José Padilla, Bushite Bonapartism and Cuba

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The announcement that José Padilla is to be held indefinitely without
charges at the pleasure of President Bush marks a watershed in the evolving
political situation in the United States.

Padilla was picked up on one of these bills of attainder called "material
witness warrants" a month ago at some airport, and the government was
unable, despite having an unconscionable one month to do so, to present to a
bought-and-paid-for ruling class judge enough (needless to say, fabricated)
evidence to have the guy held by the criminal justice system. So, on
the eve of a judicial hearing on the legality of his continued detention, he
was transported out of the court's jurisdiction, and turned over to the
military for more "aggressive" questioning as some sort of "combatant." To
show just what a fearsome terrorist this person is, the AP account details a
suspended sentence, a couple of traffic tickets, a conviction for driving
with a suspended license and --to top it off-- his juvenile record, which is
supposedly sealed and a crime to divulge (from the government side) or
publish (even if the government leaks it) from the press side.

So much for the rule of law.

There is no pretense that Padilla is being held for ANY kind of trial or
tribunal, even a military kangaroo court, or even the Alice-in-Wonderland
abomination H.R.H. George the Little has mandated by royal decree for the
Guantánamo prisioners. He is to be held at the pleasure of the Crown, or as
Americans prefer to style it, the executive branch of government.

I referred earlier to the "material witness" imprisonment of José Padilla as
a "bill of attainder," a legal term of art dating back to the 1700's. It
isn't quite accurate, for the Bill of Attainder in British history was
Parliament decreeing punishment without trial, something that was still
going on in the 18th Century. The idea that the Crown should be able to
simply punish people without trial had long since been repudiated, even in
the Britain of the 1700's: that was a struggle that went all the way back to
the Magna Carta, from which the United States inherited the very
un-republican, but  nevertheless valuable, turn-of-phrase of "trial by a
jury of one's peers."

But those guarantees, categorically codified in the Constitution, the Bill
of Rights, and other founding documents of the American Republic, today mean
little. They have been systematically attacked, abolished by legislative
action, royal decree or whim of Ayatollah Ashcroft. What the Supreme Court
said of Dred Scott 150 years ago has now been generalized to everyone: back
then it was a Black man has no rights a white man is bound to respect;
today, it is no person has any rights the government is bound to respect.

It is of special significance to note this: the writ of habeas corpus, the
"Great Writ" which is the cornerstone of judicial protection against
executive or legislative despotism, is no longer available as a matter of
*right.* The United States no longer has, not even in theory, not even in
bourgeois terms, a government of laws. It is a government of men, the
President's men, who have established, at least in principle, that they have
unchecked, unaccountable authority to do to the rest of us just as they
please.

Yes, I know, this has been the *essence* of things in the American Republic
since 1898 if not the defeat of radical reconstruction after the Civil War.
But there is nevertheless a tremendous difference between saying that is the
*essence* of the matter once you tear past all the formalities and bullshit,
and saying that is how things ARE, openly and nakedly.

In the ruling class circles, such things are starting to be discussed
OPENLY. For some months, some forces have begun to raise doubts about
whether such a wholesale and arbitrary shredding of the constitution and
Bill of Rights is altogether wise -- not, of course, because they infringe
on the rights of working people, but because they undermine the right of the
ruling class itself to run the country as it sees fit. From a bourgeois
point of view, the big problem with a Bonapartist regime is, well,
Bonaparte. They are rarely as clever as they imagine themselves to be.

Thus, on the Find Law website, we find no less a figure than former
counsel-to-the-president and ruling-class hero John Dean (yes, hero, for he
saved them from the likely consequences of Nixonian Bonapartism and was duly
rewarded, after serving his Watergate sentence, with a cushy job in the
financial markets), pointing out that the United States is well on the way
to becoming what political scientists call a "Constitutional Dictatorship."

"Dictatorship" in this sense is a term of art, much like a Bill of
Attainder. It means not so much personal power of an individual (although
this is almost of necessity part of the package in any capitalist
dictatorial regime), but a government unrestrained by pre-existing laws,
like a constitution or bill of rights.

