The dramatic Republican victory in the Massachusetts Jan. 19th election which destroyed the Democrats filibuster proof margin in the Senate seems for the moment to have thrown the bourgeoisie's plans to "reform" health care into complete disarray.  It is still too soon to know what the final outcome will be, but the current situation illustrates yet again the serious difficulties confronted by the ruling class in the period of social decomposition of capitalism in controlling its own political apparatus and implementing policies that clearly serve the interests of the national capital.

Early on the morning of Christmas Eve, following an acrimonious, highly partisan  debate, the U.S. Senate passed its version of health care reform on a strictly party-line vote of 60 to 39. President Obama immediately addressed the nation declaring this the most important social legislation since the New Deal. At the time, this "momentous reform" still faced the arduous task of reconciling the Senate and House versions of the bill,  and the final outcome depended upon the results of the special election in Massachusetts to replace the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.  But at Christmas the Obama administration assumed that the seat held by Kennedy for 47 years would remain in the Democratic column and seemed to count their chickens before they hatched. It looked as if the ruling class would finally manage to deal with the health care crisis.

As we pointed out in Internationalism No. 145 [1], "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." For the working class, the attack on medical benefits has been a central feature in virtually every contract struggle in the past decade.  Large companies routinely used to cover 100 percent of insurance premiums, but management increasingly forces workers to pay for a percentage of the costs and once they pierce the barrier of getting workers to pay, in each subsequent contract management pushes to increase the worker contribution. At the same time, workers and their families face skyrocketing co-payments, fees and deductibles and declining quality of medical care as the government grants doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies exemptions from liability for malpractice, incompetence, and defective drugs with disastrous side effects.  Recent court rulings permit unions and companies to drop retirees from existing insurance plans, forcing them to rely solely on Medicare and the purchase of their own supplemental coverage. And this doesn't even include the nearly 50 million who have no health care insurance at all.

For the ruling class, as we noted previously, "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." Having so many uninsured people further harms the US economy, as the costs for providing emergency care for such patients is covered by general tax funds. The need to "rationalize" the health care system and control rising health costs, particularly as the baby boom generation nears retirement, is recognized as a pressing policy necessity by economists and politicians across the political spectrum. For the capitalist class, health care reform is NOT intended to improve the health of workers, but rather to cut costs and improve competitiveness in the world economy.

The legislation currently stalled in Congress in the aftermath of the Massachusetts special election addresses the health care crisis for the ruling class, but will only aggravate the health care crisis faced by American workers. No matter how many times the Obama administration uses the word "reform" in their propaganda, they cannot cover up the fact this health care package is part of an austerity attack on the working class. Admittedly, the propaganda about "universal" health care has tremendous mystifying power for the ruling class. For individuals who currently have no health insurance, any expansion of health insurance coverage may sound better than nothing, but this is illusory. For the working class as a whole what is coming is an attack on health care.

Yes, more people would be covered by health insurance, but there will still between 26 million and 32 million without insurance, depending upon whether Senate or House provisions of the bill are incorporated in the final version of the law. In either case, those who will be newly covered will be forced to pay for it themselves. If they fail to purchase insurance, they will face penalties of up to 2.5 percent of their taxable income. Some lower paid workers may be eligible for subsidies from the government to pay for insurance premiums but the funding for this will come out of the hides of the rest of the working class.

Both the Senate and House bills propose cutting medicare and Medicaid benefits to retirees and the poor respectively. Most onerous of all, is the proposed excise tax on so-called "Cadillac" health care benefit plans, defined as plans that cost at least $8,500 per year for individuals or  $23,000 for families, which will include an estimated 19% of existing employer-based health plans, including many currently in place for workers in unionized industries. This proposed excise tax is supported by the White House and by leading economists. The excise taxes will be levied against the insurance companies, but by definition the cost of an excise tax may be passed along to consumers, permitting the insurance companies to recover the money. Excise taxes are generally used by the state to discourage certain "undesirable" social behaviors - for example excise taxes on alcohol or tobacco products. In this case, the undesirable "social evil" is what the bourgeois calls "overly generous" medical benefits, which economists deem too costly to the economy. This will lead either to sharp increases in employee contributions to cover health insurance premiums, deductibles or sharply curtailed benefit plans. As Beth Umland, director of research for health and benefits at the Mercer consulting firm put it, "the majority of employers will respond the way policymakers hope, by reducing benefits." According to a recent survey of 465 major corporations by Mercer consultants, 66 percent of the employers plan to cut benefits or increase employee contributions in response to the legislation, by dropping flexible spending accounts, used to cover unreimbursed medical expenses, or by dropping dental or vision coverage. This would "tend to shift more costs to workers - but could help accomplish one of the goals touted by economists and policymakers who support the excise tax: slowing medical spending."

The White House web site openly supports this excise tax and tries to sugar coat it by minimizing the number of medical plans that will be impacted and cynically claiming that it will lead to wage increases for workers: "for the small sub-set of plans that are affected, the primary impact of this provision will be to increase workers' wages... Economists agree by taxing the highest cost plans this provision will lead insurance companies to be more efficient and provide quality care to consumers at lower prices (see this endorsement in a letter from a group of prominent economists - including three Nobel laureates and previous members of both Democratic and Republican administrations and this analysis by CBO 2009). Even a report commissioned by the insurance industry's trade association acknowledged that: ‘[w]e expect employers to respond to the tax by restructuring their benefits to avoid it.'  As a result, employers will be in a position to increase workers' take home pay."  What incredible nonsense - as if employers will pass on the supposed cash savings gained from cutting workers medical compensation in pay increases. Even if they did the money would be taxable income, which means workers would lose 25 to 35 percent to the government, whereas currently their compensation in the form of medical benefits is non-taxed.  In behind closed door negotiations between Congressional leaders, the White House and union officials, it's been agreed that the final version will slightly decrease the amount of the excise tax and delay its implementation for five years (from 2013 to 2018), giving the unions a chance to ‘voluntarily' cooperate in designing the cutbacks in workers' medical coverage.

