councilor.org
| Source | Dave Anderson |
| Date | 99/05/01/22:10 |
| /* Written 9:49 AM Aug 28, 1998 by jshell@netcom.com in igc:labr.all */ /* ---------- "The Russian collapse (fwd)" ---------- */ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 08:17:16 -0600 (MDT) From: ANDERSON DAVID James Chapin wrote: "Right now it appears that the political economy of the post-Cold War era bears a closer resemblance to what happened after World War I than what happened after World War II. That means that the dream of a happy democratic capitalism running the world may well prove to be a fantasy...it is far more serious than anything else going on this year, and it certainly behooves Socialists, if they are socialists, to take a longer view than the diversions of the capitalist media." True. On that note: --- It doesn't take a genius to connect the dotted lines in the news stories dominating the front pages. There is a distinct relationship between the attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan, and the Russian financial woes. I suppose that the bourgeois media does not have many analysts who can think dialectically, so they fail to make these connections. Years ago when 1930s era radicals worked for the bourgeois press, the reporting was much sharper because these folks knew [Marx's] *18th Brumaire* like the back of their hands. No such luck nowadays, so it is up to us to make the connections. The Islamic fundamentalists that the US is trying to blow into oblivion are the very same terrorists and gangsters that we created in our surrogate war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. As Barkley Rosser just pointed out, "The royal family supported anti-Soviet Wah'habist mujaheddin in Afghanistan, and with Osama bin Laden's participation in that war, well, the rest is history." Doug Henwood also forwarded an article by Robert Fisk which stated that "in the 1980s, Mr Bin Laden and his men were regarded as 'freedom fighters' rather than 'terrorists' and were encouraged to use British-made Blowpipe anti-aircraft missiles against the Russians. Mr Bin Laden demands the withdrawal of US troops from his native country of Saudi Arabia - some of whose officials give him considerable support. None of this, of course, was finding its way into the American news reports from Washington last night." This is what Malcolm X called the chickens coming home to roost. One of the main causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union was its costly intervention in Afghanistan, which was its Vietnam. Like Vietnam, the war had an eroding effect on the country. This was why the US was so pleased at the USSR's morass. It could drain the Soviet Union while appearing as the "good guy" to world opinion. Except for Alexander Cockburn, the Spartacist League and pro-Soviet CP's, most leftists regarded this intervention as a violation of self-determination. The Soviet Union leadership decided to lift up the barbaric Afghans to civilization. When the idiocy of rural life turned out to have roots that were deeper than a 60 foot dandelion, the results were a war that drained the nation's treasury and created a mood of disillusionment among its young. So now the United States has achieved its "victory" over Communism. The effort has produced a desperate and maddened nation that has a significant fascist movement. These fascists, unlike the fascists we chummed around with since WWII, don't really admire the US. Some of them might even like to cause immense destruction to the US. Since there are thousands of tactical nuclear weapons strewn about the former Soviet Union, the US might have some genuine worries about the threat. I am quite sure that one of the reasons that the ruling class of the United States is anxious to bail out Russia is that it would like to stabilize the situation and isolate the fascists. There is as much likelihood of this happening as permanent peace issuing out of the Munich conference of 1938. Turning to the world of Islamic fundamentalism, the signs of entropy are just as alarming. The worries that fascists in the former Soviet Union might sell or donate an A-bomb that can fit into a suitcase to Islamic terrorists is very real and very scary. That would be the ultimate irony: a Russian tactical nuclear weapon detonated in Washington DC at the hands of some Islamic cabal. This would not be a case of the chickens coming home to roost, it is a scenario that would evoke the final scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." The truth is that the world has become a more dangerous place since the collapse of Communism. The Kremlin was always interested in peace and stability. Even when the "zealot" Stalin was in charge, the Soviet Union had a powerful interest in keeping violent conflicts contained. The United Nations was the joint project of the WWII allies, including the Soviet Union. Even when the cold war started, the chances of forestalling nuclear war were in a sense enhanced because of the "balance of terror." The United States worried that a strike against the Soviet Union would be met by retaliation. The only thing that stops a bully like US imperialism from incinerating people it hates is the fear of getting retribution. Now that there is no such thing as world Communism, there is a much greater possibility that nuclear weapons will be used. The people who might decide to use them are those very people we summoned into existence through our own machinations. This would be a dystopian realization of Marx's dictum about capitalism creating its own gravediggers. You would think that US imperialism would have a more rational understanding of its own self-interests. Why push the Soviet Union to the brink? Why not have made a bigger investment in someone like Gorbachev who was much more reliable and who could have effected a much smoother transition to capitalism in Russia? The answer to that question is that capitalism in its decay unleashes powerful irrational forces. What we are seeing today is analogous to the fascism and war dynamics of the 1930s, except that it looks and sounds differently. We do not have brown-shirts marching by torchlight, but we have fanaticism cropping up everywhere that has little concerns about preserving civilization. The madness of Hitler was not congenital. It was a product of the impasse of monopoly capitalism. It is difficult for many of us to think in these terms because we still tend to think of someone like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair as "one of us." After all, Clinton smoked pot in the 1960s and even invited Michael Lerner from Tikkun Magazine to the White House on occasion. A good liberal, no? The thing to understand is that powerful class forces are being unleashed by capitalism in its decay that nobody can control. The German ruling class probably would have not backed Hitler if it could have predicted the outcome of WWII. But politics does not operate that way. There is an element of the irrational in politics. When the US decided to wipe Communism off the face of the planet, it set in motion chaotic and irrational forces that it can not control today. It is up to us--civilized humanity--to restore order to the world. And just as was the case in the 1930s, the only way to achieve true order is to abolish capitalism, the main source of global disorder. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho