The view of
imperialism about the danger of Communism, for example, the advancing
of the “Domino Theory”, and the various red scares did not come from nowhere, but a
genuine fear that they were losing. Under those conditions, its no
wonder that the US saw almost any challenge as being a step towards
global communism, and one it must put down immediately. Yet,
simultaneously, the interests of big industrial capital in the US,
after WWII, and its reflection in social democracy, also began to
understand more clearly what represented a threat, and what didn't.
If we want
to understand the situation in Greece that Syriza faces today, the
comparison is not with Spain in 1936, or with Chile in 1973, but with
say Britain in 1945. If anything, the programme of the Attlee
government was more radical than that of Syriza today. Yet, it did
not provoke a military coup, or US intervention to overthrow that
government. On the contrary, the US lent them the money to be able
to carry out the programme. Not only that but the social-democratic
ideology that stood behind it, was introduced internationally under
the guidance of Keynes and others, in the formation of
social-democratic, international para state bodies such as the IMF,
and World Bank. It was applied across Europe, via the Marshall Plan
to provide huge fiscal stimulus for the purpose of capital investment
and restructuring.
But, such an
approach has been seen more recently. Quite in contrast to the US
policy of military intervention in South and Central America during
the 1960's and 70's, the US has been a powerful force in assisting
social democratic forces in the area to replace military and
Bonapartist regimes with bourgeois social democratic regimes, more in
keeping with the needs of a modern industrialised capitalist economy,
for example, in Brazil. When Germany was reunified, massive
investment was made by the West into the East, and a similar
programme of investment has been undertaken across central and
eastern Europe. The EU, and US were proposing a similar Marshall Aid Plan for MENA, before the Arab Spring descended into chaos,
and conservative reaction.
There is no
reason why big industrial capital should seek to frustrate the social
democratic programme of Syriza. On the contrary, there is every
reason for them to support it, in any way they can. Indeed, over the
last 6 years, the US has been encouraging the whole of the EU to
adopt a similar programme in opposition to the conservative programme
of austerity! The problem for much of the left's analysis is that it
is based on a repetition of mantras, without the necessary analysis
of material conditions, and dynamics. It fails to distinguish
between the interests of different sections of capital, and thereby
ends up in knots trying to portray every bourgeois party as simply
reflecting some monolithic capitalist ideology and interest.
Its why the
left ended up being totally disoriented by the rise of the Tea Party
in the US, and a similar thing exists with UKIP in Britain. The
simple question to ask here is, if the Tea Party or UKIP represents
the true, unvarnished interests of capital, whose interests then do
the Republicans/Conservatives represent, and whose interests do the
Democrats/Labour represent?
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