A new world situation
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A NEW
PHASE OF THE WORKERS' AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT
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1 The new phase
Since the
end of the 1990s, a turning point in the world political situation has put new
phase of activity, programme, strategy and organization on the agenda of the
workers', social and popular movements. This turning point is the result of
four factors:
1 the development of the inherent contradictions of the new
globalized mode of capitalist accumulation;
2 social resistance to the dominant classes' offensive;
3 the emergence of a new wave of radicalization through movements
against capitalist globalization, particularly in a series of sectors of youth
; and
4 in Latin America, a peasant, indigenous, and youth radicalization
which is changing the relationship of forces. The new governments in Brazil and
Ecuador, the electoral breakthrough in Bolivia, the radicalization of the
Chavez government, and the mobilizations in Argentina and Peru are evidence of
the political and social instability of the transition toward larger class
confrontations. The paradox we must resolve is that this radicalization is
taking place in a context where the revolutionary left is weak.
These
factors do not cancel out the underlying trends that began in the mid-1970s
with the defeat of (semi-)revolutionary upsurges and the end of capitalism's
long expansive wave, which made possible: the neo-liberal offensive of the
1980s; a new restructuring of the world by the dominant classes, called
'capitalist globalization'; a new deterioration of the class relationship of
forces to the detriment of the working class; and, following the collapse of the
Stalinist bureaucracy and the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe, an
unprecedented crisis of the class consciousness of the workers' movement and
organization and of the two currents that had dominated it throughout the
twentieth century, social democracy and Stalinism.
But the
current situation is different from the situation at the beginning of the
1990s. The revival of the workers', social and popular movements is uneven, and
takes different forms in different national political situations. But beyond
this or that conjuncture, there is an undeniable change in the social,
political and ideological climate. This encourages the emergence of
anti-capitalist/ anti-imperialist currents, on the social and trade-union
fronts as well as politically.
2 A transitional phase
The
international situation has changed significantly. The current characteristics
of the period are defined by the contradictions of an transitional situation
between a system where the state plays an important role, there is institutionalized
class collaboration and a workers' movement dominated by social-democratic and
Stalinist reformists, and a new capitalism, new political institutions and a
new organic cycle of the workers' movement and new social movements. This
transitional situation is characterized by:
* US imperialism's reinforced will to
hegemony, manifest in a series of wars and interventions aimed at controlling
the planet;
* the ongoing ruling-class offensive, now
running up against major economic and social obstacles;
* the enormous increase in the
bourgeoisie's economic and military strength, combined with a crisis of its
forms of political domination;
* a contradictory development of the
relationship of forces: challenges to past social gains as a result of deregulation,
and at the same time resistance and recomposition of the struggles and centres
of militancy of the world of labour;
* a social-liberal transformation of the
dominant sectors of the traditional workers' and social movement, whose
historic crisis is nevertheless opening up space for new experiments outside
the control of the social democratic and Stalinist apparatuses;
* a new radicalism in the demands
movements are raising and their forms of struggle, alongside difficulties in
the formation of anti-capitalist consciousness and the construction of a
political alternative.
3 The situation of the
world proletariat and the role of women
In the
former bureaucratically ruled states, the working masses' main concern is their
struggle for everyday, physical survival, while the workers' movement remains
embryonic and fragmentary. In the peripheral countries, relatively stable
productive nuclei with an over-exploited working class bereft of rights or
social legislation is surrounded by popular masses living in unprecedented,
extreme poverty as a result of the destruction of the social fabric. Young
women are preferred maquiladora workers, where they face a variety of
reproductive health and safety problems as well as ongoing sexual harassment.
Women in maquiladoras generally suffer twice the number of miscarriages and a
significantly higher proportion of babies who are underweight or suffering from
birth defects. With few salaried jobs available, working class women have had
to turn to the 'informal sector' of the economy, including involvement (mostly
involuntary) in the domestic and international sex trade. A disturbing aspect
of this youth employment, particularly in peripheral countries, is the
inclusion of children. More than 110 million girls between the ages of 4-14 are
part of the labour force. They are more vulnerable to all the problems women
face: rape, sexual harassment, unsafe and unsanitary living conditions,
domestic violence and the possibility of being sold into slavery or forced into
prostitution. Of the one million children recruited into prostitution each
year, the vast majority are girls.
In the
imperialist countries, notably in the EU, capitalism has succeeded for the
first time in a half-century in (re- )creating an almost universal job
insecurity, wage insecurity, insecurity in unemployment, health and disability
benefits, and insecure access to quality education or health care. Those
workers who have jobs are facing challenges to their social gains, including
their rights to work and as workers; a generalization of flexibility and job
insecurity; wage austerity; individualization of the labour process and
remuneration; and a decline in the number of union members. Millions of workers
in the imperialist countries have experienced these partial setbacks.
Women
make up 70% of the world's poor. In most of the industrialized countries,
women's participation in the labour force has surpassed - or shortly will
surpass - the fifty percent mark. While some women have broken into professional
and managerial sectors, the majority is ghettoized in low-wage sectors of the
economy. In the US, women without health care benefits, mass transportation
systems or access to affordable childcare, these women work often cobble
together two or three part-time jobs only to find they are still living below
the poverty level. The wage differential between women and men workers is
growing and the demand for equal pay has mostly been achieved only at the
minimum wage level. Women are the majority work force in many public service
jobs and make up the majority of all part-time or contractual workers. Most
women confront sexual harassment during their working lives, whether the man is
their boss, their co-worker or even their union representative. In today's labour
market women suffer disproportionate job loss as neo-liberal policies curtail
public services or privatize them. In addition, women are adversely affected by
the loss of public services as people who have greater need for them due to
their role and responsibility in the family.
More
globally, the contradictions of the current phase of the capitalist system are
expressed in partial struggles and movements for the defence of social gains,
in opposition to layoffs, and for higher wages, social benefits and pensions.
Finally -
a significant phenomenon - millions of young people have been entering the
production process. On the one hand, they have no memory of past struggles or
of the history of the workers' movement. But on the other hand, they "do
not bear the burden of past defeats on their shoulders", and they are
ready to fight with their own methods.
In this
context, the burden of Stalinism is being lifted and capitalism is being
discredited by its own social brutality, without the socialist project's
already having been relegitimized. At the same time thousands of activists and
cadres who have not experienced any historic defeat are still active in the
grassroots and trade-union movements, ready to relaunch or create the
conditions for a recomposition of the workers' and social movements on new
bases.
4 Youth
participation in global resistance
A new
wave of youth radicalization and politicization has taken off through the anti-
5 globalization movements. It constitutes a key element in the new political
and ideological situation and in the renewal of the workers' and revolutionary
movement.
The
spectacular mobilization in Seattle (November 1999) and unprecedented
confrontation with the G8 in Genoa were turning points in resistance to
neo-liberal globalization. This international breakthrough by the movement
against capitalist globalization was the result of a series of earlier
mobilizations, which were less visible in the climate of ideological regression
and activist resignation that reigned in the 1990s. They created a new
internationalism and new movements by confronting the summits of imperialism's
international institutions (World Bank, IMF, G7, EU...), in the streets, in
counter-summits and in the beginnings of international regroupments, of which
the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2002 has been the most
impressive so far.
This
movement is already influencing the cadres of the workers' and social movement
on the national level by offering the beginnings of an alternative analysis of
the world situation, alternative demands, and the perspective of a 'different'
society. It is, above all, the motor force behind the new youth radicalization
and politicization. In fact young people have never stopped being involved and
'thinking about politics' in the broadest sense, through antiracism/
anti-fascism, ecology, solidarity with the Third World, humanitarian activity
and the great ethical issues facing humanity. But they were very much marked by
a general rejection of politics, no longer identified with the working class
and workers' movement, and turned their backs on Marxism and revolutionary
organizations.
Outside
the countries of the capitalist centre, youth are organizing inside peasant,
indigenous, student, union and unemployed workers' movements, in response to
concrete neo-liberal measures. There is an important involvement, but it has
been insufficient to displace the old leaderships.
Other
young people are creating embryonic and usually local forms of participation
which are not always part of the movement against capitalist globalization,
and, through economic projects on a basis of solidarity, creating NGO projects
linked to more general social conflicts.
The young
people radicalizing now are not only expressing their own needs and aspirations
in an unjust society, but also showing a commitment to changing society. This
means a leap forward on the levels of (anti-capitalist) consciousness, (more
radical) forms of struggle, (more global) demands and (more militant) forms of
involvement. It is the beginning of a new phase.
5 The neo-liberal
shift of social-democracy and populism
The new
political phase constitutes a test for social democracy's projects and
programmes. It can give some leeway to social democratic governing teams, in
their respective interactions with the parties of the traditional right, but it
confirms the depth of the Socialist Parties' turn towards social liberalism.
Despite the possibilities open to them, the SPs have renounced any, Keynesian
or neo-Keynesian policy. Fearful of any serious clash with the bosses and
dominant classes and in the context of a far-reaching political and ideological
shift, the social democratic leaderships have embraced neo-liberal policies,
while adding some minor social measures. Above and beyond this, a far-reaching
political and ideological revision is under way in the social democratic
parties.
In
Europe, this has been particularly highlighted by their participation in
government, simultaneously and for several years, in 13 out of the 15 EU
countries. With very little variation they have confined themselves to the
framework of the dominant classes' strategic choices, as their socioeconomic
outlooks and unconditional participation in the three wars that imperialism unleashed
in the past ten years (Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan) have confirmed.
Apart
from their evident specificities, comparable assessments can be made of the
populist parties and the parties of the left or centre-left
(populist-anti-imperialist) in Latin America. Moreover, big parties of
Stalinist origin, whose strategic approach and practice in mass movements is
most often indistinguishable from the social democrats', have also entered an
existential crisis.
Twenty
years of policies of social assault have profoundly weakened the links between
these organizations and their social bases. The result is an unprecedented,
drastic decline in their prestige, capacity for social control and
organizational strength among the proletariat and progressive youth. Thus a
political, social and electoral space has opened in which
radical/anti-capitalist currents, movements and parties can come forward, win a
serious hearing from society and become a major factor in the workers' and
social movement.
6 Reconstruction of
the mass movement and the anti-capitalist left
Against
this backdrop, a new political and ideological situation arose in the late
1990s. This turning point did not come out of thin air. It was the result of an
accumulation of discontents, rising consciousness, a new spirit of solidarity,
and major struggles, albeit ones that all ended in impasses, setbacks or
defeats: in the US, the long pilots' and UPS strikes; in Europe, national or
sectoral general strikes in Britain (the miners, 1984-85), Denmark (1986
general strike), Belgium (in 1986, then in public services in 1987, a general
strike in 1993, a protracted teachers' strike spread over two years), Spanish
state (general strikes in the early 1990s) and Italy (1992 and 1994). In Latin
America, Ecuador, Brazil and Bolivia, and in Asia, South Korea and Indonesia,
experienced mass movements and major workers' struggles. The Bread and Roses
Women's March in June 1995 in Québec showed that the women's movement was
capable again of mobilization around feminist demands. This march was to have a
direct impact on radicalising a sector of the NGO-ized women's movement that
had been channelled towards the structures of the UN.
