Mobilize to end the occupation, but
Only socialism can abolish imperialist war
By Fred Goldstein
The Bush administration's invasion and
occupation of Iraq, bombing and wholesale destruction visited
on Afghanistan, and its proclamation of an era of "endless war"
have confronted the current generation with the same crises and
struggles faced by generations over the past hundred years who
have had to fight against imperialist war and intervention.
U.S. soldiers, mostly workers in uniform--for the rich don't
fight their own wars--are being called upon to kill and be
killed to make Iraq safe for the transnational corporations.
The anti-war movement must do everything in its power to
mobilize mass opposition to the occupation and to stay the Bush
administration's hand that is threatening Iran, Syria, North
Korea, Cuba and any other country that refuses to bow down to
its dictates.
But in the course of the struggle against war and
occupation, this question must be addressed: how to put an end
to the recurring and expanding cycle of imperialist war,
intervention and occupation. The answer to this most serious
question depends entirely on understanding the war drive's
character and cause.
The Bush administration has proclaimed the right of
"pre-emptive war" based on a phony "war on terrorism" and the
supposed threat of "weapons of mass destruction." Beneath the
false slogans and fraudulent justifications for war lie
profound ruling-class interests--profit interests, which flow
from a historically developed social system of global
exploitation and plunder that is over a century old.
This system is called imperialism.
In 1916 V.I. Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution, wrote
a fundamental analysis entitled "Imperialism: the Highest Stage
of Capitalism." In this work, Lenin made special note of the
Spanish-American War of 1898 in which the United States
inaugurated its own era of imperialist war by defeating the
Spanish empire and colonizing the Philippines, Puerto Rico,
Cuba and Guam.
Lenin wrote this book during World War I, the first
worldwide imperialist conflagration.
Lenin characterized imperialism as the highest stage of
capitalism--an irreversible evolution from its competitive
stage to its monopoly stage. In this ground breaking work he
showed, by analyzing a mass of economic and political data,
that imperialism is characterized by the merger of the giant
banks and corporations into what was called finance-capital,
which dominated economic and political life.
The great powers of Europe, the United States and Japan had
all reached this stage by the end of the 19th century.
In the process they had intensified a furious struggle among
themselves to divide the globe into colonies and spheres of
influence.
The process of brutal colonization had been going on for
centuries, since the earliest stages of capitalism. Whenever
there was a significant change in the relationship of forces
among these imperialist powers, a new struggle would open up to
re-divide the globe and war would result.
After Lenin wrote the book, the era of socialist revolutions
and national liberation struggles began in earnest. Imperi
alism's drive to roll back socialism and stop the liberation
movements became intertwined with the imperialists' own
inter-imperialist rivalry, and this became another source of
imperialist war and intervention.
The Iraq War and imperialism
Iraq is a classical example of how imperialism operates as a
system.
Washington's goal is to roll back all the gains of the 1958
national revolution that kicked the British colonialists out of
Iraq. Direct imperialist investment was at first put under
Iraqi control and eventually forbidden. The oil was
nationalized and the resources of the country were taken out of
the hands of the transnational banks and corporations.
During the era of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp,
the USSR's military strength acted as a deterrent on any open
military attempt by the West to recolonize Iraq. Furthermore,
Iraq was able to obtain Soviet anti-imperialist economic and
military assistance.
Once the USSR collapsed, however, the U.S. ruling class felt
it had a free hand in the Middle East and it began to target
Iraq. Furthermore, it made an alliance with its junior partner,
former colonialists in Lon don, to keep the other imperialists
out.
McDonald's and more
Imperialism, of course, tries to hide its motives for war
from the masses. But every once in a while, one of its
spokespeople gets bold, loses inhibitions and blurts out
something close to the truth. Thus did Thomas Friedman of the
New York Times. Drunk with triumphalism over the Pentagon's
unrivaled power and dazzled by U.S. technology, Friedman wrote
an article headlined "A Manifesto for the Fast World" that ran
in the Times Sunday Magazine on March 28, 1999.
Friedman wrote: "The hidden hand of the market will never
work without a hidden fist--McDonald's cannot flourish without
McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden
fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's
technologies is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and
Marine Corps."
Friedman seemed to have forgotten all about McDonald's when
he became an avid supporter of the current Pentagon war against
Iraq. He should peruse an Oct. 14 article in the London
Guardian in which its diplomatic editor, Ewen MacAskill,
described a London conference that began on Oct. 13.
In the piece, the first of "The 'Doing Business in Iraq'
Series" subheaded "Kickstarting the private sector in Iraq,"
MacAskill wrote: "About 100 private companies, mainly from
Britain and the U.S., gathered in London yesterday to discuss
investment opportunities in post-Saddam Iraq.
