"Socialist Perspectives on the Iraq War,
Part Two"
April 15, 2003 Iraq War Teach-in Conducted
by Eau Claire Staff and Faculty for Peace and Justice
"War is the Continuation of Business by
Other Means"
Stacy Thompson
My aim, here, is to take the fundamentals of socialism
that Bob has been discussing and build on them. Specifically, I want
to talk about how the current U.S. business and government’s aims are entirely
in line with what we might expect from the U.S.’s tiny capitalist ruling class
– quite literally a plutocracy – composed of government and business interests
indistinguishable from one another. As Bob has explained, capitalism
depends, for its continuation, upon the exploitation of labor and the consequent
production of surplus value. But the problem, for capitalists, is that
cheap labor eventually – perhaps inevitably -- becomes organized and ceases
to be so cheap. After a time, workers begin to demand a living wage,
health care, and other basic necessities. In the best of cases, laws
are also drafted to protect workers from a host of dangers on the job.
But the capitalist class doesn’t welcome these laws because they make labor
more expensive. Although I am speaking in very broad, simple terms,
my point is that the logic of capitalism demands the cheapest yet most productive
labor possible and, therefore, U.S. capital simultaneously chases cheap labor
across the globe and tries to drive the price of labor down at home.
For example, in August of 1981, air traffic controllers
went on strike in an effort to improve their working conditions – they were
especially concerned about stress on the job, wages, retirement benefits,
and hours. President Reagan intervened, announcing that it was unlawful
for the workers to strike and firing them all. Throughout the 1980s,
the Reagan administration weakened labor unions, cut social spending on the
poorest Americans, and reduced tax rates for the wealthiest Americans.
These domestic policies accompanied the well-documented, if often clandestine
or at least behind-the-scenes, military intervention of the U.S. in the politics
and economics of Latin America. According to David North, writing for
the World Socialist Web Site, the domestic and international policies
of the 80s resulted in two major developments: “within the United States the
living standards of the working class either stagnated or declined; [and]
within the so-called ‘Third World’ there occurred a horrifying deterioration
in the conditions of hundreds of millions of people.” The ruling class
and the wealthiest sections of the upper-middle class” in the U.S. reaped
enormous economic gains (North). North goes on to explain that capitalism
can be understood as a type of zero-sum game: in his words, “The American
ruling elite is hardly unaware of the relationship between its own wealth
and the exploitation . . . of the great mass of the world’s population.”
He adds that in the 1990s, the “economic stability of American capitalism
and, with it, the vast fortunes accumulated by its ruling elite in the course
of the speculative boom on Wall Street became dependent . . . [on] depressed
wage levels in the United States and the continuing supply from overseas of
cheap raw materials (especially oil) and low cost labor” (North). North’s
comment that the raw materials are “cheap” simply means that U.S. oil producers
were exploiting the workers who actually extracted the oil at a tremendously
profitable rate.
This radically abbreviated history of the past two decades
brings us to the bursting of the most recent economic bubble in the late 90s.
North notes that there has been a “protracted depression in profit levels
in the basic manufacturing industries” in the U.S. Consequently, [e]xecutives,
lacking any confidence in the long-term growth in the real value of the assets
for which they are supposedly responsible, devote themselves entirely to
their own short-term self-enrichment.” In other words, the executives
at Enron and Worldcom read the writing on the wall and tried to take the
money and run before the bubble burst. The World Socialist Web Site’s
Editorial Board reminds us that “two million workers have lost their jobs
since Bush took office, nearly half a million of them in the last two months
alone.”
It is at this moment that we might consider Bertolt Brecht’s famous dictum,
“war is the continuation of business by other means.” As the Red Collective
– a Marxist group that publishes the Red Critique – comments, “[t]he
economic and financial weakness of the U.S. exposed by the collapse of the
stock market bubble and corporate corruption scandals is ensuring that American
military hegemony and wars of effective annexation become increasingly integral
to global capitalism in the coming period” (Imperialism Now). They add
that “[u]sing warfare when capitalist ‘democracy’ fails to serve the interest
of profit is, as Lenin explains, integral to capitalism in its monopoly phase
in which giant transnational corporations grown increasingly desperate for
greater profits compete for (re)division of the world market and for economic
territory.” In short, “[I]mperialist wars are not an anomaly but a
necessity under capitalism,” and the war in Iraq is exactly such a war.
