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	Workers Vanguard No. 858	11 November 2005

War Crimes and Misdemeanors

The Libby Imbroglio

Break with the Democrats—For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

The occupation of Iraq is not going well for U.S. imperialism. For that matter neither is the occupation of Afghanistan. More than 2,000 Americans have forfeited their lives in Iraq, while over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the war and occupation. Most Americans are now aware that the expressed reason for the occupation—the “democratization” of Iraq—is as much a hallucination as were the “weapons of mass destruction” that served as a pretext for the war.

The indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice over his role in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame has been seized on by both the bourgeois press and the Democrats as a way to hide their complicity in the savage destruction that has been visited on the social fabric of Iraq and the peoples who inhabit it. The New York Times would have us believe that it was swindled by its reporter Judith Miller, who fed its readers the Bush administration’s war lies about Iraq. The Democrats, so the story goes, were at the mercy of the gargantuan lies concocted, in the main, by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the evil one, Karl Rove.

This is self-serving hogwash, as we detailed in “Judith Miller and Bush Disinformation—Big Lies and Imperialist War” (WV No. 856, 14 October). To date the main imperialist executioner of the Iraqi peoples was Bill Clinton, backed by a United Nations embargo. The starvation blockade, mainly during his eight years in office, killed a million and a half Iraqis. The hundreds of UN monitors of Saddam Hussein’s military capabilities, who operated as spies for the U.S., were fully aware, and assuredly communicated to their masters, that Iraq was incapable of any coherent military action against the U.S. Thus, to sell the war to the public, an outrageous and fantastic myth was constructed linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda and endowing the Iraqi military with nuclear capability. The bourgeois press was aware of the reality, as were the Democrats, who nevertheless voted overwhelmingly for the war.

The “discovery” that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. lied ranks with the discovery of snow in Antarctica. In fact, lies are the oil the imperialists use to facilitate their savageries. We noted in “Big Lies and Imperialist War” that the 1964 “Gulf of Tonkin incident” was a fabrication designed to sell the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Last week it was reported that the government had suppressed a 2001 National Security Agency finding which demonstrated that the “incident” was a lie.

The Democrats’ current protestations about Bush’s lies are simply due to the fact that things haven’t worked out in Iraq. Commenting on the investigations into the Bush administration, Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times (30 October), “We’re a long way from putting together the full history of a self-described ‘war presidency’ that bungled the war in Iraq and, in doing so, may be losing the war against radical Islamic terrorism as well.” This is the standard Democratic Party criticism of the Bush White House: that it cannot be trusted to defend U.S. interests around the world and to prosecute the “war on terror”—a war armed with measures that frontally attack not only immigrants but the democratic rights of blacks and all working people.

As a capitalist party, the Democrats are dedicated to the fundamental interests of U.S. imperialism, which launched the Iraq invasion to assert its unchallenged domination over this oil-rich region and the globe. The reformist and liberal left that dominates the antiwar coalitions hangs on to the coattails of the liberal imperialist opposition, searching for more rational ways of maintaining this profoundly irrational system. As Marxists, our standpoint is the need to mobilize the multiracial proletariat in struggle against the imperialist rulers, both Democratic and Republican. The Spartacist League took a side for the military defense of Afghanistan and Iraq against the U.S. and allied imperialists, at the same time standing in irreconcilable political opposition to the reactionary Taliban and the capitalist regime of Saddam Hussein. Today we call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. As we wrote in “Big Lies and Imperialist War”:

“Growing opposition in the U.S. population to the Iraq occupation, revulsion over the government’s role in the death and destruction of black people and the poor after Hurricane Katrina, anger at the attacks on fundamental democratic rights—the situation speaks to the burning need to build a workers party that would organize class struggle against the U.S. capitalist rulers. The fight against imperialist war cannot be separated from the struggle against the capitalist system that breeds such war. Only when the multiracial proletariat seizes power from the blood-drenched, arrogant capitalist rulers can we begin to speak of a world rid of imperialist wars and occupations and offering material security and social justice for all.”

