Five
years into the occupation of Iraq
and seven years after the war in Afghanistan started the Americans
and their allies are bogged down in an unwinnable situation. Even if they
withdraw from Iraq
in the medium term future, the political and social repercussions of the war
will go on for decades. The attempt to carve out a new sphere of influence in
the Middle East, and thus guarantee oil
supplies has proven to be a lot more difficult than the American Imperialists
imagined, and serves to demonstrate the limits to the power that they can
wield. The New World Order has become disorder and the economic and financial
crisis in America
brilliantly confirms Trotsky’s analysis when he explained that the cost of the
growth of American Imperialism was to accumulate “dynamite in its foundations”.
The
world centre of economic power has, as Trotsky predicted decisively shifted
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in other words from Europe and America to
Asia and America. At the same time the
growth of the Chinese and Indian economies is driving both countries to seek
out new markets and their own ‘spheres of influence’, particularly in Africa,
in the case of China. Meanwhile, the Russian bourgeoisie have begun to expand
their influence in Latin America and as the recent debacle in Georgia shows
they are flexing their muscles within their own ‘sphere of influence’. Interestingly
the European Union was at complete loggerheads in this situation as it
illustrated the contradictions between the ‘partners’.
The
collapse of Stalinism ended a period of relative stability in global relations,
the nuclear stand off and the existence of a significant number of deformed
worker’s states meant that the world was effectively divided into two camps.
For the ex colonial countries there was an alternative to the domination of
American imperialism and a number of countries experienced revolutions which
carried through the nationalisation of the economy, but developed on Stalinist
lines because of the absence of an independent movement of the working class
and a revolutionary internationalist leadership.
The
reasons behind the constant struggle between the rival imperialist powers are
rooted in the nature of capitalism itself. Frederick Engels pointed out in ‘The
Dialectics of Nature’ that the only constant in nature was change and the 19th
and 20th centuries show clear evidence of this in the way that
capitalism developed. Years earlier he and Karl Marx writing in the ‘Communist
Manifesto’ explained the way that the development of the world market tore up
the old social relations that had existed for years as capitalism spread its
tentacles across the globe. Lenin went on to develop an understanding of the
way that imperialism worked; the fusion of finance capital and the state, and
he and Trotsky explained in the early days of the Communist International the
contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the nation
state, building on Marx and Engels’ view as to how private ownership acted as a
straitjacket on the development of the productive forces. Of course by then the
contradictions between the ‘great powers’ had led to the imperialist slaughter
of the First World War, and the re-division of the world in the interests of
the victors.
What
is vital to understand is that the factors that gave rise to the First World
War and the Second, and basically every other war since, are a product of the
way that capitalism and even individual capitalists are forced to behave. The
struggle for raw materials and markets to sell finished goods inevitably leads
to conflict, war and horror without end for hundred of millions of workers and
peasants, particularly in the ex colonial countries. The outlines of this
process were already apparent when Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, when
effectively there was only one fully industrialised country in the world,
before some of the major European powers of today like Germany and Italy
actually existed as nation states.
Capitalism
is forced to grow just to stand still. Competition forces the bourgeoisie to
invest to produce goods cheaper and faster than their competitors and find new
markets to exploit. Colonial expansion fuelled by the development of the link
between finance capital and the state gave rise to a series of rival
imperialisms that sooner or later ended up in direct conflict with one another.
The
collapse of Stalinism resulted in the USA becoming the sole super power on a
world scale, the ‘New World Order’. But at the same time, a capitalist Russia is a
completely different beast to the old Stalinist Soviet Union. Russia today is
driven by the same laws of capitalism, the same ‘market forces’ that drive the
development of US imperialism, British, French and German imperialism. The
period after the Second World War seems like a golden age of stability by
comparison.
Even
in US imperialism’s back
yard the Russians are gaining a greater influence, as witnessed by the arms
deals with Venezuela
and joint military exercises. But despite the bloody history of US imperialism, the revolutionary movement
across the whole of Latin America has been
able to develop onto a higher level.
