On Feb. 29 New York City will be host to the International War Crimes Tribunal. It will be the first anti-war body to indict, prosecute and judge the U.S. government's criminal conduct and its merciless war against the Iraqi people.It is especially important that this world body will consider the U.S. government's conduct and its war against Iraq right in the citadel of imperialism itself. It is one thing to condemn U.S. aggression from outside the U.S. It is another matter to be able to do it in the belly of the beast itself.
When the African National Congress last year held its first convention in South Africa in nearly three decades, with many foreign guests in attendance, the huge mass rally applauded most vigorously at mention of the delegation from Iraq. This is not likely to happen in the U.S. at a time when the capitalist press has gone all out in its efforts to vilify not only the Iraqi government and its leaders, but the people as a whole.
However, holding the tribunal here is bound to have a significant effect as the chauvinist hysteria against Iraq recedes, which it ultimately will.
The tribunal comes against the background of revelations that the Pentagon is planning to expand its war-fighting capability into every corner of the globe at an enormous and unprecedented cost. It is going full-steam ahead with such shameless scorn and contempt for the public that it leaked the plan to the New York Times, neglecting to first show it to the principal members of the Senate and House who have to pass it on to Congress as a whole. So even Sam Nunn, a hard-liner on military appropriations in the Carter administration and now chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had to publicly protest.
Tribunals in Roman times
The term tribunal is derived from the Latin tribunus. The tribunal is not a strictly judicial body in the sense that it derives its authority from any state. It is more like the tribunals that developed in Rome around 470 B.C.
The tribunal combines within it not only a judicial but an advocacy role. This became the practice later in the Roman period when tribunes were the people who represented the plebeian (popular) masses as against the patricians (landed aristocracy).
In the second century popular tribunes like Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and his brother Caius Sempronius organized a strong resistance among the plebeian masses against the patricians, for land reform and debtor relief. The aristocrats had amassed enormous wealth at the expense of the plebeian masses, who became indebted to the usurers and the latifundians (landed aristocracy).
The Gracchi brothers lacked judicial or political authority. But by virtue of organizing and giving voice to the masses, they exercised power as though they had both. The Gracchi brothers were murdered, but later tribunes did attain such authority.
The War Crimes Tribunal does not have state authority to haul in George Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, or CIA head Robert Gates. But it can exercise tremendous moral authority by stimulating worldwide sentiment against the crimes the U.S. government has committed.
Moral authority can become a political force once the masses become imbued with it and are organized.
The Anti-Imperialist League
The tribunal comes almost 100 years after the Anti-Imperialist League was formed. It was the very first organization in the U.S. to recognize the significance of U.S. aggressive policies abroad, especially during and after the Spanish-American War of 1898.
A great deal has been written about the role in that war of one of the most venal of chauvinist newspapers, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Hearst was no passive spectator and chronicler of events.
The artist Frederic Remington--whom Hearst had dispatched to Cuba to send back pictures of Spanish atrocities and whip up sentiment for a war with Spain--cabled to New York: "Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return." Hearst cabled back: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." ("William Randolph Hearst," by John K. Winkler, Avon Books, 1955)
Hearst rallied support for the war on the basis that the U.S. would end Spain's brutal colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. But those who were more far-sighted saw it as an imperialist venture by the U.S. to establish its own dominion in these countries.
The Spanish-American War aroused considerable opposition in the U.S. Unfortunately, the tide of history seemed to be against the development of a strong anti-imperialist movement at that time. For one thing, imperialism as a sociological concept was not yet fully understood in the U.S. It was mostly seen as a particular policy pursued by a particular administration of the government, such as that of Theodore Roosevelt or later Woodrow Wilson.
It was not understood that imperialism was a specific and organic phase of capitalist development, and that the early competitive phase of capitalism was giving way to its monopolist stage.
