Alliance with liberation and independence movements

What's Left
July 22, 2005

SOCIALIST ADVANCE AND THE NECESSITY OF ALLIANCE WITH LIBERATION AND
INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS

By Stephen Gowans

http://gowans.blogspot.com/


Near the end of his life, in the mid-90s, political scientist Ralph
Miliband, a socialist, wrote with unbridled optimism about the possibilities
of a peaceful, parliamentary, transition to socialism (1). Socialism, he
believed, was a way of correcting the imbalances that allow those who own
and control economic life to dominate political life. Under a socialist
government, the commanding heights of the economy - major enterprises,
transportation, communication, critical resources, and the banks -- would be
owned publicly, denying the previous owners the wealth and influence they
used to monopolize the state and political process.



In Miliband's view, if a new socialist government built upon capitalist
parliamentary forms, a flatter distribution of wealth and public control
over major economic assets would make political decision-making more
democratic. Indeed, socialism would be an extension of the democratic
project that had set down roots in Western industrialized countries, but had
never been allowed to flower. By nationalizing major industries and
redistributing income, everyone would become more or less equal, and would
have an equal say in the political life of the country. Instead of the
democracy of capitalism, stunted by the grossly unequal distribution of
wealth, income and opportunity, you would have the robust democracy of
socialism, guaranteed by the public ownership of major industries and the
redistributive policies of a socialist government.



Like a number of socialists, and even many Communists, Miliband seemed to be
guided more by wishful thinking, even hope, than hard analysis of how his
vision of socialism might be brought to reality. He had an almost
Pollyannish devotion to the idea that socialism would one day prevail with a
minimum of mess, not by violence, but legally, peacefully, through the
ballot box - an evolution, not revolution



But if capitalist democracy concentrates ownership, wealth, and therefore
effective control in the hands of the few, and thereby creates a horribly
tilted playing field hostile to the accession of socialism, how is socialism
to gain purchase? And should those committed to socialism, in the sense of
expropriating the expropriators, meekly submit to the shackles the state
imposes? From a Marxist perspective, the ruling class fashions the state to
protect its interests, and hold down those of the contending class. How
could the forces of socialism advance within the context of a state whose
purpose is their suppression? Wasn't this socialism with the permission of
the ruling class? (2) This problem, Miliband largely ignored.



Instead, he said the "real problem for the Left, within the constitutional
framework of capitalist democracy, is not so much its accession to power by
constitutional means, but rather what happens after it gets there" (3). That
a socialist government might be overthrown, as in the case of Salvador
Allende in Chile in 1970, or that it might abandon the pursuit of socialism
in the face of opposition, a depressingly regular event, was worrisome
enough, but not enough to dim Miliband's hopes.



To Miliband's way of thinking, there were two reasons to be sanguine about
the chances for parliamentary socialism: US economic power was diminishing,
and the Soviet Union had disappeared. The decline of US economic power would
force Americans to look inward, pressing their government to solve economic
problems at home, thereby keeping it preoccupied with domestic affairs at
the expense of destabilizing socialist and reforming governments abroad,
while the demise of the Soviet Union would help advance socialism in two
ways. First, Miliband believed that the Soviet Union had given socialism a
bad name. With the Soviet Union out of the way, socialists would be able to
get out from under the weight of bad publicity and attract others to their
cause. Secondly, the disappearance of the USSR would deprive the US ruling
class of an excuse it had long used to advance its economic interests
worldwide behind the stalking horse of confronting Communist tyranny (and
indeed there was, or was supposed to be, a Communist tyranny -- against the
enemies of the toiling classes.) It didn't seem to cross Miliband's mind
that the rise of a new socialist government might simply replace the old
Communist threat, and provide Washington with a new reason to play global
gendarme; or that the new Soviet-free socialism would be the target of as
many villainous slanders as the old; it too would have to labor under the
weight of bad publicity. The problem wasn't that the Soviet Union had given
socialism a bad name; imperialism had.



Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell's complaining in
the spring of 1991 that "I'm running out of demons; I'm running out of
villains; I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung" (4) was taken by Miliband as a
statement of fact that could be projected outward, rather than as an
obstacle the US ruling class would, in time, handily circumvent. This
evinced a rather naïve understanding of how clever, resolute and unremitting
Washington can be in inventing threats to justify imperialist adventures,
and how effective the US media, equally a part of the capitalist state, can
be in selling them to the American public. As long as US imperialism exists,
there will always be a devil, a demon, an overwhelming threat that must be
confronted abroad, through methods that inevitably aim to enlarge the
financial and commercial interests of US capital, subjugate other nations
and pave the way to their spoliation.



