The editors of Vanguard recently received a fifteen page booklet from the Ray O. Light Group in the USA, titled “The economic motives for the Bush-led war at home and abroad and the need for proletarian revolution”.
We publish some extracts that deal with the relationship between economics and politics under imperialism, and the false separation of the two. These issues should also be discussed in the Australian revolutionary movement.
The introduction commenced by stating; “ Marxism-Leninism teaches that at the heart of monopoly capitalist and imperialist political economy, the “engine” that drives the world’s current socio-economic system, is the dialectical relationship between imperialist politics and imperialist economics, with economics as the driving force, as the primary aspect, of the relationship. From the standpoint of the international working class, the world’s proletariat, this explanation takes the mystery out of imperialist war.”
The booklet examines firstly the economic imperatives behind the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“… let us simply lay out the huge economic oil and natural gas stake of US imperialism in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and then connect that to the struggle between the euro and the dollar for supremacy in the world capitalist system.”
US ‘war of terror’
In Afghanistan, having backed the Taliban against the Soviets and then the Northern Alliance forces, the US was dismayed when the Taliban handed a massive oil and gas pipeline contract to Argentina, rather than US company, Unocal. In their invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the US “utilised the warlords of the Northern Alliance, their former foes, as their small native base of Afghani support, against the Taliban regime, their former friends”. They then installed former Unocal employee Kazai as the new president. “This is economics as the driving force in the most acute political struggle of our time.”
During the Iran-Iraq war, the US had openly supported Saddam Hussein, while at the same time secretly arming Iran. “…its aim was to cripple both Iraq and Iran so they would be vulnerable to imperialist domination and/or invasion.”
Saddam Hussein alarmed the US by granting oil leases to France, Russia and China, along with infrastructure contracts to Germany. One object of the US invasion was to seize the oilfields for US and British companies and deny the rival powers. It is also a reason why none of these countries has troops on the ground in Iraq.
“One key reason why Bush would not make a deal on Iraq oil with the partner-rivals of US imperialism is because of the struggle between the euro and the dollar for supremacy in the world. Saddam had raised the idea with French and German imperialism at al of conducting the global oil business in euros rather than dollars…
Such was the economic foundation for the most acute expression of politics in the modern world, the hot war taking place against the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq.”
US ‘war on workers’
The escalating impoverishment of the working poor in America is not well reported in Australia, but has been significant over the period of the Bush administration.
The booklet published statistics compiled by the Centre for Labour Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, which calculated the wage increases of 93 million production and non-supervisory workers in the US during the period 2000 – 2006, the “war on terror” period.
While labour productivity had risen 18 percent over this period, the workers’ pay increases amounted to less than half of the executive and managerial Christmas bonuses (US$36+ billion) handed out by the five top Wall St financial firms (Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley) in just one year!
Migrant workers in the USA have faced particular hardships, with immigration raids and the threat of deportation forcing many into low paid, super-exploitative jobs with no legal protections, certainly no union coverage.
As for unions, the booklet slams the official AFL-CIO for its pro-government stance. “With the AFL-CIO leading the working class in the United States on a course of great nation chauvinism and unity with “our own” imperialists against our best friends around the world, it is little wonder that the union leadership has been completely unable and unwilling to defend even the short-term interests of the US working class against capital.”
The role of the monopoly mass media in promoting and rationalising the lies of imperialism is seen as very critical, with special attention given to uncoupling of economics from politics.
The most blatant links between the Bush clan and Middle East oil; Vice-President Cheney’s links to multi-billion war contract winner Halliburton; the sinister Project for a New American Century; the Bush and bin Laden family partnerships in the Carlyle Group; the Dubai Ports deal; these are just some of the more obvious connections between economics and politics that the monopoly mass media has glossed over or trivialised.
Marxism seeks truth from facts
As the booklet notes, “The fact is that bourgeois media, religion, culture and higher education all preach and teach and promote the separation of economics from politics. Marx, on the contrary, teaches their interconnection.”
This is reflected in the speech given by Frederick Engels at the graveside of his friend and close colleague, Karl Marx in 1883. “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history: he discovered the simple fact , hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc., and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained , instead of vice-versa as had hitherto been the case.”
Opportunism and one-sided thinking
The second part of the booklet deals with “Opportunism as a valuable servant of US imperialism.” It begins with reference to Lenin’s criticism of Karl Kautsky: “Kautsky detaches the politics of imperialism from its economics, speaks of annexations as being a policy ‘preferred’ by finance capital, and opposes to it another bourgeois policy…According to his (Kautsky’s) argument, monopolies in economics are compatible with non-monopolistic, non-violent, non-annexationist methods in politics...The result is a slurring-over and a blunting of the most profound contradictions of the latest stage of capitalism, instead of an exposure of their depth; the result is bourgeois reformism instead of Marxism.” (Lenin Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism 1917).
The writers of the booklet point out, “Lenin is saying that imperialist war is not something they can choose at all; it is something that the system is constantly driving forward.” This argument continues today between bourgeois reformists and Marxists. “Opportunist forces in this period, just as in Lenin’s time, conceal the connection between capitalist economics and capitalist politics. They focus solely on the economic or on the political aspect of the monopoly capitalist and imperialist system of political economy, thus trivialising the depth of the problem in dealing with this powerful enemy.”
The booklet gives a number of examples of the sort of one-sided thinking that characterises much of the political movement in the USA, including within the unions, environment groups, anti-war and anti-globalisation groups.
Thus, even the US Labor Against the War group (USLAW) supports a limited and narrow economic struggle by workers in the US and indeed Iraq, rather than political demands of solidarity with the Iraqi resistance and an end to US occupation.
“Similarly, the petty bourgeois radical environment movement focuses attention on the economics destroying the earth – land, sea and air – but is largely silent on the political power which maintains the economic system’s direction towards ecological disaster and humanity’s self-destruction.”
“The World Social Forum and its offshoots around the globe actively promote the illusion that economic development is separate and apart from global politics and war… In contrast to the anti-globalisation movement, the petty bourgeois radical anti-war movement in the US emphasises the destructive and terrorist character of war, focusing on the political leadership of the US and other imperialist and oppressed countries in such a way as to bury the crucial fact that such wars are the inevitable product of the capitalist economic system, especially in its last , dying stage of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, and that they are carried out with specific economic objectives in mind.”
Some conclusions
In summing up, the booklet makes some observations in relation to Social Democracy, which “in its various shades and hues, teaches that we can ‘reform’ the capitalist system, even at this late date, in its last, dying stage of imperialism…supports the bourgeois illusion that bourgeois politics and bourgeois economics in the period of monopoly capitalism and imperialism can be separated from each other.”
“For, if it is merely wrong political policy, then we can change the war policy to a peace policy by changing the political leadership, perhaps from Republicans to Democrats…without changing the system…If it is merely wrong economic policy, then we can provide alternative, safer methods for carrying out social production that will persuade the economic rulers to safeguard the environment for our children and grandchildren.”
“Linking the struggle against imperialist politics to the struggle against imperialist economics will help honest proletarian forces to understand the ruthless and systematic nature of our imperialist enemy and the formidable revolutionary tasks required to vanquish this enemy.” |
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