If health care reform is so obviously essential for the bourgeoisie, as evidenced by the the fact that every Republican and Democratic presidential primary candidate in 2008 offered some form of health reform policy proposal, why have the Republicans opposed this legislation so virulently? Why all the ridiculous denunciations of Obama's alleged "socialism" and "death panels"? There are two plausible explanations:  the first, of course is the political division of labor that the ruling class often employs to augment the democratic mystification, to create the illusion of genuine political debate. Before the Jan. 19th election, with 60 votes under Democratic control, passage of some form of health care reform was guaranteed and Republican opposition in no way threatened to undermine the achievement of the necessary rationalization of health care for the bourgeoisie. But secondly, we must also acknowledge an aspect to this opposition that reflected the impact of the social decomposition of capitalist society on the political processes within the ruling class as well. In the past ten years we have noted other instances of the political difficulties for the bourgeoisie to act effectively in its own interests, such as the botched presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, in which the "every man for himself" tendency so clearly manifest on the inter-imperialist terrain where bloc discipline disappeared with the fall of the Russian imperialist bloc, led the major political parties to pursue electoral advantage and victory in a manner totally disregardful of what was genuinely in the best interests of American state capitalism. In this context, no doubt, the racism afflicting the far right in regard to an African American president in the White House, has come into play. This deep seated racism fuels the "birthers" who deny Obama's "legitimacy" because he wasn't born in the US or those who charge that he is a secret Muslim or a "socialist". If Obama were to propose that Ronald Reagan's birthday become a national holiday, one could only imagine that these elements would denounce the proposal as a nefarious socialist-Islamic plot. Another aspect to this decomposition may be seen in the dogged resistance of the insurance industry which finances the opposition of so many conservative members of the House and Senate. We even see in it the ridiculous, petty maneuvering of the more conservative Democrats who held out for particularistic concessions for their own pet projects or financial backers. Such difficulties in implementing policies that serve the vital interests of American state capitalism are not a healthy sign for the ruling class.

The bourgeoisie truly faces a bizarre political situation. It is at last on the brink of "solving" its health care crisis, imposing a change that will NOT be a reform, not an expansion of health care, not an attempt to improve the health of the working class but will in the end be an austerity attack against the working class as a whole.  The goal is to cut health care expenses and improve American economic competitiveness by attacking the standard of living of the working class. And for the moment it looks like the one remaining obstacle to this austerity attack against the working class is the opposition of the Republican party. It's too soon to tell whether the political situation is so out of control for the bourgeoisie that this measure which is so vitally important to American state capitalism will be wind up on the garbage heap of missed political opportunity.  It is still possible that mainstream Republicans will realize that their "bluff" has been called, that they will have to find some way to compromise with the Democrats in the interest of the national capital, even if it's only a handful of Republican senators who in the end wind up voting for some kind of modified bill.

But if a compromise measure emerges, there can be no doubt about its nature as an attack against the standard of living of the working class. Such is the net result of so-called "reforms" in the period of capitalist decadence, demonstrating yet again that capitalism has no future to offer humanity. Only the replacement of the current society driven by the relentless quest for profits with one where the guiding principle is the fulfillment of human needs offers any real solution to the health care crisis confronted by the working class. 

Jerry Grevin, 23/1/10

After more than two years of grim economic news, last year came to a close with cheers for the supposedly "budding" economic recovery. However, so far 2010 does not seem very promising. Presently the mass media message about the economic crisis is quite ambiguous: on the one hand we are told that the recession is over. Why? Because the economy is growing again, bankers are making money, Wall Street is again flying high, etc. On the other hand the bad news of the last two years of recession keeps on coming. For instance, unemployment is still growing, the housing market is deep in shambles, commercial real estate is hitting the wall only now, consumer loans defaults remain at record highs, and banks are still failing.

 In the specialized economic media, the mood is mostly gloomy. In general it seems that bourgeois economic specialists have no confidence in the long term effectiveness of the state capitalist policies that have been put in place to pull the global economy out of the recession. And surely it is difficult to be optimistic when you know that these policies are, essentially, no different than the policies that have so much contributed to the severity of the so-called "great recession". In particular there is a growing anxiety among bourgeois economists about the huge increase of state debt the world over as governments have been trying  to ‘stimulate' their national economies.

A new surge of public debt

From so-called ‘communist' China to democratic America, the bourgeoisie has been keen to spend its way out of the recession. Every national state is everywhere intent on saving capitalism not just by increasing the money supply through interest rate manipulation, but by a direct massive injection of money both in the sphere of production and the circulation of commodities. Sure the question arises, where is all this money coming from? According to some good thrifty souls, national states, like individuals, are supposed to spend only what they have. But obviously nobody follows this frugal advice. Like individuals, states, through credit, can "buy today, and pay tomorrow," and in fact have been covering their budget deficits through public debt more or less forever - which of course does not exclude the occasional running of the printing money machine at full speed. However in the last four decades, in the context of an insane policy of abusing the credit system to alleviate the devastating consequences of capitalism's chronic crisis of overproduction, state public debt the world over has grown to monstrous and more and more unsustainable levels.  The reality that the mountain of debt that national states are sitting on all over the world has no chance of being repaid, is creating a nightmare scenario for the whole capitalist system.

 We've seen on a smaller scale what can happen when you hit the limits of this policy.  This has already been demonstrated several times; for instance, when Argentina and Russia defaulted on their foreign debt in 2002 and 1998 respectively, and in 1997-98 during the collapse of the so-called Asian dragons and tigers that once were paraded as an example of the vitality of capitalism. We could also point to the decade long Japanese crisis in the 1990s -the so-called ‘lost decade' in this country economic history.

That capitalism's  day of reckoning is fast approaching has been signaled recently by the bankruptcies declared by Iceland and Dubai, which are likely only the opening salvo in a coming storm, but also by the quasi-official insolvency of several "developed" countries that are much closer to the epicenter of capitalism, such as Spain, Ireland and Italy. These countries are still standing only because of European ‘solidarity,' or better said, because the European bourgeoisie is afraid of the economic, political and social consequences that their collapse could create.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently published a research report by its economists about the finances of the world's "richest" countries, (the G-20 club) which provides considerable ammunition to support the argument that world capitalism is heading towards new convulsions, spearheaded this time by the financial insolvency of the biggest economic powers. A full analysis of the dozens of tables published in the IMF document is beyond the scope of this article, but we can extract from them two unavoidable conclusions.