Equally wide of the mark was Miliband's overly optimistic expectation "that
the power of international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank.would also decline," (5) so that the hegemony of the US
ruling class would "be much less assured in the future than it is at
present, and therefore less able to prevent attempts at radical reform" (6).



Optimism, as a goad to carry on in the face of seemingly overwhelming
difficulties, is one thing; failing to take the true measure of the enemy is
quite another. But Miliband's untrammeled optimism was necessary to explain
how a socialist government could come to power legally, constitutionally,
and through the ballot box, and stay there, without recourse to a despotic
crackdown on its opponents. The solution was to assume fierce opposition
away, invoking a "shift in opinion in the advanced capitalist world," (7) a
preoccupied US ruling class, and the waning of US economic power. The
argument was convenient, but terribly wrong.



Contrary to Miliband's hopes, the demise of the Soviet Union hasn't made the
struggle for socialism any less difficult than it once was, and, in many
respects, has made it more difficult (end of aid to socialist regimes and
collapse of markets they depended on, thus making life in the remaining
socialist countries meaner and less attractive as models, or intensifying
pressure to abandon the socialist project in favor of surrender to
imperialism; the idea that the demise of the Soviet Union proves that
socialism doesn't work; collapse of a force staying the hand of imperialism
against socialist advance.) It has, however, intensified economic insecurity
insofar as it has made social democracy unnecessary, and eliminated the need
for the ruling class to compete with the socialist camp by ensuring wages,
social programs and living standards measure up against the robust economic
security and egalitarian material achievements of Communist countries, and
therefore has made the material conditions of the bulk of people in the
Western world somewhat more conducive to their challenging their
exploitation.



Nor has the United States become any less committed to menacing,
destabilizing, and overthrowing socialist regimes or those serious about
maintaining independence from US control and domination. The decline of US
economic power, and the disappearance of a Soviet threat, has simply led
Washington to invest in, and rely more heavily on, its unsurpassed military
power, to curb challenges to its imperialist domination, and to find new
threats to justify its multiple expansionary aggressions.



What's more, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have lost
none of their power to ensure Third World countries will continue to be
exploited as sources of cheap raw materials, low-wage labor and profitable
investment opportunities for the aggrandizement of investors and
shareholders of the imperialist countries. The flow of wealth out of Africa
and most of Asia and Latin America exceeds the flow of wealth in the other
direction, the very outcome the IMF and World Bank exist, as agents of
imperialism, to ensure. Centuries of slavery and colonialism have made
these countries sources of incredible wealth for the capitalists of the
metropolitan centers and slums of vast misery, exploitation and oppression
for the mass of people who live in them; the IMF and World Bank,
undiminished in their power, help keep it this way.



Still, this isn't to say that Miliband failed completely to recognize that
determined opposition to any project of radical political and economic
change was inevitable. In particular, he worried that reforming governments
of the Third World would face daunting challenges, because poor countries
would be "more vulnerable to pressure and blackmail." Accordingly, he argued
that "Left internationalism . be taken to mean support for reforming
governments anywhere in the world, and opposition to the efforts of
capitalist governments and agencies to deflect them from their endeavors or
to destabilize them" (8).



It can hardly be denied that progressive forces in the Western world are
perfectly willing to support reforming governments, anywhere in the world,
if seen to embody qualities understood to be political virtues:
non-violence, multi-party parliamentary democracy, and respect for civil
liberties. But that's like saying smokers will quit if quitting is easy. And
there's the rub. A foreign government's quality of being one of reform, or
national liberation, or resistance to spoliation by outside forces, is seen
by progressives as insufficient as a basis of Left internationalism, for in
addition to pursuing these aims, the aims are expected to be achieved
non-violently, with a commitment to multi-party democracy, and with full
respect for civil liberties, including those of exploiters,
counter-revolutionaries and their agents. In the view of progressives,
methods count, and the wrong methods trump the right aim; indeed, in their
view, processes, those of capitalism, not outcomes, those of national
liberation and socialist revolution, are paramount.



