September 2001 

The Left and the War Drive

Kabul after 20 years of Devastation by U.S.-Backed Counterrevolutionaries. 

The shock waves from the coordinated September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon have spread throughout the world. Aircraft carriers steam toward the Indian Ocean, the largest air armada since World War II is being assembled to strike at Afghanistan, the killer elites of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions are on the move.  In the United States, the Bush administration has already set up a “Homeland Security Agency,” government and airline officials “racially profile” anyone with a Near Eastern appearance while racists have besieged mosques and murdered at least three individuals who “looked like” Arabs. In New York City, anguished relatives and friends who put up pictures of thousands of missing people on walls all over Manhattan have seen their hopes extinguished of finding survivors in the rubble of the WTC. 

But for the United States government, the aftermath of the indiscriminate terror attack is a golden “opportunity to restructure the world,” as a top advisor of President George W. Bush put it (New York Times, 22 September). The commander in chief of U.S. imperialism has proclaimed the “first war of the 21st century.” Waging it, he declared, will be “the purpose of this administration.” Government spokesmen talk of a “war against terrorism,” when in fact the immediate aim of the murderous strikes they are preparing is to terrorize the populations of the Near East and South Asia into submission. Afghanistan itself is so “target-impoverished,” with little of consequence left to bomb (no electricity plants, oil refineries, or even hospitals), that many in the administration are pushing to declare Iraqi strong man Saddam Hussein to be the henchman of Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, Washington’s current chief nemesis.

Bush & Co. refuse to give proof of the alleged connections of bin Laden, Hussein or anyone else with the WTC attack, so as not to “compromise intelligence sources.” And who needs proof, anyway, since this “new kind of war” is not about “stopping terrorism” or any of the other claims of the American propaganda mills. The U.S. always gives high-sounding names to its wars: WWI was supposed to be a “war for democracy,” WWII a “war against fascism,” when in fact both of these imperialist conflagrations were about controlling colonies, economic resources and world domination. The “war on drugs” is a cover for tightening U.S. hegemony over Latin America, and the vehicle for besieging the ghettos and barrios in the U.S. On an even broader scale, the “war on terrorism” will be a means for regimenting the entire population of the United States. Indefinitely.

It is a war on Arabs, Asians and all immigrants, who are being victimized and deprived of rights.

It is a war on black people, who are facing a resurgence of racist “profiling” by the authorities.

It is a war on working people, who are being thrown out of their jobs by the hundreds of thousands while the benefits of those who remain are slashed.

It is a war on democratic rights, as the capitalist rulers generalize police-state controls on everything from e-mail to national ID cards. Before long the bourgeoisie will be declaring workers’ strikes a form of “terrorism.”

“Public opinion” manufactured by the mass media is dutifully responding to the war propaganda: polls show 89 percent support for Bush (the highest ever for a U.S. president) and 92 percent in favor of military strikes against countries deemed to be culprits. Yet, remarkably, the drumroll of jingoism has not succeeded in intimidating all opposition to the war drive. At colleges and universities across the country, demonstrations and teach-ins against war have spread like wildfire. And in response to racist attacks on Arab Americans there has been considerable opposition to xenophobia.

The London Observer (16 September) noted early on, “Peace Protesters Take to New York Streets.” When the New York Times finally reported the proliferation of peace symbols in Union Square, the cops quickly moved in to erase them and put up fences. Yet the next day, thousands of peace demonstrators marched on Times Square. The event was completely blacked out in the media.

While the protesters object to Washington’s ominous war moves, the politics of the peace demonstrations are infused with illusions in American bourgeois “democracy.” 

At a September 20 “Teach-In to Stop the War” sponsored by the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and others at New York University, professor Bertell Ollman – a prominent representative of “academic Marxism” – recalled a motto of previous antiwar protests: “speak truth to power.” The very idea that speaking truth to those who hold the power in capitalist America could change their policies is a dangerous liberal illusion, antithetical to everything Marx wrote about the ruling class. But Ollman’s message was even worse: he argued that today it is necessary “to make our truth digestible” – that is, acceptable to the media-manufactured “public opinion.”

Ollman stated frankly what all the antiwar groups are doing. By front-loading their appeals with “anti-terrorist” rhetoric, they are accepting the premise that Bush’s war drive really is a response to the September 11 attacks. It is not. Every one of the moves Washington is making today was prepared long in advance. A national security review early this year called for a global war on terrorism. The munitions to be used against Afghanistan were ordered moved from Europe to Diego Garcia Island in the Indian Ocean last month. The World Trade Center gave the government just the handle it needed to put into action its plans to “reorganize the world.” 

