No War but the Class
War
The following page is a collection of documents by the group
Internationalist Perspective, along with an introduction by Red
& Black Notes
Days like These
The consequences of the horrific slaughter witnessed upon the
citizens of New York on September 11 continue to echo around the
globe. It is likely that the spectacular suicide crashes of the two
aircraft into New York's World Trade Center buildings will be
remembered for decades to come.
Yet the atrocity is not the unique occurrence many commentators
have described: Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Mei Lai; the
death camps of Treblinka, Auschwitz; the Soviet gulag. All litter the
political landscape of recent memory. Whether carried out by states
under the "justification" of national self-defence, or by national
liberation or other armed organizations, the use of terror against
civilian populations has an all too common feel to it. What is new in
the events of September 11 is that they took place in the heart of
the United States, signaling that the world's most powerful
imperialist nation and only remaining superpower will no longer be
excluded from the cycles of terror that have been a reality for so
many other nations for so long.
Indeed, as capital has pushed across the globe, its social polices
have been responsible for creating global shanty-towns of
hopelessness; themselves spawning grounds for the politics of
desperation and hatred displayed on September 11. In the case of
Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network, there is a particularly
ironic twist: It has become common knowledge that he was a creation
of the US proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980's.
Bin Laden's providers, the Taliban militia were themselves the
creation of US-ally Pakistan. This horrific Frankenstein is not an
isolated incident. Just as in the case of Saddam Hussein and Manuel
Noriaga, the US has created a puppet that has learned to walk without
strings.
Instead of asking the forbidden "why," the actions are attributed
to "evil" men who must be made to pay The natural outpourings of
grief and sympathy for the victims of September 11 however, have been
pushed into a sinister direction. Shortly after September 11 US
President Bush announced "You're either for us, or you're for the
terrorists." Across North America the cry has been not whether civil
liberties will be curtailed in the "war against terrorism," but by
how much. Although "terrorist groups" are allegedly the focus, the
state will not waste time turning its suspicious eye toward leftist
organizations it deems insufficiently patriotic. In Ontario, even
before September 11, the state and cops publicly referred to the
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty as
a terrorist group. But for capital, although a symbol of capitalism
was destroyed, life has gone on. Not a day has gone by when a firm
laying off thousands of workers has not solemnly declared "everything
has changed since September 11 . . . " and that's why we're firing
you: Oil prices jump, the airline industry sheds massive numbers of
workers, banks show record profits.
Opposition to the war in Afghanistan has largely fallen into two
reciprocal groups. The most popular approach has been to argue that
"war is not the answer." This is merely the tired old slogan of
negotiation and sanctions. Many who argued that bombing Iraq was not
the answer to the invasion of Kuwait readily agreed to support
sanctions. Sanctions, that are still in place and have cost hundreds
of thousands of lives. Ironically some of those who call for "peace"
are secretly revolutionaries. In the US, the Workers
World Party (WWP) formed its own anti-war coalition, Act Now to
Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) which, at a recent demonstration
in San Francisco carried signs which read "save American Lives by
stopping US Aggression abroad." Similar sentiments can be found in
Canada. As reported in the October 24th issue of Socialist Worker,
the newspaper of the International
Socialists, as Canadian troops sailed to the Middle East members
of the IS joined a protest carrying peace signs and wrote "we were a
presence both in solidarity [!] with the troops themselves
and against Canadian involvement in the war."
The other position taken by some on the left has been to say
"Defend Afghanistan against Imperialist Attack." The
Spartacist League (International Communist League ) and the
International Bolshevik
Tendency in the eighties quite rightly criticized other leftist
groups for their back handed support of the CIA-backed Mujahadeen
fighters who today include both sections of the Taliban and the
Northern Alliance. Ironically, in the name of a curious
"anti-imperialism" they have now switched sides in the conflict; even
though few groups have been willing to call the Taliban
"anti-imperialist" who can deny they are fighting an imperialist
power?
Despite the apparent difference between these two positions they
are in reality merely a reflection of the same worldview: A
re-division of the world according to a new imperialist balance of
power. The articles contained in this pamphlet are drawn from a
different political tradition and perspective: One which sees that
capitalism is a global system and that as a global system, it will
not alter the balance of forces to support larger or smaller
imperialist powers.
Fischer / December 5, 2001
A slightly different version
of this introduction appears in Red
& Black Notes #14
Four of the five articles published here are by the organization
International Perspective, which publishes a magazine of the same
name. Information concerning publication details follow each article.
For more information about IP, contact them directly by writing to as
follows to
AM : PO Box 40231
Staten Island, NY, 10304, USA
The Reality of the First War of the
Twenty-First Century
Refuse Both Terrorism and Militarism
The Rationality of Self-Destruction
Profit Kills
Islamism: Political Ideology and
Movement
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