Film Review - The Corporation

Approx 145 minutes
Directed by Mark Achban, Jennifer Abbot, Joel Bakan

The Corporation begins with a little US political history, observing how, in the 19th Century, corporations as we know them were “benevolent” associations of people with government charters to serve the public good. When, in the late 1860s, the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution recognised the slave as having human rights, the nascent corporate elite of the times had their lawyers stake their claim to the same rights with the Supreme Court. They fought and won and the state henceforth recognised the corporation as a human being, a person in law, with the same right to life, liberty and property.


This leads us to one of the big questions of the film: if corporations are legally defined as people, then what kind of people are they? One way the film addresses this question is to call in the FBI’s Consultant on Psychopaths, Dr Robert Hare. Hare, proceeds to run through a check-list of the traits of your run-of-the-mill psychopath before concluding that the modern corporation, bearing no moral responsibility for its actions, is very much the prototypical psychopath.


Much of the remainder of the film is given over to proving this claim beyond all reasonable doubt and many authoritative witnesses are wheeled in to testify. And what a selection of witnesses there are! – Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, Anita Roddick, Vandana Shiva, Michael Moore; experts from every field and all manner of labour rights organisations and grass roots activists, economists such as Milton Friedman and many CEOs. Their statements amount to a damning examination of the nature and personality of the modern corporation, charting its growth, its extending influence and downright indifference to democracy and how, as one commentator observes it has turned into a “monster, trying to devour as much profit as possible at anyone’s expense.”


What we are presented with is an image of all powerful organisations running wild, rabid with greed, superpowers, for whom there is “no such thing as enough” (Moore), for whom “everything is legitimate in the pursuit of profit” (Roddick). Modern corporations are presented as the “new high priests”, more powerful than governments and accountable only to their stakeholders, their brand labels protected by more legislation than covers the rights of the children who sew them onto their overpriced merchandise.


The film pits competing ideas on the modern corporation against one another. We are at one stage shown the offices of the National Labour Committee and hear Executive Director Charles Kernaghan revealing the level of exploitation of workers in the Dominican Republic (who for instance earn 75 cents for each Nike jacket that sells for $178 and 3 cents for a tee shirt that retails at $14.) We are shown the living conditions of those same desperate workers and hear their own testimony as to the level of their destitution and then listen to Michael Walker of the corporate think tank The Fraser Institute expounding his views on the role competitive markets play in providing for the economic and social well-being and how he believes firms such as Nike are an “enormous godsend” to people in the Dominican Republic


The film contains much that is totally fascinating. One section looks at big business and its penchant for the dictatorial regime. We are shown how a punch card system devised and regularly maintained by IBM (operating out of New York) processed millions of concentration camp victims and how Coca Cola, faced with the possibility of having its operation curtailed in Nazi Germany, simply changed its name to Fanta. Much evidence is presented as to how corporate allegiance to profit transcends its loyalty to national flags and we are presented with one startling fact: that in one week 57 US companies were fined for trading with enemies of the US. Contemplating big business’s links to tyrannical regimes, one commentator asks “is it narcissism that compels them to seek their reflection in the regimented structure of fascist regimes?”


One of several cases studies the film presents is that relating to Monsanto (famous for Agent Orange and 50,000 birth defects in Vietnam) and its manufacture of Posilac. This was a drug which, when injected into cows, increased their milk yield. That the world was awash with milk did not concern Monsanto; they were far more interested in profits and eventually were supplying a quarter of US dairy herds with the product. But because cows were not meant to produce so much milk, their udders went into overdrive and became infected with mastitis, the puss from which infected the milk. Not only were humans suffering the effects of the chemicals injected into the milk, their milk was now infected with mastitis puss. Monsanto’s reaction was to deny all allegations and to lie like condemned murderers.


The modern corporation is perhaps most vilified for its total lack of respect for the environment and the point is stressed in the film that the biosphere is dying, that every living system is in decline. Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Inc, who has won much acclaim promoting the idea that environmental responsibility makes good business sense, is seen addressing an audience of business leaders in North Carolina. Greeting them as “fellow plunderers” he goes on to tell them that there is “not an industrial company in the world that is sustainable.”


Robert Weismann of Multinational Monitor reminds us that the cost of getting caught for their corporate transgressions – i.e. environmental pollution – is, more often than not, less than the cost of complying with existing environmental legislation. Dr Vandara Shiva, physicist and ecologist, despairingly contemplates the suicide gene built into new strains of cash crop seeds, the new terminator technology that makes the third world farmer dependent ever on the seed supplier (instead of traditionally putting aside a portion of the harvest as seeds for the following year), and calls them inventions of a “brutal mind”


For the multinational, nothing is sacred. Even the US Patent Office has conceded defeat in its attempts to halt corporations patenting life forms and bear out Roddick’s sentiments that every means is legitimate if the end be profit. Climbing down from one seven year battle with big business, they had this to say: “You can patent anything in the world which is alive except a full birth human being.”


The film nears an end with a case study of the privatisation of the water supply of Cochabamba, Bolivia, at the bequest of the World Bank, focusing particularly on the residents of Cochabamba and their run in with the forces of the state on behalf of Bechtel, a San Francisco based company who bought the water company. So adamant were the powers that be to force the people to bow to the power of Bechtel that they demolished their homes for non payment of their exorbitant water rates and made the collecting of rain water illegal. The frustration spilled onto the streets with huge demonstrations and riots and violent clashes with the police. Eventually, though, Bechtel were forced to pull out of their Bolivian venture, but not before they had put in a claim for $25 million in compensation.


It is from this case study and other cited instances of green activism that we are meant to draw inspiration; the message being that the corporation should not underestimate the power of the people, that “the workers, united, can never be defeated.” Of course, corporations are advised to tidy up their act too. Michael Moore tells us that there should be more governmental controls and the film ends with Moore hoping the film will prompt people “to do something, anything, to get the world back in our hands”. This clearly suggests that Moore, and others who promote similar ideas in the film are missing the point. Granted, it is commendable, tragic even, that workers are prepared to often risk life and limb to defend basic rights and to confront the most harrowing injustices perpetrated by corporations. But it is a dangerous to believe that such grassroots action amounts to wresting control of the world away from its current owners.


If anyone considers this film a trumpet call for social change, a reveille for revolution, they are mistaken. The capitalist system is left unscathed. Nowhere is the logic of the market-driven profit system challenged. Nowhere are all of the case studies and criticism of corporate power and abuse rooted in a wider context. Nowhere does a commentator lambast the global “can’t pay, can’t have society” that consigns the greater portion of the planet to lives of abject misery. And no interviewee comes near to demanding the abolition of the capitalists system and its replacement with a system of society based on free access. Capitalism is taken for granted as being immutable and all that is being asked at the end is that corporations wear a smiley face and stop behaving so horridly.


Moore may well contemplate why such films are broadcast by TV corporations, in spite of the fact that they attack corporate power – for the record, he suggests it is because there is profit to be made by them and he may partly right – but he fails to grasp that this, and similar films like Fahrenheit 911, nowhere query the basis of class society - the setup that allows the ownership of property by one privileged class, and the consequent enslavement of one class by another is in no way threatened and the TV company broadcasting programmes revealing corporate crimes is aware of this.


I’d really hate to rubbish this film but, in truth, The Corporation simply echoes the sentiments of the anti-globalisation movement – the demand for greater corporate responsibility, reform of international institutions, expansion of democracy and fairer trading conditions, for instance – while allowing capitalism to carry on perpetrating every social ill that plagues us.


The Corporation is undoubtedly a remarkable expose of the modern corporation at its ugliest, at the lengths multinationals will go to and the depths they will stoop to in the search for profit. The film stands as a brilliant critique of corporate power and everything we associate with it and is a much needed resource in revealing the insanity of the present system. And as far as enthusing green revolutionaries and lending weight to the anti-globalisation cause is concerned the film is a powerful tool. But that is all.

Review of Fahrenheit 911

Michael Moore’s latest documentary film - Fahrenheit 911 - grossed $80 million in its first week. Despite initial attempts to secure an outlet for the film’s distribution and screening and right-wing claims that the film is inaccurate and initial plans to ban its screening, it has been seen by sell-out cinema audiences and won all manner of applause from US ‘liberals’ and the left everywhere.


Moore has clearly made a first rate documentary here in showing George Bush up as the first class moron we always knew him to be and heading a corrupt administration drooling oil and dripping from every pore with workers’ blood, unashamedly prepared to go to any lengths in the name of profit, but that’s about all we can extract from the film.


Whilst Moore can rip into the Republican administration over its obsession with Iraq and its intense love affair with the Saudi elite, he neglects to mention that President Clinton had Iraq bombed almost on a daily basis for 8 years—the 1998 cruise missile attack aside—and helped enforce an embargo that left 500,000 dead. Neither does Moore point out that high level dealings with Saudi Arabia have been going on since the 1940s. Furthermore, whereas the film gives full exposure to the visit by the Taliban to Texas in 1997 to sign an oil deal, that fact that Clinton was in power at the time is also overlooked.


More importantly, nowhere does Moore locate his film in a wider social and political context—in the capitalist system itself, in a system racked with contradiction, an exploitative social system that consigns hundreds of millions to abject poverty. While he clearly makes the link between oil profits and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, he nowhere suggests that war, all war, is the continuation of business by other means; that in capitalism wars are fought over trade routes, overseas markets, mineral wealth or areas of influence; that if you build empires you have to be prepared to kill people.


