Socialist Action /February 2000
Clinton's Vision of the 21st Century:
Many Colombias
By NAT WEINSTEIN
Following is a talk given to a Latin American Studies class at St.
Mary's College in Moraga, Calif., last month. The class is focusing this
semester on the civil war in Colombia and the so-called "war on drugs"
waged by President Clinton and his bipartisancapitalist government.
Colombia has a more than 50-year history of social, economic and political
crises that have engendered a series of large-scale guerrilla struggles.
The country is currently embroiled in such a struggle by poor peasants and
workers against super-exploitation and oppression.
Some 40 percent of the land area of Colombia is under the control of
the guerrilla armies. In other words, a system of prolonged dual power prevails
in that country.
The bankruptcy of a state heavily involved in drug dealing has led to
a deep crisis of Colombian capitalism and its ruling class. And we now have
to add to this picture the worst economic crisis in 70 years.
The Colombian gross national product has dropped 6 percent in the first
half of last year; the local currency (the peso) has been devalued several
times in 1999, and the total devaluation this year is now over 25 percent.
Meanwhile, imperialist financial institutions like the International
Monetary Fund have been imposing austerity on Colombia's super-exploited
workers and farmers that only worsens the economic crisis.
Today, U.S. policy toward Colombia is essentially identical to its policy
toward El Salvador in 1980. U.S. aid to a brutal Colombian government is
increasing in direct proportion to the growing misery of the people and
the inevitable tendency of millions of suffering poor to fight back against
those responsible for their desperate plight.
The chief difference between El Salvador in 1980 and Colombia in 2000,
however, is the pretext for intervention given by American imperialism.
Since the Cold War is over and since the capitalist world has been celebrating
the death of the so-called "Evil Empire of Soviet Communism,"
that can no longer serve as world imperialism's pretext for counter-revolutionary
military intervention all over the globe.
In Colombia, the new pretext is the war on drugs. Technically, all the
military aid the American bipartisan government is sending to Colombia goes
for counter-narcotics efforts.
Colombia is the leading recipient of U.S. military aid in Latin America
and is the third largest in the world, behind only Israel and Egypt. Between
1990 and 1999, Colombia's police and military received over $918 million
in so-called counter-narcotics aid from Washington.
The New York Times reported recently that Colombian President Andrés
Pastrana was in Washington campaigning for Congress to approve President
Clinton's proposed grant by American taxpayers of $1.3 billion in military
aid to his repressive government for this year.
But the Colombian army and police are not fighting a drug war. The world
knows that they are really fighting an old-fashioned civil war against an
armed struggle by Colombian workers and peasants, who are in control of
some 40 percent of the countryside. This is the emergency that President
Clinton's bipartisan government worries about-not drugs.
Clinton and his bipartisan government is worried about far more than
a social revolution in one small country in Latin America. Listen to how
The Times put it this week:
"Mr. Clinton did not directly address concerns that American support
for Colombia's antidrug campaign could spill over further into its counter
insurgency effort. But Clinton said: 'In the intersection of the narco-traffickers
and the political rebels, you see a picture of what you might see much more
of in the 21st century world."
To be sure, such damning quotations from major spokespersons for American
imperialism like the president of the United States are buried in the text,
but they don't hit the headlines as does the phony war on drugs!
The "drug war" inside the United States
But before I go on to the bigger picture in which Colombia is only a
relatively small symptomatic case, I want to say a few words, parenthetically,
on the question of drugs as a social problem here in the United States and
elsewhere and the real purpose of the so-called war on drugs.
In the first place, it's not really a war on drugs-the fact is that neither
traffic in drugs nor addiction to drugs has been reduced by this phony war.
On the contrary, it's facilitated and accelerated by the simple fact of
making such drugs illegal and by providing draconian penalties for those
convicted of mere possession of more than an ounce of marijuana.
The real war in this country, as in Colombia, is being waged against
the poorest-and the most exploited and oppressed-sectors of American society.
It is the victims of the social and economic system here in the world's
richest country who are driven by poverty to addiction and to serve as distributors
and pushers in the service of the big-time drug lords.
Without the illegalization of these mind-bending drugs, and without the
bankers who launder the ill-gotten gains of the drug lords, there would
not be the kind of social problems that exist today.
Ironically, it's a wide-open secret that the rich, who are mostly unaffected
by the war on drugs, consume far more than their share of illegal drugs
but are rarely convicted of a felony for possession. And even then, they
far more rarely serve time in jail. If you watch movies on television, hardly
a day goes by without a scene showing rich people sniffing cocaine at parties.