In other words, the war with Iraq
is a calculated effort to maintain the exploitation necessary to keep the
capitalist economy of the U.S. functioning, an economy in which the annual
income of the richest fourteen thousand families is greater than the annual
income of the poorest twenty million families. To maintain the incredible
wealth of that 5% of the population – those 14,000 families – the U.S. desperately
needs cheap labor, which is what the killing of at least several thousand
Iraqis is really supposed to accomplish. But what is the connection
between oil and labor? I would like to read the last four paragraphs
from the Red Collective’s article, “Oil and War,” which explains this connection
clearly:
But objects—whether essential natural resources such
as oil and water or manufactured commodities—do not produce wealth (and yield
political power). Labor does. While nature provides a source of use-values
[objects that fulfill some need], it is labor-power which turns them into
social wealth [objects that represent a certain amount of human labor as their
value]. Thus, in the first instance, without the labor of thousands
of workers to build the machines that locate, drill, ship and process the
oil, it would remain an undiscovered and unused substance, sitting idle in
the ground. It is human labor-power that enables oil to become a resource
of production and, under capitalism, it is control over exploited labor-power
that turns oil, like all means of production, into a commodified source of
private wealth.
It is only through the agency of labor, in short, that
capitalist wealth—whether from oil or any other object—is produced. By equating
oil with wealth, the dominant commentaries on the war from both the right
and the left erase the issue of the exploitation of labor in the production
of wealth and thus obscure the fact that the fundamental issue of war on Iraq
is not simply about control over oil and oil profits: it is about gaining
control over the world supply of surplus labor. By controlling the world's
oil resources, the U.S. will be in a position to control the rate of economic
growth in such nations as China, India, and Pakistan—nations heavily dependent
on oil from the Middle East and the major suppliers of cheap labor to transnational
capital today—and thus effectively gain control of the rate at which the workers
of the South can be exploited. It will gain control, in other words, over
the relation between that part of the working day in which workers produce
value equal to their wages and the part in which they are engaged in surplus
labor: the part in which the worker works for free, producing the surplus
value which is the source of profit and accumulation of capital.
It is not a "thing"—"oil"—that determines the economic
hegemony of capital and thus its political power, as evidenced by the fact
that many of the nations in which the largest oil reserves sit are among the
poorest nations in the world and have historically been subject to brutal
colonial and neo-colonial occupation throughout their modern existence. The
economic dominance of the rich imperialist states comes from their global
command over the exploited labor-power—the surplus labor—of workers in all
sectors of production, and the struggle for the Iraqi oil reserves is an attempt
by the US to establish its decisive hegemony within this global system of
exploitation.
Oil, in short, is a social relation. It represents the
exploitative relation of private ownership of the world's resources and productive
forces in the hands of a few while the majority of the world is left in a
subjugated state of dependence in which their ability to survive is determined
by whether or not they can earn enough in wages to purchase the commodities
their labor produces. The war on Iraq is about this relation. It is a war
of the owners against the workers. ("Oil and War").
In sum, U.S. corporate control of oil – and the social
relations of exploitation involved in the production of oil – will grant the
U.S. increased control over the labor of other nations. And, as the
90s have demonstrated, the poorer and more desperate the people of those nations
are, the cheaper their labor will be and the wealthier the U.S. corporations
can become. Oil isn’t the only commodity that the U.S. can produce through
exploitative relations, though. Naomi Klein, writing for The Nation,
“[s]ome argue that it’s too simplistic to say this war is about oil.
