Five years on from 9/11 - PR2 Editorial

Five years on from 9/11

This issue of Permanent Revolution focuses on key developments in the international class struggle. Everywhere around us international war is being waged relentlessly. The Israeli invasion of the Lebanon, the fighting in Afghanistan, the ongoing quagmire that is Iraq; proof, if any were needed, of imperialism’s determination to impose its will on its subject nations. But it also shows that those under attack from imperialism will fight back.

Five years on from 9/11 there is no let up in Bush’s war on terror; a hypocritical phrase summing up – and covering up – the US A’s aggressive, imperialist foreign policy, a policy agreed in advance of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers. That attack gave Bush the pretext to use pre-emptive military force and remove any regime that threatened the US A’s control over oil supplies.

After 9/11 Bush and his neo-cons repeatedly insisted that the US A was the only superpower willing and able to deal with “rogue states” – Washington doublespeak for any state that dares to threaten the White House’s global objectives. Afghanistan was first in the firing line, followed by the strategically vital Iraq. Iraq was quickly followed by Iran and Syria. Once these were humbled Washington expected the Palestinians to fall into line and be grateful for the scraps of territory thrown to them by Israel. US -style democracy – corruption, a compliant media, privatisation – was to be imposed throughout the region, underpinned by numerous military bases.

This was a unilateralist policy; Europe, Japan and Russia could sign up or shut up. And this policy extended far beyond the Middle East. The neo-cons planned to cut Russia down to size, and bring its former territories, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and the Central Asian republics swiftly into the NATO fold. This was to be the second “American century”.

Five years on this neo-conservative dream is turning into a nightmare.

With 140,000 troops tied down in Iraq the insurgency shows no signs of abating. US casualties can only be kept down by giving up territory and control to the insurgents. Baghdad is to be ringed with trenches to ward off attacks, more than three years after the capital was “liberated”. The Iraqi government and its army barely survives, courtesy of US troops – and increasingly by running organised death squads to terrorise the Sunni minority. The country threatens to split into three segments and surrounding powers are already eyeing up the potential spoils. And in Afghanistan, where the war on terror started and where “victory” was claimed years ago – but where all the imperialist troops put together could not capture Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, Taliban leader – NATO is being fought to a standstill. A force in the south, which was sent in to win hearts and minds, has been greeted with rockets and bullets. President Karzai’s writ scarcely extends beyond Kabul.

Five years on from 9/11 Meanwhile the imperialists are falling out amongst themselves, denouncing the shirkers in NATO, Germany, Turkey and Italy, for not throwing reinforcements into the fray. Bush the failing President Is it any wonder that George Bush’s approval ratings are worse than President Nixon’s were thirty years ago at the height of the Watergate scandal? His closest ally, Tony Blair, has fared no better. Blair is so unpopular that he is being bundled out of Downing Street by his own New Labour allies desperate to save their skins at the next election. In Washington the neo-conservative star is on the wane.

The USA has been forced to turn again to the imperialist allies it once disdained. The collective arm of this band of world thieves, the United Nations, is no longer scoffed at by the neo-cons; its help is being sought. Nowhere is this clearer than in the aftermath of the Lebanese war. As we point out in this issue, the 33-day onslaught showed both the continuing aggression of the US administration (this time working through its proxy military power, Israel) and its weakness. A small but determined guerrilla movement fought the world’s fifth most powerful army to a standstill. The failure to crush Hezbollah has increased its support and weakened Israel. Washington and London, who had fought against a ceasefire to give Israel time to “finish the job”, had to do a Uturn. They had to turn to the UN – and France and Italy – to try and disarm Hezbollah and bolster the shattered Lebanese government, a product of the “Cedar Revolution”. Working class recovery It is not only in the Middle East that the neo-liberal offensive has been blunted.

