Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 00:11:19 +1000
From: Sergio Fiedler <s.fiedler-AT-unsw.edu.au>
Subject: AUT: War and Terror in the age of Global Empire


Hi everyone,

I wrote this little piece for the Love & Rage zine Autonomy & Solidarity,
and these are a few intial thoughts on the US crisis and the possibility of
war.

Cheers

Sergio

_________________

War and Terror in the Age of Global Empire

By Sergio Fiedler

The images of devastation and human suffering shown by the news reports
coming from New York have shocked the world. The number of victims caused
by the Kamikaze attack on the WTC and the Pentagon on September the 11th is
already in the thousands. Most of those who died were mostly workers of the
services industry, not the rich and powerful who hide in their mansions and
bunkers. The victims were men and women who worked as employees in offices,
doing cleaning or catering. They were fire fighters, janitors and nurses.
They were not simply "white Americans" but people from different parts of
the world who came to the US with the dream of living a better life. As
anti-capitalists and revolutionaries, we express our solidarity with all
the innocent victims of this carnage and share with the people on the
street our rejection of the use of terror as a political strategy.

However, this is not the first time a terrorist act of such a large
magnitude has been perpetrated against disarmed civilians. Despite claiming
to defend democracy and freedom, the US government itself has carried out
devastating bombing campaigns on civilians, and actively supported
political regimes that have violated human rights on a massive scale.
Remember Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, Chile, Palestine, Iraq and the
Balkans. The cold-blooded killing of people in New York is as horrifying as
the bombing of Iraqi civilians by the US military. With the multitudes of
the world we would like to enter into a minute of silence for those who
died in the US on September the 11th. But for that mourning to have real
meaning we must also pay our respect to all the victims of the terror
inflicted by the US government throughout the 20th century; all those
millions who have died nameless and faceless as a result of US sponsored
violence and oppression, all those whose lives have been of too little
value to occupy a place within the spectacle of the global media.

Instead of supporting the belligerent reaction of the US government against
an invisible and unknown enemy, this is perhaps the time for the people of
the US to reflect upon the political reasons behind the immense hatred that
inspired this terrorist attack. Today the main question arising from this
tragedy is not who did it, but why it happened. This was not the result of
external forces of darkness that have infiltrated Western civilisation from
the outside. In the new imperial economy of corporate globalisation, there
is no outside. These attacks are not the plot of an archaic religious
fundamentalism, but the product and the symbol of the inequalities and
abuses of a global system of power within which the US government and
corporations have played a major role.

This is the opportunity, therefore, to question US foreign policy rather
than rallying behind it. To miss this opportunity would simply let George
W. Bush and all of the other powers that have come to his support a free
hand to let loose perhaps the most genocidal global warfare and
dictatorship ever known to humanity. The US Secretary of State, Collin
Powell, pointed out that people should brace themselves for a "long term
conflict... fought on many fronts". With the historical record of violent
US intervention into other countries, the prospect of this statement
becoming a reality is terrifying. The possibility of all out war becomes
even more dangerous in a terrain where international conflict has ceased to
be the sum of local struggles coming together. Rather it would be waged in
a global space as if there were no national boundaries. If there is a
generalised military conflict as the one predicted by Powell, this will not
mean simply drawing US allies together behind a war to be waged in a
"distant corner" of the world. That is simply one element of it. What is in
the mind of the imperial policy makers is for each nation state to
implement a war within their own borders against real or imagined
terrorists as a part of a global strategy of repression. In Australia that
would mean even more draconian border controls against undocumented
immigrants, more racial vilification of ethnic communities perceived as
"harbouring terrorism," and more criminalisation of anti-capitalist
activists and all those who oppose the war.

The current crisis in the US is just a concentrated event where the
destinies of all countries and peoples of the world are at this moment
contained. Over the last twenty years we have seen the globalisation of
capital, media images and political power. Now we are confronted with a
further drastic advance of the imperial system of power if the main
superpowers decide to draw humanity into war. In this new war there will be
no visible enemy, everyone is potentially both a victim and a perpetrator.
This is truly what a system of terror is based on. The Italian PM Silvio
Berlusconi has already set the tone when he said that if governments now
want to launch a war against terrorism, people must get used to living with
less liberty. In Australia, the leader of the Labor opposition has called
on Australians from "different cultural backgrounds" to dob in "terrorists"
within their communities. The attack on the US has now been constructed as
an attack on every power centre of the imperial system. This has been posed
as a "barbaric attack on civilisation." On the other hand, the invisible
and almost unrepresentable figure of "the terrorist" has been invoked as a
symbolic device to further justify the penetration of State terror into the
fabric of everyday life. The idea that the terrorist is this elusive being
that moves throughout society without restriction is not only a
justification for massive suppression of civil liberties and the
racialisation of terror, but the fostering of fear and distrust among
people as the main tool to divide and disarm social movements. This is the
"strategy of tension" that, from being implemented at a national level by
many governments throughout the 70s and 80s, now is reaching global
dimensions.

