Hands Off Wikileaks.

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis

Sunday December 05, 2010 20:14

by john throne - Facts for Working People

loughfinn at aol dot com

Capitalism uses secrets and lying diplomacy to conduct its economic exploitation and wars.

Capitalism is in never ending conflict with the working class and with its capitalist rivals. This is the objective reality and why it has to have secret diplomacy. It cannot be honest or its system would spin out of control. The wikileaks have dealt an important blow to capitalism's needs in this area. As a result capitalism is going after wikileaks in a very serious way. This assault has to be opposed. Let us build a Hands Off Wikileaks campaign. See more proposals below.

Wikileaks.

Wikileaks is not an inconsequential detail for capitalism. And not totally unrelated to the crisis of the euro in the sense that it relates to relations between the different capitalist powers also. Trotsky said that diplomacy is the lubrication of the revolutionary movement. This is important. But there is revolutionary diplomacy and capitalist diplomacy. We cannot build a revolutionary organization without relating to each other in a diplomatic way. However this is not the essence of the issue. We are not dealing here with some kind of sneaky way of talking that hides reality, some kind of superficiality. On the contrary we are talking about a way of relating to each other that brings out the reality. And the reality is that the objective international interests of the working class are one, the objective international interests of the revolutionary movement are one, and the task of revolutionary socialist diplomacy is to make this clear, to bring out this objective unity.

However bourgeois diplomacy is a different ball game all together. The international interests of capitalism are continually in conflict, continually objectively in conflict. They are irreconcilable. They are at all times trying to steal each others markets and resources and behind this lies the threat of war of one kind or another. The task of bourgeois diplomacy therefore is to hide the objective reality, to hide the reality that the essence of their relationship is one of continual conflict. They meet and smile, and wine and dine, and pretend to be such good friends and colleagues. But behind this is the vicious conflict, the dirty nasty continual attempt to get over on their rivals, to have victory over their rivals. But the problem is they cannot always say this as it would leave their world in non stop conflict and also it would open up opportunities for the working class and the revolutionary movement to challenge their rule. So capitalism speaks with its slick sneaky dirty lies, its "diplomacy", its fancy dinners. Bourgeois diplomacy therefore is a way to hide the reality behind the irreconcilable conflicting interests of the different capitalist powers.

This is where Wikileaks comes in. By exposing the real words of the capitalist diplomats from all the different countries it has helped expose the real nature of the relationships between the capitalist powers. It has helped expose the continual conflict between them. By publishing these conversations Wikileaks has done a service to the working class movement. It is positive that the working class see this conflict. It raises working class consciousness and it also complicates the relations between the capitalist powers and so weakens them and their system as a whole. If only the union and labor leaders would take advantage of the situation we could make make some real steps forward. Missed opportunities abound again due to the policies and role of the union and labor leaders.

The capitalists and their hacks scream that the leaks are threatening lives. Think about this. In the 1960's the Gulf of Tonkin incident was used to justify the Viet Nam war which cost up to three million lives. What really happened was kept totally secret. If it had been exposed and acted upon by the working class movement internationally the Viet nam war could have been prevented and millions of lives saved. So secret diplomacy was responsible for millions of deaths. More recently we have had the lies of capitalist diplomacy about Iraq's so called weapons of mass destruction which did not exist. These lies were used to justify the war and invasion of iraq and the Middle East and have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and counting. The record of secret capitalist diplomacy in saving lives is not great.

The union and labor leaders should be leading on this issue. We must persist in demanding that they do. However we must also remember that there are many many left and anti capitalist activists in this country and also tens of thousands of internet users. We must demand and organize to work together on this, that is to take a stand against the attacks on wikileaks.

What are we doing about the attacks on wikileaks. ? We have to look at the moat in our own eye. We have to take on our left sectarianism and ultra leftism, move to build a united front on a fight to win basis and begin to move working class people into action on this issue and also on the attacks on living standards that are taking place. It is of interest and could be very useful if accurate that Assange says that he has similar secret documents of Bank Of America. Let us see if we can get the secret internal documents of the financial institutions as well as the diplomatic and military institutions of capitalism.

#Build a Hands Off Wikileaks Campaign. End the pursuit of Assange, Release the US soldier accused of providing the documents and drop all charges.
#Boycott Amazon and Paypal and any other service that has moved against wikileaks.
#Open all diplomatic agreements and documents.
#Open all financial and corporate agreements.

John. Throne.