The
terrorists and their enemies have a lot in common, in the first place their
disdain for human life, their willingness to engage in mass-murder in order to
promote their power and profits. Does anyone doubt that the US in its response
to the attacks, is willing to kill far more innocents than perished in the WTC?
The "first war of the twenty-first century" is
a capitalist war, that is to say, its causes, origins, unfolding and goals are
integrally linked to the monstrous trajectory of capitalism as a mode of
production, a system, a civilization. While this may seem to be an abstraction,
inadequate to the horror of the destruction wrought on September 11, without an
understanding of this link between capitalism and the carnage that we have
experienced, we will be trapped within the "logic" of this war,
without a way to resist it. This link can be seen in three ways.
The roots, the socio-economic seedbed for the terrorist
attack on New York, and the death of thousands of innocent civilians, most of
them workers, lie in the rage and hatred born of a civilization that produces
misery, alienation, humiliation, and death for an ever-increasing mass of the
world's population. That, and a sense of powerlessness, is the source of the
anger, the visceral loathing for America, for the West, and its symbols, which
has propelled elements of the professional strata in the Islamic world to
recruit armies for this war, to mobilize the frustrations and desperation of
masses of Muslims for a "Jihad," or at least to see in the carnage of
New York a blow against what they conceive to be the source of their misery,
material and spiritual. While those conditions exist, and are growing at an exponential
rate, throughout those parts of the world which capitalism and its global
economy have turned into vast shanty-towns, it is -- for the moment -- in the
Muslim world where the specific cultural and political bases for such a war
have coalesced.
Because
the global economy can produce far more than can be sold at a profit, the more
it develops, the more people are expelled from productive activity as so much
excess productive capacity. While global capital creates impoverishment
everywhere, in the vast expanses of much of what used to be designated the
"Third World" it has already literally created a death-world where
millions are condemned to starvation, civil war, and an existence devoid of any
hope. Ancient, pre-capitalist modes of production and cultures are relentlessly
being destroyed by the "progress" of global capital. But this does
not result in the incorporation of the mass of the population into the new
capitalist economic, cultural, and social relations. Rather, it condemns the
mass of the population to a miserable existence in the vast new shanty-towns,
where unemployment, disease and death are the hallmarks of the urban life that
has arisen on the destruction of the pre-capitalist world of the farm and
village. So long as "progress" takes this form, so long as capital
presides over the economic, cultural, and political life of humanity, these
conditions will grow -- and with them the certainty that the violence and
hatred they breed will spawn nationalist political movements that will seek out
targets in the industrial and technological metropoles of which the World Trade
Center was the symbol.
The political movements that are mobilizing this rage
and hatred, Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbollah, the Taliban, do not
represent a reactionary movement seeking to recreate the village world of a --
largely -- mythic Islamic past. Rather, they embody an ideology and practice
that is as modern as that of Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, or Pol-Potism, an
ideology and practice that seeks to challenge the global hegemony of American
or Western capital, against which it will wage war with suicide bombers today,
and if it succeeds in creating an "Islamic" state in the Muslim
world, with modern armies and the same chemical and nuclear weapons with which
the West has armed itself. Within the "pure" state it seeks to
create, women are defined as biologically inferior, Hindus must wear the yellow
badge, and the "Christian-Jewish crusaders" must be exterminated. The
ideology and practice embodied by the Taliban bears a far greater resemblance
to Nazi Germany or Pol-Pot's Cambodia than to the Islamic past. Racialization,
the designation of segments of the population as the Other, a bacillus or virus
to be exterminated, is not an atavistic revival of a pre-capitalist past but
the dark side of the trajectory of capitalism, which had already made the
twentieth century into a charnel house. This racialization, inseparable from
nationalism, is the product of capitalism as a civilization. That it is
embodied in leaders dressed in robes and turbans does not make it any less a
manifestation of that very civilization, any less the noxious product of it.
This first war of the twentieth-first century will be a
capitalist war too in the way it will be waged by the US and its allies. The
face of war was transformed by capitalism in the twentieth century, first in
World War One when masses of conscripts, primarily workers and peasants, were
slaughtered on the battlefields, and then in World War Two when the civilian
population constituted the bulk of the victims -- a result of the technologies
of mass destruction, and the ideologies by which their use was justified. In
mobilizing its resources to crush its enemies today, we can anticipate that the
US will move in the following ways. Once it designates those regimes that
harbor the terrorist leadership, it may unleash assaults with high tech
weapons. The inevitable result of such tactics will be massive civilian deaths
and casualities in the countries attacked; far greater than the five thousand
inflicted by the terrorists in New York on September 11. Such a tactic,
however, may make the situation of Muslim regimes allied to the US untenable,
an outcome which the US administration seeks to avoid at all costs. Thus, the
US may prefer to wage this war, at least at the outset, by assisting Arab and
Muslim regimes to crush "their own" Islamic fundamentalists, and
thereby both assure the stability of those regimes, now threatened by the same
groups that struck in New York, and deny the terrorists the safe havens on
which they depend. Musharraf in Pakistan, Arafat in Palestine, Mubarak in
Egypt, the Generals in Algeria, all are threatened by Al Qaeda and the
multitude of groups to which it is linked. As the war waged by the Algerian
military against the Armed Islamic Group shows, such a war deliberately targets
civilians and depends on state terror for any success. It is just such an orgy
of state terror, backed by the US, that we can expect to see in this first war
of the twenty-first century -- that and the use of high-tech weaponry designed
to rain death and destruction on civilian populations. To wage this war, The
American state seeks to galvanize the population with appeals to patriotism
behind which a militarization of society will occur, one in which any
opposition to war will be equated with support for terrorism. At the same time,
the global recession, which had already begun, will also be blamed on
terrorism, uncoupled from the very trajectory of capitalism which has produced
it. Attacks on the living and working conditions of the working class will be
justified by it and the resistance of workers to them will be slandered as aid
to the terrorists. The atrocity
perpetrated on September 11, and the atrocities to come in this first war of the
twenty-first century, are the product of the profit-system, of capitalism, and
will only disappear when that system does too.
This is a war that those who grasp the link between the
carnage in New York and capitalism must resist, even as we recognize that the
terrorists who unleashed it are themselves the barbaric embodiment of the same
civilization that has produced the rage and desperation from which it
sprang.
INTERNATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE
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