"Constitutional," on the other hand, is merely eyewash. A "Constitutional
Dictatorship" means simply, a dictatorship I like; it has no other meaning.
For example, the recent coup attempt in Venezuela was an attempt to set up
what was, from the point of view of Viceroy for Latin America Otto Reich and
the Venezuelan rich, a "Constitutional Dictatorship" the first act of which
was precisely to abolish the constitution overwhelmingly ratified by popular
vote only a couple of years ago.

Political observers have long noted that there have been no small amount of
Bonapartist tendencies and traits involved in the "imperial presidency" of
the post-WWII United States. But what is going on now goes beyond
Bonapartist *traits* or *tendencies,*  the political regime seems to be
rapidly evolving towards the thing itself.

True, George the Little hardly seems like good material for an equestrian
statue. But I believe in the last analysis each class gets the leadership it
deserves, and in the meantime, is, at any rate, stuck with the leadership it
has.

Some comparisons have been made to the Truman-Eisenhower (so-called
McCarthy) witch-hunt, but I think they're off. The Truman attack on the
rights of working people, after all, had a clear motive and target. It's
purpose was to housebreak the powerful industrial unions that had arisen as
a result of the radicalization of the 1930s in huge class battles and
fragment, isolate and drive underground the main organized expression of the
radical movement that emerged in the 1930s, the CP. (And, as it turned out,
it was complemented, re-enforced, and eventually moderated and repealed by
the quarter-centure post World War II boom.)

I do not believe this change in the domestic political regime has
fundamentally anything to do with September 11 as such, at least viewed as
an *event.* CIA-spawned and trained "Islamic fundamentalist" terrorism
targetting "the homeland" has been around for nearly a decade, perhaps more.
Had the political circumstances been riper, the original 1973 World Trade
Center bombing in New York could well have served as a "cassus belli" for
the "war" on "terrorism" and there have been other attacks since then.

My own thinking on the roots of this really goes back to the Clinton
impeachment and the the 2000 presidential elections. I think the roots of
"the war on terrorism" --as it is being waged by the Bush-Ashcroft-Cheney
regime-- are there. The attempt to create a much more nakedly Bonapartist
regime, by which I mean one in which the president and his men are
qualitatively less dependent on or checked by other political institutions,
whether they be Congress, the judiciary, the two-party system or elections.

    Just before a 5-4 Supreme Court majority elected George Bush President,
I wrote on this list:

*  *  *

    It seems clear with this election that what was essentially the
coalition or bipartisan system of government that prevailed in the United
States throughout the Cold War has broken down. And it has broken down
because the Republicans in particular refuse to play by the old rules.

    The attempt to impeach President Clinton against the overwhelming
desires of the American people was a clear indication of this.

    This brazen attempt to steal the election is yet another.[...]

    The politics behind it are also fairly clear. This is the more extreme,
anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-union, anti-immigrant, theocratic,
"christian coalition" wing of the Republican Party which around the edges
overlaps with protofascist elements. This wing of the Republicans has become
conscious, I suspect, that at best, with all their hangers on, they
represent perhaps a third of the electorate, (and, of course, an even
smaller percentage of the population as a whole). But they are increasingly
acting in such a way as to bully themselves into positions of power. They
are dissatisfied with the piecemeal  attempts to chip away at the changes
wrought in U.S. society by the civil rights movement and the radicalization
of the 1960s, they want a much more aggressive, overall offensive to restore
the America of the 1950s, or to be more exact, of the 1950s TV sitcoms
(without, of course, any Cuban band leaders: THAT was before the
revolution).

    I think a lot of thought needs to be given to this changing nature of
bourgeois politics and the relations between the two main bourgeois parties.
My tentative conclusion is that much more is going on here than simply a
brawl among pigs for a place at the trough. That may be true of the
Democrats, but I don't believe it is true of a wing of the Republicans,
which might well be the politically dominant wing.

    The Supreme Court decision will tell us a great deal. There is little
question but that based on the American "democracy" religion, the court
OUGHT to rule in such a way that the votes get counted. That almost
certainly will result in a Gore victory, precisely because the uncounted
votes are disproportionately black and poor. A decision that throws the
election to Bush will almost certainly require a brazen refusal to count
more than 40,000 votes, and would be a statement by this Republican faction
that they don't care that they lost the popular vote, the vote in Florida
and the electoral college. They're going to steal the election because they
can.