But Moore is no revolutionary, no class warrior! In the film he talks to a woman whose family have a long military tradition and who proudly unfurls the stars and stripes outside of her house each morning. Moore, ever the patriot, suggests she must be a proud woman and himself qualifies her pride in her soldiering offspring with the line “it’s a great country” – and well worth dying for, no doubt, Mike? Later on, and referring to the many US soldiers from impoverished towns—such as Flint, with 50% unemployment—who have been killed since the invasion of Iraq, Moore says: “They offer to give up their lives so we can be free”. In this, Moore shows he holds the same ideas of freedom that Bush and his ilk are every ready to ask workers to defend. In a land where there exists a ‘Patriot Act’ that restricts many hitherto taken-for-granted ‘freedoms’, where trade unionists have recently been forbidden to engage in strike activity, where speaking out against the status quo is seen as dangerously subversive, where the prison population borders on 2 million, boosted by a “three strikes and you’re out” ruling, the only real freedom exists in which capitalist the workers choose to exploit them.


And I feel I must point to a racist undertone I detect in the film – though we are knocked off guard and almost miss it with the film commencing by focusing on the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida and the joint session of Congress where Congressional Black Caucus members are all but humiliated in their attempts to get a single senator to sign a letter that could initiate debate on an election that was decided on under 600 votes.


I refer to the manner in which the film ridicules Bush’s “coalition of the willing” – those small countries who lent support in the hope they would be well rewarded. Britain aside, which gave its full support the invasion of Iraq, small nations such as the Republic of Palau, Costa Rica, Iceland, Romania, Netherlands and Morocco also offered to help out. The imagery that accompanies the mentioning of the latter smaller nations, the voice-over being intentionally slow and moronic sounding, is stereotypical and demeaning if anything: footage from the film Nosferatu accompanies the mentioning of Romania, Palau has native dancers festooned in flowers and a bare chested man driving a cow-drawn cart, there are Vikings for Iceland, cannabis-smoking for the Netherlands and Morocco is mentioned with footage of rampaging monkeys. The message is clear – there are countries with large armies which are a welcome addition to a coalition (ie Britain, which never actually gets a mention), but did the US have to settle for the pathetic?


Likewise, considering the US Invasion of Afghanistan just after 911, real analysis is sacrificed for a snear at the size of the invasion force itself—smaller than the manpower needed to police Manhattan, we are told—implying it should have been many times bigger.


And again, at a time when thousands of Moslems were being arbitrarily arrested and detained without charge—some being sent to Guantanamo Bay and denied legal representation—what obscene instance of Republican repression is dangled in front of us? Answer: the case of one white-skinnned Mr Reingold who slanged off Bush at his local Gymn and was visited by the FBI who never, incidentally, detained or charged him.


The great danger with Fahrenheit 911y, lies in its frontal attack on the present Republican administration, which leaves viewers assuming that a USA headed by a more liberal—perhaps Democrat—government would not be so militaristic and friendly with its corporate elite. In truth, any newly elected government, a one headed by Nader included, would serve primarily as the executive arm of corporate America, charged with pursuing the interests of the profit-hungry US ruling elite at home and aboard, ready always to call in the troops and bombers if US profits are threatened. The history of US foreign policy since 1945 is testament to this fact. Any US president who entertained any idea other than that he/she should be maximising profits would most definitely receive a sniper’s bullet.


Moore in fact leaves the capitalist system very much unscathed and free to go on killing. Bush may well lose the coming election, perhaps partly thanks to the production of this film, but capitalism will continue in the US as it does everywhere else on the planet, and the myriad injustices Moore himself catalogues in his book Stupid White Men will continue.


Moore is building up a lot of false hopes in targeting Bush and his administration as the villains of the peace. Whereas People know Bush is a war-mongering stooge of big business, something he goes to no great lengths to conceal, Kerry gives the illusion that he can work wonders if elected and Moore helps with the fantasy by saying, in a nutshell, the sooner we get rid of the village idiot the better. Whilst one can clearly understand why audiences, who have watched Fahrenheit 911, have chanted “Bush out, Bush out?” as the film ended, they are clearly mistaken in thinking the unseating of the Texan idiot will better their lot one iota. They will exist as wage slaves, every aspect of their lives subordinated to the dictates of capital, just as much under Kerry as under Bush.

The BNP and the The Political Earthquake That Wasn’t

Just what is it about the BNP that the vast majority of British workers find so nauseating? In the run up to the 2004 local and European elections, all manner of people, organised in their respective groupings, mobilised against them, from the Labour and Conservative Party activists and the myriad left-wing groups, to student bodies, church groups and unions like the CWU who informed members that their “conscience clause” gave postal workers the choice not to deliver BNP material if they found it objectionable. The anti-nazi organisation Searchlight even produced 28 versions of a newspaper targeting the BNP election campaign and distributed 1.5 million of them in areas where the BNP were most active.


Many were clearly panicked at the thought of widespread BNP victories and this clearly afforded the BNP media coverage which was out of all proportion to the size of their organisation. An eve of poll message from Nick Griffin, fuehrer of the BNP, on the BNP website of 9th June, stated that they “were on course for a political earthquake”, that the BNP would be “breaking through with three or four Euro MPs” Yorkshire, the BNP claimed, was to be their "jewel in the crown.” Two days earlier the same website had this to say: “Today in London a Monk came up to us. He said he had voted for the Conservatives all his life but this year he was voting for the BNP. He informed us that most of the Monks in his monastery were also voting BNP.” One wonders whether the fascists of the BNP had been taking tips in humour from their favourite comedian Bernard Manning.


And so it came to pass that the BNP managed to gain four new councillors in Bradford in four wards. This ‘jewel’ was out of a record 101 candidates they fielded across Yorkshire.


Elsewhere, the BNP made a breakthrough in the south of England, taking three seats in Epping Forest in the local elections and gained its first foothold in Bradford. And in Burnley, the BNP gained one seat but managed to lose the other seven in which its candidates were standing. In the North East, where the party stood a full slate of 25 candidates in Sunderland, they failed to make any promised gains.



Leader Nick Griffin, who in April had invited over the French Nazi Le Pen to plan how they could work as a team (or rather comedy duo) when Griffin became MEP for the north west of England, failed to take the seat he hankered after. No BNP candidate succeeded in getting elected to the European parliament and in the London mayoral elections the BNP ended up in sixth place and failed to secure the votes required to get representation on the London Assembly.


Regardless of how much these smiley-faced fascists claim to have changed their image, booting out the boneheaded troublemakers of yesteryear, they still represent the politics of hate - and their writings and statements still contradict the respectable shirt-and-tie image they try so hard to project. This was much evident from their election manifestoes, moreso that used for their London Assembly campaign and entitled London Needs the BNP.


The manifesto began with a subject the BNP are famous for – the strange obsession with the colour of human skin. It opened: “Within another generation, without political change, London will not even be recognisable as a European city”. Considering the diversity of cultures existing peacefully side by side in most European cities London, in a generation, would very much be like any normal European city. It asserted that the “remaining British people in London are faced with progressive marginalisation” because there are too many non-whites, neglecting to mention the way capitalism itself marginalises, atomises and alienates not just individuals but entire communities .


There then followed the usual rant against asylum seekers, “both legal and illegal” and Ken Livingstone and the Labour Party were said to be responsible for “this new influx that is about to engulf us.” Here again, no mention of the fact that within the EU alone, the UK was recently ranked 10th in number of asylum applications compared to the country's population or that the government has recently brought in measures that make it far more difficult for people from a variety of countries to claim asylum in the UK - together with a reduction of appeal rights for a host of countries. Neither does the BNP acknowledge that the Home Office itself has recognised that asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants have made an huge contribution to the economic and cultural life of the UK, bringing with them a wealth of skills and knowledge.


Law and order, another BNP favourite, was then tackled. Having informed us that recorded crime has risen by 1000% (how they love nice round figures) since the 1950s they go on to cite the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers as claiming that mass immigration had: “brought new levels of organised crime, drug dealing, gun crime, prostitution, fraud and kidnapping,” before advocating the reintroduction of the birch and the death penalty and a policy of zero tolerance. Again, no mention that one BNP London Assembly candidate was a reputable soccer thug, that the BNP National Development Officer, Tony Lecomber, has twice been imprisoned or that BNP leader Nick Griffin was given a suspended sentence for incitement to racial hatred. A visit to the Searchlight website will reveal that the BNP has a membership full of unsavoury characters. Moreover, in the year following the first BNP council victory in Milwall in 1993, racial assaults increased by 300%. It seems crime will only be tolerated when it is the BNP and their supporters who are carrying it out.


Next was the issue of “security” with the BNP promising to “make London safe from the threat of terrorism”, by deporting “Moslem fundamentalists”. Their TV election broadcast, which was edited, though downloadable later from the BNP website, was similarly Islamophobic, blatantly hinting at a hyped threat of Islamic terrorism. Significantly, the last terrorist bombs to go off in London which killed and injured members of the white working class were set off back in 1999 by one-time BNP activist David Copeland, who, when apprehended , said his aim had been to start a race war which would lead to a BNP government being elected. And the BNP National Organiser, has a conviction for setting off a home-made nail bomb and possessing hand-grenades and electronic detonators. Moreover, Griffin’s political mentor is the Italian nazi terrorist Roberto Fiore; the very same Griffin who once went to Libya to gain support from Colonel Gadaffi and who was all too ready to share a platform at a Cambridge seminar in July 2002 with Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the despicable Muslim fundamentalist, currently awaiting extradition to the USA for alleged terrorist crimes.