The 1980s and 1990s were terrible decades for the world working class – the triumph of Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the US A ushered in a period of severe attacks on the organisations, jobs and living standards of the working class. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the triumph of a vicious neo-liberal regime under Yeltsin, the Russian and Eastern European, workers were ravaged by unemployment and poverty. The Latin American economies were crushed under a mountain of debt with the workers and peasants paying the price. Even Japanese workers saw their more privileged position eroded by a decade of economic stagnation and job insecurity.

The later 1990s, and especially the current decade, have seen a change from these gloomy times. Workers have taken to the streets in their millions protesting against neo-liberalism, unemployment and war. The growth of the mass anti capitalist movement after Seattle, its willingness to besiege the G8 leaders around the world, was one element in this; the overthrow of dictatorships in Indonesia, East Timor and Nepal another.

While the recovery in struggle and organisation has been uneven – Britain, Japan and the US A are not Bolivia or Venezuela, nor even Greece and France – the trend is upward. In Latin America the continent is in revolt against the consequences of neo-liberalism – the sale or giveaway of the continent’s assets to US and European multinationals in the 1990s. From the Argentinian crisis at the turn of the century through the Ecuadorian, Venezuelan and, most recently, Bolivian struggles, reactionary presidents have been toppled. Masses took to the streets, braving army and police repression, creating pre-revolutionary and even revolutionary crises.

Neo-liberalism has suffered a series of defeats and the workers and peasants are on the offensive. The decisive question in the next period is, can the workers consolidate these gains? Will they recognise the need to push further and overthrow capitalism not just presidents, to dismantle the capitalist state, not just remove the head of state? Or will the movements’ populist and reformist leaderships pacify and demoralise the working class by their hesitancy and fear of revolution, so allowing domestic reaction and imperialism to go on the offensive once again? Europe Europe too has witnessed major class struggles: Greece over the last decade or more; the Italian workers versus Berlusconi; and, perhaps most importantly because it lies at the heart of the European Union’s neo-liberal reform strategy, the French workers. All have struck and marched against their governments.

As a result, the EU ’s attempt to drive through its neo-liberal agenda – set out in Lisbon in 2000 – has suffered serious setbacks. The defeat in the 2005 French referendum of the centralising, neo-liberal constitution, led to it being shelved. Plans to liberalise agriculture, the WTO Doha round, fell before protectionist agricultural interests on both sides of the Atlantic. The EU Bolkestein Directive on liberalising services was heavily watered down to get the proposals through the European parliament. Most importantly, the French students and young workers defeated the government on the streets this year over its attempt to reduce security of employment for the under 26 year olds. In Germany, long a pillar of stability, social partnership and low levels of trade union struggle, opposition to German Social Democracy’s attempt to introduce elements of the Lisbon agenda – Agenda 2010 – led to a split in the party and the formation of the new Left Party, which won 54 seats in Parliament last year.

The working class is still in a period of recovery, of transition from the period of defeats. It has not yet moved onto a generalised offensive. As we explained in the minority perspectives we fought for in our former organisation, the League for Fifth international (LFI):

“This transition period has been marked by unevenness – the British working class has yet to recover from the defeats of Thatcherism in the 1980s. Japan has been quiescent, as has Russia and much of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. The US working class has not recovered from the defeats of the 1980s and its labour movement still loses most defensive battles forced upon it. Resistance to imperialism and neo-liberalism has come primarily from the anti-war movement and the struggle for migrant rights rather than from organised workers. In South Africa and Brazil the working class has been tied to neo liberal reformist popular fronts with limited struggles being led by the landless and shanty-town dwellers.” (www.permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=307)

It’s the economy, stupid

To use a phrase coined during the Clinton era, “it’s the economy stupid”. One reason the working class has been able to regain some confidence and resist attacks on its conditions and wages, and even improve them in many countries, is because of an expanding world economy.

Global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has doubled in the last ten years. The combined growth in the world capitalist economy over the three years 2003-05 has been the biggest for thirty years. GDP growth in 2004 was the highest in more than decade. That same year South America experienced its highest growth for nearly twenty years.