For
Europe, the mass mobilisation of women in defence of abortion rights combined
with the strike movement against the Juppé government in France (winter 1995)
was the first sign of this change. With the European March of the unemployed,
casualized and excluded to Amsterdam (June 1997), there began to be a change in
the state of mind of activist layers in France and the rest of Europe. Other
direct initiatives, already underway, such as the campaign for cancelling the
third world debt, certain very radical peasant movements (Brazil, India...)
added to this. The confrontation in Seattle in November 1999, opened the road
to the 'movement against globalization' which came together in Porto Alegre in
the first World Social Forum (January 2001), moved by a clearly expressed
radical, internationalist and potentially anti-capitalist spirit, carried by a
new generation. This spirit of radical internationalism on a feminist basis was
also by the 2000 World March for Women, the preparation of which predated
Seattle, based on a critique of the 1995 UN Women's Meeting in Beijing. The
'spirit of Seattle' was followed in North America by anti-FTAA mobilisation in
Québec, April 2001.
In Genoa
(July 2001), for the first time, this movement was able to combine with radical
sectors of the mass trade-union movement in a direct confrontation with the
government and its neo-liberal policies. Then it once again was broadened and
strengthened. After the 11th September it was able, in specific forms depending
on the country, to transform itself rapidly into an anti-war movement with
hundreds of thousands of demonstrators throughout the world against the
imperialist war in Afghanistan. It was also one of the sources of political and
organizational support for the Palestinian people, crushed by the Israeli
state.
A new
socio-political conjuncture is developing in certain countries, like Italy and
Spain, where the 'movement of movements' directly stimulated struggles in the
labour movement. It created a new political framework, a radical will, a new
perspective and the embryo of an alternative to the defensive social struggles
which had never stopped all through the previous period. For the moment it is
the main actor in the opposition to capitalism. But the 'traditional'
trade-union movement - organizationally weakened and politically isolated -
continues to organize millions of working men and women and hundreds and
thousands of activists. The general strikes and massive citizens mobilizations
in Italy, Spain and Greece, the restarting of sectoral strikes in Germany, also
bring onto the political scene men and women workers in unity with other social
layers and social movements.
In
Argentina, the revolutionary process emerged directly from the crisis in which
entire sections of the economy collapsed, following a long-term application of
neo-liberal policy prescriptions. In this case the battle for survival drove
the working class and poor (and middle classes) to struggle and organize
themselves. This mobilization against brutal neo-liberal policies clashes with
capitalist globalization through the foreign trans-national corporations, the
IMF and the constant intervention by US imperialism. The Argentinazo is the
spark point in Latin America where the rise of mass movement is affecting
several countries (Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru...).
The
peasant movement is one of most important actors in this anti-capitalist
mobilization. The Brazilian MST, the CONAIE (National Indigenous Confederation
of Ecuador), the French Peasant Confederation, and other movements organized in
the international network Via Campesina play a key role in the fight against
the WTO and neo-liberal commercial order, not to mention the Chiapas peasant
and indigenous movement under the leadership of the EZLN, which was in the
vanguard of the anti-neo-liberal struggle, organizing the 1996 Intergalactic
Conference against Neo-Liberalism and for Humanity.
On the
African continent, mobilization against neo-liberalism and its effects has
often taken the form of broad gatherings, such as the Cancel the Debt summit in
Dakar in December 2000, the counter-summit against the G-8 and NEPAD in Siby in
2002, and the large-scale social mobilizations surrounding the World Summit for
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002.
The
relaunch and rebuilding of the international workers' and social movement is
part of the 'class struggle', of the development of workers' struggles, but
also of the 'anti-globalization movement', of direct initiatives by the
citizens as well as those of the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and
revolutionary organizations among them. Women have played a leading role in
fighting for social justice in a period of ever greater inequality and
brutalization. Women have organized themselves in a variety of community and
women's organizations to oppose war, repression and a world where capitalist
relations are the only possibilities. Women have played a central role in the
fight against religious fundamentalism. For example, women in India mobilized
against the attacks on Muslim women perpetrated by the BJP government in
Gujarat, women in Afghanistan opposed the Taliban and woman in France, the
United States, the Canadian state and Britain mobilised against Christian
fundamentalists in defence of women's clinics against 'anti-abortion
commandos'. Without the majority social force composed of the wage-earning
class, without its mass struggles for its own demands and aspirations, without
its growing self-organization, capitalist globalization, neoliberal policies
and war will not be stopped.
In
rebuilding the mass movements and the left, attention must be paid to the
decisive presence of peasants and indigenous peoples in Latin American
countries such as Paraguay, where we see a rise of mobilization and struggle
for land; Brazil, where the MST is demanding radical agrarian reform; Bolivia, with
the peasant coca producers' struggle and the electoral breakthrough of the MAS
(Movement for Socialism); in Ecuador where the CONAIE (National Indigenous
Confederation of Ecuador) through its political expression, the Pachakutik
Movement - New Country, is part of the current government and is a fighting
front against neo-liberalism.
This
spectacular renewal of social and political confrontation opens new
perspectives for an anti-capitalist left both on the social and party-political
front.
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THE WAR
AND THE NEW IMPERIALIST COUNTEROFFENSIVE
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1 The Al Qaida attack
and the 'war against terrorism'
1 In the wake of the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001, US
imperialism launched a vast offensive that will have a great impact on the
world situation in the coming years. Beyond the first apocalyptic shock, its
true meaning will become clear only as 'the long war against international
terrorism' runs up against the many obstacles, contradictions and forms of
resistance and opposition that it will find blocking its way.
2 The US aggression, which was at the start an act of military
vengeance against a whole people on the pretext of punishing their rulers, is
situated in the framework of a series of imperialist wars since 1991 (against
the Iraqi and Serb peoples), confirm its hegemonic and interventionist attitude
in the post-Cold War period. In this case it aimed to eliminate the
fundamentalist current of the Bin Laden type, even though this current supports
capitalism being linked to bourgeois factions and to sectors of several
reactionary state apparatuses, like the Saudi monarchy and the Pakistani and
Sudanese dictatorships. The discourse of this political current is fanatically
religious, anti- Western rather than anti-imperialist, and anti-Semitic rather
than anti-Zionist. Fundamentally opposed to 7 basic democratic rights and
women's equality, they want to impose ultra-reactionary theocratic regimes. Oil
has always been an essential motivation of imperialist policy in this part of
the world.
2 US war goals
September
11th not only rescued an isolated and shaky presidency dubiously elected into
office but it legitimised a US world-wide offensive in a way only dreamed of by
US strategic planners up to that point. It transformed an administration of the
Republican right, based on the big oil companies, from a weak administration
with big ideas to an administration able to use US military power as they
wished and when they wished in order to pursue US strategic interests. The war
against terrorism was launched. The world was told: "You are either with
us or you are with the terrorists", that the danger was now from 'rogue
states', and the US would decide who they were and what to do about them.
Afghanistan was invaded with more people being killed than died on September
11th.
The
lesson Bush's 'oil junta'‚ as they have been called, took from their rapid
military success over the Taliban was that bombing works and that they should
do more of it. We then had an escalation of US war aims with Bush's 'axis of
evil' declaration in his State of the Union speech, followed by his speech at
the UN, which spelled out US strategic goals in unambiguous terms and stressed
that not only would the policy of 'regime change' be extended, but the US
intended to ensure that the current massive US military superiority would not
be challenged or redressed. The US would in the future remove any regime which
stood in the way of its interests.
Iraq was
next on the list for invasion. No link with Al-Qaida has been established
because probably none exists. The removal of Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction, which probably do not exist either, was stated as the objective.
The negative cannot be proven, and the demand is maintained as the reason for
the war. The world was being told: if you did not believe after Afghanistan
that we were going to change the world in our interests, you will believe us
after the defeat of Iraq. US imperialism intends to use its unchangeable
military power to reshape and redefine the world in its own strategic and
economic interests.
The
advantage of invading Iraq is not only the political fall-out but also its massive
oil reserves. The war is not ultimately about oil, but Iraq has the second
largest reserves in the world and they are relatively untapped. Oil is
therefore a massive issue in Iraq in a way that it was not in Afghanistan. US
oil reserves are predicted to run dry in less than 50 years and control of the
key oil reserves of the world along with huge military superiority are the key
elements in the kind of world domination which US imperialism has in mind.
There are
also the US regional aims in the Middle East. A successful occupation and
stabilisation of Iraq would dramatically reshape the region. Saudi Arabia would
be under more direct US pressure, Iran would be in US sights, and the
Palestinians further isolated. The power of Israel would be massively strengthened
and the political balance of the region changed.
The war
on terrorism is a long terms strategy for US imperialism as it seeks to play
its advantage to the full. The US is setting out to push back third world
liberation movements, subordinate European capitalism to its interests,
redefine 'global justice', and use its military power to ensure dominance for
US multi-national corporations. National sovereignty is now only granted by US
approval. Putin is given a free and even more brutal hand in Chechnya.
Meanwhile people are detained indefinitely without trial in the US and other
'democracies' and the CIA are authorised to carry out political assassinations
in the way that Sharon does in Palestine.
In the
short term the victims are the poor and the oppressed in countries where the US
has invaded or is launching military interventions. This has included Colombia
and the Philippines where the US is intervening against left wing guerrilla
movements. In Palestine the Sharon government has been given a free hand to
launch a murderous assault on the Palestinian population.
But this
is just the tip of the iceberg. A US strategic military build up is
concentrated in central and southeast Asia. The Afghan war enabled the US to
build up permanent basis in countries of the ex-Soviet Union which would have
seemed inconceivable before September 11th. Bases have been established in
Tajikistan and Kyryzstan and even in Georgia.
US
positions are being strengthened in South Korea and in the Taiwan Strait. The
implication of this is clear. The oil of the Caspian comes increasingly under
US influence - and China is being militarily surrounded. This does not mean
that China is on the list for attack, but it does mean that the US is looking
towards geopolitical control of the region with an eye on its vast markets.
This is of course a high-risk strategy that has many pitfalls. The greater the
repression, the greater the denial of justice, the greater with be the backlash
- or 'blowback' as it is known by Bush and Co. The war against terrorism has
inevitably produced more terrorism, with people increasingly prepared to die in
order to strike back in the way they see fit. This does not mean that we
support such actions, but that we understand what generates them.
At the
same time the preparation for the invasion of Iraq, which is now to be carried
out with the authority of the UN, has produced an unprecedented anti-war
movement - even before the war has started.
Britain
has seen a demonstration of 400,000 and the demonstration in Florence at the
European Social Forum was towards a million people. Even in the USA the size of
the antiwar movement is growing. The FI must redouble its efforts to build this
anti-war movement to the maximum and ensure that if the invasion of Iraq cannot
be stopped that it is opposed all around the world on the streets and that the
aggressors are forced to pay the highest political price for their actions.
3 New internal
contradictions of US imperialism
In the
short term, there has been a strong tendency to 'rally round the flag' and
President Bush. Bush, initially contending with an illegitimate election at
home and lack of respect abroad, has managed to turn the situation around
spectacularly, taken an energetic leadership role and launched a powerful
counter-offensive at home and abroad. He has reaffirmed the United States'
unparalleled military supremacy, of which the enormous increase in the military
budget is the instrument and symbol.
