by Chris Harman
The aim of the operation was not simply to discipline Iraq, or even to act as a warning to other nationalist governments and movements in the Middle East who might challenge the US oil companies. It was also intended to show the world’s other powers that they had to accept the global goals of the US, since only the US was powerful enough to be the world policeman.
Already in the 1980s, Republican administrations had set out to overcome the hangover from defeat in Vietnam, the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, by demonstrating the continued ability of the US to dominate the Western hemisphere. This was the thinking behind its invasions of Grenada and of Panama, and of its sponsorship of the right-wing Contra guerrillas who wreaked havoc in Nicaragua. The Bush administration subsequently showed that the US could carry out similar policing operations on a much bigger scale in the Middle East. Under his Democrat successor, Bill Clinton, one military operation followed another with increasing regularity through the 1990s – the landing of marines in Somalia, the repeated bombing of Iraq, the bombing of Serbian forces during the Bosnian civil war, the bombing of an alleged guerrilla camp in Afghanistan and of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and the launching of an all-out air war against Serbia.
It was not only the US which practised the new imperialism. Russia attempted to maintain its overall dominance within wide sections of the former USSR, using its military strength to influence the outcome of civil wars in Georgia and Tajikistan. France maintained a major sphere of influence in Africa, jostling with the US for dominance in regions such as Rwanda-Burundi. Britain attempted to have an impact on events in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, while Nigeria intervened in other west African states in turn under the guise of ‘peacekeeping’. Greece and Turkey periodically threatened to go to war as they clashed over their influence in the north east Mediterranean and parts of the Balkans.
The world of the 1990s was a complex hierarchy of states and connected business interests jostling for positions of influence. But they were not of equal importance, and each knew that its position in the hierarchy depended, in the end, on the armed force it could deploy. At the top, ever anxious to preserve its position, was the United States. The last year of the decade saw exactly what this entailed as the US-led NATO alliance set out systematically to degrade the infrastructure of Serbia because its leader, Milošević, had not gained permission before emulating the viciousness of a score of US clients around the world and attacking the country’s Albanian minority.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Illusion of the epoch
The twentieth century began with a great fanfare about the inevitability of progress, exemplified in Bernstein’s predictions of growing democratisation, growing equality and growing all-round prosperity. The theme dominated again in the mid-1950s and early 1960s in the writings of politicians like Anthony Crosland, political theorists like Daniel Bell and economists like Paul Samuelson. It re-emerged again in 1990, when Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history’, and persisted into the late 1990s, with Anthony Giddens’s insistence that the categories of left and right belonged to the past. If everything was not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, a few little changes and it would be.
Yet the reality of life for vast sections of humanity was at various points in the century as horrific as any known in history. The forward march of progress gave rise to the bloodletting of the First World War; the mass impoverishment of the early 1930s; the spread of Nazism and fascism over most of Europe; the Stalinist gulag; the Japanese onslaught on Shanghai and Nanking; the devastation of much of Europe between 1940 and 1945; the Bengal famine; the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the 30-year war against Vietnam and the nine-year war against Algeria; the million dead in one Gulf War and the 200,000 dead in another; tens of thousands killed by death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Argentina; and hundreds of thousands dead in the bloody civil wars of Croatia, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. Industrial progress all too often translated itself into the mechanisation of war – or most horrifically, with the Holocaust, into the mechanisation of mass murder. Nor was the picture any more hopeful at the end of the century than halfway through. Whole countries outside western Europe and North America which had hoped at various points in the century to ‘catch up’ with the living standards of the ‘First World’ saw the dream fade away – Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Russia. The whole continent of Africa found itself once again being written out of history as income per head fell steadily over a 30-year period. Civil war continued to devastate Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Congo-Zaire. To the word ‘genocide’, born of the Nazism that arose in the 1930s, was added the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’, coined in the civil wars of the 1990s.
Even in the advanced industrial countries the promises of endless wealth, endless leisure and the withering away of class division that were so fashionable in the 1890s, and again in the 1950s, proved to be a chimera. Measured economic output continued to rise in most years for most economies, but at only about half the rate seen in the long boom of the 1950s and early 1960s. And the rises did not translate into improvements in most people’s quality of life.
In the US there was a more or less continual fall in real hourly wages through the last quarter of the century. In Europe the statistics continued to show rising real wages, but there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the increases were eaten up by rising indirect costs associated with the changing pattern of work (longer journeys from home to work, rising transport costs, increased reliance on fast food and frozen food, increased childcare costs), with one ‘index of sustainable welfare’ suggesting a more or less continual rise from 1950 until the mid-1970s and then a decline thereafter. 1 There has certainly been no qualitative improvement in people’s lives, as was experienced in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the same time, there has been increased pressure on those with jobs to work longer and harder. The average American worked 164 hours longer in 1996 than in 1976 – the equivalent of one full month a year longer, 2 with survey after survey reporting people feeling under increasing stress at work. Recurrent recessions and repeated ‘downsizing’ of workforces, even during periods of ‘recovery’, created levels of insecurity among people about their futures not known since the 1930s. Mainstream political parties that had said insecurity was a thing of the past in the 1970s insisted in the 1990s that there was nothing they could do about it because it was part of the ‘new global economy’ (an unacknowledged revamping of the old left-wing phrase ‘international capitalism’).
