The Iraq War: What's Marx got to do with it?

What does Marx have to do with being against the war in Iraq?

You don’t have to be a Marxist to be opposed to the war in Iraq. From the “shock and awe” bombing to the torture at Abu Ghraib, from the killing of more than half a million Iraqis to the deaths of 3,000 plus U.S. soldiers and thousands more wounded—treated by the Pentagon as discarded goods at Walter Reed Hospital—there is plenty to be outraged about.

And you don’t have to be a Marxist to understand the profit motives behind the Bush administration’s biggest “benchmark of progress” for its client Maliki government in Iraq—namely the oil law that opens up the second-largest oil reserve in the world to Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell and British Petroleum. Incidentally, guess who just established its headquarters for all of Asia in Dubai? Of course it is Cheney’s Halliburton.

It is not necessary to understand Lenin, who updated Marxism in the 20th century with his analysis of imperialism as a social system and its irrepressible drive to expand, to be opposed to the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan; or Washington’s campaign for “regime change” of the independent government in Iran; or its support for the Israeli settler regime’s ongoing war of repression against the Palestinian people; or its use of Tel Aviv to make war against Hezbollah in order to secure a pro-U.S. regime in Lebanon; or its attempt to destroy the socialist governments of North Korea and Cuba; or the campaign against the pro-socialist, anti-imperialist government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

Whether or not one adheres to the Leninist theory of imperialism, one must oppose the latest “African strategy” of Washington to aid the oil companies by moving into the Gulf of Guinea with its reserves; the lawless military intervention in the Horn of Africa to put in power pro-U.S. “warlords” in Somalia and to re-colonize Ethiopia; and the U.S.-British drive to overthrow the government of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe because he dared to try to take back the most fruitful land in the country from white settlers left over from the old regime.

From slavery to Katrina

Marxists contend that the profit system is behind racism and national oppression. But you do not have to agree in order to see clearly that hundreds of thousands of African Americans have been left to permanently suffer the extraordinary trauma of forcible dislocation and separation reminiscent of slavery while real estate sharks, land developers and every variety of gentrifying parasite has moved into New Orleans to make the crisis of the poor into a profit opportunity for the rich.

The state, according to Marx, is an organ of the capitalist class—the ruling class of exploiters—for the suppression of the workers and the oppressed, who are the exploited. And whether or not you agree that this analysis applies to the U.S., one must ask how it is that the Department of Homeland Security winds up running terror raids against defenseless undocumented workers that leave children without parents and criminalize low-wage workers trying to survive.

It is undeniable that the police are an essential part of that state, whether you consider yourself a Marxist or not. Witness the police murder of Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and the untold number of other victims of racist profiling and police brutality in the oppressed communities. Part of that state is the prison-industrial complex, which holds 2 million poor people—disproportionately African-American and Latin@—who, before they became prisoners of the state, were prisoners of poverty and hopelessness in an $11 trillion economy run by corporate multi-billionaires.

The price of corporate rule

Part of that corporate-ruled state is the judges that allow corporations to tear up union contracts and workers’ pensions using the legal maneuver of bankruptcy. Judges who issue injunctions against strikers, police who plow through picket lines and “labor boards” that nullify union elections are all part of that state apparatus.

You don’t have to have a sophisticated analysis of capitalism to know that super-rich HMOs and insurance companies are piling up profits from the health care system while 47 million people have no health insurance; that drug companies make super-profits while people get sick and many die because they cannot afford the monopoly price-gouging of the pharmaceutical industry; that profiteering landlords and developers have destroyed affordable housing; that people living paycheck to paycheck have to borrow to keep going, and that banks and credit card companies, mortgage lenders and other corporate loan sharks are preying on the people as personal debt interest payments soar.

But the more broadly and closely you examine the nature of contemporary society in the U.S., Europe and Japan, the more it becomes clear that what is happening today is not new at all but is a continuation on an expanded scale of what has been in existence throughout the history of capitalism and imperialism.

Endangering the planet and its people

One of the most dramatic and dangerous of recent developments under the profit system is the threat to the planet. For the sake of maintaining profit margins, the corporations are poisoning the soil, the water, the air and eroding the atmosphere. If anything reveals the inherent folly and greed generated by the profit motive and the profit system, it is the corporate risk to the planet.

Capitalism threatens the people who live on the planet, as well. It is only recently that women in this country won the legal right to make fundamental decisions about their own bodies. And that right has been steadily whittled away.

Women are battered every day in this country and the courts and police just fold their hands. There are safe houses for battered women all across the country.

Lesbian, gay, bi and trans people are assaulted, beaten by police, and these crimes go unpunished and largely unreported.

To this day, lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people still struggle for the most basic rights, like the right to marry and to love as they please.

Racism, sexism and gender oppression are rooted in the need of the tiny minority of super-rich that rule to divide the workers, to throw prejudice and hatred in their eyes so that they cannot see how every facet of the profit system works against them—to keep them from uniting against their natural enemy: the capitalist class.

Marxism shows the way out

If you are against all these evils and if you want to put an end to them once and for all, then Marx and Lenin are indispensable.

Marxists fight for political, social and economic justice in capitalist society on every level and every day. There is no form of oppression and exploitation that should be allowed to pass without a fight. We are not waiting for socialism to drop from the sky and make everything right.

But in order to really put an end to all these byproducts of capitalism, the organized workers and the oppressed must take away the power of the corporations to lay people off, cut wages and take away health care. This movement must take away the power of the landlords to make housing unaffordable; the state’s ability to wage war on immigrants; the Pentagon’s power to wage wars of aggression and intervention abroad; and it must destroy the system and the ruling culture of racism, national oppression, degradation of women and gender oppression.

The power to do so rests in the control of the economy, the control of the media, of education, of the health care system and so on. Marxists want to rid society of the two capitalist parties, Republicans and Democrats, both of which are in the pay of the corporate rich and deceive the people—generation after generation—while war, poverty, racism and suffering continue on and on.

Political parties of the workers and the oppressed must mobilize to reorganize society on a revolutionary basis.

Working people must take control of the vast wealth they create. And oppressed nations and nationalities—African Americans, Latin@s, Asians, Indigenous peoples and all those who have been held down by racism and national oppression in this “prison house of nations”—must have the right to self-determination — i.e. the freedom to determine their own political, social and economic destiny.

We must take over the media so the lives of the working class and the oppressed communities around the country and around the world can be on the front pages, in the periodicals and on peoples’ television networks. The medical industry must be used the way it is in socialist Cuba—where all health care, as well as education, is free—for the well-being of the masses, not the profits of the capitalist “health industry.”

In other words, the capitalist class—the class that lives from exploitation and profit—its system and its repressive state has to be destroyed root and branch through the revolutionary struggle of the masses of workers and oppressed peoples. Then and only then will there be an end to imperialist wars like the one in Iraq.

That’s what Marx has to do with it.