Obama’s depiction has nothing to do with the reality of the war or Iraq itself. The U.S. is not leaving Iraq �" the U.S. government has only replaced its own troops in Iraq with a large mercenary army, paid for by the U.S. In October, U.S. Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, described this as “a major surge of contractors there in Iraq �" 17,000 contractors, 5,500 private security contractors.” Other estimates put the number of private contractors at 35,000, and that number is expected to increase in the future. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone has mushroomed into by far the largest embassy on the planet, a mini-city populated by 17,000 employees, contractors, security forces, etc. The U.S. State Department is also now commanding three other major centers, in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan; in Basra, the main port in the oil-rich South; and in Kirkuk, which is located in the hotly contested, oil-rich region in the North. The U.S. also has seven other facilities, for a total of 11 sites that it continues to run, nerve centers in fortified, self-contained installations at strategic points throughout the country.

Officially, the U.S. military is keeping several hundred troops, as “trainers” or “advisors,” under the Office of Security Cooperation (OSC) �" to provide “considerable continuity in the security relationship between the United States and Iraq,” according to the The New York Times (November 30).

Unofficially, a large number of Special Forces and CIA will be working under the Joint Special Operations Command. U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey admitted as much in a television interview with Ted Koppel on December 12.

Finally, the U.S. is beefing up its already considerable force of 40,000 troops in other countries in the Persian Gulf region (not including Afghanistan). In December, for example, the U.S. military increased the number of troops in tiny Kuwait on Iraq’s border by 4,000, bringing the total number of U.S. troops there to 27,000. On board the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which patrols the Persian Gulf, as well as at several U.S. air bases in countries surrounding Iraq, there are the countless aircraft and missiles that stand ready to attack Iraq at a moment’s notice.

In other words, the U.S. has exchanged one military approach for another. The Wall Street Journal (December 10) made exactly this point in an article with the headline, “In Iraq, the U.S. Shifts to a Large New Footprint.” It described how “…the U.S. involvement there is anything but over…. In place of the military, the State Department will assume a new role of unprecedented scale….” U.S. military forces will now be considered “employees” of the State Department.

As for Obama’s boast about how the U.S. war brought “stability” to Iraq, it would be laughable, if it weren’t so tragic. The U.S. government’s own unclassified data shows that Iraq remains one of the most violent and dangerous countries in the world, with about 30 per cent of all terrorist acts taking place there. The violence in Iraq has been even higher than in Afghanistan, according to “The Quarterly Report of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction” (October 30, 2011). And this violence is getting worse. On December 23, a series of explosions ripped through Baghdad, destroying schools, markets and apartments, killing at least 67 people and wounding 185. It was Baghdad’s deadliest day in more than a year. On January 2, the toll was even worse: 72 people in the Baghdad area were killed in a spate of bombings.

Furthermore, the power struggle at the top of the government almost certainly is helping to intensify the vicious ethnic and sectarian strife throughout the society. Immediately after the last U.S. troop convoy rolled out of Iraq on December 18, the Maliki government went after the top members of his own cabinet, who belong to the largest party in his coalition, which gained more votes in the last election than Maliki’s party. An arrest warrant was issued for Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, on terrorist charges, forcing Hashemi to seek refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. Two days later, Maliki placed his own deputy prime minister, Saleh al-Mutlaq, on “extended leave.” Shortly afterwards, a roadside bomb exploded near the government’s finance minister, Rafie al-Esawi. He was unhurt, but two of his bodyguards were seriously wounded.

The deadly violence that marks Iraq today is the consequence of the U.S. divide and conquer strategy. From the beginning of the war, the U.S. divvied up official positions in the government according to sectarian and religious ruling cliques, and encouraged the formation of militias and gangs run by warlords and tribal chiefs.

A “Successful” Quagmire

The U.S. went into this war with the idea �" at least on the part of the Bush administration �" that its own military would topple Saddam Hussein and quickly establish its own order in the country. Instead, almost nine years later, its own military practically slunk out of the country like a dog with its tail between its legs.

When the U.S. pulled its troops on December 18, 2011, it did not do so with flying colors and a big parade. Instead, the last contingents to leave snuck out in the dead of night, accompanied by an armada of helicopters scanning the ground for rocket attacks and armored vehicles. The U.S. military clearly had so little trust in their counterparts in the Iraqi Army, that U.S. officers deliberately misled their closest Iraqi collaborators into believing they would see each other the next day.

It could not have been more clear what the U.S. had produced in its nine years of war against Iraq �" another quagmire.

By the summer of 2009, the U.S. was pulling its troops out of all Iraqi cities and towns, in an attempt to lessen the U.S. “footprint” in Iraq �" and by the way, reduce the number of U.S. targets available to the insurgency. A year later, the U.S. military officially stopped all combat missions, moving its troops into well fortified bases from which they only infrequently strayed. But the U.S. could not really protect even these strongholds. The New York Times (June 26) reported that rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. bases had been increasing over the year, causing more casualties. In June, 2011, for example, 14 U.S. soldiers were killed in attacks on their bases.

Even in the heavily fortified Green Zone where its enormous new embassy is enthroned, the U.S. was vulnerable. Rockets and missiles hit the Green Zone when Vice President Joseph Biden paid an unannounced visit in July 2010. And the Zone was bombarded again in July 2011, during a visit by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

The very presence of U.S. troops added to the resentment in all parts of the Iraqi population. The U.S. media, reporting on the supposed end of the U.S. occupation, were hard pressed to find an opinion other than “good riddance.” Ali Jassem, 32, an unemployed worker in Baghdad, told The New York Times (December 13): “They [the U.S.] did not achieve anything, or let’s say they achieved bombing, killing and explosions. They delivered false promises. They didn’t bring anything good for us, for the people; they only brought politicians who are out for themselves.” The anger against the U.S. occupation was so strong, the Times commented, “…it is significant that in both Sunni and Shiite areas, there are some who say that life was better under Mr. Hussein … even from those who shudder in the next breath when recalling the dictatorial nature of his regime.”

For the U.S.’s own military, this near decade of war has caused real problems. Since before the “surge” of 2006-07, the generals, including many at the highest levels, have openly voiced their concerns about what the war in Iraq, coupled with the war in Afghanistan, was doing to their army. It had put huge stress on the troops, many of whom were redeployed to a war zone 3, 4, or even 5 times. Among those who have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan, 625,000 returning troops have now filed for disability. And the demoralization of the troops is reflected in the fact that more active duty troops and returning soldiers have taken their own lives than the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq. The multiple tours of duty threatened to “break the army” or at least severely erode the military’s ability to deal with other “crises” and “contingencies” �" as the generals called them.

Then there is the problem of money. So far, the war has cost about 800 billion dollars over nine years. Adding other expenses, including interest on the debt and the ongoing cost of medical care for veterans brings the final cost of the war to at least four trillion dollars, say economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.

General Karl R. Horst, Central Command’s chief of staff, voiced enthusiastic support for getting his troops out of Iraq. “I think it is healthy. I think it is efficient. I think it is practical,” he told The New York Times (October 29). In other words, it is “healthy” for the U.S. military. And it’s both an “efficient” and a “practical” way to serve the interests of the oil companies, who, in this mess of a situation, are content to have only certain areas of the country controlled, the zones with oil.

They Got What They Came For: Iraq’s Oil

In destroying the old state apparatus left over from Saddam Hussein, the U.S. also loosened the grip of the Iraqi state on the oil industry. And in fueling and playing on ethnic and sectarian tensions and divisions inside the country, the U.S. potentially split that industry in two parts: one controlled by the central Iraqi government and the other controlled by the regional government of Kurdistan in the north.