The DPRK (north Korea) is denied the support of progressives because one
party, as opposed to a few nominally contending parties, plays a lead role
in the country's affairs; there is far less political openness than there is
in the United States; and the country has a huge army, though on the same
order, per capita, as Israel's, and devotes a considerable percentage of its
GDP to supporting it; the DPRK has therefore has been called militaristic, a
garrison state, pejorative labels Israel escapes despite the share
centrality of the military in the life of both countries. Before
counter-revolution in the USSR deprived north Korea of its markets, and US
economic warfare and the demands of deterring the incessant menace of US
aggression sabotaged its economy, the DPRK achieved impressive economic
gains on behalf of the mass of its population, as opposed to a financial and
industrial elite, and in excess of what the nominally independent US colony
to the south was able to achieve. It has managed to maintain itself as a
sovereign country, free from foreign domination, in the face of the
unrelenting efforts of the US to integrate it into its imperialist orbit,
for over half a century. But these immense achievements, of ending
colonialism and feudal and capitalist exploitation, are of little moment to
progressives. Instead, they are seen as hardly justified by the means
employed.



This isn't simply a matter of placing means and ends on equal footing, and
concluding that while the DPRK met the test of ends it failed the test of
means, but of elevating means above ends, emphasizing process over outcomes.
What's important then is not the egalitarian economic gains of the past, or
the successful struggle against colonialism and US imperialism, but the
absence of Western, or in Marxist terms, bourgeois, political forms and
civil liberties. This supposes the aims either could be achieved by the
means prescribed, or that the aims are not important, the means are.



But would the DPRK have survived a moment as a multi-party parliamentary
democracy, with full latitude for pro-capitalist and pro-feudal parties to
reverse the gains of the revolution? Even if dispossessed of their land and
industrial holdings, the former ruling class would still retain considerable
advantages in the form of movable property, money, education, military
training and international connections to metropolitan centers only too
happy to finance and equip a counter-revolution, which could prove decisive
in a contest with revolutionary forces.



What's more, how long would north Korea have lasted by avoiding the
necessity of putting itself on a permanent war footing? The Korean War is
not over; it's only technically in abeyance, through a cease fire. No peace
treaty has ever been signed, despite Pyongyang's repeated requests for one.
This serves US imperialism's interests. The unremitting menace of war with a
vastly more powerful adversary places the DPRK on the horns of a dilemma:
maintain crippling military expenditures, or perish. When Pyongyang last
asked for a formal peace agreement in 2003, then US Secretary of State Colin
Powel declined. "We don't do non-aggression pacts or treaties, things of
that nature," (9) he said.



Finally, as regards US imperialism's virtual declaration of war by
designating the DPRK a member of the axis of evil, is Pyongyang's
development of a nuclear deterrent the irrational act of a paranoid
government, or the rational response of a nation committed to
anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism? To condemn the DPRK for militarism
and the absence of capitalist democratic forms and civil liberties is to say
surrender to US imperialism is a higher good than national sovereignty,
freedom from oppression by foreign powers, an end to feudal and capitalist
exploitation, and the egalitarian material gains of Communism.



On top of this, the Western media actively carry on programs of vilification
against any serious or successful movement that actively challenges ruling
class interests, and does so by parroting the lies, exaggerations and
propaganda of imperialist governments. Reforming governments are hardly
portrayed as governments that seek to rectify some historical wrong
(invariably authored by an imperialist power, and so, not surprisingly,
glossed over by its media); or of catering to the interests of the mass of
people, at the expense of an elite at home and financial and commercial
interests abroad. They are, instead, portrayed as distasteful, and, to the
ruling class, they are precisely this: distasteful and dangerous, because
they threaten ruling class domination and control. That this portrayal is
internalized by members of the contending class as constituting an impartial
view, free from class content, is only a measure of the extent of ruling
class domination; as too is the belief that the mass media are free, or can
possibly be free, from ruling class bias. It would be truly strange if
Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean leader who refuses to collaborate with
imperialism, wasn't vilified by the mass media.



Zimbabwe's ZANU-PF government is opposed by US and British imperialism for
its land redistribution program, that is, an expropriation of the
expropriators, a cardinal sin in the church of the original British
expropriators and in the larger church of capitalism; the deployment of
Zimbabwean troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo against the aggression
of imperialist proxy armies; and its refusal, by rejecting IMF demands, to
continue to mortgage Zimbabwe to imperialism. The government is equally
opposed by progressives in the imperialist countries, and so is denied the
advantages of Left internationalism. From their perspective, Zimbabwe's
government is unworthy of support because it is said to use authoritarian
means and electoral fraud to crack down on opponents and stay in power, and
its land redistribution program is said to be a cynical attempt to enrich
party officials and supporters by rewarding them with lucrative farm lands.



