The crumbling of the Warsaw Pact has accelerated the disintegration of the reactionary Atlantic military alliance. NATO was already strained because of sharper interimperialist competition among its members states and the shifts in alignments among the rival national capitalist classes.

The prospects for a united capitalist Europe with a single currency are pretty much nil. Instead, increasing rivalry and trade conflicts among the current members of the so-called European Union, and between them and the U.S. empire, are coming to the fore. Imperialism enters the 21st century in a weakened position. What's on the horizon is not a "New World Order" with Washington at the helm, but growing instability and capitalist world disorder filled with the prospect of world war.

This is what could be glimpsed through the diplomatic obfuscations, and some of the more candid remarks, uttered at the NATO meeting in Berlin. And this is what Margaret Thatcher, just like Richard Nixon four years ago - both heads of state who retired involuntarily - pointed to in her blunt speech at Westminster College.

The fact is that U.S. imperialism has lost the Cold War.

The Cold War was the term used - somewhat inaccurately, since it was dotted by a number of "hot" wars -to describe the strategic course forced upon the U.S. rulers and their allies coming out of World War II in face of the limitations imposed by the international relationship of class forces. These limitations ruled out for the foreseeable future the use of massive military force to accomplish Washington's goal of overturning the Soviet Union and Eastern European workers states and reestablishing capitalism there.

Washington was blocked from pursuing this goal by the refusal of the GIs in Europe and Asia to go back to war - this time against former allies, the Soviet Union and the workers and peasants of China. Thatcher described this period as the "fatal hiatus" of 1944-46 - fatal, that is, for the class she represents. The U.S.-led assault on Korea in 1950, which tested the "back door" approach to undermining or overthrowing the Soviet Union and the fledgling Chinese revolution, failed. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was not overthrown and the fighting ended in a stalemate at the 38th parallel. Moscow's development of nuclear weapons in the 1950s chilled any idea of a direct military assault on the workers states.

Given these realities, Washington was restricted to using its military power to try to contain any extension of the overturn of capitalist property relations. Its strategic effort to weaken the workers states became one of applying pressure on the bureaucratic castes to police the working class in those countries and keep them isolated from the struggles of workers and peasants around the world.

With the crumbling of the Stalinist regimes and their replacement by openly procapitalist politicians, and with prospects for a military assault against the former Soviet republics less feasible than ever, imperialism still faces the same challenge, but from a weakened position.

Capitalism won't return without establishing new relations of exploitation based on the crushing defeat of working people and the seizure of the means of production by a new capitalist class.

Nixon touched on that problem four years ago, when he pointed to the lack of what he called a "managerial class" in Russia. Thatcher, likewise, acknowledged the "absence of the legal and customary foundations of a free economy" - free, that is, for the exploitation of the labor of the toiling majority by a tiny propertied minority.

Unlike what Nixon suggested, however, imperialism was not, and is not today, in any position to buy its way back to capitalism in Russia, Poland, or even East Germany. Thatcher is pointing to what appears to be a less utopian perspective from the point of view of the exploiting classes. Shoot your way back to capitalism. That's what Washington and its allies are attempting to do in Yugoslavia, with very limited success so far.

But the battle over Yugoslavia, as well as the Central European workers states, is exacerbating conflicts between imperialist powers. That's what the row over whether or how fast to integrate Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO reveals. Thatcher's not so subtle anti-German and anti-French language also shows that interimperialist competition is becoming more and more the motor force of politics today.

In this world, imperialism confronts a new and more confident actor in the world class struggle: the working classes of Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union, who are less isolated than ever from their brothers and sisters in the imperialist centers and elsewhere. Accelerating unrest in East Germany over economic and social conditions and mounting labor resistance across Germany to the assault by the bosses on wages, hours, and social security is a case in point.

That is the specter that haunts the bourgeoisie throughout Europe and across the Atlantic.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home