July 22, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Miliband, p. 160.

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

5. Miliband, p. 178.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Miliband, p. 178.

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

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

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

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

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

Additional reading

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

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

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

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

Gregory Elich, especially:

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

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

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

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

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


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