And so the manifesto continues, each statement showing the BNP to be the intolerant, narrow-minded, racist bigots they have always successfully presented themselves as, before closing on a subject covered in the May issue of the Socialist Standard (The Beauty Trap), namely the forthcoming erection of the statue of Alison Lapper: “Just as Ken Livingstone dislikes anything English he equally disapproves of anything British, which is why we are now to have a sad limbless body on the vacant fourth plinth rather than a British statesman or woman. A BNP Mayor would have this dreadful thing removed.” In this regard the BNP are in keeping with their beliefs on the white master race. Indeed, their National Organiser considers people with learning difficulties to be "sub-human" and those with disabilities to be "genetically inferior". As true heroes of the white working class they claim to be the BNP have said they will introduce a GM programme to get rid of those they consider "inferior".


The 800,200 misinformed workers who fell for this sort of rubbish across Britain and gave the BNP their votes in the European and Local elections on June 10th are the products of the demoralising system we know as capitalism, deluded into thinking that one main issue - a total halt on asylum – would suddenly improve their miserable lives. In truth, a shortage of council housing and poorly maintained housing estates, low wages and pittance benefits are no more the fault of asylum seekers than is the hole in the ozone layer. At the end of the day the BNP promised voters little more than extra space at the trough of poverty and tens of thousands wanted it.


Of course, the BNP were fortunate to ride a wave of patriotism—a tool they can use to great effect when it suits—in the run up to the election, with voters going to the polls as the 60th anniversary of D-Day was being commemorated and rammed down our throats every night on TV, and the English football team were gearing up to compete in Euro 2004 and when manufacturers were reporting sales of 4 million St George flags. And neither is their raw branch of nationalism that unique in today’s climate where the UKIP and the Conservative Party can make huge gains in the European elections on a “say no to Europe” platform, proclaiming the merits of British sovereignty, and where the Labour Party is all to ready to send British troops off to far away lands to protect the interests of Britain’s ruling elite.

Furthermore, we can only wonder at the mainstream parties fears of a surge in support for the BNP. Considering the views of the Labour and Conservative parties on asylum (Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech springs to mind) and the former’s part in upsetting the Islamic world so much recently, their objections to the BNP do seem a little hypocritical. They may genuinely abhor the racists of the BNP but have been unsuccessful in confronting them where they have made political gains because to do so would mean acknowledging the shortcomings of a system they champion and which gives rise to the politics of race.

If anything the BNP are the product of the total failure of all the reformist parties to make capitalism a fit society to live in. And this is not the fault of the mainstream parties, for they are controlled by the system and not vice versa despite their claims and promises. When capitalism fails to deliver, when despondency and shattered hopes arise from the stench of the failed promises and expectations that litter the political landscape, is it any wonder that workers fall for the scapegoating lies of fascists and the quick fix they offer?

BNP humour

Sent to the Shields Gazette, 25th May 2004

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at DR's letter (the BNP candidate for Whiteleas).

He states the BNP is the "true representative of the working class" .So much so that many of their members have criminal convictions for assaulting and racially harassing the same members of their class. So much so that their National Organiser considers people with learning difficulties to be "sub-human" and those with disabilities to be "genetically inferior". As true heroes of the working lcass the BNP have said they will introduce a GM programme to get rid of those they consider "inferior".

Their same National Organiser believes the rich are genetically superior and under BNP plans many working class people will be banned from having their own children.

The Socialist Party is contesting the Monkton Ward as the TRUE representatives of the workiong class. We advocate the common ownership and democratic control of the earth's natural and industrial resources. A world without borders or frontiers, social class or leaders. A world where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation. For 100 years ( we were founded in June 1904) we have campaigned for socialism and are yet to compromise any of our principles.

I've watched the BNP for many years now and one thing I can say without fear of contradiction is that they no more have the best interests of the working class at heart than did Hitler.

I certainly do not advocate banning the BNP, as many on the "left" do. For one thing I believe in freedom of speech, regardless of how silly the claims the speaker/writer makes. For another, the ideas of the BNP are easily discredited and calling for a ban on the BNP simply shows how intellectually bankrupt we are when it comes to countering their ideas.


John B

The Socialist Party Candidate
Monkton Ward

Promises, Promises - Gordon Brown and World Poverty

No doubt aware that the myriad promises made at World Summits and UN conferences - called to address the pressing problem of global poverty - amount to zilch, Chancellor Gordon Brown conceded in mid February that the world is still 150 years off set targets for tackling world poverty.

Brown, addressing a conference of diplomats and aid organisations in London, warned that immediate action was needed to have any chance of hitting the millennium goals for halving poverty, cutting child deaths and improving education in the Third World by 2015.

Mr Brown said that steps towards key millennium development targets for 2015 were so slow that in some parts of the world they would take more than a century to attain at existing rates. He said: "On current forecasts, sub-Saharan Africa will achieve our target for reducing child mortality not by 2015 but by 2165. This is not good enough. The promise we made was for 2015, not 2165."

He continued: "If we let things slip, the millennium goals will become just another dream we once had, and we will indeed be sitting back on our sofas and switching on our TVs and, I am afraid, watching people die on our screens for the rest of our lives. We will be the generation that betrayed its own heart." And further observed that the first target of the millennium development goals - to ensure by 2005 that girls are given the same opportunities in education as boys - would be missed, while aims to establish universal primary education by 2015 would not be met until 2129 at present rates.

As someone chosen to defend the interests of the British capitalist class and to ensure the cogs of profit machine remain well lubricated, Brown was no about to advocate class war and the abolition of the profit system. Instead, he called on the international community to support British plans for a new international finance facility (IFF), to double aid from $50bn (£26bn) to $100bn a year, and urged developed nations to take action on international trade. $100 billion?.

Although Mr Brown’s speech was welcomed by campaigners, opposition MPs and aid groups warned that Britain must do more to increase aid spending and open world markets to developing countries.

Irish rock star Bono called on delegates, inclusive of the Live Aid founder Bob Geldof, to "dramatise" the cause of world poverty just as Geldof had alerted the world to the plight of Africa in the mind 1980s. "We need to get people on to the streets asking why we are breaking these promises," he said.To Chancellor Brown, Bono said, "At a moment like this we need some very big ideas. You and Tony need to be the Lennon and McCartney of progressive geopolitics. What we need here is not love. All we need here is cash."

John Bercow, the shadow International Development Secretary, commented : "While the developed world practises protectionism on a grotesque scale it is hardly surprising that the poorest countries in the world cannot compete. It is time for the OECD to slash distorting subsidies, cut trade barriers and offer the poorest people on the planet a decent deal."

Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, who hosted the event at the Treasury, contrasted the £2.3bn spent in England on pet food and pet care merchandise in 2002 and the $700bn spent by Americans on beverages with the money set aside for poverty reduction programmes. Fair point. Is Brown really asking that much? An astronomical amount? Perhaps not where governments are concerned. The US military budget for 2004 alone is $400.1 billion, or to put it another way, the US spends $1,093,169,398 on the military every single day, or if you like figures, $759,145 every minute. Indeed, the figure considered, shared out amongst the world, what Brown is really asking the global executive of capitalism for its loose change. In truth, all Brown wants to save millions of people is the figure the US would otherwise spend in three months killing them.

While it is something of an upturn to see politicians admitting that promises to help the world’s poor are utter bollocks, it comes as no surprise to note that they still fail to address the real root of the problem – the way the world is organised for production. Their answer is always to throw money at the problem, like some modern-day shaman trying to exercise a demon. Whilst they promote ideas of fair trade, allowing less wealthy countries access to overseas markets, they know full well that as servants of capital it would be more than their lives were worth to promote polices that effected British exports, profits and jobs, and just how do they plan to get such an idea past the US corporate elite , who would mobilise a rapid deployment force if a barrel of oil was threatened?

In truth their charitable solution - using capitalist remedies to address a problem inherent to the capitalist system - amounts to little more than placing a sticking plaster over a gun shot wound. The system they defend is decrepit, anarchic and outdated. In a world of abundance, with so much science, technology and an advanced means of communication at our disposal, what is needed is the total abolition of the money system, the freeing of production from the artificial constraints of profit, and the establishment of a system in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation.

UN goals for 2015 and the progress so far:

To halve the number living on $1 a day or starving. Verdict: A little progress.

To ensure all children finish primary schooling. Verdict: failing

To end disparity in education between boys and girls. Verdict: failing

To cut death rate in under 5s by two-thirds. Verdict: failing
To reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters. Verdict: failing
To halt the spread of Aids and other diseases. Verdict: failing
To halve the number with no access to clean drinking water. Verdict: failing
To develop global partnership fordevelopment. Verdict: failing

Socialist Party's Centenary - something to brag about?

This I used for the editorial of Socialist View issue number 20

2004 is the centenary year of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, our organisation having been founded 100 years ago, in June 1904. For a century we have campaigned tirelessly for the establishment of system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means for producing and distributing wealth. In those 100 years we have not compromised our position once on any issue.

So how have we faired? Just what have we achieved? What can we brag about? Well, socialism certainly seems no nearer than it was 100 years ago, though it must be said that the technology needed to establish a world of abundance is by far in advance of that familiar to our founders. Moreover, the working class nowadays are far better educated than the men and women the autodidacts of the SPGB 1904 tried to win over to the socialist cause, yet still we admittedly find it difficult to recruit new members.

Our membership remains small, scattered and, let’s be honest, relatively inactive, and whilst we have had some decent election results in recent years we are yet to win a seat in any local or national election. And it is not uncommon for members to despair at the poor results of their efforts and to resign.

