Dangers and Opportunities
America’s Global Rampage and the People’s Resistance

By Fatima Resolucao

1. A New Chapter Opens

Tuesday, 11 September 2001 may be remembered in history as the day the US declared war against the world. Like the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany, the day’s events at a minimum provided an eagerly-awaited opportunity to implement moves already in preparation. George Bush, who had begun assembling a war cabinet long ago, stepped forward to announce a new consensus uniting much of the US ruling class. The aim is without precedent: one world, one empire.

America’s attempt to recast world relations by force is the central feature in today’s politics, from the countries where the US military is already killing people or getting ready for that, to the world as a whole. It is throwing a dark shadow on every facet of social life, including movies and sports, as was witnessed in the politically-obsessed, bloodthirsty Salt Lake City Olympics.

The principal aspect of this is that it represents a new level of undisguised violence against the oppressed nations and peoples. The US is out to play “policeman of the world” in a qualitatively new way, to use its ability to project global military force to enforce and organise globalised exploitation through military intervention in a manner no other power can rival. Bush announced that the oppressed nations do not have any rights that America is required to respect. He proclaimed an open-ended war against all those who fail to “share our values” – that is, bow to US dictates. With little regard for sovereignty, international law or any other restraint, the US is sending in its armed forces and declaring its right to set up and knock down Third World governments at will to enforce its interests.

The other aspect is that the crusade is also directed against the US’s erstwhile “allies”. In attempting to stabilise the “global business environment”, the US is acting in the interests of all the monopoly capitalist countries, great and small. But at the same time, although Bush has been careful to avoid isolation so far, most of the powers once considered US allies have now been demoted to the status of members of ad-hoc coalitions, to be admitted at America’s pleasure and on the condition that it gets the lion’s share of the plunder. Now even NATO is a mere shadow of its former self.

For the world’s people, the dangers in this situation are obvious. Imperialism, through the US’s self-imposed leadership, is willing and more able to intervene directly wherever its interests require it, applying concentrated force on a scale not previously possible in recent years, and also applying internal repression in a way, until recently, considered too costly in political terms.

Although the people of the world are the imperialists’ ultimate target, so far their immediate targets have largely been former flunkies and other minor reactionaries who have escaped their control to one degree or another. This has helped spread confusion and even cynicism, since the masses find themselves offered a choice that is no choice at all. The mobilisation of imperialist military power under American leadership and the concomitant political situation (including the mixture of confusion and fear, and even demobilisation among some opposition forces) mean that right now we are facing a formidable enemy spoiling for battle, at least battles it can fight on favourable grounds.

Battle against revolutionary masses and people’s wars is unfavourable ground for the imperialists and they know it – which is part of why the imperialists welcomed 11 September as a special opportunity. But no matter what they may want, they are making themselves the target of the world’s contradictions and uniting the people of the world against them. They are once again demonstrating to the world’s people that, as Mao put it, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

The US imperialists are determined to seize the opportunities provided by the unprecedented imbalance of military forces in today’s world, yet the dangers they face are no less historic. They understand that in order to get to the new world order they dream of, first the world will have to go through a great deal of disorder. They are getting ready for that, including by preparing to crush resistance in their own “homeland”. But it is a perilous gamble, and it has an edge of desperation to it. If they fail to blast their way to “full-spectrum dominance”, as the Pentagon puts it, in the military, political and, ultimately, economic spheres, then they risk losing everything. In the long or even the medium term, US hegemony over the other imperialists cannot last. As a French representative bluntly put it in a discussion of present US-European relations, “This is unsustainable.” Even more importantly, America’s striving for a new world order is putting all existing power relations into question, generating turmoil and calling into being and focusing resistance on a global scale. The spiralling whirlpool of these different contradictions may send the situation spinning out of the imperialists’ hands altogether, even in the US itself, and who will emerge victorious out of the storms and chaos that lie ahead is yet to be written.

2. 1989-2001: The Economics, Politics and Guns of Globalisation

Politics is the concentrated expression of economics, as Lenin pointed out, and war is the continuation of politics by other means. US war aims have little to do with the fall of the World Trade Center and much to do with world trade and global investment.² 

The imperialist system has not changed fundamentally since the late nineteenth century, when industry and banking merged to form monopoly capitalism and the rich countries came under the domination of a handful of financial magnates. Since then the world has been marked by the most intense competition between rival monopolies and monopoly capitalist countries, the export of capital in search of a level of profits unobtainable in the imperialists’ own countries, the split of the world into imperialist countries and the countries they oppress, the division of the world among the great powers, and the constant striving of the imperialist countries to redivide the world in ways more favourable to them. And most importantly in the final analysis, it is marked by the emergence of the world proletarian revolution.

This is a system that lives off the natural resources torn from a mangled planet and especially the labour of the world’s peoples, including both exploitation in the imperialist countries and the super-profits gained in countries where wages are kept extremely low through the persistence of semi-feudal conditions, a disarticulated economy, national oppression and the compete lack of political rights. It is also a system where peace and profit are incompatible, where “world orders” rise and fall as the imperialists’ hold on their prey and their own constantly changing relative strength is tested through war.

In short, it is a system of global power relations based on force.

During the “Cold War” period, US hegemony among the Western powers was undisputed. There were two relatively-clearly defined rival blocs, and on each side only one country could lead a nuclear war. Some European countries may not have been happy playing junior partner to the US, but the only alternative was playing junior partner to the Soviet Union – and even that kind of switch was not going to be allowed.³ 

Likewise, the oppressed countries were, for the most part, clearly divided between the two blocs, and the slightest challenge to this line-up led to fierce reactions. When the 1970 election of Allende in Chile threatened to extend Soviet influence in Latin America, Washington unleashed mass murder.⁴ 

Then suddenly, one superpower bloc shrivelled like a spiderweb with a match.

Put simply, the USSR had military and political control or influence over a large part of the world but lacked sufficient capital resources to fully take advantage of this fact, while the West could not profitably export capital to regions where it did not have the political and military control it needed (such as India, for instance), and its economic options were limited by the need to avoid shoring up its Soviet rivals (in Eastern Europe, for example). The demise of the USSR, a victim in many ways of the underlying economic crisis bubbling up throughout the whole imperialist system, East and West alike, sprang formerly frozen geo-political arrangements into the air in large parts of the world. This, along with application of new technologies developed largely in preparation for the world war to which respite was suddenly granted, unleashed new opportunities for global expansion that brought a decade of prosperity to people in some quarters and dramatically worsening misery to billions more.

The fall of the USSR produced the political conditions for economic trends already at work to take a qualitative leap. Now imperialist capital could more thoroughly penetrate much of the world’s markets, exploit labour previously denied it and do so more intensely than previously possible. Many people came to call this “globalisation”. Manufacture and distribution could be organised world-wide to a new degree; finance capital began to flow over national boundaries at an unprecedented speed and volume; and even macroeconomic policies could be co-ordinated among the imperialist powers and imposed on the countries dependent on them. Indonesia, Thailand, Korea and the other South-east Asian countries, considered the “success stories” of world development in the 1990s, for instance, may have seemed to have their own independent industries and economies, but when imperialist finance capital was abruptly shifted out of those countries in search of new speculative opportunities somewhere else, the resulting collapse revealed the underlying relations.

The export of capital has long been a feature of the imperialist system, both in direct forms, such as British ownership of India’s railway system, French rubber plantation holdings and Belgian ownership of the Congo’s mines, and in indirect forms, like the private and public loans that bleed a country’s labouring people and allow foreign finance capital to extract profit in the form of interest even where it does not have formal ownership over the means of production. But imperialist capital has moved beyond agriculture and raw materials, and beyond indirect control of production for the local market (through the fraud of “export substitution” where the local government owned production but imperialist capital called the tune and reaped the benefits), to new kinds of globally-organised labour for the global ­market.

