NATIONAL FIGHTBACK CONFERENCE
Iraq war and Bush victory:
Prospects for struggle
Excerpts from a talk by WWP Secretariat member Fred
Goldstein at the Nov. 13-14 National Fightback
Conference.
Today the dominant political developments in the world are
the war in Iraq and the Bush election. As Marxists, we must
probe these events, their relation to one another, and the
underlying class forces at play--and attempt to glimpse the
future in order to better prepare for struggle.
Here we have a reactionary election victory and a
reactionary war of conquest--and it is now once again truly a
war to secure an occupation. How will they affect each other?
Will reaction triumph now that the Bush administration has not
only won re-election, but secured control over both houses of
Congress, with a 55 to 45 majority in the Senate?
Will the forces of reaction that have triumphed at the
political summits of society dominate capitalist society? Or
will the class contradictions generated by this vicious
colonial war burst through the surface of reaction at the
commanding heights in Washington?
The last protracted colonial war, the Vietnam war, and the
contradictions of the Lyndon Johnson administration are
instructive. In office after the Kennedy assassination from
1963 to 1968, the Johnson administration was totally different
from the present Bush administration politically.
Johnson came to office at the height of the civil-rights
movement -during the sit-ins, the freedom rides, the mass
resistance led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Tens of
thousands of African Americans, particularly youths and
students, were challenging the bastions of segregation and
legalized racism in all its forms--from ending white-only
facilities to demanding the right to vote.
Johnson was the political leader from Texas who had once
voted against an anti-lynching law. Under the impact of the
struggle, he became the capitalist leader who made historic
political concessions and signed the Civil Rights Act, the
Voting Rights Act and the 24th Amendment to the Constitution
that outlawed the poll tax he had once upheld.
The ruling-class factions behind Johnson were deeply
concerned about the rise of the Black movement. They saw the
possibility it would turn into a full-fledged liberation
movement, an extension of the worldwide decolonization
movement.
The bosses knew that to contain this movement would require
more than conceding political rights. They would have to ease
up on the colonial-type oppression and superexploitation of the
African American population. They decided they would have to
put resources into improving the deplorable conditions in the
African American community and in other regions of deep
poverty.
In March 1964, Johnson made a major speech about the "Great
Society." It was the prelude to a whole raft of legislative
proposals to put money into the inner cities and depressed
areas. But in August 1964, Johnson and the Pentagon staged the
Gulf of Tonkin incident and initiated a congressional
resolution, something like the Iraq War resolution, authorizing
an escalation of the war in Vietnam.
The U.S. ruling class was trying to stem the tide of
struggle at home by making economic concessions--while at the
same time trying to wage a colonial war to conquer Vietnam and
displace the French as the colonial power.
And just as the Pentagon dreams of setting up permanent
military bases with which to threaten and dominate the Persian
Gulf and the Middle East, so then the Pentagon set up military
bases all over south Vietnam with the aim of threatening China
and strengthening U.S. domination of the Pacific.
But instead of victory through escalation, the Johnson
administration became bog ged down in a quagmire. He had to
send over 500,000 troops to Vietnam. The dreamed-of profits
from the conquest of Vietnam turned into hundreds of billions
of dollars in losses that the masses paid for.
Johnson talked about the Great Society. Meanwhile he sent
more and more money to the military and more and more troops to
kill and be killed in Vietnam. Social contradictions increased.
There were rebellions in the Black community, from Harlem to
Watts to Detroit to Newark, as the funds for social spending
were increasingly diverted to the war.
In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, there
were rebellions in over 100 cities.
These rebellions resulted in affirmative action. The ruling
class feared a war at home at the same time that they were
trying to wage a war abroad. Affirmative action, while it
improved the opportunities for Black people, cost the
bourgeoisie nothing in social spending.
Thus the consequences of the Vietnam War, a losing colonial
war, heightened the social and economic contradictions at home
and led to massive urban rebellions.
The current administration is announcing its intention to
raid Social Security and to make permanent the tax breaks for
the rich on capital gains and dividends. Bush has a program of
pushing back the workers; pushing the anti-union, so-called
"right to work" of attacking overtime; cutting back health
benefits; and generally pushing ahead with the transfer of
income to the rich.
But the administration has an unwin nable imperialist
occupation that it has already poured $200 billion into, and
it's going to ask for another $70 billion. The attack on
Falluja guarantees that they will have to expand the
occupation.
Bush is going to try to make the working class and the
oppressed pay for this quagmire, in blood and money. This war
is going to intensify the class contradictions in the United
States.
The working class as a whole is poorer than it was during
the Vietnam era. It is more multinational. There are more women
and more open lesbian, gay, bi and trans people in the work
force.
Nothing in the election result showed that the masses of
workers have shifted to the right. The reaction is at the
top.
The prospects are for economic decline and more war. These
are ingredients for challenging the Bush reaction in a real
way--not just with protests but with struggle and resistance of
the workers, the young, women, lesbian, gay, bi and trans
people, immigrants, and all who are going to suffer the burden
of the war and the capitalist economy.
Reprinted from the Nov. 25, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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