“America” today is a class-divided society. Bondholders, oilmen, and other capitalist families that rule the United States are indeed free to maximize profits through speeding up production lines, lowering real wages, lengthening the workday and workweek, and cutting back remaining social programs like Social Security. At the same time, workers, farmers, and other exploited producers are free to be wage slaves to the boss or debt slaves to the bank. Civil liberties or democratic rights that do exist are the product of bloody battles by working people—like the civil rights movement—not the benevolence of the capitalist class in all its incarnations, Republican or Democrat.

The ruling class feels free indeed to extend around the globe the class exploitation and national oppression that prevails at home. This is what Washington’s campaign of “nuclear nonproliferation” is all about. Freedom to be the only power to have ever used the atomic bomb, to be seeking first-strike nuclear capacity through “missile defense,” and to produce part of its energy through the nuclear process; and freedom to prevent semicolonial countries from developing access to sources of energy they need—including nuclear power—consigning billions of toilers to long hours of darkness and agricultural and industrial underdevelopment.

Washington’s “free trade” offensive in Latin America and the rest of the world smacks also of the same kind of liberty. Freedom of finance capital to penetrate the economies of the colonial world and buy up its banks, land, and natural resources; and freedom to keep these nations as debt slaves to the good Yankee neighbor.

Just like in the United States, the toiling masses elsewhere have only made gains through hard-fought battles. The broad trends toward secularism, for women’s rights, and in opposition to capital punishment and torture are evident not only in the Middle East but the rest of the semicolonial world. But these are by-products of the anticolonial revolutions of the last century and subsequent struggles by workers, peasants, students, and the middle classes in these countries, not of imperialist benevolence. Washington will demagogically talk about democracy and women’s rights for that part of the world only so long as that serves its imperialist interests.

The White House has reasons to boast for enhancing the freedom of the wealthy to advance U.S. imperialism’s interests in the Middle East. The U.S.-orchestrated elections in Iraq are about to happen and all evidence indicates that the outcome is likely to be seen by a majority of Iraqis as a victory for “democracy” and thus a victory for Washington and its allies. The Baathist-organized “insurgency” is more and more isolated as it is led by beheaders of hostages, killers of children and people attending weddings, and suicide bombers who target Shiites at mosques—in the tradition of the Saddam Hussein tyranny.

This state of affairs, however, is not the result of the incapacity of the Iraqi people to fight. Working people in Iraq were dealt major blows in the past because of the betrayals of Stalinism that allowed the Baathist regime to consolidate a party-police state and rule with a reign of terror. No wonder Shiites, Kurds, and other Iraqis don’t want to go back to that.

The toilers of Iraq do have some political space today that they can use to forge their own revolutionary leadership that can guide them down the road to get rid of the Yankee occupiers and the local exploiters too. And that freedom won’t come from Uncle Sam. It will be conquered in struggle. Class-conscious workers in the United States and other imperialist countries can help this process. We should demand that U.S. and all other foreign troops get out of Iraq now!
 
 
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