This understanding has less do to with reality and more to do with
imperialist governments, and their mass media, employing exaggeration,
selective marshalling of facts, and outright lies, to vilify an irritant
regime that has posed a serious and effective challenge to imperialism. In
addition to this, the government in Harare has used what, in the absence of
threat, may be considered high-handed methods, but which, in light of US and
British programs of regime change, are necessary to crush efforts to reverse
the gains of land redistribution and the war of national liberation.
Washington and London are not interested in seeing democracy flourish in
Zimbabwe; they're interested in a return to the status quo ante, where two
percent of the population owned more than three-quarters of the arable land
and the mortgaging of the country to financial interests in the West went
unopposed, a strange definition of democracy, except from the standpoint of
imperialism. The MDC, the main opposition party, can hardly be said to exist
at arms lengths from Anglo-American imperialism; it is intimately connected
to ruling circles in the US and Britain; so, too, are a number of civil
society groups dedicated to overthrowing the ZANU-PF government, by the same
US authored methods used to overthrow the government of Slobodan Milosevic
in 2000 (10).



In other words, for the progressive community of the imperialist countries,
standards must be met that are highly unlikely to be met under realistic
conditions of challenging imperialist domination and control; that is, under
conditions of a life or death struggle with determined and vastly more
powerful opponents, whose reach extends to often well-financed fifth
columns. For this reason there are few governments or movements considered
virtuous enough to be supported. Those that do meet the lofty, ruling
class-friendly, standards the progressive community demands, Lula's PT
government in Brazil, for example, invariably achieve nothing of
significance for human progress, and soon betray the forces that support
them. No surprise.



This is doubly true of the ardently pro-imperialist Democratic Party of the
US and Labor Party of Britain which continue to draw the support of
progressives, including those who inexplicably call themselves Communists,
despite the long inglorious history of these parties betraying labor at home
and perpetrating predation, plunder and terror bombings of civilians abroad.
The first Labor government is responsible for the first instance of
strategic bombing. It ordered the bombing of Iraqi villages in 1924. Terror
bombing of civilians is the principal theory of war of the imperialist
countries, taken up by Nazi Germany at Guernica, a Democratic president in
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and returning full circle to
the current Labor Party's ordering British participation in the terror
bombings of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Progressives invoke realism
to justify their support for these parties, but reject realism as an
explanation for the repudiation by revolutionary and liberation movements of
capitalist democratic forms and liberties. They would rather support a party
at home that's responsible for the slaughter of millions of people in
countless predatory wars of aggression for imperialist booty, than support a
foreign government engaged in a struggle against exploitation and
imperialist oppression, because the latter has confiscated the presses of
the deposed ruling class, reclaimed plundered land without compensation,
jailed counter-revolutionaries, or booted foreign journalists out of the
country. The realism of progressives and self-styled Communist supporters of
the Democrats and Labor swings only one way: in support of imperialism. They
are, to paraphrase Lenin, progressives in words, imperialists in deeds.



Given that anti-imperialist governments threaten imperialist interests, they
are variously denounced as authoritarian, grand marshals of human rights
horror shows, dictatorial, and corrupt. Their leaders are regularly
demonized as thugs, villains, creeps, dictators, paranoiacs, warlords, mass
murderers and strongmen. To be sure, some meet some or many of these
descriptions; others none at all. But whether they do or don't, or whether
the descriptions are deliberate hyperbole or arrant fabrications, does not
bear on the question of whether a struggle to win or preserve freedom from
imperialist spoliation, or to reverse the effects of imperialism, is being
pursued. The critical question isn't whether anti-imperialists are angels,
or even whether angelic behavior can realistically produce the
anti-imperialist aims intended; the critical questions are, what ends are
being sought, are they progressive from the standpoint of overcoming
exploitation, and importantly, what implications have they for socialist
advance in imperialist countries?



