Lies, half-truths and weapons of mass destruction (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Every day Saddam remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons, and the development of nuclear weapons is a day of danger for the United States.” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, September 4, 2002

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” George Bush, March 18, 2003

“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.” Kenneth Adelman, US Defense Policy Board , March 23, 2003

“Saddam’s removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction.” Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003

“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003

In the months leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Blair regimes produced reams of documents to prove Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and how Saddam could realistically fire them within 45 minutes. As they geared up for war they reiterated time and again that their intention was solely to rid Iraq of its WMD and make the world a more stable place for decent and god-fearing people to live in. They campaigned long and hard for their war – for the support of their peers in governments and for the backing of the US and British electorates and, convinced they had the mandate for war, invaded Iraq in March. Two months after the end of the fighting no “illegal” weapons have been found and the odds of finding any diminish greatly as the days go by.

The recent admission from a British security chief that the 50-page “intelligence” report on Iraq’s WMD presented by Tony Blair to Parliament on 24 September last year – and used as the Labour government’s evidence for Iraq’s illicit weapons inventory – was spiced up on the government’s instructions came as no real surprise for those who have scrutinised the unfolding of the US-UK war with Iraq and the Labour government’s desperation to be part of it. Since the transatlantic plan to invade Iraq was hatched it was apparent that Truth would again be the First Casualty of War.

For their part, the CIA and their British counterparts have tried to distance themselves from their respective governments these past few weeks, with unprecedented briefings and leaks to the press, desperate to avoid the backlash that has lead to some serious questioning in London and Washington.

On a visit to Poland on 30 May, Tony Blair told a press conference that finding the weapons in Iraq was “not the most urgent priority”. And yet, according to the claims of the dossier that he defends, Saddam Hussein “has a useable chemical and biological weapons capability” and that his “current military planning specifically envisages the use” of these weapons. For months we had the Blair government ramming the WMD issue down our throats, pleading for our support for his war with Saddam, who threatened the civilisation we cherished. Yet as Saddam and his military top brass, who presumably know about these WMD, which are yet to be found, are still on the run we are told that finding the weapons is not an urgent priority!

Also now discredited by the CIA is the evidence US Secretary of State Colin Powell eagerly displayed to the UN Security Council at the beginning of February. Powell provided explicit particulars of the key players in Iraq’s WMD programme as well as the sites that are now under US military control. Nevertheless, the biologically-armed “missile brigade”, which he claimed was situated outside Baghdad has proved to be a figment of his imagination and the weapons scientists he informed the world were afraid of talking because of Saddam’s reach have not yet disclosed any secrets. As with the alleged “poison camp” near Khurmal, its labyrinth of tunnels and complex chemical communication network, so too with the photos of twenty or so Baghdad-based al-Qa’ida members the UN was presented with. No evidence whatsoever.

In spite of every quality newspaper demanding answers from him in the wake of the secret services admission, Blair, it seemed, was learning nothing. Rather than running for cover he began blurting more lies, claiming that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the African state of Niger. The documentary evidence this fresh allegation was based on has since been confirmed as forgery by the International Atomic Energy Authority. Indeed, the Bush administration was aware that this evidence was bogus a year earlier – something Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have since admitted. Moreover, early last year Vice President Dick Cheney sent a former US ambassador in Africa to Niger look into the story. Although the latter brought back word that the documents were not genuine, this was not sufficient to prevent the use of these documents as part of Bush’s rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

The sorry situation becomes more pathetic. US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld has lately offered that the reason Saddam’s WMD can’t be found is because they were destroyed before the war started. In other words the US-Britain invaded Iraq to rid the region of weapons Saddam never had and indeed that Saddam claimed he never had and which the UN weapons inspectors suggested he never had. If this was the case, then Saddam could never have been in breach of the famous resolution 1441, which was the justification for war.

Critics might consider that in light of recent revelations Blair should resign and that Bush should be impeached. Surely politicians should not be allowed to lie like this! But hold on.

Lying is the trade of politicians under capitalism.