    This will, of course, be a body blow to the prestige of the court, to
its image of impartiality, of being above the fray and all that other
nonsense. It will be an indication that these forces recognize that what
they mean to do will require quite a bit more arbitrariness and probably
force and repression by the government than we have been used to in recent
decades.

    The thing that troubles me about this line of analysis is that, frankly,
it implies a certain degree of desperation on the part of these bourgeois
forces, something that at least looking at American society on the
surface --which is how these people look at it-- seems quite unjustified.
There is no open, growing economic or social crisis, or external challenge,
that requires such a tightening in the regime, with all the risks this
implies. Yet as far as I can tell, the ruling class and its major
institutions seem unconcerned.

So while on one level this analysis seems to make sense, on a broader scale,
the pieces don't all really seem to quite fit.

*  *  *

    That was from a December 12, 2000 post. It seems to me now that what I
didn't see clearly then is the international context. No, not Osama's outfit
or anything else like that, but the reality BEHIND "terrorism," the
increasing pauperization and immiseration of the Third World, which is the
very distilled essence of capitalist "globalization," and which gives rise
to Al Qaeda and much else besides.

    The Osama bin Laden organization is, from all accounts, a bizarre
operation. Made up of would-be bourgeois messias, lumpen expats, declassed
elements from petty-bourgeois layers, etc., it shares aspects of an ideology
with real expressions of the mass struggle against imperialism, like some
radical Palestinians groups and others. Yet its REAL roots lie in the CIA's
anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, a completely reactionary imperialist
operation, and after the CIA had no further immediate use for them, they
became aligned with the most recalcitrantly reactionary political faction to
emerge from the conflict. Al Qaeda is, in a sense, an accident of history,
but one that expresses the extreme degree of irrationality, of uncontrolled
decay that is a byproduct of the world imperialist system.

    Despite all that, it seems to me the essence of this Bush-league
Bonapartism is to free the hands of the U.S. military and CIA to impose a
Pax Americana on the Third World. Domestically, there simply is no reason,
no political opposition or crisis, that even remotely justifies considering
such inherently potentially destablilizing measures, never mind adopting
them.

    But the situation on a world scale is radically different. In the
Phillippines, Colombia, Asia and other places, American personnel play an
increasing role in a variety of conflicts, all under the rubric of "the war
on terrorism."

    Behind that, there is, I believe, a growing "crisis of governability" in
Third World countries, and even a breakdown in social and economic
structures, even is some cases, especially in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a
complete collapse of anything that could be called social order. The reason
for this tendency towards collapse are fundamentally economic: there is not
enough of the social surplus product allowed to remain in-country to allow
societies with a certain level of civility and organization to reproduce
themselves, never mind progress. Argentina is an illustration of this, as
are countries like Ecuador, Perú, Colombia and Venezuela. This is not a
result simply of bad policies, venal politicians, or that favorite whipping
boy of the bourgeois press and ONGs, "corruption." It flows, rather from the
increasing concentration and globalization of capital, from the routine,
day-in, day-out functioning of the market.

    This tendency of a "free market" system to simply ruin any society that
it gets its claws into and is allowed to operaste unfettered is as old as
Capitalism itself. I've been reminded of that recently, re-reading Engels's
"The Condition of the Working Class in England." What Engels largely
recounts in that book is simply the evidence gathered by the British ruling
classes themselves through their Parliament of the results of having driven
the rate of exploitation so high that what was left to the working people
went below the socially determined subsistence level. Quite literally, each
generation of workers was shorter, less physically fit, shorter-lived and
less socialized than the previous one. The English bourgeoisie eventually
came to see that --profitable as it may be on an individual level, at first,
to work the proletarians to death, fundamentally it did you no good because
all the other capitalists would do the same thing, and collectively it was
suicide: the degredation of the whole class of workers into infrahuman
conditions was, simply, unsustainable over the long run. And hence began the
series of "factory laws" and limits on the working day, which, on one side,
represented concessions to the working class movement, and on the other,
represented the collective wisdom of the British ruling classes that the
nature of the social system they championed was such that they needed their
State to step in and stop them from continuing to commmit genocide. And in
this the existence in Britain at the time of propertied, exploiting classes
OTHER than the rising class of industrial capitalists played an *essential*
role. I'm not sure what THAT means for today, except to say that one should
not count overmuch on the unaided "enlightened self interest" of the
capitalist class. Historically, without the terrorizing presence of ghosts,
the Scrooges haven't been that far-sighted.

