By Jane West
The ‘war on terror’ launched after the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre has included so far the invasion of Iraq without the support of the UN on an illegal mission of ‘regime change’, the torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the incarceration of hundreds without trial in Guantanamo Bay, the invasion of Afghanistan, the deaths of at least three times the number of US military personnel than the total dead on 9/11 and many times that number in civilian deaths.
By Jane West
Photo WavesDream
The recent results of the elections in Brazil and the USA highlight two divergent trends in world politics. Trends in the countries dominated by imperialism continue to go to or remain on the left. Since the outbreak of the international financial crisis political trends within the imperialist countries have moved to the right.
By Andrew Williams
Islamophobia – anti-Muslim bigotry – has become an important ideological component in imperialism’s current international offensive. As has been argued in an earlier article on this website, US imperialism’s determination to maintain its international pre-eminence has for the past 30 years required it to increasingly assert its military superiority to compensate for the reduced competitiveness of its domestic economy. Over that period US military activity has extended in all areas of the globe, including in the Middle East, Central Asia and now Latin America.
The Middle East and Central Asia are adjoining regions and key to world oil and gas supplies and so of strategic importance to the US – not just because its economy is dependent on these commodities, but also because the degree to which the US can exert control over supplies gives it an advantage over its rivals.
After the Second World War, US hegemony, based on its economic leverage and its role as imperialism’s military police force internationally, meant it could develop client regimes or negotiate favourable contracts for extraction and pipelines, without direct military intervention. But its economic decline has meant that its economic leverage is now sometimes insufficient to secure this, and it increasingly therefore has to resort to military action.
By Steve Wallace
The financial events of 2008–2009 inaugurated not only an economic but a new ideological crisis of capitalism. How deep this crisis will become depends on the development of the economic situation and the intervention of the political left. The character of this crisis, however, can be seen most clearly by placing it in an historical context.
Twenty years ago, in 1989–91, capitalism achieved enormous victories. It overthrew the non-capitalist economies in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The opportunity to achieve this was created by the final failure of the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ inaugurated by Stalin – with its economically utopian attempt to create a fully developed socialist society within the framework of a single state, its introduction of a fully planned economy in a short period by administrative means, and the political repression that followed from such policies.The relative decline of US imperialism has underpinned the domestic debate about President Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan.
In his speech to the Corp of Cadets at West Point on 1 December, Obama said: ‘…as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry. And it allows us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.’
This drew a fierce response from the Wall Street Journal, which supports the surge as a necessary expression of power, not as an unfortunate diversion from its exercise at home:
The international financial crisis is frequently interpreted as being characterised by operations of avaricious and immoral bankers, motivated purely by personal greed, acting with complete indifference to the population of this or any other country, who recklessly operated financial derivates they did not understand within a casino economy, and whose net useful contribution to society has been shown to be less than zero – all of which is true. But this is only the mechanism by which the economic crisis worked itself out – not its cause. Furthermore, if this had been the real driving force of the economic crisis it would be relatively easy to deal with – tough financial regulation and similar measures would suffice.
First published: April 1991
The Gulf War was an overwhelming military victory for the United States. But what relation of international class forces did it create? And what conclusions flow for the coming class struggles?
On the military level the Gulf War was an overwhelming victory for the United States. In one sense this was inevitable. That the superior armed force of the imperialism, above all US imperialism, cannot be defeated by purely conventional military confrontation was a standard point made during the heyday of the colonial liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s – it was the backbone of the military ideas of Mao-Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, the African liberation movements against the Portuguese empire or in the struggle against Ian Smith’s ‘Rhodesia’. The original idea was that the imperialist enemy could not be defeated on the purely military level but had to be ground down by prolonged social mobilisation to which military action was subordinate – it was no accident that the NLF’s major military offensives during the Vietnam war coincided with US presidential election years. Only at the final stage, when the imperialist enemy had been ground down by political and social mobilisation, and localised armed action on that basis, could relatively conventional military struggle be engaged with a chance of success.
First published: October 2004 (pamphlet)
The European Social Forum and the struggle for socialism
The European Social Forum (ESF) and the World Social Forum (WSF) are today the largest and broadest international movements against social injustice and neo-liberal capitalism. Socialist Action supports both.
The ESF, in addition to its fundamental goal of social justice, particularly embodies key steps forward that Socialist Action has championed for years.
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