The storm before the storm

https://www.workers.org/2021/09/58808/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

There is no doubt that the climate catastrophe threatens the future of life on the planet. A massive mobilization of the working class will be needed to combat this threat.

But, as Hurricane Ida and the associated flooding revealed, this is not just a threat to future generations — climate change is already a killer. Not only have dozens of people drowned in the hurricane’s wake, but hundreds are dead from the heat wave in the Northwest. 

Structural failures under capitalism are compounding the climate catastrophe for the working class. As the Sept. 3 New York Times admitted, “Disasters cascading across the country this summer have exposed a harsh reality: The United States is not ready for the extreme weather that is now becoming frequent as a result of a warming planet.”

We see a clear lack of preparedness in the richest country in the world. There is no regard for poor, oppressed and working-class people, who get no evacuation assistance in a life-threatening situation and are basically left to their own devices. 

The trillion-dollar infrastructure bill passed by Congress “includes $150 billion for clean energy and climate change protections. Tens of billions would also be utilized to fight extreme weather like drought, wildfire, flooding and erosion.” (PBS, Aug. 5)

Tens of billions is woefully inadequate. 

Consider, on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, how Louisiana and Mississippi were devastated, their governments still not fully prepared for another major weather event. One million people remain without power and with little gas and water during the worst heat of the summer.

Floods devastated New York City. Here, Harlem subway station.

Throughout New York’s five boroughs and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, people were trapped, some dying in flooded basement apartments, others unable to commute to work or do essential tasks due to collapsed roadways and bridges, totaled vehicles and flooded subways and expressways.

Lack of money isn’t the problem. There is incredible wealth concentrated in New York City and the surrounding areas, yet workers who produce that wealth were helpless in the rush of floodwaters. If the financial fortunes in Wall St. alone were taxed at the same rate as an average worker, funds could be used to prevent many of these tragic deaths.

Manhattan is an island of asphalt, with too little exposed soil to absorb floodwaters. The land was stolen from Indigenous people and then built up to serve the interests of finance capital — people and the environment be damned. As with every major urban center, money in the city budget — needed for infrastructure repairs and improvements — instead goes to city bondholders. Big Wall Street banks extort bloated interest payments from New York and other cash-strapped cities.

Time for ‘system change, not climate change’

“The pattern of damage reflects the relationship between climate exposure and racial inequality; impacts were more apparent in low-income communities of color, which, because of historic inequalities, are more prone to flooding, receive less maintenance from city services and frequently experience lax housing code enforcement,” the New York Times acknowledges.

Environmental terrorism and environmental racism in the U.S. are part of the legacy of capitalist development.

And the situation is far worse in the colonized Global South.

But socialist Cuba, with far fewer resources than the U.S., has created a model for hurricane evacuation that looks out for every human being — and even pets and livestock. The whole population is mobilized, and no one is left to fend for themselves.

A program of working-class demands is necessary to meet the twin crises of global warming and faulty or woefully inadequate infrastructure: Money for flood protection and relief, not for war! Money for cooling centers in a heat wave, not for tax breaks to the rich! Money for green jobs, not interest to the banks! People and the planet before profits; make the fossil fuel industry pay to clean up the messes it made! 

This is just a start. It will take a monumental struggle to win climate justice.

But rebellion is inevitable. Ida is the storm of wind and rain before the coming storm of protest. The challenge is to carry future waves of resistance through to their essential conclusion: a workers’ revolution for the abolition of capitalist wage-slavery.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in 1848, said the workers “have a world to win.” 

“Antiwar Sentiment in the Military Is Stronger Than Ever.” AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE PRYSNER

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/08/antiwar-military-veterans-afghanistan-iraq-biden-troops

~~ posted for dmorista and introduction written by dmorista ~~

Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner on what the military-industrial complex gained by staying in Afghanistan so long, what’s next for US empire, and why antiwar sentiment is rising among active-duty soldiers.

Introduction by dmorista

Mike Prysner, the interviewee in this article, joined the Army right before 9-11. He was deployed one time to Iraq, during the March 2003 invasion and stayed there for about a year. He left the army in 2005. He began to speak out against militarism while still in Iraq. He is married to Abbie Martin, of The Empire Files and other projects critical of U.S. imperialism. He thinks that there is a large and growing anti-war sentiment in the U.S. military.

That is a very significant issue, particularly for the U.S. ruling class and those who are affected by the agenda and projects of the U.S. Rulers. Neither Prysner, nor the interviewer, ever mentions the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos in the interview. Prysner discusses the lack of a militant and large anti-war movement in the U.S. today. He looks back at the global demonstrations that preceded the U.S. led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and sees them as a significantly large and mobilized anti-war movement. Albeit one that did not have much staying power. Those demonstrations were global in scope and in that they represented a new level of anti-war sentiment among the people of the Earth.

The Vietnam War ended after about 9 years of significant U.S. military involvement; and after about 30 years of one sort of U.S. involvement or another; either bankrolling the French from 1947 – 1954, or setting up a client state and sending advisors from 1954 – 1964. The Vietnamese people could not be defeated by an occupying foreign “colonial” army anymore than the Afghan people could be. Due to being the site of invasions and resultant war, Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos) suffered terrible distortions to their societies, and so did Afghanistan. In the end the invaders, occupiers, and colonial masters were driven out, but the cost to these various Third World societies was very high. These places end up being unpleasant and harsh and the right-wingers and some of the Liberals all go “cluck cluck; look what happens when you choose an independent path”.

