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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the July 4, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
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BEHIND THE BUSH-ASHCROFT MAKEOVER OF THE STATE:
"HOMELAND SECURITY" AND CAPITALIST INSTABILITY
By Fred Goldstein
The attempted restructuring of the state apparatus under the
label of "homeland security" and the granting of more
repressive powers to the FBI once again have to be viewed in
light of the problems of U.S. imperialism at home and
abroad. These encompass both the present and the future-
including the long-term outlook for capitalist economic
instability and crisis.
With the stock market sinking, the so-called economic
recovery sputtering, and the world capitalist economy
suffering from global overproduction, it is a natural step
for the government to open up repression. The movement
should know that when the Bush administration talks about
"homeland security," it is aimed against working-class
resistance to the hardships brought about by an economic
crisis of the profit system.
The new "homeland security" proposal to bring together 22
agencies--including the Coast Guard, the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, the Border Patrol, the Customs
Service and others--is being hailed as the greatest overhaul
of the government since President Harry S. Truman created
the CIA in 1946.
Whether or not the Bush plan is approved in its present form
or in some modified version--or is defeated by bureaucratic
opponents--the fact is that this is an attempt by the
capitalist government to partially reshape its repressive
apparatus. It is meant to deal with vulnerability in a new
world situation it has created. This major reshaping of the
state is in response to the class struggle at home and
abroad.
The first dramatic transformation of the imperialist state
in the 20th century took place when the FBI was empowered to
open up a wave of repression after World War I.
BIRTH OF FBI, CIA
The FBI had been set up in 1908, but was not a highly
functional repressive force until the ruling class took
alarm at the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the upsurge of
the class struggle in the post-war period. Major strikes in
the steel industry, meatpacking, textile and the coal mines,
plus a general strike in Seattle in 1919, showed a
radicalization of the working class. It was met with a wave
of repression.
Attorney General Mitchell Palmer led what became known as
the Palmer Raids. They were directed at the socialist and
newly founded communist movements and the rebellious labor
movement. Thousands were arrested in a series of coordinated
raids; hundreds were deported. This temporarily set back the
movement, but it regrouped and reemerged by the end of the
1920s and was a major force in the anti-racist and class
struggles of the 1930s.
The FBI took on extraordinary powers during the witch-hunt
against the Communist Party in the 1950s as part of the Cold
War. COINTELPRO was set up to cut down the Black, Latino and
Native liberation, civil rights and anti-war movements of
the 1960s.
The next major restructuring was based upon the rapid and
dramatic emergence of U.S. imperialism as a supreme world
power after World War II. Having taken over the global
empire of the weakened and exhausted British ruling class,
as well as many outposts of the French, Dutch, Belgian and
Japanese imperialists, Washington was now a global power. It
was locked in struggle--with the Soviet Union, which had
defeated the Nazis; with the Chinese Revolution, which had
liberated one fourth of the human race; and with the
national liberation struggles in Asia, Africa, the Middle
East and Latin America.
The military-industrial complex, the basis of the Pentagon's
power, had already taken shape during the war. But in 1946
Truman converted a wartime spy agency, the Office of
Strategic Services, into a permanent instrument of counter-
revolution, assassination and subversion: the Central
Intelligence Agency.
The CIA went right to work in Europe trying to undermine the
surging influence of communist parties and communist-led
trade unions. It overthrew the popular nationalist
government of Muhammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and the
popular land reform government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala
in 1954.
It carried out the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first
head of state of the newly independent Congo. It turned over
Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress, to
the apartheid government in Johannesburg. It organized the
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and, of course, spent untold
billions of dollars trying to destroy socialism in the USSR
and the People's Republic of China. This is only the tip of
the iceberg of CIA activities, which was created as U.S.
imperialism's answer to the new world challenges.
U.S. IMPERIALISM UNIVERSALLY HATED
Viewed in that light, the Bush administration's latest moves
are an attempt to deal with the new situation of U.S.
imperialism first demonstrated by the World Trade Center
bombing of 1993.
