Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 2
January 9 – Several months ago two U.S. Marines were shot and killed in Hawaii. The “terrorists,” as they were called, left a message which demanded that the U.S. get out of Hawaii.
There have been a considerable number of such attacks against U.S. military and naval personnel on the islands. The local press has consistently neglected to print any news of it. It’s bad for business, especially the tourist trade, said the local Chamber of Commerce.
Only scattered reports of these incidents have appeared outside of Hawaii. (Only the New York Times reported the above incident.) It will probably take a large-scale increase in the number of these incidents to force the monopolist media to make the American public more aware of the developing situation in Hawaii. In the meantime, the media is content to feed the public the kind of diet about Hawaii that is dished out in the “Hawaii Five-O” TV show.
Yet all this is enormously relevant when seen against the background of the current wild and unrestrained anti-Soviet Afghanistan campaign which the Carter administration has suddenly unloosed against an unsuspecting public.
To most Americans, Hawaii has virtually been an eternal part of the United States brought into the Union by a combination of Manifest Destiny and divine inspiration.
Hawaii, however, is more than 2,000 miles away from the U.S. mainland. It was annexed by the U.S. at the dawn of the imperialist epoch in 1898 and it took fully 60 years to subjugate the islands completely and proclaim them part of the U.S. The native people of Hawaii, those who historically have been called the Polynesians, have been cruelly assimilated, if that is the correct word, by methods that in modern times can only be considered genocidal.
A modern state is usually characterized by at least having a contiguous territory. The fact that the U.S. was able to annex such a large territory as Hawaii, which is separated by a vast ocean, not to speak of its different cultures, and proclaim it as part of the integral territory of the U.S., attests to a policy of brute force. This is precisely the kind of brute force which the U.S. has sought to characterize the USSR as using but which in fact has been fundamental to the development of American imperialism.
But is it really necessary to invoke the example of Hawaii, which is thousands of miles away from the U.S. mainland, when the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico is a mere 900 miles from the U.S.?
One cannot but help contrast the brigandage of American finance capital with the high-sounding moral outrage with which it seeks to defame the USSR. The latter has a 1,000-mile border with Afghanistan which, in turn, has a population which both seeks and is getting full military, political, and economic defense against the orchestrated ambitions of Western imperialism to impose itself on that far corner of the planet.
A fallacy often encountered in American economic literature is to ascribe the privileged development of American capitalism to the automatic economic processes of the new mode of production in introduced into the hemisphere or to its superior technical skills and higher cultural level. Little attention, however, is paid to the force and violence with which the early settlers, as well as the later ones, exterminated practically the bulk of the Native Indian population.
Too little attention is paid to the enormous wealth accumulated over the centuries by the forcible institution of chattel slavery, the vestiges of which still plague some 30 million Black people of this country. Nor is the subjugation of the Mexican people in what is now the U.S. Southwest and the well-nigh forcible annexation of California, and the tremendous economic wealth generated as a result of it, ever put in its true historical perspective.
But all this was characteristic of the last century, which was symbolized by the U.S. advance from “the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” That epoch has definitively ended and no amount of force and violence can bring it back. The halls of Montezuma are becoming increasingly inaccessible and inhospitable to U.S. capital. The political climate all through Latin America has become not merely hostile but increasingly infused with the most fervent anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle.
The shores of Tripoli have become not merely off limits to U.S. warships but strictly forbidden. The sacking and burning of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli was an eloquent and dramatic illustration of how the fortunes of American financial and military prowess have changed.
Is it therefore conceivable at this late hour in its declining fortunes that the U.S. is once again trying to assume the mantle of world gendarme, of world policeman? A careful examination of the U.S. press since the Iranian crisis shows that it has steadily and consistently moved to revive old and discredited slogans and to tread on forbidden territory.
Nothing so much illustrates the truly dangerous path on which the U.S. is embarking as its response to the events in Afghanistan. By proclaiming an economic and technological boycott against the USSR, the Carter administration has created a confrontation which holds out a dreadful future both for those at the summits of U.S. finance capital and for humanity as a whole.