Back in 1925, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “This broad mass of a nation . . . will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Blair and Bush are fully aware of the power of the big lie, so little wonder they thought they could get away with it. Moreover they are fully aware their support base swallows lies every living moment of the day. For the workers’ part they are lied to from the cradle to the grave: at school with distortions of history and the myth about a God up above; in the workplace, as producers, lied to by their bosses and at home as consumers bombarded with the myths perpetuated by the advertising industry.

To be sure, the entire capitalist edifice depends for its continued survival on the promotion of lies, half truths and the distortion of facts. So powerful is the capitalist distortion machine that it takes all our powers of concentration, memory recall and skills of research just to separate the simplest of lies from fantasy. This constant digest of misinformation perhaps explains the amnesia the majority of workers appear to suffer from. And what is exasperating is that in spite of all the evidence revealing the architects of war to be the conniving and scheming rapscallions we always knew them to be, it is a fair bet that many workers will again be ready to believe their lies when Iran is found to be stockpiling WMD and harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists.

It may well be that WMD will be found in Iraq – but the assumption now will be that will have been planted there by corrupt Western regimes desperate to justify their invasion. And this evidence will likely be used not only to prop up the discredited Messrs Bush and Blair but also to malign the anti-war movement – which claimed this was a war for oil – and to further strengthen their case for a continuation of the “war on terror”.

In the months ahead be careful what you swallow.

John Bissett

Oil and the Rest (2008)

Book review from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Armed Madhouse’. By Greg Palast, (Penguin £8.99)

There are three main themes in this book: the relation of oil to the US invasion of Iraq, the plight of American workers, and the way in which US elections are manipulated. Despite its American emphasis, it’s well worth a read.

It is hardly original to claim that the Iraqi invasion was due to US concerns over oil supplies. Palast, however, goes much further than this and argues that there were two conflicting views within the American ruling class. The neo-conservatives wanted to sell Iraq’s oil fields to various private companies, leading to a massive increase in production. This flooding of the market would undermine OPEC, which operates by imposing production limits, and so bring Saudi Arabia to its knees. In contrast, the big American oil companies opposed a sell-off and wanted the oil to be owned by the Iraqi state. That would make it straightforward to restrict production and keep prices high, thus boosting their profits and the value of their own reserves. The invasion, then, would not be about gaining access to Iraqi oil but about controlling the world price of oil (which was difficult with the unpredictable Saddam in power). Palast argues that Big Oil and their State Department allies eventually won the day — the price of oil now would seem to back this up.

Domestically, American capitalism is becoming more and more unequal. One percent of US households own 53 percent of all shares in the stock market. Median wages have gone down by 4 percent under Bush, but the bottom fifth of earners have lost no less than 20 percent of their income. Between 2000 and 2006 output per worker in America went up by nearly one fifth, but workers get less and less of what they produce. Nearly three million are no longer entitled to overtime at time-and-a-half after working forty hours a week. Modern-day capitalism needs a certain number of highly-educated workers, but the rest need to be identified early so that little money is wasted on ‘educating’ them.

Lastly, attacks on the electoral system go well beyond the ‘hanging chads’ of the 2000 presidential election. Palast presents evidence that both then and in 2004 many votes were simply not counted or wrongly rejected as spoiled. Electronic voting machines often don’t work properly, and they exclude the possibility of recounts. Voting machines were removed from many areas likely to vote Democrat, leading to huge queues at voting stations. And many potential voters have been unable to register, perhaps because they are wrongly claimed to have a criminal record or have no authentic ID. Less than half of Americans earning below $15,000 a year are now eligible to vote, and generally poor, black and Hispanic would-be voters are given a hard time in both registering to vote and having their vote recorded.

It might be interesting to reflect on whether these last points have any implications for the idea of using the electoral system to demonstrate the existence of overwhelming support for Socialism when the time comes.

