September 11--There are so many aspects to the Helsinki summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachev that one could easily get lost in the maze of detail and varying interpretations.
However, the fundamental fact that emerges is that the USSR has joined with U.S. imperialism in a worldwide cooperative alliance against the oppressed people. This is the meaning of the so-called "shoulder to shoulder" summit in Helsinki.
The meeting did not deal only with vague generalities. Bush rushed to Helsinki in order to obtain political and military support for U.S. imperialist intervention in the Arabian peninsula. Gorbachev, by joining in what he himself called a "solidarity" agreement with the U.S. at a time when the Arabian peninsula is besieged by a growing U.S. military deployment, left little doubt as to who is the target of this cooperation.
This cooperative agreement is not of the type that the USSR entered into with Britain and France in the 1930s as allies against the Axis powers--Italy, Germany and Japan. That was an attempt to utilize the divisions within world imperialism to defeat one while continuing a political struggle against the others.
Leaving aside the character of the ideological struggle that was conducted, it was certainly permissible for the USSR to use one section of the imperialists against another. An earlier example of how to divide one set of robbers against another, as Lenin put it in his Letter to American Workers, was the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany which the Bolsheviks signed under duress in 1918. They didn't try to paint up the treaty but themselves denounced it and urged the workers of Germany to reject it as annexationist on the part of the German imperialists.
Collaboration with predatory imperialism
What we witnessed in Helsinki was an altogether different matter. The entire emphasis of both the joint statement and the press conference was for cooperation and collaboration. Cooperation with whom? With the predatory, rapacious imperialists who have conducted two world wars, who are the deadliest enemies of the world's oppressed, and who for the first time since the Second World War have become united, at least for the present, in a scheme to recolonize the Arabian peninsula.
It is a bald lie to say that the U.S. will get out of the Middle East or of Saudi Arabia if the monarchy is restored in Kuwait. The U.S. will repeat the performance of Grenada and Panama. They won't go until they feel themselves securely emplaced.
Because of the magnitude of the venture--the Bush administration has hastily assembled the biggest naval armada since World War II--because of the fear that this will arouse a firestorm of protest worldwide, Bush rushed to Helsinki. The object was to corral a former ally of the oppressed people, which inspired and stimulated the anti-imperialist movement for 70 years, and turn it into a willing tool of imperialist brigandage.
The fact that Gorbachev is not willing to go all the way does not in the least minimize his shameless renunciation of the anti-imperialist character of the country that used to be called the leader of the socialist camp.
A great deal of public opinion is being misled by the fact that Gorbachev, in his press conference, hinted that the USSR was opposed to the use of military force, putting him in a better light than Bush. We suppose that is enough to satisfy the liberals. But there is also cooperation on a wider scale, which would be equivalent to the use of military force: the exchange of intelligence information between the U.S. and the USSR about Iraq; covert operations to strangle or destroy the Iraqi government. Once cooperation is agreed to it can take many forms.
Allowing food and medicine for Iraqi children also makes the Gorbachev administration look better than the imperialists. But it covers up the main issue--agreement on the intervention.
Of course, Gorbachev is fearful and unwilling to militarily join in the aggression against the Arab people. That would pose considerable problems for the Gorbachev governing group, which is still the administrator of a workers' state, however badly deformed and divided it may be as to class and nationality.
Gorbachev bridled when it was intimated in the joint press conference that U.S. dollars had bought his political agreement. However, the real issue is whether a quid pro quo in one form or another is the basis for their collaboration.
No Soviet material interests
Here we must understand the enormous difference between U.S. and Soviet interests in the Middle East. Certainly the USSR has geopolitical interests concerning its own security, especially now that U.S. forces are concentrated just 700 miles from its territory. But it has no material interests in the area, compared to the fabulous stake of U.S. capital.
However, the imperialists who are rushing to the brink of a war which could cost thousands and maybe even millions of lives have enormous motive forces driving them.
An article by Thomas Friedman in the Sept. 2 New York Times Week in Review section says there are reported to be "$900 billion in petrodollars invested by the Gulf states abroad." This could be somewhat exaggerated, but it also could be even higher than that.
The Gulf oil states are really adjuncts to the huge oil monopolies--especially Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Chevron (which used to be Standard of California and Gulf), British Petroleum and the Shell Group. Before the merger of Gulf and Socal, they were known as the Seven Sisters. It is these giant corporations which control the oil wealth and are interconnected with the super-banks of Western imperialism, where the wealth is kept.
