Since our last meeting in Athens, we have been witnessing a further development of the concept of imperialist global intervention. The efforts to turn NATO into an arm of global capitalist intervention have been gaining ground. The models of interventions implemented in places such as Afghanistan and Balkan are being generalized to a great extent. This is particularly seen in the case of Iraq and Lebanon and in other crisis areas. The Bush administration faced by its serious setbacks in Iraq is seeking to bring together an international police force under its leadership. This is being done in the guise of NATO and other forms, including UN forces. This is particularly manifested m the efforts to build alliance against Iran, PDRK and other so-called rogue States according to the Bush administration terminology. Such policies pose serious dangers for the independence of States, and social and economic development of their peoples.
The campaign orchestrated by the Western powers against Iran for its insistance on acquiring nuclear know-how for peaceful purposes, and against PDRK for having nuclear weapon, is rather farsical. However, before proceeding any further, we would like to make clear our principle position against proliferation of nuclear weapons and for nuclear disarmament. The campaign against both countries is a clear manifestation of the double standard policy applied by the Western capitalist countries. They attack Iran and PDRK, while keeping completely silent about Israel’s nuclear arsenals and programmes. They even refuse to have the Inter Atomic Energy Agency inspect Israel nuclear facilities and programs. They are some States which are above this law.
It is of utmost importance that all efforts be directed to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation, thus should be coupled with concerted actions to realize without delay nuclear disarmament of all States in possession of nuclear weapons.
We are in fact witnessing a campaign of intensified exploitation in the form of so-called globalization supplemented by individual and/or collective military intervention under the guise of different names, such as spreading democracy, good governance, protection of human and minority rights, anti-terrorism, religious freedom and the like. The most desired tools for attainment of such so-called goals in the US administration catch phrase, regime change”. We have seen that in action in places like Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq.
The Lebanon was the target of such a desired regime change. It was the subject of US supported Israeli war of aggression that shought to establish a puppet regime. It is noteworthy that all the major capitalist governments kept mum as most of Lebanon infrastructure was destroyed and nearly one third of its population was driven out of its towns, villages and homes.
We witness the same silence today in face of Israeli daily massacres in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Despite all this, we observe to stubborn resistance and opposition by the peoples of the world to condemn new tactics of the capitalist governments. Demonstrations have been organized all around the globe against the continued occupation of Iraq, against the US supported Israeli war of aggression against Lebanon and against imperialist aggressive policies.
Recently, the US administration has emphasized the concept of “oil security or energy security” that should be read as a desire to control oil and gas resources in the world. President Bush referred openly to this concept in his 2006 State of the Union address when he finally put into words what all previous US presidents could not bring themselves to pronounce in public. The aim of the US is not only to assure access to cheap and reliable oil and gas, but also to keep its hold on the supply of both commodities to its allies and to other countries such as China, Japan and South Korea. It is a very well known axiom that whoever controls the oil and gas resources will control the world.
We have seen in practice that the energy or oil security has turned out to be, as one US commentator has said, “a terrifying hybrid of the old and the new: primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to the war on terror”.
In this context, we find a new scramble for Africa. The US Council on Foreign Relations discussed this openly in its new report called “More than Humanitarianism” which was put out in 2005, and in which it called for a different US approach to Africa. This new approach, it turns out, is dictated by what it called “Africa’s Strategic Importance for US Policy”. For the US policy makers the West African Gulf of Guinea which encompasses the rich-on-and off shore fields stretching from Nigeria to Angola represents a key plank in their oil policy. Nigeria and Angola alone account for 4 millions barrels of oil per day.
In these attempts over Africa, it is important to state that the US imperialism is planning to completely dominate Africa after its dominance over the Middle East.
Today, the US which has experienced a long-run decline of its economic hegemony, but still remains the leading capitalist power, is seeking to gain global dominance by military means on a scale that would have been previously inconceivable. The fall of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole remaining super power. Over the 1990, it began to move militarily into areas that were formerly part of the Soviet sphere of influence or that had been contented by the superpowers. Thus, in the past decade and a half, it has fought wars or carried military interventions in the Gulf the horn of Africa, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Libya.
Following the events of September 11, 2001, the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan, thus reaching Central Asia and the Caspian sea region with its natural gas and oil resources. Immediately thereafter it invaded Iraq in an attempt to gain control over Iraqi
oil and that of the Gulf countries as a whole. Furthermore, it supported the Israeli war of aggression against Lebanon as stank warning and threat to the Lebanese resistance, Syria and Iran to toe the line or face annihilation.
