29 April 2003
The 1st quarter 2003 edition of the African Communist is available from the website of the SACP and for sale from the SACP National and Provincial Offices.
The "AC" is the quarterly journal of the SACP.
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CONTENTS
1. Editorial notes: Iraq and the end of the Benign Globalisation Myth (pasted below)
Implications of Iraqi war
2. American Empire, the Bush administration's strategic policy by Professor Rainer Rilling (attached to the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Germany)
3. Confronting the Empire by Samir Amin
SACP Debate
4. The Political and Organisational Tasks of the SACP by the SACP Secretariat
Joe Slovo Memorial Seminar
5. Reflections on the contemporary significance, relevance and meaning of Joe Slovo's 1988 pamphlet "The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution" by Blade Nzimande, SACP General Secretary 6. The courage to search for the new: Personal Reflections on "No Middle Road" by Joel Netshitenzhe, Member of the ANC National Working Committee and Head of Policy Advisory Services at the Presidency 7. Here comes the sun: drawing lessons from Joe Slovo's "No Middle Road" by Jeremy Cronin, SACP Deputy General Secretary 8. Reply to "Here Comes the Sun" by Thulas Nxesi, SADTU General Secretary
African Struggles
9. Communique from the Nigerian Socialist Conference
10. The Momentum of the Working Class Struggle against Neo-liberalism, Globalisation and Privatisation in Swaziland by Buhle Vincent Dlamini
Book Reviews
11. ‘The Assassination of Lumumba’ – review by Suraya Dadoo Iraq and the end of the benign globalisation myth (Editorial Notes, African Communist, 1st quarter - 2003)
The illegal invasion of Iraq marks a dangerous escalation of US aggression. But it is also in continuity with more than a decade of intensifying US global unilateralism. It is important to underline both the continuity and the dangerous new features that this aggression marks.
After Bush’s narrow (and disputed) presidential election victory, US global politico-military strategies have been dominated by a powerful circle of Reaganite military men and neo-conservatives – among them Paul Wolfovitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Rainer Rilling’s article in this edition of the AC outlines the profiles and perspectives of this powerful circle. Essentially they are the advocates of a new, post-Cold War American imperial role. Just a few years back, in the AC we noted how the word "imperialism" had dropped from the vocabulary of most political discourse. For their part, the Wolfovitzes now speak unabashedly of the American empire. In his preface to the official, "National Security Strategy of the United States of America" (September 2002), George Bush boasts: "Our world is divided in many ways: rich/poor; North/South; Western/non-Western. But more and more, the division that counts is the one separating America from everyone else."
The election of Bush, and the September 11, 2001 tragedy have created conditions for these neo-conservative circles to emerge supreme within the US administration. But would the invasion of Iraq have occurred if Al Gore had been adjudged to have won the presidential election? Or if Colin Powell was not as relatively marginalized as he is? It is hard to be sure, and history is not about what might have happened.
However, while subjective realities do have an impact on history, it is important to be aware that many of the core features underpinning the Iraq invasion, have been present over the last dozen years. Since the end of the Cold War period (1945-1990), the US has been consolidating and implementing policies to affirm and entrench its monopoly on the super-power mantle. Prior to 1990, the world inter-state system was dominated by the existence of two power blocs, each possessing a significant nuclear capacity. The UN, and especially its Security Council, the Warsaw Pact, NATO, and many other realities were premised on this two bloc system, and on doctrines of mutual deterrence (a balance of power - indeed, a balance of terror).
All of this changed dramatically around 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and, soon after, of the Soviet Union itself. What were the principal emergent features of the new global configuration?
One view, probably the dominant view, was that we had surfaced into a new reality of unprecedented possibilities. With the Cold War over, the many regional wars that had been connected, in one way or another, to "super power rivalry" could be ended. The billions and billions of dollars, roubles and rands pouring into armaments could now be diverted into growth and development. With the Berlin Wall and other "impediments" down, there were unprecedented possibilities for a liberalised and globalised free market. All the peoples of the world would be able to benefit from an endless horizon of globalised growth.
In one of his recent weekly columns in ANC Today, President Thabo Mbeki captures this view very well:
"When the Cold War came to an end many said that we were entering a new world of peace, the permanent relaxation of global tension, and the demise of power blocs. All humanity would benefit from a peace dividend that would open the way to the eradication of the great scourges of poverty and underdevelopment…" (ANC Today, March 28)
Cde Mbeki correctly notes that the invasion of Iraq has shown this vision to be no more than a "dream".