The biggest single factor in the U.S. ruling class decision to give up on Vietnam was the near disintegration of the U.S. military by the early 1970s. That was the last time the U.S. ruling class was naive enough to think they could actually prosecute a long-term occupation and war on a “developing country”, using a largely conscript force. Noam Chomsky pointed out that that was a mistake that more experienced Imperialist regimes, like France or England, would not have made. Of course the U.S. military was commanded, at the top ranks, by men who had been junior or mid-level officers in World War 2. They had become accustomed to commanding forces that mostly obeyed orders. After 5 years of occupying Vietnam that was no longer the case in the U.S. military in the early 1970s.

In the discussion about the ongoing war in Afghanistan Pysner says: “... they knew for most of the duration of the twenty-year war that there was no possible way to prevent a Taliban government. But they just figured they could drag it out forever. It’s good for business. It’s good for the military. There aren’t enough American soldiers dying for people to care, and Americans don’t care about Afghan civilians, so there’s not a lot of pressure to end it. It was a good situation for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, and Washington didn’t really pay that much mind, because they didn’t have to.”

A little farther on he says: “The Bush administration thought it would be easy. They thought: 'We just go into Afghanistan, it’ll take a month to overthrow the Taliban government, and we’ll install a puppet government. Then we’ll move on to Iraq and do the same thing, and that will be really easy. Then we’ll move to Iran and do the same thing, then to Lebanon, Somalia, and Sudan.' The Pentagon really thought it would overthrow all those countries in a period of five years. (Emphasis added)

They didn’t think they were going to get bogged down in a quagmire. It was complete imperial arrogance that led the Bush administration and the Pentagon at the time to think that it would be an easy road.”

Pysner notes that Obama, who campaigned on ending the War in Iraq, moved most U.S. troops and mercenaries out of Iraq; first he moved them to Afghanistan for a “surge”. That did not work out very well and Obama then after a couple of years, he withdrew large numbers of soldiers and mercenaries out of Afghanistan as well. In fact when Obama came into office there were about 450,000 troops and mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanista. When he left there were only about 40,000 in the two countries. Obama began a change in policy similar to what Ford, Carter, and Reagan had implemented in the wake of the defeat in S.E. Asia. A change to reduced direct U.S. involvement and greater use of proxies, allies, and mercenaries. The wars that raged in Ukraine, Libya, Syria, and Yemen all began during the Obama administration. But the numbers of American troops involved was no longer in the tens of thousands but often just a few dozen, or a few hundred, or a couple of thousand in each place at most.

Trump came in talking about ending the foreign wars but Pysner notes that: “When Trump came in, he inherited a small number of troops on the ground. The withdrawal was already set up. He could have continued at the same pace and gotten out of the war, like he campaigned on. … What Trump did instead was triple the number of US troops in the country. He pressured other NATO countries to add more troops. He vastly expanded the number of mercenaries, to the point where there were roughly ten times as many mercenaries as there were soldiers. His bombing escalation was one of the more grotesque hallmarks of his presidency. The CIA and the military already faced little restriction when it came to dropping bombs and were killing civilians on a regular basis anyway, but Trump came in and said, 'Gloves off.' ”

By the time Biden came into office the military high command wanted out of Afghanistan (and it is worth noting at least parenthetically that Joe Biden is not only the first President to have a child in the military since Dwight Eisenhower some 70 years ago, but in fact Joe Biden is the first President to have a child sent into any actual combat situations since Theodore Roosevelt's two sons were in the Army during WW 1 nearly 100 years ago; Beau Biden was sent to Iraq for a one-year deployment from October 2009 to September 2009). Biden was always the most skeptical among the advisors to Obama about continued use of U.S. ground troops in the GWOT wars. Concerning the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan Pysner said: “...it isn’t Biden’s plan, it’s the Pentagon’s plan … Up until recently, the Pentagon had been mostly satisfied with the war in Afghanistan. The United States was losing for most of the occupation, and they knew that, but a drawn-out conflict like that is still good for imperialism, even if you’re losing a war in some capacity. … It was a huge boon for the military-industrial complex, and it allowed the US military to grow its technological arsenal. … Think of all the companies that made the bullets, the missiles, the tank rounds. Obviously, the defense industry has an interest in keeping the war going.

“As for the officers in the Pentagon, they get their combat experience, they get their medals, they get their command experience, they get promoted, and then they go into these six- or seven-figure jobs in the defense industry a week after they retire. … It was good for a long time, but ultimately there comes a point when it poses a problem for the empire to be bogged down in a war they’re clearly losing for twenty years. … Obama was already talking about pivoting away from Iraq and Afghanistan during his presidency. The idea he articulated was that the United States is hurting its overall hegemonic goals in the world by spending all its energy and time trying to win two wars that are impossible to win, and it needs to regroup and put its effort into other places in the world, ...”.

Pysner ends the article with a short discussion of anti-war sentiment in the military. He is in contact with many soldiers, airmen/airwomen and sailors. He thinks the depth and breath of antiwar sentiment is much higher than it used to be. I hope, and expect, that he is right, though it remains to be seen how much effect these changes will have.

==============

Article:  

Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner has been an antiwar activist for fifteen years. He has been arrested demonstrating outside the Capitol building, helped active-duty soldiers refuse orders to fight in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and organized grieving families who’ve lost enlisted or veteran loved ones to war or suicide.Prysner founded the organization March Forward! in 2008. Today, he’s an antiwar journalist, having cowritten and produced multiple documentaries for the program The Empire Files, hosted by his wife, Abby Martin. He’s also a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner has been an antiwar activist for fifteen years. He has been arrested demonstrating outside the Capitol building, helped active-duty soldiers refuse orders to fight in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and organized grieving families who’ve lost enlisted or veteran loved ones to war or suicide.

