Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 09:09:23 +0000 (GMT)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?World=20Revolution?= <iccbritain-AT-yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: AUT: ICC international leaflet on war in Afghanistan


War in Afghanistan

The only response to imperialist war: international
class struggle!

In response to the horrible war crime of 11 September,
with its death toll of over 6,000 civilians, new and
equally horrible war crimes are being unleashed by the
USA and its 'allies'. 

Even before the first assaults were launched on an
already ruined Afghanistan, tens of thousands of
Afghan refugees were being condemned to death by
starvation and disease. The death list will increase
dramatically now that the military strikes have begun.
The bombs and missiles can only impede the delivery of
food to the hungry, a fact unaltered by the publicity
stunt of air-drops of grain by US planes. As for the
talk about 'precision strikes', we heard all that
before in the wars against Iraq in 1991 and Serbia in
1999. The populations of both those countries are
still living with the devastating results of such
'humanitarian' bombardments.

We are being told that this new war is a war for the
defence of democracy and civilisation against a
network of Islamic fanatics led by bin Laden. But bin
Laden and his breed, by deliberately setting out to
slaughter as many civilians as possible, were only
following the fine example already set by the
so-called 'civilised' states. For the civilisation
that rules the entire planet, both in the 'west' and
in the 'Muslim world', is capitalist civilisation; and
this is a social system which has been in profound
decay since the First World War. In the epoch of its
decline, it has already given us, as well as the death
camps of Nazism and Stalinism, the terror bombing of
London (the Blitz), of Dresden and Hamburg, of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam and Cambodia; and
the majority of these slaughters were also carried out
in the name of democracy and civilisation. In the last
decade alone it has given us the massacres in Iraq and
Kuwait, in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo; in Algeria,
Rwanda, the Congo, Chechnya and the Middle East. In
every one of these horror-stories, it has above all
been the civilian populations which have been held
hostage, forced to flee, tortured, raped, bombed and
herded into concentration camps. This is the
civilisation we are being asked to defend - a
civilisation which now lives in a state of unending
war, which is sinking deeper and deeper into its own
decomposition, threatening the very survival of the
human species.

The war's real agenda

The 'war against terrorism' is a complete lie. Not
just because the great democratic powers use methods
of terror themselves (the USA, for example, has
supported the IRA, the Contras, the Algerian Islamic
fundamentalists and?bin Laden himself, who began his
career as the CIA's agent against the Russians in
Afghanistan); but also because 'fighting terrorism' is
not what the present military action is really about.
The collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 also resulted
in the unravelling of the western bloc. The USA has
thus been confronted with a world situation in which
its former great power allies, and numerous lesser
powers as well, have been trying to challenge its
leadership and pursue their own imperialist ambitions.
This has led the USA into three great displays of
military force in the last ten years: against Iraq,
against Serbia, and now against Afghanistan. On each
occasion the USA's 'allies', like France Britain and
Germany, were given no choice but to join the US-led
alliances or become totally irrelevant in the global
imperialist chess-game.

But the more the US tries to impose its authority, the
more tensions and disagreements it creates. Prior to
September 11, America was facing increasing hostility
from its former allies in Europe, over the Kyoto
agreement, missile defence, and the 'Euro-army'. Now
it is using the 'war against terrorism' to whip its
'friends' back into line, as well as to make major
strategic gains in the entire region which pivots
around Afghanistan, from the Middle East to the Indian
sub-continent.

For the moment the 'Coalition against Terrorism' is
papering over the divisions between the US and other
powers. But these divisions will break out again even
more openly in the future. Already the war is having a
profoundly destabilising effect throughout the
'Muslim' world, creating new conflicts that will in
turn be exploited by America's rivals. Far from
creating a 'safer' world, the present war will only
increase the slide towards military chaos. This will
certainly include further murderous terrorist
outrages, which have become a routine method of
inter-imperialist war today. 

The working class is the main victim of capitalist war

With the massacre of September 11 we have entered a
new stage in global imperialist conflict, a stage in
which war will become more permanent and more
widespread than at any time since 1945. And as in all
of capitalism's wars, the working class and the
poorest sections of society will be the main victims.
In the Twin Towers, the majority of the dead were
office workers, cleaners, firemen, in short,
proletarians. In Afghanistan, it is the utterly
dispossessed, press-ganged into the Taliban armies or
fleeing for their lives from both the government and
the US onslaught, who will pay the highest price.

