For months, the ANSWER Coalition and others have organized
protests and community meetings against NATO’s assault on Libya. The
Libya war proves once again that it is not sufficient to be simply a
political activist against war in general. Many peace activists and some
socialists did nothing to oppose this war, or remained safely silent.
To confront the challenges of building an effective anti-war movement,
one must understand the driving forces behind war in the modern epoch.
Lenin’s thesis on imperialism are as critical for today’s movement as
they were in World War I, when the socialist movement split into two
camps: one militantly opposing imperialism and the other accomodating
itself to imperialist pressure.
The First World War (1914-1918) was, until that time, the bloodiest military
conflict in history. Seventeen million people died and another 20 million were
wounded. But what was it all about? Most people would echo the lyric in Bob
Dylan’s 1962 song: “The reason for fighting, I never did get.”
At the start of World War I, a large socialist movement existed throughout
the capitalist countries of Western Europe, and even in the United States. Every
socialist group had pledged that that they would militantly oppose the war
should it break out. At socialist conferences and meetings, they passed
resolutions and made speeches against imperialism.
But once the war began, with the media in each country hysterically demonizing
their respective “enemy” governments, the socialist movements folded almost
without exception. They either remained silent or found some reason to
rationalize support for their own government’s war effort. Eugene Debs was one
socialist leader who did not fold under the pressure; he was sentenced to 10
years at hard labor for his courageous stance against the U.S. entrance into
the war in 1917.
The most important political movement opposing World War I was led by Lenin
and the Bolsheviks in Russia. For their opposition they were sent to prison, exiled
to Siberia or killed. Their elected representatives in the Russian parliament,
the Duma, were arrested as traitors and faced the death penalty for voting against
the war spending bill. The general public, including many of the Bolsheviks’
working-class supporters, initially repudiated the Bolsheviks as agents of the
demonized enemy of Russia: Germany.
From exile, Lenin wrote a pamphlet in the middle of the war that explained
how the Bolsheviks justified their intractable anti-war position. His pamphlet,
widely known under the title “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” asserts
as its fundamental premise that each of the warring governments were driven to
war by the same motives, pressures and needs:
The principal feature of the latest stage of
capitalism is the domination of monopolist associations of big employers. These
monopolies are most firmly established when all the sources of raw
materials are captured by one group, and we have seen with what zeal the
international capitalist associations exert every effort to deprive their
rivals of all opportunity of competing, to buy up, for example, ironfields,
oilfields, etc. Colonial possession alone gives the monopolies complete
guarantee against all contingencies in the struggle against competitors,
including the case of the adversary wanting to be protected by a law
establishing a state monopoly. The more capitalism is developed, the more
strongly the shortage of raw materials is felt, the more intense the competition
and the hunt for sources of raw materials throughout the whole world, the more
desperate the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.
Although they had been marginalized and organizationally decimated by
repression because of their anti-war position at the time Lenin’s pamphlet was
published in 1916, the Bolsheviks achieved state power by the end of 1917 when
the masses of Russians turned against both the war and the Czar who led them
into the carnage.
A hallmark of the Bolsheviks’ program was a pledge, should they come to
power, to renounce all secret treaties between Czarist Russia and the other
capitalist governments who were their allies in WWI.
And on Nov. 23, 1917, just two weeks after taking power, the Bolsheviks fulfilled
their pledge, creating a massive diplomatic firestorm by publishing on the front
page of Pravda and Isvestia the full contents of the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty.
The Sykes-Picot Treaty was a completely secret arrangement by the
imperialists for the division and re-division of colonies and markets. Signed
in 1916 by the British, French and Russian governments, it divided the Arab World
and Western Asia into a set of colonies and spheres to be controlled by each of
them should they emerge victorious in the war against Germany and the Ottoman
Empire.
The Bolsheviks’ publication of the secret arrangement among the imperialists
had a historic effect on perceptions in the Arab World of the motives of
western capitalist countries who in public only talked in the most flowery
language about self-determination, freedom and democracy as their foreign-policy
motives.
Although Lenin did not know of the Sykes-Picot Treaty when he wrote his
pamphlet on imperialism in 1916, his assessment of the war motives of the
imperialists was fully confirmed.
Imperialist war—a century later
Even though the era of colonialism came to an end in the decades following World
War II, the core nature of imperialism and war, as described with such clarity
by Lenin in his 1916 pamphlet, is unchanged.
What Lenin wrote in 1916 is still just as true today. The characteristic
feature of modern monopoly capitalism is the endless competition to divide,
re-divide, and—in the case of Libya—re-conquer limited markets, precious raw
materials and resources that are in high demand by the largest corporations.
The dominant western powers are also involved in a protracted campaign to
eliminate all independent governments that came to power in the former colonies
and semi-colonies. These governments pushed out the military bases of the
colonizing powers and nationalized the property of western corporations.
Having toppled the Iraqi government and now Libya, the NATO powers have set
their sight on Syria next, and eventually Iran.
The fact that the targeted governments were or are bourgeois nationalist
regimes presiding over class societies is no excuse for the socialist movements
in western countries to get down on all fours in the face of an imperialist-inspired
demonization campaign against the regimes under attack.
Today, Britain, France and Italy (the colonial power in Libya until
Mussolini’s defeat in 1943) no longer possess their formal colonies in the
Middle East and North Africa. Like the United States, however, they have
maintained a neo-colonial authority over the economies of the former colonies. To
this end they have used a series of proxy, client and puppet regimes in the
former colonies. These proxy agents are a pampered elite, handsomely rewarded
to do the bidding of the foreign imperialists.
When they started the armed revolt in Libya in February 2011, the Libyan rebel
leadership known as the National Transition Council directly appealed for
military assistance, funds and military intervention from the old colonizing
powers—Britain, France and Italy—as well as the United States.
NATO powers used the same humanitarian and noble phrases to justify their
bombing campaign and covert military operations as they used to disguise their
imperial motives in World War I.
As they did with the Sykes-Picot Treaty, the imperialists who functioned as
allies to bring down the Gaddafi government and replace it with the National Transitional
Council have certainly made secret behind-the-scenes arrangements among
themselves to divide Libya’s vast oil contracts. Their Libyan proxies are well
aware of such deals and will be compliant, owing their new governmental power
to the imperialists.
Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager at Libyan rebel oil firm AGOCO, made this
all very clear recently while speaking to Reuters: “We don’t have a problem
with Western countries like the Italians, French and U.K. companies. But we may
have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil.”
“The emergence of a new set of leaders [in Libya] has already set oil
companies hustling to grab a stake of a hugely lucrative market,” according to
the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. The magazine front cover features a
picture of Gaddafi and the headline “Now About that Oil …”