Very often this involves direct foreign investment (US and Japanese-owned manufacture in China, for instance). Another increasingly common form is “outsourcing”, in which the individual manufacture of parts and components and sometimes even whole product lines is taken up by Third World “independent contractors” entirely dependent on the import of Western capital goods and finance. In these cases, the imperialist “customer” is king, controlling every aspect of the process in real time and detail just as surely as McDonald’s controls the retail outlets of its supposedly independent franchisers. Now not only large-scale multi-nationals but medium-sized firms and even some small-fry Western capitalists can enjoy the privilege of exploiting men, women and children in the Third World.

With the advent of digital communications, new sectors were created to pump profits westward. One of the most dynamic is “outsourced business services”. All sorts of corporations have established “offshore” customer-service call centres, data input plantations, software development parks, etc. Thus much of the “back office” labour once performed at Western wage levels now costs much less, thanks to the backwardness and misery in which these countries as a whole are imprisoned, boosting profitability for the companies involved and for imperialist capital as a whole.

The prosperity of the “Clinton boom” was made not on Wall Street or in the Silicon Valley but in the maquiladora plants along the border in Mexico, the factories in the “free trade zones” of south-eastern China and the Dominican Republic, the garment sweatshops in Turkey and Bangladesh, the computer code-writing compounds in Bangalore, and so on. It was also rooted in the further polarisation of the exploited proletariat within the imperialist countries, perhaps most dramatically in the US ­itself.

However, this globalised development has run up against several interrelated but different problems in the economic and political spheres.

The first has to do with the laws of capitalism itself as a system whose very survival depends on ever more extensive and intensive exploitation. For all the prosperity for some and propaganda for all regarding the 1990s boom, and the real advances in growth and profitability made by the imperialist system overall, in comparison to the period from the early 1970s through to the end of the USSR, the world’s growth rate has never returned to the averages of the three decades after the Second World War. The relatively low level of overall profitability remains a serious obstacle to further expansion. By the end of the decade it became clear that the “Clinton boom” could not be sustained without a further qualitative leap in the penetration of the oppressed countries.

Further, for the US, like any capitalist, the problem is not the overall profitability of the system, but its own share of the profits. European and Japanese capital are pressing the US as never before. The US accounted for half the world’s production in 1950; by 1996 that share had fallen to 20 per cent. This figure is not exactly what it may seem, for US capital controls much production elsewhere in the world. But it has become indisputable that US economic strength alone cannot allow it to grab greater market share and investment opportunities from the other imperialist players. Even in its own historic sphere of influence, Latin America, US capital no longer enjoys anything like a monopoly position.⁵ 

At the same time, the process of globalisation itself has been generating roiling turmoil and resistance. The penetration of imperialist capital is tearing apart the social fabric in country after country, undermining the economic, social and political basis for the regimes on which that penetration depends. Certain features of this situation are common throughout the Third World.⁶ 

The strength of imperialist capital and its battering down of market barriers has swept some countries from grain self-sufficiency to import dependency, whilst in others, peasant livelihoods were destroyed by imported wheat and wheat products. In many countries whole sections of the middle classes are watching the promises held out by globalisation fizzle out like the air in a balloon. They have MTV and Internet cafes but no hope whatsoever of the kind of life seen in American television series and, sometimes, hardly any future at all. Even among the upper classes there has been a growing sense of humiliation. For example, as everyone now knows, sections of the upper strata in Saudi Arabia have found the national degradation imposed by the US intolerable.

It has proven difficult to replace some of the key regimes that for decades kept their countries safe for imperialism. Suharto in Indonesia, for instance, brought to power by the CIA over the bodies of many hundreds of thousands of murdered communists and other people, had been an anchor for the US in South-east Asia. The increasing integration of Indonesia’s economy into the imperialist investment and financial system, which was supposed to be a source of stability as well as profits, instead created greater instability. When the regime was forced out amid riots and street fighting, the US put in a new puppet, but the system of class alignments and cliques on which US domination depended could not be put back together again like before. The fall of Mobutu in Zaire posed similar problems for the imperialists.

Mexico, Algeria (especially the Kabyle people) and South Korea were also swept by rebellion and upheaval. In the Middle East, the determination of the Palestinians to stand up as human beings at any cost has turned the whole structure of imperialist domination through Israel and its arrangements with the oil-dependent regimes into a problem for the imperialists that has no solution. North America and Europe have witnessed protests of a size and militancy unseen in recent decades against globalisation.

Heightening instability, growing discontent, waves of resistance and, in some places, armed struggle and even people’s war – this describes much of the world on the eve of 11 September. As the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement analysed in 2000, “While we are not yet experiencing the same high tide of revolutionary struggle on a world scale that we have witnessed in the past and will surely see again, we can speak with confidence of an emerging new wave of the world proletarian revolution.” (“Interview with the RIM Committee”, AWTW 2000/26.)

All of the imperialists have been facing similar problems, to varying degrees, impeding them from just sending in troops and “crushing the natives”. First of all, most of them could not even if they wanted to – their militaries were structured for fighting an inter-imperialist world war, specifically with the Soviet Union, and not, as we will see, for the kind of wars they actually need to fight. Related to that, all of them, in different ways, have to deal with strong popular feelings against these kinds of wars, a legacy, among other things, of the long and failed colonial wars they fought in the 1950s and 1960s, especially Vietnam.

But the need for more direct imperialist intervention had become increasingly clear to all of them. For most of the 1990s, it took place under the pretext of “humanitarian tasks” and protecting “human rights”. In France, there arose the concept of the “right to interfere”, meaning that the national sovereignty of particular countries should be considered secondary to the universal importance of human rights. The practical meaning of this concept under current world circumstances was concretised when the French ex-radical and estranged founder of Doctors without Borders, Bernard Kouchner, was appointed civilian administrator of the NATO occupation of Kosovo. The Anglo-Saxon world, as usual, is more blunt: the English translation of “the right to interfere” is what that bard of British colonialism, Rudyard Kipling, called “the white man’s burden”. This idea is now being recycled with a humanitarian veneer as the West’s painful duty to run less fortunate nations. Some pundits began to bandy around the term “re-colonisation”, symbolised by Tony Blair’s 2002 tour of British former colonies in Africa. Even the arrest of Pinochet, the leader of the 1973 coup in Chile, can be seen as part of creating an atmosphere in which the imperialist countries’ self-proclaimed moral superiority could be extended to legal superiority… with subtle but very real political and military implications.⁷ 

At the same time, rivalry between the imperialist powers has been a major factor impeding the imposition of the orderly conditions for exploitation they all need. This is plain to see in the dismantling of Yugoslavia, where Germany, France, Russia and the US each vied for the spoils;⁸  in the horrendous proxy wars in Central Africa, where US-French rivalry played a major genocidal role; and in Colombia, where occasional European backing (especially German) for the guerrilla movements has helped prevent the US from “pacifying” the country and “making it safe for foreign investment”. But it also seems to be true in a far broader way in much of the Third World – the rivalry between the imperialists has been a hindrance to the imposition of the political stability they all need.

The question of regimes in the oppressed countries is key in all this. Local capital cannot be subordinated and the people’s aspirations cannot be suppressed without the political and military structures to enforce them. The neo-colonial state is the most fundamental of imperialism’s structures of domination. There are few places in today’s world where any imperialist power, other than the US, can impose its own regime. This has serious consequences in terms of opportunities for exploitation by the dominant power and its relations with the other imperialist exploiters. As Lenin said, under imperialism the world cannot be divided in any other way except in relation to the respective military strength of the powers looting it.

3. Uneven Development

A report written under US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld’s direction in 2001 predicted that increasingly globalised investment would produce a further “widening between the haves and have-nots”, but America’s “synergy of space superiority with land, sea and air superiority” could “protect US interests and investment” and give it “an extraordinary military advantage”. An advantage against those who resist being globalised, for one thing. An advantage over the US’s imperialist rivals, for another.

