It’s been a year and a half since I was last in the U.S., and compared to the aftermath of Afghanistan, the movement here is now much bigger, much more focused and enjoys substantial support from labor unions and other so-called mainstream constituencies. Therefore, we saw a spectacular demonstration today [February 15]. In Britain, there were two million on the streets today–that is one of every 25 human beings in Britain. I think it’s going to be extremely difficult and perilous for Blair to go to war under these circumstances. The media is saying that the prime minister is completely isolated. Obviously, the two million people today were not the "usual suspects"–probably very few of them had been on a demonstration before.

We’ve had some advantages that you haven’t had. First, union support–which has now grown here but is still far short of what it was at the demonstration in London. The demonstration in London was supported by unions representing more than 50 percent of all organized workers in Britain. That includes the country’s biggest union, which is UNISON with 1.5 million members, that includes the firefighters, the mail handlers and all the train drivers’ unions. The firefighters are in the middle of a dispute with Blair over wages. The line they’ve been using that has now spread rapidly through the whole antiwar movement–and it’s absolutely brilliant–is that they can’t understand why Blair refuses to pay them to put out fires at home but finds limitless funds to start fires in Iraq. And that’s been one of the points in Britain that we have made–a Labor government which was elected with a mandate to improve public services and has singularly failed to do that. Instead, it has retained Thatcherite austerity, and monetarist policies–and has actually deepened neoliberalism and privatization. So huge numbers of working people are bitterly disillusioned. This has expressed itself popularly in opposition to the war.

Another advantage we’ve had is the media. Elements of our media are extremely racist and right-wing, as you have here in America–well, of course, they are owned by the some of the same people like Rupert Murdoch!

But we also have the Daily Mirror–and people here should know about this because I’m not aware of any precedent for this. It is the second largest daily circulation newspaper in Britain. It’s a tabloid, and its usual themes are sex and celebrity. And it hasn’t abandoned those, I should stress. But in addition, it has become the primary antiwar campaigning newspaper. It’s not just that [left-wing journalist] John Pilger is a featured columnist. You have to see the graphics. For example, last week, on the front page was a big picture of Tony Blair with his hands painted red and the headline read "Blood on his hands." It was a front page you might expect in Socialist Worker! On Valentine’s Day, the Daily Mirror had a huge pink headline saying, "Make love, not war." And then under it, a heart with a photo of Bush and Blair kissing! Now it’s one thing when a newspaper criticizes the prime minister, but when the primary Labor-supporting paper–and the Mirror is the labor-supporting paper in Britain for working-class readers–ridicules the prime minister persistently for week upon week, this I think does spell the end for him. Not next week, but eventually. It feels a bit like the last days of Thatcher now, when the right-wing press turned on her.

So the Mirror, for example, sponsored the stage at today’s London rally–they paid for it. They produced 50,000 placards. So instead of saying Socialist Worker on top, the placards said Daily Mirror–but it was the same slogans. "Don’t attack Iraq" and "No blood for oil." Of course, the Daily Mirror is a commercial enterprise. They have nobody’s good at heart except their shareholders, and they are doing this because their soundings tell them that this is what their working-class readers want. So those are differences.

And of course we also have the Guardian and the Independent. In truth, the Guardian is actually editorially ambivalent about the war, but it prints a huge amount of antiwar stuff that you simply don’t see in the mainstream press. And the Independent of course has Robert Fisk who’s actually played a quite serious and significant role in shaping how people see this.

And then there are the beginnings of industrial action against the war. Two train drivers in Scotland refused to carry munitions and were fully supported by their union, and it’s quite clear that others are more than ready to do the same. And the two main rail workers’ unions have both effectively called on their members to walk out when the bombing starts. No one can be sure what will happen, but if the bombing starts, without a doubt across Europe there will be vigorous action of all kinds including, I think, some industrial action. Certainly wide-scale civil disobedience and obviously huge demonstrations.

I’m reluctant to predict what workers will do, but I certainly think it’s a realistic possibility that if the war starts there will be mass industrial action. It will, of course, be illegal. In Britain it’s illegal to strike for anything except the most narrow reasons, but I think the level of outrage and indignity is such that people will disregard that. For example, tube [subway] workers. This is a very multiracial workforce, many of these people have roots in countries with Islamic populations and know perfectly well the history of U.S. and British imperial policies. And they’ve had a rotten deal from the government. So they’re not disposed to give them a break.

