This article isˆ Copyleft 2003-2004, the Michigan Socialist
Articles may be reproduced, printed and distributed freely, as long as proper attribution is given.

Editor's note:
Though this article is in itself worth reading for its wealth of well-researched information,
it is also interesting as an insight into the natural abilities of the extraordinarily talented
young American who wrote it.
Jud Evans -- Athenaeum Library of Philosophy - Preston - England.

Matt Erard was born January 11th 1985 in Royal Oak Michigan and grew up in the city of Troy. He has been involved in political activism since early childhood. Matt began campaigning for candidates both door-to-door and at the polls in the 1992 Presidential election at the age of eight. Realizing at a very young age that the rights guaranteed to all in the U. S. Constitution are so often violated by those in power sworn to uphold them, Matt developed a strong commitment to civil liberties which has remained with him to the present day. In 1997, at the age of 12, Matt put together a website on censorship issues and in 1998 founded the International Revolutionary Truth and Freedom Association, an online civil liberties and media watchdog group which he ran until he began high school. In 1997 Matt also began exploring various political theories and third parties on the internet, hoping to find one that matched his own views. It didn't take him long to determine that democratic socialism was the movement to which he belonged.

In 2000, at the age of 15, Matt became the youngest intern ever at the Detroit office of the American Civil Liberties Union. That same year, he finally joined the Socialist Party and actively campaigned for its candidate, David McReynolds, in the 2000 Presidential election. The following year, Matt was elected State Chairperson of the Socialist Party of Michigan. In 2003, Matt was one of fourteen winners nationwide of a $4000 college scholarship from the ACLU for his work in civil liberties. Matt is currently a junior at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where is he is double-majoring in political science and sociology. He also continues to serve as the State Chairperson of the Socialist Party of Michigan. Matt looks forward to speaking to as many 53rd District residents as possible about his campaign and can be contacted on the contact page above.

Generally it is attributed to those who advocate the principle positions of the Bush regime: unilaterally engaging in wars of conquest, skyrocketing increases in corporate welfare and the military budget, and gutting essential social services that benefit the poor and working-class while spending without any regard to the deficit.

     To fully understand the Bush doctrine, however, it is essential to understand that the philosophy of neoconservatism is far deeper than the whims of a foolish president to keep his corporate donors happy and ensure his re-election.

     Despite their frequent tactical errors and political setbacks, the neocons represent the most calculated and determined political current we have seen on the American Right since the time of Kissinger, albeit far more dangerous.

What is most surprising, although not most shocking, about the philosophy of neoconservatism is its origins. The first generation of neocons has their roots not in the older waves of American conservatism, but in the opposite movement to the one the name of their philosophy would suggest.

Those who now lead the American New Right began on the American Old Left.

Those who now lead the American New Right began on the American Old Left.

     Such figures include Special Assistant to the President Elliot Abrams, State Department appointee Pen Kemble, National Endowment for Democracy Chairman Carl Gershman, leading neocon author, Joshua Muravchik, former foreign policy adviser under Reagan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Bush’s original appointee for Secretary of Labor, Linda Chavez.

     Non-members such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, member and former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle, and Defense Policy Board member William Kristol were also well connected to the same political current within these organizations.

NEARLY ALL OF these figures came into Socialist Party or one of its affiliates during one of the party’s most regressive and divisive periods.

In 1958, the Socialist Party merged with the Independent Socialist League, a “Trotskyist” group led by Max Shachtman.

Not long beforehand, Shachtman, a former “Trotskyist” himself, had drastically shifted his viewpoint on Communist movements around the world, acquiring a “Third Camp” ideology of equal opposition to both American capitalism and (“foreign”) “Communism.”

     Bent on using the ISL merger to take control of the Socialist Party, Shachtman advocated what was often referred to as “realignment strategy,” in which socialists should attempt to realign with and subsequently transform the Democratic Party while concealing their socialist identities.

     As both support and resistance toward realignment strategy in the Socialist Party increased, Shachtman’s philosophical and programmatic drift to the rightwing followed.

Shachtman revised his previous “Third Camp” ideology to a new perspective that American capitalism was incomparably superior to “Communism” and should be supported accordingly.

By 1972, Shachtman and his supporters had gained a majority in the Socialist Party and consequently blocked a resolution opposing the Vietnam War. Soon after, the Shachtmanites launched Social Democrats USA as a new organization to further his strategy of realignment.

