Did September 11 mark 'new stage of world history'? alt politics usa misc
October 8, 2001 -
http://www.themilitant.com BY PATRICK O'NEILL
Commentators in the media as well as capitalist politicians have struck
a constant theme in the aftermath of the September 11 attack: "The day
the world changed," they say. That phrase, taken from the headline of
the British Economist magazine, is one example. Washington, London, and
other imperialist governments are hoping to convince working people and
middle-class layers that a new world has dawned, and that their moves
to war in Afghanistan, the militarization of the United States,
restrictions on workers' rights and constitutional liberties are being
taken simply in response to the attacks in New York and Washington.
The reality, however, is that the response of the Bush administration
to the September 11 attacks, far from being a break with the recent
past, is consistent with the accelerated trajectory of the handful of
superwealthy families who rule the United States over the last decade
and a half, under successive Republican and Democratic presidents. The
Bush administration has simply seized on the events to try to push
further and faster along this course.
Working people will find the origins of the U.S. rulers' war drive and
assault on their rights not in the September 11 events, but in the very
marrow of the imperialist system, and more specifically in the
"mold-shattering changes that swept world politics between the October
1987 near-meltdown of the world's stock markets, and the so-called
Mexican peso crisis that hit in December 1994," as Mary-Alice Waters
write in the introduction to Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class
Politics at the Millennium. The book is a collection of speeches by
Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes published by
Pathfinder in 1999. Waters adds:
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the disintegration of the Stalinist
apparatuses in the Soviet Union; from the defeat of the white-minority
apartheid regime in South Africa to the strengthening of socialist
Cuba's world vanguard role; from the brutal and destabilizing
imperialist assault on Iraq to the opening of the twenty-first century
Balkan Wars; from the bursting of the Japanese economy's miracle
'bubble,' to the sharpening economic and social indigestion suffered by
the German capitalist rulers as they tried to swallow whole the east
German workers state--the post-World War II pattern of the twentieth
century came to a convulsive end."
1987 stock market crash
The 1987 stock market crash signaled not just the collapse of the
balloon of paper values that had built up in the previous half-decade,
it also registered the international capitalist economy had entered the
downward side in a long curve of capitalist development, as seen in a
historic decline in the rate of profit following the end of the postwar
expansion and profit boom more than a decade earlier.
"To reenter a road of accelerating and self-feeding capital
accumulation, the exploiters must inflict crushing defeats on the
working class; drive under giant quantities of the weakest and most
outmoded capitals at home and abroad in a ruthless competition for
markets and profits; and invest in new industries and technologies that
qualitatively expand their productive capacity" said the SWP's 1998
resolution, "What the 1987 stock market crash foretold."
"This course would require the capitalists to jack up the rate of
exploitation of the working class to a degree that could only be
achieved by longer hours of work and intense speedup," the resolution
added, which is exactly what the employers pushed to achieve in the
1990s. But to accomplish this, "would require chronic unemployment and
defeats of the unions on a massive enough scale to sap workers
confidence," and deal blows to working people around the world, the
resolution added.
U.S. imperialism lost the Cold War
The imperialists suffered another objective blow within the next couple
of years with the fall of a succession of Stalinist regimes in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union.
At first, the U.S. rulers celebrated the defeat of these ruling
parties. But, "As time passes, we hear less and less of such
triumphalist language," Barnes wrote in Capitalism's World Disorder.
Many capitalist figures had hoped that, with the application of
imperialist advice, pressure, and some investment, capitalist property
relations would be rapidly reinstated. But experience quickly showed
that the conversion to a market economy faced historic obstacles.
Referring to the 1917 overthrow of the rule of the Russian landlords
and capitalists, Waters and Barnes wrote in the introduction to New
International no. 11, which featured the report "U.S. Imperialism has
Lost the Cold War:"
"What was opened by the October revolution in Russia cannot be finessed
out of history. Capitalism can only be established in those lands
through bloody counterrevolution." Washington's defeat in the Cold War
impelled it to prepare, "with cold-blooded awareness, for what it is
convinced must eventually be done....The state power of the working
class must still be overthrown by military might."
