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For those who
have not seen this poll, let me describe the results: 58% of the
respondents in France, 60% in Germany, 33% in the UK, 71% in Jordan, 63% in
Morocco, 54% in Pakistan, 51% in Russia, and 64% in Turkey claimed that “control
of Mideast oil” was an important motivation for the Bush Administration’s “war
on terror” and hence its invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the US,
however, only 18% claimed “control of Mideast oil” to be an important
motivation.
Surely, one must take polls
with a grain of salt, since they are so dependent upon what, how and of
whom questions are asked (especially in any international poll). Another
issue to keep in mind is that the respondents were asked about the
motivations of the Bush Administration in invading Iraq, an inherently
difficult question, given the notorious difficulty of determining the
motivations “behind” the act of any agent.
These caveats aside, the
results are still striking, but it is equally hard to determine the
motivations of those polled. Is it that US respondents are “brainwashed”
and the people in Europe, Russia and the Islamic world can see clearly on
this matter? Should we just pack up our movement and sail across the
Atlantic to more agreeable climes?
All joking aside, how do we
account for the differences in interpreting the motivations behind the US
government’s actions? An answer to this question is important for our
movement. For if a majority of people in the US did think that the “real
reason” behind the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq was to
control “Middle East” (while recognizing all the “orientalist” objections
to the term) oil, they would then be forced to conclude that the hundreds
of dead and thousands of wounded US troops (much less the tens of thousands
of Iraqi casualties) were sacrificed for the profits of giant oil companies
like Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, and ChevronTexaco. According to this
reasoning: the truth (or more accurately, acknowledging the truth) will
make us free (or at least help end the war)! If only we in the anti-war
movement overcame the Bush Administration’s propaganda and convinced our “fellow
Americans” of the fact that the Iraq invasion and occupation was an “oil-driven
war” (as Camilo Mejia, the Florida National Guard Staff Sgt. who has
refused to return to Iraq and faces many years in prison, believes), then
there would be a mass rejection of the war similar to what eventually
happened during the Vietnam war.
2. Truth and Consequences
Yet, if Truth should make us free, then the anti-war movement would be
enjoying Liberty itself. Let us consider what the “average” movement
activist was saying to his/her fellows in the US in February of 2003:
-- give the inspectors a
chance to investigate whether Saddam was stupid enough to have weapons of
mass destruction after such a long period of surveillance,
-- there was no credible
evidence to link the Iraqi Baathist regime with Al-Quaida, since there were
decades of hostility between Bin Laden’s and Hussein’s politics and
projects;
-- there was neither reason to
believe that Saddam Hussein’s regime was any more capable to inflicting
mass human rights abuses in the near future than any other Middle East
government (Israel included), nor that the people in Iraq would welcome a
US occupation.
On each of these points we
were proven correct as was our slogan: “NO BLOOD FOR OIL!” We argued in the
run-up to the war that the justifications the Bush Administration was
producing did not “add up” and that the war would lead to the creation of a
US petroleum colony in the Middle East (with all the inevitable struggle
and carnage that would follow). What we meant then (and now) by the slogan “NO
BLOOD FOR OIL” had many levels and we should remind ourselves about them:
Level 1: No Blood for Oil,
literally.
The Bush Administration is planning war as a way to plunder and take
control (first directly and later through proxies) the oil fields of Iraq
Level 2: No Blood for
Privatization of Oil Resources.
The US has been the leader in imposing neoliberal/globalization policies
around the planet. One commodity after another has been “neoliberalized,”
but oil has escaped this fate. Most of the nationalizations of oil
companies took place between 1969 and 1973, but it has been almost
impossible for these companies to be reprivatized, even though the national
telecoms and airlines were put on the auction block in many of these same
countries (e.g., Nigeria). The US government wants to reverse the
nationalization process and an occupied Iraq is a propitious place for this
reversal. An added benefit of this privatization would be the undermining
of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), an cherished
goal of those in in the US who have been demanding the imposition of
neoliberal globalization on the oil industry world-wide.
Level 3: No Blood for
Neoliberalism
One of the main diplomatic failures of the Bush Administration has been to
give the impression that this new “world domination” strategy is a product
of a spontaneous Nietzschean will to power. Their claim that the urgency of
the Iraq invasion and take-over is due to some imminent threat to national
security posed by Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction has been rejected
even by many of their most loyal defenders. There is an emergency the Bush
Administration is responding to, but it is not a military one...it is
political-economic one.