That was the lead item on the news on every single television station that night. People ridiculed their own government. They had photocopied it from an academic article that was six months old! It was so crude! I think that contributed to the turnout. I think it made it almost impossible for them to convince anybody of anything because they have been exposed as not merely deceivers, but lazy and inept. It was an extraordinary thing. Given that they knew it was going to be read with a fine-tooth comb by us, by the antiwar movement–I should point out that it was the antiwar movement that spotted it. Some of our Muslim brothers who read Arabic and are familiar with the literature said, "We’ve seen that before somewhere," and they got on the BBC. It was shocking. It is a reckless arrogance that has become one of the characteristics of our ruling elite–post 9-11. They thought it was all going to be easy. But the episode it’s been deeply damaging to the warmongers in Britain, and so we’re delighted.

We’re in a very different kind of era. For example, there is no precedent for the size of today’s international day of action. There were international days of protest during Vietnam and during the First World War, but people were glad to get 1,000 in San Francisco or 500 in Paris. And that’s in the middle of war. It reflects a lot of positive things–as well as just the sheer horror of what may be about to happen. But there has been a growing global consciousness, more people see the world outside their boundaries than ever before. That’s probably interlinked with what’s happened with the anti-globalization movement. But I think it’s much broader than that.

In my neighborhood, which is Hackney–a multiracial neighborhood in which there is no majority, there are just minorities so we have to get on since there are people from all over the world there–I would say the antiwar feeling is running at 90 percent.

The three key European leaderships that support the war–Blair in Britain, Berlusconi in Italy, Aznar in Spain–all faced massive demonstrations today. The resistance is clearly led from the left, but it goes way beyond that. In all three countries, people were first and foremost protesting against a war that just horrifies them. The key thing is the slaughter of innocents.

But there is also a kind of symbolic dimension in all of these countries–people are asserting a new and less ethnically bound, less patriotically bound identity. In Italy, the war has become the dividing line in a social struggle between Berlusconi and the neo-authoritarian right and the broad democratic left. In all three countries, by the way, the war has been linked to the question of immigrants’ rights and the rise of the far right. So in Spain, Britain and Italy these demonstrations are also about different visions for the future.

In Spain, these are the biggest demonstrations since the end of the Franco regime. The police estimate in Barcelona is 1.3 million. The police estimate in Madrid was one million. This is amazing. There were also substantial demonstrations in Berlin, Amsterdam, Finland, Portugal and in Eastern Europe. Rumsfeld tried to say that it was "old Europe" who had gone wimpy but that "new Europe"–by which he means Eastern Europe–loves America. So it’s important to note that opinion polls show overwhelming majority opposition to the war in every single European country, without exception. Including Eastern Europe–Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Estonia.

And of course in Russia it’s overwhelming. But the Russian government is antiwar so the demonstrations were smaller. Similarly in France–people don’t feel the need to demonstrate since their government is doing the right thing. The French people are pretty united–right, left and center–and they all want to see France exercise its veto in the United Nations Security Council. They are not having to protest against their own government. The key is the axis of evil as I call it, Blair, Berlusconi and Aznar–it is not simply that they are pro-Bush. These are the three people whose vision of the European Union has been the most extreme in its commitment to neoliberalism and privatizing everything. And also the most intense in their prosecution of asylum seekers.

Now it’s important to realize that Berlusconi and Aznar come from the classic right, but Tony Blair was elected as a Labor prime minister. This means that the situation in Britain is a little different, and in a sense more complicated. Now there’s a pressing question for the British people at election time–who do we vote for? There isn’t an antiwar party. Obviously, there are smaller fringe parties, but the Labor Party and the Conservative Party are both pro-war. It’s not only about the war, but that’s the most extreme manifestation of it. The fact is that Labor, the traditional party of social democracy, is no longer a social-democratic party. It’s a neoliberal party.

Most Labor Party members do not agree with that development, but they are powerless. At least that’s my thesis. I left the Labor Party two years ago. I’d been in it for 20 years–and I have to say that given what’s going on with the war, I don’t regret it. It’s the party of war, privatization and racism. I think it’s time for people in the Labor Party to take a hard look at that. I think it’s time for the trade unions in Britain to make a break because only they can do it. They can set up a new party that will function and survive.

First, I should say that my own view is that the anti-capitalist movement in Britain has never actually been that huge. It has had a profound, galvanizing effect on a minority of young people–and that’s great, after a very fallow period. But for most people it is images of guys with purple hair smashing Starbucks or McDonald’s–which may be unfair but has to be acknowledged. But I think it hasn’t really linked up with the trade union movement. That isn’t to say it’s insignificant, but it’s to say that it’s one current among many.