The oil companies have now jumped in to play the two sides off against each other. ExxonMobil, the biggest oil company in the world, signed a contract with the central government to pump oil from fields in the South, near Basra, where most of Iraqi oil now comes from. In late November, Exxon signed a contract on much more favorable terms with the Kurdish government in the North to drill for oil there. The Maliki government threatened Exxon with losing its right to bid on future auctions in the South. But these threats apparently didn’t worry Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and the Italian company, ENI, which announced that they, too, are ready to sign up with the Kurdish regional government.

If the Kurdistan regional government succeeds in keeping control over the oil resources in its territory, this will encourage other regional governments to do the same thing. And that could set off a new round of fighting over which sets of warlords, tribal chiefs and/or religious leaders get the crumbs from the table of the international oil companies and banks. The end result may well be a further break-up and balkanization of the country, leaving the oil reserves ripe for the picking.

Certainly Iraqi oil production is seriously reduced as a result of the U.S. invasion and war and the succeeding civil war. But the big international oil companies and the banks that stand behind them have gained a much vaster control of future production and profits than they had before.

The value of this prize should not be under-estimated. Iraq’s known reserves currently rank third in the world in terms of size. But international geologists estimate that unexplored territory contains vastly larger reserves. These reserves are relatively close to the surface and don’t have to be extracted in rough seas or Arctic tundra, so the cost to get the oil out is extremely low, barely a dollar a barrel. And the oil’s generally high quality means it is cheap and easy to refine.

The balkanization of Iraq could, of course, bring more disorder, with all its risks and dangers for the oil industry. That’s exactly why the U.S. government is boosting its mercenary forces in Iraq under the command of the State Department, and why the oil companies are beefing up their own private security forces and mercenary armies.

Nationwide protests against the worsening conditions broke out last year in Iraq, lasting several weeks. The demonstrators called for better social services, electricity, water, stable food prices, more jobs, less corruption (Iraq is rated the fourth most corrupt country in the world by Transparency International) and government reform. And there was a great deal of anger aimed against the U.S. occupation. The protests varied in size, but they were held throughout the country and they cut across sectarian and religious divisions, from Basra in the South to Baghdad and Tikrit in the center of the country, up to Mosul in the North and Sulaimaniya in the autonomous Kurdish region.

Iraq’s important religious leaders, such as Moktada al-Sadr, whose main base of support is in the Shiite slums of Baghdad, and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, opposed the demonstrations. Meanwhile, the government responded with force. There were numerous reports of police opening fire with live ammunition at demonstrators, using tear gas, carrying out beatings and arresting thousands. The Maliki government also closed the offices of the Iraqi Communist Party and the Iraqi Nation Party, after accusing them of leading the demonstrations in Baghdad.

The religious hierarchy’s opposition to the demonstrations, as well as the repression by the state apparatus, offered a kind of reassurance to U.S. imperialism, as it prepared to remove its troops, that the Iraqi authorities can control the population sufficiently for oil production to go on.

The Price Paid by the Iraqi Population

This war has left the country in ashes. The future for the population is already extremely bleak, and the further break-up of the country and possible civil war threaten disaster beyond what has already been suffered.

By far, the bulk of the people killed in nine years of war have been civilians. The U.S. military’s own logs, released by WikiLeaks, enumerate 122,000 civilians killed. Surveys of the Iraqi population by the advocacy group Just Foreign Policy estimate that almost 1.5 million civilians have either been killed or died because of the conditions brought on by the war.

The CIA estimates that Iraq’s per capita income is now so low that it ranks 161st in the world �" compared to what it was before the various U.S. wars on Iraq, when the country ranked at the top in the Middle East. Iran, suffering under years of U.S. embargoes, sanctions, assassinations of scientists and other acts of a secret war, still ranks 104, far ahead of Iraq.

Even the most basic infrastructure is practically non-existent. Most of the 64 billion dollars that the U.S. officially spent on reconstruction went only to enrich the big U.S. construction companies and a few wealthy Iraqis, leaving the population with little or no electricity and drinking water, while sewage often pools in the streets. People living in cities and towns near oil producing areas, like Basra, the second largest city in the country, are inundated by soot and smoke.

The U.S. dropped thousands of bombs across Iraq laced with depleted uranium, the radioactive waste produced from manufacturing nuclear fuel. British researchers uncovered a massive increase in infant mortality and rates of cancer in cities like Fallujah, which were heavily bombarded, exceeding “those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” In the province of Babil, reported cancer cases rose from 500 in 2004 to 7,000 in 2008. And in Basra, the childhood leukemia rate has more than doubled over the last 15 years, according to a study published two years ago in the American Journal of Public Health.

As the U.S. pulled its last troops out of the country, some reporters visited the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, where the U.S. had launched two massive military sieges in 2004, to try to break the resistance against the occupation. In this city of 300,000, doctors in the local hospital reported that close to 2,000 civilians, mainly women, the elderly and children, have been killed, and skeletons continue to be pulled out of bombed buildings. A majority of the residents were displaced from their homes during the siege. While most have returned, thousands remain homeless. After the siege, the government had promised a reconstruction program. Two of the highlighted reconstruction projects were a water purification plant and a wastewater treatment project launched in 2004. Seven years later, the sewage system remains unfinished, its future uncertain. Meanwhile, the water treatment plant provides clean water for less than 20 per cent of the population. The neighborhoods that bore the brunt of the battles are now dusty dirt roads strewn with garbage. “Everything here is bad,” a bakery worker told a reporter for al-Jazeera (January 3), “No water, no electricity, no good health care. We have between 75 and 80 per cent unemployment. Widows have no rights, no compensation.”

The sectarian strife spawned by the war drove families out of their homes. Many of those who did return are now being forced out again, due to the new upsurge in fighting. The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that there are still five million Iraqis who have fled their homes. Close to three million are refugees in their own country. A big proportion of them are crammed into 380 settlements scattered around the country. They have little access to clean water, sanitation or medical care. Many are deemed to be illegally squatting and cannot get the documents necessary to register for welfare relief or take jobs or enroll their children in schools. Another two million fled Iraq for neighboring countries Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria, with little prospect of being integrated into the community, or even gaining residency rights so they can work. Those in Syria, with its escalating violence, are now being uprooted again, having to seek another place of safety.

Women have been particularly hard hit. The war, the economic hardship and upsurge in religious extremism have led to a huge increase in violence against women �" including honor killings, rape and kidnapping. Before the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq had the highest female literacy rate in the Middle East, and more Iraqi women were employed, in skilled professions, like medicine and education, as well as working class jobs, than in any other country in the region. Now most women are forced to remain at home, without jobs or education. Many Iraqi women who fled to neighboring countries have found themselves unable to feed their children. Just to make ends meet, tens of thousands of them �" including girls 13 and under �" have been forced into prostitution.

Bulldogs for Imperialism, but Victims Also

Another generation of young Americans has been transformed into imperialism’s pit bulls, themselves suffering all the moral, physical and psychological destruction that such a war holds for imperialism’s own army.

Beyond the nearly 5,000 killed in the war, are the suicide deaths that mount up year after year as soldiers return. According to the VA itself, every 80 minutes a veteran of the two wars tries to kill him or herself �" that figures out to 18 a day, or almost 6600 in one year’s time. Then there is the greater amount of domestic violence, alcoholism, drug use, etc.

The Pentagon reports only 32,226 wounded �" a number that wildly understates the toll. Various studies have been done by the Pentagon’s own Brain Injury Center, the RAND Corporation, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. They estimate that as many as one-third of all women and men return from their deployments in Iraq with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing disorders, diseases and other long-term health problems.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, who have been brutalized physically and psychologically, are returning to a country where they face untold problems �" first of all getting adequate medical care, a job and a place to stay. This country pays lip service to them as so-called returning “heroes,” but does not recognize the damage that has been done them.