The anti-corporate and anti-capitalist rebellion initiated by the
Zapatistas in Mexico and generalised with the Battle of Seattle in 1999,
drastically perturbed the neo-liberal order, and opened the possibility of
an alternative globalisation from below. The terrorist attack in New York
and Washington and the imperial response to them, is certainly a blow to
the emerging movement. We cannot keep engaging in the same type of activism
without realising that the entire political scenario has radically changed
after S11, 2001. An act of terror of such a scale and the anger and anguish
created -at least in short term- will create some considerable public
support for a war effort. Our tactics and strategies need to be re-thought.
What is not going to be taken away from us, however, are the foundations of
our politics: that people’s liberations from oppression can only be the
result of their own autonomous organisation and collective self-activity.
One of the fundamental assumptions about the politics of autonomy is that
our means of struggle are shaped by the goals of our struggle. This means
that we cannot fight for an absolute participatory democracy through
authoritarian and non-democratic means.

We do not seek to organise a movement simply as the function of a distant
achievement or even concrete demands. Rather we see the movement as an
achievement in itself, a space where we experiment with new political and
social relations based on solidarity and liberty as a fundamental stepping
stone for building a society based on cooperation, not private gain and
repression. Those are foundations that make the politics of an
anti-capitalist activist so drastically different from those who use terror
to achieve a political end. Terrorism, even if motivated by genuine
demands, is based on a desperate action inspired by extreme individual
powerlessness. While its operational structures are often decentralised and
tend to replicate autonomous and networked forms of organisation, they are
bound by a central command that defines actions from the top without any
process of consultation and enforcing the most rigid discipline on all of
its members. The functional separation between means and ends and the
disregard for internal democracy necessarily translates into an absolute
disregard for the human and social impact of the terrorist act. The
terrorist organisation is in this respect the mirror image of the State it
seeks to attack, and therefore, completely dehumanised and dehumanising. By
replicating State hierarchies and centralisation within its own body, the
terrorist organisation changes nothing and gives the excuse for governments
to crack down on genuine social movements.

We are all surprised, however, of the enormous effectiveness of the act of
terror against the WTC to damage the system, particularly its ability to
create political chaos and massive economic losses for capitalism,
accelerating the process towards a new global recession. Nevertheless, the
reason that revolutionary activists look at multitudes of people, working
class autonomies and collective power in general as the main avenues to
change the world is not because these have the social power to do so. The
attack on the US proves that social power against capital can often derive
from other sources, not necessarily the autonomous action of the working
class. The ability to shut the system down is not what makes the working
class revolutionary. Any act of terror can do that. What makes the working
class a revolutionary class is not only its social ability to be against,
but to pose the project of proletarian power positively, by creating within
its own collective organisation the possible foundations of a new future
and a new life. That is something that no act of political terror is
capable of doing; terror is only capable of destroying.

Imperialism was a system of international relations where the core nation
states of the world economy expanded capital investment and military
intervention beyond their own borders. This system generated two distinct
but connected types of conflict. On the one hand, an inter-imperialist
conflict among the different superpowers competing for greater control of
resources, markets and political client States around the world. On the
other, anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles where oppressed peoples
in Latin America, Africa and Asia struggled for the constitution of nation
states that were economically and politically independent of the
imperialist superpowers. These movements were known as national liberation
struggles.

The reshaping of global capitalism over the second half of the twentieth
century, and particularly in the neo-liberal phase, has changed this system
of international relations. World capitalism has entered into an imperial
stage. The creation of regional blocks, the development of multi-lateral
agreements, the strengthening of all sorts of global economic and political
institutions, and the fall of Soviet Union have meant that the
inter-imperialist conflict between superpowers have been substituted by an
extended imperial consensus and alliance among the core nation states and
multinational corporations within the world economy. A new world war among
superpowers is a very unlike possibility. While under imperialism the
global domination was mediated by a grid of nation states, the new imperial
system knows no boundaries or limits in its process of administration and
control, it is immediately global as much economically as militarily. While
within the new empire the US plays a dominant position, this position is
only possible through a solid network of global alliances involving
governments as much as non-government institutions. National liberation
movements, finally unable to forge independent projects of economic and
political modernisation, have been completely captured and coopted within
the new imperial network. In this respect, the emergence of nationalisms
and fundamentalisms in the last twenty years are not the expression of the
resistance to global capital. It is precisely the decline of the nation
states as a sphere of political control that has unleashed the ability of
all sort of warlords and tyrants - many of who were once supported by the
imperial powers - to cement their own local sphere of power to challenge
the empire from within. Osama bin Laden or the Taliban are products of
global capital, not the alternative to it as national liberation movements
once were. While they might enjoy popular support among the poor and the
destitute, that does not transform them into progressive movements. The
attack on the WTC was not the result of the violence of the oppressed
getting out of hand, it was simply a capitalist line of flight going
suicidal.

The war that the US government is planning and preparing with the support
of all super powers is a truly imperial war. As the war rhetoric in the US
has announced, this will be a war that will know no boundaries and will be
waged on several fronts over a long period of time. This won’t be a war
strictly between nation states, but between the powers of an imperial order
and all those communities that are perceived as harbouring terrorism.
George W. Bush has already warned that those who oppose this war effort
will be categorised as enemies, forcing many governments to intensify
repression against their own population with the excuse of fighting
terrorism. The next war won’t be a war against terrorism; it will be
against humanity.




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