Editorial from Kommunistisk Politik, No. 4, February 16, 2002
While the world is waiting for the US to start the next big war in its "War
on Terror", the peace movements, the anti-globalisation movements and other
progressive, anti-imperialist and revolutionary forces are trying to correspond
and find ways of action.
The global war launched by the US, or outright spoken, the new world war, the
first world war of the twenty-first century, will be on the agenda for a long
time in the future. The war has come suddenly and creeping and shaken all the
conceptions and illusions which arose during the 1990s following the fall of
the Berlin Wall, for example the illusion that imperialism had become peaceful
and would no longer mean war, or the illusion that capitalism had become free
of returning crises, that the so-called "New Economy" would ensure
social and economic progress all over the world, and that time had come for
focusing on human rights and political and democratic reforms and progress.
In short, it was being postulated that it was possible to give capitalism and
imperialism a human face.
Using different forms, the idea of the possibility of a "Third Way",
that is, the way of neither supercapitalism nor socialism, of neither neoliberal
policy nor revolutionary struggle, was being promoted. Other options were present,
e.g. reform, the humane globalisation supported by massive international mobilisations.
Especially in the imperialist countries, these ideas became popular and were
supported by new movements and new forms of mobilisation like the gigantic demonstrations
against imperialism's economic centres of power that increased significantly
after the WTO Meeting in Seattle in 1999. To the traditional reformist policy,
a whole new field of action, with the possibility of renovation and renewed
relevance, came into being. The neoliberal policy quickly revealed itself as
a failure; it did not bring social progress or democracy, but ever-increasing
global need and misery. It became obvious that another policy is necessary if
another world shall be possible.
But two big developments, two fundamental facts of the world in the twenty-first
century, have called all these ideas into question and all of a sudden placed
the discussion about reform or revolution in the centre again. One is the economic
world crisis: Since 1997 and the collapse of the East Asian "Tiger Economies"
and the crisis in Japan, it has been spreading; in 2001 it reached the US and
the other imperialist countries. Even though optimistic prognoses asserting
an upcoming recovery are being trumpeted all the time, everything indicates
that the crisis is turning into a long depression, as has been the case for
Japan. At the same time the social consequences of the crisis in the rich as
well as in the poor countries are becoming still more disastrous.
Is there a way out of the crisis? The world's ruling powers are telling the
hungry and suffering masses that they must again tighten their belt while receiving
more neoliberal medicine from the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, etc. That will
not fill anyone. It is adding more fuel to the fire.
The other is the war headed by US imperialism, the iron fist of neoliberalism
and globalisation, the way out of the crisis of the monopolies and imperialism,
their dictate of world hegemony. The objective of the "War on Terror"
is to ensure US world hegemony, specifically to ensure control over the oil
resources in Caucasus and military and economic control over Central Asia and
the former Soviet influential spheres. Potential rivals, as Russia and China,
are being put aside. And right now - after Afghanistan - the US is announcing
its new military targets.
At the World Social Forum recently held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, more than 70,000
people from numerous organisations gathered to make out the balance sheet of
all these developments. One result from the Porto Alegre Summit was its declaration
against neoliberalism, war and militarism. It is a solid plan of action that
constitutes a move to the left and a radicalisation forced by the harsh reality.
But the declaration still shrinks from giving the only possible answer to the
world's problems: it is imperialism as a system that is the enemy. It is imperialism
that has to be defeated. The way of reform is not passable. The revolution is
necessary because only the revolution can make another world possible.