently violating organizational principles.

The Conference reaffirmed the priority of the defense of the organization for our intervention. The deepening of the understanding of the causes of the crisis, along with the open yet firm and sustained attitude toward our organizational principles, which we have held vis-à-vis the attacks by the parasitic internal ‘fraction’, are conceived as a process of decantation. During this process the expressions of the penetration within our ranks of ideologies that are alien to the working class are rejected.

In this sense, the balance made by the Conference is very positive. A concrete demonstration is that at the time of the Conference, a new section of Revolucion Mundial in the north of Mexico was integrated. This shows the vitality of the ICC and the strengthening of our section in Mexico. In this way, the basis for the future proletarian party in the region are strengthened.

Strengthening of the collective intervention in the region

The situation in the proletarian political milieu is another aspect discussed at the Conference. We observed that a number of organizations show a tendency toward opportunism. We can see this, for instance, in the positions taken by several groups in the milieu on events that happened in the region. These groups have posed the question of the existence of the combativeness of the proletariat at the time of the events in Argentina. In reality, the working class was actually integrated in the masses of the unemployed, the ‘piqueteros’, who live in the cities’ slums, trapped in inter-bourgeois struggles. In the case of Venezuela, they identified the political crisis as a struggle of the big bourgeoisie against Chavez’s ‘reformist’ government. But it was really a conflict between fractions of capital, which are decomposing rapidly, and where the Venezuelan proletariat is trapped between the options offered by either fraction of the bourgeoisie. The ICC, in particular its sections in the Americas, takes the responsibility to intervene in a coordinated fashion to arrest the opportunist expressions of the milieu, which at times get to the point of flirting with the positions of the left and the leftists in the region. This works against the process of development of class consciousness which we see in elements in search of political clarification, even though they are a minority.

In order to strengthen our intervention, the Conference discussed and laid out the orientations to make a more efficient use of our press. We need to integrate global analyses on the political crises of the regional bourgeoisies as well as the analysis of the geopolitical situation. Above all, we aim at generating analyses on the class struggle in the region, tracing the perspectives that open up for the proletariat, and confronting the tricks laid by capital against the proletariat. One of the central aspects we need to develop in our press is how decadent capitalism, in the face of its inability to present humanity with solutions, accelerates the pauperization of the proletariat and the poorest strata in the region. In particular, we need to analyze further on the living conditions of the proletariat in the US, because there exists a belief that the US working class lives in a ‘heaven’. The left, the leftists, and ‘globalists’ are mainly responsible for this mystification, when the very statistics of the bourgeoisie show the acceleration of the conditions of misery and poverty in the world’s greatest economy.

Because the Conference prioritized the questions of organizational functioning, it could not develop on the national situations, where we deal with the economic, political, and geopolitical aspects and the class struggle. Given the importance of these aspects, the Conference decided that each section should develop them. We will then publish the analyses in our press and report upon them at public meetings.

Strengthening of the revolutionary minorities in the region

As we said in the Resolutions on activities drawn at the Conference: ìThe conference has marked a positive dynamic as to the capacity to diagnose, to deepen, while also showing a great will to take on the struggle. That is, not only has there been a connection with the rest of the ICC, but also the Pan-American Conference has marked a moment in the enrichment of the international politics of the ICC.î

This ‘political enrichment’ is the basis to strengthen the development and intervention of the revolutionary minorities in the region and to counteract the effects of capitalism’s decomposition on the militants. ìÖWe canít, however, fall into fatalistic attitudes which are nothing but the expression of decomposition (giving up, passivity, let things passÖ) We have to take up this struggle collectively. In this sense:

-we must take individual responsibility as militants of an organization of combat;

-we must make an effort in theoretical deepening. While it is an antidote against the erosion of militantism, theoretical deepening is also a weapon against clannism, and affinitarism, and the loss of acquisitions;

-we must strengthen the political and fraternal ties between militants (idem)

We are today witnessing an acceleration of history at every level, particularly a forward movement of the decomposition of a decadent system that has nothing to give other than pauperization and war, that is to say, barbarism. Notwithstanding the fact that the proletariat in the different countries of the region is entangled in the inter-bourgeois confrontations, it also makes efforts to develop its struggles of resistance against the attacks of capital. This shows that the proletariat continues to push for the perspective of class confrontations. Today more than ever the revolutionary minorities of the region have a very important role to play in the intervention toward the elements and groups in search of a class perspective. The Pan-American Conference is an effort, albeit modest, fully inscribed within the efforts our organization makes on a world level to strengthen the perspective of the only possible solution to this barbarism: communism.

Internationalism

Revolucion Mundial

Internacionalismo/ December 2002

The war in Iraq is being used by the American ruling class as a pretext to ram austerity measures down the throats of the working class. The attacks on the workers’ standard of living were actually initiated by the Bush administration last year, and have escalated sharply this year, constituting the most significant degradation of working class living conditions in more than twenty years. Patriotism and war propaganda are being used to push through these cuts with only minimal opposition. Not only is the working class paying for the war with the lives and physical well being of its young men and women in uniform on the battlefield, but it is being forced to endure a permanent decline in its standard of living to finance US imperialism’s war mongering policies.

Military costs are escalating at a feverish pace for American capitalism, which more and more feels compelled to employ brute force to defend its imperialist hegemony throughout the world. Forty-seven percent of federal spending goes to military related costs. The $2.2 trillion federal budget proposed by the Bush administration for the next fiscal year increases military spending yet again, while at the same time introducing drastic cuts in spending on social programs, through sharp cuts in funds turned back to the state and local governments. According to the Los Angeles Times, measured in real dollars, Bush is spending more on the military than Johnson did during the Vietnam war. “In 2003 dollars, defense spending would peak at $451.9 billion, compared with the peak during the Vietnam buildup of $439.9 billion, according to analysis of administration figures by the generally liberal Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (LAT March 12, 2003). And these figures do not include the costs incurred in waging the war in Iraq, occupying that country for at least six months, and reconstructing the Iraqi infrastructure, which has originally been estimated at $80-100 billion, but which many expect will run even higher. As we go to press, the war in Iraq is costing $12,000 per second, $366,000,000 per 8-hours, or a staggering $1.1. billion per day!!! (Figures computed by War Resisters League, based on published federal budgetary data.)

The cuts in social programs proposed by the Bush administration are planned as long-term measures to permanently shrink the social wage – that portion of the cost of the reproduction of the working class provided by the state in the form of social services rather than in money wages paid directly by employers to workers. For example, over the next ten years, the budget plan will cut $470 billion from medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and student loans. On the immediate level, “federal spending on poverty alleviation, science, environmental protection, transportation and health care would be cut below current levels” (Washington Post, March 13, 2003).

One of the remarkable strengths of American state capitalism is its ability to mask the imposition of austerity by means of its federal structure, and apparently decentralized power. Rather than announce a uniform national austerity program imposed by the central government in Washington that might risk provoking a working class uproar, the American ruling class uses its federal structure to decentralize the attacks. A key element in this sophisticated approach is the control of tax levy funds that are distributed to the state governments, and through them the distribution of these funds to municipal level governments. The cutoff of federal funding puts pressure on local governments to slash programs, raise taxes, or a combination of the two – any of which constitutes an attack on the workers’ standard of living. Each state and municipality cobbles together its own spending plans, producing all manner of diverse austerity measures, which obscure the fact that austerity is a direct result of national policy decisions made in Washington, and foster a climate that encourages useless local struggles against this or that particular program cutback in this or that locality, rather than against the attacks at the national level.

So for example, the New York State government will be cut 12.7 billion in funding for Medicaid programs over the next ten years, $2 billion for Supplemental Security Income, $1 billion in Earned Income Tax Credit, $1.8 billion for food stamps, and $1.2 billion for welfare. New York Gov. George Pataki has proposed cutting public education funds by $2.1 billion next year alone. In Cleveland, Ohio school officials have proposed canceling summer school sessions. Portland, Oregon school officials plan to raise the student-teacher ratio from 30 to 1 to 42 to 1. California state officials warn that they may have to lay off 30,000 teachers. In Massachusetts, where the 180-day school year has been in place for generations, officials are considering cutting the school week to four-days.

New York City, site of the Twin Towers disaster, is particularly hard hit by the austerity program. The city government faces a $4 billion budget deficit, and has already announced 5400 public sector layoffs, and these are expected to eventually reach 15,000. At the same time, property taxes have soared by 27 percent, public transit fares will increase by 33%, and the city will begin charging tolls on bridges across the East River that bring traffic into Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens, which have always been free since they were constructed a century ago.

The impact of these layoffs and austerity measures on the working class standard of living is devastating. These layoffs don’t simply signify the number of people being thrown out of work – which is devastating in itself – but they also represent a degradation in the standard of living. On the economic level, these layoffs will have a cascading effect, as unemployed workers reduced to surviving on unemployment benefits will spend less on goods and services in the areas where they used to work, and where they live, and will eventually lead to layoffs in businesses that depend upon their patronage. Workers lucky enough not to be laid off will face pressure to work harder and produce more. On the level of social conditions for the entire working class, these attacks will mean a deterioration in fire protection, education, sanitation, health services, and the physical infrastructure – which means a degeneration in the health, safety and future of the working class. But in the meantime, as the suffering of the working class increases, the government will have no difficulty or compunctions about appropriating more and more funds to finance its imperialist military operations abroad. — JG

The leading representatives of the US dominant class have followed up their victorious war against Iraq and the military occupation of that country with a flurry of political and diplomatic activity. Mr. Bush, Colin Powell and D. Rumsfeld, among others, have been busy visiting the capitals of Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, trumpeting the US dream of a world under Americaís unquestioned imperial dominance. Meanwhile, contrasting with the US bouorgeoisieís fine speeches about the gains in the war against terrorism, the bright future of Iraq, and the prospects of a peaceful Middle East, the sinister reality of capitalism is in full display in this region and on worldwide scale

Cashing In On the War Victory

There is no doubt that through the display of its overwhelming military muscle and political will in its quasi-solo war against Iraq the US has created a favorable momentum in the defense of its world imperialist hegemony. For the moment Americaís most vociferous critics have quieted down, waiting for a better opportunity to challenge their suffocating imperialist rival. This was clear in the last meeting of the G-8 group at the beginning of June, where in on apparent show of unity the leaders of major industrialized countries including Germany, France and Russia óthe noisiest opponents of the US war against Iraq ó declared that their present common objective was a ìfully sovereign, stable and democratic Iraq.î France has tried to accommodate itself to the new situation in the Middle East by appealing to the US to share the spoils of war, recalling that while the US might have been able to win the war alone, it cannot secure the peace without help. Nonetheless this plea by French President Chirac has fallen on deaf ears. The reality is that the American bourgeoisie has no intention to loosen its recently acquired grip over Iraq; with the exception of Great Britain, no major imperialist power is being allowed to meddle in its ìreconstructionî. The new international military force that the US is putting together to help police post-war Iraq ñ which include such ìpowersî as Albania, Portugal, Rumania aandPoland ñ is nothing but a political cover to legitimize American military occupation and political control of this country.

On another front, after the ìnear death experience for NATOî during the debacle over Iraq, the US is trying to breathe some life back into this cold-war relic. In early June, NATOís current 19 members made headlines by deciding to include 7 more countries, and by agreeing on the shape of a new NATO ìresponse force,î a US idea aimed at counteracting the European Unionís similar sounding military outfit already in the making. Thus although the US knows that NATOís fate had been decided long ago when the reason for its existence disappeared with the collapse of the Stalinist military bloc, it does not want to accelerate its demise. On the contrary it will continue to use this pretence of ìmilitary allianceî to, on the one hand, supplement its military activity as it did in Kosovo and post-war Afghanistan, and on the other, to sow trouble in the attempts of its European rivals to escape American imperialist tutelage.

Beyond Europe, in the Middle East region, exploiting its success in the Iraq war, the US is pushing hard to reshape to its own advantage the balance of forces between the local bourgeoisies. Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine, and Israel are all under various degrees of pressure to play the imperialist game according to the rules of its bullyish new ìneighbor.î In particular Iran, which seems next on Washingtonís list of ìundesirable regimes,î is getting a lot of US attention lately. There is no doubt that the Bush administration wants to complement its political control of Iraq and Afghanistan with the conquest of Iran, a move that would put under its hand a large belt of land stretching almost from the Mediterranean sea (Syria would still be in the way) to the borders of China and Pakistan. In fact a case for Iranís ìregime changeî is already being built and excuses are mounting to justify the toppling of the ayatollahs. Pretexts are not lacking, from Iranís lack of ìdemocracy,î mistreatment of women, terrorism sponsoring and nuclear weapons ambitions. Already the US-inspired student democracy protests are causing trouble for the regime. However, once again, as was the case with the propaganda leading up to the war against with Iraq, these issues are nothing but a smoke screen to mask the real imperialist motivations of the US bourgeoisie. Lets not forget that the present Iranian theocratic regime rose up after the toppling of the US sponsored autocratic regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Regarding the question of backing terrorism, the US has no reason to envy the Iranian dominant class. With the cynicism typical of a decadent class the American bourgeoisie is today rehabilitating the so-called ìPeopleís Mujahideenî, an armed Iranian terrorist group based in Iraq that was just a few months ago the instrument of Saddam Hussein in its imperialist squabble with the Iranian State.

No Peace Under Capitalism

On May 1st the Bush administration announced the beginning of a new period in its conquest of Iraq. With the war now over, the emphasis was now going to be put on ìnation building,î on the reconstruction of the economy and on the creation of a fix-all-ills democratic political system. Peace and prosperity were supposed to be for the first time in the future of the beleaguered population of this country thanks to its humanitarian liberation by the US war machine. What cynicism! As if the economic disaster of this country, the misery, the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the battle fields and by illnesses caused by unsanitary conditions and lack of medicine were not in large part the responsibility of the US dominant class. Even though Saddam Hussein and his clique combined political dictatorship with a ruthless economic exploitation, the two US led wars against this country in just over a decade and the economic sanctions that followed the first one, have not been a blessing for the working class and impoverished masses of Iraq. Today the material situation of the Iraqi masses is by all accounts worse than before their ìliberation.î Unemployment is rampant, sanitary conditions worse than during the Saddam regime, and widespread famine is only being avoided by the US restoration of Saddamís old food handout system. The discontent about this situation is growing as exemplified by the demonstrations in mid-June by the demobilized soldiers of Iraqís army asking for payments of pensions and owed salaries. Moreover the nearly two hundred thousand strong American and ìalliedî occupying forces and the US ìcivilian administratorsî have not been able yet to create a semblance of a functioning society in Iraq. Lately the American military is having a lot more to worry than the rampant looting that followed the first days of the collapse of Husseinís regime. In the last few weeks increasing guerrilla military activity by remnants of the overthrown system have kept the numbers of American soldiers killed growing every day. At this level the situation of Iraq resembles very much that of post-war Afghanistan, in which stability has not been forthcoming. In Afghanistan on June 7 a suicide bomber killed 7 German soldiers and injured 29 others, while a resurgent Taliban is waging a guerrilla war against the American and ìinternational peacekeepersî in the Pushtun region and east of Afghanistan with incursions from its bases in Pakistan.

In the Middle East itself the continuing carnage between Israel and the Palestinians make a mockery of the US promises of peace and prosperity in the region in the post Saddam Hussein era. The ìroad map to peaceî announced with such fanfare during the Aqaba summit between Bush, Sharon and the Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has been followed by a new descent into bloodshed. In mid-June Israel attempted to assassinate Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, a top Hamas political leader, then a Palestinian bomber slaughtered a bus-full of people in Jerusalem, which in turned provoked a new round of killings by Israel. And the common slaughter goes on as usual. The reality is that neither the American bourgeoisie nor the Israelis have a solution to the Palestinian question. The State terror of Israel is once and again unable to stop the terrorist attacks of the Palestinian cliques. The carrot offered by the Americans in the form of some sort of Palestinian State very likely will also fail.

The US launched its war against Iraq with the excuse of eliminating Husseinís weapons of mass destruction. That this was a lie is proven by the fact that almost two months after the war ended those weapons are no where to be found. However neither was this war fought for humanitarian reason or to get rid of terrorism. This was an imperialist war aimed to bolster the US world hegemony and to weaken its European imperialist competitors ñGermany and France in particular. And like all wars in the 20th and 21st century, it will generate more war and political instability. This is the logic of decadent capitalism. Only the international working class through its proletarian revolution can offer a different future to humanity.

ES

In our last issue, we reported how the American bourgeoisie is making full use of the pretext of the "war on terrorism" to ram through unprecedented attacks on the working class' living and working conditions (see "War is a Pretext for Austerity," Internationalism #125). Utilizing the federal structure of its state apparatus, the American ruling class seeks to obscure its policy of generalized austerity at the level of the national capital itself by portraying the measures as the result of particular local and state officials' policy choices.

We are seeing this logic play itself out spectacularly in America's largest locality: New York City, the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Recently, city and state officials in New York have been compelled to enact a whole series of unprecedented austerity measures. Public sector lay-offs and givebacks on the shop-floor have been accompanied by a 33% hike in the subway fare, toll hikes on bridges and tunnels, a rise in the already high sales tax, property and income tax increases, a sharp rent hike for rent stabilized tenants, fire station closures, tuition increases at city universities, and, in an attempt to raise revenue, an aggressive police enforcement of a number of obscure city ordinances. For most workers, whatever increase in take home pay that results from the Bush administration's policy of federal tax cuts, which is likely to be meager at best, is quickly eaten up by the local austerity measures.

The American bourgeoisie is employing a sophisticated strategy to divert the working class away from responding to these austerity measures on its own class terrain and calling upon it to mobilize behind bourgeois democracy, bourgeois legalism and the unions.

In New York, the media has portrayed the measures as self-contained policy choices of the particular official or agency with the responsibility for implementing them, and never as part and parcel of an overall concerted austerity campaign at the national level. For example, the recent subway fare hikes were the subject of intense media coverage as the "Straphangers Campaign," a leftist inspired "consumer interest" lobby, along with a number of local and state politicians, launched a legal challenge to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's (MTA) decision to raise the fare by 33%.

According to the Straphangers’ legal complaint, the public hearings the MTA sponsored on the fare increase were held under "false pretenses," such that the "democratic process" was subverted by lack of "informed debate, because the authorities presented the public with a set of fake financial records showing a budget deficit. In mid-May, the court had decided in favor of the plaintiffs, and subway fares would be rolled-back after all! However, with the media still celebrating this supposed "victory for the public interest," the MTA appealed the decision, was granted a stay and now "the public," i.e. the working class, will be paying the increased fare, at least until the conclusion of the legal process at some undetermined future date

Similar campaigns have been launched around the bridge and tunnel toll hikes; the pending closure of firehouses in a number of the city's poorer neighborhoods; as well as the strict police enforcement of city ordinances evidenced by a media blitz surrounding the ticketing of a man for "unauthorized use of a milk crate" for using the latter as stool on a public street and a pregnant woman cited for illegally resting in the stairway of a subway platform. The latter episode has even witnessed the local police union take out a radio commercial urging citizens to petition city hall in an effort to alleviate the pressure on beat cops to write as many citations as possible!

Moreover, a number of consumer groups, in particular the Metropolitan Council on Housing (METCOUNCIL) together once again with a number of city council members and state assemblymen launched a campaign opposing sharp rent hikes for rent-subsidized housing, calling on renters to attend all meetings of the Rent Guidelines Board. In the end, despite the campaign, the RGB voted to raise rents 8.5% for a two-year lease and 5.5% for a one-year lease, figures that were very close to the landlords' actual proposal of 12% and 9% increases respectively. Clearly, this was a process with a pre-determined outcome, as many observers believe Mayor Bloomberg had previously hinted to landlords that the burden of their property tax increases could be shifted to their mostly working-class tenants. In a city where rents are already high, where the average rent-stabilized family makes $32,000 a year and pays 1/3 of its pre-tax income on rent, and where 1/4 of tenants pay 50% of this income (cited in Tenant/Inquilino, April 2003), this rent hike constitutes a serious blow, a blow against which the democratic and legalistic route of the bourgeois state proved no defense for the working-class.

In still another example, recent city lay-offs have been the target of yet another lawsuit, this time by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), claiming that the lay-offs have unfairly targeted minority workers, because most of the teachers aides being laid off are blacks and Latinos. The union legal campaign does not challenge the logic of austerity and lay-offs; it only asks that people be thrown out of work in a more racially sensitive manner. The union campaign not only serves to trap workers behind the dead-end of race-based litigation and but actually seeks to divide workers against themselves on the basis of race and ethnicity -- one more example of the "divide and conquer" strategy the American bourgeoisie has always played, and which the unions have historically been on the front line in implementing.

The lesson of the recent media campaigns in New York City, emphasizing legalistic campaigns based on our "democratic rights as citizens," is that in struggling to resist the austerity measures being taken against it, the working class must not fall for the dead-end of bourgeois legalism and democracy. Filing lawsuits in court, petitioning city hall or testifying at administrative hearings will not halt the current austerity drive that capitalism is compelled to launch against the proletariat. On the contrary, workers must resist the call of the bourgeoisie to bury its struggle in the inter-classist stew of democracy and legality. It must struggle on its own class terrain in defense of its living and working conditions. In this, it must come to see that all factions and levels of the bourgeoisie have the same policy: faced with the insolubility of capitalism's permanent crisis, faced with the senility of its entire system, it has no choice but to attack the working-class. The working-class must take its fate into its own hands, develop its own organs to coordinate its struggle outside of the state's legal and democratic arena, including its union apparatus.

--Henk

Frank Girard, publisher and editor of the Discussion Bulletin, the independent but decidedly De Leonist-leaning journal devoted to political debate and discussion among "non-market socialists," libertarians, and anarchists, has announced his intention to cease publication with the July-August issue. It is appropriate at this moment to reflect back on the contributions of Discussion Bulletin over the past two decades, assessing its strengths and weaknesses.

Girard for many years had been an activist in the Socialist Labor Party and Internationalism frequently polemicized with Discussion Bulletin on the De Leonist legacy, especially its tendency to embrace bourgeois democratic ideas (revolution at the ballot box; rejection of the necessity of a violent revolution; rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Russian Revolution, the Third International), and also its ossified position on the union question. While the debate sometimes got heated, it was clear that Girard was committed to open debate, often publishing our polemics with his rejoinders in DB's pages. In the early days we had the impression that DB was a group project, despite Girard's insistence that it was essentially a one-man operation. In large measure our disbelief resulted from DB's record of regular publication, appearing every two months like clockwork. In a milieu too often characterized by dilletantishness, a failure to understand the need for regular publication, and a tendency towards sporadic publication schedules by often short-lived groups, this was a remarkable achievement, a reflection of Girard's seriousness and dedication to proletarian discussion. It is difficult to avoid talking about DB and Girard as being somthing other than synonymous.

DB was unique in that it specialized in publishing disparate points of view. It became a place where different groups and individual militants searching for political clarification could discover each other's existence. On many occasions, for example, when DB published one of the ICC's polemics, we would receive queries from militants interested in learning more about our politics. Similarly, we learned about the existence of certain organizations that might never have known about through reading their contributions in DB. In a country which is as geographically far-flung as the US, with a dispersed and disorganized political landscape, this function was a tremendous political contribution.

There were of course a number of serious shortcomings. For one, despite his openness to political discussion, Girard personally never was able to surpass the democratist confusions of De Leonism, and basically stayed mired in the perspectives of the Second International, cutting his political evolution from a Marxist understanding of the most important proletarian event of the 20th century: the Russian Revolution. Too often Girard's polemics against the ICC fell into the De Leonist practice of equating anyone who saw the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution as a Stalinist. On a number of occasions Girard repeated slanderous accusations that the ICC defended substitutionism and sought to establish regimes like those in Cuba and China. It is to Girard's shame that he could never acknowledge the utter falsity of these outrageous charges, which were more akin to the red-baiting of the bourgeois than fraternal debate.

Another shortcoming was the failure to have any formal criteria for publication in DB. While we appreciate the effort to create an open forum, the magazine sometimes published contributions by openly bourgeois elements, such as an environmental activist who once called upon readers to write their Congressmen! More importantly DB too often was mired in fulminations about De Leon's outmoded sentiments, and failed to address burning conjunctural questions facing the workers movement. In particular, there was a failure to publish contributions about American imperialist policies, and military adventurism. Also it would have been interesting to read Girard's own critique of the SLP; after all there must have been a reason for his departure from an organization in which he had spent three decades of his political life.

Perhaps the greatest weakness was Girard's failure to build a group. Regular publications that address significant theoretical questions are important acquisitions for the working class, and their disappearance is a real loss. We appreciate that Girard would like spend his retirement years "on other projects", but we disagree that a publication like DB is anachronistic in the age of internet discussion boards. There is a qualitative difference between the "off the top of one's head" jottings that appear on a discussion board and a well-thought out essay or article that was either written for, or reprinted in, DB. In any case, Internationalism salutes the seriousness and efforts of Frank Girard to maintain publication of DB for these 20 years, and wishes him good health in the years to come. We of course invite him to continue to debate with us. - J. Grevin

For more than a month the prestigious New York Times, and the media in general, have been shaken by the Jayson Blair scandal, which has put into question the veracity of the mass media that the ruling class relies upon to manipulate and mold mass consciousness in contemporary society. Blair was exposed for plagiarizing and even fabricating more than 73 national news stories over the past year. To repair the damage to its credibility, the Times devoted four full pages of its May 11th edition to detailing Blair’s transgressions. This “coming clean” by the self-styled American newspaper of record was supposed to reassure the public that the New York Times was more than capable of cleaning its own house. The whole thing was very reminiscent of the New York police department’s self-investigations of police brutality complaints. Journalists around the country rushed to the defense of the Times, praising the newspaper for confronting the scandal head-on. As one apologist put it, “the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post are dedicated to reporting the truth.”

For revolutionaries the current affair is not particularly shocking. Blair’s misdeeds pale in significance in light of the daily onslaught of propagandistic half truths and outright falsifications perpetuated by the mass media in defense of the state apparatus to which it is attached and which it defends unequivocally. But for the ruling class the scandal is embarrassing because it potentially undermines confidence in the so-called “free press” which is ideologically touted as a foundation stone of democratic society. There is a myth about the media as the fourth estate which asserts that an informed citizenry, capable of participating in the decisions that affect their lives, is the essence of democracy. In reality, all three elements that make up this myth (informed citizenry, participation in decisions, and democracy) are totally groundless.

“An informed citizenry”

The whole idea of an “informed citizenry” is completely fictitious in capitalist society. “Informed” about what, by whom, and for what purpose? A cornerstone of American journalism is the idea of “objectivity” in reporting the news, an idea that developed only in the beginning of the 20th century. The view that journalists can transmit the central elements of what happens in the real world through a formulaic transmission of information that includes the who, what, why, when, where and how of significant events in society free of bias is the linchpin of American journalism’s self-image and by extension, America’s “democratic” self conception. However, the notion that news coverage is not reality, but a story about reality, and it is marked and shaped by a variety of social institutions, codes of behavior, and practices, that make “objectivity” a chimera is generally accepted even by bourgeois academics in media theory. It is not the facts that determine the story that is written, but rather the story that editors have assigned to a reporter that determine the facts that are selected for inclusion.

Modern journalism as it exists in the US is a creation of decadent capitalism, in which the media has become fully integrated into the state capitalist apparatus as a tool to control popular opinion in the interests of the ruling class. During World War I, government information offices were created to manipulate public opinion as part of the war effort, and it was after the war that the first journalism schools were created in the US and the new generations of journalists were inculcated with the notion of objectivity, which facilitated the integration of the media into the state apparatus. Whatever Jayson Blair’s evil deeds, it was the media as a whole which fed the public all the administration’s lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda and Asama bin Laden as a pretext for war.

For marxists, truth is inseparable from class perspective. From the perspective of the ruling class, capitalism is a progressive system, in which the laws of the market determine an equitable distribution of wealth, and workers receive a fair wage for a fair day’s work. This capitalist version of reality, based on the exploiting class’ inability to see itself as the personification of an historically anachronistic mode of production and social relations, is supported by all manner of official and non-official data and evidence to demonstrate its truthfulness. From the perspective of the working class a completely different reality is abundantly apparent: capitalism is a ruthless system of exploitation of labor that offers humanity a stark choice between barbarism or revolution.

“Participating in decisions”

Exactly how do workers, or any individuals in society for that matter participate in the decisions that affect their lives? Any decision we make is totally limited by the circumstances in which we live even on the most personal basis. Sure, we can go to a theater and see any movie we want, but who decides on what films are made and distributed? Sure the capitalist state allows citizens to vote for president, but who decides who runs for president? We can only choose between the limited options the system allows. According to bourgeois propaganda, citizens participate in these decisions of state policy indirectly because their elected representatives make the decisions in the legislature or the executive branch. And in any case, in what way does “choosing” the president have any bearing on the policies that the government pursues?

There are many examples of the farcical nature of this alleged participation in decision making. For example in 1964, Lyndon Johnson won election by portraying the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater as a war monger and promising “no wider war,” but as soon as he was elected, Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam.In 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, public opinion polls showed a majority of American citizens opposed to war, yet that didn’t stop the elected representatives from launching war. Likewise, a majority of Americans were opposed to war in Iraq, at least without UN sanction, but that had no impact on the decision making in Washington. For a more local example, see the account of the fraudulent financial reports used by the New York Transit Authority to ram through the recent 33 percent fare increase (p. in this issue). While this case is still kicking around in the courts, there is absolutely no one talking about any criminal liability for the board for its fraudulent financial record keeping and willful misleading of the public. Why? Because they didn’t do anything that isn’t part and parcel of the everyday functioning of capitalist government.

The Idea of “Democracy”

This brings us to the third and most pernicious element in this fraudulent myth – the very idea of “democracy” itself. The reason that the bourgeoisie constantly inundates us with propaganda extolling its “democracy” and “freedom” is precisely because the opposite is true. We don’t live in a“democracy” where, by definition the people rule, but in a class dictatorship, where the capitalist class imposes its domination on society, especially on the working class, which produces all the wealth in society, and provides all the services that allow society to function but is totally excluded from the decision making process. The reality of this class dictatorship is covered over by all the trappings of bourgeois democracy: the free press, the electoral circus, clap-trap about inalienable rights, etc.

First of all, there has never been a true “democracy” in all of human social history, which has been characterized always by class rule. The much vaunted Greek democracy was in fact a slave society where democracy was reserved for male citizens only. The democracy established by the American revolution was initially a property owners democracy, with rights denied to workers, women, and slaves. Sure, in the ascendant period of capitalist development the ruling class used its democratic state as a mechanism for determining what policies its class dictatorship would implement, and it was therefore possible during that bygone era for workers to use the parliamentary system to play one faction of the bourgeoisie off against another and wrest certain structural reforms or improvements in the standard of living from the bourgeoisie. But with the passage the capitalist system into its decadent phase at the beginning of the 20th century, that characteristic of the capitalist dictatorship changed, and bourgeois democracy became 100 percent mystification. Real decision making power now resides firmly in the executive branch, and is exercised behind closed doors in the global interests of the national capitalist state, not in the legislature. In decadent capitalism, bourgeois democracy is a massive social swindle.

While the media would like to use Jayson Blair as a scape goat for media shortcomings, it is in fact the nature of journalism in capitalist society that it serves the interests of the ruling class, as a transmission belt for the capitalist propaganda and a central mechanism in manipulating and derailing class consciousness.

– J. Grevin

Earlier this year, Internationalism received copies of two leaflets distributed by the Toronto based Red and Black Notes at the anti-war demonstrations of last winter. In an effort to develop a constructive process of debate and criticism among the various tendencies in the “proletarian political milieu” (PPM) in North America, we have responded to these two leaflets with the letter that we reproduce below. The ICC has always said that the advancement of revolutionary theory can only occur as a result of open and constructive debate within the PPM. We publish our response in an effort to contribute, however modestly, to this process, a process that is an essential precondition for the eventual construction of a proletarian class party. As readers will see, although we salute the internationalist frame of Red and Black Notes’ leaflets and express our agreement on many fundamental points, we also advance some important criticisms and disagreements. This is different from the behavior of some groups in the milieu, who often seem to “flatter” new and emerging groups in order perhaps to curry their favor, rather than point out honestly and unambiguosly their errors and mistakes. If we are upfront in expressing our disagreements with some of the formulations in Red and Black Notes’ leaflets, this not done out of any desire to be sectarian. Rather, debate and disagreement are the lifeblood of the PPM, its dialectical motivation to advance and develop. Nevertheless, even if we ultimately conclude that there is much more that unites our perspectives than divides them, we still have the responsibility as revolutionaries to see that our differences confront one another openely and clearly so that mistaken ideas may be discarded, correct positions may be reaffirmed and new syntheses produced in the light of criticism. We encourage all other groups in the milieu to embrace this work fully as well. This is in the tradition of all the great revolutionaries of the past and is the necessary condition for our success in the future.

Full copies of Red and Black Note’s leaflets may be obtained by contacting them at:

Red and Black Notes

Po Box 47643

Don Mills, ON

M3C 3S7 Canada

[email protected] [33]

https://ca.geocities.com/red_black_ca/ [34]

Dear Comrade:

We have discussed the two leaflets you prepared and distributed at the Toronto anti-war demonstrations during the lead-up to the recent war in Iraq (“A Plague on Both Your Houses” and “No War But the Class War”). In the spirit of open debate, we would like to take this opportunity to share with you some comments and criticisms.

First, we want to salute the effort you have made to distribute these leaflets at the recent demonstrations. Your intervention was undoubtedly quite out-of-step with the main themes of these demonstrations, which in our analysis were all situated well within the realm of bourgeois politics. Your defense of proletarian internationalism in the face of both the official bourgeois pacifism of the demonstrations, as well as all the accompanying leftist calls to defend one imperialism against another, clearly demonstrate your desire to defend a working-class perspective on war in this historical period. In particular, your denunciations of the Trotskyists and leftists were to the point. For example, in " A Plague on Both Your Houses" you write, "For others on the left, it's about defending imperialism. This has led some, most notable the Trotskyists, to claim opposition to imperialism in this conflict means support to Iraq in the hopes of bloodying the nose of the 'main' imperialist power (…) While sounding radical, the position is essentially a lesser-evilism. (…) Capitalism is a world system, and the wars it generates are wars between the greater and the lesser imperialist powers for the right to exploit and rule. Yesterday's national liberation movements fighting against imperialism are today's exploiters of labour and tomorrow's allies of larger powers. (…) We will not choose between the greater and the lesser powers.

Moreover, your denunciations of all the belligerent parties of World War II, or as you call it the “second imperialist world war,” shows a stern refusal to fall for the bourgeois ideological justification for this war, that of defending “democracy” against fascism, a call that was repeated throughout the twentieth century not only by the official parties of bourgeois order, but also the Stalinists, Trotskyists and many anarchist currents as well; and which is being deployed in full force by the world bourgeoisie today. For us, and—as it would appear from your leaflet—for you as well, the proletariat had no side to choose in this war either. The following passage from " A Plague on Both Your Houses" demonstrates this internationalist commitment particularly well, "The second imperialist world war between 1939 and 1945 claimed tens of millions of lives. But the 'peace' that followed it also claimed untold millions of lives across the globe, as capital has engaged in low level, and sometimes not so low level wars to preserve the imperialist 'peace.' It is the peace of the grave. The only way to stop war is to uproot the capitalist system."

We believe that whether openly fascist or cloaking itself in democratic verbiage, all factions of the ruling class have been equally reactionary since the entry of capitalism into its decadent phase at some point early last century. The rejection of the defense of “democracy” is for us a key component of any attempt to defend a proletarian perspective today. We thus think that your leaflet might have been made stronger if you expressly argued that the proletariat never has any interest in taking sides between different fractions of the bourgeoisie, that there are no circumstances in which a tactical exception should be made to a “united front” policy, no matter what the ideological justification.

Moreover, despite our agreement with your leaflets’ internationalist framework we do find a number of instances in which our analysis of the Iraq war differs from yours to some degree. For example, you seemed to argue that the main reason behind the war is to be found in the US’s failing economy. By going to war, you seem to say, the American bourgeoisie was seeking some sort of “shot in the arm” for its current economic woes. In a Plague on Both Your Houses" you write, for example, "While few in the Bush administration argue that the war will revitalize the sagging US economy, it is precisely that economy which is pushing the US toward war. Trillions of dollars of debt, a stock market bubble that is about to burst and a plunging US dollar, make a war to secure massive oil reserves, and a commodity which is paid for in dollars an irresistible prize."

These assertions seem to go down the same path as the IBRP's, which argues that by taking over Iraq’s vital oil reserves, the American bourgeoisie is seeking to safeguard the international oil trade in dollars against the encroachment of the Euro. While we agree that oil is an important strategic commodity in the world economy and an important pawn on the inter-imperialist chess board, we do not think that the US decided to go to war to gain control of Iraq’s oil reserves out of any immediate intention to improve its economy, to reap super-profits or to combat the challenge of a currency-war between mounted by the European Union.

In our view, the decision to invade Iraq was the latest in a long series of military interventions that the US has been compelled to make stretching back to the First Gulf War and the collapse of the old Eastern bloc. Essentially, since the collapse of its Cold War rival, the Western bloc has ceased to have a raison d’être. Since this time, what we have witnessed are all the second and third-rate imperialisms that used to follow “bloc discipline” challenging more and more the leadership of the old bloc hegemon, the US. Faced with the collapse of bloc discipline, but still the world’s only superpower, the US has since been forced to engage in direct displays of its military power, as an attempt to keep its erstwhile allies in line. What we witnessed in the lead-up to the war in Iraq only confirms this analysis with France, Germany and Russia—the powers with the most to loose from a US take over of Iraq—protesting the loudest. In this sense, the importance of oil in this war is to be found more on the strategic level—with the US now strengthening its military presence in an area of the world upon which Europe and Japan are depended for oil—rather than for any immediate quest to reinvigorate a struggling economy. You seem to hint in the direction of our analysis, for example in "A Plague on Both Your Houses", "While the US's erstwhile European allies are expressing reluctance, it is only because they see the US's actions as a way to strengthen its position relative to their own through the seizure of Iraqi oil and the establishment of a semi-permanent US base in Iraq;" and again in " No War But the Class War!" "For France has its own reasons for opposing the US, and they have little to do concern for the Iraqi people; rather, they concern the French imperialist state's position vis-à-vis the US." Nevertheless, it does seem as if you never quite get away from the idea, mistaken in our view, that this war was about the US economy itself, or a currency rivalry between the US dollar and the Euro.

In fact, as we have shown in our press, the US intervention in Iraq can only have a negative effect on the latter’s economy forcing it to attack the living and working conditions of the working class even harder. We think that your leaflets' analysis of the origins of the war, with its focus on immediate economic factors, leads you towards some false predictions which underestimate the gravity of imperialist rivalries at this historic juncture as well as the primacy of strategic considerations in the international relations between states: i.e. the idea that the European powers would jump in and participate in the war along with the US. For example, in "A Plague on Both Your Houses," you write, "Nevertheless, the reluctant allies will likely get on board because they fear the US will go ahead and they will be left out in the cold."

For the most part, this wasn’t the case, because for countries like France, Germany and Russia had just too much to loose if the US were to strengthen its grip in the Middle East with a direct military presence in Iraq. In fact, as we wrote in our press, part of the American bourgeoisie's strategy in the lead up to the war in Iraq was precisely to raise the ante in its confrontation with its erstwhile allies by picking a fight with which these countries could not even pretend go along, and thus forcing the confrontation between the US and countries like Germany and France into the open. On the other hand, the idea that there is an emerging confrontation between a US led-bloc and a new bloc based on the European Union—a possible conclusion of seeing the war as the result of a confrontation between the dollar and the Euro—is for us a bit premature. While this may appear to be the case on the surface—and this is often how the bourgeois media on both sides of the Atlantic presents it—for the most part, however, we think the EU is little more than a sad fiction when it comes to exhibiting a united foreign policy. This was also confirmed by the lead up to the Iraq war, with a number of European countries supporting the US policy against German and French opposition.

On another level, we also feel that your leaflets tended to overestimate the current balance of class forces on the global level. As such, your calls for workers to engage in direct action tactics like sit downs and go slows against the war seems to us to be both premature and unrealistic. For example, you write in "No War But The Class War!," "And while only a full-scale break with capitalism can create a new world, resistance can be practiced on multiple levels: absenteeism, informal work to rule actions ("go-slows"), even occupations and creative industrial repairs."

While calls for workers to reject the war are perfectly legitimate in the historic sense and perfectly in line with an internationalist denunciation of imperialist war, we think it is important not to fall into the illusion of thinking the "revolution is right around the corner" today, or that a massive working class struggle against the war is likely on the immediate agenda. What we are seeing today is that much of the global proletariat is still struggling to recover its class identity after the collapse of the Soviet-bloc and all the accompanying calls of the “death of communism” and the "disappearance of the working class”. What we are witnessing now is a process of the "subterranean maturation” of consciousness in the class, where through its daily struggles against capitalist exploitation and the intensification of the austerity measures—which the bourgeoisie is compelled to impose faced with a permanent global economic crisis—the proletariat is slowly coming to recognize the connection between the drive to war and the capitalist system itself.

We think it is through these daily struggles at the point of production, on its own class terrain, where the working-class can recover its class identity and come to possess a revolutionary consciousness of the need to destroy the capitalist state and build a new society. That is why in our intervention we called on workers not to abandon their economic struggles in the face of war, not to allow either war or pacifist propaganda to distract them from the class struggle. We felt there was some tendency in your leaflets to call on the working-class to engage in an immediate “political” struggle against the war. For example, you argue in "No War But the Class War!," "If actions against the war were significant and the battle in Iraq does not go smoothly, it could provoke the kind of break down in authority in the armed forces as was seen in Vietnam: desertions, mutinies and a concern for one's own survival over that of the unit. Were these conditions to take shape, the imperialist war might well begin to resemble a civil war."

Once again, while this is a perfectly legitimate call as part of a general internationalist political line, it is, in our view, important not to fall into the trap of endorsing the idea of a "working-class anti-war movement", in today's context. For us, revolutionary class-consciousness can only rise from a unity of the economic and political aspects of the class struggle, and this is a process that unfolds in an historic and political context on the global level. Today, the conditions are not such that we are likely to see the type of movement you seemed to call for in your leaflets, and as such these calls could end up legitimizing the idea of "working class pacifism." This could possibly end up inadvertently reinforcing the bourgeois anti-war movement. Once again, this does not mean that revolutionaries should cease to call on the class to resist the war simply because it is not, at the moment, a realistic prospect; we only mean to point out that it is crucial to avoid the temptation towards an immediatist euphoria based on some isolated instances of workers appearing to struggle against with the war, such as demoralized troops criticizing their commanders or workers refusing to load trains and ships with war supplies. Many of these actions occurred on the terrain of the capitalist unions, while others were perfectly in line with the policy of certain fractions of the national bourgeoisie. While we would be among the first to salute such actions, were they to take place on the class's own terrain, we think it crucial to always keep the historic context in mind, avoid any temptation towards immediatism and try to analyze such events with a critical eye to situating them in a global context. We do not think there is a difference of principle between Red and Black Notes and ourselves on the internationalist and revolutionary defeatist framework of our intervention towards the class, but we think your leaflets may contain a certain overestimation of the reality of the class struggle at this juncture. While the historic course towards decisive class confrontations remains open, the proletariat still confronts major difficulties in finding its own class terrain in the period ahead.

Despite these differences and criticisms, we nevertheless fully support the internationalist and proletarian basis of your intervention and extend our full solidarity with your effort. We look forward to further correspondence in the future and would welcome any comments or criticisms you may have of the recent issues of Internationalism we have sent you, or correspondence on any other political question.

Communist Greetings,

Internationalism

Six months ago when US imperialism began its invasion of Iraq the ICC predicted that "far from resolving the crisis of American leadership, the current war can only take it to new levels"(Resolution on the International Situation, Point 11, 15th Congress of the ICC, March 2003). We said that the war in Iraq would lead to growing instability in the Middle East - in Iraq and Israel/Palestine in particular, that Iraq would become a quagmire for US imperialism, that far from solving the problems of the challenge to its imperialist hegemony, the US would face increasing difficulties throughout the world, and that the war would aggravate the economic crisis facing the American bourgeoisie at home. Events in Iraq (see Iraq: A Quagmire for US Imperialism, p.4), in Israel/Palestine (see p.5) have amply confirmed these predictions. Because events happen so quickly in the current period, it is critically important to understand the framework in which these events occur. There are perhaps six key elements to keep in mind: the impct of capitalist decomposition on imperialist tensions; the strategic response of US imperialism to the growing challenges to its hegemony; the contradictory impact of this strategy; the irrationality of war in the period of capitalist decadence, particularly in its phase of decomposition; the simultaneous existence of a tendency towards the formation of new blocs and the countervailing tendency of capitalist decomposition hindering the formation of blocs in the current period; and the acceleration of history.

Impact of decomposition on the imperialist terrain

The social impasse in the class struggle caused by the inability of the ruling class to impose its solution to the global economic crisis that emerged in the late 1960s - imperialist world war- and the inability of the proletariat to impose its solution - world revolution-triggered the onset of the decomposition of the capitalist system. One of the central manifestations of this decomposition was the collapse of Russian imperialism at the end of the 1980s.The breakdown of the bloc system in place since the end of World War II, as we have demonstrated often in various texts, ushered in a growing tendency towards chaos on the international level. The cement that had held nations together in the blocs, forcing them to subordinate their own narrow imperialist appetites for the good of the bloc in the confrontation with its rival - to accept the discipline imposed by the bloc leader - crumbled into dust during the 1990s. Each nation, no matter how insignificant its economic, political or military stature, was emboldened to increasingly play its own card on the imperialist terrain, to scheme for expansion at the expense of rivals, in a way that was unheard of for half a century during the cold war.

This tendency of "each for himself" on the imperialist level had drastic consequences for American imperialism, the nominal victor in the cold war, when Russian imperialism imploded in the beginning of the 1990s, because it signaled the emergence of a general tendency towards unprecedented challenges to US domination and hegemony emanating from its erstwhile allies. For half a century, US imperialist policy makers expected and received general obedience from its bloc members, even for decisions that were taken unilaterally in Washington. US imperialism became accustomed to blowing the whistle and everyone would fall in line, but now US imperialism would blow the whistle and its old allies would fall into line reluctantly, petulantly, or increasingly would not even listen. The American triumph in the cold war increasingly seemed to be a hollow victory. one that had opened a period of serious difficulties for American imperialism.

American imperialism's strategic response to its leadership crisis

The response to this growing crisis of US leadership led to a readjustment of American imperialist strategy during the 1990s. "Faced with the collapse of the rival Russian bloc at the end of the 80s, and with the rapid unraveling of its own Western bloc, US imperialism formulated a strategic plan which has, in the ensuing decade, revealed itself more and more openly. Confirmed as the only remaining superpower, the USA would do everything in its power to ensure that no new superpower - in reality no new imperialist bloc - could arise to challenge its 'New World Order'.(Resolution on the International Situation, Point 4, 15th Congress of the ICC, March 2003)

The Gulf War of 1991, triggered by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, a development which resulted from a cynical US manipulation of Saddam Hussein, in which the American ambassador to Iraq induced Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait by giving an apparent green light to the invasion with an assurance that the US would not intervene in a border conflict "between Arab brothers," was designed by Washington to warn those who would challenge its hegemony in the post-cold war epoch and press-gang other powers into endorsing its military action, shouldering considerable financial burden of the war, and at the same time reminding those powers that the US was the world's only superpower and would call the shots in the "New World Order."

Contradictory Impact of US Policy

Illustrating another central characteristic of the current period, this successful imperialist offensive by US imperialism proved to be short-lived, provoking increasing resistance from its former allies, as German, French and even British imperialism challenged the US in the Balkans under the umbrella of UN legitimacy. As the Resolution pointed out:

"the more it sought to discipline its former allies, the more it provoked resistance and hostility, and the less able it was to recruit them for militaryoperations which they knew were ultimately aimed against them. Thus the phenomenon of the US being increasingly obliged to 'go it alone' in its adventures, relying less and less on 'legal' international structures such as the UN and NATO, which more and more functioned as obstacles to the US's plans."(International Situation Resolution, Point 5)

In this sense, the imperialist terrain is defined by growing chaos in international relations, deepening challenges to American domination, to which the US feels compelled to respond with the exercise of military power, more and more on its own (except with the support of a badly divided British bourgeoisie), which is always successful because of its massive military superiority, but quickly provokes increased resistance, aggravates the international situation and leads to renewed difficulties and challenges to its imperialist power. Whatever victories US imperialism achieves in this epoch, they are temporary and of increasingly short duration, before the onset of a new aggravated crisis.

Irrationality of War

Another important aspect of the framework of the current period is the irrationality of war in decadence, particular in its period of decomposition:

"The period of decomposition shows more clearly than ever the irratioinality of war in decadence - the tendency of its destructive dynamic to become autonomous and increasingly at variance with the logic of profit.The wars of decadence, unlike he wars of ascendancy, do not make economic sense. Contrary to the view that war is 'good' for the health of the economy, war today both expresses and aggravates its incurable sickness..

"War is the ruin of capital - both a product of its decline and a factor in its acceleration. The development of a bloated war economy does not offer a solution to the crisis of capitalism, as certain elements of the Italian Fraction thought in the 1930s. The war economy does not exist for itself but because capitalism in decadence is obliged to go through war after war after war, and to increasingly subsume the entire economy to the needs of war. This creates a tremendous drain on the economy because arms expenditure is fundamentally sterile. In this sense the collapse of the Russian bloc gives us a glimpse into the future of capital since the inability to sustain an ever-accelerating arms race was one of the key factors in its demise. And although this was a result deliberately pursued by the US bloc, today the USA itself is moving towards a comparable situation, even if it is at a slower pace. The present war in the Gulf, and more generally the whole 'war against terror' is linked to a vast increase of arms spending designed to totally eclipse the arms budgets of the rest of the world combined. But the damage that this insane project will inflict on the US economy is incalculable." (Point 20)

This understanding arms us against following prey to vulgar materialist errors of looking for crass economic motives in the unleashing of war in this period, a mistake made by various left communist and libertarian groups who see the war in Iraq as undertaken to boost oil profits of American corporations. In this sense the resolution noted:

"US military action there is not carried out on behalf of the oil companies: the oil companies are only allowed to get their pay off provided they fit in with the overall streategic plan, which includes the ability to shut off oil supplies to America's potetial enemies and thus throttle any military challenge before it begins. Germany and Japan in particular are far more dependent on Middle East oil than the USA."(Point 7)

Even in the short span of the past six months the total falsity of this mistaken view is apparent. The costs of the war is currently running $4 billion a month, and increasing sharply in the months ahead, far outweighs any boost in oil profits imaginable. If American imperialism's decision making policy on war were driven strictly by a crass balance sheet calculation, even Pres. Bush would have the decision to refrain from the invasion. The unfolding of events confirms our position that it is the geopolitical imperialist strategy of the US, which sees oil as a strategic commodity and in which the current US offensive in the Middle East and Central Asia strengthens Washington's ability to put pressure on Japan and especially on Europe, that explains why from the American point of view the disastrous economic costs of the war are worth the risks.

Constitution of New Blocs

Yet another significant element in this framework is the recognition of the constant tension between the tendency towards the constitution of new imperialist blocs and the countervailing tendency for each country to defend its own immediate interest.

"The resistance to US plans by an alliance between France, Germany, Russia and China shows that, faced with the massive superiority of the US, its main rivals have no choice but to band together against it. This confirms that the tendency towards the constitution of new imperialist blocs remains a real factor in the current situation. But it would be a mistake to confuse a tendency with an accomplished fact, above all because in the period of capitalist decomposition, the movement towards the formation of new blocs is being constantly obstructed by the counter-tendency for each country to defend its own immediate national interests above all else-by the tendency towards every man for himself."(Point 9)

Despite the fact that France, Germany, Russia and China could join together with varying degrees of resolve in opposing the US war plan last spring, in no way has this led to any acceleration of the process of bloc formation. With the war a fait accompli, the opponents of US imperialism moderated the venom of the verbal attacks on the US and made themselves open to some form of accommodation. China, for example, cooperated with the US in discussions with North Korea on the question of that country's nuclear program, even if China's position is not identical to the US.

Likewise, while Blair continues to make Britain Washington's strongest ally, the discomfort within the British bourgeoisie and the growing criticism of the Blair administration only confirms the resolution's prediction six months ago that "there is a growing unease with being too closely associated with US adventurism. The quagmire now developing in Iraq can only strengthen this unease." (Point 10)

Acceleration of History

As capitalism's global crisis has deepened in the past three decades, we have witnessed an acceleration of history, a tendency for events to unfold more quickly, for the intervals between open recessions for example to shorten, or between state attacks on the workers standard of living. In regard to US imperialism's difficulties in protecting its domination, this tendency has meant that the length of time between Washington's successes and the new challenges and difficulties it faces appears to shrink, aggravating the sense of crisis of leadership as perceived by the US, and accelerating still further the process by which world capitalism pushes humanity closer and closer to the abyss of barbarism.--JG

Iraq has indeed become a quagmire for American imperialism, perhaps even worse than might have been expected. The relatively quick military victory achieved by the US military has proven impossible to consolidate. More American troops have been killed after an end to hostilities was triumphantly decreed by Pres. Bush in May than during the open warfare itself. US occupying forces have proved incapable of rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure or restoring any semblance of security, or vital services such as water, electricity or petroleum supplies to the population. The occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, which was supposed to be funded by profits from the renewed flow of Iraqi oil under American control, now requires an emergency budget allocation of an additional $87 billion that will send the US budget deficit soaring.

Before the war the American propaganda machine cooked up all sorts of fairy tales about links between Saddam's regime and Bin Laden's al Qaeda but these have been demonstrated to be utterly false. However, in the aftermath of the American "victory" there is considerable evidence that al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist terrorists have now entered Iraq to engage in attacks against US occupation forces. The invasion that was supposedly designed to eliminate an imaginary al Qaeda terrorist threat in Iraq has on the contrary now served to facilitate the emergence of such a threat in that country where it didn't previously exist.

Despite propagandistic predictions that the Iraqi population would welcome US forces with open arms as liberators and heroes, even those segments of the Iraqi population who were opposed to Saddam's regime want the US to leave. Having "won" the war, American military personnel now face guerrilla attacks from a wide range of disparate elements, including forces still loyal to Saddam (who despite American imperialism's infamous deck of playing cards, is still alive and apparently operating within Iraq), from Sunni militants, from Shi'ite activists, from al Qaeda infiltrators, and from independent fundamentalists from neighboring countries. The American military "victory" has thus led to growing chaos on the ground in Iraq.

The funding for these forces is difficult to pinpoint. Clearly, Iranian imperialism, already identified by Washington as part of the "axis of evil," which faced saber-rattling by the US during the war in Iraq, and which feels the pressure from US forces in Iraq on its west and Afghanistan on its east, has an interest in the US being bogged down in Iraq (as well as Afghanistan) for as long as possible. Iran also has considerable influence with some shi-ite leaders. Bin Laden's financing from Saudi sources has been amply demonstrated in the aftermath of 9/11.

Loss of Political Authority for US Imperialism

Last spring the ICC noted that US efforts to demonstrate its military superiority and the ideological claptrap that it invented to justify its actions were undermining its political authority:

"Although the US continues to demonstrate its crushing military superiority to all the other major powers, the increasingly open character of its imperialist ambitions is tending to weaken its political authority. While in the immediate aftermath of September 11th the US was still able to some extent to present its action in Afghanistan as an act of legitimate self-defense, the justifications for the current war in Iraq have shown themselves to be completely threadbare, while its rivals have come forward as the best defenders of democratic values in the face of US bullying.(International Situation Resolution, Point 11)

Even in the American media the official Bush administration justifications for the invasion of Iraq have been demonstrated to be outright lies. For example, besides the above mentioned false charges of Saddam's link to al Qaeda, there was a list propaganda charges: Iraq was tied to the events of 9/11; Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction but was preparing imminent use of such weapons; Iraq had conspired to have weapons grade plutonium smuggled in from Africa; Iraq was on the verge of developing and even using nuclear weapons

All these excuses for the rush to war against Iraq have all been revealed to be pure fabrications.

The fact that in his February speech to the Security Council, Secretary of State Powell used "evidence" reported in a British intelligence document that was largely plagiarized from outdated information published on the world wide web is now used by university professors in the US as an example of the folly of plagiarizing material from the web.

These revelations undermine US political authority not only in foreign countries but even within the US, where Bush's war-related approval ratings in the public opinion polls have declined sharply, as more and more people recognize that the government lied in order to rush off to war. Within the bourgeoisie itself there is growing criticism of the Bush administration's botching of the ideological campaign to justify the war, not because any bourgeois politician has any qualms about lying, but because getting caught in such a clumsy job will make it more difficult in the future to effectively marshal support at home and abroad for the inevitable further US military adventures. The differences currently voiced within the US bourgeoisie do not correspond to the level of divergences in Britain for example, where certain factions within the British ruling class are uncomfortable with Blair's close adherence to Washington's policies, or in other countries where pro-US and pro-Europe factions advocate different strategic policies.

On the contrary, in the US, the debate within the bourgeoisie is more on the level of tactics, over the best approach to take in advancing the shared strategic goal of assuring American dominance and blocking the rise of a rival power or imperialist bloc. Even former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who has emerged as the most vocal and persistent critic of the Bush administration, is not really opposed to war against Iraq. Albright argues that the war could have been justified on human rights grounds more effectively, and that the administration should have worked more patiently and effectively to drag the European powers into providing legitimacy and financial support to the invasion, and should not have been in such a hurry to invade.

Apparent Retreat from Ultra-Unilateralism

The worsening quagmire has forced even Bush administration diehards to retreat for the moment from their ultra-unilateralism of last February, and their non-compromising rejection of any international involvement in the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq under UN auspices as no longer tenable. The growing financial and military burden has led the US to propose a new Security Council resolution to authorize UN peacekeeping forces, under US command of course, which is still being debated and disputed at the security council, with France once again leading opposition to US policy. This retreat from extreme unilateralism by the Bush administration should not be interpreted as being the result of some counter-offensive by Europe, led by France and Germany, to undermine the US, but rather as the result of pressures of decomposition and the characteristics of the current period that have produced difficulties for the US.

The apparent retreat from unilateralism should be seen as a pragmatic, temporary and partial phenomenon - an historical stutter - and not as an abandonment of American imperialism's decision to increasingly go it alone to defend its imperialist interests. The resolution remains correct in its assertion that: The US still sees the UN and NATO as dominated by potential rivals and as institutions to be sidestepped as much as possible, as the US feels compelled to increasingly go it alone in defending its imperialist dominance. One need only remember that in June, Bush added the G-8 Summit to the list of international institutions that the US seems to regard increasingly as irrelevant, when Bush left the Summit early in order to hurry off to visit America's new most-closest ally on the European continent: Poland.

The decision to appeal to the UN Security Council, to put pressure on Europe to shoulder part of the military and financial burden in Iraq is consistent with US imperialism's goal of press-ganging its rivals into begrudgingly supporting and endorsing its imperialism adventures that actually have the aim of subordinating those rivals.

In this sense, the devastating attack in August on UN Headquarters in Iraq must be considered in the context of US imperialism's campaign to get the European powers to take up the financial burden of Iraq, and to send occupation troops under US command. If we ask the question, who benefits from the attack, it is clear that it is US imperialism that gains the most from this "attack on the international community." In fact Pres. Bush himself used precisely this argument in his address to the American nation on Sept 7 in calling for the UN to join the occupation of Iraq, both in sending troops and in taking up financial costs.. While the US may not have been behind the attack, as the occupying power, US forces are responsible for security in Iraq in general, and specifically was responsibility for security at the UN compounded, and permitted the same security personnel from the Saddam period to work at the compound. We certainly have grounds for suspicion.

Impact on the Economic Crisis in the US

Last spring the ICC stated, "the damage that this insane project (invasion of Iraq) will inflict on the US economy is incalculable," (International Situation Resolution, Point 20) and referred to such economic difficulties as "explicitly rising unemployment, a fall in industrial production, a decline in consumer spending, stock market instability, corporate scandals and bankruptcies, and the return of the Federal budget deficit." The so-called two year-old economic recovery without a jobs recovery continues as an economic nightmare. The unemployment rate has momentarily dropped a few tenths of a percentage point, but only because so many discouraged workers have given up looking for jobs that don't exist and officially are no longer counted as members of the workforce (an example of how the American bourgeoisie takes a bad thing and makes it better). "The return of the Federal budget deficit" mentioned in the resolution now stands at an estimated $455 billion, and is expect to reach $600 billion next year. This means a swing of $729 billion in a period of three years, from a $129 budget surplus inherited from the Clinton administration. The annual cost of the war and occupation of Iraq is now equivalent to 163% of what the US government spends on education. Cutbacks on the social wage are proceeding with a vengeance, leading to still further deterioration in the standard of living of the working class. Such economic costs certainly put the lie to the vulgar economic materialist arguments advanced by some groups on the communist left and in the libertarian milieu that the US invasion of Iraq was motivated by a short term desire to boost oil company profits or to revive the ailing American economy. The only thing that can justify such astronomical costs for the American bourgeoisie is the defense of its imperialist interests on the geopolitical strategic level for the long term. The contradiction that confronts it and which it cannot surpass is that the very defense of its imperialist interests creates the circumstances that only further aggravate the challenges to those interests. - JG

The guerrilla myth continues to be a strong attraction for leftist and petty bourgeois elements in the US. We are publishing here the first installment in a series written by our Mexican comrades exposing the bourgeois role of the Zapatista guerrillas in Mexico.

Ever since the appearance of the guerrilla movement known as the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994, the ICC has warned of its dangerous meaning for the working class. While the left of capital was thrilled and rushed to shout "We are all Marcos!", revolutionaries clearly defined the National Liberation Zapatista Army (EZLN) as counterrevolutionary, both for its typically petty-bourgeois desperate methods, and its bourgeois rhetoric. This became clear when it: called for an individual use of violence bordering on madness when the EZLN said that an irregular army formed by impoverished peasants armed with sticks could march to Mexico City, when it invoked Article 39 of the Constitution to justify its rebellion, while at the same time proclaiming the "defense of national soveregneity" of the "fatherland" as its principle and motto. It even defined "revolutionary" laws, which, with a radical yet fake pretense to justice, do nothing but validate the exploitation of wage labor.

The EZLN thus represents a structure that is both alien to the essence of the working class, and also totally opposed to it. For this reason, it is impossible to find a common ground between this armed group and the historical combat of the working class.

It's clear that Marcos' speeches and his presence, which are used by the bourgeoisie as a commodity, create a large audience. In the same way, the bourgeois press makes comments about Marcos' silence, or invents news about his health and his love affairs, as it does with any personality in the entertainment industry. This is possible because the EZLN is harmless to capital. In fact, it is in capital's interest that the EZLN spread, because its poisonous ideology confuses the working class' consciousness. Because of this, it is important to re-assimilate and deepen with new elements of reflection the arguments that the ICC has been presenting over the past 9 years in opposition to the lies of the bourgeoisie and its left apparatus. Clearly, the aim is not to start a polemic with "zapatismo." Rather, we want to defend Marxism against the EZLN's constant ideological attack, providing elements for reflection and clarification for the working class; particularly the youth, who, in the wake of the bourgeoisie's campaign against Marxism, and tits promotion of empty myths such as that of Marcos, are trapped in sterile and reactionary ideologies that put a damper on their anger against capitalism, and deliver them into the arms of blind activism, without a perspective for the future all the while trapped in the dream of both the “masked hero” and gradual change.

Guerrillas during the Cold War

During the 60's and up until the beginning of the 80's, several guerrilla groups formed which have their roots in the discontent, the desperation, and the romanticism of the petty bourgeoisie, but also in the confusion spread by Stalinist ideology, in its various manifestations from Maoism to guevarism. Some of these groups were even born outside the integral forces of the state apparatuses. Soon, however, they stopped having an autonomous life because they required economic and logistic support by a fraction of the national bourgeoisie, and, of course, by one of the two blocs. In particular, we will refer to the use the ex-USSR and its allies made of guerrilla movements. This, however, does not mean that the USA gave up doing the same, as was clear, for example, with the 'contras' in Nicaragua.

Recent history has shown that the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the Salvadoran FMLN, or the Guatemalan UNRG received assistance from states that were in the Russian bloc. What resulted from such a practice is nothing the proletariat can claim for itself. Whether these groups succeeded in taking power or were disarmed, their actions were always aimed at strengthening the structures of capitalist rule. On the one hand, we saw the Sandinistas as well as many Castro-backed movements, which, notwithstanding their radical or 'marxist' rhetoric, have done nothing but reinforce the exploitation of wage labor. They have also become more greatly integrated in international conflicts. On the other hand, groups like the Salvadoran FMLN and the Guatemalan UNRG became fused with the state apparatuses which they had said they were fighting against. This grotesque development reached an extreme in El Salvador, where the guerrillas became cops. This is why the tactics, strategy, program, and practice of guerrilla movements are alien to the proletariat and to Marxism. On the contrary, it is a tool which capital needs.

Guerrillas in capitalist decomposition

The world configuration has been affected by the disappearance of the Soviet bloc. Nonetheless, the laws governing capital and imperialist confrontations become highlighted. This explains why the disappearance of the Eastern bloc - a product of the capitalist crisis - did not bring in its wake a new, peaceful order, as the bourgeoisie had promised. Instead, it accelerated imperialist rivalries. The Western nations, formerly disciplined by the USA, released all the suppressed ambitions and tensions because of the absence of a common enemy, and proceeded in a dynamic of each for themselves. This fact, unprecedented in the history of capitalism, is a clear sign that capitalism had entered the last phase of decadence, decomposition.

Under these conditions, the guerrillas have not stopped being a tool used to clear the path for its rivals. On the contrary, it refines its actions. At the time of the blocs, a guerrilla movement could surge with its own force, while today it is marked by the action of an imperialist power from its inception. It is clear that the EZLN defines the way by which, in the present period, guerrillas act as a detonator of conflicts, not only against the Mexican government, but above all against the USA. In this context, it is easy to understand the motivation of the European bourgeoisie behind its "preoccupation" with the zapatista cause. To mention just a few aspects that allow us to see who's behind the EZLN, we will remember the closeness of EZLN to Mrs. Mitterrand, John Paul II's suspicious attitude during his second to last visit to Mexico (when he unexpectedly denounced the murders of Acteal), and Eloriaga's and Marcos' posturing about wanting to sit at the European Parliament (1996) to "denounce" the Mexican government.

In this way, the EZLN is used by European imperialist powers to defy the USA. However, because of its military nothingness, it is utilized as a source of political pressure. In this way, even though the Europeans cannot strike directly against the US, they can still generate troubles in the American backyard. Even though the North American and Mexican bourgeoisies have been able to utilize guerrillas for their own interests - for example, by strengthening their campaigns around democracy while allowing their presence at the legislative bodies, by press coverage and by protecting their marches and speeches - guerrilla movements continue to be a weapon that the German, French, and Italian bourgeoisies continuously wield. MA -to be continued-.

Earlier this year, Internationalism received copies of two leaflets distributed by the Toronto based group Red and Black Notes, who also publish a magazine and maintain a website of the same name, at the anti-war demonstrations of last winter. In an effort to develop a constructive process of debate and criticism among the various groups of the ?proletarian political milieu? (PPM) in North America, we have responded to these two leaflets with the letter that we reproduce below. The ICC has always said that the advancement of revolutionary theory can only occur as a result of open and constructive debate among the various ideas that circulate in the PPM. We publish our response in an effort to contribute, however modestly, to this process, a process that is an essential precondition to the eventual construction of proletarian class party. As readers will see, although we salute the internationalist frame of Red and Black Notes? leaflets, we also advance some important criticisms and disagreements. This is different from the behavior of some groups in the milieu, when they ?flatter? new and emerging groups in order to curry their favor, rather than point out what they may feel are their errors and mistakes. If we are upfront and somewhat insistent in expressing our disagreements with some of the formulations in Red and Black Notes? leaflets, this not done out of any desire to be sectarian. Rather, debate and disagreement are the lifeblood of the PPM, its dialectical motivation to advance and develop. Even if we conclude that there is much more that unites our perspectives than divides them, we have the responsibility as revolutionaries to see that our differences confront one another so that mistaken ideas may be discarded, correct positions may be reaffirmed and new syntheses produced in the light of criticism. We encourage all other groups in the milieu to contribute to this process as well. This is in the tradition of all the great revolutionaries of the past (1).

Dear comrades:

We have discussed the two leaflets you prepared and distributed at the Toronto anti-war demonstrations during the lead-up to the recent war in Iraq (?A Plague on Both Your Houses? and ?No War But the Class War?). In the spirit of open debate, we would like to take this opportunity to share with you some comments and criticisms.

First, we want to salute the effort you have made to distribute these leaflets at the recent demonstrations. Your intervention was undoubtedly quite out-of-step with the main themes of these demonstrations, which in our analysis were all situated well within the realm of bourgeois politics. Your defense of proletarian internationalism in the face of both the official bourgeois pacifism of the demonstrations, as well as all the accompanying leftist calls to defend one imperialism against another, clearly demonstrate your desire to defend a working-class perspective on war in this historical period. In particular, your denunciations of the Trotskyists and leftists were to the point. For example, in ? A Plague on Both Your Houses? you write, "For others on the left, it?s about defending imperialism. This has led some, most notable the Trotskyists, to claim opposition to imperialism in this conflict means support to Iraq in the hopes of bloodying the nose of the ?main? imperialist power (?) While sounding radical, the position is essentially a lesser-evilism. (?) Capitalism is a world system, and the wars it generates are wars between the greater and the lesser imperialist powers for the right to exploit and rule. Yesterday?s national liberation movements fighting against imperialism are today?s exploiters of labour and tomorrow?s allies of larger powers. (?) We will not choose between the greater and the lesser powers."

Moreover, your denunciations of all the belligerent parties of World War II, or as you call it the ?second imperialist world war,? shows a stern refusal to fall for the bourgeois ideological justification for this war, that of defending ?democracy? against fascism, a call that was repeated throughout the twentieth century not only by the official parties of bourgeois order, but also the Stalinists, Trotskyists and many anarchist currents as well; and which is being deployed in full force by the world bourgeoisie today. For us, and?as it would appear from your leaflet?for you as well, the proletariat had no side to choose in this war either. The following passage from ? A Plague on Both Your Houses? demonstrates this internationalist commitment particularly well, ?The second imperialist world war between 1939 and 1945 claimed tens of millions of lives. But the ?peace? that followed it also claimed untold millions of lives across the globe, as capital has engaged in low level, and sometimes not so low level wars to preserve the imperialist ?peace.? It is the peace of the grave. The only way to stop war is to uproot the capitalist system.?

We believe that whether openly fascist or cloaking itself in democratic verbiage, all factions of the ruling class have been equally reactionary since the entry of capitalism into its decadent phase at some point early last century. The rejection of the defense of ?democracy? is for us a key component of any attempt to defend a proletarian perspective today. We thus think that your leaflet might have been made stronger if you expressly argued that the proletariat never has any interest in taking sides between different fractions of the bourgeoisie, that there are no circumstances in which a tactical exception should be made to a ?united front? policy, no matter what the ideological justification.

Moreover, despite our agreement with your leaflets? internationalist framework we do find a number of instances in which our analysis of the Iraq war differs from yours to some degree. For example, you seemed to argue that the main reason behind the war is to be found in the US?s failing economy. By going to war, you seem to say, the American bourgeoisie was seeking some sort of ?shot in the arm? for its current economic woes. In a Plague on Both Your Houses? you write, for example, ?While few in the Bush administration argue that the war will revitalize the sagging US economy, it is precisely that economy which is pushing the US toward war. Trillions of dollars of debt, a stock market bubble that is about to burst and a plunging US dollar, make a war to secure massive oil reserves, and a commodity which is paid for in dollars an irresistible prize.?

