A response to anti-communist caricatures:
Where Workers World stands on imperialism
By Deirdre Griswold
What are the issues that define the various political
tendencies on the left today?
Probably the most crucial for the current struggle of the
workers in the developed capitalist countries is an
understanding of imperialism and how to fight it. This issue
subsumes not only the question of the attitude to take on
imperialist wars, like the war on Iraq, but also how to combat
racism in all its forms--a task that is absolutely essential if
the working class is to win unity in its struggle against the
huge predatory corporations and banks.
This question has long antecedents.
The first document of the communist movement--the Communist
Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels--called for a new
social order, but it differed from earlier utopian socialist
visions of an ideal society. Instead of trying to win over the
enlightened elements of the more privileged classes to
construct a new, more humane society, Marx and Engels argued
that it was the struggle of the working class to protect its
own class interests that would be the dynamo of social
revolution.
This class, because of its high degree of concentration,
organization and skill, and the fact that it is not a
propertied class, was the only one positioned to take over the
reins of political power in order to reorganize economic life.
But not just to become a new ruling class, like the bourgeoisie
after it won its struggle against the feudal lords. The aim of
a workers' revolution would be to abolish exploitation and
class oppression. In other words, here was a class whose
historic task was to take the power and build a new socialist
economic order that would eventually abolish class
distinctions.
That document was written more than a century and a half
ago. Capitalism had only recently emerged in Europe as the
dominant social system after centuries of feudal stagnation. A
revolutionary fervor gripped not only the workers but other
social classes as well, as they battled the autocratic
political structures of the old order.
After an age in which church dogma had governed every area
of thought, down to the smallest question--like how many teeth
were in a horse's mouth--the new atmosphere of free thought led
to amazing advances in science and technology. It all promised
a brilliant future for humankind, if only the newly created
wealth could be shared equitably.
The Communist Manifesto ended with the stirring dictum:
"Working men of all countries unite!" And indeed, by the end of
the 19th century, tremendous workers' organizations had been
built on the European continent that won significant
improvements in the lives of the workers and exerted great
pressure on the bourgeois parties and governments. In other
words, much unity was achieved in the working class, as it was
then defined. The phrase "working men" shows, however, that few
women were considered a socially active part of the class,
although their arduous work in the home was absolutely
essential to its existence and replication.
The limitations of the 19th-century view of the working
class and the struggle for world socialism were made even more
obvious in 1914. The working class organizations of Europe,
including most of the Social Democratic parties, which claimed
to uphold the mantle of Marxism, fell in line behind their
capitalist governments and ratified what was to become the
First World War. In that war of nationalistic fervor, millions
of workers were ordered into battle by their class enemies. The
result was a slaughter of unprecedented proportions. And it set
the stage for nearly a century of imperialist wars in which the
only real winner has been the class of millionaires and
billionaires.
This colossal setback for the working class movement was not
just a subjective failure of leadership. It didn't just fall
out of the blue. It was the gory proof that capitalism had
reached a new stage.
That war was the ultimate expression of capitalism's
transformation from its competitive to its monopoly stage. The
concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands had
accelerated with industrialization, but it reached a
qualitatively new level with the rise of the huge commercial
banks and other financial institutions. This great collection
of wealth couldn't just sit idle. It had to be used in the
exploitation of labor so new wealth would be created for its
owners. But the home markets were saturated; economic
contractions known as "panics" were demonstrating that at
regular intervals.
Capital was increasingly drawn to invest in the oppressed
colonies, where labor and resources were cheap and
super-profits were virtually guaranteed. That pitted each
colonial power in Europe against the others in cutthroat
competition that laid the basis for the war. Soon the United
States joined in the war for spoils.
Of all the Marxists of that period, the one who best
understood the new relationship of class forces in the world
was V.I. Lenin, a leader of the Russian Social Democratic
Party. His work on "Imperialism--the Highest Stage of
Capitalism" showed in detail how the quantitative growth of
monopoly finance capital had led directly to the big powers'
carving up the world for super-exploitation. A few gigantic
banks in Europe and the United States had a tight grip on the
social surplus created by hundreds of millions of workers.
Lenin published his book on imperialism in 1916, during the
world war. He had already acted on it, however. He was one of a
handful of European socialist leaders who had opposed the war
from the beginning, calling it an imperialist slaughter to
re-carve the world for super-exploitation. He called on the
workers' organizations to counter the reactionary nationalism
of the capitalist governments with revolutionary international
class solidarity and refuse to kill their fellow workers in
other countries.