Prysner founded the organization March Forward! in 2008. Today, he’s an antiwar journalist, having cowritten and produced multiple documentaries for the program The Empire Files, hosted by his wife, Abby Martin. He’s also a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

As US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, Jacobin’s Meagan Day caught up with Prysner to talk about why the United States stayed in Afghanistan so long, despite knowing it was losing the war and destroying countless lives. Prysner also shared why he’s more hopeful about the mainstreaming of antiwar sentiment, including among active-duty soldiers, than ever before.

---

MD

How long have you been involved in the antiwar movement in the United States, and what led you to it?

MP

I joined the Army right before the 9/11 attacks and was witness to the quick transformation within the military, the orientation toward war and racism. I was sent to Iraq in the invasion in March 2003 and stayed in the country for a year. I was lucky to get out of the Army in 2005, while most of my friends got stuck in the military and were repeatedly deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I started speaking out against the Iraq War when I was still in Iraq, which I got in a bit of trouble for. As soon as I got out of the Army, I became part of the antiwar movement. It wasn’t that uncommon. There’s a whole generation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and active-duty soldiers who went into the antiwar struggle. From that point until today, I’ve been an antiwar activist.

There’s a whole generation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and active-duty soldiers who went into the antiwar struggle.

I cofounded the organization March Forward! in 2008. We helped organize mass demonstrations in Washington, DC, and other cities each year, mobilizing contingents of veterans and GIs. But we also had a special focus on organizing active-duty soldiers. We passed out leaflets on military bases saying, “Don’t go to Afghanistan. Here’s how we can help get you out,” and we met a lot of soldiers that way who were opposed to the war and wanted to refuse orders to go.

We also did a lot of work organizing families who had lost loved ones, both in the war or to suicide when they came home from the war. I’ve spoken to many widows, and to mothers who’ve lost sons and daughters. I’ve done a lot of journalism about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the years, including producing short documentaries for The Empire Files. But my time organizing active-duty soldiers and families on the ground has been the most intense and personal.

Yesterday, Joe Biden delivered a speech about the withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan. What’s your take on the president’s speech?

MP

It was entirely expected but still upsetting to hear him be honest about his position that we shouldn’t be focusing on Afghanistan, that we instead need to pivot to other fronts, including Somalia, Yemen, and Syria — away from the wars we’ve lost and toward new places where we can engage in more bombing and more military action. It was like he was offering a compromise with the military-industrial complex and the sections of the ruling class that are interested in expansion, saying, “Yes, we’re closing down this war, but don’t worry, there will be others.

”But the thing Biden said that was correct, and very important, is that if we stayed another eight months or another five years, the same outcome would transpire, and there would still be a Taliban takeover. It’s good to hear him say this, but what’s bothersome is that Joe Biden himself, and Antony Blinken and all the others around him in the Obama administration, knew that this would be the outcome if they left Afghanistan ten or twelve years ago.

The Afghanistan papers released in 2019, which never really became that big of a scandal, revealed that they knew for most of the duration of the twenty-year war that there was no possible way to prevent a Taliban government. But they just figured they could drag it out forever. It’s good for business. It’s good for the military. There aren’t enough American soldiers dying for people to care, and Americans don’t care about Afghan civilians, so there’s not a lot of pressure to end it. It was a good situation for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, and Washington didn’t really pay that much mind, because they didn’t have to.

MD

Four presidents have now presided over this war: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Biden. Can you walk us through each of their administrations’ orientations toward Afghanistan?

MP

The Bush administration’s motivation in starting a war in Afghanistan was not to prevent another terrorist attack, which of course would not be accomplished by invading and occupying a country that had no role in 9/11. In fact, there was a survey conducted about ten years ago that showed that 92 percent of young Afghan men in the occupied southern provinces had never even heard of the 9/11 attacks. Meanwhile, the Taliban had offered to cooperate with the United States in catching Osama bin Laden and other counterterrorism efforts, but this offer was ignored.

The reason the United States went into Afghanistan is that, while the Taliban were willing to collaborate with the United States, they were difficult to deal with, because they weren’t behaving like a neocolony. Any country that’s not a totally subservient client, even if it’s willing to collaborate in some way with imperialism, is on the list for overthrow and destruction.

The Bush administration thought it would be easy. They thought: “We just go into Afghanistan, it’ll take a month to overthrow the Taliban government, and we’ll install a puppet government. Then we’ll move on to Iraq and do the same thing, and that will be really easy. Then we’ll move to Iran and do the same thing, then to Lebanon, Somalia, and Sudan.” The Pentagon really thought it would overthrow all those countries in a period of five years.

They didn’t think they were going to get bogged down in a quagmire. It was complete imperial arrogance that led the Bush administration and the Pentagon at the time to think that it would be an easy road.

It was complete imperial arrogance that led the Bush administration and the Pentagon at the time to think that it would be an easy road.

When these wars blew up in their faces, that’s when Obama came in. Obama’s statement that he was going to end the Iraq War was really what propelled him through the Democratic Party primary in 2008, tapping into the anger and hostility about that war at the time. But he also promised to win the Afghanistan War — not withdraw but win. That’s why you got the Obama troop surge in Afghanistan. Biden says he was against that, by the way, but if you go back and look, he was just advocating for a smaller surge and still continuing the indefinite occupation.

Obama flooded the country with troops to try to exert enough pressure on the Taliban to get them to accept a deal. If you look back at the Afghanistan Papers, the Obama administration and the Pentagon, by that time, never really believed that they could defeat the Taliban militarily. At that point, they believed that if they just gave them enough of a beating, they would accept the power-sharing deal, and they were doing secret talks with the Taliban to that extent.

So, while the public was being told that the United States was making progress in Afghanistan, and soldiers and their families were being told, “We have to keep fighting, we have to keep dying, we have to keep killing for just a few more years until we defeat the Taliban,” behind the scenes, they were trying to negotiate a Taliban government, only with US puppet forces having some kind of role.