These assertions seem to go down the same path as the IBRP?s, which argues that by taking over Iraq?s vital oil reserves, the American bourgeoisie is seeking to safeguard the international oil trade in dollars against the encroachment of the Euro. While we agree that oil is an important strategic commodity in the world economy and an important pawn on the inter-imperialist chess board, we do not think that the US decided to go to war to gain control of Iraq?s oil reserves out of any immediate intention to improve its economy, to reap super-profits or to combat the challenge of a currency-war between mounted by the European Union.

In our view, the decision to invade Iraq was the latest in a long series of military interventions that the US has been compelled to make stretching back to the First Gulf War and the collapse of the old Eastern bloc. Essentially, since the collapse of its Cold War rival, the Western bloc has ceased to have a raison d??tre. Since this time, what we have witnessed are all the second and third-rate imperialisms that used to follow ?bloc discipline? challenging more and more the leadership of the old bloc hegemon, the US. Faced with the collapse of bloc discipline, but still the world?s only superpower, the US has since been forced to engage in direct displays of its military power, as an attempt to keep its erstwhile allies in line. What we witnessed in the lead-up to the war in Iraq only confirms this analysis with France, Germany and Russia?the powers with the most to loose from a US take over of Iraq?protesting the loudest. In this sense, the importance of oil in this war is to be found more on the strategic level?with the US now strengthening its military presence in an area of the world upon which Europe and Japan are depended for oil?rather than for any immediate quest to reinvigorate a struggling economy. You seem to hint in the direction of our analysis, for example in ?A Plague on Both Your Houses?, ?While the US?s erstwhile European allies are expressing reluctance, it is only because they see the US?s actions as a way to strengthen its position relative to their own through the seizure of Iraqi oil and the establishment of a semi-permanent US base in Iraq;? and again in ? No War But the Class War!? ?For France has its own reasons for opposing the US, and they have little to do concern for the Iraqi people; rather, they concern the French imperialist state?s position vis-?-vis the US.? Nevertheless, it does seem as if you never quite get away from the idea, mistaken in our view, that this war was about the US economy itself, or a currency rivalry between the US dollar and the Euro.

In fact, as we have shown in our press, the US intervention in Iraq can only have a negative effect on the latter?s economy forcing it to attack the living and working conditions of the working class even harder. We think that your leaflets? analysis of the origins of the war, with its focus on immediate economic factors, leads you towards some false predictions which underestimate the gravity of imperialist rivalries at this historic juncture as well as the primacy of strategic considerations in the international relations between states: i.e. the idea that the European powers would jump in and participate in the war along with the US. For example, in ?A Plague on Both Your Houses,? you write, ?Nevertheless, the reluctant allies will likely get on board because they fear the US will go ahead and they will be left out in the cold.?

For the most part, this wasn?t the case, because for countries like France, Germany and Russia had just too much to lose if the US were to strengthen its grip in the Middle East with a direct military presence in Iraq. In fact, as we wrote in our press, part of the American bourgeoisie?s strategy in the lead up to the war in Iraq was precisely to raise the ante in its confrontation with its erstwhile allies by picking a fight with which these countries could not even pretend go along, and thus forcing the confrontation between the US and countries like Germany and France into the open. On the other hand, the idea that there is an emerging confrontation between a US led-bloc and a new bloc based on the European Union?a possible conclusion of seeing the war as the result of a confrontation between the dollar and the Euro?is for us a bit premature. While this may appear to be the case on the surface?and this is often how the bourgeois media on both sides of the Atlantic presents it?for the most part, however, we think the EU is little more than a sad fiction when it comes to exhibiting a united foreign policy. This was also confirmed by the lead up to the Iraq war, with a number of European countries supporting the US policy against German and French opposition.

On another level, we also feel that your leaflets tended to overestimate the current balance of class forces on the global level. As such, your calls for workers to engage in direct action tactics like sit downs and go slows against the war seems to us to be both premature and unrealistic. For example, you write in ?No War But The Class War!,? ?And while only a full-scale break with capitalism can create a new world, resistance can be practiced on multiple levels: absenteeism, informal work to rule actions (?go-slows?), even occupations and creative industrial repairs.?

While calls for workers to reject the war are perfectly legitimate in the historic sense and perfectly in line with an internationalist denunciation of imperialist war, we think it is important not to fall into the illusion of thinking the ?revolution is right around the corner? today, or that a massive working class struggle against the war is likely on the immediate agenda. What we are seeing today is that much of the global proletariat is still struggling to recover its class identity after the collapse of the Soviet-bloc and all the accompanying calls of the ?death of communism? and the ?disappearance of the working class?. What we are witnessing now is a process of the ?subterranean maturation? of consciousness in the class, where through its daily struggles against capitalist exploitation and the intensification of the austerity measures?which the bourgeoisie is compelled to impose faced with a permanent global economic crisis?the proletariat is slowly coming to recognize the connection between the drive to war and the capitalist system itself.

We think it is through these daily struggles at the point of production, on its own class terrain, where the working-class can recover its class identity and come to possess a revolutionary consciousness of the need to destroy the capitalist state and build a new society. That is why in our intervention we called on workers not to abandon their economic struggles in the face of war, not to allow either war or pacifist propaganda to distract them from the class struggle. We felt there was some tendency in your leaflets to call on the working-class to engage in an immediate ?political? struggle against the war. For example, you argue in ?No War But the Class War!,? ?If actions against the war were significant and the battle in Iraq does not go smoothly, it could provoke the kind of break down in authority in the armed forces as was seen in Vietnam: desertions, mutinies and a concern for one?s own survival over that of the unit. Were these conditions to take shape, the imperialist war might well begin to resemble a civil war.?

Once again, while this is a perfectly legitimate call as part of a general internationalist political line, it is, in our view, important not to fall into the trap of endorsing the idea of a ?working-class anti-war movement?, in today?s context. For us, revolutionary class-consciousness can only rise from a unity of the economic and political aspects of the class struggle, and this is a process that unfolds in an historic and political context on the global level. Today, the conditions are not such that we are likely to see the type of movement you seemed to call for in your leaflets, and as such these calls could end up legitimizing the idea of ?working class pacifism.? This could possibly end up inadvertently reinforcing the bourgeois anti-war movement. Once again, this does not mean that revolutionaries should cease to call on the class to resist the war simply because it is not, at the moment, a realistic prospect; we only mean to point out that it is crucial to avoid the temptation towards an immediatist euphoria based on some isolated instances of workers appearing to struggle against the war, such as demoralized troops criticizing their commanders or workers refusing to load trains and ships with war supplies. Many of these actions occurred on the terrain of the capitalist unions, while others were perfectly in line with the policy of certain fractions of the national bourgeoisie. While we would be among the first to salute such actions, were they to take place on the class?s own terrain, we think it crucial to always keep the historic context in mind, avoid any temptation towards immediatism and try to analyze such events with a critical eye to situating them in a global context. We do not think there is a difference of principle between Red and Black Notes and ourselves on the internationalist and revolutionary defeatist framework of our intervention towards the class, but we think your leaflets may contain a certain overestimation of the reality of the class struggle at this juncture. While the historic course towards decisive class confrontations remains open, the proletariat still confronts major difficulties in finding its own class terrain in the period ahead.

Despite these differences and criticisms, we nevertheless fully support the internationalist and proletarian basis of your intervention and extend our full solidarity with your effort. We look forward to further correspondence in the future and would welcome any comments or criticisms you may have of the recent issues of Internationalism we have sent you, or correspondence on any other political question.

Communist Greetings,

Internationalism

November, 2003.

On the 1st of May 2003, President George Bush - the cowboy turned fighter pilot-landing on an aircraft carrier under a banner that read "Mission Accomplished", announced with great fanfare the end of the military phase of the war against Iraq. Saddam Hussein's regime, confronted with the overwhelming military superiority of the US war machine, had collapsed in a few weeks of war without presenting any meaningful resistance. In the celebration that followed, the American bourgeoisie, full of itself, announced the beginning of a new era of peace and democracy for the "liberated" Iraqi population and for all the countries of the Middle East. Today, seven months after, there is not much to brag about it. The new free Iraq is so dangerous a place that the man behind the army that liberated it, Mr. Bush, had to sneak into the country in the middle of the night-protected of course by a lot more than just darkness - to share Thanksgiving dinner with his "brave warriors." The Middle East is not much better a place than before the war, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is still very much alive, while the chaos and instability of Iraq are spreading to Saudi Arabia and Turkey, where there have been recent brutal terrorist actions that have left dozen dead and hundreds of people wounded. A War Without End

The fine speeches of the Bush administration about the improvement of the situation in Iraq are in sharp contrast with the harsh reality on the ground. The butcher of Baghdad has been out of power for almost eight months, but there is not yet a functioning society in Iraq. The one billion dollars a month being spent by the US bourgeoisie in this political-military adventure have brought neither stability nor reconstruction to this country.

The guerrilla war being waged by a mixture of old regime loyalist and anti-American Islamic fundamentalist groups, far from being over, is getting more devastating as the tactics of these groups grow in determination and effectiveness. The weekend after Mr. Bush's photo-op stunt it was announced that 79 American soldiers have been killed since October 31, making November the deadliest month for US troops in Iraq since the start of the war in March. And the Americans are not he only foreigners dying in Iraq. On mid-November a truck bomb attack took the life of 18 Italian soldiers, and in November 30, seven Spaniards, one Japanese and 2 South Koreans were also killed in different violent incidents.

Moreover, the sabotage by the guerrilla movement of Iraq's oil industry - its highly vulnerable pipelines have been continually bombed - the backbone of this country's economy, is adding to the miseries of the Iraqi population. The shortage of gas and electricity is causing frequent blackouts and long lines at the gasoline pumps fuelling unrest on the street. Last August a riot broke out in the Southern city of Basra over these very issues.

Up to the present, the 150,000 US soldiers, and their foreign and domestic allies, have been unable to roll back this tide of violence. On the contrary, the brutal attempts of the occupation forces to crush their opponents, the killing of innocent civilians, the widespread arrests and the disappearance of thousands of "suspected terrorists" and the destruction of family homes are in turn stirring anti-Americanism and adding fuel to the spiral of violence. Remarkably, one has the impression of seeing in the American military tactics used in Iraq a re-edition of Israeli, Mr. Sharon's, antics in the Palestinian occupied territories. Iraqis looking for missing relatives caught in the frantic American raids against "suspected" terrorists can't help the comparison of Saddam's era with the new democratic paradise of the American occupation: "at least in Saddam's days the police would tell families that they had arrested their people" (Time magazine, 12/8/03). The "No-Exit" Strategy

The Bush administration, pressed to respond to the increasing scepticism among the American population of its Iraq policy, is quick to affirm, "We are going to stay to get the job done". And this job, Mr. Bush candidly explains, is: "to make Iraqi people happy, to return liberty to it, and to build democracy and economic prosperity for it."

This is today the preferred ideological mask with which the US bourgeoisie would like to cover its imperialist policy, particularly after its war mongering justification for invading Iraq - the weapons of mass destruction line - has been shown to be a blatant lie.

However, this ideology of benevolent fatherly imperialism, militarily occupying a country and forcibly reorganizing its society in the best interest of its population is also a pure mystification. Contrary to the new ideology being peddled by some intellectuals of the "right wing" of the American bourgeoisie to justify its military adventures, there are no good imperialist powers, only national states willing to defend, without much concern for the cost in life and material destruction, their narrow political and economic interests. Of course, it is also not the case that the US soldiers in Iraq are valiant heroes, or modern crusaders defending the free world against "the evil doers". This is all ideological rubbish intended to mystify the working class, which is in this instance the one that pays for the military adventures of the dominant classes.

As we have said many times, the US war against Iraq is nothing but an imperialist war, that can only be understood in the broader context of the offensive of the US bourgeoisie against the imperialist powers that are challenging its supremacy at the world level. In this sense, the target of the Iraq invasion was not Saddam Hussein, but the European powers, in particularly Germany and France, which have - since the collapse of the system of imperialist blocs at the beginning of the 90's - attempted to play their own imperialist card at the expense of their former American boss. In fact, it has been in reaction to the expansionist ambitions of these powers that the US has responded with a long-term operation designed to keep their rivals within the confines of Western Europe. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the building of military bases in several former republics and satellites countries of Russia in South East Asia and Eastern Europe, and the present occupation of Iraq, are all part of this strategy of containment and isolation of its imperialist rivals. On this level, the Bush camarilla does not hold exclusive rights to the present American war mongering. In fact, this long-term imperialist policy is designed to deal with the post Cold War world "order" and it has been the lynchpin of both the Democratic and Republican administrations since the one term presidency of Mr. Bush, the father.

It is because there is no possibility of turning back in this offensive, that the Bush administration has a "no exit-strategy" in Iraq. The intransigent defense of the US's global imperialist interests is what determines the nature of the "job" to be done, regardless of the personal qualities of the "commander in chief" of the moment. Towards More Imperialist Confrontations

The determined American unilateral invasion of Iraq and the military occupation of this country against the very vocal opposition of its main imperialist challengers, gives a measure of the overall overwhelming superiority of the US compared with its rivals. However, these countries, despite the humiliation, have not given up their ambitions and have not lost time trying to create new problems for the American bourgeoisie. The US's present difficulties in Iraq, and its relative loss of credibility and political authority, have emboldened its rivals to go on their own offensive. This is the meaning of the energized activity directed at the creation of an autonomous European military force, with Germany and France at its center. Also, it is this same logic of sabotaging American policy that sees Germany, France and Great Britain posing themselves as the mediators between the Iranian regime and the US over the American pressure regarding its nuclear program.

The fact that the whole historical situation-capitalism's decomposition, an undefeated working class and the overwhelming global superiority of the US compared with its rivals is not favorable to the formation new imperialist blocs and thus to a third world war does not make the present situation less dangerous. The wars, chaos and barbarism spreading today all over the planet could destroy the very material possibility for the rebuilding of society on a truly rational basis. Capitalism has no future to offer; only the world working class revolution can give humanity a chance for survival.

ES, 11/25/03.

Since 1994, with the public appearance of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), the editorials of the bourgeois press left and right have used every opportunity to launch their attack against Marxism. The book by B. de la Grange and M. Rico, "Marcos, The Genial Impostor", is structured as if it was the synthesis of police archives. It shows the origins and actions of the EZLN and, even though it seeks to be an offensive against Marcos, it also subtly spreads calumnies and attacks against Marxism, pointing out that all of the authoritarian attitudes of the EZLN are a legacy of its supposed 'marxist' past, which the book says is rooted in the guerrilla group called National Liberation Forces, which were never Marxist, but rather expressions of radical Stalinism with a special cult for Fidel Castro. Marcos himself, while at the beginning of his 'career' cautious, has not missed an opportunity to launch ironic and critical attacks against what he, from his vision of ex-Stalinist, regards as Marxism.

The book by Vasquez Montalban, "Marcos, the Lord of the Mirrors", contains an 'interpretation' of the world events since the fall of the Eastern bloc. It points to a crisis within the left consisting in its "inability to capture today's reality". The followers of this book's author, for example J. Holloway, who wrote "Changing the World Without Taking Power", define the crisis in the left in this way: "the crisis of Marxism is the liberation from dogmas..." which helped to discover (yet again!) that the proletariat is not the subject of change because, by manipulating the concept of 'anti-power' and 'anti-capitalism', it is possible to establish an assessment of history and of the dominant system which is not based in the material comprehension of how this system functions, that is, on the separation between producer and product, labor and capital, value and surplus value, but rather on ambiguous concepts such as 'dignity' ([1]). This makes of each individual oppressed by capital a revolutionary being. Armed with this 'new' reasoning, J. Holloway and his followers can say that pauperized peasants, locked in the traditions of the Indian culture, or any other social entity oppressed by capital, such as the petty bourgeoisie, are capable of transforming the world. By contrast, the role-played by the proletariat in production and the fact that it is the only modern class that has no organic or material ties with capital or other past systems of production are totally ridiculed as simple dogmatic postulates. This argument is a new weapon used to deepen the confusion within the proletariat and further demoralize it.

Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, explain the material bases to recognize the proletariat as the only revolutionary class. They clarify that, "The petty bourgeoisie - the small industrialist, the small businessman, the artisan, the peasant- all of them struggle against the bourgeoisie to safeguard their own existence. For this reason, they are not revolutionary. On the contrary, they are conservative. They will be revolutionary only when they will abandon their own point of view and embrace that of the proletariat." In spite of this, the ideologues of zapatismo want to 'enrich' Marxism and with an impressively entangled ideological argument, they claim a similarity between "the Paris Commune, the workers' councils, and the zapatist town councils [insofar as] these are all experiments in self-determination." (Holloway). Such aberration, beyond being the irresponsible expression of a philistine, or an idiotic statement made out of good intentions, is a conscious attack directly aimed at the proletariat and its weapon of combat, i.e. Marxism.

The negation (and even the death) of the proletariat as a revolutionary class has been proclaimed on several occasions. More recently this has been coupled with affirmations about 'the end of history' and 'the death of communism'. It is precisely this argument, which is spread by Marcos' speeches and those of his 'army of intellectuals'. They justify such an argument by using a marxist verbiage, as it's the case with Holloway & co., who fill the pages of a number of reviews. During his visits to Mexico City, Marcos, always escorted by the Federal Police, expresses his hatred for Marxism when he mocks it at the UNAM, the most important university in Mexico City. He uses a kind of irony which has the clear aim of denigrating the internationalist principle defended by communists when he says, "Forgive me if I bore you. I am here to make you waste your time when I talk to you about an Indian child, instead of talking about the world revolution." Brazenly, Marcos has had the guts to affirm that 'we are the only radicals'. However, such glorified radicalism of zapatismo IS NOT noticeable in its submission to capital's institutions and symbols, such as the House of Representatives, to which it pleads for a chance to have its voice heard. Neither is it noticeable in its defense of the constitution, the flag, or the national anthem. We can't note this supposed radicalism in its critique of the system of exploitation, the destruction of which they don't even dare to pose. On the contrary, they demand that capital give 'a few non-transferrable actions' to its workers when they retire, as the 'zapatist laws' dictate. Zapatismo's true radicalism rests in its constant attack against Marxism. Never before had another guerrilla group gained so much attention by the media, making of each declaration an advertising event. Because of this, each attack against Marxism is exaggerated, reproduced, and justified by the press and its 'intellectuals', as the media are at the same time engaged in capturing the attention of the young generation of workers, who have less experience and a weaker attachment to the Marxist tradition. For all of these reasons, the working class today needs to reflect collectively more than ever before. It needs to re-appropriate the experience of its struggles and its theoretical arsenal. This is the only way for it to recover the confidence in its own strength, while strengthening its consciousness and giving an impulse to its organization. Only the world proletarian revolution can transform the world

The concepts of 'civil society' and 'citizenship of the struggle' are supported by zapatismo and reproduced by the 'anti-globalization' groups to define a movement that calls itself 'transformational' and 'different', a movement by which it is possible 'to change the world without taking power'. This argument, which apparently embraces a vocation to total freedom and an 'inclusive' nature, does nothing but reproduce the bourgeois argument about democracy, with a few more colorful strokes. In fact, it is a direct attack against Marxism. In order to strengthen its 'new' ideas, it has to equal Stalinism with Marxism. For instance, Rodriguez Lascano, in "Rebellion" N.1, in order to conclude that the EZLN is the alternative which humanity has been waiting for centuries, states that there has been a "failure of the experiences in the construction of post-capitalist societies [in the sense that, these experiments have led to a] binding of marxism's conception of emancipation with the bureaucratic mechanism of political dominion." ([2]). It is clear that he does not want to make a critical analysis of history. All he wants to do, in an incorrect manner, is establish an identity between the aberrations of Stalinism with Marxism. A popular practice with the bourgeoisie is to attack Marxism by linking it to Stalinism, and the 'intellectuals of zapatismo' share such practice but revolutionaries know that Stalinism is not a particular expression of Marxism, but rather it exposes the defeat of the world revolution and, with it, the extension of the counterrevolution. Because of this, it is only either ignorance, or the planned attack against the principles of Marxism that can explain the arguments of these 'illustrious' intellectuals.

The real issue here is the insistence on the idea that the taking of political power, as a consequence of the proletarian revolution, implies its being locked within the national borders or the reproduction of the very repressive state apparatus that the revolution was seeking to destroy. Worse still, zapatismo's fiercest attack is the spreading of the idea that the origin of the problem rests in the existence of a proletarian party structure, insofar as it imposes a 'hierarchy of combat' (Holloway). We can see how zapatismo starts by posing that Marxism is a 'coup' by a minority, and ends by ascribing a kind of nationalism to Marxism. In addition, by pointing to a supposed interest by Marxism in gaining state power, it portrays the former as a bourgeois current interested in gaining hegemony over the state structures.

Where do they get these ideas about Marxism? The above mentioned author tells us: "not only from the experience of the Soviet Union and China, but also from the numerous movements of national liberation and from the guerrillas of the 60's and 70's." That is to say, from expressions and experiences that have nothing to do with Marxism.

The bourgeoisie's hatred for Marxism has found an echo in the voices and writings of these 'intellectuals'. The activity of zapatismo and its intellectuals is to denigrate Marxism. We cannot deepen here, but it's important to at least note that the radical transformation of the capitalist mode of production, which is what Marxism proposes, is derived from the material understanding of this mode of production, in which capital itself is conceived as a relation of production, which can be destroyed only by abolishing the exploitation of wage labor. This is why the taking of political power is just the beginning of this process, which must lead not to the perpetuation of the proletariat as a class, but rather to its disappearance. This is why Marx says that for the radical transformation of society what's necessary is both "a violent revolution, and also the destruction of the state's power apparatus, created by the dominant class." A desperate minority cannot accomplish this. It is rather conceived of as a historical process, constructed and conducted by the proletariat, which exposes its revolutionary nature by founding its practice in conscious and massive actions.

Lastly, among the lies dished out by these 'wise' supporters of the 'new style' guerrilla, is the one that portrays marxism as a mystical and rigid structure, which conceives of the revolution and communism as inevitable events. By contrast, Marxism talks about revolutionary combat and the construction of a truly human community (communism) as a possibility based in necessity. This is why it does not need utopian illusions that look backward, nor does it need desperate voluntaryism such as the one embraced by the guerrilla. This is why when communists defend the legacy of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary experience of the Communist Left, which fought against the degeneration of the III International, they don't deny the mistakes that were made. What communists do is tread marxism's historic thread to unite in time the experiences of the past with the present, and thus prepare for the future. This means to acquire the METHOD to discuss, to analyze, to struggle, and to organize. It is the same method we use to denounce in front of the working class all those who, like the EZLN, disguise themselves in sheep's clothes the better to launch a systematic attack against the proletariat's program and organization.

MA, 11/25/03.

NOTES

1. If anyone thinks this is just irony, we invite them to read Revista Chiapas #5 (The Revolt of Dignity), in which Holloway himself, after 'explaining' that the principal antagonism in capitalism is not to be found in the struggles between classes and that the proletariat is nothing but an old word used by Marxism, concludes that, "Dignity is therefore the revolutionary subject."

2. Following his trotskyist past, R. Lascano claims that the ex-USSR and its satellite nations are not capitalist societies, and while he previously called them 'degenerated workers' states, now he subtly calls them 'post-capitalist'.

The turn in class struggle discussed in the accompanying article on this page has been echoed here in the US, demonstrating the international character of the struggle between the working class and capitalism.

In the US, the precipitating issue has not been pensions, but medical benefits which have been under severe attack for several years. The struggles that have emerged around this issue are particularly important because they have begun to raise fundamental issues concerning the growing bankruptcy of the capitalist system, as its deepening economic crisis forces it to attack the wages and standard of living of the working class.

The social wage in the US - that part of the cost of reproduction of the working class not paid directly to the workers as cash wages, but paid by the state - is less centralized than in European countries. Medical benefits, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and pensions are not centralized through the state in the same way as they are in many European nations. Instead, the social wage is diffused through a sophisticated web of federal, state, employers and union programs and pension funds. For example, social security, a federal government program which covers all retirees is only a base level pension, providing a fundamentally poverty level subsistence, and must be supplemented for most workers by other pension plans to maintain an acceptable standard of living during their retirement. Some of these plans are administered by unions, some by employers, some by private pension funds. When the ruling class moves to attack pensions, it doesn't do so by announcing a national policy of across-the-board cuts, which, as experience elsewhere amply demonstrates, risks provoking a massive reaction from the working class. Rather, the attacks are diffused through different pension plans in different ways, cutting benefits, increasing the amount workers must contribute, raising the age of retirement, or even plunging some funds into bankruptcy, in which case pensions are entirely lost.

Likewise with medical benefits, which are only funded directly by the federal government for the poor (Medicaid) and for the elderly (Medicare), rather than Washington announcing an outright cut in medical coverage, the attacks are diffused through thousands of employer plans and HMO's and insurance plans. However, in the past three years the attacks on medical benefits have escalated to the extent of increasingly appearing as a generalized attack. Employers and unions have been working hand in glove to slash workers medical benefits. Typically this takes the form of forcing workers to pay higher out of pocket expenses and to pick up larger and larger portions of the insurance premium, which becomes tantamount to a wage cut on the one hand and a slash in quality of medical care for workers and their families on the other.

The era when large companies covered all or most of health care costs is over. In the last two years insurance premiums rose fastest in a decade, at the rate of 14% per year, more than 3 times the official government rate of inflation. In 2003, only 4% of large employers still pay 100% of insurance, down from 21% just 15 years ago in 1988. From 2000 to 2003, there has been a 50% increase in what workers must pay for their medical coverage. The situation in regard to prescription coverage is even worse. The amount that workers must pay for prescription drug coverage jumped 46 to 71% in the same period. A total of 43.6 million people in the richest, most powerful capitalist country in the world have no medical coverage - 15% of the population.

All of this combined has meant a gross deterioration in the real wages and standard of living of the proletariat and has pushed workers inescapably towards the necessity of taking up the class struggle in defense of their class interests.

Earlier this year, there was a strike at General Electric over the issue of medical insurance premiums. But things came to a head in October, when a whole series of struggles erupted over medical benefits. In Chicago it was sanitation workers, in Los Angeles transit workers. Later this was followed by 30,000 grocery store workers in Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia, and then by an additional 70,000 grocery workers in California - who are still on strike after seven weeks. Significantly in California truck drivers are now refusing to make deliveries to the struck stores.

These struggles are in stark contrast to other strikes in the 1990s, such as the United Parcel Strike (UPS) in 1997, which was essentially a manoeuvre to strengthen the badly damaged image of the unions in the eyes of the workers. Those strikes did not correspond so much to the genuine combativeness of the workers, as it did to the needs of capitalism to strengthen its shop floor police - the unions. The strikes we have seen in October are not union manoeuvres but a genuine manifestation of growing working class combativeness. In each case, the union involved reached agreement with management on contracts granting cuts in medical benefits and recommended these contracts for ratification by membership vote. However, in each case these agreements were rejected by the workers overwhelmingly, by more than 66% margins. At the beginning of the strike in California the supermarkets ran full page ads reprinting the union president's letter to the members urging ratification of a fair and equitable agreement. "We couldn't agree more," concluded the company's ad. It was only after the resounding rejection of the contracts that the unions scurried to catch up and in order to keep control of the struggle, in order to sabotage it from within.

Powerless to prevent these outbreaks of workers combativeness, the unions role internationally and in the US has been to sabotage these struggles as much as possible, to retard the process of re-appropriation of the lessons of past struggles. How? By keeping struggles isolated, by emphasizing a struggle around specific demands of the particular sector on strike, by insisting that "we are fighting for our benefits," not against a generalized ruling class attack against all workers. This blocks development of consciousness seeing the link between the attack on medical benefits and pensions and the bankruptcy of capitalism. It leads to isolation, rather than active solidarity, and distorts the tendency towards extension into division within the class. In fact the unions limit the struggle to the defense of the medical benefits and abandon any attempt for other gains. So if the company pulls back on the medical benefits cuts in exchange for double-zero wage settlements, the union declares a victory, even though the workers still emerge as losers.

These recent struggles are significant but they should not be exaggerated. The working class does not need cheerleaders who hail any manifestation of combativeness and class struggle uncritically, but revolutionaries who are capable of recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of the struggle, and can put forth an intervention that can maximize the potentiality contained in the situation, and attack the weaknesses of the struggles. As important as these struggles are, it is abundantly clear that the workers still have difficulty to break free of the unions' grasp. Despite the fact that in each case, the workers rejected the austerity contract agreed to by the union, in each case they were incapable of seeing the fact that the unions' cooperation with management exposed their capitalist class nature. Rather than take the struggle into their own hands, the workers permitted the same union leadership that had been content to sell them out, to lead the strike and continue negotiations.

This difficulty to see the necessity to confront the unions as part of the capitalist class is closely linked to the reflux in consciousness and disorientation that has gripped the international proletariat since the collapse of the Stalinist bloc, which has been characterized by a loss of self-identity as a class, and a consequent lack of self-confidence on the part of workers. The intervention of revolutionaries in these struggles must on the one hand be aimed at exposing the unions' role in sabotaging and isolating the struggles, and on the other hand at helping the class to regain its self identity as a class, and its understanding of active solidarity in struggle.

JG, 11/25/03.

Dear comrades,

Thank you for your letter of July 22, 2003 containing a critique of two leaflets I produced for anti-war rallies in Toronto in the spring of last year. I regret that until now I have been unable to reply to the comments and criticisms raised in your letter.

To begin with, I want to agree with you that it is important for revolutionaries (both those in formal organizations and those operating as independents) to discuss in a comradely fashion, points of difference about the world situation and theoretical interpretations. Such a free exchange of views is important for the de to development of political ideas and for the clarification of our viewpoints. All too often, such debate degenerates into sectarian sniping and point-scoring, rather than actual discussion. In this spirit of discussion, I want to reply to the issues you address in your letter.

The anti-war mobilizations in Toronto in the winter and spring of 2003 were no different from mobilizations in New York and elsewhere. In terms of the banners carried and leaflets distributed, the spirit of events was overwhelmingly of a liberal nature. Indeed, in the first significant mobilizations, even United Nations banners were displayed The incidence of UN banners decreased as the conflict became imminent, but they were replaced by religious pacifism.

The 'far left,' in Toronto, represented mostly by the mainstream Trotskyist groups, largely promoted these pacifist ideas; although, if one wanted to look closely, mentions of capitalism could be found. The largest leftist group, the International Socialists (linked internationally to the British Socialist Workers Party, whose slogans and orientation they parroted), were in many cases the marshals of the parade and the promoters of the worst illusions about the nature of the war. At the first demonstration after the beginning of the war, a spokesperson for the IS, masquerading as a spokesperson for the anti-war coalition called for a boycott of American goods and services, and urged the crowd to buy Canadian goods because Canada was not supporting the war!

While many leftists echoed the liberal line "war is not the answer," others definitively opted to support one side in the conflict. The International Communist League (the Spartacists) and the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) organized around support for Iraq - the irony of the Spartacists naming their supporters in these mobilizations "The Revolutionary Internationalist Contingent" seemed to be lost on them.

However, within these demonstrations, there were small forces of internationalist opposition to the war. Together with other communists and some class struggle anarchists in Toronto, I helped to distribute materials of a revolutionary opposition to the war. In addition to the two Red & Black Notes statements, material by the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, the International Communist Current, and Internationalist Perspective was also distributed. These comrades also organized meetings in Toronto and Montreal under the heading of "No War But the Class," which featured speakers from Red & Black Notes, the IBRP, and the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists. It should also be noted that the Toronto group also produced its own leaflet in January of 2003 entitled "No to Capitalist War! No to Capitalist Peace." This leaflet, along with the ones produced by Red & Black Notes can be found at the Red & Black Notes web site along with a reply by the International Bolshevik Tendency and a rejoinder to them. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that while these efforts were important, they represented a very small voice in a dark time.

Before dealing with the criticisms of the leaflets, I want to deal with a couple of questions you raise. As you correctly assume, I reject both the "democratic" and the "fascist" sides in the Second World War, just as it was necessary to reject support for either side in the current conflict in Iraq. Capital is a global system, and the cause of the working class is not advanced by support for either the lesser imperialist powers against the larger ones, or the "democratic" capitalists against the "dictators." This policy is in stark contrast to the Trotskyists who, for all their anti-imperialist rhetoric, see nothing wrong with supporting bourgeois governments in their conflicts with larger powers. The IBT for its part took no side in the conflict between Iraq and Kuwait, yet hurried to defend Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003. Its rationale being, it is about "defeating imperialism" (in reality, supporting a small imperialist power against a larger one). In my reply to the IBT I asked, but received no reply, what would have been the logical extension of this policy for Iraqi militants: support Saddam Hussein? (militarily not politically of course). And would they advocate the shooting of deserters ("like pigeons"?) as scabbing on the defense of an "oppressed nation?"

It is necessary here to make a small correction in your article You quote the leaflet "A Plague on Both Your Houses" as stating "for some it's about defending imperialism," whereas the actual line was "for some it's about defeating imperialism," referring to the Trotskyist argument that the job of revolutionaries was to defeat the imperialism (and here they meant Iraq). My use of the phrase was intended to be ironic; nevertheless, the error does not affect your point.

Despite the general agreement in the framework of revolutionaries toward the attitude in the conflict, we clearly have some differences about the base cause of the war and minor tactical points within it. In the two leaflets I produced, it is argued that the root cause of the conflict was the crisis in the American economy, a position you likened to that of the IBRP who argue that this factor and US control of the oil markets are the key ideas. In contrast, you assert that the key factor was the collapse of the other global superpower and the US' need to assert its hegemony as against its European and pacific-rim rivals.

To begin with, I do not disagree that there is an element of "superpower" politics at play in the conflict, just as you do not deny the importance of economic factors. However, it seems that the US' actions, despite the national economy's weakness, are dictated from a position of strength. In your letter, you argue that the US' decision is based on the lesser imperialist powers challenging the US leadership, and the US needing to "engage in direct displays of its military power, as an attempt to keep its erstwhile allies in line." You further argue that my argument underestimates "the gravity of imperialist rivalries." However, in the following paragraphs you admit that "while there is an emerging conflict between the US and the EU, this is premature and the EU is a "sad fiction when it comes to exhibiting a united foreign policy." If this rebellion of the lesser powers was the impetus for the US to act, where was it coming from and who was leading it? I agree that France and Germany were the loudest voices in opposition, but as I noted in "A Plague on Both Your Houses" it was because they saw the US designs in strengthening its economy at their expense. While you argue that I have overstated the short-term economic impetus to war, it seems that you may have overstated the political.

Your letter also sees the "economic" explanation my view the holdouts would eventually fall into line for fear of losing out. While this expectation was largely unfounded, it has been negatively confirmed as the US has acted to punish those who did not send troops by withholding the lucrative contracts. Canada in particular, which has traditionally played the soft-cop peacekeeper under UN auspices, has been left whining about being denied contracts. If Germany and France had too much to lose by not going along, given the US' initial success, has discipline been strengthened or weakened?

As to the tactics which should be offered, I think you may have misconstrued their function. In the closing paragraphs of "No War But the Class War" leaflet, I suggested a number of possible scenarios which could take place. If my leaflet has led you to believe that I was putting forward a program for the working class to take up in resistance to the war, then I regret this impression. Obviously a few leaflets on the Internet or distributed in a crowd of tens of thousands will not be the "spark" which brings the revolution. These comments should not be likened to the call to arms made by many leftist organizations. I do not suggest that the revolution is around the corner, and to a large extent the actions did not go beyond the terrain of bourgeois politics.

However, it is important to remember that such actions could have had an important impact. Even the case of the UK firefighters strike, which did not ultimately transcend the union form, created a panic with the UK's ruling circles as it threatened to interfere with their war plans. While revolution is not always the end product, the class struggle can always be seen. As your statement of March 2003 correctly notes:

"The working class is not a mere passive victim of war. It was the mass strikes and mutinies of 1917-18 which brought the first world war to an end.Today the working class struggle can only be a defensive one. But it contains the seeds of an offensive revolutionary struggle, of a class war against the whole capitalist system."

Despite our differences on these questions, I look forward to further exchanges and discussion.

N, Red & Black Notes, 2-15-2004

As we go to press, the bourgeois media has already been ablaze for months with intense coverage of the Democratic primary race. The media campaign that always accompanies American presidential elections got off to an early start this time around, as pundits weighed in on the race months before the official start of primary season in January with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. As early as November of last year, the quirky former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, who positioned himself as a harsh critic of Bush's Iraq policy, was declared the democratic front-runner, with the media all but anointing him the Democratic candidate in 2004. Quite clearly, the American bourgeoisie deliberately used the media campaign surrounding the primary race to attempt to accomplish several distinct propaganda goals at once: distract the American public from the continuing chaos, death and destruction resulting from the war in Iraq, revitalize the Democratic party as a viable party of government, and once again drum-up illusions that the electoral process is the appropriate avenue through which to seek political and social change and have one's just grievances addressed.

This last goal corresponds to the general strategy of the American bourgeoisie to revitalize the image of bourgeois democracy following the debacle of 2000. In that election the Democratic Party candidate, Vice President Al Gore, won the popular vote but lost the presidency to Republican George W. Bush due to the Byzantine rules of the anachronistic Electoral College. It became evident in 2000 that as capitalism's decomposition advances, the bourgeoisie is tending to lose some ability to control and manipulate its electoral mechanism, and the bourgeoisie does not want to risk a repeat of that mess. Understandably, the election of 2000 left many voters with a bad taste in their mouth, fuelling the political alienation of many in a nation where most eligible voters already stay home on Election Day. The following three years of Bush's presidency have done little to heal the wounds. While Bush was able to reap some initial public relations benefits from the tragedy of 9/11, after which his approval ratings soared, his administration was unable to translate this propaganda coup into long-term political capital. Continuing concerns over spiralling American casualties in Iraq, the deteriorating economy, unemployment that won't go way, overseas job losses, soaring budget deficits in the face of huge tax cuts, and the administration's low credibility regarding pre-war justifications for the attack on Saddam Hussein have all begun to take their toll.

It is in this context, the bourgeois media initially hailed Governor Dean as an idealistic political outsider with a strong principled stand against the Iraq war. Dean's unorthodox organizational base, raising campaign funds almost exclusively over the Internet, was hailed by journalists and academics alike as evidence of an emerging 'post-modern social movement' based on a new 'electronic public sphere' of progressive activists. All of this was designed to lure disaffected young people back into the political fold and revive the democratic electoral mystification after the hard hit it took in the last election. Nevertheless, it is evident that the American bourgeoisie never had any real intention to make an ardent opponent of the war in Iraq like Dean the Democratic Party candidate for president. As quickly as the media built him up in November and December they took him apart in January and February. The media build-up and subsequent destruction of Howard Dean is an excellent demonstration of how bourgeois 'democracy' really works. With his utility as a presidential candidate exhausted, the media shamelessly replayed Dean's infamous 'scream,' from his speech after the Iowa caucuses to discredit him as unstable and therefore unfit to be president.

With Dean gone, the media next turned its attention to propping up Senator Kerry as an acceptable alternative, as a Democrat who could actually defeat George W. Bush in the General Election come November. 'Electability' now became the central theme, as the bourgeois media campaign to strengthen the electoral mystification now switched to rehabilitating the Democrats as a viable party of government. With the Bush administration in trouble on both the domestic and especially the foreign policy fronts, the American bourgeoisie is leaving all its options open for the moment. In case circumstances require a change at the top, it needs a Democratic candidate who not only can repair the electoral myth, but can also successfully lead the country to war in defense of its imperialist interests in the future, hopefully using a more convincing ideological justification than the kind Bush offered in Iraq. Kerry is being groomed as just that type of candidate. He is being painted as man who would be a reluctant warrior who would use military force only if absolutely necessary or for humanitarian purposes.

It is too early to say whether the bourgeoisie has decided that Bush should be replaced, but it is clear that this will be one of the longest running electoral circus in history. Usually the campaign doesn't start in earnest until after Labor Day, after the Democratic and Republican conventions during the summer, but the Bush campaign has already begun airing campaign commercials, and the conventions are still months away.

While the bourgeoisie tries its best to rehabilitate the image of its democratic facade, workers must refuse to fall for the trap. No matter which candidate comes out on top in November, the meaning for the working class will be the same: more austerity, more war, more death and more barbarism. In order to put an end to all this, the working class must search for its own identity and its own political response to capitalism's historic impasse, a response grounded firmly on its own class terrain. In order to achieve this, it must refuse to participate in the bourgeois electoral circus and recognize that the change begins, not in the voting booth, but on the shop-floor, in the necessary struggle to defend its living and working conditions from capitalism's attacks, and the class consciousness of the need to destroy the entire capitalism system that this struggle must generate.

Henk, 3/20/04.

Recently the American bourgeoisie finally gave up on one of the biggest lies it used to justify its war against Iraq. In January David A. Kay, the Bush administration's chief advisor on the search for weapons of mass destruction, publicly acknowledged that he did not believe that Iraq had possessed large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in the period prior to last year's American military invasion. So, it seems that the butcher of Baghdad was, after all, the one who was telling the truth - he no longer had so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "few months away," as the American government claimed, from producing a nuclear bomb - a key prop for the administration's case for the urgency of a pre-emptive war.

What brought on this sudden change of heart? Has the bourgeoisie suddenly become honest and willing to correct the historical record? One has to be really naive or a member of the bourgeois press corps to think so. The reality is that this lie, among the other cynical lies that the Bush administration used to justify the war against Iraq, had become over time totally untenable. Almost a year after the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime and millions of dollars and countless man-hours expended on the hunt for WMDs, this bogey-man seems to have disappeared into thin air. In Great Britain - America's main partner in its pre-emptive war on Iraq - this false explanation of the war has been totally discredited for a long time. The Blair government's schoolboy like assemblage of data on the weapons capabilities of Iraq from questionable Internet sources has been amply documented before and after the war. Thus in these circumstances Mr. Kay's admission that "sorry there were not WMD after all" is not surprising and was surely decided upon by the government in order to get rid of an uncomfortable issue, especially in the context of an election year.

However even now what the bourgeoisie is saying is only half true. For one thing, the Bush administration cannot openly admit that it misrepresented, misled, exaggerated or, to say it clearly, lied, about the WMD issue in order to rally the population and particularly the working class to support for the war effort. On the contrary, now we are being asked to believe that the representatives of the dominant class were duped, the innocent victims of "intelligence failure" of American spy agencies. This is the new myth being created, and in the end it seems that the initial little scandal around Mr. Kay's declaration is destined to die out in the comfortable backrooms of the investigation commissions that American democracy is so fond of. Thus the unmasking of the cynical lie about the dangerous threat to America posed by a mad man, quasi-armed with atomic weapons, has ended with Mr. Bush's decision to appoint a major bipartisan inquiry into the "intelligence failure" that was unable to see that Hussein was not so dangerous after all. The trick has worked so well that the issue has almost disappeared from the main bourgeois press, which reflects on the one hand, the unity of all the factions of the bourgeoisie on the war against Iraq and on the other the concern of the dominant class about the potential impact of the exposure of the fabrications that justified this military adventure.

From the point of view of the working class one thing should be clear - there should be no surprise that the bourgeoisie lies consciously and cynically when it asks for the blood and flesh of "its" workers to defend its imperialist interests. This is what revolutionaries have been saying about all the justifications that the ruling class used to draw the support of the working class for its war against Iraq. For instance a year ago, in Internationalism 125, we wrote: "The Bush administration has given over the last months many "praiseworthy" explanations for this new military adventure. It has said, attempting still to exploit the patriotic feelings awaken in the American population after the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the cities of New York and Washington, that this war is a war against terrorism. It has said that this war is a pre-emptive action to disarm Iraq of 'weapons of mass destruction' that could have been used in the future against American interest. It has said that this war has the goal of changing Iraq's regime and the overthrowing of a bloody dictator that threatened its neighbors and oppressed its own people. It has said -and this is the preferred theme lately- that this is a war aimed to liberate the Iraqi population, a war meant to bring prosperity, peace and the democratic panacea to the Iraqis and the Middle East region at large. These explanations are cynical lies."

That Iraq had become a military midget after its defeat during the first Gulf war and the sanctions that followed was a fact only hidden by the American bourgeoisie and a propaganda machine interested in justifying its military presence in the Middle East during the 90's and its open military offensive initiative in Afghanistan and the war against Iraq that followed.

In any case, the use of terrorism, the alleged possession of "weapons of mass destruction," the oppression of its "own population" were not attributes solely of Hussein's regime, but rather are the shared characteristics of all capitalist states in the world no matter how democratic or dictatorial their political regime. The US is no exception to this rule. Historically its dominant class has not hesitated either to use terrorism or "weapons of mass destruction" when it suited its political interests. Let's not forget that the US possesses a military arsenal capable of destroying the world several times over. Once again there is nothing out of the ordinary about the dishonesty of the bourgeoisie. The dominant class can't just tell the exploited class -the one that has always, in one way or another, borne the brunt of the military adventures of its exploiters - that a military action is needed in order to advance or defend the political, economic or military strategic needs of the State. In order to convince people that killing, and being killed, is a worthy cause, the dominant class has to ideologically mystify the population and in particular the working class. The imperialist world wars and the equally imperialist various local wars in which the Western and the Stalinist blocs confronted each other for decades had always been justified with one or another ideological theme. The "anti-terrorist" and democratic banner that the US is today waving to justify its world-wide war campaign is nothing but a fa?ade behind which stand the desperate efforts of a frightened imperial power determined to defend its hegemony over the world. These are the lessons that workers need to draw of the reveal dishonesty of the bourgeoisie.

Eduardo Smith, 3/20/04.

We have just received a report that Frank Girard, who edited and published - virtually single-handedly - the Discussion Bulletin for twenty years from 1983 to 2003 died last month at the age of 77. Frank had been a member of the Socialist Labor Party (the De Leonist organization in the U.S.) from the 1940s until his expulsion in the early 1980s, even running for political office on the SLP ticket. He began the Discussion Bulletin as an open forum for the exchange of political views by De Leonists, anarchists, libertarians, left communists, etc. - what he called "non-market socialists." Not only were the pages of Discussion Bulletin open to a wide range of political views, but the publication appeared like clockwork on a bimonthly basis, something of a rarity in this political milieu.

The ICC had many polemical exchanges with Frank, particularly on the political legacy of De Leonism, especially its blind spot when it came to the mystifications of bourgeois democracy. Despite its opposition to reformism, and despite the lessons of history, De Leonism, and Frank, persisted in a na?ve belief that capitalism could be overthrown at the ballot box. We also frequently criticized Frank for not publishing more exchanges on contemporary issues facing the working class, especially imperialist war. He once told us in a letter that he didn't republish any of the leaflets or articles against the various American imperialist ventures in the 1990s because all the groups had the same position, even though there were many different analyses for the causes of the war, and proposals for how the working class could oppose war. He finally seemed to take this criticism to heart at the time of the most recent US invasion of Iraq by publishing a collection of leaflets by various groups.

Whatever criticisms we made of Frank, and he of us, it was always clear that they were made as part of a fraternal debate between comrades who were committed to the destruction of capitalism and the liberation of the working class. When Frank Girard made the decision to cease publication we urged him not to. We argued that the Discussion Bulletin played an invaluable role of mutually introducing to each other the elements of a very disparate, far flung political milieu. After the publication of the last issue of Discussion Bulletin last July, we sent Frank a letter saluting his efforts on behalf of the proletariat, wishing him well in his retirement, and giving him a subscription for life to the press of the ICC. We had no idea at the time that his life would sadly end so soon. We extend our condolences and solidarity to the family and friends of Frank Girard.

Internationalism, 3/20/04.

There should be no confusion about the purpose of the 9/11 Commission. The last thing that the current circus orchestrated by the ruling class is designed to do is uncover the truth about the period leading up to 9/11 and the terrorist attacks that killed over 3,000 people at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. While the hearings perhaps have undermined the credibility of the Bush administration and revealed some embarrassing details, the major thrust of the hearings will be a proposal to bolster yet again the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state, strengthen the CIA and the FBI, facilitate domestic surveillance, relax restrictions on searches and seizures at home, and unleash a new round of CIA covert activities abroad. To the extent that the hearings have been critical of President Bush, it is more because of discomfort within large sections of the ruling class about the administration's handling of the situation in Iraq, than because of errors made about the 9/11 attacks. This was made abundantly clear by the remarks, for example, by Commission member and former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, when he prefaced his questioning of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice with a critique of the administration's Iraqi policy.

Public testimony in the 9/11 Commission's investigation of the alleged "intelligence failings" offer ample confirmation of the analysis of these events developed by the ICC in fall 2001, immediately after the attacks. While the bourgeois politicians fingerpoint and try to outdo each other in proposing a revamping of the intelligence apparatus and repressive legislation to strengthen the domestic spying and police powers of the state, the real lesson of the hearings is never mentioned: the American government knew that an attack was coming and consciously permitted it to happen for political and ideological purposes, much the same way that the Roosevelt administration permitted the Japanese attack that it knew was coming at Pearl Harbor in 1941, to give it the pretext to mobilize a reluctant population for entry into World War II.

The timeline emerging from the hearings confirms with more details than were available when we first developed our analysis of why the bourgeoisie permitted the 9/11 attacks to occur. The evidence clearly demonstrates that the bourgeoisie knew that al Qaeda was preparing attacks within the U.S. that al Qaeda was planning to use hijacked airplanes as missiles, that al Qaeda was operating in the U.S., that al Qaeda's agents were training in American flight schools, and that al Qaeda was preparing a major terrorist attack within the U.S. during the summer 2001. The evidence further suggests that the administration, nevertheless, permitted the attacks to occur in order to create a political climate that would permit it to foment war psychoses in the population and simultaneously allow it to beef up the repressive apparatus of the state with minimal opposition. Here is what the timeline shows:

Summer 1996, the "American intelligence community" (in a strange distortion of the word "community", the bourgeoisie uses this phrase as an umbrella term for its foreign and domestic spying agencies) prepared to protect the Atlanta Olympics from terrorist attacks that might utilize hijacked airplanes. Former FBI director Freeh reported similar concerns about terrorists using airplanes to attack in 2000 and 2001.

January 25, 2001, President Bush and National Security Advisor Rice were briefed on al Qaeda and informed that it was operating in the U.S.

On Feb. 7, 2001, Richard Clarke, the Clinton administration anti-terrorism expert that was retained in office by Rice, further briefed Rice on al Qaeda's operations in the U.S.

Throughout spring 2001, Clarke repeatedly requested that he be permitted to address a cabinet level meeting on the al Qaeda threat, but was rebuffed by Rice.

On July 5, 2001 Rice, having declined to convene a cabinet level meeting on al Qaeda, instead asked Clarke to hold lower level meetings to help domestic agencies to prepare for possible domestic attack. This effectively sent a signal downgrading the administration's concerns about an imminent attack.

July 10, 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix recommended checking whether al Qaeda operatives were training at American flight schools (they were!).

July 20-21, 2001, Egyptian intelligence sources informed the Bush administration that terrorists were plotting to attack the G-8 Economic Summit in Genoa by crashing a hijacked airplane filled with explosives into the conference building. Italian military personnel manned anti-aircraft weapons around the site to protect the assembled imperialist leaders. For security reasons, Bush did not sleep at the conference site, but stayed aboard an American naval vessel in the harbor.

Aug. 6, 2001, the CIA presented Bush with a Presidential Daily Briefing, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." warned that bin Laden was planning to attack in the US homeland, that al Qaeda cells had been surveilling federal buildings in New York City, that the FBI reported activity consistent with preparations for airplane hijackings by al Qaeda operatives. Implausibly, the Bush administration rationalizes its blas? attitude towards this CIA warning by arguing a) that it was primarily an "historical report" and b) that there really wasn't a threat since time, date, and place were not specifically mentioned.

Sept. 4, 2001, Clarke sent a memo to Rice urging immediate action to block a possible attack, warning of the possibility that hundreds of people could be killed.

The real reason for permitting the terrorist attacks to unfold can be inferred from Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the commission. For example, Rice complained that, "...for all the language of war spoken before 9/11, this country simply was not on war footing." How does one accomplish getting a nation on "war footing"? Following the example of the Roosevelt administration in 1941, Rice explained it quite clearly when she said, "Bold and comprehensive changes are sometimes only possible in the wake of catastrophic events - events which create a new consensus that allows us to transcend old ways of thinking and acting." References to the importance of "catastrophic events" as a means of transcending "old ways of thinking and acting" were repeated several times in Rice's testimony. For example, in answer to one question, she said, "And I think that the unfortunate - and I really do think it's extremely tragic - fact is that sometimes until there is a catastrophic event that forces people to think differently, that forces people to overcome old customs and old culture and old fears about domestic intelligence and the relationship, that you don't get that kind of change."

Still later, she worried that the American people might "forget" the political lessons of these catastrophic events. "I would not consider the problem solved," Rice told the commission. "My greatest concern is that, as September 11 recedes from memory, we will begin to unlearn the lessons we've learned." This of course opens up the possibility of allowing future attacks to keep alive patriotic fervor, and may be linked to the predictions that al Qaeda may strike again before the presidential election in November.

This notion that a catastrophic event could be used to manipulate mass consciousness had been bandied about by leading Republicans even before winning the 2000 election. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had been involved with the Project for a New American Century, a right-wing think-tank that argued as early as 2000 that the United States needed "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" to justify a military invasion of Iraq.

So, what the 9/11 Commission will never tell us, is that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were allowed to occur, not because the Bush administration is incompetent or that President Bush was asleep at the wheel, or that American intelligence agencies are poorly organized, but that it was consciously allowed to happen in order to use a "catastrophic event" to manipulate the American people - in the same cynical way that the Roosevelt administration permitted Pearl Harbor to happen in December 1941. The Bush administration may not have foreseen the magnitude of the attack, or the number of lives that would be lost - it is probable that even al Qaeda was surprised that the Twin Towers collapsed into dust - but they purposely allowed it to happen so that they could finally overcome the legacy of the so-called "Vietnam syndrome," and mobilize the population behind the state for imperialist war. That the Bush administration has apparently squandered the ideological capital it gained in September, 2001 with its botched occupation of Iraq is what is creating serious political problems for Bush's bid for reelection.

Jerry Grevin.

Over the past year Internationalism has been involved in a correspondence with the Toronto based group Red and Black Notes that publishes a journal of the same name. We have already published previous installments of this correspondence. The following letter is a reply to the Red and Black letter published in our last issue [40] (#129).

Dear Comrade,

We write in order to continue the dialogue we have been engaged in over the past year regarding the nature of imperialism and war in the current period. We apologize for the slight delay in responding to you.

First, we wish to salute the spirit of open and fraternal debate that your last letter to us-a reply to our previous commentary on the leaflets you distributed at the anti- war rallies in the winter of 2003-demonstrates. It is only this open process of exchange and confrontation between ideas and positions that can advance revolutionary theory and then provide the most effective basis for revolutionary intervention in the proletariat's struggle to destroy capitalist society and build a new human community. We are certainly encouraged that the debate between us has sustained itself for a year in a fraternal and open way. We look forward to exchanging correspondence with you again soon. However, what we would like to do in this letter is to expand the debate beyond the specific intervention in the anti-war rallies to a more general discussion of the nature of imperialism and war today, and in doing so, draw your attention to what we see as some continuing methodological weaknesses in your analysis of these questions.

However, we will begin by stressing some of the main points of agreement between our analysis and the approach you have taken towards these questions. First, we certainly concur with your insistence that capitalism is a global system and that there are no longer any such things as "non-capitalist" or "non-imperialist" nations. In this era of decadent capitalism, all states are equally capitalist and imperialist even if some are stronger than others or more openly acknowledge their own imperialist character-albeit in a distorted way-as is the case today with certain factions of the American bourgeoisie. In such a situation-as you correctly point out-there can be no question of "defeating imperialism" by allying the workers movement with "oppressed nations." Defeating capitalism requires a global revolution by the entire working class against all states. The task of revolutionaries is to intervene towards the working class to defend this perspective, something your leaflets reflected admirably despite the fact-as you put it-that the revolutionary perspective may be a "small voice in a dark time" in today's political climate. Moreover, your reply to the Trotskyist group's criticism of the internationalist position on war was dead-on in pointing out the obvious inanity of their politics, a politics that offers "military" but not "political" support to lesser imperialist powers in the hope of "breaking the weakest link in the chain." You correctly point out the bourgeois class nature of such a position that would logically lead them to-as you phrase it-"advocate the shooting of deserters (.) as scabbing on the defense of an oppressed nation." Your analysis of war and imperialism, as portrayed in your leaflets and in your last letter, is one we would find ourselves in general agreement with, an agreement you acknowledge yourself.

Nevertheless, despite this general agreement, we feel your reply to our criticisms of your initial leaflets did not fully grapple with the fundamental methodological question posed by the transition of the capitalist system from its period of historical ascendancy-in which it served the purpose of developing humanity's productive forces-to its period of decadence, in which capitalist relations of production come to serve as a brake on the development of the productive forces and, in which, capitalism has become a fully regressive mode of production. For us, this historic transition, which we see occurring in the early 20th century, fundamentally changed many things in the functioning of the capitalist system. While we cannot go into all of the features of this historic transition here, a subject covered in depth in our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism, we will try to sketch out-in a somewhat schematic way perhaps-the connection between the theory of decadence and our analysis of imperialism and war today.

For us, as decadence-marked by a permanent global crisis of overproduction-has advanced, imperialism and war have more and more tended to lose any direct economic function for capitalist states. While there may indeed be some instances of residual economic benefit for this or that company or state as the result of a particular imperialist confrontation, for us this is not the primary motive behind the capitalist system's current march to war. In decadence, strategic and tactical considerations tend to dominate the imperialist rivalries between states, as they all compete-albeit in a very general sense-to strengthen their positions on the global market by making inroads into the spheres of influence of other states. In a world where the entire globe is dominated by capitalist states, there is no place left to colonize and exploit that isn't already a rival state or in another state's sphere of influence. In a context such as this, war and imperialism tend to loose the vulgar economic motives that characterized some phases of capitalism's ascendancy, such as access to markets or raw materials. In decadence, capitalist states are driven towards imperialism and war by the competitive logic of the global market itself and as such they often engage in military actions that are on the immediate level very unprofitable, and in many cases even a drain on the national capital. In this sense, the period of capitalist decadence is marked by the increasing "irrationality of war," wherein war becomes an end in itself, i.e. gaining strategic position against one's rivals, rather than a means to some immediate economic end. In this sense, the present day capitalist system has taken on the all the trappings of a mafia war in which violence takes on a life of its own outside of a direct connection to substantive ends.

Nevertheless, we think the most important oversight of your response to our previous criticisms is to see the differences in our analysis of the war as a matter of "differing emphasis." While it is true that we can have differing interpretations about the weight of immediate economic factors in a given imperialist conflict, we must be clear that there is a profound difference of method in analyzing war and imperialism from the perspective of profit and immediate interests as opposed to taking a global and historical view of the evolution and development of imperialist tensions over the longue dure? of capitalist development. For us, the theory of decadence is the method that provides this perspective and which best explains the situation facing global capitalism and all its constituent states today. And which can best guide our own analysis of imperialist tensions and the class struggle.

We believe this perspective better explains the imperialist situation surrounding the current war in Iraq than does the attempt to search for the immediate economic interests of the American national capital. Ever since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc at the end of the 1990's, the main powers of the former Western Bloc: Great Britain, France, Germany etc. have been slowly but certainly trying to free themselves from the dominance of their old bloc master: The United States. As such, over the past decade and a half-sensing its weakening grip over its erstwhile allies-the United States has increasingly been obliged to engage in direct displays of military power, as a way of reminding its rivals of its superiority in this area: the Gulf War of 1991, Somalia 1993, the ex-Yugoslavia and Kosovo under Clinton, Afghanistan after 9/11, and now Iraq once again under the 2nd Bush administration. Nevertheless, these interventions have in general had little benefit for the US economy. In fact, as we now know about the war in Iraq they have tended to be an economic burden, with the American state forced to spend a spiraling amount of money on each intervention it makes, a sum that is increasing daily with the continued violence in Iraq. While some administration bigwigs and assorted other cronies may be getting rich from this war from contracts etc., the American economy itself is suffering tremendously. We think the idea of a post-war economic revival based on some sort of "oil boom" has been, at this point, largely discredited. Domestically, it is the working class that bears the brunt of the domestic cutbacks that result from the increasingly precarious nature of the global capitalist economy and of the American national capital in particular, as well as the drive to war that only exacerbates the crisis. So, from the perspective of the theory of decadence, the current war in Iraq is less an attempt to jump start a struggling economy and more a desperate geo-political move to shore up a shrinking imperialist power base, a move that has, in fact, done great harm to the national capital and raised the stakes of austerity for the working class even further.

In conclusion, we hope that you accept our intervention in the same spirit of openness that has characterized our correspondence thus far, and we look forward to any additional reply you may send. We would also like to respond to the part of your letter dealing with the tactics of the class struggle and we will be in touch with further correspondence on this question soon. In the meantime we look forward to your letters and emails.

Revolutionary Regards,

Internationalism

Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, honored by the Cannes Film Festival, more for its politics than its artistry, has been playing to packed theatres across the country this summer. Within the US the controversy surrounding this film reflects the seriousness of the divisions within the American bourgeoisie about the conduct of the war in Iraq. Walt Disney Co., the film's producer, originally decided not to permit the film to go into theatrical release for fear of offending the Bush administration because of its sharp political attack on the administration. Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, a prominent liberal democrat, who served as legal counsel representing Moore in his efforts to get the film into release, said he was fighting for this film to be in theatres nationwide because he believes it is a film that every American should see, that it's message is vital to American democracy. The New York Post, the conservative tabloid, controlled by Murdoch's News Corp, denounced the film as crass propaganda.

It certainly is propaganda, as is the news regularly published and broadcast each day in the mass media, whether it's the NY Post or the prestigious New York Times. In the run up to the Iraq invasion, all these publications and broadcast networks were overwhelmingly pro-war in their coverage of administration policy. Today of course there are serious disagreements within the American ruling class, not about the necessity to invade Iraq, but primarily about effectiveness of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq, and whether the administration has made a mess of the invasion and therefore made things more difficult for American imperialism in its efforts to dominate the world and mobilize the American population for future military actions in the period ahead. It's a serious disagreement, but it is a tactical dispute on the implementation of an agreed upon overall imperialist policy orientation: to do what is necessary to maintain America's status as the world's only superpower and prevent the rise of any potential rival or rival bloc.

In the current uproar about Fahrenheit 9/11 what mass media commentators say depends upon what faction of the bourgeoisie the commentator and his/her media organization adheres to: whether they support the Bush administration's policies, or whether they think the administration has made a mess that needs to be fixed. However, one thing is clear. Fahrenheit 9/11 is neither anti-war, nor anti-imperialist. It is simply anti-Bush. Moore does an excellent job in bashing Bush. The film features a collection of powerful images about the horror of the war, and about the oafish ineptness of Bush and his administration, which relies heavily on embarrassing outtakes not originally meant for public viewing. For example, Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of American imperialism's strategy in Iraq, is reduced to being a clown in a scene in which he uses his own spit to groom his hair before appearing in a TV interview - even running his comb through his mouth. Moore takes advantage of Bush's acknowledged shortcomings as a public speaker to portray him as stupid and mean. In one scene, Bush can't remember the old aphorism about "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me..." and comes off looking ridiculous. On a more serious political level, another scene depicts Bush speaking before a fundraising audience of wealthy supporters and saying something like, "You are the haves and the have mores. Some call you the elite. I call you my base." Pretty damning stuff.

The movie includes compelling images, such as the interview with a formerly pro-war mother from Flint, Michigan, who now opposes the war after the death of her son, or the scene in which Moore asks members of Congress to volunteer to send their children to combat in Iraq and gets only glares of incredulity in response.

And while the movie blasts Bush's propaganda campaign to justify the war - which has already been amply discredited in the mass media - it is definitely not anti-war. Moore for example clearly supports American imperialism's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and in fact criticizes Bush for not being warlike enough in regard to Afghanistan. He ridicules the Bush administration for having had diplomatic ties to the Taliban regime before the invasion, and even having a Taliban representative tour Bush's home state of Texas. Moore attacks Bush for not invading Afghanistan quicker. He complains that the president waited two months to attack - giving bin Laden "a two-month headstart." Moore also criticizes the president for having so few troops in Afghanistan.

The debacle in Iraq is blamed on the personal failings and greed of George W. Bush. Moore offers up a rather crude vulgar economist argument that the Bush family's business relations with the Saudi royal family is guiding American foreign policy in the current administration. Moore stresses that the majority of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, as is bin Laden. While he stops just short of calling for war against the Saudi royal family, he practically denounces Bush for treason for spending the evening visiting with the Saudi ambassador to the US on the evening of September 13, 2001, and protecting Saudi interests in the US. He really plays an extremely nationalist tune in regard to the Saudis, bemoaning how much they have invested in the U.S.

This "analysis," which Moore has claimed is "very sound" in television interviews about the film is typical capitalist propaganda of blaming individuals and their policies for social evils rather than the capitalist system itself. Moore totally obscures the reality that it is American capitalism and its imperialist interests that are responsible for the war in Iraq. The real argument within the American ruling class today is not whether the US should have invaded Iraq, but about the most appropriate way to have prepared the invasion - what ideological justifications should have been used (weapons of mass destruction & links to al Qaeda vs. human rights violations), how hard the US should have worked to pressure for international endorsement of the invasion, and what military tactics and doctrines should have been used in the invasion and occupation (Rumsfeld's doctrine of lean, bare bones military force using smart weapons vs. the doctrine of "overwhelming force," used so successfully in the first Iraq war in 1991.

From a revolutionary proletarian perspective, the most dangerous aspect of Fahrenheit 9/11 is not only that it obscures the class nature of American imperialist policy, but that it is being used by capitalism to revive the electoral mystification, which took such a bad hit in the disaster of the disputed 2000 election. In the final analysis this film aims to get people out to the polls to vote against Bush, to restore confidence in the electoral system, that had been so badly shaken four years ago. The film hides the fact that imperialist war is the policy of all major factions of the bourgeoisie - after all it was the Democrat Clinton who had continued bombing raids against Iraq throughout the 1990s, and sent troops into Haiti, and Kosovo. It doesn't matter who wins the election in November, American imperialism will still wage war relentlessly around the globe. The only way to end war is to destroy capitalism. You can go see Fahrenheit 9/11 if you want to laugh at Bush and see some skillful bourgeois political propaganda, but don't for a minute think you're seeing some kind of anti-imperialist, anti-war, cinematic political statement with a cogent analysis of current events. This film is Democratic party campaign propaganda and an apology for capitalism, an attempt to bring alienated and discontented citizens back into the established capitalist political framework.

Internationalism, July 29, 2004

One year after the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the American occupation of the country is in deep trouble. The burst of intense violence in April in Central and Southern Iraq has sent any semblance of political stability and military gains achieved during the last year down the drain. The death toll among the American soldiers is mounting. In fact, more soldiers have died in the last weeks than during the official war period that led to Saddam's removal from power. The brand new American trained Iraqi security forces have routinely "dropped out of sight" during these last weeks of fighting, or, worse, joined the anti-American forces. The circle of violence against the Americans has grown from Sunni Muslims identified with the old regime and foreign terrorist groups to include a faction of Shiite Muslims -the majority religious group in Iraq that was often the worst victim of Saddam's repression- led by cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr. In fact, the US and its supporters are increasingly isolated. Today, anybody identified as being on the American side has become a target of the rising anti-American violence. Iraqis working for the US at any level, do so at the risk of losing theirs lives at any moment, while foreigners working for the so called "reconstruction" effort are facing a wave of kidnappings and killings. A year after the "conquest" of the country the American media can't show anymore flower-bearing children thanking the occupation army for their "freedom". On the contrary, the youth of Baghdad are more likely today to be on the side of the hysteric mob, celebrating the last killing of one more American soldier. In sum, it seems that the so-called "liberated" population of Iraq has turned against its "liberators".

As we write, this last flare up of the war in Iraq seems far from abating, as fighting continues in many parts of the country. In the first weekend of May, 13 soldiers died, while the Bush administration was celebrating the first anniversary of the end of major combat operations in the country. In Falluja, a Sunni city of 300,000, after weeks of virtual urban warfare, and an almost month old siege, hundreds of Iraqi civilians and combatants have been killed and many more have been injured. Many houses have been blown to pieces by the firepower of heavy weapons used by the US military to quell the resistance. Only at the last minute did the US call off an all-out assault to take control of the city. With both sides claiming victory, one thing is undeniable: the American imperialist enterprise in Iraq has become so muddled that the US is willing to grasp at any straw for salvation. In a somewhat bizarre move to avoid an escalation of violence that could have had tremendous consequences throughout Iraq and the entire region, the Americans are trying to make new allies of old enemies. The task of restoring order in Falluja has been handed to a new "Iraqi force" composed of former soldiers of the Hussein army, led by an ex-general of the infamous Republican Guard, one of the special military units closest to Saddam Hussein. In the context of this odd alliance, nothing can be more ludicrous than the comments of the US commander in charge of operations in Falluja celebrating the "formation of a military partnership", with "the most respected institution in Iraq", the army. This is to say the former backbone of Hussein's dictatorship, from whose oppression the US claimed to come to liberate the Iraqi people!

With the standoff in Falluja "resolved" the US army is now moving to crash the anti-American Shiite uprising led by the cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr. Heavy fighting has erupted in Baghdad and in the southern cities of Najaf, Kufa, Karbala and Basra. After a period of hesitation during which the US retreated from is declarations that Sadr must be arrested or killed, today the US seems to be posed to launch a military offensive to take back control of the cities of Najaf and Kufa from Sadr's followers. An all-out assault against the holy city of Najaf can only be a factor of further destabilization, not only in Iraq, but also throughout the whole region. While a last minute, face-saving, political compromise that avoids the all-out military solution can't be discounted; this alternative will not improve the US position in Iraq.

No matter how the Bush administration tries to spin its difficulties in Iraq it is obvious that the occupation has reached a crisis point. It takes a lot of naivet? or cynicism to declare, as General Meyers did, that the deadly violence of the last month is "a symptom of the success that we are having there." The reality is that the whole enterprise aimed at making Iraq a bastion of American dominance of the Middle East, and thus a center for the defense of its imperialist hegemony of the world, is in deep crisis. After astronomic amounts of money spent in the war effort, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, the whole imperialist policy of the Bush administration is beginning to look like a total failure.

At the tactical level, the US is being pushed to constantly change its policies in at attempt to handle a situation that is very much out of control. Plans decided months or weeks ago are being constantly scrapped in mid-course, while new improvised ones are coming to the table. Among these new policies are; first, the rehabilitation of the UN, which after being frozen out of Iraq during the months that preceded the war, is now being put in charge of pulling together a transitional government. Today, certain elements with the American bourgeoisie openly talk of bringing in the UN or NATO troops as a way of lessening American imperialism's military and political exposure in the region-a clear backsliding from the open "go it alone" stance that has animated US policy since 9/11 Second, an easing of the ban on former Baath party members in the new government in the making has been touted, which goes hand in hand, with the decision to allow former Iraqi soldiers to try to quell the uprising in Falluja. Meanwhile, the embarrassments for the US continue mounting. In February, we saw the total discredit of the weapons of mass destruction excuse for attacking Iraq. It turned out that by the account of the American person in charge of finding these weapons, there were none after all. Now there is a growing scandal around the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by US army personnel. The bourgeois representatives are trying to spin this latest show of brutality as an aberration, contrary to American democracy, principles, etc. The reality is that torture and abuse of rivals is not the prerogative of dictatorial military regimes. Bourgeois democracy has a long, bloody history of all kinds of sadistic cruelties against its enemies, and in particular, against the working class, when it has dared to challenge its domination over society.