- in most countries national debt has grown tremendously in the last two years, as governments the world over have tried to spend their way out of the recession and at the same time confronted diminished tax revenues. In addition, according to the IMF, this imbalance between expenses and revenues, financed by a growing debt, is not likely to end any time soon. The IMF document shows that in 2007 the average government debt to GDP ratio among the advanced economic nations of the G-20 group was 78.2 percent; by 2009 this average had grown to 98.9 percent, and by 2014 it will reach the breathtaking figure of 118 percent. Among the economic heavyweights of the G-20, Japan, Italy, the US and Great Britain are the countries with the biggest total government debt loads as measured by the debt-to-GDP ratio (this figure expressed as a percentage is found by dividing the total debt of a country  by a year's worth of its domestic production).  Thus Japan, Italy, the US, and Great Britain are expected to reach by 2014 a public debt-to-GDP ratio of 245.6 percent, 128.5 percent, 108.2 percent and 98.3 percent respectively. In other words it would take Japan about two and a half years worth of its gross domestic production and around one year for the rest to paid off their debts and balance their public expenses!

-there is no way that this mountain of debt can be repaid and the most likely scenario is a wave of defaults that will make the "great recession" look like child's play in comparison. The IMF report has not said so, but its own projections of the governments budget adjustments needed - draconian cuts in expenses, particularly in social programs, and sharp tax increases - in order to get the debt under control speak for themselves. For instance the IMF estimates that getting public debt under control "...will require a sharp correction in the structural primary balance of advanced countries. On average, bringing government debt-to-GDP ratios in advanced economies below 60 percent by 2030 would require steadily raising the structural primary balance from a deficit of 3½ percent of GDP in 2010 to a surplus of 4½ percent of GDP in 2020 - an 8 percentage point swing in one decade-and keeping it at that level for the following decade." By country, based on spending cuts or tax increases or both, this "correction" swing would amount to 8.8 percent for the US, 12.8 percent for Great Britain, 13.4p percent for Japan and around 10 percent for Spain, Greece and Ireland.

Incidentally it is a wonder of bourgeois economics that today the IMF is considering a 60 percent debt to GDP ratio as a prudent fiscal policy for the so-called advanced economic nations, when the same organization back in January 2003 chastised the Bush administration for running up a record breaking budget deficit of $400 billion, which now looks like peanuts, and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 40 percent. "An unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country"  would push up interest rates and slow global growth, as the IMF warned just seven years ago.  Today the US is running deficits of over a trillion dollars a year, its national debt has more than doubled in the last decade, and probably will pay more for servicing its debt this year than the total budget deficit of 2003. In the face of these "little" changes, the IMF economists mainly recommend a bogus budget adjustment. The bourgeoisie has really lost any sense of reality!

No way out under capitalism

The bourgeoisie can finagle its numbers all it wants to pretend that it can get society out of capitalism's historical crisis. Four decades of ever worsening economic conditions prove the reality that there is no solution to this crisis on capitalism's terms. The monstrous increase of state debt is just as much a dead end policy as the consumer credit bubble burst during the "great recession." Yet strictly speaking it is even worse. While consumer credit can stimulate production and thus help valorize capital, debt financed state expenses are mostly parasitic, a pure waste of value, which, except for economically sound infrastructure enterprises, don't add anything to the national economy. In fact the huge increase in state debt all over the world, reflecting growing government expenditures and diminished national revenues, mirrors also the repugnant growth of the bourgeois state which is sucking up the blood and energy of civil society. The upkeep of an omnipresent permanent bureaucracy, the running of an efficient repressive apparatus able to maintain bourgeois law and order and the maintenance of a well fed and equipped military - a  killing machine able to wage war and defend the bourgeoisie's imperialist interests; all these cost enormous amounts of money. For instance in 2008 the world military expenditures amounted to $1.473 trillion, of which, not surprisingly, 48 percent ($711 billion) were spent by the US alone.

In the coming period we will frequently hear the government call for sacrifice and a national "solidarity," a call to accept higher taxes and less social services to help shoulder the burdens of "our" public debt. The working class has only one way to respond to this bourgeois gimmick: the development of its class struggle on its own terrain, for its own demands, refusing to bear the brunt of the crisis. The only solution to the crisis is the overthrow of capitalism and its state, and the building of a real human community. This is the historical mission of the world working class.

Eduardo Smith. 21/1/10

In early January Internationalsm hosted its second weekend-long Days of Discussion conference in New York, once again bringing together sympathizers, readers, and correspondents from across the US and Canada for the opportunity of political discussion and theoretical deepening. As at the previous conference last April, the agenda was developed in consultation with the participants and presentations for each discussion were prepared by non-members of the ICC. Participants represented the old, young and middling generations, ranging in age from 18 to 63, coming from as far away as California, Manitoba, and Florida. Some were veterans of political activity; for one comrade, whose previous political experience had been conducted exclusively via the internet, the conference was the first "real life," face-to-face meeting with other left communists. There were university students, workers, employed and unemployed, comrades born in the US and immigrants from three continents.  The conference sent solidarity messages to two comrades who couldn't participate because of health problems and to another comrade who was stranded by automobile problems en route to New York. 

The welcoming remarks that opened the conference, prepared by a young sympathizer, stressed the importance of the discussion conferences as a means of overcoming the terrible isolation often suffered by geographically dispersed left communists, contributing to the work of theoretical clarification so crucial for the effective intervention of revolutionaries in the class struggle, and developing a fraternal spirit and openness to the exchange of ideas. This introduction set the tone for the entire weekend. The presentations were exemplary and helped to focus the discussions in a manner that permitted serious deepening on the understanding of the Russian Revolution, state capitalism, and the connection between student movements and the working class. The discussions were rich; there were no hesitancies to speak or express divergent views. Disagreements were discussed fraternally and openly.

The presentation on the Russian Revolution correctly avoided focusing on the events themselves, but instead stressed the lessons of the revolution for the workers movement. There was immediate consensus that the Russian Revolution was the highest achievement yet attained in the history of the working class, rejecting libertarian assertions that it was not a proletarian, but a bourgeois revolution. The fact that the revolution ultimately failed and was consumed by counter revolution made it all the more important that revolutionaries learn the lessons of what happened in order to avoid similar tragedy in the future. The discussion developed very quickly around  the issues of the relationship between the workers councils and the working class and the state in the period of transition - some of the same themes that had attracted the attention of the ICC in the late 1970's and early 1980's. This reflected an ability of the younger comrades to pick up the analysis of the Russian Revolution at a higher level that was possible initially in the 1970's.