The neoliberal system of
capitalist accumulation (what we in the US call “globalization”) that
replaced the Keynesian one in the late 1970s has been in deep crisis since
1997 and the Bush Administration must respond to this crisis or it too will
be thrown out by its masters (if not by its subjects!). One of the most
important questions of a neoliberal order is: who will be an enforcer when
countries wish to opt out of the system (for whatever reason). The US
government has decided that it is the only power capable to do the job and
Iraq’s Baathist regime was one of the glaring recalcitrants. Its
destruction was to have a “demonstration effect” on all other actual or
potential “rule breakers.”
Let us see how each these
levels have fared in the last year. As for Level I, the US did indeed get
to plunder Iraqi oil fields on the basis of its invasion and occupation of
the country with the assistance of the UN. For on May 22, 2003 the UN
Security Council not only lifted trade sanctions against Iraq but it also
placed the control of Iraqi oil revenues in US hands in Resolution 1483.
The mechanism to accomplish this transfer is “the Development Fund for Iraq”
in which all the UN oil-for-food moneys (approximately $13 billion) and all
future oil revenue go to. This Fund is managed by the US-controlled
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) until an “internationally recognized,
representative government of Iraq [is] properly constituted.” Though there
is an oversight board—composed of UN, IMF, World Bank, and Arab Fund for
Social and Economic Development members—this board has no power over
financial disbursement arrangements. The CPA has an absolute say over where
the money goes. Consequently, US firms like Bechtel have had an inside
track, especially since many of the contracts require a security clearance
that only US citizens can acquire. (The fate of the Fund is unclear in the
light of the creation of that chimerical being, the “transitional
government,” whose job is to write a constitution and prepare for elections
by December 2005.)
Level 2 has a similar story.
The US planners who followed in the van of the Abrams tanks and cruise
missiles were certainly determined to create a post-Saddam Iraq that was a
haven of free markets, “the best democracy money could buy,” and
privatization of government assets. The golden grail of such a quest, of
course, being the privatization of the oil industry itself. A significant
step in that direction was taken on September 19, 2003 when the CPA chief,
Paul Bremer, promulgated Order 39 which called for the privatization of two
hundred state companies; and permitted 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi
banks, mines and factories as well as 100% repatriation of profits.
The unilateral invasion of
Iraq and swift destruction of neoliberalism’s favorite pariah, Saddam
Hussein’s Baathist regime, definitely emboldened those who claimed that
only the US can save the neoliberal order from a nation-state exodus (our
Level 3). The invasion’s success certainly created a sense of caution among
neoliberalism’s nation-state recalcitrants that were on “supporters of
terrorism” and/or “failed state” lists in the State Department. There were
many different reactions to the invasion in the vicinity of Iraq, from the
Iranian theocrats’ ratcheting up the hard-line repression of their “liberal”
political opponents to the Libyan government’s swiftnessness in revealing
its nuclear program and settling the Lockerbee claims.
The US message from Baghdad
was heard far beyond the confines of the Middle East, however. US troops
continued to expand their bases into Central Asia, to return to the
Phillippines and Indonesia, and to reserve the right to intervene anywhere
neoliberalism was in trouble. For example, in December 2003 Jean-Bertrand
Aristide demanded as part of the bicentennial of the victory of the Haitian
Revolution $21 billion from the French government as repayment for the
reparations the French forced the Haitian government for nearly a century
to pay to the slave owners who were expropriated by the victorious slaves
at the end of the revolution. Such a demand, of course, was an anathema to
the neoliberal world order which only sees the past as the basis to impose
debt on workers and not vice versa! Aristide’s demand immediately led to
the “uprising” of the Cannibal Army in Gonaïves and the return of convicted
assassin Louis Hodel Chamblain to Haiti to initiate a coup d’etat that the
US military ended with the kidnapping of Aristide. Now there are thousands
of US (and French) troops in Haiti enforcing the neoliberal order and
stopping Aristide from “stirring up the past”!
However, the success of the
Iraq invasion on these three levels was soon checked by the rise of one of
the most remarkable military-political phenomena in recent history: the
armed resistance to the US occupation in Iraq. This resistance is
remarkable since it is an urban guerrilla without any significant foreign
state support, no rural safe havens, no external funding of any obvious
sort, no regular resupply routes, no open political organization with a
unified program, strategy and tactics. If the US, in a desperate effort to
create a legitimate organ by which to rule Iraq and its oil has given birth
to a political chimera, the CPA-IGC-transitional government, the resistance
it has unleashed is the equivalent of an “invisible hydra.” This resistance
has had important consequences for all these levels:
First, the resistance has, in
effect, made almost one half of the pipeline system for Iraqi oil
inoperable through sabotage for nearly a year.