3.2 As a result the social movement against globalization ('global
justice movement') in the US had to retreat quickly. It was weakened by the
AFL-CIO's withdrawal and the cancellation of the Washington demonstration
planned for late September 2001 as the biggest and most militant action since
Seattle. But the movement has not gone away. Thanks to its activists'
determination, it was able to remobilize quickly and form an antiwar movement,
which though still in a small minority is present around the country.
But the
alliance between the anti-capitalist globalization movement and the trade-union
movement -which went over to the opposition because of ''fast track''' (the
right of the president to negotiate freely the liberalisations linked to the
FTAA) and attacks against the public sector- was broken in the chauvinist
climate after 11th September. Its renewal around an axis combining these social
questions with general political consideration ('Jobs with Justice') will
depend on a decline of patriotic sentiment.
The
'national union' will be put to the test by the Bush Administration's brutally
pro-bosses economic policies, the ongoing recession and massive layoffs, and
the spectacular bankruptcies of economic giants, their antisocial consequences
- for employment and pension funds - the bosses' financial banditry and their
corrupting links with the political establishment. This 'economic picture' will
doubtless be sowing doubts in public opinion about the system's strength and
the ruling class's moral probity.
4 The international
effects of the US offensive
On the
international level, US imperialism's political and military offensive is
making itself felt immediately, strengthening all the reactionary trends
already underway.
4.1 Constant media attention has drastically exacerbated and
amplified the volatile and insecure global climate. It fosters reinforcement
and increased interventionism on the part of repressive and coercive state
apparatuses (army, police, schools, etc.). This in turn encourages the growth
of reactionary, chauvinist currents in the population. This development is
affecting the whole planet, country by country. In particular, ruling class
projects that had been blocked have been resurrected and are being successfully
imposed (such as US military intervention in Latin America, Plan Colombia, the
breakthrough this time around 'anti-terrorist' police and legal norms within
the European Union, etc.).
4.2 The use of war as a political instrument has become commonplace
and has now been reintegrated into state strategy. The right of ''humanitarian
intervention''' in other countries' affairs, reserved for imperialist countries
alone, has now been legitimized as an element of 'good governance'. This right
has been expanded in the name of the 'struggle against terrorism', subject to
the discretion of imperialism (primarily US imperialism), to other countries as
well (Russia in the Caucasus; Israel in Palestine; and in Sub-Saharan Africa,
Uganda, Rwanda and Angola in the wars in Congo). The result is a spread of
areas of tension and conflict and an increase in chaos, poverty and barbarism.
February 15: anti-war torchlight demonstration at the
Brandenburg Gate
4.3 Military spending, which stabilized in the years at the end of the
'Cold War', took off again in 1999. The massive remilitarization of the US
contained in the 2002 budget announces a level of militarization that no other
country is capable of imitating or reproducing. The political logic of this new
arms race is different from the logic of the 'cold war'. It is no longer a
question of preparing a nuclear war with the USSR in the name of a 'balance of
terror', but a means of setting off wars that effectively impose unchallenged
US political supremacy (with all the corresponding advantages in the economic
and monetary spheres). The reformulation of world political strategy which is
underway demands a redefinition of military priorities in relation to the
financial means available: to reign in space, which helps ensure military
mastery of the Earth; 'total' defence of the 'homeland' (its national
territory); the capacity to wage several major wars simultaneously
(particularly in East Asia), launch and dominate 'asymmetrical' wars (of the
Afghanistan type) and carry out one-off military interventions (in Latin
America or the Balkans). This stepped up level of remilitarization will put the
world's other countries, particularly the NATO countries, under considerable
pressure. This US 'military Keynesianism', involving a remarkable scale of
state intervention and inflation of public debt, is maintaining domestic demand
and strategic sectors of the US economy, which are also producing massively for
export.
4.4 The international struggle 'against terrorism' 9 is a threat to
democratic freedoms, to the activity of progressive organizations, and to civil
society in general. In different local situations it serves to repress or
physically eliminate any dissent or opposition, criminalize mass movements or
diminish their political impact. Bourgeois democracy - to the extent and in the
countries where it existed - now includes the legal possibility of switching
over to 'martial law' in appropriate circumstances. The strategic aim is clear,
since it had been visible even before September 11th: to stifle the mass
'anti-globalization' movement, which, for the first time since the years after
1968, is contesting the rule of capitalism and imperialism on a mass scale and
heralding a rebirth of the organized movement of exploited and oppressed
workers on an international scale.
4.5 The specific effect on women during wartime Not only the war
against terrorism but also the increasing number of wars through the last three
decades all around the world, fought to protect the interest of the
multinationals and the march of capitalist globalization in each part of the
world, have had and will continue to have specific negative effects on women of
all ages as rape is used as a conscious tactic of war as part of the strategy
to control communities. Not only do women subjected to these violent rapes
suffer a lifetime from the traumatic event, but may bear the children that are
the result perpetuating the trauma through generations.
Though
rape is now recognised as an official war crime at the international criminal
court, the rapists, the soldiers and thereby the country, are hardly ever
convicted. In addition to this, war forces women to get any kind of work, often
including prostitution, to ensure the survival of the remaining family, because
of the loss or disappearance of the male.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
GLOBALIZATION:
A NEW STAGE OF INTERNATIONAL CAPITALISM UNDER US HEGEMONY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 The
commodification of the world, especially women and children
Globalization
determines the current configuration of capitalism on a planetary scale. It is
reflected in a radical extension of the world market, an untrammelled free
circulation of capital and goods, as well as an impressive process of
concentration of capital. It tends to unite the world in one single
unrestricted market.
2 Capitalist logic and
class struggle
While the
internationalization of capital is an inherent tendency of capitalism, this new
stage of internationalization of capital is closely linked to the economic and
social conjuncture of the 1970s and 1980s. Feeble growth and recession provoked
the neo-liberal response that was carried out under Reagan and Thatcher from
the end of the 1970s and rapidly extended to all the industrialized countries.
This large-scale offensive against the working class and the social gains it
has won over the previous 50 or even 100 years led to a drastic increase in
exploitation of the working classes in the imperialist metropolitan centres and
an increase in the mass and rate of profit. In the countries of the periphery
('the South'), the imperialist law has been to strip them of any right to
impose any obligation whatsoever on movements of commodities as well as
capital. The countries of the periphery have been pitted against one another in
order to attract capital by means of low wage levels and an almost complete
disappearance of taxation, social protection or environmental legislation.
This new
stage of capitalist globalization is not the result of some pure economic or
technological determinism. It is the result of a determined class struggle
carried on by the ruling classes and their states against the world
proletariat.
3 The reign of the
trans-national corporations, imperialism's central core
The
trans-national corporations are waging an open war against any attempt to
control their activities. This new structuring of the world economy is allowing
them to drain off super-profits, guarantee markets for their products, put
downwards pressure on raw materials prices, and preserve their technological
monopoly. It is the result of an unprecedented process of concentration of
capital through mergers and acquisitions that has not spared any sector or any
part of the world. It is increasing the power of the major Northern
conglomerates.
Their new
status gives them more power in relation to the governments and countries where
they are active. National governments have relinquished state control over
financial operations, currency markets and capital flows. At the same time the
world's major trusts continue to rely on the power of their home states in
order to further their interests, through international negotiations, diplomacy
and sometimes military presence. With the world market as their arena, these great
industrial or financial oligopolies are enjoying an unprecedented freedom of
action and decision-making.
4 The international
inter-state institutions as support structures
Trade is
also being globalized. The GATT, originally an informal forum aimed at a
gradual removal of barriers to free trade, was transformed into the World Trade
Organization (WTO) on 1 January 1995. In the context of rapid growth of
international trade, this unelected and unaccountable body is now governing
world trade on the basis of strictly neo-liberal criteria, which treat rich
countries and poor as equals. The failure of the Seattle WTO summit in November
1999 is only temporary. A new cycle of talks has already been launched, with
the goal of pulling activities like health care and education into the
competitive sector and totally liberalizing private investment. Though
temporarily frustrated, these efforts will nonetheless soon resume as part of a
new offensive. Despite all the speeches about free trade, Third World countries
continue to encounter barriers to their products' entry into the richest
countries' markets, while the richest countries themselves are managing to
clear away the obstacles to invasion of the Third World by their industrial and
agricultural products, thanks to pressure from the debt and IMF. The result is
that small producers in developing countries are being wiped out by Northern
agribusiness and that developing countries' self-sufficiency in food is being
destroyed.
5 The impact of the
financialization of capitalism
The
current power of the 'financial markets' is the result of the generalized
deregulatory measures taken during the 1980s in conjunction with the very high
interest rates at that time. Financial institutions, operating alongside
traditional banks, have multiplied and diversified; some of them, such as US
and British pension funds, have considerable financial power, which has been
one of the motors of investment policies. Their accumulated striking force
enables them to condition companies' decisions as well as governments' economic
policies, inasmuch as both countries (when they accumulate public debt) and
companies raise funds on the financial markets. This structuring of the markets
has thus increased the autonomy of the financial sphere. This does not make it
less interdependent on other parts of the economy, however. First, it is only
recycling part of the surplus value that is extracted in the productive sphere,
a share which has increased enormously because of the increasingly unequal division
of income between the classes; second, because its freedom to manoeuvre is the
result of a political will and a deliberate choice.
6 A
strongly hierarchical system
Globalization
implies a big leap forward in internationalization of production under the
command of the major multinationals, which leads to an increase in
specialization and hierarchical organization. It reinforces the centre's hold
on the periphery's resources. This restructuring also serves the centre,
particularly the US, as a cushion for downward cycles and as a prolonger of
phases of prosperity. It strategically facilitates the global reproduction of
Capital.
Establishing
the difference between the countries of the imperialist centre as a bloc and
the dominated, underdeveloped periphery is the starting point for determining
each region's and country's insertion into the world market, while taking into
account the varied situations that exist among different parts of the
periphery. Latin America is on a higher level than Africa, which has been
reduced to a territory to be pillaged, but lower than East Asia. A comparable
hierarchy is reproduced on each continent, country by country (for example
through processes of partial industrialization). This hierarchy also exists
within each country and each working class as different layers have access to
different levels of job security, wages, public services (such as health and
education), thus creating a hierarchy between women and men, young and old,
immigrants and native-born workers. These factors have a profound effect on the
structure of societies, particularly the links between their dominant classes
and imperialism and thus the forms taken by the class struggle.
The
systemic oppression of women is reflected in daily life, in a society that
nurtures the degradation and violence and state bureaucracies, reinforces
ideologically and practically the power of men over women. Patriarchal
ideology, a set of ideas defining women's roles as different from - and
subordinate to - those of men, permeates all institutions and gives rise to
resistance by women's movements globally against women along with rigid gender
roles. As a result, women are socially devalued, economically marginalized and
find their very bodies commodified. The patriarchal family remains the central
economic living unit within society today and with other patriarchal
institutions, including religious hierarchies
7 The violent face of
neo-liberalism
As a
result of the neo-liberal offensive society all over the world has become more
violent and in particular we have seen an increase in the different forms of
violence against women. Never before has the use of domestic violence,
including honour crimes, incestuous rape, female infanticide, marital rapes,
and beatings reached such high level as today. For many women, their most
intimate emotional relations within the family are also the source of their
greatest danger-more women are killed by their current or former partners than
die from any other single cause. The growing ''Take Back the Night''' vigils
and demonstrations are yearly actions to dramatize the situation of violence
against women.