Among Shachtman’s most ardent supporters were the young Socialist Party and SDUSA members who would shape the future of the neoconservative ideology.

     Bypassing the New Left movement altogether and trading their Old Left revolutionary zeal for placatory liberalism, many of the young future neocons were attracted to the arch-Zionist and Cold Warrior Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, whose hawkish views made pivotal contributions to the neocons’ perspective.

     Crediting Jackson alone, however, for bridging the gap between the neocons post-Shachtmanite liberalism and the philosophy they subscribe to today would be a grave inaccuracy without noting the crucial influence on nearly all neocons from a University of Chicago professor by the name of Leo Strauss.

     Strauss was known for his philosophy based on the “politics of deception,” primarily influenced by the philosophies of Niccolo Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, existentialist and Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, and Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

     The chief tenants of Straussian philosophy are aggressive nationalism, the absence of moral truth, intensive secrecy and “perpetual deception” between rulers and the ruled, appeals to religion as a means of controlling the masses, and support for an aristocratic elite.

     According to Straussian analyst and University of Calgary political science professor Shadia Drury, Strauss believed that “those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and there is only one natural right — the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”

     It was the influence of Leo Strauss combined with other pre-neoconservative thinkers such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol that led the former Shachtmanite bloc of neocons to become ideologically linked with other, now-prominent Straussian adherents: Attorney General John Ashcroft, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Office of National Drug Control Policy Director William J. Bennett and former Vice-President Dan Quayle.

     Straussian influence today has not only developed a chokehold on the White House, State Department, Justice Department and the Pentagon, but has also permeated through educational institutions with an increasing level of influence over modern-day academics.

The vast majority of its adherents have post-graduate degrees.

Neocons represent the only major segment of contemporary conservatism of which the vast majority of its adherents have post-graduate degrees.
       Straussian and neoconservative professors have had most success in political science departments, in which they are coming increasingly close to making the discipline their own, as Marxists have accomplished to some extent with sociology and right-libertarians have accomplished with economics.

Much of Straussian influence among modern day academics during the past decade can be attributed to the best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind, written by Straussian disciple Allan Bloom in 1988.

     The book, in which Bloom directly references his teacher only once, was a source of regular outcry in the early nineties due to its influential role in censorship policies and restrictions on academic freedom.

ALTHOUGH ANY remnants of socialist principles among today’s leading neocons have diminished entirely, what they have retained from their “Trotskyist” backgrounds is the underlying Marxian philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism — viewing class as the predominant factor in politics and economics, and the class struggle as the predominant basis of history.

     What the Straussian influence has resulted in, however, is a fundamental inverse in Marxian principle — i. e., no longer viewing class struggle from the perspective of the working class, but rather from the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie.

It is this very reason that we hear such unprecedented comments in the media from the Bush regime such as casually dismissing critical responses to Bush’s tax cuts as attempts at “class-war.”

     For those familiar with the Marxian and “Trotskyist” view of capitalism’s progression, it need not be stated that such an inverse approach to Marxian philosophy by those in power would result in a refined and developed approach to imperialism based on an awareness of the near inevitability of capitalism’s eventual collapse.

Not only would such a form of imperialism be more overt than imperialistic endeavors in the past century, it would contain a more holistic understanding of the historical climate surrounding the exploitation of the world’s population and resources in pursuit of profit, as well as the revolutionary and international potential of the working-class to resist.

The internationalist perspective from the neocons’ Marxian and “Trotskyist” influence coupled with the nationalist perspective from their Straussian influence provides a rather interesting and paradoxical combination within their viewpoint.

     Understanding the potential revolutionary response to unprecedented levels of imperialism by an internationally unified working class and the setbacks in potential gains that a paralleled international unification of the ruling class would cause, the neocons have determined that the most appropriate response is to move rapidly forward in controlling the markets of other wealthy capitalist countries in addition to those in poorer countries.

Through this strategy, their gains are no longer solely economic, but also political, serving as a centralized shield against political insurrection.

Such a strategy was exemplified by the compelling need to go to war with Iraq.

Not only does Iraq sit in the heart of the only region of the world that the United States has not been relatively successful in controlling through economic institutions such as the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, it will also likely grant the United States the ability to control the oil markets of its capitalist former allies in Europe who are substantially more dependent than the U. S. on Middle Eastern oil.

BUILDING UPON THE models set by former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, the neocons aim to fully establish a unipolar world in which the U. S. has military superiority over, not only every other country, but all other countries combined.