At the strategic level, the US is today politically weaker than when it decided to go after Iraq on its own. The credibility won by its show of military and political determination in going to war defying the open opposition of other imperialist powers -France, Germany, Russia- has been lost by its inability to consolidate its initial victory in the war field. Humbled by the difficulties in Iraq, there is no more talk of Bush's grand strategy of pre-emptive action and unilateralism of which, the war against Iraq was supposed to be a test case. What is left is an imperialist power bogged down in a costly local conflict, for which it has no apparent imminent solution. This weakening of American imperialist credibility will only encourage major and minor imperialist powers to advance their own cards at the expense of their US rival. This is already the case with Iran -with the protection of Germany and France. In fact, faced with the inability to control the Shiites, the Americans have been forced to ask Iran to intervene towards its proxies in the Shiite region, the same country which Bush denounced as part of the "axis of evil" and which seemed to have been slated as the next target for American intervention only one year ago. In addition, we must consider North Korea's ongoing efforts to become nuclear armed, as well as Israel's recent actions, which take advantage of the growing American political isolation to make the Bush administration support the latest attempts of Sharon to settle the Palestinian question in Israel's favor, even though those policies are in total contradiction to what has been the US's stated policy in the region for decades. Even countries that decided that it was best for its national interests to show allegiance to the US by sending troops to Iraq, are now trying to get off the shipwreck. Spain has been the first one, with others soon to come.

The quagmire in Iraq is also bound to have a profound impact in the dominant class itself. There is a growing dissatisfaction with the Bush administration's handling of the US imperialist policy. The Democratic candidate's latest criticism of Bush is centered on the US's change of tactics in Iraq -it seems that Kerry thinks that the Bush administration has stolen his ideas. If this is all that Kerry has to offer, the US bourgeoisie would certainly not need a new president. Nevertheless, a certain faction within the American ruling class is becoming increasingly frustrated with the Bush administration's handling of the war effort as well as its general implementation of imperialist policy. We have thus seen an electoral circus off to an early start. Months before the election, quite unusual for American presidential elections, a vicious exchange of attacks from both sides has graced television sets and radio speakers. This internal discord in the American bourgeoisie quite probably reflects the growing confusion within the American bourgeoisie over the tactical implementation of its imperialist policy. The Bush administration's cavalier unilateralism having fallen flat on its face, there are clearly factions of the American bourgeoisie that would prefer to make a change. Yet, the inability of Kerry to articulate any real alternative is also proving troubling to many. Thus, the possibility exists that the current political scandals represent a real fight within the American ruling class rather than a mere attempt to manipulate the democratic circus, a real reflection of the growing crisis of American imperialist hegemony and its political leadership. While the upcoming election will be just as irrelevant for the working class as any other, the bourgeoisie-due to its internal divisions-may have difficulty orchestrating a particular result

At the working class level, the question of war has always been of primordial importance. First of all, the workers are the ones that in the last instance, bear the brunt of the imperialist adventures of the dominant class. It is the working class that pays for the bourgeoisie's war through its increased exploitation and with the life of its sons and daughters. It is only the working class that can stop, with its struggle, this maddening dynamic of capitalism barbarism, a dynamic that is spinning out of control today.

ES/Henk, 05/11/04.

The situation in Iraq this spring has become a total disaster for US imperialism. The highlights of this mess include:

• The highest number of casualties for American military forces since the official end of the war, which had been triumphantly, if prematurely, marked by President Bush's "mission accomplished" theatrics on an American aircraft carrier at sea last May.
• Simultaneous armed uprisings by both Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq, neither of which the American military was able to put down by force. In both cases the US military command had to back down from publicly stated operational goals and negotiate compromises. For example, the American punitive expedition against the Sunni city of Falluja, where four American mercenaries (officially called security "contractors" by US authorities) had been killed and their corpses mutilated, became bogged down in a nearly month-long siege that inadvertently provoked a momentary unity between Sunnis and Shiites against the American occupation, ended in a stalemate. The negotiated settlement to the siege of Falluja put the city under the military control of a Sunni militia commanded by a Baathist general of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard. After embarrassing revelations about their new ally, the Americans replaced him with another general from Saddam's regular army.
• The American crackdown against the militant Shiite cleric, Sadr, who the American authorities had vowed to "arrest or kill," provoked a 7-week rebellion by Sadr's militia, the Mahdi army. By early June, the Americans were again forced to back down, negotiating a truce with Sadr, whose militia was allowed to withdraw, but not disband or surrender its weapons, and the warrant for his arrest was withdrawn.
• Supporters of the US have been under attack, including regular terrorist attacks near the entry to the American occupation government headquarters, which resulted in the assassination of the head of governing council in May, and at least 3 high ranking officials in June.
• The scandal around the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was the final nail in the coffin for the Bush administration's ideological justifications for the war. Already all the propaganda about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and Saddam's alleged links to al Qaeda as reasons for invading Iraq had been thoroughly discredited. Now the torture, brutalization, and even murder of prisoners eliminated the last vestige of ideological justification - the "defense of human rights." The prison scandal turned that particular "reason" into a sick joke.
• The main US ally in Iraq, Chalabi, a favored client of Vice President Cheney, and Pentagon confidant has been dumped, cut off from his $400,000 per month US subsidy, and accused of ties to Iran.
• US authorities suffer increasing difficulties in manipulating its hand-picked governing council, which rejected the US choice for interim President of the provisional government.
• The costs for waging the war in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, are completely out of control. The administration has requested an additional $75 billion from Congress, giving the lie to its pre-invasion claims that the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq would be self-financed through the sale of Iraqi oil on the world market. In fact, the Iraq oil industry, which was not seriously damaged during the invasion, had been so weakened by ten years of US-imposed economic sanctions, that the occupying authority has been compelled to import oil into Iraq.
• With its political authority eroding badly, the US has been forced into a series of abrupt policy about-faces. For example, the US has abandoned:
  • its policy of banning Baathist party members and military officers from government posts in the "new" Iraq
  • its policy of dismantling the private militias loyal to the various religious and ethnic factions in Iraq
  • its policy of ultra-unilateralism, appealing to the previously vilified United Nations for political cover for the occupation of Iraq.

It is important to be clear that this is a crisis, not of the Bush administration, but of American imperialism as a whole. The strategy to block the rise of any potential rivals, and even the use of unilateral military action to support the implementation of that strategic goal is an orientation shared by all major factions of the American ruling class. Despite recent criticisms of Bush's unilateralism from certain factions within the bourgeoisie, the fact is that US imperialism has always acted unilaterally on the international arena since the end of World War II. However, during the Cold War when the US acted unilaterally, making major imperialist policy decisions that effected the entire western bloc, whether it was war in Korea, or in Vietnam or the deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe without prior consultation with its "allies," it could count on the discipline of the bloc to force its partners to go along with its decisions. In the post-Cold War period, the disappearance of the imperialist confrontation with a rival bloc, which was the basis of that international discipline, has made it more difficult for the US to get other imperialisms to sacrifice their own interests and submit to American diktat. The first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 was designed precisely to get the European powers to support American imperialism, even against their own interests, and remind them that the US was still the dominant power. The ideology of human rights was used repeatedly by the Clinton administration during the 1990s to justify its military actions in the Balkans and Iraq. The current criticism of Bush's unilateralism is premised on the contention that his administration has used the wrong tactics and abandoned prematurely efforts to get the European powers to endorse the US invasion.

The invasion of Iraq in fact had the unified support of all major factions of the American ruling class and was conceived as the latest installment in the implementation of American imperialism's abovementioned general strategy for the post-cold war era. This strategy, adopted by the US in the early 1990s, has been continued and developed by both Republican and Democratic administrations for the last decade and a half. In this context, the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with Iraq per se, but was aimed at the European powers - Germany and France in particular - to put pressure on the European powers through strategic control of Middle Eastern oil supplies, and to block European diplomatic and economic inroads in the region, especially by French, German and Russian imperialisms. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was supposed to complement America's military occupation of Afghanistan in establishing a direct US military presence in a strategically vital part of the globe. American saber-rattling during the Iraq invasion demonstrated that next on the US military target list were Iran and Syria, which taken together with growing American influence in Pakistan and the Central Asian republics that were formerly part of the USSR would allow the US to begin a literal encirclement of Europe. The reason that France and Germany were the most vocal opponents of the US invasion was not because they were champions of peace, but because they understood the real intent of US policy.

There were however differences within the ruling class about the ideological justifications for, and timing of, the invasion. For example, even former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, the most outspoken critic of the Bush administration at the onset of the Iraq invasion, was actually in favor of invading Iraq, but argued that it would have been more effective to use "human rights" and not false claims about Iraqi links to 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction. Albright and other administration critics also disagreed with the precipitous rush to act unilaterally in Iraq and favored more patient - and more convincing - efforts to pressure and manipulate the European powers into endorsing the invasion. From this perspective, the European powers would have found it much more difficult to justify their refusal to support a military intervention based on ousting a tyrannical regime and restoring human rights in Iraq. The Bush administration is in deep political trouble today because it seriously botched both the ideological campaign to justify the war and the occupation of Iraq.

Botching the ideological campaign means that the political capital that accrued from the 9/11 attacks has been largely squandered at home and it will be much more difficult to convince the American population, especially the working class, to rally behind the next military adventure of American imperialism. This is a serious problem because in the inter-imperialist arena the period of capitalist decomposition is characterized by each country, even third rate regional powers, increasingly playing its own card, growing chaos in international relations, and hence even more challenges to American hegemony. This in turn will most assuredly mean that US imperialism will be compelled to launch new military campaigns in the future, but its own population will be distrustful of its war-justifying propaganda and less likely to accept the sacrifices and loss of life that war requires. It will also be more difficult to get the populations of other countries to acquiesce in American imperialist adventures.

Botching the occupation of Iraq has demonstrated that while it might be the sole superpower in the world today, the US military is spread too thin and has military weaknesses which make it vulnerable in the international arena. For example, the inability to accomplish publicly announced goals, like arresting or killing Sadr, or occupying Falluja, demonstrates concretely American imperialism's weakness and will embolden other countries to play their own cards in the period ahead.

In this sense, rather than improving its imperialist position on the international level, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has aggravated the US position. Instead of bringing stability to Iraq, the country is totally destabilized. Instead of bringing stability to the Middle East, the entire region is embroiled in turmoil. Instead of buttressing American authority, it has become undermined. The US cannot even control or influence the policies of its only reliable client/ally in the region - Israel, and has been forced to endorse a complete reversal of policy regarding the settlements on the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian state, that Ariel Sharon can't even successfully sell to his own political party in Israel. Instead of checking the tendency towards chaos on the international level as it was intended to do, the war has increased chaos, and made the world more dangerous, as the current situation in Saudi Arabia amply illustrates. Impact of the Imperialist Crisis on US Politics

While President Bush and his closest advisers stand alone in insisting that things are going well in Iraq and that all that needs to be done is to "stay the course," almost everybody in the bourgeoisie recognizes that the occupation is a mess. Even Paul Wolfowitz, the "neo-conservative" perhaps most identified with the failed invasion and occupation, has recently been compelled to acknowledge a series of miscalculations and underestimations by the Pentagon. The Bush administration's blunders in the past year have raised genuine concerns about the future direction of American policy within a ruling class that is still otherwise united on the basic strategic goal of maintaining the American superpower monopoly. In May, Walter Cronkite, the dean of American broadcast journalism, who stepped down as the anchorman of CBS nightly news two decades ago but still appears in documentaries and talk shows wrote a widely circulated op-ed piece criticizing Bush's errors.

It was Cronkite, who in 1968, after the onset of the Tet offensive, returned from a visit to Vietnam and announced in on-air editorial that he called for an end to the Vietnam War - an act that signaled the beginning of a split within the bourgeoisie and a qualitative change in American media coverage of that war. In a thinly veiled attempt to reprise his earlier role, Cronkite's recent essay criticized Bush's squandering of the post-9/11 goodwill, unilateralism, and sidestepping of the Geneva Convention. "It seems to me," he wrote, "that, in the appalling abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and the international outrage it has caused, we are reaping what we have so carelessly sown. In this and so many other ways, our unilateralism and the arrogance that accompanies it have cost us dearly." Cronkite advocates a return to a foreign policy that "embraces international cooperation," but at the same time demonstrates the unity of the bourgeoisie on the Iraq invasion. He insists, "It still is immediately important for this nation that its invasion of Iraq should result in a free and functioning Iraqi democracy?We need to restore America's image as a preserver and defender of the peace and prove to the world that the change is more than cosmetic. But one has to ask, as others have, whether we can convince the world of our sincerity without regime change at home." (AM-New York, May 21, 2004).

This was followed by a blistering denunciation by Al Gore at a speech in New York, in which he called for the resignations of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet. A week later, Tenet and his second in command, announced their resignations. In June, in a similar vein, 20 former ambassadors, state department officials, and military leaders, including the former commander of US operations in the Middle East, prepared a statement labeling Bush's execution of foreign policy as detrimental to American interests and calling for his replacement in the November elections. In essence these critics focus their venom not on strategic goals but on the implementation of those goals. It is the execution of the policy orientation, not the fundamental, underlying policy that it is at issue. The sometimes vociferous calls for a switch to a cut-and-run policy in Iraq are confined to a small segment on the left of the bourgeoisie and is not embraced by any serious factions of the ruling class. This explains why John Kerry's policy for Iraq calls for more military forces to be sent to that country, to better "pacify" the insurgents and assure the successful installation of a loyal puppet regime in Baghdad, and not an end to the war, or even a phased-in military withdrawal.

The underlying strategic unity, however, doesn't diminish the current disarray within the bourgeoisie on imperialist policy implementation, and on how to fix the current mess. Disagreements exist even within the Republican party and the Bush administration itself. For example, the right wing of the Republican party, as reflected in articles in the National Review, has expressed its disenchantment with the "neo-conservatives" and the concept of "nation building." The disputes between Secretary of State Powell and Rumsfeld, Cheney and the "neo-conservatives" at the Pentagon over the rush to unilateralist action have been well publicized in the American media. On the military level, Powell and senior career officers in the Pentagon subscribed to the "doctrine of overwhelming force" that had been so successful for the US in the first Gulf War in 1991 and were sharply critical of Rumsfeld's insistence on a smaller, leaner, fast-strike military operation and occupation in Iraq. A leading general who argued that an occupation force of 300,000 troops would be required in Iraq, instead of Rumsfeld's 115,000 troops, was forced to retire at the outset of the war. One can only imagine the level of "I told you so" ranting in leading military circles today.

The seriousness of the crisis faced by American imperialism and the political disarray it has caused within the bourgeoisie explains the extraordinarily early beginning of the presidential election circus this year. Normally, the primary elections continue through early June and the party conventions are held in July and August. The formal campaign doesn't traditionally begin until Labor Day in September. But this year, as early as March, both sides began running political campaign ads slamming the other side on television in the major "undecided" states. It is certainly true that in part this early campaign start has been motivated by a political need to revive the democratic mystification, which had suffered a severe blow in the debacle of 2000, in which Bush lost the popular vote by a quarter million but won in the electoral college. But clearly it is also true there is a widespread sentiment within the bourgeoisie that the implementation of American imperialist policy requires a much needed repair job.

Currently the Bush administration is in deep political trouble. The numerous political scandals in the news are the product of divisions within the bourgeoisie, designed to put pressure on the administration. One conservative commentator complained that the New York Times had devoted a front page on 43 of 47 days since the Abu Ghraib scandal surfaced. But the result of the elections is not sealed. No political consensus has emerged yet on the best political division of labor for the bourgeois parties. It is still possible that Bush could manage to remain in the White House. For example, a house cleaning at the Pentagon, with the departure of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and their replacement with a new team that would set things right could salvage the situation for Bush. Implications for the Working Class

For the working class the implications of the current situation are potentially very serious. The working class was never mobilized behind this war in the first place, and clearly there is a growing dissatisfaction with the war today. A year ago Bush had a 90% popularity rating and today it is 43%. However we cannot afford to exaggerate the political significance this development. The current opposition to the war in the working class is not simply a reflection of the fact that the working class, in the US and throughout the world, is not politically or ideologically defeated on the historic level, that the historic course remains one oriented towards class confrontation not global imperialist war. While this is partly the case, discontent with the war also reflects the serious divergences and disarray within the bourgeoisie. The situation is similar to what happened in Europe when war broke out in Iraq. The massive anti-war demonstrations that shook Europe at the time in part reflected the fact that important factions of the bourgeoisie, and even the state in France and Germany, were openly opposed to the invasion. This governmental opposition to the war helped foment and legitimize those protests. In the same vein, the relentless attacks on the Bush administration from within the bourgeoisie feed the current anti-war sentiment, and create a situation in which that discontent can be controlled and manipulated by the ruling class.

There is also a serious danger that the democratic myth can be reinforced through the elections and the present anti-Bush campaign. The anti-war sentiment can easily be channeled not into an understanding of the bankruptcy of capitalism and the need to destroy it, but into a mobilization to vote the scoundrel in the White House out of office. In this sense, revolutionaries must insist that a Kerry administration will not be an anti-war administration. Kerry will only offer a different ideological campaign to justify war (human rights) and will work more patiently perhaps to draw the various European powers into future American military actions as reluctant allies. No matter who wins the election in November there will be more war, not less - more war in Iraq, more war in Palestine, and throughout the world. No matter who wins the election, the crisis of American imperialism will only deepen, chaos will grow in the international arena, and the world will move closer and closer to a future of barbarism, which is the only thing that capitalism holds in store for humanity. The only antidote to this devastating future for the human race is the class struggle and proletarian revolution. This is what revolutionaries must patiently explain to the rest of the working class in this difficult time.

Internationalism, June 15, 2004.

The clamor over gay marriage has become a virtual obsession of the bourgeois media in the United States over the past several months. Television talk shows have been replete with impassioned debate between liberal reformers and conservative Christians arguing the pros and cons of granting same-sex couples the right to a legally sanctioned marriage. From the Marxist perspective, while the often bigoted and hate-inspired arguments of the conservative foes of gay marriage-which claim that homosexuality is a perverse lifestyle whose legal recognition will further erode the moral fiber of the nation-are easy to reject, the often inspired and passionate arguments of liberal reformers for granting the right to same sex marriage are not so simple to evaluate

Many radicals, and even some self-described Marxists, have been at the forefront of the movement advocating for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Sometimes, their arguments have been couched in a certain class language. For instance, some argue that by obtaining the right to legal marriage, same-sex couples could improve their standard of living and overall piece of mind as it would be easier to share a partner's health insurance benefits, obtain hospital visitation privileges, ensure child custody rights, and obtain legal title to common property in the event of death or injury. Ultimately, they argue, same-sex couples could obtain the right to a certain legally determined portioning out of property in the event that the relationship comes to an end (legal divorce). By granting same-sex couples the right to marry, so the argument goes, they can achieve these very important legal rights and economic benefits presently available only to heterosexual couples, and thus gays will take a tremendous step towards full equality, a better life and the human dignity that capitalist-patriarchy and heterosexism deny them.

So what should Marxists, those concerned with the total emancipation of the human species through proletarian revolution, make of these arguments? Well for one, we must respond on the terrain set out by Marx and Engels and recognize that if the social and economic circumstances in capitalist society are such that married couple enjoy certain legal benefits that non-married ones do not, this does not mean that the "right to marry" is, or can be, an appropriate proletarian class demand. On the contrary, as Engels pointed out in On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the family-predicated, as we know it on a legally sanctioned marriage-is inherently an institution of class society based on economic scarcity and the existence of antagonistic social classes. In its capitalist form, the "nuclear family"-and all the Christian moralizing that has accompanied it throughout history-provides a whole plethora of benefits for the bourgeoisie. From providing a mechanism for the class inheritance of the means of production to ensuring the steady supply of labor power, the "legal family"-in the sense of the institution recognized by bourgeois law-has always been intimately tied up with the exploitation of the proletariat and thus human suffering. In this sense then, as Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto, the communist society of the future will be a society beyond the family in which human relationships will be regulated by mutual love and respect and not the state sanction of law.

While Marx and Engels never dealt directly with the issue of homosexuality, Marx nevertheless provides us with the method to approach such questions as gay marriage today. In the early 1840s, as the debate over the political emancipation of German Jewry was heating up, Marx intervened with one of his earliest, yet most profound political criticisms of bourgeois society. In On the Jewish Question (1844), Marx rails against the faulty method of the Young Hegelian philosophers who addressed Jewish emancipation strictly in political terms, as the right to full protection of the law and unfettered participation in civil society. For Marx, while political emancipation was an important first step toward ultimate human emancipation, legal equality was nevertheless a self-limiting partial emancipation that-in its very success-tended to strengthen the ideological veneer of equality that always obscures the real degradation and dehumanization of bourgeois civil society. With its universal tendency to submit all human relationships to its iron law of commodification and monetarization, the real problem with bourgeois society would be left unaddressed by simple political reforms. For the Marx of 1844 then, true human emancipation could come only from a total reconstruction of society on a fundamentally new basis, one that puts human need before capitalist profit. Only this revolutionary transformation of society could allow one to live a truly fulfilling and emancipated existence.

Using the methodology developed by Marx to analyze the Jewish question in 1844, one can conclude that same-sex couples gain nothing from obtaining the right to legal marriage other than the same institutionalized oppression that married heterosexual couples receive in the dehumanizing social world of capitalist society, including "the right" to such things as domestic violence, brutal divorce, sexual frustration, economic insecurity and personal alienation. While it is indeed true that many couples are able to construct meaningful and satisfying lives together, it is doubtful that the legal status of their relationships has anything to do with this, a legal status that really only ends up legitimizing many of the more negative aspects of marriage and the family that often dominate these relationships in the context of capitalist dehumanization. In short the demand for the "right to marry" is a demand within capitalist social relations that does not challenge capitalism in any fundamental way. It is really a demand to be recognized by capital through its state.

However, isn't it possible, it might be argued, to use Marx's method in On the Jewish Question to justify the contemporary campaign for gay marriage as a necessary "first-step"? After all, didn't Marx argue there that Jewish emancipation, even if it was only a partial emancipation, was nevertheless to be welcomed as paving the way forward? That is indeed true, however, one must also keep in mind the context in which Marx was writing. In the 1840s, capitalism was in its epoch of ascendance as a mode of production, in which real tangible reforms were possible. And indeed in most countries that became dominated by capitalism in the 19th century, Jews did achieve considerable levels of equality and were more and more integrated into society as a whole. Many Jews even shed their religious identities along the way and entered the burgeoning workers' movement. Nevertheless, today, such historical reforms are impossible to obtain from a capitalist system that has entered its epoch of decadence in which it no longer serves the need of the human species to develop the productive forces and instead acts as a break on this very process.

So, while Marx's method remains valid today, we must be very careful not to confuse the tasks facing the proletariat in the 1840s with the situation it faces in a capitalist system that is literally rotting on its feet. On the contrary, what we are seeing today in the U.S. is the bourgeoisie shamelessly appropriating the debate on gay marriage to its own ends of ideologically confusing the working class and distracting it from its historic task to destroy capitalism, the only task of the proletariat today. It is in this context that we have seen President Bush call for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, while the Massachusetts Supreme Court argues that nothing short of full and equal marriage rights would be constitutional and the "liberal" Mayor of San Francisco openly flaunts his state's law to issue gay couples marriage licenses. This "debate" is proving very valuable to the bourgeoisie in confusing and distracting working-class people from true class issues by politicizing private life.

Nevertheless, while the current subordinated legal status of gay couples in the United States is perhaps due to certain historical and cultural specificities of American capitalism, in other countries the bourgeois state has seen no problem in granting gay couples the right to get married. In Canada, The Netherlands and certain other "progressive countries," gay marriage seems not to be a problem for the bourgeoisie. In fact, it has often been championed by certain bourgeois politicians as a way of cutting back on unnecessary social expenditures such as "double insurance," etc. Nevertheless, one must ask what do gay couples really get out of the state officially recognizing their partnerships? What has really changed in their lives? These legally married gay couples continue to suffer the same fate as heterosexual couples under capitalism. While many are able to construct meaningful personal partnerships, the same conditions of capitalist alienation and dehumanization continue to prevail in general. The fundamental basis of the capitalist system that produces such personal misery has been left untouched. For working class families, legally married gay couples would face the same threat to their living standards as heterosexual ones, as the growing crisis of the capitalist system forces the state to enact ever more brutal austerity measures. In this context, the legality of one's marriage proves no defense to the imperative of the capitalist system to attack the working class.

The seemingly endless "culture wars" that dominate American politics today on this and other issues are evidence of two features of the period of capitalism's decomposition. First, is the skillful use by factions of the bourgeoisie of such "cultural issues" to distract the working class from class demands: the struggle at the shop floor against the ruthless attacks on wages and benefits underway in many sectors of the economy, as well as keep them distracted from the continuing horrors of the war in Iraq where the body count of mostly working-class youth keeps adding up. Second, is the shear inability of decomposing capitalism to pose any real tangible solution to the oppression of minority groups, be they gays, women, ethnic and religious minorities, etc. With religious fundamentalism on the rise, often deliberately stoked by factions of the bourgeoisie for their own purposes, gay couples-no matter their legal status-will likely never be admitted as full members of the human community as long as capitalism continues to exist; if for no other reason than the simple fact that the human community itself does not yet exist.

Moreover, the ideological distraction offered up by the subordinated status of gays, and the quest to either emancipate them from it or keep in that state is just too valuable to a capitalist system in utter decomposition. From the Marxist perspective then, today emancipation for gays-as well as any other oppressed group-is synonomous with the emancipation of labor from capitalism itself and the construction of the truly human communist society. This necessarily entails a society in which one's personal life needs no legal sanction, wherein the law itself has been made obsolete and individuals are free to choose the intimate relationships that suit them the best.

Henk, 04/18/04.

For four days in July the Democratic Convention occupied the center ring in this year?s electoral circus. Political conventions for the ruling class in America are media events par excellence, as was demonstrated by the fact that media personnel outnumbered delegates 15,000 to 3,000. It was all part and parcel of the bourgeoisie?s efforts to revive the electoral mystification that was so badly tarnished in the debacle of 2000.

Media pundits made it clear that they agreed with Democratic candidate John Kerry that ?this is the most important election of our lifetime. The stakes are high,? as he put it in his acceptance speech. The incessant propaganda message is that this election offers voters a stark choice about the future of America, and humanity, and it would be irresponsible to sit this one out. However when you push aside all the hype and empty rhetoric, it?s quite clear that this election, like all capitalist elections, is an ideological swindle, a charade designed to make the working class falsely believe that democracy works and that government is controlled by the will of the people. Quite the contrary is true: no matter who wins the election in November, the policies of the American government will be substantially the same: the bourgeoisie will still send young workers to fight and die for the interests of American imperialism around the world, especially in Iraq, and the economic crisis will continue to erode the standard of living. Republican and Democratic Foreign Policy Is Essentially the Same

Despite the fury of the criticisms heaped against Bush, the differences between Kerry and Bush on foreign policy are largely secondary, confined to questions of style in the implementation of the same imperialist strategy. All major factions of the American ruling class share the same strategic imperialist goal ? assure that the US maintains its imperialist hegemony as the only remaining superpower by preventing the emergence of any rival power or rival bloc. Kerry?s criticism of Bush focuses on three main points: the botched ideological and propaganda campaign to justify the war; the failure to pressure the major European powers to acquiesce in the war; and the failure to plan an effective occupation of Iraq.

The Bush administration?s ideological and propaganda justifications for the war (WMD, Iraq?s alleged ties to al Qaeda and implied links to 9/11) have all been thoroughly discredited. This seriously undermines the ability of the US to mobilize the population for more wars and military interventions, which is a weakness for American imperialism since the continuing challenges to its dominance require ever more military interventions. It?s not that Kerry rejects Bush?s ideological justifications; his criticism is that Bush?s mistakes have squandered the gains made after 9/11 in whipping up patriotism and war fever. Despite the fact that all of Bush?s rationalizations for the invasion have proven to be outright lies, Kerry still supports the invasion and defends his vote in favor of authorizing the war. Under pressure from barbs from Pres. Bush, Kerry stated that even knowing what he knows today about the situation in Iraq, he would still have voted in favor of the war authorization, but if he were president he would have used the authorization differently, to take the time to secure international support for the war and reconstruction. Since all the arguments used by Bush were lies, presumably Kerry would have told the same lies more effectively or would have conjured up a different batch of more plausible lies.

The capitalist media portrays the foreign policy debate as a clash between Bush?s unilateralism and Kerry?s multilateralism, but this is a gross distortion. Ever since World War II, US imperialism has always acted unilaterally in the defense of its imperialist interests as a superpower. Even during the cold war, when the western bloc was intact, the US always acted on its own initiative and in its own interests, whether it was in intervening in Korea, or in chastising Britain and France for supporting Israel in the invasion of the Sinai in 1956, or the Cuban Missile Crisis , or in Vietnam, or in the decision taken by Carter in the late 1970s, and implemented by Reagan in the early 1980s, to deploy intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe. As the head of the bloc, the US was easily able to oblige its subordinates in the bloc to go along with its decisions (with the occasional exception of the French bourgeoisie which sometimes acted out its own delusions of independence in resisting American policies).

With the collapse of the bloc system at the end of the 1980s, the cement that held the western bloc together dissolved, the tendency for each nation to try to play its own imperialist card emerged, and the discipline that obliged each member of the bloc to accept American diktats evaporated. It became more difficult for American imperialism to force its will on the other states. The first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 was more designed to remind its former allies that the US was the only superpower in the world and that it was necessary to follow its leadership, than it was to contain Iraqi imperialist appetites. (After all the American ambassador had purposely misled Saddam Hussein into believing that the US had given Iraq the green light to invade Kuwait in their border dispute when he was told that the US ?would not take sides? in a dispute between Arab brothers.) Throughout the 1990s, even during the Clinton years, American imperialism acted increasingly alone in the international arena when it exercised military force, as it became more and more difficult to pressure the European powers to accept American diktats. So, the extreme unilateralism of the Bush administration in the Iraq invasion, is consistent with the evolution of American policy over the past 15 years and not an abrupt break in policy, even if it is a bit heavy handed and clumsily implemented..

Kerry?s promise that he will bring other nations back into the fold is simply a proposal to be more patient and more effective in the efforts to get them to accept American policy, not a promise to abandon unilateralism. In his acceptance speech, Kerry said, ?I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security.? So, like Bush, he wouldn?t let the United Nations Security Council block the US from waging a war, when the US government decides it is necessary to do so. In the final analysis no matter who is president, American imperialism will continue to act unilaterally. Kerry and the Democrats Are Just as Much a War Party as the GOP

Anyone who thinks this election is a clash between hawks and doves needs to have his/her head examined. Kerry may have been briefly involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement in the early 1970s after his two tours of duty in Vietnam, but he and the Democrats made it abundantly clear at the convention that they are just as blood thirsty and dedicated to waging imperialist war as their Republican counterparts. It was no accident that the Democrats paraded 12 retired generals and admirals on the stage at the convention, and produced a special film in which these military giants explained how the strategic and diplomatic errors of the Bush administration in implementing American strategic goals were weakening America in the world. Kerry and his generals made a bid to show that it is the Democrats who are better able to mobilize the population for war, challenging the right?s claim to a monopoly on patriotism. Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark said, ?This flag is ours! And nobody will take it from us.? Kerry said, ?For us, that flag is the most powerful symbol of who we are and what we believe in. Our strength. Our diversity. Our love of country. All that makes America both great and good.

?That flag doesn?t belong to any president. It doesn?t belong to any ideology and it doesn?t belong to any political party. It belongs to all the American people.? Kerry criticized Bush for squandering all the unity and patriotic fervor that gripped the population in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He promises to regain that unity in support of American imperialism by making patriotism palatable again for workers and all those disenchanted with the war in Iraq and putting forth believable arguments for war. Kerry also promises to ?build a stronger American military,? by increasing the armed forces by 40,000, doubling ?our special forces to conduct antiterrorist operations,? and developing new weapons and technology. Not exactly a peace candidate.

In the final analysis, the ?most important election of our lifetime? boils down to a choice between two candidates who offer differ styles in mobilizing the population for and unleashing imperialist war. This surely is the hallmark of freedom in capitalist democracy, a system that offers death, destruction, terror, and repression, no matter who wins the election.

J. Grevin, Aug. 16, 2004

In the last few days, the situation in Iraq has once again returned to the front pages of the bourgeois daily papers. The latest attempt of the US forces to crush the radical shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his ?Mahdi army? in their Najaf stronghold has spurred a new wave of violence across Iraq, from the slums of Baghdad to practically all Shiite cities of southern Iraq. Cities and towns are being bombed and hit by rockets, adding untold numbers of dead and injured to the growing list of victims in this latest example of capitalist barbarism. The much ballyhooed ?return of sovereignty to the Iraqi people? at the end of June notwithstanding, after over a over one year since ?major hostilities? were declared over, the war shows no signs of abating. The American casualties of war are reaching one thousand soldiers dead while thousands have been injured and condemned to a life of physical pain and psychological problems. And regardless of the many promises that preceded the US invasion of Iraq, there won?t be road to a prosperous, peaceful and ?democratic? Iraq.

A year after the overthrow of Sadam Hussein the rationalizations that the American bourgeoisie used to launch its war against Iraq have been exposed to be nothing but gross fabrications. Today even school children know that the Bush administration lied about the whole issue of ?weapons of mass destruction? in supposedly in the possession of the Iraqi regime. The very people that the American paid to find Iraq?s secret weapons and illicit armaments programs have concluded that there were no such things after all. The same goes for the supposed involvement of Sadam Hussein in the September 11 attacks to New York and Washington. The reality is that there has never been any evidence to substantiate the Bush administration?s claim of links between Sadam Hussein and the terrorists of al Qaeda.

Now the actions to crush the new Shiite uprising and the behavior of the brand new ?Iraqi government? are putting a couple more nails in the coffin of the much worn-out American political credibility.

The US invaded Iraq, the myth goes, among other things, in order to ?liberate? the oppressed Shiite population that Saddam Hussein had so ruthlessly victimized. The massacres that ended the 1991 Shiite uprising were used as one more proof of the immorality of Iraq?s regime. In this regard, it is worth remembering that after the first Gulf war, the US encouraged the Shiite population to revolt but left the butcher of Baghdad enough military force to easily suppress the rebellion. Nevertheless, despite being let down previously by American imperialism, when the US invaded Iraq last year, the Shiite population welcomed of the US ?liberators,? even if they did not join in the fighting. Now it is within this same Shiite population that the opposition and hatred for the Americans is among the strongest in Iraq. Last May, after battling Moqtada Al-Sadr?s militia for over a month, the US reached a face-saving political compromised that averted an all-out assault against the holy city of Najaf and other strongholds of its supporters. Now, at a time when the Bush administration is so much in need of being to point to some kind of success of its policy in Iraq, the US seems to have gone back to square one. Neither a military solution nor a new political compromise with Al-Sadr and his supporters can help the US out of the quagmire in Iraq. At the military level, despite the fact that unlike last April, it has the option of using the resurrected ?Iraqi army? as a first line of attack, thus putting an Iraqi face to its military operations, still an all-out military assault to crush Al-Sadr and his supporters will further alienate the Shiite population and discredit even more the puppet government of Iyad Allawi. On the other hand a political compromise with Al-Sadar and his militia has no better chance of success and can only erode more American political credibility. It is this dilemma that explains the constant change of course and hesitations of the US and its creature, the Iraqi ?provisional government,? in dealing with the new Shiite uprising. Meanwhile the carnage goes on sinking the whole population in a nightmarish situation far removed from the promise of peace and prosperity that the US used to justify the overthrow of Sadam Hussein.

Regarding its self-proclaimed mission of bringing ?democracy? to Iraq, US actions are also in blatant contrast to its promises. Faced with an obvious crisis in its military adventure in Iraq, the Bush administration has been trying recently to give same credence to its suppose intention, as Bush said, of ?helping the long suffering people of Iraq to build a decent and democratic society at the center of the Middle East.? Now the US version of this ?decent and democratic? Iraq is its new puppet government led by Iyad Allawi an ex-Bathist head of an exile organization, the so called Iraqi National Accord, made up largely of ex-Baathist military officers, backed by the CIA and Britain?s MI6, known for planting car bombs in downtown Baghdad in the 1990?s. Mr. Allawi has lost no time in showing his democratic colors reinstating the death penalty for more or less all acts of rebellion, instituting a curfew in Sadr city and banning the Arab television network Al-Jazeera.

Despite the Bush administration?s promise that the invasion of Iraq would lead to peace, democracy, and stability, not only in Iraq, but in all of the Middle East, the situation is completely the opposite. The war rages on, the stillborn ?democracy? implements repression that the Americans could never have dared to impose as an occupying power, ?prosperity? is not even a relevant word, the country faces greater instability, and the chaos is spreading throughout the Middle East.

Eduardo Smith.

The US war of independence, 1776-1783, helped unify the new bourgeois class in North America, defined the nation-state and, therefore, sped up the development of capitalism. The consolidation of capitalism as a system, along with the extension of the market, shaped the American bourgeoisie?s perception of the European colonial powers, then present in the American continent as dominant forces, as enemies to fight on the economic and military terrains. This aspect of the dynamic of capitalism led the US to develop the Monroe doctrine (1823), which it used to shape the diplomatic argument in support of the national independence movements in the Latin American countries. In fact, though, it would be a threat to the old colonial powers of Europe, insofar as the declaration of ?America for the Americans? presented by the Doctrine, served a mechanism for the American bourgeoisie to define the American continents as territory under its own domination, and thus designated Latin America as its own ?backyard?.

It is clear that the domination of the US on the continent is due to the economic difficulties in Latin America, which prevented the dynamic of accumulation of capital to occur at the same rate as in the North. We need to underline, though, that this backwardness is also attributed to political difficulties, which prevented the unification of the bourgeoisie and the perspective of the unification of the Latin American nation-states. The degree of dispersion was so high that well into the middle of the 19th century in a great part of the Latin American continent internal conflicts existed which destroyed the social fabric and did not allow capitalism to proceed in the destruction of the vestiges of old modes of production. About the understanding of how such conflicts cause a ?delay? in the development of history, Engels, following the same idea exposed by Marx in the ?Communist Review? #1, London, 1847, wrote in ?The Revolutionary Movements of 1847?: ?We have witnessed with satisfaction the defeat of Mexico by the United States. This represents an advancement, because when a country is up to its neck in imbroglio, perpetually weakened by civil wars and with no way out for its own development (?) when this country is forcefully pushed into historical development, we can?t help but regard this as a step forward. In the interests of its own development, it was appropriate that Mexico fell under the ?protection? of the United States.? The Politics of Strangulation: An expression of capitalist decadence

It was in this way that the development of capitalism in North America and the backwardness in the rest of the continent helped establish the ties of domination by Uncle Sam (1). By the end of the 19th century the US had widened its territorial extension through the military invasion of Mexico and the domination of Puerto Rico and Cuba with the Treaty of Paris (1898). Doubtlessly, this tendency was reinforced when the system entered its period of decadence, around the first decades of the 20th century. During this period, the US used the ?Roosevelt corollary?(1904) to justify its right to invade Latin American territories where American property was endangered. The US? threatening and belligerent attitude was confirmed by the expansion of its economic and military power over Panama and its canal. Although the US stayed out of the first imperialist butchery of 1914 until 1917, it continued to strengthen its dominance over all the Americas. Its power widened globally through its participation in the Second World War, and was consolidated through the formation of the Western Bloc and the beginning of the Cold War. During this period of imperialist struggles between the two blocs (US and USSR), the US did not cease to pay attention to and be aggressive toward its ?allies?, the minor Latin American imperialisms. The US took special care that the imperialist forces of the opposing bloc (the USSR) did not intrude in the continent (2). This situation gave birth to the Organization of American States, with programs such as the ?Alliance for Progress?, and the structuring of the ?Schools for the Americas? (founded in 1946 in Panama for the military training and the ?teaching? of torture to Latin American soldiers) along with military incursions, among others: Guatemala (1954), Dominican Republic (1965), Granada (1983. We should not forget the long list of coup d?etats directed by the US in the South American countries during the 70?s. The ?danger of the Soviet bloc? was used by the US as a pretext to justify its invasions of the Latin American countries. When the Soviet bloc fell the new ?world order? of peace and prosperity which the US promised did not materialize in Latin America or anywhere else in the world. Plan Colombia: Uncle Sam reasserts its power in Latin-America

Contrary to the propaganda spread by the bourgeoisie, the collapse of the Stalinist bloc has not brought the ?reign of peace?. Rather, the loss of the underlying reason for the adherence of imperialist countries in a bloc (the confrontation with the other bloc), formed the basis for the tendency toward continuous confrontations, and the loss of a lasting framework for cohesion. In this ?new order?, various imperialist forces have challenged the leadership of the US, to the point where they have established a presence in Latin America, violating the sanctity ofUncle Sam?s backyard. Since the fall of the Eastern bloc, anti-US feelings have proliferated within the every Latin American bourgeoisie, as in the case of Fujimori and his overtures to Japanese imperialism, the birth of the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN), which is supported by various European imperialist powers, and the attention given to Cuba by European capital. Lately, H. Chavez of Venezuela has become a problem for the US, not because his government puts in question the capitalist relations of production, but because it can be converted into a beachhead through which rival imperialist forces can intervene in Venezuela and the rest of Latin America.

Faced with the continuous threat by its imperialist rivals, the US hopes to regain its leadership by means of force, as demonstrated in Iraq, and even if Latin America does not pose the same level of confrontation in terms of political, military, or economic strategic issues as the Middle East, and therefore does not require actions of the same magnitude, the necessity to strengthen US power over the area is not diminished. This is why with the so-called Plan Colombia (Pl-Co) (3), the US hopes to regain its power over the South American continent as a whole.

Using the fight against drug trafficking and the Colombian guerrillas -over which the US is more and more losing control, and which open the door to the support or the intervention of European capital- as a pretext, the US has implemented a process of militarization by which it will soon ?remind? the local bourgeoisies of which political alliances they have to follow. The US military presence is a threat for anti-US sentiments. Although it cannot mobilize a great number of soldiers (it has only deployed 500, officially), and its attention is for now focused on the Middle East, the US utilizes Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and Panamanian soldiers in a military unit to keep control of the southern horn, opening out from Colombia..

This military project obviously shows how desperate North American capital is to regain lost terrain. Most importantly, this expresses the level of barbarism attained by capitalism. In fact, not only are the bombings of civilian populations activated (at levels that are at times greater than the ones reached in El Salvador during the confrontations of the 80?s against the guerrillas), but also, highly toxic chemicals are being used to destroy coca plantations (4), causing the displacement of great numbers of people who, in the process, become pauperized.

The implementation of Pl-Co has produced a slow but steady process which has not stopped in the face of the claims made by European imperialist powers. In October 2000, the spokesperson for the European Union (EU), Renaud Vignal, in an open criticism of the North American project said: ?Plan Colombia is not my plan?The position of the French government and the EU regarding Plan Colombia is that it?s not our business?. In the same way, at the 2nd Conference of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the European Union (ALCUE, 2002), the European powers made a ?subtle? critique of Pl-Co by calling for a ?negotiated solution?. This caused alarm in the US, and that?s why it has been fixed up a bit in certain areas which could raise doubts about its purpose or cause discontent among the Latin-American bourgeoisie. It was at the 3rd ALCUE (May 2004) that, although the US did not participate, its presence was felt through the announcement that the Mexican government, which traditionally has played the role of the US? ?best man? in Latin America, will establish ties with sectors of the Colombian guerrillas, in particular with the National Liberation Front to negotiate the disarmament. Ties will not be established with the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionarias de Colombia), which has been so close to the European Union that at the time of the government-FARC ?dialog? in 2002, the EU agreed to discuss financial support with the guerrillas. The US rapprochement with the NLF allows for the neutralization of forces over which the US had lost control, while at the same time preparing the terrain for a better development of its military adventure.

Latin America has been traditionally under the political control of the US, but if it is to be so in the future, it is necessary to strengthen the US military presence in order to stop ?the radical positions [which fuel] anti-American feelings?, as mentioned in the March 2004 report by J.Hill, Chief of the Southern Command.

Under these circumstances, the working class cannot take sides for any of the disputing imperialist forces. Neither can it get involved in the ?defense of the nation?. The only alternative the working class has in the face of the acceleration of war and barbarism in Latin America, as in the rest of the world, is the combat against the real cause of humanity?s sufferings: capitalism.

Tatlin, July 2004.

Notes:

1. This process of domination is the product of the predatory nature of capitalism and it does not have a solution. This is why the nationalist and ?independentist? ideas postulated by the ?Latin-America economic school?, promoted by the UNO through CEPAL in the 60?s and 70?s, and which are nostalgically used today by the left apparatus of capital, are false.

2. It?s important to remember that in preparation for WWII the US led -or at least complacently allowed, as the British government expressed it ? the oil expropriation of Mexico. Although this benefited North American companies mostly, and above all the Sinclair Pierce Group, it also negatively affected the British oil companies, and, by means of the ?good neighbor policy?, the Mexican oil production became tied up with the US war economy.

3. Plan Colombia (1998) was initially called ?Plan of development for Colombia?s south?.

4. Some reporters point out that ?fusarim oxyporum? is spread indiscriminately. This chemical, they say, caused ebola in Africa.

We are daily being bombarded with propaganda about how absolutely important the election is this year from the media, politicians, labor leaders, clergy, academia, civil rights leaders, rock stars, movie stars, and anti-war movement leaders ? from all the institutions that prop up the capitalist state. We are told that this is the most crucial election in our lifetime, that the future of humanity literally hangs in the balance. But it?s all a load of nonsense.

The differences between Bush and Kerry are minimal - confined to secondary issues of style, different approaches to implementing the same goals. They share the same commitment to maintaining US imperialist hegemony, the same strategic goal of preventing the emergence of any country that could challenge US domination as the world?s only superpower. They both support the war in Iraq. They both seek to whip up patriotic fever so they can plunge us into still more wars in the years ahead. They both pledge to strengthen the armed forces and thus accelerate the militarization of American society. They both support increasing state repression ? Bush through the US Patriot Act and Kerry through his pledge to implement immediately the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which include establishment of a domestic espionage network that will dwarf anything the FBI ever did. They both defend capitalism and the ruthless exploitation of the working class, in the US and around the world.

Sure, they appear to diverge sharply on secondary social questions like abortion, ecology, and stem cell research, but these are hot button issues that the capitalist class doesn?t really plan to ever resolve one way or the other. They cynically use these controversies to to whip up political emotions and distract attention from the fundamental problems of capitalism?s economic crisis and the class struggle. These divergences are more for show than anything else.

Today, elections have lost any meaning except as a mystification, as a means to confuse, trick and manipulate the working class into thinking it was ?free.? Bourgeois democracy is in fact the most sophisticated and pernicious form of class dictatorship the world has ever seen, the class dictatorship of capitalism. In the period of capitalism?s development when elections mattered, the bourgeoisie resisted the expansion of the franchise tooth and nail. Now that elections are useless except as an ideological mystification they keep expanding the franchise, making it easier and easier to register and vote ? because they want to suck more people into the charade.

For the working class, it is meaningless to participate in deciding which capitalist politician will be the titular head of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. For the working class, it is the class struggle, the uncompromising defense of working class interests, that is the only thing that makes sense. It is this struggle, which inevitably puts the working class into confrontation with the state, that holds the seeds of the revolutionary struggle that is capable of destroying the capitalist state and its horrid economic system, and making possible the creation of a genuinely human social community, led and controlled by the working class, organized in workers councils. In such a society the guiding principle will be the fulfillment of social need, not the exploitation of labor and drive for profits. Whoever wins in November the fundamental orientation of the American state will be the same ? imperialist war abroad and austerity at home.

Internationalism, August 17, 2004.

The following letter to the editor was sent to Red & Black Notes in response to an article by Loren Goldner analyzing the California grocery workers strike which was published in issue #19 of that publication. Internationalism.

While we wouldn't use the same words or formulations, there are certainly many things in Loren Goldner's 'Notes on Another Defeat for Workers in the US: The Los Angeles Supermarket Strike of 2003-2004,' which was published Red & Black Notes #19, that are on the right track. For example, we agree that the grocery workers' fight was an important strike for American workers in the struggle to resist capitalist attacks on their living standards in the form of cutbacks in their medical benefits and that it ended in a serious defeat. It's also accurate to say that the strikers were militant and enthusiastic, and that other workers were sympathetic and wanted to demonstrate their solidarity. Who could disagree with observations that the unions followed the same 'localist and legalist strategies of so many losing strikes of previous years,' that the union kept the strikers 'under control, and that 'no mass meetings were held to discuss strike strategy.' And it is clear that 'the decisive factor in the defeat was the absence of any challenge to the union strategy from the UFCW rank-and-file.'

However, the article falls terribly short in explaining why this terrible defeat occurred. Goldner doesn't seem to understand why the unions persist is such disastrous tactics year after year. He thinks perhaps that 'they underestimated the willingness and ability of the three chains to lose millions of dollars in order to break the power of the unions,' or that 'it is possible that the UFCW leadership in Southern California thought they could win, based on the early momentum, not realizing that the supermarkets had national backing and a national strategy.' Essentially, Goldner's explanation boils down to this: the union leaders underestimated, they didn't realize, they didn't understand. In other words, they made mistakes. A possible implication of such an analysis could be that different union leaders smart enough understand their adversaries and to use different strategies and tactics could have won the strike - though of course Goldner's article does not specifically advocate such a reformist, leftist view.

This kind of analysis is totally inadequate. It reflects a wrong understanding of the class nature of trade unions in this period of capitalism. First of all, this struggle was not an attempt to 'break the power of the unions,' as Goldner suggests. It was all about cutting the standard of living of the working class, pure and simple. It is usually the unions and their leftist choir groups that raise the 'union busting' slogan as a way to divert attention from the true nature of the bosses' attacks on the workers, often as a way to celebrate an allege 'victory' when the union's 'security' is maintained even as the workers suffer wage cuts and layoffs. If anything, in this strike, it was the power of the unions that was used effectively to defeat the strike and help American capitalism as a whole, and not just the three national corporations involved, to achieve a significant victory in scaling back the medical benefits for American workers.

The supermarket strike failed because the strike remained firmly under union control from start to finish and trade unions are no longer organizations of the working class. Unions once were defensive organizations of the working class in an earlier period capitalist development, but for nearly a century since the period of the First World War they been integrated into the state apparatus of capitalism. As we wrote in Internationalism 130, "unions are part of the capitalist state, the arm of the ruling class, charged with the specific function of controlling the working class, and rendering its anger, combativeness, and solidarity harmless for capitalism. The lesson that workers must remember is that the way to advance the struggle is to push aside the unions and take control of the struggle into their own hands." In the supermarket strike, the unions and the union leaders didn't make any mistakes; they did the job that they are supposed to do for capitalism - and they did it quite well.

Internationalism June 24, 2004.

Despite the fact that the Democratic convention was an orgy of flag waving patriotism and war mongering, the so-called anti-war movement did not march in the streets. This movement demonstrated clearly that it is an appendage of the Democratic party with the specific function of controlling and manipulating the growing discontent with the imperialist war in Iraq for purposes of the factional disputes within the bourgeoisie. All the anti-war spokespersons within the Democratic party abandoned their opposition to the war for the sake of party unity in defeating Bush. Howard Dean, whose whole campaign in the primaries was based on a denunciation of the war and a call for withdrawal from Iraq, voiced his support for Kerry. Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the self-styled ?progressive? candidate, who had previously called for the creation of a Department of Peace in the cabinet, likewise squelched his anti-war perspective, as did Ted Kennedy and Al Sharpton. Tom Hayden, the former SDS leader, a member of the Chicago Seven who faced federal charges for his role in leading protests at the 1968 Chicago convention, called upon the anti-war movement not to protest or disrupt the Democratic convention, but to support efforts to elect Kerry and defeat Bush. Farenheit 9/11 filmmaker Michael Moore not only voiced his support for the Democrats but promised to take his cameras to Florida on election day to make sure that the Republicans didn?t steal this election, like they did in 2000.Despite their leftist credentials, the leaders of United for Peace and Justice, which took the lead in organizing the massive protests on the eve of the Iraq war, also lined up behind the Democratic party, ignoring the Democratic war mongering. Instead they concentrated their efforts on organizing an anti-Bush demonstration at the Republican convention in New York at the end of August.

Once it became clear that dominant fractions of the ruling class had come to recognize that a division of labor between the two major political parties that coincided with the best interests of the national capital rested on the election of John Kerry, the mass media quickly fell into line to help facilitate this result. The first inklings of this came in the positive coverage of Kerry’s speech at New York University in September, where he changed position and clearly denounced the war in Iraq as the wrong war at the wrong time, a distraction from the war against terrorism and the crusade to find and kill Osama bin Laden. But the first clear expression of the media’s new orientation came in the coverage of the first presidential debate, focused on foreign policy – supposedly Bush’s strong card, according to the media pundits. The media made it clear that Kerry was the big winner in that debate, that Bush was the big loser, and that Kerry and the Democrats had emerged from the debate with a renewed confidence and self-assurance.

Soon afterwards, the vice presidential debate pitted the experienced Dick Cheney against the newcomer John Edwards. Again the media coverage of the debate emphasized an important breakthrough for the Democrats. Cheney had launched a blistering attack in the debate against what he called Edwards’ “undistinguished” career in the Senate. Cheney charged that though he presides over the meetings of the Senate, he had never met Edwards until they walked on stage for the debate. The media was all over this charge and by the 7:00 am news shows the next day had gathered video tape of at least three occasions when the Cheney and Edwards had met. One showed the two men sitting side by side at Senate prayer breakfast. Whatever advantage Cheney had had during the debate quickly evaporated with the exposure of his blatant lie.

The media moved quickly after the third presidential debate when Bush had scoffed at Kerry’s charge that the President had publicly stated that he was not concerned about bin Laden. When Bush made that denial, Kerry simply grinned. Perhaps he knew that by the next morning the media would produce video to show that Bush had indeed made such a comment at a press conference, again exposing the Republicans as liars.

ABC News executives subsequently issued a memorandum to their staff which argued that while both candidates were distorting and stretching the truth in their campaign speeches and political commercials, Kerry’s distortions tended to involve only peripheral issues, but Bush’s dealt with issues at the heart of the campaign. The memo therefore instructed network journalists to highlight these gross distortions in their coverage.

Officials in the permanent bureaucracy seeking to influence the course of the election began leaking a series of damaging stories to expose Bush administration errors and wrongdoing, particularly in regard to Iraq. The media promptly picked up these stories and gave them wide exposure, including reports about the Bush administration’s efforts to create secret changes in the military justice system that circumvented the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Central players in this scandal were Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Attorney General Ashcroft, and White House aides. The plan was so secret that neither Secretary of State Colin Powell nor National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice were informed. An anonymous source within the CIA reported that there had been widespread opposition to the plan because it violated American democratic principles. Yet another damaging story concerned the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives that American troops had failed to secure and which had probably fallen into the “wrong” hands and are probably being used against American forces in Iraq. And just a week before the election, sources in the FBI leaked details of a planned criminal investigation of Halliburton’s preferential treatment in the granting of lucrative no-bid contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. (VP Cheney was the chief executive of Halliburton prior to the 2000 election.) The media also gave prominent and sympathetic play to the story of the 19 soldiers who refused a direct order to participate in a supply caravan to deliver fuel supplies in Iraq, because they complained it was a “suicide mission” because their trucks were not armored and they would not have an armed escort. Rather than portraying these soldiers as mutineers and cowards, stories described them sympathetically, as brave and honorable soldiers fed up with being poorly supplied and armed – exactly what the Kerry campaign had been charging for weeks.

One media commentator even noted a shift in coverage by the pro-Bush media controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. For example, the NY Post ran a picture of Bush and Kerry standing side by side after one of the presidential debates, which unflatteringly depicted Kerry towering over the president. One Bush-Cheney campaign official reportedly complained, “Couldn’t they choose a better angle?”(amNew York, Oct. 21, 2004)

Yet another example of the media falling into line could be seen in what happened with the threat by pro-Bush Sinclair Media company to air a 45-minute anti-Kerry documentary attacking Kerry’s Vietnam war record on the 60 local stations it owns across the country, many of them in the so-called battleground states. The chief executive had actually compared the refusal of the mainstream networks to broadcast the film as tantamount to supporting holocaust revisionists. However, under pressure from journalists from within their own organization, major stockholders, and government officials, Sinclair backed down, and excerpted several scenes from the controversial documentary along with scenes from anti-Bush films to include a shortened and more “balanced” report on the campaign.

The results of the presidential election reflect the increasing difficulties that the American ruling class is experiencing in its ability to manipulate the electoral circus. These difficulties, which first appeared in the debacle of the 2000 election, were manifest this year in two important respects.

First, it took the bourgeoisie a comparatively long time to coalesce around how best to realign the political division of labor between the Republicans and Democrats – perhaps too long a time. It wasn’t until mid-September, that one could discern a preference for the election of Kerry, as evidenced in the pronouncements by prominent members of the foreign policy establishment in the Republican party and by the shifts in the media coverage of the campaign. Despite his various shortcomings, including his contradictory statements on the war in Iraq, the predominant view was that Kerry was best suited to restore American credibility on the imperialist terrain and allow an opportunity to salvage the situation in Iraq for U.S. imperialism. The fact that there had been so much confusion and dissension within the bourgeoisie on this reflected a real difficulty to act in the national interest in the face of the conditions of the social decomposition of capitalism. The fact that the consensus came so late in the campaign weakened the bourgeoisie in its ability to manipulate the electoral outcome.

Second, the growth and cohesion of the Christian fundamentalist right wing in America, which like religious zealotry everywhere in this period is a response to the increasing chaos and loss of hope for the future that characterizes social decomposition, posed serious difficulties to the ruling class. This group, first cultivated as a base for the Republicans in the Reagan years, has grown large in many of the less populated, rural states (the so-called “red states” in media parlance), and is characterized by its anachronistic social conservatism and control by local clergymen. This segment of the electorate proved impervious to media manipulation on the essential political questions of the campaign such as the economy, the war, international policy, or cronyism, especially a media manipulation that began so late in the campaign. These fundamentalists voted based on issues like gay marriage and abortion, and contributed significantly to the bourgeoisie’s ability to re-adjust its political division of labor. As one CNN commentator noted with incredulity on election night, despite the fact that Ohio had lost 250,000 jobs, there was a disastrous war in Iraq, and Kerry had won three face-to-face debates, still the social conservatives in Ohio had thrown the election to Bush.

As decomposition continues to accelerate, the U.S. ruling class has joined other capitalist nations, like France, in its difficulties in controlling the electoral charade.

Kerry’s election coincided most with the interests of the ruling class

As we have pointed out previously in Internationalism, Kerry was not an anti-war candidate. He merely promised to be more sensitive as to how he takes the U.S. into war, to win in Iraq, to expand the American military, to increase the size of American Special Forces units, and modernize weapons systems. This was not the political program of a dove. Kerry’s program coincided with the view of a growing majority within the bourgeoisie that recognizes the seriousness of the mess in Iraq. The Bush administration’s refusal to face reality undercut its credibility and increasingly made Bush’s continuance in office untenable. From the bourgeoisie’s perspective, Kerry alone offered the possibility of being able to convince the population to accept further military excursions in the future.

If Kerry’s campaign appeared to falter during the summer after the Democratic Convention, it was because he did not clearly assert a critique of the Bush administration on the war, implausibly insisting he would have still supported the invasion of Iraq even if he known that all the reasons justifying the invasion were wrong. He was criticized for this inconsistency in the editorial pages of the New York Times for example. It was only after Kerry’s speech at New York University in September in which he changed position and embraced the view that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time that his support within the bourgeoisie began to solidify. Already at the convention in July, a dozen retired admirals and generals had endorsed him, including three former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In September, Republican Senator Richard Lugar, the chair of the Foreign Relations committee, openly criticized the Bush administration for incompetence in Iraq. Another Republican, Sen. Chuck Hagel, the second ranking Republican on the same committee, also lashed out at Bush’s handling of Iraq. And even, Republican Sen. John McCain, while still avowing support for Bush’s candidacy, also criticized the administration for not leveling with the nation on Iraq. When leading Republicans openly attack their own candidate on the central foreign policy issue of the day just five weeks before the presidential election, it gives a real glimpse of the thinking of the bourgeoisie. The Democrats of course quickly took out a full page campaign in major newspapers featuring photographs of these leading Republicans and excerpts from their anti-Bush statements.

The media quickly followed suit, its coverage shifting on balance to support of the Kerry candidacy, as could be seen in the coverage of the debates and their aftermath, which portrayed Kerry as the winner. At the same time, an ABC News policy memo surfaced, which argued that while both candidates were distorting and stretching the truth in their campaign speeches and political commercials, Kerry’s distortion tended to involve only peripheral issues, but Bush’s dealt with issues at the heart of the campaign. The memo instructed ABC journalists to highlight these gross distortions in their coverage. One media commentator even noted a shift in coverage by the pro-Bush media controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – Fox News and New York Post (see accompanying article on the media [44]).

The electoral circus

The capitalist propaganda barrage that accompanies each electoral circus always promotes the democratic mystification, the capitalist political swindle that tries to convince the working class that its participation in choosing the particular politician who will formally preside over the capitalist class dictatorship for the next few years means that it is free. While it is fashionable this year for journalists, politicians, pundits, professors, and clergymen to proclaim that this is the most important election in a generation or in our lifetime, one must note that similar claims were made in many previous elections. From the perspective of the democratic mystification, there is no such thing as an “unimportant” election.

This year the media blitz was awesome. The war in Iraq, national security, terrorism, civil liberties, chronic unemployment, medical care, social security, abortion, gay marriage, the environment – were all invoked as hot button issues, the better to get people interested in voting.

But despite the hoopla, like all elections in the period of capitalist decadence, this election was not really about the clash of alternative policies advocated by different factions of the bourgeoisie, but about manipulation and mystification. Certainly there are differences within the bourgeoisie but these disputes are confined primarily to tactical questions on how best to implement a shared strategic outlook internationally and domestically. It was already pre-ordained that regardless of who the victor was, the U.S. would continue a policy of austerity at home (making the working class pay the brunt of the economic crisis) and military intervention abroad (making the working class risk the lives of its young men and women to protect US imperialist interests), regardless of the winner. The style in which these policies are implemented may differ slightly, but the end result – austerity and war – will be the same.

Strategic political imperatives for the capitalist class

On the level of political strategy, the ruling class this year had two primary political imperatives:

1) It needed to revive and repair the credibility of the democratic mystification which suffered a heavy blow in the debacle of the 2000 election.

2) It needed to adjust the capitalist political division of labor between the major political parties, making sure that the team formally in power is best suited to carry out the strategic requirements necessary to defend effectively the needs of the ruling class in the period ahead. These needs include a) the implementation of the ruling class’s agreed upon imperialist strategy designed to block the rise of any rival superpower in Europe or Asia, and b) the continued implementation of austerity, attacking the standard of living of the proletariat, making it bear the brunt of capitalism’s global economic crisis.

Restoring the democratic mystification

The 2000 election outcome wasn’t resolved for 36 days – determined only by a controversial Supreme Court decision, reached along narrowly divided partisan political lines, which deeply eroded political confidence in the court and the Bush presidency. For the first time in the modern era, the candidate who lost the popular vote won the presidency by gaining a majority in the antiquated Electoral College, based on the chaotic mess in Florida, the state controlled by George Bush’s brother (Governor Jeb Bush). The whole thing was more reminiscent of what one would expect of a third world banana republic rather than the most powerful democracy in the world. The 2000 debacle was a reflection of the effects of social decomposition on the ruling class' electoral process, which has made it increasingly difficult for the bourgeoisie to control its own sham electoral circus. In fact, the political strategy of the bourgeoisie in 2000, which was to keep the Democrats in office actually worked. Gore received 500,000 more votes in the popular balloting. His loss by 500 votes in Florida was attributable to a variety of miscues, ranging from confusing ballots, disenfranchisement of voters who typically voted for Democratic candidates (African Americans), and outright fraud. Once the recount process began, the capitalist politicians lost all sense of self-control and propriety. Each side adopted an irrational attitude to win at any cost, with no-holds barred squabbling. This loss of ruling class discipline and decorum stood in sharp contrast to the more mature and responsible comportment of Richard Nixon in 1960, for example, when he decided not to initiate a court challenge against Kennedy’s election due to voting fraud in Chicago. Nixon understood better his role in the electoral circus and put the interests of the “nation” above his own partisan desires to win the White House.

This year the bourgeoisie needed to restore confidence in elections. To do so, it needed a decisive victory at the polls in order to avoid any repeat of the ugliness of four years ago. The media has been very successful in spreading propaganda about the importance of each citizen’s vote – the idea that every vote counts is crucial in getting as many people as possible to participate in the electoral sham. To keep the pressure on for people to go to the polls, the media incessantly portrayed the contest as too close to call, keeping the tension alive and serving the purpose of making sure that no one lost interest in the race.. The campaign was incredibly effective on certain levels. In the battleground state of Iowa, the media reported that every eligible voter has been registered to vote. In Ohio, another swing state, the campaign has been so successful that there are an estimated 120,000 more people registered to vote than are eligible – either some people registered more than once or the ghosts of citizens past were lining up to vote. In the end nearly 120 million people went to the polls, setting a record for participation (though this was still around only 65% of the eligible voting population).

Had Kerry carried the state of Ohio, he would have emerged as the winner of the presidential election, giving the U.S. for the second time in a row a president who had lost the popular vote (this time by an even bigger margin than Bush in 2000 – 3 million as compared to 500,000), which would have been disastrous for the democratic mystification. This is what prompted Kerry not to push for the counting of the disputed provisional and absentee ballots in Ohio, or demanding a recount, for which there was ample justification. The New York Times reported four days after the election that some of the new electronic voting machines had registered 3,200 votes for Bush in one Ohio district, even though there were only 800 voters who had actually cast ballots. In thus making this decision, from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, Kerry acted “responsibly” in the same way that Nixon had declined to dispute the Kennedy election in 1960, deciding against a course of action that would have potentially contributed to political instability.

However, despite the large turnout and the responsible behaviour of Kerry, the democratic mystification still suffered a serious setback for the bourgeoisie. Among large sectors of the population, the “anybody but Bush” campaign had become a real crusade, an opportunity to correct a serious political blunder in American political history. Unprecedented numbers of volunteers, from rock stars to everyday citizens, got caught up in this crusade and traveled to the so-called battleground states from other parts of the country to campaign for Kerry. In the large, urbanized, industrial states, the media campaign was largely successful. In New York City, Kerry received 75% of the votes, in Philadelphia, 80%, and in Washington, DC, 90%. Kerry carried the industrial states of the northeast, Midwest and far west. The failure of the bourgeoisie's media campaign to shift the political division of labor to the Democrats resulted in widespread frustration, even depression, at how such a democratic movement could have failed to dislodge an unpopular president, and risks triggering widespread disillusion in the electoral process. The Canadian government reported a 600 percent increase in American citizen requests for information about immigrating to Canada the day after the election. New Zealand and Australia also report a tremendous jump in such requests.

Adjusting the division of labor

Because of the proletariat’s continuing difficulties in breaking free of the disorientation that has characterized the reflux in class consciousness since the collapse of the Russian bloc, the bourgeoisie has considerable flexibility in deciding whether to put its left team (Democrats) or right team (Republicans) in power. In times of intense class struggle, the bourgeoisie often prefers to keep the left in opposition, as a means of controlling and derailing working class discontent. But today this is not a necessity – the left is equally capable of implementing austerity, beefing up the repressive apparatus, and waging imperialist war without jeopardizing its ability to control the working class. The Clinton administration demonstrated that amply.

The central consideration for the bourgeoisie today in the U.S, as it has been for more than a decade now, is not how to contain the class struggle, but rather the defense of its imperialist interests in a drastically changed international arena in the post-cold war period. While there is a general agreement within the dominant factions of the American capitalist class on the strategic goal of maintaining U.S. imperialist hegemony and preventing the emergence of any new imperialist rival, there are significant controversies over the tactical implementation of that strategy. Most notably this dispute has focused on the war in Iraq for the past year. In the winter of 2003, the ruling class was united on invading Iraq as reminder of American supremacy aimed at potential rivals, as a reinforcement of direct American military presence in a strategically important zone of imperialist competition, and as a means to put pressure on Europe by establishing a growing American control of Mideast oil supplies. As the ICC predicted on numerous occasions, this strategy was doomed to failure because in the phase of capitalist decomposition the dominant characteristic is the tendency for each nation state to play its own card on the inter-imperialist terrain, which results inevitably in growing chaos on the international level. In this period, every venture that U.S. imperialism undertakes ultimately aggravates the very circumstances that it aimed to combat, increasing rather than decreasing the level of chaos in the world and the challenges to U.S. hegemony.

The divergences on Iraq within the American bourgeoisie emerged only after the abject failure of the Iraq invasion. There are today three positions within the American ruling class on Iraq: 1) the situation is going well, and the U.S. needs only to stay the course, a position defended by the Bush administration, and one that seems to contradict blatantly the reality on the ground; 2) the situation is a mess, and the US should withdraw immediately – an extreme position defended by a few elements on the left and others on the right; 3) the situation is a mess, and the US must find a way to minimize the damage of the Iraq quagmire in order to be able to respond effectively to new challenges to use hegemony, a position increasingly defended by the dominant factions of the ruling class.

The utter failure of the Bush administration’s propaganda justifications for the Iraq invasion raised concern for the ruling class not because they were lies (the bourgeoisie, left or right, is united on the necessity to lie), but because their exposure has made it increasingly difficult to prepare popular acceptance for future military adventures, particularly within the proletariat. Bush’s ineptness squandered the considerable political capital gained from the 9/11 attacks, which had given the bourgeoisie an opportunity to use patriotism to manipulate the population at large. But now patriotism has once again become increasingly identified with the political right, as Kerry noted in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party Convention when he promised to reclaim patriotism for the left as well.

As we pointed out in Internationalism n°131, the controversy over Bush’s unilateralism versus Kerry’s alleged multilateralism was “a gross distortion. Ever since World War II, US imperialism has always acted unilaterally in the defense of its imperialist interests as a superpower (…) As the head of the bloc, the US was easily able to oblige its subordinates in the bloc to go along with their decisions…”

Making the best of a difficult situation

Having failed to readjust the political division of labor through the electoral circus, the bourgeoisie will be forced to make the best of a difficult situation in the period ahead. Bush will face pressure to abandon his early rhetoric of “a mandate” in the election giving him a free hand to pursue more of the same. There will be tremendous pressure to develop a more realistic assessment of the situation in Iraq and to adjust policy in a way more consistent with what Kerry advocated. Already there is talk of a shake-up in the cabinet. It is contrary to the interests of American capitalist class to have the population so badly divided as this election demonstrated and something will have to be done about it.

J. Grevin, Nov. 5, 2004

George W. Bush’s foreign policy in regard to imperialist alliances has come to symbolize American imperialism’s historical break with its former allies in the so-called “old Europe”. The Democratic candidate, John Kerry, campaigned on a promise at this level to restore the past status quo, to mend fences with the “dear friends” of Europe that Bush’s reckless cowboy policies had supposedly so much alienated. However, even if Kerry had won, and his statements on this issue had been more than campaign gimmicks, any improved relations with Europe on the bases of a new face in the White house would have been destined for a very short honeymoon.