In Russia, his wing of the Social Democratic movement, known
as the Bolsheviks, organized resistance to the war and called
for the revolutionary defeat of their own ruling class--which
they were able to accomplish in 1917.
It was Lenin who amended the communist slogan to "Workers
and oppressed peoples of the world unite." This was not mere
words but was based upon a worldview of the class struggle that
saw the fate of the workers in the imperialist countries as
inextricably linked to that of the oppressed nations under the
heel of colonial--and today neo-colonial--oppression.
Today's anti-worker offensive in the U.S. demonstrates the
continuing truth of this thesis. The super-oppression of
workers in the Third World, just like the systematic racist
down-pressing of African Americans, Latinos and Native people
at home, becomes a club used by the bosses against the standard
of living won through labor's struggles.
Leninism came to be synonymous with international
solidarity--not only among the organized workers in the
developed imperialist countries, but with the national
liberation movements for independence and sovereignty.
These movements reached a high point after World War II,
when anti-colonial revolutions rocked Asia, the Middle East,
Africa and Latin America. In China, Korea and Vietnam, the
leaders of the anti-colonial struggle were communists who led
the masses to victory with a program that combined the goal of
national liberation with the overthrow of the old class order
and the building of socialism.
These revolutions, however, took place when there was
relative prosperity and conservatism in the imperialist
countries; capitalism was rebuilding after the Great Depression
and then the massive destruction of the war. The communist
movement was on the defensive in the United States
particularly. The needed solidarity between the national
liberation struggles and the working class in the imperialist
countries was minimal, at best.
All this set the stage for an unremitting effort by the CIA,
the Pentagon and other imperialist agencies to undermine the
workers' movement internationally along with the states
building socialism and the newly liberated nations of the Third
World.
But today we are in a new era, when U.S. imperialism, now
the sole super-power, has become hated everywhere because of
its ruthless efforts to rule the planet. At the same time, the
workers in all the imperialist countries are struggling to
survive against a vicious anti-worker offensive. The
imperialist metropolises have become more multi-national, with
large-scale immigration from the oppressed countries, and it
becomes clearer every day that super-exploitation in any part
of the world drags down the workers everywhere. Under these
circumstances, the prospects for international class solidarity
are once again on the rise.
Here in the United States, Workers World Party, an
independent Marxist party that has been consistent in its
active opposition to imperialist war and aggression, has been
roundly criticized in the recent period by elements of the
capitalist media and some liberal publications. They seem
astounded that the party refuses to put an equal sign between
the violence of oppressor and oppressed, whether in Iraq,
Yugoslavia, North Korea, Palestine, Puerto Rico or anywhere
else that resists U.S. domination.
As happens so often in bourgeois journalism, they have
created a caricature of WWP, which they then go on to attack.
In a style seemingly inspired by George W. Bush's lumping
together of such diverse countries as Iraq, Iran and the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea as an "axis of evil,"
these writers accuse WWP of everything from being "Stalinists"
to "simplistic apologists" for Saddam Hussein and Slobodan
Milosevic.
Fortunately, these attacks have spurred interest in WWP and
its political analyses over the years, which can readily be
found on the Web site www.workers.org.
In such a counter-revolutionary country as the U.S., where
the government has spent literally trillions of dollars taken
from workers' taxes over the last half century to shore up
monopoly capitalism, such attacks are no surprise.
WWP is mindful of the constant propaganda from the ruling
class here aimed at undermining international solidarity.
Whether it's films or television or the slant of the news, a
chauvinist arrogance, hatred and fear of countries that resist
imperialist dictates is inculcated daily.
This not only facilitates the global spread of low-wage
sweatshops and the subsequent high rate of profit for investors
in so-called "emerging markets," but it also dehumanizes the
people and their leaders in countries that dare defy the rules
set by the imperialists. How much easier for the Pentagon to
impose an order satisfactory to Exxon-Mobil, Citibank or The
Gap when the people and leaders of a country have been reduced
to demons in the minds of the population here.
Workers World refuses to participate in or condone the
demeaning and insulting attacks on Third World leaders that
fill the pages of imperialist newspapers and journals. It will
continue to spotlight the source of today's bloody conflicts
around the world: the system of imperialism and the billionaire
capitalist ruling class that has nothing to offer the world but
a widening gap between rich and poor and an uncontrollable
boom-bust cycle.
Reprinted from the Dec. 12, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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