by Michael Schmidt

US President Barack Obama’s military regime (for as commander-in-chief of the world’s largest military machine, his is not merely a mild “administration”), has proven once again that when it comes to American imperialism’s dealing with the darker majority of humanity, having a black man in the Oval Office simply doesn’t matter.

As we argued in the last edition of Zabalaza, the widespread myth that Obama’s skin-colour automatically made him a better man was a deeply racist argument that would be proven to be threadbare as soon as Obama ordered the invasion of his first “country of colour” – and this happened in under a month of his inauguration when he authorised sending 17,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.

But American imperialism is not just about the stick of armed intervention or enforced regime-change: we must not forget the carrot of aid, aid that can be temptingly held out, and then withdrawn if the recipient nation is not suitably compliant.

Egypt, the most populous nation in the Arab world, and, along with Nigeria and South Africa, one of the most economically and militarily powerful states in Africa, has been the largest recipient of US aid after Israel since it signed a peace accord with Israel in 1979 – sometimes topping US$2 billion/year, US$1.3 billion of that in military aid and between US$100 million to US$250 million in economic aid. Ironically, under President George W Bush, the Americans gave US$45 million to “good governance” and “democratisation” programmes, with a substantial chunk of that bypassing the state and going directly to civil society organisations. But over the past year, Washington has slashed this civil society aid to Egypt by more than half, down to US$20 million.

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by Michael Schmidt

As Zabalaza goes to press, the West African country of Guinea is preparing to go to the polls in the second round run-off of its first democratic presidential elections ever (the first round was held in June), half a century after its ‘independence’ from France. Its first president, former postal worker Ahmed Sékou Touré, drew heavily from Marxist-Leninism in building a one-party state and ruling with an iron fist until his death 27 years later in 1984, with the blood of an estimated 500,000 people on his hands. He was followed by Lansana Conté who likewise ran an authoritarian military regime until his death in 2008. But is the dawn of bourgeois democracy a guarantee to the Guinean popular classes that they shall be freed from five decades of oppression and exploitation? I argue that when both privateering states such as Guinea that have plundered their citizens and their neighbours, and conventional ‘contractual states,’ have resorted to massacre to ensure the dominance of their parasitic elites, the only solution is a class-line, anti-nationalist social revolution.

It was a black day in the Guinean capital Conakry on Monday 28 September 2009, when troops loyal to junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara opened fire on a rally of pro-democracy activists, killing an estimated 157 people. Camara had seized power in December 2008, just 21 months after I warned in the mainstream South African press that a coup was imminent in Guinea. I’d based my prediction on the observations of different interest groups, including the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent organisation used by the United Nations as a bellwether, which had noted as far back as 2004 that there were isolated uprisings in Guinea, directly related to the collapse of state services. The ICG stated in early 2007 that while the ‘fragile but successful peace processes in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia have greatly diminished the external threats to the stability of Guinea … its internal instability remains a source of immediate concern for the whole region as Guinea is at risk of becoming West Africa’s next failed state.’

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by José Antonio Gutiérrez D.

I.

Chile has again been hit by an earthquake of apocalyptic magnitude, like in the earthquakes of 1938, 1960 and 1985. With the precision of a Swiss watch, the centre and south of the country is hit every 25 years by a seismic movement that puts the country in a state of deep shock. The earthquake we saw on 27 February was one of the strongest recorded in history – 8.8 degrees on the Richter scale, 9 on the Mercalli scale.

The anguish of not knowing anything about our loved ones, of not being able to communicate with them, has followed the destruction, the isolation and death or disappearance of a great many people. Impotence is a shadow hanging over the heart. The death toll is now at about 700 – some are saying that they expect a final figure of about 2,000 when we eventually get the full picture of the devastation. Nothing is known yet about many in the affected provinces in the regions of Maule and Bío Bío. When people were still talking of about 300 killed, we learnt that the Constitución tsunami had swallowed up around 350 inhabitants, doubling the death toll. And we now know there were other places hit by tsunamis, though the extent of the damage is still unknown.

