AN EPOCH OF WARS AND REVOLUTIONS:
IRAQ AND ARGENTINA
Critique Conference 2003: Towards a New Imperialism?
February 15 has demonstrated beyond any doubt that current History is far from an absolute realm of the imperial “free will”: millions of people, in an unprecedented political mobilization on a planetary scale against the U.S. led impeding war against Iraq, have show that the pretending to the throne of Emperor is rather naked, vulnerable, but still deadly dangerous for the future of humanity.
The biggest anti-war rallies took place in the advanced capitalist countries where the governments are preparing the so-called ‘preventive’ war of aggression: the United States, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Australia. Never the gap between the rulers and the ruled was so wide. The orientation of the leaders of the representative bourgeois political system is totally opposed to the expressed will of the people they pretend to represent, putting into question the legitimacy of the system itself and the life-and-death decisions taken by it. This crisis of legitimacy is developing into a political crisis of the first order, where there is a polarization between the anti-war determination of the people and the war decisions of the political State, even before the war explodes and the people is called to pay its price.
After February 15 nothing can be the same. Those from above they cannot launch the war in the same conditions as before and those from below will never accept as a fait accompli imperialist barbarism. Those from above are split among themselves, as the first open split in NATO, the sharpening conflict between the US and the French-German hard core of the EU, the split in the British Labour parliamentary group and the tensions inside the American ruling class itself demonstrate. Furthermore, they drive by their own actions those from below into independent political activity. All the elements of an unfolding political confrontation between rulers and ruled are rapidly assembled.
Despite all the unavoidable confusions and conjectural leaderships, the present anti-war movement has deep differences with the previous one during the Vietnam War, which erupted years after the beginning of the war operations in Indochina, in the framework of the Cold War, with the Stalinist bureaucracies still in command positions and in conditions of the expiring but still existing post World War II economic boom. The Vietnam War was the last war in the framework of the Bretton Woods system of Keynesian concessions, accelerating its final collapse in 1971. Now the war drive and the anti-war movement emerge out of a protracted economic downturn, stagnation, dismantlement of the Welfare State, destruction of all concessions, dramatic deterioration of the living conditions. For these reasons opposition to war and imperialist aggression is combined now with accumulated social frustrations and social anger, giving to the anti-war movement a much deeper social depth, beyond the limits of sheer pacifism. The workers under conditions of chronic unemployment and “flexibility of labor” and the middle classes insecure, over-indebted, on the brink of ruin, see clearly and with a growing anxiety that the deepening social economic crisis will be exacerbated, particularly in Europe, with a major war explosion in the Middle East. And they fight back by a preventive political struggle against Bush and Blair’s “preventive” war. From this vantage point the mass struggle against the war has the potential to become a struggle against not only the warmongers but also against the crisis, which pushes the rulers in the warpath and the masses to destitution.
Cecil Rhodes, in the dawn of the imperialist epoch, insisted that imperialist expansion in the periphery and colonization was the solution to avoid civil war in the metropolitan center. Now the new military expeditions of the advanced West to ex-colonial countries of the periphery provoke, even before the actual military conflict starts, popular unrest, mass anti-war mobilizations and political crises inside the Metropolises themselves. The threat for a major political upheaval drives the ruling circles who plan preventive aggressions in an indefinite in time and space campaign of ‘wars on terror” to build up as well an apparatus of preventive civil war at home, conditions of repression of dissent by a Police State. The U.S. Patriot Act and special courts, the Euro-police and the Euro-mandate for arrests and extraditions, the exercises of repression of mass mobilizations as in Gothenburg and Genoa in 2001,the denial of the rights of political prisoners etc. are features of this “New Brave World” against which the demonstrators have rebelled on February 15, 2003.
The fantasies about a ‘uni-polar world’ with the United States as the ‘only superpower’ to be able to do what they like anywhere anyhow any time as well as the illusion of a “ post-imperialist de-centered Empire” have received a serious blow. It is, on the contrary, an apparent “return of the old” that takes place: a brutal, unprovoked, cynically planned imperialist aggression on an ex-colonial country, rich in the most precious raw material, oil, sharpening inter-imperialist rivalries, anti-imperialist resistances in the periphery, growing opposition by the working class and popular strata to the war in the belligerent centers, germs of a new internationalism. All these elements, known from past phases in our epoch, are preserved in the present world situation and, at the same time, negated and superseded (Aufhebung). To grasp the new contradictory content, it is necessary to explore, in their interrelation, the nature of the coming war, the nature of the world crisis behind it and, last but by no means least, the nature of the epoch itself.
