Re: AUT: Re: unions against the war??

[Scott Hamilton <s_h_hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>]

The dominant strand of the European bourgeoisie has
little to gain and much to lose from a unilateral US
invasion of Iraq. The French, for instance, have
significant interests in Iraq's oil industry. Several
European countries - France and Germany, especially -
are attempting to compete, or rather coexist, with
U.S. imperialism by carving out their own 'spheres of
influence'. There was quite a struggle over central
Asia, especially the oil reserves there, with the
early European ascendancy being reversed after S 11,
the invasion of Afghanistan, and the setting up of US
military bases in several Central Asian states.


The Europeans are in no position to compete with the
US militarily, and therefore look to multilateral
institutions like the UN to muzzle US unilaterlaism
and advance their own interests. That's what all the
talk about 'international law' comes down to.

Britain does not challenge the US in the way that
France and Germany do - ever since the end of the
Second World War, which confirmed the US's gradual
usurpation of Britain's role as leading imperialist
power and guarantor of the world economy, Britain has
employed the strategy of attaching itself closely to
the US and hoping to get crumbs from the big boys'
table. Britain is in truth too weak to pursue the
relatively independent line favoured by France and
Germany. It has little choice but to follow the US in
its late imperialist adventures. The liberals and
social democrats of the Guardian and the Mirror only
think Blair's attachment to Bush 'perverse' because
they ignore this fact.

It can also be seen, though, that a section of the
British bourgeoisie, the so-called Europhiles
represented by a minority of the Tory Party and to
some extent by the Liberal Party, has become
integrated with the dominant strand of the European
bourgeoisie, and for this reason tends to share the
European bourgeoisie's opposition to a unilateral US
adventure in Iraq.

Other, smaller European countries like Sweden and
Norway are at best tinpot imperialists who rely
economically upon trade with larger Euro-imperialists
and hence live indirectly off the superexploitation of
regions like the Middle East. Even more than Germany
and France, they lack the military means to act on
their own behalf in the semi-colonial world. It's not
surprising, then, that they tend to favour a very
'liberal' multilateralist imperialism conducted
through institutions like the EU and the UN as well as
their own ad hoc beatups like the Oslo Accords.

I think, then, that there is a material basis for
opposition to the US war drive from much of the
European bourgeoisie. It's no wonder that so many of
them are making anti-war and anti-US talk. It needs to
be stressed, though, that the interests of the US
bourgeoisie do not overlap with the interests of the
European working class, except in the negative
short-term sense that a section of the European
working class, the people Engels called 'bourgeois
workers' and Lenin called a 'labour aristocracy',
benefit from Euro-imperialism and can be expected to
feel the temptation to side with their bourgeoisie a
la 1914.

There is no progressive sense in which the interests
of the European workers and the European bourgeoisie
coincide, in the way that the feeble national
bourgeoisie in Palestine, Venezuela, Iraq and other
semi-colonial countries may temporarily have some
progressive interests in common with the working class
they exploit (ie a common interest in resisting
occupation or invasion, or avoiding bombs). Even more
importantly, there is no sense in which the interests
of the Euro-bourgeoisie and the workers and peasants
of the semi-colonial world being threatened with war
coincide. The Euro-bourgeoisie is opposed to the US
only because it wants to exploit more semi-colonial
workers, not because it wants to relieve them from
exploitation. Its beloved UN has killed more Iraqis
with its sanctions than any US invasion will kill.

Revolutionaries must break workers away from the
Popular Front that is the anti-war movement in the
West. Doing this, though, is easier said than done.
Walking away and leaving the mass of the workers to
the bureaucrats of the Popular Front, as anarchists
appear to have done the other day in San Fransisco
(report/retort anyone?) is no solution. We have to
push for workers' direct action, explain the deep
nature of imperialism, and oppose the undemocracy
which is an inevitable feature of the Popular Front,
so that the bureaucrats and the bourgeoisie inside the
movement are put under pressure and expose themselves.


We had a tiny, tiny example of this at the end of 2001
in Auckland, when revolutionaries won a mass planning
meeting of the anti-war Popular Front over to the
slogan 'Stop America's War', in opposition to 'Peace
Now' or something similar. The bourgeois Peace
Foundation walked out of the Front, claiming that the
protests using that slogan would be 'anti-American'. A
few months later I saw that they had invited pro-war
US bourgeois media 'pundit' Wynne Dyer to their annual
black tie 'Peace Awards' dinner. I guess they were
worried about offending him, and the people who'd pay
$50 to come and see him. Organisations like the Peace
Foundation are totally incompatible with a an anti-war
United Front of labour.

Cheers
Scott





=====
"Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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