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Digging Up Old Bones (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics and ideologies are in reality best understood not as imponderable excursions into the deeper truths of society but as products mass-produced off a production line and sitting on ideological supermarket shelves with brightly coloured labels, often red, blue, yellow or green or some novel mix thereof. One thing which you cannot fail to have noticed about commodities generally, and which these ‘soft’ commodities share with ‘hard goods’ like washing machines, cleaning products and tinned spaghetti is the inane compulsion to keep rebranding themselves with the legend NEW! in a big starburst banner just next to the price. As with NEW! pasta shapes, so with NEW! Labour. As with NEW! blue-whiteness, so with NEW! blue sky thinking. As with ‘revolutionary’ NEW! hair colour, or our special NEW! improved recipe, the manufacturers are challenging you to do what is probably impossible, and spot a difference that doesn’t exist, due to a change they didn’t make on a formula they didn’t modify. Why the manufacturers do this, in a fast-changing world where novelty has a short shelf-life, is too obvious to need spelling out, but one has a deep-rooted suspicion that many consumers too are so accustomed to these everyday revolutions that they would manage to find a difference between ‘old’ cola and ‘new’ cola even if there wasn’t one. This may be because they desire to see themselves as sophisticated and discerning customers with subtle palates that can detect changes at homeopathic levels, and thus they delude themselves and their peers, and in so doing become accessories to the grand illusion, perfectly trained pavlovian customers of capitalism.

Anyone who remembers, say, the adverts of the 1970s will have a strange feeling of detached deja-vu when seeing modern commercials for ‘revolutionary new products’ such as sunglasses that react to light (aka ‘reactolites’ in the 1970s ), but the feeling is somehow detached because nobody seems to remark on the fact that this is yesterday’s leftovers being served up as fresh. Perhaps to the extent that we stop bothering to protest, we join those consumers who can detect non-existent changes to recipes and in our own way become complicit in the grand illusion, finally for the sake of a quiet life pretending we don’t remember or don’t care. Meanwhile those who don’t remember previous incarnations will of course be under the happy impression that they are getting the newest and the brightest and the best of everything.

So it is part of the heavy labour of any forward-looking revolutionary to be backward-looking as well, in order to recall all the previous times society, debates, ideas and individuals have trod the same paths and been down the same blind alleys, and to remind those who are listening that the most heavily signposted routes are usually the ones that don’t go anywhere. And where politics, or its twisted and malicious great-aunt, religion, impact on the one truly novel field of human endeavour, science, the same dead hands of bigotry beckon us down the same old cul-de-sacs, winding along scenic back roads that skirt the evidence and obscure the real lay of the land.

So it is with the ‘controversy’ over Darwinian evolution. Just when you think, after the recent court judgments in America against it, that creationism is becoming a laughing stock and the American public are finally becoming tired of being caricatured as vegetable-brained hicks who praise the Lord and marry their sisters, the debate convulses once again, a bubble emerges from the fetid swamp, and a NEW! argument explodes over the scenery. Neoconservatives, it seems, are now at war with the religious right in an attempt to reclaim Darwin as the ideological figurehead, not of the scientific liberal progressive agenda, but of red-blooded two-fisted Republican screw-the-other-guy frontier capitalist values (‘A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin’, New York Times, May 5). The argument of the neo-cons is of course that evolution, being ‘red in tooth and claw’, and involving the ‘survival of the fittest’, is perfectly suited to the conservative view of capitalism. Never mind that the first of these phrases was coined by T H Huxley and the second by Herbert Spencer, Darwin is held up as the perfect justification for any amount of callous disregard by the rich of the vast majority of the world’s poor population, and the only people persistently getting in the way of this wonderful ‘proof’ of capitalism’s natural and therefore inevitable provenance are those silly religious evangelists who don’t seem to understand how to intelligently design capitalism’s propaganda machine.