Iraq’s operative oil fields
are in the northern and southern parts of the country. Before the war, the
southern oil was pumped to the Persian Gulf ports and shipped by tanker.
This is still happening and constitutes the bulk of Iraqi oil that is being
exported. The northern oil was largely sent by pipeline through Kurdistan
to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. This is the route that has largely been shut
down due to the persistant attacks of the resistance. The Wall Street
Journal (Europe) reported on March 1, 2004 that although exports from the
southern ports are about 1.5 million barrels a day, “Iraq’s only other
major export route—a pipeline from the northern oil fields at Kirkuk to
Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan—has yet to resume pumping on a
regular basis due to sabotage.” This fact puts into question many of the
CPA’s “Stalinoid”-smelling statistics being thrown around in the run-up to
the first anniversary of the invasion that proclaim oil exports had passed
the pre-invasion levels. Certainly, the effective loss of the northern
fields to the resistance undermines any US claim to completely control the
Iraqi oil production cycle.
Second, the resistence has
largely enforced the Hague Convention of 1907 (which denied the right of
conquorers to dispose of the non-military property of the defeated) and
made most of the Bush Administration’s ambitious privatization schemes “null
and void.”
Indeed, barely three months
after Bremer’s Order 39 was promulgated the resistance’s attacks were
credited (in an article in the December 28, 2003 edition of the Washington
Post by Rajiv Chandrasekaran) as the reason why the CPA had to “retreat”
from slash-and-burn privatizations and other “brilliant” neoliberal “solutions”
to Iraq’s many social and economic problems. Chandrasekaran gave as a
salient example the fate of a state-owned Vegetable Oil company which was
high on Bremer’s privatization list. The company’s director, Faez Ghani
Aziz, agreed with Bremer and he began to “downsize” the operation and look
for foreign investors. But in July 2003, as Chandrasekaran puts it:
After refusing to rehire
dozens of workers who had been dismissed before the war, Aziz,...was gunned
down on the way to work. His killing sent a wave of panic through the
Ministry of Industry. All of a sudden, no one wanted to talk about
privatization.
Indeed, by December 2003,
Chandrasekaran reports, the CPA stipulated that privatizations would be authorized
only if the purchasing corporations could guarantee that the new private
firms would not lay off any workers.
A similar retreat can be seen
from Bremer’s and the Bush Administration’s original goal of privatizing
the Iraqi oil industry during the occupation. That goal is now on hold
because of the resistance. Even the Iraqi Governing Council, whose members
were hand-picked by the US, has rejected Bremer’s repeated proposals to
privatize the oil industry. At best, Bremer is now feverously working on
re-establishing the national company, Iraq National Oil Co. (INOC), which
ran the oil sector from 1964 to 1987. The Hussein government dissolved the
INOC into the Ministry of Oil, to have even more direct control over it at
the end of the Iran-Iraq War. The idea behind reviving the INOC being,
according the Robert McKee, the oil chief in the CPA, that “a state oil
company...allows a significant outside investment in the industry”
(Reuters, 2/29/04, Iraq Co. to Run Oil Sector by July). Thus Bremer and Co.
must settle for “half a loaf,” due to the resistence.
This failure to privatize the
Iraqi economy (especially the oil sector) will also have consequences on
Iraq’s future relation to OPEC. For the Bush Administration assumed that,
under the supervision of the giant oil companies, the post-Saddam Iraq
would either leave OPEC or become a “spoiler” from the inside. But with a
resistance making such a privatization more problematic, the post-Saddam
oil industry might very well find itself in alliance with one or more of
its OPEC neighbors (Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait). At any rate, the vision
of an Iraq becoming the 21st century source for the profits of
the major US-based oil companies and low gas prices for its SUVs is
increasingly distant.
