Compared to living under the brutal and dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, it is true that there is more space for working people to defend their interests in Iraq today. Revolutionists need to take full advantage of this opportunity by pressing to use any civic space that exists to work towards building proletarian parties that can eventually lead working people in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East and Central Asia to get rid of the bloody boot of the U.S. occupiers—and the United Nations too. Revolutionists in the United States and other imperialist countries can aid this process by concentrating their fire on the bourgeoisie in the country they live in, demanding the unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and other occupying forces from that part of the world.

This stance, however, can’t be translated to support for democratic imperialism. Advances in the struggle for women’s liberation are not attributable to the guns and butter of Uncle Sam. The broad worldwide trends towards secularism, for women’s rights, and against capital punishment and torture are the result of struggles by working people, students, and various middle-class layers in the semicolonial world and beyond. They are by-products of the anticolonial revolutions of the last century, not imperialist benevolence. As long as democratic forms, which include gains conquered through popular struggles, serve to advance imperialist interests, Washington will wield them—but only so far.

In addition, we need to remember that bourgeois democracy in the United States or Afghanistan is nothing but the rule of one class—the relatively few wealthy propertied families that control the means of production and appropriate the wealth produced by working people and nature. Their profit system and its dog-eat-dog reality and morality are maintained to a large degree through bodies of armed men—the cops, army, secret police—used to defend the prerogatives of the wealthy and perpetuate the class exploitation of humanity’s large majority. Only those whose course is based on a revolutionary class-struggle orientation—leading the working class and its allies towards taking power, abolishing capitalism, and joining the worldwide fight for a society based on the needs of the vast majority—won’t end up on the bandwagon of one or another imperialist power that imposes certain bourgeois democratic forms as part of its military offensive and occupation.
 
 
Related articles:
In State of Union speech Bush trumpets ‘war on terrorism’  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home