Markin comment:
In 2007-2008 I, in vain,
attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American
presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed
election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the
event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious,
in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really
believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama
presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world
politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially
the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois
commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things
to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies,
the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for
a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some
of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.
************
A CALL TO
ALL WORKING PEOPLE / ANTI-IMPERIALIST YOUTH: HAVE NO ILLUSIONS-----WAR WITH
IRAQ IS COMING!!!
BUILD A
WORKER/ANTI-IMPERIALIST YOUTH UNITED FRONT AGAINST UNITED STATES/ UNITED
NATIONS ATTACK ON IRAQ!
DEFEND IRAQ AGAINST U.S./UN ALLIED
IMPERIALIST ATTACK!
SUPPORT EFFORTS BY IRAQI WORKERS,
PEASANTS, RELIGIOUS AND ETHIC MINORITIES TO OVERTHROW THE HUSSEIN REGIME!
DOWN WITH THE UN STARVATION BLOCKADE!
The war-crazed Bush-led United States government is leading
the world to war. Tens of thousands of American and British troops are getting
positioned for a full-scale attack on Iraq, while other powers from Australia
to Turkey elbow each other for a role in the slaughter and share of the loot.
The White House has already revealed plans for a post-Saddam military
occupation of Iraq. Look at the war chest of nuclear weapons that the United
Sates has and threatens to use today and it is clear that the fate of life on
this planet is threatened by the continued existence of this American led world
disorder.
In this war against Iraq workers and students in the United
States and elsewhere clearly have a side: we must stand for the military
defense of Iraq without giving any political support to the Hussein regime.
Hussein is a bloody oppressor of Iraqi workers, leftists, Shiite Muslims, the
Kurdish people and others. As such he was in the past a close ally and client
of the American government for a full two decades before he made a grab for
Kuwait in 1990. Mow the American government wants a more pliant regime and
tighter control of the oil spigot, not the least to put economic rivals like
Japan and Germany, who are more dependent on Near East oil, on rations. With
the latest renewed saber rattling over North Korea, Washington has made it
clear that that country will be next on its hit list in the event of an easy win
in Iraq. Every victory for the American government and its allies in their
predatory wars encourages further military adventures, every setback serves to
assist the struggles of the working peoples and the oppressed of the world.
The tremendous military advantages of the United Sates
against neocolonial Iraq- a country that has already been bled white through 12
years of United Nations sanctions which have killed more than one and one half
million civilians- underscores the importance of class struggle in the imperialist
centers as the chief means to give content to the call to defend Iraq. Every strike,
every labor mobilization against war plans, every mass protest against attacks
on workers and minorities, and every struggle against domestic repression and
against attacks on civil liberties represents a dent in the imperialist war
drive. To put an end to war once and for all, the capitalist system that breeds
war must be swept away through a series of revolutions and the establishment of
a rational, planned, egalitarian socialist economy on a world scale.
ANTI-IMPERILALISM ABROAD
MEANS CLASS STRUGGLE AT HOME! DEFEND IRAQ AGAINST AMERICAN ATTACK!
The extent to which Washington’s allies in the United
Nations, especially Germany, have openly criticized the Bush administration’s
rabid provocations in the Near East is a measure of the growth of tensions
among the capitalist powers in recent years. But, while objecting to the
rudeness of an American cowboy boot on their necks all of the subordinate
capitalist states will acquiesce to the dictates of the master of the
capitalist ruling classes, the United States, and they want to be rewarded with
at least a share of the spoils. As an official of a French oil company stated,
“We want the oil and we want to be in the game of rebuilding the country. If
there were a new regime and we have not been with the Americans, where will we
be?”
War: THE CONTINUATION OF
POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS
The American ruling class manipulated the grief and horror
felt by millions at the criminal and demented attack on the World Trade Center
to wage war on Afghanistan. But the patriotic consensus in the United Sates is
wearing thin and elsewhere there is massive opposition to a war against Iraq.
