Mark Phillips: The American Question

12/9/02: Complexity.

Ernest Mandel's short book The Meaning of the Second World War provides a helpful model for analyzing the War on Islam.

Mandel's thesis is that World War Two can't be understood as a simple, bipolar conflict of Allies versus Axis. Instead, he argues,

"the overall character of the Second World War must be grasped as a combination of five different conflicts:

1. An inter-imperialist war fought for world hegemony and won by the United States (though its rule would be territorially truncated by the extension of the non-capitalist sector in Europe and Asia).
2. A just war of self-defense by the Soviet Union against an imperialist attempt to colonize the country and destroy the achievements of the 1917 Revolution.
3. A just war of the Chinese people against imperialism which would develop into a socialist revolution.
4. A just war of Asian colonial peoples against the various military powers and for national liberation and sovereignty, which in some cases (e.g. Indochina) spilled over into socialist revolution.
5. A just war of national liberation fought by populations of the occupied countries of Europe, which would grow into socialist revolution (Yugoslavia and Albania) or open civil war (Greece, North Italy). In the European East, the old order collapsed under the dual, uneven pressure of popular aspirations and Soviet military-bureacruatic action, whereas in the West and South bourgeois order was restored -- often against the wishes of the masses -- by Western Allied troops."

As Mandel notes, "The exact outcome in each instance depended on the strength and maturity of the class leaderships, the degree of importance the victors attached to a given area or country, and their ability to impose a political settlement."

The combination Mandel emphasizes did not come to be immediately. The war began as an imperialist war of expansion, with Germany's invasion of Poland and plans to dominate Eastern Europe. With the entrance of Britain and France, its character changed to an inter-imperialist war for European hegemony. Germany's attack on the USSR added a new character, at once colonial and explicitly counter-revolutionary. Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on America created a world-wide inter-imperialist struggle for global hegemony. By the end of 1943 wars of national liberation had begun in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, France, Italy, and Indonesia, while the Chinese war of national liberation had spilled-over into revolution. The global war of 1944 and 1945 was a combination of these five distinct yet intertwined conflicts, many of which continued afterwards, e.g., the Chinese war until 1949, the Vietnamese until 1975.

Mandel's analysis is a useful model for the War on Islam. While "War for Oil" rhetoric may be compelling on the left, it's too simple to enable strategic predictions of the global war's likely dynamics, where "simple" means incognizant of the combination of distinct conflicts of which it increasingly consists:

1. An imperialist war to roll-back the international momentum of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
2. An unjust war of colonial expansion fought by Israel.
3. Just wars of national liberation fought by the peoples of Chechnya, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and elsewhere, unfortunately under extreme right-wing leaderships.
4. A just war of national liberation fought by the people of Palestine in which centrist and right-wing currents compete for hegemony, in part under the momentum of the Islamic Revolution.
5. Just wars of national liberation fought by the peoples of the Philippines, Columbia and elsewhere under left-wing leaderships, in which the struggles tend toward development into socialist revolutions.

As during the early stages of World War Two, these conflicts have begun relatively independently of one another. Over time, they're likely to tend toward an increasingly global combination. I don't know what that combination will be. I do know this war will be with us for many years to come. If we can better understand its dynamics we may be more effective in mobilizing for peace.

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