And it is at this point that the reactolite factor sets in. People new to this debate might screw up their eyes, dazzled by the spectacle of conservatives being pro-Darwin and fighting their own religious brethren. But there’s more. What would they make of the logical extension to this scenario, which is the emergence of a liberal progressive element opposed to evolution? Yet the world has seen it all before, where the conservatives championed Darwin and the liberal progressives championed creationism. It was a sell-out gig, it was a set-up, it ruined careers, and it made history. It was the Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, a trial so bizarre that the defendant deliberately got himself accused as a teacher of evolution even though he was actually a football coach, where his friends were on the prosecution counsel, and where the jury was instructed by the defence not to find him innocent. The story of this world-famous publicity stunt, engineered entirely by the defendant and his team of bible-baiters, is hugely entertaining and too long to indulge here (but look it up in Wikipedia).

Why the pro-evolution lobby, and people like Clarence Darrow and H L Mencken, would want to crucify the religious right in public is not difficult for any scientifically-minded progressive to comprehend, especially one with a sense of humour. But, asked Stephen Jay Gould, in his perceptive article on the subject, what on earth possessed a liberal and progressive, three-times Presidential candidate like William Jennings Bryan, a man who had devoted his life to social reform, to lead the prosecution, in what he must have known was an ambush (see Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, 1999)? Bryan, ever since lampooned as the villain of the piece, was according to Gould motivated not so much by any fondness for the theory of creationism or its adherents as by a truly messianic hatred of the iniquitous implications of what had already by then become known as Social Darwinism, a vicious ideology of social callousness which owed more to Spencer than Darwin and whose consequences in social inequality and poverty Bryan had spent his life trying to battle. Gould, himself a lifelong bitter opponent of creationists, nevertheless manages to paint a sympathetic portrait of a decent man consigned to history as a buffoon, who found himself on the wrong side for the right reasons.

To socialists this is all old hat now, and they won’t be tempted into the debate between neo-cons and evangelists in the neo-neo-Darwin saga. They know that Darwin wasn’t a social Darwinist, that capitalism doesn’t show the survival of the fittest but in fact destroys the healthy host and preserves the degenerate and useless parasite, and also that the enemy of your religious enemy is not necessarily your friend. Those addicted to the NEW! however might end up scratching their heads over this one.

Paddy Shannon

Iraq, imperialism and the anti-war campaign (2005)

From the July 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The anti-war campaign agitates for withdrawal of all Australian and US troops from Iraq, but this is not a demand for no war in Iraq (although the campaign organisers seem to think that it is), it is a demand that the existing civil war be allowed to continue without the US and Australia backing one side or the other. The fact that the civil war started because of the US invasion does not change this.

It is wildly unlikely, but just possible, that the US would indeed withdraw. They have done something loosely similar in Vietnam, Somalia and Lebanon. Conceivably, it could happen in Iraq. However, Iraqi oil is an enormously rich prize, and the strategic leverage that it would grant to the US over the EU, China and Japan is an even richer prize.

The US invaded Iraq to gain control of the most cheaply accessible large oilfields in the world. It will withdraw only if the insurgency makes the military costs of controlling Iraq (which increase the effective cost of producing the oil) so great that these costs become an intolerable burden on the US capitalist class as a whole, or if popular resistance in the US and throughout their allies produces the same effect.

Almost certainly, the insurgency would have to get much, much worse or popular resistance massively increase, before that point was reached, because the US does not want the oil of Iraq only for the sake of the profits to be gained from it.

They also want it because having control over the two largest oil producers in OPEC (Saudi Arabia and Iraq) would mean that the US would have something approaching a veto over the industrial development of their three main world rivals; China, Japan and the EU.

The justifications for the invasion are entirely hypocritical, both the pre-invasion claims about the weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion ones based on the blood-soaked repressiveness of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the story that “We did it to bring democracy to the Iraqis”. We may begin to take Iraqi democracy and sovereignty seriously when the US government is willing to accept an order from an elected Iraqi government that US forces leave Iraq.