The Iraqi resistance has also
put into question the US government’s claim to be the SWAT team (or slave
catcher) of the neoliberal world order (our Level 3). This claim was pumped
up by the rapid collapse of the Hussein’s regime (and his pathetic
capture). Surely any “leader” of a Third World country thinking of
declaring a debt default or a foreign policy initiative antagonistic to the
US (like openly supporting the Cuban government) would remember those days
in Baghdad in late March of 2003, when the maximum leader was turned into a
mouse in a hole. But the fact that the resistance has tied the US military
down for almost a year and has forced its leaders to strain their personnel
to the limit has shown to the world that the Bush Administration is really
not capable of the title it claims for itself: being the military arbitor
of the world market. This failure will have tremendous consequences for the
fate of the US imperial ambitions as well as the future of the neoliberal
project.
3. Lies and Truth in
Politics
The moral of this story, then, seems to be: they in the Bush Administration
are liars, we in the anti-war movement are truth tellers, and that’s that.
They lied about the WMD, the Al-Quaida link, Saddam’s dangerousness to the
Iraqi people, and the lack of resistance the US troops would face during
the occupation. We told the truth about the Bushites’ real economic
motivations. In fact, the bulk of political discourse concerning Iraq in
the last year has been...philosophical, for want of a better word. The big
issues have been epistemological (i.e., who knew what, when and how?)
and/or semantic (i.e., who spoke falsehoods and who told the truth?).
Indeed, one of the most
commented upon recent revelations did not have to do with sex scandals in
the White House, but with the influence of a long dead political
philosopher on the thinking of the people around Dick Chaney and Donald
Rumsfeld: Leo Strauss! In Tim Robbins’ latest play, “Embedded,” Strauss’s
words are spoken by a mesmerized chorus of masked accolytes suggesting the
figures of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Condolezza Rice and others in the
Bush Administration’s inner circle. What was scandalous about Leo Strauss
that would get a rise out of Robbins? It is very simple: Strauss
transferred Plato’s famous justification of the philosopher kings and
queens lying to the lower classes in their utopia (what Plato called “the
noble lie”) to a contemporary democracy. Strauss—distaining the rhetoric of
transparancy in democratic discourse—argued that it was perfectly ethical
for wiser political heads to proclaim lies to the public as long as these
lies made it possible to make the political decisions that should be made
(but that the majority of people, knowing the truth, would have rejected).
The revelation of Strauss’s ideology
of ethical mendacity within the White House added to the importance of the
politics of truth (and falsehood), at least to the opponents of the Bush
Administration and the anti-war movement. We began to see the Bushites as
not just occassional, but principled liars who cannot be “found out” simply
because they believe that their lies are means to ethical ends, unlike Bill
Clinton’s purely utilitarian lies about his sexual relations with Monica
Lewinsky. Thus the question for us was, how can we in the anti-war movement
counter these “super-lies”? But for all our efforts, we could still only
get 18% of the population to believe that the Iraq War as an exchange of
blood for oil one year later!
Something is wrong. Perhaps we
are looking at the wrong end of the problem. Instead of studying the liar,
we should also examine the “liee,” i.e., the gullible one. The latter, not
the former, might be the source of the problem. Is there a will to believe
lies which is stronger that the will to lie? Is there something that Leo
Strauss forgot? Are the ignorant masses more cunning than their lying
masters? In order to explore this question, we will have to confront
another question: why do so many support the war when they can clearly see
the mendacity it is based on? What could their interest be in being
gullible? Is it that many of the 82% of the poll’s respondents who do not
believe that “control of Mideast oil” was a motivation for the Bush
Administration’s war on terrorism-based invasion of Iraq are saying something
to us? What could it be?
4. The Bush Deal
In order to begin to answer these questions about that enigmatic sphinx,
the US working class, let me return to the poll I started with. As I said,
polls are very tricky things and depend upon what question is asked. In
this case, the graph appearing in the Portland Press Herald was the product
of a compound question. The first question asked was: Do you think the US
led war on terrorism is a sincere effort to reduce international terrorism
or don’t you believe that? 67% of the polled in US responded “Yes” to that
question (whereas in Germany 29% answered “Yes”). The 27% in the US that
responded “Not sincere” or “Both” were then asked a subsequent question:
Why do you think the US is conducting the war on terrorism? Is control of
Mideast oil an important reason why the US is doing this or not? A large
part of that group answered “Yes.” Indeed, it made up 18% of the total of
the people polled in the US. Therefore, we are led to surmise that a large
majority of people in the US see the war in Iraq is part of the sincerely
motivated Bush Administration’s “war on terrorism.” Indeed, without
September 11, 2001 there probably would not have been a March 20, 2003.