The same applies to movements, guerilla armies, and opposition parties
engaged in the struggle to throw off the yoke of imperialism, which, through
their refusal to accept ruling class-approved forms of struggle, pose a
serious threat to imperialist rule. By contrast, those engaged in less
effective forms of struggle are singled out as models to be emulated and
supported. So, for example, any group or movement that renounces violence
and declares its willingness to allow itself to be shackled to legal,
peaceful and constitutional means of resistance and change - socialism or
reform by permission of the ruling class -- is held up as worthy of the
support of those concerned with Left internationalism. Mugabe's ZANU-PF was
admired in Western circles, both ruling class and progressive, so long as it
submitted to the social-conservative restraints of British parliamentary
forms, the glacial program of land reform prescribed by London, and the
demands of the IMF. Once these were rejected, the party was declared persona
non grata, and plans drawn up to oust it, with the full support of
progressives. The World Social Forum, voting for social democratic parties
or the lesser evil - all of these are presented by the state, its media, and
its agents in the progressive community, as acceptable, because they pose no
serious threat. Talk-fests, banner waving, feel-good concerts, a predominant
concern for political and civil liberties over economic rights, and
political parties committed to working within the system for change, are all
welcome, as responsible, civilized - and in the end, "constructive," i.e.,
harmless - outlets for incipient revolutionary stirrings.



There are, however, formidable threats to imperialism, which have become
formidable, by transcending the limits imposed by imperialism and its
deliberately stifling definition of what constitutes legitimate action to
achieve and preserve social transformation: the armed resistances in Iraq
and Palestine; the guerilla movements in Nepal, Colombia and elsewhere; the
DPRK's development of nuclear weapons to deter US aggression; the land
redistribution program of the ZANU-PF government of Zimbabwe with its
expropriation of land plundered by British imperialism; the ongoing struggle
of Cuba to preserve and extend its socialist revolution in the face of the
implacable hostility of the US ruling class; Venezuela's Bolivarian
revolution, being carried forward despite the attempts of US imperialism to
destabilize it. All these -- unlike the class-collaborationist PT government
of Lula, the safety-valve World Social Forum, funded by imperialist
governments and imperialist foundations (11), and social democracy -- are
serious threats to imperialism, and all, some to higher degrees than others,
are vilified by Anglo-American imperialism, its arm in the mass media, and
reliably, by the community of those who are progressive in words, but
imperialist in deeds.



Despite the vilification, indeed, because of it, the forces of socialism
ought to support serious, effective challenges to imperialism, not to simply
genuflect to the abstract ideas of solidarity and Left internationalism, but
to increase the possibilities of socialist advance at home. This is based on
the idea that imperialism is the common enemy of the bulk of the population
within the imperialist countries, for it blocks the advance to socialism,
and so provides no surcease from wars of conquest and aggression, economic
crises, and environmental despoliation, and to the inhabitants of the
under-developed countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, for it condemns
them to lives of misery, hunger and super-exploitation. What weakens
imperialism weakens the ruling class, and what weakens the ruling class
makes the chances of advance to socialism at home, and to national
liberation and independence abroad, all the greater. Out of a common enemy
is born the necessity of an allied front.



Of course, if you are anti-war but not socialist, this will hardly seem
worth considering, and your main concern will be how to mobilize opposition
to the US-led occupation of Iraq, as opposed to making symbolic shows of
solidarity with the Iraqi resistance. You might also argue that symbolic
shows of support are at best meaningless (after all, they're symbolic) and
at worst, detrimental to the cause of pressing the US and British
governments to withdraw their troops from Iraq, because any declaration of
support for the Iraqi resistance will alienate those who are equally opposed
to both the occupation and the resistance, and will therefore militate
against mass mobilization.



Since occupation and resistance are mutually opposed, being equally against
both is like being equally against bacterial infection and antibiotics and
equally against central plumbing and open sewers in the streets. Once one
process arises, it's not possible to oppose both the initial process and the
one that arises to oppose it. In other words, in advance of the violent
occupation of Iraq by US and British forces it may have been possible to
say, "I'm against violence, whether expressed through occupation or violent
resistance" and mean something, but once the violent occupation sets in
train a violent resistance as an opposing force, to say you're against both
is to ignore the fact that the one has occurred and called forth the other.
You may "regret" the violence, but to say you "oppose" the violence of both
sides is meaningless.



What could possibly be meant by "I oppose both sides equally"? On the one
hand, it could mean that the violent occupation should be ended, and troops
withdrawn. Since the withdrawal of troops would automatically end the
resistance, this seems to reduce to, "I'm against the occupation," and any
further statement about being opposed to violent resistance is unnecessary
and meaningless.