No Exit

The U.S. has laid a whole country to waste, imposing on the Iraqi population a descent into chaos and barbarism �" a war that from the beginning was based on lies and fabrications, driven by the interests of the oil companies, other major corporations and the biggest banks.

To these last nine years of war must be added the bloody cost already paid by the Iraqi people in the Iraq-Iran war from 1980 to 1988, which the U.S. encouraged; the first Gulf War of 1990-91 and the massive bombing carried out ever since. This latest chapter of the U.S. war on Iraq is not over yet for the Iraqi people, not by far.

It is a war that the troops of this country have also paid heavily for. And this war is not over and neither is it the last of U.S. imperialism’s wars.

The Iraq war gives the exact picture of the enormously barbaric impact of imperialism, the human price it extorts from populations around the world, including in this country �" all in the search for a few more dollars in profit.

The shutting down of the camps may have put an end to what many activists called "the first phase." But it certainly did not eliminate Occupy as a political phenomenon. Some people who were active in the camps speak of taking a break in order to prepare an "American Spring" when the camps will be re-established. Others have been involved in more traditional style demonstrations and actions, aimed at a multitude of targets, often organized by already established organizations, such as the unions, left or community groups.

So the question is, where is the Occupy movement going -- to the extent that we can speak of a single movement. There are large differences from one city to another; and a wide range of views, even diametrically opposed views, within a single city. There is no clear agreement, for example, over what role the unions should have in Occupy, or what attitude Occupy should have toward friendly Democratic politicians and toward the upcoming elections.

In any case, the apparatuses of many unions have certainly shown their intention to use whatever influence they might gain in Occupy to recruit forces for the 2012 Democratic Party election campaigns, especially that of Barack Obama.

Fresh Air in the Political Atmosphere

Springing to life, supposedly as the result of a proposal circulating through social media sites, roughly 2,000 people came down to Wall Street on September 17, with hundreds remaining that night in Zuccotti Park, "occupying" it.

In fact, there had been a foreshadowing of the take-over-Wall-Street idea last spring. New York City unions organized four marches in May and June, which flooded through the Wall Street area, blaming the big Wall Street banks for budget cuts to NYC schools, city services and the city workforce. The last June demonstration brought out 20,000 unionists and their allies, marching from Brooklyn across the bridge down into Wall Street. That was immediately followed by a three-week "occupation" of City Hall Park -- called "Bloombergville," in an ironic toast to NYC Mayor Bloomberg. And activists in Washington D.C., concerned with the wars, the problems of health care and the lack of jobs, had taken out a permit last summer for a permanent camp in a park in that city, to start on October 6.

In any case, the takeover of Zuccotti Park, especially after the mass October 1 arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge, served as a kind of beacon, from which the idea of "occupying" public areas rapidly spread to almost every major city in the country and to many medium size cities, as well as university cities and even a few small towns.

None of the camps were more than a few thousand at their height, and most, if we count essentially only the people who stayed in the camps, were not much more than some hundreds, and many were often less than that. But the very existence of the camps, and the assemblies associated with them, served as focal points for pulling tens of thousands into some actions. And the slogan that rapidly became the watchword of Occupy, "We are the 99%" -- even if it was in fact inaccurate socially -- spoke to resentment widespread in the population.

In an earlier time period, working people might have looked with distrust on a crusade like this -- somewhat marginal, composed for the most part of young petty-bourgeois people. Not this time. Workers seemed to appreciate the fact that young people camped out in the middle of the cities, in seeming defiance of the authorities. Some have joined the demonstrations, and even a few, the camps. Denouncing the wealthy 1% and the banks, the Occupy activists touched a raw nerve.

Today, the richest 1% of the population get almost one quarter of the total income of the country, the biggest share since an earlier generation of Wall Street titans pocketed a similar amount in 1928. And the disproportionate hold on wealth is even greater. By 2009, the richest 1% owned 42% of the country's financial wealth, while the bottom 80% owned only 7%. And the gap has been growing.

The springing up of Occupy reinforced and expressed the bitterness simmering in ordinary layers of the population about their worsening situation. And its rapid spread was a challenge to the decades-long demoralization oozing through the working class and other ordinary parts of the population.

For the first time in decades, the political atmosphere was not being shaped only by organizations like the Tea Party, whose populist rhetoric has always been a front for the very wealthy who fund it, using it to pull the middle classes and part of the working class in an openly reactionary direction. Instead, there were people in the center of all the cities, at the same time, under the Occupy name, with the same 99% slogan, denouncing the wealthy and the banks.

During the weeks the camps existed, thousands of people were arrested. Some were people who decided to be arrested, in order to make a kind of "civil disobedience" statement; for example, most of the 700 people arrested on October 1, on the Brooklyn Bridge. Some were arrested within the framework of an agreement with police or authorities allowing people to decide to be arrested; for example, many of those arrested in various cities in the bridge protests of November 17, or in October in Chicago. But there were also others, especially in Oakland, who faced a tough round up by the police, involving clubs, tear gas, and even rubber bullets. But however the arrests went down, those arrested drew wide moral support from ordinary layers of the population.

With the Camps Shut Down, Occupy Seems to Be Everywhere

As the camps were vacated, signs with the Occupy name began to appear in a much wider range of activities, aiming at more targets than in the first days. And that gave the sense that Occupy was continuing to grow.

In some cities, Occupy activists reinforced or added the Occupy name to actions carried out by groups who had been organizing legal activity and support for people trying to have their mortgage rewritten; for example, in Las Vegas, San Diego and Detroit. They joined in demonstrations at Welfare offices carried out by advocates for the poor and welfare rights organizations. In cities like Oakland or Atlanta, they joined with activists who had a history of protesting actions by the police. In Los Angeles, they joined with the AFL-CIO, SEIU and immigrant rights groups to protest actions taken by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). In Michigan, they caravanned with United Steel Workers members to support locked out workers in a Findlay Ohio Cooper Tires plant.

Some demonstrations seemed aimed mostly at keeping the Occupy name on the front of the stage; for example, Occupy activists joined in at the end of the nationally televised Pasadena Rose Parade -- the preliminary for one of college football's biggest bowl games.

Other actions shared a kind of "social worker" outlook, for example, working with the churches in several cities to provide Thanksgiving meals for the homeless or with social service activists to set up a free "health fair" in Washington D.C.

In some notable cases, Occupy activists carried out actions for people, in the name of those people, substituting themselves for the people involved. On the West Coast, for example, from Vancouver Canada down to San Diego, activists carried out several one-day demonstrations in November and December to block the entrance of the ports, with a range of signs supporting port workers and the ILWU, and denouncing globalization. The one-day demonstrations were symbolic, but they attracted attention and sympathy, particularly the first time, from many of the workers whose access to the port was blocked. However that may be, the Occupy activists did not take into account how people would react, much less how to engage them -- other than handing some of them a leaflet telling them their port would be shut down, asking support for the Occupy protest. And there was some resentment among the port workers, particularly on the second one-day shutdown.

In some cases, like the "anti-commercialism" protests on the Friday following Thanksgiving, Occupy activists were outright contemptuous toward the "99%" they pretended to represent. In many cities, activists paraded through big chain stores like Wal-Mart, denouncing "commercialism," bunching to clog the already long check-out lines -- in the face of people who rush to the stores to get a chance at the big sales that are traditional that day.

Other actions picketed the headquarters of the politicians -- especially Republican politicians, including at the places the Iowa caucuses were held, and earlier at a conference of conservative Republicans in Washington D.C. However, when it seemed that only Republicans were being targeted, Occupy Wall Street demonstrated in front of Democratic office-holders, for example, outside a Democratic Party $25,000 a plate fund-raiser for Wall Street's high rollers in New York.

Congressional offices of both Democrats and Republicans were "occupied" in December in an action essentially organized by the unions and their liberal allies, but with support from Occupy activists. The "occupiers" stayed in Congressional offices until a representative talked to them or until the office closed.