And the working class is not only a victim in the
flesh; it is also a victim in its consciousness. In
the USA, the bourgeoisie is taking advantage of the
legitimate outrage and disgust created by the
terrorist attacks to stir up the worst forms of
patriotic hysteria, to call for 'national unity', for
solidarity between exploited and exploiters. In
Europe, we are being told that 'we are all Americans
now', once again seeking to turn human sympathy for
the dead into support for the new war drive. And if
workers are not asked to take the side of civilisation
against terrorism, they are asked to see bin Laden as
a symbol of 'resistance' against oppression and to
prepare for Holy War, as in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the
Middle East, or among 'Muslim' populations in the
central countries. In this version of the events, the
'Americans got what they deserved' on September 11.
This 'anti-American' ideology is yet another form of
racism and chauvinism, yet another way of preventing
workers from seeing their true class identity, which
cuts across all national frontiers.

Throughout the world, the proletariat is being
subjected to state terror in the name of the fight
against terrorism. Not only the terror imposed by the
climate of nationalist frenzy, but also by the very
concrete measures of repression being set up
throughout the world. The real fears generated by the
terrorist attacks provide the ruling class with the
perfect climate to increase its whole system of police
controls, identity checks, phone-tapping and other
'security' measures, a system that will in future be
used not against terrorist suspects but against
workers and revolutionaries fighting capitalism. The
issue of identity cards in Britain and the USA is just
the tip of this iceberg.

The answer to war is not pacifism but the class
struggle

The ruling class knows that it needs the loyal support
of the entire population, but above all of the working
class, if it is to take its imperialist designs onto a
new level. It knows that the only real obstacle to war
is the working class, which produces the vast majority
of social wealth, which is the first to die in
capitalism's wars. And this is precisely why the
workers must reject any identification with any
national interest. To struggle against the march
towards war, they must revive and develop the struggle
for their own class interests. The struggle against
redundancies, being demanded not only as a result of
the recession but also as a consequence of the
terrorist attacks. The struggle against sacrifices at
work, imposed to strengthen the ailing national
economy or the war effort. It is this struggle alone
which can enable the workers to understand the need
for international class solidarity with all the
victims of capitalist crisis and devastation; it is
this struggle which alone can open up the perspective
of a new society free from exploitation and war.

The proletarian struggle has nothing in common with
pacifism, as exemplified by the various coalitions to
'stop the war' being set up by the 'Peace' groups,
Green parties, Trotskyists and others. The pacifists
make their appeal to the UN and to international law;
the proletarian struggle can only expand if it breaks
the barriers of the law. Already in most 'democratic'
countries, any effective forms of struggle (such as
attempts to spread strikes to other sectors,
decision-making by general assemblies rather than
union ballots, etc) have, with the assistance of the
trade unions, become illegal. The outlawing of the
class struggle will become even more explicit in a
period dominated by war.

The pacifists also make their appeal to 'all decent
minded people', to an alliance of all classes opposed
to the positions of Bush, Blair and Co. But this is
yet another way of drowning the workers in the
population at large, at precisely the time when the
number one problem for the working class is to
rediscover its distinct social - and political -
identity.

Above all, pacifism has never opposed the national
interest, which in the epoch of imperialism can only
be defended by the means of imperialism. This goes not
only for the 'respectable' pacifists, but also for
pacifism's 'radical' wing, the Trotskyists, who always
seek to get the workers to defend one nationalism or
another. In the Gulf war, they defended Iraq; in the
Balkans war they argued about whether to support
Serbia or the Kosovo Liberation Army (and thus NATO);
today they are scrabbling around to find some
'anti-imperialist' faction to support, if not bin
Laden and the Taliban, then the armed groups of the
'Palestinian Resistance' whose ideas and methods are
exactly the same.
Far from opposing war, pacifism is a necessary adjunct
to the military coalition of the bourgeoisie, a way of
delaying and diverting an authentic class
consciousness about the meaning of war in this
society.

Humanity is not faced with the alternatives of war and
peace. It is faced with the alternative between an
insane spiral of imperialist wars and the development
of the class war, between the descent into barbarism
and the victory of the communist revolution. This was
the alternative announced by Lenin and Luxemburg in
1914, and answered by the strikes, mutinies and
revolutions which brought an end to the first
imperialist world war. After almost a hundred years of
capitalist decadence and self-destruction, that
alternative stands before us with even sharper clarity
today. 

Against capitalism, which is responsible for the wars,
the poverty, the famines and all the barbarism in the
world today, the slogans which have always belonged to
the workers' movement have never been more relevant:

WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

THE EMANCIPATION OF THE WORKING CLASS IS THE TASK OF
WORKERS THEMSELVES!

International Communist Current, 8.10.01

This leaflet is being distributed in the following
countries:

Britain, USA, Mexico, Venezuela, France, Spain, Italy,
Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, India, Russia
and Australia.

Write to: BM Box 869, London WC1N 3XX, Great Britain.

Website: www.internationalism.org


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