A
cultural war is being waged on women: Women are being blamed by those who seek
to impose the status quo as well as those fundamentalists who imagine a better
world when rigid roles were enforced. Reacting to the tensions of the
neo-liberal world, these forces focus on controlling women through dictating
state policy particularly around women's reproductive issues.
In
general society all over the world has become more violent because
neo-liberalism increases exploitation through speedups, longer working day etc.
Even longstanding labour policies are being revised to provide more flexibility
for the corporations (hiring part-time workers, fewer rights for the laid off
worker). Internal competition among workers creates physical and psychological
violence in the labour market; without the existence of worker solidarity the
power of the bosses is unchallenged. Sweatshops and domestic work stand as
examples where the overwhelmingly female work force is subjected to low wages,
demeaning, violent and unfair working conditions, including sexual harassment
and physical punishment. The mantra of ''free trade''' hides the violent
mechanisms of that mark the capitalist system.
8 US hegemony: the
dollar and war
The
installation of the imperialist ''new world order''', in particular its global
hierarchization, require two wars (Iraq, Balkans) and two military
interventions (Panama, Haiti). The initiative for these wars was taken by US
imperialism, relying not only its economic power, but also its military
supremacy. As the main artisan of victory in the ''Cold War''', the US managed
to unleash a war against Iraq. Having overcome the open or hidden opposition of
the USSR and its traditional allies, the EU countries (except Britain) and the
great majority of Third World countries, the US emerged as the planet's only
military and political superpower. The EU, incapable of containing the
increasing explosive contradictions in the Balkans, had to appeal to the US.
The US used this opportunity to demonstrate its superior military technology
and to affirm its European power, with designs on Russia. Together with its
'new economy' and the strength of the dollar, 11 military and cultural factors
(including its media, music and communications) have made the US the keystone
of globalized capitalism.
9 Industrialisation
of the sex trade and human merchandise
Capitalist
globalisation is at the origin of the global development of the sex trade
industry. This rapidly growing sector of the world economy has resulted in very
significant population movements (migratory flows have become more and more
female) and generated prodigious profits and income. It is now third in
magnitude after arms and drug trafficking, and a microcosm of fundamental and
new characteristics of this new stage of the capitalist economy.
The
dynamics and pressure are such that, since 1995, international organisations
have adopted positions that, after analysis and despite a position of speaking
out against the worst effects of this globalisation of the sex market, tend
towards liberalisation of prostitution and sex markets.(1)
This
industrialisation, legal and illegal alike, bringing in several thousand
billions of dollars, has created a sexual commodity market, in which millions
of human beings, especially women and children, have become goods of a sexual
nature. This market was fostered by the massive deployment of prostitution, the
unprecedented development of the tourist industry, the rise and normalisation
of the pornographic industry, the internationalisation of arranged marriages
and the needs of capitalist accumulation.
Prostitution
and related sex trade industries (bars, clubs, brothels, massage parlours,
pornographic production companies, etc.) rely on a massive underground economy
controlled by procurers with ties to organised crime. The tourist industry is
very dependent on the sex trade industry as are governments - (60% of the Thai
government budget in 1995).
Prostitution
has become a development strategy for certain countries. Faced with the
obligation to reimburse the debt, many governments in Asia, Latin America and
Africa have been encouraged by international organisations such as the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to develop their tourist
and entertainment industries, leading to the take-off of the sex-trade
industry.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE FALL
OF THE STALINIST BUREAUCRACY, RESTORATION OF CAPITALISM AND INTEGRATION INTO
THE WORLD ECONOMY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Crisis and
capitalist restoration in the USSR and Eastern Europe
A The late 1980s were a historic turning point towards capitalist
restoration in the USSR and Eastern Europe, which is the result of internal
causes and international factors marked by the neo-liberal, imperialist
offensive of the 1980s.
1 This historic turning point encompasses the following factors:
* The failure of the various attempts at
post-Stalin reforms, which prolonged single-party rule and non-capitalist
relations of production for several decades without managing to carry out a
transition to an intensive mode of growth. The contradictions grew between
workers' values and aspirations linked to collective property of the means of
production, on the one hand, and its management by the bureaucracy at their
expense, on the other. The absence of workers' democracy throughout the society
as a whole emptied any self-management rights that might have been granted to
factory collectives by a party-state seeking to preserve its privileges and
power of any substance or coherence.
* The aggravation of these contradictions
in the international capitalist context of the years 1970-89 under the pressure
of several Eastern European countries' foreign debt in hard currency and of the
arms race.
* Popular rejection of bureaucratic
dictatorships, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of
single-party rule, without workers' resistances and social aspirations having
any way of leading to a coherent socialist alternative.
* A swing by significant sectors of the
bureaucracy over towards capitalism in the 1980s in order to break
working-class resistance while consolidating their privileges and power by
translating them into property.
* A generalization of market relations
and private property in the means of production; re-emergence of mass
unemployment; abandonment of the old ideology that had legitimized socialist
aspirations in favour of the neo-liberal line; and a challenge to social gains
that amounted to a sharp defeat for workers both in these countries and around
the world, which made possible an extension and intensification of the
imperialist offensive started at the end of the 1970s.
* At the same time, ten years of
capitalist restoration have produced deep disillusionment with the promises of
efficiency that accompanied neo-liberal programmes. But the combination of
large-scale social deterioration with newly won trade union and political
freedoms has deepened the generation gap and the confusion in people's minds.
The forms of solidarity that could have been associated with the crisis of the
Stalinist mode of domination have lost ground to reactionary or even
neo-Stalinist ideologies.
The
recomposition of an anti-capitalist and democratic trade union and political
movement can only progress with difficulty in a context that is much more
problematic than that in Western Europe. It will be very much dependent on the
emergence of a credible alternative to (and inside) the European Union, and a
growth of new internationalism of resistance to capitalist globalization.
2 Whatever the variants of the reforms introduced in the USSR and
Eastern Europe from the 1950s to the fall of the Berlin Wall, they all
maintained a single-party dictatorship and bureaucratic relations of
production, which were protected as a whole from the logic of capitalist profit
and from market discipline.
After
several decades of catching up with the living standards of developed
capitalist countries, thanks to a very extensive growth, the gaps began to grow
again in the 1970s. The social gains, which in any event were combined with bureaucratic
waste and repression, crumbled, while the new generations' aspirations and
needs as well as upward social mobility were blocked by bureaucratic
conservatism.
a But the imperialist offensive of the 1980s made the impasses of
the bureaucratic dictatorship and the gaps in development between Eastern and
Western Europe, further deepened by the technological revolution, even worse:
* The pressures of the last phase of the
Cold War and of the arms race at the beginning of the Reagan era weighed all
the more on the USSR because its growth rates were stagnant. Priority was given
to the arms industry at the expense of industrial investment and modernization
of infrastructure and consumption.
* The growing debt of several Eastern
European countries in hard currency during the 1970s put them under pressure
from the IMF's structural adjustment programmes. This led to different
reactions from the different regimes in power, ranging from the drastic,
explosive austerity imposed by Romanian dictator Ceaucescu, to the rise of
national and social conflicts in the paralysed Yugoslav federation, to
Hungarian Communist leaders' decision to sell their best enterprises to foreign
capital. The arrival in power of right-wing forces in the first multiparty
elections drastically increased the teams in power's acceptance of the
privatization programmes laid down by the IMF. The cancellation of part of the
Polish debt and the resources devoted to corrupting Solidarnosc's spokespersons
accompanied the shock therapy imposed on Poland.
* The construction of Maastricht Europe
reinforced the IMF's criteria as accelerators of capitalist restoration in
Eastern Europe.
b While capitalist restoration relied on powerful international
institutions and the pressures of the world market, it would not have been able
to move forward without internal levers, in a context of very great confusion
in workers' minds and weakness of their self-organization. Winning most of the
leaders of the communist parties to a project of capitalist restoration in the
1980s, after systematic repression of democratic socialist forces during the
course of earlier decades, made it possible for the break-up of the single
party to usher in the rise to power of restorationist forces irrespective of
their labels.
B Capitalist restoration was carried out after the explosion of the
former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, largely industrialized countries, in
an unprecedented historical context characterized, to begin with, by the
absence of all the elements necessary to the functioning of a capitalist market
and the lack of an ''organic''' base, even though the great bulk of the old
regime's bureaucrats aspire to transform themselves into capitalists or put
themselves at the service of foreign capital.
1 The new governments' submission to the programmes imposed by the
IMF or EU involved dismantling every form of self-management - and even of the
soviets however bureaucratised - for fear that the workers would take control
of them, transforming the means of production into commodities, along with
extending the functions of money and the generalization of privatization
programmes as ''proof''' of the break with the past and supposedly universally
effective criteria.
2 But in these countries, which had been through several decades of
industrialization without domination of monetary relations and under hybrid
property forms belonging 'to the whole people', privatizations ran up against
the question: who can buy the enterprises (legitimately and in practice)? The privatization
of large-scale enterprises, which sometimes structured whole regions and under
the old system provided social services and housing through distribution in
kind, is at the heart of the difficulties of capitalist restoration. The risks
of social explosion are compounded by the high cost of restructuring, given the
non-existence of adequate capital or of a national bourgeoisie capable of
buying these enterprises and imposing capitalist management on their workers.
3 Faced with this general difficulty, the Hungarian leadership
chose to sell their best enterprises directly to foreign capital. But except
for this case, most of the new regimes in the ex-USSR as in Eastern Europe
invented various forms of 'juridical privatization' in the first half of the
1990s, without any influx of capital, often largely to the benefit of the new
states, which became shareholders. The distribution of 'coupons' to the
population, which gave people the right to buy shares, or workers' access at
virtually no cost to a substantial part of the shares in their enterprises,
made it possible to speed up 'privatizations' in the eyes of Western creditors
and institutions while luring workers into 'people's shareholding'. Whatever
the variations in the new forms taken by property, the restructuring of big
enterprises was slowed down or 'avoided', more often taking the form of
asphyxia through a lack in funding and non-payment of employees than in a class
confrontation through redundancies. This has exerted a great influence on the difficulty
encountered by workers' collective resistance, while pushing them towards the
search for an individual survival solution (cultivation of small plots of land,
odd jobs…). The gradual concentration of legal property title and real powers
of management in the hands of the new powers of the bourgeois state, banks and
oligarchs - under very opaque forms - initially kept sales to foreign capital
limited.
4 Barter, which became more common in Russia in the 1990s at the
same time as the IMF was imposing privatizations and ''deflation''', was a
tenuous form of protection from the new market constraints combined with the
real extension of monetary relations, mafia-like financial operations, and the
Yeltsin regime's subordination to the IMF's and oligarchs' dictates.
The
absence of restructuring or financing of enterprises went alongside massive
flight of capital abroad and intense speculation by the new private banks in
government bonds, leading to the crisis of summer 1998.
5 In all the EU accession countries, pressures to open up the
economies and particularly banking to foreign capital intensified in the second
half of the 1990s. More than 70 per cent of the banks are foreign-controlled in
several Central European countries, including Poland, where unemployment is
over 17 per cent.
The race
to join the European Union, which is still the alibi for the unpopular policies
imposed by Central European leaders, has accelerated the break-off of the
richest regions, which have been casting off the ''budgetary burden''' of other
regions in their haste to push themselves into the EU.