In January came "occupy the court" -- small demonstrations in Washington and in federal courts around the country -- to protest the "Citizens United" decision. The Republican dominated Supreme Court had ruled in 2010 that since corporations are "persons" in the eyes of the law, there could be no more limits placed on their contributions to election campaigns than on the contributions of human "persons." It's a decision that the Democrats particularly worry about, since the Republicans ordinarily, but not always, get the bulk of corporate election money.

On a monthly basis, ever since mid-October, Occupy has called for demonstrations either in conjunction with the unions, or "coincidentally" on the same day that the unions had announced their intention to demonstrate. Generally, these were the biggest of the demonstrations, given the ability of the unions to provide troops. Over a hundred thousand people demonstrated across the country in November, for example. For these demonstrations, the unions made little attempt to call out the rank and file, but even with just their apparatuses, staff and some activists, they gave Occupy the appearance of a mass movement on those days.

A Movement without a Program, without Demands, and without Leaders

From the beginning in New York, Occupy groups declared that they had no program, other than the "process" itself, no demands to make on power, no leaders who represented them, no one who would speak for them.

In one sense, Occupy was doing nothing but giving a kind of expression to the anarchist views that many of its originators shared. And they were using much of the same very formal and restrictive rules of functioning -- including elaborate hand signs -- that had surfaced earlier in Spain in the movement of the Indignados. Decisions could be made in the assemblies or in the "groups" only by "consensus, " that is, total agreement. (Given the interminable discussions, "consensus" soon became "modified consensus": in some cities, 90% was enough to by pass an objection; in other cities it took only 66.7%.)

More basically, this insistence on no demands and no program was a reflection of the enormous heterogeneity of those attracted to Occupy. Even the first September demonstration brought together, as its "originators," academic anarchists, "non-violent-passive-resistor" anarchists, hackers, anti-globalization activists, along with communists, trade unionists and student activists from Bloombergville, as well as people who had been to the protests in Spain. Soon added to that melange were Libertarians and supporters of the extreme-right-wing and elitist Lyndon Larouche. There are people who had voted for Obama in 2008, but had been disappointed in him, along with those who saw no choice but to vote for him again in 2012, given how disgusting the Republicans are. There are students employed by the Ron Paul campaign, and student activists paid as interns for the unions, many of whom were active in the college "sweatshop" campaigns. As more groups around the country began to declare themselves part of Occupy, some were organized in conjunction with local leftists, some with liberal organizations loosely linked to the Democratic Party, like Action Now, or Rebuild the Dream, or even Move On, for example. Others, like some of those on the West Coast, included young people who styled themselves after the window-breaking anarchists of the WTO protests.

How could this mixed bag decide what should be the aim even of the demonstrations at the banks, for example? Should they demand that Congress resurrect the old banking regulations of the 1930s, or should they aim at getting rid of the Federal Reserve, or denounce the politicians who bailed out the banks -- or simply denounce the banks? There might have been leftists in almost all the Occupy groups from the beginning, but Occupy itself was certainly not about to call in question the very capitalist system, of which the banks are an integral part.

In fact, given "consensus," not to mention the insistence that Occupy has no program, issues like this were decided for Occupy, by people acting in its name. Thus Occupy DC issued a kind of program, "The 99% Deficit Proposal," which essentially repeated, almost verbatim, all the propaganda liberal Democrats were making about the budget. It was introduced with an explanation that it did not represent the views of other Occupy groups, nor even of all the people active in Occupy Washington. Nonetheless, it was widely circulated as representing the views of Occupy. It was, for example, paid for as an ad in the papers by Occupy San Francisco.

Who would decide who spoke for Occupy -- these groups that declared that they were "horizontal," that they had no hierarchy? In the absence of a "hierarchy," it seemed that anyone could.

In fact, very quickly, the various Occupys did develop a hierarchy -- to the extent they didn't start out with one. There may have been a rule that no one could "facilitate" -- that is, chair -- a meeting two times in a row. But there quickly developed a "Facilitators Working Group" to decide before the assemblies, who would "facilitate," what would come up, how to present it, etc. Later, for example, in New York, people from the Structure Working Group prepared a proposal to set up a "Spokes Council" that would regularly take over many of the "process" decisions from the General Assembly -- including for example, what to do with the half a million dollars that had been donated to Occupy Wall Street. The "consensus" required to take the decision to set up the Spokes Council was arrived at in a relatively lightly attended general assembly on October 23, after similar proposals had been voted down several times before.

None of this is very extraordinary and wouldn't even cause much of a raised eyebrow these days -- except it highlights the cynicism behind all the talk about no program, no leaders, no hierarchy.

Of course, in a mass movement, there would be a wide range of views. But the only way for those views to be tested -- as opposed to be talked about -- would be for all those who have different programs, policies, proposals to stand for them openly under their own name, to carry them out under their own name, to confront different policies with each other.

But Occupy is not a mass movement. If there were a mass movement, people who wanted to control it against the interests of the forces active in it would act exactly the way Occupy has been set up now, with a way of functioning that serves to hide the real decision-making behind the scenes.

It's this unclear situation and arcane way of functioning that allows the union apparatuses, structured as they are, to play a very big role in Occupy -- and for purposes very different than those of many of the young people today drawn to Occupy.

Pretending to Be Little More than "Supporters"

At the beginning, the union leaderships took a back seat to the young people active in the camps and the assemblies, quietly offering financial help, donating food, supplies, tents, bringing in their troops for the occasional big demonstrations. They weren't publicly at most of the activities, but their numbers at the big demonstrations with their jackets, hats, t-shirts, etc. gave them weight and influence -- as did their student interns who became some of the most responsible people allowing the camps to function.

Many of the big demonstrations were papered with signs, prepared by the unions, calling for support for Democratic Party electoral propaganda. For example, along with two SEIU locals, "Good Jobs Better Baltimore" and "Move On," Occupy Baltimore sponsored a march for jobs in November, which called on "Congress" to pass the "Rebuild American Jobs" bill -- Obama's bill, which Congressional Republicans had opposed. If implemented, that bill would have given more money to business than anything else. But given the title of the bill, and the Republicans' refusal, the demonstration was little more than a ploy to embarrass the Republicans as people voting against jobs.

Certainly, there are people active in Occupy in different cities who very clearly express their distrust of both parties, and often their distrust of the union apparatuses for pulling activists into actions that lead people into next fall's election campaign. Occupy Los Angeles, for example, issued a statement strongly critical of SEIU for trying to use the Occupy name for that purpose. (SEIU had paid for a number of Occupy Los Angeles activists to go to Washington, supposedly for an Occupy demonstration, but then pulled many of them into a conference organized by Take Back the Dream, in preparation of the elections.)

In general, however, the union leaders have been prudent not to call on Occupy openly to support the Democrats. Instead, they have been accumulating credit by supporting Occupy and by turning out forces for Occupy demonstrations, beefing up its numbers. And, as SEIU's president, Mary Kay Henry did, many of them have presented themselves for arrest in an act of "civil disobedience" along with Occupy demonstrators.

The aim of the union leaderships is to use the credit they win to bring young people attracted to Occupy into the new ranks of Democratic party troops this coming spring -- much as Move On was used in 2008 to attract disaffected young people, pulling them in as active troops on the ground for Obama's election campaign.

It's Necessary to Understand this Capitalist Society

Some young people have been attracted to Occupy. Moved by the glaring inequalities, outraged, wanting to change the situation they find themselves in, they have thrown themselves into activity.

To work to turn out the vote in another election campaign for one of the two big parties is exactly the opposite of changing anything. It is the old lesser evil argument that has diverted people for years and helped to produce the current horrible situation.