 The presentation on state capitalism demonstrated that contrary to the assertions of leftism, the state capitalist analysis defended by the left communist movement is not some new, outlandish conception, but was in fact the position developed by the workers movement at the time of the founding of the Communist International at the height of the first revolutionary wave. The irreversibility of the "state-ization" of the economy was identified in the Manifesto of the Communist International in 1919, in the writings of Bukharin and Louis Fraina, in the US. There was no time lost in musing over whether state capitalism applies only to Stalinist states, as well as to countries like the United States.  This was in effect taken as a given - a huge step forward in relation to the situation in the 70s and 80s.

The presentation on student movements and the working class described the difficulties of the workers movement to situate students demographically within a class framework, sometimes considering students as a "privileged" petty bourgeois strata, and sometimes as linked to the working class, identified the links between student struggles and the working class, whether France 1968, the French CPE struggles in 2006 or the student struggles in Greece in December 2008. The increasing proletarianization of the professions and the petty bourgeoisie, as well as the rising college loan debt for students in the US, belies the notion that students are an over-privileged strata. The discussion was particularly animated as student participants described struggles and political discussions on their campuses, the ideological confusions rampant on college campuses, such as identity politics, a contempt for the working class (an idea of seeking an education to escape from the proletariat), and a tendency for leftists to personalize responsibility for attacks against students (tuition increases, cutbacks in services and academic programs) as emanating from pernicious administrators and thereby obscure the fact that the general economic crisis of capitalism is the culprit. The point was raised several times that student debt is used by the bourgeoisie as a form of "indentured servitude," to depress student militancy and tie workers to the state.

A wrap up discussion on Sunday emphasized the importance of continuing the discussions in the future and explored the possibility of regional meetings to draw other interested people into the discussion.  We are publishing the presentations on the Russian Revolution and state capitalism below. The discussion on student movements and the working class continues via an online forum and will be the topic of an article in a future issue of Internationalism. 

Internationalism 28/1/10

The Russian revolution of 1917 was a heroic moment in the history of the working class, when it took political power for the first time, and did its best to hold it. Its aftermath is one of the great tragedies in the history of the working class: isolated by counter-revolution in the west, and outmaneuvered at home, it was beaten finally into line by the goons of Stalinism. The events of the revolution are well-known, and I don't think that so many people asked to discuss the lessons it can teach us because they wanted to dwell on heroic images or agonize over tragedy. The fact is that the Russian revolution, precisely because it is as of now the highest tide-line of the proletariat's ebbing and flowing struggle, is the richest experience from which revolutionaries today can draw lessons for their politics. The Left Communists of the twenties and thirties saw this clearly, and saw as their task the preservation of the theoretical gains made by the workers' movement during the Russian revolution and its Russian and international aftermath. Today, as the world situation forces the proletariat to struggle in defense of its living conditions, it is important that, as we intervene, we keep the lessons the Russian revolution can teach us firmly in mind, so that we can be as clear and as effective as possible.

Internationalism is one of the core principles of the workers' movement, and we would be remiss in our duty to the working class if we failed to examine the Russian revolution in an international framework. It is a favorite tactic of bourgeois commentators and especially academics to isolate the Russian experience from the experience of the world proletariat. According to these distorters of history, the Russian revolution was noteworthy at all because it ended Tsarism. In this world, the most important consequence of the revolution was to make the Allies of World War I entirely "democratic", set against the "autocratic" German bloc and to make it acceptable for the pure-of-heart, democratic United States to enter the war. Another favorite distortion is to locate the rot at the heart of the Russian system in the countryside and to emphasize the role of the peasantry in bringing down Tsarism. Against this distortion, revolutionaries must recognize, from an examination of the facts, that the rot at the heart of the Russian system was the endemic crisis of world capitalism, the same crisis that had produced the World War. We must reaffirm that what made the revolution possible was not simply the internal weakness of the regime, but the change in historical epoch that marked the end of capitalism as a progressive system. We must recognize that the epoch of "wars and revolutions" identified by the Communist International is the epoch in which we live, and that changes in the balance of force between classes only push society towards either war or revolution.

Nor may we forget that the Russian revolution, though it marked the only point where the proletariat managed to seize power, did not happen in a vacuum. It was the first act in a worldwide revolutionary drama, and inspired and taught the other actors by its performance. The German and Hungarian working classes learned to demand a republic of workers' councils from the Russians. The Mensheviks', the Social Democrats' defense of their old slogan of the democratic republic reaffirmed their allegiance to the counter-revolution. Today, the demand for the democratic republic in Iran and countries like it is used to tie the workers in those countries to a faction of the bourgeoisie. The Russian revolution teaches us that this demand is an intrusion of bourgeois ideology into the workers' movement. Lastly, history shows us that the revolutionary wave was not merely international, but also internationalist. It was the uprising of Russian workers that led to that country withdrawing from the World War. It was the rising of German workers, and not, as bourgeois academics would have it, the Junker military, that forced Germany to ask for an armistice. It was not out of some special kindness, but rather due to the mass struggles of British, French, Japanese, and American dockers, railroad workers, munitions makers, and other workers that the British, French, Japanese, and American ruling classes were forced to withdraw from Russia.

What principles, besides the necessity of international working-class solidarity, and the fact that a good way for workers to defend themselves is to spread their struggle, does the Russian revolution teach us to reaffirm? The Russian experience shows us that, yes, the working class does possess the power within itself to organize to overthrow capitalism. Moreover, it reveals the forms in which this organization takes place, and that its development is directly linked to the development of the class struggle. First, when the struggle is defensive, isolated and a-political, there is the discussion circle, examined during the last Days of Discussion. Confined to a small group of workers-perhaps not even a whole workplace, depending on the level of struggle-this is just what it sounds like, a place for interested workers to talk about what's going on around them and how to defend themselves. If a struggle spreads, there appear the strike committee, the mass meeting, and the general assembly. The workers are beginning to take confidence in the ability of their struggle to succeed, and planning on how to achieve it. They are reaching out, finding and drawing in allies amongst other workers and in the non-exploiting general population. They begin to monopolize space, to convert it to their purpose. As the struggle becomes broader, and to become political, there appear workers' councils, elected and responsible bodies composed of recallable delegates. Only in a few places and times in history has the workers' council form appeared, and only when and where the struggle became political, where workers demanded power. Finally, this capacity to struggle as a class shows that it is the working class alone that can pose this question of political power.