The figure is worth pondering. Nearly one trillion dollars! We are talking about the most fabulous fortunes in world history. What would the imperialists, the oil companies, the multinational super-banks, the military-industrial complex, and the government of the U.S. not do to preserve, secure and expand such a fortune?
Karl Marx in a footnote to Capital quoted a bourgeois writer, T.J. Dunning, who summed up the driving forces of capitalism excellently: "With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10% will ensure its employment anywhere; 20% certain will produce eagerness; 50%, positive audacity; 100% will make it ready to trample all human laws; 300%, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated."
Now, consider the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has no part of that $900 billion, either as lender or depositor. It has no stakes in the oil resources of the Gulf states. It has not been given the right to explore or drill in any of these areas. States like Saudi Arabia do not even have diplomatic relations with the USSR.
The USSR, since its birth in the greatest revolution of the workers, peasants and soldiers in 1917, has had a very different relation to the so-called Third World than the imperialists. Even after the Leninist period, when the USSR lost much of its militancy and revolutionary momentum, it remained as a source of inspiration and considerable material aid to the oppressed peoples.
As it became more industrialized, it embarked upon the construction of huge and necessary projects in the oppressed countries. It aided China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and other revolutionary countries. It helped nonsocialist governments, as in Egypt. The great Aswan dam, an example of the knowhow of Soviet technology, was built in the face of daily opposition and aggression, including a Franco-British attempt to invade Egypt in 1956. John Foster Dulles of the U.S. had earlier refused to sell to the government of Egypt, headed by Gamel Abdul Nasser, the necessary equipment to build the dam.
The U.S. never forgave the Nasser government for overthrowing the Farouk monarchy, any more than they can forgive the Iraqi leaders for overthrowing the monarchy in 1958.
Role of UN
What does the Gorbachev administration hope to get out of its cooperation with the imperialists? A Middle East conference? A conference can only concretize what has become a fact politically or on the battlefield. No great revolution or social change in favor of the masses has ever occurred as a result of a diplomatic conference.
The UN has not solved a single important international question in all the years of its existence. It was a cover for the U.S. Korean adventure. It left a divided country, with nuclear bombs and over 40,000 U.S. troops in south Korea. In the Vietnam War, not one resolution ever came out of the UN denouncing U.S. military adventurism.
Its only success has been in validating what was already accomplished on the battlefields, as in Zimbabwe and Namibia. But the UN has not stopped one intervention by U.S., British or French imperialism and it will not stop the U.S.-supported occupations of Arab territories by Israel.
We have already written of how the UN on Aug. 2 passed a unanimous resolution denouncing Iraq's intervention into Kuwait. Then followed resolutions calling for an embargo against Iraq and a naval blockade to enforce it.
Just prior to the announcement of the summit meeting, UN Secretary General Perez de Cuellar met with the Foreign Minister of Iraq. What had been expected to be a comprehensive dialogue instead ended abruptly with the Secretary General going to the unusual length of publicly stating his disappointment with Iraq's position. He didn't first present the contents of his report to the UN Security Council. Instead, he framed his public statements of disappointment in such a way as to make it appear that further discussion was virtually impossible.
This shifted the focus of discussions from the UN Security Council to the so-called superpowers. It was an indignity to the Security Council members that should have elicited some objections.
But that's its superficial aspect. The deeper significance is that the UN Security Council is a rubber stamp for U.S. imperialist demands, especially now that there is collaboration with the USSR, leaving all others out in the cold.
How important is all this? Let us look at it from the point of view of the overwhelming majority of the human race, who are peoples of color.
The question of color, of race, is not unimportant in the contemporary world. It is true that the class struggle is the overriding contradiction in society, and that the class struggle has been the motivating factor in all preceding class societies. But the color line is important, especially when the overwhelming majority of the human race comes from people of color.
Bush and Gorbachev are regarded by a wide number of people as representatives of the Caucasians; as two white leaders in a world where the overwhelming majority are nonwhite. Of course, this has not been brought up in the capitalist press today, nor in the Soviet press. But the millions of people who watch television or watch the newspapers know this. And it is a fact of considerable significance, when one deals not only in world affairs but also in domestic affairs.