By their rhetoric, the protest organizers are positioning themselves as the pacifist wing of the war drive. In adjusting their “truth” to what is digestible by the powers that be in U.S. bourgeois politics, it is revealed as a lie. They appeal to “all people of conscience to come together” to  stop the war declared by “our” government. (Even the “Anti-Capitalist Convergence” which is sponsoring events in Washington on September 29 says, “We demand that no more terror or violence be perpetrated in our name.”) Yet a key lesson to be driven home is that the Pentagon, White House, Congress and the courts are the government of, by and for the ruling class: they are the machinery of the capitalist state, which rests on the police and military, the armed bodies whose job it is to “preserve and protect” the interests of the exploiters. And their war drive will not be stopped by a bunch of peace marches, however numerous. 

“War and racism are NOT the answer!” is the title of a leaflet of the International Action Center (IAC), led by the Workers World Party (WWP), calling for a September 29 national rally in Washington, D.C. What the flyer does not say is that war and racism are an integral part of capitalism, and it is impossible to get rid of these evils without overturning the system that engenders them. No. 1 among the signers is Ramsey Clark, who as Lyndon Johnson’ attorney general oversaw the murderous war on the Black Panther Party. 

“Justice yes, war no!” chanted demonstrators at the September 21 NYC march. A meeting of “peace activists” held at the Local 1199 union hall two days earlier raised as one of its key “points of unity” for an October 6 march that “terrorism” must be dealt with by “international law.” Yet international law is a myth under capitalism. What do they mean by “justice,” The Hague tribunal? Those “judges” sitting on a former military base in the Netherlands are nothing but the “judicial” auxiliary of the NATO imperialist forces that terror-bombed Yugoslavia in 1999. 

  Photo: Studio X

Baghdad residential district bombed by U.S. during Persian Gulf War. 

Do they want United Nations sanctions against Afghanistan? That’s what many “peace” protesters demanded against Iraq, following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the family-owned oil sheikdom of Kuwait in 1980. And they got them. UN sanctions were the stepping stone to the Persian Gulf War, and they have continued ever since, condemning a generation of Iraqis to misery, disease and death. Revolutionaries defended Iraq and Yugoslavia against imperialist attacks, while giving no political support to their murderous, anti-communist leaders. Today it is the duty of all class-conscious workers and socialists to defend Afghanistan, Iraq and all those countries under attack by U.S. imperialism, at the same time as we fight for socialist revolution to overthrow their bloody rulers, most of whom are former allies and flunkeys of Washington.

  Many of the organizers of today’s budding “peace movement” are veterans of earlier such movements over the Persian Gulf War and the Vietnam War. If they seek to make a profession of leading antiwar movements, at least they have the promise of steady employment. For as Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin noted in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, capitalism in its epoch of decay ceaselessly produces war and new economic crises. But as Lenin also remarked, imperialism is the epoch of wars and revolutions. The key is forging a proletarian revolutionary leadership.

The September 11 WTC attack had an immediate effect on the U.S. economy. From the minute the opening bell sounded at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, September 17, prices of shares in leading corporations plunged. It was the worst-ever point loss on the Dow Jones stock index and by the week’s end the accumulated stock market losses added up to a drop of 14 percent, the worst week since the depths of the 1930s Great Depression. In five days over $1.2 trillion in paper wealth was wiped out, quite a chunk in a capitalist economy for which the drive to accumulate “shareholder value” is the word of Moses and the prophets.

The crisis in the real economy is no less severe. U.S. airlines have announced 100,000 layoffs, a quarter of the entire workforce in the industry. Another 100,000 jobs are expected to be eliminated in New York City due to the WTC collapse. Hotels, restaurants and the tourist industry have laid off well over 100,000 nationwide. The International  Monetary Fund has now officially announced the U.S. to be in a “recession.” 

Of course, this is not all the result of airliners crashing into buildings in an indiscriminate terror attack. The U.S. economy was already declining sharply after the longest expansion in history. The decade-long boom was limited to the capitalists: the poor got poorer, hundreds of thousands of industrial workers lost their jobs, the middle class barely held even, while multi-millionaires and billionaires raked in fabulous profits. But it was only a matter of time until the speculative bubble burst. And now that it has, the underlying weak underpinnings of American capitalism are as starkly exposed as the wreckage of the Twin Towers. The United States has been living off of imported capital for years, running an annual balance of payments deficit of over $400 billion, more than three times its monetary reserves. The minute foreign investors lose confidence in the U.S. economy or the dollar, the resulting financial crisis could be cataclysmic. 

  AP

Stock market crash 1929 (above). Capitalism engenders 
economic crisis and war.