There was a progressive working class struggle raging, but the socialists' attention at the time was mostly turned to the white workers. Inadequate attention was paid to the Black struggle, when the Black masses were chained to virtual semi-servitude and the revolutionary gains made during the period of Reconstruction had been abandoned by the Northern bourgeoisie in collusion with the Southern Bourbons.
This is a highly instructive lesson in the class politics of the bourgeoisie. It should be gone over again and again in order to organize the multi-national working class in independent and irreconcilable struggle against the bourgeoisie.
Divorcing two aspects of same struggle
At that time, the leaders of the working class, except for the most militant, like Eugene V. Debs, conducted the class struggle separately from the struggle against capitalist and imperialist war. On the other hand, the most progressive elements among the liberal bourgeoisie and radical intellectuals directed their efforts against imperialist intervention, but didn't necessarily see it as an extension of capitalist development. So on both sides the working class struggle at home was seen as separate from the question of imperialist expansion and war.
This unfortunate dichotomy that began 100 years ago still needs to be bridged. The anti-war movement has only recently begun to address workers as a class.
This divorce between the two most important aspects of the struggle against capitalist exploitation does not come from a lack of intellectual capacity. It can only be explained on the basis of the monstrous growth of monopoly capitalism.
At the turn of the century, roughly the time when the Anti-Imperialist League was formed, the concept that imperialism was a stage in the development of capitalism was first emerging. It took on ever more vigorous momentum in the years that followed.
When the Standard Oil Company was formed in 1911 after the Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil Trust, the Rockefellers elicited strong but contradictory reactions. The liberal and progressive press pilloried them for their greed and avarice, but the capitalist press praised them for their philanthropic endeavors.
Few if any saw the growth of the Rockefeller oil empire as a product of the organic tendency of capitalist development to stretch its tentacles outside the U.S. Few made the connection between the struggle for the division of markets, especially in oil, and imperialist war.
Connecting symptoms with causes
Yet the Rockefellers were already building a worldwide empire. Just a year after Standard Oil was formed, it culminated a long struggle with Royal Dutch and Shell by opening a subsidiary in far-off Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.
Even in 1975, after the so-called energy crisis arising out of the OPEC oil boycott, the author Anthony Sampson fell far short of linking these seven giant oil companies, which he described so well in "The Seven Sisters" (Viking Press, New York), with imperialism and its ultimate consequence--war.
Likewise, while a later book by Peter R. Odell ("Oil and World Power," 1982), dealt with the Arab-Israeli War, it did not by a long shot see the oil monopolists as principal fomenters and instigators of imperialist war.
Even Harvey O'Connor, well-known as a radical when he wrote "The Empire of Oil" (Monthly Review Press, 1955), had the same limitations. When the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 broke out, this writer phoned O'Connor in an effort to get him to endorse a demonstration against U.S.-Israeli aggression in the Middle East. His answer: Oh no, it's the Arabs who are the aggressors.
His view flowed strictly from the formal standpoint of who fired the first shots. It discarded altogether the relationship between oppressor and oppressed that he himself had shown in his books.
Would anyone ask today which side fired the first shot in the American Revolution?
Right now so-called peace talks engineered by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker are taking place between a Palestinian and an Israeli delegation. In the midst of these negotiations, the Israelis launched a massive attack against Lebanon. The Lebanese and Palestinian masses retaliated by attacking Israeli positions. The Israelis, of course, insist that the Palestinians fired the first shot.
Hanan Ashrawi, chief spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation, says this is merely discussing the symptoms but not the cause--which is the Israelis' illegal occupation of Palestine. She might have added that the fundamental cause is the intrusion of imperialism into Arab lands for the sole purpose of ravaging their wealth and resources, most of all oil.
The first to raise the question of imperialism as a new phenomenon in capitalist development was the English economist J.A. Hobson, who was later followed by the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding. Lenin brought it all up to date in his classic analysis, "Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism." How little it is understood today. Lenin didn't just describe imperialism but showed that imperialist war was a product of capitalism. He also showed that it was the precursor to socialist revolution.