* * * *
Undoubtedly, in a war initiated and led by the most advanced Capitalist super-power in the world against an ex-colonial country with the second in size oil reserves in the Middle East, the “black gold”, oil, is central. Nevertheless, put in a wider historical context, the coming war cannot be reduced solely to ‘blood for oil’. Oil is a crucial element integrated in a whole strategy. The United States are moving to occupy militarily Iraq and its rich oilfields and, with them, an all powerful strategic position in the entire explosive region of the Middle East, in the immediate neighborhood of Caucasus, the former Soviet Union and Western Asia. They will be able to re-shape the political map not only of Iraq but of the Middle East as well; to control OPEC and the oil pricing in the world market; to prevent any challenge of its hegemony by the oil-dependent European Union and Japan; and to occupying vital strategic positions to direct, according to US interests, the process of Capitalist restoration in Russia and China.
It is obvious that the war aims have nothing to do with “terrorism” or “weapons of mass destruction”; the real objective is the re-shaping of American domination in the post-Cold War chaotic world, adapting its form to the urgent needs of an uncontrollable world crisis and the inexorable historical decline of American and world Capitalism itself.
The indefinite world ‘war on terror’ launched by the Bush Administration, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, first by the total destruction of Afghanistan, now with an even more barbaric aggression on Iraq, tomorrow with Iran, North Korea and any other country-target, segment of an imaginary “axis of evil”, is not the manifestation of the unmatched strength of an ascending Empire striving to subjugate the entire planet but the spasms and convulsions of a social formation where the world wide historical development of Capitalism accumulated the most powerful resources raising it to the position of the center of a world system – which now is torn apart from its own internal contradictions.
The ascension of capitalist America to world supremacy came in the epoch of Capitalist decline and it was interconnected with the two world wars, the Crash and the Depression of the ‘30s, the decline of the European capitalist powers and the dismantlement of their colonial empires and, above all, with the first emergence of the world socialist revolution in Russia in 1917, the birth of an alternative new social order, definitely proving the transitional character of the historical epoch. From the start, the rising power of America had to confront not only its rivals in declining “old Europe” but the driving forces of the epoch, the decline of the system as a whole and the prospect of social revolution as the transition to a new classless world, communism.
As Trotsky has stressed in an early period, in his pamphlet in the ‘20s on “Europe and America”, the law of uneven and combined development made necessary for American Capitalism to base its own internal equilibrium on world equilibrium and in this way to accumulate all the world contradictions in its own foundations.
After the First World War, America has heavily financed the re-establishment of an international equilibrium, helping (profitably) Capitalist Britain and Continental Europe, to prevent the German and European revolutions isolating the October Revolution in Russia. The whole effort collapsed in the Crash, the Depression and the descent in a new more devastating world war. From the ruins of this second war, the United States emerged as the undisputed leading power of the Capitalist World, with its gigantic resources and the US dollar, its national currency in the position of international reserve currency, re-building Western Europe and Japan, on the basis of the Bretton Woods 1944 agreement and confronting throughout the Cold War the Soviet Union, in the name of “containment of communism”.
The collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the end of the convertibility of dollar with gold in 1971 and the defeat of the most powerful imperialism in history, US imperialism, in 1975 by the combined forces of the Vietnamese Revolution and the anti-war movement at home, heralded the transformation of the “Thirty Glorious Years” of post-war capitalist expansion into an unprecedented world crisis of overproduction of capital and at the same time put an end to the Golden Years of American supremacy. What followed, Reaganism, finance globalization, even the collapse of the historical foe, the Soviet Union, did not succeeded to reverse the tide of decline and restore American Capitalism to its previous levels of expansion.
The collapse of the two pillars of the post war world equilibrium, the fall of the twin towers of Breton Woods and of the Yalta geopolitical order of the Cold war period, deprived American Capitalism from the necessary material basis on which it regulated for a long period its internal contradictions. The war drive comes as the manifestation of interaction of processes generated by this twin collapse and as the search to impose a new world “order” as a precondition for the re-regulation of the globally expanded and exacerbated contradictions.