The
US
received a bloody nose in the Vietnam war, which reflected the fact that there
were limits to the power of imperialism and reaction on a world scale. The
drain of resources in Iraq and Afghanistan represents an objective difficulty
for the Americans, and so they have been forced to operate by Proxy, through
the ‘Escualidos’ (counter-revolutionaries) and the oligarchy in
Venezuela and the fascist reaction in Bolivia. US imperialism maintains
Colombia as an armed camp and is acutely aware of the risks to capitalism posed
by the Bolivarian revolution, but provided that the movement in Venezuela
continues to move forward they are restricted in their actions. It is vital
that the lessons of the Pinochet coup in Chile are thoroughly understood. The
bourgeois state is the biggest obstacle to the successful conclusion of the
Venezuelan Revolution.
The
experience of the post war period has been of small wars, revolutions and
counter revolutions, wherein the big powers tended to act by proxy. But the
collapse of Stalinism in Yugoslavia
and the fragmentation of the Balkans that followed indicated that Europe was not immune to the instability that was more
apparent on a world scale.
The
carnage in Yugoslavia
gave an opportunity for German, British, American and Russian imperialism to
expand their interests into the Balkans, in the same way that the Balkans used
to reflect the rival interests of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman
empires in the past.
During
the nineteenth century Kropotkin said that “the usual condition in Europe is war”.
During the first half of the 20th century this was doubly the case.
But the world economic boom that took place between 1948 and 1973 allowed
capitalism to partly solve some of its problems for a temporary period. As
such, together with the apparent ossification of relations between Western imperialism
and Stalinism, Europe was ‘peaceful’. The fact was however that it was an armed
camp with nuclear weapons, thousands of troops, tanks and B52 bombers. But it
was a period of relative stability.
Recent
events in Afghanistan and Iraq
have created serious contradictions within NATO as the individual states have
come under pressure from the working class to pull out and end the wars. As we
reported recently a group of serving and ex senior military commanders produced
a major document which argued that NATO should retain a “Nuclear Pre-emptive
Strike Capacity”. The document went on to list the contradictions and problems
within the alliance and record the major threats that they considered NATO had
to contend with.
The
whole of world politics and economics is decisively affected by the world
market. Even in a boom, the speed at which money can be transferred from one
stock to another, from one currency or one continent to another is
breathtaking. No one country can stand outside of the world market for long.
Even China,
which was previously not integrated into the world economy, is now influenced
by world demand, because of the huge growth in its exports. The financial crash
has bankrupted Iceland, and none of the European powers is exempt from the
crisis that began in the US sub-prime market. This process was clear in the
1930s as the Wall Street crash and the American depression undermined the rest
of the world. But today the interpenetration of every one of the national
economies by multi national capitalism and world trade means that a deep slump
would have a massive impact on events everywhere. At the moment we are at the
beginning of the slump. World capitalism is looking into the abyss.
The
impact of the financial and economic crash that we are passing through at
present is a huge factor in world relations. The tensions between the European
powers and the USA, between
each other and with the new massive capitalist economies in India and China can only be exacerbated as a
consequence. The European Union, despite a certain success in integrating the
European powers over the last decades, will come under economic and political
pressures on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the 1930s. The drive towards
new sources of raw materials and markets will accelerate as the bourgeois and
the imperialist powers are forced to maintain their position in an increasingly
difficult environment.
From
the point of view of the Marxists however, the period through which we are
passing will be hugely different to that we have experienced over the last
period. The convulsions of capitalism will create the conditions for social,
economic and political crisis. The working class will be forced to pay for the crisis
in the capitalist system. There will be dramatic shifts in the consciousness of
the working class, sharp turns and sudden changes in the outlook of all classes
as the working class seeks a way to solve their problems.
The
victory of the socialist revolution in any one major country would transform
the situation internationally, and would begin a chain reaction that would
transform the world. Provided, that is, that we can build a Marxist leadership
with a clear revolutionary internationalist programme.