There was another side to the growing poverty of wide parts of the Third and former Communist worlds and the growing insecurity in the West. It was the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the ruling classes. By the late 1990s some 348 billionaires enjoyed a total wealth equal to the income of half of humanity. In 1999 the United Nations Human Development Report could tell that the world’s richest 200 people had doubled their wealth in four years. 3 At the end of the 1960s, the gap between the richest and poorest fifths of the world’s population stood at 30 to one, in 1990 at 60 to one, and in 1998 at 74 to one. Most of the very rich were concentrated in advanced counties. In 1980 the top managers of the 300 biggest US corporations had incomes 29 times larger than the average manufacturing worker – by 1990 their incomes were 93 times greater. But the same phenomenon was visible elsewhere in the world, where even in the poorest countries a thin ruling stratum expected to live the lifestyles of the world’s very rich, and to keep multi-million dollar deposits in Western banks as an insurance against social unrest at home. Everywhere their reaction to social crisis was to accumulate wealth in order to insulate themselves against its effects, not worrying overmuch if, in the process, the basic fabric of society was undermined. The contracting out of state tax raising to wealthy individuals (tax farming) had been a recurrent feature accompanying the crises of pre-capitalist class societies, a feature which only served to intens
ify the long-term trend to crisis. The contracting out of state services became a growing feature of capitalist class society in the last decade of the twentieth century, with equally inevitable long-term effects.
Along with the reborn insecurity and the recurrent slumps, another spirit emerged from the nether world where it had been apparently banished after the Second World War – various forms of fascism and Nazism. It became quite normal, even during periods of ‘economic recovery’, for far right figures like Le Pen in France and Haider in Austria to get 15 per cent of the vote – and quite realistic for them to hope to do much better with the onset of the next great recession. It became equally normal for mainstream conservative political parties to trade in the language of racism and ethnic division in order to pick up votes, and for social democratic parties to concede to that language in a desperate attempt to hold their own electorally.
Socialism, barbarism and the twenty-first century
Rosa Luxemburg, writing in the midst of world war in 1915, recalled a phrase from Engels: ‘Capitalist society is faced with a choice, either an advance to socialism or a reversion to barbarism.’ ‘We have read and repeated these phrases repeatedly,’ she notes:
without a conception of their terrible import … We stand before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a cast cemetery; or the victory of socialism, that is the conscious struggle of the proletariat against imperialism … This is the dilemma of world history, its inevitable choice whose scales are trembling in the balance … Upon it depends the future of humanity and culture. 4
In this passage she was challenging in the most forceful way the illusion of inevitable progress under capitalism. She was making the same point made by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto when they pointed out that the historical alternative to the transformation of society by a newly emerged class was the ‘common destruction of the contending classes’. This, as we have seen, happened not only with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, but also with the first ‘Dark Ages’, the early Bronze Age civilisations of Eurasia, the collapse of the Teotihuacan and Mayan civilisations of Meso-America, and the crisis of Abbasid Mesopotamia in the eleventh century. It came close to happening in second millennium BC Egypt, in twelfth-century AD China and in fourteenth-century AD Europe. Rosa Luxemburg saw the world war as threatening a re-enactment of such disasters: ‘In this war, imperialism has been victorious. Its brutal sword of murder has dashed the scales, with overbearing brutality, down into the abyss of shame and misery’. 5
Leon Trotsky made the same point in 1921:
Humanity has not always risen along an ascending curve. No, there have existed prolonged periods of stagnation and relapses into barbarism. Societies raise themselves, attain a certain level, and cannot maintain it. Humanity cannot sustain its position, its equilibrium is unstable; a society which cannot advance falls back, and if there is not a class to lead it higher, it ends up by breaking down, opening the way to barbarism. 6
The founding document of Trotsky’s Fourth International, written on the eve of renewed world war, posed the alternative grimly: ‘Without socialist revolution, in the next historical period a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of humanity’. 7
Both Luxemburg and Trotsky located, as few other thinkers did, the insane logic of capitalist society in the twentieth century – the way in which forces of production had turned into forces of destruction, and human creativity been distorted into inhuman horror. The century was a century of barbarity on a scale unknown, in Europe at least, since the seventeenth or even the fourteenth century. If the century did not fulfil the worst prophecies of Luxemburg and Trotsky, in terms of a complete collapse of culture and civilisation, there were also repeated lurches towards barbarism in the strict sense of the word as used by Engels and Luxemburg, of rulers prepared to pull society down around them rather than concede their power – the behaviour of the White armies during the Russian civil war, the drive to complete the Holocaust by the retreating Nazi forces in the Second World War, and the willingness of both sides in the Cold War to deploy nuclear devices which would have reduced the whole world to a radioactive desert. In the last decade of the century whole areas of Africa, the Caucasus and central Asia seemed caught in the same logic, with armies led by rival warlords massacring each other and ravaging civilian populations as they fought for scraps of wealth amid general economic and social decay. That decade also exposed terrible new threats alongside the old ones of war and economic slump.