It is not lost upon the world that there are 100 U.S. senators, 98 of whom are white. The population of the United States is at least 25-35% Black, Latino, Native and Asian people. A correct census would perhaps show a larger number of these nationalities, especially if immigrants known as "illegal aliens" are counted.
China, Third World left out
The two leaders might have invited de Cuellar to sit at the summit as mediator or representative of the UN. A much more critical problem, particularly for the USSR and from a different angle for the U.S., was whether China should also have been included in this discussion. That would show that the Third World was a factor to be considered.
And it would address another issue. Is there still a residue left of socialist solidarity and fraternal relationships between the USSR and China? Is the 1950 Friendship Treaty still in force? It was directed against the imperialist powers and strengthened the defense of the socialist countries against the military interventions of imperialism.
To leave China out of the discussion of war and peace in the Middle East, a strategic area of the world, is to in reality humiliate China. It is to stimulate further the national antagonisms between the two largest contiguous countries in the world. It's to multiply the errors made by Khrushchev in his summit meetings with Eisenhower and Kennedy, when he disregarded a socialist ally until the relationship turned from friendship and solidarity into outright hostility.
Of course, for the U.S. it is quite important to leave China out of the summit, especially since China resolutely hurled back a U.S.-inspired if not totally U.S.-engineered counter-revolutionary uprising. The U.S. has every reason to continue to isolate, boycott and harass the Chinese government until it adopts the kind of economic reforms and so-called democratic processes which will bring back the "good old days" before the Chinese Revolution.
Bourgeois restoration looms in USSR
The summit and this new cooperation at the expense of the oppressed peoples have their roots in the vast and significant domestic changes in the USSR which have taken on a bourgeois restorationist aspect, particularly in the last period. If we are to believe what the Soviet press itself is now saying, the Supreme Soviet is about to start discussing a 500-day economic plan which involves such massive amounts of privatization as to endanger the very existence of the Soviet Union as a workers' state.
All this is still in the planning stage. But enough has already happened in the last few years to amount to outright sabotage of socialist industry and agriculture. Artificial shortages in the Soviet Union of even such items as bread are symptoms, not of the unworkability of the socialist system, but of attempts to undermine it. The masses are being prepared to blame the economic chaos on socialism rather than on the bourgeois grouping which has seized power and is headed in the direction of capitalist restoration.
How else can we explain the recent factional agreement between Gorbachev, the centrist, and Yeltsin, the outright bourgeois? But there is many a slip between the cup and the lip, and the masses have not yet spoken.
The imperialists, particularly the Bush administration, feel they must hurry and more fully embrace the Soviet leadership in order to rally it behind their attempt to take full and complete control of the entire Middle East. Nothing less than the recolonization of the entire region lies behind the huge, unprecedented military buildup which, even while the two so-called superpowers were issuing unctuous phrases about a peaceful settlement in the Middle East, continued unabated.
Of course, there are many assertions about an "Arab factor.'' Imagine the use of such offensive terminology! The people and region whose land is being invaded are merely a "factor" in the overall considerations of these two outside powers. Let no one be deceived, however, by assurances that the Arab governments support the UN Security Council measures against Iraq. All these extravagant phrases--"the world agrees that the aggressor must be contained," etc.--have yet to be tested.
The majority of the world's people are opposed to this unprecedented diplomatic and military realignment behind predatory imperialism.
Internal Arab struggles not the issue
To focus here on the question of the validity of Iraq's intervention in Kuwait is a red herring. What's right and what's wrong in the struggle between the Arab states, in the struggle of the working class and the oppressed against their oppressors at home--all of this is valid within the framework of the internal class struggles and the struggles of the Arab peoples for self-determination of the region. But when it is thrown in as a monkey wrench here in order to distract attention from the all-out assault on Iraq that imperialism is preparing, then it serves to weaken and even nullify the anti-imperialist struggle and to embolden the imperialists.
To do so is to revert to the naive view that the assassination of the Archduke of Austria was the issue behind the First World War, when in reality the war was over the redivision of the world's resources, over markets, quotas, and the struggle between the new expanding capitalist powers (Germany) and the weakened older ones (Britain).
What is involved now is another redivision of the oil supplies. It has become clearer every day as more leaks are made to the capitalist press by the Bush government that one of the principal aims of the imperialists is to finish off OPEC, to get rid of it lock, stock and barrel.