The Ba’athist regime was, indeed, one of the world’s worst tyrannies, but that didn’t bother the US while Iraq was a US ally, during, for example, the Iran-Iraq war. The US has no objection to blood-soaked tyrannies, provided that they are useful (meaning profitable, directly or indirectly) to the US ruling class. The chemical and biological WMD, or the facilities for making them, were originally supplied by the US and Western European governments, at a time when there were certainly terrorist outfits headquartered in Baghdad; Abu Nidal’s, for one. So, the possibility that Iraq would pass WMD to terrorists (a possibility that the US and other Western governments helped create), only became a threat when the US needed an excuse for an invasion.  Andrew Wilkie, who was in a position to know, developed the real point:

  “Superimposed over specifics like oil, however, was a much bigger issue – the US’s determination to safeguard and enhance its global ideological, economic and military hegemony. This is the big one: the grand strategy of the US to reign supreme permanently, as espoused by the so-called ‘neo-conservatives’ and articulated bluntly in September 2002 in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. In this quest, Iraq was as much a demonstration as a consequence – an almost theatrical performance against a country consequent enough for people to notice, for reasons alarming enough for people to care, on terms lopsided enough to guarantee a crushing demonstration of US military muscle. Or at least that was the idea.”

However, even if the US did withdraw, then almost certainly, Iraq would not be left to its own blood-letting; there would very probably be other invasions, Turkey and Iran being the obvious candidates, Syria and Saudi Arabia other possibilities.

Even if, through some miracle, there was no further foreign interference in Iraq after a US withdrawal, there is no reason for confidence that the civil war would stop anytime soon or even that it would be less bloody in the absence of US and Australian troops. One of the bloodiest civil wars of the twentieth century occurred only a little over ten years ago, without any obvious interference from the West, except for a French intervention to protect the perpetrators of the genocide; we refer, of course, to Rwanda.

That civil war fed directly into what must be the worst war in the world; in the Congo there have been an estimated 3 million dead and it’s still going on. Almost certainly, the riches that can be looted from Iraq, and the strategic advantage that can be gained from that looting, exceed those that can be had by looting from the Congo; which is one reason why the West is not directly involved in the Congo. (Although all the states surrounding Congo, plus Zimbabwe, are) It is also why Iraq will not be left alone; any state that can see an opportunity to interfere, will.

No one, least of all anti-war demonstrators in Australia, should pretend that any of these possibilities are in any way in the interests of the people of Iraq.

Virtually all the left-wing agitation about Australian foreign policy, and US imperial policy, is based on the underlying assumption (or rather, fantasy), that the natural order of capitalism is a world of independent, sovereign, mutually-respectful nations. What is thought to be necessary to achieve this is that the US stop acting as an imperialist thug, and that Australia stop helping them do it. Nice idea, but capitalism just ain’t like that.

It’s a world system of interdependent, not a worldwide collection of independent ones.

If the US declines as an imperialist power, others will take their place, China being an obvious candidate and, given the Chinese government’s record of racist, genocidal colonialism in Tibet, they may even make the US look moderate by comparison. An obvious target for the first major Chinese imperialist adventure is the group of oil-and-natural-gas-rich states between the Chinese Western border and the Caspian Sea.

Capitalist states (of which China is one) are not moral entities, and their ruling classes do not react to attempts at moral persuasion. They perpetually seek profit and react to what could loosely be called profit-and-loss calculations. If profit requires that they dominate other countries (to the extent that they can), so be it.

The consent of the ruled (us!) is essential to the continued functioning of capitalism (in both its state-capitalist and private-capitalist forms). Our consent, or our resistance, is part of our rulers’ profit-and-loss estimates.

We can make this particular imperialist adventure too difficult or too expensive for the rulers of Australia, which is, after all, a junior partner of US capitalism.

The people of the US and the rest of the world, by huge efforts, could make the Iraq occupation too difficult or too expensive, even for the dominant capitalist power. But as long as we, all of us, consent to the capitalist system as a whole, in other words, so long as we resist only this particular imperialist adventure, then there will be more imperialist adventures, by the US and others, more bloodshed, and more terrorist atrocities.

There will also be more poverty, ecological devastation, and more lives spent on mostly-meaningless work and totally meaningless consumerism.

All that the protest organisers can offer, fundamentally, is the prospect of more problems within capitalism, including more wars caused by imperialist adventures, and by rulers using “ethnic tensions” to grab territory, etc., and more protests against those problems and wars. And so on, and on, and on.

