Who Can Save the World From Chaos? Some Problems
The only power – today as ever – that can stop imperialist lunacy is the working class. However, because of the dire conditions US imperialism is creating in these foreign lands, the working class that must lead the way is the US working class. Unfortunately, the US working class has been virtually silent on the subject, hardly even defending itself from capitalist assaults on its unions.
Throughout the vicious wars imperialism has been waging – particularly since the attack on Iraq in 2003 – there has been no massive antiwar movement. Millions protested throughout the world and in the United States to try to prevent the US government from launching that 2003 offensive against the Iraqi people. However, these protests failed to prevent that attack. Since then, there has been virtual silence. This is true despite the fact that it is common knowledge that US government officials deliberately lied to justify that war and the multiple atrocities and crimes they have committed. Key known war criminals – such as George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and David Petraeus – write books, appear at public ceremonies, serve as “experts” on network TV, and live peaceful lives, in no way being held accountable.
The US working class has been “sold a bill of goods,” as the saying used to go: It has been cheated, hoodwinked, lied to, fooled again, except for the fact that the really damaging “goods” in this picture are being produced right here by the US working class itself.
One of the few sectors of the US capitalist economy that has been doing very well during the latest world capitalist crises has been the war industry. Congress last year approved a war budget of over $653 billion, according to the American Friends Service Committee. One reason Congress never says “No!” is because the key military contractors like Lockheed Martin engage in what is called “political engineering” to insure that the politicians will not vote “No.” This means that to produce one plane, say the white elephant F-35, Lockheed Martin spreads the work out through 1,400 contractors creating jobs in 46 states. Even though production of this plane should have been canceled long ago for many reasons, Lockheed Martin’s threat that this would “end jobs” helps justify repeated Congressional approval. (32)
Lockheed Martin is not alone. All the war industry giants use the same “political engineering” to insure that they receive huge government handouts. Certainly, the war industry does create jobs, many of them high-paying union jobs. Moreover, these jobs include not only the direct production of the bombers and the bombs, but of all the components used in the production process and all the weapons, uniforms, equipment, parts, and ammunition plus all the electronics used in every phase of attack.
Furthermore, Pentagon money is often welcomed by research departments in today’s underfunded universities, where our scientists misuse their expertise to develop and perfect ever-new weapons and instruments of war. Then, there are the transportation networks that rely on moving all the component parts to production plants and from the plants to the Pentagon or to the Pentagon’s customers. In addition, consider all the jobs that rely on the paychecks of the workers involved in everything listed above. We are talking about tens of millions of US jobs that rely on a thriving US imperialist war economy and the implementation of US imperialism’s plan to take over the entire globe and humanity’s resources.
How Must the Workers Organize to Stop This War Machine? What Is to Be Done?
How can we even begin to take on and shut down such an incredible behemoth that is actually being created by our own working class, by ourselves, here in the “belly of the beast?” It seems impossible! Yet it is not, and it must be done. What is required?
Public protests: First, of course, the working class and its allies across the nation must organize serious public demonstrations demanding that Washington stop funding jihadi armies, stop funding Arab terrorist monarchies, to stop funding Israel and stop the phony “War on Terror.”
However, to really stop all this, to really shut down the entire imperialist war industry requires much more than street protests. What must be done includes:
A thorough public investigation by the workers themselves: First, we need to conduct a complete national and international analysis of what is going on around us. This can only be done by the workers themselves taking on the task of investigating the role of their labor and their plant, industry, and community in the war machine.
A national network of collaboration: This will require that we establish a national organization and collaboration network. Workers on the job can then in a coordinated way form committees to investigate and report on what is being produced in their own plants and locales. Through this process, we will probably learn that the tentacles of this war machine penetrate into every pore of this society, encompassing entire industries, cities, towns, and communities. Workers may otherwise not even be aware – but often they must be! – of the role their labor plays in facilitating this gigantic machine of death and destruction.
A national conference: All of the above work must be directed toward making completely public and understandable what is now arcane and secret. The process will have to be facilitated by workers in some key industrialized and union-organized sectors – say, for example, the airline industry – calling a national conference to discuss the implementation of this process and related issues with the goal of maximizing the participation of workers from as many war-industry sites as possible so everyone involved can have a voice and participate.
Formulating a new national plan: The workers must then begin to formulate an alternative plan to build our economy anew, offering new jobs and using resources in ways that serve life and not death, human needs and not private profits.
While some industries will need to be completely eliminated, others may be converted relatively easily to useful and humane production. Where industries must be eliminated completely – such as those producing cluster bombs, for example – we will need to make sure that the workers whose livelihoods depend on such industries are able to live full and productive lives until the transformed economy provides better options.
Confiscation of the vast war profits of the “masters of war” and all their collaborators will be the first step toward achieving that last goal and many others.
The working-class revolution: The ruling class – these “masters of war” – of course, will not surrender and go home. Seeing this process through to completion will require that the working class take over the means of production and set up a new workers’ government, i.e., the proletarian revolution. Workers will also need to be able to defend ourselves and our gains from all the inevitable attacks from the capitalists and their state.
Genuine international solidarity: At the same time, we have the historic responsibility to help workers everywhere else make the working-class revolution in their countries and help those who have already become victims of US imperialist aggression to rebuild their economies.
And, indispensable to achieving all the above, of course, is the need for an organization to lead the way, a revolutionary party, which must also be built. This is the only way we can begin to “Stop the Bombing” and all the other US imperialist aggression that squander and ravage humanity and our resources.
Conclusion
This is not a matter of charity, pacifism or “good deeds.” It is a matter of survival. As Leon Trotsky put it simply in the Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, “Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the crumbs of a disintegrating society…” (33) This is the situation confronting us today. We are talking about the need for the working class to organize to take power. A socialist proletarian revolution is at the top of the agenda. As Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and other Marxists warned a century ago: Humanity faces a choice: It is either socialism or barbarism. Barbarism right now has the upper hand.
This article was originally published on Truthout.
Marilyn Vogt-Downey is a retired teacher of economics and foreign policy in a New York High School and UFT delegate, the translator of Mikhael Baitalsky’s Notebooks for the Grandchildren and works of Leon Trotsky. She was a frequent contributor to The Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, Socialist Action newspaper, and other socialist publications for many years and is currently a Co-Chair of the Moscow-based Committee for the Study of Leon Trotsky’s Legacy.
Notes
1. See Tomorrow’s Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, Nick Turse, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2015.
3. Ibid. pp. 6-10.
4. Ibid. 1-2
5. Ibid. p. 6
6. Ibid. p. 9,
7. Ibid. p. 10
8. Ibid. p. 11
9. Ibid. p. 17
10. Ibid. p.21
17. A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin, Avon Books, NY, 1989, p. 560
21. Globalsecurity.org
23. http://sss.migrationpolicy,org/article/labor-migration-united-arab-emirates -challenges-and-responses)
24. “ISIS Commands Media, Boasting of Statecraft and Killing,” The New York Times, August 31, 2014.
26. Robert Dreyfus, The Devil’s Game, Henry Holt and Company, NY, 2005.
27. Gerard Chaliand, Report From Afghanistan, Viking Press, NY, 1982.
31. “To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State,” Op Ed, The New York Times, November 24, 2015.
32. “The F-35’s History of Costly Problems,” NPR, September 29, 2013.
33. Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program For Socialist Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1983, p. 116.
*Population data for the Gulf States was taken from their respective entries in Wikipedia.
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
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