If there are people, young and not so young, who don't agree with this, who don't want to be maneuvered once again into activity that will turn back against them, it's necessary to understand how this capitalist society really functions, the role the politicians play, the capitalist class they serve, the hold that class has today on all of society.

All the talk about no program, no demands, no political party is a way to hide from those questions.

On the contrary, these are the questions it's absolutely necessary to deal with. It's necessary to have a clear view of who does what in this capitalist society, of which class owns and controls, but also which class has the power to take control out of the capitalists' hands and use it to build a new society.

It's necessary to have a clear vision about what kind of society it is necessary to build. That society is one without profit. It is called a communist society.

This year’s most important event in the evolution of the global capitalist economy was the return of the financial crisis, under the form of the so-called “sovereign debt” crisis. Its diverse expressions include the euro crisis, stock market turbulence, the threat of a new crisis in the banking system and the return of inflationary policies, open or hypocritical. The insane turmoil in finance is the expression of the crisis of the capitalist economy as a whole. At the same time, it is one of the aggravating factors for this crisis. Even official statistics note that economic activity has slowed. The growth of unemployment globally is certainly the most significant marker of the period, which began in 2007 with the American housing crisis and still continues. The World Trade Organization (WTO), one of the official economic organizations of the bourgeoisie, has sometimes designated it as “the Great Recession” in reference to the Great Depression that followed the stock market collapse of 1929.

The earlier phase of the crisis was the freezing up in bank liquidity following the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. The means used to overcome that boomeranged, unleashing the next problem: the hundreds of billions of dollars handed over by the major governments to the banking system and big capitalist groups aggravated the financialization of the economy and increased government debt. This massive assistance by governments to the banks and big companies assured them two short, prosperous years. Profits increased. Production in principal sectors from auto to information technology continued to decline, even while governments and economists began in 2009 to salute the recovery. For profits, there was a recovery. From the capitalist viewpoint, profit is the alpha and the omega of the economy.

The Balance Sheet of the Bailout of the Financial System

Even in this period of high profits, unemployment remained high. The economic base for the creation of surplus value was expanded only through an increase in exploitation, not through an increase in the number of those who were exploited. Profits, in production as well as in finance, ultimately come from the surplus value created by exploitation in production. The financial gifts by the governments allowed some big companies, especially in auto, not only to survive, but also to thrive with high profits. But it increased demand only in an artificial and temporary manner. It did not convince the capitalists that the market was expanding, which could have made new investments in production profitable.

The balance sheet of the governments’ bailout of the financial system essentially only turned private debt into public debt. And the new financial jolts that began in August 2011 represent a greater threat than those of 2008. Not only are private banks in danger of undergoing a chain reaction of bankruptcies, but so are countries. This is the concern of the financial system �" and not only in Europe �" faced with the possible bankruptcy of Greece and the domino effect that this could trigger.

The Euro Zone in the Financial Storm

Having begun in 2007 with the mortgage crisis in the United States, which was transformed into a banking crisis in 2008, the financial crisis then bounced over to the European Union. The euro zone is now the epicenter of the crisis.

We are not going to discuss the specific form of speculation against the euro zone, and less the almost daily shocks. We will only say that speculation found the fault lines in the euro zone: the European states had created a single currency, but did not align their fiscal systems; above all, they did not set up a state authority able to intervene on currency matters. Speculators seized the opportunity.

Inside the euro zone, political leaders and the media, both of which serve finance, blame Greece for the chaotic turbulence around the euro. But they all know that any other state in this zone can be hit, whether it be Italy or Spain tomorrow, or maybe France the day after tomorrow. In fact, when it comes to sovereign debts, speculation can break out elsewhere in the world (not to mention the other forms of speculation that can break out).

The sovereign debt crisis is only the current manifestation of a succession of crises due to financial speculation �" one hundred of them of varying seriousness �" that sprinkle the history of finance since the end of the 1960s. The monetary crisis that led to the implosion in 1971 of the international monetary system, which had been put in place after World War II at Bretton Woods, opened up a long period of crises and stagnation of production.

The European Union, and especially the euro zone, corresponds to the interests of big industrial and financial groups in Europe and the United States. The European Union may gradually have established a parliamentary functioning �" which is, however, powerless. But the sole aim behind the building of the EU was to provide the big companies with a wider economic space than their respective national markets. However, the financial activity of these groups is today in the process of destroying the foundations of the euro zone and the European Union. This may be contradictory �" but it is only one more contradiction in the capitalist economy today.

The Ups and Downs in International Trade

The year 2009 was also the year when international trade declined. After several decades of permanent expansion, international trade had been brutally halted, starting in November 2008. The plunge in 2009 was the largest since World War II. According to the WTO, trade declined by 22 per cent of its value and a little bit more than 12 per cent of its volume. This decline in trade was linked to the decline in production, but it also was a consequence of the financial crisis of 2008. About 90% of international trade requires short-term credit, according to the WTO. The crisis of confidence between the banks, and the generalized lack of confidence that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers, led a number of companies to give up financing international operations, lacking guarantees from the banks. This decline in 2009 puts the so-called recovery of 2010 in perspective. And it was a very limited recovery. By the first half of 2011, international trade had once again begun to decline.

High Profits

As the 2010 results of the big companies came out in March 2011, big business was swimming in euphoria. In the United States, the companies that make up the S&P 500 �" which consists of the 500 biggest companies �" made 700 billion dollars in profit, close to their 2006 record (Les Echos, March 3).

The same thing in France: 82.5 billion euros in profits for the 40 big companies that make up the CAC 40. That is below their 101.4 billion in profits in 2007, a record year, but the 85 per cent growth in profits in 2010 ended the stagnation of 2009 (Le Monde, March 5). It is significant that the highest growth in profits came, in addition to the banks, from the auto companies or companies connected to them, like Peugeot, Renault, Michelin, which all benefited from state aid, as well as from companies like Vivendi, which live on expenditures from state or local authorities. Investments in manufacturing nonetheless fell by 2 per cent (according to INSEE, the Bureau of Statistics and Economic Analysis). And real investment, that is, the construction of more factories, is being carried out mainly in the big semi-developed countries (China, Brazil or India). These investments essentially are aimed at getting around protectionist barriers put up by the semi-developed countries, in order to conquer part of their national markets.

High profits sharpen competition, not only between big companies in the same sector, but also between the mastodons of the same big country, situated either upstream or downstream in the process of production. Upstream, the prices of raw materials skyrocket, as a result not only of the appetite of big production groups, but also even more of financial speculation. While speculation had been at the origin of the 2008 financial crisis, threatening the banking system with bankruptcy, nevertheless, it took off again, as soon as the immediate threat had passed. And the inflationary policy of the governments has continued to feed it.

The Rise of Inflation

In the United States, this inflationary policy was openly carried out under the vague expression, “Quantitative Easing,” under which the Federal Reserve bought bonds issued by the U.S. government. It’s nothing but a new name for the old practice of printing money. This manipulation allowed the U.S. Treasury Department to finance an extra 600 billion dollars, practically everything the federal state needed to cover its budget shortfall in 2010. (Le Figaro, June 14, 2011). The Bank of England follows the same policy. The Central European Bank also dumped 75 billion euros (100 billon dollars) into the economy by buying securities from Greece, Ireland and Portugal, despite legal barriers established in the treaties that accompanied the formation of the Central European Bank.

With fresh money at very low rates of interest provided by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, financiers rapidly increased their speculative operations, focusing on shares in the stock market, raw materials, the euro and other currencies. They contributed to a big part of the increase in the prices of minerals and of raw materials, giving a wild, jolting character to the price increases. The same is true for the price increases for raw materials in energy. Despite the crisis, oil and gas prices are increasing, and the profits of the oil companies, skyrocketing.