But why is this the case in
the face of so much contrary evidence? Is there a will or an interest
behind so many US workers’ belief in the Bush Administration’s war on
terrorism? I think so, and it is important to isolate this interest,
examine it, and suggest substitutes for it. One way of understanding the “the
war on terrorism” and the military build-up it has justified (as well as
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) then, is that they are parts of a “deal”
the Bush Administration is offering to some workers in the US that will
give them limited guarantees of wages in a period when there is a
widespread perception that almost any job can be exported.
A key part of this deal is a
tremendous increase in the traditional military and the new “homeland
security” budgets which should lead to many new jobs. In one sense this
increased expenditure (financed by enormous budget deficits) is a form of “military
Keynesianism,” i.e., the use of government funds directed to the military
to “stimulate” economic activity in a period of decreasing private
investment and profitability. But the Bush Administration is anxious that
this increased expenditure is directed not to civil servants and government
agencies, but to private firms contracted to do the work that unionized
government workers did. This privatization of government services would
guarantee that the hundreds of billions of dollars increase in the Federal
budget that has taken place since Sept. 11, 2001 would not result in an
increase of the predominantly unionized government employment, but would
instead consign hiring procedures to private contractors (from cleaning
companies to “rent a soldier” operations) heavily relying on non-union
labor.
This anti-union privatization
would be the solution to the contradiction posed by the Bush Administration’s
revival of military Keynesianism with the neoliberal agenda’s commitment to
undermine any increase in workers’ power and security. The elements of this
contradiction was voiced by Michael Kalecki in the 1940s: how is it
possible for the state to invest in social reproduction without
strengthening the working class? Of course, capital’s general preference is
to invest in “disciplinary” branches like the police and military rather
than in housing, medical care or education, but even military/police
spending creates a guaranteed sphere of unionized employment for millions
of mechanics, secretaries and janitors. Indeed, government workers
constitute the largest segment of unionized workers that whose rate of
unionization (35%) has not declined in recent years.
The Bush Adminsitration’s plan
for a massive use of non-union private contractors that would at the same
time offer “national security” guaranteed jobs for US citizen workers
satisfies the conditions of the problem it faces. In effect, the Bush
Administration is proposing a subtle mixture of neoliberalism
(privatization) and Keynesian deficit spending to get and keep US capital
out of a crisis for the near future, which would, at the same time, promise
non-union jobs in a hugely expanded and privatized “national security” sector
to citizen workers while further driving immigrant workers into illegality
and wage slavery.
September 11, 2001 and March
20, 2003 together mark a turning point in the history of the US working
class, initiating a decisive crisis in the US workers’ rights to legally
resist exploitation and a temptation to turn against immigrants in the US
and workers in lands occuppied by the US military. Through the Patriot Act
and the Homeland Security Act, a powerful machine has been set in motion
intended to undermine unionization and contain working class organizing
drives and wage demands, especially in the case of immigrant workers,
presently the most militant US workers.
With the rhetoric of the “war
on terror” and “national security,” the Bush Administration has offered a
barbed deal to the US working class reminiscent of that offered to German
workers in the Depression. A select part of the working class, mostly white
or native-born, is being promised a future in an economy bloated by US
anti-terrorist and foreign war-related government procurements that foreign
companies (and workers) could not compete for because they would be labeled
“national security” contracts (and jobs) reserved for US companies and
workers. Thus, Bechtel and Halliburton are given contracts in Iraq because
they can meet “national security” clearance requirements foreign companies
cannot. Meanwhile, the remaining non-citizen workers in the US must live
under the threat of being labeled “terrorists”—should their activism exceed
what business can accommodate to—and of being stripped of their rights, at
best deported, at worst incarcerated for an indefinite time in a
concentration camp like Guantanamo.
This complex “deal,” I claim,
is increasingly being identified with the “war on terrorism.” Consequently,
the use of this term is not simply an expression of some personal fear of
actual terrorist attacks but is increasingly become a code term for the new
form of military Keynesianism which promises jobs and a little job security
to US citizen workers fearful of the international competition. In other
words, the war on terrorism is less and less about images of the collapsing
Twin Towers and more and more about billions of dollars of government
contracts and millions of jobs that are going along with them.