The Obama troop surge was a disaster on the ground — just a complete failure militarily. In the Afghanistan Papers, you see that the Pentagon was saying to the Obama administration, “By every metric, we are losing the war and cannot turn it around,” and the White House responded with, “Well, create a metric that shows that we’re doing good.”

There was growing hostility to the war strategy from within the ranks of the military. High-ranking enlisted people were speaking out about soldiers being put on pointless patrols where, every single day, someone was getting their legs blown off. There was a lot of discontent inside the military, and it started to look bad for the United States.

So the end cap of the Obama strategy was basically, “Okay, we’re going to slowly retreat. There’s no possible way for us to accomplish our goals militarily, but instead of withdrawing, over the next decade, we’re going to reduce the number of troops and have them isolated on their little bases. We can still occupy the country, still drop a lot of munitions, still be feeding the military-industrial complex, but we’re slowly going to leave.”

When Trump came in, he inherited a small number of troops on the ground. The withdrawal was already set up. He could have continued at the same pace and gotten out of the war, like he campaigned on. He ripped the Republicans and the Democrats for keeping us in this forever war. He loved that rhetoric, until he was in a position to do it.

What Trump did instead was triple the number of US troops in the country. He pressured other NATO countries to add more troops. He vastly expanded the number of mercenaries, to the point where there were roughly ten times as many mercenaries as there were soldiers. His bombing escalation was one of the more grotesque hallmarks of his presidency. The CIA and the military already faced little restriction when it came to dropping bombs and were killing civilians on a regular basis anyway, but Trump came in and said, “Gloves off.”

Under Trump, the United States dropped so many bombs that it actually killed more civilians than any other previous year for two years in a row. That includes the troop surge under Obama, when there were twenty times the number of boots on the ground. Just as Obama tried to pressure the Taliban into a deal with a troop surge, Trump thought he could pressure the Taliban into a deal by just bombing everything in sight.

For both the Obama and Trump administrations, the violence they wrought in Afghanistan was never even about preventing the Taliban from entering power. Even though that’s what they’re saying, they were behind the scenes trying to form a unity government with the Taliban, or a Taliban government that’s friendly to the United States and has some vestiges of the neocolonial puppet regime they tried to install. And in many ways, that’s exactly the outcome they’re getting right now. When you think about it that way, you realize they implemented years and years of more killing for absolutely no reason at all.

MD

Why is the withdrawal happening now under Biden? He hasn’t exactly been a stalwart opponent of the war in Afghanistan.

MP

It’s funny, because Biden never advocated a full withdrawal. Even up until the last days of his campaign against Trump, he was saying we needed to leave several thousand troops in the country and using all this rhetoric about how we can’t abandon our Afghan partners. Then, when Biden got into office, his tone and rhetoric about the war completely changed to favor a total withdrawal.

The reason is because it isn’t Biden’s plan, it’s the Pentagon’s plan. The Pentagon brass, who are unelected, wield so much control over our elected government. Foreign policy really flows from the Pentagon, not from any so-called democratic institution. So Biden came into office with his idea of leaving troops there forever, and then the Pentagon said, “No, we need to get out,” and that’s why he changed his tune.Up until recently, the Pentagon had been mostly satisfied with the war in Afghanistan. The United States was losing for most of the occupation, and they knew that, but a drawn-out conflict like that is still good for imperialism, even if you’re losing a war in some capacity. You have this extremely bloated military budget. At times, the United States was spending $400 or $500 million per day on expenditures just for the occupation of Afghanistan. It was a huge boon for the military-industrial complex, and it allowed the US military to grow its technological arsenal.

Think of the energy companies providing fuel to all the different defense contractors that maintain the bases. Think of the companies that were building vehicles that came off the assembly line at the factory and went straight into the roads of Afghanistan, where they would get blown up, sending the military back to the factory to replace them. Think of all the companies that made the bullets, the missiles, the tank rounds. Obviously, the defense industry has an interest in keeping the war going.

As for the officers in the Pentagon, they get their combat experience, they get their medals, they get their command experience, they get promoted, and then they go into these six- or seven-figure jobs in the defense industry a week after they retire. So there is no desire from the Pentagon to end it quickly, when an ongoing occupation is a path to building their résumé and to personal enrichment.

It was good for a long time, but ultimately there comes a point when it poses a problem for the empire to be bogged down in a war they’re clearly losing for twenty years. The United States is supposed to project power as this invincible military machine. At a certain point, the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq make the United States look weak and defeatable. It starts to hurt the image of American imperialism and the kind of dominance it wants to project in the world. And so the ruling class starts looking for other targets for regime change.

There is no desire from the Pentagon to end it quickly, when an ongoing occupation is a path to building their résumé and to personal enrichment.

Obama was already talking about pivoting away from Iraq and Afghanistan during his presidency. The idea he articulated was that the United States is hurting its overall hegemonic goals in the world by spending all its energy and time trying to win two wars that are impossible to win, and it needs to regroup and put its effort into other places in the world, including other countries in the Middle East, Latin America, and especially Asia.

You started to see this transition happen under Trump, even as the wars in Afghanistan dragged on, with the attempted coup in Venezuela, escalating regime-change policies against Cuba, actions in Yemen and Syria, and a major escalation of patrols in the South China Sea. That hasn’t stopped under Biden. Vice President Kamala Harris went to Vietnam and pressured them to confront China in an apparent effort to provoke conflict in the region. Many countries in Asia are striving to create a region of peaceful cooperation, and then you have the United States coming in and trying to increase tensions.

I think the United States is kind of scared of a war with China and not going to intentionally rush into one. But its behavior on the world stage is so provocative and belligerent that a series of escalating conflicts might cause one to happen anyway. And it’s clear the focus of attention has shifted. All the officers going through training at West Point and the elite military academies are being trained to prepare for this great power confrontation. In light of that pivot, I think the Pentagon wanted to leave Afghanistan in the past, and Biden’s actions reflect that.