It became fashionable in the bizarre atmosphere of the presidential election campaign to blame Bush and his friends for whatever has gone wrong with America’s standing in the world. In particular the Democratic candidate, echoed by a great part of the media, has peddled the idea that the Bush administration is somehow responsible for the present rift between the US and the Western European powers headed by Germany and France. Nothing could be further from the truth. The confrontation between Europe and the US that has come so clearly to the open during the Bush administration in the last couple of years, in particular in relation to the question of Iraq, goes back to long before Bush came to power. In fact this rift, far from being a circumstantial event, produced by the style of a particularly foolish president, is rooted in the upheavals of the end of the 80’s and the beginning of the 90’s that completely changed the relation of forces between states that had existed up to then for over half a century. The historical collapse of the Stalinist imperialist bloc led by Russia at the end of 1989 was soon followed by the breaking apart of the Western imperialist bloc that the US headed since the end of WWII. The disappearance of the military alliances that have dominated every major event at the level of imperialist confrontations between nation states in the world arena for over 50 years did not mean the beginning of a “new world order” – in the words of Bush the father – of a revitalized capitalism and democracy. On the contrary, free of the discipline imposed by the existence of the military blocs and impelled by the deepening of the economic crisis, every state has since tried to play its own imperialist card causing a free-fall of world capitalism into a growing state of the barbarism of war and political chaos. The European nation states, some of the most powerful economies of the world, felt compelled to defend and extend their own imperialist interests just as much as anybody else. This has been so for France, but is particularly true for Germany, which as a loser in WW II had seen its world status diminished for over five decades.

The collapse of the Stalinist imperialist bloc also meant the demise of the USSR “superpower,” leaving Russia to play a totally lessened role in the world arena. However this was not the case for the leader of the other bloc. The disintegration of the Western bloc did not mean the direct weakening of the USA. On the contrary, the end of the bloc system left the US as the only remaining “superpower” and thus the world hegemonic imperialist nation. This fact has in great part determined the way in which the imperialist confrontations have taken place around the world in the last 14 years. On one side, any nation that wants to expand its influence has to do so at the cost of challenging directly or indirectly the American dominance over the world. On the other hand the US bourgeoisie can’t afford to fail to respond to its competitors with a permanent political, economic and military offensive to outplay its enemies. The first Gulf war under Bush the father, just as the present Iraq war under Bush the son and the wars in the Balkans under the Democratic Clinton administration are all part of this dynamic of imperialist confrontation between the US and the challengers of its hegemony, and first among them the imperialist powers of western Europe. In fact as we have said many times in relation to the Iraq war, the real objective of this US military adventure has never been the “destruction of weapons of mass destruction”, the “liberation of the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator”, “the war on terrorism”, or ….any other lie put forward by the dominant class. The enemy that George Bush and friends were addressing with the invasion of Iraq was located somewhere else: in Europe, where the real danger to American dominance is centered. In this sense there is nothing surprising in the fact that Germany and France have been the most vociferous opponents of the war, the French and the German bourgeoisie know very well what is at stake in this American military adventure.

The historical situation is leading not to less, but to an ever growing confrontation between the major imperialist powers and this will not change with or without a new face in the White House.

Eduardo Smith.

As the American bourgeoisie began its lavish preparations to inaugurate President Bush’s second term in the White House there didn’t seem to be much open worry in the administration about the state of the American economy.  In fact, economic growth of 4.7 % in 2004 and a predicted 3.5 % growth rate for the coming year would appear to mean that everything is groovy in the present phase of expansion of the so-called business cycle, and therefore with the bourgeoisie’s capitalist system. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that, even considering the bourgeoisie’s own data on several key economic indicators, the U.S. is as stuck in the chronic economic crisis of capitalism as everybody else in today’s world.

The end of a decade of economic delusions

The 1990’s were years of economic delusions for the American bourgeoisie. In the wake of the euphoria about the collapse of Stalinism and the campaign about the virtues of democratic capitalism, after the recession of 1991, for the rest of the decade the American bourgeoisie never ceased to show off its supposed economic success. The things that were said then about the “health,” “vitality”, etc. of capitalism say tons about the stupidity of the talking heads of the bourgeoisie. The starting of the new millennium four years ago brought a good reality-check to American capitalism. The “longest running economic recovery in American, history” –according to bourgeois mythology – suddenly ground to a halt. The catastrophic collapse in 2001 of the “casino economy,” symbolized by sky-high stock market indicators and the once celebrated “new economy” of dot.com and high technology “virtual” companies, brought an end to the much-repeated bourgeois fairy tale of a vigorous capitalism that has just demonstrated its superiority over the busted Russian “communism.”

Thus the Bush administration during most of its first term in office presided over the worst recession of the US economy since the onset of the present open crisis of capitalism in the late 1960’s. The pompous “new economy” created by the “internet revolution” came tumbling down like a castle of sand. The paper “wealth” created by years of frantic stock market speculation suddenly went up in smoke. The great economic miracles of the 90’s became the great busts of the new millennium with many of their “hot-shot” so-called “entrepreneurs” showing what they really were: ruthless bloodsuckers, gamblers and crooks. But these spectacular events were just the tip of the iceberg. At the root of the Enron and Martha Stewart  “scandals,” among many others, what really is in play is a sick capitalism running out of options to handle its economic crisis.

According to the official version of the bourgeoisie the recession that officially started in March of 2001 supposedly ended in December of the same year. However, beneath even the enthusiasm of the official cheerleaders of capitalism, there is a certain level of consciousness that there is not much to brag about in the current ongoing “recovery.”.

An anemic “recovery” looking very much like its true self: a deepening economic crisis

The bourgeoisie can talk all it wants about the importance of present and future economic growth projections, but it cannot hide the fact that capitalism, whether in recession or recovery, can no longer bring about any improvements to the general economic and social conditions of the working class. On the contrary, every new cycle of recession-recovery, brings about a new level of deterioration in the proletariat’s living and working conditions, as the bourgeoisie tries to make workers bear the brunt of each new fall into the abyss of the chronic crisis of its system,.

The recession of 2001   put millions of workers on the street, as companies went bust or simply tried to squeeze more profits from fewer employees. Now in the phase of recovery, at the same time that the media was recently celebrating a supposed record-setting 2.2 million jobs created during last year, two remarkable facts around the issue of employment-unemployment have come to dampen the euphoria. First, the gains in job creation in the last year are not even enough to make up for all the jobs lost earlier in President Bush’s’ first term in office. In fact there has not been any growth in the total of workers with a job in the last four years –132.4 million when Bush took office in 2001 and 132.3 last December. Taking into account the population growth since 2001 –around 10 million – this means that total unemployment has surely increased, and only god knows what statistical tricks the Labor Department has had to pull to establish the rate of unemployment at 5.4%, significantly lower than the 6.3 % that existed at the height of the “recession.” Second, manufacturing companies, which shed more than two million jobs from 2000 to the end of 2003, added back only 96,000 jobs in 2004, which is said to be the weakest rebound in factory employment of any economic recovery on record in the United States. In truth, service industries have accounted for almost all the celebrated new jobs created in 2004,  which speaks volumes about the depths reached by the economic crisis. More particularly this fact reflects the tendency of the most powerful economy of world capitalism to become a service economy, with more than 4/5 of the labor force employed in services (110.2 million in services; 22.0 million in manufacturing; and 2.2 million in agriculture).

In a recent television interview the Treasury Secretary John Snow predicted a steady economic expansion and “good job numbers for the foreseeable future.” The question is: what kind of jobs? According to a recent study in the New York region, which reflects what is going on in the rest of the country, the anemic new job creation was accompanied by an even more anemic development in salaries: the jobs created in the last four year paid 43% less than those created from 1996 to 2000! Besides, these new jobs are in many cases part-time, contract work or what they now call “seasonal work,” lacking benefits like pensions, paid vacation or health care. Moreover despite the record number of new jobs being created, for the unemployed worker it is becoming more and more difficult to find a new job. As of November, about 1.8 million, or one in five, unemployed workers were jobless for more than six months, compared with 1.1 million when the recession officially ended in November 2001. By other accounts since the start of the recession in March 2001, the average length of unemployment has risen from 13 weeks to 20 weeks.

A cancerous economic growth

According to last year’s growth figures the American economy is doing much better than any of its major competitors –except China. The countries of the Euro zone grew an average of 1.6%, Japan and Great Britain 3%, compared with a 4.7% for the U.S. However rather than being the expression of a healthy economy, American economic growth is very much like the growth of a cancerous tumor in a dying body. This positive growth figure is basically based on a frantic resort to the mechanism of credit which is filled with dangerous consequences both for the U.S. and world capitalism as a whole. For the U.S., this policy is the primary cause of the new record setting deficit in its current account and, in great measure, for the astronomical growth in the government budget deficit. In other words, the American bourgeoisie has fashioned its economic “recovery” on a mountain of public and private debt that is not being paid and will not be repaid.

 There is among the dominant class a consciousness that this cheap money policy is unsustainable. It has re-ignited inflation –  3.3% last year.  Thus the Federal Reserve has reversed its policy of near zero interest rates and has begun to move them upwards.

 At the international level, the gigantic American debt is a very heavy negative weight for the world economy and a very dangerous time bomb. For one, it is world capitalism that has to cover for the deficits of the American bourgeoisie, and its aggressive policy of cheap dollar  intended to jump-start its exports. This policy in particular is affecting in the first place the countries of the euro zone –against which the dollar value is at record lows – making more difficult their own economic woes.

As the capitalism’s chronic crisis more and more affects the most powerful economies of the world, what dominates the relations between national states is a ruthless competition and a tendency of each sate to look after number one, regardless of the consequences for the world economy. —Eduardo Smith

Despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars on the electoral circus in 2004, the American bourgeoisie is no better off today than it was before the election and continues to face severe political problems. The goal of any electoral circus under capitalism is twofold: to exert the full power of the democratic mystification and to put in place the most appropriate ruling team for the coming period.

This year, the goal of re-establishing the credibility of the democratic mystification was particularly important, given the clearly tainted electoral shambles of 2000, from which the candidate who lost the popular vote nevertheless emerged victorious, but whose authority and legitimacy was in question for four years. At the same time, the fallout from the deteriorating military situation in Iraq, both at home and abroad, has seriously undermined American imperialism’s political authority and increased its difficulties to respond effectively to challenges to its hegemony on the international level, creating a situation which required a readjustment of the ruling team..

The election has accomplished neither goal, leaving the capitalist class with a political mess as it faces the difficulties ahead. The failure to achieve its goals were the consequences of the social decomposition of capitalism on its ability to control and manipulate the electoral process. As we discussed in Internationalism 132, these effects included the difficulty encountered by the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie in settling on a  preferred political division favoring the election of John Kerry until very late in the campaign – perhaps too late – to facilitate its successful implementation. Another problem was its difficulty in being able to manipulate and control the electorate effectively, especially the Christian fundamentalist right, which seemed impervious to the political rhetoric of the campaign. Twenty million of the sixty million votes cast for Bush came from Christian fundamentalists who essentially ignored the central policy issues of the war in Iraq and the economy, and voted solely on the instructions of their clergy based on secondary and even tertiary issues like gay marriage and abortion. 

The Lack of Post-Election Euphoria

A central characteristic of a successful electoral circus is the emergence of a social and political euphoria, largely manufactured and manipulated by the capitalist mass media. When a new president is elected for the first time, this euphoria is generally fed by a media campaign celebrating the dawning of a “new age” and a sense of national renewal in the period following the election, running through the inauguration, and continuing through at least the first three or four months of the new regime (the so-called “honeymoon period”). The honeymoon periods that accompanied the Kennedy victory in 1960 and the first term victories of Reagan and Clinton are examples of this phenomenon. This post electoral euphoria occurs even if the election was bitterly fought and the electorate sharply divided and even if the winner did not gain a majority in the popular vote, as in the case of both Kennedy, who received only 49.7%  of the popular vote in 1960 and Clinton who got only 43% in 1992, due to the third party candidacy of H. Ross Perot that year. In the case of second term victories, the propaganda campaign generally focuses on the promise of national unity as the re-elected president, who will never have to face another election, is supposedly free to rise above political expediency and partisan politics and pursue policies that can leave his historic mark on the nation – his “legacy” as the bourgeois academics and journalists like to call it.

The most striking thing about the current period is the total absence of any political euphoria. Even in those parts of the country where Bush enjoyed heavy political support, the mood is quite subdued. For a good part of the country, the whole election seems like a bad dream, leaving people as if in a state of shock. This is true particularly in the large urban, industrialized states of the northeast, the Great Lakes region in the Midwest, and the far west where the campaign propaganda pushing for a change in the ruling team proved effective. The scenario that would have worked best in restoring the democratic mystification to full glory would have been a Kerry victory at the polls. The dominant bourgeois media campaigns had emphasized that the Bush administration had misled the nation into war, did not have a strategy to win the peace, was riddled with lying, cronyism and corruption, and an unprecedented effort was undertaken to mobilize “the people” to help rectify the wrong that had been done by a “stolen” election in 2000. From rock stars like Bruce Springsteen to everyday citizens, volunteers for Kerry were mobilized to travel to so-called swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania for door-to-door canvassing.

The opposition to Bush in the major metropolitan areas ranged as high as 75, 80, even 90 percent.  The stage was set for a tremendous celebration of this exertion of “people power” to change America for the better. Had Kerry won, there would have been dancing in the streets in the major cities of America on election night, the democratic mystification would have gotten an incredible shot in the arm and at the same time the bourgeoisie would have gotten a new president, who was committed to continuing the war in Iraq, even if he said it was mistake to be there, who would have been better able to mobilize the population for future wars, which are sure to come, and would have made it more difficult for Paris, Berlin, and Moscow to oppose the U.S. openly – at least in the near term. But instead of a much need revitalization of the democratic myth, there was demoralization and shock.

No Honeymoon for Bush

The malaise is not confined simply to those who opposed Bush in the campaign. Even within the Bush camp, instead of political euphoria the post election period is characterized by recrimination and political upheaval. A majority of the cabinet has resigned, some perhaps because they are tired, but in other cases because of policy disagreements. For example, the dispute between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the neo-conservatives at the Pentagon over Iraq policy has been well documented. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson no sooner announced his resignation than he revealed policy disagreements with the president on a number of key issues. Ashcroft is out as attorney general, as a sacrificial lamb to critics from both the left and the right who felt that the Justice Department’s strengthening of the state’s repressive apparatus was clumsy and poorly handled, especially the attempt to exempt the U.S. from the Geneva Conventions and officially legalize torture. In late December, the administration attempted to mollify these critics by revising the controversial memorandum on torture and re-committing the US to abide by the Geneva Conventions. That Ashcroft’s departure was merely a gesture at silencing critics and not a substantive retreat from repression was demonstrated by the fact that his replacement is slated to be White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who originally developed the controversial position in the first place.

The dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie are well aware of their problems and are not entirely powerless and despite their inability to achieve the appropriate political division of labor at the polls, are seeking to rectify or minimize the damage done by the electoral outcome. Despite Bush’s inclination to circle the wagons and surround himself with close supporters as cabinet members and advisers, considerable pressure is being exerted on the administration to modify its more extreme positions, and to actually move towards the very policies advocated by Kerry in the election campaign (such as beefing up military presence in Iraq in the short term and developing a disengagement plan in the longer term).  At the same time, there are efforts to restore a certain discipline to the state capitalist apparatus, a good portion of which worked behind the scenes to defeat Bush’s re-election.

Sen. John McCain seems to most clearly represent the main faction of the bourgeoisie on this front at the current moment. On the one hand, McCain has supported the Administration’s bloodletting at the CIA, which has forced five top CIA directorate members to resign since the election in retribution for their leaking embarrassing information to the press during the final weeks of the campaign.  McCain made it clear that such disloyalty from the intelligence community is totally unacceptable. But on the other hand, McCain has aggressively criticized Rumsfeld’s handling of  defense policy and the war in Iraq, basically echoing the same charges and criticisms made by the Kerry campaign before the election. Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Nagel, second ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, shares McCain’s lack of confidence in Rumsfeld and openly called for his resignation. Retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded US forces in the first Gulf War, and was one of the handful of former generals to openly support Bush in the campaign, also voiced his displeasure with Rumsfeld. At the same time, Brent Scowcroft, a close friend and adviser to Bush’s father and a former national security adviser, has strongly attacked the administration’s Iraq policy and predicted that the January 30th elections in Iraq “won’t be a promising transformation, and it has great potential for deepening the conflict.” Scowcroft actually proposed the possibility that the best solution is for the U.S. to get out of Iraq now. Even Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, warned that “we are now digging ourselves out of a hole in Iraq.” The New York Times reported January 10th that Republican politicians, fearful that another four years of combat and body bags, will fuel growing popular discontent with the war, are pressuring the administration for a timetable for withdrawal – precisely the position of Kerry in the campaign, who called for beginning to pull troops out of Iraq over four years. According to the Times, secret strategy sessions at the Pentagon have been exploring the option of orchestrating the Iraqi government to be elected January 30th to request the U.S. to begin a phased withdrawal. 

While Rumsfeld struggles to cling to his post and still has the support of the president, he has been forced to yield to the pressure by designating retired four star general Gary E. Luck to conduct a thorough, independent review of policy in Iraq and prepare recommendations for a policy shift. So, despite victory at the polls and the president’s insistence that his Iraq policy has received a popular ratification and that he will not announce a timetable for withdrawal, the Bush administration is experiencing strong pressure to move away from its often repeated policy of  “staying the course” and confident predictions of victory in Iraq and towards the very policies that the Bush camp ridiculed during the election.  All of these developments are unprecedented in the aftermath of a presidential re-election.

While imperialist policy is the central concern of the dominant fractions of the ruling class, Bush’s domestic agenda enjoys no honeymoon either. Despite obtaining 51 percent of the popular vote and insisting that he has a mandate for his domestic program, Bush faces tremendous opposition from the general population, from Democrats, and even from members of his own party. Public opinion polls not only show that a majority of the population thinks the war in Iraq is a mistake and not worth the cost in lives or money, but a majority also disapproves of key aspects of his domestic program, including particularly changes in social security. Even some Republican members of congress are sharply critical of his social security proposal. The administration’s plan to slash federal expenditures for Medicaid, forcing state governments to shoulder greater financial obligations, forcing them to raise taxes at the local level, has triggered a rebellion by governors, including Republicans. His plans to drastically cut appropriations for financial aid to college students at a time when tuition costs are soaring are also triggering opposition.

 What Lies Ahead for the Working Class?

Despite failure to achieve their desired political division of labor, America’s rulers are the strongest bourgeoisie in the world and are moving rapidly to adjust the policy orientation of the administration to one that will more effectively serve its interests, especially at the imperialist level. However, with the failure of  the electoral mystification to achieve any semblance of a fictional “political consensus” in society, the bourgeoisie will have increasing difficulties at the social level to control the working class. There is no significant support for the war in Iraq, especially within the working class, and even if the administration moves towards a policy of disengagement, the impatience of the workers and other strata with war-making will create tremendous difficulties for the bourgeoisie. As the need for other military incursions abroad arise, the Bush administration’s lack of credibility on war will take a heavy toll.

On the international level, there is a general trend towards a return to class confrontation, as the proletariat everywhere finds itself under increasing attack. This phenomenon will become more pronounced in the U.S. as the Bush administration accelerates its attacks on the working class’ standard of living, as a consequence of the global economic crisis and social decomposition of world capitalism which forces it to initiate more and more military interventions around the world to protect its super power status and to finance this on the backs of the proletariat. The attempt to “reform” the social security pension program poses the same risk for triggering a proletarian reaction as it has in various European countries where the bourgeoisie has been forced to cut such programs. Without the beneficial effects of the social and political euphoria that generally accompanies its electoral circus, the bourgeoisie faces the potential to confront an increasingly combative working class.  Jerry Grevin

The following article, reprinted from the ICC’s territorial publication in France, was written a week prior to the December 26 election.

After the presidential elections of 31 October the Ukraine has faced a political crisis involving Leonid Koutchma’s and Viktor Ianukovitch’s pro-Russian fraction and that of the opponent Viktor Iushchenko, a reformer and declared supporter of an “opening toward the West”.  This has taken place in the context of diplomatic tensions and threatening declarations by Russia, which the European countries and especially the US have met with harshness.  The contestation around the manipulation of the October 31 and November 21 elections has then spread in the development of massive demonstrations in the Ukrainian capital, which ended in the occupation of downtown Kiev and the blockage of the access to Parliament by the demonstrators “until democracy wins”.  The so-called ‘orange revolution’ has started, we are told by both Iushchenko’s supporters, and the media of the great democracies, which have glorified the ‘will’ of the Ukrainian people to ‘free’ themselves of the Moscow clique.  Interviews, reports, and photographs have filled the pages of the press: “The people are no longer fearful”, “we’ll be able to speak freely”, “those who thought of themselves as the ‘untouchable’ are no longer so”, etc.  In short, the hope for a better and freer life has supposedly opened up for the population and the working class of Ukraine, and, to show that democracy is advancing, a third round of the elections has been imposed for December 26, with the perspective for the electoral victory by Iushchenko!

Russia stakes its future as a world power in the Ukraine

Behind this barrage, the essential question has nothing to do with the struggle for democracy.  The real issue is the ever growing confrontation among the great powers, in particular the US’s present offensive against Russia, which aims at getting Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence.  It is important to note that Putin directed his anger essentially against the US.  In fact, it is the US which is behind the candidate Iushchenko and his ‘orange’ movement.  At the time of a conference in New Dehli on December 5, the leader of the Kremlin denounced the US for trying to “reshape the diversity of civilization through the principles of a unipolar world, the equivalent of a boot camp” and impose “a dictatorship in international affairs, made up of a pretty-sounding pseudo-democratic verbiage”.  Putin has not been afraid of throwing in the face of the US the reality of its own situation in Iraq when, on December 7 in Moscow he pointed out to the Iraqi prime minister that he could not figure out “how it’s possible to organize elections in the context of a total occupation by foreign troops”!  It is with the same logic that the Russian president opposed the declaration by the 55 OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) countries in support of the process taking place in Ukraine and confirming the organization’s role in monitoring the unfolding of the third round of the presidential elections of December 26.  The humiliation the ‘international community’ inflicted on Putin by refusing to acknowledge his own backyard is aggravated by the fact that several hundred observers from not only the US, but also from Great Britain and Germany, will be sent.

Ever since the collapse of the USSR and the catastrophic constitution of the Community of Independent States  (which was meant to salvage the crumbs of its ex-empire),  Russia’s borders have been unrelentlessly under threat, both because of the pressure from Germany and the US, and the permanent tendency toward exploding, inherent to it.  The unleashing of the first Chechen war in 1992, then the second in 1996 under the pretext of the fight against terrorism, expresses the brutality of a power in decline trying to safeguard its strategically vital position in the Caucasus at all costs.  For Moscow the war was a matter of opposing Washington’s  imperialist schemes, which aim at destabilizing Russia, and those of Berlin, which developed an undeniable imperialist aggressiveness, as we had seen in the spring of 1991, when Germany played a major role in the explosion of the Yugoslav conflict.

The Caucasus question is therefore far from a solution, because the US resolutely continues to advance its own interests in the area.  It is in this context that we can understand Shevarnadze’s eviction in 2003 by the ‘roses revolution’, which placed a pro-American clique in power.  This has allowed the US to station its troops in the country, in addition to those already deployed in Kirghizistan and in Uzbekistan, north of Afghanistan.  This strengthens the US’ military presence south of Russia and the threat to Russia of encirclement by the US.  The Ukrainian question has always been a pivotal one, whether during tsarist Russia or Soviet Russia, but today the problems is posed in an even more crucial fashion. 

At the economic level, the partnership between Ukraine and Russia is of great importance to Moscow, but it is above all at the strategic and military levels that the control of Ukraine is to it of even greater importance than the Caucasus.  This is because, to begin with, Ukraine is the third nuclear power in the world, thanks to the military atomic bases inherited from the ex-Eastern bloc.  Moscow needs them in order to show, in the context of inter-imperialist blackmails, its capacity to have control over such great nuclear power.  Secondly, if Moscow has lost all probability of gaining direct access to the Mediterranean, the loss of Ukraine would mean a weakening of the possibility to have access to the Black Sea as well.  Behind the loss of access to the Black Sea, where Russia’s nuclear bases and fleet are found in Sebastopol, there is the weakening of the means to gain a link with Asia and Turkey.   In addition, the loss of Ukraine would dramatically weaken the Russian position vis-à-vis the European powers, and particularly Germany, while at same time it would weaken its capacity to play a role in Europe’s future destiny and that of the Eastern countries, the majority of which are already pro-American.  It is certain that a Ukraine turned toward the West, and therefore controlled by it and the US in particular, highlights the Russian power’s total inadequacy, and stimulates an acceleration of the phenomenon of explosion of the CIS, along with a sequel of horrors.  It is more than probable that such a situation would only push whole regions of Russia itself to declare independence, encouraged by the great powers.

Therefore a life or death issue is posed to Russia in the near future.  It is certain that Putin will do all he can to keep the Ukraine under his influence.  At least, he will not let go of the prize without getting at least a share, even at the cost of mincing it up. This is why Russia is pushing the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine to secede, in this way contributing to chaos and the destabilization of the region.  Russia is responding to the very logic of its American rivals, whose imperialist politics worsen the deadliest barbarism by the day.

By attempting to take control of Ukraine, the US is putting pressure on Russia in order to make it back off its frontiers and allow the US to expand its own sphere of influence.  At the same time the US continues its politics of encirclement of Europe, which they initiated with the war in Afghanistan.  In particular, the US aims at blocking Germany’s expansion toward the East, which is the ‘natural’ area of expansion for this country.  We saw this at the time of the Third Reich, when the attention was turned to this area of the world, and we saw it at the time of WWI.  If the German bourgeoisie makes its own the rhetoric of its American rival, which denounces Russia and its ‘neo-colonialist’ policy toward Ukraine, it is to be better able to gain the upper hand in the future.  Therefore, it’s not a two-party game that is taking place in Ukraine, but rather a three-party one.  This does not bode a bright tomorrow for the Ukrainian population, quite the contrary.  In fact, if up to the present moment it has been lured by the Russian bourgeoisie, it is now three bandits that will sow chaos, with all the repercussions that such a situation may have at the regional and world levels.

It is for instance certain that this advance by the US will have an impact on the Ukraine, Russia, and the CIS, but also on the central Asian region.  In addition, even if it is true that it is the great powers that are the first to sow disorder, we cannot neglect the capacity that regional powers such as Turkey or Iran have to contribute to aggravate the situation.  Turkey and Iran will not stay inactive, and they will contribute to the dynamic of chaos.  The tendency toward explosion and permanent civil war which prevails in this huge area and which is greatly aggravated by the war in Iraq will therefore get a further push because of this new center of the aggravations of imperialist tensions.  Such a destabilization in turn, can only have serious consequences in a new acceleration of the tendency toward war by many countries, as new foci of tensions emerge.  The US is at the lead, with its mad race to control the planet.

The working class must not be fooled by democratic mystifications

The democratic ‘choice’ in Ukraine has reduced the population to being pawns, manipulated by this or that rival bourgeois fraction, each of which is acting on behalf of this or that imperialist power.  The ‘triumph of democracy’ will not fix the situation of misery of the Ukrainian workers.  On the contrary, it will push them to mobilize in defense of the ‘democratic’ fatherland, in the same way as the preceding generations were led to defend the ‘socialist’ fatherland, and to accept the ‘orange’ sacrifices, which the future leaders of Ukraine will no doubt impose on them.

Let us remember that the ‘democratic’ Iushchenko did not fail to impose austerity on the working class when he was prime minister and banker of the very pro-Russian government he now denounces so adamantly.  The clique that is getting ready to seize power has nothing to envy to the previous one, and its divisions promise no stability.  The democratic perspective sows illusions as to the possibility to reform the capitalist system, to gradually transform it and make it ‘better’.  It requires the working class to break its back in the face of the ‘superior’ interest of the state as opposed to the ‘inferior’ demands around food and the conditions for existence. 

The perspective to create a world of ‘citizens’ within a democracy that is working at creating a happy humanity is an illusion which aims at destroying the consciousness of the necessity to do away with capitalism, a system that engenders more and more barbarism and chaos. Mulan  12-17-04

The blind violence committed by mobs is often fueled by the economic crisis, but the ruling class knows how to use it to its own benefit.  What happened in Tlahuac was a desperate act by an interclassist mass which behaved with no perspective, pushed to react with vengeance by feelings of being manipulated and terrorized.  Even though the lynching is directed against members of the repressive arm of the state, it does not mean that this violence expresses a conscious act.  On the contrary, it is a manifestation of the irrational behaviors which capitalist decomposition causes.  We highlight the desperate actions by members of the petty bourgeoisie and the marginal strata of society, but we note that elements of the working class also become  trapped in this dynamic.

This dynamic is not the result of ignorance and backwardness alone.  It is rather a manifestation of agonizing capitalism.  This kind of irrational violence is not exclusive to the peripheral countries.  In El Ejido in Almeria, Spain, in 2000,  xenophobic fever affected the inhabitants who tried to lynch a group of immigrants.  The ‘skinheads’ and the hooligans of the industrialized countries  display similar characteristics.

The events of Tlahuac raise a deeper question than whether they were induced  by guerrillas, or drug traffickers, or government provocation.  They are an expression of desperation, immediatism, the lack of a perspective for the future.  It is the practice of a mob of people who recognize that bourgeois institutions don’t offer any kind of safety , and decide to take justice in their own hands.  They think that in this way they will find a solution to the problem, but they don’t see that the real problem is this system, which creates violence because of the insecurity resulting both from corruption and complicity, and exploitation and submission.  Which violence is greater than the one exerted by the exploitation and poverty which capitalism imposes on the workers daily?

The events in Tlahuac are not an isolated case.  It is rather a typical action, a product of capitalist decomposition.  However, it’s important to notice that this kind of action is utilized by the bourgeoisie to its own advantage.  Whether for its own incapacity or as the effect of the confrontation among its own fractions, the ruling class decided not to rescue its body-guards.  Nevertheless, they use these events to liven up the confrontation and put pressure on the Fox and Lopez Obrador governments.  This is also done to attack the consciousness of the workers, as they are invited to take sides in the dispute among fractions of the bourgeoisie.

The working class cannot be fooled.  Workers need to understand that this is not a problem of so-called ‘civil society’.  It is a problem that requires reflection and the ability to learn lessons from it.  Workers need to see that the mobs, notwithstanding their apparently ‘massive’ action, are desperate and blind.  This type of action prevents all possibility of a conscious act performed with a true sense of solidarity.  A population turned into ‘vigilantes’ because it no longer trusts the police is not, under prevailing, capitalist conditions, an alternative.  Far from being an alternative, it is a dangerous weapon, which the state repressive apparatus itself can use.  Workers need to understand clearly that it is only the proletarian revolution that can bring an end to the sense of insecurity which capitalism gives us. Vania, December 2004

(Details of the attack can be found here:

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4038173.stm [49])

On February 26, 2005 the meeting in Toronto on class consciousness and the role of the revolutionary organization could not be developed in depth because the discussion got cut short due to time limitation. We would like to take this opportunity to explore further the topic of the meeting.

There were two presentations, one by NF, editor of Red and Black Notes, and the other by the IBRP. The first posed a point of departure for the discussion, laying out the materialist basis of class consciousness and raising the question of the role of the revolutionary organization in the process of coming to consciousness. The other presentation by the IBRP, on the other hand, was rambling, suffered from immediatist enthusiasm about the class struggle, filled as it was with anecdotes about recent struggles in Quebec, but did not lay out the position of the IBRP on class consciousness and the revolutionary organization. In this sense, it did not contribute to political clarification.

We think that the discussion posed by Red and Black contains elements that can advance the understanding of the topic. First, we salute the clarification contributed by the first part of the presentation as to the working class being the revolutionary subject. Our understanding of class consciousness cannot advance if we don’t first identify the class in society who bears a revolutionary consciousness. Red and Black used the materialist approach to effectively explain and demonstrate that it is the conditions of exploitation and oppression experienced by the working class that provide the fertile soil for its revolutionary consciousness to arise.

The presentation then ran into difficulty in trying to connect the development of class consciousness and the role of the revolutionary organization. The presentation said that revolutionaries could “assist” in this process, but it could not clarify what this meant. This reflects the difficulty the comrade is having in clarifying his position as he moves away from councilism, which minimizes and even denigrates the importance of the revolutionary organization in the revolutionary project. It reflects a difficulty perhaps to understand the relationship between revolutionary minorities and the class.

Unlike the trotskyist who intervened in the discussion to insist that it is essentially revolutionaries who were petty bourgeois and bourgeois intellectuals who bring revolutionary ideas from outside the proletariat and inject them into the working class, we do not make a separation between revolutionary minorities and the working class. Marx himself, whom the trotskyist might view as an ‘intellectual’, was always clear that his understanding derived from the living struggles of the class. Revolutionaries and revolutionary organizations are not separate from the class, but are secretions of the class, as it struggles to understand reality in order to change it.

Revolutionaries are the workers who come to understand the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism earlier than their class brothers. It is in this sense that we say they are the vanguard of the proletariat – they are in the forefront of the struggle to understand, to come to consciousness. For us the vanguard is not the general staff of the revolution that orders the workers around. It is the most class conscious workers whom the class itself secretes, and who fulfill the task for which they are secreted: to spread their understanding to their class brothers and sisters, to accelerate the process of coming to consciousness within the class, and to deepen, clarify, and elaborate the theoretical arsenal of the working class.

It is this dialectic process between the class and the revolutionaries that councilism does not understand and that trotskyism taints. This basic interconnectedness between class consciousness and organizations means that a proletariat that has not given rise to a strong revolutionary organization is not prepared for the revolutionary confrontation with capitalism. It means that there is a weakness in the development of revolutionary class consciousness within the class. A class that is struggling to come to consciousness gives rise to revolutionary minorities and organizations. These are the tools, the means the class gives itself to assure the acceleration, deepening, and extension of consciousness within the class. Internationalism.

Internationalism, New York, April 2005

• the economic, social, and political impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
• the worsening of the economic crisis and the escalation of the ruling class’ austerity attacks
• the difficulties of the proletariat’s response and potential to respond in the coming period.

— Internationalism

The Impact of the War against “Terrorism”

Imperialist intervention has continued to be the dominant factor in the national situation. As we have previously demonstrated this intervention is the result of a conscious imperialist strategy adopted in 1992 a unified by basis by all major factions of the American bourgeoisie as a response to the change historical circumstances following the end of the cold war. This strategy is designed to maintain US imperialist hegemony as the world’s only remaining super power and block the rise of a potential rival in Europe or Asia in a world in which decomposition has unleashed a tendency for each imperialist power to play its own card in the international arena. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are only the latest and most ambitious military initiatives by the American bourgeoisie pursuant to this strategy. The impact of the Iraq war in particular on the US national situation is a complete confirmation of what we said in the last congress, where we insisted that the war would exacerbate global instability, accelerate the challenges to American imperialist hegemony, and wreak havoc on the American economy.

On the imperialist level, this intervention has steadily accelerated instability in the Middle East, with the spread of terrorist violence to Saudi Arabia and most recently Lebanon, and eroded US political authority on a global level. Now the US is sounding the war drums against Syria, and Iran. Elsewhere in the world, confrontations against American hegemony abound, as major and secondary, and even tertiary powers, play their own cards on the imperialist terrain, emboldened by American preoccupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This ranges from imperialist inroads by European and Japanese rivals in Latin America, U.S. imperialism’s own backyard, to tensions with Russian imperialism over Ukraine and American inroads in the former republics of the Soviet Union, to North Korea’s nuclear gambit. Also it has had tremendous impact on the economic and political situation in the US.

Political Impact of the War

On the political level on the domestic front, the war in Iraq has revealed that any illusions the bourgeoisie had surmounted what they referred to as the “Vietnam Syndrome” – a term they used to refer to the unwillingness of the working class, and the population at large to permit itself to be mobilized for war and to accept the death and mutilation of working class youth in the service of the imperialist appetites of American capital – were completely groundless. As we have noted previously, on the historical level, the proletariat, internationally and in the US, remains undefeated, and the bourgeoisie cannot mobilize the population to accept on a prolonged basis the economic, political, and physical (in terms of lives), sacrifice that long scale imperialist war requires. Furthermore, the ideological justification for imperialist war in this period manufactured after the 9/11 attacks and clumsily manipulated by the Bush administration, has been totally discredited, and consequently presents the bourgeoisie with grave problems in its efforts to mobilize the population to accept future wars. Despite Bush’s claims that his re-election constitutes a popular ratification of his Iraq policies, it is abundantly clear that Bush’s electoral triumph is a pyrrhic victory. All the bourgeoisie’s own data demonstrates that the majority of the population thinks that the war in Iraq is not worth the cost to fight it, in terms of the lives lost or the money expended. The various explanations for the war in Iraq – the purported link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, or the imminent threat posed by alleged weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Iraq – were all revealed as lies. As of March, the official statistics quoted in the mass media indicated that 8,000 soldiers had deserted from the military rather than face deployment in the war zone. Bush was re-elected president in spite of the unpopularity and discrediting of his Iraq policy, not because of it.

Decomposition has so seriously eroded the bourgeoisie’s ability to manipulate its own electoral circus that it has been unsuccessful in assuring the desired electoral outcome for the past two presidential elections. This has politically weakened the bourgeoisie by failing to readjust the political division of labor in order to make possible a shoring up of the ideological underpinnings for its imperialist interventions abroad, and by failing to reestablish the credibility of the electoral mystification. (For a full analysis of the election results, see Internationalism 132 [52] and 133 [53].) As we noted in Internationalism 133, a striking characteristic of the current period is the total absence of any post-election political euphoria. The dominant bourgeois media campaigns had emphasized that the Bush administration had misled the nation into war, did not have a strategy to win the peace, was riddled with lying, cronyism and corruption, and an unprecedented effort was undertaken to mobilize “the people” to help rectify the wrong that had been done by a “stolen” election in 2000. But instead of a much needed revitalization of the democratic myth, the election’s outcome was widespread political demoralization and shock.

The dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie are well aware of their problems and are not entirely powerless in the face of their inability to achieve the appropriate political division of labor at the polls. There are clearly efforts underway to rectify the damage done by the electoral outcome. Considerable political pressure has been exerted on the administration to modify its more extreme positions, especially on Iraq policy, and to actually move towards the very policies advocated by Kerry in the election campaign. At the same time there is a concerted effort to restore a certain discipline to the state capitalist apparatus, a good portion of which worked behind the scenes to defeat Bush’s re-election. This effort at political rectification within the bourgeoisie is reflected by:

• the shake up in the cabinet, with the resignation of nearly half its members
• the shake up at the CIA, where five top directorate members were forced to resign in retribution for leaking embarrassing information to the press during the final weeks of the presidential campaign
• sharp criticism on Rumsfeld’s handling of the war, including attacks from prominent Republican party leaders like Sens. John McCain and Chuck Nagel, retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Newt Gingrich
• Rumsfeld’s decision to bow to this pressure by appointing retired General Gary E. Luck to conduct an independent review of Iraq policy as a prelude to a policy shift
• the removal of Defense Department Undersecretary Wolfowitz, the primary neo-conservative architect of the administrations war policy from the Pentagon and his being “kicked upstairs” to the World Bank
• temporarily increasing the number of troops in Iraq (as suggested by Kerry) in the period leading up to the January elections and the recent announcement that troop levels would start to be reduced within the next year (again as suggested by Kerry)

The Political Weight of Decomposition

In the pages of Internationalism we have developed an analysis of the impact of decomposition on the bourgeoisie’s inability to manipulate successfully the electoral circus to achieve a change in administration. We will not repeat this analysis here, but simply assert that nothing since November has refuted this analysis. More recently we have demonstrated in the press how the bourgeoisie is moving to mitigate the negative impacts of its botched election by pressuring the Bush administration to modify its imperialist policy, especially in Iraq, and actually implement policy orientations advocated by the Kerry campaign. It is necessary here, however, to consider a theory that has become quite fashionable in the liberal-leftist milieu and the mainstream bourgeois media, as an explanation for the 2004 election results. Various versions of this theory describe the existence of “two Americas” or refer to the “Great Divide” in American society. In one highly publicized variant, John Sperling talks about the supposed existence of two Americas, epitomized by the division between the Red states or “Retro states” and the Blue states, or “Metro states.” According to Sperling, the Retro states represent “Old America” and its “commonalities are religiosity; social conservatism; an economic base of extraction industries, agriculture, nondurable goods manufacturing, military installations; and a commitment to the Republican Party.” This Retro America encompasses the South, the Prairie states and the Rocky Mountain states.

By contrast, the Metro states represent the “New America” and the “New Economy, and “are loosely held together by common interests in promoting economic modernity and by shared cultural values marked by religious moderation; vibrant popular cultures; a tolerance of differences of class, ethnicity, tastes, and sexual orientation; and a tendency to vote Democratic.” Metro states include New England, Middle Atlantic, Great Lakes states, and the West Coast, plus Colorado and Arizona. Their economies are “productive” rather than extractive, based on manufacturing and services. With 65% of the US population, they pay the bulk of tax revenues to the federal government, “but some $200 billion a year of Metro taxes flow to Retro states and support the economic life of its small cities, towns, and rural areas.”

This fashionable theory totally obfuscates current political realities by attributing the political difficulties of the bourgeoisie to a clash between two rival factions of the capitalist class – the extractive, old, reactionary bourgeoisie versus the productive, modern, progressive bourgeoisie, and clearly supports the modern, progressive wing of the ruling class. It reinforces the bourgeois democratic myth by insisting that the election is the means by which the ruling class determines policy orientation, in a contest between rival economic interests within the ruling class who seek to gain control of the state apparatus in order to implement policies that favor their parochial economic interests. This is an historically outmoded view of how the bourgeoisie uses elections. In the ascendant phase of capitalism in the 19th century, different factions of the bourgeoisie would indeed vie for power in elections, seeking to gain control of the state apparatus to wield it to benefit the development of certain economic interests. But in the decadent phase of capitalism, which began in the early 20th century, with the completion and saturation of the world market and the resulting exacerbation of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, the rise of state capitalism has given quite a different character to the way state policy is determined and in the role that elections play in the political life of society. The real policy orientations of the state are decided behind closed doors, in the permanent state bureaucracy and the think tanks of the bourgeoisie, from the perspective of the global interests of the national capital. The parochial interests of this or that sector of the ruling class in this framework are subordinated to the interests of the state and the national capital as a whole.

The social decomposition of capitalism has given rise to the bourgeoisie’s difficulties in controlling the electoral process. This has been demonstrated by the difficulty and delay in the major factions of the bourgeoisie settling on an electoral strategy in the last presidential campaign until what proved to be too late to effectively pull it off, and in the rise of religious fundamentalism as a political phenomenon not easily controlled by the bourgeoisie’s traditional means of manipulating the electoral process. While used by Reagan in the early 1980s as an element in putting together his electoral base, Christian fundamentalism has increased dramatically in the US , to the point in which it played a critical role in the 2004 election, providing Bush with 20 million votes, considerably more than the 3 million vote victory margin in the popular vote. More significantly is the fact that these votes were largely influenced and controlled by the Christian fundamentalist clergy, largely on the basis of tertiary social issues like gay marriage and abortion, rendering this segment of the electorate impervious to the main ideological campaigns of the electoral circus.

The alarming rise of religious fundamentalism, whether in Christian, Islamic, or Jewish variants, is a consequence of social decomposition, representing a false response to a society without hope, a world characterized without a perspective for the future, by increasing despair, and fear.

The Devastating Economic Impact of the War in Iraq

The economic impact of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been devastating, perhaps even more than we predicted. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost so far around 300 billion dollars and there is no end in sight. It was just two years ago that the Bush administration predicted that Iraqi occupation and reconstruction would be largely self-sustainable, financed by the sale of Iraqi oil on the open market. However, 10 years of economic sanctions, American bombing, and Iraqi corruption, combined with damage inflicted during the war, and sabotage by the anti-US insurgency have totally exposed the futility of such illusions of self-sustainability. On the economic level, Iraq is a bottomless pit for the US. Reports of corruption and the disappearance of billions of dollars worth of American taxpayer financed equipment in Iraq are essentially accepted as routine at this point. The waste and corruption has meant that American military forces are poorly supplied with vital security equipment and mundane daily supplies. The scandal over the lack of armor plated humvees is well known. Family and friends of American military personnel take up collections to raise money to send bullet proof vests and even toilet paper to combat forces stationed in Iraq.

When the Bush administration took office in 2001, it inherited a budget surplus from the Clinton administration. Today the budget deficit has not only returned, but it has hit record highs. Ten years ago the Newt Gingrich-led conservative “revolution” in Congress promised the end of big government. Today conservative Republicans complain that the end of the end of big government has arrived and that it is the supposedly conservative Bush administration that has unleashed the return to a policy of big government. Today expenses are running totally out of control. Whether the economy is officially in recession or recovery, the ruling class can no longer bring about any improvements to the general economic and especially the social conditions of the working class. On the contrary, every new cycle of recession-recovery, brings about a new level of deterioration in the proletariat’s living and working conditions, as the bourgeoisie tries to make workers bear the brunt of each new fall into the abyss of the chronic crisis of its system.

The recession of 2001 put millions of workers on the street, as companies went bust or simply tried to squeeze more profits from fewer employees. Today while the bourgeoisie celebrates a supposed record-setting 2.2 million jobs created during last year, two remarkable facts relativize the significance of these new jobs: first, the new jobs are significantly less than the three million jobs lost earlier in President Bush’s’ first term in office. In fact there has not been any growth in the total of workers with a job in the last four years –132.4 million when Bush took office in 2001 and 132.3 last December. Taking into account the 10 million growth in population since 2001, this means that total unemployment has surely increased, despite the statistical tricks the Labor Department has had to pull to establish the rate of unemployment at 5.4%, significantly lower than the 6.3 % that existed at the height of the “recession.” Second, manufacturing companies, which shed more than two million jobs from 2000 to the end of 2003, added back only 96,000 jobs in 2004, which is said to be the weakest rebound in factory employment of any economic recovery on record in the United States. Service industries accounted for almost all the new jobs created in 2004, which speaks volumes about the depths reached by the economic crisis. More particularly this fact reflects the tendency of the most powerful economy of world capitalism to become a service economy, with more than 4/5 of the labor force employed in services (110.2 million in services; 22.0 million in manufacturing; and 2.2 million in agriculture).

Still another indicator of the economic deterioration of the living conditions of the proletariat can be seen in the wage level of the jobs created in the last four years—43% less than those created from 1996 to 2000. Besides, these new jobs are in many cases part-time, contract work or what they now call “seasonal work,” lacking benefits, such as pensions, paid vacations or health care. Moreover the despite the record number of new jobs being created, for the unemployed worker it is increasingly more difficult to find a new job. As of November, about 1.8 million, or one in five, unemployed workers were jobless for more than six months, compared with 1.1 million when the recession officially ended in November 2001. By other accounts, since the start of the recession in March 2001, the average length of unemployment has risen from 13 weeks to 20 weeks, or in other words the longer the “recovery” progresses the longer unemployed workers are going without a job – truly a “robust” recovery

There is among the dominant class a consciousness that the cheap money policy is unsustainable. It has re-ignited inflation – 3.3% last year. Thus the Federal Reserve has reversed its policy of near zero interest rates and has begun to move them upwards.

At the international level, the gigantic American debt is a very heavy weight on the world economy and a very dangerous time bomb. The aggressive cheap dollar pursued by the US is intended to jump-start American exports, but is endangering in particular the countries of the euro zone –against which the dollar value is at record lows. By making it more difficult to export European goods, it is exacerbating the economic woes faced by those countries.

Social Security Reform: a Frontal Attack on the Working Class

The current media blitz in the US about social security “reform” is the latest installment in a quarter century of austerity attacks against the American working class. American capitalism has been implementing austerity measures since President Carter first began talking about the “economic malaise” during the period of double digit inflation in the late 1970s. The continuing economic crisis has pushed the bourgeoisie towards the brink of a qualitative breakthrough in the ferocity of austerity. Up to now, one of the strengths of American state capitalism was its ability to use the relative size of the private sector economy in the US and the lack of direct state ownership to impose austerity in a diffused manner.

For example, the lack of a state-run, centralized health care system meant that cuts in medical care were not announced and implemented nationally on a centralized basis but were introduced through thousands of employer-based medical benefit programs at different companies and economic institutions at different times, in different places, in different forms and guises. Likewise, instead of announcing a generalized reduction in wages across the economy, or even across an industry, wages were attacked at the level of individual enterprises and corporations, making it more difficult for the proletariat to respond in a unified and simultaneous manner. Today the bourgeoisie is finding it impossible to continue its avoidance of a frontal assault on the social wage. It is in this context that the current social security “reform” proposed by the Bush administration must be viewed.

The current proposed fiscal budget put forth by the Bush administration calls for the abolition or scaling back of a 150 programs that the government claims “don’t work”. The cuts include programs that are near and dear to core constituencies of the Bush administration, such as the abolition of the farm subsidy program, vital to the prosperity of the agribusiness sector. However, even if they cut these programs – and there is no guarantee about this, as the last time the Bush administration proposed cutting 100 programs, only 4 wound up falling under the axe – they would have a virtually insignificant impact on the budget deficit. These programs are small potatoes compared with the rest of the “social programs.” Most of the expenses of the state are on two issues, one the so called “entitlement” programs, such as social security, medicare and Medicaid, and the other, the military. In the face of the imperialist imperatives facing the US government in this period, it is inconceivable that military expenses are susceptible to cuts. In fact the Bush administration considers the homeland security and military expenses as “off budget” items, which are not included in the official budget proposals. This means that the bourgeoisie must move towards directly attacking the social wage head on, which is something they have carefully tried to avoid in the past.

The Economic and Social Function of Social Security in the US

While social security is part of the social wage – that part of the wages paid to the working class by the state in order to assure the social reproduction of the working class, in this instance to support the standard of living the disabled, elderly, retired workers, and the survivors of workers who have died, it would be inaccurate to assume that this is money that comes from the state; it is actually money confiscated from the workers’ own wages, collected, administered and distributed to the workers as part of state capitalism’s mechanism of centralizing economic life and tying the proletariat to the state apparatus. Historically workers always had the responsibility to support not only themselves (those on the job), but also their dependents – their children, their elders (who were too infirm to continue working) or their relatives who were disabled. They used part of their wages received from their employers to do so. However, in the Great Depression in the 1930’s unemployment in the US reached 30 percent and millions of workers were unable to support themselves or their dependents. Private charities were totally incapable of handling this social crisis, and state capitalist measures were introduced through the New Deal to stabilize the social situation and prevent potential future disasters. This was not some great reform, as the bourgeoisie likes to claim, but merely a restructuring of the way the working class had always supported its elderly and disabled in a manner that benefited the state. Social Security is actually paid for by the working class itself, not the state. Fifty percent of social security funds are raised by taxes on the wages paid in each pay period to the workers. The other 50% comes from a matching tax levied on their employers. As far as the employers are concerned, economically their tax contribution to Social Security is actually calculated as part of the wages, or labor costs, they pay for their workforce, part of their wage bill. Whereas the workers used to support their seniors by personally setting aside part of their earnings, under Social Security the state itself literally confiscates a part of the workers wages determined by law and distributes this money to the retired workers in the name of the state. While this guarantees that the senior citizens will be supported even in times of high unemployment, more importantly the state’s distribution of Social Security checks serves to tie the working class to the state – even if it is only to have access to part of their own wages that has been set aside.

The Manufactured Financial Crisis of Social Security

The money paid into the social security system has never gone into individual retirement accounts, even if the government annually sends workers nearing retirement age a financial record of the amount of money they have paid into the system over the years. The social security checks of current retirees is paid from the taxes levied on the first $90,000 of wages of current workers and exempts the bourgeoisie from having to contribute significantly to the system. Most of the taxes collected goes into the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund (commonly called the Social Security trust fund). A much smaller amount goes into the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund. The social security checks distributed to the retired and the disabled each year are drawn from these funds. At the end of the year any money left over is required by law to be lent to the federal government; it is not allowed to accumulate in the trust fund. According to the New York Times, “The government issues interest bearing bonds to the trust fund and immediately spends the money for other purposes” March 8, 2005. These bonds are supposed to be redeemed when and if the social security trust fund does not have enough money to pay social security checks. In other words, the social security trust fund is actually comprised of current-year social security tax funds and a bunch of IOUs from the federal government.

Until the 1980s, social security taxes were low and generally very little money was left over at the end of the year.

To solve an alleged social security financial crisis during the Reagan administration, a special blue ribbon panel, headed by Alan Greenspan, who would convert his success on this panel into his nomination as head of the Federal Reserve, proposed to “save” social security by cutting benefits and raising taxes. This led to the accumulation of incredibly large surpluses in the trust fund, reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars each year, as baby boomers paid vastly more money into the program than was necessary to support their elders. These surpluses were each year turned over to the federal government and were used by the Reagan, and the first Bush administration to begin reducing budget deficits and by the Clinton administration to actually achieve a budget surplus. This money helped Reagan to fund the acceleration of the arms race in the 1980s that helped to bankrupt Russian imperialism, to fund wars and military adventures over the past two decades, and to compensate for tax cuts for the rich. Today it is estimated that there is approximately $1.7 trillion dollars in IOUs in the trust fund, and that this sum will rise to $5.3 trillion by 2018, when the trust fund will have to pay out more than it gets from tax revenues. However, despite Bush’s alarmist propaganda about 2018, “the interest earned on the fund will more than cover the shortfall and keep the fund growing until it reaches $6.6 trillion by 2028” (Denver Post, 3/9/05).

In other words, while the bourgeoisie is ranting and raving about the impending bankruptcy of social security as members of the baby boom generation near retirement age, the system is actually awash with incredible surpluses – except that these surpluses are being diverted to finance imperialist war and military expenditures. The Bush administration predicts the system will become insolvent by 2042, but the less politically motivated prediction by the Congressional Budget Office is that insolvency would occur 10 years later, in 2052 – when the oldest of the baby boomers would be 106 years old, and the youngest 88, i.e. when most of them would have already died and it would be their children who would be receiving their pensions. It is estimated that the shortfall in 2052 could be easily compensated for by an adjustment in federal spending of around 3 percent.

The Real Purpose of Social Security “Reform”

The debate in the bourgeois media over social security “reforms” proposed by the Bush administration focuses on the brouhaha over the diversion of a portion of workers’ tax contributions into private investment accounts, tied to the stock market. There is a lot of talk about fantastically high conversion costs to set up these accounts (estimated as ranging from $2 trillion to $6 trillion) and the supposed windfall profits to Wall Street investment brokers. But this debate obscures what is really at stake. The heart of the Bush plan is to alter the formula used to calculate benefits for future baby boom generation retirees who are 55 or younger today, which would slash guaranteed benefits by 25% to 45% over the coming decades. The real goal of the Bush administration is to avoid paying back those $6 trillion that will have been pilfered from the trust fund by 2028. In 1983, the American ruling class used the ruse of an impending social security crisis to raise the taxes on the working class and used that money not to pay pensions to retirees or to set it aside to pay the pensions of future retirees but to fund its aggressive imperialist policies. Now it wants to complete this massive social swindle by maneuvering to avoid repaying $6 trillion dollars confiscated from the working class back into the social security trust fund.

Whether the Bush investment accounts are ever implemented, the bourgeoisie is united in its view that social security can only be fixed by cutting benefits and raising taxes, as the New York Times, which is opposed to the investment accounts, has openly said in its editorial columns. Despite the bourgeoisie’s attempts to throw up a smoke screen around social security “reform” with talk of private investment accounts, the fundamental reason for social security reform is to cut the social wage of the proletariat. This frontal attack, while necessary for the bourgeoisie, is fraught with the risk of triggering a proletarian response, which is why they have delayed this type of attack for so long. When added to the accumulation of serious inroads on the proletarian standard of living, the potential for a proletarian response increases exponentially. Clearly there is unity within the bourgeoisie on the need to “reform social security, but the danger of provoking a working class explosion is one reason why there is so much hesitation within the ruling class on exactly how and how quickly to proceed. But there is also a concern that any clumsily orchestrated reneging on repaying the Treasury bonds to the social security trust fund, which are supposed to be backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States,” might jeopardize the confidence in and value of other Treasury bonds, much of which are held by foreign investors, like the Japanese and Chinese, who might transfer their funds to investments in Euros. This would create an economic calamity for the US. Even within the Republican party there is a hesitation to rush headlong into the investment accounts proposals, including Greenspan’s call for a go slow approach that would phase in the private accounts over a protracted period of time. However it is an open question for the ruling class as to whether they actually have the option to delay for too long.

State Capitalism Exists for the Preparation for War

The movement towards a service economy, which is a general phenomenon in the industrial countries, as the bourgeoisie looks to take full advantage of lower labor costs in underdeveloped countries, must be situated within the context of the war economy, which is at the very heart of the reason for the existence of state capitalism in the period of decadence. The emergence of US imperialism as the dominant world power in World War II was based essentially on its strength as an industrial powerhouse, one that was benefited from its geographical isolation from the major theatres of war and the protection that isolation afforded its manufacturing industries from attack. The entire American industrial apparatus was mobilized for war production, producing the steel, vehicles, munitions, food, clothing, etc. to support the war effort and destroy its imperialist rivals. On the surface, it might seem that the transition to a service economy, away from a manufacturing economy would jeopardize American military superiority. However, it is clear that American state capitalism is very conscious of its need to not only protect but to more fully develop its war economy. What remains of the manufacturing sector in the US is increasingly enmeshed in the war economy – in the production of weapons and other material for war and destruction.

In 1995, this policy was clearly laid out in a White Paper entitled “Technology Leadership to Strengthen Economic and National Security,” prepared for the White Hose Forum on the Role of Science and Technology in Promoting National Security and Global Stability. That report acknowledged that “since World War II, US military superiority has been based on our technological advantage,” and that there had been changes in American manufacturing industries. “Thirty yeas ago the US economy accounted for well over a third of the world’s total and was the leader in most manufacturing industries. By 1994, this figure had fallen to about a fifth of the world economy, with industries in Europe and Asia now fierce competitors.” The report went on to argue, “the technology base that propels the economy is in turn increasingly critical for national defense,” and proposed a strategy that would exploit “the technology base for both economic and defense needs.”

At the heart of this new strategy was a “dual-use technology policy” which reflected “the recognition that as a nation, we can no longer afford to maintain two distinct industrial bases. We must move toward a single, cutting-edge national technology and industrial base that will serve military as well as commercial needs. This ‘dual-use technology strategy’ will allow the Pentagon to exploit the rapid rate of innovation and market-driven efficiencies of commercial industry to meet defense needs.” There were three “pillars” to support this dual-use strategy: first, Defense Department support for research and development of computers and software, electronics, sensors and simulators; second, the “integration of defense and commercial production to enable industry to ‘dual produce’”; and third, initiatives to encourage “insertion” of “commercial technologies and products in the development, production and support of military systems.” What we have seen in the past ten years is not a weakening of American state capitalism, but a policy reorientation to better mobilize the productive capacities of the economy for the preparation for and the waging of modern warfare.

Proletarian Response to Imperialist War and the Worsening Economic Crisis

In discussing the impact of imperialist policy and the economic crisis, it is crucial to avoid the error of simply confining the analysis to the divisions within the bourgeoisie without focusing on the difficulties of the proletariat in the US to respond to the demands of the situation and the potential for the future. In part the difficulty of American workers to respond on their terrain is an expression of an historic weakness of the American proletariat, isolated geographically from its class brothers in Europe, characterized by a weaker Marxist theoretical history, all of which is accentuated by being trapped in the bowels of the worlds strongest and most sophisticated state capitalism. Since the onset of the open crisis at the end of the 1960’s, this historic weakness has not meant that the American proletariat has been absent from the class struggle, but rather a tendency for it to lag behind the development of class consciousness and class struggle elsewhere, particularly in Europe. Therefore, it is only a matter of time and circumstance for the same tendency towards the return to class confrontation that has been characterized by various struggles in Europe, no matter how tentative, to be echoed here in the US.

In this sense, it is clear that the bourgeoisie has taken full advantage of the disorientation ensuing from the collapse of Stalinism and the cold war, and the attendant reflux in class consciousness and class struggle to give prime attention to its imperialist interests for over a decade now. It was particularly successful in using the 9/11 attacks to develop a war psychosis campaign to obtain temporary acquiescence in its imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to divert attention from the continued existence and steadily worsening of the economic crisis. While the working class has not suffered an historic defeat making it susceptible to permanent mobilization for imperialist war, the disorientation that followed the collapse of the Stalinist bloc and the end of the cold war, has made it very difficult for the proletariat to find its own terrain. For example, though the working class is clearly disenchanted with the war in Iraq and experiences the seriousness of the economic crisis in its daily life, there has not been a significant breakthrough on the level of class struggle. Working class opposition to the bourgeoisie’s imperialist war found no independent proletarian expression. Many workers participate in the massive mobilizations organized by the so-called “antiwar” movement, but these demonstrations were not on the class terrain of the proletariat. The antiwar demonstrations were massive one-shot deals, and not even part of an ongoing movement. They served the interests of the bourgeoisie by serving as safety valves for widespread discontent with the war, tied the demonstrators to the Democratic party, and actually hindered the development of any autonomous action within the proletariat. This movement assisted the bourgeoisie in sweeping the economic crisis and the attacks against the working class under the rug. The working class would have done more to undermine the bourgeoisie’s murderous policies by demonstrating its rejection of the ideology of sacrifice by accelerating its defense of its immediate economic interests. The fact that the Kerry campaign was largely successful in the industrial states in November is yet another demonstration of the degree to which the bourgeoisie was able to derail proletarian discontent with the war away from a working class terrain.

The bourgeoisie has waged a relentless ideological campaign to emphasize that there is one party, the Democratic Party, that cares about the workers and another, the Reupublican, which is the enemy of the workers. This ideological nonsense of course obscures the division of labor between the two major political parties which is designed to disarm the proletariat and help the bourgeoisie implement its austerity programs and defend its imperialist interests on the international level.

Thus far the bourgeoisie has been able to attack the standard of living of the proletariat and wage imperialist war with relative impunity. But the worsening of the economic crisis and the continuing challenges to American imperialist hegemony are combining to decrease the room for maneuver that the bourgeoisie has. The only way for the state to finance its imperialist interventions is to make the working class pay for it. We have already documented the steadily deteriorating condition of the working class, which more and more pushes it towards class struggle to defend itself.

We must be alert to developments within the class struggle in the US in the period ahead. We have a proletariat that has been disoriented and has allowed the bourgeoisie to attack it with impunity for too long, but a proletariat at the same time that is not historically defeated and is increasingly seething with discontent over the war in Iraq and the attacks on its standard of living. In this sense, the proletariat in the US is actually in the forefront of the world proletariat, as in no other industrial country does the proletariat openly confront the question of imperialist war and the deepening economic crisis simultaneously. The bourgeoisie increasingly risks the danger of provoking a social explosion, an explosion that holds great potential for the deepening of class consciousness and revolutionary intervention.

Internationalism, March 2005

Alaska Airlines has proposed a contract to its workers that, if signed, will cut their salaries by 20%, while United Airlines has succeeded in cutting wages by 25%.

On a different front, the number of American deserters from the Iraq war over the last two years has grown to 8,000, and is still growing.

Far away, across the Atlantic Ocean, in several European countries the working class has staged massive struggles, especially around the issue of the attacks on state-funded pensions (the equivalent of the American Social Security system). We can cite many examples of this kind, which show both a return of the class’ combativeness and militancy, and weakness in face of the bosses’ attacks, but if we do not have a method, a framework for understanding them, they will just appear as isolated snapshots that have no bearings on or relationship with history and with each other. Without a method, we will not be able to make any sense of them. It is then appropriate to ask these questions:

How to explain these apparently contradictory behaviors by our class, which in the first instance, seem to point to passivity and tremendous weakness, and in the other two reveal a determination not to settle and rather to fight back and even see through the bourgeoisie’s ideological campaigns? More importantly, how do we analyze and understand them?

• What do they mean in relation to the overall assessment of the forces between the bourgeoisie and the working class?
• What do they mean in terms of the decisive, revolutionary struggles the class will have to wage in the future, if it is to fulfill its historic task?

The historic context

The massive, worldwide struggles that began 1968 marked the return of the working class on the historic scene after the years of the counter-revolution. During those years, the working class had suffered a major historic defeat, as the ruling class succeeded in dragging it into the madness of World War II. Its revolutionary organizations survived only in the very small and dispersed numbers of their militants. 1968 marked the first great wave of class struggle out of the counter-revolution, which continued, with ebbs and flows, and waves of struggles in the 70’s and 80’s, until 1989. It was the first attempt by the working class to once again advance toward the revolutionary perspective after the years of the counter-revolution.

Various factors explain the failure of this first attempt. While the struggles of 1968 were massive and extensive, they came up against a lack of political maturation and theoretical depth. As important as they were in terms of developing the class’ consciousness of the dead-end of capitalism, there were yet important illusions in the possibility for reforms. They were also marred by councilism and anarchism, petty bourgeois contestationism, and a rejection of political organizations. The collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, resulting from the deepening of decomposition, as we have analyzed elsewhere in our press, marked the failure of the class’ first attempt at regaining its revolutionary perspective after the counter- revolution. The collapse of the Eastern bloc in turn had a severe impact on the combativeness and consciousness of the class. The ruling class was able to take advantage of this important disorientation in the working class as a whole, particularly by unleashing a tremendous campaign about the ‘end of communism’. This campaign aimed at discrediting the proletariat’s final goal, its history, and its class theory, and resulted in a significant, although temporary, loss of the class’ self-confidence and identity, and in the domination of inter-classist ideology.

The working class’ disorientation permitted the ruling class’ success in waging the first Gulf War in 1991. It was easy, at that time, to fall in the mistake of assessing the working class’ strength and overall historic perspective based on the state of confusion and disorientation of the class, and on its apparent passivity in the face of the war. It was rather common then to hear even revolutionaries express a loss of confidence in the class and disappointment as to the class’ final goal. In a similar way, it is also easy to fall into a euphoric over estimation of the struggles and the overall state of the class when the latter engages in massive confrontations, as in Argentina in 2001, or in France in 2003. The Marxist method, by contrast, strives to place events of a different nature in a historic perspective. In this sense, the retreat in consciousness and combativeness in 1989 and the massive confrontations of 2003, contradictory and disconnected as they appear to be, are part and parcel of the same tortuous, difficult, non-linear process the class experiences as it learns to face a very sophisticated class enemy which throws in its path serious obstacles and diversions. They are also part of the process by which the class comes to an understanding of the impasse of the capitalist system and of its own historic, revolutionary role.

The Marxist method does not base the analysis of the class struggle on an immediatist or empiricist approach, but by taking into consideration the overall historic conditions, which include an understanding of the maturation of the proletariat and the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie. When we use this method, then we are able to see that undeniable as the weaknesses and retreats of the working class are in the face of war and the ferocious attacks against its very conditions of life, they do not constitute, by any means, a direct ideological or historic defeat. On the contrary, we are able to see that the historic course is still open for the revolution.

The turning point

As we have said, 1989 marked the beginning of an important retreat in class consciousness and a lull in its struggles. Since then, though, we have witnessed and are witnessing how the class is reawakening, although slowly and with great difficulties and hesitations. We have seen this most clearly in the massive mobilizations in France and Austria during the spring 2003 and summer 2004. We continue to see this in less spectacular, yet significant, events as well, from the desertions from the Iraqi war and a growing reluctance against military recruitment in the US, to the surging of a questioning minority in search of a political orientation. This last aspect in particular, is the most significant in the present period, which we have characterized as a’ turning point’. Contrary to the dynamic opened in 1968, during which consciousness arose following and almost as a result of the massive struggles, today we are seeing a reflection and a insistent questioning of capitalism’s perspectives, of the bleaker and bleaker future it has to offer, prior to the class’ engaging in the struggles. We are seeing a growing awareness of the degradation of the conditions of life, which the open crisis can no longer hide, as the class’ very conditions of life are threatened by growing unemployment, war, and, more recently, the brutal attacks against pensions and social security. These aspects will favor the development of consciousness in depth, as well as a rapprochement by the searching minorities with revolutionary organizations. It is clear that these conditions represent an advantage in relation to the struggles opened by 1968. The ICC has for some years recognized a ‘subterranean maturation’ of the class, which does take place at the very moments of apparent lull in the class struggle, and which today is more and more coming to the open in the voices of the minorities in search of political clarification.

Although the struggles of 2003 and 2004 in France and Austria were massive and in response to significant attacks, there is no decisive or contingent element that confirms the idea of a change in the development of the balance of forces between the classes. What the 2003 events tell us is that there is a real potential present in the development of the struggle, because they reveal a growing awareness that the attacks are worldwide, carried out by an exploiting class against the exploited class. They reveal the beginning of a regaining of class identity, and of a feeling of belonging to the same class.

It is doubtless that the nature of this turning point is not as spectacular as the one which marked the return of the class onto the historic stage in 1968; however, we can draw one important parallel. It is the underlying change in the view of the future. A specific and contingent aggravation of the crisis, with its accompanying windfall of brutal attacks on the conditions of life of the class, can well spark outbursts in the class struggle. However, it is not true that there is a mechanical link between the attacks and rising consciousness, or even combativeness. The current turning point is characterized by a questioning about the perspectives that capitalism offers to humanity. In 1968, the massive mobilizations were not just a response to the return of the crisis after the ‘boom’ years; they were above all the result of a growing disillusionment with post-war capitalism’s ability to offer a better a future, but with a comparatively low level of politicization. The present turning point is characterized by a change in spirit in the working class, the result of years of subterranean maturation in which the questioning as to what capitalism has to offer is becoming more and more the central preoccupation of the class.

This analysis and this method allow us to conclude that the present turning is the second attempt by the working class to advance toward the recovery of the revolutionary perspective since the return of the global economic crisis, the first attempt being 1968. This perspective has been maintained to date, because the class has not suffered a profound, direct or ideological defeat. Thus, what we call ‘turning point’ is not any specific point in time, but rather an ongoing process in a changing period.

The context for the development of consciousness and future struggles

Two generations of workers have now gone undefeated: the generation of 1968 and the present generation, a situation that the bourgeoisie has not confronted since the revolutionary wave that began in 1917 in Russia. The maturation of minorities since 1989 is characterized by much more fundamental questions about what the class is, how it struggles, what the role of revolutionaries is, what obstacles will have to be overcome, and, above all, the question about the validity of Marxism and the communist perspective. Whereas the generation of 1968 was distrustful of Marxism because of the weight of Stalinism and the organic break with the past of the workers’ movement, the present generation looks at the communist minorities for a political understanding and clarification. The present generation also confronts certain obstacles that the generation of 1968 did not confront: the context of decomposition and the fact that this time, contrary to 1968, the bourgeoisie will not be taken by surprise. The ruling class has elements against itself, too. Although better prepared to confront the working class, the effects of decomposition are working against it too. The crisis pushes it to more and more openly reveal the bankruptcy of its system. Similarly, the political disarray resulting from the collapse of the Eastern bloc forces the ruling class, particularly the American ruling class, to pursue imperialist confrontations. In the context of an undefeated working class whose consciousness is developing in depth, the present war has the potential of provoking a crucial understanding: there is no solution to capitalism’s contradictions. Without developing this point further, it is important to notice how, in the belly of the beast, in the country that was ‘attacked by terrorism’, the unease about the war is expressed in the number of deserters, but also of parents who oppose their sons’ and daughters’ recruitment and enlistment, which has grown from 58% in summer 2003 to 75% today, according to the bourgeoisie’s own public opinion polls. The bourgeoisie would like us to believe that there is nothing political in the decision to desert, and looks at this action as a shameful example of cowardice. In reality, the decision not to die for ‘your’ country is the proof of an underlying process of political maturation. The unwillingness to stand by the state is above all political: it expresses the budding assertion of a proletarian perspective, which poses itself in contradiction with the attempt by the ruling class to tie ideologically the workers to the state.

