THIRD ANNUAL UWEC HUMAN RIGHTS AWARENESS CONFERENCE
"TERRORISM, STATE TERRORISM, WAR, AND PEACE: SOCIALIST REFLECTIONS"
NOVEMBER 13, 2001
PROFESSOR BOB NOWLAN
Welcome, my name is Bob Nowlan and I am here to offer some reflections, from a socialist perspective, on "Terrorism, State Terrorism, War, and Peace." I will begin our session by reading some remarks I have prepared, and gathered, for this occasion. These remarks will provide us a focus for our discussion to follow.
Socialists condemn the terrorist attacks of
September 11th. Nothing excuses the horrific
murder of thousands of innocent civilians and the emotional, physical, and
economic devastation wrought upon the lives of millions of others as a result
of this murder -- certainly not the reactionary religious and ethnic hatred
spouted by the perpetrators of these attacks and their chief supporters.
Socialism represents the organized movement of self-emancipation, from capitalist
alienation and exploitation, of the international working class. The terrorist
attacks on September 11th severely undermine international working class
solidarity while greatly enhancing the economic, political, and ideological
strength of the capitalist class and its chief political representative,
the imperialist state. Consequently, the killing spree two months ago in
New York City, Washington D.C., and Western Pennsylvania renders considerably
more difficult the immediate tasks ahead for all of us who continue actively
engaged within the historically long, ongoing struggle on behalf of the international
working class to realize its objective social interest by seizing means sufficient
to exercise genuinely effective control over both the process and the product
of its own labor. Nonetheless, socialists staunchly oppose the U.S.-government-lead
war because we believe this war works in tandem with the terrorist activity
of the Al-Qaeda network to divide and conquer workers' collective resistance
to our common alienation and exploitation, preventing our unity in struggle
for our collective emancipation, and that this war ultimately serves imperialist
interests of capitalist expropriation and accumulation, not the interests
of peace and justice.
Although virtually all organized groups of
socialists in the United States and beyond unite in condemning the terrorist
attacks of September 11th as well as in
opposition to the U.S.-government-lead war in Afghanistan, socialists come
in many stripes; we maintain substantial, principled differences on how we
conceive of socialism, capitalism, and the proper means to seek to move from
the latter to the former. Since these numerous different versions of socialism
exist I want to take just a few minutes to elaborate slightly further on
my own conception of what socialism means.
In a socialist society those who produce social
wealth will own and control it. What's more, workers will cooperate publicly
together in producing strictly to meet human needs, not to contribute to the
accumulation of private profit. We will maintain directly democratic control
over our workplaces and over the products of our work; we will exercise directly
democratic control within our communities over the determination of for what
ends we will use the social surplus product and over how to manage access
to, as well as exercise of, natural and cultural resources. Socialism represents
a form of organization of human social relations in which a socialist mode
of production will dominate; according to this mode of production, social
wealth will be collectively owned and its production and distribution collectively,
as well as democratically, determined.
Socialism cannot succeed - cannot, that is,
become viable - other than on an international scale as a replacement for
a global capitalist system which suffers a complete and irrevocable breakdown.
Isolated attempts to establish socialism in one nation while capitalism
remains overwhelmingly predominant everywhere else fall prey toward irresistible
tendencies for bureaucratic degeneration and counterrevolutionary stagnation.
Capitalism represents a relatively new form
of social organization -- only a little more than two hundred years old.
However, capitalism cannot survive forever; despite its enormous world-historical
achievements, capitalism suffers from deep-seated, inherent tendencies toward
repeated and substantial crisis as well as from fundamental contradictions
that cannot ultimately be resolved other than through the supersession of
capitalism itself, either in the direction of international socialism or
in the direction of a brutally totalitarian form of global barbarism.
That's the gist of my conception of socialism,
even as my account here of course greatly simplifies and leaves out much
of considerable importance. But I want to make it clear, from the beginning,
that I do not identify socialism, or communism for that matter, either, on
the one hand, with the Stalinist USSR and its Warsaw Pact satellites in Eastern
Europe, with Maoist China, and with Castroist Cuba, or, on the other hand,
with Social Democratic parties - and states - in places like Scandinavia,
the Netherlands, Germany, France, or Britain.
Rarely do faculty, students, staff, and members
of the greater Eau Claire and Chippewa Valley area communities gain the opportunity
to engage with socialist perspectives on urgent contemporary issues. I hope
that what I share with you today will enable you to confront some unorthodox
ideas that you will find worthy to think about and take into account no matter
what your own position on the Bush administration's current war campaign
might be, and no matter how much you might find yourself in disagreement
with me. In short, I hope these ideas prove stimulating to discussion -
and debate.
I will refer from this point to selections
from a series of three recent articles published on the World Socialist Website,
at www.wsws.org.
The International Committee of the Fourth International, founded
by Leon Trotsky over sixty years ago, publishes the World Socialist Website;
the ICFI maintains a strong commitment to an orthodox Trotskyist version
of socialism. I myself strongly sympathize with this version of socialism.
