Kerry, Bush & the Reagan legacy
By Fred Goldstein
Part 2
It is best to approach the Kerry-Bush struggle
from the perspective of the last quarter of a century of
capitalist politics in the United States. This period has been
consistently characterized by intensified military buildup and
aggression abroad and an across-the-board attack on the
economic, social and political rights of the masses at home.
This has been true through eight years of Democratic
administrations--10 if you count the last two years of Jimmy
Carter--and 15 years of Republican administrations.
Leaving Carter aside for the moment, this sharp shift to the
right-wing orientation of the last quarter century began with
the Reagan administration. This orientation was not merely the
product of a right-wing politician and his cohorts. It found
fertile soil in the ruling class under very specific historic
conditions of crisis at home and abroad in the latter half of
the 1970s.
The Reagan administration came to office six years after the
U.S. effort to conquer Vietnam collapsed. In the period of 1974
to 1979, the Portuguese colonialists were driven out of Angola,
Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and revolutions took place in
Ethiopia, South Yemen, Nicara gua, Grenada, Iran and Afghan
istan. The Palestine Liberation Organization was growing in
strength. There were insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala.
Cuban troops using Soviet-supplied equipment defeated the
attempt by the apartheid regime of South Africa to overthrow
the Angolan revolution.
The strength and prestige of the Soviet Union and the
socialist camp, which was making economic and military strides,
was growing world-wide. And the sphere of U.S. imperialist
influence was contracting.
At home, the industrial-technological infrastructure of the
U.S. ruling class was outmoded and in need of restructuring.
European and Japanese capital were outstripping the bosses
here. Capitalist overproduction resulted in falling profit
margins. Economic stagnation, high interest rates and inflation
were plaguing the capitalist economy.
The U.S. ruling class was faced with a choice of adapting to
new world conditions or launching a gigantic counter-attack on
the workers and oppressed at home and abroad. This was the
class basis for the triumph of Reaganism.
Reagan's task was to prepare for military adventure abroad;
to push back the USSR, the socialist camp and the national
liberation movements; to overturn all the remaining economic,
social and political concessions won by the workers' struggles
during the Roosevelt period; and to take back the gains of the
Black people and all the oppressed nationalities won during the
1950s and 1960s and of women, lesbians, gays, bi and trans
people during the 1970s.
This aggressive orientation arose out of the predatory need
of the capitalist class to rescue its position as the dominant
exploiter of the world. This orientation has not changed since
and has been pursued by every administration, Democrat and
Republican, since then.
Under Reagan the role of the capitalist state as the
guarantor of private property and exploitation shifted from
that of combining oppression with class and social compromise
to an all-out frontal assault by the state upon all previous
concessions won in the struggle.
Reagan and George W. Bush
The George W. Bush administration, like the Reagan
administration of 1981, sought to open up a full-scale
right-wing offensive at home and abroad. Just as Carter
prepared the way for Reagan by carrying out a vacillating
policy dominated by concession after concession to the right
wing and the military, including a plan for a $1-trillion
military buildup, so Clinton prepared the way for Bush with the
same types of concessions on the military front, health care,
welfare and much more.
When Bush arrived on the scene in January 2001, the
Clinton-Gore regime had already waged a brutal air war against
Yugoslavia, bombing hospitals, factories and numerous civilian
installations. It had bombed Iraq and, under pressure from the
right wing, moved to have regime change written into policy in
a congressional resolution. Clinton had carried out eight years
of brutal sanctions and bombings in the so-called no-fly zones
in Iraq, had sent missiles into Afghanistan and the Sudan, and
increased the military budget.
The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz grouping took over with
the overriding goal of demonstrating the capability of the U.S.
military to establish absolute dominance over the world. Its
immediate goal was to roll back the smaller, independent
nations that had liberated themselves from imperialism and then
to move on to the larger nations, such as China.
After various limited starts--such as bombing Iraq,
violating China's air space with fighter planes, pulling out of
the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty signed with the former USSR,
and so on--they seized upon the Sept. 11 disaster to open up a
war against Afghanistan and then quickly moved on to Iraq.
Aside from all their tactical and diplomatic blunders, which
in the long run are secondary, they came up against a
fundamental factor that could not be overcome, even by all the
"right" military and diplomatic moves. This factor is the
collective will of the Iraqi people to resist colonial
occupation and a takeover of their country by imperialism.