When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit, for the first time in its existence the NATO powers invoked a treaty clause that meant that they considered it an attack on all of the member states. But when the US invaded Afghanistan and they all wanted to join the blood feast, they were unceremoniously told, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.” Offers to send troops by France, Germany and Italy were initially scorned. Finally the US put the UK in charge of a distinctly non-NATO force limited to Kabul and took the rest for itself. Then the US sent troops to the Philippines, its former colony, without inviting anyone else along, and declared that the next target was Iraq, despite opposition to such a war from nearly every other NATO country. American relations with its former NATO allies became so strained that Germany’s Foreign Affairs Minister complained that “alliance partners are not satellites”, implying that the US was treating the new unified Germany the same way as the USSR previously treated East Germany.

Does the German minister oppose America’s war on the world? Like the rest of his European counterparts, he has actually defended it and done his best to get his country in on it.⁹  The problem is that the European countries are not in any position, militarily, to join the US assault in a way that would make a difference, and in the absence of that firepower, the US is not only uninterested in their help but using its superiority to serve its own interests independently of, and in opposition to, theirs. At this time, the other imperialists have no choice but to pay a price they hate for a service they cannot do without.

No other country can contest with the US in terms of “power projection” – the capacity to dispatch troops and equipment quickly and massively. This now includes Russia – and that marks a significant change in the world since the Gulf War. The former USSR has further disintegrated and its military power came crashing down as the economic base on which it stood proved unable to sustain it. The debacle associated with the sinking of the submarine Kursk, for example, demonstrated just how little of its once mighty nuclear navy Russia is able to maintain.¹⁰  Germany’s early attempts to set a precedent by sending combat troops into Afghanistan were humiliated when its transport aircraft were nailed down for days by bad weather. It ended up borrowing Russian-made Ilyushins to get supplies to Afghanistan. In fact, at this point at least, Europe does not even manufacture military transport planes to compete with the US long-range tank and troop carriers, and if Europe had to buy them from Boeing it would spell the end of Europe’s joint efforts to rival the US’s efforts to monopolise the making of large aircraft (a monopoly of strategic economic and military significance). Attempts to knock together a joint European strike force have come to nothing so far. Only France has perfected its ability to send in enough special forces troops to massacre and bully small countries, especially in Africa.¹¹  Aside from Russia, only two other powers, Britain and France, have nuclear missiles and a nuclear navy.¹²  Today, Britain is the US’s only long-term ally, due to the “special relationship” in which British and American capital are thoroughly intertwined.¹³  London is closer to Manhattan than to Paris. As for France, sometimes described as the closest thing the US has to a rival at the moment, its sole nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and icon of France’s nuclear status, the Charles de Gaulle, has spent as much time in repairs as sailing the seas.

Why should the US rulers abide by “coalition politics” when they have a near-monopoly on the means for massive military intervention? Its military budget is greater than that of all its potential rivals combined; now its spending is to jump by 15 per cent in the next budget year alone, by $50 billion dollars, the biggest single increase in two decades and an amount that alone dwarfs the military spending of most NATO powers. At the Munich international conference on security in February, the NATO secretary-general complained that the European powers risked being reduced to the status of “a military pigmy”. The International Herald Tribune reported the following exchange there: “When a German participant voiced his uneasiness about US threats against Iraq, [US official] McCain snapped back, ‘I would tell our German friend to go out and buy some weapons’ before questioning US intentions or power.”

Much has been said about the development of a new military doctrine in which the combination of sheer manufacturing power (giant troop-transport aeroplanes, ultra-long range bombers, war helicopters and other specialised aircraft) and hi-technology (pin-point bombs and cruise missiles guided by satellites and the aptly-named Predator drones, enhanced digital communications and electronic intelligence) could make it possible for small numbers of special operations troops operating in conjunction with local cannon fodder to fight in such a way as to reduce the need for co-operating with other imperialists and still keep the number of American causalities low. This is a military doctrine specifically designed to fight in, and for, the former colonies, not an inter-imperialist world war. No other imperialist power has such a military, and none, at least now, can afford the kind of fast recast of its armed forces that the Bush administration is determined to achieve in the next five years, at a cost of a quarter of a trillion dollars.

But this military imbalance exists to a great extent for historical reasons, in particular the military division of labour developed by the NATO powers during the period when they were preparing for a war against the Soviet bloc in central Europe, and this imbalance cannot last. The US spends over 3 per cent of its gross domestic product every year on direct military spending (not counting payments of loans for past spending, military pensions, etc.). This is about twice the European average – but the UK and France have not been far behind and sometimes even ahead in recent years. Germany and Japan are also on a new trajectory. In fact, the Bush doctrine can only give Europe and Japan fresh militaristic incentive. Recently, for instance, French President Chirac called for Europe to develop its own European satellite ground positioning system, called Galileo, at enormous cost, rather than find itself dependent on the US for its GPS system in a military conflict, and risk becoming, as Chirac said, US “vassals”. After initial reluctance, Germany decided to support this major effort.

One fact is that, economically, Europe is roughly equal to the US, and there is no reason why the present military imbalance should continue indefinitely. The other fact is that right now such imbalance does exist. That is one reason why the US had to act, if not on any specific day in September, then at least soon.

4. From Superpower to Unipower

A number of war buffs now comfortably established in the Bush cabinet began theorizing a new world order in the early 1990s. Their main point is that the surrender of the US’s main rival, the USSR, came so easily that the US neglected to carry out the other half of what it needed to do – cut itself loose from concerns about its “allies” and take over the whole world.

In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld’s deputy, and L. Lewis Libby, now Vice-President Cheney’s national security advisor, wrote a confidential report for the Pentagon entitled Defense Policy Guidance 1992-1994. It called for “preventing any ‘hostile power from dominating regions’ whose resources would allow it to attain great power status, discouraging attempts by the advanced industrial nations to challenge US leadership or upset the established political and economic order, and precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor”.¹⁴  It coined the phrase, “benign domination” – that is, benign towards the other imperialists.

Although this secret paper was written just after the war with Iraq and not long after the collapse of the USSR, its postulated goals were neither possible nor necessary to achieve a decade ago in the same way as now, because of the reasons indicated here – the further decline in Russia’s strength, on the one hand, and the increasingly acute need to intervene in the Third World and contradictions between the imperialist powers on the other. But now it is the united policy of the US ruling class – at least as long as it seems to be working. The position of its authors at the heart of Bush’s cabinet, where the key posts are filled by military figures or civilian life-long military experts and “national security” veterans associated with this line, is testament to a conscious adoption of this new line.

Bush’s warning that “You’re either with us or against us” is directed against “foe” and former “friend” alike. An unidentified US “administration official” put it this way in interpreting General Colin Powell’s remarks to the cautions about invading Iraq from some of the US’s former allies: “At some point, the Europeans with butterflies in their stomachs – many of whom did want to see us go into Afghanistan – will see that they have a bipolar choice: They can get with the plan or get off.”¹⁵  Get off here means get out of the US’s way or get off the earth. After the fall of the Soviet bloc, there was a lot of talk about the emergence of a multi-polar world. Bush’s plan is for a unipolar planet.

Not since Nazi Germany has there been such an open bid for world hegemony. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say not since the end of the Second World War, when the US began to slip into the colonial shoes of both its former enemies (Germany and Japan) and its allies (the UK and France) – but then it faced a formidable opponent, the socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union, which later was transformed through counter-revolution into a social-imperialist (socialist in words, imperialist in deeds) rival equal in stature to the US.