The
accession countries have radically reoriented their trade towards the EU, and
are now subject to the fluctuations of the EU's growth rates and contending
with more or less structural trade deficits. By deepening poverty and
unemployment, the criteria imposed by the EU on the accession countries are in
fact making EU membership more and more costly - while the lid remains clamped
down tight on the European budget. The EU will no doubt cut the aid given to
Southern European countries rather than extend Common Agricultural Policy
subsidies to Eastern European farmers.
The EU's
failures in terms of the crisis in ex-Yugoslavia and the wars there have
encouraged NATO's redefinition and eastward expansion. NATO's eastwards
expansion enables the United States to have an influence on the future member
states of the EU and on those of its periphery, in particular in the Balkans,
offering the latter a substitute for EU membership.
6 Alternation in office without any real political alternative has
become the norm behind the new political pluralism. Abstention rates continue
to rise, it is hard to put together parliamentary majorities for governments,
and financial scandals are spreading to taint all the parties in power,
whatever their labels. The rapid and general return to office of ex-Communists
through the ballot box has shown people's deep disillusionment with neo-liberal
prescriptions and their hope for more social policies. But their hopes have
been quickly dashed by the ex-Communist parties' social-liberal transformation.
7 Putin's arrival in power in the wake of the summer 1998 financial
crisis opened a new phase, characterized by the installation of a nationalist
('patriotic') government and an authoritarian state on several levels:
restoration of Russian power (notably in Chechenya) and of a certain kind of
moral and economic order, and reassertion of control over the media and
regional authorities. The new Labour Code and the Putin's most trusted advisers
illustrate this regime's bourgeois socio-economic objectives. The devaluation
of the rouble that followed the summer 1998 crisis made possible an unstable
recovery of domestic production and a decline in barter, but the needs of
finance and industry remain under imperialist pressure.
The
Russian government is seeking to reclaim the attributes of a great power
through negotiations with NATO, whose eastward expansion has created tensions.
It hopes to encourage resistance to US omnipotence by relying on the EU. But
the Atlantic, neo-liberal framework in which the EU is being built holds these
impulses in check. Bringing Russia into the new 'anti-terrorist' coalition
behind the United States left the former a free hand to carry out its dirty war
in Chechyna. But the tensions between the United States and the EU like those
that have arisen on the Iraq question will once again enable Russia to attempt
to play power broker between the major powers.
2 The Chinese dynamic:
growing openings to capitalism behind the upholding of the single party
From the
great powers' standpoint, China continues to represent an uncertain factor as
much on the geopolitical level (given the issues of Taiwan, Tibet, Central
Asia, etc.) as on the socio-economic. The ruling groups in the United States,
the European Union and especially Japan are conscious that in any scenario
(except break-up, difficult to envisage despite the potential centrifugal
forces) China will try hard in the coming decades to play the role of a great
power and assert its hegemony in Asia. Moreover, it too seems to have drawn the
lessons of the Kosovo war by pushing onwards with a further modernization of
its military potential. Russia and all countries in Eastern Europe experienced
a fall in production in the early 1990s, with a GDP in 2000 that caught up with
the level reached ten years earlier in only 5 per cent of Central European
countries. Conversely, China has experienced a growth rate of almost 10 per
cent per annum over the past 20 years, including higher than 8 per cent growth
during the Asian crisis. The Chinese figures on the decrease in the absolute
number of poor during these past twenty years are what enable world statistics
to claim that global inequalities have been reduced - while these have been
increasing in the past 20 years, not counting the Chinese statistics.
At the
same time, income gaps have grown in China parallel to the challenges to the
social progress achieved in health and education and to employment protection.
The logic of capitalist privatisation is underway, and more and more enshrined
in law.
Whence
the rise of an outbreak of social protests against inequalities, often making
specific reference to the gap between the socialist ''line''' and the developing
capitalist reality.
It is,
paradoxically from the standpoint of neo-liberal rhetoric, the upholding of
state and strong party power, at once repressive and supporting growth, that
have proven most attractive to foreign capital. At the turn of the millennium,
the accumulated stock of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) stood at 300 billion
dollars in China compared to 12 for Russia. But the Chinese opening had been
controlled and massively ''Chinese''' up until then and financing of growth
relied only partially on foreign investment - which, with its considerable
commercial precedents, gave China a power to resist neo-liberal precepts. In
relation to the size of the country, the FDI figures become more significant.
In 2000, they stood at $160 per habitant in China, compared to $85 in Russia,
but 571 in Kazakhstan, approximately 1000 for Poland and about 2000 in Hungary
and the Czech Republic. In substance, Chinese growth relies on neo-mercantilism
based on interventionism and State protection more inspired by measures taken
in South Korea and Japan in their years of strong growth than by neo-liberal
precepts.
Up until
the end of the 1990s, China's opening to international trade took place on an
extremely protectionist basis (for example through the non-convertibility of
its currency and strict limits imposed on financing by non-residents), as is
borne out by the fact that it was largely spared by the 1997-1998 Asian crisis.
WTO
membership was accompanied by a radicalisation of the reforms aiming to convert
the major firms more and more into share-issuing corporations) and opening up
the financial system to foreign capital, alongside the CCP's membership
becoming open to business people. In parallel, former measures of social
protection continue to be dismantled.
The
ongoing process is hampered by growing social resistance towards the growth in
inequality and the development of contingent work.
These
forms of resistance, whose origin goes back to the Tien Anmen movement, which
could shake the unified façade of the regime and lead to a break in the
institutional framework of the party-state. The socialist rhetoric must
obviously be challenged, both in terms of measures of extension of capitalist
production relations; and facing any 'moderate' or conservative wings that
would fail to place the introduction of workers' self-organisation rights and
management rights on collective property at the heart of the necessary
anti-capitalist resistance.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE
CONTRADICTIONS DESTABILIZING THE NEW IMPERIALIST ORDER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 The rise of contradictions
among imperialist powers
1 The new structure of globalized capitalism contains the seeds of
a substantial worsening of inter-imperialist rivalries among the three regional
economic blocs, each structured around one of the three big economic powers.
The US, the only ''global''' power, ensures the stability and persistence of
the system of exploitation, while abusing its position of strength to impose
its will on its rivals. The political result of the new war could substantially
change the political and economic relationship of forces between the USA on one
side and the imperialist powers (EU and Japan) and great powers (Russia, China)
that are becoming integrated into the world market. The recession will sharpen
them.
2 In the last ten years Japan has been suffering from economic
stagnation, linked to its incapacity to overcome the effects of a speculative
bubble and a gigantic banking crisis. But this conjuncture is hiding for the
time being Japan's ongoing industrial and financial power. Japan remains the
epicentre of East Asia, one of the most dynamic zones of the world economy. 'Globalization'
means the country's opening up through a series of legal and institutional
deregulations and privatizations. Big foreign conglomerates are fighting a
battle to push their way in, and the US is pushing to eliminate the existing
protectionist structures. The US is throwing the full weight of its military
presence around in the region, justifying this as a means of containing the
rising (economic and military) power of China as it confronts Taiwan. In the
medium term the US is preparing to confront the formation of a new political
and economic power - China/Hong Kong/Taiwan - that would radically upset the
balance of power in Asia and the Pacific.
3 The European bourgeoisies have achieved an indisputable success
with the adoption of the single currency. At the current stage the members of
the Union are trying to take better advantage of the common economic space and
to become more competitive on the world market. A succession of major merger
and concentration operations has taken place among the most powerful
industrial, commercial, financial and banking groups. The Single Market is
moving forward in particular in the harmonization of financial markets. Since
the Kosovo war the EU has set itself the goal of forming an armed force
autonomous from the US. This is directly linked to the EU's eastwards
enlargement, which is running into many obstacles, as the accession countries
are obliged to introduce the required deregulation, privatizations and
structural changes. By transforming the EU into a fortress (by means of the
Schengen accords) the EU is trying to halt the flow of populations from south
of the Mediterranean, Black Africa, Eastern Europe and parts of Asia.
The
dominant classes' will to advance towards a 'European great power' implies a
reform of the EU institutions, which today are very hybrid, in order to arrive
at a genuine supranational political leadership. The EU has managed to acquire
the first core of a truly supranational state apparatus, surrounded by a series
of steadily more coherent interstate coordinating bodies. But its construction
is still transitional and fragile. It is cut across by major contradictions
among the (larger) member states. It represents a retreat from parliamentary
democracy. Its popular legitimacy remains very limited, thanks to its
virulently anti-social policies. At the same time its dynamic remains at work,
propelled by the general capitalist globalization and the needs of big European
Capital. It is obliged to confront the obstacles and move forward, because
retreating would lead to a serious crisis that would endanger everything that
has been gained (particularly the monetary union).
Rivalry
with the US is a major stimulus for the construction of a European state. US
capitalism has a powerful state apparatus at its disposal, present on every
continent. It constitutes an indispensable support structure for all the
imperialist bourgeoisies. But at the same time the US uses it to favour its own
multinationals in fierce battles on the level of economic competition and for
spheres of political influence.
European
big capital cannot pull back from its attempt to create its own European
imperialist state. This state's emergence inevitably implies a new balancing
act relative to the current US supremacy. This cannot happen without frictions
and conflicts.
2 The relations
between Russia and the imperialist countries
The
contradictory relationship between the US and Russia, a product of the ''Cold
War''', is now set in the framework of a global extension of capitalism, the
ex-USSR's transition to capitalism, and the Stalinist bureaucracy's recycling
as a bourgeois class. This process is anything but painless.
1 The break-up of the ex- Soviet Union has led to serious
instability and a series of wars.
In the Caucasus,
where conflicts around oil have been interwoven with Russian internal politics,
no country has emerged from economic crisis or political instability. The war
in Chechnya was started by Yeltsin to boost his flagging popularity and to get
his chosen successor elected in the forthcoming presidential elections. Putin
then pursued it more vigorously than Yeltsin had done - and it became the means
by which he built his power base and stabilised his rule.
The
invasion took place in the wake of the NATO war in the Balkans, and under
different political conditions than the previous (disastrous) invasion of
Chechnya by Russia in 1994. This war, carried out with the complicity of the
Western powers, notably the United States, in the name of the ''war on terrorism'''
is characterized by war crimes, massacre of civilian populations, rape, torture
and deportations.
The war
was also an attempt to rebuild the morale and offensive ability of the Russian
army. The generals had been opposed to the invasion of Chechnya in 1994 but in
1999 they were fully behind it. It was also useful in rebuilding great Russian
chauvinism which had taken a dive with the collapse of the USSR and again with
the 1994 defeat by Chechnya. And it gave a warning to the other Autonomous Republics
of the consequences if they looked for independence themselves.
It was
also in line with Russian strategic interests, in particular the control of
oil. Russia needed to maximise its influence in the Caspian region. There were
no plans for a new pipeline that would by-pass Chechnya altogether and provide
access to the Black Sea. For Russia to remain a major player in the region it
had to have stability and political control. Our task is to expose Russian
oppression of the Chechens and support unambiguously Chechnya's right to
self-determination.