Reaganism, despite all the anti-Communist bravado and the “neo-liberal” frenzy, failed to reverse American decline; it was under Reagan that the US was transformed from the biggest exporter of capital into the biggest importer, depending to face its fiscal crisis and deficits on the pumping up of Japanese and European capitals and descending into extreme financial parasitism in relation to the rest of the world.
Globalization of finance Capital in the last two decades represents the attempt to find a temporary way out to the crisis of over-accumulation with the flight into the liberalized /globalized financial markets as well as to create conditions to control and reverse the radicalization which exploded with the downfall of the Bretton Woods system in the late ’60s –early ’70s.
But this finance globalization led to the globalization of all the capitalist contradictions, which started to explode from the late ’90s with a series of financial crashes, following the Asian 1997 Crash, the bursting of the financial bubble in Wall Street itself, the collapse of the US. “Dot. Economy”, of gigantic US Corporations such as Enron and World.com the bankruptcy of entire countries such as Argentina.
* * * *
Argentina, the highest implementation of the so-called policies of neo-liberalism, is not an exceptional case but the most advanced expression of all the trends of finance Globalization. Its bankruptcy manifests the universal tendencies of declining Capitalism to self-dissolution. The “miseria universal del capital” – to use an expression by Adolfo Gilly- the universal misery of capital, the misery of its universality, leads to the disintegration of the social fabric itself and to the “rebellion of the cities”, to revolts of the working class, unemployed and employed, together with the suddenly impoverished middle classes, demanding “Que se vayan todos!”the rejection of the entire political personnel and system.
More than one year after the biggest default in the history of Capitalism and the revolutionary revolt on December 19/20, 2001, the Argentinazo, the process of social disintegration but also of revolutionary upheaval did not stop. Argentina with the mass vanguard movement of the piqueteros, the hundreds occupied factories, the experimentation into workers control, the Popular Assemblies in the neighborhoods, the powerful emergence of a new revolutionary subjectivity from the most deprived masses, the regroupment of the workers vanguard around the Polo Obrero and the Partido Obrero, represent the most advanced battlefield of a revolutionary process which transforms Latin America as a whole into a volcano erupting from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia to Uruguay and soon in Brazil.
It is important to note that this wave of revolutionary mass struggles is unfolding in the backyard of the American imperialist superpower itself while it is preparing a major military assault and occupation in Iraq and the Middle East. The failure of the new “democratic” coup by the pro-US forces in Venezuela, the defeat of the offensive led by Uribe with US backing against the Colombian guerillas, the new rebellion in Bolivia, this time in the cities, the continuing revolutionary process in Argentina, the upheaval in the entire Latin America gives a powerful blow to the Bush Administration’s war expeditions, together with the continuous flow of anti-war mobilizations in the metropolitan countries themselves.
* * * *
Iraq as the target today of imperialist war aggression and Argentina, from the other side, as the most advanced expression of the bankruptcy of finance globalization leading to revolution in an industrial country are both interconnected aspects of the same historic process: they manifest the universal tendencies of declining Capitalism towards self-dissolution through a transitional epoch of wars and revolutions.
During this epoch, a conflict, sometimes hidden, sometimes quite open, between an ascending America and the declining European powers have taken place. During the Cold War, the tensions were checked by the need of a common stand against the Soviet Union and its camp. After the implosion of the USSR, the end of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the unification of Germany, the first response of European imperialism was an agreement between France and Germany on the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, on Mitteleuropa and the extension eastwards as well as on the acceleration of European capitalist integration based on a Stability pact based on the so-called Maastricht criteria. The entire project was led into a disaster. Even their architects abandoned the Maastricht criteria as German and European economies were plunging into recession. From the other side a series of barbaric wars by proxies, the local nationalist-bureaucratic elites, destroyed Yugoslavia; Europe arrived into an impasse and America/NATO forces were “invited” to occupy the vacuum and win a strategic area of first importance for the future in the post Cold War world. The European Union had proved to be as it was said, an economic giant, a political Pygmy and a military non-entity. The new NATO doctrine on April 1999 for international military interventions all over the world and the Kosovo war the same year mark the transition from the Balkan wars of the ’90s to the new war against Afghanistan and now against Iraq, the so-called ‘war on terror’ of indefinite duration.
