government by the IMF as part of a $4.8 billion financial rescue package. which given the stark and open options • America which is not going through political being posed, will radicalise many more people than the Vietnam war did.
The onset of war would certainly be a disappointment for thousands who have laboured to build the giant movement in Britain and many other countries. But this is a long-term battle.
In this anti-war movement positions are being taken, ideologies and loyalties forged, ..••••• which will not just last for weeks, but for years and even decades. The political capital is being assembled for the long term battle to defeat the new and frenzied stage of imperialism. Shockwaves in Latin America
Ithough it hardly makes it into the A
British papers, Latin America is being torn apart by the world economic crisis. The downturn in world trade and world financial crisis have hit dependent economies hardest, especially those who foolishly tied themselves to the dollar.
Over the past year this has literally brought destitution to the Argentinean masses - working class and middle class alike. For millions of people in that country the normal economy has collapsed, replaced by scavenging and barter.
Over time this will have a huge effect on the health and mortality rates of the poor. A huge social historic regression is taking place, similar in scale to what has happened in Russia after the collapse of communism.
Now a similar financial collapse has happened in Uruguay and Brazil's economy is threatened. Radical and nationalist politicians have been elected in a series of contries as a response to the crisis, most notably Lula, leader of the Workers' Party in Brazil, but also moderate leftist Lucio Gutierrez in Equador.
There is hardly a country in Latin Globalised business as usual in Indonesia: police smash a protest against utility price rises of up to 22 percent, imposed on crisis and turmoil. The election of leftwing leaders will give rise to social expectations which only revolutionary, anti-capitalist, measures can possibly meet. Moderate reforms are likely to achieve little in the light of economic crisis.
The World Bank reckons that even if the ultra-optimistic annual rate of output
... There is hardly a country in Latin America which is not facing political crisis and turmoil. Moderate reforms are likely to achieve little. ... .... growth in Latin America reached 4% for the next decade, it would only allow about 50% of the region's population to be lifted out of extreme poverty by 2015.
This means Latin America might see some relief after 13 years; meanwhile 150 million people are expected, in a superpoliticised continent, to live on less than two dollars a day. That is not going to happen. Dramatic social struggles are going to break out continent wide. World Social Forum Process
This is the picture facing the world in 2003. Rampant but crisis-ridden finance capital is desperately trying to defend its gains by deepening neoliberalism and creating mass poverty; workers in Europe and popular movements on other continents are fighting back; and imperialism is pushing ever harder for war.
(We might add, when meteorologists are saying that 2003 will be the hottest year on record, all this is in a period of ecological crisis). In this scenario of heightened global struggle that the global justice movement -all the parties, unions, social movements and campaigning organisations which came together in the World Social Forum and the European Social Forum in 2002 - has to face and politically respond to.
The first goal has been attained. A really massive international movement is being built, and it is transforming itself into a movement - without abandoning its original aims - also against imperialist war. A new world social forum is being held in january, and this year the European Social Forum will be in Paris. Eventually there is no substitute for a global anti-capitalist, revolutionary and socialist alternative.
In Britain socialists face a massive range of challenges, a huge agenda of tasks in the trade unions, in the anti-war movement, the Socialist Alliance and in the European Social Forum process. As the capitalist enemy becomes more frenzied, vicious and dangerous, our prospects have been transformed by the new spirit of resistance worldwide, which started, let us remember, not at Seattle in December 1999 (important though that was), but when the Zapatista guerrillas in Chiapas raised the banner of resistance to neoliberalism by their spectacular and totally unexpected armed rebellion on New Year's Day 1994. The Clash of Barbarisms: Sept Il and the Making of the New World Disorder, by Gilbert Achcar (Monthly Review Press 2002) Reviewed by Piers Mostyn recity worked and mobiled with he anti-war movement has corthe Islamic community - as well as defending it against racism, marginalisation and attack. However, this has not diminished the need for the left to develop a critical analysis of Islamic fundamentalism.
This new book is an important contribution to the debate among socialists about this issue. It weaves such an analysis into a history of the new imperialism of the US defence establishment in the decades since Vietnam.
Achcar is a leading member of the Fourth International. He edited a recent collection of writings on Ernest Mandel and was a key guest speaker at Marxism 200l. Now a Paris-based academic he previously lived in the Lebanon.
At the heart of the book, Achcar revisits articles he wrote on Islamic fundamentalism for Quatrime International and International Marxist Review in 1981 and 1987. These responses to the Iranian revolution and developments in Pakistan, Syria and Egypt have been updated with the benefit of a longerterm context, focussing on American policy in Saudi Arabia.
It is well known that Bin Laden and many other Al Qaeda fighters are "creations" of the CIA's involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Less well appreciated is how US backing for Islamic fundamentalism of the Wahhabite variety was part of a deliberate policy to both outflank the Iranian revolution and provide military and ideological stability for the Saudi regime.
n the aftermath of the 1974 oil crisis,
layers of the Arab petty bourgeoisie
and working class suffered from declining living standards and increased insecurity.
This threatened the stability of the absolutist monarchy running this key oil state -leading the USA to take virtual military control through deals providing multi-billion dollar profits for American and English arms industries (helping, incidentally, to finance the Reagan-Thatcher "boom" of the 1980s).
These circumstances provided both the social base and the ideology for the move ments that fought in Afghanistan and then turned to terrorism in the 1990s.
Achcar rejects any analysis of Islamic fundamentalism as "fascist" (albeit sharing some similarities in terms of social base). "objectively anti-imperialist" or in psychological terms (eg. mad or irrational). Instead he focuses on the historical processes that produced an ultra-puritan religious opposition to the Saudi regime (and parallel developments elsewhere creating a kind of "blowback".
As the title makes clear, the book labels this as "barbarism", a product partly of the vacuum created by the collapse of Arab socialist and Nationalist movements of the 1950s and | 960s. But contrary to the implication in the title he does not equate this and imperialism.
"The different barbarisms do not carry the same weight in the scales of justice", he writes. "Admittedly, barbarism can never be an instrument of 'legitimate self-defence'; it is always illegitimate by definition. But this does not change the fact that when two barbarisms clash, the strongest, the one that acts as the oppressor, is still the more culpable. Except in cases of manifest irrationality, the barbarism of the weak is most often, logically enough a reaction to the barbarism of the strong. Otherwise why would the
weak provoke the strong, at the risk of being crushed themselves?" The book is based on an article first published over a year ago, before the war drive shifted to Iraq, and has understandably little to say on that aspect of the current situation. But Achcar's stress on the post-Cold War shift in US military thinking from defence to "asymmetric dominance" does much to explain Bush's rush to war despite the obvious risks and US contempt for the weapons inspec tion process.
After September I | this led to a replace ment of a "threat based strategy" by a "capabilities based strategy". "US military readiness is now no longer supposed to be based on an estimate of military means in the hands of identified potential enemies, but on a summation of all the military means that could be used by any hypothetical adversary whatsoever", he comments
On this basis it would be irrelevant whether Iraq actually has any weapons or poses any present threat so long as it could do at some future point.
However more would have been wel come on Israel and on differences within the imperialist camp
The challenge is to eliminate the "funda. mental causes of barbarities", according to Achcar, who rightly reserves his main venom for US-led imperialism and the rot ten society it is based on. Anticipating devel opments in the year since writing this book he identifies the rapid growth in the struggle against neo-liberal globalisation as "our bes hope for defeating the wave of reaction".