"The companies, mainly oil and banking, are being invited by
the U.S. and British governments to move in as soon as security
is restored. The fast-food chain, McDonald's, which has a
branch in most parts of the world, was predicted by the
conference organizers to open in Baghdad next year."
In Friedman's "Manifesto," McDon ald's was a name that made
a cute juxtaposition next to McDonnell-Douglas. And hamburgers
do not sound nearly as threatening as giant, blood-sucking oil
monopolies or parasitic bankers, exploiting industrialists and
military contractors. Friedman may have left these latter out
of his "Manifesto" but they turned up in London, along with
McDonald's.
ExxonMobil, Delta Airlines, American Hospital Group,
Bechtel, Motorola and several giant British monopolies,
including British Petroleum, were on hand. The conference,
according to the Guardian, "was set up in June last year. Its
supporters say it attracted the support of 145 multinationals.
The alliance has close contacts with the Pentagon."
So there's the nexus of imperialism in one room in London:
the banks, the giant corporations and the Pentagon gathered to
divide up Iraq. One keynote speaker was Dr. John Shaw, an
undersecretary of defense from the Pentagon who spoke on
"Understanding the Contracting Process for the Reconstruction
of Iraq."
For all the talk by Paul Bremer, head of the U.S. occupation
in Iraq, about not privatizing the Iraqi oil industry, one of
the key addresses was by Mahdi Sajjad. Sajjad, a vice president
of Gulfsands, a Houston-based oil company, spoke on
"Privatization of the Iraqi Oil Sector."
The U.S.-Iraqi Business Council represents the elite U.S.
and British finance capitalists, who together with the
businesspeople in uniform are driving the war. Bush had the
support of the entire ruling class, including those who
objected to his diplomacy, to carry out the war.
It was an imperialist war in the sense that Lenin described
this in 1916: a war to re-divide the Middle East, based on the
USSR's collapse and Washington's rise to a position of enormous
military superiority over its rivals. For example, the Deutsche
Bank, Siemens, the Societe General, Alcatel and France Telecom
were not invited to London.
Imperialism rooted in capitalism
But a most important conclusion of Lenin's work was that
imperialism is rooted in capitalism. In the final analysis, all
the giant monopolies rest upon the profits sweated from the
working class day in and day out.
The bosses fight each other by expanding the number of
workers under their control, bringing down wages to increase
the rate of profits. This means expanding throughout the world
in search of cheaper labor, more resources and greater spheres
of influence.
Militarism is an essential ingredient of imperialism because
war and intervention are deeply rooted in the monopolies' class
need to expand their profits. It is not merely the result of
this or that political grouping's policy, which could be
reversed by changing leaders.
To put an end to war, imperialism itself must be destroyed.
That means the destruction of capitalism--which is the very
foundation of imperialism and cannot, once having reached the
monopoly stage, be reversed or shifted onto a peaceful
path.
Imperialism created the world basis for
socialism
Lenin demonstrated a second important conclusion: that
imperialism was creating an interdependent worldwide network of
production, which in turn lays the basis for socialism.
By shipping factories, expanding transportation and
communication, and exporting capital investment, imperialism
has created a worldwide apparatus involving the synchronized,
harmonized production of hundreds of millions of people around
the globe. This network has actually socialized the operations
of day-to-day worldwide production. But billionaires own this
productive apparatus privately, reducing these workers to wage
slaves.
So under private ownership, this worldwide means of
production has become an instrument for expanded suffering of
workers trapped in sweatshops or forced into the giant
transnational corporations' global division of labor.
The owners of this vast socialized apparatus of production
have absolutely nothing at all to do with production itself.
They only live to profit off it. They are utterly unnecessary
to it. Yet they operate it as their own private property.
They close factories when they are not making enough profit,
throwing workers out of jobs. They shut down operations, only
to open them up again in other regions or countries to get
cheaper labor. They impoverish whole countries so that the
workers and peasants have to migrate and be uprooted by the
tens of millions.
A handful of directors at General Motors, Citibank, Alcoa
and General Foods can sit in a boardroom and decide the fate of
millions of workers across the globe. Human need and the
environment mean nothing to them. Only profit.
The world is suffering under this growing contradiction
between private ownership and this vast, socialized productive
system. The working class creates all the wealth, while the
owners use all the instruments of labor to increase their
wealth at the workers' expense.
This contradiction can only be resolved by expropriating the
factories, mines, offices, health facilities, banks, telephone
companies and transportation systems--and putting them under
the ownership of the working class to run on behalf of society
as a whole for human need and not for profit. That is
socialism.
Only when capital is eliminated will the global struggle for
profit and domination be eliminated along with imperialist war.
Socialism is the only way to do it.
Reprinted from the Oct. 30, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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