Of course we have faced many obstacles to our growth which we could not foresee back in 1904; not least of which was the 1917 Bolshevik coup and the myriad groupings that sprung from the inspiration of the “Russian Revolution” and which, in truth, have caused untold damaged to the true socialist cause. For many years now, we in the Socialist Party have spent a great deal of time not only trying to rescue the socialist name from the many Leninist and Trotskyist groups who have sullied the image of socialism, but also in exposing the fallacy that socialism was ever established in the former Soviet Union and distancing ourselves from the illusion held by many that socialists advocate violent revolution and that socialism can exist in one country. Though we were in existence a long time before any left wing group in Britain, we find that we have constantly had to compete, for the minds of the workers, with groups like the SWP, RCP, CP, CWO, CPGB and a hundred others, all of whom pedal the politics of confusion, offering the workers fast-track routes to the Promised Land, prepared to recruit anyone capable of signing their membership forms, regardless. Little wonder we have had such a difficult time recruiting.

Moreover, we have watched in dismay the ongoing workers’ support for the Labour Party in Britain - workers’ belief in Labour’s claim to be “socialist”, workers’ belief in the empty promises of New Labour and that party’s continued determination to betray those same workers at every opportunity and lead them down the blind alley of reformism.

It’s fair, also, to mention the impact of the thousands of single-issue groups on the political scene and indeed the collective consciousness of the workers. Groups like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and CND, though well meaning, focus many a worker’s mind on a single issue or reform, as if this is the most pressing matter of the day. If their combined energy had have been spent on attacking capitalism as a system, instead of campaigning against problems the system throws up, distracting millions of workers, then our task would have been halved.

So in honesty a great amount of our work has been taken up in attempts to rectify the damage done by other political organisations to socialist ideas and in challenging the single-issue mentality of thousands of organisations. Make no mistake about it – we have tried.

Let’s not forget that back in 1904 there was no means of mass communication, bar newspapers. Advances in communication technology were undreamed of in 1904. Now many workers have several televisions in their homes, and access to hundreds of channels. They have computers and access to a world wide web of information and all manner of electronic gadgetry that helps lull them into political apathy. And controlling all of this is the big corporations and the advertising industry, turning those same means of communication largely into idiot boxes that numb the minds of the workers.

Since 1904 there have been vast improvements in health, housing and in the way people live generally and which gives workers the impression that capitalism works for them and that the politicians ‘running the show’ have their best interests at heart. Little do the workers realise that any reforms were really the price the master class had to pay for their continued survival, and were certainly not an act of altruism. And all improvements in living were in general relative. Moreover, it was the workers who produced this wealth the politicians have taken the credit for and which the workers have erringly thanked them for on election day.

Of course we have had our successes over the years. Our monthly journal, The Socialist Standard, has been printed without fail since September 1904, producing sound Marxist analysis of current and international events as they have happened. We now have companion parties and members right across the world and hundreds of thousands access our website. We have our own head office, owned by the party and we produce literature and leaflets on a wide variety of subjects. We hold day schools and summer schools and attend as many events as we can to put forward our arguments to the workers. We contest elections every year — with increased returns in some places — and we regularly have members appearing on TV and radio and in the press arguing our case. We have for 100 years held lectures and debated with scores of political organisations and notable personalities. Many of the latter now exists on audio cassette and cd and more recently we have begun producing a film documentary to highlight our case. In 2003 we were active at almost every political event in Britain—we were even Glastonbury—handing out leaflets, putting up speakers and erecting literature stalls; in short, doing our level best with our limited resources to propagate the case for a non violent, democratic transition to socialism.

So let’s be fair – the lack of socialist consciousness and desire for real change is hardly down to us. It is the lack of success of the class of wage and salary workers in general. It's up to them, not us, to establish socialism. But such have been the distractions – some listed above – that we really have had our work cut out for us.

We can also consider ourselves successful in having developed some quite original and distinctive arguments in response to advances within capitalism. We were, for example, perhaps the first political party in the world to contend that the Russian dictatorship, in the wake of the 1917 coup, was “state capitalist” rather than socialist — an argument since adopted by many others. On other occasions, The Socialist Party has developed new distinctive arguments in that we have effectively blended extant strands of political and economic thought into a entirely new mix. This is most notably the case with our views on the “reform or revolution” question, where two seemingly incompatible theories were entwined into a unique new political position.

There are indeed a number of distinctive arguments The Socialist Party has developed since our formation in 1904 and while socialism has not yet been achieved, we have helped make some serious contributions to the development of socialist political and economic theory – weapons for battles now being fought and yet to come. Here are some of our most noteworthy contributions.

The Socialist Party helped solve the “reform or revolution” predicament which had beset the early labour movement by rejecting reformism but not democratic political action to capture state power – two views that had formerly been associated with one another. An early forerunner of The Socialist Party, The Socialist League of William Morris, Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, had been taken over by anarchists in the 1880s largely because it combined opposition to reformism with anti-parliamentarianism, specifically a tendency to view elections as a bourgeois diversion and parliament as merely the “talking shop” of the capitalist class. The founders of The Socialist Party learned from the mistakes of the Socialist League and other groups, and contended that opposition to elections and Parliament did not logically follow on from opposing reformism. We claimed that for a socialist revolution to be as peaceful as possible, the state machine and armed forces would have to be democratically captured from the control of the capitalist class and converted from being “an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation.”

The Socialist Party resolved that modern wars are fought over issues of concern to the owning class and not the workers; specifically being disputes over areas of influence, trade routes, sources of raw materials and sometimes overseas markets or the strategic points from which all of the same can be defended. When war broke out in 1914, The Socialist Party was the only political organisation in Britain to unequivocally oppose the conflict. Many of our members were imprisoned for refusing to join the army. Other parties professing to uphold the interests of the working class took sides, having identified anti-militarism, “national liberation” and other causes as goals worth pursuing before socialism.

Admittedly, in the 19th century, socialists like Marx and Engels supported so-called “progressive wars” against feudal reaction at a time when capitalism had not yet become the dominant world system. They thought that sweeping away feudal regimes like Tsarist Russia would help pave the way for socialist organisation and eventually revolution. Their position in the period of capitalist ascendancy over feudalism was taken by some supporters of war in 1914 as justification for their own action. The Socialist Party maintained that whatever Marx and Engels’ views in the 19th Century, there could be no question of socialists taking sides with any section of the capitalist class once capitalism had become the dominant world system and socialism the pressing alternative to it. When capitalism has advanced far enough to create the material conditions for socialism, the capitalist class becomes socially useless and all nation states reactionary, needing to be swept aside not bolstered.

The Socialist Party, unlike most of the “left wing”, opposed the establishment of the dictatorship in Russia under the guise of “workers control” or “socialism.” The Socialist Party argued that Russia, under Bolshevik rule, would be forced to take the capitalist road as the only one open to it. Socialism in one country (an economically backward one at that) and without majority support was impossible. The Bolshevik “Revolution” was in fact a political coup d’etat by a self-appointed elite of political conspirators with no respect for the wishes of the majority. For decades, The Socialist Party has maintained in distinction to Bolshevism that minority action can never lead to socialism.

Socialists have affirmed that Soviet Russia was capitalist and could only have been so given the nature of its political birth. It exhibited all the principal features of the capitalist mode of production in one form or another, notably wage labour, capital accumulation, commodity production, class division and the exploitation of one class by another.

In the 1920s and 30s, the Communist Party and Independent Labour Party (ILP) argued that capitalism was going to collapse, with socialism arising, phoenix-like, from the ashes. The Socialist Party contended that this was baloney and that capitalism would not pave the way for socialism without majority political action. This contention was repeated in the years after the Second World War to Trotskyists and left-communists who took up afresh the mantle of “capitalist collapse”. In particular, The Socialist Party denied the claim that capitalism would collapse because of an in-built lack of purchasing power, with the workers and capitalists combined unable to buy back the entire product of industry. This claim was based on a erroneous view of the relationship between productive labour and effective demand in capitalism – that somehow there is a permanent mismatch between the value of the mass of commodities produced at any one time and the income derived from this production in the form of surplus value (unpaid labour) and the value of workers’ labour power (unpaid labour). This “deficiency of purchasing power” claim—sometimes called “under-consumptionism” and wrongly credited to Marx—is a myth and has been disproved both in theory and by history. The Socialist Party has argued that enough purchasing power exists in capitalism—it is how it is used that causes difficulties, as its relationship to production is not planned. This is the phenomenon which gives rise to periodic (not permanent) crises and slumps and the trade cycle which has been a characteristic of capitalism since its infancy.

In response to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, The Socialist Party resolved that bourgeois democracy, with elementary political rights, is the most favourable condition for the overthrow of capitalism. In addition, we maintained that workers living under dictatorships should struggle to establish basic political rights, though without ever giving support to capitalist organisations, including those professing bourgeois democracy as their aim. This is not only because of the general reformist and anti-socialist nature of such organisations, but because these organisations in government are compelled to use the might of the state machine against the working class in the interests of capital.

For similar reasons, The Socialist Party resolved that socialists cannot support allegedly “democratic” countries fighting wars against dictatorships. Socialists are aware that wars are never fought over such lofty ideals and that history has proved that “democratic” states will prop up and assist dictatorships if it is in their interests to do so. The Socialist Party position was vindicated after the second World War when the allies carved up Europe in such a way as to hand half of it to the Stalinist dictatorship while leaving Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, among others, as neo-fascist regimes.

