09.06.2004

Reassertion of US imperialism's power

Marcus Strom gives his view of the life and death of Ronald Reagan

I suppose I have something of a personal grudge against the 40th president of the United States: he had me beaten up at school on September 1 1983.

            That was the day that Soviet Migs shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007 in Soviet airspace, killing the 269 people on board. It will be of little surprise to many that I was a fairly political 14-year-old. I turned up at school confident in my knowledge that KAL007 must have been used as a spy plane. I knew this intuitively without having any party briefing or reading my weekly copy of Moscow News. Of course, I didn’t keep this knowledge to myself. I told everyone at school; which is how I ended up getting a beating. I blame Reagan. I must say, I raised a glass on news of his death.

            Certainly in the US, but even in the UK, the death of Ronald Reagan overshadowed the commemoration of D-Day 60 years on. There is something of a symmetry here. D-Day, it is claimed, was all about the US and UK drive to liberate Europe from Nazism and secure democracy. Reagan in his turn is credited by the establishment with having finished off the job by defeating that other scourge, communism.

            From 1945 to 1989, US power was contested by the ‘Soviet threat’. That threat reached its zenith in the 1970s: US diplomats escaped Vietnam by helicopter in 1972 and three years later North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the Saigon presidential palace. Reagan symbolised the re-emergence of confident American imperial power in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. His presidency spanned from the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran to the end of the Soviet bloc. His administration oversaw the US ruling class coming to terms with the end of the long boom and the beginning of the restructuring of capital in both the domestic and international spheres. For that reason the Reagan era was of strategic importance for US ruling circles.

            Almost all the obituaries I have seen credit Reagan with ending the cold war and bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union. This only displays the ignorance of what passes for journalism in this country. No doubt Reagan’s belligerence towards the “evil empire” gave the USSR a shove, but its collapse resulted from its internal laws and dynamics. A freak society born from the defeat of the Russian Revolution at the end of the 1920s, the USSR was not a mode of extended reproduction: it could not carry out a continuous revolution in productivity and technique within existing factories, plant and economic units. Once its reserves, crucially of people, were exhausted, the end was in no doubt. It was only a matter of timing.

            Yet the left has so far not learnt the lessons of the USSR either. Stalinites of the new stripe merely bemoan a lack of democracy in the Soviet Union, but, sounding more and more like pale Trotskyites, reckon the ‘socialist’ economic ‘base’ was fine. Trotskyists also cling to the fantasy that the USSR was some sort of workers’ state and the Cliffites of the Socialist Workers Party merely think that the USSR stepped sideways - from state capitalism to global capitalism - and therefore completely underrate the political and social significance of its demise. In fact the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a period of reaction of a special type and left the US as the sole superpower - a position is has exploited to the full, not least by unleashing the ‘war on terrorism’ and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. No wonder George W Bush says he is indebted to Reagan.

            One of the main victims of Reagan’s administration was, of course, the American working class itself. While the US ruling circles had no need to deliver a strategic defeat against organised labour, as the British ruling class did through the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85, still Reagan had to show who was boss. The readjustment of imperial priorities demanded turning the screw on the working class. This was most dramatically seen in Reagan’s handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1982, when 11,000 airport workers walked off the job. Reagan sacked the lot and rode out the strike.

            Reaganomics, as it became known, was an experiment in supply-side economics: cut taxes, cut welfare, cut budgets, cut spending and eventually more money will flow into government coffers. In his first budget Reagan set himself the goal of balancing the books and reducing national debt to zero. Instead it blew out of control. Unemployment hit 10% in 1982 and he actually had to increase taxes at the end of his first term.

            Put simply, what Reaganomics actually meant was a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich in order to pay for the end of the long boom and to rearm the United States. Ostensibly this was for the fight against the USSR, but in reality it was to bolster the US position as a World War III-winning superpower. Reagan was richly rewarded in terms of donations to his 1984 re-election campaign fund from the American military-industrial complex.

            His second term was overshadowed by the Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan and his administration traded arms for hostages in Iran and passed on the profits of illegal arms sales to the brutal anti-communist death squads in Nicaragua. The fact that Reagan avoided impeachment shows what a political operator he was and how the bulk of the US ruling class were behind him. Yet this period saw his credibility slip. Only 14% of those who watched his broadcast explaining ‘Irangate’ believed his version of events.

            For all the hoo-ha about Reagan’s belief in ‘small government’, his administration saw the continuation of the Carter interventionist approach. This is a chief fallacy of the neoliberals - their policies actually mean increased interference and intervention in both the economy and society as a whole, giving free rein to the corporations at the expense of the working class. Only the working class, organised around a communist programme, can truly fight for ‘small government’: ie, the abolition of the state altogether.

            The final stage of Reagan’s presidency saw massive military spending. The Strategic Defence Initiative, or Star Wars, became a shibboleth for Reagan, the believer in Armageddon. As Gorbymania took over the west, Reagan’s summits with the Soviet president were a sideshow to the main event - the continuing disintegration of the Soviet economy and the impending collapse of the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev was preparing the way for a ‘transition’ to a market economy and trying to find a pathway for the Soviet bureaucracy to emerge as a nascent capitalist class.

            Although his twin policies of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness) did not save the Soviet Union, they did, however, open the door to Boris Yeltsin and all the little Yeltsins, as the USSR broke up into its 15 constituent parts. In Russia Yeltsin unleashed his disastrous so-called 500-day transition to capitalism. As a result industrial production plummeted by a half, poverty returned with a vengeance, but out of the wreckage there emerged the so-called oligarchs - lesser bureaucrats and managers turned robber-capitalists.

            This period confirmed the United States beyond doubt as number one in the imperial pecking order and was accompanied by the collapse of the USSR. While the US debt was still a problem in the 1980s and early 1990s, it is quite handy being top of the tree. Clinton carried on with much of the economic reforms laid out by Reagan, but he also rearticulated US foreign policy with the aid of global institutions, as the world readjusted to the ‘new world order’ under a single superpower.

            Being in charge of the world’s master currency allows you to export crisis - since Reagan, the US dollar has been devalued, effectively devaluing the national debt too and making US industry and exports more competitive on the world market. In addition, the sheer scale of US power enables it to engage in trade wars and, ultimately, military adventures to bring its rivals to heel, at the same time using the military-industrial complex as a means of combating the overproduction of capital.

            The unilateralist invasion of Iraq did present a certain break with the Reagan-Clinton years. It was hyperpower arrogance that led the US to believe all that it needed were ‘coalitions of the willing’. The efforts put into getting this week’s unanimous vote of the United Nations security council - giving credence to the lie that Iraqi sovereignty will be restored at the end of this month - shows that the US cannot operate its hegemony without the use of global institutions.

            The neocons around Bush junior were boasting only a year ago of being able to fight in four or five Iraqs simultaneously. Now, not even Richard Perle or any of the Project for a New American Century acolytes would suggest invading Cuba, North Korea, Syria or Iran, while Iraq seethes with rebellion and discontent.

            Nevertheless, for all that, Iraq also represents a continuation of the Reagan era - the reassertion of US imperialist arrogance in the post-Soviet world