Of course, neo-liberal globalisation also increases inequality – the expanded profits are not handed over on a plate to the workers. They have to fight hard to get a bigger share of the pie. But the rapid industrialisation of countries like China and India has raised millions of peasants out of poverty (300 million in China, 1% of India’s poor every year). Wages in the new industries in China have increased, even while the social wage in old state industries has declined. In countries like Britain real wages for the majority of workers have increased every year for more than a decade as the economy and employment has grown – while unorganized and migrant workers continue to struggle on low and poverty wages.

Good times for the capitalists also mean less need to take political risks in launching onslaughts on the workers’ movements. Such was the desperate state of British capitalism in the late 1970s that the ruling class was willing to back Thatcher to take on and smash one of the most militant and well organised workers’ movements in Europe. It was a highrisk strategy given the militant workers, led by the miners, had broken and defeated governments that tried it in the previous decade. Today the European capitalists do not need to take such risks – yet.

The European ruling classes are able to retreat in the face of a determined working class, knowing they can return some time in the future. Weaker economies, like Italy and Greece, are under more pressure to demand “givebacks” and deregulation from their workers, but even they have, for the moment, the cushion of Brussels’ handouts, domestic economic growth and expanding tax revenues. It is not an immediate question of “Americanise or Bust” for the European ruling classes.

Much of the left has closed its eyes to the expansion of the world economy and little thought has gone into explaining the roots of this development. Business cyclical downturns are pored over as evidence of the ongoing crisis and instability of capitalism. But an uncomfortable silence descends when it comes to explaining the recent absence of the deep and synchronised world recessions that we had in the 1970s and 1980s.

This journal does not intend to close its eyes to reality, however uncomfortable it may be for the schemas of the left. In two articles in this issue, one on the world economy and one on China, we begin to explore the reasons for capitalist growth. We put forward the view that the collapse of the Stalinist states (US R, Eastern Europe) and the ability of imperialism in the era of globalisation to incorporate these economies into its system of exploitation, allowed world capitalism to offset the structural crisis of accumulation.

We will develop this analysis further in future issues and we welcome responses from our readers – be they critical or in agreement.

Rising powers, new tensions

The new millennium, dominated by globalisation, has many similarities with the period of the 1890s-1913: capitalist expansion, rising imperialist powers, massive movements of labour (migration). China has grown about 10% a year for more than 25 years and is now the fourth largest economy in the world. Its GDP has doubled in the last ten years. India’s economy has grown at 6% a year between 1980 and 2002 and at 7.5% a year over the last four years. Last year the global south as a whole accounted for more than half of new world growth. On one measure they now account for more than half of global GDP for the first time. Russia under Putin, on the back of buoyant gas and oil prices, has overcome its economic crisis, emerged from its period of contraction and has started repaying its foreign debt ahead of time as well as setting aside a $50 billion domestic stabilisation fund. Russia is no longer willing to be the playground punch-bag in the G8. US commentators are bemoaning the fact that Russia is re-asserting its role as a regional power – with the Ukraine moving back into its orbit as the most recent example.

Of these three powers it is China which threatens to shake up the world imperialist system. Like the Germany that burst onto the world scene in the 1880s demanding a political position consummate with its economic power, China will demand the same in time. This burgeoning power is already beginning to extend its economic and political influence around the world – especially in Latin America and Africa.

Today China does not possess one aircraft carrier and Washington’s annual defence budget increase is more than the total Chinese military spending. But the US imperialists know very well the potential threat China poses to their global dominance in the next decade or two. While they continue to rely on the country’s massive cheap labour resources for their super profits, they are already taking military and economic steps to keep China in a sealed box. It is no accident that Defence Secretary Rumsfeld was recently in Vietnam mending fences and that India (unlike Iran) was rewarded for actually breaking the nuclear nonproliferation treaty with a new “strategic partnership” deal.