MD

Many of the arguments we’re hearing right now against troop withdrawal center around the Taliban’s violation of human rights, particularly women’s rights. How can we respond to those concerns, acknowledging that the Taliban is often brutal and responsible for real suffering, while still making the case for the United States leaving Afghanistan?

MP

First, I think we need to start by acknowledging what an absolute catastrophe the US occupation was for the Afghan people. We need to recognize the amount of violence that was imposed on the country throughout the war — villages being bombed, villages being raided in the middle of the night by special operations forces shooting people in their beds — really heinous stuff. In addition to that violence, there was the constant humiliation of ongoing occupation — having soldiers at the gates to your village, patting you down every time you go in and out. Existence under occupation and under a state of war is horrific.

Polls of Afghans show that the number-one priority of people in the country is ending the war. They want peace. Most Afghans wanted the complete withdrawal of US forces and favored a deal with the Taliban. Something like two hundred thousand civilians were killed in the war, with some estimates a lot higher, and the vast majority of that violence was from the United States. The US media didn’t care much about that violence when it was going on, but now it wants to use human rights as a way to advocate staying.

As for the specific topic of women’s rights, that’s interesting, because it’s not like women’s rights were suddenly implemented in territories under US control. I’m sure it was easier for women to be in Kabul and some other main power centers that were treated like fortresses, but areas that were under US occupation throughout the countryside have mostly maintained the same cultural and religious norms they did under the Taliban.

If we want to see Afghanistan progress socially, it’s important to understand that none of that can happen when you’re under occupation. When there’s fighting in your village every single day, that completely hinders any possibility of progressive movements flourishing and advancing, because the main issue that everyone is grappling with is the war. In the 1970s and ’80s, there were women’s rights advocates and socialists and all kinds of progressive movements in Afghanistan crushed by US policy. The only way for that to reemerge and advance again is to stop the nation from existing in a state of war, which means ending US interference.

MD

Earlier this week, we saw footage of Afghan citizens chasing a US military plane on the tarmac, desperate to be lifted out of Afghanistan, while US soldiers were shooting at them. Meanwhile, French president Emmanuel Macron gave a speech saying, “We must anticipate and protect ourselves against significant irregular migratory flows.” What does the West owe people who remain in Afghanistan, as well as Afghan refugees and asylum seekers?

MP

Biden has gotten some credit for saying we needed to do a complete and immediate withdrawal, and that was the right thing to say and do, but the fact that they allowed thousands of people to be basically run over by these Air Force jets leaving the country is appalling. The videos of people falling from the landing gear as the plane was a thousand meters in the sky were horrendous. The withdrawal itself was necessary, but it was a completely botched operation.

They knew that the Taliban was coming into the city, and they should have had a rational exit plan.

The images of Kabul airport say everything about how the United States views Afghan citizens and refugees, which is to say, complete dehumanization. It also speaks to US incompetence. They had six thousand American soldiers there. They knew that the Taliban was coming into the city, and they should have had a rational exit plan. Instead, they acted like if they didn’t leave in the next hour, they were all going to get killed, and screw all these Afghans standing in their way.

The military is this huge machine with incredible logistical capabilities, and it wasn’t able to come up with an orderly way to manage the crowds that assembled, hoping to leave the country, which was totally inevitable. They ended up shooting into the crowds, killing people on the tarmac. Many of these were people who had helped the United States in Afghanistan, who were on their side. The Taliban didn’t come in shooting. The US military completely panicked for no reason, and people ended up dead. It’s a horrific failure of the Biden administration and the commanders on the ground, and it should haunt them.

As for what the West, and in particular the United States, owes people inside and fleeing from Afghanistan, the first thing I will say is reparations. We have poured money into Afghanistan, but nearly all of it went to either defense contractors or to US puppet forces, which have now fled the country and are living off the tens of millions of dollars they stashed in bank accounts. We owe the Afghan people money to rebuild after the destruction that the United States did in the country. And people who want to leave Afghanistan deserve the right to come to the countries that destroyed it, including the United States and nineteen additional countries that were part of the NATO force.

MD

You’ve had a front-row view of the US antiwar movement for a long time. Do you feel hopeful that antiwar sentiment is growing among the American populace? What do we need to do to build an effective domestic movement that can end the forever wars?

MP

After fifteen years in the antiwar struggle, I’m actually more optimistic than I’ve ever been. We don’t have a mass antiwar protest like we did during the height of the Iraq War, but I think antiwar sentiment is more widespread and mainstream because of people’s experiences with Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that there’s an end cap on Afghanistan, I think we can look back in the rearview mirror of history and see what it really was.

After fifteen years in the antiwar struggle, I’m actually more optimistic than I’ve ever been.

In particular, I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made a major impact on working-class Americans. Any poor person in this country knows someone who was in the military in the past twenty years, which means they likely know someone who went to Iraq or Afghanistan came back a different person, or came back to a life harder than the one they joined the military trying to escape. I think this has had a deep impact on the American working-class psyche.

In particular, I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made a major impact on working-class Americans. Any poor person in this country knows someone who was in the military in the past twenty years, which means they likely know someone who went to Iraq or Afghanistan came back a different person, or came back to a life harder than the one they joined the military trying to escape. I think this has had a deep impact on the American working-class psyche. the main reason for my optimism is what I’ve seen from within the ranks of active-duty service members in my work organizing war resisters. Throughout my time doing this, we’ve always been able to find people who wanted to speak out against the war or resist orders. There were always discontented people, and even a few willing to make a courageous stand, but it was a tiny minority.