Even the Wall Street Journal, the reactionary spokesman for U.S. high finance and industry, calls the Carter approach “a perilous policy towards the Soviet Union which faces a hazardous future.” (WSJ, January 7)
How is it possible, in light of the death-dealing atomic weapons available both to the U.S. and the USSR, for the Carter administration to so flagrantly and suddenly, without real consultation even from the U.S. Congress, embark upon such a perilous course?
It can do so because it is driven by economic forces which in truth are beyond its control. The inherent tendencies of capitalist development are particularly aggravated by the growing aggressiveness of the constantly warring financial and industrial dynasties. These are inextricably linked with the destinies of the military-industrial complex. None of the financial dynasties can be free either to extricate themselves from it or even to be free of its economic and political influence.
After all the twists and turns of U.S. diplomacy in the last three decades are taken into account, only one sure and certain trend emerges: inexorable movement in the direction of political reaction at home and unrestrained militarism abroad.
A look at the brief period since the grain and technology embargo was imposed vividly shows the insuperable problems of American finance capital. According to the scenario imagined by the White House and State Department planners, panic should have broken out on the streets of Moscow. There should have been long lines of nervous, fearful, panicky consumers lined up in front of Soviet supermarkets trying to buy up everything in a hurry in fear of the imminent devastation that was supposed to be caused by the Carter grain embargo.
The streets of Moscow, however, were calm. The supermarkets were as busy as any day. And Western reporters looked in vain for what had been anticipated. And this was not because the Voice of America and the West European media failed to beam the Carter message to the USSR.
The panic, however, was elsewhere – in the Chicago and Minneapolis Board of Trade. Not even the closing of these markets for two days prevented it.
It matters little whether the Carter administration is able to purchase from the four giant grain monopolies the grain that would have been sold in such massive quantities to the USSR or whether the grain was burned, as was done not so many years ago. The fact of the matter remains that, without the huge purchases by the USSR, the current grain production of the U.S. reveals itself as capitalist overproduction, a chronic malady which cannot be overcome by simply storing the grain or having the government pay the grain monopolies for it out of the hides of the mass of the people who eventually will have to pay for it.
No amount of statistics can hide the fact that the farm produce of the U.S. produced, not in accordance with a rationally planned economy based on human needs, but one based strictly on profit. To sell the grain on the scale which only the USSR, with its vast population and developed economic and social system, can absorb, requires not just hungry people, of which there are all too many millions upon millions in the world. It requires – in accordance with the norms of the capitalist mode of production – paying customers. And this is not available in the capitalist world to meet the scale of U.S. agricultural production.
Of course, it is possible over a period of time to impose hardships on the population of the USSR by a concerted capitalist economic blockade. This is precisely what the U.S. is trying to fashion right now with what they call a consortium, a 14-carat word for a conspiracy by the imperialist powers against the USSR.
Drastic as such measures may be, they do not really constitute a new departure for U.S. foreign policy against the USSR and other socialist countries. The truth of the matter is that ever since the victory of the October Socialist Revolution more than 60 years ago, the imperialist powers have not ceased their efforts to economically strangle the USSR and other socialist countries.
One would think that the embargo, which the Carter administration issued with all the fanfare of a virtual ultimatum to the USSR, was something of a sharp departure from previous policy. The bald truth of the matter is that there are indeed few economic and industrial areas of trade between the USSR and the U.S. which are not and have not been for years severely restricted. In reality they amount to a permanent partial boycott.
Most of the important trade which the USSR would find advantageous to engage in with the U.S. is banned, both by old anti-Soviet laws and new legislation which deliberately excludes and discriminates against the USSR, such as the notorious Jackson-Vanick legislation and the many administrative restrictions which emanate from the Commerce and especially the Defense departments.
One merely has to take a look at the world as it is today and examine the relations of the 20 or so socialist countries with imperialism, and one can easily see that most of the socialist countries are still under an economic or diplomatic blockade. And for some it is both.
After trying literally to obliterate Viet Nam and Kampuchea from the face of the earth, the U.S. to this day has neither normalized its relations with Viet Nam diplomatically nor stopped its economic blockade.