Speculation in the stock market created a bubble that burst in August 2011, and the beginnings of a panic amplified the drop. Since then, share prices vary day by day in jolting upheavals. This doesn’t stop the speculation; in fact, it offers new possibilities.

Financial groups can make fortunes even when speculating on declines in stock prices. And beyond speculation in the strict sense, falling share prices of a big company can offer a more powerful and wealthier competitor the opportunity to buy enough shares to take control of that company. Companies are buying back large amounts of their own shares, rather than investing �" reflecting the aim of increasing the fortunes of shareholders by increasing the value of each share of stock. But it is also a way to keep away a possible predator.

New Instruments of Speculation

During the months following the 2008 panic, financial products were hit by unbridled inventiveness. The diversity of financial products had an increasingly complex and risky character. Worth a special mention are the different securities, representing a kind of insurance against possible losses. Thus, today, there are credit default swaps (CDS) that insure against a default in payment of a sovereign debt, that is, a kind of insurance against the bankruptcy of a debtor state. Given the prevailing climate of uncertainty, the volume of these CDS’s exploded. These insurance securities are themselves an object of speculation. Their volume amplifies the speculative moves and links the banks to each other, all of them existing as both insured and insurer.

Despite their imagination, financiers cannot enlarge the planet, but they did find ways to speed up financial operations. “High Frequency Trading” allows traders, or more exactly their computers equipped with software specially designed to make a gigantic number of trades, buying and selling shares or currencies in a few tenths of a second. These types of trades have grown from 9 per cent to 40 per cent of all shares sold on European exchanges from 2007 to 2011 (Economic Images of the World 2012, published in September 2011). In a sign of how finance has gone incredibly mad, one of the “regulatory measures” that is seriously discussed is to limit the speed of the computers used in speculating.

The crisis in financial operations in September 2008, just as the dazzling recovery of these same operations a few months afterwards, have each contributed to financial concentration. The 10 biggest banks in the world (including Bank of America, JPMorganChase, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, UBS, Citigroup, HSBC) carry out 77 per cent of all currency transactions on the world market and, as a consequence, they dominate speculation. Behind the neutral expression, “financial markets,” is the harmful ability of 10 boards of directors to intervene in the world economy.

Financial groups don’t work just with their own money, but with the liquid assets of big industrial groups.

Despite the crisis, the industrial groups of the S&P 500, which in 2010 had 940 billion dollars in cash, were able to gain 700 billion dollars in profit on their operations. (Images Economiques du Monde 2012). These companies consecrated only what was strictly necessary to productive investments, and even less to paying their employees. Despite spending 300 billion dollars buying back their own stock in order to increase its value, they still had considerably more left to place in the financial system.

Starvers of the World

The most odious form of speculation in raw materials is on food. The price of grains increased in 2006, 2007, and 2008, only to skyrocket again beginning in 2010.

The prices of wheat and corn �" which were, at the beginning of the 2000 decade, respectively $80 and $110 a ton �" rose to $160 and $220 in 2006. After prices leveled off in 2009, the prices resumed rising in 2010. In the spring of 2011, the price of a ton of wheat was $350!

Even worse: prices are not only overall higher, they are also more unstable. In 2008, for example, the price of a ton of these two cereals, so important for feeding the planet, hit peaks of $240 for corn and $400 for wheat.

There was the same evolution for rice, whose price per ton hit $150 at the beginning of 2000 and $350 eight years later, causing hunger riots in a number of big cities in Southeast Asia and West Africa.

The capitalist groups don’t have confidence in the future of their own economy and in the future growth of the marketplace. What they don’t invest in production is directed toward financial operations that contribute to the speculative increase in raw material prices, which then makes productive investment less profitable.

During 2010, the price of raw materials increased on average by 50 per cent (Les Echos, March 9). The industrial enterprises decided to pass through the price increases of raw materials. This intensified their struggle over the division of profits with the capitalists involved in distribution. In the jungle of this intense competition, the relationship of forces is decisive. A number of subcontractors or smaller distributors paid the cost, while the workers of these companies, who are the first victims of “cost reduction schemes,” paid a much higher cost.

Public Debts, a New Excuse to Extort Money from the Exploited

Public debt nourishes finance. But the extent of this debt is threatening to bankrupt whole countries. Public debt is the new flag that is being waved to impose new sacrifices on the exploited. Austerity policies, being carried out everywhere today, correspond to the interests of the capitalists. The wage freeze and the legal lengthening of the work week give the bosses weapons to increase exploitation. The reduction of social spending allows a greater part of the budget to go to the capitalists. At the same time, this reduces the number of consumers and shrinks the markets for capitalist expansion. By becoming more dependent on the state and its ability to extort money from the working masses, big capital demonstrates more and more clearly its parasitic nature.

The immediate cause for the brutal fall in stock prices was the bursting of a speculative bubble. Following after the fall in price of bank shares, the stock market capitalization of the big enterprises dropped 20 or even 30 per cent. But this was not only a financial phenomenon. It also meant that capital is not optimistic about the profit these enterprises will produce in the future.

Since the middle of August, the specter of a recession floats once again over heavy industry, steel, and automobile. In only one month, European enterprises linked to steel saw the value of their stock plunge by 34 per cent (ArcelorMittal, for example, plunged by 38 per cent).

The memory of the recession that followed the financial crisis of September 2008 is still too fresh not to serve as a warning. In 2008, the automakers foresaw a drop in sales and reduced their production so they would not accumulate costly inventory. That pushed their steel suppliers to shut down a number of blast furnaces. This then reverberated throughout industry, in particular against machine manufacturers, whose sales collapsed. In 2011, the same mechanism is beginning to be set in motion.

The Crisis of Finance, the Expression of the Crisis of the Economy

The financial crisis has another effect on production. Although one cannot yet speak about a crisis of confidence among the banks, as in 2008, it is already difficult for companies to get the credit necessary to run their businesses. This lack of confidence by the banks is not limited to small and medium-sized companies whose representatives denounce the difficulty in obtaining loans, even those whose business appears healthy.

“Difficulties of French banks makes the placement of loans for airplanes more fragile,” was the headline of Les Echos on September 22. The difficulties in the aviation industry are worse because purchases and sales are in dollars. Speculation against the euro, which makes European banks weaker, does not encourage American banks to respond favorably to requests from European banks to refinance loans in dollars.

Beyond these problems, austerity measures taken by all the governments to satisfy the demands of financial capital limit the ability of a growing part of the population to consume, and therefore also limit the market for the products of industrial capital. Financial capital thus undermines industrial capital, even if they are two forms of the same capital. To believe the opposition between them could be resolved is a delusion.

Anti-Globalization: a Moderate Critique of Finance, Without Calling Capitalism into Question

Today it is fashionable to denounce the excesses of finance. The economist Joseph Stiglitz, ex-economic adviser to Clinton, and Nobel prize winner in economics, and considered one of the leading theorists opposing globalization, entitled his work analyzing the last developments of the crisis: “The Triumph of Greed.” As if greed was something unknown to capitalism before the fateful deregulation of the 1980s!

To critique “neo-liberal policies,” deregulation or even globalization or financialization of the economy, and to remain at that level, without explaining how all this is rooted in the evolution of the capitalist economy, is a way of defending the capitalist economy. The fact that the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and parts of the extreme left also take up these kinds of explanations shows that they put themselves fundamentally on the terrain of the bourgeoisie.

To the question of why there is such a development of financialization, the antiglobalization movement offers only platitudes. They go no further than denouncing the neo-liberal policies that governments follow or denouncing the influence of the “monetarist theories” of bourgeois political-economy gurus. They do not explain why these policies became dominant at a specific moment in postwar economic history �" after the first signs of the economic crisis appeared at the end of the 1960s.