Because of the Iraqi people's resistance, the Bush
administration's war in Iraq turned out to be a disastrous
adventure. Not only did this war fail to demonstrate the
ability of the Pentagon and Wall Street to dominate the world,
it showed the severe limitations of the mighty super-power.
When it had to put troops on the ground to expand its empire
against even a small, poor nation with a vastly inferior
military--but a nation whose people are trained in the use of
arms, technically skilled and fiercely anti-imperialist--U.S.
imperialism showed its weakness.
What was supposed to be an intimidating show of strength,
which would easily secure the second-largest supply of oil
reserves in the world for the giant oil monopolies and give
Washington a strategic stranglehold on the center of the Middle
East, has turned into the first major setback to the forward
advance of U.S. imperialism since the collapse of the USSR in
1991.
The entire ruling class in the U.S. backed the war,
overcoming their misgivings about the dangerous "unilateralism"
of the Bush group. This class also bought the idea that the
U.S. would be greeted as "liberators." All the more recent
criticisms by the outraged media, which were embedded with the
Pentagon during the war and were its biggest cheerleaders, are
a reflection of splits in the ruling class because they are
facing disaster in Iraq. They cannot get over the dizzying
discrepancy be tween their imperial world ambitions and their
inability to secure Baghdad or Falluja after 14 months of
bloody occupation.
Having aroused the largest anti-war demonstrations in
history during the pre-war period, the Bush administration now
faces an even broader and deeper anti-war, anti-occupation
sentiment at home. The mounting casualty figures, the torture
scandals, the bumbling, the miscalculations have become daily
grist for the media mill because the ruling class, and
especially a large part of its brain trust and political
advisory establishment, are thoroughly disillusioned and in a
state of consternation about the prospect of being unable to
secure Iraq for U.S. imperialism. A defeat in Iraq would not
only be an immediate material loss for the ruling class, but
would be an inestimable strategic setback that would greatly
encourage the anti-imperialist struggle worldwide.
Kerry's political identity
These divisions within the ruling class and the endless
second-guessing and Monday-morning quarterbacking are going on
in the context of a presidential election campaign and have led
to no end of confusion and difficulty for the masses, who are
increasingly disturbed about the war, the casualties and the
scandals. The masses want to put an end to it all.
John Kerry is running on the Democratic Party ticket and is
desperately trying to establish a political identity separate
from Bush. The one phrase that would do that clearly and
decisively would be: "Bring the troops home." Yet his position
on the war is the exact opposite. His position is "stay the
course" and send 40,000 more troops.
His arguments with Bush over the war are over past policies
exclusively. There are no basic differences going forward.
Kerry's strategic objective of "staying the course" in Iraq
is indistinguishable from the objectives of Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, the military, the oil companies and U.S. big business
in general. His criticisms are of an imperialist nature through
and through. The Democratic Party leadership is thoroughly
committed to trying to save the situation there.
At the moment, John Kerry is trying desperately to sound
like a friend of the masses of workers, the poor, the elderly
and those suffering from the pro-big business policies of
George W. Bush. While he is very short on substance, Kerry is
hinting that he will reverse the economic situation of the
people, which is deteriorating on all fronts.
This position is as fraudulent coming from Kerry as it was
when it came from Bill Clinton, the previous Democratic Party
president--who promised a jobs program and health care for all
and instead destroyed welfare, destroyed the health care
system, balanced the budget on the backs of the people, and
betrayed every promise he made or progressive position that he
hinted at during his campaign.
Reagan's historic role was to reverse the decline of U.S.
imperialism abroad and to overturn the gains won through
historic struggles at home. Bush hoped to follow in his
footsteps by riding roughshod over the right of sovereignty,
self-determination and self-defense of liberated peoples and by
deepening the attacks upon the domestic political, social and
economic rights of the masses.
The Iraqi people have struck a blow against the ambitions of
Washington and the Pentagon for global dominance. The people at
home can win back all the concessions taken from them by the
ruling class, its capitalist parties and its state, not by
siding with one bourgeois candidate or another, but by reviving
the methods of mass, militant organized struggle that brought
about the concessions in the first place.
Reprinted from the July 8, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
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