It is those addicted to drugs among the working-class poor of the United
States who are paying heavily by spending years of their lives in the expanding
prison population of this, the richest country on earth. That's exactly
what the "three strikes" law in this country is all about.
Moreover, the war on drugs is also a weapon that has been used to frame
up and sentence militant civil rights leaders to long prison terms for the
mere possession of small amounts of such mild and relatively harmless drugs
as marijuana.
And in Colombia, there could be no drug trade without the active aid
and assistance of American forces of law and order and the banks that eagerly
launder money for the drug lords. In fact, without the illegalization of
drugs in the United States there would certainly not be the huge material
incentive to grow and smuggle drugs anywhere.
But don't get me wrong. I am not an advocate of any drug that is harmful
to one's health or impairs one's ability to function as a useful member
of society.
Moreover, instead of treating the possession and use of drugs as a crime
with all its attendant penalties and miseries for the poor, it would be
far more effective, sensible, and humane to treat any harmful addiction
to drugs in the same way that society under ideal conditions treats addiction
to tobacco and alcohol; that is, as a very serious health problem.
Deepening crisis of world economy
But, now to the more general problem referred to by the commander in
chief of world imperialism. (In case you haven't yet got my message, I am
talking about the president of the United States, who led NATO and world
imperialism in its war on Yugoslavia.)
Colombia is only symptomatic of the deepening crisis of the world capitalist
economy. Even though the rich get richer and the poor poorer, American and
world imperialism are in deep trouble, and the ruling classes everywhere
know it.
After all, what lies at the root of the developing global crisis is the
relentless expansion of the productive capacity of industry everywhere through
the introduction of ever-more sophisticated machines.
A short news item, given no special significance by its author or his
editors, appeared in the financial section of The New York Times a few months
ago. A single sentence from this report, which tells of a marked increase
in sales of industrial robots, illustrates how the global economy works.
"In the first half of 1999, motor vehicle manufacturers' orders
[for industrial robots] surged 101 percent worldwide, and 214 percent in
North America, compared with the same period in 1998."
This seemingly routine news item points to the heart of the problem faced
by global capitalism. The booming market for industrial robots reflects
the general trend toward the replacement of human labor by machines. In
other words, more robots mean fewer workers-both relatively and absolutely.
Thus, the longer this process continues, the greater is the productive
capacity of the world economy, and the fewer workers there are to buy the
mounting supplies of goods. Consequently, the bottom line is clear: the
longer the expansion of the productive forces continues, the greater will
be the number of surplus factories, surplus goods and, last but not least,
surplus workers.
And make no mistake, hundreds of millions of jobless and otherwise hungry
people throughout the planet is a recipe for revolutionary upsurges and
counterrevolutionary repression erupting everywhere. That's what Clinton
really means when he says:
"In the intersection of the narco-traffickers and the political
rebels, you see a picture of what you might see much more of in the 21st
century world."
The movers and shakers of American and world imperialism are fully aware
of their desperate world position. The tendency of the average rate of profit
to fall, largely concealed by what really is a global bubble economy, has
begun to break out into the open.
Contributing heavily to this entire process is the decade-long recession
in Japan, the world's second-largest economy. But the only way that the
profit rate can be kept from falling ever faster is by intensifying the
rate of exploitation.
That's the meaning of the ongoing assaults by capitalists everywhere
on the living standards of their own working classes and on the already
super-exploited neo-colonial world.
Socialism or Barbarism!
Karl Marx said over 150 years ago that the alternatives for humanity
are only two-either capitalism will take the human race toward an unimaginably
horrible form of capitalist barbarism or it will be overthrown by its victims
and a new world socialist order will be put in its place; the alternatives
are either Socialism or Barbarism!
We live at a moment in world history in which the continued existence
of our species lies in the balance. Doubts about the survival of the human
race have spread from a relatively small but significant number of the world's
most serious scientists and other thinkers to ever-wider layers of the general
population.
Never in the history of the world has the very existence of the human
race been threatened on so many fronts at one time. We are faced with the
accelerating process of pollution of the oceans, rivers, lakes and the very
air we breathe. Pandemics like AIDS and asthma spread across the planet
from continent to continent and from nation to nation.
The peoples of the poorest countries, already ill-housed, ill-clothed
and ill-fed must now also endure the absence of such elementary human needs
as clean water for drinking and bathing.
And then, of course, there are the arsenals of nuclear-tipped missiles
whose destructive powers are steadily being multiplied. The danger of a
global thermonuclear conflagration has not diminished despite the capitulation
of Stalinism to imperialism and the ending of the Cold War.