Will the “citizen workers” of
the US accept this deal and will non-citizen US workers silently suffer
their condemnation to “wage slavery”? Their collective choice remains
unclear as of the moment. But what we know is that in the last two years,
about two hundred and sixty cities (including the city of Portland, Maine
as of March 15, 2004!) have passed resolutions defending their residents’
(especially immigrants’) civil rights from the threat posed by the Patriot
Act, the Homeland Security Act and the related legislation. Moreover,
immigrant workers are refusing to become invisible. For example, in the
face of enormous intimidation, in the Fall of 2003 hundreds of immigrant
workers undertook a “Freedom Ride” across the country, from Los Angeles to
Washington, with stops in dozens of towns and cities, to make their case to
other workers against the provisions of the Patriot Act and similar
anti-immigrant legislation. These are small but significant harbingers of
the decisive decisions that are to be taken by the US proletarians in the
coming year that could lead to the rejection of the Bush Administration’s “war
on terrorism” deal. Can the anti-war movement’s use its resources to
strengthen the rejection of the deal?
5. A Politics of Truth?
If we still want a politics of truth in a world of the master’s lies and
the precisely-timed gullibility of many of our fellow US workers, then we
must be truthful with ourselves, sober up and assess our situation and the
possibilties for effective action.
First, we should recognize
some of the unique elements of our situation, the most important being that
we are opposing a war of occupation waged against an Iraqi resistance
movement that has no discernable political program, strategy, or even
tactics. This is quite different from the anti-Vietnam war movement of the
1960s and early 1970s and of the anti-Central America War movement of the
1980s (the training ground of many older militants of the present
movement). In those previous movements the US government’s opponent was
well known. Whatever you thought of them, the Vietcong, the FMLN, and the
Sandanistas were political organizations with a public, even international
presence in contact with the US anti-war movements. This is not the case
with the Iraqi resistance in 2004. We are ignorant about something we
should know about. We must face the political vulnerbility of our ignorance
and work hard to turn this ignorance to knowledge.
Second, the situation is going
to change on July 1, 2004. Using a classic “prestidigital” trick, the Bush
Administration on that day will swiftly transform an occupying army into an
“invited police force” asked to keep order by a “transitional” government
concerned about terrorism in its borders. At that very moment, guerrilla
resistance fighters will officially become terrorists, and hence open to
the kind of treatment accorded to fighters in Afghanistan (including
shipment to Guantanamo). Our movement will then have to face the
consequences of this categorical slight-of-hand, since we will find
ourselves attacked by the Bush Administration as supporters of terrorism.
The key to the trick was the recent “constitution” “passed” by the US-hand
picked Iraqi Governing Council and approved by the CPA. This constitution
(especially with all its attractive civil liberties trappings) must be
decisively deligitimated by our movement. In this fight, we should remember
that “constitutions” are fetishized by many in the US working class, so we
have to confront many of the prejudices that have “frozen” political change
in the US for the last two hundred years.
Third, let me say this again, “respect
your enemies.” The antiwar movement’s lack of interest in the Bush
Administration is one reason why we fail to grasp the underlying
imperatives propelling its actions. We look at the ungrammatical President,
the secretive Vice-President, the Dr. Strangelovian Secretary of Defense
and the Lady Macbeth-like National Security Advisor and conclude that they
are “just” lackies of a right-wing conspiracy fueled by the “majors” in oil
industry. Such reductionism is not completely accurate, for they are
responding to a major crisis throughout the machinery of capitalism that
goes beyond (but definitely includes) the profits of the oil companies and
the “control of Mideast oil.” The Bush Administration has offered a “solution”
to this crisis: a war on terrorism, and all that it means. Their political
replacements (perhaps the Democrats) might offer a more multilateral, more
union-friendly varient of “the war on terrorism” or a completely “new”
solution, but either option must deal with the world-wide crisis of
neoliberalism, because that is their business as residents of the White
House.
Fourth, we not only must
understand the “invisible hydra” of the Iraqi resistance. There is a Sphinx
closer to home whose riddle needs to be answered: the US working class. It
is a complex beast and bitterly divided within itself. Many of the 67% of
US workers who attested in the poll to their belief in the sincerity of the
Bush Administration’s commitment to the war on terrorism are terrorized all
right, but not of Al-Quaida personally blowing them up. They are
terrorified of being made jobless and homeless by the power of capital to
move beyond US borders and use foreign workers against them. That is why
the “helping hand” from capital that the Bush Administration is offering
white or citizen workers through the “war on terrorism” is so attractive.
It holds out the possiblity to them that they can escape the international
competition for jobs in a globalized labor market through their status as “loyal”
citizens which will make them “irreplacable.” Can our movement offer a
better answer to the real terror of the US working class?
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