This is not the only reason, however, that
I turn to what these particular socialists write. I can only speak to you
today for a short time, while still allowing time for discussion. Working
with the constraints we face, I cannot improve upon what my fellow socialists
from the ICFI argue, so I won't try. What's more, as one who has self-identified
and actively worked as a socialist for over twenty-five years now, I conceive
of myself as a participant in a long-term, collective struggle for socialism
- a struggle that far, far exceeds the scope of my own individual will and
action. I aim simply to contribute what I can from where I am at to this
much greater cause, one that long precedes and will long succeed the duration
of my own life. I speak here today, therefore, not to offer you a uniquely
original, purely individual position -- not by any means. I certainly seek
no credit myself for coming up, on my own, with a brilliant socialist analysis
of the current war.
I speak here as a representative of a social
and political perspective that I maintain no interest in identifying as merely
eccentric, idiosyncratic, or even iconoclastic. I work in solidarity with
thousands upon thousands of comrades past, present, and future, all dedicated,
like me, toward active struggle in the interest of realizing international
social transformation sufficient to secure the basis for a global social system
that requires human emancipation, collective
equality, social justice, and ecological sustainability in order for this
system to function at all, in order, that is, for its institutions and structures
of relations and practices to exist and persist. Today, in particular, I
work in solidarity with comrades from the World Socialist Website and the
International Committee of the Fourth International who provide the intellectual
resources to help understand where we, presently, are at and who thereby
at the same time enable the development of the political means to understand
what, in the immediate future, is to be done.
One final prefatory remark, before turning
to the texts from the World Socialist Website: I can only touch upon some
of the many reasons socialists oppose this war. Others we can address in
discussion. I will not discuss in detail the real damage wrought by the
U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, the real human toll of this war for
poor and starving Afghans, and the ways in which the food drops in Afghanistan
function as little more than a cynical propaganda exercise, although I will
note here that independent human rights and relief aid organization estimates
place the number of Afghans likely to die as a result of the U.S. offensive
in Afghanistan as high as one and one-half million or more, including not
only those who will die as a result of bombs and bullets but also from starvation,
malnutrition, disease, and raw, unsheltered exposure to the harsh Winter.
I will not discuss in detail how and why the corporate conglomerate mainstream
U.S. "news" media uncritically promotes the Bushian agenda. I will not discuss
in detail the long, sorry record of U.S.-government-lead economic, political,
and military intervention in numerous nations throughout the rest of the world,
and especially throughout the so-called "Third World." I will not discuss
in detail the enslavement, impoverishment, and social and ecological degradation
caused throughout this "Third World" by U.S.-based and U.S.-backed multinational
and transnational capitalist interests, as well as international capitalist
institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and
the World Trade Organization. And I will not discuss in detail the specific
history of U.S. capitalist and imperialist engagement in the Middle East
that gives rise to widespread resentment of and bitterness toward the United
States, especially on behalf of people from the poorer socio-economic classes
in this region. Still, we can talk about these matters, and more, in discussion,
as you wish.
The first World Socialist Website article
from which I will read excerpts to you is an essay co-written by David North
and David Walsh, entitled "Anti-Americanism: The 'Anti-Imperialism' of Fools."
This essay reads as follows:
The socialist future of mankind depends upon the awakening of the most humane and generous instincts of the working people of the world. What happened on September 11--the awful deaths of thousands of innocent people, among them office workers, firemen, janitors, and business people--profoundly offends those instincts. . . .
[T]he reprehensible response of certain petty bourgeois opinion makers . . . underscores the gulf that divides socialist opposition to imperialism from vulgar anti-Americanism. A case in point is an article that appeared in the Guardian, the British daily newspaper, on September 18, authored by Charlotte Raven . . . The piece is headlined, "A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully," the bully in question being the US. In the first place, the September 11 tragedy was not "a bloody nose," it was a catastrophe. Thousands of people were incinerated instantly when the airplanes hit the buildings, thousands more died when tons of rubble collapsed on them. Anyone who was emotionally unaffected by the terror and suffering experienced by tens of thousands as a result of this attack has no right to call himself or herself a socialist. Raven [however] writes: <quote> "It is perfectly possible to condemn the terrorist action and dislike the US just as much as you did before the WTC went down. Many will have woken up on Wednesday with that combination of emotions... America is the same country it was before September 11. If you didn't like it then, there's no reason why you should have to pretend to now." <endquote>
Raven's references to "the US" . . . is no slip of the pen. It is repeated throughout the article. She never once uses the phrase "the US government" or "the US ruling elite," or an equivalent. Using nationality as an epithet is always reactionary. Confronted with the most monstrous government in history, Hitler's Nazi regime, socialists never descended to referring with contempt to "Germany" or "the Germans" . . . .
What does it mean to "dislike the US"? . . . The United States is a complex entity, with a complex history, elements of which are distinctly ignoble, elements of which are deeply noble. The US has passed through two revolutions--the American Revolution and the Civil War--the mass battles of the Depression and the struggle for Civil Rights. The contradiction between the democratic ideals and revolutionary principles on which the nation was founded and its social and political realities has always been the starting point of the struggle for socialism in the United States. The US was, if one considers the relationship between theory and politics, the product of the great Enlightenment. It established political principles, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, rather than religion or ethnicity, as the basis of national identity. This origin of the nation in the struggle for abstract ideals--democracy, republicanism--reverberated across the globe. The American Revolution played no small role in inspiring the events that transformed France a decade later.