Moreover, local wars between and within nations erupt with increasing
frequency-often threatening to become regional in scope-any one of which
can trigger even wider conflicts involving the world's massively armed nuclear
powers.
"Interesting times!"
Now in conclusion, I want to use a quote from my favorite Wall Street
economic expert, a guy by the name of Floyd Norris who writes for The New
York Times. While he's a very reliable representative of the capitalist
class, he's a favorite of mine because his columns are so very truthful
about the irrational exuberance of the stock market and the impending economic
crisis.
The Times economic expert starts off one of his recent columns with the
words: "May you live in interesting times. So goes the ancient Chinese
curse. And these days the stock market is nothing if not interesting."
That phrase was subtle enough for me to have read it twice to get the
full flavor of his insightful observation. And of course, Mr. Norris's concept
of an interesting stock market is, for him and his class, a very unpleasant
one.
Really, the entire 20th century was also very interesting in the sense
attributed to the word by the Chinese. But if you think the century that
has just ended was interesting, you ain't seen nothing yet! The ultimate
fate of humanity on this planet, its very existence, in fact, will likely
be decided well before the first quarter of the new century comes to an
end.
Many of those alive today will probably live to see how it all turns
out. Far more important, the current generation will have the opportunity
to affect the outcome of humanity's most "interesting" moment
in history.
I know that for those who cannot see further than their nose it appears
that capitalism is here to stay and that the notion of the victory of world
socialism seems to be a utopian pipe dream. Well, in fact, that's what most
people believed in the late 1920s, just before the Great Depression hit
and the world-and people's ideas about the world-were turned upside down.
Already big changes in mass consciousness that have been simmering just
below the surface of events have begun to break through into the open-first
here, then there.
Last December such an eruption broke out in Seattle. In my opinion, this
will go down as one of the first indications of changing mass consciousness.
My report on its significance in the December issue of my party's newspaper,
Socialist Action, detailed the deep radicalization taking place among the
youth of this country.
The radicalization among youth
Whatever limitations this heat lightning of the coming storm may have,
it serves as proof that mass consciousness is undergoing very interesting
changes. And even more interesting is the radicalization taking place among
high school youth. That's something very new and different.
To be sure, the youth are always among the first to feel the big changes
taking place in the subterranean depths of society. A few of you here may
be old enough to have experienced the youth radicalization of the 1960s
and '70s. Like all big changes in mass consciousness during the last century,
that youth radicalization more than 25 years ago was a global phenomenon.
And so will the next one be, whose coming appears to have already been signalled
by the events in Seattle.
But as important as the last youth radicalization was, it was primarily
centered among the more privileged youth, who were able to afford a college
education-primarily the sons and daughters of the middle class. The mass
of working-class youth were less affected.
And while the radicalizing youth were inspired by the big social problems
of the day-the Black struggle against segregation, the struggle for women's
rights, the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Vietnamese workers and
peasants-at the same time, economic questions had little effect on their
consciousness.
In fact, one of the most telling limitations of that youth radicalization
was their sense that their economic security was never in doubt. It took
the strange form of a universal disdain for consumerism by the radicalized
youth of the Vietnam War era.
Thus side by side with their opposition to racism, sexism, and war was
their contempt for what most people considered the necessities and small
luxuries of life-like nice clothes, cars, washing machines, television,
and electric toothbrushes.
The college youth of that time could be contemptuous of such things because
their parents had it all and their careers seemed guaranteed by the hordes
of corporate recruiters dangling good-paying jobs for the taking on the
campuses of the advanced capitalist countries.
The current youth radicalization has barely begun. But we can already
see it is a very different kind of radicalization. Those in college work
hard to get high marks in the different world of today. It's a world in
which most youth for the first time since the Great Depression can't expect
to make a living as good as that enjoyed by their parents.
But most important, the youth today also live in a world changed by the
big social struggles carried out by the generation of the 1960s and '70s.
Young people today automatically sense these changes and will assimilate
all that was learned by the 1960s generation, as well as those that preceded
the last youth radicalization.
If I had to sum up what I think lies ahead for the world today, I could
not say more than to tell you that the world is in for some very interesting
times. And whether that proves to be a curse or a blessing will largely
be determined by people like you here in this room.
It's a great time to be alive and young enough to help change the world.
The opportunity to change the world for the better for the great majority
may be a curse for the capitalists of this world, but it offers the rest
of us the opportunity to do that and much more.
The task of your generation will also be far more profound. It will be
up to young people like you to save the human race from capitalist barbarism
and ultimate nuclear annihilation.
Socialist Action /February 2000 |