From Kommunistisk Politik, No. 25, December 20, 2003
The year 2003 was a sombre year for the peoples. The year 2004 can become even worse.
What did the year 2003 show? It showed the biggest anti-war movement that has ever existed against a concrete war, against the US war on Iraq, a movement manifesting itself as a visible force on the global scale.
In spite of that, the war came. It was an illegal war according to international law, a colonial war like the ones in the eighteenth century, and it has now been succeeded by an illegal occupation. And even worse: The US showed that it follows a strategy for world hegemony, for permanent war, in order to impose imperialist globalisation and the hegemony of the multinationals by the use of military force. Tens of thousands of killed Iraqis have no significance; they are just “collateral damage”.
The US showed that it does not respect the international law that was developed following the defeat of Nazism in the Second World War. The new American world order means that the only imperialist superpower in the world today is above the law, and by virtue of its military strength it can do whatever it wants. The US wants to subjugate the whole world to its dictate and immortalize the imperialist system of exploitation that has impoverished the great majority of people of the globe and brought incredible wealth to a few thousands of dollar billionaires.
The year 2003 also deepened the world economic crisis, and worldwide millions of people were thrown into even deeper misery, which has increased by the continuing neoliberal offensive privatising all the resources of the countries and making even water to a field of pain and superprofits.
It was also a year that showed that the EU, which has its own superpower dreams, is deeply divided, full of contradictions, which the US has cleverly been playing on in its endeavours to avoid, at any cost, that a new imperialist rival develops. The temporary failure of making the EU constitution brought all this to the surface. The current crisis of the EU is one of the deepest in the history of the whole project of the Union, being reinforced by the EU enlargement to 25 countries, which was decided in Copenhagen in the end of 2002.
The crisis includes both the strategic relation to the US, the global interests of the European monopolies, different interests of European Great Powers and small states, and not at least the growing aversion and opposition of the workers and the general population to the EU project, which is being implemented at their expense and is paid by deteriorating conditions of life and social cuts of any kind.
Denmark has a small history of its own. The war on Iraq destroyed the traditional national consensus between the government and the opposition when Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Danish Prime Minister, translator’s note) and Per Stig Moeller (Danish Foreign Minister, translator’s note) turned the scale in favour of the US and A.P. Moeller (Denmark’s biggest multinational company, translator’s note), and sent Denmark to war without any UN mandate at all. They have made themselves war criminals and Denmark a nation of war crime. The ruling class in Denmark is divided regarding which strategy to follow, a pro-US or a pro-EU. In the end of the day, this division will be incompatible, but the Fogh Rasmussen government is trying to hold its trousers while straddling over the Atlantic and the opposition is trying to cover up the splits.
In two years, Fogh Rasmussen and Co. have managed to get the majority of voters against them. The government’s war, its constant attacks on social rights, its endless scandals involving ministers and mayors being caught in cultivating the narrow, economic interests of them and their friends, have made the triumphant smiles turn pale. Fogh Rasmussen is weakened and staggering to a national election, which can come long before time.
Because of all these reasons, and more, the year 2003 was a dark year. But it was also a year which showed that there is a way out of the darkness. A potential new superpower – the peoples, the majority of the globe – manifested itself for the first time in a massive way, on a global scale. The struggles of the peoples against the neoliberal offensive increased on all continents, not at least on the Latin American. The European workers and students protested the imposed neoliberal “reforms” that have opened the social mass grave in the EU. The Palestinian Intifada continued and has brought the Israeli occupying power in deep trouble. And the Iraqi people have risen in armed struggle in order to drive out the occupiers.
What is of special importance is that a whole new generation around the world are getting to understand who their enemies are. That the enemy is imperialism lead by the more and more globally detested and isolated US imperialism, that capitalism does not work, but impoverishes the vast majority of people, that it is necessary to draw the conclusion of all that: Imperialism cannot be reformed; it has to be defeated. Capitalism must be overcome and thrown at the dunghill of history.
If it is up to the imperialist powers, the year 2004 will be an even worse year for the human beings than the year we are leaving. It is up to the peoples to become strong enough to stop them.