In such times of crisis, the government is revealed for what it is, the executive committee of the capitalist class. Suddenly, the top U.S. economic officials began pouring in tens of billions in “liquidity.” The airline executives with their million-plus salaries got a $15 billion hand-out from the feds. Thereupon, they turned around and fired tens of thousands of workers while refusing to pay contractually “guaranteed” severance payments. When the unions complained, the phony “friends of labor” of the Democratic Party agreed to “forgo” any guarantees for workers. 

In the face of the escalating economic crisis, a number of union leaders sense that labor is under the gun in the new war drive. While AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney called Bush to his “full support for him in this time of crisis,” there have also been a number of calls for “peace” from labor officialdom. But these timid statements invariably emphasize their fundamental loyalty to capitalism, and to American capitalism in particular. Thus the United Electrical Workers issued a September 14 statement criticizing “military adventures that can lead only to more carnage and senseless loss of life,” at the same time emphasizing that “after Pearl Harbor…UE mobilized to win the war for freedom….” 

In the California Bay Area, the San Francisco Labor Council issued a statement saying, “We reject the idea that entire nations should be punished for the actions of a few. Bombing raids and military strikes will only fuel an endless cycle of revenge.” The SFLC then cited Samuel Gompers, the founder of the AFL, saying “that labor wants more justice and less revenge.” Gompers was a rabid supporter of the U.S. in the first imperialist world war. Meanwhile, Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the Bay Area voted to send a letter to Congresswoman Barbara Lee “commending her for her courageous sole vote against the war.” 

In justifying her dissenting vote Lee made it clear she was defending what she understood to be the national interest of capitalist America. She objected not to the so-called “war on terrorism” itself but to the open-ended nature of the use of force resolution, because it “significantly reduces Congress’s authority,” and she worried that things could “spiral out of control.” To make her stand clear, the Democratic representive also voted in favor of the $40 emergency financing bill which includes a blanket authorization (amount undefined) for “intelligence activities.” So much for defending the “authority” of Congress.

 The Local 10 meeting also discussed attempts by the bosses’ Pacific Maritime Association to blacklist longshoremen by “security” checks following the September 11 attack. This poses a direct threat to the union hiring hall, a gain of the 1934 SF dock strike. Rather than hiding behind a capitalist politician, what is clearly called for here is working-class action against the war drive and its consequences for labor. Class-conscious workers must emphasize that the impending war will slaughter countless working people abroad, as did the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, while the government launches a frontal assault on civil liberties at home; and that what’s needed is to mobilize workers struggle against the U.S. war drive, defending the targeted semi-colonial countries against U.S. attack while defending working people at home, for example against the attacks being pushed by the maritime bosses. 

It is axiomatic in the Marxist movement that wars and revolutions are the ultimate test of any party or leadership. This was true in the First World War (1914-18) when the large majority of the social-democratic parties of the Second International lined up behind “their own” bourgeoisies in the imperialist slaughter. The current crisis is no exception. While various reformists want to get in on the action of a new antiwar movement, these pseudo-socialists are careful to pitch their appeal in liberal terms. Thus along with ILWU Local 10, the reformists of the Communist Party and WWP also hailed Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s vote against the war resolution. Workers World (27 September) hailed her as the “Hero from Oakland,” while the CPUSA’s People’s World (22 September) headlined its article, “Lee shows courage with vote for peace.” This was a replay of the line taken by the CP and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the 1960s movement, when they chased after Democratic Party “doves,” in order to wage their “peace” campaigns in the framework of a class-collaborationist popular front with bourgeois politicians. In 1965-66, they hailed senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, the only ones to vote against LBJ’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

Another important “player” in the peace scene is the International Socialist Organization. While calling for a different U.S. policy, these small-time social patriots would not defend Afghanistan any more than they would defend Yugoslavia or Iraq against imperialist attack. The ISO points in a special supplement, “Don’t Turn Tragedy Into War” (Socialist Worker, 14 September), to how the CIA trained bin Laden, noting that when the mujahedin (Islamic holy warriors) were fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan, Ronald Reagan called them “freedom fighters.” What the ISO doesn’t mention is that it howled along with the Reaganites, declaring “We totally condemn the Russian invasion of Afghanistan” (Socialist Worker, January 1980). And when the Soviets pulled out nine years later, the ISO salivated: “The Mojahedin victory will encourage the opponents of Russian rule everywhere in the USSR and Eastern Europe” (Socialist Worker, 4 February 1989). 

In fact, the Soviet Army withdrawal did encourage counterrevolution internationally, which culminated in the destruction of the USSR and bureaucratically deformed workers states throughout East Europe. The working people there, who are suffering the ravages of capitalist restoration, and the women of Afghanistan, once again enslaved by the veil, will have accounts to settle with these pro-imperialist social democrats who cheered the victory of the Islamic fundamentalist cutthroats. 