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by Wayne Price (NEFAC, USA)

The expansion of the United States’ (US) attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan is not due to the personal qualities of Obama, but to the social system he serves: the national state and the capitalist economy. The nature of the situation guarantees that the system will act irrationally. Anarchists should participate in building a broad movement against the war, while raising our political programme.

In discussing President Obama’s expansion of the US attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is important not to focus on Obama as a personality, but on the social system to which he is committed, specifically to the war-waging capitalist national state. “War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne declared during World War I. It is what the national state is for, what it does, and why it still exists, despite the real trends toward international unity and worldwide coordination. In an age of nuclear bombs, the human race will not be safe until we abolish these states (especially the big, imperial ones such as those of North America, Western Europe and Japan) and replace them with a federation of self-managing associations of working people.

After 3 months of consultations and deliberation, President Obama announced that he is going to do what he had promised to do during his campaign for the presidency — namely to expand the US attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan. This may not have been inevitable (since he broke many of his campaign promises already, such as ending overseas prisons, openness in government, ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of silence on homosexuality in the military, a health care plan which covers everyone, an economic plan for working people, etc.). But it was probable.

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by James Pendlebury and Sian Byrne (ZACF)

In liberal political theory – a favoured ideology of many capitalist states – an important principle is that the functions of government are divided into three “spheres” or “branches”:

• The legislature (national and provincial parliaments, local councils) makes the laws;
• the executive (ministers, officials, cops and soldiers, who report to the president or premier) carries out the laws;
• the judiciary (courts) decides what the laws mean when there is some dispute.

In states with written constitutions (including the United States, South Africa and many others) an important task of the courts is to decide whether laws passed by parliament (the legislature), or actions taken by the executive, are allowed by the constitution. (Some liberal states, such as Britain, do not have written constitutions; there the power of the courts is officially more limited.)

A key principle of the ideology of liberalism is “the separation of powers”. Each of the three branches, the liberals tell us, is entitled to autonomous responsibility for certain functions that do not overlap, or cannot be interfered with by the other spheres. The reason for this, it is argued, is that the people who make the laws shouldn’t be the same as those who interpret them or those who enforce them, and so on. No single person or group should have all the power. In this way, liberals hope to limit the powers of the state, which they recognise as a threat to freedom.

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This is an extract of a speech called “(De)constructing Counter-power” given at five universities in Canada in March 2010 by Michael Schmidt, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of Counter-Power, a challenging new two-volume study of anarchist theory, tactics, strategy and history. The first, theoretical volume, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, USA, 2009), has received largely constructive reviews from the global activist, academic and labour press (see http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com/). Schmidt was kindly hosted by the Wilfrid Laurier University, the Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, McMaster University, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Toronto. His talks were warmly acclaimed – not without comradely criticism – and his audiences consisted in part of anarchist-communists of ZACF sister organisations Common Cause (Ontario, Canada), the Union Comuniste Libertaire (Quebec, Canada) and the North-Eastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists (USA), plus platformists Juventud Libertaria (Mexico), libertarian Marxists such as Gramsci is Dead author Richard Day, members of the hardline Communist Party of Canada and of the (Trotskyist) International Bolshevik Tendency.

Ever since the revolutionary vision that is anarchism gained a foothold in the imagination of the popular classes with the rise of syndicalism within the ranks of the trade unions affiliated to the First International in about 1868, it has provided the most devastating and comprehensive critique of capitalism, landlordism, the state and of unequal social power relations in general, whether gender-based or rooted in racism, colonialism or other forms. In their place it has offered a practical set of tools whereby the oppressed of the world can challenge the dominance of the tiny, heavily armed elites that exploit them. As such, anarchism and syndicalism – together what we have termed in Counter-Power Volume 1, Black Flame, “the broad anarchist tradition” – was not only the most implacable enemy of the rise of the industrialists and landed gentry who were the ruling class antagonists in the state/capitalist modernisation project in most countries, but it unalterably shaped class struggle in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, producing several key effects that we today presume to be fundamental aspects of civilised society.

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