They’re right. It’s about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports and
drugs. And if this process isn’t halted, ‘free Iraq’ will be the most
sold country on earth.” However the Kellogg Brown & Root Services,
which is owned by the Haliburton Company, for which Dick Cheney served as
chairman until 2000, obtained a Pentagon contract for advice on rebuilding
Iraq's oil fields after the war. (In a side note, according to the Edward
Epstein of The San Francisco Chronicle, “The Pentagon wouldn't discuss the
exact size of the contract, nor how it was rewarded, saying the information
is classified.”)
To return to Klein’s point, The Nation reports
that “[t]he 4.8 million dollar management contract for the port in Umm Qasr
has already gone to a US company, Stevedoring Services of America, and the
airports are on the auction block. The US Agency for International Development
has invited US multinationals to bid on everything from rebuilding roads
and bridges to printing textbooks. Most of these contracts are for
a year, but some have options that extend up to four. How long before
they meld into long-term contracts for privatized water services, transit
systems, roads, schools and phones? When does reconstruction turn into
privatization in disguise?” Klein point is clear: if U.S. corporations
can keep everything in Iraq privatized – and it certainly looks as if the
Bush administration will help them do exactly that -- as opposed to “allowing”
the Iraqi people or the Iraqi state to own their own utilities, roads, oil,
etc. – then U.S. corporations will basically own Iraq. The “reconstruction”
of Iraq alone has been valued at around $100 billion. And who will provide
the wealth-creating labor for all of the new U.S.-owned businesses?
Iraqi workers. In other words, U.S. corporations will do the owning
and profiting, and Iraqis will do the work. Based on Bush’s stance
toward trade unions in the U.S., there is no reason to think that the workers
of Iraq will make anything like a living wage for a long time to come.
They will have to fight for every concession that U.S. capital grants them
in terms of wages, healthcare, hours, job safety, etc.
I have two final points to make, one about Afghanistan
and one about Syria. First, I think that anyone who believes that the
War in Iraq is not about economics should consider the post-9/11 War with
Afghanistan. In that case, too, the U.S. was supposedly fighting to
liberate a nation from an oppressive regime and to spread democracy.
Yet, the fighting continues in Afghanistan, and the nation is at best marginally
better off now than before the U.S. attack and possibly no better off at all.
Yet, Afghanistan has dropped out of the headlines. What happened to
the plan to “reconstruct” Afghanistan? Why weren’t multinational corporations
eagerly bidding on the right to take part in that reconstruction? What
happened to our fierce desire to spread democracy to that nation? The
only answer that makes any sense is that the U.S. administration no longer
cares about Afghanistan, because the country produces little to no value in
terms of the global economy. Afghanistan has become an embarrassment
to the U.S. government.
One of the demands of Marxism and Socialism is to historicize.
In other words, learn from the past so that you don’t have to repeat it and
learn from the working class of the past and of other nations so that you
know what needs to be done. We seem to be living in a weirdly a-historical
time. We learn nothing from our past and, in fact, are encouraged to
forget it as rapidly as possible. To bring up Afghanistan at all is
tantamount to being unpatriotic.
The last point that I want to make concerns Syria.
Sunday’s edition of The Observer reports: “The United States has pledged
to tackle the Syrian-backed Hizbollah group in the next phase of its ‘war
on terror’ in a move which could threaten military action against President
Bashar Assad’s regime in Damascus.” The Observer quotes Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who says “There will have to be change
in Syria, plainly” and adds that hawks “in and close to the Bush White House
have prepared the ground for an attack on Syria, raising the specter of Hizbollah,
of alleged Syrian plans to welcome refugees from Saddam Hussein’s regime,
and of what the administration insists is Syrian support for Iraq during the
war.” The article continues, “Washington intelligence sources claim
that weapons of mass destruction that Saddam was alleged to have possessed
were shipped to Syria after inspectors were sent by the United Nations to
find them.” As I have indicated, the war in Iraq is not an aberration
in American policy but a logical extension of it. Perhaps the only difference
between the current war in the Gulf and other recent U.S. imperialist wars
is that each war seems to be built on flimsier excuses. Thank you.
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Last Update: June 2, 2003