Revolutionary socialist politics in the era of world capitalist crisis

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This is our second installment of major excerpts from the Political Resolution adopted at the August 2012 So­ cialist Action National Convention in Minneapolis.

T race, with every major power striving to in­ Today we are witness to a new world armaments crease its military arsenal. This clearly indicates the desperate need of all capitalist nations to protect, expand, and develop new markets by force, when nec­ essary. The U.S.-led NATO war against Libya served as a perfect example, when the U.S., England, France, and Italy jockeyed for position regarding whose military forces would predominate in the destruction of that nation and which would secure the largest percent­ age of the oil booty.

The already severe sanctions against Iran and Syria and the increasing threats of war have but one objec­ tive, to re-integrate these nations into the economic and military framework of the great powers. Equally overt examples of the use of force to advance impe­ rialist needs includes the Belgian-based, U.S.-con­ trolled AFRICOM operation, in which the U.S. seeks to advance its neo-colonial interests in Africa at the expense of its European and Chinese competitors.

In Afghanistan, the fiction of an external imperialist power training an oppressed people to fight has been dropped. Instead, the “trainers” are to be re-named and continue to operate in one form or another as death-squad mercenaries backed by the most ad­ vanced off-shored military equipment in the world, including drones, now to be manufactured in the thousands.

It is instructive in this regard to note that in Iraq, despite government reports to the contrary, the lion’s share of the oil proceeds, according to The New York Times, are now in the hands of U.S. corporate inter­ ests. The U.S. did not murder some 1.5 million Iraqis only to withdraw from that nation with little or no booty!

In the super-competitive capitalist world of today no previous or present alliances are permanent. New power blocs, including China, which spends approxi­ mately one-quarter of the amount that the U.S. does on upgrading its military, and perhaps Japan and oth­ er Asian nations, can be expected to collaborate when their interests coincide—as is the case today, when trading in major commodities between Japan and 6 SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2012 China is based on the Chinese currency, the renminbi, as opposed to the ever-weakening U.S. dollar.

The U.S.-backed Philippines’ confrontations with China in the North China Sea is another major exam­ ple of imperialist rivalry, wherein naval maneuvers are aimed at securing access to unpopulated and dis­ puted islands that are known to be rich in fisheries as well as oil deposits.

The same applies to every continent. U.S. troops are increasingly the lynchpin in all major military ven­ tures, as in Colombia, where seven new U.S. bases are under construction—aimed at potentially revolution­ ary developments in Latin America. The U.S. imperial venture today confronts the entire planet, with troops on the ground when needed and a massive program to employ drone warfare and privatized mercenary armies, the increasingly common calling card of U.S. imperialism.

The Arab Spring In Tunisia and Egypt, U.S. imperialism’s corporate media machine posed the Obama administration as a friend of the Egyptian people and a defender of de­ mocracy in the face of the fact that the Mubarak dic­ tatorship was second only to Israel in receipt of U.S. military aid. So swift, broad, and deep were the mo­ bilizations against Mubarak that any U.S. decision to smash it with massive and brutal force was untenable. A similar dynamic emerged earlier in Tunisia, with the hated Ben Ali dictatorship lacking any credibility among the Tunisian masses.

Instead, the U.S. relied on diplomatic guile, threats, and maneuvers to achieve a “democratic” transition through elections overseen by the still-in-power ty­ rants’ military heirs. While the mobilization of sig­ nificant trade-union forces, including mass strikes in Egypt and Tunisia, was sufficient to drive out the dic­ tators, the reformist leaderships knew full well that any steps beyond Mubarak’s and Ben Ali’s removal would pose the issue of overt military intervention. The native bourgeois forces never contemplated any­ thing other than the constitution of reformed and “democratic” capitalist governments.

In Egypt and Tunisia the massive and ongoing Tah­ rir Square mobilizations of youthful fighters never­ theless lacked anything close to a disciplined core of organized and revolutionary forces of sufficient (Above) Israeli soldier takes aim at West Bank protest in solidarity with Gaza, Nov. 16.

strength and implantation to effectively guide the mass power in the streets in a revolutionary social­ ist direction. Despite the valiant efforts of tiny revolu­ tionary groups to unify their forces and strive to build independent unions and to challenge with a revo­ lutionary party and program in the elections, their forces were too meager and inexperienced to affect an outcome that differed in its fundamentals from the old regime with some new bourgeois components.

Within a year’s time the massive uprising was chan­ neled into bourgeois reformism—the old and tem­ porarily restrained military regime coupled with the Muslim Brotherhood electoral victors in pretending democratic rule.

In Libya, the situation was worse. The initial mass mobilizations against the Gadhafi dictatorship were almost entirely lacking in revolutionary leadership. Whatever forces appeared on the scene early on that tried to pose a semblance of a revolutionary alterna­ tive to Gadhafi and to U.S./NATO intervention were soon overwhelmed and likely disappeared. The door was open wide to an overt imperialist resolution.

Gadhafi’s concessions to imperialism over the past years proved insufficient to realize his efforts at a negotiated solution. The imperialists used the UN’s “humanitarian no-fly zone” to deploy massive NATO forces, led by the U.S. Tens of thousands of Libyans were slaughtered, along with Gadhafi’s army.

So weak was the imperialist orchestrated internal opposition that it took what amounted to a continu­ ous six-month bombardment by the world’s super­ powers, coupled with the covert use of U.S.-trained Qatar mercenaries who “liberated” Tripoli, to remove Gadhafi and install a handpicked imperialist govern­ ment. In such a war, regardless of their criticisms of the Gadhafi regime, revolutionaries must not only demand the immediate withdrawal of all NATO/U.S. troops but also favor without qualification an impe­ rialist defeat.

In the antiwar movement, “U.S./NATO Out Now!” was the critical and principled demand of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC). Tragically, others (continued on page 11, in “New Potential for Occupy’s ‘Strike Debt’ Campaign”)

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Tony Savino / Socialist Action Tony Savino / Socialist Action