But the main reason for my optimism is what I’ve seen from within the ranks of active-duty service members in my work organizing war resisters. Throughout my time doing this, we’ve always been able to find people who wanted to speak out against the war or resist orders. There were always discontented people, and even a few willing to make a courageous stand, but it was a tiny minority.

I think it’s grown. In fact, I think antiwar sentiment in the military is stronger than ever. For example, when Trump assassinated Qassim Suleimani and it looked like we were going to go to war with Iran, I was contacted constantly for that one-week period by people in active duty who told me that they would under no circumstances go fight a war with Iran. I had never experienced anything like that, including at the peak of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, when people knew that if they went over there it was definitely possible they wouldn’t come back in one piece. That represented something really significant for me.

Consciousness in the military is reflective of consciousness in society in general.

Consciousness in the military is reflective of consciousness in society in general. I think all the big shocks — the Occupy movement, the Bernie Sanders movement, the George Floyd movement — have had reverberations among active-duty soldiers. And in the same way that we see so much more potential for movement building and social change in the United States, that’s there in the military as well. Bernie Sanders got more donations from active-duty troops than all the other Democratic presidential primary candidates combined, plus Donald Trump, during the primary. That says something about the sentiment that’s bubbling underneath the surface in the military.

As for what we do to build a strong antiwar movement at home, we need to be doing the principled work of building that sector of our struggle and linking it to the other important issues that working-class people deal with every day, so that when the next pivotal moment happens, we’re ready to keep up movement pressure and change the outcome.

There’s not always going to be hundreds of thousands of people flooding the streets like they did at the start of the Iraq War, but we can’t anticipate when that kind of moment will come again. What we do know is that there is always going to be a new escalation. There is always going to be a new target of US imperial aggression, and we need to be ready to engage in the day-to-day work of international solidarity.

No Solutions Under Capitalism: Revolution is Required ~~ PAUL STREET

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/20/no-solutions-under-capitalism-revolution-is-required/

~~ and podcast link 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/06/paul-street-2/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Liberals and progressives would do well to understand that while class is not everything – far from it, as I shall argue below – there are still no real or lasting solutions to problems that rightly agitate them under capitalism and bourgeois democracy, that is, under the de facto material dictatorship of the capitalist class and its mode of production. Take the giant American problem of racial inequality and oppression. Does it have a certain real life of its own, one that should not simply be reduced to class in economistic ways? Sure. Of course. Go to any major US city and observe how residence and employment and the lack of both are apportioned and spaced by race. Look at the long and continuing legacies of Black chattel slavery and its ugly stepchild Jim Crow: the de facto racial apartheid, separate and unequal settlement, schooling, and investment patterns that are endemic across the United States along with racially disparate mass incarceration and felony marking and numerous other and interrelated practices and policies wired to produce savagely disparate outcomes by race. Look at the dogged denial of race and systemic white racism’s continuing central relevance in American life on the part of millions of right-wing white Amerikaners, whose politics are shaped at their core by absurd narratives of white victimization and a fear of white demographic encirclement. Race has a terrible space and life of its own in the US. Race matters. It matters a lot.

Still, it is impossible to properly understand race and racism’s evolution in the U.S. (and elsewhere) without grasping how it developed in accord with the economic and political imperatives of capital and class rule. Racial othering, the dehumanizing consignment of Black (along with Native American) people to the realm of Nature, beyond the sphere of human Society and the social contract, permitted the southern US ruling class and the broader American capitalist system to profit and expand on the basis of the ruthless class-race exploitation and torture of Black labor – as chattel slaves, sharecroppers, debt peons, prison laborers, and poorly paid wage-earners. It also fueled working class divisions that undermine the popular solidarity required for mass opposition to the American capitalist class. The great Black scholar W.E.B. DuBois wrote brilliantly about what he called “the psychological wage” of whiteness, whereby ordinary white working people cling to the notion that their skin color confers special power and privileges that compensate for their subordination (wage-enslavement) to capital.

At the same time, it is inconceivable that the nation’s savage inequalities of race, intimately related to and overlapping with its ferocious disparities of class, will ever be properly addressed, much less overcome, under capitalism. The bourgeois system, caught up in a continuous global intra-capitalist struggle for markets, materials, labor supplies, and share of the surplus value and profit pie, does not have a socially responsible surplus at hand to even begin to remotely redress the massive racial disparity created by the genocidal oppression and wealth extraction imposed on Black people since even before the nation was founded. At the same time, the ruling class remains deeply invested in racial divide-and-rule. Like economic/class inequality, racial inequality and oppression will never be overcome under the capitalist mode of production, something that is most particularly evident and true in a deeply racist nation whose original and pivotal accumulation of capital was achieved through Black chattel slavery.

Much the same can be said about gender disparity and oppression. Any remotely and unbiased observer can and should know that gender oppression predates the capitalist system and possesses a perverse, many-sided logic and life of its own under capitalism. Like toxic whiteness and intimately related to it, toxic maleness and opposition to women’s rights is a major force in right-wing neofascist politics. It is also a major factor in daily American life, with girls and women regularly subjected to horrific abuse ranging from verbal harassment and shaming to beatings, rape, and murder. Being female is a major barrier to advancement and equality across the class structure, from animal processing plants in Iowa to CEO appointments and presidential viability atop the corporate sector and the national government. Gender oppression, hardly invented by capitalism, has a life of its own to this day.

