No War but the Class War Home Page
The following is a proposed text for discussion in the event of the bombing of Iraq (though it should be emphasised that it would require a high degree of diplomacy and manoeuvring as part of the build-up to such a possibility):
Amongst many, the initial reaction to the twin towers bombing was a terrified “It could happen here” and a subsequent desire to show to the so-called Third World poor that not everyone in the West were complicitous with “their” government’s brutal foreign policy. However, after a few months of nothing crazy happening on London’s tube or a kamikaze attack on Canary Wharf, most people are just glad to be physically alive, unlike the Iraqui, the Afghani, the New Yorker, the Israeli or Palestinian victims of this new phase of capitalist competition. But though we might have got used to the mad logic of capitalist war and capitalist peace, not all of us are resigned to the inevitability of it, till death us do part. Beneath the sense of impotence in the face of the horror, beneath the inevitable anaesthetisation to it, beneath the depression that niggles constantly, and makes you want to avoid watching or reading the news, beneath that inertia that makes you wish you could get motivated, stalks a restless anger, pacing the prison bars of indifference and cynicism. The ruling show does everything to encourage this sense of the uselessness of struggle, in particular by keeping quiet about the social movements that are struggling: the movements in Iran and Argentina, the social explosions in Algeria, the – admittedly rare - strikes of schoolkids against the bombing of Afghanistan in Italy, France and Berlin.
A leaflet is not enough to release this anger, but it could contribute some clear reasons for it. If, over time, we don’t wreck this logic of competing gangs of capitalist rackets, we’ll all end up utterly wrecked ourselves. And if your response to this is “Yeah – we know all that” or “So what else is new?” isn’t that merely indicative of how wrecked we have already become?
So Bush, and the Gulf War veteran, Colin Powell (the first Black US President...?) , have decided “to finish off what we failed to do in 1991”. Only this, surprise surprise, is a tiny distortion of the facts. To be sure, in ’91, the allied coalition of Western capital, had encouraged the possibility of an uprising of the poor, and many of those who then took part in the uprisings had illusions in being ‘saved’ by the West. The uprising – in the form of placard-waving demonstrations (absolutely forbidden in such a fascist society) had already started before the 3 day ground war had begun. So did the allies encourage such a movement by, say, attacking Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican guards? No – these were left well alone, in tact to protect the government. Instead the UN-backed forces did the one thing to ensure that this uprising was defeated. When tens of thousands of Iraqui conscripts, many of them Kurdish and Shiites press-ganged into fighting, mutinied in the South and fled, armed, from the front, they were massacred in the famous “turkey shoot” on the road to Basra. Maybe as much as 100,000 mutineers, well-armed with guns and a hatred capable of destroying the Baathist regime, were killed, many of them buried alive by gigantic sand-moving bulldozers. Saddam had already given in to all the coalition’s conditions so as to crush the uprising. The Saudi government , America’s main ally in the Gulf, was in favour of letting him crush the uprising: it was afraid of it being successful because it would be an inspiration throughout the Arab world (and probably elsewhere). Some of the food-drops landed on the heads of the Kurds they were meant to save. Much of the money raised from the charity shows lined the pockets of the Kurdish nationalist parties which had, for years previously, often collaborated with Saddam as part of their rivalry with opposing nationalist parties. Both were just a cover of ‘humanity’ designed for the cameras. Their purpose was to hide this essential complicity between the Iraqui regime and the West against the only possible exit from the horror of this world – the class struggle*. Complicity and rivalry, whether in the form of business and trade or in the form of politics & war, is the essence of capitalism and of all the rackets. It’s well-known that America was Saddam’s ally during the Iran-Iraq war, and the chemical bombing of Halabja was virtually ignored by the West until it was a convenient atrocity to mention over two years later when Saddam became Public Enemy No.1 with the invasion of Kuwait.