Beyond reaffirming in the heat of reality what we already know, the Russian revolution disproved certain theories long-held by the workers' movement, and still paraded out today by the left of capital in order to prove its socialist credentials. One of the most important is that it is not the revolutionary organization that takes power, whether riding the wave of an insurrection or a democratic election. The idea that it was the organization that takes power was widely accepted in the workers' movement up until the Lefts in the Communist International began to examine the Russian experience critically, and to see that one of the major factors that led to the degeneration of the Bolshevik party and the International itself as revolutionary organizations was their integration into the Russian state. In fact, and this is another important lesson, it was that state apparatus itself, and not the dangerous but historically disarmed small bourgeoisie or foreign imperialism, that became the instigator and conductor of the counter-revolution. In order to understand how the state that emerged out of the revolution began and carried out the counter-revolution, we must understand its social foundation. The social foundation of the post-revolutionary Russian state was nationalized property. Most large industry, money, and transportation capacity was, during the revolution, deeded over to the state specifically, by means of nationalization. At the time, this was considered a revolutionary act: the history of the twentieth century teaches us to know better. Nationalization a recognized tool of bourgeois policy, and the property of the state is not the property of society. In Russia, this property, over time, came to be managed by agents of the state, people who had been union leaders, party leaders, or middle management in the old firms. Reacting to the defeat of the revolution outside Russia, this state found itself bound to follow the law of value and the other laws of motion of capitalism. Because the Bolsheviks had, by their own policy, integrated both themselves and the whole social capital into the state, they were unable, despite ferocious intra-party struggle, to resist the transformation of the state into the national capitalist, and their transformation into agents of the national capitalist. State capitalism developed the way it did in Russia because of the theoretical and practical errors the Bolsheviks made, and because the defeat of the international revolutionary wave allowed no room or time for such errors to be corrected.

This raises an important question which I hope will be considered in discussion: just how does property become the property of society. Not through nationalization. Nor can it be through the ownership of property by the workers' councils. To conceive of these bodies as organs of economic management weakens them, and diverts them away from the question of political power. The Russian experience proves this: prior to the revolution, the workers' councils were political bodies. Afterwards, and especially once the counter-revolution had begun, they were shut up in the factories, cut off from each other, and tied to the state by converting them into transmission belts from the economic planners to the workers. Today, the demand that workplaces be owned by the people who work in them amounts to imprisonment inside the workplace, the inability to reach out and spread the struggle.

The last lesson that we must learn from the Russian revolution comes not from the revolution itself, but from the way it was examined after the revolutionary wave had ended. There exists the conception among council communists and some anarchists that the protagonist of the Russian revolution was not the proletariat at all. For them, the revolution began as a bourgeois revolution that may or may not have dragged the proletariat along, ending in a coup by the Bolshevik party that put that party at the head of the already created bourgeois state. They arrive at this position by examining the product of the counter-revolution-state capitalism, and a Bolshevik party integrated into the state-and assume that endpoint was the only and inevitable consequence of the revolution. There are a number of problems with this conception. First, it ignores entirely the question of capitalist decadence, assuming there could be a bourgeois revolution in a world already dominated by capitalist relations of production. Second, and quite oddly, given this tendency's emphasis on the need for proletarian self-organization, it ignores or emasculates the independent political activity of the working class, and ignores the fact that the revolution was fundamentally a political act. The Bordigist conception that Russia saw a simultaneous bourgeois and proletarian revolution that led to the defeat of the latter by the former, and that the former was the bearer of state capitalism in Russia is similarly flawed. Revolutionaries today must defend the Russian revolution as a proletarian event, as a political event, and as an event that was not foredoomed to failure by its own shortcomings, but defeated in bloody counter-revolution. 

Ron 2/1/10

From Manifesto of the Communist International, 1919:

"The catastrophe of the imperialist war has completely swept away all the conquests of trade union and parliamentary struggles. For this war itself was just as much a product of the internal tendencies of capitalism as were those economic agreements and parliamentary compromises which the war buried in blood and muck.
"During the decades preceding the war, free competition, as the regulator of production and distribution, had already been thrust aside in the main fields of economic life by the system of trusts and monopolies; during the course of the war the regulating-directing role was torn from the hands of these economic groups and transferred directly into the hands of militarystate power. ...all these fundamental questions of the world's economic life are not being regulated by free competition, nor by associations of national and international trusts and consortiums, but by the direct application of military force, for the sake of its continued preservation. If the complete subjection of the state power to the power of finance capital had led mankind into the imperialist slaughter, then through this slaughter finance capital has succeeded in completely militarizing not only the state but also itself; and it is no longer capable of fulfilling its basic economic functions otherwise than by means of blood and iron.
"The state-ization of economic life, against which capitalist liberalism used to protest so much, has become an accomplished fact. There is no turning back from this fact - it is impossible to return not only to free competition but even to the domination of trusts, syndicates and other economic octopuses."

Why is state capitalism an important concept

Understanding the tendency toward state capitalism is fundamental to understanding key questions in the class struggle, especially the neutralization of reformist parties and unions, national liberation struggles, nationalization demands, etc. The ICC says that the unions and the left parties have become integrated into and are now a part of the bourgeois state. What does this mean? How did it come about? What is the nature of state capitalism? How did it come about? Through what mechanisms, and why?
Understanding this process will allow revolutionaries clarity to explain fundamental questions like why these organs can't be reconquered any more than the Democratic Party can taken over for the working class-in short, any more than the bourgeoisie can be persuaded to fight for socialism. Also crucial is understanding the development of state capitalism to avoid being driven off class terrain in struggles by falling into leftism which demands union recognition, arbitration, nationalization, etc.

These phenomena must be understood from a materialist standpoint-understanding what it is about the unions and 2nd International that led to their integration into the state. It is only thus that one can understand why a mass party for reforms within capitalism is, as soon as capitalism enters its historical period of decadence, when the capitalist expansion upon which those reforms were based becomes impossible, doomed to be integrated into the state's management of the national economy and doomed to lead workers' struggles into the hands of the state. Similarly, only with a materialist understanding can one grasp what it is about the structure of the unions in state capitalism that leads them to be enforcers of capitalist austerity, and police against real mass struggles.