Still, it is impossible to understand patriarchy’s modern forms and essence without reference to capitalism. The noxious and dehumanizing Western consignment of women to the realm of Nature, outside Society and the social contract, provided justification for the consignment of women to the unpaid toil of raising, providing care for, and otherwise sustaining proletarian populations (the natural resource called human labor power) – and for the bidding down of wages to women in the paid workforce. At the same time, the notion of “the women problem” being meaningfully solved under capitalist rule is fantastic. The bourgeois system will not provide and does not possess the resources required to seriously redress and overcome gender oppression. It remains dependent on the cheap and free, wage-suppressing and profits-protecting labor of women both in the paid workplace and in unpaid homes. Patriarchal capitalism provides middle- and working-class males with a “psychological wage” of maleness that offers them a measure of mental and status compensation for their subordination to an emasculating US One Percent that owns more wealth than the nation’s bottom 95 percent. And gender conflict divisions join with racial and ethnic fragmentation in fueling popular social and political divisions that the capitalist class can’t help but love.

Like racial oppression, gender oppression will not be overcome under the capitalist mode of production.

Or take the immigration question. Capitalism hardly invented conflict between “settled” populations and geographically incoming masses from other territories, races, and/or cultures. Obviously overlapping with and intimately related to whiteness and racial division, the immigration issue has a certain perverse logic and political life of its own, linking and overlapping with race and gender divisions to fuel border-obsessed right-wing nationalist neofascistic politics in the U.S. as in Europe and elsewhere. Still, the modern-day immigration issue is intimately bound up with capitalism in multiple and obvious ways, including shifting patterns of global investment, technical displacement, rural enclosure, and environmental ruin. The profits system clearly cannot and will not begin to seriously address and redress the misery it inflicts on migrants. At the same time, capital derives profits from the exploitation of Otherized migrant labor power whose price is pushed down by migrants’ stateless/rightless status. And capital garners political divide-and-rule protection from the direction of “settled” volk working and middle-class rage away from concentrated wealth and power (capital and its political class) and against Otherized immigrant scapegoats. There’s a “psychological wage” of native status that provides a measure of mental and status compensation for untold millions of “native” US- Americans suffering under the yoke of capitalist rule: “Hey, I’m an American, unlike those people, who don’t know our ways or speak our language.’

The immigration problem will not be solved under the capitalist of production.

Most good progressives say they are against war and imperialism. Neither of those terrible problems were invented by capitalism. Read Gibbon and Thucydides. Google up Genghis Kan. Study the Greek, Roman, Aztec, Inca, Holy Roman, and Chinese among other great empires of the long precapitalist past. At the same time, war and empire, the subsidy and advancement of which massively cancel social and environmental protection and uplift within and beyond the US today, are not without lives of their own. “War,” as Chris Hedges ironically titled his first book, “is a force that gives us meaning.”  Hedges drew brilliantly on classical literature and his experiences as a war correspondent to show that war seduces whole nations, generating illusory narratives that much of their publics internalize and use to support lethal conflicts. He also related how many who experience war find it invigorating and even addictive.

Soldiers have long killed millions and died en masse to defend empires, typically justified with absurd notions of national greatness and exceptionalism. Ruling classes in great powers benefit from what might be called “the psychological wage of Empire” – the sense among their subordinate domestic classes that they are people of elevated status and power because they reside in and fight for a “great” nation with awesome strength on the global stage. There have also long been material wages of Empire for homeland rulers to distribute to restive domestic masses: materials, goods, and even slaves extracted from conquered colonies, regions, and nations have provided imperial rulers economic benefits with which to pacify their subject populations at home. This all predates capitalism.

Still, the reigning Western and global imperialism of the last half millennium has been fundamentally capitalist and the capitalism that has ruled the world during that time is imperialist by origin, nature and definition and in its own specific ways. Marxists from Lenin on have noted how the rich capitalist nations’ plundering of the oppressed periphery of the world capitalist system periphery permit rich state capitalist states to buy off and even “bourgeoisify” certain better off sections (what Lenin called “the labor aristocracy”) of their domestic proletariats. “To a certain degree the workers of the oppressor nations are partners of their own bourgeoisie in plundering the workers (and the mass of the population) of the oppressed nations; politically … compared with the workers of the oppressed nations, they occupy a privileged position in many spheres of political life; ideologically … they are taught, at school and in life, disdain and contempt for the workers of the oppressed nations,” Lenin wrote.

Raj Patel and Jason Moore go back to the system’s imperial origins in the “long Sixteenth Century” in their important book A History of the World in seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and he Future of the Planet. “Capitalism,” Patel and Moore write, “not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers, expanding from one place to the next, transforming sociecological relations, producing more and more kinds of goods and services that circulate through an expanding series of exchanges.” Capitalism, as Moore showed in his pathbreaking book Capitalism in the Web of Life, depends on such expansion in order to replenish its ever-self-endangered rate of profit (a product of the competitive capitalist race to reduce costs through new applications of technology/constant capital) through the search for and appropriation of new supplies of “cheap nature”: cheap raw materials, cheap labor power, and cheap energy.

The expansion has always required brutal military force and conquest, empire. It is intimately tied to racial oppression and Othering, to the naturalizing dehumanization of nonwhite people on the wrong side of imperial capitalism’s rapacious frontiers. It also by definition Ecocidal, dependent on endless, profit rate-sustaining expansion and the environmentally brutal commodification of “everything under the sun.” The task of advancing and protecting of the American Empire (the leading military agent and protector of not just of American capitalism but of global capitalism after World War II) gave rise of the Pentagon System and the military-industrial-complex, a massive corporate subsidy and diversion of public resources from the potential meeting of social and environmental needs to the high-tech corporate sector. American capital is deeply addicted to “cost-plus” “defense” (empire) contracts and the warfare state, which provides an immensely profitable outlet for surplus capital investment and sustains a military empire that possesses the single largest institutional carbon footprint on Earth.

We will not overcome war, empire, and, for that matter, Ecocide under the capitalist mode of production.