In the late 1940s, we argued that the setting up of the “welfare state” in Britain and other countries after the war would not solve the problems of the working class, which are integral to capitalism. To the extent that the welfare state represented a gain for some workers on the previous arrangements, we noted that it was always dependent on the maintenance of a low level of unemployment and destitution—a situation capitalism is incapable of sustaining for long. In recent decades unemployment, the rise of the so-called “underclass” and demographic change have undermined welfare provision as it came to be built up.

Over time the burdens on the welfare state have increased just as the capitalist class finds it increasingly difficult to finance it through taxation of profits. These increased burdens have led to a squeeze on the rate of profit after tax—the bottom line for the capitalists—which is the main factor determining the pace of future investment and growth, and also whether firms or entire nation states sink or swim in the competitive world economy.

In distinction to the main political parties, The Socialist Party was never taken in by claims of Keynesian economics, which promised low unemployment, steady growth and stable prices for the post-war period on the basis of government borrowing, “easy money” and redistributive taxation, especially when slump threatened. Unlike most of capitalism’s economists, socialists argued that Keynesian policies could not prevent unemployment and crises as the major determinants of these—production for profit, the anarchy of production and capitalism’s antagonistic system of income distribution, are integral features of the market economy.

Sure enough, everywhere Keynesianism was attempted it proved disastrous and eventually provoked the return to “laissez-faire” economics in the 1980s. Its lasting legacy—still with most of the capitalist world—has been persistently rising prices. This has been brought about by the mistaken belief—exposed by The Socialist Party from the standpoint of Marxian economics—that an excess issue of inconvertible paper currency would act as a stimulus to production and trade.

In Anti-Duhring, Friedrich Engels had written of production in socialism being guided “on the basis of one single vast plan”, but given the complexity of modern society, this is not possible. The Socialist Party realised that socialism could not be built on the basis of a centralised allocative plan which would be, by definition, antithetical to local decision-making, and which would be unresponsive to changing needs. Instead, The Socialist Party suggested that socialism would operate a system of production solely for use, operating in direct response to needs, these needs arising in local communities. The operational basis for this system would be calculation in kind (e.g. tones, kilos, litres etc.) instead of monetary calculation, combined with the responsive system of stock-control outlined in our pamphlet Socialism as Practical Alternative. Such a system would be able to allocate resources much more efficiently, responsively and democratically than a pre-determined allocative plan which had proved next to useless for state capitalist regimes, and is no model for a real socialist democracy.

If anything, the aforementioned contributions to political and economic theory should reveal that The Socialist Party is no unsuccessful, sterile organisation full of utopian dogmatists. Socialists are not content to sit on the sidelines of history – we are original thinkers and are open to innovation and new ideas – providing, that is, that they are sound. We are willing and able to cooperate with men and women the world over to bring about a better society, and we are proud of the small contribution we have already made to the movement that will one day sweep away capitalism once and for all.

We remain small in size for numerous reasons outside of our control, not least because we refuse to compromise our position and pursue reforms and single issues that the myriad reform groups like the SWP do to the detriment of revolutionary struggle.

Our message to those who can see no future so long as the market economy remains is join us – and help us make history. Let’s make sure that this coming century sees the end of the profit system.

World's Undernourished Reaches Record Levels

Its official! In spite of all the promises made by leaders of the advanced industrial nations at the three international conferences since 1974, called to discuss the issue of hunger across the world, there are now more malnourished people on earth than at any time in history! Moreover, some 36 million people are now estimated to die from hunger, directly or indirectly, every year.

According to a new United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003, across the planet 842 million are malnourished and the figure is growing by 5 million per year. This includes 10 million in the industrialized countries, 34 million in countries in transition and 798 million in developing countries. The report says the new figures “signal a setback in the war on hunger and make previous pledges to address the problem “increasingly remote”

According to SOFI2003, only 19 countries successfully reduced the number of undernourished during the 1990s. “In these successful countries, the total number of hungry people fell by over 80 million”. At the bottom of the table are some 26 countries, where the number of undernourished people increased by 60 million during that same period, including countries in transition, where those suffering from hunger climbed from 25 million in the mid-1990s to 34 million at beginning of this century

Twenty-two countries, inclusive of Bangladesh, Haiti and Mozambique, succeeded in addressing the problem of hunger. In these countries, the report states, “the number of undernourished declined during the second half of the decade after rising through the first five years” But in 17 other countries, “the trend shifted in the opposite direction and the number of undernourished people, which had been falling, began to rise. This group includes a number of countries with large populations, including India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Sudan”.

The report also cites a number of countries in Central and West Africa which saw their numbers of hungry rise due to war.

In a number of ‘successful’ countries, including China, progress slowed after impressive gains in reducing hunger had been made in the early 1990s. The report says that having reduced chronic under-nourishment to modest or low levels, “these countries can no longer be expected to propel progress for the developing world”.

Referring to the last World Food Summit’s goal of reducing the number of undernourished people by half, by 2015, Hartwig de Haen, FAO Assistant Director-General, Economic and Social Department, said: “The goal can only be reached if the recent trend of increasing numbers is reversed. The annual reductions must be accelerated to 26 million per year, more than 12 times the pace of 2.1 million per year achieved during the 1990s”. He added: “The SOFI project has provided us with many insights about hunger. Through SOFI we are learning more everyday about what works to reduce hunger and what causes increased numbers of people to suffering from under-nourishment. We are now in a position to make very specific recommendations that countries can follow to alleviate hunger and malnutrition sustainably”. Those countries who have began reducing the number of their hungry share five characteristics, concludes de Haen—faster economic growth, rapid expansion in the agricultural sector, slower population growth, lower rates of HIV infection and far fewer natural emergencies.

Whilst de Haen observes that "investment in agriculture is a precondition for growth in incomes of the poor and the food supply,” in reality such investment has been dwindling and there is little to suggest any immediate change.

And those 19 countries who have reduced the number of their hungry can hardly brag. The plain truth is that they have been fortunate not to have experienced the levels of droughts and natural disasters that have increasingly troubled other parts of the ‘Third World’ this past decade.

The influence of domestic politics on population growth is negligible, when poverty is widespread. Population growth tends to be determined largely by levels of poverty – the tendency being that the more dire your plight, the more intense your poverty, the more children you invest in to look after you when you grow old and infirm. For many poor families a large number of children are an insurance policy for old age.

And neither can poor nations address their Aids epidemics in the way the rich world can with its new drug systems, with its patents and profit quests that put essential drugs out of the reach of so many. Aids has killed over 25 million in the ‘Third World’ and in this decade it is expected to kill as many still as the numbers who died in both world wars. The undeveloped world is hit harder as it devastates agricultural communities, leaving hungry orphans.

Those countries suffering the most malnutrition are those most reliant on agriculture and many countries find they have to use land, hitherto used for crops, for cash crops such as cocoa and coffee to pay off debts. There are even instances of countries with undernourished millions producing flowers and strawberries for western markets.

The report points out how “half the higher prices received for exports went not to farmers but traders," and that “there was no increase in production in response to the higher prices". Furthermore, it says that "prices are expected to rise more steeply for food products that developing countries import than for the commodities they export.”

Little wonder that it then forecasts how “the lion's share of benefits from trade liberalisation is expected to go to developed countries."

The report reiterates the well-known statistic that the West spends 30 times more on domestic farming subsidies than it does on aid. It cites the US spending $3.9bn (£2.3bn) a year subsidising its 25,000 cotton farmers - more than the entire GDP for Burkina Faso and how Europe is now the world's second- largest exporter of sugar, despite the fact that EU sugar costs twice as much to produce as does that of Third World growers.

The report is straightforward in concluding "the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will.” In truth, in a world where profits are to be had, there are more pressing concerns than the world’s starving.

Back in the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger boldly announced that within 10 years global hunger would be eradicated. There were then 400 million malnourished people on the planet and this figure was a 75 million increase over the previous decade. In 1996, a World Food Summit pledged to halve world hunger by 2015. Six years later, in June 2002, came the second World Food Summit, called to review the progress made since 1996. Here the FAO revealed there were still about 815 million hungry people in the world. One of the clearest conclusions of that Summit was that little progress had made since 1996 and that it would take until 2030 to get global hunger figures down to the levels they had been when Kissinger made his famous promise back in 1974.

So here we are, 30 years after Kissinger’s famous remark and despite vast improvements in technology and food production methods there are now more than twice as many malnourished. In reality the leaders of the large industrialised nations don’t give a shit. The USA comes instantly to mind.

At the 1974 World Food Conference, governments examining the global problem of food production and consumption, soberly proclaimed that "every man, woman and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition in order to develop their physical and mental faculties". But, within a decade the US would twice tell the world what they really thought about the 1974 proclamation. In 1981 and 1983, the US voted against UN resolutions declaring access to nourishment a human right (1981: 135-1, with the US voting against and in 1983: 132-1, the US voting against). The very fact that this had to be put to a vote in the first place shows how much warped thinking abounds. Did the UN really think it necessary that a vote was needed on whether humans should have a right to food? How the hell can you consider addressing the problem of hunger if first you need a vote on whether access to food is a human right?

As any socialist will argue, not only does that right very much exist, but that we can already feed the present world population and more. Organisations like Food First (Institute for Food and Development Technology –www.foodfirst.org) are clear that the world today produces enough grain alone to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. “That's enough to make most people fat!” they assert. And this estimate does not take account of many other universally eaten foods—vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Indeed, if all foods are considered together, sufficient is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. That includes two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs. Put that on a platter in front of most people and ask term to eat it and the thought of it makes them nauseous.

“Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today,” declares Food First. They go on to point out how, in the past 35 years, increases in global food production have outstripped the world's record population growth by about 16 percent. Indeed, mountains of unsold grain on world markets have pushed prices strongly downward over the past three and a half decades. Grain prices rose briefly during the early 1990s, as bad weather coincided with policies geared toward reducing overproduction, but still remained well below the highs observed in the early sixties and mid-seventies.