The working class is in the period of a turning point. Its hesitations are in significant ways linked to a growing awareness of the immensity of its historic task. Revolutionaries, the searching minorities, and the most class-conscious workers are called upon to take on the responsibilities the class has invested us with. We need to show the class the necessity to struggle and to develop the struggle. We need to show that the class’ strength lies in its solidarity. We need to show the bankruptcy of capitalism, and thus continue to fuel the deep, important reflection presently taking place in the class.

Ana, 25/6/05.

The pensions of American workers face an unrelenting attack as part of the ruling class’ austerity program aimed at lowering the standard of living in order to make the working class bear the brunt of the deepening global economic crisis and to finance US imperialism’s military interventions throughout the world. In Internationalism No.134, we demonstrated how the bourgeoisie has been siphoning off vast financial surpluses from the social security fund over the years to finance its imperialist operations (“Report on the National Situation: Social Security Reform – A Frontal Attack on the Working Class [54]” Internationalism 134). We pointed out that in regard to its proposed social security “reforms,” “The real goal of the Bush administration is to avoid paying back those $6 trillion that will have been pilfered from the trust fund by 2028. In 1983, the American ruling class used the ruse of an impending social security crisis to raise the taxes on the working class and used that money not to pay pensions to retirees or to set it aside to pay the pensions of future retirees but to fund its aggressive imperialist policies. Now it wants to complete this massive social swindle by maneuvering to avoid repaying $6 trillion dollars confiscated from the working class back into the social security trust fund.”

Facing tremendous skepticism within the working class and reluctance even from elements within the bourgeoisie, who fear the economic impact if the government refuses to repay the bonds issued to the social security trust fund, the Bush administration continues to readjust its social security reform proposal. The most recent version of this plan maintains the call for a partial privatization of social security, with part of pension money deposited in privately administered stock market investment accounts. But its most significant feature is to propose changing social security from a pension fund that is supposed to support all workers’ retirement, to a modified welfare fund, aimed at using the contributions paid by more well paid workers to finance the retirement of lower income workers. According to this plan, low income workers would receive 100% of their current benefits, but workers earning higher wages would have changes phased in that would lower their benefits by up to 65% (in the previous proposal, the maximum cut was only 45%) in order to fund benefits for the poorer workers.

The argumentation supporting this proposal emphasizes that higher paid workers don’t “:need” social security to support their retirements, because they receive money from their private pension funds usually managed through their employers. Never mind that workers have fought for these private pensions as part of the benefit package that comprises part of their wages, and have also put part of their savings into these funds, precisely because social security benefits are only sufficient to maintain a bare subsistence standard of living in retirement. Recent developments demonstrate the hypocrisy of this argument. The seriousness of the economic crisis has put these private pensions in jeopardy. For example, as part of its court-supervised plan to recover from bankruptcy, United Airlines was granted permission to abandon its seriously underfunded pension plan, which will now be taken over by the government sponsored Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), which is responsible for bailing out failed private pension funds. United Airlines employees will be lucky to receive 70% of the benefits they were entitled to. Other major airlines, also facing economic difficulties, are expected to follow United Airlines lead. Major companies in other industries may also follow suit. So serious is the failure rate of pension funds in the US, the PBGC is currently operating with a $23 billion dollar deficit. An estimated 50% of the top 100 private pension funds in the US are currently underfunded, and at risk for collapse.

So, the so-called “higher paid” workers, who are supposedly so comfortable, face up to 65% cuts in their federal social security pension benefits at the same time that their private company-based pension funds increasingly face economic disaster which will mean a loss or severe cut in benefits from that quarter as well. This double-whammy that the government is trying to ram down the throats of the working class is fraught with tremendous political risk for the bourgeoisie, as there is a risk that workers will respond to this frontal assault on their standard of living. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced in April to abandon his proposal to privatize state employee pensions because of near universal opposition from public sector workers. Despite making social security reform his number one domestic issue, Bush has made absolutely no headway, despite his so-called “mandate” at the polls last November. The inability of American capitalism to pay its wage bill, including pensions earned working class, in large part in order to pay for its imperialist military incursions, exposes both the economic bankruptcy of global capitalism and the fact that it offers humanity a future of death and destruction.

J. Grevin, 25/6/05.

The AFL-CIO is primed for a possible split at its upcoming quadrennial convention. A coalition of unions, led by the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) and including the Teamsters, Laborers, United Commercial Food Workers, and UNITE HERE are threatening to leave the federation if it does not adopt a broad set of “reforms” ostensibly designed to once again make the union movement a powerful force in national and international politics.

What are workers and revolutionaries to make of these events? Do they harbinger the possible revitalization of the unions as organs that could once again defend the interests of the working class and serve as weapons of the downtrodden in the 21st century quest for global justice?

From a revolutionary Marxist perspective, the answer is a clear no. Unions may have been the unitary form of working-class self-organization in the period of capitalist ascendance, when workers could come together to confront and win reforms from a still historically progressive capitalism, however, with the rise of capitalist decadence, when the system becomes a brake on the further development of the productive forces, the unions were transformed into weapons of the state to instill shop-floor discipline among the workers. They do so by pursing a capitalist agenda while pretending to speak the workers’ language. From the point of view of the theory of capitalist decadence, unions have been irretrievably lost to the working-class as a mode of organization. They are no longer proletarian institutions and no change of leadership or political direction can alter this fact.

If the working-class is ever to carry out its historic mandate to overthrow the capitalist system and build a world human community beyond capital, the union is just one of the capitalist institutions it will have to confront, defeat and ultimately surpass.

Nevertheless, this does not mean the recent turmoil in the AFL-CIO is not unimportant. These events ultimately need to be seen in the context of the overall political life of the bourgeois class. In many ways, the fact that the AFL-CIO might split is a reflection of the wider difficulties of the American ruling class to control and manipulate its political system.

What we are witnessing today with the unions is the complement of the turmoil and disorder that have infected the overall bourgeois political arena. From the botched election of 2000 to its hesitancy to rally behind a candidate in 2004, the American bourgeoisie is encountering increasing difficulty in coordinating its democratic mystification, of which the unions are a key element.

What we are seeing today is not the equivalent of 1995 when current AFL-CIO president (at the time president of SEIU) John Sweeney ousted Lane Kirkland in an effort to radicalize the union’s image in the eyes of the working class. SEIU’s program is not appreciably more radical appearing than other unions. While they do call for spending more money on organizing, consolidating unions, and confronting Wal-Mart, there is no visible plan to call for strikes, mass protests or other actions. On the contrary, most of SEIU’s program involves organizing more workers and consolidating smaller unions in order to have more influence in national politics. In other words, SEIU seeks to bring more and more workers into the union trap so as to increase their own weight in intra-bourgeois political scheming and bureaucratic competition.

This does not compare to the 1930s, the era of the CIO and its philosophy of mass industrial unionism, when the Roosevelt administration actively cooperated with the unions in order to gain greater control of the working-class and enroll more workers into these capitalist institutions as part of a long-term vision to quell class struggle.

Today’s turmoil in the AFL-CIO does not reflect some well-thought out strategy by the main factions of the ruling class. On the contrary, it reflects the very decomposition that is eating away at capitalist society and complicates the decisive historic action of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. SEIU and its allies are not threatening to break away from the AFL-CIO in line with any plan to radicalize the unions. Rather, their posturing has more in character with a selfish power move to improve their own union’s standing. In other words, they are considering jumping ship and going their own way. As the largest union in the country, the SEIU leadership probably think they can do better on their own than have to deal with the dead weight of the AFL-CIO and its regulations.

This tendency for “every man for himself” is reflective of the entire period of capitalist decomposition where the discipline of the state over the various factions of the bourgeoisie is beginning to break down. This is the exact process that is at work today within the AFL-CIO and workers should have no illusions about it.

The simple fact of the matter is that the American bourgeoisie is unable to keep its unions on the same page, very similar to the fashion in which it was unable to rally behind a clear candidate for President in 2004, leading to the debacle of a second term for George W. Bush. Today, SEIU sees the opportunity to grab more power for themselves and that is exactly what they are attempting to do, very similar to the way in which Bush and his team saw the opportunity to become President when the Florida vote came back so close, despite the fact that in 2000 most of the main factions of the bourgeoisie backed Gore.

One should not interpret these events as some indication that the democratic sphere or the unions have once again become relevant to the working class. Due to the very nature of the unions, it would be impossible for the working class to exploit this turmoil to its advantage. Moreover, the fact that the American bourgeoisie is experiencing difficulty to control its political apparatus does not mean that a total loss of control is imminent. In fact, it is not even certain that SEIU and company will leave the AFL-CIO. The possibility still exists that a back-door solution could be found, whereby SEIU’s program and the egotistical needs of its leaders are accommodated within the AFL-CIO.

Nevertheless, these events are significant as they mark a definite acceleration in the decomposition of the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus. Workers and revolutionaries need to be aware of this. They cannot allow themselves to be drawn into the increasing drama of bourgeois politics by allowing themselves to believe they have a stake in its outcome. Either way, split or not: the AFL-CIO and SEIU will both remain enemies of the working-class. This is an historic fact that no degree of reform or reorganization can change.

Henk, 25/6/05.

A century ago on June 27, 1905, in a crowded hall in Chicago, Illinois, Big Bill Haywood, leader of the militant Western Miners Federation, called to order “the Continental Congress of the Working Class,” a gathering convened to create a new working class revolutionary organization in the United States: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), often referred to as the Wobblies. Haywood solemnly declared to the 203 delegates in attendance, “We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism…The aims and objects of this organization should be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.…this organization will be formed, based and founded on the class struggle, having in view no compromise and no surrender, and but one object and one purpose and that is to bring the workers of this country into the possession of the full value of the product of their toil.”

The IWW, however, never lived up to its lofty goals. It’s critique of capitalism never transcended a visceral hatred of the system’s exploitation and oppression, and never attempted to examine the nuances and intricacies of capitalist development and understand the significance of the consequent changing conditions under which the working class waged its struggles.

Historical Context for the Foundation of the IWW

The rise of the IWW in the U.S. was in part a response to the same general tendencies that triggered the rise of revolutionary syndicalism in western Europe: “opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism.” [1] [55] The crystallization of this general international tendency in the US was conditioned by certain American specificities, including the existence of the frontier; the accompanying large scale immigration of workers from Europe to the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s; and the vitriolic clash between craft unionism and industrial unionism.

The Frontier and Immigration. The existence of the frontier and tremendous influx of immigrant workers were strongly intertwined and had significant consequences for the development of the workers movement in the US. The frontier acted as a safety valve for burgeoning discontent in the populous industrial states of the northeast and Midwest. Significant numbers of workers, both native-born and immigrant, alienated by their exploitation in the factories and industrial trades, fled the industrial centers and migrated westward to the frontier in search of self sufficiency and a “better” life. This safety valve phenomenon disrupted the normal and routine evolution of an experienced proletarian movement.

The differences between native-born, English-speaking workers (even if the latter were only second generation immigrants themselves) and newly arrived immigrant workers who spoke and read little or no English were used to divide the workers against themselves. These divisions were a serious handicap for the working class in the US because it cut off the native Americans from the vast experience gained by workers in Europe and made it difficult for class conscious American workers to be current with the international theoretical developments within the workers movement. This retarded the theoretical development of the workers movement in America, and hampered its ability to resist effectively against opportunist and reformist currents, and understand its political tasks.

Another consequence of the frontier tradition was the tendency towards violence in American society. The American bourgeoisie displayed no reluctance to utilize repressive force in its confrontations with the proletariat, whether it was the army, state militias, private militias (i.e., the infamous Pinkertons), or hired thugs that were deployed to suppress numerous workers struggles, even massacring strikers and their families. Such circumstances readily exposed the viciousness and hypocrisy of the class dictatorship of bourgeois democracy and the futility of trying to achieve fundamental change at the ballot box. This in turn triggered widespread skepticism among the most class conscious workers about the efficacy of political action, which was generally perceived as synonymous with participation in electoralism.

Craft Unionism vs. Industrial Unionism. The clash between craft and industrial unionism was a dominant controversy within the workers movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In essence this was a dispute about which type of unitary class organization best corresponded to proletarian class interests in the period of capitalist ascendancy, when capitalism was still historically progressive in the sense that had not yet reached its historic limits and continued to foster the further development of the productive forces. Since it was possible for the proletariat to wrest structural reforms and improvements in wages, and living and working conditions from the bourgeoisie in ascendant capitalism, this dispute over whether unions organized along narrow craft lines, confined primarily to the most highly skilled workers, or unions organized along industrial lines, uniting skilled and unskilled workers in the same industry in the same organization, was a substantive issue for the advancement of working class interests.

Craft unions regrouped in the American Federation of Labor, which accepted the inevitability of capitalism and the wage system, and sought to make the best deal possible for the skilled workers it represented. Under Samuel Gompers’ leadership the AFL presented itself as a staunch defender of the American system, and a responsible alternative to labor radicalism. In so doing, the AFL abandoned any responsibility for the well being of millions of unskilled and semiskilled American workers who were ruthlessly exploited in the emerging mass employment manufacturing and extractive industries.

Perhaps the most important current in the evolution of the industrial unionist perspective, particularly in terms of its direct impact on the founding of the IWW, was the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Embittered by their experiences in what literally amounted to open class warfare with the mining companies and the state authorities (both sides were often armed), the WFM became increasingly radicalized. In 1898, the WFM sponsored the formation of the Western Labor Union, as a “dual union.” A regional alternative to the AFL, it never really had any independent existence beyond the influence of its sponsor. While their immediate demands often echoed the same “pork chop unionism” wage demands of the AFL, by 1902 the long range goal of the WFM was socialism. The 1904 WFM convention directed its executive board to seek the creation of a new organization to unite the entire working class, which initiated the process that led to the founding convention of the IWW.

IWW’s Revolutionary Syndicalism vs. Anarcho-syndicalism

Despite the incipient syndicalist viewpoint that permeated the views of the founders of the IWW, particularly the idea that the socialist society would be organized along the lines of industrial unions, there were sharp differences between the IWW and anarcho-syndicalism as it existed in Europe. The men who gathered in Chicago in 1905 considered themselves adherents of a Marxist perspective. Except for Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons who attended as an honored guest, no anarchists or syndicalists played any significant role in the founding congress.

Coming out of the founding convention, “every IWW official was a Socialist Party member.” [2] [56] In addition, the IWW’s general organizer from 1908-1915, Vincent St. John, made it clear that he opposed tying the IWW to a political party, and “struggled to save the IWW from Daniel DeLeon on the one hand and from the ‘anarchist freaks’ on the other.” [3] [57] IWW leaders regarded syndicalism as an alien, European doctrine. “In January, 1913, for instance, a Wobbly partisan called syndicalism ‘the name that is most widely used by [the IWW’s] enemies.’ The Wobblies themselves had few kind words for the European syndicalist leaders. To them, Ferdinand Pelloutier was ‘the anarchist,’ Georges Sorel, ‘the monarchist apologist for violence,’ Herbert Lagardelle was an ‘anti-democrat,’ and the Italian Arturo Labriola, ‘the conservative in politics and revolutionist in labor unionism.’” [4] [58]

In contrast to the decentralized vision of anarcho-syndicalism whose federationist principles favored a confederation of independent and autonomous unions, the IWW operated in accordance with a centralist orientation. While the IWW’s 1905 constitution conferred “industrial autonomy” on its industrial unions, it clearly established the principle that these industrial unions were under the control of the General Executive Board (GEB), the central organ of the IWW: The subdivision International and National Industrial Unions shall have complete industrial autonomy in their respective internal affairs, provided the General Executive Board shall have power to control these Industrial Unions in matters concerning the interest of the general welfare.” This position was accepted without controversy. The GEB alone could authorize an IWW strike.

The Anti-Political Perspective

The preamble to the IWW constitution adopted at the founding convention was clear in its commitment to the revolutionary destruction of capitalism. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life…Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system…It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.” The organization was not clear, however, on the nature of this revolution or how it would be made. It wasn’t even clear if the revolution was a political or an economic act.

Despite their Marxist sympathies, the dominant view amongst the IWW’s founders held that for the workers the political struggle was subordinate to the economic, and that the organization should not be directly involved in politics, much to the chagrin of Socialist and Socialist Labor Party militants who sought to get the IWW to affiliate with their respective organizations. In the interests of unity, the convention formulated a convolutedly worded concession to socialists from both parties, by agreeing to the insertion of a political paragraph in the preamble to the IWW constitution, which read as follows: “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as the industrial field, and take hold of that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.” For most delegates this concessionary reference to politics was incomprehensible. [5] [59]

The opposition to politics derived from a theoretical misunderstanding of the nature of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution and the political tasks of the proletariat. For the IWW, “political” meant participation in bourgeois elections, which offered only propagandistic value in demonstrating the futility of electoralism.

This narrow definition of politics failed to understand the political nature of the proletarian revolution. What could be more political than the destruction of the capitalist state, taking control of the means of production, and the imposition of the proletarian revolutionary perspective over the whole of society? The proletarian revolution is the most audacious and thoroughgoing political act in all of human history – a revolution in which the exploited and oppressed masses rise up, destroy the state of the exploiting class, and impose their own revolutionary class dictatorship over society in order to achieve the transition to communism.

The political compromise embodied in the arcane wording of the political paragraph in the 1905 preamble was not sufficient to maintain the unity of the organization. By the 1908 convention, the anti-political perspective triumphed. The political clause was deleted from the preamble, DeLeon was barred from attending the convention on a credentials technicality, and his followers split with him to form their own IWW based in Detroit that was subordinate to the SLP. Eugene Debs, along with many other Socialist Party members, permitted his membership to lapse and withdrew from IWW activities. Haywood remained in the organization and in 1911 served simultaneously as a leading member of the IWW and a board member of the Socialist Party, until he was removed from the latter after membership in the IWW was deemed incompatible by the Socialists because of the IWW’s stance on sabotage and opposition to political action.

Confusing the Revolutionary Organization and the Unitary Organization

For the IWW the industrial union was an all-in-one organizational form. The union would not simply be a unitary organization what would serve as a mechanism for working class self defense and the form for proletarian rule after the revolution but it would also be an organization of revolutionary militants and agitators. According to its 1908 constitution, the IWW believed that “the army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” As we have pointed out in International Review 118, such a syndicalist vision that sees the possibility to form “the structure of new society within the shell of the old …springs from a profound incomprehension of the degree of antagonism between capitalism, the last exploiting society, and the classless society which must replace it. This serious error leads to underestimating the depth of social transformation necessary to carry out the transition between these two social forms, and it also underestimated the resistance of the ruling class to the seizure of power by the working-class.” [6] [60]

With this vision revolutionary syndicalism also confounded the two types of organization that have historically been secreted by the working class: revolutionary organizations and unitary organizations. They failed to appreciate the difference between the revolutionary organization that regroups militants on the basis of a shared agreement on, and commitment to, revolutionary principles and program, and a unitary organization of the class that unites all workers as workers on a sociological basis. This failure condemned the IWW to an unstable existence. The open door to membership that the organization maintained was literally a revolving door, through which perhaps as many as a million workers entered and just as quickly exited between 1905 and 1917.

Furthermore, the battle waged by the industrial unionists against craft and business unionism was increasingly anachronistic. The historic period changed in the early 20th century with the completion and saturation of the world market, which accentuated the effects of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, and ushered in the onset of capitalist decadence and the evaporation of the possibility of durable reforms. Under these changed conditions, the trade union form of organization itself, whether industrial or craft, became irrelevant to the class struggle and was absorbed into the capitalist state apparatus as a mechanism for working class control. The experience of the mass strike in Russia in 1905 and the discovery of soviets, or workers councils, by the proletariat in that country was an historical watershed for the world proletariat. The lessons of these developments and their impact on class struggle were the focus of theoretical work by Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Anton Pannekoek, and others in the leftwing of the Second International. In the real struggle of the proletariat, workers councils displaced the trade unions as the unitary organization of the working class. This new type of organization united workers from all industries in a given territorial area in the revolutionary confrontation with the ruling class and constituted the historically discovered form that the dictatorship of the proletariat would take. Unfortunately, all this theoretical work seemed completely lost on the IWW, which never understood the significance of the changed period or of the workers councils, and continued to laud “industrial unionism [as] the road to freedom.” [7] [61]

Centrist Hesitancy in Response to World War I

Moments of war and revolution are historically determinant for organizations that claim to defend proletarian class interests, a litmus test revealing their true class nature. In this sense, the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 revealed the betrayal of the major parties of the Social Democracy in Europe who rallied to the side of their respective bourgeoisies, turned their backs on the principles of proletarian internationalism and opposition to imperialist war, participated in the mobilization of the proletariat for the slaughter, and thereby crossed the class line to the camp of the bourgeoisie.

When war broke out in Europe, the Wobblies formally espoused principles of proletarian internationalism, and opposed the war. In 1914, the IWW convention adopted a resolution that stated, “…the industrial movement will wipe out all boundaries and establish an international relationship between all races engaged in industry…We, as members of the industrial army, will refuse to fight for any purpose except for the realization of industrial freedom.” In 1916, another resolution committed the organization to a program advocating “anti-militarist propaganda in time of peace, thus promoting Class Solidarity among the workers of the entire world, and, in time of war, the General Strike in all industries.” [8] [62]

However, when US imperialism entered the war in April 1917, the IWW lapsed into a centrist hesitancy and failed miserably to put its internationalism and anti-militarism into practice. Unlike the AFL, the IWW never endorsed the war or participated in mobilizing the proletariat for war. But neither did it maintain an active opposition to the war. Instead, antiwar pamphlets like The Deadly Parallel were withdrawn from circulation. IWW soapbox speakers stopped agitating against war. The majority of the General Executive Board, led by Haywood, regarded the war as a distraction from the class struggle and the more important work of building the union and feared that active opposition to the war would open the IWW to repression. [9] [63]

Individual militants who faced the problem of resisting conscription into the imperialist war were told that it was an individual decision, and received no organizational support. Many IWW leaders were correctly opposed to interclassist anti-war demonstrations and organizations and accurately argued that the IWW did not have sufficient influence within the proletariat to organize a successful antiwar general strike. However, they appeared equally unwilling to seek ways in which they could find a way to oppose the imperialist war on the working class terrain. In a letter to Frank Little, a leader of the antiwar faction on the General Executive Board, Haywood counseled, “Keep a cool head; do not talk. A good many feel as you do but the world war is of small importance compared to the great class war…I am at a loss as to definite steps to be taken against the war.” [10] [64]

When an IWW activist wrote to headquarters and urged that an emergency IWW convention be convened to decide how the organization would respond to US entry into the war, Haywood deflected the request: “Of course, it is impossible for this office…to take action on our individual initiative. However, I place your communication on the file for future reference.”

In an irony of history, it was the IWW that consciously chose not to actively fight against the war once the US had entered the conflict, and not the socialist parties that opposed the war, that was targeted for repression. Only the IWW, as an organization, faced indictment for a conspiracy to sabotage the war effort. In this sense the war provided a pretext for the bourgeoisie to crackdown on the IWW for its past activities and wild rhetoric. One hundred and sixty-five IWW leaders were indicted September 28, 1917 on charges of obstructing the war effort and conscription, and conspiring to sabotage and interfere with the normal contractual economic functioning in society. At the Great Trial of Wobbly leaders, the defendants pointed out that of the 521 wartime labor strikes, only three were organized by the IWW, the rest by the AFL and disowned the views of Frank Little. After their conviction, the bulk of the IWW’s leading centralizers were sent off to Leavenworth in chains and the organization fell under the control of decentralizing anarcho-syndicalists and went into decline.

The Failure of the IWW

There persists even today a romanticized image of the Wobbly organizer as a rugged, itinerant revolutionary, who hops freight trains and hoboes from town to town, propagandizing and agitating for the One Big Union – a proletarian knight in shining armor. This petty bourgeois model of the revolutionary as exemplary individual figure, so appealing to the anarchist temperament, is of no interest to the proletariat, whose struggle is not waged by isolated, heroic individuals, but by the collective effort of the working class, a class that is both an exploited and revolutionary class.

The Russian Revolution won many of the non-anarchists in the IWW to communism, including Big Bill Haywood, who fled to exile in Russia in 1922. While Haywood became disillusioned with the Russian Revolution, in part because he was disappointed that the revolution did not take a syndicalist form, he made a comment to Max Eastman that succinctly summed up the failure of the IWW’s revolutionary syndicalism: “The IWW reached out and grabbed an armful. It tired to grab the whole world and a part of the world has jumped ahead of it.” [11] [65]

The revolutionary syndicalists of the IWW were dedicated to their class, but their response to opportunism, reformism and parliamentary cretinism was completely off the mark. Their industrial unionism and revolutionary syndicalism did not correspond to the changed historic period. The world had “jumped ahead of it” and left it far behind.

J.Grevin, 18/6/05.

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

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

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

The system is to blame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only the working class offers an alternative

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

Internationalism Sept. 4, 2005

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

Internationalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalism, September 24, 2005

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

The Bourgeoisie Knew About the Attacks in Advance

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

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

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

The Historic Course Remains towards Decisive Class Confrontations

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

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

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

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

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

JG

Last spring, in our report on the National Situation (see Internationalism No. 134 [54]), we described the serious political problems confronting the American ruling class in the wake of their botched attempt to elect John Kerry president and to realign American policy in Iraq. This failure to effectively control the outcome of the election was a reflection of a number of factors flowing from the phenomenon of the social decomposition of the capitalist system, including the difficulty of the main factions of the bourgeoisie to align behind Kerry until quite late in the electoral circus and the impact of Christian fundamentalist right, which appears impervious  to conventional political propaganda and manipulation. Instead of a much needed revitalization of the democratic myth, which would have accompanied a Kerry victory as a correction to the “stolen” election of 2000, the outcome of the  2004 was not political euphoria but widespread political demoralization and shock.

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

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

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

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

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

The exchange of views below continues a discussion with Red and Black Notes on the vitally important question of class consciousness and the role of the revolutionary organization. As readers will recall, in Internationalism 134 [80] we published a letter to R&BN commenting on a joint public forum they held with the Internationalist Workers Group, the Canadian affiliate of the IBRP, last winter. We publish below R&BN’s response to our letter, followed by some further comments that we offer in an effort to deepen the discussion on consciousness and revolutionary organization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fischer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ana

The American ruling class continues to grapple with the political mess created by its botched election in 2004, which kept the wrong team in power and failed to achieve a corrective adjustment in imperialist policy. The disagreements within the ruling class focus on how best to handle the quagmire in Iraq, so that the U.S. will be able to continue to intervene militarily throughout the world in order to oppose challenges to its continued dominance as the sole superpower in the world. The problem that the bourgeoisie has with Bush is not that he took the U.S. to war under false pretences – no one in the ruling class has any problem with or reluctance about lying. Indeed lying and manipulation is the mainstay of ruling class politics.  No, the problem the capitalist class has is that the war has dragged on and on, turning into a quagmire and the population in general, and the working class in particular, is clearly aware that the government has been lying and support for the war has collapsed. This squandering of the political capital gained by the US government in the wake of 9/11 threatens to exacerbate the difficulties that the ruling class will face in launching new military excursions in the future, to which all factions of the bourgeoisie are committed on a strategic level.

Despite the strident polemicizing of the Bush administration against its critics, the intra-bourgeois dispute over Iraq is not a clash between advocates of immediate withdrawal and others who favor “staying the course,” but an important argument over how best to begin a partial withdrawal of American forces, which will reduce American casualties and ease growing political impatience at home.

 The corruption and political scandals that are daily undermining the political authority of the Bush administration reflect this discontent within the bourgeoisie over the administration’s refusal to modify significantly its disastrous Iraq war policies, which place American imperialism in the precarious position of being severely hampered in its ability to unleash new military interventions necessary to bolster its imperialist hegemony around the world.

The dissatisfaction with Bush has led to mounting criticism not only from the Democrats, but even from significant sections of the Republican party itself. Week after week, the media reports results of still another new public opinion poll that shows Bush’s popularity has fallen to yet another new low.  The last two months  have been catastrophic for the administration. The highlights of the political pressure campaign include, but are not limited to a series corruption and Iraq-related scandals: 

·         The indictments of Republican lobbyist Abramoff, accused of “selling” access to administration officials for campaign contributions.

·         The indictment of House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, on money laundering charges and his removal from the leadership position in Congress.

·         Indictment of I. Lewis Libby, Chief of Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney for lying to investigators and misleading the federal grand jury investigating the CIA   leak case. The name of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in order to discredit her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson who had criticized publicly the administration’s misuse of intelligence data about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

·         Continuing investigation into the Wilson case, which may yet lead to the indictment of White House Deputy Chief of Staff and administration political strategist, Karl Rove.

·         Denunciation of a “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” that usurped control of American foreign policy by Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of state under Colin Powell at the State Department from 2001-2005. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College,  charged that the “dysfunction within the administration was so grave that ‘if something come along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”(NYT Oct 21, 2005)

·         Bi-partisan Congressional support for a legislative ban on torturing prisoners proposed by Republican Sen. John McCain, which the White House threatens to veto, and which Vice Pres. Cheney has been leading the fight against. Cheney insists that CIA agents be exempt from the torture prohibitions. This criticism focuses on Bush’s open flouting of democratic and humanitarian mystifications that undermine U.S. political authority.

·         International uproar over secret CIA prisons operating in Eastern Europe.

·         A call by the New York Times for the president to break with Vice President Dick Cheney’s influence on Iraq policy and suggestion that Cheney’s activities for the remainder of the presidents term be confined to ceremonial duties, such as representing the president at funerals and other such meaningless events

·         Passage by the Republican controlled Senate of a resolution designating 2006 as “a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty” and requiring the president to report regularly to congress on progress in Iraq. The resolution stopped short of setting a deadline for troop reduction, but as the New York Times noted, “the proposal would never have gone to the floor if members of President Bush’s party had not felt the need to go on the record, somehow, as expressing their own impatience with the situation.”

·         Republican Doug Forrester’s complaint that he lost the gubernatorial race in New Jersey because of the president’s unpopularity.

·         Publication of a New York Times Op-ed piece by Richard N. Haass, former director of policy planning the State Department from 2001-2003 under President Bush and currently president of the Council on Foreign Relations, arguing that “America needs a new vision for a new world” and complaining that under Bush  the US is confronting serious foreign policy questions in Asia and Europe and   “right now Washington is trying to answer them without a compass.” (NYT Nov. 8, 2005). Haass calls for a doctrine of “integration,” which would be “based on a shared approach to common challenges,” which would require that the US “cooperate with other world powers to build effective international arrangements and to take collective actions.” In other words, he suggests retreat from the unilateralist approach pursued both by Clinton and Bush in recent years.

·         A storm of controversy unleashed by a hawkish Congressman John Murtha, Democrat from Pennsylvania, a  war hero veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam wars, and  previously a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, who  delivered an emotional appeal in Congress lambasting the Bush administration’s handling of the war and calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq over a six month period. While rightwing Republicans initially denounced Murtha as a defeatist calling for surrender to terrorists, Murtha actually called for a tactical withdrawal of US troops into bases in neighboring countries over six months, where they could be used in precision raids to support Iraqi government troops against the insurgents, and not for immediate withdrawal. He argued that the presence of US troops in massive numbers and their daily patrols was exacerbating tensions, fanning resistance, and making them unnecessary targets.

·         A recently published article in the New Yorker by Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to Bush’s father, Pres. George H.W. Bush, in the early 1990s, renewing his criticisms of the administrations foreign policy originally made public last winter, and triggering speculation once again that Bush is acting contrary to advice from his father, who served as director of the CIA earlier in his career.

·         Other items, not linked directly to the war in Iraq, but aimed at the same goal of exerting pressure on the Bush to retool his administration and revise his policies for the next three years include:

·         A watchdog report by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission condemning the administration for failure to implement the policy recommendations proposed by the commission to improve American intelligence gathering and security procedures. Both Democratic and Republican members of the commission cited Hurricane Katrina as example of the Bush administration’s refusal to improve communications for first responders in emergency situations.

·         The unprecedented failure of Harriet Miers nomination for Supreme Court, who was forced to withdraw her nomination even before Senate confirmation hearings were convened, due primarily to criticism from the right of the Republican party – a terrible political humiliation for the administration.

·         A warning from Linda Chavez, a Republican who directed the United States Commission on Civil Rights under President Reagan called upon her fellow Republicans to abandon any strategy for stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment to achieve electoral victory in the Congressional elections in 2006 and the presidential election in 2008. As she put it, “immigrant bashing is not a winning strategy.”

·         Revelations by the Washington Post that the unanimous conclusion of six lawyers and two analysts in the Justice Department that the Republican-led redistricting of Texas congressional districts was illegal and unconstitutional in disenfranchising minority voters and essentially rigging election of Republicans, was overruled by political appointees supervising in the Justice Department.

The Bush administration responded initially to the growing pressure by launching a new offensive defending its disastrous policies, denouncing critics as defeatists, cowards, and unpatriotic, a tactic which has already begun to backfire. Meanwhile the Iraqis are feeding the flames. Despite the administration’s  rejection of proposals to reduce troop levels as “cut and run” and “outright surrender” to terrorism, 100 Iraqi Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish leaders meeting in Cairo under the auspices of the Arab League signed a declaration calling for U.S. withdrawal according to an undetermined timetable after the December elections. Interestingly, the document included language acknowledging the legitimacy of resistance to foreign invaders, opening the door to integration of the terrorist insurgents the U.S. seeks to kill and destroy into the new Iraqi state apparatus.

There are signs that the administration is beginning to see the writing on the wall. Despite the vituperative attacks against critics calling for a timetable for troop reduction and withdrawal as traitors, the White House has begun hinting that it might begin reducing troop levels after the upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections, down to a level of 80,000 within sixth months. The President unveiled a new “plan for victory,” which the administration claims has been secretly guiding American policy for some time but has only been recently declassified so it could be made public. Even Bush’s supporters, however, can’t find anything particularly new in the plan or responsive to criticism. The bourgeoisie is stuck with George Bush for three more years and a lot is at stake. We can expect a further ratcheting up of the pressure on the Bush administration to modify its policies. But none of this should be mistaken for a fight between doves and hawks. It is rather a fight between hawks and hawks, on how best to pursue their hawkish objectives.

JG

An article like this has never appeared before in the pages of Internationalism. But this is a special situation, quite unprecedented in the 35 years that Internationalism has been published. Readers may have noticed that articles signed “EF” or “Eric Fischer” no longer appear in the pages of Internationalism, and have not for some time. In fact several readers have inquired if EF is still in the ICC. The answer is yes, he continues to be a militant of the ICC but under very difficult and tragic health circumstances and is no longer able to write for the publication.

For the past few years, the comrade has suffered from an early onset of Alzheimers disease, a condition which especially affects his short term memory. This is a degenerative disease and while medications temporarily slowed the rate of degeneration, there is no hope for recovery. He is on100% disability and no longer able to work.  His situation is particularly dismaying because he is comparatively young (57 years old on his next birthday), and has a strong thirst for life.

In the face of this great adversity, EF has demonstrated a revolutionary courage that has inspired many comrades. Four and half years ago he attended what we knew would be his last ICC congress in Europe. He discussed with comrades from many countries about the nature of his disease, how his condition would inevitably worsen, and his desire to maintain his militancy in the communist organization and to contribute as much as he can for as long as he can. As he put it, “I have been a revolutionary since I was 19 years old and the class struggle is important for the future of humanity. I may be losing my memory, but the last thing I will forget is that I am a revolutionary.”

Rather than surrender to the disease and succumb to depression and demoralization, comrade EF consciously grappled with the serious question of how a communist revolutionary should face such an affliction.  And in this he has been supported firmly by his partner, F, who has confronted this disease with him and supported his efforts both in medical treatment and in the struggle to maintain his political activity. In addition to maintaining his communist militancy, the comrade also participated in various Alzheimers support groups and fundraising efforts to support research and treatment. He also continues to write poetry, a lifelong interest. In New York, the section continues to meet with him to read and discuss political texts, which is a central aspect of militancy and an important part of his life. He also participates in the work of mailing out the subscriptions to readers.

The comrade’s situation has given concretization to the meaning of solidarity between militants in a revolutionary organization. Last Spring, the 16th Congress of the ICC discussed EF’s situation and sent a letter to him expressing its profound solidarity. In part the letter said:

“the [Congress’s] discussions on the organization’s activities made clear to all of us, if it was not so already, how important has been our difficult struggle in recent years to understand what it means to be a militant in this epoch. We understand far better than we did before the fundamental, critical importance of solidarity among the comrades. We understand better also, how important is the confidence of the organization and its militants in the possibility and necessity of the proletarian revolution. We want to express to you our immense respect for the example that you have shown in your own participation in the organization, despite your illness…. If the ICC is able to act as a pole of reference, then it is not just because of the political positions we defend, but also because of the example that we give of what it means to be communists. And in this sense, the whole congress wants to salute the example that you give us, in confronting your illness, of what it means to be a communist militant…We are proud to be militants with you in the ICC.”

At the National Conference of Internationalism in March 2005, comrade EF made an intervention as the conference drew to a close that deeply moved all the comrades present with his reaffirmation of revolutionary commitment and expression of confidence as a revolutionary in his class, in himself, and in his comrades. Fighting tears, the comrade said:

 “I always wanted to be a revolutionary and that’s what I want to do with my life. Thank you for that. I want to die that way. I remember being in another organization where if you couldn’t do something they would kick you out. The ICC is different. I have troubles with my life, my brain doesn’t work the way it use to. But this work has given me meaning in life. Since I was a young kid I wanted to be a revolutionary. I may not be able to do what I could before, but I want to contribute whatever I can. I told my wife I want to be with the ICC as long as I can. It’s been the most important thing in my life for a long time. I want to participate in this for as long as I can.”

Reflecting the solidarity felt by everyone present at the conference, one of the comrades responded, “There is no question about your commitment or your seriousness. No matter what happens, even if you are lying in a coma unable to move, you will always be one of us. You will always be with us and we will always be with you. You will always be a comrade of the ICC. No matter what. Someday, when the history of the workers revolution is written, there will be a chapter about your struggle. You will be remembered.”

Any readers wishing to send messages of solidarity to Comrade Dick, may send a webmail message [81] to Internationalism at the ICC’s website, Internationalism.org.

Here are two poems by our comrade. 

Great Endeavors

Forgetting is only the flip side of remembering

But that being said just how do we collect memories

And how do we take the edge off painful dreams

Which reflect in fantasy fashion

Our dreams unfulfilled.

And our hopes and plans that have come to naught

As the challenges which we encounter are the ones

Which we have come to own and to take seriously

Fighting the odds to make

Progress and perhaps win.

The challenges undertaken in true pursuit

And in honorable circumstances without shame

To take up the hopes for tomorrow and beyond

And working toward realization of hope

And joyful freedom as a great endeavor.

Piece Parts of a Life

Left only with piece parts of a life

That had unsuspected twists and turns

Requiring a tune-up now and then

I keep trying to live out my life

With dignity and hope but sometimes

It is hard to keep trying to live productively

As the illness I have wears me down

In small increments from day to day

And I fight the best way I can

With medicines and doctors’ visits

As well as exercising routinely

But by now I doubt that

There will be a magic bullet

To make me whole again in my lifetime.

When I got the diagnosis

I had mixed feelings

First of all, I recognized that my problems

Lately, were not a sign of horrid

Hallucinations confronting me daily

But a medical condition which

Over time picks out brain cells and

Lets them die as if it was a war of attrition

Going on in my head where I can’t

See exactly what’s going on, but

The evidence is clear that by now

I am losing cells in my head

Which I would have much preferred

To have remained perfectly healthy.

The American unions have been in the news often lately.  The decision by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and several other unions to split from the AFL-CIO and set-up the new “Change to Win Federation” has many commentators predicting a new burst of union activism, as the split will supposedly force both sides to compete with one another and thus organize more workers and step-up their political activity.

Whatever the results of this split, it is clear that it will not benefit the working class at all.  While trade unions were originally working-class institutions as they emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries to win concrete reforms from a still expanding capitalist system, this is not the case today.  Ever since capitalism became a decadent social system in the early part of the 20th century, the unions everywhere have been integrated into the state apparatus as the capitalist system’s shop-floor police against the working class.  This is true no matter what policy, focus or direction the union’s leaders claim to embody.  Whatever ideological gleam they use to mask their role as capitalist institutions, there is no mistaking the fact that today the unions serve the interests of the ruling class.

As the unions’ role in the architecture of the capitalist state is to “speak the language of the working class” in order to prevent the proletariat from developing its own critique of the capitalist system, confronting their lies and exposing their nature is one of the most important tasks revolutionaries face today. The attempt to rehabilitate the image of the unions comes at a time when the deepening economic crisis and growing attacks on the working class standard of living are pushing workers to defend themselves. Recent strikes at Northwest Airlines, Boeing, and Philadelphia transit, and the current strike threat in New York City transit are notable examples of this trend. This revival in class struggle makes it all the more important that workers are clear on the nature of the unions.

As Marx pointed out, “the ideas of the ruling class tend to be the ruling ideas of the epoch.” It is thus very difficult for workers and even many revolutionaries to consciously articulate the reality of unions today.  Nevertheless, many workers, even if they do not yet openly identify the unions as part of the enemy class, express a certain intuitive indifference, suspicion or even hostility towards the very institutions that are supposed to speak in their name.  This is not surprising when one considers the nearly century long record the unions have of sabotaging workers’ independent struggles, mobilizing society for war, and forcing austerity on the working class.

Despite the recent political audacity of union figures like SEIU president Andy Stern or Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., today the unions face the same crisis of legitimacy with their members that politicians suffer with the public as a whole. Just as voter turnout reaches record lows, participation and activity levels for union members are bottoming out.  While there may always be a hard-core of “union activists,” members either who are enrolled behind the union ideology or who covet a possibly lucrative career in the union’s bureaucracy themselves, the majority of union members do not participate in union activities and many ignore its political recommendations.

As a result, the unions have been spending boatloads of members’ dues money on member opinion research, ostensibly to figure out how to best reach to members, get them “involved” and mobilize them for politics.  While the unions paint these efforts as attempts to learn how best to mobilize workers, in reality they are just seeking more effective ways to sell the myth of bourgeois democracy and the idea that unions are the workers’ voice in that system.

Not surprisingly, the results of these studies are usually the same.  Workers tend to reject the idea of the union as a political entity and tend only to look at it as a source of peripheral benefits such as health insurance and retirement benefits.  Like the population as a whole, union members are growing more and more indifferent towards bourgeois politics and many have long given up on the idea that the unions are a real vehicle for change. Therefore, to the extent that members pay dues, many of them without choice, they tend to see fringe benefits as the only real advantage to union membership.  Alas, for the unions, most members tend to rate the union’s performance in delivering these benefits less than satisfactory.

All this indicates that underneath all the rhetoric and confusions, workers are growing increasingly disillusioned with the unions.  While this is generally not expressed in a very conscious way right now, there is clearly a certain subterranean maturation of class-consciousness taking place, evidenced by the growing tendency among workers to reject unionism as a source of social and political change.

Due in part to the erosion of their legitimacy, but also due to the increasing tendency towards “every man for himself” in the arena of bourgeois politics, some unions have launched broad campaigns to “organize” more workers and bring them into the union fold.  A chief example of this is the SEIU’s campaigns to organize more service sector workers.  In fact, in the last decade, SEIU has won National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections to represent such peripheral sectors of the labor force as childcare and homecare workers in a number of states.  SEIU has painted these campaigns as part of a broad strategy to “organize the unorganized” and gain recognition for workers that have previously been ignored and even regarded as not part of the working class.

In reality though, the unions’ efforts have accomplished little other than increase it dues base.  It has generally been able to win these elections as NLRB rules state that it only needs to win a majority of votes cast to represent these workers in collective bargaining negotiations.  As generally only the most ideologically mobilized workers cast ballots, the unions have generally walked away with these elections.  However, once the elections are over, the unions then claim the right to collect dues from all workers in that sector, many of whom do not even know they are now in a union.

As many of these workers receive payment from the state to care for family members as an alternative to the expense of putting them in nursing homes or day care centers, the unions have generally been able to negotiate modest raises in the first contract.  However, imagine the surprise these workers have when they receive their paychecks only to learn that the raise has been cancelled out by mandatory dues reductions.

In reality then, the recent campaigns by SEIU and other unions to “organize the unorganized” has been of no benefit to the workers themselves.  Most still work for close to minimum wage, receive few if any benefits and work more hours than they are actually paid for.  On top of all this, they now have to pay dues to a union few recognize as their own and many find illegitimate.  While there is generally an initial upsurge in “appreciation” for the union after the initial contract, the unions generally find themselves in a rut shortly afterwards unable to communicate with its “members” or mobilize them for political action.

Therefore, far from the recent bourgeois propaganda regarding the revival of unionism today and all the academic chatter about “increasing union density” as a prerequisite for progressive change, what we are really witnessing is a subterranean maturation of class-consciousness, whereby many workers are slowly and subtly but clearly coming to reject the unions as a vehicle of political change.  While many continue to look to the unions as a source of fringe benefits, they are increasingly tending to look to them only for that reason, and many do not like what they find.  In the period ahead, as capitalism’s economic crisis deepens, it is likely the unions will be increasingly unable to offer these benefits, accelerating their crisis of legitimacy and making them ever less relevant in more and more workers’ eyes.

Nevertheless, exposing the unions for what they are - institutions of capitalist discipline- will remain a priority for revolutionaries in the period ahead.  As they claim to “speak the language of the working-class” while in reality seeking to sabotage its independent struggle, exposing their lies will be more important than ever in a context where the historic course is open to more and more decisive class confrontations and in which the unions will likely radicalize their discourse in an attempt to keep more workers under their sway.

Moreover, as the decomposition of the capitalist system increases, and the bourgeois political structure fractures, it is likely that we will see more and more radical sounding talk from certain unions.  Revolutionaries must be on guard for this and continue to patiently, but clearly, expose the nature of unions today.  Nothing less than the success of the proletariat’s struggle to build a truly human community is at stake.

Henk

A common tactic in the capitalist onslaught against pensions and medical benefits is the attempt to create “multi-tier” systems, in which new employees receive lower benefits or pensions, whether this takes the form of decreasing the value of benefits received by new employees or requiring them to pay in higher contributions to medical insurance or pension funds. Veteran workers are bribed with the promise that the cuts won’t affect them, but only the unknown persons who will be hired in the future. The unions traditionally help ram through these “deals,” hailing their efforts at having saved the benefits of the currently employed workers as “victories”. This tactic divides the workers against themselves, pitting the interests of longer employed workers against newer workers, the older generation against the younger – a recipe for disaster for working class unity – allowing management to divide and conquer.

It was precisely this attempt to divide the workers that was at the heart of the recent struggle in NYC transit. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, controlled by the governor, and to a lesser extent by the mayor, sought to increase the age of retirement for new hires, from the current 55 to 62 and to require that new hires would have to pay 6 percent of their wages into the pension fund. The 55-year-old retirement age (after 25 years service) had long been in place out of recognition of the extremely harsh working conditions under which transit workers toil in the 100 year-old subway tunnels, with foul air and fumes, rat infestation, and general lack of sanitary facilities. The government proposal would not have effected the retirement age of any currently employed workers.

But the transit workers were definitely NOT buying this bit of divide and conquer flimflam. On behalf of a working class that has been enduring a full scale attack on its pensions, transit workers essentially drew a line in the sand and refused to accept any change whatsoever in the pension. They struck to protect the retirement pension of workers who are not yet on the job, what they called “our unborn” – their future, unknown colleagues. As such, this struggle became the clearest embodiment of the movement to reaffirm working class self-identity and solidarity to date. It not only had a profound impact on the workers who participated in the struggle, but upon the working class in other sectors as well. The transit workers struck out of a sense of class solidarity with the future generation, those who were not even hired yet. It resonated with many workers in many industries, who can see that someone had finally stood up and said, “Don’t mess with pensions!”

The Significance of the Transit Struggle

The strike by 33,700 transit workers that paralyzed New York City for three days during the week before Christmas was the most significant workers’ struggle in the U.S. in 15 years. It was important for a number of interrelated reasons: 1) the international context in which it occurred; 2) the development of class consciousness amongst the strikers themselves; and 3) the potential impact of the strike on other workers. The significance of this strike should not be exaggerated; it cannot be compared to strikes in the 1980s which challenged the authority of the capitalist trade union apparatus that serves to control and derail workers struggles and posed the question of extension of the struggle to other workers. However, in the context of the difficult conditions in which the working class struggles today, it’s significance must be clearly understood.

Though it remained firmly under control by a local union leadership dominated by leftists and base unionists, the transit strike reflected not only rising working class combativeness, but also more importantly significant strides in the development of a renewed sense of working class self-identity and self-confidence, and understanding of class solidarity, uniting workers across the boundaries of generations and workplaces. The transit workers undertook this struggle even though they knew it was in violation of New York State’s Taylor Law, which prohibits publicly sector strikes and automatically penalizes strikers two-day’s wages for every day on strike, which means they would lose 3-days salary for each day on strike (one day for the day not worked and two-days penality). The city further threatened to seek a civil fine of $25,000 against each worker for going on strike, doubling each day -- $25,000 for the first day, $50,000 for second day, $100,000 for the third day. With such stiff penalties threatened by the bourgeoisie, the decision to strike was not taken lightly by the workers but represented a courageous act of militant defiance.

The International Context of the Struggle

The New York transit strike occurred in a context of an international tendency for the working class to return to open combat in defense of its class interests after a reflux in class struggle that has lasted nearly a decade and a half, since the collapse of the two imperialist blocs that had been in place since the end of World War II. In 1989, the collapse of the Stalinist bloc led by Russian imperialism, which was followed by disintegration of the rival western imperialist bloc, led by the U.S. and increasingly chaotic events on the international stage, opened up a period of disorientation for the working class on an international level. The changed historic conditions, the unrelenting propaganda barrage by the bourgeois state, including its mass media, proclaiming the death of communism, the triumph of capitalist democracy and the end of classes, took its toll on the proletariat. The process of clarification that had been going since the late 1960s became disrupted and gains in class consciousness had receded. This was particularly problematic in regard to the understanding that the trade unions which had once been organizations for working class self defense had long since been integrated into the state apparatus of decadent capitalism and now served as the shopfloor cops for capitalism, and in regard to the search for new forms of struggle that would enable workers to take the class struggle into their own hands. So deep was this reflux in class struggle and so thorough was the ideological attack of the ruling class, the working class showed signs of a loss of self confidence in itself as a class and a difficulty in even recognizing its own identity as a class.

However, the seriousness of the global economic crisis and the consequent escalation of attacks by the ruling class on the workers’ standard of living made it inevitable that this terrible period of proletarian disorientation could not last forever. In 2002 we began to see a turn in the international class struggle, which was characterized not by dramatic outbreaks of militant struggles, but rather by the beginning of a difficult, hesitating attempt to return to the historical center stage. The primary task posed by these nascent struggles in many countries was not the extension of struggles across geographic and industrial sector lines, but the reacquisition of consciousness at the most basic levels, of class self-identity and solidarity.

This process has been well underway in the U.S., as the examples of the grocery workers struggle in California, the struggles at Boeing and Northwest airlines, the transit strike in Philadelphia, and the graduate assistants strike at New York University demonstrate. What makes the New York transit strike so significant in this process is not simply that it is the biggest, most impactful strike in the sense that it paralyzed the largest city in America for 3 days, but on the level of progress in the development of class consciousness that it reflects.

As we have said, the main issue in the strike was the defense of workers’ pensions, which are under incredible attack by the bourgeoisie everywhere in the world but especially in the U.S. In the U.S. government social security pensions are minimal and workers rely upon their company or job-related pension funds to maintain their standard of living in retirement. Both types of pensions are in danger in the current situation, the former through the Bush administration’s efforts to “reform” social security, and the latter through outright financial default and efforts to reduce pensions payments. Since the collapse of the Enron corporation, in which thousands of employees lost their entire pensions, countless American corporations have reneged on their pension obligations. Most recently, in the face of corporate bankruptcy, major players in the airline industry defaulted on their pension funds. The federal government agency that assumes responsibility for these failed corporate pension funds can guarantee workers only 50% of what they would have normally been entitled to receive. So many pension funds have gone under, this agency is operating with an anticipated $24 billion deficit.

The automobile industry, with bankruptcies threatening at General Motors and Ford, has also put pension funds in jeopardy.

The Development of Class Consciousness Amongst the Strikers

The reaffirmation of the working class’s ability to see and comprehend itself as a class could be seen on many levels and in many manifestations in the transit struggle. Clearly the central issue itself – protection of the pensions for future workers – embodied this aspect. This was not just on an abstract level, but could be seen and heard on a very concrete level as well. For example, at a picketline at a bus depot in Brooklyn, dozens of workers gathered in small groups to discuss the strike. One worker said he didn’t think it was right to strike over the pensions for future workers, for people we don’t even know. His co-workers countered by arguing that the future workers affected by accepting the cuts in the pensions, “could be our kids.” Another said it was important to maintain the unity of different generations in the workforce. He pointed out that in the future, it would be likely that the government would try to cut the medical benefits or pension payments to “us when we retire. And it will be important for the guys working then to remember that we stood up for them, so they will stand up for us and keep them from cutting our benefits.” Similar discussions occurred elsewhere around the city, clearly and concretely reflecting the tendency for workers to see themselves as a class, to look beyond the barriers of generation that capitalism seeks to use to divide them against themselves.

Other workers driving by the picket lines honked their horns in solidarity and yelled cheers of support. In Brooklyn, a group of teachers at a nearby elementary school expressed their solidarity by discussing the strike with their students and brought their classes of students ranging in age from 9-12 years old to visit the picket line. The kids brought Christmas cards to the strikers with messages like, “We support you. You are fighting for respect.”

The children were assigned by their teachers to interview the strikers, and the kids asked the workers what kind of jobs they did and why they were striking.

The day after the strike was over, one of our comrades boarded a city bus and had a conversation with the driver that illustrated the strides made in this struggle. After he paid his fair he told the driver, a 35-year old Latino worker, “You guys did the right thing.”
The driver responded, “But we didn’t win. We went to back to work without a contract.”

“But what really matters is what you did. You said don’t fuck with pensions, workers need to stick together, no matter what. It’s an important example for other workers,” said our comrade.

To this the driver replied, “Yeah, it’s true. It was important that we stood up for the working class.”

Impact of the Struggle on Other Workers

The transit strike became a point of reference for workers in other industries. Alongside the displays of support and solidarity mentioned above, there were countless other examples. Non-transit workers were welcomed at the picket lines. In one instance, a group of striking NYU graduate assistants visited the picket line in Brooklyn, introduced themselves and discussed strike issues and strategies with the workers. In countless workplaces around the city, other workers in other industries talked about the importance of the solidarity being exemplified on the defense of pensions. Among municipal workers, many of whom had gone for 3 or more years without a new contract, the transit workers adherence to the slogan of “no contract, no work” showed the importance of struggle.

So strong was the sympathy for the strikers that the capitalist media’s own surveys showed that Roger Toussaint, the president of the transit workers union, scored a higher approval rating than the mayor of the governor on the first day of the strike. The existence of $1.02 billion Metropolitan Transit Authority surplus made management’s hard line appear particularly harsh and ruthless to other workers. The bourgeoisie countered with an all out campaign on day two of the strike to demonize the strikers. The tabloids, like the Post and the Daily News, called the strikers “rats” and “cowards.” Even the liberal New York Times denounced the strike as “irresponsible” and “illegal.”

The theme of “illegality” was picked up by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki. Pataki declared that the strike was criminal and that no negotiations would occur until the strikers returned to their jobs. Bloomberg echoed this stance, denouncing strikers as “thugs” and “criminals.” The billionaire mayor suddenly championed the cause of poorer workers who were being inconvenienced by the strike, supposedly suffering at the hands of the striking, comparatively well paid transit workers. For his part, Toussaint denounced the mayor and governor for their outrageous accusations, and championed the transit workers against the “insults.”

Television news reports focused on the hardships inflicted by the strike on people trying to carpool to work or walking over the city’s East River bridges to get to work in Manhattan. But even after this media barrage, the city’s rulers knew working class solidarity with the strike remained strong. A local judge threatened to jail union leaders and fine individual strikers for defying a court injunction to stop the strike and return to work, but Mayor Bloomberg urged that the court should increase the fines, and not jail the union leaders, which would make Toussaint “a martyr” and risk provoking sympathy strikes by other public sector employees.

The illegality of the strike itself triggered considerable discussion within the working class throughout the city, and around the country as well. How could it be illegal for workers to protest by withdrawing their labor? asked many workers. As one worker said in a discussion at a school in Manhattan, “It almost seems like you’re only allowed to go on strike, if you won’t have any effect.”

The Role of Union in Sabotaging the Struggle

Many workers were painfully aware that the union’s new, militant leadership had capitulated three years ago to a contract that gave 0% raise the first year, and 3% in the second and third years. The union was thus pressured by the rising militancy and anger of the workers to act more militantly in the current situation. While the base unionist/leftist led Transit Workers Union Local 100 clearly controlled the strike, employed militant rhetoric and adapted the language of solidarity to maintain firm control of the strike, the role of the union was nonetheless to undermine the struggle and minimize the impact of this important strike. Early in the strike the unions abandoned the demand for 8% annual wage increases for three years, and focused entirely on the pension. The union meeting that voted on the strike authorization permitted no discussion or debate but was conducted as a union rally, featuring a demagogic address by Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The collusion between union and management was revealed in a post-strike report in the New York Times. All the vicious name-calling between the union and government officials was a sham. While the mayor and the governor were stridently screaming that a return to work was a precondition for the resumption of negotiations, secret negotiations were in fact underway at the Helmsley Hotel, and the mayor secretly accepted a proposal by Toussaint to have management withdraw the pension demands in exchange for an increase in worker contributions to their medical care coverage to compensate the government for the cost of maintaining the pensions for future workers.

This union-government orchestrated end to the struggle is of course not surprising, but simply a confirmation of the anti-working class nature of the trade union apparatus, and in no way undercuts the significance of the important gains made in the development of class consciousness. It reminds us of the important tasks that remain ahead for the working class in breaking free of the union straight jacket and taking control of the struggle into their own hands.

– Internationalism, December 2005

The massive mobilisation of students in France against the attacks of the Chirac/Villepin/Sarkozy government which wants to impose the “Contrat Première Embauche”[1] [82] (CPE) by force, is part of the present resurgence of the international proletarian struggle. This movement is nothing  like previous inter-classist movements of young students. It is part of the struggle of  the whole working class. From the outset, this movement has been firmly on a working class terrain, against economic attacks, against the “no future” that capitalism promises the younger generations. The students in struggle have been able to put to one side their own specific demands (such as the reform of the system of LMD diplomas) and instead have put forward a common demand of the whole working class: “No to the CPE! No to precarious work, to lay-offs and unemployment!”.

The movement’s strength lies above all in the growing and active SOLIDARITY in the struggle. The students (and the high school students) have understood that unity is strength, and have closed ranks to put into practice that old slogan of the workers’ movement: “All for one, and one for all!”. This is how they have been able to draw in behind them the teachers and office personnel who have held their own general assemblies (“assemblées générales” or AG). The students in the universities have opened their AG to their own parents and other workers, and even to pensioners (at Paris 3 Censier in particular). They have asked them to speak and to help with their “ideas”. A kind of “suggestions box” has been carried around in the street, in the AG, in supermarkets, at workplaces, on the Internet, etc. This is how the most conscious and determined battalions of the movement have been able to make solidarity come alive and widen their struggle to take in the whole working class!

The mass general assemblies are the heart of the movement 

The day following the 7th March demonstration mass student general assemblies spread throughout the universities of Paris and the provinces: Villepin,[2] [83] the “man of iron”, stuck to his hard line; the CPE was voted in by the National Assembly because it was out of the question that the “street should rule” (as the ex-prime minister Raffarin said in 2003, when he pushed through his reform of the pension system in order to throw old wage slaves into poverty after enduring 40 years of exploitation!) The students have not given in. The lecture halls where the AG are held have been filled to overflowing, the spontaneous demonstrations have multiplied, especially in the capital. The students have lifted the media blackout and forced them to break their law of silence and lies.

The ten days from the 8th March to the 18th have “shaken the world” of the French ruling class. The students have increasingly organised in one direction and one only: SOLIDARITY and UNITY with the whole working class.

In the capital this dynamic has spread out from Censier, which has been in the vanguard of the movement towards the extension and the centralisation of the workers’ counter-attack.

In the AG the workers who were “passing by” have been welcomed with open arms. They have been invited to participate in the discussions, to contribute their own experience. All those who have taken part in the AG in Paris and in several other provincial towns (notably Toulouse) have been astonished by the capacity of the young generation  to place its creativity at the service of the class struggle. At Censier especially, the richness of the discussion, the sense of responsibility of the students who have been elected by the strike committee, their ability to organise the movement, to run the assembly, to allow all those who want to expresses their point of view to do so, to convince others and to unmask the saboteurs through the confrontation of arguments in the discussion has fully confirmed the vitality and the strength of the young generations of the working class.

The students have constantly defended the sovereign character of the AG, with their delegates who are elected and revocable (on the basis of mandates and the giving back of mandates), by open votes in the assembly. Every day a different team (including both unionised and non-unionised students) chairs the discussions.

In order to be able to share out the tasks, to centralise, to coordinate and to keep the control of the movement, the strike committee of Paris 3 – Censier has decided to elect different commissions: Press, “Animation and Reflection” to think about wider issues, Welcome and Information etc.

It is thanks to this real “democracy” in the AG and the centralisation of the struggle that the students have been able to decide on what action to take, with their principle concern being how to spread the movement to the workplace.

The dynamic spreading the movement to the whole of the working class

The students have clearly understood that the success of their struggle is in the hands of the wage workers (as one of the students said during a meeting of the Île de France Coordination of 8th March “if we remain isolated, they’ll make a meal of us”). The more the Villepin government refuses to budge, the more determined the students become. The harder Sarkozy[3] [84] hits the more angry the workers get and the more the “voters” grumble.

The wage workers most accustomed to the class struggle (and the less stupid fractions of the bourgeoisie) know that this confrontation carries with it the threat of the mass strike (and not the general strike put forwards by certain unions and the anarchists) if the ruling “rabble” remains caught up in its present irrational “logic”.

This dynamic towards the movement’s extension, towards the mass strike, has appeared since the outset of the students’ mobilisation and has been expressed throughout the country, through large delegations to workers near the places of education.[4] [85] They have come up against the unions’ “blockage”[5] [86] and the workers have remained shut up in their workplaces without being able to discuss with the student delegations. The “little Sioux”[6] [87] of the Paris universities have been very imaginative in finding means to overcome the union blockage.

In order to mobilise the workers, the students have proved rich in imagination. Censier have used a cardboard box called the “box of ideas”. In some universities (such as Paris Jussieu), they have had the idea of taking to the street, to address passers-by about the reasons for their anger, and asking for ideas for the “box” because “all ideas are worth looking at”. This has been particularly the case in relation to the workers who have passed by or who have come to show their solidarity, who the students have asked to place their ideas in the “box” in order that they can try to put them into practice. Thanks to their experience, they have been able to sort out the “good ideas” (which go in the direction of strengthening the movement) from the “bad ideas” (which weaken and sabotage the struggle in order to leave the students open to repression, as we saw with the idea of “occupying the Sorbonne”).

In many universities, and especially those at the forefront of the movement, the students have opened the lecture halls where the AG are held to wage workers, the unemployed, and even pensioners. They have asked them to pass on their experience of the workplace. They are eager to learn from the older generations. And the “elders” have been eager to learn from the “youngsters”. As the “youngsters” have gained in maturity, the “elders” have rediscovered their youth! This osmosis between the generations has given a whole new impetus to the movement. The struggle’s greatest strength, and its finest victory, is the struggle itself! It is the solidarity and the unity of the whole working class in all its generations and in every sector.

This victory has been won not in parliament but in the university lecture halls. Sadly for the government, its spies in the AG have understood nothing. They have been unable to give Mr Villepin any “ideas”. The Villepin/Sarkozy/Chirac infernal trio have run out of “ideas”. They have thus had to show the true face of bourgeois democracy: repression.

The violence of the police state shows that of bourgeoisie has “no future”

The student movement is far more than a simple protest against the CPE. As a teacher from Paris-Tolbiac University said at  the 7th March demonstration “The CPE is not only a real and specific economic attack, it is also a symbol”. It is indeed a symbol of the bankruptcy of the capitalist economy.

This is also an implicit response to the  police “errors” (which in the autumn of 2005 caused the “accidental” death of two young innocents  denounced as “ burglars” by a “citizen” and chased by the cops). Putting a pyromaniac (Sarkozy) in charge of the Interior Ministry has demonstrated the bourgeoisie’s inability to draw the lessons of its own history: it has forgotten that police “errors” (amongst others, the death of Malik Oussékine in 1986[7] [88]) became factors in the radicalisation of the workers’ struggles. Today, the repression of the students of the Sorbonne who only wanted to hold an AG (and who did not burn books as the mendacious Mr de Robien has tried to claim) does nothing but strengthen the students’ determination. All the bourgeoisie and its hired media hacks have been endlessly spreading lies about the students being “hoodlums” (or “rabble” to use Sarkozy’s gentlemanly term for the youth of the suburbs).

But the lies have been too gross, and the working class has not been taken in. The violence of the hoodlums of the bourgeoisie has revealed the violence of the capitalist system and its “democratic” state. A system that has thrown millions of workers onto the street, which has reduced pensioners to poverty after exploiting them for 40 years, a system that imposes its “law and order” with police truncheons. Mr Villepin continues to play deaf, and has demonstrated the truth of the old joke: “dictatorship means ‘shut your mouth’, democracy means ‘talk all you like – we’re not listening’”. But the Villepin/Sarkozy/Chirac trio has gone one better: they’ve invented the slogan “talk all you like and shut your mouth”.

And as they hang on to power these gentlemen have enjoyed the “solidarity” of the media, and above all of its prime instrument of ideological intoxication: the TV news. The media’s ignoble pictures aim to stir up an exhibitionist fascination for pointless violence, to manipulate the crowds, and to corrupt the workers’ consciousness. But the more the TV piles it on to intimidate and paralyse the working class, the more they turn our stomachs (to the point where they even disgust the electorate of the Right).

It is precisely because  the new generations of the working class and its most conscious battalions hold the key to the future, that they have refused to fall for the provocation of the police state (and the imprisoning forces of the unions). They have refused to use the pointless and desperate violence of the bourgeoisie, of the young rioters in the suburbs, or of a few over-excited  “anarchos” and “leftists”.

The children of the working class who are in the vanguard of the student movement are the only ones who can open up a perspective for the whole of society. This perspective, the working class can only develop thanks to its historical vision, to its confidence in its own strength, thanks to its patience and also its humour (to use Lenin’s words). It is precisely because the bourgeoisie is a class with no historic future that the Villepin clique is panicking and can only use the same pointless violence of “no future” as the young rioters.

Mr Villepin’s determination not to give way to the students’ demands (the withdrawal of the CPE) shows one more thing: the world bourgeoisie will never give up power through the pressure of the ballot box. If it is to get rid of capitalism and to build a real human world community, the working class will be obliged, in the future, to defend itself by force against the violence of the state and all the hangers-on of its repressive apparatus. But proletarian class violence has nothing whatever to do with the methods of terrorism or with the riots in the suburbs (as the bourgeoisie’s propaganda would have it, to justify its  policing, its repression of the workers, of the students and of course, of real communist militants).

The counter-offensive of the ruling class to sabotage and corrupt the movement

In order to try and push through its economic and police attacks the bourgeoisie has laid mines around the counter-attack against the CPE. First, they counted on the university and school holidays to disperse the students’ anger. But the students are no goody-goody choirboys (even if some of them still go to church, or to the mosque). They kept up their mobilisation and have reinforced it since the holidays. Obviously, the unions have been present in the movement from the outset and have done their utmost to infiltrate it.

But they never foresaw that they would completely lose their grip in most of the university towns.

In Paris for example, more than a thousand students gathered outside Paris 3 Censier to go together to the demonstration. When they discovered that the CGT[8] [89] had already unfurled their banners at the front of the demonstration in order to lead it, the students used all sorts of transportation and the vitality of their own legs to get to the front of the unions. At the head of the demonstration, they unfurled their own banners, emblazoned with unifying slogans: “University and school students, unemployed workers, workers of the private and public sectors, temporary workers, all in the same struggle against unemployment and insecure work!”.

The CGT was made to look ridiculous. It found itself tailing the students behind a multitude of banners: “CGT Engineers”, “CGT RAPT”,[9] [90] etc., etc. Behind each of the CGT’s enormous red banners were to be found a handful of militants, completely disoriented. To beef up their troops, the cadres of the Stalinist party of Maurice Thorez (who after World War II asked the striking miners and Renault workers to go back to work and to “roll up their sleeves” because “strikes are a weapon of the monopoly trusts”) tried to shout a few radical slogans. They tried to drown out the students with their loudspeakers. The cadres of the CGT and the FRENCH “Communist” Party tried to stir up their troops by getting them to sing the Internationale. The old Stalinist dinosaurs only made themselves look still more ridiculous. Many demonstrators and passers-by on the sidewalks roared with laughter. You heard comments like “It looks like Spitting Image”.[10] [91]

That same night the leader of the CGT Bernard Thibault said on TV: “it is true that there was an unforeseen aspect to the demonstration”.

The unions have unmasked themselves with their own manoeuvres. And Mr de Robien has still not understood this with his “indignation” at the acts of vandalism by the “students” at the Sorbonne (waving a few books torn up by the bourgeois specialists in manipulation) and his pretence that “the students’ revolt is being led by a tiny minority”. Mr Robien has put his glasses on the wrong way round. It is indeed a small minority that runs, not the movement, but the whole of human society. A minority that produces nothing but exploitation and repression against the great majority of the productive class.

The unions, CGT and FO,[11] [92] have not gotten over their nasty surprise on 7th March. This is why some of the more intelligent TV journalists have been saying that “the unions have been humiliated”. They have also been humiliated by the students spontaneous demonstrations on 14th March. Incapable of restraining their fury against their “humiliators”, against the workers who have shown their active solidarity with the students during the demonstration of 16th March, the unions have ended up revealing in public, and in front of the cameras, their complicity with the troops of Mr Sarkozy.

In Paris, the stewards provided by the CGT (linked to the Stalinist party) and by FO (founded after World War II with CIA funding) were at the head of the demonstration, hand in hand, facing the CRS.[12] [93] Suddenly, the union cordon disappeared as if by magic to let a few petty “kamikazes” who had infiltrated the demonstration move off towards the Sorbonne in order to play cat and mouse with the cops. All those who saw the new scenes of violence first hand have said that it was thanks to the unions’ march stewards that Villepin/Sarkozy could get out their truncheons and fill up the Black Marias.

Above all, the constant TV images of violent confrontations that have followed the Paris demonstration have been used to generate fear before the demonstration of 18th March. There are many workers and youths who intended to take part and who may now give up for fear of this violence.

The TV news anchormen have been able to announce the good news: the movement is “dying down” (according to the TV news on 16th March).

Those who want the movement to die down are the accomplices of Sarkozy, the forces of union control. And the working class is beginning to understand this. Behind their “radical” and hypocritical talk, the unions want to save the government’s skin.

The Stalinist party and its CGT deserve their place in the pantheon of Jurassic Park (alongside the brontosaurs of the UMP).[13] [94] If until the unions have been unable so far to play their part as social firemen, it’s because the pyromaniacs Sarkozy/Villepin set fire to their banners on 16th March.

And if the workers have come to support the students in struggle, it is because they have seen the unions in their workplaces contributing to the media blackout of the mass general assemblies.

