These are the same issues you argue and discuss right here in southern California every week.

A civil war has been widening and deepening in Algeria since early 1992. We would never know this from reading the newspapers here in the United States, however, or from watching television. There has been a flurry of coverage this month about the hijacking of an Air France jet, which ended with French government commandos killing all four Algerians involved in the takeover. But that is about all we as workers in the United States are likely to find out.

Yet an average of eight hundred people each week have been killed in that conflict in the recent period--thirty thousand in all over the past three years. I find that figure mind-boggling--it is two-thirds the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action during the entire Vietnam war. But those are the figures reported in the Financial Times of London and elsewhere.2 To the big-business press, nonetheless, it is thirty thousand Arabs, thirty thousand Muslims, thirty thousand fanatics. "Who’s gonna miss ‘em?" That is truly their attitude.

The civil war in Algeria, moreover, is in large part the product of the imperialist foreign policy of the capitalist rulers in France, the country’s former colonial overlord. In December 1991, Paris collaborated with the government in Algiers to annul the results of the national elections there. The specter of "Islamic fundamentalism" sweeping across North Africa was used as the pretext. The French rulers were concerned because the bourgeois opposition party that had won the first round--the Islamic Salvation Front--was insufficiently deferential to the language and culture of Paris’s propertied class. Such a regime promised to be less pliant and less subservient to the economic and political demands of French imperialism.

A military junta took command in Algeria, and France’s Socialist Party president François Mitterrand acted on behalf of the ruling capitalist families to arm the new regime in Algiers with attack helicopters and other weaponry to use against its opponents. This was not a new departure for the social democrats in France. They were also the dominant party in the government just after World War II that dispatched troops to hold on to French colonies in Algeria and Indochina; the pro-Moscow French Communist Party, too, held posts in that government and backed its colonial policies. In the mid-1950s, a Socialist Party–led coalition regime again pressed the bloody but losing war to suppress Algerian freedom fighters. (Mitterrand, in fact, was the interior minister, or top cop, in that government.)

Because of the attraction by capital of accelerating labor flows over the past several decades, these civil conflicts and class tensions in Algeria come right into France, right into the former colonial power itself. There are one million Algerians or people of Algerian origin in France today. Immigrants from North Africa and other predominantly Muslim countries make up about 5 percent of the population, a substantially larger percentage in Paris and in cities across southern France, and a much larger percentage of the working class.

With official unemployment at around 12 percent in France, the same kind of anti-immigrant scapegoating is on the rise there that we hear from Patrick Buchanan here in the United States. "Save American jobs!" "Save French jobs!" Just as in the United States, such nationalist demagogy is on the increase in France, including in the officialdom of the social democratic- and Stalinist-led parties and unions.

The French rulers are also continuing to press their defense of the franc fort--that is, keeping interest rates high in order to keep the franc strong, pegged to the German mark. That deflationary policy puts the squeeze on anybody who works for a living in France or who needs a job, whatever their national origin. But it serves the class interests of most of those who own and control wealth, and all of those who own bonds and hold debt.  
 
Borders more valued by bourgeoisie
National boundaries are more important to the bourgeoisie today than at any time in history, just as they are becoming more porous than ever before. Forget the hoopla about European unity, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations. To the most powerful ruling families of world finance capital, borders are becoming more important, not less.

Why? Because national boundaries mark off two things the capitalist rulers need in order to maximize their wealth and protect it in face of rising competition.

One, boundaries define currencies. The borders of France define the area in which the franc is legal tender, backed by the full faith and credit of the state. The French bourgeoisie’s effort to keep the franc strong is important if they are to keep capital flowing into their coffers, not out.

Second, boundaries define the home base of the bourgeoisies’ armed forces. The French army stands behind the franc; that is the power that makes the franc more than a piece of paper when push comes to shove. French bankers do not want a devalued franc when it comes time to collect on their loans; the bourgeois state and its armed forces are the ultimate collection agency. It defends French finance capital against its rivals around the world and against the effrontery of working people from Paris to Rwanda, from Lyons to Martinique and Guadeloupe, and from New Caledonia to Marseilles.

The greatest single contradiction in world politics is the internationalization of both capital and labor, on the one hand, and, on the other, the growing conflicts among the most powerfully armed nation-states as a result of intensifying competition for profits. Marx and Engels explained this fundamental contradiction of capitalism many years ago, and Lenin and the Bolsheviks taught us why these conflicts are much more explosive and much more devastating for working people in the imperialist epoch.

We might look at the wars that have been fought in recent years and initially think: well, these all seem to be conflicts between imperialist powers and colonial countries, as in the Gulf War; or between big powers and oppressed peoples, as in Moscow’s assault against Chechnya; or civil wars between rival ruling groups in colonial countries or weaker workers states, as in Angola or in Yugoslavia. If we look a little more carefully, however, we can also see the mounting social tensions in world politics that lead to growing nationalist demagogy and rightist movements in the imperialist countries. We can see the class polarization that can and will fuel the war party--the nonpartisan bourgeois war party--in all the centers of finance capital. And we can recognize the threat of interimperialist armed conflicts and wars that can set humanity on the path toward a world conflagration.

We must learn to spot the significance of occurrences that might at first seem accidental or unrelated to broader political developments. To cite one example, take the events this year marking the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--one of the most horrible crimes in the history of the U.S. ruling class. Stop and think for a moment about the decision by the U.S. postal service to issue a stamp depicting a mushroom cloud with the caption, "Atomic bombs hasten war’s end, August 1945." The Clinton administration finally bowed to the outcry from world public opinion and withdrew the stamp. But it had already been designed and was ready to be issued in September 1995.

The stamp is not an isolated incident. In recent years, the U.S. rulers have been striving to reaffirm not only that the war with Japan was a just war, but also that unleashing nuclear terror against the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified to save the lives of U.S. soldiers. There continues to be a firm bipartisan consensus to brook no retreat from Washington’s official rationale for this heinous act.  
 
 
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