BY
RICHARD INGRAM
Links #22
New Course Publishers, Sydney 2002128 pages, $8 each or $39 for
six issues
Order at <links@dsp.org.au>
Available from Resistance Bookshops (see page 2) or visit <http://www.resistancebooks.com>
The latest issue of the international socialist journal Links focuses on the US war drive as it has developed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The cover headline asks What's at stake?. The articles explore that question, not only in terms of immediately threatened military confrontation but also in terms of the class struggle in a number of countries.
The lead article, by Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), is entitled A war to defeat, a world to win, indicating that for socialists this is a time not only of challenges but also of opportunities.
While the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's turn to the market offer major opportunities for the expansion to capitalism, Bhattacharya writes, this expansion could be achieved only by aggravating the internal contradictions of the system especially the contradictions between imperialism and the Third World. The movement against capitalist globalisation, which has not been derailed by the post-9/11 imperialist propaganda, is a sign of the unmanageability of those contradictions.
Malik Miah, Barry Sheppard and Caroline Lund examine the war drive and the Bush Doctrine from within the United States. They point out that the offensive of US imperialism has been in preparation ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union removed a major restraint on US military adventures. Bush's axis of evil rhetoric indicates the US aim of suppressing any opposition to its global dominance, while the suppression of civil liberties within the US aims to cut off any possibility of domestic resistance.
But while there are notable similarities between the present offensive of US imperialism and that of the 1950s, Miah, Sheppard and Lund also note important differences.
Chief among them within the US is the different economic circumstances. In the 1950s, political and social conservatism was underpinned by US capitalism's ability to make economic concessions to the working class: Prosperity was a factor in the majority support among workers for the Cold War and the anti-communist witch-hunt. By contrast, Since the end of the post-war boom in the early 1970s, there has been a capitalist offensive against the living standards and organisations of the US working class.
Links also provides analyses of struggles and contradictions unfolding in this new international context in five countries: Indonesia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Russia.
Pembebasan, the magazine of the People's Democratic Party of Indonesia, provides an analysis of the growth of mass struggles as a result of both increasing poverty and the Megawati Sukarnoputri government's attempts to restrict democratic rights.
The experience of four years since the fall of Suharto showed that bourgeois government is unable to put an end to the crisis, Pembebasan points out. Therefore the mass of people ... must start to realise that their power of resistance, demonstrated in a host of struggles, has the power to replace the Megawati government with a government that is free from imperialist interests and New Order remnants.
In a detailed and informative study, Michael Alexandros examines the question, Where is Vietnam heading?. Alexandros outlines the competing forces that are seeking to increase or restrict the role of the market, and the ways in which this battle intersects with other social and political questions.
Munyaradzi Gwisai, a leader of the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe, provides a concise history of that country's labour movement as a background to recent developments, including the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and the re-election of Robert Mugabe as president. He explains how the ISOZ, despite being a small and relatively new organisation, has been able to intervene in and influence national politics (Gwisai was elected to parliament on the MDC ticket.)
In South Africa, as in much of the world, the neo-liberal offensive has involved systematic efforts to privatise public services such as education, electricity and water supplies. Particularly in the Third World, privatisation quickly results in the poor being deprived of these services. Patrick Bond, the author of a number of books on Southern Africa, describes a movement that has arisen to resist these attacks by decommodifying necessities.
Boris Kagarlitsky, whose insightful work on post-Soviet Russia appears frequently in Links, is represented by What remains of Soviet culture?, which is an intriguing study of a question that has many implications for future political developments.
Also in Links #22 are reports on the second Asia-Pacific International Solidarity Conference in Sydney and the meeting of the European Anti-Capitalist Left in Madrid.
This is an issue filled with thought-provoking and useful material.
From Green Left Weekly, January 15, 2003.
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