Who's going to force the withdrawal of the occupation forces? Apart from
intervention by an outside force, it's difficult to think of any occupation
that wasn't overcome except by the recalcitrance of the natives. To believe
that the US government will quit Iraq, simply because a large group of
people, who have no class connection to the state, demands it, is to be
horribly deluded about the nature of capitalist democracy, and blind to the
history of what has - or rather hasn't - been achieved by similar peaceful
expressions of opposition in the past. It was the fierce and determined
violent opposition of the Vietnamese that drove the US out of Vietnam, not a
sea of peaceful demonstrators descending on Washington. And the peaceful
mobilization of world public opinion in the largest demonstrations in
history against the planned invasion of Iraq, didn't, for a moment, stop
those plans from going ahead. If the vaunted democracy of capitalism
actually allowed peaceful pressure from below to occasion fundamental shifts
in the direction of the state, some expectation of success could be
reasonably entertained of anti-war forces in the imperialist countries
single-handedly forcing the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. But since this
isn't going to happen, the greater chance of putting an end to the initial
violence of occupation lies also in the recalcitrance of the Iraqi
resistance, expressed through whatever means are available and effective
given the circumstances - including violent means.



On the other hand, saying you're opposed to both military occupation and
armed resistance, could mean that the violence of occupation should be
resisted by peaceful means alone. There are two problems with this. The
first concerns the relative efficacy of violent vs. non-violent methods of
resistance in opposing occupation. It can't be proved that violent methods
are more effective than non-violent methods, or that non-violent methods
work better than violent ones. But it seems likely that the most effective
resistance is one that draws on a variety of tactics, their suitability
determined by what resources are available and the demands of the moment. An
insistence that a resistance be uncompromisingly one way or the other is
likely to be too restrictive, and, therefore, detrimental to the overall aim
of overcoming military occupation. Hence, the demand that occupation be
opposed by non-violent methods alone is a demand that puts greater weight on
process, that is, the means selected to overcome the occupation, than on
outcome, the goal of overcoming the occupation. The means become the ends,
and the ends fall away. The professed neutrality of those who make this
demand is mistaken. They would rather live with the prolongation of the
violence of occupation, than accept an effective resistance, if
effectiveness depends, as conditions dictate, on violence.



It might also be mentioned at this point, that the most visible of the
progressive in words, imperialist in deeds fraternity, have for years
preached the desirability of non-violent action as a means of struggle from
below. Their attachment to non-violence, though professedly absolute, turned
out to be a good deal more class-specific than they let on. For with the
attacks of al Qaeda on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the
subsequent decision of US imperialism to use the attacks as a cover for the
military occupation of Afghanistan and the establishment of a network of
military bases throughout the petroleum rich region of Central Asia, these
same gurus of non-violence declared, after years of singing hosannas to
Gandhi and the Reverend Martin Luther King, that they weren't pacifists at
all and that pacifism was too limiting a doctrine. Under some circumstance
violence was necessary. The timing of these conversions, on the eve of the
Anglo-American assault on Afghanistan, buttressed the view, dominant in the
progressive community, that while it is impermissible, as an absolute, to
use violence in struggles against the state, there are times when the state
can legitimately use violence against its enemies. The war of aggression on
Afghanistan is seen by many progressives to be a good and necessary war,
whose overwhelming violence against hundreds of thousands of defenseless
peasants was fully justified. This is consistent with the sudden conversion
of the advocates of non-violent direct action to the use of force, if
necessary.



When the former US Secretary of State Colin Powel visited Jon Stewart on the
Daily Show, Stewart, who calls himself a socialist, and is held in high
esteem by the progressive community, gushed over the conquest of
Afghanistan, declaring it a good war, and one that he would support all over
again. Bob Rae, a Canadian politician, who once led social democracy's New
Democrat Party to power in Canada's largest province, Ontario, and then
immediately reneged on every promise he made, has acted as consultant to the
puppet government in Iraq. Deploring the violence of the resistance, he
remarked that "the rule of the gun is a terrible rule," (12) a statement
which applies a thousand times over to the Anglo-American occupation of
Iraq -- for there is no power more thoroughly committed to the rule of the
gun than imperialism -- but which Rae intended to refer to the resistance
alone, as if the conquest of Iraq was somehow predicated on something other
than the rule of the gun - or 140,000 of them to be precise. That social
democrats deplore the violence that arises to overcome the rule of the gun
that imperialism uses to extend its rule over subject people, while granting
the state the exclusive right to use violence, underscores what has been
evident since 1914: social democracy has nothing whatever to do with the
struggle for humanity's progress, but is thoroughly embedded in the
capitalist state, and operates as a force for the preservation of its own
ruling class, and the expansion of its ruling class's interests in
competition with other imperialist countries and against the weak countries
of the world.



