------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the April 15, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
EDITORIAL: WHAT DRIVES EMPIRE?
In the 90 years since the start of the worldwide conflagration among the imperialist powers that became known as World War I, U.S. finance capital has honed its justification for war to a fare-thee-well.
According to this ideological spin, the problem always lies beyond the shores of North America. The problem is always external. And the Pentagon is never the aggressor, it's the defender.
The "endless war on terror," approved and funded by Repub licans and Democrats alike, has been painted as a response to the attacks on 9/11. But evidence has already proved that the war against Afghanistan was in the works months before September. And the war to control oil-rich Iraq began with Daddy Bush, and continued during the eight years of the Clinton administration.
Haiti. Palestine. Colombia. Wherever Washington is sending troops or weapons, the excuse is always that the U.S. needs to solve the problems "over there." But their problems are effects, not causes.
The heart of the world's problem is right here, in the belly of the beast.
Many here who oppose the U.S. military drive rightly characterize it as a "war for empire." But what is the motor force of the drive for empire?
V.I. Lenin, the early 20th-century Marxist and leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, developed the most thorough and scientific analysis of imperialism in his 1916 book, "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism."
In it he wrote, "If it were necessary to give the briefest definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism."
Monopoly came out of the competition and concentration of capital that began during capitalism's early laissez-faire stage in Europe, the U.S., and later Japan. That laid the basis for the emergence of today's giant monopolized industries, fused with banking capital. These behemoths play a decisive role in economic and political life. Rather than merely exporting commodities, imperialism is exporting capital--dragging hundreds of millions more people into the social relationship between exploiter and exploited. The endless search for greater and greater profits is the driving force behind this capitalist globalization.
Once the whole globe had been carved up by the imperial powers into their spheres of economic domination, a war among them to redivide the world's spoils exploded in 1914. Since then, whether the imperialists have sent their armies to fight each other in open theaters of combat, or battled for hegemony with local proxies, or fought wars of conquest like in Afghanistan or Iraq, it is the built-in imperative of monopoly capitalism to expand its markets or die that fuels imperialist war.
But this "endless" war is creating a fire storm of resistance from those under the boot-heel of Pentagon occupation. And the concentration of monopolies has also created a worldwide working class. This is the class, including its most oppressed sectors, that can end imperialist wars once and for all by removing the contradiction behind them--the private ownership of the vast mechanism of production created by collective labor.
Lenin stressed that the monopolies, themselves products of labor by workers around the world, are ready for the laboring class and oppressed to take over and run themselves. Only this class can transform private ownership into social ownership.
Getting rid of the profit motive will remove the firing pin of imperialist war.
To really be anti-war, we must be anti-imperialist and fight here at home against the rule of the giant monopolies.
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