Did September 11 mark 'new stage of world history'? alt politics usa misc
Alfred Banks
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 crises-ridden old imperialist world
order. It is the increasing internal strains within this declining
order that drove Washington to launch its murderous military
adventure."
Clinton--a war president
The administration of Democratic president William Clinton deepened and
expanded the course represented by the Gulf War. Under Clinton, the
White House pressed towards the greater use of its military forces
abroad, and began preparing in earnest for their use alongside other
repressive institutions at home, in the expectation of deepening class
struggles on U.S. soil.
Speaking in 1993, Barnes described Clinton as "a war president." "That
includes international economic and financial wars that will end up
destabilizing capitalism and threatening real wars, as they always have
throughout the history of capitalism," he said in Capitalism's World
Disorder. "It will include the cold-blooded use of assaults against
oppressed and exploited peoples and nations, in order to further
advance Washington's dominant position in the imperialist feeding
chain.
"U.S. imperialism will use its weight," continued Barnes, "be it police
power, be it economic coercion, be it grinding pressure on the job, be
it threats abroad, be it organizing direct military intervention or
precipitating bloody struggles in other countries it pretends to stand
above--in order to try to compensate for the disintegration of the
stability of an expanding, self-confident capitalist social and
economic order.... Economic instability, social dislocation, and
political radicalization--right and left: that is what all of us are
slowly but surely being pulled into."
During the eight years of Clinton's rule, U.S. armed forces were sent
to Somalia and Yugoslavia; cruise missile attacks were launched on
Sudan and Afghanistan, under the pretext of punishing "terrorists"
accused of attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa; and regular air strikes
were conducted in the no-fly zones imposed on Iraq after the Gulf
War--a practice continued by Bush's government.
Attack on workers at home
The Clinton administration was marked by a simultaneous offensive
against the rights of working people at home. Federal death penalty
laws were demonstratively broadened. Congress bolstered the legislative
weaponry at the disposal of the courts and the cops, including powers
of indefinite "preventive detention" and measures aimed first at
immigrant workers, including the summary deportation of alleged
"illegal" immigrants.
Clinton's anti-working-class measures included a 1996 act that gave
terrorism a broad definition, raising the prospect of such a charge
being leveled against those involved in struggles by unions, farmers,
or against imperialist war.
Under the banner of the fight against drugs, Clinton's 1994 crime bill
weakened protections provided under the Fourth Amendment against
unreasonable search and seizure. The same banner provides the rationale
for the buildup of U.S. military involvement in a number of Latin
American countries--a buildup aimed at the struggles of workers and
peasants against local landlords and capitalists, and the governments
that serve them.
In expanding these attacks on democratic rights, Bush has used the full
range of legislation introduced by Clinton, from the anti-immigrant
measures--some of which have been modified in the face of the
dependence of U.S. capitalists on immigrant labor, and under the impact
of a succession of equal-rights and other struggles by immigrants and
the labor movement--to the death penalty, and frame-up trials of
alleged "spies."
Commenting on these moves in talks published in the Pathfinder title
Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, Barnes stated that there is no
"reason to anticipate some tidal wave of repression right around the
corner. But the U.S. rulers are already shifting gears from the last
decade. They know they will face more and bigger battles as
international capitalist competition drives them to slash wages, extend
the workday, intensify speedup, cut social security protections, and
crush the unions. And they are preparing to defend their class
interests."
Before a joint session of Congress September 20, Bush announced the
formation of the Office of Homeland Security, a move, like the massive
and unprecedented military deployments on U.S. soil over the prior nine
days, was prepared under the Clinton administration. The Pentagon
changed its structure for the first time during Clinton's presidency to
include a North American Command and began training military forces for
use inside the United States. Congress authorized the Pentagon in 1999
to place specially trained National Guard units in the largest
population centers for possible deployment.
The reality of imperialist rule
Washington's assaults abroad and abrogation of rights at home serve the
same end: to maintain the imperialist order and the super profits that
it shovels into the pockets of the ruling class. This system exacts a
terrible toll on the vast majority of working people of all countries.
"Americans, think why you are hated all over the world" read a banner
held by Pakistani working people protesting the looming attack on
Afghanistan. Writing earlier this year in the Militant, in a series of
articles entitled "Communism and Labor's Transformation of Nature,"
Steve Clark noted the enormous disparity of resources across the globe.
"Roughly 2 billion people," he wrote, "have no access to modern
energy--either to electricity, or to modern sources of fuel for cooking
and heating."