Even after 200 years, the United States is still fighting through the political and historical implications of its own founding principles . . . . A low level of class consciousness and the failure of masses of Americans to generalize from their experiences, however, provides the ruling elite the opportunity to play on precisely these democratic notions in order to blind layers of the population temporarily as to the true nature of its plans. For Bush and his ilk "defending freedom and democracy" is merely a code phrase for the right of the American elite to have its way around the world. To the ordinary American citizen, [however,] these words mean something quite different . . . .
In many ways all the vast problems in the struggle for socialism find their most complex expression in America. How could that not be the case? If one cannot find points of departure for a higher form of social organization in the US, in what corner of the globe are they to be found? What's more, the individual who sees no basis for socialism in America clearly has given up on the prospects of world socialism altogether. The Marxist has always been distinguished from the common or garden variety radical by his or her deep confidence in the revolutionary potential of the American working class. . . .
America is, at once, the most advanced and the most backward of societies. Its culture attracts and repels, but always fascinates. Official society and many ordinary Americans deny the very existence of distinct social classes, and yet the country is riven by the most profound and ever-deepening social differentiation. These social contradictions will only be exacerbated . . . as the war drive proceeds.
The US has produced Franklin, Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, as well as extraordinary working class and socialist leaders. Its immense contradictions are perhaps exemplified by the figure of Jefferson, the slave-owner who wrote one of the greatest and most sincere hymns to human freedom. . . . In fact, when "America," in the form of its greatest political and cultural representatives, has spoken "from its heart," millions around the world have listened and understood, beginning in the aftermath of July 4, 1776. The most advanced British workers certainly paid attention to the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. One could mention the appeals to the international working class on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti and numerous other examples. And such instances, we hazard to predict, will occur in the future too. One might add that the finest products of American culture have also attracted and moved masses of people around the world. . . .
There are, after all, two Americas . . . [As] James P. Cannon, the leader of the American Trotskyists observed [in 1948]: "One is the America of the imperialists--of the little clique of capitalists, landlords, and militarists who are threatening and terrifying the world. This is the America the people of the world hate and fear. There is the other America--the America of the workers and farmers and the 'little people.' They constitute the great majority of the people. They do the work of the country. They revere its old democratic traditions--its old record of friendship for the people of other lands, in their struggles against Kings and Despots--its generous asylum once freely granted to the oppressed." The struggle against the policies and designs of the American government requires, in the first instance, the exposure of the latter's claim that it is the true voice and representative of the people. Socialists are obliged to explain that the US ruling elite is carrying out anti-democratic and rapacious policies, with inevitably tragic consequences, in the pursuit of which it falsely invokes the name of the American people. <Endquote>
Second, I will turn next
to read from the October 9th Statement of the World Socialist Website Editorial
Board, entitled "Why We Oppose War in Afghanistan." This statement reads
as follows:
[W]hile the events of September 11 have served as the catalyst for the assault on Afghanistan, the cause is far deeper. The nature of this or any war, its progressive or reactionary character, is determined not by the immediate events that [preceded] it, but rather by the class structure, economic foundations and international roles of the states that are involved. From this decisive standpoint, the present action by the United States is an imperialist war.
The US government initiated the war in pursuit of far-reaching international interests of the American ruling elite. What is the main purpose of the war? The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago created a political vacuum in Central Asia, which is home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. The Caspian Sea region, to which Afghanistan provides strategic access, harbors approximately 270 billion barrels of oil, some 20 percent of the world's proven reserves. It also contains 665 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, approximately one-eighth of the planet's gas reserves. These critical resources are located in the world's most politically unstable region. By attacking Afghanistan, setting up a client regime and moving vast military forces into the region, the US aims to establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control. These are the real considerations that motivate the present war.
The official version, that the entire American military has been mobilized because of one individual, Osama bin Laden, is ludicrous. Bin Laden's brand of ultra-nationalist and religious obscurantist politics is utterly reactionary, a fact that is underscored by his glorification of the destruction of the World Trade Center and murder of nearly 6,000 civilians. But the US government's depiction of bin Laden as an evil demiurge serves a cynical purpose--to conceal the actual aims and significance of the present war. The demonization of bin Laden is of a piece with the modus operandi of every war waged by the US over the past two decades, in each of which--whether against the Panamanian"drug lord" Manuel Noriega, the Somalian "war lord" Mohamed Farrah Aidid, or the modern-day "Hitlers" Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic--the American government and the media have sought to manipulate public opinion by portraying the targeted leader as the personification of evil. . . .
Were the US to oust the Taliban, capture or kill bin Laden and wipe out what Washington calls his terrorist training camps, the realization of these aims would not be followed by the withdrawal of American forces. Rather, the outcome would be the permanent placement of US military forces to establish the US as the exclusive arbiter of the region's natural resources. In these strategic aims lie the seeds of future and even more bloody conflicts.