These countries, along with Taiwan and Japan, are the allies designed to keep their giant Chinese neighbour in check. These countries need to be firmly wedded to the US A if they are to be able to do this.

As for China, it is determined to re-integrate Taiwan with the mainland, one potential flashpoint for the future. It will also push for control of vital mineral and energy sources in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East to keep the industries at the heart of its economy beating. The real threat of imperialist clashes in the decades ahead comes not from Europe versus America but from China versus America.

It would be wrong, as many ill-educated but highly paid bourgeois commentators do, just to look at China’s astounding growth rates and project them uninterruptedly into the future. This was regularly done with Japan in the 1980s. If the predictions had come true it would have overtaken the US A by now as the world’s economic giant. It didn’t. China is a capitalist dictatorship. The misnamed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rules over the workers with an iron fist, under capitalism just as it did when China was a degenerate workers’ state. Yet China is producing a mighty proletariat, a working class hundreds of millions strong. With that growth will come organisation, maturing class-consciousness and militancy. The working class will not allow this dictatorship to continue its brutal rule. Revolutionary storms are inevitable.

Whether such a struggle will stall China’s growth and even lead to national disintegration is uncertain. Rulers in South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand rode the storms to “manage” their transition from bourgeois dictatorship to forms of parliamentary democracy. These involved mass struggles but they were contained and in the longer term had little impact on those countries’ forward economic development.

Revolutionaries around the world will hope for a very different outcome; a democratic revolution that grows into the struggle for socialism – a revolution that is made permanent. And for that to happen it is crucial that a communist party that really has the right to such a name, a revolutionary internationalist party, is built. In turn efforts by revolutionaries outside China to build a revolutionary International, can help build such a party in China.

The role of Permanent Revolution

That is the purpose of this journal – to contribute to building such an international, a revolutionary, Trotskyist International. We are not here to develop interesting analyses and stimulating political perspectives to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of left wing academics. We publish for practical purposes. There is a real need, at every level of the world’s workers’ movement, for a revolutionary re-arming after the closing decades of defeat at the end of the last century. We will strive to make this journal one weapon in that process. Its theory will be revolutionary and will serve the building of a revolutionary movement. We hope Permanent Revolution will provoke real dialogue in the workers’ movement and we intend to open its pages to debate. So if you want to contribute – a letter, a comment, a review, an article – contact us. We hope our articles will not appear dogmatic or arrogant.

Of course we do think our politics and perspectives are essentially correct. After all if we did not we would not have gone to the bother of forming a new organisation and bringing out a new journal. We would have joined a different group with whom we agreed.

But we will strive to argue our point in a way that is constructive and fraternal, not arrogant and impervious to criticism. We do not believe we have all the answers to all the questions. Nor have we formed ourselves as a sealed sect, set against discussion.

We opposed that approach by the LFI while we were in the organisation. As a result they now brand us as “party defeatist”. What they really disagreed with was our argument that it was necessary to build a party not only by carrying out our own activities but also by debating with the forces of the left. The aim of such debates was to achieve a re-alignment of those forces and, where possible, fuse with others on a principled revolutionary basis. We opposed the belief that such forces did not exist and that the task was simply to rally everyone around the lectern of the LFI.

Our commitment to this new approach, aimed at revolutionary regroupment – including splits and fusions – is not just a comforting statement of intent. It is real and is demonstrated by the fact that we have already started to carry it out at an international level. At the same time our comrades will work in the class struggle with the goal of persuading militants to join our ranks and strengthen our existing organisation.

No doubt we will make mistakes, but we hope we will have the courage to say when we are wrong, and to accept valid criticism. Our view is that fraternal debate can enrich our understanding, inform our practice and help creatively develop Marxism in the twenty-first century.

The Editors

 

Fri 01, June 2007 @ 14:44