Liberals and progressives are concerned about political authoritarianism. They should be, God knows. The menace posed by repressive political tyranny is very real in the US, where one of the two reigning capitalist political organization (the Amerikaner Party of Trump, APoT, formerly known as the Republican Party), has gone full-on white-nationalist and authoritarian – fascist, in all honesty. The “Nazified” APoT appears to be well on the way to achieving full control of the national US government in 2025. Unless blocked by a popular rebellion the dollar-drenched Democrats will never encourage, this neofascist restoration and consolidation will come with and through big help from the many “red states” currently under literally sickening APoT control and no small collateral assistance from the hollow resistance of the dismal Democrats. It will develop with no small ironic assistance from America’s minority-rule-friendly slaveowners’ Constitution, which offers a clear legal path towards a vote-Tally-Banning Trumpasmic State and Orange Caliphate via federalism (which grants white power “red states” under APoT control remarkable power to ban and cancel minority and Democrat vote tallies, US Senate malapportionment and power (which grants absurdly outsized power to cancel voting rights and reform measures to the nation’s most reactionary and white states in the preposterously powerful upper body of Congress), the awesome anti-democratic judicial review power of the US Supreme Court (where a 6-3 right-wing super majority stands absurdly far to the starboard side of the US citizenry), the Electoral College (which vastly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary states and regions), and the 12th Amendment (which calls for the settlement of a contested presidential election marked by conflicting state-level Elector slates by a House of Representatives election “with each state having one vote.”

With the closing of the interrelated territorial, military, economic, and ecological frontiers US capitalism has long been able to use as a safety valve for temporarily escaping from its internal contradictions of race, class, and gender, we’ve reached the Rosa Luxemburg cliff or moment. It’s “socialism or barbarism,” though nowadays and really since the aftermath of the failed German Revolution that led to the murder of Rosa, we need to name the barbarism as fascism and add “barbarism/fascism if we’re lucky” thanks to the even graver if intimately related menace of ecocide. And we nowadays must put the crucial prefix “eco-” in front of “socialism.”

Still, capitalism has never been about actual democracy. It has advanced only oxymoronic bourgeois democracy. “Bourgeois democracy” is not actual democracy qualified by bourgeois power, as in “take money out of politics,” or “we can achieve socialism through reform and electing decent people.” It is the class rule of capital cloaked by nominally democratic and representative electoral and parliamentary institutions and formal rule of law. As Frederick Engels wrote in his introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx’s Civil War in France: “The state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.” Lenin put it well in his 1918 pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky: “bourgeois democracy…always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.” Bourgeois democracy is democracy for the bourgeoisie alone. It is cloak for the de facto class dictatorship of imperial capital.[1]

We will not achieve democracy under the capitalist mode of production. It would take an actual popular and socialist revolution, dedicated among other things to the drafting and implementation of a new constitution (the still reigning American one was drafted by and for slaveowners and merchant capitalists for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare in the time of Louis XVI), to get on the path of popular sovereignty (the last thing the US Founders ever wanted to see).

If an actual radical Leftist prefers miserable bourgeois politicos like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Anthony Blinken to malignant white power pandemo-Nazis like Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, and Stephen Miller in the imperial executive branch, it has nothing to do with believing in bourgeois democracy and everything to do with the calculation that chances for building opposition to the whole damn system are better under bourgeois democracy and its nominal rule of law than they are under fascism. A related calculation tells a serious radical that openly authoritarian rule is the ultimate destination of capitalism, whose rapacious and inherent contradictions always tend towards the final abolition of democratic pretense and constitutional rule of law qualifications and moderations. After concentrated capitalist wealth and the (literally) cancerous spread of capitalist social relations have proletarianized and subjugated most of the species, thoroughly corrupted government and media, badly polluted and cooked the planet, eviscerated key ecological and epidemiological safeguards, it is clear that humanity can no longer survive as long as capital owns and rules the material base and the political superstructure of society. As capital’s identity as the dark class rule lynchpin of humanity’s failed state of being and existential menace becomes more undeniably evident, the bourgeoisie and its political class must undertake to abandon and dismantle democratic pretense and past popular-democratic victories and align themselves with full on revanchist authoritarian and repressive, genocidal ecofascism. Getting neoliberal bourgeois democratic and nominally rule-of-law electoralist politicians like Joe Biden into office and perhaps passing a few half human reform measures become at best holding actions in the face of authoritarian consolidation The holding actions are essential, providing transient breathing room in which to try to organize an “actual revolution, nothing less,” to use the thoroughly appropriate language of the Revolutionary Communist Party, to overthrow a system that devolves towards dictatorship and the destruction of livable ecology by its very historical-material nature.

Endnote

1. You don’t have to be a Marxist or some other kind of anti-capitalist to understand the capitalism and democracy are not only different from each other but opposed to each other. My old copy of Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary defines capitalism as “the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution … are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions: it has been generally characterized by a tendency toward concentration of wealth and, [in] its latter phase, by the growth of great corporations, increased government controls, etc.” There’s nothing—nada, zero, zip—about popular self-rule (democracy) in that definition. And there shouldn’t be. “Democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power,” liberal economist Lester Thurow noted in the mid-1990s: “One [democracy] believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, ‘one man, one vote,’ while the other [capitalism] believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. … To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not.” Thurow might have added that capitalism is perfectly compatible with fascism, racism, nativism, sexism, militarism, and imperialism among other authoritarian and anti-democratic forces and formations. More than being merely compatible with slavery, moreover, U.S.-American capitalism arose largely on the basis of the Black cotton slave system in the nation’s pre-Civil War South. This is demonstrated at length in historian Edward Baptist’s prize-winning study The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. “We must make our choice,” onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said or written: “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” This statement (whoever made it) was perhaps unintentionally anti-capitalist. Consistent with Webster’s(above), the historically astute French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that capitalism has always been inexorably pulled toward the concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands.