Depleted Uranium –

US Weapon of Mass Destruction A study issued by the Pentagon last summer stated that there is no link between illnesses suffered by US Gulf veterans and the use of depleted uranium in the Gulf. The study was intentionally focused on kidney damage caused by immediate high level radioactive exposure ignoring all long-term hazards. 1 This is hardly surprising coming from the same military that still refuses to accept Vietnam veterans claims concerning exposure to the dioxin in Agent Orange. Dioxin being one of the most toxic chemicals ever made.

Depleted Uranium is one of the heaviest naturally occurring elements on earth with one cubic centimeter weighing 18.95 grams. When a shell containing depleted uranium is fired it heats up and is capable of cutting through metal like a knife through butter. Upon exploding it spreads an oxidized uranium dust releasing alpha radiation that is toxic when airborne or when ingested. This substance is a byproduct of the nuclear weapons and power industries, composed mostly of uranium isotope-238 and was first used in the process of creating enriched uranium. Alpha radiation accumulates in bone and organ tissues, it has the long term side effects of cancer, leukemia and birth defects. An estimated 630,000 pounds of depleted uranium ammunition were used during the Gulf War, one million rounds of this ammunition were fired. Increased incidences of lymphomas, leukemia and brain cancer are found among US veterans who served in the Persian Gulf. Cancer rates in southern Iraq have increased by 200 percent.

It is likely that equivalent effects of contamination can be found in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

The US military long sought a use for this byproduct and a chance to use it in a situation of battle was absolutely necessary in order to establish its usefulness and potential for sale. Both the European powers and the US had huge stockpiles of the material left over from the nuclear industries just sitting around. As the nuclear power industry faced ever greater internal opposition, new nuclear power plants were no longer built, so that by the time the imperialist rival the USSR collapsed the US military was already looking for other potential uses for this byproduct of both the nuclear weapons and power industries. The Iraqi army, largely composed of ground troops and armored vehicles, made perfect target practice for these new weapons. After the Gulf War the US came to completely dominate the world's arms market, by 1995 the US had finally gained a 55 percent majority of all arms sales. Beyond control of the flow of oil, military actions also aid the sale of weapons, the ability to demonstrate to potential buyers a combat track record is an enormous bonus in the sale of arms.

To gain a foothold in the Central Asia it is necessary have an occasional show of force. The US is seeking to shut out Russia and Europe and control as much of the future flow of oil as possible. As new pipelines are planned to go through neighboring countries like Iraq are seen as regionally destabilizing menace. The US military has used the bogey man of Saddam Hussein attempting to justify its imperialist actions by talking of the possibility that this "new Hitler" might use biological weapons or that it could potentially develop a nuclear capability. The irony is that this initiative against Iraq comes from the world's number one arms dealer, the one military with the most of everything. The pacifist/labor left-wing of the ruling class has hardly begun to address this. Beyond a few veterans advocacy groups, very little has been said in relation to US military action in the Gulf and the US use of a real weapon of mass destruction. Not a hypothetical Iraqi capacity for a hypothetical weapon but a real weapon that will continue to do long term damage particularly on its primary victims, Iraqi workers, for years to come.

One might think that the use of depleted uranium "weapons of mass destruction" by the US military would be the kind of hypocrisy that could be publicized to some advantage by forces of the democratic capitalist left. This will probably not happen since the enemy of US imperialism is seen as too terrible and in need of the retribution of the "international community" (the robbers' league of the UN). The constant missile attacks on "Iraqi weapons sites" are a part of a conflict which cannot be couched in terms of a bad imperialist superpower against the saintly forces of a national liberation movement, thus the official opposition will not oppose the role of the US government as they did during the Contra war in Nicaragua in the eighties. It is a conflict of world imperialist domination with a brutal regional nationalist power serving as a whipping boy for the US overlord. The humanitarian rhetoric of the will of the international community has also allowed the left to look the other way, if it has democracy attached to it then it must be good, or so the remnants of the US left seem to have us believe. In this respect depleted uranium weapons become just a footnote in the bloody story of the Pax Americana.

1 Sullivan, Kathleen. Pentagon Study Called a Fabrication. SF Examiner.

August 5, 1998.

The Origins of Our Political Tendency

An Introduction

The following article is one that strikes at the heart of the popular history of the United Front of Stalinism and Democracy against the "common enemy" of fascism. To this day the liberals and leftists of the ruling class use the threat of fascist evil lurking behind every republican to mobilize support for the democratic faction of the ruling class. This keeps workers involved in a system that oppresses them. Far from being a critique of democracy as some kind of "social-fascism" it describes how workers were removed from the terrain on which they are able to fight the bourgeoisie and used in a merciless inter-imperialist conflict.

The original article was printed in the theoretical journal, Prometeo, of December 1, 1943.

It is part of a series of translations of selections from the archives of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt). It is important to show that our political tendency did not just appear in a puff of smoke or was thought up in the comfort of an armchair. Being translated from Italian it may at times seem awkward in English but it reveals some of the origins of Internationalist Communists and clarifies much of what may be confusing about the positions of left-communists towards democracy and fascism. T

The internal commissions mentioned in the article were organs of state power within the workplace they gave an appearance of representation and decision making but were an outgrowth of the fascist unions. The government of Badoglio that took over immediately after the fall of the Fascists, simply put the Stalinist Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Socialist Party in charge of making these organizations a part of machinery of democratic capitalist industrial conflict resolution.

These founding comrades were active in workers' struggles against wartime austerity in Italy and carried on agitation against the forces of Stalinism and democracy under the most difficult of circumstances. By countering propaganda for united fronts and national fronts with the question of proletarian revolution they faced the organized wrath of both factions of the ruling class.

The Internationalist Communist Party and the Communist Workers' Organization today form the International Bureau for a Revolutionary Party (IBRP). Internationalist Notes is published as a leaflet by sympathizers of the IBRP in the US.

Demagogy - Democratic and Fascist

The Reality of Class

Each belligerent state has failed in convincing the working masses of the supreme necessity and sanctity of the massacre and thus adopts a certain social tint or a downright socialist facade. The National Socialism of Hitler has served as a cover for the military preparation of Germany; the "slow beverage" served Churchill as a means of gaining sacrifice of workers in the present for the promise of an easy life and a tranquil old age in the future. This social demagogy is all the more necessary the more profound the crisis of the bourgeois system becomes. Thus in the states in whose social decay and internal political threat is founded, the same bourgeois society feels the necessity of supporting itself through analogous treatments of aesthetic surgery. Not by accident, the fascist republic, the point of least resistance within the global capitalist edifice is self-proclaimed as socialist in order to regain the confidence of the proletariat that it so sensationally lost.

This maneuver is in itself puerile and is one of the most startling examples of capitalist degeneration. This coming from the very same bourgeoisie that in the massive social crisis of the last post-war period raised the subject of fascism, a movement republican and "proletarian", then in a confused yet ingenuous twist removed its mask and revealed its nature as a monarchical movement both reactionary and patronal. With this form the bourgeoisie hoped to forever demolish the last threat to its rule by sweeping the proletariat into the abyss of the militaristic adventure.

This same bourgeoisie is pulverizing the proletariat again and wearing the old demagogic cloak of 1919 in hopes of harnessing to itself a part of the working masses as if it were their gravedigger. Twenty years of anti-proletarian reaction passed in vain with the capitalists orgy, shamelessly absorbing profit in the shadow of the minimum salary, under the protection of tariffs, of autarchy and finally of war.

With a stroke of a wand, capitalism transformed itself into...socialism.

Now what is this socialism which the Fascist Party heralds as having a revolutionary function?

-A socialism made of the so-called "wages adaptation" and of profit-sharing schemes (which is a weapon half a century old), with which the ruling class has often tried to make the workers interested in the company's fate, promising them an invitation at lunch on the end of the year;

-A socialism of the defense of the small farmer, of the production and distribution-coops; of the expropriation of the poorly cultivated or uncultivated lands;

-A socialism which revives the obligatory themes of the most worn out and easy-going reformism; -A socialism which engages itself to rebuild the internal commissions and to give birth to a general confederation of only workers freely elected, while it stirs up in the proletarian centers and in the factories a pitiless reaction;

-A socialism, above all, which declares the intention of putting labor at the center of the State, but suddenly hastens to declare private property as inviolable and protected by the State;

-A socialism that threatens war against the world plutocracies, but refuses class struggle, and to the contrary wishes conciliation between the classes;

-A socialism that thunders against the monopoly capital, but does not have the courage of discussing the nationalization of monopolies.

Equitable salary, participation of the employable, profit sharing, internal commissions, free unions, cooperation of production and consumption, another step and the social program of the five or six anti-fascist parties would perfectly match that of the republican fascists. Thus it does justice to our thesis that fascism and democracy are but two sides of the same coin. This is only natural, in fascist republican Italy the social measures of the fascist program extended itself so far as to render the German war more popular. In democratized Italy this same program tended to lend popularity to the English war.

