The 'war mentality' involves the strengthening of nationalist identity and the creation of racist divisions within the proletariat. An immediate impact of terrorism is to reinforce identification with the state and the existing order. Like the wider class struggle, the opposition that has expressed itself at the anti-'globalization' mobilizations has to deal with the changed political climate. With 'the war on terrorism', capitalist society vindicates itself as civilization against a barbaric enemy. The Italian PM Berlusconi described the war as one between a superior western civilization which has generated "widespread prosperity" and "brought us democratic institutions, civil, religious and political rights of our citizens, openness to diversity and tolerance of everything." Other leaders, aware of its impact on Muslim allies, criticized the statement but this and other comments on a 'strange unanimity' between the anti-'globalization' protesters and the terrorists expresses a dominant ideological tendency: the equation of capitalism with civilization. However the world bourgeoisie has naturally been attempting to justify what it is doing in more noble terms. The reinforcement of an nationalist identity, especially in the States, has been a predictable feature of the preparation for war.
Even before the World Bank and IMF meetings were cancelled, the unions and NGOs withdrew support for a demonstration, the radical liberal fraction decided on a series of workshops on the war while only the (largely anarchist) 'anti-capitalist convergence' opted for turning the event into an actual demonstration against the war. Reading Indymedia as we write, what actually seems to have happened in Washington appears to be a splitting along some of the lines of tension that we discuss in the article below. (Colin Powell's definition of its aims as a prolonged campaign against those who threaten, 'America, Americans, its allies and American interests throughout the world' actually sounds like a description of aims of standard US foreign policy.) What sort of war this will be remains to be seen. A lot of eyes turned toward the next big event - the Washington meetings of the World Bank and IMF - to see where it was all going. At the mobilization in Genoa, confrontations between demonstrators and police reached a new peak of ferocity. With events changing from day to day, we have decided to limit our comments here to a few updates to the Israel/Palestine article and this preface to our article on the 'anti-capitalist movement'.īefore the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre, a great deal of attention had been focused on the mobilizations against 'globalization'. Naturally the development of a class opposition to the 'war' has become a major concern of those who do the magazine.
The events of 11/9/01 occurred as we were preparing this edition of Aufheben for printing. Preface: From anti-'globalization' to opposing the war We analyse the relation to the mobilizations of four ideological tendencies that have become salient from the UK perspective: the progressive liberals, the established left, anarchist/black bloc and Ya Basta! We suggest that for the supposed 'anti-capitalist' mobilizations to become a proletarian movement, connections need to be made with the struggles of the wider proletariat. If anything, it is a political rather than a social movement as such the question of its ideology needs to be addressed.
Yet the 'movement' has little existence outside the mobilizations, and is riven with internal contradictions. The recent series of international Summit mobilizations have been referred to by some as a 'movement', and have often been treated by the state as a unitary entity.