War and the class struggle

Workers World Party statement, Workers World 26 September 2002

The U.S. capitalist government is planning an immense crime, in front of the whole world. It is assembling a huge force for mass destruction, armed with the most sophisticated weapons created by military science. It has openly announced that its goal is to destroy the government of a small but potentially prosperous oil-producing nation that has defied its dictates.

Bush labels the Iraqi leader evil and a monster. His father stages a special interview to say he hates Saddam Hussein. Cynical and sophisticated liars repeat this personalized bashing as though it were the profoundest political assessment.

Since Iraq has done absolutely nothing, these epithets are supposedly reason enough to launch a war that will surely bring horrible consequences for the Iraqi people--and unknown risks to U.S. troops.

The financial pages of the capitalist newspapers are already leaking inside information on which oil companies from which countries will be cut in on the profits to be made from Iraqi oil, depending on how much support they give to the U.S. war. All this, of course, will automatically be ratified by the free regime Washington installs.

Not since the days of open imperialist domination, before the existence of a socialist bloc and the rise of liberation movements in the colonial world forced the lords of capitalist finance to conceal their objectives and prettify their methods, have the imperialist politicians been so crass and blatant about their aims.

On Oct. 26, national anti-war marches on both coasts will give voice to the growing movement to roll back the war machine. Workers World Party wholeheartedly supports this effort and urges the broadest participation of all who want to stop the war.

This period is reminiscent of when Mussolini attacked Ethiopia in 1935. Ethiopia had done nothing but resist becoming a colonial possession--at a time when all the rest of Africa had been carved up by the European imperialist powers. Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians with little more than horses and light arms fought back against the fascist army, which bombed and strafed them with airplanes and machine guns.

The League of Nations, established by the victors after World War I supposedly to preserve world peace, did not really try to stop Italy's invasion. Much of its debate focused on how to get Ethiopia to make concessions to Rome. All this was a prelude to the inter-imperialist struggle that led to the mass murder of World War II.

The Bush administration, which owes its existence to a fixed election and the capitulation of the Democrats, has tried to significantly override, in the name of homeland security, the bourgeois democratic political traditions until now tolerated in most developed capitalist countries. It gives the impression that nothing can stop it--neither mass nor official resistance in the Third World, not the strains it has generated with its imperialist allies/rivals, not the anti-war sentiments of the masses at home.

But these arrogant servants of the capitalist oligarchy are short sighted. They are undermining the very basis of their power. All their vaunted technology is just a pile of junk once the fury of the masses is unleashed.

The potential strength of the working class to intervene and change history lies not just in its numerical strength--in the United States it is the vast majority of the population, separated by a growing gap from the tiny class of super-rich owners of capital. Even more important is its strategic role in production.

There can be no production without the workers--it's as simple as that. And a modern economy cannot be run by slave labor. It requires the participation of those enslaved not by law but by wages and the ideological hold of the ruling class.

The war drive of big capital--especially pushed by the oil gang so well represented by the Bush administration--shows no signs of alleviating the deepening economic hardships of the workers here. On the contrary. The offensive abroad is matched by an offensive against the workers and their organizations at home.

The capitalist economy is doing what capitalism does periodically: it is destroying some of its own structures--through bankruptcies and layoffs--because it cannot continue to expand profitably at the breakneck pace of the last decade. How deep this will go cannot be predicted, but the roster of huge corporations reporting trouble is still growing.

The immediate effect of this capitalist crunch on a working class far overextended with debt, far under-protected by any government safety net, and extremely dependent on working long hours and even extra jobs to pay the bills, is already drastic.

And now these workers are expected to pay for an endless war focused on the Middle East but extending all over the world? A war so clearly to defend the super-profits of the same corporations that have looted workers' pensions, thrown them in the streets, and spent billions putting corporate alumni into the highest political posts while cutting their own taxes?

Those already active in the struggle against imperialist war have every reason to feel confident that they can win the support of millions of workers in this country. Even more than during the Vietnam War period, it is becoming clearer every day that the interests of the workers and the oppressed peoples are diametrically opposed to those of the war profiteers, the oil barons, the bankers who oversee the entire system, and their criminal CEOs.

Neither frenzied war propaganda nor threats of repression can turn back this developing class struggle, which will be the key component in stopping imperialist war.