Following are excerpts from the Nov. 17 speech in Detroit's Cobo Hall by Sam Marcy, chairperson of Workers World Party.
In Detroit, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Paris, no matter where on the planet, there is but one most urgent issue today. We are faced with a world war.
The mere fact that hostilities have not yet started is not that significant. The most important industrialized nations of the capitalist world are fully involved in it; this cannot but be regarded as the most ominous sign for all the workers of the world and first of all for the workers right here in the United States.
It's not just a group of nations banding together in order to carry on intervention in a small country. That's not the whole story. Its greater importance is that it's a united thrust of all the imperialist powers in the world against the oppressed people of the world and the working class. I think this has to be brought home very sharply and clearly, and our Party is devoting all its efforts to making this very clear.
It is still regarded as a peripheral issue in U.S. politics. Our problem as Marxists, as Leninists, as revolutionary defenders of the cause of the working class, is to define the class character of the war. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of a war is it?
If we do not address ourselves to this question first and foremost, then we are not Marxists, we are not leaders of a proletarian tendency that recognizes that class struggle is the primary mover in society.
This war is a war of the capitalist class, worldwide.
Its immediate attention is focused on what appears to be a small, faraway country of little consequence. The bourgeoisie is trying to explain to us that what is involved here is really a humanitarian gesture on the part of the so-called civilized nations against those who are uncivilized. The viciousness of this alone should raise the ire and class consciousness of the average worker.
Take Britain, a colonial power that has been oppressing millions of people for hundreds of years. Have they become humanitarian all of a sudden and interested in the fate and destiny of some small country in faraway Arabia? Is that what interests capitalist Germany, they who only a few decades ago were involved in the most brutal slaughter of people and would have done it on a world scale if they had not been defeated?
And it's not only those that are dominated by a white capitalist ruling class. Involved also is Japanese imperialism, which oppressed a billion people in Asia and carried out a brutal war for years against China, Korea, Vietnam, all of southeast and north Asia. And let's not forget France, an oppressor colonial regime in North and Equatorial Africa.
But we don't want to cite just the foreign imperialists. That's opportunist, to cast the foreigners in the role of villains and leave out your own capitalist bourgeoisie. No. It is the U.S. ruling class which is the ringleader of the conspiracy to unite the ruling classes of the capitalist world against the masses of oppressed everywhere.
They're telling us that a small country was invaded by another Arab country and that that is horrendous. In fact, they say, the leader of that country is as bad as Hitler himself. And it is absolutely necessary for the American people to unite behind the president and send half a million troops to stop the invasion of this small country.
And who is telling this to us? The very people who invaded the smallest of all countries, Grenada! And they never asked the United Nations if they should do it.
Didn't the U.S. take California from Mexico? Wasn't Arizona populated by Mexicans, and invaded illegally by the United States? What about Texas? Puerto Rico? All this is the result of intervention and the seizure of territory. The United States is built upon the illegal seizures of land and property from the Native people to whom it belonged.
Are we to forget this just because the capitalist press doesn't want to mention it?
In the first few weeks of this war, the mass of the working class was taken by surprise and pulled into it. That happens in every capitalist war. The capitalists have the press, the radio, all the repressive forces in their hands. As Marx says, the ideas of any time are the ideas of the ruling class because they've got the instruments to indoctrinate the people and the people do not have their own press. There is no free press — no, not in Detroit either.
What do these robbers have in common, they who have always fought each other tooth and nail, who have conducted two world wars against each other which have taken millions of lives? How come they have gotten together all of a sudden? How have they been able to rope in the United Nations Security Council as though it were a toy in their hands, getting it to pass one cowardly resolution after another against an oppressed country?
Now they've got 10 resolutions denouncing Iraq and preparing the people of the world for the slaughter that is sure to take place unless the mass of the workers all over the world stand up as a class, with all the other oppressed peoples, and stop it.
It's the most dangerous development we have faced since the Second World War. What are we going to do?
This war concentrates all of the struggles of the working class. Every kind of struggle of a progressive character that takes place is affected by this kind of war. It diverts the struggles of the women, of the gays and lesbians, the national struggle of all the oppressed — it pushes them aside and says there's a more important war to be fought. It tends to nullify the class struggle and to disintegrate everything that is progressive.
Name any struggle and you will see as this war goes on that it will be nullified or made so insignificant as to be irrelevant. That is why the anti-war struggle must be given predominance over every other, because it is the most intense and most concentrated class struggle that there is.
