By Malik Miah
It's 12 years since a Democrat last occupied the White House. In that period of Reagan and Bush, the super-rich became more wealthy. The rest of us became poorer. Working people are paying the price. Class divisions are widening.
Fully 96% of the wealth created during the 1980s flowed to the richest 20% of all US households; 55% was distributed to the wealthiest 0.5% of the US population.
Over 7% of Americans are officially unemployed. Millions more are underemployed. Big business continues to move higher-paying industrial jobs abroad.
The US deficit meanwhile is growing by US$20-$30 billion per month. The government debt is over $4 trillion.
The economies of Europe, Japan and the Pacific, including Australia, are not much different. Big Japanese companies are planning lay-offs, ending their claim of "full employment".
The productivity of US workers remains one of the highest in the world. Yet it isn't enough to reap the type of profits the bosses need to compete. They want more. They plan to cut more jobs and push wages lower. Since the election, both General Motors and IBM have announced major lay-offs.
More than 35 million people don't have health insurance. Many workers can't change jobs they hate for fear of losing their modest health benefits. As bad as this picture is, it is significantly worse for blacks, Latinos and women.
The contradiction for Bill Clinton is simple: he won election because he promised a better life for working people and higher profits for the capitalists. He can serve only one class, and it won't be the working class.
The world's capitalists are fighting over shrinking markets; there is overproduction and overcapacity. The US dream of having a decent-paying job, nice home, college education for your children and two cars is a thing of the past for most working families. Expectations are declining.
The economic crisis in the US is a reflection of a deeper world economic crisis for imperialism. Competition, especially between the US and Asia, US and Europe, is behind the changes. It is a
real capitalist war without bullets being fired — yet. The military superiority of Washington makes that unlikely in the short term, but ultimately war is the way political settlements are reached.
For example, the new North American Free Trade Agreement signed by the US, Canada and Mexico has one purpose: to make the US capitalists stronger against Japan and the Pacific, and against the EC. It is not really a free trade pact. It is a protectionist pact to aid North American capitalists.
Fundamentally the capitalists have only one way to raise their profits and beat out their competitors. They must steal more of our surplus value.
That's why Clinton will not be able to change Bush's domestic policy in a fundamental sense. He must protect big business interests. He must strengthen the employing class's position in the world. This means carrying out more attacks on US workers and the oppressed of the world.
Who elected Clinton? The core of his support came from the oppressed. According to exit polls, 82% of African Americans who voted, voted for Clinton. Among Latinos it was 62% (higher if you exclude the Cuban vote) and among Jewish voters it was 78%. Gay and lesbian people voted by 75% for Clinton. Workers earning less than $15,000 a year voted 59% for Clinton. And 55% of trade union members and their households voted for Clinton.
The Clinton vote was both anti-Bush and pro-change for progressive reasons. They were blacks who feared the racism of the extreme Republican right. They were women who fear Bush's anti-abortion stance. (Clinton came out for choice.) They were unionists who saw Reagan and Bush oppose strikes and side with the employers in every labour dispute.
Unfortunately, that support is misplaced since the Democrats can't be pro-black, pro-women, pro-labour and pro-democratic rights.
Clinton will grant some modest concessions that cost little money. He will appoint more blacks and women and openly gay people to prominent government positions.
But he won't change the decline of capitalism. That's out of his control. He must make it easier for the employers to operate and compete in the world. That means supporting more attacks on working people. It means letting racial and sexual divisions continue to flourish, but in more subtle ways. For example, he will slow the attacks on abortion rights. He will end the ban on homosexuals in the military. It's more effective to integrate
minorities and women, without giving them control.
Who will Clinton be? A John Kennedy? Franklin Roosevelt? That's what many progressives are hoping.
Roosevelt was president in the 1930s. Washington was becoming the number one imperialist power in the 1930s. In the 1950s and early 1960s Washington was still in the middle of its postwar expansion. Its only serious challenger was the Soviet Union.
Today Washington is still the top cop. But its economic competitors are stronger. This is the source of the current rise of protectionism.
Clinton's domestic policy will be not much different from Bush's except for cosmetic and style changes. Clinton must support restructuring of the economy and basic industries. That's why he backs the NAFTA pact, with some modifications.
Clinton plans to raise taxes to lower the deficit. More taxes on petrol, for example. This will hit workers the hardest. He may tax health care benefits too, while giving investment breaks to big business.
While Clinton rejects some of the most rightist positions of the Reagan-Bush era, he must implement similar policies with a "gentler" style to get working people to accept less so the capitalists have more with which to fight their competitors abroad.
On foreign policy, Clinton is more of a hawk than Bush. His criticisms of Bush tend to be from the right. He opposes granting most favoured nation trade status to China. He advocates direct military intervention in Bosnia. He supports stronger sanctions against Cuba.
