Last Political Post For a While

I just watched a good video of the March 20 antiwar walkout at a local state school. But, one of the signs in the video -- "3,000 Dead, For What?" -- bothered me.

The main victims of this war are the Iraqi people: 655,000 dead according to the Lancet study put out in October 2006 and 4 million displaced, which is worse than the Palestinian refugee crisis. The Iraq war is genocide. Any other description short of "genocide" doesn't live up to the reality of the situation.

"3,000 Dead, For What?" -- people with that sentiment should definitely be united with and in that context struggled with. But, activists who know better should stop tailing behind that and the whole list of economistic slogans like "Money for Jobs/Education/Healthcare, Not War." If there's money to fund both the capitalist welfare state and the war, that makes the war right? Hell no. The war is wrong mainly because it's killing massive numbers of innocent people.

Creating that kind of internationalist consciousness is infinitely more difficult than tailing spontaneous nationalist feelings (which are also "antiwar" in a sense). However, if the goal is a whole other world without exploitation and oppression (breaking with the 4 Alls) and not just a "better" U.S. foreign policy, it has to be done. People's consciousness has to be transformed. And there already exists a basis for that, because: 1) many people of color in the U.S. come from countries that have been subject to the same colonial and imperialist treatment experienced by the people of the middle east and 2) the proletariat, because of socialized production, is an international class.

As Sunsara Taylor put it in a recent article: "Many in this country already gravitate towards a kind of internationalism in their sentiment that American lives are not worth more than the lives of others. This should be built upon as well as deepened with the scientific understanding of proletarian internationalism." Right on.