U.S. rulers have started their latest oil war. They are temporarily targeting Afghanistan, but their strategic goal is to secure the Middle East. They are disguising this war as a "crusade against international terrorism." The atrocious murders in September of thousands of workers and others in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. have given them the cover they need to conceal their true motives under a cloak of flag-waving patriotism.
At the moment Bush and the ruling class as a whole enjoy significant popular support. However, the war’s imperialist character will become clear over time. Workers who allow themselves to be fooled into supporting the new mass slaughter for Middle Eastern energy supplies can come to recognize their error. Millions will eventually learn the hard way –on the battlefield and in the tightening vise of the rulers’ police state –that our class’s only rational choice is to turn the guns around and fight for communist revolution.
Our Party has a decisive role to play in this process. What we do to guarantee the survival and growth of the communist movement in the years ahead will determine the course of class struggle and, to a great extent, the future of humanity. The period that has just begun is the most serious challenge to the working class since the start of World War II. It is fraught with grave danger. It offers great opportunity. Our organization must steel itself to meet a communist party’s responsibilities. Despite appearances and many enormous obstacles, our class can train itself to seize power and rid the world of the profit system.
Oil is the lifeblood of imperialism. The imperialist who controls the largest amounts of the cheapest oil supplies can rule the world. At present, and for the foreseeable future, these supplies lie in the Middle East. U.S. "superpower" status has been based for decades on calling the shots about how Middle Eastern oil would be pumped, shipped and refined — and about how much it would cost. No Middle Eastern oil nation’s government has been too corrupt, criminal or brutal against its working class for U.S. tastes–as long as the billion dollar profits keep flowing to the coffers of Exxon Mobil et al.
Neither the U.S. ruling class nor the anti-Exxon Saudi capitalists such as bin Laden — who use religion to cover their own oil dreams — will hesitate to turn the Persian Gulf red with workers’ blood in order to control this wealth. The next war has already started. When bosses fight among themselves, workers must never choose sides among them. We have only one side, the international working class. We have only one banner, the Red Flag. We have only one Party, the PLP. And we have only one goal: communist revolution. In the difficult days that lie ahead, we must never lose sight of it.
The profits of Exxon Mobil & Co. are now more seriously threatened than ever. The first sign came with the takeover of Iran in 1979 by Islamic Fundamentalist holy rollers. They used nationalism and religion as a cover for taking control of the oil there after booting out the murderous U.S. puppet, the Shah. In 1991, U.S. rulers butchered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers to prevent Saddam Hussein from raising oil prices and making deals with U.S. competitors. A decade and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, Hussein still rules Iraq and the U.S. continues to plan another war to destroy him and bring Iraq into the Exxon Mobil orbit.
But despite their seriousness, these problems pale before the nightmare brewing for U.S. imperialism in Saudi Arabia. The Persian Gulf holds the world’s biggest oil reserves and Saudi Arabia’s are bigger than any other Gulf nation’s and also the easiest to extract. Only Iraq comes close. Exxon Mobil, already the biggest customer for Saudi crude, has a deal in the works to get the lion’s share of Saudi natural gas riches. The Saudi royals are known for their love of mass terror, as well as their degeneracy, self-indulgence, extravagance, support for fascists around the world and corruption. Their saving grace has been their continued alliance with U.S. oil companies and their willing manipulation of supply to keep prices low, in accord with U.S. oil companies’ wishes.
But this sweetheart arrangement is on very thin ice. Three things have kept the House of Saud in power: U.S. support, a reign of terror against workers in general, particularly foreign-born oil workers, and an ability to create a welfare state for the benefit of a large labor aristocracy of Saudi citizens. However, the economic salad days are over. Per capita income is plummeting. Many Saudi-born university graduates can’t find work. The government is in deep debt, worsened by U.S. imperialism’s arm-twisting, which forced the Saudi rulers to fork over $65 billion for Desert Storm in1991. By maximizing its profits in Saudi Arabia, U.S. Big Oil has created a scenario for another Iran.
U.S. bosses have chosen Osama bin Laden as their main target in the "war against terror." Bin Laden is indeed a terrorist and an enemy of all workers. As the last issue of CHALLENGE indicated, he was a terrorist the U.S. was only too happy to fund and train back in the 1980s, when he fought against the U.S.’s Soviet rivals in Afghanistan. He joins many other Frankensteins made in the U.S.A.
But bin Laden and his horrible tactics represent much more than one ruthless individual with wealth and political ambition. Bin Laden reflects the growing threat to the Saudi royal family and, therefore, the continued U.S. control of Saudi oil and gas. The worsening economic conditions in the country, the Saudi government’s many internal contradictions, general social decay, as well as periodic strikes by foreign workers in the oil fields in Saudi Arabia "have shaken the kingdom to its foundations," wrote a serious London-based Palestinian journalist in 1997. "The only thing keeping Saudi Arabia from disintegrating or falling to an Islamic group is the absence of a cohesive force capable of replacing the royal family…But [such groups] are gaining strength at a rapid rate" (Saïd Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud, St. Martin’s Press, 1966, p. xvi).
Aburish wrote those lines five years ago, when anti-U.S. fundamentalist terrorists had already attacked U.S. troops on Saudi soil and the Clinton White House was "desperately trying to stop Saudi Arabia’s decline into chaos." (ibid, p. xvi.)
From the U.S. imperialist viewpoint, "chaos" means loss of the Saudi oil fields. Bin Laden admits that they are the ultimate prize he hopes to win for his faction of bosses. In a 1998 interview, he "claimed that the United States has carried out ‘the biggest theft in history’ by buying oil from Persian Gulf countries at low prices. According to bin Laden, a barrel of oil today should cost $144. Based on that calculation, he said, the Americans have stolen $36 trillion from Muslims…" (Associated Press, 9/28).
For U.S. imperialism, led by Rockefeller’s Exxon Mobil, the stakes are in the trillions. War is their only option to maintain their grip on the world’s most crucial resource. For the international working class, the only option is to overthrow these exploiters and establish a society without profits or imperialist bosses.
(exxonwtc100101.html)