Some spectators who support these wars say “Well, we can’t just do nothing”. It’s kind of true but it begs the question, “Who is this ‘we’?”, and it’s this that few try to answer. Most use ’we’ in order to turn their enemy – the protection racket of the British State, defender of the most horrendous market economy in West Europe – into an avuncular friend: they give the State an initiative in inverse proportion to their own initiative. Killing some of the poorest people in the world is justified because it’s done unintentionally (rather like an alcoholic driver who persistently mows down scores of people can fairly claim he didn’t mean to). Judgement of people on their explicit intentions is no judgement at all: it divorces intentions from the practical manifestations of these ‘intentions’, a way of accepting everything at an abstract level. This abstraction is there when Blair talks of Bin Laden not knowing the value of human beings - he of course means exchange value. The destruction of a very small section of the worlds’ working class is fine if it helps ‘liberate’ people so as to get rid of an archaic localised manifestation of the economy, which, despite endless flirtations from a modern capitalism, has always played hard to get .
However, the other false choice is the traditional Left, which also take at face value many of the explicit intentions of “the war against terrorism”. Whilst they might criticise the ideology that “The ends justify the means” that still doesn’t lead them to try to understand what’s behind the explicit ends – except to reduce it all to a pretext for ensuring the security of the oil in the Caspian Sea. This simplistic reductionism is, above all, a way of playing the specialist, finding a One Answer dogmatic ‘explanation’ for it. It just leads them to attack the irrationality of this particular policy, as if capitalism isn’t inherently irrational for the vast majority (but ‘rational’, in the short term at least, for the powers-that-be). Ends and means are invariably intertwined: the real ends of this war – having a base to make sure there’s no threatening uprising in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Algeria, the oil/gas pipeline, a long-term militarised intensification of competition with China, and general battles over resources (human & natural) – are perfectly compatible with the means – the terrorisation of the Afghani poor, coupled with the carrot of modernisation, and the propaganda and legal war at home used to quash all opposition, especially towards the recession. But the Left wants to simplify everything by just reducing everything to foreign policy. But war is the continuation of the commodity economy by other means. As workers are discovering through the mass sackings, the war has become a pretext for yet another restructuring of the economy hit by recession and for bringing in various forms of legal repression. Meanwhile, those sacked and humiliated in other ways under the cover of this war, are meant to be consoled by the fact that unlike, the victims in New York and Afghanistan, we’re alive. Merely surviving is meant to compensate us for our lack of anger and life.
“Since September 11th we haven’t heard from the [anti-globalisation] protestors. I’m sure they are reflecting on what their demands were because their demands turned out to be very similar to those of Bin Laden’s network…They say world trade is evil, we want to stop it. If he says that too, do they still want to say that? There is a sort of anarchist’s chaos”- Claire Short, 5/11/01
Demagogic manipulation is not confined to bin Laden, obviously. Here, Short is echoing the semi-fascist Berlusconi, who said in September that there is a “strange unanimity” between Islamic terrorism and the anti-globalisation movement, under which pretext he proceeded to raid at least 60 autonomous centres, shutting most of them down. With the FBI mouthing about Reclaim The Streets** as being ‘terrorist’ (though not yet putting them on the proscribed list for fear of seeming ridiculous) we’re in for a long long winter of repression. This is a creeping totalitarianism far more insidious than fascism (the legal aspects of this totalitarianism are probably the least significant: it’s the madness of the isolation and the fake gang-like communities that the ruling show inspires that are driving people to the edge).
Bin Laden, under the demagogic guise of speaking for the poor Palestinians and all the other Third World proletariat suffering under the weight of globalised multinational capital, represents that section of the Saudi bourgeoisie which has lost out to the domination by foreign, mainly US, capital since the Gulf War. A bit like Lenin almost 100 years ago, he wants to develop a purely national capital not subservient to foreign domination. Islam, and his attempt to give it a ‘radical’ image, is the ideological cohesion given to this competition with the worlds’ dominant power. It is probably not accidental that this attack on the WTC has coincided with the beginnings of a resurgence of opposition to capital, and it is really no surprise that some demagogue would try to co-opt the weak ‘critique’ of capitalism represented by the more Middle Class sections of the anti-globalisation movement, regardless of the intentions of these critics. It’s not intentions that count: if you want to reform or modify the commodity economy and its States you inevitably succumb to their contradictions, you inevitably give fuel to those you hadn’t dared imagine would use your ideas like that).