The process of US disengagement from international encumbrances began well before 11 September, with American rejection of nearly every international treaty and convention conceivable. In retrospect, Bush’s decision to withdraw the US from the 1997 Kyoto agreement was one of his first special messages of American intentions to an incredulous world: the US would not allow itself to be limited in any way, even over a matter of its sacred right to pollute. There was an ideological message as well – nothing is more important than profit, and the US’s rulers have as much contempt for the planet as for its people. An equally stunning event in international diplomacy occurred when the US refused to go along with an international pact against money laundering and tax evasion. The reasons why came to light later, when the Enron scandal revealed how vital the use of unregulated “offshore” banks has become to the functioning of multinational corporations. Even before Bush, the US had already rejected international treaties against the development of biological weapons – the US is threatening to demolish Iraq to force Saddam Hussein to welcome the international bio‑warfare inspectors that are barred from American shores. The US also turned down a convention that would have made the World Court a permanent institution, despite US approval of the Milosevic trial there now. The US objected on the grounds that such a treaty might mean that some day American soldiers or officials would be charged with war crimes, and, therefore, called for the Court’s abolition.

The bin Bush administration reversed the course set by Bush senior and Clinton on nuclear weapons. Instead of destroying missiles to match the number destroyed by Russia, the US will put them aside for “safe-keeping” and increase its spending on new nuclear weapons development. The US is even considering resuming nuclear bomb tests to fine-tune them. The US ruling class has also ratified another Bush project, dear to his heart since his first days in office, to revive Ronald Reagan’s plan for an anti-ballistic missile system. Unlike his predecessors, Putin has accepted this without protest – much to the dismay of the Continental European governments. America’s renewed need for these weapons and for the once-discredited ABM system does not come from any second thoughts about dangers from the former Soviet Union or any “rogue” states, as the only country to have used nuclear weapons likes to put it. Right now no state in the world could conceive of launching a nuclear first strike against the US. During the Gulf war, Saddam Hussein, who was often cited as the reason why the US needs a nuclear missile shield, didn’t even dare use his alleged chemical warheads against a far less dangerous opponent, Israel, for fear of the consequences. By retaining thousands of missiles and erecting an anti-ballistic missile shield capable of knocking down a limited number of rockets, the US aims to neutralise any attempt by the lesser nuclear powers to use nuclear weapons to resist a conventional American invasion and is thus positioning itself to unleash a first strike with no fear of retaliation.¹⁶ 

In short, the US has been openly and brazenly proclaiming it will do whatever it considers necessary to serve its own interests. An assistant to Powell proclaimed that as far as the US is concerned, “International law doesn’t exist”. One pundit labelled this “the deregulation of the international violence market” – and like the US’s idea of global trade deregulation (steel, for instance), the aim is to free American interests from all constraints; however it doesn’t mean that anyone else is free to do anything at all against US interests.

International law, of course, means imperialist law, agreements reached by the rulers of the most powerful countries designed to protect their common interests at the expense of everyone else. And actually, the US, like any imperialist country, has never recognised international law when its interests dictated otherwise. Bush senior’s 1989 invasion of Panama is a case in point. The US created Noriega and then sent its troops to remove him when it felt like it. But, significantly, the US preserved some of the appearances of observing international law even though it was basically mocking it. For instance, Noriega was tried as a prisoner of war and to this day is being kept in a prison in compliance with the Geneva Conventions. George junior’s prisoners at the American naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba are being treated very differently, in legal as well as human terms. American defiance of international law has become so extreme that when the Bosnian Human Rights Court (set up at Western insistence) ordered six men of Middle Eastern origin released from prison for lack of evidence, after they had been accused of planning an attack against the US Embassy in Sarajevo where they lived, US troops kidnapped them (with the probable complicity of the Bosnian government) in the middle of the night and carted them off to Guantanamo. There they are being held along with British, French and other nationals whose countries’ requests for jurisdiction or even access have been ignored.

The US openly admits that the men at Guantanamo are being submitted to relentless interrogation, psychological manipulation (including sensory deprivation and such isolation that they reportedly don’t even know where they are) and other forms of treatment prisoners of war are supposedly protected from. Since the use of outright torture has been openly defended in the US and European press, it is not hard to guess what is happening on a remote island closed to the media and international observers. (When protests were raised, the Red Cross investigated and made a report – a secret report for US eyes only.) By mistake or arrogance, the Pentagon itself released the famous photo showing these prisoners shackled with their eyes and ears covered. Why is Bush so determined that these men not be recognised as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, despite the international uproar around it and his own claims that this is a mere “question for lawyers” that would make no practical difference? “To preserve flexibility”, a Bush aid wrote in a memo.

“Flexibility” is exactly the point for the US, in all matters. The US wants the world to know that it will do what it wants to whomever it wants, full stop, and there’s always room in Guantanamo’s tiger cages for anyone who doesn’t like it.

Guantanamo is not just a concentration camp for prisoners from Afghanistan. It is a symbol of what the US intends to do to anyone who stands in its way. The US does, however, implicitly recognise the division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations, and does not propose, at least for now, to send Marines to haul off France’s Chirac. Yet Guantanamo’s very existence is meant to put some practical menace into the warning “Get with the plan or get off.”

This new unilateralism does not mean that the US intends to act alone. Bush has paid great attention to the ad-hoc building of coalitions under his leadership. There will always be inter-imperialist co-operation when that serves their common interests – even now French soldiers are working side by side with American soldiers in building a long-term airbase in Kyrgyzstan. But to the degree possible (and this could be a very big question), the US intends to act quickly and decisively without even trying to achieve consensus, imposing its decisions in deeds and letting others express their qualms and quibbles afterwards, unbounded by treaties among its allies, supreme in its own sovereignty and considering that of others worthless (especially oppressed nations). Wolfowitz explains that “there will not be a single coalition but rather different coalitions for different missions” in which the US hopes to work mainly with “local forces” (i.e. puppet troops) rather than its “partners” and rivals.

America’s closest allies are now to be its underlings, imperialists who recognise their weakness and get with the unipolar plan on that basis. Never has Russia seemed so subservient to the US as since 11 September. Vladimir Putin suddenly became Bush’s “best friend” through a combination of enticements and threats. Among the latter is an understanding or at least the hope that the US will drop the Chechnya independence movement that Russia sees as part of a campaign to carve its state into smaller and smaller pieces. Putin supported the invasion of Afghanistan and reportedly told his “best friend” that he would not object to a US attack on Iraq, both countries previously being objects of Russia’s predatory ambitions. Most remarkably, and unexpectedly, he acquiesced to the extension of NATO right up to Russia’s present borders, including the Baltic states that belonged to the USSR until a decade ago, and accepted the American building of 13 new bases and the permanent stationing of US troops in what was formerly Soviet Central Asia. He even gave his blessing to the current American incursion into Georgia, also until recently part of the USSR, and until now, at least, a pawn built up militarily by the US and Turkey against Russia. This does not necessarily mean that everyone in the Russian ruling class shares Putin’s interpretation of their interests, and Russia’s imperialist interests are sure to give rise to sharper contention with the US in the future.

5. The Geopolitics of the Apocalypse

Bush’s hit list of countries to be attacked, or at least threatened, is highly instructive. It may be mad, but it is a well thought-out (and broadly supported within the US ruling class) plan to make the world safe for American plunder. For instance, after long squabbling between the various powers with influence in Afghanistan to set up a new interim government, the US sneered at the Northern Alliance, whose troops did most of the fighting against the Taliban but were deemed too friendly to America’s rivals, and instead simply put in its man, Hamed Karzai, a former advisor for the California-based Unocal company, whose proposed pipeline, in Western eyes, is the only thing that might give the country any value at all. (The US Special Envoy, Zalmy Khalilzad, was also on the Unocal oil company payroll.)

Or take Iraq. At first, some commentators did not believe Bush would fight a battle so distasteful to the US’s former allies in the Gulf war. The contrast between Bush’s insistence and their opposition has been so striking that a newspaper commentator remarked that Europe “seemed tempted to make the Iraq issue one of American hegemony in world politics rather than of Saddam’s brutality and treachery”. That, in fact, is an accurate assessment of what is at stake.¹⁷  As Rumsfeld’s old Nixon team-mate, Henry Kissinger, recently wrote, “The issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack on the United States.… The challenge of Iraq is essentially geopolitical.”