It is obvious that national States and their leaders played a role at each stage of the financialization of the economy. All the measures taken to “deregulate” �" to get rid of the obstacles in the way of investing or moving capital from one country to another, from one sector to another �" were taken by the national States. But governments simply translated into legal terms the evolution of capitalism itself, of its internal dynamics �" sometimes anticipating that evolution.

The antiglobalization movement exposes the economic neo-liberal “theorists” who argue that markets regulate themselves. With good reason. The multiplication of financial crises and their growing seriousness prove the stupidity of such arguments. But the crises of the capitalist economy have always existed, even when the market was more or less regulated. And let’s not forget that the regulated market bred the deregulated market. First it incubated it, then it gave birth to it. It prepared the financiers to demand it, economists to justify it and politicians to provide its legal framework. So how could a return to regulation �" if that were possible today �" be preserved in the capitalist economy?

The preponderance of financial capital over industrial capital has a history that stretches back more than a century. It’s even one of the characteristics of the evolution of capitalism that has reached maturity, or senility, as Lenin put it; one of the signs that capitalism has passed from the stage of competition to the monopoly stage of imperialism. In the context of this global evolution, financial and productive activity evolved symbiotically. Their respective roles reflect the rhythm of the capitalist economy.

Regulation: One Method of Saving Big Capital

The regulatory measures wished for by economists who pose as experts for the bourgeois left were reinvented in the context of the 1929 crisis and the years of depression that followed. They took on different forms in the imperialist democracy of the U.S. and under the fascist regime of bourgeois Germany, but the goals were the same: to save big capital.

During World War II, “regulation” was the norm in all imperialist countries. This regulation not only didn’t stop the major trusts from prospering but, on the contrary, the war was a period of enrichment for the biggest sharks of the capitalist economy.

Regulation continued long after the war, imposed by the need to give State crutches to private capital because it couldn’t, on the basis of private profit and competition, accomplish all the tasks of reconstruction and of restarting production. Even in the imperialist countries, particularly those of Europe, the State not only regulated, it played an important role in production and credit. Myriad legal and administrative rules were drawn up, among them the separation of the respective activities of banking and insurance; and the compartmentalizing of deposit banks and investment banks within the banking system itself. Moreover, in the relations between countries, an international monetary system with the dollar predominating was established, and controls over currency exchange were added.

Those years stand as proof that it is possible for the capitalist system to be stuffed with regulations, but also as proof that, if we don’t make fundamental changes to the capitalist economy, to private ownership of the means of production and to the race for profit, then the crises will not disappear; and as soon as the rules initially designed to help big capital become restrictions, capital will throw them off.

The Reagans, Thatchers �" the high priests of neo-liberal capitalism �" were only instruments, carrying out the wishes of big capital at a particular time in its evolution.

Among the nonsense it has spouted, the antiglobalization movement criticizes the treaties of Maastricht and Lisbon for forbidding the Central European Bank to lend to States, causing the States to borrow from the financial markets, thus making them prisoners of those markets. Increasing public debt is apparently due, therefore, only to the interest paid to private banks.

It’s true that an important part of the debt is interest owed to the banks and that the decision of governments to finance themselves on capital markets, paying interest, has been an immense gift to the financial system. But the antiglobalization movement’s explanation is partial and given for selfserving reasons.

First of all, while they vilify the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, which were the legal foundation in Europe for limiting what the Central European Bank can do, they purposely avoid mentioning the fact that public debt is also considerable in the U.S. and Great Britain, even though these two countries are not in the euro zone and were therefore not concerned by the obligations in the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties.

Second, presenting a return to the right of each country in the euro zone to print money as an alternative to the current financial crisis is in no way a solution to overcome the crisis, nor does it give a more favorable perspective to the exploited classes. It’s only an inflationary policy. And even if it is implemented by a national State, it is nonetheless a policy designed to empty the workers’ pockets by destroying their purchasing power.

Circumstances may persuade the bourgeoisie to adopt this policy. The U.S. is already doing so. Europe also, to some extent. Workers obviously should not find themselves lining up behind the policy of the bourgeoisie, whether it aims at monetary stability or whether it is inflationary. This again raises the need for the working class to put as one of its objectives the sliding scale of wages in order to preserve its purchasing power.

In the text of last year’s congress, dedicated to “The capitalist economic crisis,” we noted that: “Contrary to the fears in financial circles, and among the political leaders of the great imperialist powers, the frenzied printing of money has not, or not yet, caused the high inflation of the 70s....

“It’s as if the economy were compartmentalized and the surplus cash due to printing money were absorbed by the financial system itself.”

It is nevertheless probable that the cash created by the frantic printing of money in the U.S., in Great Britain and to some extent in Europe, will simultaneously feed the casinos of the wealthy and cause inflation for the masses.

The antiglobalization movement is careful never to call into question the foundations of the capitalist economy even while criticizing some of the damage it does. No surprise that they aspire to be economic experts for the Socialist Party. They are already flattered that the very reactionary duo of Sarkozy and Merkel looks kindly on their Tobin tax, a tax which is derisory since it changes nothing fundamental in the capitalist economy, the true cause of the crisis, while it hardly touches the financial speculators’ interests. The latest meeting of the G20, that coterie of imperialist dignitaries, even put the idea of taxing financial operations on their rhetorical agenda.

The governmental left, along with antiglobalist theorists, are bidding to carry out the wishes of big capital should the current financial chaos bring it to ask for help from the State.

The return to a more “Statist” terminology and the evocation of nationalization haven’t come out of nowhere. It is possible that new rules will come out of the current crisis to try to confine finance a little, to protect the national or European economies by using protectionist measures.

Financial Concentration and the International Division of Labor

If the crises of the capitalist economy are always catastrophic for society, particularly for the exploited who are pushed into unemployment, they are simple pulsations in the economic life of capitalism. For the major companies, crises are often favorable because they cut out dead wood, getting rid of the less viable companies. They are periods when capital is rapidly concentrated. The will to control energy sources and minerals, which are essential to production, is combined with the speculative skyrocketing of prices, and this sharpens the rivalry between the major specialized companies who share the planet. They take advantage of the surfeit of financial capital to merge or to buy out one another. (In 2010, the total spent on mergers and acquisitions reached a record sum of 2.48 trillion dollars.)

The hold that a few monopolies or oligopolies have on the mineral riches of the planet was reinforced. As it already was in the time of Lenin’s “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” their hold is complete in the essential sectors of petroleum, iron, bauxite, gold, copper and nickel, and it aggravates the antagonism between cartelized and noncartelized industries.

One of the consequences of the hold that the big trusts have over the sources of raw material is the control the trusts have over the underdeveloped countries in which those raw materials are found. This results in a local ruling layer being put and kept in place, a layer whose duty is to prevent the exploited classes of their country from sharing in any of the return from the country’s mineral wealth. Africa, where a number of countries have particularly rich mineral deposits, remains the continent with the poorest population. Even if colonial domination has run its course, these countries remain totally dominated by the major companies. Even if no Fashoda incident highlights the race to share out colonies, the rivalry between capitalist groups seeking to control the resources stands behind many of the civil or ethnic wars.

Mergers and acquisitions in the extraction industries aren’t aimed at increasing the merged company’s production capacity. They simply allow the most powerful multinationals to grab the markets that previously were beyond their reach.

This quantitative extension of the major monopolies has also brought about qualitative change. All the major companies have solid national bases and, as far as major American companies are concerned, a huge national market, but they are also present in a large number of countries. Their strategy has been to develop all the specific qualities in other nations that would serve the companies’ interests (proximity to raw material sources or the price and the quality of the workforce, etc.). Together with their subcontractors and their suppliers, they make up conglomerates whose tentacles grasp the world economy as a single whole. By favoring specialization, they refine the international division of labor. The large multinational firms have become international production networks, which include a multitude of plants in a multitude of countries, each holding a specific place in the production process for the global market. They have thus pushed the “universal interdependence of nations” (Marx, The Communist Manifesto) to an unprecedented level.