Furthermore, it might be pointed out that the occupation of Iraq hardly
counts as an anomaly of US foreign policy that can be addressed on an ad hoc
basis. The United States, from its inception, and even before, has actively
engaged in the plunder by force, of the land and resources of other people,
with the attendant slaughter of the natives. This extends from the genocide
of American Indians to the occupation of Iraq, and threatened wars against
north Korea and Iran. This recurrent pattern of aggression can't be due to
the ideas of this or that president or of whatever party is in power at a
particular time, because the extension of US political and economic control,
through diplomacy, subversion, economic warfare and force, has been an
unbroken defining characteristic of US foreign policy; it has, what's more,
been the defining foreign policy theme of all advanced industrialized
countries, even when nominally labor-based social democratic parties have
been in power. The roots of these recurrent patterns are not to be found in
the ideas of statesmen and politicians, but in the expansionary logic of
capitalism, which drives imperialist countries to seek outlets for surplus
industrial capacity and spare capital, at the expense of its rivals, while
trying to monopolize control of land, markets and natural resources.

Addressing each war, in isolation, without reference to the motive forces
compelling them, is, at best, a half measure. "What is most likely is that
the present-day peace movement, as a movement for the preservation of peace,
will, if it succeeds, result in preventing a particular war, in its
temporary postponement, in the temporary preservation of a particular peace,
in the resignation of a bellicose government and its suppression by another
that is prepared temporarily to keep the peace. That, of course, will be
good. Even very good. But, all the same, it will not be enough to eliminate
the inevitability of wars. It will not be enough, because, for all the
successes of the peace movement, imperialism will remain, continue in
force - and, consequently, the inevitability of wars will also continue in
force. To eliminate the inevitability of war, it is necessary to abolish
imperialism" (13).

The successful conquest of new markets and the monopolization of critical
natural resources make imperialism stronger. So too does the swelling of
Third World proletariat populations, caused by competition of the advanced
agribusinesses of the imperialist world, destroying the basis of peasant
agriculture, thereby driving dispossessed peasants into squalid urban slums.
Deprived of the means of making a living from the soil, they constitute an
almost inexhaustible supply of labor, available to Western corporations for
hire at inhumanely low wages, to supply corporate titans with fat profits,
which can then be loaned out, at interest, to Third World countries for
"development," a high sounding word used to dress up the building of
infrastructure by Western engineering firms (hence, more export of capital),
to transport goods and raw material out of the country; in other words, to
develop the Third World as a subsidiary economy based on the supply of raw
materials, markets for capital investment and armies of the dispossessed
with no option but to work at desperation-level wages, or perish.



All of this makes imperialism stronger - new markets are conquered to absorb
surplus capacity, opportunities for the absorption of surplus capital are
created, including through expanded armament production to supply the needs
of the military for more wars of aggression to expand capital's living
space, fresh sources of low-wage labor are made available, and sources of
raw materials, including oil, the life-blood of capitalist expansion, are
secured. Capitalism carries on, supplying material comforts to the working
class of the West, as well as rent, profits and interest to the ruling
class.



That which strengthens imperialism, then, strengthens the ruling class,
strengthens its ability to block advance to socialism, and strengthens the
commitment of the most privileged sectors of society, that which includes
trade unionists, to imperialism. It is, therefore, reactionary -- inimical
to human progress. This too applies when the incidental outcomes of
imperialist domination are otherwise progressive; for example, as in Iraq,
when democratic forms and civil liberties are introduced where despotism
once existed. While the incidental outcomes may be an advance over
previously existing political conditions, the enterprise, in total, is
reactionary, since its aim is to strengthen the ruling class at home, and
since it may, through the super-exploitation of people in the neo-colonial
world, underwrite concessions, reforms and higher wages in the imperialist
countries, chaining the privileged, non-ruling class, sectors of society
more strongly to imperialism, and allowing imperialism to escape the
dilemmas of its internal contradictions.