War demands civil peace and from Los Angeles to London the imperialist war makers
are revealed as vicious union-busters and strikebreakers. Declaring that a
strike could “threaten national security,” the Bush administration has brought
down the force of the capitalist state to coerce the powerful American dockers
union, the ILWU, to work under the dictates of the union-busting employers association.
Across the seas, British firefighters are threatened with strikebreaking by the
army. Plunging stock markets rob millions of workers of their pensions while
public scandals expose insatiable corporate greed. Tens of thousands of working
people, including the entire workforce at a number of Fiat plants in Italy.
Face a future of being unemployed by owners seeking to protect their own profit
margins amid the capitalist economic crisis. Civil liberties have been shredded
and the capitalists have intensified their assault on social welfare and other
gains wrested through decades of workers struggles.
Everywhere the anti-immigrant witch-hunt has been whipped up
to fever pitch in an effort by the capitalist rulers to deflect working-class
struggle with racism and xenophobia. The anti-immigrant hysteria provokes a
tide of blood as thousands of disparate refugees die trying to cross the U.S.
border from Mexico or to land a rickety boat in Australia or Europe. Now as the
mass of immigrants is not needed the capitalist system shows that it is the
biggest threat to workers everywhere. A decade ago the rulers crowed about the
supposed “death of communism.” But capitalism has once again brought the world
to an impasse which the Iraq war illuminates with the terrifying glare of missiles
streaking across the night sky. A workers student united front against these
imperialist acts is the only way forward.
In the United States, not even the dizzying flag-waving or
the heavy fist of state repression has induced the masses to embrace war with
Iraq. In Europe, hundreds of thousands of workers and anti-imperialist youth
have demonstrated their opposition to this war. The problem is that the
anti-war protests in Europe have all been channeled into a national-chauvinist
direction of getting one’s “own” rulers to stand up to the Americans. In
America, antiwar liberals and leftists bleat, “Money for jobs, not for war” and
so fuel the lie that fundamental priorities of the capitalist rulers can be
altered to serve the interests of working people.
The truth is that this whole capitalist system is based on
the extraction of profit for the owners of the means of production through the
exploitation and subjugations of the workers who produce the wealth of society.
War is a concentrated expression of this, as competing capitalist ruling
classes scramble to steal natural resources and to carve out new markets for
export of capital and fresh sources of cheap labor. The leader of the Russian
Revolution of 1917, Lenin, emphasized the difference between bourgeois
pacifism, which lulls the masses into passivity and embellishes capitalist
democracy, and the yearning for peace of the masses
In wars between the imperialist predators and plunderers
and their colonial and semi colonial victims. The proletariat has a side. As
Lenin stressed in his 1915 pamphlet SOCIALISM AND WAR: “If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on
France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Tsarist Russia, and so on,
these would be ‘just,,’ and ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who would be the
first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal
states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘Great Powers.”
There are palpable opportunities to organize class-struggle
opposition to imperialist war and to break the narrow nationalist and economist
limits of strikes contained by the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.
During the 1999 U.S./NATO war against Serbia, Italian COBAS unions organized a
one-million-strong political general strike against that war. Fiat workers, who
today battle plant closings in Italy, organized a campaign of material aid- a
campaign supported by all partisans of the international working class- for the
workers of the Yugoslav Zastava auto plant, which had been bombed by the
imperialists. In 2001, Japanese dock workers at Sasebo pointed the way forward
by “hot-cargoing” (refusing to handle) Japanese military goods for the war in
Afghanistan.
What is essential is to draw the class line and unshackle
the working people and anti-imperialist youth from capitalist politicians,
their agents in the trade unions and others who channel their justified hatred
of war into illusory calls for parliamentary reforms of the profit-driven
system that breeds war and, in West Europe, into support for their own ruling
classes against the Americans. Here, in the heart of the beast the workers and
anti-imperialist youth united front can point the way forward building an
internationalist perspective in the antiwar protests. Our demands should be:
Struggle against the bosses at home- the main enemy is at home Defend Iraq
against imperialist attack Down with the United Nations starvation blockade.
All U.S./ UN and allied troops out of the Persian Gulf and Near East
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