The union struggle & imperialist war machine

U.S. planes are now dropping bombs on Libya, killing children in an effort to recolonize this part of Africa. This is yet another illegal war. Regardless of who is president, the Pentagon budget grows and the U.S. is in a permanent state of imperialist warfare.

Struggles in the U.S. are being carried out against attacks on every social program, on the right of unions to exist and on immigrants. Foreclosures and unemployment continue to devastate working-class communities and youth, hitting people of color twice or even three times as hard.

It is not just a moral question to connect these issues — it is a necessity for the working class in the fight on economic issues. The roots of militarism and the war on labor both arise out of the capitalist system. The immense funds and power of the financial sector and military-industrial complex are driving reactionary policies here and abroad.

Politics flows from economics. The wars and social and economic assaults result from the deep, continuing, insolvable capitalist crisis on a global scale. Reactionary government policies are devised to fulfill capitalism’s needs.

Capitalism in earlier phases of development — at great cost to the people — eventually came out of its bust cycle and moved into an upturn and boom phase. People went back to work and employment even expanded.

The productive capability of the global workforce today is enormous; it can produce all that humanity needs. However, under capitalism the means of production is privately owned by a small, useless clique that says that unless commodities can be sold for a profit, workers lose their jobs. If there are no sales, there are no profits. The millions of people worldwide who do all the labor are thrown away by a tiny group of parasites. Then no one can afford to buy the products workers create.

Temporarily capitalists can overcome this crisis by imposing speedups, lowering wages and/or moving production to areas where labor is paid the least, thereby reducing costs. They can also force countries to buy U.S. products, while they push to steal the natural resources of countries like Iraq or Libya.

Built-in U.S. war drive

None of this is possible without deadly force and occupation. In “Low-Wage Capitalism,” Fred Goldstein wrote, “The Pentagon, the entire warfare state promotes intervention to insure the protection and continued expansion of corporation interests and world-wide wage competition.” Unless production starts up again and people go back to work and have money to buy products, there is no capitalist recovery.

Driving down production costs by cutting wages and benefits at home is not possible without destroying unions and removing social measures that workers fought for long ago. Destroying welfare, unemployment insurance, Social Security, child labor laws, minimum wage protections and attacking immigrants are ways to drive down the wages of all workers. This is all part of the “global race to the bottom.” Just as the Pentagon is the international enforcer, so are the police and the courts in the U.S., which uphold increasingly repressive laws.

Each recession of the last few decades has not produced a capitalist recovery. The current “jobless recovery,” with its swollen profits, is not just a product of elected officials’ rotten policies. It is the product of a rotten system that is in decay. But because production is only for the purpose of selling for profit and workers can no longer buy what they produce, the capitalist system has reached the end of its ability to absorb its enormous productive capacity and create a capitalist recovery.

Exploitation of labor is at the heart of the capitalist system: The super-rich capitalist class profits by paying workers less than the value of what they produce — and stealing the rest. That’s called “surplus value.”

The capitalist class has turned to looting the public treasuries as a major source of their profits. They have instructed the government to privatize everything — turn over public facilities and services to private companies, which are guaranteed profits because the funds come from the public treasury.

In “High Tech, Low Pay,” Sam Marcy, the late chairperson of Workers World Party, wrote, “The capitalist state is not only the collective organ on behalf of the individual capitalist. Insofar as its economic function it appropriates an additional portion of the surplus value, unpaid labor of the workers, beyond what the individual capitalist has the power to do.” It does this by taxing the workers. All the money in every city, state or federal budget comes from labor and belongs to the working class as a whole.

The purpose of warfare is to impose U.S. domination globally in order to ensure the profits of capitalist industry. War is big business. In fact, the arms industry is the biggest business in the U.S. Together with the financial industries that invest in it, the military-industrial complex rules Congress and is the driving force of war, budget cuts and attacks on unions. The Pentagon is not only the thug for the transnational banks and corporations, but the military uses up weapons so that more must be produced.

Military industry: anti-union, racist, sexist

The military sector is the most anti-union, racist, sexist sector of industry. The industry bosses openly advocate super-automation, workerless factories and moving industries from union sites to so-called “right-to-work” (non-union) locations. This sector of industry strongly opposes worker organizing and protests; it has assisted in breaking strikes in the U.S. and globally.

Where civilian industries attempt to minimize production costs to maximize profits, the military industries seek to maximize costs so they get more money from the government. Their profits don’t depend on workers going back to work, but on bleeding public funds dry.