Hold on! Isn’t it the case that most of the world's hungry are living in countries with food shortages - countries in Latin America, in Asia, and especially in Africa?

Hunger in the face of abundant food supplies is all the more shocking in the ‘Third World’. The FAO has previously reported that gains in food production since 1950 have kept to the fore of population increase in every region except Africa. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced in a report published in 1997 that 78% of all malnourished children under the age of five in the developing world live in countries with a food surplus.

The simple fact is that what underlies global hunger is the maxim of the present mode of production—capitalism: can’t pay can’t have. Whichever country you live in, if profits are threatened enough then governments can be found ordering the destruction of food to keep prices high and paying farmers to take land out of production.

A close look at some of the world's hunger-ravaged countries confirms that scarcity, war and poverty are not the cause of hunger – they might result in hunger, but they are the symptoms of capitalism. And in an age when the US can overnight mobilise an invasion force (and supplies) of 130,000 troops thousands of miles away, there is no logic in saying drought and natural disaster cause hunger, for if the political will was there then those ill-fated multitudes could be rescued, fed and housed in a day.

In years to come expect similar reports like this recent offering from the FAO to be just as grim, and for one reason — they believe the problem of hunger, in a world of abundance, a problem rooted in the way our society is organised for production can be solved by reforming that system, by coaxing the capitalist class into mending their ways. Thirty years of world conferences on hunger, a thousand promises by the defenders of capitalism have proved otherwise and always will until we end their system.

Syria - on the wrong side of history

"What I said to him [President Bashar al-Assad of Syria] very clearly is that there are things we believe he should do if he wants a better relationship with the United States, if he wants to play a helpful role in solving the crisis in the region. So if President Assad chooses not to respond, if he chooses to dissemble, if he chooses to find excuses, then he will find that he is on the wrong side of history." (US Sec. of State Colin Powell, following a visit to Syria, May 11)

"I made it very clear to the prime minister [Ariel Sharon], like I have consistently done, that Israel's got a right to defend herself, that Israel must not feel constrained in defending the homeland." (President Bush, summarizing his conversation with Ariel Sharon after the Israeli attack on Syria, Oct. 6)

"I am happy to see the message was delivered to Syria by the Israeli air force, and I hope it is the first of many such messages." (Defence Policy Board member Richard Perle, in Israel, Oct. 14)

"We tolerate nuclear weapons in Israel for the same reason we tolerate them in Britain and France. We don't regard Israel as a threat." (A high-ranking administration official, identified by the Guardian as leading US neocon John Bolton)

On October 5th, Five months after Powell laid down the law to Bashar al-Assad, two weeks after Bolton's report and, as the press were reporting that Congress would adopt sanctions against Syria, Israel bombed what it claimed to be a "terrorist training camp" in Syria, ten miles north of Damascus.

Damascus insisted the camp had been discarded seven years ago and seemingly there were no casualties. Syrians, however, have expressed bewilderment at the attack, ostensibly in retaliation for a suicide bomb attack in Haifa which killed 21 people, and for which the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad had since claimed their part in.

Syria, of course, had to be attacked. It was after all a Jenin woman lawyer (Jenin is in Israel, incidentally), who most likely had never travelled to Damascus in her life, who blew up herself and 21 innocent Israelis – a suicide bombing which needed no terrorist camp training. Israel, though, is simply following in the footsteps of the US. Was not Afghanistan the first to bear the brunt of the US retaliation for 9-11, in spite of the fact that 15 of the 16 terrorists known to have hijacked the planes that day were from Saudi Arabia? And was not every attempt made to link Iraq with al-Qaeda, actually hours after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, despite the fact that Iraq is a secular state and al-Qaeda a militant Islamic fundamentalist organisation.

Typical of the vociferous US neocons is Richard Perle. His quote, above, is from his talk to reporters and delegates at the inaugural "Jerusalem Summit,” on October 21, a gathering of Israelis and mainly American Jewish and Christian analysts and politicians opposed to conceding a Palestinian state. Perle, who was honoured at the event, praised Israel highly for the air attack on the alleged terrorist camp in response to the suicide bombing in Haifa. The Jerusalem Post the following day quoted Perle as saying: "President Bush transformed the American approach to terrorism on September 11th, 2001, when he said he will not distinguish between terrorists and the states who harbour them. I was happy to see that Israel has now taken a similar step in responding to acts of terror that originate in Lebanese territory by going to the rulers of Lebanon in Damascus."

Perle’s sentiments at once reveal, of course, that the Israeli Attack upon Syria could not have happened without the support, or the expected support, of the USA and which came in the shape of the ‘Syria Accountability Act’, and which was finally passed, 398-5, by the House of Representatives on October 16.

The Voice of America reported House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as saying: “We will send a very clear message to President Assad and his fellow travellers along the 'axis of evil.' The United States will not tolerate terrorism, its perpetrators or its sponsors, and our warnings are not to be ignored."

In the weeks prior to the vote, speaker after speaker warned that Syria is the new threat previously posed by Iraq: that it has weapons of mass destruction, some with biological warheads, that it took delivery of Saddam’s elusive arsenal just before the invasion of Iraq in March.

Not so long ago Richard Perle and fellow neo-conservatives, stated in a report exclusively prepared for Benjamin Netanyahu and other radical Israeli Zionists (Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000) that "Israel can shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria... Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which America can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran." In other words, Sharon's script was written by those US neocons more interested in a Greater Israel than the blowback such Israeli military actions against its neighbours would create for the US at home and aboard..

What is apparent is that there are two layers to the Bush administration – the oil baron faction, made up of the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, and a second layer of neoconservatives (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton etc) who unite a traditionalist domestic agenda with an futuristic, imperialist foreign policy that seeks to benefit from the U.S.'s post Cold War rise as the sole superpower. The neocons promote the "New American Century” philosophy, in which the US pursues its goal of "full spectrum dominance", making use of "pre-emptive" strikes against prospective challengers. A great part of their game plan is to reshape the Middle East, not only to guarantee the security of Israel as a US satellite but to secure future US supplies, and profits from, the region’s oil reserves. Despite the present nightmare their ongoing efforts have created in the region – particularly the Iraqi quagmire – their power goes unchallenged and they continue to promote the idea of regional regime change in US interests. Though highly influential, the neocons do not control the White house as yet and neither is the Bush administration motivated wholly by Sharon’s right wing designs. The simple fact is that Israel is an important regional ally of the US, chiefly in regard to the corporate, military and geopolitical aspirations of the US capitalist elite. Total US domination of Southwest Asia - a politically volatile but oil rich region - would give Washington enormous influence over time-honoured allies it now wants to "contain," and over any potential rivals. To date, Israel has played but a minor part in Bush's “War on Terror” and one would expect the Bush camp to insist it keeps to its occasional walk on role and not impede US designs on the region by escalating anti-US feeling in the Middle East. But globopolitics knows no set rules where profits are involved and you could beforgiven for thinking that any retaliation against Israel would give the US the pretext it needs to escalate its domination of the region viz-a-viz its continuing “War on Terror”.

As for Colin Powell and Co, it is our contention that it is they, the defenders of capitalism, the enemy of the working class who are on the “wrong side of history” – a history characterised by an archaic system of class rule in defence of the interests of a small, privileged minority. Their history is one of murder, exploitation and robbery. Real history, our history, begins when we put an end to their system and with it the wars and misery it spurns; when the resources of the world - that the Bush administration seem to think are theirs by divine design - are the common property of all.

The Jarrow March Remembered

On September 14th, 93 year-old Con Whalen of Hadrian Rd in Jarrow, South Tyneside, the last of the original Jarrow Marchers, died at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead.

For 60 plus years, Con treasured the memories of the now famous march and of the solidarity he and his comrades encountered along their 291 mile route to London, even if he could dismiss the event as having achieved nothing.

Con, who last year had a beer named after him by a Jarrow Brewery – the Old Cornelius – was proud to have taken part in an event that had been the subject of numerous books and which would even feature in the National Curriculum.

Indeed, so significant is the march now that it is a poor 1930s documentary that does not show footage of the 200 strong band of thin-faced Geordies making their way to the capital to protest to Stanley Baldwin’s government the plight of the town.

The economic slump that plunged Britain and many other countries into depression was felt in fewer places harder than in Jarrow, where unemployment soared above 80 percent, where people lived in overcrowded and vermin-infested houses and where poverty was unimaginable.

In 1933, JB Priestly, having visited Jarrow, wrote about the town in his book English Journey:

“Wherever we went men were hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a distant civilisation, observing the condition of the place and its people would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was now being punished.” (Penguin edition, 1977, page 296).

Not long after the publication of the English Journey, in January 1934, a delegation of 300 people from Jarrow, Hebburn and Felling travelled to Seaham to argue their case with the town’s MP and leader of the largely Conservative National Government, Ramsay McDonald.

Leading the delegation was “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, MP for Jarrow, hoping to impress upon the PM the plight of the people along the Tyne and their desperation for work.

No doubt McDonald was all too aware of the pathos of the situation and the reality of the present situation and capitalism’s inability top solve the crisis. The advice he gave the member from, Jarrow was later described by her as “sham sympathy”:

“Ellen, why don’t you go and preach socialism, which is the only remedy for this?”

The reply was cold and smacked of the same indifference a similar delegation received when they visited Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, regarding the opening of a steelworks in Jarrow. Said Runciman, “Jarrow must work out its own problems.”