The combined forces of world imperialism, led by Washington,
had overthrown the USSR and dealt a grave blow to the
socialist camp. As part of its struggle against world
socialism and the movement for national independence by the
oppressed countries of the world, Washington waged a war of
extermination against all progressive forces, particularly
in the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia as well as
the areas surrounding the USSR and China. It orchestrated
the anti-communist coup in Indonesia in 1965 that killed at
least a million people. It supported every reactionary
regime in the region, from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia to the
Philippines.
In the course of this struggle, progressive and
revolutionary leaders have been pushed back. Most
importantly, the mass struggles against imperialism have
temporarily receded. U.S. imperialism is now the dominant
oppressor of countries and peoples everywhere--and is
universally hated.
In the absence of progressive bourgeois nationalist
movements and especially socialist and communist movements
that organize the mass struggle and genuinely challenge
imperialism and its clients, the more conservative forces
that are removed from the mass struggle and rely on
conspiratorial methods alone have come forward to fill the
vacuum. By carrying out dramatic strikes against targets
either in the U.S. or at U.S. installations abroad, they
hope that the masses will somehow spontaneously rise up or
that the attacks will provoke repression which will, in
turn, evoke a mass uprising.
This is the new situation that the Bush administration is
attempting to deal with. The U.S. has removed the
organizations and political forces that historically
organized the anti-imperialist and socialist struggles which
limited the super-exploitation of imperialism. By so doing
it has been able to intensify its plunder--thereby deepening
and widening hatred of the U.S. government.
For the last decade the think tanks and strategists of
imperialism have been trying to figure out how to shield
Washington from underground retaliation. This is the new
situation that has confronted the state and is behind the
reorganization.
The cruelty of the war against Iraq and the sanctions war
that followed; the backing of a murderous Zionist occupation
regime in Israel; the terror bombing of Afghanistan and the
spread of the Pentagon all over the Persian Gulf, the
Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean; exploitation by Wall
Street and the transnational corporations; and now the
cultural imperialism that these institutions bring with them-
-all this has provoked a widespread hatred for Washington.
But there is no force right now that can organize an
effective struggle of the masses to drive the imperialists
out, so the U.S. government is attempting to shield itself
against attacks.
Of course, the responsibility for the attacks lies squarely
on the shoulders of the oppressors in Washington.
This so-called "homeland security" restructuring is being
done in the most racist, repressive and chauvinist way to
dovetail with the U.S. drive to scapegoat and stir up
antagonism against the people of the Middle East. This is to
provide ideological justification for violating legal and
constitutional rights on a mass scale, including arbitrary
detentions and torture, and to prepare the population for
war and intervention against Iraq, Iran or any other regime
in the arc from Morocco to Indonesia where 1.3 billion
Muslims live under the neocolonial rule of clients of
imperialism.
The only way to get "homeland security" for the people of
the U.S. is for the Pentagon, the CIA, and all the corporate
profiteers they defend to pull out of the entire region and
let the people there determine their own destinies, free of
interference by imperialism.
But it would be foolhardy to regard the reorganization of
the capitalist state from a strictly international point of
view. The Bush administration is using Sept. 11 to broaden
the powers of the FBI and to give new powers to the CIA in
the domestic arena.
WHERE'S THE RECOVERY?
While these moves are perhaps precipitated by and explained
in terms of the phony "war on terrorism," any strengthening
of the repressive forces, whether in some new super-agency
or by giving additional powers to the traditional police
agencies, will be aimed at the forces fighting for social
justice.
The more sober elements in the ruling class don't take all
the hype about an economic rebound and recovery very
seriously. They find nothing to boost their spirits in the
latest monthly numbers on home sales or inventory
liquidation.
Consider the mournful commentary of an authoritative
analyst, Stephen Roach, from one of the most powerful
institutions of U.S. finance capital, the Morgan Stanley
investment banking house.
Roach's subject is the decline of the dollar. It reflects
the fact that the capitalist economy in the U.S. is no
longer a guaranteed source of profits, either from the
formerly booming stock market or from the profits of
production based on an expanding economy.