In the view of the imperialists, OPEC has played too big a role. The imperialists at first adapted themselves to the situation created by the oil boycott of the 1970s. The popular misconception prevailed for a number of years that OPEC was a free and independent entity able to arbitrarily set quotas and prices. It held a "knife at the throat" of the world's oil supply, according to Carter's White House aide Eisenstadt. The giant oil companies, you see, had nothing to do with it. This was used to inflame public opinion and raise prejudices against the Arab peoples.
The truth, of course, was that the oil companies never really relinquished control. The nationalizations which took place, such as in Kuwait, were really deceptive. The hundreds of billions in petrodollars flowed only in one direction--into the Western imperialist banks, notably Citicorp, Morgan Guaranty, Bankers Trust, Chemical Bank and Manufacturers Hanover.
This was the inescapable result of the circulation of capital in an imperialist-controlled economy. Let's say the Kuwait Petroleum Company wished to make a deposit of a billion dollars. It could only put it in Western imperialist banks, which could secure the deposit and meet any demand for immediate withdrawal. And if withdrawn, they would have no alternative but to redeposit it in another imperialist bank.
Any worker with a paycheck faces the same problem. There is no escaping the banking system, either at home or abroad.
The small Gulf states have no real capacity to utilize their funds for modernization via the advances of the scientific-technological revolution, or even to establish themselves as independent capitalist states. They are inhibited by their history and size (in Kuwait, most of the people are not citizens but foreign workers). Iraq is larger and can afford to purchase weapons to defend itself against imperialist aggression.
The imperialists as well as the USSR were perfectly willing to sell Iraq weapons. When the Iraqis, by mistake, shot a missile into a U.S. warship during the Iraq-Iran war, it was an Exocet from France. Which in turn raised the price of the missile. Iraq's effort to attain nuclear capability was supplied by the Germans, French and others. When the Israeli government flagrantly destroyed the facility, nothing but a harmless, ceremonial resolution condemning the attack was passed in the UN, over the objections of the U.S.
The whole world situation has changed dramatically because of the development of telecommunications, computerization, advances in the technology of oil exploration and drilling, as well as geology. All of this has made it more imperative that the imperialists redivide the booty of the Arabian peninsula. The advantages that the imperialists were willing to concede to OPEC no longer seem warranted to them. The rising tide of revolutionary consciousness in the entire Middle East has posed a continuing threat to this fabulous empire of oil.
Fragility of world banking system
But there's another element of urgency adding to the deep concerns of the imperialist powers over any political changes in the Middle East. The gargantuan sums of petrodollars we have been discussing are largely tied up at the present. A huge chunk has been reloaned or invested in Third World countries unable to pay their debts. Many of the loans to Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Nigeria and smaller countries have become "nonperforming." And some has been invested in highly speculative ventures, such as real estate in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and elsewhere.
The reader has followed the scandals of the S&L banks. But what goes on with the petrodollars deposited in Western banks puts the S&L scandals into the shade.
This all comes at a time when the banks worldwide are in their shakiest position since 1929. Any kind of political instability would disturb the shaky equilibrium in the financial institutions of the imperialist powers. From the banks to the oil companies to the military-industrial complex and to the very apex of the imperialist powers, particularly the U.S., they are painfully aware of this.
It is from this vantage point that we have to consider the attack against Iraq. What is at stake is not the corrosive, feudal monarchy of Kuwait which the imperialists would sell for a song if that suited their interests. What's involved is the fragile stability of the entire imperialist financial structure and its dependence upon this fabulous source of easy wealth.
Minor political disturbances and coups constantly wrack the world. They get little publicity or concern precisely because they have no economic, financial or strategic significance for the imperialist powers. But when an event touches their jugular vein, as T.J. Dunning said so well, there's not a crime in the world they won't commit to insure their fabulous super-profit. That's the fundamental issue.
When, in June 1982, the Israelis were raining death and destruction on Lebanon aided by the U.S., the liberal establishment here was mobilizing one million people in New York to call for peace and disarmament. Just about all the speakers on that beautiful June day failed to take note of this truly barbaric crime against the Lebanese people.
Why then are they so concerned today with the Kuwait situation, where not even one single casualty arising from the invasion has been confirmed by the viciously hostile imperialist press? Does this not in itself speak volumes?
Doesn't it explain that it is profits, not people they are concerned with? The mass of the workers and oppressed people everywhere should unite in the broadest possible front against the imperialist intervention in the Middle East and denounce it as an act of aggression.