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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 26, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
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WORKERS WORLD PARTY STATEMENT: WAR AND THE
CLASS STRUGGLE
The U.S. capitalist government is planning an immense crime,
in front of the whole world. It is assembling a huge force
for mass destruction, armed with the most sophisticated
weapons created by military science. It has openly announced
that its goal is to destroy the government of a small but
potentially prosperous oil-producing nation that has defied
its dictates.
Bush labels the Iraqi leader "evil" and a "monster." His
father stages a special interview to say he "hates" Saddam
Hussein. Cynical and sophisticated liars repeat this
personalized bashing as though it were the profoundest
political assessment.
Since Iraq has done absolutely nothing, these epithets are
supposedly reason enough to launch a war that will surely
bring horrible consequences for the Iraqi people--and
unknown risks to U.S. troops.
The financial pages of the capitalist newspapers are already
leaking inside information on which oil companies from which
countries will be cut in on the profits to be made from
Iraqi oil, depending on how much support they give to the
U.S. war. All this, of course, will automatically be
ratified by the "free" regime Washington installs.
Not since the days of open imperialist domination, before
the existence of a socialist bloc and the rise of liberation
movements in the colonial world forced the lords of
capitalist finance to conceal their objectives and prettify
their methods, have the imperialist politicians been so
crass and blatant about their aims.
On Oct. 26, national anti-war marches on both coasts will
give voice to the growing movement to roll back the war
machine. Workers World Party wholeheartedly supports this
effort and urges the broadest participation of all who want
to stop the war.
This period is reminiscent of when Mussolini attacked
Ethiopia in 1935. Ethiopia had done nothing but resist
becoming a colonial possession--at a time when all the rest
of Africa had been carved up by the European imperialist
powers. Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians with little more
than horses and light arms fought back against the fascist
army, which bombed and strafed them with airplanes and
machine guns.
The League of Nations, established by the victors after
World War I supposedly to preserve world peace, did not
really try to stop Italy's invasion. Much of its debate
focused on how to get Ethiopia to make concessions to Rome.
All this was a prelude to the inter-imperialist struggle
that led to the mass murder of World War II.
The Bush administration, which owes its existence to a fixed
election and the capitulation of the Democrats, has tried to
significantly override, in the name of "homeland security,"
the bourgeois democratic political traditions until now
tolerated in most developed capitalist countries. It gives
the impression that nothing can stop it--neither mass nor
official resistance in the Third World, not the strains it
has generated with its imperialist allies/rivals, not the
anti-war sentiments of the masses at home.
But these arrogant servants of the capitalist oligarchy are
short sighted. They are undermining the very basis of their
power. All their vaunted technology is just a pile of junk
once the fury of the masses is unleashed.
The potential strength of the working class to intervene and
change history lies not just in its numerical strength--in
the United States it is the vast majority of the population,
separated by a growing gap from the tiny class of super-rich
owners of capital. Even more important is its strategic role
in production.
There can be no production without the workers--it's as
simple as that. And a modern economy cannot be run by slave
labor. It requires the participation of those enslaved not
by law but by wages and the ideological hold of the ruling
class.
The war drive of big capital--especially pushed by the oil
gang so well represented by the Bush administration--shows
no signs of alleviating the deepening economic hardships of
the workers here. On the contrary. The offensive abroad is
matched by an offensive against the workers and their
organizations at home.
The capitalist economy is doing what capitalism does
periodically: it is destroying some of its own structures--
through bankruptcies and layoffs--because it cannot continue
to expand profitably at the breakneck pace of the last
decade. How deep this will go cannot be predicted, but the
roster of huge corporations reporting trouble is still
growing.
The immediate effect of this capitalist crunch on a working
class far overextended with debt, far under-protected by any
government safety net, and extremely dependent on working
long hours and even extra jobs to pay the bills, is already
drastic.
And now these workers are expected to pay for an endless war
focused on the Middle East but extending all over the world?
A war so clearly to defend the super-profits of the same
corporations that have looted workers' pensions, thrown them
in the streets, and spent billions putting corporate alumni
into the highest political posts while cutting their own
taxes?
Those already active in the struggle against imperialist war
have every reason to feel confident that they can win the
support of millions of workers in this country. Even more
than during the Vietnam War period, it is becoming clearer
every day that the interests of the workers and the
oppressed peoples are diametrically opposed to those of the
war profiteers, the oil barons, the bankers who oversee the
entire system, and their criminal CEOs.
Neither frenzied war propaganda nor threats of repression
can turn back this developing class struggle, which will be
the key component in stopping imperialist war.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to
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