In the face of the traumatic impact of the September 11 attack, a variety of left groups seek in different ways to feed off the sentiments of powerlessness and the thirst for vengeance whipped up by the bourgeois media. A 14 September statement by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) emotes: “As the dust clears from our eyes, the people in the most powerful country in the world find ourselves held hostage…” – what is this, some kind of right-wing tract? While it goes on to say that what “we” are “held hostage” to are “the inevitable repercussions of the actions of this U.S. power structure and their bloody military machine,” what the RCP is appealing to here is a sense of imperialist superiority. 

In turn, the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) simultaneously declares that “American workers are right to hate their enemies and to seek revenge for the massacre,” and that the terrorists responsible for the attacks “aimed a blow against imperialism,” although “their contempt for the loss of innocent life reflects their disregard for the lives of all people.” This schizophrenic quality accurately reflects the politics of the LRP, which seeks to appeal both to the chauvinism of the union bureaucracy and labor aristocracy in the imperialist countries and to “Third World” nationalists who see no difference between the U.S. government and American workers. Such contortions are to be expected from a group which like the Maoist RCP joined the anti-Soviet Cold War chorus (calling the USSR “capitalist”), while trying to maintain a leftist veneer.

Another group of self-proclaimed “revolutionary communists,” the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), issued a leaflet headlined “Condemn All Terrorism.” Covering over the fact that U.S. imperialism is by far the most powerful terrorist in the world, the PLP “evenhandedly” declares that the working class “is caught between two terrorists, the cowardly suicide bombers and the vicious U.S. ruling class.” In its newspaper Challenge (3 October), which praises “great Communist leaders like Stalin and Mao,” the lead article declares, “Our job is to fight all the rulers, not to mobilize our class to choose sides among them,” whether in Afghanistan or the U.S. Some “communists,” who refuse to choose sides with the victims of “their own” imperialism as it bombs semi-colonial countries!

Genuine communists defend semi-colonial countries against imperialist attack as we fight for socialist revolution against their bourgeois and, in the case of Afghanistan, feudalistic leaders. During the 1930s, Leon Trotsky and his supporters in the Fourth Internationalist movement defended Ethiopia against attack by Italian imperialism, without for a minute giving political support to the emperor Haile Selassie. And today it is crucial to stress defense of the remaining deformed workers states (China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba) against imperialism and internal counterrevolution.

The Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League (SL/ICL), for many years upheld the Trotskyist banner. The ICL correctly called to “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan,” and to extend gains of the October Revolution to the peoples of this impoverished Central Asian country. The Internationalist Group/U.S., section of the League for the Fourth International, was founded by long-time leading Spartacist cadres, and the IG/LFI continue to uphold these revolutionary Trotskyist politics as the ICL plunges deeper into centrist confusion. 

Thus the SL put out a statement dated September 12 with the innocuous title, “The World Trade Center Attack.” While a superhead called to “Oppose Domestic Repression, Imperialist ‘Retaliation’,” the beginning of the statement focuses on denouncing the terrorists, as does most of the end of the statement. Nowhere does the SL statement call to defend the countries (notably Afghanistan and Iraq) which were already targeted by Washington in the first hours after the WTC/Pentagon attack. For that matter, it doesn’t even call to defeat the mounting war drive, only to “oppose” it. This is no minor difference: as Lenin emphasized against “social pacifists” like Karl Kautsky in World War I, at issue is whether you are calling for a different policy for the imperialists or taking a stand for their defeat. Challenged by Internationalist Group supporters, SLers have repeatedly been unable to defend their statement, sometimes lamely saying it should be read together with past ICL statements, at other times lapsing into embarrassed silence.

While the U.S. imperialists cynically exploit the suffering of working people over the loss of family members, relatives and friends in the Trade Center attack, using their grief to whip up war hysteria and a drive toward a police state , it is the job of genuine revolutionaries not to speak “digestible truth” to power but to “tell the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter” as the rules of the Fourth International state. In the war that has been proclaimed by the imperialist rulers, communist internationalists must know how to struggle inside the imperialist juggernaut, to break through the chauvinist war propaganda to defend our embattled class brothers and sisters around the world against the greatest state terrorists of all, the U.S. imperialists, who are also the direct oppressors of the U.S. workers, minorities and poor.

The truth is that the endless wars, racism and economic crises will not end until capitalism is overthrown through international socialist revolution. It is urgent today to win workers and youth to the need to build a revolutionary workers party to lead that struggle. n

27 September 2001