It’s worth repeating what former general and Republican President Dwight Eisenhower said when he left office in 1961. He was a dedicated warmonger and the architect of the fusion of government with the military industries, universities and banks. He was well qualified to issue a warning about the growing Pentagon industry: “The total influence — economic, political even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, and every office of the federal government. ... We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the counsels of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

The longer the global capitalist recession — and depression in many places — continues, the more the monopoly financial sector and the military sector turn to looting our treasuries as a source of the super-profits they cannot get by traditional means of directly exploiting labor.

The banks are doing to every U.S. city, town and state what the International Monetary Fund has done abroad for decades. They make loans — not for the purpose of development — but to incur indebtedness, which creates profits for the financial industries and robs the treasuries.

For example, New York City, which has a gargantuan budget of $63 billion a year, is paying out $7 billion in tax-free interest payments, as the administration callously cuts schools, hospitals, libraries, firehouses, day care and senior centers. New York state has 1,000 authorities, which were created solely to evade laws, that limit direct government indebtedness. They get loans in the form of bonds, but the treasury is obligated to repay them, as well as any revenues they get from fees or fares.

The military-industrial-banking complex that Eisenhower warned of more than 50 years ago has grown monstrously since then. The military budget — when all departments are added in — is more than $1 trillion a year! The government borrows funds from the banks to pay for this. The result is that huge profits from interest payments go to the banks, in addition to the profits they make from investing in war companies. This year the federal government will pay about $400 billion in interest payments. Altogether, the military-industrial-banking complex loots about 65 percent of the federal budget.

Pentagon’s reach grows

So huge are the super-profits that banks and the military industry control Congress. Their lobbyists write the legislation, which many in Congress don’t even read. Congress members now have $151 million invested in military companies. (FedSpending.org). In 2006, members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committee invested $44 million. In 2009, war contractors gave 57 percent of their donations to Democrats.

However, that’s only part of it. Military production has taken over from civilian production. Large, medium and small companies — from GM and Chrysler to Dunkin Donuts and Marvel Comics — feed from military budget contracts. Entire towns and counties are dependent on military industries or bases. Prison officials coerce prisoners to do slave labor under Pentagon contracts. The Pentagon makes sure that their contracts are spread out widely.

Pentagon spending in universities is enormous. Its purpose is to influence research and thought and to create loyalty or a dependence on the military by educators, scientists and the institutions themselves. The army owns a multibillion-dollar network of research and development facilities at more than 100 sites worldwide. They do technological research in medicine, microelectronics, photonics and much more.

There are dozens of Pentagon foundations and agencies like Military Technology Advisory Group, Defense Science and Technology Strategy Advisory Group and the Defense Trade Advisor Group, which describes itself as “a cross-section of the U.S. defense industry, trade associations, and academia and foundation personnel.”

Their self-proclaimed goal “is to foster competitiveness in the marketplace to produce a market demand. To support and improve technology and manufacturing readiness levels, to exercise the supply chains that are fundamental to manufacturing, and to fund research and development efforts in areas that need to be more competitive.” (Office of Naval Research) In “High Tech, Low Pay” Marcy quotes General Bernard Weiss of MTAG: “Take the U.S. out of the position that it is in terms of productivity ... and move it back to being pre-eminent in the world.”

Marcy wrote of the “deep and profound shift of the civilian industry toward the military-industrial complex. It strengthens the hand of the Pentagon in its longstanding attempt to become the central organizer of the capitalist economy ... [Note: It’s not just the war industries but also the whole economic policy.] Monopoly capitalism has been steadily and relentlessly fusing with the capitalist state for decades and is intertwined with the military in a thousand ways.”

The stronger the military gets the more reactionary will domestic policies be. The more the U.S. military invades, occupies and sets up bases in other countries, the poorer the workers in that country will be and the more pressure will be exerted to cut wages and jobs in the U.S.

Build international solidarity

Workers — those in unions and the unorganized — are connected to our sisters and brothers in the working class around the world. We need international solidarity, and it is in the interest of every union and every worker to oppose all Pentagon wars. All their wars are waged solely to exploit and oppress working people around the world. Our loyalty is to our class and not to the capitalist class, which will throw us out on the street, impoverish, starve and imprison us.

As we explore new avenues of struggle together, we need to analyze what is driving these assaults. The struggle against war, militarism, unemployment, union busting, racism, sexism and homophobia need to be an anti-capitalist struggle. Tactics and strategies need to be implemented that build the power of working-class organizations, unions and community groups to challenge the system — and to occupy and take back what the capitalist ruling class is stealing from us.