Ninety miles from the U.S. shore is the Republic of Cuba. It has scarcely known a day free from U.S. harassment and its territory is still occupied by the Pentagon at Guantanamo. Even trade in such fields as medicine is severely restricted, so much so at to amount to a virtual ban. Cuba is under a rigorous blockade by the U.S. for no other reason than that it has sought and continues to seek to be a sovereign and independent state.
Yet the U.S. is looking some thousands of miles away into Afghanistan, attempting to pour in hundreds of millions of dollars to train and arm mercenaries and if need be U.S. soldiers to bring what it calls “sovereignty and independence” to that country. These are in reality code words for the reinstitution of a feudal, semi-slave puppet state as a base for aggression against the USSR.
It is ironic that the Carter administration, in its efforts to deal a brutal blow to the USSR, gave first consideration to what it calls the “farmers.” In reality Carter means the grain monopolies, the Wall Street farmers – those big multinational grain corporations such as Cargill, Continental, and others, which are sure to get the full measure of the government’s compensation. But the small, poor farmers and the hundreds of thousands of workers in the transportation industry, from the grain elevators all the way to the docks and ships, are in truth an altogether forgotten category for the government.
With the imposition of the grain embargo the Carter administration aimed a solar plexus blow to the Soviet Union from which it expected capitulation in the long run. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, has on two great historic occasions survived the famine imposed by imperialist intervention. This included U.S. military intervention under General Graves more than 60 years ago during the course of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War.
It need hardly be recalled that the onslaught of the Nazi war machine created far more difficulties for the USSR than an economic blockade. The whole strategy of containing the Soviet Union after the Second World War, in which the imperialists all joined in concert, had as its objective the economic strangulation of the USSR. Did it succeed? On the contrary. Whatever else one may say about the USSR and its socialist allies, it is not suffering economic dislocation, skyrocketing inflation, and the fearful unemployment which characterizes the capitalist West.
Of course, capitalism is still the predominant mode of production on the planet. This explains the tremendous super-profits they have been able to accumulate as a result of the super-exploitation of the underdeveloped nations. Yet imperialism is shaky and more vulnerable economically, as the monetary crisis demonstrates almost daily in the form of the flight from usually accepted currencies to gold.
The prohibition of the sale of technology to the USSR in certain fields of endeavor will, of course, also be harmful to the USSR as would the restriction of any form of trade or commerce. The imperialists regard the field of high technology as their most valuable weapon and asset in their struggle against not only the USSR but all the socialist countries and the oppressed peoples of the world. It is this field of achievement that they boast most frequently and rely upon it as their ace in the hole to overcome the inevitable victory of world socialism over the world system of monopoly capitalism.
Even people who ought to know better permit themselves to be taken in by the raging hysteria which the media has unloosed. For example, Daniel Greenberg, science commentator for the Washington Post, asserts, contrary to his better judgment, that the high technology of the West is so advanced it will overcome anything that the socialist system can conceivably produce.
The Soviet system, he says, “is too highly compartmentalized. Institutions for basic science and technology are walled off from each other and they are also segregated from industry. There is no incentive for collaboration among these separate bastions.” Above all, “Soviet research is ... non-competitive.”
That last comment is the final body blow! But how can this science specialist in writing this obituary to Soviet science forget to mention what must unquestionably still be uppermost in the minds of many scientists when they compare the respective achievements of the Soviet Union as against the capitalist countries? How can he forget the most spectacular achievement of the latter half of the twentieth century, the launching of Sputnik, which not only amazed the Western scientific community but also disqualified and discredited the stereotype of Soviet science which Greenberg dishes out in the Washington Post of January 6?
A science specialist can only forget this when he becomes blinded by the imperative demands of hysterically induced propaganda and the needs of predatory monopoly capitalism. Therein lies, as the Wall Street Journal aptly puts it, the “perilous policy” of the Carter administration.
It cannot be righted, as Carter’s far-right opponents claim, by supplementing the economic perils with military adventures. It can only be righted by a vigorous and unrelenting massive protest and intervention into the political arena by the broad masses of the people.
Last updated: 11 May 2026