MEANING OF
WATERGATE and of the buying power of the wage-earners in a national and international context that is more and more unfavorable to reformist operations of any real scope. As for the MSI, which was the only bourgeois formation to openly support the Christian Democratic secretariat in the referendum campaign, the defeat of an electoral campaign based on appeals for order and discipline (the appeals being accompanied by some provocative actions that under the circumstances were totally secondary) will have the effect of bolstering the "ultros." So the problem of self-defense and of organizing a determined response to fascist provocations remains on the agenda. As for the reformists, it is clear that the results of the May 12 referendum will prod them to take some initiatives. The CP will try to relaunch its policy of "historic compromise" and the SP will try to support such a development by simultaneously raising the price for its collaboration in the government. Nevertheless, the bureaucrats will find themselves in a contradictory situation. On the one hand, they will have to protect their "civilized and democratic" image in the framework of the "social peace" they want -- which they did during the electoral campaign, concretely by blocking workers struggles. On the other hand, they will not be able to alienate their worker base, which saw in the referendum a political confrontation and which will be stimulated by the result to up the ante and try to move from the defensive to the offensive. The bureaucrats will try to use workers strug gles as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with the bourgeoisie. Such operations will be limited above all by the narrow maneuvering room that now exists for reformist policies. But it would have run into qualitatively more important difficulties if the strongest far-left groups had taken a different attitude. In reality, these groups have developed a campaign totally subordinated to the general schemas of the reformists and have refused to sketch out any orientation of general anticapitalist mobilization. By underestimating the role of Fanfoni (the present secretary of the Christian Democracy), by underestimating his chances of satisfying his Bonapartist aspirations, by refusing to place the main priority on the necessity of extending struggles and unifying them (even during the electoral campaign) around objectives linked to crucial necessities of the class struggle like the attack on employment and the buying power of the wage-eamers, Lotta Continua, 1l Manifesto, and Avanguardia Operaia have underestimated the working class's understandUNITED STATES by ALLEN MYERS Eighteen months after winning one of the biggest electoral victories in modern U.5. history in a campaign in which he enjoyed the nearly unanimous support of the ruling class, Richard Nixon is likely to become the second president of the United States to be impeached. And if and when the House of Representatives does vote a bill of impeachment, his chance of winning acquittal in the Senate will be very small indeed.
16 ing of the general political significance of the confrontation. By joining in the legalistic and hypocritical chorus of all those who denounced the Red Brigades as "fascists, " these groups have failed to shed any light on the real problem involved; they have Forgotten that criticism of the erroneous analyses and conceptions of an adventurist group must in no way lead to ignoring the problems of the struggle against bourgeois institutions and the perspective of overthrowing Today it is necessary to relaunch a generalized struggle to defand the employment and buying power of the wagerearners and to develop effective instruments of workers control that can prevent the rationalization of the capitalist apparatus that the bourgeoisie is rigorously seeking to impose on the back of the working class. Today it is necessary to exploit to the maximum the obvious crisis of bourgeois institutions and to put forward as an alternative o workers government based on organs arising from real struggles, rejecting all collaboration with the bourgeoisie and its parties. Today it is necessary to prepare militants, the vanguard elements among the workers and students, for a period that will be for from peaceful. It would be suicidal to take a triumphalist attitude toward the victory, won in the referendum. At the same time, the links between the difficulties of the Italian bourgeoisie and those of the bourgeoisie of the other Common Market countries, the simultaneity of political crises and the tendency toward synchronization of economic recessions, the extreme sensitivity and combativity of the working class which is again being expressed on a continental scale, from France to Britain, From Germany to Denmark, and the dynamic that has opened up on the Iberian peninsula after the overthrow of Portuguese fascism all impose internafionalist tasks that go beyond pure and simple solidarity and that require a means of centralizing the vanguard on a EuroIn relation to these national and international tosks we must wage a systematic struggle to win the worker and student vanguard to a revolutionary program, to defeat opportunism and centrism, to reject any subordination to the strategy of the reformist parties. Let us not allow the bourgeoisie to get out of its difficulties! Accept no social truce ! Reject the "historic compromise"! For a workers government based on orgons arising in struggle! Against the Europe of the trusts! For a red Europe! While lawyers and members of Congress are busily studying the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Jahnson for precedents, there are few basic parallels between the two situations.