If we don't say it's a class war, a war of the oppressor against the oppressed, of the exploiters against the exploited, of the capitalists against the workers and oppressed people of the world, then we are not telling the whole truth.
Historically, that's what happened in the American working class movement, in particular the more progressive ones and those who called themselves socialist. We've got to go over the history in order to strengthen our own hands.
While they vigorously conducted the class struggle, they rarely mentioned the necessity to carry on an anti-racist struggle. They always thought that socialism will come first, and then we will free everybody.
But we can't fight for socialism unless we fight against racism first.
That's one of the most important characteristics of the early workers' movement in the United States, and in particular the socialist sects. They took a great deal from Marx and the Communist Manifesto, his language and so on, but did not grasp the motive force of the struggle in the United States insofar as the struggle of the Black people was concerned, even a hundred years ago.
No wonder that socialist movement disintegrated, even though Marx and Engels fought to teach them the right lessons of the Civil War.
There's also the struggle against the First World War 50 years later. There was a growing and promising socialist movement which did believe in the class struggle. But when the war came closer to the shores of the United States, they did not link up the anti-war struggle with the class struggle and the struggle for socialism. Only a small part of it understood the need to carry on an anti-war struggle together with the struggle against capitalism.
What happened? Along came a demagogue from the Democratic Party named Woodrow Wilson who promised the people that he would not involve this country in any foreign war. A great many socialists deserted the Socialist Party in order to elect this candidate of the capitalist class who had promised peace. And only three years after his election, he threw the whole country into the war and jailed those leaders who were against it.
That's a lesson about capitalist politicians and why it is necessary to have our own party that is divorced from capitalism and is in a constant and relentless struggle to expose it on all fronts.
What do we see today? For many weeks, there was a conspiracy of silence about the nature of this war that is taking place. Organizations that have been devoted to peace, pacifist organizations that normally are the first to get out on the streets and protest against the war, sat on their hands and kept quiet while the Bush administration mobilized more and more troops and sent them abroad.
The capitalist press kept silent as to the true class character of the war, but viciously chauvinist as far as conducting the war. There was a dead silence on this continent as to the nature of this war. Nobody of significance raised their voice. We watched it and decided that we ourselves would help initiate a broad movement against the imperialist war and that the masses will learn through bitter experience that they have to oppose this war because it is led by the bosses and the bankers against an oppressed country, against the peasants and workers there.
We have participated in building an important coalition that, because of the very successful initiatives it has taken, is now recognized as the opposition to the war, even by the bourgeois press.
And now what happens? The ruling class says they have opened up a debate. Before you know it they have several congress people with eminent reputations challenging the president on the question of war powers, reminding him that there's a Constitutional provision that only Congress can declare war. They're saying some of the things that have been on our leaflets day in and day out.
What's up? What's happening when war hawks like Senator Sam Nunn, who was vicious on the Vietnam War, all of a sudden become doves? What happened to a senator like Moynihan, who seems to have been asleep all this time but is suddenly denouncing the president, saying, ``So many people will be killed, why don't we spend the money at home?"
They have started a phony debate in Congress on this issue. The purpose of it is to derail the anti-war movement, get it off the streets and make it a talking point in Congress between the president and a handful of congress people. It's not really on how to stop the war or how to withdraw the troops.
But what are they proposing that seems like they are against the war?
They're saying let's not have a military offensive against Iraq, let's not insist upon the withdrawal of troops from Kuwait first, let's talk it out. Sounds reasonable. But they are also saying, let's continue an economic war, an embargo and sanctions. And what does that mean?
It means that they are trying to explain to the president that a military offensive will bring about a regional revolutionary upsurge in the Arabian peninsula, will bring out all the Arab people against the U.S. It would be better, they say, to contrive a slow method of economic war, of starving the people to death, of not letting anything go in or out of the country except minor items. They're proposing a form of genocide that differs only in form. And they call it sanctions, an embargo.
But look what lies behind the word sanctions. It means a war to the death by other than military means. And they say if these methods fail, then start a military war and at the same time build up the troop movement to maximum capacity. Now how could that be a peaceful approach?
How could that possibly mean a progressive, democratic approach to ending the hostilities on a worldwide scale?
This century the United States has fought a great number of wars, large and small. Has Congress ever opposed a war? They have senators who have spoken against it, but they haven't stopped one war. Why would it be any different now?
All the more is it necessary for us to mobilize now, before the war actually starts.
Last updated: 23 March 2018