Ukraine,
which has gone through an even more serious economic regression than Russia, is
far from having established a stable political-institutional framework, and is
still threatened by the fracture between its western regions, more orientated
towards Western and Central Europe, and the eastern regions under the influence
of their Russian neighbour. Ukraine's fate is one of the most important issues
at stake in Eastern Europe. The balance of this whole part of the world depends
to a large extent on this country's evolution: it could either be integrated
into the NATO powers' zone of influence or return to the bosom of Mother
Russia, repairing the links torn by the break-up of the USSR.
2 The Russian neo-bourgeoisie aims at reclaiming its world power
status by mobilizing its history, its national consciousness, its international
links with countries traditionally opposed to the US, its productive forces and
natural resources, its skilled labour force and above all its capacity for
military troublemaking. But its transition is very much 15 dependent on big
international capital and imperialism. Second, its insertion into the world
market is a conflictive process in which US-EU rivalry also plays a role. The EU,
with Germany in the lead, is trying to carry out a diplomatic and economic
rapprochement in the region while preserving peaceful relations (given the EU's
geographical proximity, its policy of eastwards enlargement and its own
military weakness), while the US is confronting Russia in the framework of its
own policy of global hegemony.
3 Latin America faced
with US imperialism
Latin
America is experiencing a very exceptional situation, especially in South
America. It combines the depths of the socioeconomic crisis and growing
political/institutional instability with the intensity of a broad and radical
social resistance. The process of liberal counter-reform has lost legitimacy,
especially following the eruption of a popular rebellion in Argentina, and the
crisis of bourgeois political leadership is deepening. A mood of civil
disobedience and insurrection has taken hold in many countries in the region.
The election of Lula in Brazil and Gutiérrez in Ecuador, as well as the strong
electoral showing by Evo Morales in Bolivia, are all signs of the backlash
against neo-liberal policies and the bourgeois parties' crisis of credibility
and attrition. The current period of the class struggle is clearly transitory
in nature, marked by an open-ended battle between revolutionary and
counterrevolutionary focuses fighting for a more favourable correlation of
forces.
It is too
soon to assess the impact throughout Latin America of the electoral victory of
Lula and the PT. Since both the party and its candidate have for years
represented the country's social movements, their victory is a source of
renewed hope and may help spark a cycle of social struggles in Brazil and
beyond. Weighing against such a scenario is the new Brazilian government's
self-declared ''moderation''', its broad alliances with sectors of the dominant
classes, decision to at least initially attempt seamless change while
sustaining many of the policies of the Cardozo administration, and appeal for
voters to ''be patient'''. Meanwhile, with public disappointment with the Lula
government growing as the administration consolidates its politics of
''moderation''', the end result could be a demobilization.
U.S.
imperialism is fine-tuning its strategy with two key objectives in mind: the
economic recolonization of Latin America along with the realization of a
hemisphere-wide free trade plan (FTAA, Plan Puebla-Panama, foreign debt,
complete subordination to the IMF and World Bank); and a military/repressive
response to any popular struggles and resistance (Plan Colombia as well as
military bases, DEA and CIA operations throughout the region). Washington's
counterinsurgency strategy for the Americas includes a number of multilateral
initiatives aimed at developing a Latin American intervention force that would act
as a sort of ''anti-terrorist''' armed wing for the OAS. The institutional
manifestations of this strategy have already begun to take form. The OAS has
been given new life under the paradigm rubric of ''democratic solidarity'''
that has been devised for the region (e.g. the Inter- American Democratic
Charter approved on September 11, 2001, in Lima) that focuses on ''the defence
of human rights''' and good ''regional governance'''. Meanwhile, repressive
institutions are being modernized, the terrorist impunity of the State is
guaranteed along with the need to ''cleanse''' society of ''disposable
elements''' (as in Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Chiapas, Argentina and
Brazil). This style of Inter- American governance is tailored to establish the
right to intervention, trampling on the concepts of non-intervention and
respect for national sovereignty that are still deeply engrained in many
countries whose entire history has been marked by struggles against imperialist
and other forms of foreign intervention.
The
socio-economic crisis of what is often termed the neo-liberal model as well as
the crisis of subordinated regional projects (Mercosur, Andean Community of
Nations, Central American Common Market) intensified following the financial
crises of 1997-1998, and Washington's push for the FTAA. This ''new colonial
pact''' implies a massive transfer of all manner of resources into the hands of
huge imperialists concerns (industrial-commercial- financial groups) and their
hand full of local partners. This project incorporates monstrous corruption and
the parasitic behaviour of a ruling class that prefers U.S. or Swiss bank
accounts and those of offshore fiscal havens to investing in their own country.
The transfer of wealth is such that it decimates entire social layers, leading
to an unprecedented concentration of wealth, social disaster,
economic/financial crises and increasingly protracted recessions. The resulting
shock implies industrial ruin in countries such as Argentina that had achieved
relative degrees of development. The region's potential has been dismantled as
capitalist globalization, along with the demands of imperialist countries and
their multinationals, oblige these ''underdeveloped''' countries to contract
their economies in the logic of ''structural adjustment''' and foreign debt
servicing. Virtually everything has been privatized or is still on the auction
block: everything from oil reserves, water and electric power utilities, land,
mines, ports and health services. Forty-six per cent of Latin Americans now
live in poverty, with more than 40 per cent experiencing unemployment or
underemployment.
The
bourgeois elites' crisis of legitimacy and governability has prompted the
imposition of social-control mechanisms and laws as well as a curtailment of
'civil society's' democratic rights. The supposedly democratic state is
increasingly assuming the authoritarian features of a police state, repressing
any sign of protest or civil disobedience. This crisis of the current phase of
capitalist globalization-the neo-liberal paradigm-and the failure of
'modernizing underdevelopment', are among the key factors underlying of this
loss of legitimacy and of cohesion in the prevailing discourse. Consumerist
promises have lost their lure for very broad sectors of the 'middle classes',
who instead are increasingly drawn into the ranks of the militant opposition as
they take to the streets and cast protest votes or abstain from electoral
participation. This crisis has extended to the arena of 'representative democracy'.
Institutionality has been breached by the democratic struggles of the masses,
which in the past three years have brought down a succession of presidents
elected or re-elected at the polls, or imposed by legislative bodies.
The
checklist of Washington's objectives agenda appear clear: to crush the new rise
of popular combativity, the breadth of civil disobedience, and the radical
character of the social struggles; to reverse the revolutionary process opened
in Argentina; to co-opt, neutralize or directly sabotage the Lula
administration in Brazil; to defeat Colombia's armed insurgency and ensure
access to the country's oil; to destabilize the government of Chávez owing to
his nationalistic discourse and alliance with Havana; to crush the Zapatista resistance
in Chiapas and that of the indigenous communities, peasants, settlers and
trades unionists who oppose the plunder of the Puebla-Panama Plan; to maintain
the blockade and inflict final defeat on Cuba; to create conditions of
'democratic stability' that assures the reach of U.S. capital as it disputes
control of the region's markets with the European Union.
We are
witnessing a revival of popular mass struggles, a reorganization of the social
movements and a re-emergence of class consciousness. This means the worst part
of the period of setbacks is now behind us. Although problems of fragmentation
and confusion remain, this process of outright recovery, in which there is an
widening socialization of the diverse experiences of struggle, has a broad and
radical character, linking demands and programs that incorporate economic,
social, political, democratic, ecological, cultural and ethnic components. This
process was not halted by the ideological intoxication of the attack on the
Twin Towers and the terrorist campaign of imperialism and its media pundits. On
the contrary, social polarization was accentuated following September 11, 2001.
The argentinazo and the popular revolt against the attempted coup d'etat in
Venezuela, as well as the growth of massive protests, strikes and caceroleos in
Uruguay, and the increasingly broad radical struggles in Paraguay and Bolivia,
confirm this new period of class struggle.
In these
struggles by social movements, programmes and demands emerge that become
visible as anti-neo-liberal, but which are part and parcel of the
anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist dynamic of the resistance. The long list
of examples includes movements and struggles like those of the Coordination for
Defense of Water and Life in Cochabamba, the Chapare coca farmers, and the
peasant marches in Bolivia; the Ecuadorian CONAIE; the MST in Brazil; the
Zapatistas in Chiapas; the mobilization organized by the Democratic Peoples
Council of the People in Paraguay; the teachers, students and Mapuches in Chile,
the Vieques squatters; and the public employees and popular movements in
Colombia. The innumerable mobilizations of trade unionists, peasants (who have
found a fundamental driving force in Via Campesina), unemployed workers (the
example of the piqueteros has extended to several countries), the black and
women's movements, activists for human rights and against impunity, students
and neighbourhood activists, and even community radios all articulate the
varied dimensions of this resistance that contains incipient elements of a
counter-offensive. The resurgence of indigenous struggles-their organizations
and demands-has been another outstanding dimension of this process, especially
since the protests sparked by the 500th anniversary of the conquest of the
Americas. Equally significant is the resilience of the armed insurgency in
Colombia, faced with an unrelenting war whose victims number in the tens of
thousands.
All these
struggles - which by no means are confined to the periphery of 'social
outcasts' or de-proletarianization', nor can be characterized as struggles of
an amorphous and eclectic 'multitude' lacking class points of reference -
extend to ever broader sectors of the exploited classes, and intersect with the
growing movement of resistance to capitalist globalization, the solidarity
campaigns and networks, and big confrontations against the international
financial institutions that mark the emergence of a renewed internationalism,
whose massive expression has extended from Seattle to the World Social Forum at
Porto Alegre. It is in this rebellious movement that a new radical social left
is emerging that participates in the class struggle, leads rebellions,
challenges the relationship of forces, and is daily engaged in the construction
of a latent 'counter power'.
The
argentinazo has accelerated this recomposition of the popular movement as well
as its radicalization. It represents a decisive historical event in the course
of the class struggle in Latin America. And although one should not underestimate
the capacity of the bourgeoisie and imperialism to organize a
counter-revolutionary outcome (or repressive intervention such as that of June
2002) the force of the popular movement is slowly establishing new forms of
self-organization, and rank-and-file democracy.
There is
a thread running through the mass struggle in Argentina, and throughout Latin
America, with the protests in Seattle and Genoa, with the movement against
capitalist globalization, as well as with the insurgencies, civil disobedience,
protests and the formidable radicalization of ever broader layers of youth on a
world-wide scale. In Latin America, this process especially includes women who
are workers, unemployed, and heads of households, who play an essential role in
the recomposition of a radical social left.
The
extreme polarization of the class struggle sharpens the relationships and the
debates within the Latin American left regarding what strategy to follow. More
importantly, it helps to narrow the gap between social resistance and an
alternative political project, while the need to link them in a strategic
perspective of taking power assumes a new sense of urgency. The schematic
understanding of 'reform or revolution' must today give way to the urgency of
reform and revolution to "transform the prevailing order", as Rosa
Luxemburg proposed.
A gap
also continues to widen between the radical left, with its unquestionable
commitment to confronting and breaking with the established order, and that
part of the left whose strategic perspective is now limited to competing for
power within the confines of existing institutions. This dichotomy cuts across
the government of Lula in Brazil and that of Gutiérrez in Ecuador, and may well
confront the Frente Amplio in Uruguay; should this hypothesis be confirmed even
if at this stage the predominant option of these governments remains
neo-liberalism.