Altogether the imperialist countries of North America, Europe, and the
Pacific, with 14 percent of the world's population, consume 57 percent
of the electricity. Excluding Japan and China, on the other hand, the
countries of Asia and the Pacific, with 31 percent of the world's
population, consume only 10 percent of the electricity; and the
countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, with nearly 10 percent of the world's
population, consume only 1 percent of the electricity.
This system was established through, and has been marked by, a series
of brutal wars. Imperialist conflicts took at least 100 million lives
in the 20th century.
'We' and 'they'
Workers and exploited farmers in the United States have no common
interests, in wartime or peacetime, with the imperialist rulers, Barnes
explained in "The Opening Guns of World War III." During the Gulf War,
he said, "we explained to our co-workers and others why the U.S.
government is not 'our' government, but the government of the
employers, of the capitalists, of the imperialist exploiters and
oppressors of working people the world over--'their' government. He
returned to this theme in Cuba and the Coming American revolution:
Our class enemy is the capitalists themselves and the two-party system
that in the United States serves as the central political prop of their
rule. We have no common interests with the capitalists. Everything they
try to tell us about "our country," "our way of life," "our language,"
"our industry," "our factory" are lies. The "our" is the heart of the
lie. It's a diversion aimed at dividing us from those with whom we do
have common interests--the workers, farmers, and exploited toilers of
all countries. All of us share the same class enemies: the imperialist
ruling classes, and the domestic landlords and capitalists dominated by
imperialism the world over. That's the only "we" and "they" that has
any meaning for working people.
In wartime pressures mount on vanguard workers, farmers, and
anti-imperialist fighters to fudge this fundamental question. Let "us"
mourn the tragedy "together" goes one refrain often heard in New York,
for example. Many forces who claim to speak for the working class and
for socialism have adopted that framework.
"The terrorist attack on September 11 has shaken all of us," said Sam
Webb, the national chair of the Stalinist Communist Party, USA, in a
September 21 statement. "Indeed, people are questioning long held
assumptions that inform how we think about our lives, our families, and
our nation's future." Webb adds, that "no country, not even ours, is an
impenetrable fortress able to safeguard people's livelihoods and lives.
This lesson has been brought home with enormous force." This, the CPUSA
chair says, signals "a sea change has occurred in our nation's life."
Sea change in working-class politics
But long before Sept. 11, 2001, workers and farmers in the United
States and around the world had already gone through a sea change. In
the opening chapter of Capitalism's Word Disorder, entitled "A Sea
Change in Working-Class Politics," Barnes describes the upturn in
resistance, and the development of a vanguard of workers and farmers
steeled in recent struggles. Speaking in 1998, he contrasts this to the
immediate aftermath of the Gulf War.
"Battered by the way imperialism's brutal assault on Iraq ended,
without a fight, and lulled by the extension of the Reagan-Bush
economic expansion, our class went into retreat for more than half a
decade," he said. This period had passed, said Barnes in the 1998
speech. A sea change in working class politics had already occurred, he
emphasized. "The most important aspect of it," he said, is "that a
shift in mass psychology is taking place in the working class in the
United States of America"
The sea change had begun by early 1997, at the latest, he said.
That's when it became clear that no matter what the legacy--in an
industry, in a union, in a region, among any segment of working
people--no matter how limited the results of previous struggles, what
happens now in any struggle has less and less connection to earlier
defeats...
A new pattern is being woven in struggle as working people emerge from
a period of retreat, resisting the consequences of the rulers' final
blow-off boom, of 'globalization'--their grandiloquent term that
displays imperial arrogance while it masks brutal assaults on human
dignity the world over. The emerging pattern is taking shape, defined
by the actions of a vanguard resisting indignity and isolation, whose
ranks increase with every single worker or farmer who reaches out to
others with the hand of solidarity and offers to fight together.
As the imperialists accelerate their offensive at home and abroad, the
stakes in linking up with this vanguard in formation rise.
Seven years earlier, Barnes had described how communist workers tackled
the same tasks during the Gulf War. Writing in "Opening Guns of World
War III, he explained that in carrying out this campaign against
imperialism and its war drive:
We have consciously avoided the political trap of functioning as
communist workers in peacetime, and then sliding toward acting as
radical pacifists in wartime. We act as the communist component of the
vanguard of the working class, at all times and under all conditions.
We have been confident that a working-class campaign carried out in
this way will be politically attractive to and will draw in
fighters--whatever their social background, especially among the
youth--who oppose imperialist war, who want to understand the roots of
such wars, and who seek ways to act on their convictions." -- See
http://www.pathfinderpress.com
Related articles from http://www.themilitant.com:
Imperialist forces move to border of Afghanistan: Stop the war drive!
No to imperialists' Afghan war!
Docky Wocky
No more terrorists hiding anywhere, or using a friendly country as a base of
operations.