This warning is substantiated by a review of recent history. America's wars of the past 20 years have invariably arisen from the consequences of previous US policies. There is a chain of continuity, in which yesterday's US ally has become today's enemy . . . In the case of Iraq, the US supported Saddam Hussein in the1980s as an ally against the Khomeini regime in Iran. But when the Iraqi regime threatened US oil interests in the Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein was transformed into a demon and war was launched against Baghdad. The main purpose of the Gulf War was to establish a permanent US military presence in the Persian Gulf, a presence that remains in place more than a decade later.
Even more tragic is the outcome of US sponsorship of bin Laden and the Taliban. They are products of the US policy, begun in the late 1970s and continued throughout the 1980s, of inciting Islamic fundamentalism to weaken the Soviet Union and undermine its influence in Central Asia. Bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists were recruited by the CIA to wage war against the USSR and destabilize Central Asia. In the chaos and mass destruction that followed, the Taliban was helped along and brought to power with the blessings of the American government. Those who make US policy believed the Taliban would be useful in stabilizing Afghanistan after nearly two decades of civil war. American policy-makers saw in this ultra-reactionary sect an instrument for furthering US aims in the Caspian basin and Persian Gulf, and placing increasing pressure on China and Russia. If, as the Bush administration claims, the hijack-bombing of the World Trade Center was the work of bin Laden and his Taliban protectors, then, in the most profound and direct sense, the political responsibility for this terrible loss of life rests with the American ruling elite itself.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalist movements, infused with anti-American passions, can be traced not only to US support for the Mujahedin in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also to American assaults on the Arab world. At the same time that the CIA was arming the fundamentalists in Afghanistan, it was supporting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This was followed in 1983 by the US bombing of Beirut, in which the battleship New Jersey lobbed 2,000-pound shells into civilian neighborhoods. This criminal action led directly to retribution in the form of the bombing of the US barracks in Beirut, which took the lives of 242 American soldiers. The entire phenomenon associated with the figure of Osama bin Laden has its roots, moreover, in Washington's alliance with Saudi Arabia. The US has for decades propped up this feudalist autocracy, which has promoted its own brand of Islamic fundamentalism as a means of maintaining its grip on power.
All of these twists and turns, with their disastrous repercussions, arise from the nature of US foreign policy, which is not determined on the basis of democratic principles or formulated in open discussion and public debate. Rather, it is drawn up in pursuit of economic interests that are concealed from the American people. When the US government speaks of a war against terrorism, it is thoroughly hypocritical, not only because yesterday's terrorist is today's ally, and vice versa, but because American policy has produced a social catastrophe that provides the breeding ground for recruits to terrorist organizations. Nowhere are the results of American imperialism's predatory role more evident than in the indescribable poverty and backwardness that afflict the people of Afghanistan.
What are the future prospects arising from the latest eruption of American militarism? Even if the US achieves its immediate objectives, there is no reason to believe that the social and political tinderbox in Central Asia will be any less explosive. US talk of "nation-building" in Afghanistan is predicated on its alliance with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, with whom the Pentagon is coordinating its military strikes. Just as Washington used the Albanian terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army as its proxy in Kosovo, so now it utilizes the gang of war lords centered in the northeast of Afghanistan as its cat's paw in Central Asia. Since the Northern Alliance will now be portrayed as the champion of freedom and humanitarianism, it is instructive to note recent articles in the New York Times and elsewhere reporting that the vast bulk of the Afghan opium trade comes from the meager territory controlled by the Alliance. The military satraps of the Northern Alliance are, moreover, notorious for killing thousands of civilians by indiscriminately firing rockets into Kabul in the early 1990s.
The sordid and illusory basis upon which the US proposes to"rebuild" Afghanistan, once it is finished pummeling the country, was suggested in a New York Times article on the onset of the war. "The Pentagon's hope," wrote the Times, "is that the combination of the psychological shock of the air strike, bribes to anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan covertly supported by Washington and sheer opportunism will lead many of the Taliban's fighters to put down their arms and defect." Given the nature of the region, with its vast stores of critical resources, it is self-evident that none of the powers in Central Asia will long accept a settlement in which the US is the sole arbiter. Russia, Iran, China, Pakistan and India all have their own interests, and they will seek to pursue them. Furthermore, the US presence will inevitably conflict with the interests of the emerging bourgeois regimes, in the lesser states in the region, that have been carved out of the former Soviet Union.
At each stage in the eruption of American militarism, the scale of the resulting disasters becomes greater and greater. Now the US has embarked on an adventure in a region that has long been the focus of intrigue between the Great Powers, a part of the world, moreover, that is bristling with nuclear weapons and riven by social, political, ethnic and religious tensions that are compounded by abject poverty. The New York Times, in a rare moment of lucidity, described the dangers implicit in the US war drive in an October 2 article headlined "In Pakistan, a Shaky Ally." The author wrote: "By drafting this fragile and fractious nation into a central role in the 'war on terrorism,' America runs the danger of setting off a cataclysm in a place where civil violence is a likely bet and nuclear weapons exist." Neither in the proclamations of the US government, nor in the reportage of the media, is there any serious examination of the real economic and geo-strategic aims motivating the military assault. Nor is there any indication that the US political establishment has seriously considered the far-reaching and potentially catastrophic consequences of the course upon which it has embarked.