There were always two fundamental errors in the dream of a benign post-1990 globalisation. In the first place, the collapse of one power bloc did not mean the demise of the other. It meant the United States became more powerful and more tempted into military, diplomatic and economic unilateralism. Unilateralism has certainly been accentuated in the last years under Bush, but it has been a feature throughout the 1990s. The Gulf War (1991) was, as we now know, a deliberate sucker-punch for which Saddam Hussein fell. He was led to believe by George Bush Snr’s ambassador in Baghdad that the US would welcome an Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, in the "interests of stabilising" oil supplies. In fact, the US was looking for an excuse to deliver a humiliating blow to the most powerful military power in the region – of course, partly in the "interests of stabilising" US oil supplies. This was the first major blow struck in the name of the newly ascendant single super-power. It met with little international opposition (apart from within the Arab world), at a time when the world was still off-balance.
On Clinton’s watch, the US refused to sign the ban on land-mines, effectively boycotted the World Conference Against Racism, bombed Yugoslavia and engineered regime change there, and launched, but still on a limited scale, the "preventive war" doctrine with cruise missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan. Aggressive US unilateralism is certainly not an entirely new phenomenon.
The second illusion in the dream of a new era of benign globalisation was that the developed economies of the North could act as the locomotive of a relatively harmonious process of global growth and development. What "developing" economies had to do was hitch a ride (through liberalisation, privatisation and getting our own carriages in order). Attaching ourselves economically to the great locomotive of the North was, so the dream told us, all that was required.
However, as the article by Samir Amin in this issue of the AC demonstrates, far from being a locomotive of growth and development, the US economy is extraordinarily parasitic, and its parasitism has been accentuated through the past decade. In 1989 the US trade deficit stood at a whopping $100 billion. By 2000 it had grown to $450 billion. The US now has a trade deficit even in high technology goods. These facts are underpinned by systemic social and economic problems within the US – including falling labour productivity relative to competitors, a poor educational system, and the general cutting back on public spending. The "growth miracle" in the Clinton years was fed, as Amin notes, by expenditure based on growing social inequalities.
The parasitism of the US economy can only be sustained by major capital flows from the rest of the world. The US increasingly relies on extra-economic coercion (notwithstanding the rhetoric about "free market" principles). Virtually the only area in which the US has a comparative advantage is in the armaments sector (60% of world trade), a sector that operates outside of the rules of the market.
The war in Iraq, for which Congress has just passed an additional $80 billion, needs to be understood, systemically, against this background. The world is being coerced into, not just supporting an unjust and illegal war, but into propping up parasitic US consumption and "growth".
Major transnational corporations from outside of the US have been complicit in funding this parasitic consumption and growth path, in part, because any alternative has been seen as a threat to the whole global system of capital accumulation. However, there are growing intra-imperialist strains. US unilateralist undermining of global institutions is not confined to the UN. Last month (March 2003) the World Trade Organisation ruled against US steel tariffs, which have mainly hit EU, Japan and South Korean steel-makers. The US has not accepted the ruling, and is appealing against it. This is one of many such WTO rulings against the US. In the US Congress there are even mutterings to the effect that the US should quit the WTO.
In the first week of the Iraq war, the Bush administration dispatched Alan Larson, the US under-secretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs, to Brussels to allay the concerns of EU multi-nationals and to mend transatlantic relations. According to the Financial Times (March 28), he "met with a barrage of criticism from business leaders". Not because the European businesses are particularly opposed to the war, but because they are concerned that they will lose out to US companies in the profitable business of post-war reconstruction in Iraq. "George Brodach from ABB, the Swedish industrial group, asked why some US companies were being awarded contracts for reconstruction while Europeans had no opportunity to win them". Howard Chase from BP and others expressed similar concerns about growing US economic unilateralism.
Apart from popular moral and political outrage in their countries at the illegal invasion of the Iraq, the anti-war position of some of the governments of major powers is also influenced by these underlying economic realities. For decades, Western Europe and Japan have propped up US economic parasitism. In the last decades of the Cold War period, this was seen as a necessary price to pay. However, the Cold War rationale has now disappeared. More and more, Germany, France, Japan (and Russia and China), like the rest of the world, are being asked to forego some of their own economic growth and development to sustain a burgeoning US trade deficit, and to prop up unsustainable US consumption patterns.
Unilateralism isn’t what it used to be
Given the sheer power of the US, is it possible to stop the imperialist juggernaut? We should certainly not underrate the difficulties of mounting a coherent and sustainable challenge. The display of military might in Iraq, the strategy of "shock and awe" is directed not just at the long-suffering Iraqi people, but, in a certain sense, at all of us. It is intended to provoke speechless wonder across the globe, to stun us all into passive resignation. If this is the intention (and it is, indeed, part of the new imperial strategy) then it has not worked. In 2003, unilateralism, no matter how technically and militarily dominant, somehow isn’t what it used to be.