What is  state capitalism.

"The debate on Russia or any specific economy has often clouded the issue of state capitalism as a general tendency in all capitalist countries and it is by no means clear what is meant by "state capitalism" as used by anyone from International Socialism [Cliffite] to Bordiga to Mattick." (A Contribution on the Question of State Capitalism)

Rather, "In the decadence of capitalism the general tendency towards state capitalism is one of the dominant characteristics of social life. In this period, each national capital, because it cannot expand in an unfettered way and is confronted with acute imperialist rivalries, is forced to organise itself as effectively as possible, so that externally it can compete economically and militarily with its rivals, and internally deal with the increasing aggravation of social contradictions. The only power in society which is capable of fulfilling these tasks is the state. Only the state can:

take charge of the national economy in an overall centralised manner and mitigate the internal competition which weakens the economy, in order to strengthen its capacity to maintain a united face against the competition on the world market.

develop the military force necessary for the defense of its interests in the face of growing international conflict.

finally, owing to an increasingly heavy repressive and bureaucratic apparatus, reinforce the internal cohesion of a society threatened with collapse through the increasing decomposition of its economic foundations; only the state can impose through an all-pervasive violence the preservation of a social structure which is less and less capable of spontaneously regulating human relations and which is more and more questioned the more it becomes an absurdity for the survival of society itself.

On the economic level this tendency towards state capitalism, though never fully realized, is expressed by the state taking over the key points of the productive apparatus. This does not mean the disappearance of the law of value, or competition, or the anarchy of production, which are the fundamental characteristics of the capitalist economy. These characteristics continue to apply on a world scale where the laws of the market still reign and still determine the conditions of production within each national economy however statified it may be. If the laws of value and of competition seem to be ‘violated', it is only so that they may have a more powerful effect on a global scale. If the anarchy of production seems to subside in the face of state planning, it reappears more brutally on a world scale, particularly during the acute crises of the system which state capitalism is incapable of preventing. Far from representing a ‘rationalization' of capitalism, state capitalism is nothing but an expression of its decay.

The statification of capital takes place either in a gradual manner through the fusion of ‘private' and state capital as is generally the case in the most developed countries, or through sudden leaps in the form of massive and total nationalizations, in general in places where private capital is at its weakest.
In practice, although the tendency towards state capitalism manifests itself in all countries in the world, it is more rapid and more obvious when and where the effects of decadence make themselves felt in the most brutal manner; historically during periods of open crisis or of war, geographically in the weakest economies. But state capitalism is not a specific phenomenon of backward countries. On the contrary, although the degree of formal state control is often higher in the backward capitals, the state's real control over economic life is generally much more effective in the more developed countries owing to the high level of capital concentration in these nations.
On the political and social level, whether in its most extreme totalitarian forms such as fascism or Stalinism or in forms which hide behind the mask of democracy, the tendency towards state capitalism expresses itself in the increasingly powerful, omnipresent, and systematic control over the whole of social life exerted by the state apparatus, and in particular the executive. On a much greater scale than in the decadence of Rome or feudalism, the state under decadent capitalism has become a monstrous, cold, impersonal machine which has devoured the very substance of civil society." (ICC Platform [8])

A couple of points about State Capitalism to be deepened

How did the transition to State Capitalism come about and through what mechanisms?
...The ICC's position is that "there is no section of the bourgeoisie which is the exclusive carrier of state capitalist tendencies: the military (as representatives of national unity and the "forces of order"), the technical bureaucracy, the educated elite, the disenfranchised tribal groups, or the powerful members of the private capitalist class in crisis can be instruments of the state capitalist tendency depending on the specific needs of the situation." (Contribution...) Still, it is important to understand why the system of monopoly capitalism developed into State capitalism, and why it could not have been otherwise.

Indeed, before the onset of state capitalism, the world market was divided into trusts, cartels, and syndicates based on industrial monopolies, sometimes international and transnational in character. Thus, "The tendency towards state capitalism did not appear as a gradual, intrinsic "rationalization" of the system. Unlike monopoly capital, which gradually grew out of laissez-faire competition without any particular planning or over-all design, state capitalist measures grew abruptly out of the situation during World War I as a conscious, economic policy of the national governments. State capitalism was not a direct outgrowth of the freely developed previous economic trends but was a breaking down of the tendency towards international cartels and trusts, a movement towards national concentration and unity." (Contribution...)

State Capitalism & Workers' Struggle

"State capitalism enchains the proletariat more firmly than ever, and it does it with its own traditions of struggle. This is because the capitalists, as a class, have drawn the lessons of experience and have understood that the essential weapon for preserving their class rule is not so much the police as direct ideological repression. The political party of the workers has become a capitalist party. What has happened with the trade unions, emptied of their former content and absorbed into the state, has also happened to what used to be the workers' party. ...the old objectives of struggle, linked to a bygone period, have disappeared, while the forms of struggle survive, without their former content." ("Evolution of Capitalism and the New Perspective [9]," Internationalisme 1952)

From this we have the question, what is the state? What does the ICC mean by saying that the unions & workers' reform parties are "part of the state"? Surely this doesn't mean that left parties are always in power or that in all periods the ruling class utilize the unions in the same way or collaborate openly. Is it because they don't challenge the state's framework? Because they participate in state initiatives (wars, arbitration boards, national economy plans)? Does every bourgeois ruler know what an ally they have in these organs and consciously use them? Or is it rather that the structure, material basis, and mode of existence and operation of these organs necessarily compels them to ACT as instruments of the state, even if they are unconscious of this? How much does Machiavellianism play into this?

Decadence:

The idea of state capitalism and what it implies is deeply tied to the notion of decadence-the idea that capitalism has long since reached the objective limits of its real expansion and thus campaigning for reforms from the state, and concessions from individual employers has become useless because these reforms and concessions cannot be granted in a lasting way. ...As Trotsky indicated, the reforms which had been possible in a certain period of capitalism had as their precondition the expansion of capitalism across the world and the expansion of the market and the accumulation of capital.

