Contribution to the 13th International Communist Seminar
Brussels, 2-4 May 2004
www.icsbrussels.org , ics[at]icsbrussels.org
Ray-O-Light
USA
"Our challenge in this new century is a difficult one: to defend our nation against the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen, and the unexpected (…) To accomplish [this task], we must …take risks and try new things - so we can deter and defeat adversaries that have not yet emerged to challenge us."
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
(Our emphasis, "Transforming the Military", p. 23, Foreign Affairs,
May-June 2002)
The quote cited above from US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld certainly sounds like the ravings of a lunatic; yet, at the same time, it represents the precise military position of United States imperialism in this historical moment when the one imperialist "super-power" has marched forward to assert its new world order---its claim to world empire. This combination of "lunacy" and precision underscores the extent to which imperialism, headed by US imperialism represents the last, dying stage of capitalism. As Lenin taught, imperialism offers the peoples of the world only one path to salvation---socialism, the path of the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the basis of the smashing of the system of international capitalism, on the basis of the military-political defeat of imperialism.
Rumsfeld’s ravings also reflect the extent to which this truly "evil empire" moves inexorably toward isolating itself. An integral aspect of this process is the accelerating militarization and fascisization of US imperialist society itself. The USA Patriot Act and other repressive post 9-11 laws (as well as implementation of pre-9/11 repressive laws) represent a fundamental alteration of the bourgeois democratic rule that has operated domestically at least since the end of the McCarthy period over forty years ago. All this provides an increasingly strong basis for almost everyone else in the world to find common ground upon which to unite against the imperialist juggernaut.
As far back as Bush senior’s administration, with its projection of a "new world order", then U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had written that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA must act to prevent the rise of peer competitors in Europe and Asia. (See G. John Ilkenberry’s "America’s Imperial Ambitions", Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct. 2002) As Ilkenberry puts it, "America is to be less bound to its partners and to global rules and institutions while it steps forward to play a more unilateral and anticipatory role…The United States will use its unrivalled military power to manage the global order."
In June 2002, in his West Point commencement address, President Bush II established the centerpiece of his post 9-11 US security policy as follows: "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenges…" This "new grand strategy taking shape in Washington"… "begins with a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor." (Ibid) Rival imperialist powers have learned this lesson the hard way.
Since 9-11, wherever oil and/or natural gas is in abundance, or where strategic transport routes and pipelines for oil and natural gas are at stake, from Georgia in the former USSR to Qatar in the Middle East, to Colombia in South America to the Philippines in Southeast Asia, and especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military has been sent to take control of the world’s oil and natural gas supply in order to maintain US economic hegemony in the world. George W. Bush (with the aid and comfort of Britain’s Tony Blair) unilaterally threatened and then launched unprovoked ("pre-emptive") war against oil rich Iraq in March 2003. Most significantly, in this process, Bush moved a few hundred thousand US troops with phenomenal armaments into the oil laden sheikdoms of Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, etc and militarily occupied Iraq and surrounded Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world with proven oil reserves greater than Iraq’s. (Iraq and Saudi Arabia are really one land literally divided by a line in the sand drawn by British and French imperialism in the closing days of the First World War.)
Prior to the Spring 2003 open war of aggression and subsequent military occupation of Iraq, the US had no lease agreements for Iraqi oil fields with the Saddam Hussein regime, while French and Russian leases were for huge oil reserves and Germany possessed lucrative construction contracts for Iraqi infrastructure and industry.
Since mid 2002, when Bush began to focus on Iraq as his next target, the partner-rivals of US imperialism have begun to realize that they are in danger of becoming "permanent" economic subordinates to the hegemonic imperialist power. This growing realization led to growing resistance, especially on the part of French and German imperialism, along with the Belgian imperialists and big capitalist forces in China and Russia. Thus, the US-led war against the people of Iraq and the Middle East, in contrast to the global coalition that attacked Afghanistan, was virtually a solo act by the United States.
Even before US and British imperialism launched their war against Iraq, mainstream US news sources had leaked the fact that the master plan for US imperialism’s post Saddam Hussein direct US military occupation government in Iraq featured the allocation of Iraq’s vast oil reserves exclusively to US oil companies. Likewise, no-bid contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq were granted to Halliburton, Bechtel Corp., and other Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld connected corporations by the bloodthirsty Bush Regime before they had even destroyed it! Recent revelations from former Bush appointed Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill exposed that the Bush Administration was already planning the military invasion of Iraq within days after assuming office in January of 2001.
The awful unity of the US-led global coalition for imperialist war and aggression against the people of Afghanistan in 2001 was precipitously transformed in the 2002-2003 Iraqi war scenario where such partner-rivals of US imperialism as Germany, France and Russia were not only not part of the coalition but actively opposed its initiative! These powerful monopoly capitalist and imperialist states (as well as the powerful capitalist states in Asia including China, India, Pakistan and of course Imperialist Japan) must find vehicles to express their selfish interests in opposition to those of US imperialism.