Nevertheless,
in Latin America the dimension of the crisis and imperialist dominance has
acquired such magnitude that the space for 'progresismo' needs footnote has
evaporated. The disastrous experience of the government of the Alliance in
Argentina is the best example. And when there appears a timid process of
nationalism and social populism, as in Venezuela, the right, the reactionary sectors
of the Church, the military and the multinationals move to destabilize it with
the backing of imperialism, ultimately radicalizing the situation.
4 The disintegration
of the African continent
The
neo-liberalization of sub-Saharan African has proved particularly brutal and
murderous, worsening the already catastrophic situation of the part of the
capitalist periphery. The Strategic Adjustment Programmes, through
privatization of state enterprises, favour the liberalization of markets,
control by multinationals of the most profitable sectors of local economies,
and recolonization processes accentuated in some cases by proxy wars. Local
neo-colonial factions, linked to various imperialist interests, give themselves
over to wars of primitive capital accumulation, and pillage of natural
resources (minerals, energy, etc), wars whose ethnicization tears apart the
national fabric, and create fiefdoms under the rule of extremely criminal
politico-mafia gangs (Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Congo-Brazzaville...). These further worsen the situation for
populations in the conflict zones, often condemned to wander, giving
sub-Saharan Africa a huge number of refugees. In addition there is the
situation of workers suffering through restructuring of social expenditures,
massive layoffs, the freeze on hirings ... Despite this catastrophic situation,
the ruling elites, in adopting NEPAD, sanctioned by the G-8 at Kananskis, June
2002, and the multinationals at Dakar, 2002, remain attached to the Washington
Consensus. This promises a worsening social situation for a majority of the
African people.
5 The explosive nature
of the situation in Asia
The
global changes now under way are having a particularly profound and explosive
impact on Asia. They are being felt on every level: diplomatic, economic and
social, political and military. The international alignments forged in the
period of the Cold War have been put in question, particularly in South and
Western Asia, without making way for a new system of stable alliances. In the
framework of the new world disorder, tensions among states have been
exacerbated to the point of giving new impetus to nuclear proliferation (as
seen in the Pakistan-India confrontation and North Korean nuclear blackmail of
the US, the major occupying nuclear power in South Korea).
The first
major so-called 'financial' crisis of neo-liberal globalization began in
1997-98, with lasting consequences: a process of economic (re)colonization and
tearing up of the social fabric (South Korea), political destabilization (the
structural crisis of the regime in Indonesia), delegitimation of the
international institutions and the IMF in particular (Malaysia's temporarily
enlarged manoeuvring room), and prolonged stagnation (Japan).
Beyond
Afghanistan, the military dimension of capitalist globalization also has very
serious implications for Asia. US imperialism is redeploying its forces
throughout the region. It is establishing new bases in areas where it did not
have them (the former Soviet republics). It is once more strengthening its
presence in countries where it had had to cut back; this is particularly the
case in the Philippines, its former colony, where US troops have even been sent
into combat zones. Thanks to the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), the Pentagon
has obtained unlimited access to the country's military infrastructure. Here as
elsewhere Washington is pursuing local objectives - gaining better access to
the agricultural, oil and mineral wealth of the southern Philippines - and
regional ones: keeping an eye on Indonesia, preparing for possible future
action in the South China Sea, and controlling the straits between the Indian
and Pacific Oceans through which Middle Eastern oil is transported to Japan
Washington
wants to rebuild and complete the old Cold War barriers in East Asia to contain
China, stretching from Seoul to Manila by way of Tokyo and Taipei. In this case
too US imperialist ambitions are as much economic (control of petrol and gas
reserves and of trade in them) as geo-strategic (consolidating the key elements
of a truly global military redeployment).
From
Kashmir to the Korean peninsula by way of Mindanão and the Indonesian
archipelago, Washington's new interventionist doctrine and its 'anti-terrorist'
ideology are adding an additional obstacle to the search for political
solutions based on recognition of the concerned people's right to
self-determination to territorial conflicts. They contribute to criminalizing
popular and revolutionary movements, as well as eroding the most basic
democratic freedoms. Capitalist globalization also tends in this region to
worsen gender oppression and inter-communal tensions and foster the rise of
far-right communalist and fundamentalist currents. This holds true even in
countries where the pressure towards economic globalization was only felt
relatively late, as in India: a significant fraction of the bourgeoisie has
turned to the BJP in order to push through neo-liberal counter-reforms, thus
enabling Hindu fundamentalist Hindutva currents to threaten the secular
foundations of the state.
The war
that Washington is preparing to wage against Iraq and the military occupation
that will follow it will further exacerbate contradictions in the region, which
the intervention in Afghanistan had already made acute. The consequences of
this war cannot be overestimated, at a time when there is a whole set of
focuses of major crises in Asia: US/Chinese relations (including Taiwan), the
Korean peninsula, Afghanistan-Pakistan-India, Indonesia-Philippines-South China
Sea, etc.
In this
situation, progressive and revolutionary parties and movements in Asia tend, in
many cases, to establish closer relations of solidarity with each other than in
the past. Social movements, grassroots organizations and peace movements are
coordinating their joint campaigns against the militarist dynamics and for
peoples' rights more and more effectively. The meeting of the World Social
Forum in India in January 2004 can give a new dimension to these activist
convergences.
6 The strength of
globalized capitalism and the weakness of international interstate institutions
1 The emergence of a globalized capitalism would require a global
government in order to master its contradictions, which have become more
numerous, more acute, more contagious and harder to control since the end of
the Cold War. But this kind of state or government is completely beyond
imperialism's reach.
Nonetheless,
the dominant tendency of the past decade has been the emergence of and
self-assertion by a series of international, state-like institutions. Despite
their rivalries, the ruling classes have been won over to the idea of
establishing an imperialist 'new order'. Economic globalization, which is very
volatile, has 'spontaneously' pushed onwards and increased the weight of
regulatory bodies on both the regional/continental and world level. Their
keystone is the IMF (plus World Bank) and WTO. NATO has amended its charter and
imposed itself as the armed force of global capitalism. The G7 (plus Russia) is
attempting to ensure a common political leadership. The process of
institutional globalization is widening on the judicial level (International
Court of Justice in the Hague, the CCI) as well as other levels less in the
media spotlight (the OECD and Bank of International Settlements).
2 The attempt to legitimize and stabilize these institutions is
running up against major contradictions: economic and political rivalries among
the major powers themselves (including regional economic blocs), their lack of
democratic, electoral legitimacy, and their openly partisan character in major
conflicts (such as Iraq, Rwanda, Palestine and Serbia). Their popular
legitimacy has been limited from the outset. These contradictions have been highlighted
by the mobilizations 'against globalization'. Their capacity to govern the
planet will be put to a brutal test by the turbulence looming on the horizon
because of the US government's war policy and the attempt to control the
current economic recession.
Furthermore,
the self-assertion of these non-elected institutions, in which the executive
bodies dominate, and US unilateralist strategy, have further marginalized the
UN (including its Security Council). Previously the UN supplied an
institutional framework (its General Assembly and related agencies) in which
the imperialist countries could be questioned and 'kept in bounds' and certain
'progressive' policies could be implemented.
The
factor that has subjugated all this institutional architecture is the supremacy
of US imperialism, which is more and more playing an international and
unilateral role.
3 The US's arrogant and heedless policies, including in its
relations with its allies, are making their own limitations obvious. The US
more and more clearly needs a division of labour, a sharing-out of spheres of
influence and a system of coalitions with its main rivals and secondary
regional powers. But the process of concentration and internationalization now
under way also has an impact, in the context of fiercer and fiercer
competition, on sectors of the ruling classes. This is leading to divergences
among them about the means, rhythms, concrete goals and structures that are
needed to reach their common goals; this is reflected at the level of the
leading political groups, where the divergences are resulting in frequent
infighting, hidden struggles and recurrent splits. US hegemony over the planet
is undeniable, but its direct control of the situation turns out to be very
difficult.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
NEW
CAPITALISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL RECESSION
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The end
of the US upswing identified with the 'New Economy' has put an end to illusions
about the birth of a new capitalism. The productivity increases made were
obtained only by means of a very great investment effort and an increase in the
rate of exploitation in the form of a lengthening of the work week. Far from
laying the foundation for a stable model and opening up a new phase of growth,
this over-accumulation of capital eventually ran up against a very classical
constraint: a profitability squeeze. The end of the upswing has uncovered the
underlying components of the instability of contemporary capitalism.
The
dynamism of rapid growth in the US was fuelled by a trade deficit on a scale
that would never be tolerated in any country other than the world's dominant
imperialist power. It was the surplus value accumulated in Europe and Japan
that was drawn on to finance the high-tech boom. A model like this could
therefore, by definition, never be extended to the whole of the world economy.
On the contrary, it has been accentuating inter-imperialist contradictions,
which are often manifest on the monetary level. The Japanese growth rate has
been hovering around zero for the last ten years, partly because the yen is
overvalued. The recent rise of the euro is not evidence of any particular
strength, but rather the reflection of a changed US orientation; the US is
letting the dollar fall in order to make its products competitive again.
The
collapse of the financial bull market that had resulted from the mushrooming of
the 'dot.com' economy is a brutal reminder of the law of value: stock exchanges
do not create value, and financial profits are a form of income derived from
exploitation of labour. The rapid rise of stock market prices bore no relation
any more to the real economy and could not last forever. The creeping crash is
an excellent course in the real world for those who were fooled by the
illusions of finance. Wage earners around the world should reflect on Enron's
bankruptcy, which is costing millions of workers not only their jobs but their
pensions, which were dependent on the company's share prices.
More
generally, we can say that neo-liberal perspectives are now running aground on
experiences that enable masses of people to perceive how toxic neo-liberalism
is. Millions of workers in many countries, from Argentina to South Korea and
from Indonesia to Ivory Coast, are not about to sit and listen today to the
praises being sung of beneficent globalization. The impossibility of carrying
out a world public health policy without sufficient resources for the fight
against Aids and other pandemics shows that the rules of the marketplace are
more important to the WTO than social and health emergencies. All around the
world people are realizing that privatizations obey no other logic than the
logic of profit. In Europe, wage earners have been able to see that the recent
recovery has not benefited them and that the fruits of growth continue to be
swallowed up by interest and dividends. Far from being a hard time to be lived
through or a necessary adjustment, wage austerity has now been revealed for
what it is: a new, profoundly unjust rule for redistributing income.
World
capitalism is thus facing a difficult situation, combining its internal sources
of tension with a considerable loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the majority
of the world's population, who view this system more and more as a pure and
simple obstacle blocking the satisfaction of their social needs.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WAR
POLICY AND THE CONTINUING NEO-LIBERAL POLICY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
These two
questions are going to dominate the world situation in the next 12 or 24 months
and influence the lives of millions of human beings and the activity of all
social and political forces.
1 The policy of the
war against terrorism
1 The US government won the war in Afghanistan at a low cost and
strengthened its domination of the world. Certainly it has showed that it has
the diplomatic monopoly over the situation in the Middle East (the Israeli war
against the Palestinian people). But it has not been able to exploit this
victory by immediately starting a new war with Iraq. The Bush Administration
continues to express its desire to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In the mean time,
the US government has been able to impose on all its allies (big and small) the
ideological and political framework of the 'war against terrorism' and, up to a
certain point, make a military-political line out of it. In Palestine, Kashmir,
Chechnya, Georgia, the Philippines, Colombia, Venezuela... it supports or
intervenes militarily to create an atmosphere on ongoing war, justifying an
increasingly arbitrary hegemony.