Despite a relentless media campaign to whip up chauvinism and militarism, the mood of the American people is not one of gung-ho support for the war. At most, it is a passive acceptance that war is the only means to fight terrorism, a mood that owes a great deal to the efforts of a thoroughly dishonest media which serves as an arm of the state. Beneath the reluctant endorsement of military action is a profound sense of unease and skepticism. Tens of millions sense that nothing good can come of this latest eruption of American militarism.
The United States stands at a turning point. The government admits it has embarked on a war of indefinite scale and duration. What is taking place is the militarization of American society under conditions of a deepening social crisis. The war will profoundly affect the conditions of the American and international working class. Imperialism threatens mankind at the beginning of the twenty-first century with a repetition on a more horrific scale of the tragedies of the twentieth. More than ever, imperialism and its depredations raise the necessity for the international unity of the working class and the struggle for socialism. <Endquote>
Next, I will read from the World Socialist Website Editorial Board's November 7 th essay "Bush's War at Home: a Creeping Coup D'Etat." This essay reads as follows:
In the period since the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the United States has undergone a radical transformation in the structure of the government, in the relationship between the people and the police and armed forces, and in the legal and constitutional framework.
The White House has assumed vast new powers for internal repression, establishing by executive order an Office of Homeland Security that is not subject to either congressional oversight or any vote on the personnel appointed to run it. An all-encompassing political police agency is coming into being, through the passage of an "anti-terror" law that effectively amalgamates the FBI and CIA and abolishes the longstanding separation between overseas spying and domestic policing.
Side by side with the bombing of Afghanistan, the Bush administration has declared that there is a second front in the war, the war at home. The federal government issues vague and unsubstantiated "terror alerts," which fuel anxiety while providing no protection to the public. Government spokesmen urge the population to get used to measures like random police searches and roadblocks as a permanent feature of life. National Guard troops patrol the airports, harbors, bridges, tunnels and even the US Capitol.
Fundamental constitutional safeguards--the right of habeas corpus, the right of the accused to know the charges against them, the right of arrested persons to see a lawyer, even the presumption of innocence--have been set aside for millions of immigrants from the Middle East and Central Asia. The right to privacy has been all but abolished for the entire population, with government intelligence agencies given the green light to plant bugs and wiretaps, monitor financial transactions, and conduct other forms of spying, virtually at will.
If the average American had been shown on September 10 a picture of the United States as it is today, the response would likely have been: "This is not the America I know. This looks more like a police state." The bitter irony is that such a sweeping attack on democratic rights has been perpetrated in the name of a war to defend "freedom" and "democracy" against terrorism. But neither the Bush administration, nor its Democratic Party collaborators, nor a compliant and complicit media bother to explain the following contradiction: the United States government never secured powers such as these at any point in the twentieth century. Not in World War I, World War II or the Cold War, when the antagonists were powerful and heavily armed states, was such a radical restructuring of the governmental and legal framework carried out. Why is this happening today, when the alleged enemy is a small band of terrorists operating out of caves in one of the poorest countries in the world?
One of the key elements of the assault on civil liberties is the new "anti-terrorism" act, which was rushed through Congress and signed into law only five weeks after the terror attacks. The law defines terrorism in such a way as to include political activity and speech previously protected by the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution. It provides wide-ranging authority for police agencies to carry out secret searches, conduct expanded electronic surveillance, and indefinitely detain terrorism suspects. Non-citizens, including legal permanent residents, can be denied reentry to the US for expressing political views, and can be deported for having even the most incidental association with organizations designated as "terrorist" by the government. Attorney General John Ashcroft last week expanded the number of groups so designated from 46 to 74 . . . .
In recent days, federal officials have urged the lifting of legal restraints on state and local police powers. Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson lamented that Justice Department agents "don't have enough eyes and ears" to monitor terrorist suspects, and said restrictions on local police departments "need to be looked at."
Many local police departments are already scrapping rules on intelligence-gathering that were established to protect First Amendment rights. The Los Angeles Police Commission voted last month to relax intelligence restrictions adopted in the early 1980s, following disclosures that police were monitoring anti-war protesters, liberal politicians and other political dissidents. Other big city police departments are moving to revive the surveillance methods utilized by "Red Squad" operations of the past.
On October 29, the government issued its second general terrorism alert in less than three weeks. Declaring that major terrorist attacks against the US or US interests around the world were in the offing, Attorney General Ashcroft was utterly vague as to the likely targets, methods or perpetrators. He provided no information to support the claim of imminent danger. He gave no instructions as to how the public was to respond to the alleged danger. However, he issued an advisory to 18,000 state and local police agencies to "continue on highest alert and to notify immediately the FBI of any unusual or suspicious activity." Instructing the public to accept extraordinary measures, such as random stops or searches by police or National Guard troops, or questioning by FBI agents, Ashcroft said, "We ask for the patience and cooperation of the American people, if and when they encounter additional measures undertaken by local law enforcement or federal law enforcement authorities and others who are charged with securing the safety of the public" . . . .
The government claims that the "terror alerts" have been issued in order to warn and protect the public. But with no specific information provided about the imminent threat--when and where the terrorists might strike--what is public expected to do? Their vacuous character demonstrates that these alerts are essentially fraudulent. Their real purpose is to accustom the population to invasions of privacy, the dismantling of constitutional safeguards, and a general militarization of society. The authorities want people to accept as a normal state of affairs the deployment of armed troops at airports, public buildings, bridges, border checkpoints and in the streets.
