Cynics will of course say that the anti-war movement has failed to stop the war, that France and Germany are now busy to appease the US, that after the fall of Iraq third world governments would now be even more desperate to comply with the American Empire, that secular Iraq (some posthumous recognition, at last!) is now all set to relapse into Islamic fundamentalism and social retrogression. This cynicism is a defeatist, opportunist response to cries of imperialist triumphalism and sections of the liberal-labour coalition in every country are susceptible to this infection.
For activists of the anti-war movement, there can however be no room for despair and defeatism. If millions had come out to protest against the war, tens of millions of people must now raise their voice and assert their strength against the American agenda of occupation and re-colonisation of Iraq. The US military-industrial complex is hungry for war and more war, and the forces of peace the world over must be on ready alert.
It is instructive for the forces of peace and progress to make a review of their own experiences and of the evolution of the anti-globalisation movement. We are using the word anti-globalisation movement for that still appears to be the broadest description for the new global upsurge in mass activism.
In the 1990s the movement gradually emerged as a series of spiralling protests against the havoc created by the so-called ‘free market’ and ‘free trade’ policies pursued selectively by multilateral institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO. The last decade of the twentieth century was witness to major currency turmoils and share market crashes, systematic demolition of the welfare state in most advanced capitalist countries, and a general rise in unemployment and socio-economic uncertainty across the world. In other words, the world economy has been marked an increasing globalisation of economic uncertainty and crisis and accentuation of disparities across the globe and within every country. This was the backdrop against which the anti-globalisation movement went on acquiring a global dimension, drawing in more and more people and gathering a growing momentum.
But the movement was still faced with a problem of naming the enemy. There was still no specific and uniform target for the movement. There was still very little coordination and the movement had started getting trapped into what some sections of participants began to see as summit-chasing. It was around this time that George Bush entered the White House and embarked on his widely denounced drive for absolute global hegemony. From the National Missile Defence project through Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond, the drive shows no signs of abating. Under these circumstances, the anti-globalisation movement quickly transformed into a still more powerful anti-war movement. In between, September 11 had indeed stirred the whole world and there was tremendous global solidarity for the American people. But only a small section of the anti-globalisation opinion went on to support Bush’s so-called global war on terror. The overwhelming majority of anti-globalisation forces saw September 11 as a desperate reaction to US foreign policy and the post September 11 developments have only corroborated this understanding.
Now that the anti-globalisation campaign has grown into an unprecedented anti-war movement and George Bush stands exposed as the most hated American reincarnation of Hitler, the movement has to take the next step of confronting the unfolding Anglo-American agenda of occupation and re-colonisation of Iraq. Now is the time to grasp the logical organic connection between war and imperialism, between the military, political and economic spheres – in short, to grasp the economic essence of imperialism, without which it is “impossible to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics.” (Lenin’s preface to his 1916 classic Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism). And, of course, now is the time for building an effective anti-imperialist resistance.