Roach writes, "I'll leave the short-term calls to the
traders. My macro lens continues to see the movie of the
1990s running in reverse. America was the world's bubble and
now it has popped. Equities led on the upside and were the
first to go on the downside. And the real economy has
followed with predictable lags. The first shoe to fall was
the capacity overhang of earnings-battered businesses. Next
to come should be the spending excesses of savings-short and
overextended consumers."
The weak dollar, says Roach "unmasks new fault lines in the
global economy. This puts the rapidly spreading Latin
American currency crisis in a very different light. This, of
course, was the contagion that was never supposed to happen
again. The tragedy of Argentina [the four-year recession
that is still deepening--F.G.] was widely thought to be a
country-specific problem that had little or no bearing on
the rest of the region. But now Brazil, the largest economy
in the region, has seen a wholesale markdown of its currency
and bonds that is every bit as bad as that which occurred in
the depths of the crisis three and a half years ago. Nor are
other Latin economies spared this contagion. From Uruguay to
Mexico, virtually all of the region's currencies are now
lurching to the downside."
As for the U.S. economy, Roach says, "In my opinion,
earnings-battered Corporate America remains very much
focused on cost cutting, likely to take further actions that
would continue to restrain capital spending and hiring."
His main commentary on all the positive reports of a
recovery is that "the forest has never looked more different
than the trees."
This is the voice of an expert speaking dire warnings to
policy makers and to the summits of the ruling class. And he
is speaking in their language. But the way to put it more
properly is that U.S. capitalism was on an orgy of profit
expansion for 10 years, from the spring of 1991 to the
summer of 2001. This orgy was fueled by brutal corporate
globalization, with its sweatshops and plundering of
resources, holding down wages, speeding up workers, wild
speculation, swindling, excessive corporate and consumer
credit, tax cuts for big business and Federal Reserve Board
welfare for Wall Street.
All these measures to extend profits could not overcome the
inherent problem of world capitalist overproduction. It is a
law of capitalism that because production takes place for
profit, it always expands production at a rate that
outstrips the ability of the masses of people to buy the
products. In the race against each other to pile up profits,
the capitalists struggle to get market share. Sooner or
later this fight for market share results in too many
commodities to be sold at a profit, no matter how much the
masses need the products. That is the point of capitalist
overproduction.
Two principal underlying conditions formed the basis of the
expansion, aside from credit and monetary manipulations. On
the one hand, the collapse of the USSR opened up a worldwide
corporate expansion for the predators of Wall Street and all
its junior partners. On the other, the scientific
technological revolution made possible the building of a
massive infrastructure for the new communications system.
Neither of these conditions is reproducible. The worldwide
expansion of production has already glutted the markets.
Over a million miles of fiber-optic cable were laid in
recent years. A dozen giant monopolies, including AT&T,
Worldcom and Global Crossing, were competing with each other
to lay international and nationwide cable. Hundreds of
companies were building local networks. With overproduction,
the present estimate is that 95 percent of the cable will
not be used!
Overproduction has afflicted all industries, including the
production of steel, laptop computers, automobiles, semi-
conductors, commercial aircraft, movie theaters, retail
stores and many service industries. This is not just a U.S.
phenomenon but is global.
The Labor Department admits that in the downturn from March
2001 to March 2002, 1.8 million jobs were lost. Despite all
the optimistic talk about the economy, the bosses are so
heavily in debt and the masses so overextended on their
credit cards and other borrowing that the long-term
prospects for U.S. capitalism point toward crisis, with
increased hardship for the workers as the capitalists try to
unload their crisis on the backs of the people.
Under these conditions, resistance and an awakening of the
struggle at home and abroad are inevitable. Understanding
that the problem is capitalism will come more sharply into
focus. Right now everything is being reduced to the greed of
the corporate executives, who have grown filthy rich through
stock swindles, insider trading and speculation. In the
future it will become patently clear that it is the profit
system itself that produces these swindlers and is to blame.
Then the FBI, homeland security and all the repressive
organs of the bosses will not be able to stop the movement.
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