The Bush administration has seized on the anthrax attacks as an additional means of bludgeoning the public into accepting such far-reaching restrictions on civil liberties. Although the evidence so far made available suggests that extreme right-wing elements of the Timothy McVeigh stripe are the most likely suspects, the White House and the media constantly suggest that Osama bin Laden is responsible for the anthrax attacks, depicting his Al Qaeda network as a pervasive and all-powerful threat.
Periodic alerts such as those issued October 11 and October 29 are intended to facilitate the consolidation of the new apparatus of internal repression . . . .
These far-reaching changes come under conditions where the national security dragnet initiated after September 11 is expanding, with the number of people rounded up now standing at more than 1,100. While federal officials will not say how many of these detainees have been released, a Justice Department spokesperson said "a majority" of them are still in custody. The roundup of these individuals has been shrouded in secrecy, with the government providing no information about the detainees' identities, where they are being held, why they are being detained, and what charges, if any, are being laid against them. Many are held in solitary confinement. The whereabouts of some suspects are unknown to family members, and others either have no legal representation or have been denied contact with their lawyers. Much of the legal action against those in custody is taking place in secret court proceedings, with court documents sealed to the public. All of this is being done to shield the operations of federal, state and police agencies from public scrutiny.
The Justice Department has rejected appeals from civil liberties groups and some congressmen for information about the detentions, without giving any explanation for its blackout. Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, commented that the government's conduct in the investigation is "frighteningly close to the practice of 'disappearing' people in Latin America."
Following each of the two national alerts against terrorism since September 11, the number of those rounded up by the government has risen sharply, tripling in the past few weeks. One of the main purposes of the alerts is to signal state and local police to step up their surveillance activities and round up more suspects.
While the mass murder at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is the pretext for the mass arrests, not a single one of those detained has been charged with any offense related to the September 11 attacks. Even the Justice Department claims that at most 10 or 12 of those detained are suspected, but not proven, of having links to the hijackers. The vast majority of the arrests have another purpose, unrelated to any investigation of the terrorist attack: to intimidate the immigrant population and accustom the American people as a whole to methods previously associated with police-military dictatorships.
Government officials have emphasized that the anti-terror measures adopted in recent weeks should not be regarded as temporary. At a briefing on October 29, [Director of Homeland Security Tom] Ridge declared, "We want America to be on the highest alert. And from time to time, we may issue the same general alert again."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a column in the November 1 edition of the Washington Post, baldly stated that not only should the American people accept an open-ended war against terrorism, but they must "prepare now for the next war--a war that may be vastly different not only from those of the past century but also from the new war on terrorism that we are fighting today." In other words, America is going on a war footing, not for the duration of a specific conflict in Afghanistan, but indefinitely. Consequently, the domestic police measures being taken now by the government must also be accepted as a permanent state of affairs . . . .
[I]n light of the extraordinary security measures taken by the government since September 11, references to a battle on the "home front" take on a chilling significance. With their attempt to create an atmosphere of fear and hysteria over impending terrorist threats, authorities want to identify anyone rounded up in their investigation as the enemy, whether or not there is evidence against them. The same methods will be used against those who oppose the war against Afghanistan and other policies of the government, domestic or foreign.
The government's actions in the period since September 11 constitute the most serious and sustained attack on civil liberties in US history. No one should believe that this is merely a reaction to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Such measures have long been sought by the most right-wing sections of the ruling elite, who have seized on the tragic events of September 11 to realize their political agenda at home, just as they are using them to launch a US military intervention in oil-rich Central Asia.
These sweeping changes are the culmination of two decades of political reaction and attacks on democratic rights, which have seen a steady buildup of the repressive forces of the state--two million Americans in prison, thousands on Death Row, legal restrictions on the rights of defendants, expanded powers of police spying and electronic surveillance. This has been accompanied by the emergence of a fascist-minded right wing with little popular support, but enormous influence in the Republican Party, in Congress, and now in the White House . . . .
This is an administration committed to a domestic and foreign policy tailored to the interests of the wealthiest and most privileged layer in American society. It is also an administration of enormous crisis. Prior to the terror attacks, the Bush administration was showing clear signs of internal disarray. Its already narrow social base of support was eroding under the pressure of a deepening economic slump, both in the US and globally.
The Republicans had lost control of the Senate, and on the international front, the Bush administration was increasingly isolated, with nominal allies as well as enemies opposing its aggressive and unilateralist posture. The events of September 11 were seized on by those who run the Bush administration as a welcome opportunity to shore up the government and rally public support by launching a military attack on the alleged perpetrators, while preparing for an upsurge of social struggle over rising unemployment, worsening slump and the government's pro-corporate policies by expanding and restructuring the police powers of the state.
The Bush administration's domestic "anti-terror" campaign must serve as a sharp warning. After the Florida debacle of November and December 2000, there were complacent commentaries in the press declaring that, unlike many other countries, the bitter political struggle in the United States did not end with tanks in the streets. Now the tanks are in the streets, and soldiers surround the Capitol, in what might be called a slow-motion coup d'état.