Since the 7th March demonstration, the unions have dragged their feet, they have twisted and turned in every way imaginable to paralyse the workers. They have carried out all sorts of manoeuvres in order to divide and dissipate the workers’ anger. They have tried to sabotage the students’ movement. They have radicalised their language – very late in the day – by “demanding” the withdrawal of the CPE before opening negotiations (this does not mean that they have stopped negotiating behind the workers' backs). They have even threatened a “general strike” in order to make the government “give in”. They have openly declared that they do not want the workers to mobilise in solidarity with the students. Their backs are to the wall, and now they have tried to slip the ace of trumps out of their sleeves: by using a few over-excited kids to keep the violence going.

The only way out of this political crisis for the French bourgeoisie, is to clean up the façade of the republican state. And this present is being offered to Mr Villepin on a sliver platter by the PS/PCF/Greens[14] [95] who have all united to “put their case” against the CPE to the Constitutional Council.[15] [96] This “helping hand” from the PS may let the government may let the government off the CPE hook by appealing to the “12 wise men”:[16] [97] then it could stick to the Raffarin formula “it’s not the street that rules”, with the addition that “it’s the 12 pensioners of the Constitutional Council who do”!

The greatest victory is the struggle itself 

In wanting to “power-cleanse” the Sorbonne students (and their comrades who had come to bring them food) Mr Sarkozy has opened a Pandora’s box. And the Villepin/Sarkozy government have pulled out of this box of “black ideas” the workers’ “false friends”: the unions.

The world proletariat can therefore thank the French government. By brandishing the scarecrow of Le Pen[17] [98] at the last presidential elections, the red-white-and-blue ruling class has managed to put in power the world’s most imbecile Right-wing. A Right-wing that has adopted policies worthy of a “banana republic”!

However this movement plays out, it is already a victory for the whole working class.

Thanks to the new generation, the working class has succeeded in breaking the unions “blockage” of class solidarity. Every sector of the proletariat, especially the new generations, have lived through a rich experience that will leave a profound mark on their consciousness.

This experience belongs to the world proletariat. Despite the blackout of the “official” media, the “parallel” media, “untamed” cameras and other “free” radios – as well as the revolutionary press – will make it possible for the world proletariat to make this experience their own. For this is only one episode in the world wide struggle of the working class. It is part of a whole series of struggles that have taken place since 2003 and that have confirmed that the working class throughout the industrial countries are overcoming the retreat that they have suffered due to all of the campaigns unleashed by the bourgeoisie after the 1989 collapse of the Eastern bloc and of all the regimes that claimed to be working class and socialist. One of the essential characteristics of these struggles has been the revival of solidarity between workers. Thus in two of the most important countries in the capitalist world – the United States and United Kingdom – this solidarity has lain at the origin of workers’ struggles. Just before Christmas 2005, the New York transit workers went on strike not for themselves but in order to preserve for young workers who would be hired in the future the same retirement benefits that they enjoy today. Similarly the strike, during several days in the autumn of 2005, of the baggage handlers at London Heathrow airport, was in solidarity with the workers in the catering sector who were the victims of an brutal attack by their employer Gate Gourmet.

These strikes were particularly significant of an unfolding tendency towards the development of struggles that has not stopped since the end of the 2003 movements for the defence of pensions in France and in Austria, which saw its biggest street demonstrations since World War II. The same tendency found expression in 2004 in Germany in the car workers’ struggle (at Daimler-Chrysler and at Opel especially) which clearly posed the question of workers’ solidarity against lay-offs. The same tendency was once again confirmed in Spain, in December 2005, at SEAT in Barcelona where the workers fought outside of and against the unions who had signed “the deal of shame” behind their backs to lay off of 600 of their comrades.

The students’ movement in France is therefore part of a struggle that is developing on a historical scale and whose final outcome will allow the human species to escape the dead-end of capitalist barbarism. The young generations who have engaged in the struggle on the terrain of the working class today have opened the door to this future. We can have confidence in them: all over the planet, they will continue preparing a new world freed from competition, profit, exploitation, poverty, and bloody chaos.

Clearly, the road that leads to the overthrow of capitalism will be long full of difficulty and dangers of every kind, but it has begun to be cleared.

International Communist Current, 17th March 2006

As we went to press, the situation in New York City transit remains unresolved. The tentative agreement which ended the 3-day strike that paralyzed New York before Christmas was narrowly rejected by a 7-vote margin out of more that 22,000 votes cast (more than 11,000 workers did not vote). The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) responded to the contract rejection with a provocation, proposing an offer  even more onerous than the original one they had quickly abandoned at the beginning of the first  round of negotiations, declaring an impasse and requesting that the state impose binding arbitration. The state public employees labor relations board put this request for binding arbitration on hold for two weeks, and directed the two parties to resume negotiations. There are indications that both management and the union leadership may wait out the uproar and push the rejected contract through in another ratification vote. Meanwhile workers, who already lost wages for the 3 days they did not work in December, are now receiving legal notice from the MTA that they will forfeit an additional 2 days wages each day they were on strike, for a total of six days wages. These wages will be deducted from their checks during March.

As we noted in our statement on the MTA strike published on the internationalism.org Website, this “was the most significant workers’ struggle in the U.S. in 15 years,” because of its international context, the development of class consciousness exhibited by the striking workers,  and the potential impact of the struggle on other workers (the importance of solidarity, resistance to further attempts to slash pensions). Events since December confirm the validity of this analysis.

The transit struggle occurred in an international context in which the working class worldwide is going through a process of returning to class struggle after a decade and a half of disorientation since the collapse of the imperialist bloc system that had prevailed since the end of World War II. The deepening global economic crisis and the escalation of attacks on the working class standard of living has pushed the proletariat into action in an increasing number of countries, including the U.S.  As we noted in December, “The primary task posed by these nascent struggles in many countries was not the extension of struggles across geographic and industrial sector lines, but the reacquisition of consciousness at the most basic levels, of class self-identity and solidarity.”

 This process was clearly demonstrated in the transit strike,  by the clarity by which workers refused to accept the time-honored management-union tactic of trading the erosion of wages and pensions for future workers in exchange for wages for currently employed workers. Instead they willingly defied the repressive New York State Taylor’s prohibition of public sector strikes and imposition of mandatory forefeiture of two days’ wages for each day of strike, and waged the struggle to defend the pensions of the next generation of workers.

The contract rejection reflects the confluence of several factors. First many workers clearly understood the sell out by the union, which originated the crucial proposal that led to the tentative agreement: offering to have workers contribute 1.5% of their wages to help finance medical benefits if management withdrew the demand to have future workers contribute 6% of their wages to the pension fund. In this instance the union proposed to trade the wages of the currently employed workers to finance the pensions of future workers, which is just as unacceptable as the original proposal. Management actually bragged that the tentative agreement was better for them financially over the life of the three year contract than their original plan to have new employees contribute to the pension fund, as it traded the 6% of the salaries of the relatively few new workers that would be hired each year for 1.5% of the wages of the entire 34,000-member workforce.

Second, many workers were angered by the bourgeoisie’s unrelenting propaganda campaign which tried to drive home the message that struggle does not pay. Over and over the media broadcast the message that the strike had been lost, that the workers were losing more by striking in terms of the Taylor law fines and 1.5% payment for medical benefits than if they had accepted management’s offer.

Third, a minority faction on the executive board played opportunistically to this disenchantment with the contract settlement by campaigning for a “no vote.”

Like all “votes” under capitalism, the contract referendum was a no-win proposition for the workers. No matter what the result the workers would inevitably be screwed: ratification would validate a 1.5% salary cut; rejection would leave the workers in the current predicament of being without a contract, with the momentum for struggle definitively broken, and little perspective to improve the contract. This explains why fully one-third of the workers chose not to vote.

The current confluence of events, including the unrelenting MTA propaganda against the contract which attempted to minimize any notion that workers had “won,” and the factional disputes within the union, ironically opened the door to questioning the credibility of the unions, which had not really been posed during the struggle in December. It did so by exposing very clearly the nature of the union sell-out, originally presented, as always, as a union “victory” by union leadership, and by exposing the dead-end offered by union dissidents. Having eked out a triumph in the ratification vote, the dissidents had nothing to offer, no strategy, no tactics, just posturing. It won’t be surprising if union and management stall for a while and then resubmit the same agreement for another vote. Workers have to take struggles into their own hands and go outside the union straight jacket to advance their struggle.

Meanwhile the example of the transit workers resistance to attacks on theis pensions has resonated with other workers in all sectors, especially the public sector. Municipal union leaders in New York have expressed worries that their members will now become increasingly difficult to control, as the threat of the Taylor Law prohibiting strikes has proven ineffective in staunching the militant will to struggle. This is particularly significant as contracts for public sector workers come up for negotiation in the months ahead, in New York, in other cities around the U.S. and even in other countries, where the transit struggle has stood as a shining example of workers’ solidarity.. -JG, 25/3/06.

George W. Bush is worried about the future. He thinks there are too many of us living too long and if we live to too ripe an old age we’re going to break the government’s piggy bank, draining all that money out for social security pensions and medicare. Having failed last year to slash the living daylights out of the social security system, now he’s ordered the creation of a special commission to investigate the impact of the impending retirement of millions of baby boomers. What the pension crisis shows unequivocally is that capitalism is mired in economic crisis, is bankrupt and offers no future for humanity. It is no longer fit to rule.

In response to growing global economic crisis, the capitalist state in every country pursues policies designed to make the working class bear the brunt of the crisis. This includes above all a concerted effort to slash to the bone the social wage—that portion of the cost of reproduction of the working class paid directly by the state. In nation after nation the ‘welfare state’ is being dismantled wholesale, cutting the standard of living to make the working class bear the brunt of the economic crisis. In the U.S. the government and its media deprecate these “benefits” by talking about the need to trim “entitlements” from the federal budget, as if we were spoiled children with inappropriate expectations of what we’re entitled to.

At the same time that the government is trying to rid us of our false sense of entitlement, contributory pension plans at the workplace, both in the public and private sectors, are under fierce attack. The pension crisis is so serious that a recent New York Times editorial reported, “traditional corporate pension plans are disappearing” (NYT Feb. 5, 2006).  In the troubled airlines industry, company after company has been permitted by the state to simply abandon financial obligations for their pension plans as part of their bankruptcy court settlements. Pension plans in the auto industry, at GM and Ford, will soon follow suit. Of course the state has an entirely less charitable and forgiving attitude about permitting financially strapped workers to walk away from their financial obligations, as evidenced by the recent federal legislation tightening up personal bankruptcy policies.

So serious is the trend towards collapse of private pension funds, that the federal agency that bails out these failed pension plans and assumes responsibility for payments to retirees (paying  perhaps 25% of what workers were legally entitled to) has paid out so much, and   is now operating with more than a $24 billion deficit. IBM has announced a freeze on its pension plan, and, like the government and other private companies is trying to put the onus for retirement income on workers themselves by pushing employees to open up 401(k) retirement saving account, which have now become the norm. But this is an impossible solution. Since the standard of living is so much under attack,  American workers and other strata are increasingly forced to live beyond their means, accumulating massive personal debt to the point where in 2005 for the first time since 1933, there was a negative savings rate. According to the Times, 401(k)’s are “now the main retirement plan for 42 million Americans, about half the work force.” However, at the same time, “half of the people with 401(k)’s have saved less than $20,000; and about one-third of households have saved nothing for retirement” (NYT Feb. 5, 2006).

 In a nutshell, the message is work until you drop. This applies especially to the poorest sections of the working class, whose life expectancy is well below the national average. 

A new society is needed

Remember the ‘leisure society’? Not so long ago we were being told that with the increase in automation we would all have much more leisure time. Unfortunately things don’t work like that under capitalism, which can only squeeze profit from living labor power, and which uses technological developments to intensify its exploitation. Far from having a laid-back leisure society, we have seen massive global unemployment on the one hand, and a brutal lengthening of the working day on the other. The current attempt to lengthen working lives is just another prong of this same attack.

None of it is justified on the criterion of human need. If we could end the gigantic waste of human labor power that capitalism pours down the drain of unemployment, of military production, and a whole host of useless unproductive activities (advertising, bureaucracy, etc…); if new machines could be used to reduce the burden of work rather than speed it up – then there could be massive reductions in the working day, or the working week, or the working life. And if, in Marx’s words, labor was transformed from “a means of life to life’s prime need”, to a truly creative activity, there would in any case be no more need for this rigid separation between work and leisure and work and retirement.

All this, however, can only come about through the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a world communist society. This in turn will only become a real possibility through a vast development of class struggle and of class consciousness. But the capitalist crisis and the attacks on workers’ living standards provide the material foundations for this development. The attempt to ‘reform’ pensions, in particular, has already led to large-scale mobilizations of workers in France and Austria, and the recent strike by transit workers in New York shows that the same could happen in the U.S. These attacks are directed against all workers: they can thus help workers see the need for a united response. They are being spearheaded by the state: they can thus help workers see that the state is not their protector but the boss of all the bosses, their principal enemy. And they are an assault on our very future: they can thus help workers see that they must make their own future.

In 1880, when Germany’s ‘Iron Chancellor’ Bismarck introduced a national insurance system, he said: “Whoever has a pension for his old age is far more content and far easier to handle than one who has no such prospect” and will “put up with much more because he a has pension to look forward to”.

What the pensions crisis is showing is that workers have less and less to look forward to from capitalism.—Internationalism

Canada’s recent federal election has brought the Conservative Party, under Stephen Harper, to power for the first time in 13 years and sealed the collapse of the Liberal regime mired in corruption scandals. The bourgeois media and political pundits across Canada have been buzzing with anticipation of what changes the new Conservative government will bring to a nation proud of its international reputation for “tolerance,” “openness,” “peace,” and a generous social welfare system.

The ruling Liberal minority government was forced to call the election in December 2004 when it lost a vote of confidence in Parliament after the NDP(New Democratic Party) refused to support its budget proposal following the publication of the Gomery commission’s report into the Quebec “sponsorship” scandal. This report detailed the involvement of high-level Liberal Party figures in a corruption scheme that saw large sums of money diverted from a federal program to promote federalism in Quebec into the hands of Liberal Party hacks.

The Liberal Party, already mired in Quebec corruption scandal, narrowly won a minority victory in the last election during the summer of 2004, and clung to power with the support of the left NDP, as it beat back several attempts by the newly united and energized Conservative Party – with occasional help from the separatists of the Bloc Quebecois—to bring down the government. Faced with a need to rejuvenate its electoral mystification after 13 years of Liberal rule, growing corruption scandals undermining the government’s legitimacy,  and a need to stabilize the government, the Canadian bourgeoisie clearly saw the necessity to change the ruling team, even if it did not see the need for a drastic change in either international or domestic policy.

In order to accomplish this, the Canadian media went to work making sure to stoke enough anger over the corruption scandal to bring the Liberal government down, but at the same time instill enough fear over an unchecked Conservative government (the only other party capable of winning enough votes to form a government) to make sure they did not win enough of a mandate at the polls to enact the most radical elements of their domestic agenda.

In the months leading up to the election, the media and the various opposing parties ran a two-prong scare campaign, which on the one hand fed the anger over the corruption scandal, while on the hand warned sober-minded Canadians that a Conservative government could mean greater restrictions on the right to an abortion, an end to the recognition of gay marriages, the returns of the death penalty, further attacks on the national health system, the possible secession of Quebec, increased subservience to the U.S., and Canadian participation in American imperialist adventures.

Even the media in the United States got into the act, welcoming a new Conservative government as a step toward repairing the two countries’ relationship, which had become severely strained under the Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin and the Bush administration.

The result of the media campaign would seem to be just what the Canadian state ordered: a minority Conservative government –a new ruling team with a new face, but lacking the national mandate necessary to enact its most radical domestic program.

Despite the campaign hype, the ascension of the Conservative Party to power will not change the historic situation of the working class in Canada, nor will it significantly alter the dynamic at work in the  international relations between capitalist states, which is pushing even the Canadian bourgeoisie to increasingly go its own way, to look out for its own interests and formulate its own imperialist policy distinct from its erstwhile allies.

Immediately after being sworn in as Prime Minister it became clear that Stephen Harper possesses little desire to see his nation’s imperialist interests subsumed to the U.S. One of his fist acts in office was to call for the construction of a fleet of military icebreakers to patrol the Northwest Passage –the series of straits and bys surrounding Canada’s Arctic islands that link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans—in order to defend against the incursion of military submarines from other nations, especially the U.S.!

While this may seem like a minor issue in the scope of the imperialist confrontations rocking the globe today, the Northwest Passage is expected to become an increasingly important shipping lane, as global warming melts the ice cap that currently engulfs much of the area for the better part of the year. Canada’s current attempt to assert its sovereignty over these waters represents a clear effort to send a message to all other nations that it will defend these waters in the future, with force if necessary. Harper’s announcement was immediately met with a public rebuke from the U.S. ambassador, who forcefully stated his country’s case that the Passage is international waters.

In fact the row over the Northwest Passage represents a continuity with, and the latest entry, in a growing list of Canadian provocations against the U.S. that began under the Liberal regime. From the dispute over fishing rights in the Dixon Entrance, to Canadian protests against the U.S.’s alleged violation of the NAFTA treaty by imposing duties on softwood lumber; from vocal public outcry over the acquittal of U.S. fighter pilots who “accidentally” bombed Canadian troops in Afghanistan while high on speed, to Martin’s refusal to participate in the Bush administration’s plan for a continent-wide “ballistic missile shield,” the Canadian government has taken an increasingly provocative stance against its southern neighbor in a way that has gotten the attention of an American bourgeoisie, until recently basically content to ignore Canada.

As a result, the U.S. has fired back, banning imports of Canadian beef on several occasions over fears of Mad Cow disease, loudly criticizing Canada’s supposedly lax immigration policies that have allegedly allowed terrorists to infiltrate the continent, and going public with a plan to require Canadian citizens traveling to the U.S. to present passports by 2007.  Canada has not allowed these slights over the border to pass without retaliation. Harper has announced plans to arm Canadian border officials in response to the growing number of “criminals” crossing into Canada from the U.S. Moreover, crossing into Canada is no longer a simple affair for many American tourists, who now often have to undergo extensive questioning at the border.

While Harper has announced plans to cooperate more closely with the U.S. in the “war on terror,” strengthen and re-equip the Canadian military and take a more active role in Afghanistan, this should not be seen as a major reversal from prior Liberal policies. In fact, any increased “cooperation” with the U.S. will in reality only serve as an umbrella under which the Canadian state attempts to strengthen its own hand and play its own imperialist card. In this sense, Harper’s plan to take Canada out of the Kyoto environmental accords is not a capitulation to U.S. pressure, but an attempt to assert Canadian independence against both the U.S. and Europe.

On the domestic level, the new Conservative government is unlikely to take the country in any dramatically new direction either. In fact, the major issues affecting the working class-that the media focused on during the campaign to stoke fears about what might have happened under Conservative rule --were actually policies first formulated by the Liberal regime. Chief among these is the dire warning about the progressive dismantling of Canada’s previous comparatively generous social wage system, primarily through cuts to the country’s expensive national health care system that the Conservatives would supposedly implement. However, what this  propaganda fails to explain was that this attack on the healthcare system, and on other elements of the social wage in general, was already well under way under the Liberals. Harper’s policies, and those of his provincial protégés in Alberta, are little more than advanced expressions of the logic rooted in the very nature of the global capitalist economic crisis itself that forces the bourgeoisie to progressively attack the living and working conditions of the working class throughout the world. Canada is no exception.

The Canadian media was to some degree successful in lining the Conservatives’ policy on healthcare to the ideology of the “right-wing movement” in the U.S., through the themes of “privatization” and “neo-liberalism,” further feeding fears that the Conservative government would accelerate Canada’s assimilation with the U.S. Nevertheless, these policies do not differ in any fundamental way from what a Liberal or NDP government would be compelled by the very logic of capitalism to do: attack the living standard of the working class.

On the social level, the excitement about abortion, gay marriage and crime was used to maximum effect during the election campaign to divide and distract the working class from class issues. On crime, Harper has announced plans to “crack down” on gun crime and other violent offenses that are becoming increasingly more common in Canada’s large cities. These are the same cities hailed as safe, multi-cultural utopias in American leftist Michael Moore’s film “Bowling for Columbine.” In fact, Winnipeg’s violent crime rate is about the same as New York City, while Toronto has witnessed several high profile shootings involving youth, and Vancouver is becoming a central hub for violent Sikh and other Asian gangs.

While growing crime clearly reflects the effects of capitalist social decomposition, it is without doubt that the Canadian state’s attempts to strengthen its repressive apparatus will do little to make the cities safer. In fact, they  will only give the state more tools to crack down on the working class, when the later begins to respond to capitalism’s attacks on its own class terrain.

When all is said and done, the recent Canadian elections mean no qualitative change for the condition of the working class in that country. Moreover, while the Canadian bourgeoisie may have succeeded in reviving its electoral mystification for the short term, it remains in a very difficult predicament. Canada, even more so than the U.S., is a very divided nation, as the election showed. While the Conservatives won a plurality of the vote, and were thus able to form a government, the majority of Canadians voted for “left of center” parties. Moreover, the Canadian bourgeoisie itself is very divided along linguistic and regional lines, and the specter of Quebec’s secession is a serious threat to the country’s very geographic integrity. All this makes the situation for the current Conservative government very precarious. Nevertheless, due to the global nature of the capitalist crisis, it will have no choice but to continue most of its Liberal predecessor’s main policies, attack the social wage, continue to forge an independent imperialist policy and challenge the domination of its southern neighbor. - Henk, 24/3/06

 The following report on Internationalism’s March 10 public meeting is extracted from a lengthier posting on the Commie Curmudgeon blog (nomorebigwheels.blogspot.com)

March 13. This past Friday night, I was faced with a somewhat difficult choice – go help the people of the New SPACE with their/our table at the Left Forum, or go to an open ICC Meeting in Brooklyn instead. A couple of weeks ago…I said that I would not be able to do the latter. But as it turns out, after giving it some thought…I went to the ICC meeting after all. And I am glad that I made that choice – I think the ICC meeting provided a lot more good information, and was overall a far more interesting (and intellectually intense) experience, than I would have been likely to get attending those sessions of academic-leftist schmoozing, networking, and/or star-gazing that comprise the Left Forum…   
…The specific subject of this meeting was the Meaning of the New York City transit strike. This extended into some lively discussion about unions in general, the increase of workers’ solidarity (especially separate from, or one might say in spite of, the official dealings of the trade unions), and the possiblities for workers to further build “consciousness” at a time when the true nature of capitalism is becoming more blatant and brutal as capital tries to defend itself against increasing crises (which the ICC maintains are actually part of capitalism’s decline)...

At a later point, we discussed the issue of what kinds of workers’ groups might best contribute to future radical or revolutionary struggle, and I was pleased to hear my ICC comrades say that real revolutionary groups or organizations would probably have to be temporary entities specifically springing up to meet a high moment of struggle or revolutionary challenge. They would not be permanently established worker’s groups, such as “anarchist unions,” which almost always end up falling into the same role as trade unions, especially during times when the struggle has subsided, functioning in ways that at best compromise (if not work directly against) their supposed revolutionary purpose. (This, by the way, is not a quote, but my own summary of the dialogue. Maybe the ICC can say this better/more forcefully.) I might add that this is the sort of viewpoint that I have been leaning toward more myself, after trying for some time to work with the idea of traditional revolutionary syndicalism - especially anarchosyndicalism - which I have found less and less convincing in recent years.  These syndicalist unions are certainly preferable, at least in principle, to trade unions, but I’ve arrived at the opinion that neither form of established workers’ union will ever provide a good means by itself to radically challenge the system, especially not in the present age.

Toward the close of the meeting, I asked a little about the idea of capitalist decadence. This is the idea that capitalism is not simply going through one crisis in a never-ending series of crises but is actually in long-term decline as a result of certain built-in contradictions in the system that were discussed by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, etc. This idea was raised in the ICC’s formal presentation during the meeting, because it is a significant part of their critique, along with their idea of a newer phase of capitalist decomposition, which is a later and even more critical stage in capitalism’s decline.

I wondered whether the ICC sees the decomposition of capitalism as following a sort of timeline, and whether they shared the idea with some proponents of decadence theory that there will be a specific moment of final collapse which revolutionaries should be preparing for. (I believe that Loren Goldner subscribes to this idea to some extent, focusing especially on the impending crises from the unprecedented explosion in dependence on fictitious capital and world debt.) And, as I’d correctly surmised, the ICC isn’t about to specify a deadline or moment of ultimate collapse but does see the danger of a sort of timeline running out, due to the present condition of capitalist decomposition, if there is no genuine socialist revolution – the danger being that, as mentioned by Rosa Luxemburg (which was based on something said earlier by Engels), without achieving socialism, we will enter a state of total barbarism.As I told the ICC, I find the notion of capitalist decadence, as well as decomposition, to be very intriguing, but I can’t say that I’m 100 percent behind it yet. Certainly, I see signs of deterioration and regression everywhere as well as impending crises…. There is a passage in Chapter 15 of Marx’s Grundrisse which the ICC cites as a major source for this theory of decadence…. However, I have spoken to other people, who are far more versed in Marxian theory than I am, who say that they wouldn’t interpret that passage in the same way at all. Personally, the idea of capitalist decadence and decomposition is something that I am very enticed to believe, but I also know that an idea like this can be dangerously comforting to those of us who are yearning to see some sort of end to the awful story that capitalism has been creating over the past several centuries. So, though this might seem a bit too wishy-washing/wavering, I’m not going to close myself off to the other side of the debate completely right now.

I do look forward to going to more ICC meetings, where I can participate in more fascinating discussions, learning and sharing revolutionary ideas. // posted by RS

It is impossible to clarify communist positions without an active exchange of different points of view, without a debate. Therefore we welcome letters from readers and regularly publish them alongside our response in the press of the ICC with the aim of generating discussion around our work and political positions. With this in mind we encourage readers to contact us if they have a comment on, or criticism of, a position defended in our press, even if it is just a few lines.

We recently received a letter from Germany, which deals with the question of human behavior and in particular, comportment. How we behave with others is a central aspect of social life, of what it means to be human. The letter conveys that its author is not merely dwelling on general problems of being human, but is especially interested in the question of social comportment. The letter also looks at the perspectives for the class struggle. Essentially it deals with the question of whether or not the working class today and in the future will be able to stand up to the pressure of competition –the central theme of capitalist  thought and comportment – and put forward its own social perspective. 

What are the preconditions for the proletariat developing its own specific class forms of behavior, which can live up to the final goal of its struggle – communism? In what context does a specific kind of behavior evolve? Which emotions are an expression of this?

This letter makes it perfectly clear that our reader has not just posed major a question but that he has gone a step further and has begun to provide an answer. We consider the questions raised by the comrade as extremely important and vital for the working class as a whole. Below we publish extracts from the comrade’s letter followed by extracts of our response.

Extracts from correspondence on question of comportment

“What influence, what function and what cause does confidence, will, solidarity, organization, feeling of responsibility and personal history have? What actually causes us to behave in a specific manner and how can we consciously influence our behavior? How arbitrary is the question of comportment? What meaning does comportment have within society? Whose interests does it serve? And is it possible to build a collective consciousness?
    “The connection between these questions must be made within the given social reality. Today, due to social decomposition, there is a danger that,  if the proletariat does not succeed in developing a class perspective, more and more parts of the working class will become lumpenized. Low paying jobs and short term contracts are linked to this danger, because workers have to take up such jobs in fear of unemployment and poverty. Another face of capitalist decomposition is increasing criminality as an expression of the capitalist idea of everybody for him- or herself and against the rest of the world. If the working class gives in and forgets about its collective consciousness, its solidarity and confidence and its class interests as a world wide class in the face of its momentary weakness, then there is the danger that the balance of forces will turn towards capitalist decomposition and towards a loss of a communist perspective....In a society in which the ruling class owns all the means of production and where competition is actually the ruling ideology,  this ideology certainly does not serve the class interests of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie as a whole has the main interest of expanding the exploitation of man as labor power. The exploitation of the proletariat is in fact a necessity for the bourgeoisie to exist. Competition is not part of the class nature of the working class. Nevertheless each worker is forced to compete with other workers for a job in order not to fall beneath the minimum standard of living. It is a matter of fact that there are not enough markets. Therefore unemployment and low paying jobs will increase. Of course the working class as a whole has to defend itself against this situation. The proletariat has to do so by developing the perspective of communism through collective consciousness, international mass strikes, the creation of soviets and a yet-to-be created communist world party. This shows that even though on the surface it may appear that the question of comportment is a general, cross class issue, you do in fact need to give an answer that is necessarily class specific. According to the way the “democratic” policy answers this question of comportment with the help of sociology, psychology, neurobiology, and philosophy, there is supposedly no general difference between classes. The only differences to be found are between female and male, old and young, rich and poor, social and antisocial, stupid and intelligent,…losers and winners, good genes and bad genes, good and bad, ill and healthy. So that at the end of the day behavior is measured and selected according to how well you function as a worker, to be exploited. Within these capitalist criteria of the functionality of the workers – which obviously biased in favor of the interest of the ruling class’ ideology – there remains no room for the common interests of wage workers.

“The working class as a whole and its political organizations have to stand up against the ruling ideology, and draw lessons from past experiences, and use its knowledge for its class interests. Emotions such as envy, jealousy, meanness and ambition are expressions of property relations  and therefore part of bourgeois society, as well as the ruling ideology. They are also to be found within the working class but only when competition situations create it. Competition among workers is not abstract, but a concrete reality. It is, thus,  in the  interest of the international proletariat to fight to put an end to its exploitation. In consequence, the more the proletariat gains collective awareness, the more the ideology of general competition is unable to prevent the strengthening of the working class.  This broad and far reaching perspective is necessary, so that we can defend ourselves against this increasing exploitation today….”

Comments of the ICC

The comrade has posed questions of great complexity and relevance. Issues of comportment have been researched and controversially discussed in scientific studies. As a communist organization we do not feel able to develop in great detail the origin and historic development of a great number of forms of comportment, which humanity has produced. We want to limit ourselves to naming some important principles, which the Marxist workers movement has worked out on these questions. These few general ideas may help  contribute  a framework for the discussion our reader has opened up. 

The question of comportment

The comrade wrote that feelings like envy, jealousy or ambitions are an expression of property relations and therefore part of bourgeois society. We agree that these feelings, in their form today, are also part of the property relations and thereby also of capitalism. Nevertheless Marxist authors such as August Bebel or Leo Trotsky repeatedly stated that a feeling like ambition would still exist in a future communist society. They were convinced of the fact that these feelings would not be a driving motor of competition, as in capitalism, of each against all but rather a form of ambition which would serve the whole society as much as possible. Therefore it would play an extremely positive role. This shows that according to Marxism the history of humanity does not necessarily develop in such a way that every form of society comes up with its own, completely new forms of emotions.  If this were the case this would mean that there would be no continuity in history at all but rather merely a series of breaks and beginnings. However, the dialectical method teaches us that every great leap forward does not just mean a restart; at the same time it constitutes building on existing emotions on a higher level than before.

One and the same feeling can have different effects depending on the organization of society. An emotion, which in a given context can rather serve a notion of hostility amongst human beings, is capable of strengthening the social bond in changed living conditions. Obviously we should be cautious not to make things too easy for ourselves by saying that feelings lead to more competition in a society based on competition but in a society of truly social bonds, feelings would automatically have the opposite effect. This cannot be the case because the basic feelings of human beings are not always in harmony with each other. They can get into a clinch because they serve different purposes. The so-called maternal instinct for instance can collide with the instinct of self preservation, when a mother risks her life in order to protect her children. Apart from which, it is also obvious that not all emotions can foster the unity of society to the same extent, such as the example of jealousy given in the comrade’s letter. We actually do not know how old the emotion of jealousy is. Engels did not consider it an inherent social impulse in humans, but rather a cultural product. Anyhow it appears to be a very old feeling. Since it is quite difficult to reconcile the notion of jealousy with preserving  social ties in society at the same time, different societies have had to develop various means in order to keep jealousy under control. If a communist society should still be confronted with such a problem, it is quite likely that it will find more effective and culturally more advanced means to deal with it. 

In the letter the comrade asks about the causes and the social relativity of comportment. “Which influence, which function and which causes do confidence, will, solidarity, organization, feeling of responsibility and personal history have?” The main concern in the letter is a better understanding  of those emotions, which are most needed in course of the struggle of the proletariat. The letter expresses the fear that capitalism might finally destroy all these positive qualities.

We think that this worry is fully justified. The fact that probably the most severe cruelties in history happened in the last 100 years is directly linked to the fact that capitalism –like no other system of production  – destroys the bond between and the compassion amongst man, by turning all human beings into competitors within an impersonal market mechanism. As written in the letter, capitalist decomposition speeds up this process. Do these emotions still exist, which for 200 years were an undoubting sign of proletarian class struggle? Where do its roots lay?
    Let us take the example of the feeling of social responsibility mentioned in the letter. In her article on the writer Korolenko, which Rosa Luxemburg wrote in prison during the First World War, she demonstrates how this feeling of social responsibility developed from the 1860s onwards in Russia, where generations of heroic revolutionaries emerged:

 “That attitude towards society which enables one to be free of gnawing self-analysis and inner discord and considers ‘God-willed conditions’ are something elemental, accepting the acts of history as a sort of divine fate, is compatible with the most varied political and social systems.… In Russia, this ‘imperturbable equilibrium of conscience’ had already begun to crumble in the 1860’s among wide circles of the intelligentsia. Korolenko describes in an intuitive manner this spiritual change in Russian society, and shows just how this generation overcame the slave psychology, and was seized by the trend of a new time, the predominant characteristic of which was the “gnawing and painful, but creative spirit of social responsibility””. (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks. Pathway Press, New York, p. 343).
    It becomes clear that it is the power of consciousness that arouses people. This consciousness, as well as solidarity, is a sign of the social being of humanity. The fact that man was able to achieve a higher level of consciousness and outgrow animality, is directly connected to the highly developed social predispositions of our  species. The manifestation of these social predispositions itself – common labour, common language etc. – has not weakened our social dependency but rather increased it incredibly.

Of course it is true that capitalism undermines social impulses and makes active solidarity more difficult. But at the same time it has given birth to a class which per definition, due to its position in production – unlike any prior class in history – is capable of rediscovering these common social feelings in class struggle and taking them to a higher level. This class is the modern proletariat. The working class is able to do this, not because workers are better humans, but rather because the proletariat is the first class, which produces collectively without owning any means of production.

On the question of unemployment

The letter is absolutely right in saying that there is the danger that unemployment, by increasing the competition on the tight labour market, can lead to opening the door within the ranks of the proletariat for the idea of everybody for him- or herself“. It was already back in the 1840s that Friedrich Engels said in his “Elberfelder Speeches,” that the workers only start acting as an active class as soon as they line up their own solidarity against capitalist competition.
Even more so: according to Engels it is only by doing so that the workers actually regain their own humanity. Towards an undefeated generation of the working class, unemployment is a particularly good means to uncover the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. Firstly, because unemployment turns class solidarity more and more into a question of survival. Secondly, because the bankruptcy of capitalism unveils the incompatibility of wage labour and human dignity.   
    As Rosa Luxemburg wrote in her “Introduction to National Economy”, the struggle of the proletariat against  being made superfluous by machines, in other words, against the consequences of the inner tendency of capitalism – the fall of relative labour rate, the increase of capital power, an overflowing army of unemployed – is a struggle against the system itself.:

“The workers cannot oppose anything to the technical progress of production, to discoveries, the introduction of machines, to steam and electricity, to the improvement of the means of transport. The effect of all these steps forward on the relative wage is a purely mechanical product of commodity production and the commodity character of labor power. This is why even the most powerful trade unions are quite powerless against this tendency of the relative wage to rapidly fall. The struggle against the drop in relative wages is thus no longer a struggle on the terrain of the commodity economy, but a revolutionary, insurrectional offensive against this economy itself, it is the socialist movement of the proletariat.”  (ICC translation from the German original)

The letter is  right in stressing that the proletariat – in opposition to the bourgeoisie - is capable of overcoming the bourgeois ideology, which tries to hide its reality, because of its own class interests.
Social feelings as well as the power of human consciousness are incredible forces. Marxist confidence in the working class is also confidence in human nature. 

Translated from Weltrevolution (Germany).

The current immigration crisis that has captured so much attention in the capitalist media is not solely limited to the U.S. but is increasingly experienced by all capitalist metropoles in Europe and North America. The rioting in France last autumn by immigrant youth and the children of immigrants, primarily from North Africa, the recent flood of illegal immigrants and refugees to Spain’s Canary Islands, and the massive immigrant demonstrations in the U.S. this spring, predominantly by Latinos, but also including Asian and European immigrants stand as a clear reminder that this issue is a problem of global capitalism that exposes the bankruptcy of the capitalist economy and the inexorable decomposition of its outmoded social system.

For some years now in the U.S. as in France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany and other countries in Western Europe, the capitalist media and politicians have fueled an anti-immigrant ideological campaign. The central message of this campaign is that the recent immigrant, particularly the illegal immigrant, is responsible for the worsening economic and social conditions faced by the “native” working class, by taking jobs, depressing wages, overcrowding schools with their children, draining social welfare programs, increasing crime, and just about any other social woe you can think of.

This scapegoat propaganda is a classic example of capitalism’s strategy of divide and conquer, to divide workers against themselves, to blame each other for their problems, to fight over the crumbs, rather than to understand that it is the capitalist system that is responsible for their suffering. Blaming these problems on the immigrant workers is particularly cynical, since it is American state capitalism, which needs immigrant workers to fill low paid jobs, to serve as a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers to depress wages for the entire working class.

Under cover of this campaign the bourgeoisie implements increasingly repressive policies ostensibly aimed at immigrants, but which augment the state’s repressive apparatus and increase social tolerance for such repression that will ultimately be available for use against the working class as a whole in moments of decisive class confrontations.

At the same time that it ruthlessly fans anti-immigrant hatred, the U.S. bourgeois cynically boasts that it is “a nation of immigrants,” providing opportunity for a better life for millions of people. And it certainly is true that because of the particular historic conditions under which American capitalism developed – an enormous territory with an extremely small native population – it was built on the backs of immigrants, whether imported against their will as slaves and indentured servants or as voluntary immigrants. Put in other words, the “American” working class was historically recruited from all around the world.

During the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, wave after wave of workers and ruined peasants from Europe, and to a lesser extent from Asia, supplied the labor force needed for the expansion of American capitalism. However, the time when American capital used any and all imaginable means to entice a desperately needed labor force to the U.S., that time of “generous” and essentially unrestricted immigration, is long gone.

It is no accident of history that the period of unrestricted immigration corresponded with the period of capitalist ascendency, when capitalism was still an historically progressive mode of production, dramatically expanding the forces of production, and that repressive, restrictive immigration policies characterized the period of capitalist decadence when the relations of capitalism became a fetter on the further development of the productive forces around the time of the First World War. Thus for instance, the Immigration Act of 1917 barred all Asian immigrants and created for the first time the concept of the non-immigrant foreign worker – who would come to America to work but was barred from staying. The National Origins Act enacted in 1924 limited the number of immigrants from Europe to 150,000 persons per year, and allocated the quota for each country on the basis of the ethnic makeup of the U.S. population in 1890 – before the massive waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. This was a blatantly racist measure to slow the growth of “undesirable” elements like Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans and Jews. In 1950, the McCarran-Walter Act was promulgated. Heavily influenced by McCarthyism and the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War, this law imposed new limits on immigration under cover of the struggle against Russian imperialism and the “world communist threat.”

In 1986, America’s anti-immigrant policy was updated with enactment of the Simpson-Rodino Immigration and Naturalization Control Reform Act, which dealt with the influx of illegal immigrants from Latin America, by imposing for the first time in American history sanctions (fines and even prison) against employers who knowingly employed undocumented workers. The influx of illegal immigrants had been heightened by the economic collapse of Third World countries during the 1970s, which triggered a wave of impoverished masses fleeing destitution in Mexico, Haiti, and war ravaged El Salvador. The quantitative proportions of this out of control upsurge resulted in the arrest of a record 1.6 million illegal immigrants in 1986 by immigration police.

However, this repressive “reform” law had only short-lived success in blocking immigration, as the devastating effects of capitalist decomposition in the underdeveloped countries throughout the period since the 1980s – poverty, civil war, disease, untold suffering – has impelled millions of workers in the Third World to seek refuge in Europe and America. By 1992, arrests of illegal immigrants in the U.S. were back up to 1.1 million for the year. At that time the U.S. government responded by increasing the number of airport immigration officers, introducing counterfeit-resistant green cards, increasing the number of agents patrolling the Mexico-US boarder, introducing the use of “surplus” military vehicles for patrol use, and constructing an American-made “Berlin Wall” – a 10-foot high solid steel barricade which ran inland from the ocean for about 10 miles in the Tijuana-San Diego area. Fourteen years later, the Bush administration plans to extend this wall for 700 to 2,000 miles depending upon the final version of the immigration bill that will be worked out by the House-Senate conference committee. 

While immigrants come to the U.S. fleeing deplorable conditions in their countries of origins, the social and economic situation they find themselves in once they get here is far from a paradise. They are as a rule condemned to the most hazardous and lowest paying jobs. Hispanic industrial workers, who comprise the majority of illegal immigrants in recent decades, are suffering work-related injuries more often and more seriously than other workers in similar jobs. Nor do they receive comparable medical care or workmen’s compensation for their injuries. In addition, immigrants are forced into the ghettoes of the big cities where they face crowded housing, miserable hygienic conditions, reminiscent of the 19th century conditions faced by Italian and Irish immigrants more than a hundred years ago.

There are two essential differences between the flight of today’s illegal immigrants and their class brothers of the past. First the working class and peasant immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries, after a period of extreme exploitation at the hands of the bosses were either integrated as part of the working class into the normal relations of production in an expanding bourgeois society, or to some extent became part of the petty bourgeois element in the cities and countryside. In this way the immigrants’ standard of living rose to the average economic and social norm for the rest of the working class. The situation has largely been different for today’s immigrants, who have been subjected to social marginalization, hazardous and low-paying jobs, and over-exploitation in an ever-growing cash/off-the-books economy.

The second difference between the immigrants of the ascendant period of capitalism and today is that contemporary immigrants confront a different historical situation: capitalist decomposition. Pushed to emigrate from the periphery of capitalism to its center regions due to economic collapse and political chaos, rejected, socially marginalized, victimized by racism and other bourgeois prejudices in the so-called “land of opportunity,” this “immigrant” sector of the working class is particularly trapped in the turmoil of capitalism.

Historically the working class has always been a class of immigrants, migrating in the first place from the countryside to the cities in search of work and the chance to be exploited at the dawn of capitalist development, or later migrating from city to city following opportunities for work as new industries and centers of production sprang up. In this sense the tension between “native” workers and immigrants is alien to the class interests of the proletariat, and has always represented the intrusion of bourgeois ideology into working class life. In the last analysis what matters for the world working class is to understand that both the wave of impoverished immigrant masses and the anti-immigrant campaigns we are witnessing today are expressions of the dead-end to which decadent capitalism has condemned humanity. The global economic crisis has put the working class standard of living under attack everywhere. The social decomposition of capitalism has created chaos and despair in the underdeveloped countries forcing millions to seek the opportunity to sell their labor power in the more stable capitalist metropoles.  Only the working class movement, with its revolutionary communist perspective can deliver society from its current impasse. It is essential for proletarian revolutionaries and class conscious militants to point out the fundamental unity of the working class against all our enemy class’s attempt to poison us with hatred and disunity. 

ES/JG, July '06.

This spring hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers, most of them “illegal aliens”, as the bourgeoisie calls them, predominantly from Latin American countries, took to the streets in major American cities across the country, from Los Angeles, to Dallas, to Chicago, to Washington DC, and New York City, protesting a threatened crackdown proposed in legislation advocated by the right-wing of the Republican party. The movement seemed to erupt overnight, coming from nowhere. What is the meaning of these events and what is the class nature of this movement?

The anti-immigrant legislation that won approval in the House of Representatives and provoked the demonstrations would criminalise illegal immigration, making it a felony for the first time. Currently being an illegal immigrant is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. Illegal immigrants would be arrested, tried, convicted, deported, and would forfeit any possibility to ever legally return to the US in the future. State laws which forbid local agencies, from police to schools to social services from reporting illegal aliens to immigration officials would be nullified, and employers who hired illegal aliens would suffer legal penalties as well. Under this legislation, upwards of 12 million immigrants would face arrest and deportation. This extreme legislation does not have the support of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie, as it does not correspond to the global interests of American state capitalism, which clearly needs immigrant workers to fill low paid jobs, to serve as a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers to depress wages for the entire working class, and considers the idea of mass deportation of 12 million people to be an absurdity. Opposed to this proposed crackdown are the Bush administration, the official Republican leadership in the Senate, the Democrats, big city mayors, state governors, major corporate employers who need to exploit a plentiful supply of immigrant workers (in the retail, restaurant, meat packing, agribusiness, construction and home care industries), and the trade unions who dream of extracting membership dues from these destitute workers. This motley crew of bourgeois “champions” of immigrant workers favors more moderate legislation, which would tighten up the border, slash the numbers of new immigrants, allow illegal immigrants who have been here for a number of years to become legalized, and force those who have been here for less than two years to leave the country, but with the possibility to return legally in the future. Some form of “guest” worker program would be set up to allow foreign workers to find temporary work in the US on a legal basis and maintain the supply of needed cheap labor. 

It was in this social and political context that the immigrant worker demonstrations erupted. Coming on the heels of the unemployed immigrant youth riots in France last autumn, the student revolt triggered in France this spring against the government’s attack on job security, and the transit strike in New York in December, the immigrant demonstrations were hailed by leftists of all stripes, many libertarian and anarchist groups as well. It is certainly true that the immigrants threatened by the legislation are a sector of the working class that confronts a particularly harsh and brutal exploitation, suffers a harrowing existence, denied access to social services and medical treatment, and that their situation demands the solidarity and support of the working class as a whole. This solidarity is all the more necessary because in classical fashion the bourgeoisie uses the debate over legal and illegal status of the immigrants as a means to stir up racism and hatred, to divide the proletariat against itself, all the while that it profits from the exploitation of the immigrant workers. This could indeed have been a struggle on the proletarian terrain, but there is a big difference between what could be and what actually happens in any given movement.

Wishful thinking should not blind us to the actual class nature of the recent demonstrations, which were in large measure a bourgeois manipulation. Yes, there have been workers in the streets, but they are there totally on the terrain of the bourgeoisie, which provoked the demonstrations, manipulated them, controlled them, and openly led them. It is true that there have been some instances, such as the spontaneous walkouts by Mexican immigrant high school students in California – the sons and daughters of the working class – that implied certain similarities to the situation in France, but this movement was not organized on the proletarian terrain or controlled by immigrant workers themselves. The demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets were orchestrated and mobilized by the Spanish-language mass media, that is to say by the Spanish-speaking bourgeoisie, with the support of large corporations and establishment politicians.  The fact that the demonstrations announced for May 19 during the May 1 protests never materialized is testimony to the bourgeois control of the movement.

Nationalism has poisoned the movement, whether it was Latino nationalism, which  cropped up in the opening moments of the demonstrations, or the sickening rush to affirm Americanism that followed more recently, or the nationalist, racist-based opposition to the immigrants fomented by right-wing talk show broadcasters on the radio and right-wing Republicans. When there were complaints in the mass media that too many immigrant demonstrators carried Mexican flags in California and that this showed they were more loyal to their home country than their adopted home, movement organizers supplied thousands of American flags to be waved in the demonstrations that followed in other cities to affirm the loyalty and Americanism of the protests. The demand for citizenship, which is a totally bourgeois legalism, is another example of the non-proletarian terrain of the struggle. This putrid nationalist ideology is designed to completely short circuit any possibility for immigrants and American-born workers to recognize their essential unity.

By the end of April a Spanish language version of the national anthem recorded by leading Hispanic pop stars was released and broadcast on the radio. Of course the right-wing nationalist opponents of the immigrants jumped on the Spanish-language version of the national anthem as affront to national dignity. Even though he opposes the extreme anti-immigrant legislation rammed through the House of Representatives, even Pres. George W. Bush criticized the Spanish-language version of the anthem, in an attempt to placate the far right base of the Republican Party. This was particularly ironic since Bush himself appeared in campaign rallies in Hispanic communities during the 2000 presidential election and sang along with Spanish renditions of the Star Spangled Banner.

Nowhere was the capitalist nature of the movement more evident than in the mass demonstration in April in New York City (with an estimated 38% of the adult population born in a foreign country) when 300,000 immigrants rallied outside City Hall, where they had the support of the city’s mayor, Republican Michael Bloomberg, and Democratic Senators Charles Schumer and Hilary Clinton, who spoke to the crowd and praised their struggle as example of Americanism and patriotism.

It’s been 20 years since the last major immigration reform effort undertaken by the Reagan administration, which granted amnesty to illegal immigrants. But that amnesty did nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigration that has continued unabated for two decades, because American capitalism needs a constant supply of cheap labor and because the effects of the social decomposition of capitalism in underdeveloped countries has so degraded living conditions as to impel growing numbers of workers to seek refuge in the relatively more stable and prosperous capitalist metropoles.

For the bourgeoisie the time has come to stabilize the situation once again, as it has become more difficult to absorb an increasing flood of immigrants and more and more difficult to tolerate a situation where millions of workers are not officially integrated into the economy or society, who don’t pay taxes, are not documented, after nearly 20 years of illegal status. On the one hand, this has led the Bush administration to resort to clumsy efforts to restrict new immigration at the border, for example by militarizing the border with Mexico, literally constructing a Berlin Wall to make it difficult for immigrants to cross into the US. On the other hand it has also led the administration to favor legalization for workers who have been here more than two years. Because the U.S. economy is such that it needs a constant flow of cheap labor in a big sector of the economy, it is highly unlikely that the several million workers who have been in the U.S. under two years and will be legally required to leave the country, will actually do so. Most likely they will remain here illegally, and will become the base of the future illegal workforce that will continue to be necessary for the capitalist economy, both to provide cheap labor and put pressure on wages for the rest of the working class.

The recalcitrance of the right-wing to accept this reality reflects the increasing political irrationality created by social decomposition, which has previously manifested itself in the ruling class’ difficulty in achieving its desired results in the presidential election. For example, the irrational xenophobia exhibited by the right is completely at odds with the interests of American state capitalism. In the last decade and a half the presence of immigrants has spread from the traditional population centers in California, New York, Florida, Texas, and Illinois to more rural, more traditional ethnically homogenous regions in the south and Midwest. The meat packing industry, for example, has brought thousands of illegal immigrants to work in their meat packing and poultry processing plants in places like Nebraska, Iowa, Georgia and North Carolina. The racist reaction to the immigrant influx in these areas is a classic illustration of the effects of decomposition. The immigration bill passed by the Senate which coincides with the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie’s policy orientation, with a few measures thrown in to placate the right, such as the construction of a wall at the Mexican border, beefing up border patrols, and the administration’s decision to dispatch National Guard troops to police the border, still has to be reconciled with the House. It’s hard to believe that the extreme right cannot see the impossibility of mass deportations of 12 million people, and the need to stabilize the situation. It’s only a matter of time before the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie imposes its solution to the problem as the bourgeoisie moves to integrate the newly legalized population into the mainstream political process.  

 Internationalism 5/30/06

As the Memorial Day weekend neared the price of gas at the pump in New York State skyrocketed to $3.21 per gallon for regular. In the past year crude oil has risen 33 percent. The Bush administration and the mass media claim the cause is the law of supply and demand. According to them the industrialized countries are “addicted” to oil and, particularly in the U.S., as the summer vacation period approaches, demand is going up. Add to this the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina on oil production and the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, and the burgeoning energy needs of the booming economies of India and China and fears of political instability in the Middle East, particularly because of the continuing war in Iraq, where oil production has not returned to pre-war levels, and a possible military confrontation over Iranian nuclear ambitions, and terrorist attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria, and  the result, according to the bourgeoisie, is a classic situation in which demand far outstrips current oil supplies. As National Public Radio put it, “So you have a situation where demand has been growing steadily and inexorably, and the systems of supply is quite vulnerable. That’s the basic recipe for high prices” (NPR April 27, 2006).

The leftists, including consumer spokesman and Greens leader Ralph Nader, offer yet another explanation. For them, corporate greed and unconscionable price gouging are to blame, pure and simple. It’s the work of evil, money hungry capitalists. They point to soaring oil company profits as proof.

Whatever grain of truth these explanations contain that give them some semblance of plausibility, neither corresponds to a comprehensive explanation of reality.

Despite the current controversy over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, oil supplies are unaffected. Iran has not even threatened to cut oil production as a political tactic in the current confrontation. As Iranian oil minister, Kaxem Vaziri-Hamaneh, put it during the January OPEC meeting in Vienna, “We are not mixing politics with the economic decisions on this issue.”  Despite the American bourgeoisie’s claim that there are inadequate supplies, all the evidence indicates that current inventories of crude oil are adequate to meet current purchases, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. According to forecasts for future global oil production from sources as diverse as the U.S. Energy Department, Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and Simmons and Company International, global oil production will continue to grow for the next 10 to 30 years.  All the political instability and war that the bourgeoisie says might reduce supplies in the future are the inevitable by-products of imperialism and the social decomposition of capitalism. It is imperialism and decomposition that is responsible for soaring oil prices, not the invisible hand of supply and demand.

If there is pressure on world oil supplies, it comes from the headlong rush of industrialized countries to augment their Strategic Petroleum Reserves, in anticipation of possible interruptions in oil production due to the threat of war. Currently there are 26 nations with SPR of over 1.4 billion barrels of oil, oil that is artificially removed from world oil supplies, oil that it is not available to meet current consumer demand. With the growing threat of war (imperialism again!), the U.S. is reportedly planning to increase its current SPR of 700 million barrels of oil, by 300 million. Australia, the countries of the European Union, and Japan and Korea are also expected to increase their SPR as well. In addition, China, Russia, and India plan to create their oil SPR in the period ahead. India seeks to create an SPR of 40 million barrels initially. China plans an SPR of 100 million barrels. While Russia has not announced its SPR goal, 78 million barrels would give it a reserve equivalent to 30 days of typical oil consumption. To fill these expanding SPR needs, as much as 1,000,000 barrels of oil per day are likely to be withdrawn from the open market over the next few years, putting more pressure on crude oil prices (www.energybulletin.net/11386.html [119], May 22, 2006). This inflationary pressure on crude oil prices is the direct fruit of U.S. imperialism’s strategy in the Middle East for the past decade, to put pressure on Europe, particularly German and French imperialism, by exerting control over world oil supplies. As increasingly happens under the conditions of capitalist decomposition, every action U.S. imperialism takes to defend its hegemony only exacerbates its problems, in this case by sending petroleum prices through the roof, even for the U.S. itself.

In this context the leftist grumbling about greedy capitalists becomes a caricature. Nader’s arguments about corporate greed rest primarily on the contention that American petroleum industry has artificially created an oil shortage by shutting down “scores of refineries and then turn ‘refinery shortages’ into higher gas prices at the pump.” (Nader, “The Price of Oil,” April 28, 2006 www.pirg.org [120]). Even if this were true, it wouldn’t explain why the price of crude oil would rise so dramatically so fast. Sure, greed is inevitably a factor in the capitalist economy. The oil corporations, as any capitalist enterprise in the same circumstances, have not hesitated to take immediate advantage of soaring crude prices, to raise prices at the pump, even if it will take two to three months for current higher priced crude oil to make its way to retail outlets. Since their original investment in crude oil production, from which they gain most of their profits, was made at a time when oil prices were much lower and their break even point is therefore much lower, naturally profits will rise dramatically.

To the extent that the Hurricane Katrina impacted oil refineries in the Gulf Coast, that is a manifestation of decomposition, in that capitalism’s total disregard for the environment has negatively affected world meteorological patterns and caused the rash of extreme weather disturbances in the last few yeas. Years of neglect of the infrastructure, a fruit of the social decomposition of capitalism, has made the Gulf Coast unnecessarily vulnerable to catastrophic storm damage.

The bourgeoisie can spout all the mumble-jumble it wants about supply and demand as its alibi for skyrocketing oil prices, but it is the world imperialist system itself that is the fundamental cause of the current difficulties.

JG, July ’06.

Clearly the proletariat in the U.S. is completely inscribed in the same generalized return to struggle that has been occurring on the international level since 2003, as the world working class struggles to emerge from the disorientation, confusion and reflux in consciousness that ensued after the fall of the two bloc system at the end of the 1980s, which was so deep and so profound that in many ways the proletariat, while not defeated in the historic sense, experienced great difficulty in even recognizing is own identity as a class and in having confidence in itself as a class with the capacity to defend itself.

As we have noted on the Web site and in the press, the dramatic high point of this trend was the New York City transit strike in December, but it is important to stress that this struggle was not a sudden development but rather the fruit of an ongoing tendency to retake the struggle as seen in the grocery workers struggle in California, the struggles at Boeing and North West Airlines, Philadelphia transit, and the graduate assistants strike at New York University. As in other countries, workers in the U.S. have been pushed by the seriousness of the global economic crisis and consequent escalation of attacks by the ruling class on their standard of living to defend themselves as shake off the effects of the period of disorientation. The primary task posed by these nascent struggles in many countries was not the extension of struggles across geographic and industrial sector lines, but the reacquisition of consciousness at the most basic levels, of class self identity and solidarity.

The return to struggle in the U.S. occurs within a social situation increasingly free of illusions. Gone is the sense of a false reality that characterized at least part of the Clinton years, with promises of unending growth, the Internet bubble, the soaring stock market. Today there is a generalized sense that the future is not rosy, that things are not going right, there is nothing to brag about in the economy, no cause for optimism – no alternative but to struggle, to fight against the escalating austerity attacks on the standard of living. Coupled with the fact that there are today two generations of undefeated workers in the proletariat also favors the development of class struggle.

There is a qualitative aspect to the current return to struggle that is significantly different from previous experiences since the onset of the global crisis in the 1960s. Yes, there is anger, even rage, about austerity attacks, particularly in regard to cuts in pensions and medical benefits, which is in fact a drastic cut in the compensation or wages of the workers. But the struggles that are emerging today are not driven by blind anger or unthinking combativeness, as they were more likely to be in the late 60s or the 70s. Today workers are returning to the struggle with a great consciousness of what is at stake and what has to be done. A strike today means risky replacement by scabs, it risks the threat of company bankruptcy and the permanent disappearance of jobs, it risks trading increasing difficulty to support one’s family, for absolute disaster. In the case of the transit workers, their strike was illegal, with the loss of wages not only for everyday they were on strike, but also a penalty of two additional days’ pay for every strike day—in other words for a three-day strike, they lost nine days pay. In addition they faced the threat of a $25,000 fine for the first day of the strike, which would double each day – thus for the three-day strike, the court could have imposed a fine of $175,000 on each individual striker!

Conscious of all these risks, dangers, and penalties, workers have struck, because they increasingly understand the necessity to fight and that they are not just fighting for themselves but their class. This reclamation of class self identity and the closely linked revival of class solidarity are perhaps the most important legacies of the transit strike. We can see it in many manifestations, in the statement of the bus driver who told one of our comrades, “It was good that we stood up for the working class.” We can see it in the tremendous sympathy for the strike throughout the working class in NYC during the strike, even though the strike inconvenienced many workers. Workers everywhere talked about the need to stand up for the erosion of pensions, against the imposition of two-tier systems that would penalize new workers. It could be seen in the voice of the older African American worker who was seen on television denouncing Mayor Bloomberg for branding the strikers “thugs.” “If they’re thugs, then I’m a thug, too,” she said. It was seen as well in the tendency for other workers to refuse to leave the strikers isolated and alone, but the desire to demonstrate their support and solidarity. Other workers visited the picket lines, to march with workers, to bring food and hot coffee in the extreme cold weather, to talk to the strikers – and they were welcomed wholeheartedly by the strikers. In one case, several teachers brought their classes to visit the workers and offer support. The transit strikers knew they were not alone, that they were not isolated, and it was because their struggle confronted exactly the same problems and conditions that the rest of the class confronts.

During the 3rd wave of class struggle we used to argue that real solidarity meant joining the struggle, spreading the struggle to other sectors, having other sectors joining the strike, integrating their own demands, etc. This type of generalization, and spreading and politicization of struggles is absolutely necessary and integral to the revolutionary process, but perhaps the present manifestations of solidarity emanating from the proletariat  itself shows how much deeper, and even more elementally human solidarity can be in the working class. During the waves of class struggle that occurred in the 70s, there was often a simultaneity of struggle, but not necessarily any significant sense of solidarity between the workers in struggle at the same time. Today, as workers turn to struggle with an increasing consciousness of the importance and difficulties of their struggles, a re-emerging sense of class self-identity, and a profound need for solidarity, the situation is qualitatively different. While the struggle ahead will be exceedingly difficult, there is room for optimism about the perspectives for class struggle, and a growing responsibilities for the intervention of revolutionary minorities in the class struggle.

 Internationalism, July '06.

With the elections of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Michelle Bachelet in Chile, the bourgeoisie’s mouthpieces are once again spewing ideological venom, according to which these democratic elections have opened the door to new possibilities to help the have-nots in certain countries of Latin America. This is possible because the victors of such elections belong to Left parties, or to Center-Left coalitions. People such as Carlos Fuentes [1] portray the election of Morales to the Bolivian presidency as a positive event, which supposedly serves to strengthen democracy, as before then “The Left had no other recourse but armed insurrection” (Reforma, 02/01/06).

This trend began with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela; then Lula in Brazil; Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador; Kirchner in Argentina; Tavare Vasquez in Uruguay; and Toledo in Peru. Could it be that democracy is finally paying off? Have the have-nots finally succeeded in electing candidates to office that represent their interests? Is the “Bolivarian dream” of a united American continent becoming a reality? Could this new united America—or at least part of it—offer a response to US imperialism, and in this way improve the lot of poor countries?

Perhaps we would do better by asking ourselves why it is that the bourgeoisie itself has been so welcoming of the newly elected Left, as the World Parliamentary Forum did: “We claim as ours the powerful presence of popular movements, one of the central elements in building alternatives that strongly put in question the capitalist model on its phase of neo-liberal globalization – a presence in which the social movements, and the mobilizations of native American Indians are on the first line of combat. In particular we claim the importance of the victory of the popular sectors in Bolivia and the election to the presidency of their American Indian leader Evo Morales…” (Final Declaration of the WPF, February 16, 2006).

Both, Left and Right Parties Have the Same Objective: Perpetuating Exploitation

Those still holding illusions about democracy and the democratic process believe that the main factor determining the policies of a particular candidate for office is his character. That is why the bourgeois media has focused greatly on the personal and social lives of presidents, in their “revolutionary” language, and on whether or not they are “indigenous.” These bits of information are used as guarantees that these governments will act on behalf of the exploited, and in opposition to the bourgeoisie.

However, we need to understand that it is not a candidate’s party affiliation, his intentions, or his ethnic origins that will determine the type of politics he will practice. On the contrary, his influences will always be the necessities of the capitalist system. That is why in today’s world it is impossible to implement a Left political platform that is essentially different from that of the Right.

Under decadent capitalism, parliamentary structures and electoral processes are mere circuses that the bourgeoisie uses to trap the working class in a democratic illusion. This is why left parties that participate in the electoral process - by claiming to champion the interests of the exploited - help reinforce the oppression of the exploited. These parties serve as agents of the capitalist class who have infiltrated the ranks of the working class. When they use names and rhetoric similar to that historically employed by the working class, or by “revolutionaries,” they do so with the intention of keeping the exploited under the illusion that a vote for the candidate that “fights on their behalf” will help the exploited “win” and have a chance for a better future.

In Revolucion Mundial (ICC newspaper in Mexico) No. 86, May-June 2005 [121], we wrote that the arrival of left parties to Latin American governments reflected “…a weakness of the political apparatus, which desperately seeks to unite the bourgeoisie and strengthen its control of the workers, in a time in which the later have been making their will known as a response to the on-going and deepening crisis of capitalism.” By following this line of thought, it becomes possible to understand that the political presence of left populist governments is fundamentally due to:

• The necessity of national bourgeoisies to confront the effects of an economic crisis that is primarily felt by countries within the “periphery” of capitalism.
• The weakness and political decomposition of the bourgeoisie in the Third World.
• The imperialist interests of each national bourgeoisie.
• The urgency of stopping (or accelerating) social discontent.

This is why the election of left parties, and the celebration of the “triumph of the oppressed” are only means by which the bourgeoisie takes combativeness and class-consciousness away from the class struggle.

In Latin America in particular, the election of leftist administrations have made the myth of democracy more believable once again (in the past, decades of poor living conditions in the continent had almost ruined the reputation of democracy). This is why we contend that although the elections of these “new” governments in Latin America reflect the inability of the bourgeoisie to produce a candidate capable of imposing discipline among the different factions of the ruling class; it is also an opportunity for the bourgeoisie to strengthen its ideological dominance. For example, with the election of Evo Morales, the Bolivian bourgeoisie accomplished something it had not been able to do in 40 years: to obtain the support of 54% of the population during the election. This trend can be seen in Brazil with Lula, in Argentina with Kitchner, and (as is expected) in Mexico with Lopez Obrador.

“In general, the mechanism is the same: to convince workers that the left will ‘change things,’ and that it’s enough to follow a ‘Messiah’ to solve society’s problems. The electoral campaigns attempt to have workers do away with their methods of struggle, their strikes and their soviets (soberain general assemblies…) to instead take refuge in ‘democratic channels and elections—and in doing so, they attempt to prevent workers from developing class consciousness, and lose themselves in the labyrinth of a ‘voting citizenry’…The election of Lula needs to be analyzed from a proletarian perspective. The illusions that Brazilian workers had in his candidacy gave the bourgeoisie the tools through which they were able to pass tough economic and political measures. However, let us make it clear: Lula did not betray the workers; his policies were merely a continuation of his anti-proletariat maneuvers that began with his invocation of ‘democracy’ and his alluring ways to trap the workers in the ballot box mystification.” (Revolucion Mundial, No. 86 [121])

Anti-Imperialism, Nationalism, and Latin Americanism: Workers’ Poison

Another myth that the socialist presidential candidates have spread is that their national economies will benefit from protecting their “sovereignty” through the nationalization of businesses, or by confronting “yanqui imperialism.” Hugo Chavez has been the most successful selling this lie, which was helped by his alliance with Fidel Castro.  “Anti-imperialism” is as effective as nationalism in helping the bourgeoisie recruit proletarian participation in the exploitation of the latter, and the defense of the former.

The Bush administration defines Chavez and Castro as “negative forces within this region,” but not because Bush  actually believes Chavez and Castro are dangerous in and of themselves. The Bush administration is aware that these two heads of state are just tools that are used by political and economic rivals of the USA to advance their own national interests. The election of left governments in Latin America will not necessarily strengthen the enemies of “yanqui imperialism,” even if the newly elected left joins the rhetorical anti-imperialist bandwagon. With the arrival of left governments, the Latin American bourgeoisie need not change its political alliances; Lula is a perfect example of this. [2]

When a government or group of governments (such as the ones that came together at the World Parliamentary Forum) screams anti-imperialist clichés, it is safe to assume that either its alliances lie with the imperialist’s enemy, or is attempting to use the anti-imperialist rhetoric to win votes (as Evo Morales did). [3]

The anti-imperialist “formula” used by the left factions of Capital can be summarized as such: the exploited need to take disease, misery and hunger with a smile so that their “poor” national bourgeoisie will not have such a hard time in life. And to help the workers swallow the nationalist poison, the bourgeoisie uses tactics such as protests against neo-liberalism, the advocacy of nationalist populism, the nationalization of businesses, co-operativism, auto-management, etc. all of which are sold as measures that are intended to help the workers, but which actually strengthen their particular state capitalisms and thereby help “save” their economies a little. [4]

What the above discussion suggests is that the bourgeoisie’s propaganda about the left’s advances in Latin America is intended to separate the proletariat from its class struggle. Neither the left nor the right of the bourgeoisie have the capacity to fix the state of the economy in Latin America. On the contrary, regardless of the party in power, the misery of the working class—on whose shoulders the bourgeoisie rests the weight of the crisis—will only grow. We thus need to reaffirm that the only way for the working class to obtain its emancipation is to develop its class struggle.

Hector / February 2006.

The electoral circus is once again upon us and this time it is a particularly fascinating drama. In decadent capitalism, elections have long served as an insidious mystification, an ideological swindle designed to deceive the population, particularly the working class, into believing that it is free to choose the political leadership that will determine the direction of society. In this manner, the ruling class hides its class dictatorship over society behind a democratic myth. For decades the real decisions have been made behind the scenes by the dominant fraction of the ruling class, including political leaders from the major parties, the permanent state bureaucracy, leaders from major corporations,  think tanks, and the mass media, based on an assessment of what best serves the interests of the global national capital both domestically and internationally. In this context elections have long been reduced to a theatrical event, scripted, manipulated and controlled to produce their predetermined results.

In recent years, as the social decomposition of capitalist society has progressed, it has become increasingly difficult for the bourgeoisie in the U.S to control effectively its electoral process and assure the desired result. The past two presidential elections, especially the disastrous election of 2000, are notable examples of this tendency. These problems include the ability of the media to manipulate popular opinion, in part because of the rise of religious fundamentalism, and a tendency in particularly close elections for candidates not to accept the division of labor, not to accept their role as designated loyal opposition, but to want to win at any cost. As we have written before, this is essentially what happened in 2000, when the Bush camp stole the election in Florida through the efforts of  Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, and his underlings. The two sides then fought it out in the courts rather than gracefully accepting defeat in the interests of national unity. That Gore finally accepted the partisan ruling of the Supreme Court, rather than resort to the resistant posture of Lopez-Obrador in the recent Mexican election, is testimony to a more mature, responsible concern for the interests of the national capital, than Bush.

In 2004, the bourgeoisie had difficulty in deciding upon a strategic orientation until quite late, well into September when consensus finally crystallized on support for Kerry. This lack of clarity on how best to proceed in the wake of Bush’s bungling of the war in Iraq meant it was too late to implement this policy successfully, despite the best efforts of the media to boost Kerry’s candidacy.

Emerging Ruling Class Consensus On Need to Change Iraq Policy

As we examine the current political campaign, it is necessary to consider what political division of labor best corresponds to the strategic needs of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie in the coming period. While this fraction was unanimous in support of the invasion of Iraq and in the underlying imperialist strategy that aimed to reassert American imperialist hegemony, insert the U.S. into a dominant position with a military presence in the strategically important Middle East, and to mount pressure on its increasingly rancorous former allies in Europe, there is today consensus within the dominant fraction that the situation in Iraq is an absolute mess. The U.S. military is stretched too thin because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is incapable of responding to challenges in other parts of the globe, which is absolutely necessary. Recent reports in the New York Times reveal that high ranking military officers have been leaking classified documents to sympathetic congressional leaders, think tank scholars, and retired military officers that indicate that only 7,000-8,000 combat troops are available to respond to any military challenge beyond Iraq and Afghanistan (NYT 9/22/06).

Even worse from the ruling class perspective, the Bush administration’s inept handling of Iraq has resulted in the total collapse of popular support for the war and will make it increasingly difficult to mobilize support for future imperialist military missions abroad. This is a particularly serious problem for American capitalism because in order to maintain its imperialist dominance it has to increasingly exert its military muscle. The inability of the Bush administration to modify its policy, to compensate for shortcomings, to in any way restore the squandered national unity that accrued from the 9/11 attacks, makes the current division of labor even more intolerable for the ruling class. Except for the removal of Paul Wolfowitz as undersecretary of defense and chief architect for Iraq war policy, the administration has failed to make any fundamental changes, and, in the words of Vice President Cheney despite whatever mistakes may have been made, if they had to do it all over again, the administration  “would make exactly the same decisions.”