Fighting World War I
At the time of World War I, this country's most outstanding fighter against the imperialist bloodbath was Eugene Victor Debs. He had developed from a militant and widely loved trade union leader into a revolutionary socialist with an internationalist perspective. Debs spoke out passionately against the war.
In a letter to Upton Sinclair in 1915, when Europe was already at war and the U.S. was preparing to join in, Debs wrote: "I want the workers to prepare to resist and put an end to ... our own predatory plutocracy right here at home. I do not know of any foreign buccaneers that could come nearer skinning the American workers to the bone than is now being done by the Rockefellers and their pirate pals. The workers have no country to fight for. It belongs to the capitalists and plutocrats. Let them worry over its defense, and when they declare wars as they and they alone do, let them also go out and slaughter one another on the battlefields." (From "Eugene V. Debs" by Ray Ginger, Collier Books, 1962)
Later asked if he was opposed to all wars, Debs replied: "I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. ... I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the worldwide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades. That is where I stand and where I believe the Socialist Party stands, or ought to stand, on the question of war."
His position was similar to that of the Zimmerwaldists in the European social democratic movement. They met after the outbreak of the war, called for the workers to turn their guns against their own capitalists and denounced the social democratic leaders who had voted for war credits.
Even as early as 1912, the socialist leaders had met in Basel, Switzerland. They passed a resolution that if capitalist war broke out, the workers' duty was not to support this or that capitalist country but to use the war crisis and turn it into a struggle against capitalism. All the socialist leaders who attended the conference had supported that resolution.
But when the war actually broke out, it was another matter.
Lenin at Zimmerwald
The German Social Democratic Party, the leading party in the world socialist movement at the time, capitulated to the wave of chauvinism. With the sole exception of Karl Liebknecht, its deputies in the Reichstag voted for war appropriations. The French Socialists then followed suit, as did the Belgians, Italians and others.
Those in the Socialist International who regarded this as an act of treachery met in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in September 1915 to decide what to do. The betrayal had had a catastrophic effect, virtually destroying the International as a force in the world struggle against capitalism.
The tremendous shock, confusion and demoralization that followed the collapse of the Socialist International can in some measure be compared to the effect Gorbachev's and then Yeltsin's capitulation to imperialism--which had been foreshadowed by earlier administrations of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union--has had on the movement today.
Even at Zimmerwald, the socialist leaders were divided. The more moderate grouping confined itself to general pronouncements against the capitalist war. But Lenin's program carried the struggle forward to a more practical political stage. He said it was the workers' duty to turn their guns against the capitalists. The issue was not which capitalist was the lesser evil or which had started the shooting.
The duty of the workers in each capitalist country was to regard the defeat of their own capitalist government as the lesser evil. This was hard for the moderates to accept.
From then until the end of his life, Lenin continued to promote the view that workers in each imperialist country should regard their own capitalist government as the fundamental enemy. That would have the effect of uniting the proletariat in solidarity against imperialist war rather than just abstractly denouncing it.
The Zimmerwaldists who sided with Lenin were called the "defeatist" tendency--for the defeat of their own capitalist governments by class struggle warfare. Of course, they were not for aiding the enemy. The others were called the defensists.
This was classic Leninism. After his death, it was watered down beyond recognition into pure bourgeois pacifism. (See "Bolsheviks and War" by Sam Marcy, WW Publishers, 1985)
Debs and the Socialist Party
In the United States, Debs too wanted to make a clean break from the "war-socialists" in the Socialist International. But such prominent leaders in the U.S. Socialist Party as Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger opposed him.
The Socialist Party did meet in an emergency convention in St. Louis on April 17, 1917, the day after the U.S. entered the war. The party issued a strong anti-war document endorsed by 80 percent of the delegates. When this report was later submitted to a nationwide referendum of the party, it received an even higher vote.
"The Socialist Party of the United States," read the statement, "in the present grave crisis reaffirms its allegiance to the principle of internationalism and working class solidarity the world over, and proclaims its unalterable opposition to the war just declared by the government of the United States....