Jarrow, it seemed, was indeed left to sort out its own problems. To a town whose ship industry had closed down and whose much anticipated steelworks had failed to materialise, Runciman’s words were received as icily as they had been uttered and sent a shiver down the collective spine of the borough.

At a time when the entire country seemed to be taking part in hunger marches and protest rallies, Councillor David Riley’s suggestion in July 1936 that the unemployed of Jarrow should march to London hardly seemed original or serious in light of the fact that many marches had been dismissed as “communist demonstrations.”

However, the idea was discussed at length with the town’s MP and the Jarrow Labour Party executive. Eventually it was decided that any march should be a town’s march and only to go ahead with the full support of the citizens. The town council went on to sanction the march and above the signature of the mayor went appeals for support, and this was followed by the sending out of letters requesting the use of services and halls to towns along the proposed route to London. As the pace of events hotted up, the organisation of the march was done from the town hall and under the supervision of the town clerk.

At the same time, though denied the oxygen of publicity the Jarrow march was attracting, men were marching from South Wales, Cumberland, Durham and Yorkshire, all bent on expressing their grievances against the means test and the UAB regulations, which was for the Jarrow men “a welcome sign that other men felt the same as they did and were kicking, too.” (Wilkinson, The Town that was Murdered, 1939.)

So on a cold morning, October 5th, 1936, 200 marchers set out; ahead of them representatives from the Labour and Conservative parties to arrange meetings en-route to London. Even the Inter-Hospital Socialist Society came to their assistance, sending out relays of helpers performing dentistry and medical necessities.

The marchers had hardly time to get blistered feet when their organisers were condemned by a labour party meeting in Edinburgh for “sending hungry and ill-clad men across the country on a march to London.”

Incensed, Ellen Wilkinson left the marchers and travelled to the Conference in Edinburgh in an attempt to rally support. Her efforts were in vain for the conference had more important matters to discuss, such as their attitude to the Spanish question and the rearmament issue – a time-honoured and typical response from the Labour Party to requests for help from the working class.

Neither was support to be found with the TUC, who similarly blacked the march and advised trade councils against giving help.

Wilkinson had this to say: “I went from the warm comradeship of the road to an atmosphere of official disapproval;…had the Labour Party put its powers behind the marches, sent out the call for solidarity with them, then by the time these men reached London, not only from Jarrow, but from all parts of the country, the support that would have been aroused…would have been enough to shake the complacency of the Baldwin government.” (ibid. p.204-5).

There was, however, no shortage of support and working class approval of the march. After all, 47 per cent of the industrial population of the country at that time resided in areas scheduled as “distressed” or in need of being so scheduled.

The brainwashed Trades and Labour Council at Chesterfield might have obeyed the TUC circular denouncing the march, but this did not stop the local Conservative Party from rallying to the aid of the marchers, providing hot meals and a place to sleep. The Labour Party rationalised their apathy by asserting that if they gave support to one march, then support would have been demanded by them all. This from an allegedly working class party!

Along the route to London, members of the working class and, indeed, capitalist class, were all too ready to support the march

By the time the marchers reached Leicester their boots were falling apart. In response, the Co-operative Society’s own cobblers took it upon themselves to work all through the night without pay to repair the boots of the Jarrow men, the Co-op donating the necessary material free.

One cobbler almost anticipated Socialism, saying: “Its seems sort of queer, doing your own job just because you want tot do it, and for something you want to help, instead of doing it because you’d starve if you didn’t.” (ibid. p. 297).

Elsewhere, at Leeds, a newspaper proprietor laid on free food and beer (no doubt providing his own paper with a story) and at Barnsley, Joe Jones, a miners’ leader, had the municipal baths specially opened and heated in time for the arrival of the marchers. A group of journalists, following he march, even clubbed together and purchased a dozen mouth organs in an attempt top boost the morale of the marchers.

The march continued and gained support and sympathy the entire 291 miles of its journey. The men marched between 10 and 21 miles every day and held meetings every night. After three and a half weeks on the road, they reached Marble Arch tired and rain soaked, perturbed that only a small crowd had braved the October weather to greet them.

The following day they were given permission to hold a meeting at Hyde Park. The Communist Party was already there, holding a mass demonstration to protest unemployment. Realising the Jarrow men were in the area, they suspended their rally for an hour and asked their audience to swell the Jarrow Crusade meeting.

When Parliament reassembled two days later, the men marched to the Houses of Parliament and handed in 2 petitions, one containing 68,500 signatures from towns along the Tyne. The petition presented the case for Jarrow in simple language, pointing out how Jarrow was experiencing a stage of industrial depression unprecedented in the town’s history. Shipyards had closed and the steelworks had been denied a lifeline. Once, 8,000 workers were in employment. Now the figure stood at 100, with others on temporary schemes. The petition continued:

“The town cannot be left derelict, and therefore your petitioners humbly pray that His Majesty’s Government and this honourable house will realise the urgent need that work should be provided without delay.”

As many of the marchers as possible had been crammed into to public galleries anticipating a lengthy debate, aware that many an MP had been bombarded with letters regarding the march from their constituents. But there was no debate! As Wilkinson points out:

“A few questions were asked…and the house moved on to consideration of other things.” (ibid. p.209).

The marchers took it all in their stride. Wilkinson describes them as being “rather sporting about it” and how they were afterwards entertained to tea in the house. Demoralised to the point they had given up hope would have been a more fitting description of the marchers’ sentiments – men pushed and crushed until they could only accept their fate.


When the marchers arrived home, they did so to a hero’s welcome. Tens of thousands turned out to greet them and bonfires burnt long into the night. For many they had achieved something – even if it meant no change to their meagre existence.

Wilkinson writes of the marchers:

“Many were politically educated men, who through the long, bitter struggle, knew who and what was the real enemy.”

To be honest, and not to disparage an important event in labour history, where they? Where they so educated as to think marching could better their lot and did they really think it possible that capitalism could be bargained with? Did they realise that, in truth, they were marching for the right to be exploited by a system that cared not a jot had the marchers perished to a man en-route to London?

Three years later, work did come to Jarrow in the form of a new rolling mill, and much more would follow as World War Two kicked in and the capitalist war machine revved up.

Walking through the site when the men were laying the concrete foundations of the rolling mill, Wilkinson was greeted with: “This is what we marched to get.”

Red Ellen could only find a strange pathos in the statement. She commented:

“The grim reality is that the workers have no share in these mills. When the works are built they will still be subject to the toll of profit, the exigencies of a system where they can be closed at the will of people far away to suit a financial policy.” (ibid. P.213).

Perhaps like the cobbler at Leicester, the stark reality of the madness, the insanity of capitalism, had finally become apparent to the member for Jarrow, and perhaps she at last realised that the internal mechanisms of capitalism run on with a will of their own, oblivious of logic and their own foul contradictions and men with Geordie accents and sweaty feet.

Iraq - Liberation or Occupation

From a leaflet that was handed out at the "Stop the War" demonstrations in London on 27 September 2003.

The million anti-war demonstrators who poured into London at the beginning of the year have since been proved right on a number of issues. The people in Iraq did not roll out the red carpet for the “liberating” US and British troops as they overran the country. The war did provoke more anti-Western resentment. There was never any threat to the USA. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were never the issue and so far have proven not to exist, except in the warped mind of US neo-cons and the Blair junta in Britain. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11¾at last admitted by George Bush on 17 September¾and neither was there any link to Al Qaeda. The US war machine is up to its neck in a mess of its own making, which worsens daily, while Bush’s corporate buddies are now raking in huge profits from contracts awarded for the reconstruction of Iraq.


The killing continues

It is now six months since Bush informed us that Iraq had been liberated. If this is liberation, then what is oppression? Iraqi infrastructure is virtually non-existent, crime is out of control, and the “liberation” has turned into guerrilla war in which daily Iraqi deaths from gunfire outnumber those of the occupying forces by 20-1. Widespread resentment against US occupation is the norm. The common consensus worldwide is that the US has failed miserably in Iraq, creating only greater regional problems. Millions of Iraqis now accept that whilst


Saddam might have been a tyrannical dictator, his regime did ensure relative stability.
The recent US “liberation” of Afghanistan is perhaps analogous. Since the ousting of the Taliban, unaccountable American-paid warlords have been free to rape and murder at will. People are being murdered at the rate of 100 a week. Women are still fearful to walk out without burqas. Opium production is now back to normal and every organisation reporting from Afghanistan makes the same claim – human rights abuses are greater than under the rule of the Taliban


Indeed, the only significant US achievement in Iraq lies in the fact that the US has turned the only Arab country with no Al Qaeda base into a recruiting ground for Islamic terrorism. You could be forgiven for thinking this was part of the US game plan insofar as it provides the US with a further pretext for its “war on terror” as it currently calls its imperialist foreign policy. What an amazing feat Washington has performed. What a mess Bush now realises he has created.


A recent Washington proposal now under consideration is for the establishment of a UN multilateral military force to join U.S. occupation troops in Iraq. It would operate as a separate, parallel force with a separate command composition, but under the overall command of the US and accountable to the Pentagon. Furthermore, the arrangement would not include the US sharing authority and information with the UN or the countries providing assistance. This was in fact US practice during the Clinton administration in Somalia and Haiti, for instance.


Interestingly, when the UN Security Council opposed the US invasion of Iraq, arguing there was no reason to resort to violence, it was Bush who dismissed the UN as a mere “talking shop”. Now after starting an “illicit” war¾if a war can ever be called licit¾which marginalised the UN Security Council, a war that has not gone Bush’s way, the US seeks the help of the Security Council to internationalise the economic and human costs of their occupation of Iraq. Perhaps Bush thinks Indian, Pakistani or Nigerian mercenaries of the United States will receive a more amicable reception in Iraq than US forces.