The dominant fraction’s consensus that the Iraq war is a disaster led in March to the creation of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan group headed by James A. Baker, III, close adviser to the elder President Bush  and secretary of state during the 1991 war in Iraq, and former  Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, who served as co-chair of the 9/11 commission. A long time friend and confidant to the Bush clan, Baker has a reputation as the Bush family “janitor,” who steps in to clean up the messes they have created from time to time. As the Washington Post recently reported, “The group has attracted little attention beyond foreign policy elites since its formation this year. But it is widely viewed within that small world as perhaps the last hope for a midcourse correction in a venture they generally agree has been a disaster” (WP 9/17/06).”  Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff under Clinton, and a member of the study group, characterized the need to find a solution to the mess in Iraq in these words, “If this war is consumed by partisan attacks, if the choice is presented as simply one between ‘stay the course’ or ‘cut and run,’ we will never be able to do what is right.”  Panetta’s remarks reflect a concern to go beyond the politicization of the war in the current congressional campaign and assessing ‘blame,’ towards a policy adjustment that will serve the needs of the national capital. Some observers have likened this study group to a similar effort in 1968 after the Tet Offensive had exposed the lies and false intelligence disseminated by the government on the Vietnam War. That group recommendations led Pres. Johnson to decide not to run for re-election and to seek negotiations with North Vietnam.

Political Division of Labor That Best Serves Ruling Class Needs

The political goal of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie continues to require modifications in the disastrous implementation of the imperialist policy by the Bush administration. For the bourgeoisie, the problem is not, as some leftist intellectuals contend, that the irresponsible neoconservative faction has seized control of the state. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld are undeniably part of the dominant fraction of the ruling class; it’s just that they are not effective in implementing the shared imperialist strategic orientation of this fraction. In part this is because Bush has allowed the neocons to assert  more influence – but not control – within this administration than ever before, and in part because Cheney’s orientation is particularly reactionary, oriented towards a clumsy reversal of the Watergate era responses to the excesses of the Nixon administration and a return to a “strong” executive branch. In addition, another aspect of this problem is Rumsfeld’s ill-founded penchant for a lean military with quick strike capacities, but insufficient manpower for sustained conflict and military occupation, as many in military circles have complained.

 That  the concern to revamp Iraq policy reflects the bourgeoisie as a whole and not the narrow partisan interests of this or that part of the Democratic party is demonstrated clearly not only by the creation of the Iraq Study Group, but by the festering political disputes within the Republican party itself. The feuding between the far right and the president over his failure to implement their extremist social agenda is only a small part of this problem. Of greater importance is the rebellion by Senators  John McCain, former military hero and prisoner of war during Vietnam,  John Warner, former Secretary of the Navy and head of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, and Lindsey Graham, a former military judge,  over the Bush administration’s  attempt to openly abandon the Geneva Convention. The conservative Republican senators, with their strong military credentials, argue that Bush’s proposal to reinterpret Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (Bush complained that the treaty’s prohibition against “outrages upon human dignity” is vague and meaningless) in order to permit the extreme mistreatment and torture used by the CIA in their secret prisons to interrogate al Qaeda prisoners would risk terrible long range consequences. They warn of an erosion of American political authority on the international level, growing international chaos as each nation would emulate US comportment and redefine and reinterpret Article 3 to their own liking, and would thereby jeopardize the safety of American soldiers taken prisoner. It’s not that the senators are reluctant to use extreme measures to interrogate prisoners, as their “compromise” agreement with the president demonstrates, it’s the open repudiation of the Geneva Convention that they oppose. The public repudiation of the Bush administration position by Colin Powell, the former four-star general and head of the Joint Chiefs, who served as Bush’s Secretary of State from 2001-2004, and the congressional testimony by high ranking legal military officers against reinterpreting Article 3 demonstrates the seriousness of this dispute within the ruling class as a whole. Powell warned that the attempt to sidestep the Geneva Conventions would put in question “the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.” The leaking in late September in the New York Times and Washington Post of a classified intelligence estimate, reporting on the consensus of 16 U.S. spy agencies that the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the indefinite imprisonment of suspects at Guantanamo has given rise to a new generation of Islamist terrorists and increased the threat of terrorism (the opposite of the Bush administration’s repeated boasts) is yet another example of the growing pressure on the administration to abandon its “stay the course” line and in fact make a midcourse correction in imperialist policy implementation. The fact that hardliners in the Bush administration over the summer began blaming the elder Bush’s administration, including particularly James Baker, for emboldening bin Laden by deciding against ousting Saddam in 1991, reflects their bitterness against the pending policy changes that will be forced upon them.

The situation is no better on the domestic front.  Despite controlling both houses of congress, the Bush administration has been totally paralyzed in implementing its domestic agenda, as the failure of its attempts to privatize and gut the social security program  and to “reform” immigration amply demonstrate. Bush can no longer control the far right of his own party, which provided the electoral base for his victories in 2000 and 2004. The failure to push through an immigration reform package that would stabilize the situation of 12 million illegal immigrants who have been here years and to permit a guest worker program that would guarantee a reliable supply of cheap labor  to the retail, meatpacking, hospital, and agriculture industry poses potential economic disaster, as the shortage of immigrant workers to pick this summer’s fruit crops in California illustrates.

In this context, the best electoral result from the bourgeoisie’s perspective would be for the Democrats to gain control of at least one house of Congress. This is most likely to be possible in the House of Representatives. Such an adjustment of the political division of labor would enable the dominant fraction of the ruling class to increase pressure on Bush to moderate his imperialist policies and block the most egregious mistakes through legislative action. It would increase pressure for extra-electoral adjustments in the administration, including perhaps the forced resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Journalist David Gergen who served in the White House as a press spokesperson for both Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton, recently criticized Bush’s tendency to rule in a divisive way with a partisan cabinet and pointed favorably to the examples of presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, both of whom appointed Republicans as their defense secretaries (Robert McNamara in the case of Kennedy and William Cohen in the case of Clinton).He suggested that appointing a prominent conservative Democrat to replace Rumsfeld at defense would go a long way toward moving toward a unity government. Of course he meant “unity” for the ruling class. A conservative Democrat, such as former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, for example, would make a fine replacement for Rumsfeld from the bourgeoisie’s point of view. The departure of Vice President Cheney, seen by many as the “evil” force behind the war in Iraq and the attempt to legitimize torture and the negation of traditional civil liberties, because of “health” reasons might be another alternative extra-electoral adjustment to the ruling team. 

While a Democratic victory would best serve the needs of the bourgeoisie, the question remains as to whether they will be able to control the process to achieve the desired result. Certainly the Foley scandal unleashed by the media in early October opens the possibility to crack finally the monolithism of the Christian right that Bush has relied so heavily on in past elections, and thereby favors Democratic gains in the election. In addition, the divisions within the Republican party at the moment go a long way towards undercutting the Bush administration’s attempt to use national security as an issue against the Democrats in the election and certainly undermines his political authority. Bush’s denunciation of prominent Republican critics as “putting the nation at risk,” his characterization of the conclusions that the war in Iraq had created a new generation of Islamist terrorists and increased the threat against the U.S. in the National Intelligence Estimate prepared by America’s 16 spy agencies as “naïve,” and his press secretary Tony Snow’s dismissal of Colin Powell as “confused” only fuels widespread fears about the administration’s self-delusional views on the current situation, and tendency to see critics as traitors, which might further isolate it from support within the ruling class. On the other hand such extremist posturing reveals an almost messianic belief by Bush that his is the one and only vision that can save the nation and could therefore justify using any means necessary to maintain control – in much the same way that Nixon justified his use of the state against his critics within the ruling class in the 1972 election. Thus despite the clear requirements from the ruling class’s perspective for a political realignment in Washington, we should not be surprised if the Bush administration resorts to all manner of illegal, fraudulent maneuvers to steal the election, which in the case of House races could be done at a very local level.

 This election is a very important moment in the political life of the American ruling class. A situation in which the ruling class of the only remaining superpower has extreme difficulty in putting in place a ruling team and political division of labor that best serves its interests cannot be tolerated indefinitely. J. Grevin, 09/06.

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 has been marked by a propaganda orgy. In the two months leading up to the anniversary, there were all manner of solemn ceremonies, pompous speeches, television and radio news specials, interviews, documentaries, and Hollywood’s release of not one, but two, theatrical movies -- the World Trade Center and United 93 – during the summer.  Even cultural institutions, like the museums in NYC have organized exhibits and displays as part of the campaign.

While some of the more local ceremonies perhaps simply memorialized the 2800 people who died on 9/11, the main focus of the Bush administration was an attempt to rekindle the patriotic fervor that gripped the U.S. in 2001 in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. This fervor, complete with flag waving, war psychoses, and willingness to accept whatever the government said was necessary to prevent further terrorist attacks, has been largely squandered in the last few years, due to a combination of clumsiness, miscalculations, and general bungling of the Bush administration and the effects of capitalist decomposition which would have kept any White House occupant from being successful.

 President George W. Bush threw himself into the forefront of the administration’s newest propaganda campaign with a series of addresses before pre-screened, guaranteed-to-be-friendly audiences, such as veterans groups and military officers associations, that reaffirmed American resolve to wage the war against Islamic terrorism. With nearly two-thirds of the population now believing that the war in Iraq was a mistake and expressing a lack of confidence in the government, Bush seemed particularly desperate to revive support for the war and minimize any Democratic gains in the midterm elections in November.  Bush even introduced the formulation “Islamic fascism” into the mix and compared critics of his war policies, including those who disagree on the war in Iraq and those who oppose his abandonment of the Geneva Convention and endorsement of torture, to those who appeased Hitler in the 1930s. Such posturing appears increasingly quixotic when critics, particularly on torture, include the likes of Senators Warner, McCain, and Graham, as well as Colin Powell, former member of the Joint Chiefs and Bush’s own Secretary of State from 2001-2004.

  In his radio address on Saturday, Sept 9th   Bush fell back on his now boringly familiar platitudes about the “brutality of the enemy” and the need to “act decisively to stop them from achieving their evil aims.” His primetime address to the nation on the evening of Sept. 11 was more a pep talk for the war in Iraq than it was an homage to the 9/11 victims, especially since now the administration has been forced to admit that Saddam Hussein had no links to al Qaeda, had nothing to do with 9/11, and even regarded al Qaeda as hostile to his regime. Bush devoted a mere three paragraphs of his speech to remembering the dead, and went on and on glorifying his administration’s role in “this struggle between tyranny and freedom” and invoked the image of the glory days of World War II and the Cold War, when fascism and Russian Communism respectively were the “evil” enemies of the U.S.

Putting aside the bombast of the bourgeois propaganda barrage, it is appropriate to offer a revolutionary perspective on the 5th anniversary of 9/11. There are a number of observations that should be advanced:

1) The tragic death of so many innocent people, the overwhelming majority of them workers, on 9/11 is testimony not to a “war of civilizations,” a pretext for imperialist war, as the bourgeoisie claims, but irrefutable evidence of the depravity of world capitalism. It is proof that capitalism today offers humanity a stark choice between barbarism or socialism, that unless it is destroyed by proletarian revolution this bankrupt and outmoded social order will condemn humanity to more and more death and destruction. Nearly three thousand people died in a single day because capitalism no longer has a reason to exist.

2) Five years after 9/11, it is clear that the bourgeoisie has failed miserably to use that tragedy to achieve an ideological and political defeat of the working class in the United States in order to mobilize it behind the state for imperialist war. The dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie, including both Republicans and Democrats, were unanimous in their support for war in Afghanistan and Iraq, as part of American imperialism’s strategy to reassert its global hegemony in the post Cold War era, to firmly establish its military presence in the strategically important  Middle East, and put pressure on its erstwhile allies in Europe who were increasingly inclined to play their own cards on the imperialist terrain following the collapse of the bloc discipline that had characterized the Cold War period. With the 9/11 attacks, which as we have detailed previously in articles in Internationalism and in the International Review, were anticipated, expected, and permitted by the Bush administration, in much the same way that the Roosevelt administration permitted the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941, in order to manipulate popular opinion in favor of war, the U.S. bourgeoisie counted on those traumatic events to help it definitively overcome what the bourgeoisie terms the “Vietnam Syndrome” – the unwillingness of the working class to be mobilized for war and to accept sacrifice in the service of America’s imperialist appetites.

However, despite the momentary gains the bourgeoisie made on this level in the aftermath of the attacks in 2001 and the high hopes the bourgeoisie harbored, the working class has turned its back on the war and increasingly moves to return to class struggle. So discredited is the official explanation of 9/11 and so advanced is the mistrust of the government, that all manner of conspiracy theories have proliferated in recent years. The growth of this “9/11 truth movement” shows  a deterioration in the political authority of the state. This movement includes elements that believe the government knew in advance that a terrorist attack was coming but permitted it to happen and others who believe that it was the government itself that blew up the trade center.  In fact polls show that as much as 36 percent of the population disbelieves the government’s official explanation of 9/11 – a level of distrust that was unimaginable in the days immediately following the attacks in 2001.

3) If the bourgeoisie has not achieved an historic defeat of the American proletariat, they have been successful in using national security as the pretext for a dramatic strengthening of the state’s repressive apparatus. Under the guise of protecting Americans from the “enemies of freedom,” the ruling class has eroded legal rights and protections that were supposedly characteristic of this highly vaunted “American freedom.” The USA Patriot Act, introduced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and voted upon even before legislators had an opportunity to read it and without any public hearings whatsoever, permitted all manner of intrusions into individual privacy, promoted domestic spying, warrantless wiretaps and searches, and interception of email, regular mail, library borrowing and bookstore purchasing records (so Homeland Security could protect America by knowing what people were reading!). In New York City, the police now set up random checkpoints to search backpacks and briefcases of workers traveling to or from work. The Patriot Act was modified slightly this year when it was renewed by Congress, but its most repressive measures remain intact. While these repressive measures today are supposedly directed at Islamic terrorists, their institutionalization and general acceptance will make them a valuable tool in the future for the bourgeoisie to use against the working class as its struggles intensify. On this level, the ruling class can claim a real success from 9/11.

4) The war in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, the war in Afghanistan have achieved the opposite of their desired effect. Rather than strengthening American imperialism and reasserting its hegemony, have bogged U.S. imperialism down in an endless quagmire, weakened its strategic and tactical position, spread chaos throughout the Middle East, increased challenges to U.S. domination and created a crisis for American imperialist leadership. The American military, the most powerful in the world, has been stretched thin, unable to respond effectively to further military missions, and thus renders American imperialism more vulnerable to challenges in other parts of the globe. Indeed it is this crisis of American imperialism that underlies the current divergences within the ruling class, as it becomes increasingly clear that Bush team is incapable of adequately defending the interests of the national capital (see the article on the crisis of American imperialism elsewhere in this issue).

5) This disunity in the bourgeoisie over the ineptitude of the Bush administration  has exposed the political incapacity of the ruling class to manipulate its electoral process effectively. For the bourgeoisie,  George Bush’s re-election represented a setback in its ability to readjust its political division of labor and imperialist policy. It was not the result that best served the interests of the dominant faction of the ruling class. This inability to manipulate successfully the electoral circus as it has done for decades during the period of decadent capitalism reflects a serious weakness for the ruling class of the only remaining superpower. Following the election a series of political campaigns were used to put pressure on the Bush administration to moderate its policy. After a period of resistance, the administration seemed to respond to the pressure, removing, for example, Paul Wolfowitz, the chief neoconservative architect of the Iraq war strategy, from the Pentagon and kicking him upstairs to the World Bank.

However, since then the administration has dug in its heels and recently attacks on the Bush administration have reached incredible heights. The regime is essentially gripped by political paralysis, incapable of implementing any of its domestic agenda since the 2004 election, such as social security cuts or immigration “reform,” and facing a rising chorus of criticism on its conduct of the war. In June, the same Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees who put a partisan seal of approval on Bush stealing of the 2000 presidential election, ruled that his policies on international prisoners held at Guantanamo violate international law and the Geneva Conventions proscription of torture and inhuman treatment. (The Court did not rule on the CIA’s secret prisons and torture program, which were not acknowledged to exist by the government until September.) Even high ranking uniformed legal officials in the military testified before Congress in opposition to Bush’s new proposals for military tribunals for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo, and leading Republicans like McCain, Warner, and Graham have rebelled against the same proposals. This whole blame game is of course ironic since it doesn’t really matter who occupies the White House or how they nuance American policy. The conditions characteristic of the period of decomposition are in the final analysis the underlying cause for the failure of American policy. While the Bush administration is indeed particularly clumsy in its implementation of imperialist policy, there is in fact no reason to believe that any other occupant of the White House would have been any more successful.

In sharp contrast to the warlike rhetoric of the last few weeks, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, American capitalism is mired in crisis on both the imperialist and domestic political terrain. Its long sought dream of mobilizing the working class for war is once again just a dream, and it faces a working class that is undefeated and more inclined to return to class struggle and resist austerity. Not much for the bourgeoisie to celebrate. The only alternative to the future of death and destruction that capitalism holds in store for us is the class struggle and working class revolution. – J.Grevin, 09/06.

The deepening of the crisis makes the workers’ conditions of life worse by the day and engenders expressions of real discontent.  In the ICC press, we have written about the important mobilizations of the French workers and students against the CPE.  The strikes of the metal workers in Spain have expressed a similar decisiveness, combativeness, and clarity, even though they have not had the same magnitude.  Even in a country in the periphery, like Bangladesh, there are opportunities for the class to have important experiences of struggle, although with greater difficulties.  And in Mexico, too, discontent has led to the outbreak of struggles in recent months, most notably by the Michoacan mine workers, and the public schoolteachers in Oaxaca. While these struggles demonstrated potential strength and resolution, the ruling class took the lead and directed the struggles toward real traps, sterilizing combativeness by mystifying and delaying reflection and the development of class consciousness. 

The death of 65 workers in the Pasta de Conchos mine, caused by the dangerous conditions of work under which the miners are obliged to labor, sparked discontent among the miners. Low wages fueled the miners’ anger even more.  But their struggle was sterilized by the union, which put itself at the head of the movement, supported by bosses and government, with the aim of derailing the workers’ discontent in the dead-end of the defense of corrupt industrialist Gomez Urrutia, who is currently in conflict with the government (1).  This manipulation eventually led the miners into confrontations with the police, during which 2 miners were killed. 

Similarly, the combativeness expressed by 70,000 Oaxacan teachers as they struck for wage increases, ended up suffocated in an interclassist movement led by the City of Oaxaca Popular Assembly (APPO), which, regardless of its radical and autonomous pretenses, has no class orientation whatsoever. The strike began in May, as yet another in a long list of springtime teachers strikes over the past 26 years in impoverished Oaxaca state, where teachers are among the most poorly paid in Mexico.  Most striking teachers earn from $400 to $600 per month. As they often do, the striking teachers set up an encampment in the central plaza of Oaxaca. On June 14, governor Ulises Ruiz ordered police, armed with tear gas and clubs, to disperse the encampment. Dozens were injured, but the strikers held fast and quickly became a rallying point for farmer groups, university students, and leftists of all stripes, who rushed to the town and created the APPO which claims to govern the town, or at least the part of town that they have occupied and barricaded off.  

 But the APPO is far from being an embryonic form of a workers commune. It is an interclassist organization, dominated by leftist and union structures in which one can find such diversity as Stalinists and supporters of the Zapatistas’ 6th declarations side by side. The APPO drains the workers’ strength by leading them into mobilizations that have no coherent objectives, dominated as they are by the desperation of those classes in society that have no future.  Desperation and voluntarism help to create a fertile soil for provocation by generating demoralization and isolation. 

This is best illustrated by the manipulation of the Oaxaca teachers.  First, the SNTE (teachers’ union) kept the teachers in isolation through a long, drawn out strike.  The Mexican government then attacked the strikers with its repressive apparatus, the police.  The workers successfully resisted the aggression, but the demands around the wages and conditions of work, which showed that teachers are part of the working class, and that, as such, they directly confront exploitation, are gone, and the discontent has been derailed toward the ‘improvement’ of Oaxaca democratic order, a thoroughly bourgeois, not a proletarian, preoccupation.  For example, with proletarian demands like wages now no longer in the forefront, the APPO has demanded the removal Oaxaca governor, Ulises Ruiz, in order to facilitate the search for “…a new leadership and a new democratic and popular constitution for the city of Oaxaca,” (La Jornada, 8/24/06), as if a new bourgeois constitution corresponded to the interests of the working class.

   In the face of these events, the workers need to reflect on whether changing one governor for another will in any way change their condition of exploitation, and whether it is at all possible that a system based on exploitation and oppression can generate laws that benefit the workers.

The defense of the system’s democratization = defense of capitalism

This derailment of the struggle by a fake radicalization has benefited the bourgeoisie, which has also used the struggle as its own arena.  The bourgeoisie has in fact used the massive demonstrations and the desperate responses to put pressure on certain sectors of the dominant class to the detriment of others.  Already at the time of the intervention of the SNTE we could see the differences between sectors of the bourgeoisie.  With the aggravation of the conflict the various bourgeois gangs try to influence or put pressure on the workers, either through provocations or by allowing the conflict to drag on. 

 It is important to keep in mind the attitude the different fractions of the bourgeoisie kept for the duration of the conflict.  Even though they express political differences, some personalities and groups of the ruling class have united behind Oaxaca’s governor.  This is the case, for example, with Felipe Calderon, presidential candidate of the PAN who won the July elections contested by Manuel Lopez Obrador.  The federal government’s attitude towards alliances and ruptures is also significant.  For instance, the government allowed the conflict to escalate, but its aim was to isolate Ulises Ruiz.  Let’s remember, for example, that Fox’s spokesman made a veiled accusation against Ulises Ruiz’s use of paramilitary groups, used to take back the Oaxaca radio station which the APPO had occupied, while Ulises Ruiz was careful about denying any such intervention.

 Throughout the movement, the bourgeoisie did not care to show its bloody face as it killed, tortured, and jailed, but all along it was very careful not to lose control of the movement.  Even though some sectors of the bourgeoisie may be weakened, the system as a whole has strengthened while the working class’ confusion has deepened.

We also need to point out that, even though the APPO does not represent class interests, the working class looks at it sympathetically because, in appearance, this organization seems to be critical of the ruling class.  However, it is precisely the sympathy of the workers that the left apparatus of the ruling class uses in order to strengthen its own trap.  What is now called ‘peaceful popular insurrection’ is hailed as an example to follow.  If this was an example in the negative, now the campaign is about extending such ‘peaceful insurrections’. This is how confusion deepens among the workers, and the pro-democracy campaign strengthens. For instance, Lopez Obrador’s proposal to carry out a ‘democratic national convention’ on September 16  gained credibility thanks to the ‘example’ set by the Oaxaca ‘peaceful insurrection’.  In this way, the bourgeoisie moves to demolish all discontent and feed illusions in democracy and the possibility of a betterment of capitalism through ‘…new representatives who will make of the country that which all of us aspire to.’ (Excerpted from the Popular Assembly of the People of Michoacan, 8/20/06.)

The conditions of misery under which the working class lives cannot be changed with a change of representatives in office, by the laws, or by an extension of democracy. On the contrary, these are instruments used by the ruling class to tie the workers’ hands and have them believe that capitalism can offer a better life.

Based on an article by Cloe [124], translated from Revolucion Mundial , organ of the ICC in Mexico. October 2006.

Notes:

1.  The confrontation between Gomez Urrutia and the Secretary of Labor is nothing but the tip of the iceberg of a more serious confrontation going on within the bourgeoisie.  Behind it, we find the confrontations between mining interests, where political alliances and business disputes are mixed.  This is why it’s not surprising that some businessmen openly support the union behind which Gomez Urrutia stands, while others promote the union in support of the federal government.

The collapse of the Russian superpower in 1989 and with it the disappearance of the system of imperialist blocs that dominated world affairs since the end of World War II, left the US as the dominant imperialist power.  After more than a decade and half, in spite of a relentless questioning of this hegemony, the US has been able to maintain its economic, political and particularly its military global supremacy. And for the moment there isn’t another country, or group of countries, that can challenge this  position of power on the global level. This lack of  a viable imperialist competitor, capable of strategically challenging American world dominance, is in great part the product of the present  historic state of capitalism, in particular decomposition’s  chaotic dynamic preventing the formation of permanent imperialist alliances. But it is also the consequence of the US bourgeoisie’s political imperialist strategy centered around the  battle to block the rise of any power, whether a single country or a group of countries, that could effectively challenge its world supremacy. This policy has been in place and has served as the cornerstone of American imperialist strategy since the collapse of the system of imperialist blocs, regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican has occupied the White House.

However, even though the US bourgeoisie has for the last 16 years successfully defended its world hegemony, this success has to be very much qualified.  In fact behind the preservation of American world supremacy is the hard reality of the historic crisis of   US leadership against which all the policies of the American state have proven ineffective.

This decline of the American empire, has been particularly obvious in the failure of  the last world-wide offensive of  the  US bourgeoisie launched under the cover of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

THE FAILURE OF THE “PREEMPTIVE ACTION” STRATEGY 

At the end of May 2006, the Bush administration announced that, with the formation of a new democratically elected government in Iraq, there has been a turning point in the struggle against terrorism and the fight for “democracy” in the world. Empty words of an embattled president who seems to continue to hold power only thanks to the weaknesses of the American bourgeois political apparatus. Unlike its European counterparts with their parliamentary systems, which permit them to change horses in the middle of the race, the American bourgeoisie has almost no way to dump its ineffective head of state before a full term has been served. With two and a half years more left in the White house, there is one sure legacy that this president will pass to his successor: a declining imperialist power, seemingly unable to extricate itself from the quagmire that its actions have created in Iraq, and heavily restricted in its ability to respond to the constant questioning around the world of its hegemonic imperialist position.

In past declarations Bush has said candidly that the problem of withdrawing US troops from Iraq will be left for the next president to decide. This declared impotence to bring the war in Iraq to a successful resolution is just the crowning jewel in the administration’s growing disarray in  the implementation of US imperialist policy.

In the beginning of his first term Mr. Bush put forward the belligerent imperialist “Bush doctrine,” which had as its centerpiece the notion that the US would take the initiative in knocking down any would-be enemy before it had the chance to attack America –a so called “preemptive action.” This declaration of war against the world served well the immediate post-September 11 situation during which the American bourgeoisie launched, under the cover of the so called “war on terrorism”, a major political and military offensive in South Asia and the Middle East aimed to advance US military and political position in those regions in order to better contain the expansionist imperialist appetites of Russia and various European powers.

Today this grandiose Bush “doctrine” is nowhere to be heard of in America. And this is not an accident. The fact is that the political military offensive engineered by the Bush administration is a total shambles. The “war on terrorism” ideological banner  has  lost the appeal that it had within the American population following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Besides, five years after these terrible events and the ensuing American response, the US is far from “winning the war on terrorism” as the government would like us to believe. In fact Osama Bin Laden and his loose network of  followers of Islamic extremists seem only to have gotten stronger, while the American bourgeoisie has lost domestically and internationally the high moral ground that it had at the time of the barbaric Al  Qaida terrorist attacks—attacks facilitated, to say the least, by the higher echelons of the US state itself. Even though the war in Afghanistan has allowed the US to improve its strategic  military position in South Asia –curbing Pakistan’s imperialist ambitions, establishing American military bases in former Russian satellites in Central Asia-- the situation in post-Taliban’s Afghanistan itself is hurting American political credibility enormously. Five years after being taken over by America, this country is far from stable with permanent  on-again-off-again flare ups of war in many regions and no visible improvement in the fortune of a population  that for decades has been ravaged by war and abuse by one or another foreign power and/or local political clique.

However it is in the Middle East where the implementation of American imperialist policy by the Bush administration  has been a total fiasco.  In Iraq, where Bush’s preemptive action doctrine got its real first test, after three years since easily toppling  Sadam Hussein regime, the US is bogged down in a costly and increasingly unpopular war with no victory in sight. Over 2600 American soldiers have been killed, and 8 billion dollars are spent a month in this conflict. The US invaded this country, for reasons that have long since been proven to be phony, and overthrew its brutal regime, promising the moon and the stars to its brutalized population. Instead, the misery,  suffering,  insecurity, and dehumanization that it has  brought about are beyond anything imagined at the time of the invasion.   Also in the Middle East the American strategy vis-à-vis the Palestinian question has been a total failure. Completely busy with Iraq  the US role in the Israel/Palestine conflict has been reduced to one of spectator. It makes one  laugh to remember Mr Bush’s “road map” for peace in this conflict that was announced with great fanfare after the “victorious” Iraqi invasion. Powerless to play any substantial role in this conflict the US has witnessed the recent  election to power of  the terrorist group Hamas in Palestine, and the continued re-drawing of the Palestine/ Israel  borders by the Israeli government to its own liking, neither of which  fit at all with the needs of American imperialism in the region.

WHAT CONSEQUENCES

The Bush administration’s failure to be up to the needs of the imperialist requirements of  American capitalism is creating tremendous difficulties both for the present and future policy needs of American imperialism.

Its political credibility in shambles, there exists a growing international isolation of the US In Iraq even the “coalition of the willing” –the little gang that the US managed to put together to give its invasion of Iraq an international flavor-- has, little by little disintegrated. Spain has long retreated.  Italy, now that Berlusconi is gone, will probably pull its troops out soon. There is even tremendous pressure on the lame-duck government of Blair to withdraw Great Britain’s troops.

Its mounting loss of political authority and credibility and the very material fact that it is bogged down in Iraq are exacerbating imperialist tensions around the world and encouraging other countries to play their own imperialist cards. In this context, there is a growing recognition among the high level military officials that, under present conditions, America cannot fight another war simultaneously to the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the Far East, North Korea, one of the so called “axis of evil” countries, has been able to continue its defiant attitude towards the US vis-à-vis- its nuclear ambitions.  China, despite being identified recently by the Pentagon as the greatest potential threat to the US, has gone unchallenged by the US and has continued to increase its regional and international power status. The European powers, the real targets of the US invasion of Iraq, have not given up on their ambitions in the Middle East, as demonstrated by their diplomatic meddling in the Israel/Palestine conflict and Iran’s nuclear activities. Iran has been able to improve its status as a regional imperialist power increasing its influence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, leading many bourgeois commentators to suggest that the big winner from American imperialism’s offensive and democratization campaign in the Middle East are pro-Iranian groups like Hamas and Hezbollah triumphing in Palestine and Lebanon, and the dominant Shiite groups in Iraq maintaining close links to Iran. At the same time, Iran has been able so far to get away with its efforts to develop a future nuclear armaments program and European powers have resisted the US call for sanctions against Iran. In Somalia the “war on terrorism” resulted in a debacle with the triumph of extremist Islamic militias against the war lords supported by the US secret services. In Latin America, the tendency to question US control in its own backyard by other powers has just gotten another boost with the ascension to power of one more “anti-imperialist” left government, now in Bolivia. Even Canada, with its new conservative government, has been giving the US a hard time over the control of the Artic Ocean waterways.  

In the face of this questioning of its hegemony, the US bourgeoisie, given its present difficulties, is having a hard time to respond with a coherent policy, thus giving the impression that it is jumping erratically from situation to situation with no clear orientation. For instance, when Israel decided to redraw its  borders with Palestine without  Washington’s consent, the US was incapable of opposing this policy –after all Israel is America’s only trusted ally in the Middle East— and the American government  decided to endorse its actions. Vis-a-vis China, even though this country has been  identified by the Pentagon as a main challenger to the US,  unable to do much about it in the present situation, the US had no choice but to placate China in a recent controversy over the itinerary of Taiwan’s head of state. When Taiwan’s democratically elected president wanted to stop in the US on his way to Latin America, the Bush administration, in order not to upset China –which considers Taiwan a renegade province-- did not allow a stopover. India, which against the US wishes went nuclear and has faced US sanctions ever since, has now been rehabilitated. The US and India have signed a treaty allowing India to buy nuclear technology from the US. This could seem rational in the sense of the need that the US has to contain China, yet what is remarkable is that according to bourgeois commentators, India has not made  any commitments to the US in response to this new policy. What is most incredible is that India seems to be helping Iran with nuclear technology. Vis-à-vis this last country the official position of the American bourgeoisie has been not to negotiate. The US considers Iran a “country sponsor of terrorism”, one of the “axis of evil” nations in Bush’s terminology, but recent diplomatic developments around Iran’s nuclear program seems to imply that the US is changing this hardline position. 

The continued eroding of American world leadership will without doubt lead to another crisis. As we have said before the US is obliged more and more, given its historic decline, to use its military muscle as the central element in its imperialist policy. The pressure is building more and more for a new American show of military force. In particular the Iran question seems far from exhausted.  09/06 Eduardo Smith               

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

However, as the situation in Iraq steadily worsened, by last winter a consensus had emerged within the dominant fraction that the situation in Iraq was an absolute mess, a quagmire that jeopardized the long range, global interests of American imperialism. The U.S. military was clearly stretched so thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that it was incapable of responding to threats in other parts of the world. This was an intolerable situation because the exercise of military might abroad is an absolute necessity for American imperialism in a period in which its hegemony is under increasing challenge. To make matters worse, the Bush administration’s bungling of the war in Iraq had completely squandered the ideological gains the U.S. ruling class had made in manipulating popular acceptance of its overseas imperialist adventures in the aftermath of 9/11.

This consensus led last March to creation of a bipartisan commission, the Iraq Study Group, led by James A. Baker, III, and former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamiliton. Baker has been a close adviser and friend to the elder George Bush, served as secretary of state under Bush senior during the first U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991. Baker managed the current President Bush’s legal effort to successfully steal the 2000 election Florida, and is sometimes referred to as the Bush family “janitor,” who can always be counted upon to clean up Bush family messes. Hamilton also co-chaired the 9/11 Commission. Comprised overwhelmingly of prominent officials1 from the Reagan, Bush senior, and Clinton administrations, the commission in essence represented the continuity of the permanent state capitalist apparatus, which saw the need to force the ruling team to alter course.

The initial work of this commission was conducted secretly and in confidence, but in the course of the electoral campaign, its members, both Democrats and Republicans increasingly spoke out in public, critiquing specifically the administration’s polarizing political rhetoric, pitting “stay the course” vs. “cut and run,” as incapable of advancing national imperialist interests. The administration’s tendency to put in doubt the patriotism of its bourgeois critics was clearly unacceptable. Indeed the media conveyed the message, emanating from the commission, that this simplistic policy dichotomy reflected an untenable loss of touch with reality. So strong was this pressure, that by early September the President actually stopped using the “stay the course” slogan. Nevertheless, Bush still stubbornly certainly seemed to cling to this view. He still continued to denounce the Democrats as the party of “cut and run” and the content of his own message continued to stress the need to fight on in Iraq until victory was achieved. However the study group had effectively laid the basis for a change in policy even before the election.

In Internationalism 140 we predicted that the impending Democratic victory: "would increase pressure for extra-electoral adjustments in the administration, including perhaps the forced resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld."

Confirmation of this prediction came almost immediately with the announcement of the forced resignation of defense secretary Rumsfeld and the designation of a successor by 1pm the day after the election. If bourgeois media reports can be believed, as early as the weekend before the election, Bush had already asked Rumsfeld to step down and decided to replace him with Robert Gates, a veteran national security agent, who served as CIA director under the elder George Bush. Demonstrating even more graphically the potential influence of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, it must be noted that Gates was in fact a member of the Iraq Study Group (he stepped down only after his nomination as defense secretary). Gates generally subscribes to Baker’s cautious approach to imperialist policy and criticisms of the current administration’s approach.

The reinvigoration of the democratic mystification accomplished by the November election is important for the bourgeoisie because a belief that the system works is a precondition for popular acquiescence in what is to come. Despite the popular revulsion against the war, particularly in the working class, the election is of course not a victory for peace, but rather a victory for the bourgeoisie’s effort to prepare for the next war, by repairing the damage done to the U.S. military, intelligence and foreign policy apparatus by the Bush administration’s mistakes.

The real debate within the bourgeoisie over Iraq does not pit hawks against doves, but hawks against hawks on how best to extricate themselves from the quagmire and prepare for the next overseas military adventure. As the “dovish” New York Times wrote in its editorial two days after the election, “Mr. Gates’s most urgent task, assuming he is confirmed, must be to reopen those necessary channels of communication with military, intelligence and foreign service professionals on the ground. After hearing what they have to say, he needs to recommend a realistic new strategy to Mr. Bush in place of the one that is now demonstrably failing…He will have to rebuild a badly overstretched Army, refocus military transformation by trading in unneeded cold war weapons for new technologies more relevant to current needs, and nurture a more constructive relationship with Congressional oversight committees.”

Since the election, the general chiefs of staff moved quickly to assert their independence from the discredited Rumsfeld. The chiefs have undertaken a reassessment of the military situation in Iraq, searching for their own policy alternatives even before Gates was confirmed and before the Iraq Study Group issues its recommendations in mid-December. The Army has already released a new training manual that reverses one of Rumsfeld’s more controversial policies regarding minimal troop levels for occupation and reconstruction operations following military invasions, a policy which has been disastrous in Iraq.

Freed from an obligation to toe the line set forth previously by the lame duck Rumsfeld, General Abizaid, director of U.S. Central Command, testified before Senate and House committees in mid-November and openly criticized and contradicted Rumsfeld’s and Bush’s past decisions and policies in Iraq. For instance, regarding the long simmering dispute between the armed services and Rumsfeld over necessary troop levels in Iraq, Abizaid testified that General Eric Shinseki who was fired by Rumsfeld in 2003 for criticizing Rumsfeld’s doctrine of sparse occupation force deployments and insisting that up to 300,000 troops might be necessary had been correct in his assessment of the situation and shouldn’t have been fired.

Abizaid also contradicted the administration’s long standing propaganda line by insisting that the greatest threat in Iraq came not from Al Qaeda but from sectarian militias that were on the brink of civil war. Abizaid opposed both a phased troop withdrawal, as advocated by some Democrats, and a deployment of thousands more troops, as advocated by Republican Senator John McCain. Instead he called for a policy change that would shift deployment of significant numbers of American troops from patrol and combat assignments to training Iraqi security forces.

Despite popular disenchantment with the war and widespread support for withdrawal, there will in fact be no quick military withdrawal from Iraq. Indeed the Bush administration has essentially rejected the study group’s recommendations and seems hell bent on escalating the war in Iraq. The hardliners in the administration have embraced Sen. McCain’s proposal for a “surge” in troop strength, with the deployment of perhaps 30,000 additional troops to quash resistance in Sunni areas, despite the fact that military leaders at the Joint Chiefs and in the field in Iraq are opposed to increasing troop levels. The military opposition to the “surge” stems from worries that this will only make the situation look more like an out and out occupation, increase the number of American targets on the ground and hence the number of casualties, and in the long run weaken the military’s ability to intervene elsewhere. It is indeed ironic that when the military wanted additional troops in 2003, the Bush administration refused and fired their leading general, and now when they don’t want more troops, the administration seems posed to ram them down their throats. Bush has responded by announcing a shake up in the military command. Military leaders opposing the escalation in the Central Command and in the field in Iraq have been reassigned elsewhere, and are being replaced with officers who accept the administration’s plan.

In all likelihood, despite expecting some stubborn resistance from certain neo-cons in the administration, the dominant fraction anticipated the implementation in large measure of the Iraq Study Group proposals, including particularly stepped up pressure on the Iraqi bourgeoisie to reach compromises within itself, some kind of timetable for phased withdrawal, and a reversal of the Bush administration’s refusal to talk to Syria and Iran and convening an international conference in the Middle East on the future of Iraq that would include participation of these two countries. In this regard, Baker has stressed publicly the importance of talking to your “enemies.” This is the only option available that would allow the U.S. to extricate itself from the Iraq quagmire, maintain a presence in the region, and counter European overtures toward Iran and Syria. While Bush appointed Gates as his new secretary of defense under pressure from the external forces within the bourgeoisie, Gates appears to be the only figure in the president’s war council currently capable of recognizing the gravity of the situation. Adjustment of the situation in the Middle East is crucial to the interests of the American imperialism, necessary in order to lay the basis for the American imperialism to more effectively orient itself towards challenges in the Far East and Latin America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Internationalism, Jan. 12, 2007

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

Difficulties in Controlling the Electoral Circus

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Role of the Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviving the Electoral Mystification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/300/anarchism-and-workers-control [126]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What future political Strategy for the bourgeoisie?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalism, March 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalism

April 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a New Recession

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

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

ES, 04/15/07.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerry Grevin, 04/15/07.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalism, 04/15/07.

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

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

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

The Reality of Global Warming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Myth of the Kyoto Protocols

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

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

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

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

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

Environmental Hypocrisy of the Bourgeoisie

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

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

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

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

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

Environmentalism in the Service of Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Environment and the Working Class

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

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

Jerry Grevin, July 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalism, July 2007

As we have pointed out in other articles on the US national situation - see in particular Inter 142 [127] - American capitalism is currently besieged by a twin malady: an historic crisis of its imperialist power and an economic crisis that is becoming more and more unmanageable. The answer of the dominant class to this situation has been a head long flight into imperialist war around the globe and the continuation of the worn out monetary and fiscal tricks that have kept the economy out of a total collapse up to the present. These policies have meant for the working class a continuous deterioration of its working conditions and standard of living and a growing sense of social insecurity. Due to the retreat of the struggle of the working class amid the confusion after the collapse of "communist" Eastern bloc and the supposed "victory" of democratic capitalism, the bourgeoisie has been able to implement these policies without a serious challenge from the working class, the only force in society that has a real option to offer to the dead-end of moribund capitalism. However in the last few years there is growing evidence that we have entered a period in which the class struggle will once more be at the center stage of the social situation and the bourgeoisie's policies of austerity and war will not go on without a challenge. In order to be able to help the future struggles to bear the fruit of all their potentialities we need to make more precise our understanding of the present stage of the working class struggle.

Where is the class struggle in the US?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

Eduardo S, July 8th 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/306/struggles-in-SA [128]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ana, 30 September 2007.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The role of credit in capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Housing industry illustrates the anachronism of capitalist production

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

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

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

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

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

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

The present situation: the same problems as 1929

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capitalism has prepared the conditions for socialism

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

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

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

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

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

[3] www.mcclatchydc.com [130]

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/310/unity-in-struggles  [131]

No one really denies anymore that there is a health care crisis in the US. Every Republican and Democratic presidential hopeful is touting some kind of plan to fix it. In reality, there are two versions of the health care crisis in the US - one for the working class and a separate one for the ruling class.

The Health Care Crisis for the Workers

Any worker in America can give you the details on the health care crisis. Those who are lucky enough to have medical benefits at their jobs find that these benefits are under a generalized, all-out attack. Medical benefits have been a central feature in virtually every strike in the past three years, as workers seek to resist the erosion of their benefits. Costs for workers are spiraling out of control. It used to be that companies paid 100% for health insurance as part of the wage/benefit package. But today workers are forced to pay for a percentage of the medical premiums. Once management wins the end of 100% employer-paid insurance, the percentage workers must contribute is constantly being increased. Within the plans themselves, worker's costs are skyrocketing, co-pays, fees, and deductibles are constantly going up. Workers' insurance coverage is being eroded. Younger workers often lack coverage or have substandard coverage that doesn't cover much, and they have to pay exorbitant contributions to extend coverage to the entire family.

Quality of care is also declining, and the government keeps granting doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies exemptions from liability for malpractice, incompetence, and defective drugs with disastrous side effects. Then of course there are the estimated 46+ million Americans who have no medical insurance at all. While the poorest Americans are covered by Medicaid, sponsored by the federal government's social welfare system, and Medicare covers retired workers, increasing numbers of workers who earn too much to be covered by Medicaid are left to their own devices.   Recent court rulings have empowered unions and companies to drop retirees from medical insurance programs, forcing them to rely solely on Medicare and purchase their own supplemental coverage while retired from private insurance companies.

The Health Care Crisis for the Bourgeoisie

For the ruling class the health care crisis is that they are saddled with an incredibly inefficient and expensive system that damages American capitalism's economic competitiveness on the world market. Insurance costs, doctor fees, hospital costs, overhead and administrative costs are out of control. The US has the costliest health care system in the world, with per capita expenditures more than double that of most major industrialized nations. Health care costs as a percentage of GDP are 9.9% for Canada, 10.1% for France, and 8% for the United Kingdom, but an astronomical 15.2% for the US. And all of this extra cost provides an inferior quality medical care that makes the US look ridiculous on the international scene. Patient outcomes are among the worst in the industrialized world. In Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, life expectancy ranges from 79.5 years (France, UK) to 82.5 in Japan. In the US it lags behind at 77.  A study by the World Health Organization evaluating the overall quality of health systems ranked the US as 37th in the world, trailing behind Dominica, and Costa Rica. Infants born in the US are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway.

The cost of having so-many uninsured people actually hurts the US economy, as the  costs for emergency care for such patients is passed on to everyone else.  The dominant fractions of bourgeoisie see the value in rationalizing the system, getting more people covered to save overall costs and help competitiveness. So there should be no mistake. The motivation for health care reform is NOT to improve the health of workers in America, but rather to cut costs and improve competitiveness in the world economy.  The crisis is so serious actions are already being taken on a piece meal basis. Massachusetts, for example, has passed a plan to implement a near-universal mandatory coverage law, requiring residents to purchase health insurance - the so-called individual mandate.  Maine, Pennsylvania, and Vermont are also considering universal systems at the state level.  In California, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing a plan that also includes an individual mandate-requiring residents to purchase insurance coverage or pay extra taxes. Unions, especially the breakaway Social Employees international Union (SEIU) supports ending employer based health care and has actually teamed up with Wal-Mart to push this agenda on the "corporate elite."  SEIU Pres. Andy Stern is a strong advocate of this approach.

Health Care "Reform" and the Presidential Campaign

Presidential candidates in both parties are floating proposals to overhaul the health care system and to provide coverage for the uninsured. Republican candidates tend to propose some version of so-called "market-based" reforms that will use tax credits and deductions to encourage people to purchase medical insurance. The Democratic candidates tend to propose some form of direct government intervention to control costs and provide universal coverage.   For example, Republican Rudolph Giuliani has proposed granting tax credits of up to $7,500 for individuals and $15,000 for families, provided the money is spent on health care insurance -that gives you an idea of how expensive health insurance can be. Senator John McCain proposes a similar plan, with tax deductions of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is more vague, proposing a plan to "encourage the private sector to seek innovative ways to bring down costs and improve the free market for health care services." Mitt Romney proposes allowing the cost of insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to be taken as a tax deduction.

Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards advocate requiring health insurance for everyone, requiring employers to contribute to covering the costs and funding the rest by rescinding Pres. Bush's tax cuts on Americans earning over $250,000 per year. Barack Obama favors requiring only that all children will have to be covered by insurance, which he claims will lead to near universal coverage as families will wind up purchasing insurance for the parents as well.

Meaning of the proposed "reforms"

The campaign propaganda about "universal" health care has tremendous mystifying power for the ruling class. For individuals who currently have no health insurance, any of the plans proposed by the politicians surely sound like they'll be better than nothing. The leftists push for universal care as a central "reform" demand. In his recent Sicko documentary, filmmaker Michael Moore portrayed the health care systems in France, England, and Canada in the most idyllic light, as if those countries were heaven on earth. However, wherever these so-called universal plans exist, they are in crisis. Everywhere the bourgeoisie faces the same task, to cut costs, to attack health care. This is especially true as the post World War II baby boom generation begins to retire and suffers deteriorating health.

Whatever form they may take, the coming change in the health care system will NOT be a reform, not an expansion of health care, not an attempt to improve the health of the working class. It will be an austerity attack.  The goal is the same as in Europe --  to cut society's expenditure on health care. None of the plans will do anything to combat the erosion of health benefits for workers already insured at work - co-pays and premiums will go up, coverage will continue to deteriorate. Those covered by the new plan will pay a lot of money. Most of what has been proposed will only provide very basic coverage to the poorest people. Everyone who can "afford it"-i.e. the working class will have to take their employers' plan, or pay out of their own pocket for basic coverage. These plans give employers an incentive to drop coverage and pay less into the state fund instead. Coverage will decline for most who already have "good coverage".

The US ruling class is trying to manage a crisis that threatens its economic competitiveness, not to solve a medical crisis.  Yes, more people will be covered-but they will have to pay for it and coverage will be minimal with no reimbursement until you have paid considerable out of pocket expenses. The health care crisis is yet another manifestation of the general economic crisis of world capitalism. The attack on medical benefits and on pensions is essentially an attack on workers wages, the total compensation package paid to the workers for their labor. More and more the economic crisis forces the ruling class to attack the working class standard of living, amply demonstrating that capitalism has no future to offer humanity. The attacks on pensions and medical benefits pose life and death issues for the working class. Only the replacement of a society driven by the quest for profits, with one where the operating principle is the fulfillment of human needs offers the possibility to seriously address the health problems that we confront today. --J. Grevin, 1/8/08.

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/310/october-1917 [133]

In the last few months, there has been a series of simultaneous strikes and struggles in the US, the likes of which we haven't seen in quite a while. This includes a number of official union strikes, such as the strike by the Access-A-Ride drivers in New York who provide transportation for people with disabilities, as well as the Broadway theater stagehands, and the film and tv writers which has paralyzed production of new movies and television programs.The tendency of the working class in the US to come back to the path of the struggle also confirms that it is totally inscribed in the international resurgence of class struggle, which has been happening for the last four or five years across the globe, and was highlighted most importantly by the students' movement against the CPE in France in November 2005.

However, by far the most interesting struggle was the wildcat strike by so-called "free-lance workers" at MTV in New York City. These workers, many of them in their 20's and 30's, lead precarious existence but have long put up with little or no health care and relatively low wages because of the ‘glamour' associated with ‘working for MTV'. The bosses like to call them ‘free-lancers,' non-permanent employees, to justify the fact that they are not included in the standard benefits and wage programs at the company. MTV employs nearly 5,000 of these workers, who prefer to call themselves ‘permalancers', because many of them have been working for MTV for years. They are non-unionized, and treated as "independent contractors" by the company. When the company unilaterally announced a plan to cut their minimal medical benefits and contributions to their 401k retirement accounts on December 11, 2007 these young workers walked out spontaneously and took to the streets, carrying signs reading, "there are too many of us to ignore." And they did so again on January 3, 2008.

It's clear they have become painfully aware of their proletarianized status and totally identify themselves as workers, with the same needs, and the same plight, as their own parents. In the heat of the struggle, MTV workers not only identified themselves with the rest of the working class, but, in an echo of the methods used by their class brothers in France at the time of the struggles against the CPE, they also attempted to self-organize. At the walkout on December 14, a list was circulated of everyone's personal email address, so "...we can organize a website that people can go to for information." They also organized groups of delegates to approach the film and television writers, who were on strike at the same time.

While this mobilization has not seen the maturity or development of the students' movement in France, we see the reflection of the same dynamic toward the search for solidarity and the recognition of class identity. In the words of one young demonstrator: "We are not free-lancers because we come in and work at the same place every day, don't work on equipment we own, have taxes taken out of our paychecks, and report to people that are staff." The result of this struggle is that MTV reinstated the 401k plan that it had rolled back, and conceded health benefits for workers who had worked steadily since March, without an additional waiting period, as envisioned in the new package to take effect on January 1. But the MTV workers are not settled yet on the health care plan, which, under the proposed package, includes higher deductibles and a $2,000 cap on hospital expenses each year.

Although these workers did not win a clear victory in this confrontation, it is clear that the bosses want to avoid an all-out confrontation. Above all, their struggle shows the capacity of the workers to take the struggle into their own hands, to organize autonomously and to the see the possibility to seek unity with other workers in struggle.

Where workers are unionized, their only weapon is their militancy. The building cleaners, doormen, and elevator operators' carried out a series of mass demonstrations in Manhattan in December reflecting their militancy and threatening to strike on New Year's Day. The strike was averted by a last minute tentative agreement -that still has to be ratified - which includes increases of 20 percent in management contributions to the health benefit and of 40 percent to the pension benefit funds. In addition wages will increase by 4.18 percent a year for the next four years. Also, many jobs have been transformed from part time to full time and many janitors were given family health coverage. Of course this isn't the "big" victory that the union claims, because these workers' wages and benefits have been always very low to begin with. But it is certain that if the workers had not been as militant, they would have gotten a much worse deal.

In the film and television writers strike the unions have done their time-honored job of sabotaging the struggle. The demands of the writers, to share in the revenues from the sales of DVDs and online downloads of the shows they have written, have widespread support in the industry. Many actors who sympathize with the striking writers have refused to cross the picketline, but the dozen or more unions in the entertainment and broadcasting industry (separate unions for actors, news writers, news reporters, carpenters, electricians, stagehands etc) have maintained their institutionalized tradition of not only crossing each other's picket lines, but of never asking other workers to respect the pickets, let alone join the struggle. Nevertheless, despite their relatively high salaries and "glamour" jobs, the writers are increasingly aware of their proletarianized situation, as illustrated by remarks by one writer at a Writers Guild of America meeing shortly before the strike began: "This (residual payment for the DVDs and downloads) is such a big issue that if they see us roll over on this without making a stand, three years from now, they're gonna be back for something else. ...it'll be ‘we want to revamp the whole residual system,' and in another three years, it'll be "y'know what, we don't really want to fund the health fund the way we've been.' And then it will be pension. And then it'll be credit determination. And there just is that time when everybody has to see-this is one where we just gotta stand our ground."

These recent developments confirm what we wrote in Internationalism 143, that the NYC Transit workers' strike of December 2005 marked in the US the entrance to a "...period in which the class struggle will once more be at the center stage of the social situation during which the bourgeoisie's policies of austerity and war will not go unchallenged." The recent and present struggles are a manifestation that this new period is beyond simply a ‘beginning'; it is now maturing, and the perspective can only be that of extension and strengthening of the confrontations and of class consciousness. As we said above, this is an international development in which the workers in the US are full participants.

Today in the belly of the beast, the workers' struggles are demystifying the bourgeoisie's campaign about the ‘superiority' of American-style capitalism and how it benefits the workers' standard of living. This is a ‘gain' that goes beyond an immediate victory on the defensive terrain, because it teaches the workers that the present struggles are only a preparation for a much bigger struggle against this dying system. The working class is undergoing a tremendous reflection and the dynamics of its struggle show a growing maturation of the understanding of the need for solidarity and the impasse of capitalism. This dynamic will deepen and extend as the workers engage in the struggles and become more and more conscious of the task their class has to carry out. A new period has opened up toward important confrontations between the two leading classes in our society. Our responsibility is not to stand and watch but to intervene to help the class advance its understanding of what needs to be done and how to do it. Ana 1/5/08

As 2007 come to a close the American bourgeoisie was not in a party mood and rightly so, because there wasn't much to celebrate for American capitalism. By all accounts 2007 has been a horrendous year for the US economy. It opened with the bursting of the real estate bubble, then in the summer came the bust of the financial sector, a series of mini-crashes of the stock market, and the drastic devaluation of the dollar. Finally, to top it all off, the year ended with ominous news of low job creation, anemic holiday season sales and fears of rising inflation, fueled by the rising prices of oil and other commodities.

Understandably as the new year begins the mood in the ruling class is beset by gloomy forecasts for the coming year. In fact, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. 2008 does not promise to be much better than 2007. On the contrary even by the most optimistic predictions, the worst is still to come.

A worsening economic crisis

The bourgeoisie's official definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Based on the avalanche of bad economic news that have come out in the last weeks, some economists are saying that a recession may have already begun in December. However not all economists are convinced that things are that bad. Despite all the bad news, the GDP is still showing small positive growth rates today, so, some economists express hope that the American economy may avoid falling into a recession. On the other hand some other experts think "it literally could go either way."

These predictions that fill the pages of the economic sections of newspapers and magazines are very misleading. In the last instance they only contribute to hide the catastrophic state of American capitalism that can only get worse in the months to come regardless of whether or not the economy officially enters recession.

What is important to emphasize is that we're not talking about a supposedly "healthy" American economy that is simply going through a troubled phase in a supposedly normal business cycle of expansion and bust. What we are witnessing are the convulsions of a system in a chronic state of crisis that can only buy ephemeral moments of "health" by toxic remedies that will only aggravate the next catastrophic collapse.

This has been the history of American capitalism -and worldwide capitalism- since the end of the sixties with the return of the open economic crisis. For the last four decades through official expansions and busts the overall economy has only kept a semblance of functionality thanks to systematic state capitalist monetary and fiscal policies that the government is obliged to apply to fight the effects of the crisis. However the situation has not remained static. During these decades of crisis and state intervention to manage it, the economy has accumulated so many absurdities that today there is a real threat of an economic catastrophe, the likes of which we have not seen in the history of capitalism.

The bourgeoisie bought its way out of the burst of the tech/internet bubble in 2000/01 by creating a new bubble based, this time, on real estate. Despite the fact that key industries in the manufacturing sector -the auto and air line industries for instance- continue going bankrupt, the real estate boom for the last five years gave the semblance of an expanding economy. Now the boom has transformed itself into the present bust that has shaken the whole edifice of the capitalist system and which will still have future repercussions that no one can yet predict.

According to the latest data about the real estate crisis, the activity related to private housing is in total disarray. The construction of new homes has already fallen by around 40 percent since its peak in 2006; sales have fallen even faster dragging down with it prices. Home prices have dropped by 7 percent nation-wide since the peak in 2006 with predictions that they will fall by another 15 to 20 percent before hitting bottom. The real estate boom has left a huge inventory of vacant unsold homes - about 2.1 million, or about 2.6 percent of the nation's housing supply. And the glut is bound to increase as the wave of foreclosures continues to broaden, hitting even borrowers with supposedly good credit. Last year's foreclosures were mostly limited to the so-called subprime mortgages -loans given to people with essentially no means to repay. Nearly one-fourth of such loans were in default by last November. Although default rates on loans given to people with relatively good credit are much lower, they are also rising. In November, 6.6 percent of these loans were either delinquent, in foreclosure, or had been repossessed. In a sign of worse things to come, this spike in foreclosures is happening even before many mortgages have reset to higher interest rates.

The bursting of the real estate bubble is wreaking havoc in the financial sector. So far the crisis in real estate has generated over 100 billion dollars in losses at the world's largest financial institutions. Billions of dollars in stock market value have been wiped out, rocking up Wall St. Among the big names that lost at least a third of their value in 2007 were Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Moody's, and Citigroup. MBIA, a company that specializes in guaranteeing the financial health of others, lost nearly three-quarters of its value! Several of yesterday's high-flying mortgage related companies have gone bankrupt.

And this is only the beginning. As foreclosures accelerate in the coming months banks will be counting new losses and the credit crunch already in place will tighten up even more, impacting other sectors of the economy.

Moreover, the financial crisis related to the mortgages is only the tip of the iceberg. The same reckless lending practices that we are learning were dominant in the mortgage market are also the norm in the credit card and auto loans industries, where problems are also increasing. And here lies the essence of today capitalism's "health". Its little dirty secret is the perversion of the mechanism of credit as a way to buy its way out of a lack of solvent markets to sell its commodities. Lending is no longer a promise of repayment with a profit backed up by some material reality (i.e., collateral) that can stimulate capitalist development. It has become a way of keeping the economy artificially afloat and preventing the collapse of the system under the weight of its historic crisis. Already in the 1980's the financial crisis that followed the bust of the Latin American economies weighed down by debts that they had no means to repay demonstrated the limits of credit as a remedy to deal with the crisis. The same lesson could have been learned in 1997 and 1998 at the time of the collapse of the Asian tigers and dragons, and Russia's default on its debt. In fact the housing bubble was a reaction and an effort to overcome the burst of tech/internet bubble. One can justly pose the question, what is the next bubble going to be?

Yet there is another aspect of the present financial crisis. This is the rampant speculation that accompanied the real estate bubble. What we are talking about is not small time speculation by an individual investor buying a house and quickly flipping it to make a quick buck from the fast appreciation of the value of the property. This is peanuts. What really counts is the big time speculation that all the major financial institutions engaged in through the securitization and selling of mortgage-debt in the stock market. The exact mechanisms of these schemes are not easy to come by, but from what is known they look very much like the age old ponzi schemes. In any case, what this monstrous level of speculation shows is the degree to which the economy has become a "casino economy" where capital is not invested in the real economy, but instead it is used to gamble.

The medicine is not working

The American bourgeoisie likes to present itself as the ideological champion of free market capitalism. This is nothing other than ideological posturing. An economy left to function according to the laws of the market has no place in today's capitalism, dominated by omnipresent state intervention. This is the sense of the "debate" within the bourgeoisie on how to manage the present economic mess. In essence there is nothing new being put forward. The same old monetary and fiscal policies are applied in hope to stimulate the economy. Among the big proposals are lower taxes and rising spending - public projects like public infrastructure expansion: highways, bridges, airports.

For the moment what is already being done is also the application of the same old policies of easy money. So far the Federal Reserve has cut its interest rate benchmark three times and seems posed to do so once more this month. In a desperate move to bolster liquidity on the credit market it offered a big Christmas gift -cheap multibillion emergency dollars - to the financial institutions that were short on cash.

Perspectives

What these efforts by the State to manage the crisis will amount to remains to be seen. What is evident is that more than ever the bourgeoisie has less margin of maneuver for its economic policies. After decades of managing the crisis, the American bourgeoisie sits on a very sick economy. The monstrous national debt, the federal budget deficit, the fragile financial system, all this makes it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to deal with the collapse of its system.

For the working class the aggravation of the economic crisis will undoubtedly bring more misery as it deals with the attacks that the bourgeoisie will launch to try to make it bear the impact of its economic difficulties. It is time to prepare to defend itself and give society a different perspective than the present madness of capitalism.

- Eduardo Smith 1/13/08

The hype about the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary seems overwhelming. But it is still too early to tell what consensus will emerge in the dominant circles of the American ruling class about the political division of labor that will best serve its interests in the period ahead. However, it is clear that what is at stake for American capitalism in the coming presidential election are a) a break with the Bush administration's disastrous imperialist policies in order to significantly restore American authority on the international level, and b) a total refurbishment of the democratic mystification, which has taken a terrible beating since the year 2000.

Restoring American Imperialist Authority

Even before the November election, the bourgeoisie has made great strides in setting the stage for a full scale redressment of the catastrophic imperialist policy of the Bush administration. With virtually all of the neo-cons driven from the administration and the forced resignation of their close ally, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney is essentially the only hardcore hawk remaining in the inner circles of the administration. The permanent bureaucracy in the State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA, which represents the continuity of American imperialist policy through both Democratic and Republican administrations since the collapse of Russian imperialism in 1989, is increasingly exerting its influence in Washington. The neutralization of the Cheney-inspired campaign to stir up yet another preventative war, this time against Iran, is testimony to the power of this permanent bureaucracy. Career foreign service officials opposed the war plans as yet another irrational policy that would further isolate US imperialism on the international level. Military leaders were painfully aware that American forces are already stretched way too thin to sustain a third front in yet another theatre. And the intelligence bureaucracy, sick and tired of having its intelligence gathering manipulated and twisted by Cheney and the neo-cons with disastrous consequences, gave the administration's bellicose Iran policy the kiss of death by releasing its National Intelligence Estimate findings that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program over three years ago, thus eliminating the rationale of the Bush administration's bellicose policy.

This sets the stage for an even more far reaching realignment of imperialist policy, regardless of whoever wins the White House in November. It is perhaps noteworthy that Huckabee, the surprise winner in the Iowa Republican race, was the only candidate to denounce Bush's foreign policy as "arrogant, bunker mentality." Likewise, in the Democratic race, Obama, who has emerged as the main alternative to Clinton, was the only candidate who could claim that he had been opposed to the war in Iraq from the very beginning. Regardless of who wins the nomination, the struggle of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie to pursue a more sophisticated, more "multilateral" imperialist policy, that will lessen American imperialism's growing isolation and reestablish its authority on the international level seems to be making significant headway.

Refurbishing the Democratic Mystification

Initially it seemed that the 2006 election constituted a reinvigoration of an electoral mystification that had been badly tarnished by both the stolen presidential election of 2000 and the failure of the American ruling class to accomplish its belated 2004 consensus on the need to elect John Kerry president. By contrast, the 2006 election which put the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, was portrayed in the capitalist media and by prominent politicians in both major parties, as an expression of the political will of the American people for an end to the war in Iraq, for a change in political direction at the national level. Politicians and political pundits alike threw around phrases like "a swing in the political pendulum," and a "tremendous blow to the Republican party," and there was growing acceptance of the notion that the Republicans were destined to take up the role of political opposition in the future political division of labor. For a while it truly seemed like the sorely eroded public confidence in the electoral process had been restored in the general population, including the working class. But this proved to be short lived as the failure of the Democrats to overcome the Bush administration's continued resistance to end the war in Iraq revived skepticism about the effectiveness of electoralism as a means of expressing the "popular will." Public opinion polls showed the approval ratings of both Bush and Congress hovering at record low levels, approaching 29%. The electorate was just as fed up with the Democrats as they were with the Republicans.

The bourgeoisie desperately needs the 2008 election to revive its central ideological swindle, the idea that participation in its elections is the means to achieve peaceful change in the direction of society. Having squandered the fruit of its 2006 election so quickly and given the persistent difficulty of the bourgeoisie's dominant fractions to control the electoral process in the context of worsening social decomposition, it is not clear whether the ruling class will be successful in reinvigorating the democratic mystification.

Sensing inevitable victory at the polls, Democratic politicians with presidential ambitions started the electoral circus so early this time around that they pose the potential of mutually destroying each other's political prospects by the time the primaries are over. Having started out riding a tidal wave of opposition to the war in Iraq, most of the major Democratic candidates now openly acknowledge that an early troop withdrawal is impossible and predict that troops will have to remain in Iraq for quite some time.

Prominent politicians from both parties are openly pondering whether the traditional two-party system is now too badly bent or broken to effectively serve the political interests of the ruling class and is considering support for a serious independent candidate. In their call for a two-day conference in Oklahoma in early January, former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, who served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Democratic Senator David L. Boren of Oklahoma, who served as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote, "Today we are a house divided. We believe that the next president must be able to call for a unity of effort by choosing the best talent available - without regard to political party - to help lead our nation." They went on to state, "Most importantly, we must begin to restore our standing, influence and credibility in the world." Other prominent participants include: former Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb of Virginia (son-in-law of President Lyndon Johnson); Bill Brock, former Republican Party chairman and former Tennessee U.S. Senator; Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa; former Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, who also served in the U.S. Senate; departing Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who served on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and denounced the Bush administration's Iraq policy as the greatest foreign policy mistake in American history; and ex-Democrat, ex-Republican New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire ready and able to not only offer himself as the nominee but also able to spend $1 billion of his $12 billion personal fortune to fund the campaign.

Whatever the outcome, the stakes are high for the bourgeoisie, but will mean nothing for the working class except that we will be subjected to a more finely tuned political propaganda used to manipulate us to accept the austerity policies employed to make us bear the brunt of the economic crisis and the imperialist policy that uses us as cannon fodder for American capitalism. -- Jerry Grevin, Jan. 5, 2008

On February 28th, even though he acknowledged the risk of an economic slowdown, President George W. Bush declared, "I don't think we're headed for a recession...I believe that our economy has got the fundamentals in place for us...to grow and continue growing, more robustly than we're growing now. So we're still for a strong dollar." Two weeks later, on March 14th, the President reaffirmed his optimistic outlook before a meeting of economists in New York City, where he expressed confidence in the "resilient" American economy. He did this on the very day that the Federal Reserve and JP Morgan Chase were forced to collaborate on an emergency bailout plan for Bear Stearns, the Wall Street investment bank, after it suffered a run on the bank reminiscent of the Great Depression; and crude oil prices hit a record high $111 per gallon, despite the fact that supply far exceeds demand; and the government announced that mortgage foreclosures rose 60 percent in February; and the dollar hit a record low against the Euro. Bush's denial of reality notwithstanding, it is clear that appearance of prosperity that accompanied the housing boom and real estate economic bubble of the last few years has given way to a full-blown economic catastrophe in the world's largest and strongest economy, thus putting the economic crisis in the forefront of the international situation

In the article about the economy in the last issue of Internationalism we warned that the "worst is still to come. The ink was barely dry before that prediction was confirmed. Ever since the first signs that the housing boom was coming to an end at the beginning of 2007 the bourgeois economists have been playing at setting the odds of a recession in US economy. At the start of this year the field was still quite open, stretching from the ‘pessimists' who thought that a recession had already started in December, to the ‘optimists' who were still expecting a miracle that would avoid it. In the middle, placing a safer bet, were the uncommitted experts saying that the economy "could literally go either way." Things have gone so bad so fast in the last two months that there is not more room for optimism or ‘centrism'; the consensus is now that the good times have come to an end. In other words the American economy is now in recession or, at best, on the brink of one.

However this recognition of American capitalism's troubles has little value for understanding the real state of the system. The official bourgeois definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. A slightly better definition used by the National Bureau of Economic Research mentions a significant, protracted decline in activity that cuts across the economy, affecting measures like income, employment, retail sales and industrial production. On the basis of these definitions the bourgeoisie can't officially designate a recession until one has been going on for a while and often until the worst of it is already behind. Thus according to some estimates one will have to wait until late this year to know if there is a recession, or, the date of its beginning. All this controversy over the onset of the recession is largely beside the point, and only hides the catastrophic state of American capitalism. The current economic slump has nothing to do with an "normal business cycle" as the bourgeois pundits insist, but on the contrary is a manifestation of the convulsions of the permanent economic crisis of decadent capitalism.

American capitalism, and capitalism worldwide for that matter, has dealt with the return of the open crisis for four decades with systematic state capitalist monetary and fiscal policies that have led to the accumulation of so many absurdities that there is a real threat of economic catastrophe. As we pointed out in Internationalism 145, the real estate bubble that gave the semblance of an expanding economy for the past five years was based on easy and speculation, which have now shaken the entire capitalist system.

The Bankruptcy of Free Market Ideology

The American bourgeoisie endlessly proclaims the virtues of free market capitalism. But the present crisis exposes this claim as empty ideological posturing. An economy left to function according to the laws of the market has no place in today's capitalism, dominated by omnipresent state intervention. The last thing the capitalists would dream of today is to permit market forces to settle the current problems. There's no hesitation to call upon the Federal Reserve to manipulate interest rates, for the government to bailout Bear Stearns and other mortgage lenders, and to authorize an economic stimulus package. The bourgeoisie is implementing precisely the same easy money and cheap credit policies to prop up the economy that they have always relied upon.. The Federal Reserve has cut its interest rate benchmark 6 times since September.

For their part the White House and Congress have moved quickly as well, passing a so-called ‘economic stimulus package", in essence approving rebates for families and tax breaks for businesses and passing legislation geared towards easing the mortgage defaults epidemic and reviving the battered housing market. However given the extent of the housing and financial crisis there is even growing consideration of proposals for a massive bailout by the State of the whole housing debacle, the price tag of which would make the huge 124.6 billions bailout by the State of the Saving and loans collapse in 1990 look insignificant.

So far this traditional government medicine to jolt the economy has failed to produce any positive results. On the contrary it seems to be aggravating the illness that is trying to cure. Despite the Fed moves to easy the credit crunch, stabilize the financial sector and revive the mortgage market, credit is in short supply and expensive, the Wall Street rollercoaster ride continues unabated with wild swings and an overall downward tendency and rising mortgages rates are not helping to alleviate the housing slump. Furthermore the Fed's policy of cheap money is contributing to the decline of the dollar, every week hitting new lows against the Euro and other currencies and driving up prices of key commodities like oil. The rising prices for energy, food and other commodities at the same time of a sharply slowed down economic activity are fueling fears among the bourgeois "experts" about the prospect of a period of "stagflation" for the American economy. In any case as things are already today the rising inflation is already squeezing up consumption of people in fix income obliging the working class and other sectors of the population to tighten up their belts.