"The ghastly war in Europe was not caused by an accidental event, nor by the policy or institutions of any single nation. It was the logical outcome of the competitive capitalist system...."
The Socialist Party stood by this only as long as there was merely preparation for the war. But Congress soon passed the Sedition Act, and those opposing the war were jailed by the hundreds.
The economy began to boom with war production, and a campaign of violence and hysteria against the socialists took hold. Their meetings against the war, which had attracted tens of thousands in small and large cities and towns across the country began to falter. Debs himself was indicted under the new Sedition Act for his militant speeches against the war. He served two-and-a-half years of a 10-year sentence before he was finally pardoned in 1921 by President Warren Harding.
The resolution passed in St. Louis, while not as sharp as Lenin's formulation, would have been quite adequate within the framework of the U.S. had the Socialist Party lived up to it.
Debs had condemned the European Socialist leaders as traitors to the movement. But it was one thing to see the treachery of the Socialist leaders in Europe; it was another matter altogether to be able to prepare the Party to organize against the war.
The capitalist government led by Woodrow Wilson had begun lining up the masses for war with its "preparedness campaign." The capitalist press almost uniformly began a most jingoistic, chauvinist tirade--not merely flag-waving but inciting wholesale intimidation of workers' organizations and particularly of anti-war demonstrations.
Debs himself was aware of the disarray in the movement and the inevitable confusion in the party as the result of the witch-hunt. But unfortunately he proved incapable of taking the bull by the horns. He did not go to the St. Louis convention--which while it had moderate socialists and right-wingers as well as some ultra-lefts, nevertheless passed this important resolution which for that time was highly progressive.
Instead of asserting his strong moral and political leadership, he who disdained factionalism did not see the necessity for vigorously intervening and pushing the revolutionary position he had made public on many occasions. Even after several carloads of workers drove 100 miles from the convention to his house in Terre Haute, Ind., to entreat him to come, he still stayed away.
What can be learned from this convention is that the Socialist Party at that time, while it was broad in scope, did not have the necessary discipline. It was based too much on voluntarism. It was by no means a Bolshevik Party of the type Lenin had built up in Russia to fight against the war and the capitalists.
Characteristics of a Leninist party
The imperialist holocaust and the subsequent struggles of the working class showed that in the face of a sudden attack leaders are sometimes paralyzed by indecision. They may be overly influenced by the temporary confusion among the masses and get engulfed by the war psychosis deliberately created by the imperialist press, which itself is basically an agent of the warmongering ruling class.
Debs never retracted his firm convictions. He continued his revolutionary position against the war. But where he failed was as a party leader. The party itself was not fully prepared for the war; it was not organized on the kind of basis that would enable it to meet the challenge of a witch-hunt. It lacked the flexibility to be able to combine legal and illegal actions during an imperialist holocaust; to adjust itself when, after a growing mass movement, there is a temporary decline; and then to prepare for a recovery of the struggle.
One of the fundamental teachings of Leninism was on how to prepare the party to survive during periods when it is only a small circle, then move to the head of the masses when later there's a stormy period, but retain the flexibility to adjust itself to a decline of the movement by correctly analyzing each new relationship of class forces. It must learn how to retreat in the face of superior forces and how to regroup, all without abandoning its revolutionary positions.
The U.S. Socialist Party was not prepared for the twists and turns of a war situation. It had had no real experience. Basically, it had adapted to gradualist struggle, unlike the Bolsheviks who went through three revolutions and were able to adjust themselves to new situations (although not without great losses).
At the present time, as the U.S. takes on itself the role of mastering, exploiting and oppressing the rest of the world, what is needed more than ever is a thoroughgoing proletarian organization that has assimilated the lessons of the worldwide revolutions. One of the most crucial teachings of Leninism, as borne out by experience on a world scale in the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, is that peace under capitalism, as Lenin tirelessly explained, is only an interval between imperialist wars.