Despite the US-led effort to boycott Iraq, France, Germany, England and Russia have been openly doing business with the Iraqi government. In fact, practically the whole world has been conducting business almost as usual with that country for years now, including American companies (Vice President Cheney, in his oil-baron days, was involved in trying to beat out the Europeans in deals with Saddam). Since Bush senior cut short his war on Iraq, apparently out of the realisation that the toppling of Saddam might lead to the dismemberment of Iraq and, therefore, be destabilising for American interests in the region overall, the regime has been a symbol of the limits of American power. That seems to be the main thing Bush wants to overthrow. He wants to demonstrate in the most convincing way possible that the developments of the last decade and the posture adopted by the US on that basis mean the old limits no longer apply.¹⁸ 

Bush’s sudden addition of Iran to his “axis of evil” list in January puzzled many observers. After all, that regime’s recent concessions to the US included an unpublicised agreement to rescue downed US pilots, close co-operation in brokering the US-dominated “interim” government in Afghanistan and allowing the US to offload supplies for Afghanistan through Iranian ports.¹⁹  Apparently the mullahs didn’t bow quite low enough to suit Bush, who demanded more and threatened to overturn the regime anyway. One reason why the Iranian government thought it could maintain the appearance of something less than openly kissing the Great Satan’s fat behind has been the degree to which it has welcomed German, French and other European investment. A country that lives from the sale of oil needs at least a France to exploit it. It seems that being totally and openly subservient to the US politically, and to US interests economically, are two sides of the same coin. The threat of American troops in Iraq seems to have spurred the Khamenei-Khatami regime to yield even further to the US, shutting down Afghanistani forces in Iran opposed to Bush’s Afghanistan government and rounding up foreigners (including European citizens) viewed unfavourably in Washington. More recently, Iran indicated that it would allow the US-sponsored Iraqi National Council, presumably the US’s choice to replace Saddam, to open offices in Tehran, the capital of Iran, and broadcast calls for Saddam’s overthrow from Iranian soil – not a gesture to be expected from a regime in any kind of “axis” with Iraq. The US move towards invading Iraq may allow the US to bend the present Iranian regime completely to its will, or the US may hold out for a rupture between Khomeini’s successors and what it considers an acceptable government. But either way, the key to forcing the changes America wants is… force.

The sending of American troops to Yemen is another piece of the puzzle. Considered on its own, Yemen has no importance for the US. This is about American naval bases in Yemen, US naval power stationed in that part of the Gulf, and really about the American dream of turning the Gulf into an American lake.

Everyone knows why the Gulf is strategic: because of the oil. But it is not just a matter of the money to be made. The previous quote from the Wolfowitz-Libby report about strategic regions and resources echoes Lenin’s remarks about the importance of oil during the First World War: the imperialists consider oil a strategic resource to be controlled not only for its own sake but also to be denied to their rivals. Actually, today Europe is far more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than is the US, and Japan even more so. The profits to be made are enormous, but even more importantly, he who controls these petroleum spigots has his hands on the throat of the European and Japanese economies.

It is significant that the Philippines was the second country to be invaded by the US, after Afghanistan in October 2001, and in greater numbers than anywhere else but Afghanistan. (About 900 US troops, 650 of them combat forces; some of them have been sent on patrol in the countryside alongside Philippine government troops.)

The Philippines became an American colony when the US took advantage of a popular revolt against Spanish domination to snatch up the islands for itself.²⁰ 

It has been said that the American military first adopted the .45 semi-automatic pistol because Philippine fighters resisted so fiercely that they could not be stopped by smaller bullets. The islands became a key military outpost for the US in the Pacific, as was reflected in the strategic battles over the Philippines in the Second World War. After the war, the US was forced to give up direct political control of the Philippines but maintained economic and indirect political control. The Subic Bay naval base remained the key anchorage for the US in the Pacific, until the US thought it better to leave of its own accord in the wake of a popular upsurge and the toppling of the US-sponsored Marcos dictatorship in the 1980s. The rebellion of the oppressed Muslim people of the southern Philippines islands has been a serious obstacle for US-sponsored regimes for many years, but US intentions are not limited to the reputed Muslim strongholds on Sulu island. According to news accounts, US troops flying over northern Luzon, on the opposite end of the archipelago, exchanged fire with troops of the New People’s Army led by the Communist Party of the Philippines. Clearly the US intends to make major moves to tighten up its control of its former colony. These aims are not limited to the Philippines alone. The US is now also negotiating for access rights to the huge Cam Ranh naval base in Vietnam, which the US built during its unsuccessful war to conquer South-east Asia. The base is about to be vacated by Russia, which can no longer afford the lease.

The inclusion of North Korea on Bush’s target list has been particularly difficult to understand, since that country has been trying desperately to grovel at America’s feet for several years now. Clinton says he was about to travel there to accept its surrender at the close of his term in December 2000. In fact, several years ago North Korea unilaterally halted testing of the missiles that Bush is complaining about. It is not clear, as this article is written, whether or not Bush intends to make war there. But from his first days in office Bush has made it clear that he is reluctant to allow North Korea to make peace. Again, there is some political symbolism involved in dramatising his rupture with Clinton’s policies. But the most important factor in this equation is not North Korea but the 37,000 US troops stationed in South Korea. The maintenance of an unsettled military situation on the peninsula is an important component of the US’s ability to bully China, which Bush apparently hopes to pull more firmly into the US orbit, and Japan, a country whose exploitation of Korea is at the core of its imperialist existence.

Other countries where the US military is now present, or considering involvement, include Colombia, Yemen, Indonesia (American advisors may be sent there) and even perhaps Algeria (the US has begun supplying military equipment to the Algerian government, a provocative step into France’s backyard, where until now US contacts have mainly been with the Islamic fundamentalist “terrorists”). Put it all together and you have a map of where the US has long considered that its strategic political and economic interests require military intervention and a clearer picture of the necessity behind Bush’s madness.

6. A War Just in Time

The relations between politics and economics are complex and dynamic. Everything in today’s world situation is rooted in the increasingly global “comprehensive socialisation of production” and its contradiction with private appropriation, as Lenin noted nearly a century ago, when he called imperialism the antechamber of a new system of global co-operation that would emerge through proletarian revolution. The economic compulsions driving the imperialists (including crises, rivalry and the expand-or-die imperative) are rooted in that contradiction, as is the struggle of the international proletariat and its allies. These ruling classes are ultimately representatives of the requirements of imperialist capital and not simply making wilful policy decisions. But new policies have in fact been coming into being through the interworking of these requirements and imperialist politics.

There is ample evidence that the Bush administration took office looking for something like 11 September, an opportunity to change the military, political and social course that the US has been on. In an interview reported in the 29 January 2002 Washington Post, Bush said, “I do believe that there is the image of America out there that we are so materialistic, that we don’t have values, and that when struck, we wouldn’t fight back.” In the same article, Rumsfeld recounted how when Bush interviewed him for the job of Defence Secretary (the key role in the Bush cabinet, as it turned out), Bush criticised Clinton for following a pattern of “reflexive pullback” whenever American military intervention ran into serious obstacles, such as its defeat at the hands of local militias in Somalia. Rumsfeld replied that he believed US power was needed to “discipline the world”. “I left no doubt in his mind but that, at that moment when something happens, I would be coming to him to lean forward, not back. And that I wanted him to know that. And he said, unambiguously, that that is what he would be doing, and that we had a clear, common understanding.” This is exactly what Bush did, “leaning forward” to leap at the first good opportunity for war that presented itself. For those in the know, these cards were already on the table when Bush was picked to be president.

