The Reality of the First War of the Twenty-First Century

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 causalities in the countries attacked. 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

Originally published as a leaflet September 2001

No War But the Class War

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