The 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq have been used as cases in point for a world in which other countries have no choice but to either give the green light to the U. S. for all of its military pursuits while pretending that a semblance of international law still exists or to challenge the U. S. politically and later pay the consequences as U. S. military strength is flexed and unleashed without regard.

Cheney’s frequent proclamations that the “War on Terror” will continue indefinitely      across generations is an inversion of Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution into a well-derived theory of permanent imperialism and inexhaustible nationalism. In organizational form, the neocons of today are best represented by the rightwing think tank, Project for the New American Century.

     PNAC, currently chaired by the son of former Young People’s Socialist League member Irving Kristol, was founded in 1997 by such prominent neocons as Abrams, Bennett, Podhoretz, Quayle and Wolfowitz, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush.

The stated mission of PNAC is “American global leadership [read: domination].”

     The front of their webpage, which displays a map of the world allowing the viewer to click on any region to see PNAC’s plan for it, also links to PNAC’s statement of principles, a document calling for massive increases in defense spending and a foreign policy based on American leadership and interests abroad.

The organization receives much of its funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a foundation established under the principle of absolute employers’ control, after the business of its founders was forced to recognize unions, hire African Americans, and pay its female employees as much as it paid to males. With over half a billion in assets, it is arguably the most powerful rightwing foundation in the country.

PNAC received some media attention after the Iraq War when it was discovered that the organization sent an openly published letter to Bill Clinton in 1997 calling for the invasion of Iraq and citing Saddam Hussein being a significant threat to the world’s supply of oil as a justification.

PNAC’s most telling documents can be found on its “Publications and Reports” page, in particular its document titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which has often been perceived to be a blueprint for the foreign policy of the Bush regime.

     The document, published in September 2000, calls for fighting and decisively winning simultaneous theater wars around the world, states that increasing U. S. forces in the Gulf transcends the issue of the Saddam Hussein regime (which serves only as an immediate justification for doing so), calls for complete control of space and cyberspace, calls for the establishment of a world-wide command and control system for ballistic missiles, and says that this “process of transformation … is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

From the parts of this document that have already been accomplished by the Bush regime since its publication, it is very clear that September 11, 2001, was that catastrophic and catalyzing event.

The extent to which political setbacks and world-wide resistance to Bush’s wars will stall this “process of transformation” remains to be seen.

DESPITE THE DEGREE of danger that the neocons present to the world, to believe that simply voting the neocons out of office and replacing them with Democrats is a fatal mistake.

The neocons have not risen to power from their level of political savvy, but rather from material conditions that capitalism has created in the world.

The neocons represent a level of crisis in the profit system in which intensified imperialism is essential for expanding to new markets and maximizing profits.

     This crisis is not a result of the capitalist system’s miscalculated errors, but rather its natural development. This new wave of imperialism is also a response to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a once great impediment to U. S. unipoliarity.

     The Democratic Party does not remain unaffected by this stage of capitalism. Democratic presidential front runner John Kerry, a supporter of the U. S. occupation of Iraq who also voted for many of Bush’s most loathsome proposals including both wars and the USA-PATRIOT Act, is a member of the “New Democrats,” formally known as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).

The “New Democrats” represent a similar faction in the Democratic Party to Tony Blair’s “New Labour” faction in the British Labour Party. The temporal proximity of these two movements across national boundaries is no coincidence.

     Both represent historically mainstream liberal parties moving in accordance with worldwide political and economic change and embracing a rightward, more anti-labor and pro-military-interventionist shift.

The DLC has established its own equivalent to the Project for the New American Century, called the Progressive Policy Institute, an official DLC-sponsored think-tank advocating the establishment of a “third way” that embraces the “new economy” and moves beyond the “left-right debate.”

     While sharing a more subtle contempt for workers’ rights in the domestic sphere, the PPI fundamentally differs from PNAC by advocating a more multilateral approach to imperialism, an approach in which the United States cooperates with rather than subverts its Great Power capitalist allies.

     The un-televised debate between the “New Democratic” and neoconservative segments of the ruling class this election year will primarily surround the issue of the extent and current method to which we engage in the “process of transformation” that PNAC has laid out.

It will be a debate over how much to stall this process and the degree to which older methods of conquest both at home and abroad will be used in relation to newer ones.

Regardless of which faction wins the White House in 2004, it is only workers’ internationalism and the transformation from capitalism to democratic socialism that can permanently resist this process.

The stakes only get higher with time.

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