Bosses’ Class War Against U.S. Workers

Even as Bush was faced with tens of thousands of protesters during his trip to Argentina, the U.S. press corps kept hounding him about the Plame investigation. Growing sections of the U.S. bourgeoisie are running out of patience with the challenged president, as clearly expressed in the New York Times (8 November) editorial, “President Bush’s Walkabout”:

“After President Bush’s disastrous visit to Latin America, it’s unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can’t afford an American government this bad for that long....

“The central problem is not Karl Rove or Treasury Secretary John Snow or even Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. It is President Bush himself.”

Compounding Bush’s current problems are former House majority leader Tom DeLay’s indictment for financial shenanigans and investigations into Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who is suspected of similar transgressions. The Republicans are concerned that, given the occupation’s unpopularity, their hold on the Senate and House may be in danger in next year’s Congressional elections.

Republicans as well as Democrats are calling for greater restrictions on the FBI’s ability to procure and indefinitely retain business and personal records in “terrorism” investigations without a judge’s approval. The Republicans rebelled against Bush as the Senate voted unanimously for a measure outlawing the torture of prisoners. This has not stopped Cheney from doggedly pursuing an official waiver for the CIA on the use of torture. With the European Union now investigating reports of secret CIA prisons in Poland and Romania—part of a worldwide prison complex for some of the thousands of “terror” suspects “disappeared” by U.S. imperialism in the last four years—the U.S. rulers have ever more reason to worry that their pretensions to pursuing democracy abroad are being shredded.

Fearing that the weakness of the Bush regime might soften its resolve to stack the Supreme Court with anti-abortion, anti-civil-rights zealots, the religious right rose up to quash the candidacy of Harriet Miers, prompting Bush to select a candidate from the Catholic right, Samuel Alito, whose record of racist, socially reactionary and pro-big-business court decisions is unambiguous. This comes after the installation of the arch-reactionary John Roberts as Chief Justice. The conservative core of the party, answering to its wealthy constituents, is taking an ax to Medicaid and Medicare while holding dear the tax cuts for the rich. Those Republicans who are dependent on more plebeian elements for their re-election are seeking to persuade the oil companies, which are presently gouging the population and recording enormous profits, to provide a little free natural gas, perhaps during the holidays, for the “poor people.”

While the abandonment of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina starkly exposed the raw reality of race and class in capitalist America, the administration’s abysmal efforts in the wake of Rita and Wilma illustrated that there’s not much that anyone can expect from government in today’s America—not organized evacuation from disaster nor access to necessities like water and gasoline. One can, however, expect that Halliburton will be in charge of any given recovery effort. Even in brother Jeb’s Florida, thousands of the victims of previous hurricanes live on giant, featureless parking lots in sardine can-like mobile homes waiting for the next storm to peel back the tin roofs.

All this while ordinary working people are being hammered by draconian cuts in health benefits and the disappearance of pensions. While bankruptcy procedures have been sharply curtailed for those who have next to nothing, the same procedures are used by the bosses to slash paychecks and benefit packages of their unionized workers. If the Delphi auto parts manufacturer succeeds in its attempt to use the bankruptcy courts to cut union wages by 63 percent, this would further encourage employers to transform the current assault on workers into a wage- and benefit-slashing Armageddon.

U.S. workers are prone to see themselves not as members of the working class, with interests that are counterposed to the capitalists, but as part of a “middle class” that lies somewhere between abject poverty and unimaginable wealth. Not so America’s rulers, who know there is a working class from whose exploitation they derive their profits, and who seek to increase profits through speed-up, layoffs and wage cuts.