The working class

The March 7 announcement by the Labor Department that 63 000 jobs were lost nationwide during the month of February sent jitters around the bourgeois world. Surely not because of concerns for the lot of laid-off workers, but because this sharp decline in employment confirmed the economists' worst nightmares of a worsening crisis. It was the second consecutive decline in employment and the third straight drop for the private sector. However in a kind of sick joke at the expense of unemployed workers, the overall rate of unemployment declined down from 4.9 to 4.8 percent. How is this possible? The reason is nothing but a clever statistical trick used by the bourgeoisie to underreport the number of unemployed. For the government you are only unemployed if you are out of job, have actively looked for one in the last month and are ready to work at the moment of the survey. Thus the official unemployment rate significantly understates the jobs crisis. It ignores millions of Americans who, both have lost their jobs and given up on finding new ones, or who want to join the workforce but are too discouraged to try to do so because the job situation remains so bleak or simply are not willing to work for half the wage rate that they had in their recent lost job. If these "discouraged" workers were included, the unemployment rate would be significantly higher. Furthermore, the official unemployment rate does not take into account the quality of the employment. It puts part-time and full-time jobs on the same footing, and does not include millions of underemployed workers who want and seek full time employment but have had to settle for part-time work. And since 1983, it includes around two million men and women "employed" by the US military as soldiers and sailors as part of the workforce. This artificially dilutes unemployment, especially as compared to the pre-1983 when it was calculated based on the civilian workforce only.

The present economic slump is bringing an avalanche of lay-offs across all sectors of the economy, but one has to say that the now defunct housing boom was never a paradise for the working class. Income, pensions, health care, working conditions, all continued to deteriorate even while the housing market was booming. This undeniable fact led some economists to point out that this was a ‘jobless' and ‘wageless' recovery. But even this recognition understates the gravity of the situation. The reality is that the working class' working and living conditions have continued to deteriorate for the last 4 decades of open economic crisis, expansions and busts notwithstanding. As this crisis worsens during the present economic slump there is nothing in store for the working class but more misery as the bourgeoisie tries to make it bear the impact of its economic difficulties. For the working class the aggravation of the economic crisis is bringing more misery as it deals with the attacks that the bourgeoisie is launching to try to make it bear the impact of its economic difficulties. -- ES 3/23/2008

The electoral circus is clearly at the heart of the political strategy of the bourgeoisie in the current period. Revolutionaries differ from the bourgeois media pundits because our concern is not to make electoral predictions or succumb to immediatist and empiricist temptations in dissecting the minutiae of the day-to-day evolution of the electoral circus, but to understand the historic role of elections for the bourgeoisie and the strategic interests at stake for the ruling class.

Historical Perspective on Electoralism in the Workers' Movement

In the period of capitalist ascendance, when capitalism was still historically progressive, in the sense that it was capable of materially advancing the forces of production, the proletarian revolution was not yet on the historical agenda. As pointed out in the ICC's Platform, "in a period when the revolution was not yet on the agenda and when the proletariat could wrest reforms from within the system, participation in parliament allowed the class to use it to press for reforms, to use electoral campaigns as a means for propaganda and agitation for the proletarian programme, and to use parliament as a tribune for denouncing the ignominy of bourgeois politics."

However these social and political characteristics changed drastically with the onset of decadence around the time of World War I. The possibility of wresting durable social reforms from the capitalist system no longer existed, and the orientation of the workers movement toward electoralism and parliamentarism was fundamentally altered. At its Second Congress, the Communist International asserted that "the centre of gravity of political life has now been completely and finally removed beyond the confines of parliament." In decadence, the determination of political policy switched definitively into the hands of the executive branch, the permanent bureaucracy in particular, which rules in the global interest of the national capital. Each capitalist state became locked in a permanent, deadly competition with rival imperialisms as the complete division of the world market created the conditions in which economic expansion was possible only at the expense of rival powers, ultimately through world imperialist war. Despite the ideological campaigns and slogans used to mobilize popular support, the First and Second World Wars were fought in essence to re-divide the world market.

With the disappearance of the historical circumstances that made elections relevant to the workers movement, parliamentarism inevitably became an instrument of political mystification, an ideological swindle perpetuating the democratic myth and obscuring the true nature of the capitalist class dictatorship and fostering the illusion that working people can participate in the determination of governmental policies. On this level, the electoral circus represents the grand ideological maneuver of the bourgeoisie. For the greater part of the past century the American bourgeoisie has been particularly adept in controlling presidential campaigns to put in place political teams that would be capable of implementing its strategic orientations and promote the credibility of the electoral circus. The party in power in the White House was generally determined by carefully orchestrated media manipulation of the electoral process to generate the desired outcomes. Political discipline within the ruling class under which the major parties and their candidates could be relied upon to accept the division of labor determined by the dominant fractions within the ruling class further guaranteed the smooth working of the democratic mystification. Thus for example in 1960, when Kennedy achieved a narrow electoral victory over Nixon through voter fraud by the Daley political machine in Chicago, Nixon chose not to file a legal challenge to the election, but displayed his adherence to bourgeois political discipline by accepting the results in the interests of national unity.

The factors at play in determining the desired left-right political division of labor at the level of the national state may vary depending upon prevailing domestic or international circumstances. For example, when it is necessary for the bourgeoisie to initiate a new round of austerity attacks against the proletariat, it is often useful to put the right in power and the left in opposition. When it is necessary to derail a rising tide of class struggle, it may be useful to put the left in power. On the other hand, in 1992 when George W. Bush displayed ineffectiveness in responding to the imperialist challenges confronting the US after the collapse of the post World War II imperialist bloc system, the bourgeoisie opted to limit him to one term in office. Perot's third party candidacy that siphoned off votes from Bush, facilitated Clinton's victory with only 48 percent of the popular vote.

The Impact of Social Decomposition on the Electoral Circus

Since the collapse of the postwar bipolar imperialist bloc system in 1989, the US bourgeoisie has experienced increasing difficulty in effectively controlling the electoral charade. One of the central characteristics of capitalist decomposition is the rise of the tendency of "each for himself," a losing sight of more global perspectives, and a breakdown of political discipline within the bourgeoisie itself. In the presidential elections in particular this has been characterized by a trend toward "a win at any cost" mentality, a thirst for power at the expense of the long term interests of the ruling class. The 2000 electoral debacle was a glaring example of this loss of control. The ruthlessness of the Bush campaign in stealing an election in which it lost the popular vote and had to rely on the corrupt machinations of Jeb Bush's machine in highjacking the Florida vote count demonstrated the degree to which "each for himself" had put in question the capacity of the ruling class to control the political apparatus. This malfunctioning of the bourgeoisie political process led to a situation in which the Bush administration's inept imperialist policy blunders proved disastrous for the US, squandering the political capital/moral authority acquired on the international level in the aftermath of the of 9/11 and the gains made in securing working class acquiescence in rallying behind the state for war. This isolated US imperialism internationally, undermined military preparedness to respond to challenges to US hegemony in other theaters, and destroyed popular support for war, especially in the working class.

This continuing political disarray of the bourgeoisie contributed to a situation in 2004 in which the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie delayed so long in deciding on its desired political division of labor that despite the best efforts of the media to skew its coverage to favor Kerry and of the permanent bureaucracy in the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community to undermine Bush's reelection possibilities with a steady flow of embarrassing and scandalous revelations, the bourgeoisie failed yet again to achieve its desired results. The 2006 midterm Congressional elections, which produced Democratic majorities in both Houses momentarily revived the electoral mystification as a means to bring about change. But the failure of the Democrats to force significant alterations in imperialist policy quickly produced a new round of popular political disenchantment.

The Political Goals of the Current Electoral Circus

There are two fundamental political objectives for American the dominant fractions of the American capitalist class in the coming presidential election:

a rectification of the Bush administration's disastrous imperialist policies in order to significantly restore American authority on the international level,

a total refurbishment of the democratic mystification, which has taken a terrible beating since the year 2000.

Rectification of Imperialist Policy.

The bourgeoisie has already made great strides in setting the stage for a full scale redressment of the catastrophic implementation of imperialist policy by the Bush administration. With virtually all of the neo-cons driven from the administration and the forced resignation of their close ally, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney is essentially the only hardcore hawk remaining in the inner circles of the administration. The permanent bureaucracy in the State Department, Defense Department, and the CIA, which represents the continuity of American imperialist policy through both Democratic and Republican administrations since the collapse of Russian imperialism in 1989, is increasingly exerting its influence in Washington. The neutralization of the Cheney-inspired campaign to stir up yet another preventative war, this time against Iran, is testimony to the power of this permanent bureaucracy. Career foreign service officials opposed the war plans as yet another irrational policy that would further isolate US imperialism on the international level. Military leaders were painfully aware that American forces are already stretched way too thin to sustain a third front in yet another theatre. And the intelligence bureaucracy, sick and tired of having its intelligence gathering manipulated and twisted by Cheney and the neo-cons with disastrous consequences, gave the administration's bellicose Iran policy the kiss of death by releasing its National Intelligence Estimate findings that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program over three years ago, thus eliminating the rationale of the Bush administration's bellicose policy.

This sets the stage for an even more far reaching realignment of imperialist policy. Whoever wins the White House in November, the struggle of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie to pursue a more sophisticated, more "multilateral" imperialist policy, that will lessen American imperialism's growing isolation and reestablish its authority on the international level seems to be making significant headway. Even McCain, who supported Bush's ‘troop surge" last year and still defends the invasion of Iraq, is committed to more multilateral policies and a longer term vision of imperialist military planning.

Refurbishing the Democratic Mystification.

Initially it seemed that the 2006 election constituted a reinvigoration of an electoral mystification that had been badly tarnished by both the stolen presidential election of 2000 and the failure of the American ruling class to accomplish its belated 2004 consensus on the need to elect John Kerry president. By contrast, the 2006 election which put the Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, was portrayed in the capitalist media and by prominent politicians in both major parties, as an expression of the political will of the American people for an end to the war in Iraq, for a change in political direction at the national level. Politicians and political pundits alike threw around phrases like "a swing in the political pendulum," and a "tremendous blow to the Republican party," and there was growing acceptance of the notion that the Republicans were destined to take up the role of political opposition in the future political division of labor. For a while it truly seemed like the sorely eroded public confidence in the electoral process had been restored. But this proved to be short lived as the failure of the Democrats to overcome the Bush administration's continued resistance to end the war in Iraq revived skepticism about the effectiveness of electoralism as a means of expressing the "popular will." Public opinion polls showed the approval ratings of both Bush and Congress hovering at record low levels, approaching 29%. The electorate was just as fed up with the Democrats as they were with the Republicans.

The bourgeoisie desperately needs the 2008 election to revive its central ideological swindle. Having squandered the fruit of its 2006 election so quickly and given the persistent difficulty of the bourgeoisie's dominant fractions to control the electoral process in the context of worsening social decomposition, it is not clear whether the ruling class will be successful in reinvigorating the democratic mystification. Having started out riding a tidal wave of opposition to the war in Iraq, the remaining Democratic presidential candidates now openly acknowledge that an early troop withdrawal is impossible and predict that troops will have to remain in Iraq for quite some time. Even Obama, the most "anti-war" of the candidates, promises a "responsible," "orderly" withdrawal that might take two years or more to complete.

In recent weeks we have once again seen the impact of decomposition on the election, the same win at any cost ruthlessness that characterized the stolen election of 2000, in Hillary Clinton's destructive "Tonya Harding" strategy which puts at risk the bourgeoisie's capacity to regain control over the electoral process. While it is not our concern to predict the election results, it is clear that the bourgeoisie could live with the any of the three remaining candidates, particularly in regard to imperialist policy. However in regard to resuscitation of the electoral mystification, Obama best serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. His charismatic, but largely vacuous, appeals for change have triggered a rarely seen enthusiasm among young generations of voters, who have been largely apathetic to the bourgeoisie political process, drawing them into electoral politics in large numbers for the first time in many years. This is a tremendous plus for the bourgeoisie and has led to unprecedented numbers of voters participating in the primaries and caucuses this winter. Bourgeois political pundits have promoted the Obama phenomenon as "a social movement," that has tapped the wellsprings of "hope" and a desire for change. To the contrary, what we are witnessing is not a social movement, but an extremely successful ideological campaign, reviving the electoral mystification.

Like everything the bourgeoisie does to address its problems in the period of decomposition, the Obama candidacy ultimately risks aggravating the very problems that it's designed to redress. If he fails to gain the nomination or if he gains the nomination and loses the general election, disillusionment sets in with millions of young people. If he gains the nomination and wins the election, it will be impossible for him to deliver any significant change, which would also give rise to widespread disillusionment.

In the months ahead, as the electoral circus gears up even more, it will be critical for revolutionaries to expose this ideological swindle for what it is, and to stress the need for the working class to defend its interests on its own terrain, at the point of production and in the streets. - J. Grevin 04/13/2008

There are so many things that are going wrong in today's world -- wars without end that are killing and displacing millions around the world; health epidemics that condemn millions to early deaths and suffering; famines; homelessness; degradation of the environment that is menace the future of all life on earth; growing pauperization of the working masses of the world.... the list could go on and on. And there is no safe haven.

The metropoles of capitalism and the ever underachieving undeveloped countries, where the majority of the world population lives, are all in the same sinking boat. The talking-heads for capitalism have a thousand-and-one reasons for this situation, none of which is close to the truth. The fact is that in four decades of open economic crisis capitalism has driven the whole of humanity to the edge of a precipice. Society, instead of being in control of its own destiny, seems to be more and more the helpless victim of ruthless social, economic and natural forces that appear to have a life of their own. Left to its own devices decadent capitalism will in the end destroy humanity.

It is against this dramatic background that the international struggle of the working class, the only force in present society that can offer an alternative to capitalism's madness, takes on all its historic importance. It is in this context that we have to situate our balance of the present stage of the working class struggle.

An international upsurge of class struggle

Ever since the first signs of the return of the open economic crisis of capitalism 40 years ago, the world working class put the bourgeoisie on notice about its undiminished historic importance, belying the modernist propaganda about the disappearance of the proletariat. Once again the historic class confrontation between the bourgeoisie, representative of decadent capitalism, and the proletariat, its potential gravedigger, came to the center of the social situation. Through successive international waves of struggles, starting with the great mobilization of workers and students in France in 1968, and up to the late 1980's, the world proletariat confronted in the class struggle capitalism's attempts to make workers bear the brunt of its deepening economic crisis. Many hard lessons about the working class methods of struggle, the bourgeois nature of the unions, and the traps of bourgeois democracy were learned in these struggles. This dynamic came to an end with the sudden collapse of Stalinism at the end of 1989 and beginning of the 1990's.
The world bourgeoisie used this collapse to convince workers about the futility of hoping for a different world beyond profit driven capitalism. Thanks to years in which the working class had been made to believe that Stalinism=communism, this campaign delivered a setback both at the level of combativeness and consciousness in the workers ,sending the class struggle into a deep reflux for most of the decade of the 90's.

As we have pointed out in the press of the ICC, in the last few years this reflux has come to an end. At the international level, in the last five years, there has been an upsurge of the class struggle by the world proletariat involving all sectors in the developed and underdeveloped countries of capitalism. Combativeness and, above all, consciousness are once again in the rise in the class.

What are the general characteristics of this phase of the class struggle?

As highlighted in the resolution on the international situation adopted by the ICC's 17th Congress in May 2007 and confirmed by numerous recent struggles throughout the world the general characteristics of these recent class struggles are:

"...they are more and more incorporating the question of solidarity. This is vitally important because it constitutes par excellence the antidote to the "every man for himself" attitude typical of social decomposition, and above all because it is at the heart of the world proletariat's capacity not only to develop its present struggles but also to overthrow capitalism."

The struggles express a disillusionment in the future that capitalism offers us: "nearly four decades of open crisis and attacks on working class living conditions, notably the rise of unemployment and precarious work, have swept aside illusions that ‘tomorrow things will be better': the older generations of workers as well as the new ones are much more conscious of the fact that ‘tomorrow things will be even worse.'"

"Today it is not the possibility of revolution which is the main food for the process of reflection but, in view of the catastrophic perspectives which capitalism has in store for us, its necessity.''

"In 1968, the movement of the students and the movement of the workers, while succeeding each other in time, and while they had sympathy for each other, expressed two different realities with regard to capitalism's entry into its open crisis: for the students, a revolt of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie faced with the perspective of a deterioration of its status in society; for the workers, an economic struggle against the beginning of the degradation of their living standards. In 2006, the movement of the students was a movement of the working class."

True, many of the present struggles are still taking place under the suffocating stronghold of the unions and are often derailed into dead-ends, but as shown during the students struggle in France in spring of 2006, there is also an incipient tendency for the class to struggle to use its own methods, taking control collectively of its own movement. This was the sense of the mass assemblies, open to the participation of all members of the class, that took place during the student movements in France in Spring 2006 and autumn 2007, and also during the struggle of metal workers at Vigo Spain in May 2006.

Where is the working class struggle in the US?

Workers in the US, faced with tremendous attacks on their working and living conditions by capitalism's deepening economic crisis, have also returned to the path of the struggle, leaving behind the period of disorientation that characterized the 1990's. As we have shown in our press the working class in this country has been a full participant in the present upsurge on the international class struggle, showing both the strengths and weaknesses of this movement.

In the December holiday season of 2005 over 34, 000 NYC transit workers --subway and buses- went on strike effectively paralyzing New York City for 3 days. For the bourgeoisie this movement was the illegal act of selfish vandals - in ‘democratic' America most public workers cannot legally strike. For the working class this was the clear beginning of a new moment in the confrontation with capital. This movement had at its heart the same question of solidarity that we have seen in many other struggles throughout the world. Workers refused to be accomplices in the attempt of the State to create a new pension tier affecting future new hires, to sell out the ‘unborn" as the main slogan of the movement said. This solidarity with the new workers generation, an expression of a growing consciousness of class identity, was echoed by the enormous sympathy expressed by working population of the city with the struggle, despite the attempts of the city officials to turn the population against the striking workers.

However the transit workers strike 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 workers 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.

In the last few months of 2007, as we detailed in the last issue of Internationalism, there were a number of simultaneous strikes and struggles, a phenomenon we haven't seen in quite a while. This included a number of official union strikes, such as the strike in New York City by mini-bus drivers who transport people with disabilities, Broadway theater stagehands, and film and TV writers, and an unofficial strike by young "free-lance" workers a MTV in New York. This latter group, many in their 20's and 30's, non-unionized, leading a precarious worklife as more or less permanent temporary workers with little or no health care benefits and relatively low wages, echoed the struggles of the French student movement against the CPE in 2006 in their attempts to self organize, use innovative methods to communicate, including the use of e-mail and websites, and organize street demonstrators. Their slogan "there are too many of us to ignore" reflected a recognition of the need for solidarity and the maxim that in unity there is strength.

More recently there have been two other major strikes in the auto industry involving several thousand workers in a number of states in which workers have shown enormous courage, but which seemed to be under total control of the UAW union honchos. In February 1 2,600 workers at Volvo Trucks North America in Dublin, Virginia, went on strike after the company refused to renew the current contract, presumably in an attempt to force its workers to accept the ‘industry standards' of cutbacks set by the ‘big three' automakers in last year's contract negotiations and union-controlled strikes at GM and Chrysler. February 25, 3,600 workers went on strike at American Axle and Manufacturing Holdings Inc. American Axle has five plants in Michigan and New York that produce parts for GM and others automakers. American Axe is demanding wage reductions of up to $14 an hour, as well as elimination of future retiree and pension benefits. Already in 2004 the UAW agreed to lower the wages for starting workers at American Axle after a one-day strike. A union boss at this company in an amazing confession of the bourgeois nature of these organizations said: "the UAW has a proven record of working with companies to improve their competitive position and secure jobs." No comment necessary.

The bourgeoise is not resting on its laurels

The dominant class has been able to respond to the present upsurge of the class struggle at different levels. After their initial surprise at the time of the NYC transit strike, the bourgeoisie's main focus has been to derail any efforts by the working class in drawing the real lessons of this movement. Thus the main strengths of the strike, the combativeness of these workers that went in strike in defiance of bourgeois legality, their class consciousness and deep sense of solidarity with their class brothers, were turned into a "defeated" strike that ended with workers accepting a worse deal -an across the board establishment of health insurance contributions- than the main reason of the movement --a new more precarious pension system for future workers.- The fallacy of this conclusion is that after the transit strike the local bourgeoisie recognized that its attempt to use the transit workers to set a bargaining pattern had failed and took the proposal for the same new pension system off the table in negotiations with other city workers. Furthermore in an attempt to avoid any contagion from the transit strike to other city workers upcoming contracts were negotiated with unusual speed and without the usual cutbacks.

Another central weapon of the bourgeoisie against the present upsurge of the class struggle has been the use of the democratic mystification, the myth that workers can influence at the ballot box their present fate and the future of society. For nearly three years now, there has been a barrage of intensive political campaigns whipped up by the media (see the article on the election campaign elsewhere in this issue Although it is difficult to quantify, there is no denying that this electoral campaigns have had a negative effect in the working class, particularly at the level of strengthening the democratic mystification. In particular the Obama campaign has been able to draw a lot of attention from the young generation of workers, who are so important to the future of the class struggle. What is clear is that despite this toxic effect of bourgeois electoral campaigns, workers have still been struggling on their own terrain as shown by the mobilizations that we described above.

Also with the excuse of the ‘terrorist' boogey man the dominant class has been strengthening its apparatus of repression creating a social ambience of an omnipresent political persecution, a fear of not saying the ‘wrong' word, or writing it for that matter. Although for the working class at large the present measures of repression are mostly ‘preemptive', direct repression for immigrant workers - legal and illegal-

are already very real. The press is filled with news about the official abuse of these workers by the State repressive apparatus. The question of immigration is being use as always to create divisions within the working class: to play immigrant against native workers, legal against illegal.

However in the ‘field' the most trusted and skillful representatives of capitalism in the struggle against the working class are the Unions and their twin brothers the Left and leftist organizations that use a working class-sounding language to sabotage the workers struggle from within. All the unions have been working hard, helping capitalism manage the crisis on the workers backs, negotiating lay-offs and wage and benefit cuts. And during strikes they have done their utmost to keep struggle workers in isolation, sabotaging solidarity and leading them into dead ends. For their part the leftist -trotskyst, maoist, Marxist-Leninist.... are doing their job in trying to block the development of working class consciousness, defending the unions as working class organizations and spreading the bourgeois ideologies of nationalism and interclasism.

Conclusion

By the bourgeoisie's own accounts the worst of its present economic difficulties are still to come. As the current crisis deepens the working class will face a barrage of attacks, the violence of which it has not seen in the recent past. If the promises of the present upsurge of the class struggle come to fruition will, we will also see an unprecedented level of mobilizations in which the historical stakes of the present will come to the forefront.

The bourgeoisie has no solution to the crisis and can only offer to humanity a future of increasing barbarity. The key to overcoming the present state of society rests with the working class, it is the only force that can through its worldwide revolution bring about a world community based in human needs and solidarity. The intervention of revolutionaries is the class struggle is an essential part of this perspective.

-- Edo Smith 4/12/2008

For the past seven years the American ruling class has moved relentlessly and forcefully to use the events of 9/ll as the pretext for pushing through a tremendous reinforcement of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. While ostensibly designed as a means to combat the “terrorist” threat from Islamist fundamentalism, the strengthening of the repressive apparatus is a means that the state will not hesitate to use against any threat to its dominance, including especially the working class and its revolutionary movement. Using the semi-hysteria created by 9/ll is a cynical maneuver to undo the post-Watergate reform measures that had been designed to prevent a recurrence of the Nixon administration abuses, in which the repressive apparatus was used against members of the ruling class itself.

The commitment to strengthen repression is not simply the preoccupation of the rightwing, but a general policy orientation of the dominant fractions of the American bourgeoisie, which actually predates 9/11, and that this policy has already tangibly impact on daily life in the U.S. These measures range from the U.S.A. Patriot Act, to the abuse of illegal wiretapping, to development of terrorist watchlists (which now include the names of 917,000 people), to the long list of abuses of the newly granted powers, and the use of new technologies to monitor the everyday activities of citizens.

The U.S.A. Patriotic Act was passed overwhelmingly within a few weeks of 9/ll without any public hearings, without any expert testimony, without hardly an opportunity to read the legislation. That this rush to erode traditional civil liberties was not simply the result of legislative hysteria, was amply demonstrated in five years later when the law was reauthorized with only the most minor alterations, despite widespread criticism of the original provisions. Likewise, there has been no difficulty in securing bipartisan support for the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay which fly in the face of international law, or for wireless wiretaps and surveillance by the National Security Administration (Bush’s dispute with Democrats over immunity for telecommunication companies that cooperated in illegal wiretaps before the authorizing legislation is in fact a secondary matter).

The strengthening of the repressive apparatus predates 9/11, which only provided a convenient pretext to accelerate the process. So for example, the Clinton administration provided funding in the 1990s to vastly expand police forces across the country and increased the number of federal crimes that were punishable by the death penalty. Indeed some bourgeois observers noted that Clinton, despite his “liberal” image, had done more to expand the death penalty than Ronald Reagan. The strengthening of the police forces and their closer integration with federal authorities, increases monitoring of various protest movements, as could be seen in the infiltration of groups that protested at the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City. So-called “community relations” or “community affairs” units work with demonstration leaders to control protests and keep them under control—a lesson the bourgeoisie learned from the unrest of the 1960s. Recent reports demonstrate that the U.S. has more of its adult population in prison, both in terms of absolute numbers and percentage of adult population than any other country in the world for which reliable statistics are available. According to research generated by the Pew Center on the States, more than $44 billion was spent on prisons last year. Vermont, Connecticut, Deleware, Michigan and Oregon spent as much or more on keeping people in prison than they did on financing public higher education. One in 99 American adults is in jail. Among black males, between 20 and 34 years of age, one in 9 is serving time in prison. For Hispanics, 1 in 36 male adults is behind bars. And all of this occurs at a time when the bourgeoisie brags that crime is declining.

For the working class, the capitalist state is the enemy. The destruction of the capitalist state and its replacement by the power of the workers councils is the central political goal of the workers revolution. It is only a matter of time before the strengthening of the repressive apparatus will be used against the working class struggle. No propaganda campaign about the threat of mindless terrorism can be allowed to hide the fact that it is the revolutionary proletariat that is the real target of this campaign. -- JG 4/12/2008

Anyone who has followed the ICC press in the last couple of years has certainly noticed the articles where we saluted the emergence of a new militants in the working class searching for political understanding and willing to take militant action to defend proletarian interests. This included articles assessing the mobilization of working class students in France in 2006 and the participation of new groups in the internationalist milieu at the 17th Congress of the ICC, to which four groups were invited, but only three were able to attend (the other couldn't participate because of visa problems). The participation of these groups in the work of the ICC reflects the fact that we have entered a new period in the development of the class struggle, both at the levels of combativeness and consciousness, which has broken with almost 15 years of retreat following the collapse of the Stalinist bloc and the confusions that event had sown, and the great effort by the ICC to open up to the new generation in the spirit of fraternal debate.

Internationalism itself, the ICC section in the US, has just completed its yearly territorial conference, at which some close contacts participated, along with delegates from sections of the ICC in Europe and Latin America. Far from representing the final product of a long work, this participation is just the beginning of a promising perspective for growing involvement of the new generation of internationalist comrades at our territorial conferences in the future. Their presence and contributions have inspired the section to pursue the work of opening the debates to our contacts and sympathizers, have instilled greater confidence among the comrades, and have enriched us with the learning experience of how to fruitfully and fraternally conduct debates.

The importance of the contacts' presence

The significance of the participation of these comrades in an internal moment in the life of the ICC cannot be overstated. Today's recovery of class combat is comparable to that of 1968. In both instances we see a deep reflection on the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, on the dead-end of this agonizing system, and a resurgence of elements attracted by left communist positions. In both instances, there is a break with periods of retreat in combativeness and consciousness: 1968 broke with the counter-revolution which had lasted around fifty years following the crushing of the revolutionary wave that began in 1917. Today, the class is leaving behind the retreat it suffered after the collapse of the Stalinist bloc. The presence of our contacts at the conference was really just the tip of the iceberg of this profound maturation. Because a territorial conference -which every section of the ICC holds regularly-- is a vital moment in the life of the ICC as a whole, this truly unprecedented event for Internationalism will contribute to the strengthening and expansion of the ICC presence in the US. We thus anticipate more and better for the future.

The discussions

Preparing for the conference was as intense as it was politically invigorating, full of anticipation and questions regarding how to conduct an internal event in which non-members were to participate. The goal was to give the US section a clear orientation for its activities and intervention for the year to come. However, the presence of our contacts demanded that we assured their complete inscription in the debates, that their contribution would, in effect, help the section flesh out these orientations. To this end, the various reports were written in advance of the conference date and given to the participants, as well as several others who were ultimately unable to attend. This issue of Internationalism includes articles based on the reports and discussions at the conference (election campaign, economy, class struggle, repression). Readers will appreciate the depth of the analyses, so this report will not go into the details of those reports and discussions. Instead, we would like to make a balance of how the discussions went in order to learn and advance in the future, when we will have more and more comrades participating in our conferences.

Of the various discussions held -on the aspects of the national situation in the US -- the economic crisis, the class struggle, and the political strategy of the bourgeoisie, and the culture of debate - the latter was the one that drew the most comments and reflections by our contacts. We premised it by pointing out that the culture of debate and class consciousness are not the monopoly of any revolutionary organization, but belong to the proletariat as a whole. The class learns its historical lessons and pushes its consciousness forward through debate, as the experience of the general assemblies-the soviets-have demonstrated historically. Debate is a fundamental aspect of political development. In fact, it politicizes. We see the coming to consciousness as a process that goes from confusion to questioning to making mistakes to clarification through the widest possible collective debate conducted fraternally, while maintaining the unity of the organization. It is crucial that revolutionaries deepen on this question in the context of the present aggravation of the crisis, the consequent resurgence of class struggle, and the increasingly clear perspective that capitalism offers no future. The ICC has a tremendously important role to play, but we don't have all the answers. In the words of one of the contacts, "The development of ideas is facilitated by debate and by questions and criticisms posed with respect between the debaters that leads to clarification. Also, it can lead to a new formulation, combining elements within the comrades, and can lead to a new understanding, which could deepen clarification. This could deepen the discussion and clarity becomes more comprehensive within the context of sincere commitment to clarification."

The report on the economic crisis was welcomed with soberness. It was pointed out that the present recession reveals the vulnerability of a system that relies more and more on credit and massive state intervention to stave off economic disaster. While there was caution as to the use of the concept of ‘sudden collapse' and even "catastrophe", the question was raised as to how much and what margin of maneuver the bourgeoisie will be left with. The economic crisis and its plethora of attacks on pensions, jobs, working conditions, wages, and health benefits, is inevitably linked to the resurgence of the class struggle, because it lays bare the dead end of capitalism. Of course, this is what the bourgeoisie itself is watching, in the context of struggles that more and more are posing the question of solidarity and that show similar dynamic internationally. The beefing up of the bourgeoisie's repressive apparatus is seen as a response to the threat of future upsurges of class struggle. It is also the way for the bourgeoisie to face the manifestations of decomposition, such as the threat of massive immigration, but also terrorism.

As to the political strategy of the bourgeoisie, it was pointed out that there is at present quite enough homogeneity within the ruling class regarding the necessity to rectify imperialist policy to enable the US to intervene militarily in other theaters of operations without any precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, that any of the remaining three major candidates would be viable for the next term in power. In terms of which candidate can best revitalize the democratic mystification, badly in need of a face-lift, the answer was, quite obviously, Obama.

Finally, on imperialism, we acknowledge the impasse of the ruling class, lasting already several years, not on which strategy overall, but on how to implement it. Further, we reaffirmed that the more force the US uses to protect the vestiges of its hegemonic status, the more this results in a further decline of its legitimacy as a world power.

What is the balance sheet for the conference?

The conference was a tremendous learning experience on how to debate and address the points of the discussions. A conference at which contacts participate requires a special level of preparation, a fine tuning of how to pose questions so that the debates can go as deep as possible and an ability to listen for the divergences, hesitations, confusions, the real questioning that goes on within the class, and which our contacts themselves express.

In the words of one of the contacts, "I didn't think depth was reached on some issues, but there was a comprehensive view of the bourgeoisie's strategy and the culture of debate. It certainly opens us up to a deeper analysis on this. I like the way the meetings were held because everyone had a chance to speak and say their ideas, much more valuable than other left meetings that I have gone to. For example, in the trotskyist organizations I had the freedom to ask questions and then they jumped on me when I said something about nationalization that they didn't like. I am glad I came and met you folks and hope we can get together again."

Another comrade commented, "The afternoon started for me with a welcome and I want to say thank you for the invitation. I liked the diversification in the discussion, the different texts, there was something for everybody. I am more familiar today with the conditions of the world...something for the experienced and those less experienced. You made me aware of stuff that I don't think other organizations would share. Giving us the texts in advance was very valuable so I didn't come in here cold. I am aware of being a worker today, not just an American, or whatever brand of nationality or ethnicity or race, but a worker which is much bigger than the other categories. The understanding of consciousness is key. I would have liked to see younger people here in the future. I came in at a 3 and I'm leaving at an 8." For comrades of Internationalism, the conference marks a watershed moment in the effort to open to the fast growing internationalist milieu that surrounds us and which portends great possibilities for the left communist workers movement in the US. Ana, 4/11/08

Dear Internationalism,

I've read your series on how decadence affects capitalism in the International Review. Even though the union movement is portrayed as being progressive in the 1920's and 30's, it had moved away from being a worker's movement and became a hindrance on the working class. In the US, the situation was different in that the industrial unions sprang up in the 1920's and 30's and were quite militant causing wildcat strikes and sit-ins in the plants -- especially in the 30's. Large gains were won in wages, work hours and medical care. Only after the middle 30's did the unions move away from militancy and become supporters of FDR's New Deal and, then, support for the coming imperialist war. The unions after WWII never moved back to militancy. Instead they backed reformist bourgeois liberals who granted concessions while the Soviet Union existed. The workers themselves didn't show militancy but followed the unions' betraying leadership. No significant sector of the union movement emerged to challenge union officialdom and this speaks of a deep moral chasm in the union's middle strata...

SH, Jan. 08

Our reply

Dear SH

We have discussed your recent message concerning decadence and its impact on the class struggle. We want to salute your seriousness and willingness to share your reflections. In this communication, we would like to expand a bit on why we think unions were integrated into American state capitalism at the time of the First World War, with global capitalism's entry into its decadent phase. Capitalism is a global economic system, and the qualitative change in the capitalist system from its ascendant to its decadent period occurs on a global, international level, not a country by country basis. Certainly, there may be specificities in how global tendencies and processes play themselves out in particular countries, but this in no way should imply that there was any significant difference in the situation in the US compared to other countries.

In this context, the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and industrial unions in the US was NOT an expression of working class militancy, but on the contrary a response by state capitalism to counteract that militancy. Despite the mythology of the CIO's creation propagated by Stalinist and Trotskyist propaganda, the successful organization of industrial unions in the 1930's in the mass production industries was imposed by American capitalism as a means to control, discipline, and eventually mobilize the working class for imperialist slaughter in World War II.

We published a lengthy article in Internationalism No. 12 in 1977, "The Formation of the CIO : Triumph of the Bourgeoisie," which refuted Art Preis' "Labor's Giant Step," which painted a glowing picture of the CIO from a Trotskyist perspective. We think the analysis and evidence developed in that article is pertinent to your further reflection on the unions and decadence. To highlight some central points:

1).- As in other industrialized countries, World War I marked the integration of the unions into the state apparatus, with their participation in the War Industries Board, which was charged with mobilizing American industry for the war. Then serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, during WW I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked closely with and appreciated the effectiveness of the WIB, with the unions as full partners and participants, in exerting centralized state control over the economy. In addition a number of other prominent capitalists who participated in the statification of the economy during the war, recognized the benefits that industrial unions could render to American capital, especially in industrial mobilization for war.

2).- While the state capitalist measures introduced during WW I were largely dismantled after the war during the 1920's, not to be reintroduced until the after the onset of the Great Depression and the New Deal program introduced by FDR in 1933, the rise of Fordism and mass production industries during the 1920's increasingly demonstrated the anachronistic nature of the traditional AFL craft unions, as a means for effectively controlling the working class. Gerard Swope, president of General Electric, who had been involved in the work of the WIB during WW I, "vainly tried to convince William Green, the president of the AFL, to form a nation-wide industrial union of electrical workers. For Swope, industrial efficiency would be ‘intolerably handicapped if the bulk of our employees were organized into different and often competing craft unions'" (Internationalism No.12, p3). From the union side, Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, one of the only industrial unions within the AFL, criticized narrow craft unionism because "it permits of no responsibility between labor and management," and undercut the ability to provide for stable and responsible management of large scale industry. In essence, both Swope and Hillman saw that big capital and the state needed to deal with one bargaining agent in each industry to guarantee efficiency and labor discipline. Industrial unionism in decadence was no threat to capitalism, but a necessary tool.

3) -The impotence of organized labor, as personified by the AFL, to control and discipline the American working class was demonstrated during the 1920's and early 30's, where the number of strikes by non-unionized workers as compared to union-called strikes, grew continuously until by the early 30's the majority of strikes in the US were wildcats outside union control - hence, outside state control.

4).- As early as 1933, the incoming FDR administration recognized the necessity to prepare for eventual war with German imperialism and understood that the coming inter-imperialist war required the creation of industrial unions to control and mobilize the masses of unorganized unskilled and semi-skilled workers. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933, a key element in FDR's New Deal, granted workers "the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing," laying the framework for the organization of industrial unions. The National Recovery Administration, which presided over state centralization of the depression-ridden economy openly encouraged unionization. The newly created National Labor Board (NLB) decreed that the union receiving a majority of votes in a plant would have exclusive bargaining rights for all employees in the plant, a practice that differs from many European nations, where a single plant may have workers belong to different unions affiliated with the CP, the SP or and centrist political party. US capitalism was committed to centralized control over its workforce in key industries. While unionization of mass production industries had the support of the state, and "enlightened" members of the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, it was opposed by small and medium sized industrialists organized in the American Manufacturers, as well as recalcitrant big capitalists like Henry Ford (Ford) and Tom Girdler (Republic Steel). . In any case, the AFL proved indifferent and unwilling to undertake organization of unskilled workers.

5).- The strike wave of 1934, as increasing numbers of workers rebelled against the conditions of hardship, convinced the FDR administration that it couldn't rely on the AFL to organize the working class. The Wagner Act gave strong enforcement powers to the newly created National Labor Relations Board to override the resistance of backward members of the bourgeoisie and to accelerate the efforts of the Congress of Industrial Organizations to organize the mass production industries. The CIO and state leadership was crystal clear on its role in service of capitalism. CIO President John L. Lewis, from the Miners, in reference to the spontaneous eruption of class struggle and strikes, said, "it is conceivable that if this dangerous state of affairs is allowed to continue there will not only be ‘class-consciousness' but revolution as well. But it can be avoided. The employers aren't doing much to avoid it. The United Mine Workers are doing everything in their power to make the system work and thereby avoid it." The head of the NLRB, Lloyd K. Garrison, said "I regard organized labor in this country as our chief bulwark against communism and other revolutionary movements." Len De Caux, editor of the CIO Union News Service, said, "When collective bargaining is fully accepted, union recognition accorded and an agreement reached, CIO unionists accept full responsibility for carrying out their side of it in a disciplined fashion, and oppose sit-downs or any other strike action while it is in force."

6).- Reflecting the anger and discontent of the workers, it is true that militant strikes erupted in many industries during the CIO unionizing drives, including the sit-downs at General Motors in 1936-37, which involved 136,000 workers in 17 plants, where strikers demanded abolition of piece work payment schemes, a thirty hour week/six hour work day, premium pay for overtime, reinstatement of fired workers, and worker control of production line speed. However the militancy of the workers should not be confused with the attitude of the CIO unions. For instance, while the plants remained under worker control, the union bureaucracy paid lip service to the workers' demands and concentrated on union recognition as their central concern. Forced by the government pressure to end the strike, GM agreed to bargain with the United Auto Workers for the next six months in exchange for an end to the factory occupations. In the end, the union surrendered on the central workers' demands but won union recognition, which was the pattern throughout the CIO's organizing campaigns. --Internationalism 02/1/2008

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/313/may-68 [139]

Since the collapse of the housing bubble at the beginning of 2007 economists and government representatives have been betting on the odds of a recession in the US economy. Currently we are mid-way through 2008 and still the ‘experts' have not made up their minds about its likelihood. Meanwhile the signs of crisis are everywhere: the mortgage debacle continues unabated, driving down house prices and leaving in its wake a wave of foreclosure, company bankruptcies and shaking to its core the entire financial system, where profits have been going up in smoke as fast as they were created in the boom days of the real estate market. Furthermore, the economic troubles are not limited solely to the industries related to the housing market. The same devastating picture can be seen in the airlines and automobile industries for example, which in fact collapsed well before the bursting of the real estate bubble.

The US government's response to the unfolding crisis has been yet again more of the same monetary tricks that it's used to manage its chronically sick economy every time it has shown signs of a sudden decline: in essence pumping huge amounts of cheap money into the economy in the hope that this will stimulate demand and keep the consumers partying on. For instance, since last September the Federal Reserve has lowered its basic interest rate 7 times and has kept a semblance of order in the financial system through a constant flow of cheap money. However, even though government policies in the short term have saved the economy from a total collapse there seems to be a very high price to pay in store (no pun intended!) One of the main consequences of the Fed's policy of cheap money is to have driven down the value of the dollar, which has set record lows against the Euro and other major currencies, thus pushing up the price of commodities in the world market, which are priced in dollars. In other words, the Fed's policy has sharply increased inflationary pressures around the world.

Faced with the obvious fact of rising prices, the US government has acknowledged in recent weeks that inflation is escalating. The latest government data shows that in May inflation in the US is running at a yearly rate of 4.2%.  In one of his latest public speeches Mr. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has hinted that - given present inflationary trends - the Fed will not lower interest rates any more in the immediate future. Therefore the Fed seems to be changing gears and making the fight against inflation its main priority, putting the attempts to jump start the economy on the backburner.

To be sure, inflation has surged in the US recently and no worker would need bourgeois economic ‘specialists' to tell them this, as the working class has been feeling the pinch of higher prices in everything from food to shelter, heating fuels and gasoline. If the government inflation estimate seems suspiciously low it's because it has a conscious policy of underestimating inflation, just as the bourgeoisie has a conscious policy of understating the rate of unemployment. For the last three decades, using statistical gimmicks on the way the CPI (consumer price index) is calculated, the US bourgeoisie has managed to showcase a relatively low rate of inflation compared with the double digits hyper-inflation of the 1970's. Some of these statistical tricks deserve to be mentioned. Until 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured housing inflation by looking at what it cost to buy and own homes, considering factors like house prices, mortgage interest costs and property taxes. Based on some dubious reasoning, this component of the CPI disappeared and was replaced by a so-called "owner's equivalent rent" instead of the real cost of home ownership. It has been calculated that this manipulation alone has served to understate inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points.  In the 1990's the CPI was subject to three other downward adjustments. Firstly, ‘product substitution': very conveniently, if a product (say high quality meat) gets too expensive, it is moved out of the CPI, because people are assumed to shift to a cheaper substitute, say hamburger. Secondly, ‘geometric weighting': goods and services for which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting because of a presumed reduction in consumption. Thirdly, something called ‘hedonic adjustment', which pretends to measure consumer satisfaction due to improvements to products and services.

In August 1971, when inflation in the US reached 4%, it was considered a national crisis and the Nixon administration imposed price and wage controls. Today a 4.2 % inflation rate is merely sounding some alarm bells. What's worse, according to non-government calculations, this supposed 4% inflation rate seems to be in reality much closer to a 7 to 10 percent yearly rate, as it has been on average since 1980 if one ignores the government manipulation of CPI statistics.

Obviously the bourgeoisie doesn't go to all this trouble to manipulate the real rate of inflation just for the sake of it. In addition to its value as an ideological mystification - presenting capitalism as being in much better shape than it really is - there is a very practical reason behind it. Since CPI calculations are used to measure social security benefits (and other state entitlement programs) as well as pension, salary and benefit increases, its downward estimation means that the worse effects of the chronic crisis of the system are passed on directly to the working class. In fact, inflation and especially its official underestimation have contributed greatly to the pauperization of the working class in the last forty years of open economic crisis. For instance, by some calculations if one were to roll back changes made to the CPI calculations since the Carter years, Social Security checks would be 70% greater than they currently are!

The specter of inflation haunts the world

Evidently the recent spike on inflation is not just a US phenomenon. Raw material prices have been on an upward spiral for most of this decade, and since 2007 global food and energy prices have been rapidly increasing. The international market price of wheat doubled from February 2007 to February 2008. Rice prices also reached ten years high, while in some parts of the world milk and meat prices have more than doubled. Also, soy and corn prices have increased dramatically. Finally, the price of oil has skyrocketed, doubling in the last year.

Here are some examples of the developing inflation around the world. In May of this year, the Euro zone inflation rate was reported at 3.7%, up from 3.3% and the highest since modern records began in the mid-1990s. Now the UK has reported its own record-breaking 3.3%, up from 3% the previous month, when just last January the annual rate was as low as 2.2%. Not even China, often cited as a showcase of capitalist dynamism and health, has been spared. The jump in China's inflation rate to a 12-year high of 8.7% last February sent chills around the world. In the last year food prices jumped in China by 23%, with vegetable prices 46% higher and pork a dramatic 63%.

Moreover, what has cause increased worry in capitalist circles is the fact that this acceleration of inflation is happening at the same time that the system is suffering a generalized slowdown spearheaded by the developing convulsions of the US economy.  The word "stagflation" is more and more on the lips of the economic ‘specialists.' What they are not saying is that in the last 40 years of growing capitalist economic crisis, through cycles of bubbles and busts, inflation has been a permanent phenomenon of world-wide capitalism.  In fact one of the main goals of the economic policies of the government central banks in every nation is to keep inflation pressures in check. However, government policies not withstanding, inflation has spiked out of control quite often. During the ‘70s, following on the collapse of the Breton Woods Accord in 1971, inflation broke loose internationally, reaching double digits in the central countries of capitalism. In the ‘80s the so-called ‘third world' went through a round of hyperinflation that brought down the economies of many Latin American countries.

Bourgeois economists have debated to no end the causes for these inflationary spikes, but what they never say is that the reasons for inflation are contained in the capitalist system itself and the policies of the dominant class:

The anarchic nature of capitalist production.  Capitalist production is social production only in the sense that what is produced is not produced for individual consumption but for the use of others.  Production is bound to produce excesses (over supply) in one sector of production and shortages (over demand) in another. In a system based on the law of value prices changes reflect a lack of conscious, social planning.

Capitalism's drive for maximum profits without regard for social need. The recent rush for the diversion of staple foods like corn and soybeans from human and animal feed to the ‘feeding' of the  fashionable ethanol bio-fuel industry is a point in case. There is no doubt that the bourgeoisie's present obsession with bio-fuels has driven up the price of commodities as much as it has filled up the coffers of big farmers and driven millions to the point of starvation around the world, who have long been dependent on cheap food products coming from the dominant world food producers.

Capitalism's lack of foresight. The consequence of an economic system that is basically geared to the present is well illustrated by capitalism's historic dependence on fossil fuels for its energy needs. This dependence has on the one hand created a nightmare scenario of increasing climate change that is affecting worldwide food production. On the other hand, by putting oil at the center of production and circulation of commodities (and the running of its military machine) it has created a permanent shortage of this commodity. Except for very short intervals, there is never too much oil in the world market -- hence the oil price volatility.

The bourgeoisie's own economic policies in face of the chronic state of crisis of its system are also inflation inducers. The abuse of the money printing machine, the permanent monetary manipulations, the abuse of the mechanism of credit, the ballooning budget deficits -- all contribute to keep inflation going.

Imperialist policies drive also up energy and food prices. The instability in the Middle East and in Nigeria have contributed greatly to driving up the price of oil. In fact the war in Iraq has had a double impact on the recent spike in inflation. On the one hand the war has totally devastated the oil production in that country, cutting down the supply in the world market; and on the other hand, the fact that the US has been running this war ‘off budget' has contributed to the dollar devaluation and the concomitant rise in commodity prices.

To rising inflation workers have to oppose the class struggle

Often enough the bourgeoisie tries to blame workers for rising inflation. The so-called wage/prices spiral is often blamed for the hyperinflation of the 70's in the central countries of capitalism. However in reality wages have never been able to keep up with the pace of inflation. Today rising food and energy prices are squeezing workers' living standards around the world. Workers are facing vanishing real salaries in a time in which lay-offs are everywhere on the agenda. No wonder that food riots and protest against skyrocketing energy prices are multiplying around the world (see article in this issue of Internationalism). Only the working class has the power to stop this madness. Capitalism has no future to offer humanity other than wars and growing pauperization.

Eduardo Smith June 23, 2008.

In capitalist democracy, the corporate news media reportage, commentary, and "debates" faithfully reflect the dominant class's ideas regarding which imperialist and domestic strategy best suits its interests. This means that the media is the mouthpiece of the ruling class.  When capitalism entered into its phase of decadence, the links between the state and the media were strengthened to the point where the mass media became part of the state apparatus of state capitalism. The media now plays a dual role for the bourgeoisie: strengthening the democratic mystification and serving as the propaganda arm of the state.

The myth of the free press is a fundamental cornerstone of democratic society.  The lie peddled is that "freedom of the press" is at the heart of every bourgeois definition of democracy, supposedly guaranteeing the right to criticize the state and the status quo.   This mystification constantly contrasts the "freedom" of the media and press in the "democratic" West with evidence that in "non-democratic" and "totalitarian" nations, the press is under the thumb of the state. Those of us lucky enough to live in "democratic" society supposedly enjoy the advantage and luxury of a media that is the watchdog of the public interest -- the fourth estate, which safeguards the public against wrongdoing by government and corporate officials. This mystification can be successful only if the media is presented as "independent" and free from influence and control

At the same time that it supposedly operates as the independent watchdog of the public interest against the government and against powerful individuals, the media also serves as the propaganda arm of the bourgeois state.  The present electoral campaign offers an illustration of how the media and the capitalist state work cooperatively to provide news coverage that supports the political priorities of the dominant fractions of the ruling class.  As we wrote in Internationalism 145, what is at stake in the 2008 presidential election is the distancing of the new administration from the Bush regime, especially with regard to its tactics and stance
vis-a-vis American imperialist policy.  Just as importantly, the disillusionment in "democracy" following the 2006 elections, coupled with disgust with the war in Iraq, requires that this election bring back into the fold of democratic mystifications an electorate that has grown more and more skeptical of "democracy."  This requires, above all, that the ruling class stage a credible campaign to attract the vote of the young generation, the ones who have never voted and who may otherwise be influenced by their parents' skepticism. Barack Obama fits the bill. To the high echelons of the American bourgeoisie -- who conduct the real debates behind closed doors, away from the public ear -- it has become clear that Barack Obama could be used to rejuvenate the democratic mystification, overcome widespread political disenchantment, and readjust imperialist policy. The media have simply fallen in line. 

From the start, Barack Obama has been elevated to the status of a prophet.  In the words of superdelegate Rober Byrd, Democratic Senator from West Virginia, who's supporting Obama, this candidate offers a "transformative national vision, a commitment to a new and unifying politics, and to a long-needed truth in governance and international relations."  This is the same line that the media has peddled.

Every time so far that an opponent unearthed an Achilles' heel in Obama's positions or affiliations -- as in the case of his controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- the candidate seemed momentarily at a disadvantage only to make an even stronger comeback, thanks to the support of the media.  This is not a matter of how skilled and well prepared Obama's campaign strategists are in responding to  criticisms and accusations or how "objectively" the media report the various scandals and allegations, but rather how the media covers the controversy and what they emphasize. This doesn't depend simply on the shims of media correspondents and executives, but rather on the strength of the support a candidate gets from key elements and groups within the ruling class, including in its permanent state bureaucracy.  Again, the media just follows suit. 

However, we should point out that the fact that the media do their job of propaganda for the state is not a guarantee that the ruling class will obtain the desired results.  In fact, the risk of failing is heightened by the tendency toward a lack of discipline and an "each for themselves" characteristic of decomposition.

We can also see how the ruling class uses the media for state propaganda with regard to imperialist policy.  In every imperialist war, from the Mexican War of 1845-48, to the Spanish-American war of 1898, to WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, even the invasion of Grenada, the Gulf War, and, obviously, the war in Iraq, the media supported the foreign policy initiative of the war, until and unless divergences developed within the bourgeoisie on war policy.  In fact, when parts of the media oppose the official policy of the state, this reflects either a political division of labor intended to legitimize the claims of a free, independent press, or the existence of real divergences within the ruling class.  This was seen clearly in the Vietnam war, where the criticism of the official policy did not reflect a critical section of the media, so much as it reflected which parts of the media were linked to the factions of the bourgeoisie that were critical of the imperialist policy.

It requires a high degree of sophistication for the ruling class to present the media as the ambassadors of "free speech" when in reality they are pawns in the hands of the state.  How do the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie exert control over the media?

Control is not exerted overtly or directly as in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, where the media was directly owned or controlled by the state.  This was a sign of the weakness of the local state capitalism.  The state's inability to mask its control and manipulation of the media weakened its ability to legitimize its domination over society.   By contrast, in the more advanced democracies, control is exerted indirectly through interlocking networks formed by various connections, such as corporate links, whereby major corporations control the media organizations.  A good example of this can be found in the national security industry - for example, GE, which controls NBC news. 

During the ‘80s, the Reagan administration would routinely complain to GE if they didn't like what NBC was doing.  Despite avowals that the corporate parent would never interfere with editorial integrity, they did all the time.  Sometimes  the mere fear that the corporate parent's links to the government might jeopardize  a journalist's career would lead to toeing of the line, suppressing or canceling negative stories about the government's policies.

Prominent journalists and news executives shift back and forth between government, politics and the news media.  ABC's George Stefanopolous was Clinton's press secretary; Tim Russert of NBC was Mario Cuomo's. In the 1980's, Tom Rogers was an RCA executive who became a public affairs official at the Pentagon during the Reagan administration, who then became an executive vice president of NBC News. Roger Ailes, was a media consultant to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush and then became head of CNBC (NBC's business channel on cable TV), and now serves as Rupert Murdoch's chief executive at Fox News. There's no need for clumsy, heavy handed bossing around of the media when the people in charge are part and parcel of the same ruling elites. They know what to do without being told.

There are other examples of interlocking networks forming the backbone of the ruling class's control of the media.  There are institutional links.  Journalists are trained to think that part of their job is to support the prevailing system (rather than questioning or subverting it).  For example, when the Reagan administration restricted reporters' access to covering the Grenada invasion, media spokesmen complained that they wanted to support the administration, but to do so effectively, they needed to be free to the cover the story in full. "Please let us do our job," said one of the prominent TV commentators.

Neither should we overlook social links - journalists and media executives are part of the same class, they have the same educational backgrounds, went to school together, belong to the same social clubs and groups, and share the same tendency to move back and forth between the government and media organizations. This independence of the media is an illusion that helps to make it much stronger in its true role as an arm of the state.

Instead of falling into the trap of believing in the democratic mystifications surrounding the trumpeted "freedom of speech and the press," we would like to reaffirm a few fundamental lessons learned by the working class in its long struggle against the bourgeoisie, this most sophisticated and shrewdest of all exploiting classes.  "Democracy" can only be a sham in a society divided in classes, where one class holds the monopoly of wealth and weapons.  Here, the media can only be in the hands of the exploiting class and its political organization, the state.  It is clear that under these circumstances the media-sponsored political "debates" are an exclusive privilege of the ruling class, in which the working class does not take part.   The electoral "debates," culminating in the election of the president and vice-president, are nothing but a smokescreen to hide the fact that the choice of the team responsible for carrying out the bourgeois state's policies is something that occurs in the corridors of the permanent bureaucracy.  The media helps the ruling class to attain the desired results through a campaign of mass ideological manipulation.

In contrast to this, we would also reaffirm the method the working class has historically created to secure the most open expression of ideas and divergences aimed at the clarification necessary to decide on what course of action to take. This method is the widest possible, collective debate, which finds expression in the massive assemblies the workers create in heightened moments of struggle, not in any media coverage, TV ad, reportage, or news commentary. Ana 6/11/08

In confronting the existence of ethnic, racial, and linguistic differences between workers, the workers' movement has historically been guided by the principle that "workers have no country."  Any compromise on this principle represents a capitulation to bourgeois ideology.

A hundred years ago at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907, an attempt by the opportunists to support the restriction of Chinese and Japanese immigration by bourgeois governments was overwhelmingly defeated. Opposition was so great that the opportunists were actually forced to withdraw the resolution. Instead the Congress adopted an anti-exclusionist position for the workers movement in all countries. In reporting on this Congress, Lenin wrote, "(T)here was an attempt to defend narrow, craft interests, to ban the immigration of workers from backward countries (coolies from China, etc.). This is the same spirit of aristocratism that one finds among workers in some of the "civilized" countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are therefore inclined to forget the need for international solidarity. But no one at the Congress defended this craft and petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness. The resolution fully meets the needs of revolutionary Social Democracy."[1] In the US, the opportunists attempted at the 1908, 1910 and 1912 Socialist Party congresses to push through resolutions to evade the decision of the Stuttgart Congress and voiced support for the American Federation of Labor's opposition to immigrants. But they were beaten back every time by comrades advocating international solidarity for all workers. One delegate admonished the opportunists that for the working class "there are no foreigners." Others insisted that the workers' movement must not join with capitalists against groups of workers. In a 1915 letter to the Socialist Propaganda League (the predecessor of the leftwing of the Socialist Party that went on to found the  Communist and Communist Labor parties in the US) Lenin wrote, "In our struggle for true internationalism and against ‘jingo-socialism' we always quote in our press the example of the opportunist leaders of the S.P. in America who are in favor of restrictions of Chinese and Japanese workers (especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907 and against the decisions of Stuttgart). We think that one cannot be internationalist and at the same time in favor of such restrictions."[2]

Historically immigrants played an important role in the workers' movement in the US. The first Marxist revolutionaries came to the US after the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany and later constituted vital links to the European center of the First International. Engels introduced certain problematic conceptions regarding immigrants into the socialist movement in the US which while accurate in certain aspects, were erroneous in others, some of which ultimately led to a negative impact on the organizational activities of American revolutionary movement. Frederich Engels was concerned about the initial slowness of the working class movement to develop in the US. He understood that certain specificities in the American situation were involved, including the lack of a feudal tradition with a strong class system, and the existence of the frontier, which served as a safety valve for the bourgeoisie, allowing discontented workers to escape from a proletarian existence to become a farmer or homesteader in the west. Another was the gulf between native and immigrant workers, in terms of economic opportunities and the inability for radicalized immigrant workers to communicate with native workers. For example, when he criticized the German socialist émigrés in America for not learning English, he wrote that, "they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out-and-out Americans. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they the minority, and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all learn English."[3] It was true that the there was a tendency for German immigrant revolutionaries to confine themselves to theoretical work in the 1880s and to disdain mass work with native, English speaking workers. It was also true that the immigrant-led revolutionary movement did indeed have to open outward to English-speaking American workers, but the emphasis on Americanization of the movement  implicit in these remarks proved to have disastrous consequences for the workers' movement, as it eventually pushed the most politically and theoretically developed and experienced workers into secondary roles, and put leadership in the hands of poorly formed militants, whose primary qualification was being an English-speaking native. After the Russian Revolution, this same policy perspective was pursued by the Communist international with even more disastrous consequences for the early CP. Moscow's insistence that native American-born militants be placed in leadership positions catapulted opportunists and careerists like William Z. Foster to leadership positions, cast Eastern European revolutionaries with left communist leanings totally outside the leadership, and accelerated the triumph of Stalinism in the US party.

Similarly, it was also problematic when Engels remarked that the "great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native workers...(The native working class)  has developed and has also to a great extent organized itself on trade union lines. But it still takes up an aristocratic attitude and wherever possible leaves the ordinary badly paid occupations to the immigrants, of whom only a small section enter the aristocratic trades."[4] Though it accurately described how native and immigrant workers were divided against each other, it implied wrongly that it was the native workers and not the bourgeoisie that was responsible for the gulf between different segments of the working class. Though this comment described the segmentation in the white immigrant working class, in the 1960's the new leftists interpreted it as a basis for the "white skin privilege theory."[5]

In any case, the history of the class struggle in the US itself disproved Engel's view that Americanization of immigrant workers was a precondition for building a strong socialist movement in the US. Class solidarity and unity across ethnic and linguistic roles was a central characteristic of the workers' movement at the turn of the 20th century. The socialist parties in the US had a foreign language press that published dozens of daily and weekly newspapers in different languages.  In 1912, the Socialist Party published 5 English and 8 foreign language daily newspapers, 262 English and 36 foreign weekly newspapers, and 10 English and two foreign news monthlies in the US, and this does not include the Socialist Labor Party publications. The Socialist Party had 31 foreign language federations within it: Armenian, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hispanic, Hungarian,  Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jewish, Latvian, Lettish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Scandinanvian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, South Slavic, Spanish, Swedish, Ukranian, Yugoslav. These federations comprised a majority of the organization. The communist and communist labor parties founded in 1919 had immigrant majority memberships. Similarly the growth in Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) membership in the period before World War I came disproportionately from immigrants, and even the western IWW, which had a large "native" membership, had thousands of Slavs, Chicanos, and Scandinavians in their ranks.

The most famous IWW struggle, the Lawrence textile workers strike of 1912, demonstrated the capacity for solidarity between immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Lawrence was a mill town in Massachusetts where workers worked under deplorable conditions. Half the workers were teenage girls between 14-18 years of age. Skilled craft workers tended to be English speaking workers of English, Irish, and German ancestry. The unskilled workers included French-Canadian, Italian, Slavic, Hungarian, Portuguese, Syrian and Polish immigrants. A wage cut imposed at one of the mills prompted a strike by Polish women weavers, which quickly spread to 20,000 workers. A strike committee, organized under the leadership of the IWW, included two representatives from each ethnic group and demanded a 15 percent wage increase and no reprisals for strikers. Strike meetings were translated into twenty-five languages. When the authorities responded with violent repression, the strike committee dramatized the situation by sending several hundred children of the striking workers to stay with working class sympathizers in New York City. When a second trainload of 100 children were being sent to  worker sympathizers in New Jersey, the authorities attacked the children and their mothers, beating them and arresting them in front of national press coverage, which resulted in a national outpouring of solidarity.

In 1913, during the silk workers' strike in Paterson, NJ, the IWW used a similar tactic, sending strikers' children to stay with "strike mothers" in other cities, once again demonstrating class solidarity across ethnic lines.

As World War I unfolded, the role of émigrés and immigrants in the left-wing of the socialist movement was particularly important. For example, a meeting on Jan. 14, 1917 at the Brooklyn, New York home of Ludwig Lore, an immigrant from Germany, to plan a "program of action" for left forces in the American socialist movement included the participation of Trotsky, who just arrived in New York the day before; Bukharin, who was already resident as an émigré working as editor for Novy Mir, the organ of the Russian Socialist Federation; several other Russian émigrés; S.J. Rutgers, a Dutch revolutionary who was a colleague of Pannenkoek; and Sen Katayama, a Japanese émigré. According to eyewitness accounts the discussion was dominated by the Russians, with Bukharin arguing that the left should immediately split from the Socialist Party and Trotsky that the left should remain within the party for the moment but should advance its critique by publishing an independent bi-monthly organ, which was the position adopted by the meeting. Had he not returned to Russia after the February Revolution, Trotsky would likely have served as leader of the left-wing of the American movement.[6]  The co-existence of many languages was not an obstacle to the movement; to the contrary it was a reflection of its strength. At one mass rally in 1917, Trotsky addressed the crowd in Russian, and others in German, Finnish, English, Lettish, Yiddish and Lithuanian.[7]

We must stand for the defense of the international unity of the working class. We cannot   even appear to legitimize irrational fears and distrust of immigrant workers, or the bourgeoisie's attempt to use immigrants as a scapegoat for the problems that are squarely the responsibility of an economic mode of production that has outlived its usefulness. As proletarian internationalists we reject as bourgeois ideology such constructs as "cultural pollution," "linguistic pollution," "national identity,"  "distrust of foreigners," or "defense of the community or neighborhood." Our intervention cannot be that "you are right to be concerned about the threat to American culture, or national identity, or that it is terrible that you feel like a stranger in your own ‘country'," which would give credence to bourgeois ideology on the question of country, nation, culture, national identity, etc. and strengthen the bourgeois attempt to foster division within the class. On the contrary, our intervention must defend the historical acquisitions of the working class movement that workers have no country; that the defense of national culture or language or identity is not a task or concern of the proletariat, that we must reject the efforts of those who try to use these bourgeois conceptions to exacerbate the differences within the working class, to undermine working class unity. We must stress the unity of the proletariat above all else and international proletarian solidarity in the face of attempts to divide us against ourselves. Anything else constitutes an abandonment of revolutionary principle.  - Jerry Grevin, 6/24/08.

[1].- Lenin, V.I. "The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart," Proletary No.17, Oct. 20, 1907. In Collected Works, vol. 13, p75. (We leave aside in this text controversies concerning the question of "aristocracy of labor" that Lenin implies.)

[2].- Lenin, V.I., Letter to the Secretary of the Socialist Propaganda League, Nov. 9, 1915. In Collected Works, vol. 21, p423.

[3].- Marx and Engels, Letters to Americans, p. 162-3, 290 (cited in Draper's, Roots of American Communism.)

[4].-Engels, Letter to Schluter, op cit. In Collected Works, vol.49, p392.

[5].-White skin privilege theory was an ideological concoction of the 1960s new leftists, which claimed that a supposed deal between the ruling class and the white working class granted white workers a higher standard of living at the expense of black workers who were victimized by racism and discrimination.

[6].- Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. pp. 80-83

[7].- Ibid. p.79

This article has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/314/may-68 [141]

In recent weeks there has been an aggravation of the economic crisis that has shaken the confidence of even the most unrepentant cheerleaders of American capitalism. The official line of the White House has gone from a self-assured defense of the "good fundamentals" of an economy that's just going through a momentary hiccup, to a hysterical call for "all hands on board" to shoulder the task of saving the sinking ship.

Without doubt the bourgeoisie is right to be concerned. What started as the infamous bursting of the housing bubble at the beginning of 2007, has become the greatest financial disaster in 70 years. The pile of failed institutions is growing by the day: the investment banks Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers; the mortgage behemoths Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; the world's biggest insurance company, AIG; Washington Mutual, America's largest savings and loan; and the commercial bank Wachovia -- just to mention the more famous cases. The whole financial system is in shambles. The air is filled with the poisonous odor of capitalism's rotting body, and amidst this agony, we are being given a window into the rarified world of high-stakes gambling that characterized the multi-trillion casino-like-economy centered around Wall Street.

Yet even though the center of the storm is the US economy, its effects are rapidly extending throughout the world. In Central Europe, Russia, Japan, Asia.... everywhere, the financial system is going bust, forcing governments to scramble to the rescue, repeating the American experience, except for the specificities of the local details.

Faced with a dramatically worsening situation, the "collective capitalist", the State, has done its best to manage the economic crisis. But the balance-sheet so far is negative. The State has proved once again unable to stop the blood-letting. And the current so-called "comprehensive bail out" of the financial system at the staggering cost of 700 billion dollars could well go the same way as other measures put in place in the last year.

Behind the financial crisis, the economic crisis of capitalism

The whole bourgeois media is having a field day covering the financial crisis. Newspaper reporters, economic columnists, TV commentators and all kinds of economic "experts" are outdoing each other in their colorful description of the storm blasting the high temples of the American financial system. The message is one of high alarm. The predominant view is that the financial system is on the brink of collapse, and credit - the lifeblood of the system - is drying up, endangering the well-being of everybody. In short, the turmoil on Wall Street, the financial system, is now menacing Main Street, the real economy. There is a lot of moral outrage expressed against the "excesses" and "greed" of the Wall Street crowd that recklessly brought this calamity to themselves and the rest of society. It's almost comical, that this condemnation is coming from the same media that not long ago servilely celebrated the seemingly unstoppable record profit making of the high-flying Wall Street financial industry and the lavish life style of investment bankers, traders, hedge fund speculators, unscrupulous mortgage brokers and other parasitic so-called entrepreneurs.

What the media is not saying - and can't say because its main function is the mystification of reality through conscious choice or self-delusion - is that the current financial crisis is clear and simple an expression of the economic crisis of capitalism, a chronic crisis that is rooted in capitalism's own contradictions and for which the dominant class has no real solution to put forward. On the contrary each remedy put forward to manage the crisis in the end winds up aggravating the malady. This is expressed in the fact that what the economists called recessions are each worse that the preceding one, while the so-called recoveries are increasingly phony.

Four decades of economic crisis

The immediate chain of events behind the current financial crisis is very well known. The American bourgeoisie got out of the recession of 2001 just the same way that it had done before during previous recessions: through state capitalist policies of cheap credit and lax fiscal policies. And just as during other "recoveries," in time these policies feed the illusion of growth and finally end by creating the conditions for a new crash. Thus, the celebrated housing boom became the current housing bust, just as the Internet "revolution" ended in the dot.com bubble being popped in 2001.

This is the basic short story of how the American economy ended up where it is today: with a financial system in total disarray, weighed down by an unstoppable wave of mortgage defaults, housing foreclosures, downward-spiraling real estate prices and mind-blowing gambling bets going bad. The bourgeoisie has yet to recognize officially that its economy is in recession, but given the extent of the carnage, that hardly seems relevant.

The "basic short story," however, is a very poor reflection of reality. Actually, what gives the present financial crisis its historical proportions is the fact that it expresses the accumulation of decades of contradictions of a decadent economic system that has become in all senses a menace to the very survival of humanity. A permanent state of war and economic crisis, with a relentless worsening of standards of living, chronic unemployment, rampant inflation and growing insecurity for the working class and other non-exploiting sectors of the population - this has been the history of capitalism for most of the last century. This is a system that has put humanity through two devastating World Wars and the Great Depression, a dreadful worldwide crisis to which the present turmoil is often being compared.

After the brief respite during the post-World War II period of reconstruction, the economic crisis came once again to the forefront, shattering the vision of unlimited, crisis-free prosperity put forward by the system's acolytes based on the record setting economic growth of the post-war period in the central countries of capitalism.

The economic malaise that started at the end of the 1960's exploded in a full blown worldwide economic crisis at the beginning of the 70's and has since persisted like a slow growing terminal cancer at the center of the body of capitalism.

It is not an accident that the US economy is today, just as it was in the ‘70s at the center of the storm. In August 1971 Richard Nixon reneged on the U.S. commitments under the American-brokered 1943 Breton Woods System that had guaranteed the dollar convertibility to gold and that had given the post-war financial and commercial systems a semblance of stability. This turnaround of the American bourgeoisie left the use of the dollar as a world currency without an economic rationale and has contributed greatly to the fragility of the world financial system showcased in today's crisis. The world's banks are awash with paper dollars. The currency reserves of most countries are held mostly in dollars. In fact there are, by far, more dollars circulating around the world that in the US economy. This insane situation is based on a simple collective delusion: that behind the dollar stands the so-called "full faith and credit" of the US government, which amounts to an overt overestimation of the U.S. creditworthiness. If the present U.S. financial turmoil does not bring a reality check to the global financial system, then nothing will.