German left faces
An additional stimulus to demand, above all for arms, came in the wake of the war; for example, Saudi Arabia made the "biggest arms deal of the century" (The Guardian) in 1987 - 50 tornado jets from West Germany and Britain.
• The two warring states, and to some extent other OPEC countries, were forced to sell as much oil as possible to cover the costs of the war.
The oil cartel, which had already been weakened by North Sea oil production and efforts at energy saving, was thereby undermined. There was a massive fall in the price of oil providing an additional present for the imperialist centres.
### Petrodollars recycled through Gulf War
The Iran/Iraq war therefore recycled the petrodollars in a way which left the OPEC countries holding no property rights. The income from increased oil production went straight out again. Indeed as the oil price fell the extra income itself melted away.
The volume of demand that Iran and Iraq alone generated during their war in the West - almost exclusively, in Japan, the USA, Western Europe and Brazil -was around $200b. And this is without the expenditure occasioned by the war in the other countries in the region.
The savings made in the imperialist countries owing to the fall in the oil price by around 40% came to an even higher sum. Thus the war was effectively a counter-cyclical programme for the imperialist economies, and had a lot to do with the eight-year long boom in the industrialized countries.
What this adds up to: Capital is power. This simple lesson, drawn from the analysis of capitalism and its 200 year history also implies: the bigger the capital, the greater the power and the stronger the desire of other powerful owners of capital to increase their capital through robbery of other capitals which are themselves the product of similar robberies — even when this is done through the extraction of surplus value in production.
It is also the case that the capitals amassed by the individual OPEC contries are worth almost any action. The "thief of Baghdad" has stolen from the bulging coffers of Kuwait. The thief of Washington (or Wall Street) understands this kind of business well.
Finally, the history of capitalism shows that this kind of trigger happy covetousness always arises when a powerful imperialist country finds itself in economic 18 difficulties and on the strategic slide. • And this is true today of the USA. * elections THE mainstream political parties have accepted the logic of the new Anschluss; thus the Western parties have swallowed their junior partners in the East. The conservative parties - the Christian Democrats (CDU), the Christian Socials (CSU) and the Liberals (FDP) -have annexed former satellite parties of the Stalinist regime (now "reformed"). In what way have they been reformed? In the old system they served the regime, in the new, larger Federal Republic, they will do the same. The East German Social Democrats, the SPD, at least had the merlt of being formed In opposition to Honecker. MANUEL KELLNER
HE UNITED SPD, however, is having trouble finding a coherent oppositional line; it was the first to launch the slogan "Germany, one country", leading to the ideological hegemony of the right; secondly, it has participated in the capitulation government of De Maizière; thirdly, it has no alternative to rapid unification. The authorities have furthermore adopted an electoral law favouring the conservative groupuscule the DSU and discriminating against the PDS and other party poopers [on September 29 the West German constitutional court ruled that this law contravened the principle of equal chances for the parties].
Greens ally with civic movements
The Greens have made an electoral alliance with a large proportion of the groups coming out of the ex-GDR's "civic movements" . This alliance has developed a far more serious critique of the Anschluss and of present German reality, espousing principles that could be described as radical democratic. The Greens have, even so, become the dominant force in this alliance, which is not altogether to the liking of the civic movement groups. The left wing of this latter movement has been marginalized — the United Left, for example, is no longer supporting this alliance.
On September 15 and 16 in Berlin the Left List/PDS electoral alliance was formed and adopted a platform for the elections. In the east, the United Left and some other socialist groups are supporting the PDS. In the West personalities from different small currents - left Social Democrats, parties and groups from the far left such as the Communist League (KB, ex-Maoist, non-Stalinist), the VSP, the reformist socialist wing of the Greens, the "renewers" from the (West) German Communist Party (DKP) and what is left of the DKP itself have formed a list to make an alliance with the PDS.
Problems in forging alliance
There were many problems in forging the alliance, above all owing to the different weight of the small Western left and the PDS. But the Berlin congress reflected the alliance's pluralism and allowed real debates.