The U.S. ruling class had maintained the hope that the "Cold War" could
wear down the working class and weaken the workers states enough to
make it possible over time to move in for the kill. "But they failed,"
Barnes says. "The bureaucratic caste was not an adequate surrogate. It
had contradictory, not identical interests to those of the
imperialists. Most important, it could not defeat the working class in
the workers states" nor could it "permanently limit the degree to which
the colonial peoples encroached on the prerogatives of capital," he
writes. "And now imperialism, in a much weakened position compared to
half a century ago, finds itself still confronting the working classes
in these horribly degenerated workers states, as well as the
communist-led socialist revolution in Cuba--but without the ability to
rely on the massive counterrevolutionary apparatus of Stalinism as a
buffer against uncontrolled forces in the world class struggle."
In pursuit of that objective, Washington has pushed to expand NATO, the
European military alliance dominated by the U.S. imperialists, eastward
to the very borders of the old Soviet Union. The U.S. rulers' actions
have increased conflicts between Washington and its European allies and
rivals, as well as within the anything-but-unified European Union.
Meanwhile, the crippling blow dealt to Stalinist regimes, and the
parties they sponsored abroad, by the events of the late 1980s, opened
the possibility for workers and farmers to begin to link up with their
brothers and sisters internationally, and to reknit the continuity with
revolutionary communism that had been torn apart by the Stalinist
counterrevolutionaries.
"The disintegration of the bureaucratic castes, abandoning all pretense
to speak for communism or represent the interests of the working class
and its allies internationally, has removed an enormous roadblock that
for decades stood in the way of revolutionary fighters finding their
way to Marxism," wrote Waters and Barnes.
Assault on Iraq
As these changes were gaining momentum, Washington organized its
massive assault on Iraq, beginning with a several-month embargo and
blockade, and building up to a massive offensive by air, land, and sea.
It is useful to remember, in face of the hypocritical statements of
U.S. ruling figures over the past weeks, that the U.S.-organized "air
assaults inflicted massive death and destruction, and 150,000 or more
Iraqis were cold-bloodedly massacred during the one-hundred-hour
invasion and 'turkey shoot' that culminated the war," said Barnes in
Capitalism's World Disorder.
"This slaughter," said Barnes, "along with similar unreported
operations during [the first President] Bush's heroic hundred hours
ranks among the great atrocities of modern warfare."
The refusal of the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein to organize
effective national defense--saving its best armed units for the
crushing of the national and popular rebellions that followed the
war--guaranteed the imperialists a military victory. "Nonetheless,"
says Barnes in Capitalism's World Disorder, "The outcome of the Gulf
War was not the big victory that Washington initially pretended." Among
other things, Washington had hoped to put far behind it the widespread
distrust among working people of capitalist institutions, including the
officer corps, and disbelief in their rationale for their brutal
military adventures mood often referred to as the "Vietnam syndrome."
The kind of alliance cobbled together by Washington for that war would
not be put together again. An alliance of all the imperialist powers
and many bourgeois governments in the Gulf region and Middle East, with
open backing in the United Nations Security Council from Moscow and
Beijing, had come together to support Washington. But such a
combination of powers would never again come to agreement on a war or
similar major military operation.... Conflicts will accelerate
internationally and open up the next stage of world capitalist
disorder.
The failure of Bush's attempts to draw any active support in its "war
of terrorism" from other imperialist powers, outside of the United
Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, or to form a pro-war alliance of
governments in the Middle East, confirms the accuracy of that
assessment.
One of the key political conclusions of Opening Guns of World War III
rings particularly true today: "Washington's Gulf war and its outcome
did not open up a new world order of stability and UN-overseen
harmony," as claimed by Bush in the first short-lived flush of victory.
"Instead," wrote Barnes, "it was the first war since the close of World
War II that grew primarily out of the intensified competition and
accelerating instability of the
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