US,UN, same difference


One wonders whether Washington is oblivious to the recent attack on the UN base in Baghdad with the loss of 21 lives. For many Middle Eastern militants, the UN is seen as simply another branch of US imperialist foreign policy and thus a legitimate target. Back in the early 1990s, it was the UN which put in place the US-sponsored sanctions regime which wrought havoc on Iraqi society – a society recovering from a 10-year war with Iran and a murderous war with the US, Britain, France (yes) and others. Such sanctions left 500,000 Iraqi children dead from disease and malnutrition and crippled Iraq’s infrastructure. More recently, it was the UN Security Council which approved the US-installed puppet government and in effect approved the occupation by opening a UN mission office to help make it successful. So any idea that the UN could carry through something the US could not is wishful thinking. UN forces would fare no better than US troops.


Clearly the Washington warmongers did not count on the post-invasion expenses they would encounter, or the number of troops they would need for the job. The US war-for-profit machine has clearly bitten off more than it can chew. Following on from the $79 billion that was released in April 2003 for the cost of the occupation of Iraq, Bush has since allocated an extra $87 billion and Vice-President, Dick Cheney, has indicated even that will not suffice. Meanwhile, in Britain, chancellor Gordon Brown is to announce a further £1 billion for the British part in the occupation next month.


Sixteen of Americas's 33 combat brigades are now in the quagmire of Iraq, which means that Bush's pre-emptive wars have placed 160,000 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Still, Bush wants to send more troops and Blair has also indicated that he is prepared to send thousands more young men and women into the cauldron of hate.


And the beneficiaries? The Iraqi people? No. So far the only ones smiling are the corporate elite close to the White House, the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel, Parsons Group and Stevedoring Services of America, which are earning billions of dollars out of the reconstruction of Iraqi society.


There was always the risk that once Saddam was removed from power extremist groups would come to the fore and make Iraq far more unstable than under Baathist rule. This much had been acknowledged by President Bush senior during the first Gulf War and lay behind Washington’s decision not to support US-inspired revolts of the Iraqi Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. It made sound US sense to have Saddam crush these revolts mercilessly rather than have him removed and the country fragment and the region destabilise. The very forces the US feared would be unleashed following the toppling of Saddam are now on the rampage – they might have loathed Saddam, but they hate the US more. As the guerrilla war spirals, tens of millions across the world look on in despair, their worst fears confirmed.


Protests without end?


Today, well-meaning people from across Britain have again travelled to London to protest their outrage at the policies of Bush and his sidekick Blair in the pursuit of US global hegemony and the destruction created en route, particularly in Iraq. Most will believe the malaise can be sorted out within the usual channels capitalism offers – either a UN force moves in or the US and British troops come home. The former, though more likely, will only compound the problem and the latter can only leave the region further unstable, with war lords and the varying shades of the region’s religions vying for political power. Whilst Bush would welcome a UN effort, a US retreat would be unthinkable.


As on previous demonstrations, placards and banners will carry myriad messages, some demanding “Bush Must Go” and “Bring the Troops Home”, with others screaming in assorted bright inks “No War for Oil” and “End the Occupation.”


Few, if any, will address the root of the problem¾the capitalist system itself and its inherent and vicious competition for profits¾and how the problems of capitalism can only be solved when we abolish the system itself. On previous occasions we have advised demonstrators who protest against war, without setting it in its true context, to invest in a sturdy banner. If you are opposed to war and its effects, yet are prepared to support capitalism – and many left wing groups actually are despite what they say, usually in the form of a state-run capitalism – then settle down to a life of campaigning.


While it is important that workers oppose war, it is just as important that we recognise just why armed conflicts between states break out and in whose interests wars are waged. If you think about it you’ll be hard-pressed to think of a single war that did not have its roots in the desire of small elites to make profits. All wars, even small-scale conflicts¾and the ongoing conflict in Iraq is no exception¾tend to be fought over mineral wealth, foreign markets and areas of influence, trade routes or the strategic points from which the same can be defended.


To end war¾and the need to demonstrate against each war as one war succeeds another (were you on the demos against the war in Afghanistan and before that against the war in Kosovo?)¾capitalism has to be ended and replaced by a global system where the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all Earthpeople. That way, competition and conflict between elites over resources can give way to co-operation between peoples in different parts of the globe to use the world’s resources for the benefit of all its inhabitants.


If you lend your support to a political party or organisation that fails to question the real nature of capitalist society, how our world is organised for production and how power is distributed, then you are in effect supporting a system that bred this war¾and will breed future wars. We urge you to think seriously and reconsider your position. Capitalism and the war and uncertainty that comes with it, or world socialism and global peace and security? Protest endlessly against each new war as it arises or campaigning for a new world of common ownership, democratic control, peace and human welfare.

The worst day in the UN's history"

"My answer is bring them on."— George W. Bush, referring to attacks by Iraqi militants. Washington, D.C., July 3, 2003

“The worst day in UN history” was how many news reports described the recent attack on the UN offices in Baghdad which left twenty-three civilians dead. Whilst many in the west have been shocked and appalled at this attack, wondering how such a ‘non-partisan’ humanitarian organisation such as the UN could be the target of Iraqi extremists, it must be remembered that for many Middle Eastern militants the UN is seen as simply another branch of US imperialist foreign policy.

To many Iraqis, the thousands of US and British soldiers in Iraq constitute an army of occupation, and with the UN endeavouring to help stabilise Iraqi society and promote "democracy" they are in actual fact perceived as an accessory to the occupation, creating the stable conditions that will facilitate a smother expropriation of Iraqi oil assets. In short, the UN is viewed as just another US ally and thus a legitimate target.

Back in the early 1990s, it was the UN which put in place the US-sponsored sanctions regime (most notably resulting from resolutions 661 and 687) which wrought havoc on Iraqi society – a society recovering from a 10 year war with Iran and a murderous war with the US and Great Britain. Such sanctions left 500,000 Iraqi children dead from disease and malnutrition and crippled Iraq’s infrastructure. More recently, it was the UN Security Council which approved the US-installed puppet government and in effect approved the occupation by opening a UN mission office to help make it successful. In the interim, the Bush administration has refused any significant contribution by other world powers (with the exception of its British hangers-on) in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Little known is the fact that the UN building in Baghdad also housed the World Bank. Back in May, the World Bank sent a senior bank diplomat along with Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Special Representative in Iraq (killed in the blast )"to assess reconstruction and development needs on the ground," according to the WB's website. Back in April the World Bank and the IMF issued a joint press statement on how they "stand ready to play their normal role in Iraq's re-development at the appropriate time." And based on their past track record, what is the "normal role" played by the World Bank and IMF? Answer: Structural Adjustments Programmes which result in slower economic growth, austerity measures, poverty and unemployment. So again, the United Nations is viewed in the same light as is the IMF and World Bank, and to many grudge-bearing Iraqis is a suitable target.

Neither is the fact that the US invaded Iraq whilst the world protested, killing 8,000 civilians in the process, ostensibly because Saddam refused to reveal his non-existent chemical weapons, lost on Iraqi people. Iraq clearly posed no threat to the US and neither did it invade the United States or Britain or any other country destined to send forces there to police the country. Iraq no more rolled the red carpet out for US forces than it welcomed with open arms the World Bank, the IMF, Halliburton, Parsons Group, Stevedoring Services of America, and a myriad other companies set to make vast profits from the country’s oil and the rebuilding and reconstruction of Iraq.

Moreover, there was always the risk that once Saddam was removed from power extremist groups would come to the fore and make Iraq far more unstable than under Ba’athist rule. This much had been acknowledged by President Bush senior (the one with more functioning brain cells) during the first Gulf War and lay behind Washington’s decision not to support US-inspired revolts of the Iraqi Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. It made sound US sense to have Saddam crush these revolts mercilessly rather than have him removed and the country fragment. The very forces the US feared would be unleashed following the toppling of Saddam are now on the rampage – they might have loathed Saddam, but hate the US more.

As Bush’s badly designed occupation struggles on, it continues to inflict more misery upon an Iraq fed up with decades of repression, war and uncertainty. Their long-crippled infrastructure, and the arbitrary and unruly search and arrest-without-charge procedures by US soldiers, provoke bitterness and anger among Iraqis. All of this considered, are attacks, such as that on the UN base in Baghdad surprising? We could well be forgiven for asking why such attacks are not in fact more ferocious.

We might ask where was the UN mission in Rwanda when 1 million were being hacked to death during the Tutsi-Hutu conflict? Where the US attempts to try to install democracy in Rwanda? Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive of a situation the UN has been involved in that has not had some strategic interest to the US. Would the UN have a mission in Iraq if the country’s sole export was dates?

This is not to condone the attack. It was terrible loss of life – those killed being warm-hearted, well intentioned workers, joining the UN because of a desire to help others. The sad fact is that they were killed trying to sort out a mess of US making. Moreover their deaths are shrouded in a veil of lies. They might have believed they were in Baghdad to help bring stability to a long-suffering people, but the real reason is that the US needs a stable Iraq to help with the theft of its oil. Furthermore, the US would have us believe they were killed by outsiders – they need our support for their “War on Terror”! But what is apparent now is that the US and Britain are seen as the real “outsiders” and are now neck deep in a guerrilla war, a war of struggle and self-determination, and the kind waged against outside aggressors and colonial masters for centuries.