There are a number of historical sources for the political backwardness of the U.S. working class, that is, for its inability to recognize its class identity in opposition to the capitalist class. The primary and day-to-day barrier to the forging of a working-class party is the special oppression of black people as a race-color caste. If the good industrial job has been slaughtered, it is to no small degree black workers who are thrown into unemployment and the grinding poverty of the ghetto. If education and health care are going down the drain for most everyone, it’s been this way in the ghettos for decades. What Karl Marx said almost 150 years ago is every bit as true today: “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

For Working-Class Independence!

Normally, the stark incompetence of the White House and pervasive social discontents would suggest that the party in power would do well to pack the china and look for deals on moving vans while the opposition, in this case the Democrats, might begin investigating the D.C. housing market. A recent Pew Research Center survey, however, revealed that Democratic leaders in Congress had a dismal 32 percent approval rating while Bush’s rating has dropped below 40 percent. Both the excessively venerable Walter Cronkite and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert have recently suggested in the Times that the Democrats should at least appear to articulate differences with the Republicans.

For decades, it was the norm that the Democratic Party, as the capitalist party that sought the votes of working people, at least pretended to address their concerns, promising a less savage and heartless social contract. This was the legacy of the 1930s New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt, which proposed a set of palliative reforms in an attempt to deflect an upsurge of class struggle. Instead of leading to the formation of a workers party, the titanic labor battles of the time were channeled by the Stalinist Communist Party and other union misleaders into support for Roosevelt’s Democratic Party. Since that time, it has been primarily through the instrument of the Democratic Party that the trade-union officialdom has chained the workers to the capitalists and their state.

During Bill Clinton’s two terms as president, he continued the work of his Republican predecessors in taking an ax to many of the social programs set up under the New Deal. Following years of rollback of the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, it was left to this consummate hustler to convince black people that he felt their pain as he pushed the death penalty and signed the death warrant for welfare. And it was during his regime that the criminal speculation and Ponzi scheme “investments” by the dot-com industries attracted the monies available to the giant pension institutions with the result that, when the bubble burst, the pensions of many working people became so many worthless scraps of paper.

The Democratic Party has the same class interests as the Republicans. The Democrats may still wrap their program differently to appeal to their voters, for example over social issues such as abortion rights. Whereas the Republicans are open in their contempt for labor and blacks, the Democrats continue to posture as “friends of labor,” the better to position themselves to contain outbreaks of class struggle. But given the low level of class and social struggle, there is simply no current motivation for the Democrats to offer up the New Deal rhetoric that some of their liberal ideologues demand. Furthermore, ruling-class politicians, Democrats included, will not lightly tamper with the imperial presidency. Nevertheless, bourgeois opposition to the Bush administration may well deepen if, for example, the Iraq occupation gets further bogged down or the domestic economy worsens.

Any labor movement worth its salt would use the travails of the White House to mount a fightback against the massive assault on working people. Why, for example, given the attacks on health benefits and the declining number of those covered by any such insurance, are the unions not fighting for some form of national health insurance? This directly raises the question of labor’s leadership. Marxists understand that the existing leadership of the trade unions is the representative of the capitalist order within the working class. Residing in the most powerful imperialist country on the planet, this labor bureaucracy not only concedes the “right” of the capitalist rulers to a profit but supports their aspiration to dominate their imperialist competitors. This is just as true of Andy Stern’s Change to Win Coalition as it is of John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO officialdom. Both seek “partnership” with the American capitalists. The labor tops’ class collaboration is exemplified by their “America First” protectionism, pitting the U.S. proletariat against its class brothers and sisters overseas, and their role as lieutenants of U.S. imperialism in subverting struggles of working people in the semicolonial world.

A primary symptom of the abject condition of the working class is the steep decline in union membership, to the point that currently less than 10 percent of the workforce in the private sector is organized. The responsibility for that decline lies squarely with the generations of the labor bureaucracy in the period following World War II, from the anti-Communist union tops of the McCarthy era to the current lot, many of whose only experience with struggle has been to pass the bar exam.