All of the traditional norms of bourgeois democracy in the US are in question. The Bush administration expresses the contempt for democracy that pervades powerful sections of the American corporate and financial oligarchy . . . . They are determined to go as far as they can in establishing an authoritarian regime. Such concepts as the separation of powers between the three branches of government and legislative oversight of the executive branch are being tossed aside in the effort to vastly expand the police powers of the federal executive.
It is worth noting that at the height of the anthrax scare, in mid-October, congressional Republicans favored shutting down Congress and adjourning indefinitely, the better to give Bush, the FBI, the CIA and the military a free hand, both abroad and at home.
The Bush administration's war on democratic rights has exposed the inability of the Democratic Party to offer any serious opposition to the extreme-right forces that dominate the Republican Party. Within hours of the September 11 attacks, the Democrats pledged unconditional support to the Bush White House, declaring that political dissent was no longer permissible. The Democratic leadership not only lined up to give Bush an open-ended mandate to wage war abroad, it insured the passage of his "anti-terror" bill, suppressed any investigation of the unexplained intelligence failure that allowed the September 11 attacks to take place, and sanctioned the trashing of constitutional safeguards in the ongoing police dragnet . . . .
While for the moment, the vast majority of those caught up by the government's dragnet are immigrants of Middle-Eastern and Central Asian descent, it is only a matter of time before these anti-democratic methods will be used more widely. The wholesale attack on democratic rights can only be halted through the independent organization of the working class, which unites all sections of the working population--immigrant and US-born--in a political struggle against the financial oligarchy and its political representatives. <Endquote>
Finally, I will conclude my presentation with a few remarks
of my own on imperialism - and on socialist struggle to resist and overcome
it. Imperialism refers to capitalism which has reached the stage of development
in which it expands beyond national boundaries: the home nation provides
markets for commodity exports and investment of accumulated capital insufficient
to satisfy the needs - to sustain the profits - of emergent giant national
monopolies and oligopolies. Under imperialism, capitalist production and
circulation starts to become transnational, while the world becomes ever
increasingly subject to the needs of capital, supported by the power of the
state in the capitalist home nations. The needs of imperialist capital as
a whole - as well as conflicts among specific imperialist capitals - thus
provide the crucial basis for understanding all major wars conducted from
the end of the 19th century to the present:
all of these military adventures take their roots from struggle for and competition
over new markets for means of production, labor-power, sale of products,
capital investments, and so on. This list includes, in the case of the United
States, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War,
the Vietnam War, the War against Iraq, and the War in Afghanistan.
Nominal political independence has not freed the nations
of the third world from domination by first world, imperialist monopoly capital:
the latter today effectively owns and controls most of the productive forces
as well as the principal markets for consumption in the majority of these
countries. What's more, imperialist capital supplies the great bulk of the
financial means involved in operating smaller domestic-based productive enterprises
and initiatives (for as long as these remain independent, not yet swallowed
up by huge transnational corporate powers). In addition, imperialist capital
pays for much of the cost involved in providing national, regional, and local
government services. All of this financing of Third World economies comes
at a huge price, however, as imperialist capital lends money at exorbitant
rates of interest and on draconian terms for repayment. This in turn only
greatly increases the subjection of the third world - especially third world
governments and local capitals - to first world capitalist domination. Under
neo-imperialist conditions, indigenous third world governments are often at
the virtual beck and call of their imperialist masters - and the few countries
who do not play strictly according to the rules imposed upon them suffer
the most severe consequences. The "punishments" enacted on Fidel Castro's
Cuba, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, on Sandinista Nicaragua, and on Chile under Salvador
Allende are all instances of this.
Within the imperialist stage of capitalist development,
the principal contradictions of capitalism continue slowly to worsen over
the long term while at the same time gradually engulfing the entire human
social world, as capitalism becomes the first truly global mode of social
production and system of social relations. At the same time this means that
the contradictions of capitalism become globalized as well. These contradictions
include the following:
1. the objective socialization of processes of production of goods and provision of services expands while the effective ownership and control of the means and ends of this production and provision narrows to a steadily more and more concentrated, small, private minority;
2. despotism persists within the internal running of the capitalist firm (even with team circles, total quality management practices, and the like purporting to involve workers in firm decision-making processes), while anarchy persists within the circulation of goods, services, and monies across the capitalist marketplace, including through the circuits of banking, finance, and investment;
3. an ever-greater need for rational cooperation and planning within the firm as well as across the disparate sectors of the capitalist class for effective allocation of productive and reproductive resources, and so as to maintain the general environmental and infrastructural preconditions required both for inaugurating and insuring efficient surplus production, continue to run up against the obstacle of inveterate competition among private capitals for private profit -- and for surplus profit through successful raids upon each other's profits;
4. capital continues to squeeze labor, the source of the surplus value that enables capital to turn a profit, for all it can get while labor continues to resist and fight back with all that it can muster to reduce the gap between necessary and surplus expenditures of labor, or, more simply put, between wages and profits;
5. exchange value continues to predominate over use value in the determination of principal avenues for and sizes of social investment, such that what a good or service can bring on the market continues to prove far more important in determining how and how far it will be developed and disseminated than what benefit it will provide, what real need it will satisfy;
6. human cultural expression and creation continually develop the objective preconditions for qualitative expansions and enrichments of the realm of human freedom yet access to most of the concrete manifestations of this enhanced freedom remains tightly limited and even largely denied to the vast majority of the world's population, whose lives continue to be dominated by the forces of necessity and the daily struggle simply to survive and subsist; and
7. the inefficiency and waste of capitalist production, exchange, and consumption, as well as the inevitable cyclical and spiral repetition of economic and social crises of capitalist overproduction and underconsumption - i.e., production above and consumption below the level at which capital can achieve an optimal level of profit - continue to wreak havoc in the lives of all who must struggle to live under capitalism as well as throughout the natural world and upon the fraying ecology of the planet Earth.
In conclusion, therefore, from a socialist perspective,
there exists only one ultimately viable solution to the twin ravages of terrorism
and state terrorism -- which are in fact felt most acutely in times of war
-- and in turn only one way to begin to insure lasting peace. This is especially
true in this age of globalization, or, as I see it, better put, this age
of global capitalism, entailing at the same time a globalization of the contradictions
of capitalism. The solution I have in mind requires working class men and
women to join together, slowly but surely, to build an international mass
movement organized in resistance and opposition to capitalist domination
and control of our lives. This movement must be prepared ultimately to seize
control from capital of the means, processes, and ends of social production,
distribution, exchange, and consumption in the interest of creating a genuinely
progressive new world order, and that cannot be, as I see it, anything less
than an international socialist world order.
Socialists do not perceive this as a purely utopian goal.
We as working men and women do maintain much greater power than we often
realize - our labor runs the capitalist economy; we produce the goods and
provide the services that satisfy human needs - and that feed capitalist
profits. Socialists believe that the people can and should rule, that we
should be in charge of determining the course of our own lives, and of participating
equitably in the collective, genuinely democratic determination of all that
effects our common destinies. We also believe that this represents the best
pathway toward overcoming the gross inequality, the brutal deprivation, and
the callous alienation and exploitation that causes vast numbers of people
around the world to support and join in the violence of war even when and
where this war does little if nothing in the long run to advance the real
objective best interests of the vast majority of those so involved. Socialists
struggle for a future where few would maintain any objective reason or interest
to join the likes of Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush in apocalyptic military
struggles, a future in which these men and those like them would be treated
as at best petty criminals and at worst a lunatic fringe.
I cannot offer an easy answer of precisely how to move
from capitalism to socialism. In fact this task will prove quite difficult,
and face considerable obstacles. Capitalists along with their political
representatives will strongly resist this effort and seek every possible
way of preventing it from taking place. They will seek to fracture the unity
of a revolutionary international proletarian movement, playing upon every
potential major line of division - nationality, regionality, race, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, religion, culture, and so on. They will almost certainly
use their virtual monopoly on legal use of violence against us as well.
We need to be prepared for this, and suffer no illusions that we can avoid
a great deal of painful loss and sacrifice. Yet we do maintain considerable
power as well. Already much, if not most, of what we do together as fellow
workers and citizens involves extensive cooperation and constructive competition
within an overall cooperative framework. Already a vast number of our social
institutions and practices embody socialistic tendencies in struggle with
capitalistic tendencies. At the same time, workers frequently unite across
national boundaries, no matter how difficult this may be, and in today's
globalized world of advanced communication and transportation technologies
greater resources than at any previous period in human history exist to facilitate
these efforts. The anti-globalization campaign provides a hopeful model
for a successful international campaign, and we should recognize this movement
as one which is in many crucial respects already strongly anti-capitalist
if not proto-socialist. Beyond this, the contradictions of capitalism continue
to exacerbate and the damage this causes frequently extends across national
boundaries in ways that become more and more difficult to ignore. Working
people can and should become involved in self-organized efforts at the workplace
and community level, making connections from one such site to the next, and
refusing to surrender control over efforts at collective, democratic, self-determination
to an alien elite. Workers should continue to question, challenge, pressure,
and critique those in power, demanding accountability and pushing both for
urgently needed reforms and for transitional programs that start to bridge
the gap between reform and revolution -- that require fundamental changes
in the structure and function of the overall social system in order to take
place. Mass strikes can play a pivotal role, as can many other forms of counter-hegemonic
critical practice and self-organization in resistance and opposition to capitalist
rule. Finally, workers need to combine together in these efforts, including
in the efforts to seek out alternative sources of information, analysis,
and perspective to those disseminated by the imperialist state and capitalist
mass media. We can pursue many avenues to build this effort, and to make
it succeed. We need to start where we can by doing what we can - and unite
in every possible way with others who strive to do what they can where they
are at. Socialists believe socialism makes common sense: right now we,
as human beings, as a species, possess the resources to eliminate hunger,
poverty, and many forms of disease; we also possess the power greatly to
reduce if not virtually eliminate the worst ravages of alienation, oppression,
abuse, and the destruction of nature. Capitalism stands in the way; as more
and more of us grow to recognize this fact and realize the stakes in this
struggle our strength will expand and we will eventually, ultimately, prevail.
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