This notion of decadence is something that needs to be debated by revolutionaries, in order to ensure that the revolutionary strategies and forms of struggle are rooted in the objective historical reality of the development of capitalism. Just as the reforms of the 19th Century parliamentary and trade union struggle were only possible based on the expansion and accumulation of capitalism, revolutionaries need to know whether such expansion is possible and base their intervention on that knowledge. For communist revolution is only a possibility when it has become an objective historic necessity. State capitalism itself only exists on this same objective economic and historic basis.  

Jeff 2/1/10

After 8 years in Afghanistan, the international force led by the USA is sending in more troops. Far from a blow for democracy or the ‘war on terror', this conflict is turning the region into an ever worsening hell.

Eight years after the ‘great victory' that overthrew the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the international NATO and Enduring Freedom forces are not only still there, but due to be increased by another 30,000 US and 500 British troops with another 10,000 requested from NATO. The 100,000 international (and 200,000 Afghan) soldiers and police have already lost over 1200 dead and countless injured and maimed. In addition there have been more than 2100 civilian deaths caught in the crossfire of the Taliban, Al Qaeda terrorism and western forces, with the latter responsible for 40% of these deaths according to UNO (such as the 90 killed near water tankers in Kunduz last September). And the risk of death, from bombardment, drones and terrorist bombings has been exported across the border into Pakistan. This spread of chaos, fear and death is the first great achievement of this military adventure, which like operations in the Middle East, Iraq, or ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, are carried out for imperialist interests, however they may have been dressed up as ‘peace-keeping', ‘democracy' or the ‘war on terror' to disguise the build up of military tensions and sanitise the death and suffering visited on the population. To give an idea of western priorities, current US military spending is $100 million a day, while international aid by all donors is $7 million a day, and half that promised has never materialized - with Robert Gate proposing that the US cut off this sort of aid to punish corruption. Similarly France spends 200 million Euro for the army and 11 million on civilian aid. While the cost of the war to ‘save' the people of Afghanistan is $3.6 billion a month, the population suffers. Drug barons drive about in 4x4s along with other dignitaries while only 5% of aid goes to supporting legitimate agriculture that is not only the livelihood of 70% of the population but also key to stemming the tide of drugs.

Meanwhile around 50,000 children work on the streets of Kabul, cleaning cars, shining shoes, collecting papers, and still suffer hunger, disease, violence and slavery. Conditions are worsening throughout the country. Afghanistan's maternal mortality is the second highest in the world, but in the North-East province of Badakhshan, a centre of opium traffic, it is significantly worse with 6,500 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births, the highest rate ever recorded. 75% of the newborn die from lack of food, warmth and care. Furthermore on average a pregnant woman has a one in 8 chance of dying, and half of them are under 16. This UN study showing just one aspect of the devastation of war and poverty on the population has not been publicized by the British media, which is sufficiently bare faced to imply that the war is necessary to improve the position of women. The election fiasco was well publicized, as is criticism of the corruption of Karzai and his regime by Gordon Brown, Obama, Clinton and others, but he is their man!

More oil on the fire

Despite the failure of the military intervention Obama has announced a troop surge, a second one after sending an extra 17,000 in February. He is claiming that "these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011", although NATO secretary general Rasmussen has assured us that the troops are there for as long as it takes, and the US is planning to send in a ‘high representative' to take over day to day control in Kabul. The new troops show that Obama is following exactly the same strategy as his predecessor George Bush, with the same justification: "we cannot tolerate a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear".

This is despite recent revelations that US forces had bin Laden ‘within their grasp' in 2001, but chose not to send the troops in to capture him and that Obama's national security advisor, James Jones, told Congress that Al Qaeda's presence is much reduced, with less than 100 operatives in the country, no base and no capacity to launch attacks against the ‘allies'. Even in Pakistan, the Wall Street Journal notes that Al Qaeda is pursued by US drones, short of money and having difficulty attracting young Arabs to fight in the bleak mountains of Pakistan. However, when Obama says that he will not tolerate a safe haven for terrorists, and that his policy must work for both sides of the border, this is clearly also a veiled threat against Pakistan.

So why such slaughter when the neither the threat of Al Qaeda nor the benefit to the population are in any way credible? Many of the ‘allies' are becoming more reluctant (Sarkozy has announced France will send no more troops, Germany is waiting till the New Year to decide) and even announcing the war is lost in advance. The Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, told CNN that Canada does not report the war since it was not fighting with the insurgents - a US complaint about many of the ‘allies'. Obama's announcement told us that the troop surge is in "the national interest". Precisely.

For the USA the national interest is the control of this strategic region close to China, Iran and Russia, essential trade routes for primary commodities and a region that looks across to Africa from Asia. It is, therefore, a major prize for the world's greatest power, its allies and its rivals, all of whom have complete contempt for the population. We can expect imperialist forces will be fighting over and devastating this region and massacring the population for a long time to come.

Wilma/Alex 5/12/9

Today, a year after Obama's inauguration and the euphoria that accompanied it, what assessment can we make of the "change" that Obama was supposed to deliver? There's been plenty of change but not much of it for the better. The government still dreams up more bail-outs for the banking and auto industries, while unemployment is still going through the roof and has risen officially above 10 percent (in reality if we count  discouraged workers, who have given up looking for jobs that don't exist, and underemployed workers who are forced to accept part-time employment, it is close to 20 percent), foreclosures and evictions continue unabated, and slow, partial withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq has begun to enable Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan and unleash a virtual civil war in Pakistan (some bourgeois media pundits now call it the "Afpak" war. President Obama even became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner in history to deliver an acceptance speech justifying war.

At this time last year the ruling class enjoyed a great ideological victory and basked in the glow of the after-election euphoria and rejuvenation of the democratic mystification, which led to a lull in class struggle. At the time, we predicted that the euphoria would be short-lived, perhaps a year or a year-and-a-half until it wore off. As we noted in Internationalism 149, "the failure  of the Obama administration  to bring the promised ‘change' for the better will lead inevitably to disenchantment and seething discontent."  This has proven correct.  There has been considerable inroads into Obama's support, as his promises of "change" are increasingly revealed as demagogic rhetoric lacking substance.  Even the bourgeoisie's own polls show that Sarah Palin's approval ratings (48%) are higher than Obama at 44%! 