What I think has been more significant was Jubilee 2000–which I know was related to that but is a much more mainstream, religiously oriented formation. It is the awareness that Third-World poverty is the principal moral question facing every human being on the planet, and that we are responsible for Third-World poverty. That there is a world system in which the rich white minority benefits and the poor nonwhite majority suffers. That awareness, I would say, is now a majority awareness in Britain. I go to schools, and that’s what bugs them–Third-World poverty. I think that consciousness has fed into the antiwar movement.

So the anti-capitalists are part of the movement, but it’s all one movement. I think the Stop the War Coalition should be given credit for succeeding in forging this unity–and it’s never easy. It’s not some simple formula. It requires a lot of flexibility and listening–and sometimes swallowing your pride. But we have kept our eyes on the prize. We need one antiwar movement. If some people had had their way, we’d have had five. There were people who said we can’t march with these "jihadis," by which they meant anyone who had an Islamic identity. The beautiful thing to see in our movement is the unity–Muslims marching with trade unionists, marching with traditional peace groups, marching with all different religions, marching with young people, students, anti-capitalist kids, and so on. But they are not marching even as separate contingents. They did in the early demonstrations, but in the last two people just walked together. They want to because it says something to them about who they are.

This has taken me by surprise–that NATO, which is really the American arm in Europe, has come under stress this quickly. You have to remember that a significant section of the European bourgeoisie is extremely uneasy about all of this. Not only because their own populations are giving them a hard time about it, but because an unchained, single superpower threatens some of their interests. The French are worried about their own oil interests and so forth. What you are seeing is a certain degree of division and fragmentation among the Western capitalist classes, which of course have been amazingly cohesive since 1945. So I think the world is extremely uncertain now as a result of imperialism’s response to 9-11, and all kinds of things are in flux.

What I know more about is the situation in South Asia, which is appalling. The impact of 9-11 in South Asia has been disastrous. It’s ratcheted up the level of conflict between India and Pakistan. That border remains the great flash point–by far the most likely place where a weapon of mass destruction is going to be used is between those two countries, and it could happen at any time. Of course both are allies of the United States. Pakistan is a military dictatorship. India is run by a Hindu fundamentalist right-wing regime, whose horrors are not sufficiently known here. Among other things, this regime murdered 2,000 of its own Muslim citizens in Gujarat just a year ago.

Interestingly, the only country besides Israel where the aggressive response to 9-11 was welcomed unequivocally was India. Because the paradigm of a strategic opposition to "Islamic terror" fit in perfectly with what Hindu fundamentalists wanted. They have now signed a military pact with the United States–and remember that India was the bastion of nonalignment for so many years. Unlike Pakistan, which was effectively a military satellite of the U.S. since the mid—1950s, India had never previously engaged in any joint military exercises with the U.S. as it has in the last year.

As we speak, the U.S. is conducting military operations in Pakistan, which I am astonished to see go uncovered by the media here. FBI agents in Pakistan stopping Pakistanis, interviewing them. The U.S. bombed a section of the Northern Territories in Pakistan with the approval of the military dictatorship, and that is something slightly new. It didn’t take a genius to predict that in the absence of a left, secular, anti-imperialist opposition to the Musharraf regime, the jihadis would flourish. There is a left secular opposition, but they couldn’t take part in the election, and for historical reasons they’ve been quite weak–though they may build something. So people should be aware that if the war on Iraq goes ahead it will have a huge impact in South Asia, it will make war between India and Pakistan more likely for all sorts of reasons, and the world will change if that happens–irrevocably.

I was deeply moved to see what I would call the real New York, the real America. Multiracial and working class. One of the things I say to people in Britain when we have meetings is that it’s not all "Friends" and "Frasier"–that image that many people have of the United States as a universally prosperous place. The multiracial, multireligious character of it was superb, and was in keeping with everywhere else.

But I was also struck by [New York Labor Against War representative] Brenda Stokely’s speech, which I thought hit the nail on the head. To hear the authentic voice of American workers making the absolutely central point that there are some people who are centrally placed to stop this war, and they are clearly those workers in the industries related to the war. Her call for people to walk out of their offices, their factories and their schools is something that was repeated in London today.

It took two years of the most brutal destruction of Vietnam before we broke six figures at a demonstration in the United States, by which time South Vietnam was already finished. This time we are so much further ahead, and the scale of global coordination–there is no comparison. All those are partly the result of the fact that despite Hollywood, despite the vilification of the 60s, the real lessons about solidarity and about what our government is actually about had sunk into large numbers of people. You could see it today. It was reflected in a million ways. Julian Bond struck me. He was speaking for the NAACP today. The NAACP supported the Vietnam war. This is a profound change.