The burning need for class struggle is inextricably linked to fighting for the political independence of the proletariat from the capitalists’ political parties and government agencies. What is required is a new, class-struggle leadership of labor. The crucial task is to break labor from the Democrats and to forge a revolutionary working-class party that shares no interest with the bosses but rather seeks the overthrow of their system and the establishment of workers rule.

For a Socialist Planned Economy!

The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state, in 1991-92 removed the one serious obstacle to U.S. military dominance and encouraged the capitalist rulers everywhere to drive down workers’ living standards and slash social benefits. No reform won by U.S. workers in the class battles of the 1930s has been spared from the increasing attacks of the profit-gorged bosses, who perceive themselves as destined to rule a worldwide American empire. The USSR stood as a living example that the overturn of capitalist rule and the building of a collectivized, planned economy, even in the rather miserable circumstances of backward Russia, could provide all with a job, a place to live, basic health care and a decent education, something that no capitalist society has achieved. This was the product of a successful workers revolution—the October Revolution of 1917 led by the Bolshevik Party.

Despite the subsequent degeneration of the workers state under the political rule of the parasitic Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the International Communist League defended the Soviet Union against all attempts at capitalist counterrevolution, whether of imperialist or domestic origin. We fought for a workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy, which daily undermined the gains of the October Revolution, and replace it with the rule of workers soviets (councils). That is our program for the remaining deformed workers states—China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba.

The current situation in the U.S. steel industry is a clear example of how the capitalist profit system differs from a planned economy under workers rule. In 1980, some 400,000 workers were employed in U.S. steel plants and produced about one ton of steel per worker every nine hours. Today, only 120,000 workers are similarly employed and produce a ton of steel every two hours. Under capitalism, which is geared toward maximizing the profits of the tiny class of exploiters, this increased productivity has fueled unemployment, the contraction of wages and benefits and the savaging of the pensions of union retirees. Under a socialist planned economy, this transformation would be a good thing, shortening the workday while increasing the potential social product available to society as a whole. There is no reform that can bridge these counterposed social systems.

The fight to forge the American revolutionary proletarian party requires the exposure and denunciation of those who lead the workers onto the path of reform of the murderous and anarchic imperialist order. This includes the likes of the International Socialist Organization and Workers World Party, whose efforts center on pleading with the Democrats to beat imperialism’s sabers into the plowshares of jobs and social benefits. Most recently, they raised this appeal in league with the anti-Semitic, anti-woman, pro-black-capitalism demagogue Louis Farrakhan, supporting (critically or not) his reactionary “Millions More March” in Washington, D.C. last month. Attracting support from Bill Clinton and an array of black Democrats—as well as a handful of “progressive” union officials—that march was called to commemorate Farrakhan’s 1995 rally for “atonement,” which blamed black people for their own oppression.

The groundwork for the current attacks on the well-being of all was prepared with a frontal assault on black people. The deindustrialization of the Northeast and Midwest has been especially devastating in this regard, since unionized industrial jobs were central to the fragile economic base of the segregated black communities. Budget cuts slashed social welfare programs, capped by Clinton’s 1996 “reform” all but eliminating welfare, and hit particularly hard at black workers in public services. In short, anything that could be characterized as addressing the needs of the black population became a target. The loss of jobs was accompanied by skyrocketing incarceration of young black (and Latino) men, largely under the banner of the “war on drugs.” The intensification of state repression included a speedup on death row, campaigns for draconian mandatory sentencing and the construction of myriads of prisons.

Black oppression, with its profound and pervasive ideological effects, is fundamental to the American capitalist order. Obscuring the class divide, racism and white supremacy have served to bind white workers to their capitalist masters with the illusion of a commonality of interest based on skin color. A proletarian revolutionary party simply cannot be forged in the U.S. without linking the fight for black freedom to the fight against all exploitation and oppression. It is necessary to recruit those who recognize the depravity of U.S. imperialism to become fighters for the forging of a multiracial working-class party—a U.S. section of a reforged Fourth International, which is the indispensable instrument for the victory of socialist revolution.