The move to impeach Johnson was a byproduct of deep divisions and conflict of interest in the U.S. ruling closs that only a few years carlier had resulted in a long and bloody civil war. In 1974, by contrast, while there are always factical differences over various issues within the ruling strata,
these have not produced hardened "factional" divisions, nor do they reflect a challenge by new layers to the hegemony of the most powerful capitalists or a basic conflict of economic interests between opposing capitalist groupings. While the Stalinists, Mooists, and pseudo-Trotskyist sects in the United States have all viewed the Watergate scandal as reflecting basic ruling-class divisions, such speculations are sufficiently refuted by the fact that if Nixon is removed, he will be succeeded by Gerald Ford, a man hand-picked by Nixon himself and one who is expected not only to carry on with Nixon's policies, but even to utilize most of the same personnel in doing so. Yet the capitalist politicians who have been most vocal in demanding Nixon's impeachment or resignation have generally been equally vocal in praising Ford's qualifications to become president. While the Watergate crisis does not reflect any basic division in the U.S. ruling class, it does show the evolution of U.S. imperialism over the past half century. The actual burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee was merely the catalyst that precipitated a contradiction between two eléments of bourgeois rule that had taken decades to develop. Expansion of Executive Power Historically, the U.S. ruling class began with an advantage over its European rivals in having a strong, centralized executive, simultaneously head of state and head of government, even before the United States became a major imperialist power. It is worth noting that the French bourgeoisie, in establishing a strong state under de Gaulle, chose a presidential system investing powers in the executive that the U,S. president had possessed for decades. In recent years, Congressional liberals have complained of an imbalance" between Congress and the president, often blaming it on "usurpation" of additional powers by the executive branch. The truth of the matter, however, is that through the course of this century there has been remarkably little disagreement in the U.S. ruling class about the need to centralize power in the executive. Consequently, the Congress has not only approved such centralization but in many cases has taken the lead in providing legal authorization of additional powers. A Senate committee headed by Democrat Frank Church of Ohio and Republican Charles Mathias of Maryland reported last year on its study of "emergency" laws presently in effect in the United States. The committee discovered that the country has legally been in a continuous state of emergency since 1917In the fifty-six intervening years, Congress has passed a total of nearly 600 additional laws -- a rate of nearly a dozen per year -- conferring various increased emergency powers on the president. As Church and Mathias noted in a joint statement summing up the committee report: "The President has the power in hand to seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodifies, assign military forces abroad, call reserve forces amounting to 2.5 million men to duty, institute martial law, seize and control all means of transportation, regulate all private enterprises, restrict travel, and in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all Americans." According to the committee report, Congress approved most of these 600 laws "with only the most perfunctory committee review and virtually no consideration of their effect on civil liberties or the delicate structure of the U.S. Government of divided powers." This centralization and expansion of executive power was a necessary and natural part of the rise of U.S. imperialism to a position of dominance over the capitalist world. The cop of the world required a government that could act anywhere without delaying to consult Congress -- let alone the public. But at the same time, the economic dominance of U.S. capitalism made it possible for the ruling class to maintain sufficient "class peace" so that it has never found it necessary to destroy the widespread democratic illusions of the working class. A major element of capitalist rule in the United States has continued to be the carefully nurtured myth of bourgeois democracy -- the twin illusions that (1) the masses, through their vote, can have a decisive influence on government policies, and (2) there are constitutional principles, laws, or traditions that can guarantee the maintenance of democratic liberties under capitalism. While there have been expansions and contractions of the democratic rights actually enjoyed by the working class in different periods of U.S. history, the ruling class has generally not considered it necessary or desirable to introduce measures that completely undermine these illusions. The concentration of executive power necessary for the efficient operation of imperialist adventures was, for a long time, largely compartmentalized and isolated, at least so far as appearances were concerned, from "the democratic process." Events like the Palmer raids following World War I and the McCarthy witch-hunt following World War Il were portrayed, and largely believed to be, aberrations from the norm, whose chief component was overzealousness in defending "democracy" against a foreign threat. Even during the worst periods of reaction, "free elections" continued to be held. Presidents might send thousands of troops around the world in an effort to suppress revolution, but they normally sought formal congressional approval or were able to provide such actions with the cover of an alliance or treaty ratified by the Senate. While they might in reality ignore the wishes not only of the public but of Congress as well, they did not proclaim the right to do so as "constitutional principle, " but preferred to maintain the fiction that they were merely carrying out the popular will as demonstrated by elections or whatever shows of support could be drummed up by the mass media. When Nixon's agents were caught breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, this "third-rate burglary" did more than undermine public belief in the legitimacy of capitalist elections in the United States - - although that in itself was a serious blunder in the eyes of the ruling class. Beyond that blunder, the incident and the subsequent disclosures have confronted the ruling class with the growing incompatibility of its drive toward further centralization and the maintenance of the myth of bourgeois democracy, particularly in a period when wide layers of the population have already begun to question that myth. The contradiction is not a mere temporary crisis in the "credibility" of the Nixon administration. For half a century, democratic illusions have served as an ideological complement and support to U.S. imperialism's drive toward world hegemony. Now the very successes of imperialism and the effects of the radicalization have combined to turn the complements into controdictions. The present crisis of the U.S. ruling class centers on the effort to find a new combination or balance of these now essentially irreconcilable elements of its rule.