But now, the interim period, which followed the collapse of Stalinism, has ended and the two-decades finance globalization gave obvious evidence of its exhaustion. The new aggression against Iraq has split NATO, marked the total decay of the UN, treated by Bush as the League of Nations was treated by Mussolini during the invasion of Ethiopia by Italian fascism, and made quite open and sharp the conflict between America and “old Europe”, as Rumsfeld sarcastically called the French-German axis of the EU just before giving to it a kick to the teeth by mobilizing the right wing regimes of South Europe and the East European restorationist elites.
A decade after the end of the Cold War, nothing can hinder the sharpening antagonism between Europe and America as one of the features of our epoch. But there is an essential difference between the present and the past history of this conflict: this time we do not have the antagonism between an ascending American superpower and the descending European powers in the framework of an overall declining world social system; despite the relative economic preponderance and undoubted military supremacy of America, she is also a declining imperial power.
Not only the warmongers in the US Pentagon still suffering from the “Vietnam syndrome” are speaking about the “decline of America” suggesting its revival by military expeditions against every shade of ‘anti-Americanism’ in the world but also a Keynesian pacifist like J.K. Galbraith insists on the “unbearable Costs of Empire” depicting in black the picture of an economically declining America: The picture is one of consumption without production, dependent on inflows of borrowed foreign capital, which inflows are in turn dependent on American military supremacy( see “The Unbearable Costs of Empire”, James K. Galbraith, The American prospect 18/11/02) The warning is that an ambitious Empire, which is militarily over-expanded in relation to an ever constricting material economic basis of production of real value, cannot but to have the similar fate of the Roman Empire.
Globalization, which was much publicized as ‘a new epoch’ of a revived Capitalism, more and more is proved that it gave to the system the ‘kiss of death’. It pushed to the extremes, although in the distorted form of an over-expanding ‘abstract’, finance capital, the tendency towards universality inherent to capital as a self-expanding value. A tendency, which as Marx has analyzed in the Grundrisse, “ distinguishes it from all previous stages of production […] and at the same time contradicts it and hence drives it towards dissolution […]. Capital is posited as mere point of transition” (Grundrisse, Pelican 1973 p.540)
Finance capital, the “supreme fetish” apparently separated of real production, as alienated, abstract universality becomes the “universal misery”. It generates the sharpest, irreconcilable conflict both with the producers who are excluded in growing numbers from a stagnating production as well as with the internal limits constituting the nature of capital itself (see Grundrisse op. cit. p. 416). The latter antagonism dissolves the social organization itself, as in the Argentinean case, and the former drives to a universal rebellion against the universal misery of capital, against the totality of the conditions of social existence condemning them to that misery. This is the case, again, of the movement of the piqueteros in Argentina, which is much more original and revolutionary than a movement of unemployed looking for “social assistance”, as many conservative dogmatists consider, fetishizing, from the past, the old trade union forms ‘of the organized working class in the production point”.
Decline as Hegel first pointed out is the negative appearance of the emergence of a new principle of historical development (Principles of the Philosophy of Right); as Marx said, the tendency to universality, generated and distorted by capital, nevertheless produces the universal basis of free development of the social individual of Communist society “ the richest development of the individuals […] As soon as this new development is reached, the further development appears as decay…”(op. cit. p. 541). Decline is transition, unfolding of contradictions more and more explosive, creating the conditions for a revolutionary rupture and a leap in History. Marx has anticipated this when he spoke about the dynamics of capitalist crisis: “ These contradictions, of course, lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide. Yet these regularly occurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow” (op. cit. p.750).
The world capitalist crisis has reached a point where non-economic solutions are searched by both opposed classes. War is an attempt for a military solution to an economic crisis. The insolubility of the current crisis and of the systemic decline is what drives the Bush administration against Iraq today. The dissolution of the social fabric by the crisis has put the question of a social re-organization on a new basis in Argentina. The Argentinazo is not just a manifestation of social anger but also the first step for this necessary social re-organization from below.
For every new Iraq posed as a war target by imperialism a new revolutionary Argentina will emerge. Universal misery by capital and its wars is producing universal rebellions: February 15 is not the end but the beginning. Universal rebellion in North and South produces the conditions and the urgent need for a new universal revolutionary subjectivity. The epoch of wars and revolutions put again in its urgency the central question of a much-needed revolutionary International of the working class.
27-28/2/ 03