A year after the invasion of Iraq, the US-led occupying forces are provoking resistance from ordinary Iraqis. As many countries pull out their civilian workers from Iraq, it is clear that Napoleon understood better than the US administration that you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it! Claiming to be 'winning hearts and minds' while bombing the civilian population, the US are on hiding into nothing [sic]. Instead of putting in enough resources to rebuild the infrastructure, providing jobs, and allowing Iraq to determine its own future, the US occupation forces, with their poodle partners in tow, have begun to unite the disparate peoples against their common enemy. Instead of the predicted civil war, a war of national liberation is developing.
Whether these grave setbacks for the coalition undermine the broader Project for a New American Century long-term, depends to a large extent on the response of the working class and anti-imperialist forces on a world scale. But certainly the capitalist political and economic imperatives which launched the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq have not gone away. The need for imperialism to impose political and military hegemony, and to control energy resources, along with preparations to hold back the economic threat represented by China's growth, mean that already three hundred US bases exist in the Middle East and up to China's borders. And US and coalition bases will remain in Iraq even after the so-called 'handover of power' on June 30.
Climate change
The other developing, long-term threat to the peoples of the world is the crisis of the environment. Although this crisis is denied publicly by the Bush administration, the Pentagon document leaked to The Observer admits to 'thinking the unthinkable'. It lays out a frightening scenario of short term, dramatic, climate changes, which would produce mass migrations of people fleeing areas that can no longer sustain their populations. The document's overwhelming argument is that this process is a natural one, on which humans have little effect and that therefore the US will have to defend its shores and its resources by force if necessary, to maintain hegemony and feed (most of) its peoples.
Predictions of wars over resources and mass migrations suggest that the current attacks on civil liberties, in the name of a war against terror, may in part be preparation for something much more cataclysmic. Legislation is already in place to keep out those who can no longer live in countries devastated by the policies of neo-liberalism and increasingly the ravages of climate change. In future even more draconian laws may be put in place to control both domestic dissent and population movements. Even if the Pentagon scenario is too catastrophic, imperialism will continue to present ecological disasters as natural in order to shift responsibility for global crisis away from the depredations of capitalist globalisation and the neo-liberal offensive.
Neo-liberalism
This issue of Socialist Outlook takes neo-liberalism as its theme, charting its effects on our lives and the global opposition to it. Neo-liberal policies have been adopted by the main imperialist states to maintain capitalist profits and to compete with emergent economies like China. This has meant a series of attacks on working conditions, deregulation, marketisation and the privatisation of increasing parts of the welfare state and social provision, to boost the profits of the private sector.
In the neo-colonial world and in many of the nations of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR, neo-liberal 'shock therapies' of the WTO and the IMF have led to devastation and disaster. To give just one example: in Ethiopia more than eight million people, fifteen percent of the country's population, have been locked into 'famine zones'. Those who would blame the drought and the border war with Eritrea for this ignore the fact that several million people in the most prosperous agricultural regions have also been driven into starvation. Their predicament is not the consequence of grain shortages, for Ethiopia produces more than ninety per cent of its consumption needs, but of the bitter, free-market economic medicine imposed under the IMF-World Bank sponsored Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP).
Opposition
The imperialist powers face not only the contradictions of their own policies, for increasing impoverishment cannot provide a market for the goods produced by capitalism. They also face an increasingly large and hostile response to their policies of war and destitution. In the neo-colonial world large majorities oppose US imperialism. In the imperialist countries too, millions have demonstrated their opposition to the US-led war drive.
There have also been the beginnings of more structured opposition and incipient alternatives such as the World and European Social Forums. Anti-globalisation and social justice agendas have been combined under the banner of 'Another World is Possible'. Co-ordinated actions have been organised internationally, such as last year's days of action against the war, or the international day of action in support of the right to political asylum in January this year. This all recognises the need to organise against both neo-liberal policies and the politics of imperialism.
These developments need to be pushed further, for if history tells us nothing else, we know that the brutality and barbarism of capitalism will not be defeated by fine words alone. We aim to win this burgeoning movement to a socialist perspective, which understands the need to rid ourselves of capitalism once and for all and recognises that to achieve this we need a socialist programme and revolutionary organisation.