The Taliban regime was born amid the muck and mire of “the great game”, the imperialist jockeying for control of the oil and gas pipelines in Central Asia. The US gave Pakistan the green light to bring the Taliban to power in 1996 because it believed they could bring about the political stability needed for the Unocal corporation to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan, making sure that American hands controlled the petroleum flowing from the former Soviet republics. Support for the Taliban paralleled the close military relations the US was developing with most of these Central Asian countries. Their medieval oppression of women was certainly no obstacle, especially since it matched much of the programme advocated by American Christian fundamentalists well respected in Bush circles. Moreover, the American government found the Taliban so potentially useful that for a time the State Department blocked the FBI investigation of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen because it hoped to quietly persuade the Taliban to turn him over without disrupting their relations. (The head of the FBI investigation, who resigned in protest, became head of security at the World Trade Center, where he died.) Negotiations between the US and the Taliban reportedly continued through July 2001. The French daily Le Figaro claimed that the local head of the CIA met with bin Laden himself, while the latter was being treated at the American Hospital in Dubai that month.²¹ 

Those negotiations were suddenly broken off in August 2001. It seems that the US had given up on the Taliban and was already itching for a fight in Afghanistan. One way or another, it got one. Who fired the first shot? It doesn’t matter. The US invasion of Afghanistan, like its support for the Taliban, was meant to establish a semi-feudal, patriarchal and imperialist-subservient regime. What’s more, Afghanistan was only a target of opportunity, an easy enemy militarily and politically, nothing like the Vietnamese revolutionaries who battered the US and won world-wide support. Afghanistan was important, not so much in its own right, but as a good place to start a global rampage.

As Lenin wrote, “War does not alter the direction of pre‑war politics but accelerates their development.” The aftermath of 11 September didn’t alter historical trends. It did, however, mark a new, qualitatively different situation.

7. The “Home Front”

The “coalition politics” and “leaning backward” policies Bush brought to a halt were very much tied up with US reluctance to inject its own troops into direct combat, especially where they might get killed in numbers that would be politically difficult to sustain domestically. Only a very short time ago, European imperialists were criticising the US for not sending in enough soldiers, especially to places where European troops were being sent, like ex-Yugoslavia, where, it was said, “The US does the bombing, we do the dying and the NGOs do the feeding.” Today, even more than before, the US is counting on being able to rely on being able to inflict death from a safe distance. What this means has already been amply demonstrated in Afghanistan, where the estimates of civilians killed run from 3,000 to several times that number. When at a press conference someone referred to a village wedding that had been bombed by the US and the survivors strafed, Rumsfeld curtly lectured the media on how such things should not even be considered an issue.

But Americans are going to have to get ready for body bags, and Bush wants them to know it. Indeed, while “raining death from above” will remain a cornerstone of US strategy, the US imperialists are also intent on burying the “Vietnam syndrome” (by which they mean the fear of being stuck in a losing imperialist war of conquest) and doing away with any remaining reluctance to sacrifice the troops’ blood to achieve their aims. Ultimately, political control requires ground troops. In the scramble to secure new positions abroad, all the imperialists are anxious not to be the only ones without battle-scarred troops.

The sea change in military policy has been prepared along with changing politics within US society as well. In the wake of 11 September, a broad spectrum of representatives of the US ruling class have been working to operate a paradigm shift from a social contract with sections of the middle classes, in which their passive acquiescence was considered enough to earn them a certain comfort, to more of a Spartan model, in which the order of the day is war without end and the willingness to accept the mobilisation and sacrifices that makes necessary.

Tremor after tremor has shaken the American political landscape during the last few years, as a new agenda began to emerge through the development of events, political infighting and a shifting consensus. There have been bitter “culture wars” around abortion, the patriarchal family and cultural issues – questions of how people live – but little has been said in public about the point of all this, except for obscure articles in foreign policy journals. Whether they believe in his system of ideas or just pragmatically believe that it makes for effective propaganda, the ruling class circles behind Bush have a whole highly repressive social and cultural agenda. They seek to create a social situation that is as radically different domestically as the unfettered global empire they seek to bring into being. Without making facile comparisons that history may or may not confirm, or ignoring the profound differences between a Germany making a desperate bid to break out of its status as a defeated power and an America at the top of the imperialist heap and determined to stay there, it can be said that the recasting of society embarked upon by the Nazis was at one with the global aims of German imperialism and what they knew would be necessary to achieve them.

8. Dangers and Opportunities

After the First World War Stalin wrote, “The significance of the imperialist war which broke out ten years ago lies, among other things, in the fact that it gathered all of these contradictions in a single knot and threw them onto the scales, thereby accelerating and facilitating the revolutionary battles of the proletariat.” The situation now is different in many ways – today the contradictions between the imperialists are being conditioned mainly by the contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed peoples – but nevertheless the analogy is useful, for the world’s contradictions are intertwined, the whole knot is being drawn tighter and tighter, and they are again being thrown “onto the scales”. Cataclysmic events are unfolding and the imperialists and reactionaries themselves have placed war, the resolution of contradictions by the force of arms, squarely at centre stage. All of this can serve to accelerate and facilitate the battles of the proletariat and the oppressed peoples at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In order for this to happen, in order to bring out and concretise the favourable potential in today’s world situation, a great deal of work is required to bring forward the flag of the proletariat more powerfully into the current swirl of contradictions. Never before in the existence of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement has the need and the possibilities for Maoist leadership stood out more sharply.

It is indisputable – even George Bush understands it – that there will be resistance. It may arise in different ways and at a different rhythm in different countries, and it will not take a straight path. But the most important question, for the Maoists, is this: Should we stand in its way (by trying to direct attention elsewhere, hoping for some different conditions)? Tail behind the contradictory and sometimes dead-end currents that spontaneously appear? Or strive to lead it? Who else can correctly tie together all the strands of struggle, bring out the people’s common interests and enemy, and point out what needs to be done at every stage?

Lenin wrote, “The experience of this war… stuns and breaks some people but enlightens and tempers others”. He pointed out that war reveals that which is normally hidden, that the imperialist system ultimately depends on military force to survive, and that war creates more favourable conditions for the proletariat and the people to establish their own rule through revolution. This new world disorder will be feared by some and welcomed by others, but at any rate it is the currency and it will sweep millions into motion, dragging their own points of view and interests with them. Events such as these shed light on the real relations that govern this world and the strengths and weaknesses of the people and their enemies, and mobilise and temper the people to fight them. What Lenin’s words mean now, in our situation, is that we face both the danger of being crushed, through confrontation with an enemy that is striking out aggressively or through our own passivity or missteps, and the need and possibility of rising to the occasion and leading the struggle on a planetary scale, in a way that was not possible when the world’s people did not face such a sharply-defined and rampant enemy.

Global resistance and the more forceful assertion of the proletarian alternative are what are called for. This resistance will take many forms.

On the one hand there needs to be mass movements at an international level, uniting all who can be united, bringing the outlook and the programme of struggle of the proletariat into these battles and, through this process, winning broad masses all over the world not only to more powerfully and effectively oppose and resist the war and aggression of the imperialists, but also to understand and focus more sharply on the imperialist system itself as the cause of injustice and oppression all over the world.

At the same time, and central to the Maoists’ ability to step more forcefully onto the political stage on a world scale, the current international situation also makes it possible and necessary for further accelerated work on the path of seizing power in every country and building and strengthening Maoist parties capable of leading this process. The conditions for actually doing so can be glimpsed on the horizon to various degrees in different countries.

For example, today we can see how the People’s War in Nepal is interacting with the rapidly sharpening revolutionary situation in the whole region. The resounding victories of the People’s War are providing a model of how to fight and what to fight for. Fear of such an alternative path appearing in the tinderbox of South Asia is no doubt one of the reasons why the revolution in Nepal is facing more direct opposition from the US and British imperialists, as well as from the regional gendarme of the world imperialist system, India. It is also clear that the rivalries between the different reactionary states, especially India and Pakistan, as well as the turmoil and resistance that has been unleashed by the so-called “war on terrorism”, also create more favourable conditions for revolution throughout the subcontinent.

