Salient points that still hold up as an explanation for the leadership contradictions our class faces today, as much as when this editorial on the "Bush doctrine" was written in 2004.
.... Because of Stalinist betrayals from North Africa to the Mideast and Southeast Asia, there is a complete absence of revolutionary working-class organizations in these countries. The political vacuum thus created has been filled by bourgeois nationalist organizations—like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, or the National Salvation Front in Algeria—that have nothing to do with defending the interests of working people.
At the same time, the claims by Republicans or Democrats that Washington stands for bringing democracy and freedom to the world are bogus. It is true that compared to living under the Saddam Hussein regime, there is more space for working people to defend their interests in Iraq today, and elsewhere in the Mideast. Revolutionists need to take full advantage of this. But class-conscious workers don't therefore support democratic imperialism. The broad trends toward secularism, for women's rights, and in opposition to capital punishment and torture around the world that the Militant has described, for example, are the results of struggles by working people, students, and middle-class layers in the semicolonial world and internationally. They are products of the anticolonial revolutions of the last century, not imperialist benevolence. Washington and its allies will wield them as long as they serve to advance imperialist interests—but only so far.
U.S. imperialism's biggest enemy is the economic catastrophe capitalism is leading humanity toward and the resistance to its effects by workers and farmers. Only by joining this resistance and offering a working-class alternative to the parties of capitalism, such as that presented by the Socialist Workers Party ticket in the 2004 elections, can we defeat the "Bush agenda" and the program of Kerry too.
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