Markin comment:
************
A CALL TO ALL ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/YOUTH: HAVE
NO ILLUSIONS-
WAR AGAINST IRAQ IS COMING!!!
THIS IS NOT OUR WAR -DEFEND IRAQ
AGAINST U.S./UN AND ALLIED IMPERIALIST ATTACK!
SUPPORT EFFORTS BY IRAQI LEFTISTS, WORKERS, PEASANTS, KURDS AND OTHERS
TO OVERTHROW THE HUSSEIN REGIME!
DOWN WITH THE UN STARVATION BLOCKADE!
As the
United Nations Security Council vote on November 8, 2002 graphically points out
the war-crazed Bush-led United States government is leading the world to war.
Tens of thousands of American and British troops are getting positioned for a
full-scale attack on Iraq, while other powers from Australia to Turkey elbow
each other for a role in the slaughter and share of the loot. The White House
has already revealed plans for a post-Saddam military occupation of Iraq. One
look at the war chest of nuclear weapons that the United States has and
threatens to use today and it is clear that the fate of life on this planet is
threatened by the continued existence of this American led “ world disorder”.
We must act.
In the
coming war against Iraq working people and anti-imperialist youth in the United
States and elsewhere we must stand for
the military defense of Iraq without giving any political support to the
Hussein regime. Hussein is a bloody oppressor of Iraqi workers, leftists,
Shiite Muslims, the Kurdish people and others. As such he was in the past a
close ally and client of the American government for a full two decades before
he made a grab for Kuwait in 1990. Now the American government wants a more
pliant regime and tighter control of the oil spigot, not the least to put
economic rivals like Japan and Germany, who are more dependent on Near East
oil, on rations. However, every victory for the American government and its
allies in their predatory wars encourages further military adventures, every
setback serves to assist the struggles of the working peoples and the oppressed
of the world.
Historically, in wars between the
imperialist predators and plunderers and their colonial and semicolonial
victims anti-imperialists have a side. As Lenin, the leader of the Russian
Revolution of October 1917 which stands as one the greatest antiwar movements
ever, stressed in his 1915 pamphlet SOCIALISM AND WAR: “If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on
France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Tsarist Russia, and so on,
these would be ‘just,’ and ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who would be the
first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal
states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘Great Powers.”
We must continue that tradition.
The tremendous military advantages
of the United States against neocolonial Iraq- a country that has already been
bled white through 12 years of United Nations sanctions which have killed more
than one and one half million civilians- underscores the importance of class
struggle in the imperialist centers as the chief means to give content to the
call to defend Iraq. Every strike, every labor mobilization against war plans,
every mass protest against attacks on workers and minorities, every struggle
against domestic repression and against attacks on civil liberties represents a
dent in the imperialist war drive. To put an end to war once and for all, the
capitalist system that breeds war must be swept away. However, our immediate
task is to stop the imperialist war drive.
The
American ruling class manipulated the grief and horror felt by millions at the
criminal and demented attack on the World Trade Center to wage war on
Afghanistan. But the patriotic consensus in the United States is wearing thin
and elsewhere there is massive opposition to a war against Iraq. War demands
civil peace and from Los Angeles
to London the imperialist war makers are revealed as vicious union-busters and
strikebreakers. Declaring that a strike could “threaten national security,” the
Bush administration has brought down the force of the capitalist state to
coerce the powerful American dockers union, the ILWU, to work under the dictates
of the union-busting employers association. Across the seas, British
firefighters are threatened with strikebreaking by the army. Plunging
stockmarkets rob millions of workers of their pensions while public scandals
expose insatiable corporate greed. Tens of thousands of working people,
including the entire workforce at a number of Fiat auto plants in Italy, face a
future of crisis. Civil liberties have been shredded and the capitalists have
intensified their assault on social welfare and other gains wrested through
decades of workers struggles.
In
the United States, not even the dizzying flag-waving or the heavy fist of state
repression has induced the masses to embrace war with Iraq. In Europe, hundreds
of thousands of workers and anti-imperialist youth have demonstrated their
opposition to this war. The problem is that the anti-war protests in Europe
have generally l been channeled into a national-chauvinist direction of getting
one’s “own” rulers to stand up to the Americans. In America, many antiwar
liberals and leftists plead, “Money for jobs, not for war” and so fuel the
notion that fundamental priorities of the capitalist rulers can be altered to
serve the interests of working people. The time for such illusions ran out long
ago.
The
truth is that this whole capitalist system is based on the extraction of profit
for the owners of the means of production through the exploitation and
subjugation of the workers who produce the wealth of society. War is a
concentrated expression of this, as competing capitalist ruling classes
scramble to steal natural resources and to carve out new markets for export of
capital and fresh sources of cheap labor. Therefore, it is necessary to draw a
distinction between bourgeois pacifism, which lulls the masses into passivity
and embellishes capitalist democracy, and the yearning for peace of the masses.
Over
the past period there have been opportunities to organize class struggle in
opposition to imperialist war and for the international workers movement to
break out of narrow nationalist and economist limits. During the 1999 U.S./NATO
war against Serbia, Italian COBAS unions organized a one-million-strong
political general strike against that war. Fiat workers, who today battle plant
closings in Italy, organized a campaign of material aid- a campaign supported
by all partisans of the international working class- for the workers of the
Yugoslav Zastava auto plant, which had been bombed by the imperialists. In
2001, Japanese dockworkers at Sasebo pointed the way forward by “hot-cargoing”
(refusing to handle) Japanese military goods for the war in Afghanistan. These
types of actions here can concretize our opposition to this war.
Moreover,
U.S. military bases across Europe and Asia, as well as high-tech spy
installations such as Australia’s Pine Gap, have become deserving targets of
antiwar protests by leftists and trade unions. It would be a good thing if the
U.S. were deprived of its international launching pads for war against Iraq.
For all of German chancellor Schroder’s electioneering against war in Iraq, it
is highly unlikely that he will interfere in any way with the key American air
bases and military installations across Germany which house some 70, 000
American troops. What we need is not an “antiwar movement” of social-chauvinist
support to one’s own ruling class but an internationalist working class
opposition to U.S./NATO bases
What is
essential is to draw the class line and unshackle the working people and
anti-imperialist youth from capitalist politicians, their agents in the trade
unions and others who channel their justified hatred of war into illusory calls
for parliamentary reforms of the profit-driven system that breeds war and, in
West Europe, into support for their own ruling classes against the Americans.
Here, in the heart of the beast the workers and anti-imperialist youth united
front can point the way forward building an internationalist perspective in the
antiwar protests. Our demands should be: Struggle
against the bosses and their government here at home- “the main enemy is at
home”! Defend Iraq against imperialist attack! Down with the United Nations
starvation blockade! All U.S./ UN and allied troops out of the Persian Gulf and
Near East!
JOIN AND BUILD THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/ YOUTH
UNITED FRONT AGAINST THE COMING UNITED STATES/ UNITED NATIONS ATTACK ON IRAQ!
THE COMMITTEE FOR AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST WORKERS/
YOUTH UNITED FRONT AGAINST UNITED STATES/ UNITED NATIONS ATTACK ON IRAQ
CHECK BOSTON. INDY MEDIA. ORG
CALENDAR MA-ACT SECTION FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS OF MEETINGS AND EVENTS
Labor Donated
No comments:
Post a Comment