The plans for it were
already in place long before 9/11—in the September 2000 report of the Project
for the New American Century (PNAC), for instance, which mapped out a strategy
for 'American global leadership' well into the future. That among its founder
members were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, now at the centre
of the US administration, attests to the seriousness of the project. That its
implementation awaited a corporate President 'elected' by the corporate machine
and not by popular vote attests to its viability. And '9/11' presented the
occasion, the 'catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor'
which, the report hinted, would mitigate the unpopularity of war. The impetus
for the war, however, derives from the imperative of global capital to break
free of the geopolitical fetters that prevent it from bestriding the world.
The
history of the last thirty years is the history of the 'struggles' of global
capital to overcome the three major obstacles to such domination. In the first
phase—a rough periodisation would put this between 1970 and 1980—it was
confronted with a resurgent working-class movement both in Europe and the
United States. The oil crisis (1973) and the defeat in Vietnam, followed by
Nixon's impeachment, added to America's woes. In Britain, the miners brought
down a Tory government, and public sector workers embarrassed a Labour
government, which was toadying to the IMF, in the 'winter of discontent'.
Capitalism was certainly in crisis.
But
in the wings stood a technological revolution—the microprocessor was invented
around 1970-73—which promised to rescue capital from labour by shifting the
whole basis of production from labour power to electronics and computers. All
it needed for take-off was the defeat of organised labour. Thatcher was the
instrument of that defeat in the UK, as Reagan was in the US.
In
the ten years (1980-90) that it took to undermine the trade union movement and
disaggregate the working class, the micro-electronic technologies gathered
pace, transforming not only industry but the whole of society. Capital was now
free to roam the globe—for labour, for markets, for resources—facilitated by
monetarist policies, by deregulation and privatisation. Which, in turn, shifted
the concerns of government from social welfare to social control. And
international bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank tied debtor Third World
countries into structural adjustment programmes, and so wove them into the
global project.
There
was still the opposition of the Communist bloc to overcome, though—compounded
now by the wars of liberation in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola, and the
rise of left-wing regimes in Chile, Nicaragua and Grenada. But with the
overthrow of those regimes by the CIA, the Contras and other American agencies
(regime change was more surreptitious then), the fall of the Berlin wall and
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the next great obstacle to global capital was
removed.
Corporations
now had the whole world to operate in, and the economic policies initiated by
the UK and the US in the 1980s—free markets, structural adjustment and
privatisation—were reproduced across the globe. New international bodies and
agreements, such as the WTO and NAFTA and TRIPs, sealed up trade and patent
rights in favour of multinationals and the state itself became the servitor not
of its people but of business conglomerates.
Today,
there is not one country in the world that corporate capital does not
penetrate, not one area of society it does not control, not one aspect of life
it does not influence. Food conglomerates determine what we eat, pharmaceutical
corporations govern our health, media magnates manipulate our thinking.
But
global capital has not finished its marauding yet, or satisfied its greed.
There's still the primal urge to refashion the geopolitical world to its
absolute will. Where better to launch that project than in the Middle East, the
oil fulcrum of global change?
However,
the justification for such a strategy, enshrined in the Bush doctrine of
pre-emptive strikes, regime change and full-spectrum dominance, all in the name
of democracy, imposed from above, is so manifestly false and immoral that
public opinion will not buy it. The march of millions all over the world on
15/2 attests to their disbelief. It was the one thing they all had in common:
the refusal to believe the disinformation peddled by the information society.
And the moment of disbelief is the beginning of rebellion.
The
answer to the darkness of 9/11 is the enlightenment of 15/2.