17
UNITED STATES A Balance Starts to Crack This dilemma of the ruling closs was foreshadowed in the radicalization that began in the late 1950s and early 19605, gaining a particularly sharp expression in the mass movement of opposition to U.5. aggres. ion in Vietnam. With the growth of the movement against the Vietnam war, millions of Americans began to learn that "their" government could not be trusted to tell them the truth, that it lied not just occasionally but constantly, as a matter of deliberate policy. Lyndon Johnson's "credibility gap" was to contribute to the uncovering of the scandals of the Nixon gang. The antiwar movement, particularly the students, realized that the govornment could not be believed and began conducting its own research. Generally this centered on the involvement of campus institutions in the war. The students exposed seemingly innocuous rescarch projech as covers for the development of weapons. Anthropologists and sociologists were discovered investigating ways of deflecting the hatred of Asian peasants for corrupt governments, cataloguing the political views and weapons available to remote villages, or listing geographical features that might pose obstacles to tanks. The effects of this widespread distrust and the efforts of radicalized young peaple to discover the truth should not be underestimated. Reaching even into the government bureaucracy, they made it increasingly difficult for the government to keep anything secret. Bureaucrats who opposed a particular policy -- for whatever reason -- discovered that a "leak" in the right ploce could often be more effective in forcing a change than long and wearing arguments within the bureaucracyThis situation has sometimes produced spectacular results. Neither the Mylai massacre nor the Pentagon Paper would have become public knowledge without the previous radicalization and its effects on the copocity of the government to maintain secrecy. Mylai was exposed because of the investigations of Seymour Hersh, af that time a reporter for an obscure news service with no national influence, and because low-ranking army lawyers involved in the case were unwilling to cooperate with the Pentagon in covering it up. Daniel Ellsberg was himself one of the intellectuals whom Washington hires in large numbers to help it evaluate and plan imperialist strategy. When he became disillusioned with the government's seeming inability to "learn" from its experience in Vietnam, he begon by sending portions of the Pentagon Papers to liberal members of Congress. When that produced no results, he tried the New York Times, which published them in order to push Nixon closer to its own line on the Indochina war. The governmental trend toward further centralization is also contradicted by every democratic victory that has been won by radicalizing layers of the population. Civil rights legislation, the eighteen-year-old vote, the right to abortion, abolition of the death penalty, etc., are all concessions won from the ruling class in opposition to its needs for greater regimentation of U,S. society -- as the continual attempt to roll back such concessions testifies. The radicalization has severely undermined some of the most powerful of traditional ruling-class methods of control. Wartime patriotism, racism, and red-baiting have become less and less effective precisely because the radicalization is based on opposition to the results of those policies. Both 18
Johnson and Nixon were therefore required to use more secretive and illegal methods of dealing with political oppoSuch methods were the hidden side of Nixon's publicly proclaimed "low and order" campaign against the effects of the rodicalization. For both the secret and the open aspects of his strategy, Nixon enjoyed the substantial backing of the ruling class; in the 1972 campaign this backing approoched unanimity. Nixon was certainly not, as some have maintained, striking out on his own when he authorized the various Watergate-style programs. The infamous 1970 secret spy plan; for example, was drafted by a committee recruited from the highest levels of the state "security" apparatus. It consisted of the directors of the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and the heads of the spy groups of each of the armed services, in addition to a White House aide representing Nixon. These are the "nonpartisan" bureaucrats who stay on in their jobs no matter which party holds the presidency and who are entrusted by the ruling class with the defense of the interests of the entire class rather than any particular sector of it. Even those of Nixon's actions that served his own personal interests rather than those of the ruling closs - spying on the Democrats, trading favors for campaign contributions, etc. — were hardly innovations in U.5. capitalist politics. Barry Goldwater has claimed -- and there is no reason to doubt him -- that the Democrats kept him under electronic surveillance during the 1964 presidential campaign. Ambassadorial posts and favorable business rulings from government agencies have always been for sale to the highest bidder. If the U.S. ruling class does not desire venality in its politicians, it nevertheless expects it. But never before have the normal operations of the U.S. government been made so visible to the entire country. Influential sectors of the ruling class are in favor of impeaching Nixon or forcing his resignation because they hope that doing so will obscure this view of reality with the illusion that, after all, "the system works. " But while from the standpoint of the ruling class impeaching Nixon seems to be a lesser evil than the alternative of an indefinite prolongation of the scandal, it is not likely to fulfill those hopes. A Continuing Crisis Watergate has already undermined the credibility not just of Nixon but of capitalist government in the United States. Nixon's forced resignation or impeachment would be a confirmation of the widespread belief that the government is not to be trusted -- just as Agnew's resignation was for many the proof of an already prevalent suspicion that "politicians are Nixon's removal would add an unsettling precedent to U.5. capitalist politics. If would raise in the masses the idea that their democratic rights ought to include the right to get rid of unpopular presidents or other officials without waiting until the next clection. (This is a right that the bourgeois authors of the constitution -- wisely, from the viewpoint of their interests -- deliberately denied to the people.) From the standpoint of the ruling class, the best outcome of the Watergate scandal -- although one that now seems extremely unlikely -- would be for Nixon to apologize for his transgressions, promise to do better in the future, and then finish out his term. This would mean that Nixon had succeeded to some degree in covering up the extent of his crimes and winning public acceptance for the idea that the president should be given considerable lattitude to decide what actions "national security" requires.