While there is no longer an alternative power bloc in the world system, there are countless challenges to aggressive US unilateralism, more now than just a few years ago.
In the first place, there are the obvious strains between key EU states (Germany and France) and the US, and between these states and their EU partners (the UK, Italy and Spain). NATO’s coherence has been badly dented. Governments supporting the war in the developed North find themselves challenged by a very large domestic groundswell of opposition. The British Labour Party is divided, and Tony Blair’s medium-term future uncertain. Even in the US there has been very wide mobilisation against the war.
Indeed, there are unprecedented levels of popular mobilisation around the world – Japan, Italy, France, the entire Arab world. Relatively vulnerable third world countries (Angola, Cameroon, Mexico, Chile) have stood their diplomatic ground in the face of US blandishments and threats.
For most of the 1990s, the struggle against US-dominated "globalisation" was led by disparate, social movement and NGO "anti-globalisation" forces, and by fundamentalist reaction in parts of the world. Over the last months a much wider "broad front" of global forces has emerged – including many governments, political parties, and social movements. While the unity and likely durability of this "front" should not be overstated, it IS indeed united behind very important basic principles – an opposition to US-imposed international unilateralism, a commitment to global peace, and (in however vague a manner) a call for development.
Another noteworthy reality, acknowledged by many commentators, is the fact that the global electronic media monopoly of CNN, so evident in the 1991 Gulf War, has been broken. Of particular note, has been the emergence of Al Jazeera and several other Arab language electronic media networks. The media coverage of the invasion in our country has generally been admirable, with both e-tv and SABC being prepared to be highly critical of the standard fare of US and British sources. But, in varying degrees, this has been a widespread international feature.
Underpinning all of this, as we have tried to underline above, is the systemic, parasitic and non-sustainable US consumption trajectory.
Continuity and discontinuity
Underrating the discontinuity between the immediate past and the current Bush administration, could lead to a failure to appreciate the medium-term possibilities of weakening and perhaps isolating the most extreme elements currently at the centre of US policy-making. Already there are tensions within the US administration, centred around Donald Rumsfeld and his arrogant and technicist assumptions of a "quick and clean" war. As the disastrous fall-out from the war becomes more apparent, it will become more possible, not least within the US itself, to campaign for a wiser, more multi-lateral approach.
However, underrating the continuity between the Clinton and Bush administrations will lead to a failure to understand the systemic realities underpinning US policy. It can also lead us back into a naïve dream about a benign US-led globalisaiton, with all of the domestic policy choices that flow from this.
The invasion of Iraq and the global fall-out it has provoked underline the relevance of the central principles advanced by the SACP, ANC, COSATU and a range of other forces in the context of the Stop the War campaign – Peace, Multilateralism, Development. Of course, the content of each of these core principles is, itself, of great importance. It cannot, for instance, simply be a question of uncritically going back to existing multi-lateral institutions, without asking transformational questions about them. We must certainly resist the attempt, by the US administration, to marginalize the UN into irrelevance. But, as our government has been arguing since 1994, the UN system, inherited from the post-World War 2, Cold War era, is certainly in need of revamping. Likewise with development, we cannot assume that with "peace restored" in Iraq, somehow the global third world crisis of underdevelopment (which has deepened over the past decade) will benefit from a "resurgent US economy".
It is against this background that President Mbeki made an important observation on NEPAD. Addressing a gathering of international church groups in late March, he predicted the war in Iraq and post-war reconstruction would push NEPAD down the world agenda. While this would certainly draw away resources that might have gone into NEPAD, "in another sense it may be a good thing that others around the world put Africa on the backburner", Mbeki said. "We will have to rely on ourselves, our own resources and efforts."
We agree entirely. The "p" for partnership in the acronym NEPAD has tended to be largely about a partnership between Africa and the developed North. Neo-conservative forces have done their best to turn this partnership into a modern-day version of colonial indirect rule. The role of Africa, and particularly of South Africa, is to ensure "good behaviour", to boss recalcitrant neighbours, in exchange we will receive "generous" international investment. Obviously, war or no war, we do need investment and technology from the North. It is a question of relative emphasis and strategic calculation. But we certainly need, as President Mbeki is suggesting, to put much greater emphasis on intra-African partnerships. We need also to be using our own, African resources, more purposively.
In this, as in many other respects, the tragedy unfolding in Iraq, may turn out to be a defining moment in which the challenges of a post-Cold War world come to be better appreciated.
CONTACT
Mazibuko K. Jara (surname Jara)
Department of Media, Information & Publicity
South African Communist Party
3rd Floor, COSATU House, 1-5 Leyds Street
Braamfontein, 2017, Republic of South Africa
Tel: 27 11 339-3621/2, Fax: 27 11 339-4244,Cell: 083 651 0271
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