By threatening to seize control of world oil reserves through the exercise of its military power, the US has sent a message to the rest of the world, contributing to fear and insecurity throughout the globe.
The US has engaged in “preemptive” attacks against smaller powers, has announced its intention to maintain and modernize its vast, world threatening nuclear arsenal and has increased its military spendings to an unprecedented level that overtake the expenditures of all states put together.
The ecological crisis egendered by the capitalist world economy meanwhile threatens the collapse of world civilization, and make an irreparable damage to the entire biosphere from which human society and the planet as we know it may never recover — if current trends are reversed.
The capitalist world system of today can therefore be seen as envelopped in an allencompassing crisis of the future of civilization. Not surprising in this context, resistance to the system is growing more widespread and the renewal of socialism as a socio political movement and challenger to capitalism seems in the offing. In some capitalist countries, workers, students and minorities joined forces to demand that the impossible be made possible. Protests in Seattle helped to engender a world-wide anti-globalization movement that is continuing to challenge the capitalist system. Worldwide outbursts of protests against the war in Iraq and the Israeli aggression were the largest in recent history and point the groundwell of global opposition to imperialism. The fierce resistance to US imperialism within Iraq, while arising out of nationalism and frantic religious forces as well the heroic Lebanese resistance to the Israel aggression have not only highlighted the weakness of the imperialist military machine, but has pointed to the urgency that the progressive, democratic and revolutionary forces are joining the ranks and the forefront of the struggle against imperialism.
Cuba remains as a standing reproach to all those who had abandoned hope for socialism and a bacon to the oppressed - above all to the rest of Latin America. Progressive changes are occurring in areas so far removed as Nepal and Venezuela, and show that attempts to break with capitalism and imperialism are part of the present history. Chávez has repeatedly called for a “Socialism for the 2lst Century”. In this, he is clearly not asking for the renewal of some pre-existing models, but new global alternative geared to twenty-first century needs and aimed as always at the promotion of equality, cooperation and social justice. Venezuela in alliance with Cuba is drawing upon and stimulating the discontent in other parts of Latin America — in Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador — where many people are changing the course of events, wrenching their right and declaring the bankruptcy and the defeat of the “Washington Consensus”.
It is impossible to know precisely what forms this new socialist renewal will take since it is still in the making and will be subject to continuing historical struggles. Yet, it is not utopian to believe that present and future attempts to build socialism will reflect critical historical lessons derived from the past, as well as changing historical conditions that define the present.
Socialism must seek to turn the enormous productivity of modern society to other ends than the accumulation of capital. Exploitation in the labour process needs to be eliminated through workers’ own self-organization. In a society that is socialist, i.e. committed lo the principle of “free development of each is the conditions for the free development of all” (Marx & Engels, the Communist Manifesto). Everyone must have access to basic requirements of free existence: clean air and water, safe food, decent housing, adequate health care, essential means of transport and worthwhile and rewarding employment.
Socialism cannot survive unless it transcends class division that divides off those who run the society from those that are compelled to work mainly on their behalf but also all major forms of oppression that cripple human potential and prevent democratic, social alliances. If any lesson was learned from the past experience to create socialism it is that class struggle must be inseparable from the struggles against gender, race, national oppression — and against those politically weak (disabled). Socialism must cater for ecological improvement and protection of all endangered species which we have on the Earth.
The various forms of non-class domination are so endemic to capitalist society that no progress can be made in overcoming class oppression without fighting these other social divisions. If the political emancipation of bourgeois society constituted one of the bases upon which a wider human emancipation could be built, a major obstacle to the latter has been the fact that political emancipation – the realm of so-called inalienable human rights
— has remained incomplete under capitalism. This must in all cases be overcome.
Rosa Luxemburg insisted that “without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.” Hence, the requirement of “socialist democracy”, she insisted, “begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and the construction of socialism.” The reason for this is not some abstract sense of justice, but a law of socialist revolution itself. Such a democracy — no longer formal but filled with economic and social content — constitutes “the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions ... /it thus embodies/ the active, energetic, political life of the broadest masses of the people.” (Rosa Luxernburg, the Rosa Luxemburg Reader New York. Monthly Review, January 1993).
Socialist democracy is not to be conceived as applying merely to the political sphere, narrowly conceived, but would have to extend to all aspects of public and private life: the factory, the check-out counter, and the office as well and even the home.