There’s got to be a better way, and there is; abolish capitalism. That’s what we are working for.

The only solution is to work for a world system based on common ownership, and moneyless, free access to wealth. Only then can we have genuinely democratic economies, and therefore genuinely democratic societies. We call this socialism. (which has nothing to do with the deeply repressive and now-failed variant of capitalism invented in the former Soviet Union, and adapted in China, Vietnam, etc.)

The precondition for this society is a majority who understand and want socialism, and understand and reject capitalism. Nothing less than this can give us socialism. Leaders certainly can’t.

Huge efforts are required. Let’s make sure that they are directed towards getting off the treadmill that is capitalism, not towards trying to turn it into something it can’t be.

World Socialist Party of Australia leaflet.

Bourgeois Blues: The Future of a Collusion (2017)

From the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again” (— The Who)

The recent presidential election in the US has left many people around the world confused if not anxious. Yet worrying about Donald Trump This and Donald Trump That misses the point — and gives the Left altogether too much credit.

The Trump victory is symptomatic that the capitalist class has lost its revolutionary cachet. It rose to power having seduced its creature, the working class, to help it seize power in revolutions all over the world, most typically those in mid-19th century Europe. To accomplish this feat, it made a radical switch in the Romantic era, from fulminating against the menace of letting the working class govern – excoriated as ‘a great beast’ (The People) by Alexander Hamilton – to making common cause with its own class enemies, on the promise of indefinite rewards once the bourgeois middle class took power.

Overall, this new policy tended to work like a charm, though it was not without its problems. For one thing, it inadvertently legitimized long-standing grievances and demands of ‘power to the people’ that traced their roots back to the French Revolution of 1789 – in much the same way as the US would later legitimize the emerging Islamist movement of the 1970s by intervening in Afghanistan.

But the corporate revolution that set in following World War I caused the capitalist class to think better of its earlier flirtation with the forces of democracy and revolution. Increasingly conservative, many capitalists began thinking instead in terms of consolidating their power, a trend which the war had accelerated. Liberal capitalism was morphing into something more cohesive, a richer, denser plutocracy whose most pressing need was to thwart efforts to modify capitalism’s power structure in favour of the working class.

The ultimate expression of this trend today bears the ungainly names of ‘neo-liberalism’ and ‘neo-conservatism.’ Its adepts brandish a massive array of carrot-and-stick policies aimed at controlling or confounding the working class through vast networks of deception, disinformation and – where these fail – naked force. But fussing over the details of class struggle can lead to its own peculiar myopia. Today’s all-powerful Right is actually a very shaky and dysfunctional bandwagon; its factions will in all likelihood begin falling out before too long. And borrowing from Marx’s observation in The 18th Brumaire, it is not hard to imagine a follow-up pendulum swing back in the other direction, as neo-New-Dealers farcically attempt a comeback, hoping to recover what they can from the preceding wreckage.

So what does this portend, exactly? Historically, politically and economically, the working class has always been the material force underwriting the legitimacy of capitalism. In the works, under the leadership of the oil billionaires, is nothing less than Capital’s gratuitous renunciation of any acknowledgement that it ever depended on the working class – especially for political support. Our Betters no longer need us to move and shake the world, either at times of crisis or in the hurly-burly of business. We are being handed our walking papers as a class. History is over. The hubris of Capital has grown so huge the master class now figures that the bad old days of needing our help every so often are, well, history. This naturally reinforces a tendency to regress to the earlier open antagonism toward any hint of a threat to profits. And we are in fact already there.

Some of this might even seem convincingly gloomy, as the capitalist class has shown no bashfulness about converting the enormous gobs of surplus value we have given them over the past two centuries into a 1984-style totalitarian control that makes the Nazis look like stuffy Victorians. Leftists continue to build careers around posturing before the monstrous injustices, the sheer wickedness, of the capitalist class; if your head is stuck inside their box, Marx’s rhetorical portrait of the challenges faced by a proletarian revolution might well induce a suffocating pessimism.

