U.S. capitalists have a growing crisis on their hands. As they prepare for a wider global conflict with their imperialist rivals, they’re having trouble forging the coalition they need. This process will have unpredictable twists and turns. What’s clear is that the U.S. is in sharp economic decline and increasingly unable to go it alone in paying for their war machine.
Of the nations Washington counts on as strategic bases of operation, sources of troops and financial backers, two key ones are balking. The German rulers’ public outrage at U.S. phone tapping reflects their reluctance to toe the U.S. bosses’ line, economically or militarily. Some important Japanese capitalists, meanwhile, aren’t ready to abandon the post-World War II pacifist edicts (forced into the Japanese constitution by the U.S.) that helped enrich them. The prohibition of a standing army boosted the profit margin for Japanese corporations.
These edicts could change, however. Capitalism is a dictatorship of the ruling class. Capitalists use the government to maintain their profit system. They use war to resolve their conflicts with other capitalists. The bosses’ sole interest in the working class is to exploit labor for profit — and to use workers’ sons and daughters to fight and die in inter-imperialist wars. The rulers will alter or nullify any laws that limit their ability to pursue their profit goals.
We, the international working class, need to smash this bosses’ dictatorship. We need to establish a workers’ dictatorship that represents our class interests and eliminates the profit system and all its evils: unemployment, racism, sexism, mass poverty and war.
German Bosses Won’t Bow
to U.S. Demands
On November 4, Paul Krugman, a liberal economist at the New York Times, wrote, “German officials are furious at America, and not just because of the business about Angela Merkel’s cell phone. What has them enraged now is...a U.S. Treasury report. [It] argues that Germany’s huge surplus on current account — a broad measure of the trade balance — is harmful, creating ‘a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as for the world economy.’ ” Krugman went on to attack Germany’s relentless impoverishment of Eurozone U.S. allies and NATO members like Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal.
A day later, the Times further exposed the root of the Obama-Merkel rift. In the eyes of U.S. rulers, Berlin is withholding its military potential from the cause of U.S. imperialism. As Jochen Bittner, editor at the pro-U.S. Die Zeit, complained in an op-ed piece:
Germany is Europe’s unrivaled superpower, its largest economy and its most powerful political force. And yet if its response to recent global crises, and the general attitude of its leaders and citizens, are any indication, there appears to be nothing that will get the German government to consider military intervention.
This attitude was apparent in the German population’s overwhelming opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But U.S. capitalists worry most about Germany’s contribution in future global crises. Germany spends only 1.4 percent of it gross domestic product (GDP) on its military. The U.S. tops the world by devoting 4.8 percent to its war machine. Resurgent rival Russia is close behind at 4.4 percent. China invests 2 percent of its GDP in its armed forces, but that figure underplays the true scope of its war preparations:
“The Chinese military budget, at official exchange rates, is one-seventh that of the United States. But on a more appropriate purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, the Chinese military expenditure is about $500 billion, about three-quarters that of the United States” (Global Security).
U.S. Wants Japan on War Footing
Meanwhile, President Obama is desperately trying to get Japan — the world’s third largest economy — to increase its measly 1 percent military outlay by reversing the pacifist Article 9 of its constitution. It states, “The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.”
This edict was imposed in 1947 to prevent a repeat of the massive Asian war launched by Japan prior to World War II, which threatened U.S. supremacy in the Pacific. But today the U.S. capitalists have more pressing concerns with a new emerging superpower, namely China. Obama and the bosses he represents are tilting toward Asia to meet this threat. At the same time, Japan is embroiled in a struggle with China over energy resources recently discovered in the seas that lie between them.
Under circumstances like these, the bosses simply change the rules. Ann Wright, former U.S. Army officer and diplomat, writes in Global Research (11/8/13):
On October 3, 2013, the United States and Japan issued a “Joint Statement of the Security Consultative Committee: Toward a More Robust Alliance and Greater Shared Responsibilities.” In the document, the United States “welcomes” the [Japanese Prime Minister] Abe government’s “re-examining the legal basis for its security including the matter of exercising its right of collective self-defense....”
In other words, they are seeking a way to eliminate Article 9 and allow Japan to participate in wars of aggression. As a side benefit for U.S. rulers, Japan would be forced to pay for a portion of U.S. military outlays in Japan and Okinawa.
But major Japanese capitalists oppose Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s push for “proactive pacifism,” his euphemism for remilitarization. A November 8 editorial in the Japan Times warns:
Through the exercise of the right to collective self-defense “proactive pacifism” could eventually lead to deployment of the Self-Defense Forces overseas on armed military missions. In short, if implemented Mr. Abe’s policy of “proactive pacifism” will destroy the Constitution’s war-renouncing principle and Japan’s traditional “defense-only defense” posture [where military force can be used only internally or if Japan is attacked]. Thus the prime minister’s push for “proactive pacifism” must be stopped.
Japan Times is wholly owned by Nifco, Inc., the largest supplier of plastic parts for Japan’s worldwide automotive industry. The company’s profits are much larger when not
being taxed to finance a world-class military apparatus.
U.S. Post-WWII Policies Backfire?
Shortly after World War II, the triumphant U.S. rulers conducted highly publicized war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo. Then they restored their fascist former enemies to political and economic power. They re-Nazified Germany to counter the pro-working class Soviet and Chinese movements of the postwar era. But the U.S. refused to restore military power to the vanquished.
U.S. planners like John J. McCloy, chairman of  Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations, was installed as High Commissioner of Germany, essentially its lord and master. At that point the U.S. capitalists owned half the world’s manufacturing capacity. They thought they could maintain sole military control of Germany and Japan. And so they did for decades, with hundreds of thousands of GIs stationed in the two countries, even at the height of the Vietnam War.
But with their vital interests now threatened in the Middle East and elsewhere, the U.S. imperialists’ huge military outlays are straining their capacity. They need their longtime protectorates to chip in as armed protectors of their global empire. The chief U.S. rivals are China and Russia, two former workers’ states that are now state capitalist. By using their governments to directly exploit their working classes, these rivals threaten U.S. rulers’ world domination.
Rebellion Good, Communist Revolution Crucial
What all the ruling classes fear is how workers will react to their murderous plans. Masses in the European Union are rebelling against the austerity imposed by German bosses. Suffering the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, demonstrators are taking to the streets in Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal. They are fighting the French bosses’ pension and job cuts and the rise of the new Nazis in Germany and Greece.
In China, hundreds of rebellions are underway to oppose the removal of hundreds of millions of peasants from the land and into $2-a-day urban sweatshops and other menial labor. Tens of thousands have demonstrated and fought the cops in Brazil, protesting the rulers’ extravagant spending on the World Cup and the Olympics while transportation fares are raised, wages are cut and food prices climb. Who can predict when U.S. workers will say they’ve had enough of mass racist unemployment? When they’ll fight back against their impoverishment? When they’ll refuse to provide the cannon fodder for the U.S. bosses’ war machine?
Spontaneous rebellion is a positive expression of workers’ anger. But it can never end the exploitation of capitalism. We need a working class led by a mass communist party to smash the state power of the world’s capitalist classes—and to replace it with a workers’ dictatorship.