According to Thatcher, “Islamism is the new Bolshevism”. This has a partial truth to it. Given the crushing of almost all independent anti-hierarchical revolutionary perspectives, in particular the retreat of the class struggle in this country since the defeat of the miners , the only perspective that appears to be against the market economy, and its domination by US capital, is Islamic fundamentalism. Islamism is able to win over thousands, maybe millions, to a cause that seems rebellious but is as utterly submissive as the defence of the stars and stripes, and can inspire radical revolt against this mad world even less than defence of the Socialist Fatherland did, with a very different content, in previous epochs.
*The decision by a section of the US ruling class to bomb Saddam Hussein off the map (and to bomb a lot of the people he, the US, the UK and the UN have helped to immiserate over the years) is likely to be opposed by a considerable section of the ruling classes of different parts of the world. Not just the obvious ones – those closest to the area of conflict – but also in the European Union and even in Britain. Those superficial anti-Americans, who criticise the British State, and Tony Blair, for being the poodle of American foreign policy, are wilfully blind to the fact that often British and American capital often share a common interest in the protection and development of finance capital, albeit at different levels of the hierarchy. Up till now this has been the material basis for Britain’s subservience to America – but those who support one section of capital against another never look to material reasons for ruling class behaviour – they prefer to resort purely to a moralistic critique. Such attitudes look for the solution to this madness as being, not through their own initiative,or the intitiative of the rest of those dispossessed by this world but through trying to get changes in the policy of the State. This just opposes one horrific solution to another horrific solution: just look at CND’s proposal, during the Gulf War, of sanctions against Iraq as opposed to war. Some solution! During the war on Afghanistan (which, of course, is not over yet by any means) that hero of the Left, Tony Benn, could even dare to propose that the United Nations should intervene in this war (the poor of Iraq might have a slightly different take on this proposal), a proposal which received a massive cheer from demonstrators. Hope from some external authority is the carrot keeping people passive and subservient (this passive ‘hope’ will doubtless soon be optimistically given to the majority of Labour M.P.s who, at the moment at least, are opposed to any extension of the war against terrorism to more bombing of Iraq). In this epoch, the endless parade of false choices, rarely challenged by a concrete social movement, makes the fantasy of possible stability through a change in the persona and direction of the State seem realistic, regardless of the real history of this ‘realism’. Some Leftists parade the Stalinist-style State of Afghanistan of the late 70s and 80s as a golden age, selectively forgetting the vicious atrocities. For those of us with a better memory than that of a goldfish, the State, under all its guises has always been a weapon of class power, like the commodity economy it manages.
Those who superficially denounce Britain as the poodle of America would probably support those sections of European capital which recognise that one of the US/UK Axis’ war aims is to heat up the competition with Europe, to fight, through proxy wars, for their supremacy during the permanent the permanent crisis which is our only future.. Most people don’t know that France has been closely connected to the massacres in Rwanda and Zaire, and its history in Algeria has been no better than Americas’ in Vietnam. War is the health of all States. Moreover, the US/UK “special relationship” has its limits: it’s still even possible that the dominant section of Britain’s rulers will throw their lot in with the EU, whose interests often clash with those of the USA (a symptom of the difference is over Palestine, with Britain and the EU being far more in favour of a Palestinian State than the USA, regardless of its occasional pro-Palestine verbiage).
The main global political development over the next epoch will be the development of intensifying conflict between America and some of its erstwhile allies. This conflict might even eventually lead to the war to end all wars (and everything else). Where then will be the crude anti-Americans, who identify capitalism mainly with American power and focus their hatred so narrowly?
*In the end, if we try to oppose these wars it’s mainly to oppose them as convenient covers for the repressions and vicious insecurity that millions of workers are going to be thrown into by this recession. To be sure, we must oppose these wars – ignoring them can only add to the brutalising power of the dominant world. But ambivalence towards organising specifically against these wars has good reason - if these wars become just an opportunity to campaign separate from daily life, whilst we have to submit even further to the miseries of work/home/leisure/the street, then such campaigning becomes just a convenient cover-up. By not challenging the totalitarian contradictions where we might be able to really effect something - in our daily life - we are not really facing up to the real underlying truth of these wars. In fact, this is the fundamental false choice these wars have thrown up.
B.M.Combustion, London, WC1N 3XX, February 2002. ...to be continued...