But in reality, no one can win the class war: capitalists cannot have everything their way any more than those whom they exploit. The capitalist class can only use the class struggle to its advantage, and every so often the working class manages to score a few upper-cuts of its own. The real question is the limits to which this struggle can be pushed. At the end of the day, however, it is not anyone’s wish-dreams that make the world go round. It is what humans find in the natural world and pass on to future generations that governs the fortunes of economic classes.

We are about to find out just where these limits lie. Capital has been testing them all along (with virtually everyone’s benediction), and now it must prove that ‘dominating’ nature really can be pulled off with impunity. Science is telling us some very alarming things to the contrary. And if we are to take those reports seriously, it is clear that climate change is going to tear the guts out of Capital’s average rate of profit, as the cost of responding to ‘natural’ disasters goes through the roof. However Capital may respond, the skyrocketing cost will overwhelm the fragile defences of the profit economy; the best we can hope for will be an anaemic and erratic global economy struggling endlessly to get back out of the red.

From an ant’s perspective, this decay might appear to be different from the fate of all other empires, but the variation is only one of degree.

Politically, all of this is guaranteed to test the working class’s loyalty and its willingness to continue pocketing the insults of Capital. So if the capitalist class is now moving triumphantly to inaugurate a neo-liberal/neo-conservative dispensation, cramming its hateful counter-reforms down the throat of an unwilling majority, it is a cinch that the capitalists are naïvely setting themselves up as a pack of unloved élitists wearing Scrooge costumes – just as Mother Nature, looming over them, prepares to whack the daylights out of their profit system.

For such a fatuous forgetfulness to set in at any juncture would entail serious consequences: for it to set in now, as unprecedented systemic stresses generated by climate change start rolling down the pike, will surely prove a fatal error. In forgetting where it came from, the capitalist class courts the loss of critical support at a critical moment and looks down the same road as the destitute Absolute Monarchy that once ruled France before 1789, until an angry and frustrated middle class finally lopped off its head.

The difference is that this time, the anti-capitalist revolution will not be headed by minorities bent on carving out a new status quo for themselves. Strictly speaking, it will not be headed by anyone at all. To the capitalist class it will appear like a frightening pandemic of madness, as the whole world seriously discusses ending the rule of Capital forever. But the only way to ‘fix’ capitalism is to abolish both wages and capital, and once that gate has been opened, the road back becomes irretrievably closed. All functions of leadership collapse into the cold, hard logic of common survival, whose articulation is at the disposal of every thinking person. That is what will make it world history’s one and only socialist revolution.

Ron Elbert

World Socialist Party (US)

American centuries, old and new (2003)

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The United States ended the twentieth century as the unchallenged global superpower, and its ruling class are determined not only to keep it that way but also, if possible, to extend their control over world events. The Free Trade Area of the Americas, for instance, which is due to be introduced in 2005, will enable the US to rule the roost in Central and South America, using cheap labour and preventing other countries from imposing import controls. Already, the North American Free Trade Agreement has helped ensure that most ordinary Mexicans are poorer than their parents were, to the benefit of US financial and industrial companies.

One particular vision of the future along such lines is contained in the documents of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) (see their website at www.newamericancentury.org*, from which the quotations below are taken). This is a think-tank and pressure group whose members include top politicans and industrialists; many past members are high up in the Bush administration, so it is in no way a fringe organisation. They argue that cuts in US defence spending (so-called) in recent years have made it difficult to sustain American influence around the world, so such spending needs to be significantly increased (recall that it is at present nearly $400 billion per year!). Armed forces that are ready for “tomorrow's battlefields” will serve the nation well and act as a deterrent against any possible upstart. In their own words:

“At present the United States faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”
“The willingness to devote adequate resources to maintaining America's military strength can make the world safer and American strategic interests more secure now and in the future.”