The demagogy, accordingly, is of both sides. At the bottom of this is hidden a tragically serious reality; the reality of a social crisis for whom the dominant class is already alerted to the symptoms that threaten it, and for which it preoccupies itself to delay at whatever cost the collapse. Be sure that in order they not yield on the important question of their class domination - the bourgeoisie, fascist or democratic will tomorrow (and today as well) be inclined to yield on secondary questions.

By augmenting salaries a little, giving up their resistance to the internal commissions that have many ways of corrupting, or by lifting control on the entrance of preventatively narcotized workers' organizations. It is also possible that, in extremes, they concede something more and in this game they find a fraternal apogee of support in the opportunism of the self-styled workers' parties. Today it is our duty to unmask the maneuver of this old yet forever vigorous arm of the collaboration that blunts the revolutionary impulse of the proletariat and to always demonstrate that the solution of the social crisis cannot occur within the confines of the economy and the capitalist state - this is a primary fundamental act which presupposes the broad sweep of the proletarian revolution.

Demagogia democratica e fascista e realtà di classe (Prometeo 12/1/43)

Economic Rhetoric Hides Reality of Worsening Conditions for US Workers

Beneath the rhetoric of an eternal economic boom where all are prosperous lies a reality that continues to fester. This is not the reality that the press as a whole looks for and it is not one that will be heard from the parties of the center and left. The current crisis in the world economy has been avoided by a government that is foisting off US goods and continuing to encourage debt and spending as a way of boosting an economy that cannot continue as it is.

When the regulations governing the administration of welfare money were changed in 1996 the state of Wisconsin had already become a test site for the reform of the welfare system. A study released in the beginning of this year found that 38% of those on currently on the Wisconsin Works program couldn't find a job. Furthermore, the average wage of those newly employed stands at $7.42 per hour and that 68% of those surveyed state that they are just barely making it financially. 1 Wage averages in the US between 1980 and 1997 dropped despite two recessions and two anemic recoveries. According to US census bureau statistics measured in 1982 dollars as a constant, average hourly wages from '80 to '97 dropped from $7.78 to $7.55. These official statistics counted 36,529,000 US citizens living in poverty. 2 Even though by their own estimates at least 4 million citizens went uncounted, almost all of these were poor or lower-income workers. 3 In these carefully tailored figures, part-time workers are counted as full time employees and workers who have multiple part-time jobs are counted as multiple full-time employees. When a company that employs 600 workers lays-off 200 workers it arbitrarily falls below 500 employee mark and becomes listed as a small business, this is listed as a gain in four hundred small business jobs.

As a result of the economic crisis that started in Asia and Russia the World Bank saw the risk of an even more generalized recession coming in 1999, despite the rosy economic rhetoric coming from the government.

Speculation, which is endemic to the capitalist system has been belatedly targeted by the world's baking institutions. The governor of the Bank of Thailand, Chatu Mongol Sonakul stated, "It doesn't make sense that you run your own financial system well and with rules...and the financial system, internationally has no rules." The ruling class has no new solutions to the crises that affect it. After the many joyful proclamations issuing from the Federal Reserve stating that the economic crisis in Brazilian markets will not affect the US there lies the fact that 2,000 US based multinational corporations do business in Brazil. One third of all US trade goes to Mexico, Central and South America. As markets for US goods shrink, the trade deficit continues to grow indicating a real tightening of the screw on an economy which will eventually be due for a serious "correction".

The crisis in the Latin American markets has caused the ruling classes of the countries of Argentina and Mexico to seriously consider adopting the US dollar as currency in the interests of economic stability. It is a call for a monetary union within the US economic bloc meant to emulate and surpass the recent monetary union in Europe under the banner of the Euro that itself was at least partially meant to combat the power of the dollar.

By the middle of February, the Japanese central bank cut the already low interest rates in an attempt to encourage increased borrowing and bring the economy quickly out of its downslide. Just a week previous to this the head of the economic planning agency had proclaimed that the Japanese economy had hit bottom and would begin to recover by the second half of '99. The trouble is the Japanese bourgeoisie can only do what every other troubled national economy seeks to do, borrow and export their way to a brighter future.

The reigning thought in US economics is that a positive attitude and status as a superpower will forever manage to forestall worsening cyclical crises even when the economic upturns become weaker and weaker every time.

Capitalism is still doomed but workers do have a choice of whether to destroy it or be doomed along with it.

1 Associated Press. Study Targets Welfare in Wisconsin. January 13, 1999.

2 US Bureau of the Census Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1998 (118th edition.) Washington, DC, 1998. 3 Associated Press. Court: Census Can't Use Estimates. January 25, 1999.