UNITED STATES: Fighting for change in the belly of the beast

May 1, 2002
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BY ALISON DELLIT

"The idea that the United States is just one big pool of reactionary politics is false — there is resistance to President George Bush, and we want to extend that", Ahmed Shawki, a leader of the US International Socialist Organization (ISO) told Green Left Weekly.

Shawki and Paul D'Amato, editor and associate editor of the ISO's journal International Socialist Review, were attending the second Asia Pacific International Solidarity Conference in Sydney at Easter.

The ISO is the largest revolutionary socialist organisation in the US, with more than 1000 members and 40 branches across the country. In the last year, its membership has expanded rapidly.

Since September 11, the Bush administration has used the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington to whip up racist hysteria and patriotic fervour to justify its war against Afghanistan.

The "war on terrorism" is now being used to justify Washington's inaction over Israel's aggression against the Palestinian people and preparations for a US military attack on Iraq.

Pointing to the record US sales for books by Noam Chomsky and left-wing satirist Michael Moore, and the huge crowds turning up to hear Moore speak, Shawki argued that since September 11 there is a growing political polarisation in the US.

Many of those who had become radicalised before September 11 are now more radical because they have had "to come to grips with issues that are more complicated and [that] demand a level of seriousness that's higher than it was before". As well, new people are being drawn into the anti-corporate globalisation and anti-war movements.

The activism of many pre-September 11 radicals, Shawki explained, can be traced to protests in the late 1990s. "There was the movement in solidarity with the Zapatistas in Mexico that began in 1994-95, the 15-day strike at United Parcel Service in 1997 and 1999 protests against US training of human rights' abusers at the School of the Americas."

These kinds of struggles drew a new group of activists, mostly young, into political activity. Their demand was "global justice".

Ralph Nader

"[The 1999 protests against the World Trade Organisation in] Seattle brought many of the campaigners together. The decision by the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) to mobilise at that protest gave it enormous numbers. The size of the protest, combined with the militancy of the relatively small radical wing, won. It shut the meeting down for three days. This sent a signal to the US left that there was the possibility of re-birth", Shawki told GLW.

After Seattle, many global justice campaigners supported the presidential campaign of consumer advocate and Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. Around 2.7 million people voted for Nader in the face of the Democratic Party's vehement smear campaign that claimed that a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush.

According to Z-Net founder Michael Albert, speaking at the conference, at least seven million Americans wanted to vote for Nader but were too scared.

"You would expect that after the election [Bush was controversially elected with a minority of votes] there would be a large amount of hostility directed towards Nader and his supporters", Albert said. "There was not. People understand that Bush stole the election because he was a better thief than [Democrat candidate Al] Gore."

After the election, "it was a perfect opportunity for Nader to come out and say 'I call on my supporters to mobilise against the people who are trying to steal this election'", D'Amato told GLW. "Which he did not do."

Shawki added that, "People were showing up to Nader rallies in towns — upwards of 10,000 people — with no plans after the elections. In a sense, this was reinforcing precisely what Nader's candidacy was meant to undermine: that we shouldn't have [politics] beyond elections.

"So you have thousands of people who want to do something, but are not confident, don't have the connections and don't have the organisations to express their bitterness or their anger."

Vietnam syndrome

"The attack on the World Trade Center gave Bush and the Republican administration a gift they could not have dreamt of", Shawki said. "Bush took over [President Bill] Clinton's program — pro-US economic globalisation, backed by the military — but he wants to extend that."

Shawki and D'Amato believe that the US government is still grappling with how to defeat the "Vietnam syndrome" — the reluctance of US people to support overseas wars if they result in large US casualties. The "war on terrorism" is an attempt to weaken or overturn it.

"Every war has three reasons: the pretend reason (fighting terrorism); the real reason (extending the US grip on the world); and winning the 'war at home' against the working class. Bush's agenda is to a return to open imperialism and to convince US workers to die for it", Shawki argued.

"[US Secretary of State Colin] Powell wants to get around the 'Vietnam syndrome' by minimising casualties. Afghanistan wasn't a real test because the US casualties were so light. It wasn't a war, it was a massacre. The 'hawks' [including Bush] want US casualties to test the Vietnam syndrome. They want to be able to intervene militarily all over the world at will", Shawki explained.

"September 11 has increased the pace and the speed with which Washington has been able to win support for war. There's still an attitude of 'what have I got to do with it' among the US people. As more people are affected, that will change."

September 11

"Immediately after September 11, the left — that is the organised socialist left, the anti-imperialist left — moved very quickly to stand up against the drive to war", Shawki told GLW. "There was more confusion among the broader left — the thousands of people who had supported the Nader campaign or who were active in the global justice movement.".

"In the first month after the September 11 attacks, there was a spontaneous revulsion to the idea of war. In hundreds of cities, hundreds of people came out saying, 'Let's not make this worse by having a war'. Those mobilisations began to recede when things got tougher and the capitalist media joined the pro-war chorus.

"In the liberal press — magazines like Mother Jones and The Nation — there were people who said, 'I have in the past opposed American intervention. This is different, [terrorism] is an attack on innocent civilians'. And even if they opposed Bush's war, they were in favour of some kind of military or police action. This meant they were unable to challenge the ideological offensive that the government was carrying out."

D'Amato described how some pacifist organisations also defended the US right to retaliate: "The argument was often posed in the anti-war movement as, 'You won't be able to talk to ordinary people unless you concede that America has the right to defend itself'. On the right of the movement, it was very difficult to tell where anti-war ended and pro-war began."

Confusion was also evident in the global justice movement, Shawki added. "The AFL-CIO and many non-government organisations withdrew support from the demonstration in Washington at the end of September, which was to be our 'Genoa'. The AFL-CIO said, 'This is not the time to demonstrate. This is the time to rally around the flag'."

However, Shawki noted, "In many cases, particularly on campus, it was the same individuals organising against the war who led the global justice campaigns. But they had to form new organisations, because the old ones didn't oppose the war."

War drive

Z-Net's Michael Albert also discussed the response of the left to the war drive. "The US population reacted differently [to Bush's war drive]. One half were in [pro-war] reflex mode, but the other half were in confused mode. The left panicked because of the first side and didn't push [an anti-war message]. That was a mistake. There are more, not less, people asking what is going on. US leftists have to wake up from the view that people can't understand that this war is not in their interests.

"The [political] divisions in the US are bigger than ever", Albert pointed out. And while 80% of US people support the war drive, the 20% that doesn't is also important. "Hits on the Z-Net web site are up by 500%. If we're about stopping the war, we can't fritter supporters away. That would be a horrendous catastrophe."

Shawki agreed. "First, we have to mobilise these people. We need to set up activist networks to generalise the sentiment into something more coherent.

"I think we could see 300 to 500 campuses with anti-war groups, for example, and it is possible to organise campus anti-war groups into a network. It should also be possible, coming out of the April 20 protest in Washington, to re-affirm a national network. I know social-forum type organisations have been floated in various countries — something like that could form.

"What sort of formation is possible, however, depends not on the organised left, but on how well the unorganised anti-war, global justice activists respond."

Shawki added that people who support Bush's war drive can be won over. He pointed out that the April 20 Washington mobilisation brought together a wide coalition of groups opposed to the war.

"The administration could over-reach itself by overestimating what it can do. If there is a war against Iraq, which would be harder for the administration because there would be more resistance, we could see thousands more people demonstrating, if we're organised for it.

"ISO members are doing our best to make sure we are part of the broader left. What's good for the anti-war movement is good for the left, and that's good for us."

From Green Left Weekly, May 1, 2002.
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