The PNAC were of course strong advocates of the US attack on Iraq, claiming that a regime change would lead to democratisation not just of Iraq itself but of the whole of the Middle East, “an objective of overriding strategic importance to the United States”

Not much critical scrutiny is needed to see through this language of strategic interests and a safer world: the aim is to control access to raw materials (oil in particular), to ensure the availability of cheap labour, and to enable military bases to be sited and maintained where the US rulers wish. At the end of the 1970s, the US was powerless to prevent or undermine the takeover of the Iranian government by the ayatollahs, and the ensuing rise in oil prices; this is just the kind of situation that the US rulers and their mouthpieces seek to render impossible in future.

It may be felt that the capitalists in PNAC simply wish to get their snouts in the trough and to gain their firms' share of the massive US military spending. No doubt this is part of the truth, and there is some degree of conflict between companies that benefit from the defence budget and those that do not do so but still have to pay taxes. However, there is no firm and unvarying line between corporations that have big government orders placed with them and those that miss out on this jamboree. Most big companies stand to receive some gain from increased military spending – or hope to do so – and they are the ones that have the biggest say in determining government policy. But it is not simply a matter of some having their greedy fingers in the big-spending pie: such policies really are undertaken in the interests of the whole ruling class.

This, then, is the vision of America's rulers for the coming century: an enormous US military presence on a global scale, laying down what other countries can do, intimidating them into acceptance of the US order, and bombing them into submission when they forget their place. A world of “free trade” where the biggest bully in the playground enforces treaties and agreements in its own interest. A world of massacres and dictatorships, where the American capitalists rake in the billions, and ordinary people, wherever they live, are just pawns on the profit-oriented chessboard. Already, as the military budget grows under Bush, US spending on health care and education is being cut: teachers are getting the sack, and thousands of workers are losing health cover.

The other side

For a contrasting view of the USA, we can look at Studs Terkel's book My American Century. Terkel, who was born in 1912 and is still going strong, is a superb interviewer and oral historian who is able to get people to talk in eloquent and often moving ways about their lives. My American Century is a selection from his publications over the years, from Division Street (1967) to Coming of Age (1995), and provides an unforgettable portrait of twentieth-century America, mostly through the words of ordinary people. It is worth reading just for the story of CP Ellis (from American Dreams, 1980). Ellis was once president of a local Ku Klux Klan branch; he had joined because the Klan gave him a chance to “be something”, which had been beyond him as a poor white worker. But gradually he came to see that the rich were using him and his Klan colleagues to keep ordinary workers, black and white, in their place, and that all workers had the same problems. When Terkel interviewed him, Ellis was a union official, elected by a predominantly black membership.

Terkel's own position can be seen from the heartfelt opening of his introduction to Working (1972):

“This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.”

Time and again, Terkel's subjects talk of the boredom and meaninglessness of work, of how they feel they are treated worse than the machines they operate, of how they have no control over their job and feel no pride in it. But some kinds of work are rewarding. Tom Patrick, firefighter:

“I worked in a bank. You know, it's just paper. It's not real. Nine to five and it's shit. You're looking at numbers. But I can look back and say, 'I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody'. It shows something I did on this earth.”

But despite their frustrations, workers feel unable to find a real way of fighting back: as CP Ellis says, “Hatin' America is hard to do because you can't see it to hate it.”

Another remarkable theme is the way that workers look back to past times and see them as examples of solidarity and co-operation. There is quite likely some viewing the past through rose-coloured glasses here, but the way people value mutual help is clear over and again, especially in descriptions of the thirties:

“That period was the high point of my life. It was the Depression, when working people had a feeling for each other. We helped each other out in times of trouble.”
“A lot of times one family would have some food. They would divide. And everyone would share.”

Here's Tom Patrick again:

“I like everybody workin' together. You chip in for a meal together. One guy goes to the store, one guy cooks, one guy washes the dishes. A common goal. We got a lieutenant there, he says the fire department is the closest thing to socialism there is.”

Not quite – but workers who combine together towards a common goal in their own interests point far better towards the future than the plutocrats who want the whole world to become a means to their own wealth and power.

Paul Bennett

*Dead Link.