Somalia will be his acid test. This will tell the world whether the Clinton administration will be any different than the Reagan and Bush administrations in foreign policy.
Some liberals, amazingly, claim Bush went into Somalia after his electoral defeat to set Clinton up in a "no-win" situation. If he stays in and fights, Clinton is seen as a hawk. But if he runs out, it shows him as weak. Neither is the case. Bush's decision is not his alone; it is made by the highest circles of the ruling class. The stakes are too high for "personal vendettas".
Washington's "humanitarian intervention" in Somalia is not to feed starving people. Famine has been endemic in the region for years. Where was Washington? There are massive food
surpluses in Europe and North America. Farmers are told not to plant grains, for example. Yet the US and its allies did nothing in the 1980s. Why? They had a friendly dictator ruling Somalia.
The US policy is full of hypocrisy. What about the hungry in Harlem and the South Bronx in New York City? The hungry in Latin America?
The armed gangs in Somalia are no more criminal than US-backed dictators in other parts of the world. The difference is there is no stable government in Somalia today.
To see the hypocrisy of imperialism consider two other examples where a people is suffering but no humanitarian aid is forthcoming. I speak of the only country in the Western Hemisphere that has done away with illiteracy: revolutionary socialist Cuba. For 32 years Washington has attempted to starve the country with an economic blockade.
Second is Iraq. Washington and its allies have tried to punish the Iraqi people because Saddam Hussein maintains his rule over that country. Where are the media pictures of hungry Iraqi children?
Humanitarian aid is not behind the US intervention. It is the cover, the camouflage.
Washington is the only country capable of acting as world cop for imperialism. The consolidation of the "new world order" means Washington must play this role with a new disguise. Previously it did so under the pretext of "fighting communism".
Somalia's invasion comes in a new world situation with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Somalia and Ethiopia are in a strategic region. Somalia borders Sudan, a key ally of Iran, a country that opposes the current US intervention and supports the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. Islamic fundamentalists are a threat to the ruthless pro-capitalist Arab dictatorships. Somalia is also a Muslim country. It is also near the Gulf.
Then there is Iraq. The situation there is very unstable. Until Palestinian rights are satisfied, the region will remain unstable. The Israeli expulsion of 450 Palestinians, and the response to it, shows how tenuous the situation is.
There are several precedents being set with this "humanitarian" intervention . First, Washington violated the United Nations edict against interference in a country's internal affairs. This is a violation of national sovereignty.
Bush claimed a "moral" obligation to go in.
Second, the UN Security Council gave Washington the "legitimacy" to invade. But what is the UN except a body used by imperialism to justify its invasions of Panama, Iraq and now Somalia? Washington's intervention in Panama and Kuwait had the cover of so-called legitimate forces calling Washington for help. Not in Somalia.
Third, as it did with the Gulf War, Washington is forcing its allies to pay the costs of the intervention.
Lastly, it places the UN more firmly under Washington's thumb. The Europeans and Japan and other countries are trying to be more independent of Washington now that the Cold War is over. But Washington's main power is in its military domination, so of course it is using it.
At the time Washington was dispatching 28,000 troops to Somalia, the UN was dispatching 3500 UN troops to organise and control food distribution. Could they have succeeded? Maybe. But that wouldn't have served Washington's long-term strategic purposes. This indicates that the imperialists are in conflict, reflecting the deeper economic competition among the advanced capitalist countries.
We should demand that Washington and its allies provide massive food and other aid to the Somalian people. This includes cancellation of all foreign debts. Second, we should oppose any attempt by Washington to establish a puppet government. The Somalian people must decide their own future.
Imperialism has never gone into a Third World country and developed it. Imperialist domination generally means rape by US and other foreign multinationals. The Somalians deserve better.
Another reason for Washington's aggression in Somalia involves South Africa, the only advanced country in Africa.
The white minority regime's days are numbered. Washington backs Pretoria's attempts to forge a national unity government with some form of white veto over major changes.
But what if the black majority goes further in implementing the Freedom Charter, which is a radical democratic program for a non-racial South Africa? The precedent of Somalia is then available. If the majority goes too far, a pretext for "humanitarian" aid for the minority whites could be drafted by Washington.
Who knows? The UN and Washington could test this tactic soon by
going into Angola, where the civil war has restarted.
International solidarity with the oppressed must be raised high by progressive-minded people around the world. Imperialism has not changed its spots. It is still as brutal and vicious as it ever was.