On the other hand, that which weakens imperialism is progressive, even if
the movements and governments which successfully challenge imperialism, and
so weaken it, are otherwise reactionary, misogynistic, obscurantist,
wantonly violent, anti-democratic and implacably anti-socialist. Hence, the
resistance of Iraqis to US occupation is progressive from the standpoint of
socialist forces in the West, though some parts of the resistance may be
zealously religious, anti-democratic, anti-socialist, obscurantist, backward
and barbaric. But insofar as the resistance thwarts the spoliation of
petroleum resources, hinders the plundering of publicly owned enterprises,
and reduces opportunities for Washington to mortgage Iraq to US and British
capital - and, moreover, scuttles plans to use Iraq as a base from which
Anglo-American imperialism can extend its control over the important
oil-producing regions of the world -- it weakens imperialism, and thereby
advances, if only minimally to start, the possibilities of socialist advance
in North America and Europe.



Does this imply support for al Qaeda? Hardly. The point of support is to
develop an allied front against imperialism of the Western working class and
the liberation and independence movements of the Third World. Al Qaeda may
be anti-imperialist, in the sense of aiming to drive the "infidel" out of
countries in which Islam is the dominant religion, but its attacks on the
Western working class, in a stupid and misguided attempt to "bring the war
home," in the manner of the equally stupid and misguided tactics of the
Weather Underground in the United States of the early 70s, hardly contribute
to building a common front. On the contrary, they actively work against that
front, by alienating the working class, and galvanizing it to support
measures for further imperialist plunders to eradicate the threat that
imperils their lives. Hence, al Qaeda is unworthy of support, not because
it's misogynist, fanatical, and fiercely anti-Communist, but because it's
objectively uninterested in an allied front with the working class of the
imperialist countries.



Most liberation and independence movements are not of this character, and
actively welcome support. To the extent they succeed, they inspire other
movements, and discourage further imperialist plunder. The success of one
resistance, then, establishes the conditions for the success of many. With
the success of many comes the growing possibility for success of socialist
advance in the imperialist countries, and with that comes expanded
opportunities for governments and movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America to break free of the imperialist orbit. In this way, the struggle of
the forces of socialism in the imperialist countries, and the
anti-imperialist forces elsewhere, are complementary and mutually
reinforcing. Their success makes us stronger; our success makes them
stronger.





1. Miliband, Ralph, "Socialism for a Scepitcal Age," Verso, 1995.



2. Following R. Palme Dutt's dismissal of parliamentary socialism as
"socialism with the permission of the bourgeoisie." In R. Palme Dutt,
"Fascism and Social Revolution: A Study of the Economics and Politics of the
Extreme Stages of Capitalism in Decay," International Publishers, New York,
1935.



3. Miliband, p. 160.



4. Newsweek, April 22, 1991, quoted in Cumings, Bruce, "North Korea: Another
Country," The New Press, New York, 2004, p. 60.



5. Miliband, p. 178.



6. Ibid.



7. Ibid.



8. Miliband, p. 178.



9. "Beijing to Host North Korea Talks," The New York Times, August 14, 2003.



10. See my "War by other means," What's Left, May 10, 2005,
http://gowans.blogspot.com/2005/05/war-by-other-means.html .



11. The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lesson for the
Struggle against Globalization, Aspects of India's Economy, No. 35,
(September 2003), http://www.rupe-india.org/35/contents.html .



12. The Globe and Mail, July 22, 2005.



13. Joseph Stalin, "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR," Foreign
Languages Press, Peking: 1972.



Additional reading



LALKAR Online http://www.lalkar.org/index.php , especially:



"Oppose continuing demonisation of Zimbabwe," July/August 2005,
http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/jul2005/zim.php



"Statement on Zimbabwe elections," July/August 2005,
http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/jul2005/zimstatement.php



"DPRK's nuclear weapons are the only guarantee of peace on the Korean
peninsula," July/August 2005,
http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/jul2005/korea.php



Gregory Elich, especially:



"Zimbabwe's fight for justice," www.counterpunch.com, May 7/8, 2005,
http://www.counterpunch.org/elich05072005.html .



"Zimbabwe under siege," www.swans.com, August 26, 2002,
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/elich004.html .



"Targeting North Korea," www.globalresearch.ca, December 31, 2002,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ELI212A.html .



Proletarian online http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian ,
especially:



"Victory to the Iraqi resistance," April 2005,
http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=70



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