It is also a world in which resistance by workers and farmers to these conditions will accumulate. Communist workers prepare politically for the coming explosive conditions and class battles, Barnes said, by the political work they do today "within the resistance that’s growing right now among toilers in city and country."

Barnes was the featured speaker at the November 2 meeting, held under the banner, "The Struggle against Imperialism Today." The event, held on the Columbia University campus, drew people from across the country, as well as some from Canada and elsewhere. Among those attending were a number of students and young workers who had only recently met the communist movement through their political activity.

Speaking besides Barnes were Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine New International; Jason Alessio, a union coal miner and Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Congress in Colorado; Martín Koppel, editor of the Militant and Socialist Workers candidate for governor of New York; Ma’mud Shirvani, Pathfinder’s Farsi-language editor; Arrin Hawkins, Socialist Workers candidate for lieutenant governor of New York and a worker in Pathfinder’s printshop; and Olympia Newton, Socialist Workers candidate for California secretary of state. Alessio, Hawkins, and Newton are also members of the Young Socialists. (A broader news article on the November 2 meeting, titled "New York meeting discusses fight against imperialism, response by communists," appeared in last week’s issue.)

Barnes opened his remarks by noting that Walter Mondale, vice-president during the Carter administration, "has had an unexpected honor--to stand again for one of the twin parties of U.S. imperialism." Mondale, 74, was chosen as the Democratic Party’s senatorial candidate in Minnesota following the death of incumbent Paul Wellstone in an airplane crash October 25.

Mondale, a longtime liberal Democrat, had been pulled out of semi-retirement to co-chair a bipartisan "Commission on Global Aging." Last year this "commission of notables came out for increasing the retirement age and privatizing a big hunk of Social Security," said Barnes.

While Mondale was one of a handful who dissented with the speed and immediacy of these conclusions, he did not disagree with the commission’s starting point: that increased longevity is a problem.

"The bourgeoisie’s framework on this question alone should make one a revolutionist--and fear for the future of humanity under capitalist rule," Barnes said. "More workers living longer," he explained, "helps make possible the fruitful working together of more generations for longer periods of time." But the capitalists see this advance as a giant drain on their profits and fortunes.

Attempts to undermine the character of Social Security as a universal entitlement are part of the U.S. rulers’ war on the rights and living standards of working people at home and imperialist aggression abroad, Barnes noted.  
 
‘Level playing field’
On October 30 the British Guardian had reported remarks by Lord Browne, chief executive of British Petroleum, in which he had warned Washington "not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of any future war," and called for "a level playing field for the selection of oil companies to go in there."

"It’s a sign of the times and of the speed of events" that Browne would casually make an open nationalist demand to Washington to get its share of oil for blood, Barnes said. Browne’s argument amounted to saying: "We are furnishing cannon fodder to an imperialist assault and to an occupation of a country that will prepare us to make up for the overthrow of the Peacock Throne" of the shah of Iran.

The class Browne speaks for, the socialist leader said, will never forgive the Iranian people for their 1979 revolution, which toppled the shah, long a pillar of imperialist interests in the Mideast. And they also have their eyes on Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arabian peninsula--a region where London once maintained protectorates that hardly made for a "level playing field."

Highlighting a point made earlier by Shirvani, Barnes said that Browne’s remarks bear out the description of the imperialists as the "civilized" hyenas, by V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution. The cold-blooded attitude voiced by the BP chairman "expresses the logic of capital--a logic that cannot be prevented. It can only be ended by overthrowing the domination of capital."

Washington’s aggressive military posture was laid out in the "National Security Strategy of the United States of America," a White House document released in September. One sentence quoted in early press reports but omitted from the final published version bluntly spelled out the U.S. imperialists’ stance. It read, "the President has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge [military] lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago."

The document refers to a "distinctly American internationalism," reminiscent of the "Fourteen Points" proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I to offer a justification for its course of plunder worldwide. At that time the U.S. ruling class had started down the road to become the dominant imperialist power; by then it was too late in history, however, for it to become a major colonial empire.

Today it remains impossible for any imperialist power to build a colonial empire with direct, stable rule, either in Iraq or anywhere else, Barnes said.

The 2002 White House strategy document asserts that the Cold War "ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom--and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise."  
 
Imperialism did not win the Cold War
Those sentences are written as if the imperialist order faces no contesting forces, said Barnes. In reality, the rulers know they still have to fight for the victory the words describe. If the Cold War had actually ended with a victory for world capitalism, the socialist leader said, "their task today would be much, much easier. Working people would have to go through a very long period of retreat."

But the end of the Cold War, he said, did not resolve its goal: the overturn of the states, including the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where workers and farmers had overthrown capitalist rule, no matter how bureaucratized they had become under Stalinist misleadership.

Far from being a sustainable model for national success, said Barnes, the imperialist order generates turmoil, wars, and national and class rebellions. The evolution of capitalism in this epoch is not toward free trade but increased trade conflicts between rival powers. Nor is it toward "developing" nations becoming developed, but rather toward greater imperialist exploitation and unequal relations between nations--a trend seen dramatically in the gap between sub-Saharan Africa and the United States.

