Apart from those who are valiantly fighting an incomparably superior military power in Afghanistan and Iraq, we see basically there kinds of forces ranged against the empire.
First, the world-wide anti-American/anti-Bush feelings that numerous recent surveys have shown to have grown to unprecedented levels in several decades. In addition to anti-establishment organisations and individuals, America’s traditional allies and admirers also have vehemently criticised the Bush push for war. “American imperialism used to be a fiction of the far-left imagination,” wrote the English journalist Madeleine Bunting early this year, “now it is an uncomfortable fact of life.”[1] More recently, on 26 December Financial Times of UK carried an article which described America’s unilateral, isolationist stance as the Achilles’ Heel. Even friendly governments and ruling circles have expressed their disgruntlement — through their intellectual representatives if not officially. Considered as a whole, such international opposition combines within itself both inter-imperialist contradictions and the world people’s anger against their enemy number one.
Compared to this rather amorphous opposition, a second and more potent force is the internal resistance from American civil society. To be frank, part of this emanates from narrow political self interests (on the part of Democratic Party leadership, for instance) while some amounts to no more than pious wishes. But there is also a strong streak of persistent opposition, particularly against war mongering and attacks on democratic rights and livelihoods. Emerging as it did from a glorious independence struggle against British colonialism, the nation boasts a healthy tradition of democracy and love of independence (remember Abraham Lincoln’s famous statement: “when the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs others, it is no longer self-government; it is despotism.”) So it is only normal that there is a robust resistance to the fascist project of empire-building. At the core of this force is the American working class[2] —‘blue collar’ and “white collar’ included – a sleeping giant, but lately waking up under the heat of globalisation (cuts in wages and amenities, vanishing jobs thanks to relocation of production and business process outsourcing and so on.). Symptoms of a new consciousness and new activism in this largest single constituency of American civil society include:
(a) A surge in strikes and other forms of struggles together with the rise of a new leadership challenging the old workers’ aristocracy [3]
(b) Welcome changes, however small, in the national TU leadership. The participation of the AFL-CIO in something like the Seattle demonstration was pretty unthinkable a few years back, given the organisation’s track record. As New York Times reported on February 28,2003: “After backing administrations in the Korean, Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, … the AFL-CIO executive council unanimously approved a resolution urging Mr. Bush to embrace a broad multilateral approach to Iraq and criticizing the administration for dividing the world and insulting America’s allies.” March 12,2003 was observed as the first-ever National Labour Day for Peace.
(c) The spirit of solidarity with workers in underdeveloped countries, as expressed for example, in the activities of the US LABOUR AGAINST the WAR (USLAW), a coalition of workers’ organisations which opposed the Iraq war and which is now trying to help Iraqi workers particularly in struggles against firms like Halliburton.
(d) Broadening base of the movement, with new sections joining in. Mike Martin observed in Straight Goods, (Internet edition, New Society Publications, November 18,2003):
“Americans have lost nearly three million jobs in George Junior’s first three years… as many as a third of these are … white collar jobs. … These highly-paid professionals are being betrayed by the same corporations that used to coddle them.” These professionals never felt the need for organising unions, but attitudes are changing rapidly: “The American trade union center, the AFL-CIO, report that a record 66,000 new white-collar workers joined unions in 2002, and accounted for almost 30% of the overall rise in AFL-CIO membership. In 2002, their growth outpaced all other occupational groups within the federation…. In the United States white collar workers, such as nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, attorneys, musicians, journalists and even forest rangers, now account for 60% of the overall US workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a lot of people to organize, but at least they seem to be making some headway.” (Ibid.)
Thirdly, the challenge thrown out to the surviving superpower by the militant movements in its backyard: Brazil (notably the MST or Landless Peasants’ Movement, which engaged in over 330 land occupations involving over 55,000 families in 2003)
Mexico, Ecuador, Columbia, Bolivia, and so on. In Argentina, insurgent masses came close to seizure of power in late 2001 and early 2002. Public sector employees across all these countries — workers, doctors and medical staff, public school teachers and others — launched concerted strike struggles in middle of this year. Millions were involved and in many cases the strikes triggered work stoppages in the private sector too, defying mafia and police attacks. And are not the protracted Cuban and Venezuelan resistances to blatant US exploitation and intervention truly inspiring?
All these discrete streams of struggle, like those in other parts of the world against other imperialist plunderers and their local clients, hit the imperialist system as a whole. Despite economic and political contradictions, imperialism consciously operates as a block pitted against the world people; despite communication gaps; we the activists fighting against oppression and exploitation objectively constitute an international common front against a common enemy: imperialist globalisation (or simply imperialism) with US empire as the spearhead and national ruling groups as local agents. The difference is, our enemy is most efficiently organised, whereas we are in the primary stage of networking.
The progress we have made in this respect during the four years since Seattle is no mean achievement, but we must qualitatively develop the level of mutual cooperation, coordination, and healthy debate. Seminars, publications, symbolic protests, occasional demonstrations and WSF-type congregessions may appear gratifying if we are prisoners to the illusion (could we decelerate the marauding march of globalisation or stop the Iraq war?) that nebulous public pressure can force the enemy change his way; but to actually make him bite the dust, we need to advance further. To go deeper among the masses, to learn from them, to help them organise themselves and play the role of conscious creators of history.
Notes :
1. “Beginning of the End: The U.S. Is Ignoring an Important Lesson from History—that an Empire Cannot Survive on Brute Force Alone,” The Guardian, February 3, 2003.
2. Here we go by the Communist Manifesto which defines “the proletariat, the modern working class” as “a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market”. Broadly speaking, all those who live by selling their manual or intellectual labour power for wage or salary belong to the working class.
3. For details, see “Working Class Struggles in the US: Encouraging Signs” (Liberation, central organ of CPI(ML), February 2003)