Likewise, in other front-line states the revolutionary process is now much more directly conditioned by the US-led crusade. In Iran, the regime’s sham opposition to imperialism may be about to be put to the acid test, clarifying minds and providing revolutionary openings. The solidity of Turkey’s reactionary regime is the object of increased US concern amid the political and economic strains of enlisting in US war efforts, a highly risky proposition.²²  To cite another example key to US plans, despite the Israeli effort to “beat the Palestinians into submission”, as Sharon puts it, the Israeli occupation of Palestine has in no way been rendered more stable by this world context but instead continues to generate resistance and spew instability throughout the region. The return of US troops to the Philippines has already triggered an anti-imperialist uproar throughout the country and may offer opportunities for a new level in the mobilisation and unity of the people for armed struggle.

The exact effects on each of the oppressed countries will be uneven and hard to predict. In general, it may be that the higher stakes set by Bush will have contradictory consequences. People’s wars are necessarily protracted and go through twists and turns. But just as it is impossible for reactionary rule to prevail evenly throughout the whole of a single country in most of the countries oppressed by imperialism, because of the relative weakness of the central state power in the oppressed nations, particularly in the vast countryside, it is also impossible for the US imperialists to intervene everywhere and all at once around the world, and they will face some stark choices of their own.

US forces are now stationed in at least 100 of the 189 member states of the United Nations – their greatest world-wide presence since the Second World War. Many of them are operating in areas like Central Asia that are relatively unfamiliar, and far from the US home base, with supplies dependent on intermediate bases positioned in “friendly” third countries like Saudi Arabia that are sometimes not all that stable. However “lean and mean” they may be, they are still stretched thin, including relative to US economic strength. The US rulers are gambling that they will eventually be able to translate this expanded military presence into economic gains. But this situation leaves their forces exposed and vulnerable on an unprecedented scale.

While the US has been fairly successful in the initial stage of the “crusade” in lining up the other imperialist powers, the diverging interests of the different powers mean that they will not be able to maintain indefinitely a unified camp—contention as well collusion is a permanent feature of imperialism. Already the fissures in the US-led “coalition” are showing themselves in relation to Iraq and Palestine and will grow deeper as the resistance of the people intensifies.

When Rumsfeld defined the new US military doctrine as the ability to fight in four major theatres of war at once – and largely alone – he was making the assumption that nobody would fight back too hard and that the US would keep winning easy victories. After all, the war in Vietnam was just one war and even so the US could not win it. This situation poses unprecedented challenges to the revolutionary forces, too, including in terms of raising their level of internationalist unity so as to wage the global struggle against the imperialists in a more unified way.

As for the situation in the imperialist countries, there is historical experience to draw on there as well. “Never is imperialism stronger than at the outbreak of a war”, Lenin wrote in 1915 in a polemic against those who saw only that aspect of the situation and not the revolutionary situations that were to break out over time as the effects of the war unfolded in the belligerent countries. Later on he added, “In the first place, never do the governments stand in such need of agreement with all the parties of the ruling classes, or of the ‘peaceful’ submission of the oppressed classes in relation to that rule, as in the time of war. Secondly, even though ‘at the beginning of a war’, and especially in a country that expects a speedy victory, the government seems all-powerful, nobody in the world has ever linked expectations of a revolutionary situation exclusively with the ‘beginning’ of a war, and still less has anybody ever identified the ‘seeming’ with the actual.”

No revolutionary situation now exists in the imperialist heartlands, but revolutionary situations are impossible without crises generated by events such as the current war, and no one can say with certainty whether this or some future crisis will give rise to such a situation. There has never been an imperialist war that was not at first greeted by a wave of patriotism. On closer examination, the sentiments among even the intermediate people in the US and other imperialist countries are more complicated than they might at first appear. Also, the situation between imperialist countries is necessarily uneven, but the eager race to build up arms, to militarise societies and to get troops on the ground to contend for control and booty wherever possible will drag all of these countries into the whirlpool. The US position as a frontline country will draw people into political life in an intensified manner, and the struggles there against the US crusade will have enormous impact on the rest of the world, just as the struggles in other countries will give heart to those in the belly of the beast.

The struggle against the US-led war and aggression against the world’s people will have a crucial impact on the development of the world revolution. Marx spoke of the need for the working class to resist the capitalists or risk becoming reduced to a mass of broken wretches; the same applies to resistance against today’s unjust wars. Moreover, Middle Eastern immigrants in America are already living under martial law. Britain has locked up asylum seekers in concentration camp-like conditions. Its proposed requirement that they carry microchip “smart cards” whose contents are secret even from the men and women carrying them,²³  has been compared to the yellow stars Jews were made to wear by the Nazis. Colonial wars old and new are inevitably accompanied by repression against those forced to leave their homelands to work in the metropolises, where they form a basic component of the proletariat in many imperialist countries. This was seen in the massacres of Algerian demonstrators in Paris during France’s war against Algeria. Only if the advanced proletarians and their Maoist representatives in these countries stand up in solidarity with the world’s people can they become fit to rule; only in this way can they represent the interests of, and begin to unite, the workers and the majority of people in these societies whose fundamental interests are opposed to the kind of world they are now trapped in.

Further, this is the context for the necessary organisational efforts to go from what Lenin described as a situation of revolutionaries wearing “thin-soled shoes” to one where “hob-nailed boots” are required. It would be an error of shameful and perhaps fatal proportions to fail to recognise the existence and implications of the new situation.

There is considerable danger of losing revolutionary bearings in the face of this situation. There has already been some experience in the anti-globalisation movement, whose surge in the period before 11 September so alarmed the imperialists of every country and provoked much of their post-11 September crackdown. (Police gunfire against anti-globalisation protestors in Gothenburg and Genoa heralded the changing rules of the game in Western politics.) Some forces have tried to disconnect demands against globalisation from the current wars and preparations for wars. The question facing people in these movements, like everyone else on the globe, is whether or not to stand with the people of the world. Otherwise, just and important protests against McDonald’s and genetically-modified products, or even political repression, risk missing the point. For instance, there was not nearly strong enough opposition to the US-led war at the anti-globalisation conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Members and supporters of complicit European governments (especially France) were allowed to participate as if they were not part of the problem. This was a case study in how to reduce the demand for a different world to an irrelevant, pious wish by ignoring what keeps that world from being born – imperialism and its armed forces and enforcers. To take another example, raising slogans against both war and terrorism means avoiding pointing the spearhead of the struggle against the US and one’s own ruling classes and can only strangle the people’s resistance in its cradle. Those who understand the possibility and necessity of uniting very broadly, of basing themselves on the masses and uniting all who can be united against the US-led crusade and imperialist war in all its manifestations, will be able to inspire and lead the hard work of shedding light on the world situation and telling the masses the truth about where their interests lie – not with the imperialists and governments, but with the people of the world.

As the Revolutionary International Movement has recently written, “The world has entered a period of conspicuous change when what on the surface seemed permanent and immovable is being shaken by its internal contradictions. It is a time full of both greater opportunities and real dangers. It will require all of our proletarian resolve, our Marxist-Leninist-Maoist stand, viewpoint and method as well as our correct political orientation to advance amidst the turbulent storm. We can see the possibility of ultimate victory coming more sharply into focus but this will require more struggle and more sacrifice.”

Mao Tsetung said that imperialism is both a real tiger and a paper tiger, and in the long run it is the people and only the people who are really powerful. In today’s world, anyone who tries to ignore that real tiger aspect is spreading a suicidal fallacy. But why is it also a paper tiger? This aspect can remain latent in ordinary times and is brought out only by mass struggle in all its forms. Not because imperialism’s skyscrapers can fall to the ground but because it does evil things at home and around the world, arousing the hatred of the people and uniting them against it, and in the long run the people and only the people, including in the belly of the beast, can resolve the contradictions it gives rise to. The world is plunging deeper into disasters that can only be resolved by the people, mobilised in revolutionary struggle and led by a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line.