    What September 11 showed is that what Fidel has been preaching for quite
a few years now is true: the current world social and economic order is
unsustainable, and that is true even for the leading capitalist countries,
for there simply is no way to isolate the United States or other imperialist
powers from the effects of the decay, irrationality and violence their
system generates on a world scale.

    Part and parcel of this is the decomposition of bourgeois democracy in
the imperialist powers. It is a tendency that was long ago noted by Trotsky,
propelled at the time of his last exile by the aftermath of WWI, the
depression of the 30's, and the beginning of WWII. Even though in the new
circumstances created by the twin --and, in the last analysis,
counterposed-- victories of the Soviet Union and American imperialism (over
its enemies AND allies) in World War II, there was a prolonged period of
"normal," stabilized, "democratic" rule in the imperialist countries.

    And, yes, that period has now come to an end. But I am not going to
predict here that, inescapably, this must lead to some sort of reborn
fascism or some similar phenomenon  in the advances imperialist countries
with cataclysmic consequences if not met and defeated in the next immediate
historic period. The Communist movement has been down that road before, and
the comrades of the American SWP continue to selflessly provide us with a
practical demonstration that down that road lies madness.

    Yes, that is ONE tendency --the one that preoccupies our thoughts-- but
history shows that there will be other tendencies at work, as well as the
unique results of their clash and playing out in real life, and the future
is, as yet, unwritten, and it will be much stranger in how it comes about
than we can possibly imagine.

*  *  *

    I wish I could give comrades something more fulfilling or more practical
than that abrupt end to my ruminations. But that is as far as I've thought
things through. I feel somewhat like the Mr. Jones of the Bob Dylan song,
except that it isn't that "something is happening" and I don't know what it
is, in fact, I kind of think I do. What I don't know is what to do about it.

    Yes, fight the good fight, and all that. Of course. Needless to say. But
there is also this: history has a way of providing a way out of the dead
ends it seems to have led humanity to. I have no doubts, fewer now than
ever, of what the ultimate solution MUST be: a worker's world, or none. And
I have no doubt on at least a lot of what we should do today -- raise a
voice, protest, dissent, resist; analyze, understand, explain.

    In between those two, the ultimate goal and this post, there is
something missing -- a strategy, an orientation, an overall approach. No,
not for the working class movement as a whole, but rather for the
Communists, the Marxists.

    The Leninists among us, of course, have no problem providing a
ready-made answer to this question: the Leninist Strategy of Party Building
is "the" answer to all questions. But it is, I fear, a false answer on two
levels, a) it has not, in fact, worked and b) unless you turn the party into
a sect, into an end in itself rather than an instrument of the workers
movement, this only raises the same question collectively for a few dozen, a
few hundred or a few thousand people at once. It is not at all answer.

    It may well be that, in regard to THIS question "they also serve who
stand and wait." I do not think that when Marx got together with his fellow
expats in the private room of a London pub in  the 1850's, he knew that the
answer to that time's equivalente of this question was the International
Working Men's Association that would arise in the following decade.

    Yet when the IWMA came along, he had the acuity to recognize what it
represented, and the communist movement, through successive stages of
political stuggle and education, eventually got to October in 1917, and if
you study that 50-some year history, you can see clearly how each stage led
to the next, sometimes with fewer forces, sometimes with more.

    [The inveterate Trotskyoid sectarians should probably skip this next,
concluding paragraph.]

    The *one* idea I have on what to do next, apart from the obvious, is
that it may well revolve around Cuba, and Fidel. Cuba represents the
projection into the 21st Century, into these days, of the historic conquests
of the working class movement. And, specifically Fidel because he is still,
and, I hope, for at least a few more years, despite his advancing age, will
remain the most seasoned leader of our movement at the dawn of this new
millenium. And, of course, it is more than Fidel, there is a whole cadre
around him. But if there is something we bring from the past as a
springboard for the future, we have there, in Cuba and Cuba's voice, Fidel,
its most concentrated expression.

José




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