The most dramatic is that of ecological catastrophe. Class societies have always shown a tendency to place excessive demands on the environment which sustains their populations. The history of pre-capitalist class societies was a history, beyond a certain point, of famines and demographic collapse produced by the sheer burden of maintaining greedy ruling classes and expensive superstructures. The very economic dynamism that characterises capitalism has vastly increased the speed at which negative ecological consequences make themselves felt. Nineteenth-century accounts of what capitalism does to working-class communities, from Dickens and Engels onwards, are also accounts of polluted atmosphere, endemic diseases, overcrowding and adulterated food in slum life. But at a time when a maximum of ten million people worldwide were involved in industrial capitalist production, ecological devastation was a localised problem – Manchester’s smoke did not affect most of England, let alone the rest of the world. The spread of capitalism to the whole world in the twentieth century, encompassing six billion or more people by the end of the century, transformed ecological devastation into a global problem. The year 1998, one authoritative report tells, was ‘the worst on record and caused more damage then ever before’, forcing 25 million people to flee as refugees, ‘outnumbering those displaced by war for the first time’. 8 With one billion people living in unplanned shanty towns, and 40 of the world’s 50 fastest-growing cities located in earthquake zones, the worst horrors are still to come. But that is not the end of it. The production of ever escalating amounts of carbon dioxide is causing the ‘greenhouse effect’ to heat up the globe, producing unpredictable weather patterns that are expected to produce freak storms and rising ocean levels that will flood huge coastal areas. The CFCs used in refrigerators are eating up the ozone layer, causing a proliferation of skin cancers. The use of antibiotics in animal feed is undermining their effectiveness in dealing with human diseases. The unrestricted use of genetically modified crops could create havoc for the whole of the food chain. Such ecological disasters, actual and threatened, are no more natural disasters than were those which destroyed the food supply of Mesopotamia in the twelfth century, or which led to mass starvation across Europe in the fourteenth century. They are a result of the specific way in which human interaction with the environment is occurring on a world scale.
Under capitalism, that interaction is organised through the competition of rival capitals – of small-scale firms in the early nineteenth century, and of giant multinational and state-owned firms at the end of the twentieth century. Competition leads to an incessant search for new, more productive and more profitable forms of interaction, without regard to their other consequences. States sometimes try to regulate the whole process. But they are themselves drawn into it by their desire to advance the interests of nationally based firms. Regulation, they all too often say, is impossible because it will undermine the competitiveness of locally based firms to the advantage of foreign competitors. And even when they do intervene it is after the damage is already done, for there is no way state officials can second guess every industrial innovation and foresee its wider impact.
So dangerous were the consequences by the end of the twentieth century that there was a tendency for people to turn their back on all science and all technology. Yet without the technologies of the last century, there would be no way to feed the world’s population, let alone free them from the ravages of
hunger and overwork that have been most people’s lot since the rise of class society. There was a parallel tendency for people to adopt one argument of that old reactionary Malthus, and to insist there were simply too many people – or, at least, that there would be by the time the world’s population had doubled in 30 or 40 years. Yet the eightfold growth in humanity’s numbers since Malthus’s time was matched by a more than eightfold increase in its food supply. If people went hungry in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, it was a result not of an absolute shortage of food, but of its distribution along class lines.
The problem for humanity is not technology or human numbers as such, but how existing society determines people’s use of the technology. Crudely, the world can easily sustain twice its present population. It cannot, however, sustain ever greater numbers of internal combustion engines, each pumping out kilograms of carbon dioxide a day in the interests of the profitability requirements of giant oil and motor firms. Once humanity covers the globe in such numbers the precondition of its continuing survival is the planned employment of technology to meet real human needs, rather than its subordination to the blind accumulation of competing capitals.
The use of technology for competitive accumulation also finds expression in its use for wars. In the 1990s the military technology which gave us the carnage of the Western Front in the First World War, and the barbarity of the Eastern Front and of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War, looked incredibly primitive.