The international division of labor is now organized, for the most part, within these major conglomerates and according to their needs. Under the reign of big capital, the development of the multinational constitutes a formidable shackle, which submits the world to the search for profit for the fewer and fewer boards of directors that dominate the world economy. But these multinationals also are a sign of the growing socialization of production.

Imperialism �" From Lenin’s Time to Now

Lenin, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, foreshadowed in his day how much of a weight monopoly capitalism would become.

“The extent to which monopoly capital has intensified all the contradictions of capitalism is generally known. It is sufficient to mention the high cost of living and the tyranny of the cartels. This intensification of contradictions constitutes the most powerful driving force of the transitional period of history, which began from the time of the final victory of world finance capital.

“Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations �" all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the ‘rentier state,’ the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie to an everincreasing degree lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by ‘clipping coupons.’ It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a greater or lesser degree, now one and now another of these tendencies.”

Since Lenin wrote this text, the great imperialist states have tended to become rentier states and leave production to the “workshops of the world” in underdeveloped countries, from China to Brazil and a string of countries in Eastern Asia. This has made the contradictions more pronounced between the rentier states, in which financial activity has taken over from industrial activity, and the poor countries, whose growing industrial activity feeds the financial activity of the imperialist countries.

But since Lenin was a revolutionary communist, he saw what this development would bring in the future:

“When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organizes according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of twothirds, or threefourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organized manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds or thousands of miles from each other; when a single center directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (…) �" then it becomes evident that we have socialization of production, and (…) that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period….”

Lenin’s “fairly long period” has in fact been a lot longer than the revolutionary communists of the time thought it would be. Barely a year after Lenin wrote Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916, the capitalist world was shaken by the powerful wave of revolution that began with the Russian revolution, but the wave was not strong enough to destroy capitalism. We know the rest of the story.

Society paid for the survival of capitalism with the crisis of 1929, the Great Depression, fascism, World War II and, as a sort of boomerang effect, the degeneration of the workers’ state itself.

Twenty years later, in The Transitional Program, Trotsky wrote, “The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ripened, they have begun to get somewhat rotten.” The transformation of society is taking a lot longer than Trotsky thought it would.

But the obstacle is still the same as Trotsky described. An economic and social organization, even if it has been obsolete for a long time, does not fall until it is overthrown �" in other words, not unless there is a revolutionary class, putting itself forward to run society and to fight for power.

Despite the destruction brought about by World War II, despite all the damage caused by the perpetuation of capitalism, despite the succession of crises that have shaken it, during the years when the capitalist economy was regulated and the years since it was not, humanity has continued to develop its scientific and technological knowledge and therefore the efficiency by which it exerts a growing power over nature. The division of labor on a global scale, which has continued to develop, is part of this growth, even if it has exacerbated the inequalities and heightened the chaotic nature of this development.

Financialization: Its Continuity and Amplification in the History of Capitalism

Financialization is not a break in capitalism’s history. It has not changed its laws, nor any of its contradictions; on the contrary, it has amplified them.

Financialization has contributed to the concentration of the world economy into a single whole. It has widened the polarization between the wealth of a small minority and the poverty of the greatest number, between the owners of capital and the exploited, between rich countries and underdeveloped countries. It has accentuated all the contradictions of the capitalist economy. It has given economic life a still more chaotic character than before.

In this dreadful waste that the perpetuation of the capitalist order has cost humanity, we must count the considerable price paid in multiple wars, with or without direct intervention by the imperialist powers; and the famines, particularly those caused simply by speculation on food products.

Above and beyond the millions of dead and wounded in the wars caused directly or indirectly by imperialism’s domination of the world, we should also take into account what humanity loses by the restriction of so many people to a vegetative life, exclusively preoccupied with surviving from day to day, with no access to education or culture.

The economists of the bourgeoisie have invented a “Human Development Index” (HDI) to fill in what the GDP does not show. But the damage that comes from the survival of capitalism cannot be counted by a statistical index. How many child Mozarts, da Vincis, Rembrandts, Balzacs, Einsteins, or Marxes die of hunger before reaching adulthood? How many survive but have no chance to join the ranks of those who help to further humanity?

At the time of Marx, a communist organization of the economy, with socialized production and distribution, was only an inspired anticipation.

At the time of Lenin, because the Bolshevik party took power in an underdeveloped country, it had to try to do, by means of administration by the workers’ state, what capitalism had not done in Russia. Facing this Herculean task, Lenin knew what he was talking about when he said that the Russian economy wasn’t suffering from too many monopolies but from too few.

His main preoccupation during the years that preceded his death was to insist on the need for censuses, in order to know what means of production then existed in Russia.

Despite the tardiness of the proletarian revolution since the first try in 1917, history has not stopped.

Although the deadline is further away than Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin or Trotsky thought it would be, the question “socialism or barbarism?” has not yet been definitively decided, even if moldering imperialism has resuscitated a multitude of barbaric forms from the past, such as religious fundamentalism of various stripes, ethnic sectarianism or chauvinism. To all of these should be added others, coming out of human activity itself: like the nuclear threat or, more generally, all the threats to nature and the environment represented by production for profit only.

It is as true now as it was in Lenin’s time that the gigantic multinationals that devour the product of human activity in the four corners of the world, also herald what society can become. The growing socialization of productive activity and imperialist globalization are the tributes paid by vice to virtue, by rotting capitalism to the future, communist, reorganization of society.

Down with Reactionary Ideas �" Even When Wrapped Up in Left-Wing Language

An important aspect of the political fight of revolutionary communists is the fight against those who, under the pretense of attacking this or that consequence of the survival of capitalism, do it with reactionary ideas, which, at best, cannot be applied, and at worst would represent a step backward.

Revolutionary communism cannot be reduced to defending acquired advantages. Protectionism or de-globalization, even when rehashed by the left, is not only a stupid idea in the face of the great interdependence of economies. (How many factories spread over how many countries are involved in the production of an airplane? How many workers here in France work for an American, Japanese, English or even Chinese company?)

Protectionism has been a little �" and already very little �" progressive for poor countries that were trying to protect their national economy against imperial robbery. But in the imperialist countries, even when protectionism is presented as a way of protecting workers, it is pretty obvious that it is going to be used against competition from workers in poor countries, in Africa, China or Mexico. In whatever convoluted way it is presented, protectionism sets workers of one country against their class brothers and sisters from other countries and chains them each to their imperialist bourgeoisie.

Humanity can be emancipated from capitalism only as a whole. It is as a whole and by taking advantage of the division of labor prepared by capitalism, up to and including by globalized imperialism, that it is possible to reorganize production, consciously and rationally, on a planetwide scale.

The future of humanity is not a world with a “Fortress Europe” and a “Fortress America,” each protecting their privileges against the sea of misery in the rest of the world. That would not only be humanly vile. It would be unrealistic. Capitalism builds twentyfourfoot walls and puts barbed wire around territories that are considered privileged; it gives carte blanche to the crooks in top positions who direct the hunt against immigrants. But it cannot make these walls impassable. And the barriers it puts up to protect itself from the poor people of poor countries don’t protect it against the poverty that grows even inside these capitalist heavens.

Communist revolutionaries took Stalin’s saying that it was possible to have “socialism in a single country” as a sign that Stalinism had passed irretrievably into the capitalist camp and had accepted a capitalist future for society.

Humanity cannot move forward until it has rid itself of the economic power of the bourgeoisie, starting with its vision of the world. The only perspective really opposed to a world dominated by imperialist capitalism, regulated or not, depends on the capacity of the proletariat to play its historic role. Even more than in Trotsky’s time “the turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”