2.1 Palestine is once again at the centre of world politics because
of the renewed intensity of Zionist aggression and the continued resistance by
the Palestinian people. The de facto expansion of the Zionist state through
colonies, roadblocks and the wall, attacks on the rights of Palestinians in
Israel and Israeli occupation forces' successful attempt to make life
unbearable in the occupied Palestinian territories - daily arrests and
assassinations, incessant demolition of houses, commercial establishments and
factories, or through looting plantations or other cultivated areas - have created
a climate of desperation which has profoundly affected the Palestinian people's
forms of resistance.
2.2 The brutal occupation and intensive colonization of Palestinian
land, combined with the world context of the 'war on terrorism' and the Labourite
Oslo Process, are creating the conditions for the most radical wing of Zionism,
in power through Sharon and his allies, to put on the agenda the plan for
'transfer' (massive deportation) of Palestinians outside their homeland. The
threat of war hanging over Iraq may provide the Zionist leadership an
unexpected opportunity to put this project in action, in the shadow of American
bombing.
2.3 This is why, with the protection of the USA, Sharon has been able
to happily ignore the UN resolutions, whilst he carries out systematic
assassinations of Palestinian activists. Bush now hopes that a victory by the
USA in Iraq will put him in a position to impose a settlement on the
Palestinians which will leave them completely subordinate to the whims and
wishes of the Israeli state and remove them as an obstacle to US policy in the
region.
2.4 The Bush/Blair/Sharon axis must be resisted. The FI must make
solidarity with Palestine a key part of our anti-war work. We must be at the
centre of the support activities for the Palestinian people both in the West,
through involvement in the solidarity organizations, and in Palestine itself -
where the development of organizations such as the International Solidarity
Movement has given a unique opportunity for practical involvement.
2.5 The Fourth International will do everything possible to work to
reinforce the international solidarity movement with Palestinian people, for
their protection, their right to selfdetermination and the right to return for
all refugees. This solidarity campaign must completely oppose any transfer
plan, demand the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the territories occupied
since 1967, support the Palestinian demand for their own viable and sovereign
state. To put an end to racism and all forms of oppression, the solution
consists in the creation of a secular, united and binational state, which
guarantees equal rights (including to land) to all its inhabitants.
3 But the war against Iraq could become the decisive test for the
relationship of forces, the political alignments and the future force lines,
constituting a 'defining moment' for the whole world situation.
From this
point of view, the change in the situation that US imperialism is now working
to impose on the planet, will be felt by all existing actors, governments as
well as political and social forces. This will necessarily involve a long-term,
international political battle on a grand scale. The question is, will the US
be capable of using its overwhelming military supremacy to impose this war
policy? Will it be able to take the initiative, alone if it has to, win
victories, shift the relationship of forces even further in its favour, win an
international political base and fight until it wins a 'final' victory, which
would also mean the defeat of the popular masses' social aspirations and
organizations?
4 The US faces three major obstacles in launching this war. First
of all there are the contradictions within the main ruling classes, which weigh
on the US government's capacity for initiative. It will have to wage a battle
("it's the objective that determines the coalition"). Because
alongside its anti-terrorist line the Bush government is also building the NMD
(National Missile Defence) - another global military project which would give
enormous advantages on the military, technological, political and economic
fronts.
Then, are
the American people, currently living in a climate of 'anti-terrorist'
propaganda accepting the 'self defence' of the national territory and of their
lives, ready to go to a murderous war in the Middle East?
Finally,
there is a major gap between US material supremacy and its moral (social and
ideological) weakness. On a world scale, disaffection, suspicion and even
hatred towards the United States have rarely been as intense or as widespread.
This 'handicap' will be a big problem for governments under US pressure, who
will have to legitimize a 'crisiswar' of this kind in the eyes of domestic
public opinion. The fight against the US and its allies is a priority on the
international level.
2 The capitalist class
continues its neo-liberal offensive
The
capitalist class continues its neo-liberal offensive while adapting to new
difficulties and resistances.
1 The neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 90s led to a brilliant
success for capital. The subsequent decade of growth in the US, the European
recovery of the last few years, and the partial insertion of the periphery into
the world economy have in no way benefited the popular masses who were called
upon to make 'sacrifices' in order to get the machine moving again. Surfing on
this relationship of forces, the capitalist class has no intention, now as the
recession is hitting, to share 'the fruits of economic growth'. On the
contrary, the current economic 'difficulties' supply a pretext for continuing
with and reinforcing neoliberal policy prescriptions point by point.
2 Global neoliberal policies are now running up against a gigantic
credibility problem. Not only has capitalist globalization led to a war (in
Afghanistan), but neoliberal policies, pushed to their extreme by the
multinationals and international institutions (IMF, WTO and BIS, G7+1), have
brought about the collapse of the Argentinean economy (and society), with
direct involvement of the US government. The Enron bankruptcy, the biggest
ever, in the heartland of global capitalism, requires a drastic overhaul of the
very structures of finance capitalism and the rules of 'corporate governance'
(not to speak of the social disaster involved in the total loss of the workers'
saved-up pensions).
Whatever
their attachment to a stubborn, cynical pragmatism, the rulers of global
capitalism cannot stand by passively as their doctrines crumble and the dead
ends of their economic policies. Unless they mean to go along with allegedly
controlled chaos (which they are already doing in Africa), they will be forced
to open a discussion that can only reveal the insanity of their policies.
3 This recession will have a contradictory impact on the (social,
ideological and organizational) relationship of forces between the two
fundamental classes. Objectively, it is putting the proletariat on the
defensive, with a risk of a new dramatic decline in its living standards and
capacities to reorganize itself. On the other hand, it has certainly already
destroyed any illusion, that after twenty years of uninterrupted neoliberalism
and three different economic phases (recession, recovery, and another
recession) that capitalism is about to improve things for the working class.
This is
already leading to fierce social conflicts, even in the absence of any assured
alternative, perspective or solid organization. A new cycle has begun of
fiercer, broader, but also more difficult struggles, around immediate, partial
demands that almost spontaneously emphasize the need for an overall solution
and raise once more 'the political issue' (the issue of who governs and what
role political parties have).
The
prolonged experience with neoliberal policies and with the political and social
forces that have imposed neoliberalism will play a key role in political
clarification on a mass scale and in the rebirth of a reorganized,
reinvigorated workers' and social movement at every level (in terms of size,
level of activism and activity, self-organization, demands and anti-capitalist
programme).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE
SOCIAL CRISIS AT THE WORLD LEVEL
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Faced with this general capitalist offensive, which has won
several victories in recent years, many forms of resistance have been growing.
The failure of the Seattle WTO summit, after the abandonment of the projected
Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), amounts to a major political event.
For the first time a major international - and in many ways internationalist -
campaign contributed to making the masters of globalization lose a battle. This
setback for globalization is the result of numerous contradictions that combined
to result in the failure of the negotiations: the contradiction between
European and US capitalist interests, particularly on agricultural subsidies
and the trade barriers between Europe and the US; the contradiction with the
interests of the developing countries, which are incapable of competing with
developed economies given their low productivity levels and the burden of the
debt, and thus demand special, differentiated treatment; and the contradiction
with the massive growth in public opinion of awareness of the misdeeds of
unbridled neoliberalism, symbolized by the trade-union and grassroots
demonstrations that succeeded in disrupting the WTO conference proceedings.
2 The unprecedented ecological crisis is directly linked to the
commodification of the world under capitalist globalization. It is laying waste
to the environment, that is, the conditions of life on the planet as a whole,
but is hitting the poorest and most vulnerable regions and social layers
hardest. Environmental destruction can now put the survival of humanity in the
balance. The transformation of life forms into commodities is steadily
advancing. It is made possible by the refinement of new technologies, whose
ecological impact is often out of control and sometimes unknown. It can also be
accompanied by a heightened dependence of the South not only for technology but
also for food. The agribusiness giants' offensive aimed at imposing genetically
modified organisms (GMOs) on the world is symptomatic of this situation.
Successive
international conferences have ended with pitiful results; the big powers, and
above all the US, are responsible for this. A resolute approach to
environmental problems as well as to issues around food and health care on a
world scale provides a great occasion for calling capitalism into question.
3 This overall picture should lead us to take into account the
tensions and contradictions that the system as a whole is prey to on a world
scale and in many countries in different parts of the world.
The world
economy has experienced a prolonged upward conjuncture in the wake of the US
economy's long expansive cycle. But the emergence of a 'new capitalism' is not
leading to a long phase of socio-economic stabilization comparable to the
post-war period of expansion. The current slowdown of the US economy, the
restructuring and planned layoffs in industry and the stock markets' erratic
ups and downs raise the question of a new US recession. More generally, the
global context remains characterized by imbalances and growing inequality at
the expense of the great majority of the planet's population. A deeper and
deeper gulf is widening within the most developed countries themselves. A
situation of this kind at the socio-economic level is, in the last analysis, a
source of rather generalized crises of traditional political leaderships and
even of their breakdown, and of the difficulties faced by attempts at to
rebuild their institutions and states.
The
contradictions that are tearing apart contemporary society on a world scale and
ravaging the world in many different ways are putting the definition and
construction of a systemic alternative on the agenda more than ever before.
4 The main contradiction in the world, which in the last analysis
is the main obstacle to the militarism of the US and its allies, is beyond
doubt this: never before has a ruling class had such complete supremacy on the
material (military, technological, economic and diplomatic) level, while ruling
over millions of exploited, oppressed, humiliated, crushed women and men,
victims of a system that has never been so iniquitous and barbarous on the
social and human level. This contradiction is at work every day in every
country and society. The acuteness and explosiveness of the global social crisis,
engendered by the globalization of capital under neoliberal policies, are
certainly giving enlightened ruling class circles to think.
5 But only conscious, organized activity by the exploited and
oppressed can prevent further capitalist disasters. To achieve this, overcoming
the historic crisis of the 'subjective factor' in the broad sense is our
fundamental task.
The
massive, repeated reactions by young people and wage earners have finally led
to an initial accumulation of forces and energy. The 'anti-globalization'
movement hesitated for a moment but, stimulated by the growing discredit of
warmongering and neoliberal policies, has taken off again. It appears more than
ever as a mass alternative at the level of society ('post-capitalist'). This
international confrontation symbolized by Porto Alegre against Davos/New York,
will play a determining on the outcome of the present political stage. It is in
this general framework that the social and political forces that reject the
'globalization' preached by the dominant classes exist in every region of the
world and are ready to fight now, independently of the relationship of forces
at the national and international level in the current stage. They include a
great diversity of analyses and political responses, ranging from bourgeois
nationalist protectionism to revolutionary socialist internationalism.
In the
context of this kind of international mobilization and a more general relaunch
of class struggle, we must find the way to rebuild the workers and anti-imperialist
movement from top to bottom, to welcome the emergence of vanguards whose
experiences are those of the new epoch we are living in, and to re-launch a new
internationalism and a revolutionary International.
VOTE: 86 - 2 - 8 - 0 CARRIED
Notes
1 In a 1998 report, the International Labour Organisation (ILO)
states that "the possibility of official recognition would be extremely
useful in order to expand the tax base and thereby cover many lucrative related
activities".