We have not yet reached the point where workers have returned to open struggles to resist the attacks on their standard of living on a large scale, but one year after the inauguration, the reality of the crisis and the current US imperialist orientation have increasingly exposed the vacuity and hypocrisy of the promises made for ‘change' and ‘peace', while the total inability to do anything at all vis-à-vis the environmental crisis has demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of the capitalist system.    Today, if any dancing in the streets occurs at all, it is not over Obama's victory or speech at any summit about global warming, but for rejoicing over having found a job. As the economic crisis deepens and spreads, the bourgeoisie is more and more forced to frontally attack the working class with unprecedented brutality. Obama's strength rested on his charisma and his ability to galvanize, mesmerize, and mobilize the masses, especially the youth, behind the electoral mystification, with his empty promises, but that was the extent of his power. As we said in Internationalism 145 more than a year ago, even before Obama's victory:

 "No matter who wins, no matter who occupies the White House, the situation for the working class will be the same:

-our sons and daughters will be called upon to shed their blood for American imperialism, which will be forced to resort to more and more military interventions throughout the world

-the economic crisis will continue unabated attacking our wages, our standard of living, our health care, our pensions, our housing conditions, and social services

-the social divisions that exist in the U.S. will continue to worsen; the rich will get richer and the poor poorer

-unemployment will continue to grow the future will continue to look bleak."

Why so?  The difficulties the US ruling class has experienced on the international arena and the unpopularity of the previous administration among the working masses at home were not the result of Bush's idiosyncratic stupidity, but rather of capitalism's historical crisis as a social system, its failure and inability to address the enormous problems humanity is faced with on all levels of social life.  This historical crisis is most clearly expressed in the current economic crisis, which is neither a passing one, nor one of those crises ‘of growth' which the system experienced in its ascendency. It is rather a crisis of ‘senility'; its character is irreversible and its trajectory is toward a deepening and spreading of all the ills which ails it, like an old man dying of an incurable disease.  This is the essential reason why, regardless of who wins the election at any time, the promises for improving working and living conditions are a total lie aimed at buying social peace and trust in the democratic mystifications. 

For the working class, the onslaught of the present, most serious economic crisis in the history of capitalism has shattered any illusion it may have had regarding a ‘change' for the betterment of its economic conditions.  Reality has shown to be quite different from the mythology of the electoral mystification. In the context of this crisis, the Obama administration will be unsurpassed in the ferociousness and determination it will use to pass the most draconian attacks against workers' economic and working conditions, and social wage.

The intensification of exploitation, accompanied by further layoffs as companies try to protect profits, is on the agenda for the foreseeable future. This will be compounded by the impoverishment of the masses as state capitalism continues to escalate austerity attacks.  For example, the bail outs of a few months ago, but also of the ones to come, will engulf the masses in trillions of dollars of debt for generations to come, while not improving the present fragile situation of the world financial markets.  Slashes in social programs and state and local budgets also add to the impoverishment of the conditions of life and the list of the millions of unemployed.  The perspective for the working masses is not of improved working, social, and environmental conditions, but of a deepening and intensification of misery never seen before.

Despite the urgent need to address the looming environmental catastrophe, the latest ‘summit of the greatest' on global warming held in Copenhagen has done nothing but repeat what the previous such international gatherings have done: accomplish nothing other than getting bogged down in controversies which will be irresolvable as long as capitalism is the dominant system. By reason of the competitive nature of capitalism, the bourgeois governments of this world are incapable of the level of cooperation necessary to deal with the environmental crisis.  The relentlessness of the economic crisis has also silenced the talks about ‘green jobs' that were supposed to sprout from investing in ‘green technology'. It is clear that the ruling class has reached an impasse here too, as its system of exploitation has reached its historical limits and can no longer provide answers to the burning issues of humanity.

Regarding war and peace, as we said in our press at the time, the American bourgeoisie desperately needed a break with the Bush administration's disastrous imperialist policies in order to restore its status on the international level.  Obama's promise to pursue a more ‘multilateral' approach appeased the European powers.  In this way, the US hoped it could redress the isolation it had found itself in during Bush's years and thereby re-gain its worldwide authority.  This approach, however, has only given mixed results: the US is currently, if only temporarily enjoying greater popularity among the European powers.  Also, greater diplomatic ‘openness' results in smaller imperialisms taking advantage of the present US flexibility to advance their own interests.  This means that there will be no ending to imperialist barbarism.

Obama was not a "peace" candidate. We knew this at the time of his campaign, but if anyone had still any doubts, the recent decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan certainly should dispel them.  His criticism of Bush was that the latter got bogged down in Iraq, spread the troops too thinly, and left American imperialism incapable of responding adequately to future challenges to its dominance. That the current US imperialist policy is a continuation of Bush's is best demonstrated by Obama's very words at the speech he gave upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, in December 2009: "We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.  So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play."

Here are the words of a true war monger! And not so different from Bush's words themselves, either! As Obama himself admitted, we can only expect the continuation of militaristic interventions for decades to come, as the US defends its dominance as the world's only remaining superpower. This is why the US current policy, rather than resulting in ‘peace', aims at a far-ranging re-assessment of what geo-political realignment and diplomacy can best help it achieve its goal of recuperating the terrain lost by a decade of policy damage wrecked by the Bush administration. This is the meaning for the cessation of military operations in Iraq, which, while still allowing the US to occupy the area with 100,000 troops stationed outside the major cities of this country and in the Persian Gulf, gives the US both a respite from the criticism by the working class at home, and an opportunity to better deploy in Afghanistan and, above all, Pakistan.  This is a strategic area that can allow the US to confront Iran to the West, the Caucasus and Russia to the North, China and India to the East.  It is particularly because of China's rise as an imperialist power that the US sees the need to adjust its policies regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan. So much for ‘peace'!

Bourgeois elections are the most sophisticated swindle devised by a ruling class.   The promises Obama made were the result of a very  well orchestrated campaign which aimed at refurbishing democratic mystifications. They also aimed at helping the US regain credibility and authority in the international arena. The actions taken by the Obama administration since it has taken power prove that the working class cannot trust the falsehoods concocted by any presidential candidate, whether black, white, male, or female. Capitalism has reached its historic limit and lies, falsehoods, and untruths will not be able to reverse its chronic path of decay.

Ana, 12/19/9