Thus far, the British Labor (i.e. Social-Democratic) government has remained closely allied to US imperialism. Nevertheless, international Social-Democracy, led by Germany’s S-D’s in state power in concert with the Christian Democrats at the head of the French government, has been the main vehicle to express the contradictions between these powerful capitalist and imperialist states on the one hand, and US imperialism (with its fascistic character) on the other. Even within the USA, Social Democracy (as manifested in the top leadership of both the AFL-CIO and the NAACP) became opposed to the specific imminent war on Iraq in late 2002 seemingly in concert with the European imperialist powers. The massive demonstrations worldwide were largely fueled by this phenomenon. However, as soon as Bush declared his quick victory at the beginning of May, these same imperialist partner-rivals, just as quickly jumped back into line behind US imperialism. And the global anti-war movement in its tens of millions virtually dried up overnight!!
All of these representatives of international capital as well as US imperialism itself have become increasingly desperate under the impact of the global capitalist economic crisis. Each tries to shift the burden of the crisis off its shoulders and onto those of its partner-rivals as well as the international working class. Its German and French partner-rivals, Russia and China and others have been toadying to US imperialism since the end of the official war in Iraq, some even canceling part of Iraq’s debt to their governments, despite the fact that all of them were big losers to US imperialism with the overthrow of Saddam’s regime abrogating his contracts with their companies! At the same time, thus far, the Bush Regime has been unwilling to share this new great "opportunity" for international capital with companies from these countries which had failed to march to the US military baton in Iraq as they had done in Afghanistan, despite the fact that it now needs their support in Iraq!
The contradiction between and among the various imperialist countries and groups is clearly intensifying. This is especially the case in the rivalry between the leading countries of the European Union on the one hand and United States imperialism on the other.
This is an historical moment in Europe--- pregnant with promise for the European (and world) proletariat. In order to defend and promote its own interests as distinct from the interests of US imperialism the European imperialist bourgeoisie has to allow the European communists and workers to mobilize and unite the European masses against US imperialism. In the process, European imperialism cannot stop the revolutionary proletariat of Europe at the door which it has itself opened to the working class for the purpose of education and organization of the European masses in opposition to US imperialism; it cannot stop them from marching on to education and organization against imperialism in general and against their own imperialist bourgeoisie, in particular!
In our view, the European Communist movement, in particular, needs to pay careful attention to the following formulation about the main enemy, i.e. "imperialism, headed by US imperialism". A European vanguard party dominated by opportunism can err on either side. If too much emphasis is placed on imperialism in general then US imperialism gets away lightly and the European working class and masses are not sufficiently mobilized against US imperialism, the current bulwark of world capitalism and juggernaut of reactionary violence and war throughout the globe. On the other hand, too much emphasis on US imperialism by European opportunists creates bourgeois democratic, social-pacifist and social-chauvinist illusions about imperialism in general and about "their own" imperialists in particular.
An example of this latter tendency emerged in the May 2003 Brussels international communist seminar conducted by the Belgian Workers Party (PTB). At the time, Belgian imperialism along with German and French imperialism had begun to oppose US imperialist hegemonic warfare. International social-democracy was being used by the European imperialist bourgeoisie to defend its interests over against those of Bush and US imperialism, helping to build massive demonstrations of millions of Europeans against the imminent US war in Iraq. Yet the Brussels Seminar Outline focused only on "United States war policy since September 11" without any mention of the war drive inherent in European (or Japanese) imperialism! Such focus on US imperialism is just and correct only as long as the Belgian and other European comrades use the tremendous opportunity afforded them by their temporary anti-US imperialist alliance with European imperialism to educate the European masses in their millions about the bestial nature of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, in general, and of European imperialism in particular.
We opened our analysis of the World-Wide Strategy of US Imperialism in 1999 with the following quote from great Lenin: "A proletariat that tolerates the slightest coercion of other nations by its ‘own’ nation cannot be a socialist proletariat." If our European comrades are successful in embracing this Leninist approach to the specific question of "US war policy" and to the question of imperialist war in general then great victories for the European and world proletariat will be ours.
As we have already seen in 2003, there was a sudden and rapid resistance to US military policy from its "closest and most powerful imperialist allies" that arose around the prospect for US led war on Iraq and its attendant adverse consequences for these imperialist powers. The intense animosity that seemed to come out of nowhere in the USA toward its oldest historical ally, France, (French fried potatoes became "freedom fries"), reflected the serious obstacle that France, Germany, and Russia, among others, represented for the US "pre-emptive" war on the peoples of Iraq and the Middle East. The current abeyance of this contradiction is temporary. Fueled by the gravity of the sharpening world capitalist economic crisis, there is an uneven but unmistakable drive toward greater and more substantial resistance on the part of US imperialism’s partner-rivals as US imperialism continues to use the "sword" to slice up the pie of imperialist superprofits in more and more inequitable pieces.
Local and regional wars are leading inexorably toward world war among the great powers. The only way to avoid such a global conflagration is for the international proletariat, under international communist leadership, to triumph over imperialism, headed by US imperialism in the local and regional wars of colonial and dependent peoples for national liberation and socialism, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Colombia, the Philippines and Palestine, which today remains the main contradiction. If such revolutionary struggles are unable to prevent world war, then it will be our task to make sure that the world war will lead to proletarian revolution.
RAY O. LIGHT
JANUARY 2004