Oil is not the only commodity targeted by the imperialist powers, Barnes said. They are fighting for control of the production and trade of all kinds of minerals and agricultural products in the world, from cocoa to gold and diamonds.

"Under the rampant inflation that we will live under sooner than many think," he said, "the control of the gold supply will become extremely important." This will have a direct impact on the struggle inside South Africa, the world’s largest gold producer, for Black ownership of the mining industry, a debate that is brewing today.

Anticipating stronger resistance by working people in the coming years, the U.S. rulers are stepping up moves aimed at curtailing workers’ rights. That is the reason for the establishment of the U.S. Northern Command, a military structure with domestic jurisdiction established by the Clinton administration and activated under the Bush presidency. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to deploy military spy planes over Washington, D.C., during the "sniper hunt" in that city would not have been conceivable in an earlier period, Barnes said.  
 
Dollar’s domination has peaked
A two-decade period of rising domination of the U.S. dollar in world trade and investment exhausted itself a little less than two years ago, said Barnes. Now capitalist finance is marked by deflation, which means the contraction of hiring, credit, and production.

Price deflation, he noted, has been epitomized by the "zero down, zero payment, zero interest" deals offered by major U.S. automakers, which helped to boost sales to record levels for a period. This bubble had burst by October, when sales by the "Big Three" fell between 30 and 35 percent compared with 12 months before.

An accelerating pace of layoffs and bankruptcies forces the capitalists to begin to use their currencies to try to regenerate economic activity and growth, he said. Noting the widespread forecasts of a cut in interest rates at a Federal Reserve meeting scheduled for November 6, Barnes remarked that the rates are down to the Japanese levels of only three years ago.

We will see the beginning of the "inflate or die" approach, said Barnes, through which the capitalists will try to spend their way out of a deflationary spiral--a policy that can trigger runaway inflation at a more advanced stage of the crisis.

Today, said Barnes, Ford Motors and United Airlines, two flagship companies of U.S. imperialism, are effectively bankrupt. Pension plans operated by many major firms are heavily underfunded. "I don’t know if there is anyone here who has a pension from Ford, from Delta, or from United," he said. "But if there is, I would urge them to become a fighter for improved Social Security."  
 
Denial of depression conditions
Barnes noted that, as the opening stages of a long-term economic depression unfold in the United States, the reaction among the majority of the middle class and working people is denial of this reality. It is like a frog in water that is slowly being heated and that doesn’t recognize the rising temperature as it’s being cooked.

Among those who do sense the crisis, middle-class layers and even some working people who fear for the security of their savings begin to turn to the age-old havens of gold and silver. These precious metals have intrinsic value as commodities, Barnes said. By comparison, paper currency, containing only a few pennies’ worth of fiber, is little more than a debt backed by the "full faith and credit" of the government, Barnes said.

A number of governments have begun to seek such havens from the U.S. dollar. The Malaysian government, for example, has taken the lead in promoting the gold-based "Islamic dinar" as a medium of exchange among a number of majority-Muslim countries. The Chinese government has been buying up gold and at the beginning of this year opened its gold exchange to the public.

As working people go through the impact of the imperialist wars and the deepening world depression, resistance will grow, said Barnes. The hundreds of millions around the world who join that resistance--like the Palestinians who refuse to submit to the Israeli occupation and military-police assaults--make up what will be the proletarian army that, through class combat and political experiences, will develop the ability, leadership, and organization to overthrow the rule of the capitalists.  
 
Integrated into resistance
It is impossible to predict and be fully ready for the social explosions and class rebellions that will be generated by capitalist exploitation and brutality, Barnes said. But communists must make full use of the time beforehand to strengthen their Marxist political homogenity, discipline, and proletarian habits, and simultaneously build the communist movement through integrating it in the proletarian vanguard already being formed in the struggles of today.

The experience at the Dakota Premium meatpacking plant in the St. Paul, Minnesota, area shows the openings that exist right now, he said. Communist workers there have been part of a broader vanguard of workers that has helped lead a successful fight for union recognition and, just recently, a first union contract (see article on page 8). Through this course, two unionists who are communists, along with three other workers, have been elected shop stewards by their co-workers.

"I celebrate the contract as much as I celebrated the victory 15 months ago in the union recognition vote," Barnes said. Now workers will be able to judge the truth of the statement by Farrell Dobbs--an organizer in the Teamster battles of the Midwest in the 1930s and leader of the party that became the Socialist Workers Party--"that a contract is what the workers make of it," he said.

The union victories at Dakota Premium, said Barnes, are related to the political space that communists have to present their ideas and sell revolutionary books to fellow workers and farmers. These books are weapons that allow them to stand on the shoulders of those whose struggles make their victory possible. Having access to the political continuity crystallized in such books is "a question of life and death" for the building of a revolutionary working-class movement that can win, said Barnes.

"What we do to build and strengthen the communist movement here and now as a part of the working-class vanguard that is attracting revolutionary-minded youth is decisive," he said.  
 
 
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