A look at Europe also shows this. Clinton and Washington face big trouble there. It's not just Bosnia and the former Soviet and eastern European Stalinist countries. The economic crisis has led to the rise of rightist formations which are using racism and anti-immigrant demagogy to divide people. The campaign is directed against immigrants, who are blamed for taking "our" jobs. In Germany there has been a resurgence of Nazism.
Imperialism doesn't know what to do. It encourages racism and anti-immigration hysteria to let itself off the hook for declining economies. Yet it fears the dynamic of such movements.
The problem is tearing the region apart, and their is no short-
term solution. Europe's capitalists face the same contradiction as Washington: how to become more competitive without causing social explosions.
They must roll back social gains won by workers since 1945. This includes reducing national health care, social security benefits and low-cost education. The capitalists can't improve their rate of profit without raising productivity and lowering the cost of labour.
We are living in a "new world order". But it isn't what Bush or Clinton are talking about. One of the problems world imperialism has today is the end of the Cold War. While they claim they won, they didn't.
Stalinism collapsed because of the bureaucratic method of running the workers states. Productivity had been stagnant for 30 years. The command economy was rotting away.
Imperialism, after World War II, was unable to overthrow the Soviet Union by force. The workers overthrew the Stalinist regimes. They reject socialism because of Stalinism. That's the opening the capitalists are trying to use to take back these countries for their system. But it is not a settled question.
The lack of working-class leadership and the transformation of the ex-Stalinists into nationalists and capitalists is a roadblock to socialist consciousness. The workers will have to re-learn socialism from their own experiences under capitalism. This is beginning to occur, especially in countries like Poland,
which has gone the furthest in dismantling the old workers state.
Imperialism didn't create the people's revolutions. It knows it needs the Yeltsins to bring about the new capitalist states.
That's why Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and other cold warriors call for massive economic aid to these regimes and even give open political support to Yeltsin. They know that if the Yeltsins fail, the workers will get another chance to reverse the drive toward capitalist restoration and put the working class back into political power.
Bill Clinton agrees with the Kissinger and Nixon.
There are challenges facing the left. We have a new president that the labour officialdom and liberal leaders of the black, Latino, and women's movements are supporting. They give him at least 100 days to begin to make do on his domestic agenda. They ignore his reactionary agenda.
As the contradiction of supporting this president are realised, the misleaders of the working class will be exposed and bypassed, and new struggles will explode. The process will take some time as working people see for themselves that Clinton is no better than Bush.
The new leadership of workers and the oppressed will arise from these future conflicts. And the organised left will play an important role in leading these fights.
The collapse of Stalinism combined with the world recession has thrown the US left into turmoil. But there is some real motion toward drawing lessons from the collapse of Stalinism and rebuilding a new left. It is why I'm optimistic about the future.
After the failed coup against Gorbachev, a full-blown crisis developed in the Communist Party of the US. A minority demanded some political changes and more democracy. The leadership responded with expulsion.
The former CP comrades, which included the overwhelming majority of members in northern California and key leaders including the editor of the weekly newspaper, organised a group called the Committees of Correspondence. The Committees aim to regroup progressive forces into a new national organisation. They held a founding conference in July which 1300 activists attended. In their founding document the Committees defined their theoretical framework in the following way:
"The initiators of the Committees of Correspondence are predominantly people with a socialist vision and a Marxist view
of history. Yet we are convinced that we can and must build an organisation that is pluralist, embracing members who have theoretical frameworks other than Marxist. Recent history makes us believe that there must be tolerance, and even more, genuine mutual respect and equality among differing activist views."
We are now in an 18-month discussion to decide on program and purpose. With little public activity, the Committees have grown to nearly 1800 members. A majority are not former CPers.
Many of us from the Trotskyist tradition are also involved in building the Committees. Some of us are organised into a group called Activists for Independent Socialist Politics. The AISP's purpose is to win members of Committees and others to the perspective of independent politics and socialism. We also seek to convince other Trotskyists to join and build the Committees.
The development of the Committees gives us confidence and optimism. The fact that so many former Communist Party members can break with Stalinism and for the first time in their political lives work as equals with Trotskyists and other radicals shows what is possible.
There is another important development outside of traditional politics. A number of union activists, led by a former top official of the oil workers union, have launched a group called Labour Party Advocates. This propaganda initiative is aimed at convincing workers to support the formation of a third party based in the unions.
The organised labour movement is down to 15% of the working class and declining. Until now, only socialists have actively pushed for such a formation. The officialdom supports the Democratic Party, but as labour continues to be battered, revolts will arise that will be the basis of left-wing developments.
The world as Bill Clinton sees it is very different from the world experienced by working people everywhere. That is certain to become more obvious as Clinton sets about governing on behalf of his class.
[US socialist and black activist Malik Miah was in Australia recently for the Socialist Activist Education Conference. This article is an abridged version of his talk to the conference.]