ENDNOTES

1 The burning of the German Reichstag (parliament) in 1933 gave Hitler the pretext to declare “you’re either with us or against us” in his own style and consolidate Nazi rule as a prelude to a war for world hegemony.

 2 In the real world, these neutral economic terms mean chaos and suffering on a scale rarely seen in human history. For instance, the “normal workings” of world trade meant that Zambia’s agriculture was ruined and its economy became dependent on foreign-owned mining, and those same normal workings meant that when the world’s handful of competing monopolies produced too much copper in the various Third World countries they controlled, Zambia’s mines were closed and that capital just picked up and moved elsewhere. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) solved the problem of the shortage of profit opportunities for imperialist capital in Zambia by opening its economy to further penetration in other ways. It forced the country to drop the trade barriers that protected its once-thriving garment factories where the miners’ wives, sisters and children worked. Imported clothing soon swept them away like a tidal wave. One of the dozens of women trying to keep her children alive by selling a few tomatoes in a local market told a reporter, “No one alive now has ever seen such poverty.” In the wake of the financial crisis caused by global currency movements, within a matter of weeks peasants in Indonesia went from eating rice to the bark off trees. The world has seen famine, plague and other disasters, but never have they been so clearly man-made.

 3 The two blocs were held together by mutual interests, not force, but defections weren’t allowed on either side. The Soviets made that point in Czechoslovakia in 1968. So did the US, although sometimes less openly. In Italy, for instance, under Project Gladio and secret organisations like the P2 Masonic Lodge, the US organised to launch a military coup in co-operation with like-minded sections of the Italian ruling class should the pro-Soviet Italian Communist Party come too close to power.

 4 Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, is on record as saying, “We can’t let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.” He directed the CIA to organise a military coup to overthrow Allende. The US-backed generals executed thousands of real or suspected impediments to US interests, creating the political conditions for further US investment.

 5 Argentina is a good example. European and especially Spanish capital is so heavily concentrated in that country and its neighbours that when the IMF refused to extend Argentina’s loans, the Spanish stock market trembled, while the US market was able to take it in stride. France and Spain had attempted to forestall this decision, but under the IMF system of weighted voting, the US has veto power. Too bad for the Spanish banks. And too bad for the millions of Argentinians who woke up one morning and found themselves poor or poorer when the country’s currency collapsed.

 6 For more on this, see “Free Trade – Engine of Growth or Plunder?”, in AWTW 2000/26.

 7 By now it should be clear to all that the argument that “human rights” trumps sovereignty has led to a new doctrine: “national security” (of the US, of course) trumps human rights, now merely “a fashionable cause of the dim and distant 1990s”, as a columnist cynically wrote.

 8 Today, in the World Court in The Hague, we see the Serbian thug favoured by Russia and much of the French ruling class, Milosevic, on trial, while the Croatian Tudjman, the thug favoured by Germany and the US, is still in power.

 9 They finally got their wish in the fierce March fighting south of Gardez, the first battle in the Afghanistan war the US fought with conventional forces. Troops from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway took part, with France sharing the tasks of aerial bombardment. For a few days, the Continental European foreign ministers softened their tone.

 10 The USSR produced military equipment, from Kalashnikov automatic rifles to MiG jet fighters and the world’s largest military aircraft, that were considered at least equal in quality to that of the West. But measured in current exchange rates, Russia’s annual military budget is now down to $9 billion. By comparison, according to some estimates, the US is now spending about $1 billion a day. It has been said that the cost of maintaining military parity with the West on the smaller economic base of the Eastern bloc created economic imbalances that were a major factor in its demise. There may be lessons for the US in terms of its plans to greatly expand military spending.

The change in the world balance of military forces, brought about by the further weakening of Russia, also impeded dreams of grafting Russian military power onto European economic might. That is another important difference between the world situation of a decade ago and that of today.

 11 In the last few years, France has developed a rapid-reaction strike force of 50,000 troops, part of a strategic realignment, begun in 1996, of France’s armed forces away from its nuclear-dependent focus of the Cold War days. It has abandoned its land-based nuclear missiles and bombers and, by abolishing conscription, made it politically easier to send troops overseas. Until recently Germany had only 1,000 soldiers specifically trained and equipped for rapid intervention abroad. The UK has 4,000 seasoned special operations troops, the SAS, long infamous for atrocities in Ireland and elsewhere, whereas by contrast, comparable German units saw combat for the first time in Kosovo. All three countries have made efforts to send these soldiers into battle wherever and whenever possible, not only to achieve immediate military and political goals but also to test and train them as core units for future expansion.

 12 India and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons can be ignored as far as the world military scene is concerned. Israel’s nuclear weapons have a specific role to guarantee the US-sponsored Zionist outpost in the Middle East.

 13 This may be the model the US wants to implement for some or all of the other imperialist countries as well, akin to the Roman Empire where the local ruling classes were articulated into its empire, for their mutual benefit, as long as all roads led to Rome, and Rome got the lion’s share and the last word.

 14 See “Cold War Government with No War to Fight – America’s Imperial Longings,” Philip S. Golub, Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), July 2001. Note the headline – this analysis of America’s quest for unipolar power was published before 11 September. Golub notes that even before becoming Bush’s war secretary, Rumsfeld was warning about a new “Pearl Harbor”. It may be more accurate to say that Rumsfeld was calling for one. This is, of course, what the Bushites labelled the 11 September events. The original Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attack on the American fleet stationed in Hawaii that occasioned the US entry into the Second World War, was also an event at the very least welcomed by the US, if not provoked or deliberately allowed to happen.

 15 Shortly afterwards Powell accused his French counterpart, Hubert Vedrine, of having “caught the vapours”, a remark that yet other “unidentified spokesmen” for the US translated as acting like a “menopausal woman”. These remarks, from Bush’s chief diplomat (!), are the terms on which America is setting the debate: “real men” versus females and the effeminate. For the macho – misogynist and homophobic – American military man, this is a provocation.

 16 America recently announced it would develop smaller “tactical” nuclear devices that would be used in “normal” wars. In fact, Afghanistan and Iraq were cited as potential targets. War strategists used to talk about the “balance of terror”, which meant that neither side would dare to provoke a thermonuclear showdown. Now, in the “brave” new post-Cold War world, we may see – soon – the first nuclear warfare since Hiroshima.

 17 Bush barely bothers to formulate credible pretexts. The CIA itself (suddenly on the “left” in American politics) issued a report in February stating that Iraq, like Iran and North Korea (the three countries on Bush’s “axis of evil” list), was not at this time involved in what the US considers “terrorism”. Bush hasn’t tried to argue otherwise. Instead, he emphasises what weapons the regime might acquire at some time in the future, which, even if they existed, would still pale beside the chemical, bacteriological, nuclear and other “weapons of mass destruction” already in the hands of the US, Israel, etc. (after all, the anthrax used to kill people by mail in the US was made for equally murderous purposes by the American government).

 18 In addition to the end of US-European “coalition politics” previously discussed, a decade ago the USSR was the main defender of Iraq; recently Russia refused to receive the visit of an Iraqi minister.

 19 Hardly a new venture for a regime that provided weapons to the US-sponsored Contras in Nicaragua during the early 1980s.

 20 The US acquired Cuba and Puerto Rico in the same way during its 1898 war with Spain.

 21 Contrary to its standard and almost invariable practice of refusing to confirm or deny allegations about its activities, the CIA later denounced this as a fabrication.

 22 This is one reason why the IMF bailed out Turkey and not Argentina.

 23 In a country that prides itself on the lack of any national identity card for its citizens.